Liberating Atlantis

VI

The Liberating Army could draw on three plantations for livestock and supplies. That went a long way toward making sure the soldiers in that army didn't go hungry right away. Frederick had enough other things to worry about. Adding hunger to the list would have been… part of what a general was supposed to take care of.

He'd never thought he would be a general. He wondered whether his grandfather had expected the job. He supposed Victor Radcliff must have. The white man had been a prominent officer in the earlier war, the war where English Atlantis and the mother country fought against France. When it came time for Atlantis to rise up against England, who else would the Atlantean Assembly choose to lead its forces? No one else. And who but France would aid Atlantis in her fight against the mother country? Politics could be a crazy business.

Frederick wondered what his grandfather would think of his own rising. Neither Victor Radcliff nor Isaac Fenner, the other First Consul, had done anything against slavery. Maybe they'd thought southern Atlantis would promptly part company with the United States of Atlantis if they tried. Or maybe they hadn't cared-a much more disheartening prospect.

Well, why should they have cared? Frederick thought. The lash never came down on their backs. It had come down on his. The strokes had healed well enough, but he could still feel them if he twisted the wrong way. He would bear the marks till the day he died. And he would remember the humiliation of being shackled to the whipping post-and the terror of each snap!-crack!-till they shoveled dirt over him, too.

If they shoveled dirt over him. If they didn't burn him or chuck him in a river or leave him aboveground as a feast for ravens and vultures and scuttling lizards. Once you raised your hand against the white man, you couldn't expect mercy from him, not even in death.

"You gonna wait for the white folks to come after us, or do you aim to go after them some more before they can?" Lorenzo asked.

"I've been wondering about that." Frederick also wondered if he should admit he wondered. Weren't generals supposed to know everything? Didn't they pull answers out of the air the way a stage magician pulled coins out of people's noses? Maybe white generals did. They got a lot more practice soldiering before they became generals than Frederick ever had. He was reinventing the art from scratch, and had to hope he wouldn't sink the uprising with some silly move a real general would have seen from a mile away. Sighing, he went on, "Looks to me like we ought to move again. If we get used to sitting around on our hunkers, the white folks're liable to just walk right over us once they commence to fight."

"Looks that way to me, too," Lorenzo said. "An' it looks like they'll commence to fight pretty damn quick, too. Longer they wait, more of their slaves'll run off to us."

"Ain't it the truth?" Frederick said. "Mudfaces and niggers're already coming in. Folks want to be free, dammit. And why shouldn't they? Look at what the whites've got. Then look at what they give us. Who wouldn't want to be on the other end of that stick?"

"I want to say nobody wouldn't, but that ain't so," Lorenzo said unhappily. "That son of a bitch of a Jerome who came runnin' in to warn the Menands. And we've had us a couple of fellows who went and disappeared. Don't know where they went, if it wasn't to tell tales on us to the white folks."

"Maybe they just snuck off to hide in the woods," Frederick said. Lorenzo rolled his eyes. Since Frederick didn't believe it, either, he couldn't very well come down on his lieutenant for doubting. He knew how the white folks worked. To stop an uprising, they'd pay spies as much as they had to. They might even reward them with freedom. Frederick didn't think he could stomach freedom bought at the price of betraying other slaves. Some men might not have such a tender conscience, though. Some might not have any conscience at all.

"Which way do you want to go, then?" Lorenzo asked. "Gibsons are off to the east, an' the St. Clairs're north of here. We go after anybody else, we'd have to march back the way we've come."

"Uh-huh." Frederick nodded. "I reckon we better hit the St. Clairs next. If I remember right, their land is on the edge of a good-sized swamp. Things go wrong, that's a good place to hide. White folks won't have an easy time digging us out of it."

"Makes sense," Lorenzo agreed. "Things ain't gone wrong yet, though. Maybe they won't, knock wood." In lieu of wood, he bounced a fist off the side of his own head.

"No, not yet," Frederick said. "But right when you're sure they can't, that's when they do."

Frederick knew that Lucille St. Clair came to Mistress Clotilde's socials, and that she invited Mistress Clotilde to hers. He'd heard that Ebenezer St. Clair was a slow man with an eagle, but not an especially harsh master. The plantation grew cotton and indigo. From everything he'd heard, it made money. Maybe that was Master Ebenezer squeezing every eagle till its eyes popped. Whatever it was, it was something not every plantation could boast.

And it didn't matter an atlantean's worth, not when the Liberating Army was about to call on the place. How would Master Ebenezer record an invasion in his ledgers? He'd never get the chance, not unless he ran before the slaves who'd freed themselves arrived.

The Negroes and copperskins under Frederick's loose command grumbled when he got them moving. Sure enough, they were happy with what they'd already done. They wanted to sit around and enjoy it for a while.

"You gonna keep sitting when the white folks come and cut your throats?" he asked them. "You gonna wait around for them to do it? You can do that-and I don't reckon you'll need to wait real long. You got to remember, they know we've risen up. Ain't a question that they'll try and smash us. Only question is, when are they gonna come after us?"

His warriors shouldered their rifle muskets. They moved north after him. If they weren't especially enthusiastic, that wasn't the biggest surprise in the world. He didn't think any soldiers could stay enthusiastic about killing-and about laying their own lives on the line. But fighting came with their line of work, and so they did it.

One of the slaves who'd fled to the Liberating Army at the Menands' plantation came from the St. Clairs'. "I think I can get you close to the big house without letting the field hands see you on the way, if that's what you want," he told Frederick as they tramped north.

"That'd be good-let us get at the white folks without anybody warning 'em," Frederick said. He paused, eyeing the Negro he didn't know. "You lead us into an ambush, you may fuck us. All the same, I promise you won't be around to spend whatever the white folks said they'd give you. You understand what I'm talking about?"

"Sure do," the other man answered steadily. "I don't want to fuck you. I want to watch the big house burn, is what I want to do."

"How come? He do somethin' to you in particular?" Frederick asked.

"My woman's gonna have his baby," the Negro said bleakly.

"Oh." Frederick left it right there. That was one of the special miseries black and copperskinned men faced in Atlantis. If a white man set his eyes on their woman, he could take her. Dreadful things happened to slaves who tried to resist. But were you a man at all if you couldn't protect your woman?

Of course, this fellow might be lying, looking for sympathy as he fooled the Liberating Army. If he was, he wouldn't get the chance to profit from it; Frederick had been in deadly earnest about that.

The man led them to a stretch of forest that ran alongside the fields. For a little while, Frederick could imagine himself in the Atlantis that had existed when Edward Radcliffe (his how-many-times-great-grandfather) founded New Hastings. Ferns, barrel trees, a big green cucumber slug clinging to the trunk of a pine, spicy odors in the air, birds chirping… No sign that anything had changed, except for the weight of the rifle musket on his back and the pull of the sling against his shoulder.

"Hold up," said the Negro from the St. Clairs' plantation-his name was Andrew. "We're almost there. If you kind of scoot forward, you'll be able to see the big house through the ferns."

Frederick scooted up till the leaves of the ferns started tickling his nose. Sure enough, there was the big house. The columned front porch would have looked incongruous to anyone who didn't take that style of building for granted, but Frederick did, so he saw nothing strange in it.

Chickens pecked in the yard between the big house and the barn. An enormous hog rolled in its wallow. And… as Frederick watched, a dozen white men with longarms rode up to the house. Another white, presumably Ebenezer St. Clair, came out to greet them.

"Damnation," Frederick muttered. "They're getting reinforcements." He called Lorenzo forward-he wanted the copperskin to see for himself. When he had, Frederick asked, "Can we take them?"

"If we can't, we'd better go home and let them do what they want with us, because we don't deserve to win," Lorenzo said. "I do wish we would've got here before they went into the house. Killing 'em in there'll be a lot harder. How'd they know to come here, anyways?"

"Maybe one of our runaways went and told them. Or maybe they've sent people to the Gibsons' place, too. Only stands to reason we'd go after one or the other," Frederick said. "Doesn't much matter either way. They're there, and we gotta get 'em. I wish we'd beaten them here, too, but I'm not gonna fret about that now. All I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna make sure we've got our guns loaded."

He passed the word back to his followers. They would vastly outnumber the whites inside the St. Clairs' big house. The defenders would fight from splendid cover, though. And they would be very determined. Frederick was sure of that. How well would his own copperskins and blacks fight? Whites professed to believe slaves couldn't fight-and did their damnedest to make sure slaves never got the chance.

Well, they had their chance now. And they were at least as well armed as their enemies. Lieutenant Torrance would be kicking himself if he could know… or would he? He was a Croydon man. Maybe he was smiling down from heaven now.

As soon as Frederick had the word that his followers would indeed be fighting with weapons loaded, he said, "Let's go get 'em, then. Use the best cover you can find, and get up as close to the big house as you can. We may have to set it on fire to smoke those white bastards out of there. I'd sooner not, but I won't worry if it comes to that. The secret's out. The white folks know we're in arms against 'em. So now we've got to win. Come on!"

They emerged from the woods and trotted toward the big house. Lorenzo led a smaller party over toward the barn. That would give the Liberating Army cover almost as good as the big house offered the whites.

Bang! A gun barked from the big house. A copperskin howled and clutched at his shoulder. "Get down!" Frederick called to his fighters. "Get flat! Crawl! Get behind things to shoot." Reloading a rifle musket while flat wasn't quite impossible, but it was a long way from easy. On the other hand, getting killed standing up wasn't so good, either.

A bullet cracking past his ear persuaded him to follow his own order. He wriggled forward through the grass. A small yellow-green lizard scooted away from him in horror, or perhaps derision.

"Keep coming!" a white man yelled from the big house. "We'll shoot you down like the mad dogs you are!"

The white didn't believe slaves could fight, not down in his heart he didn't. He stood at an open window to shout defiance at them. Half a dozen rifle muskets spoke in the space of a heartbeat. He clutched at his chest and fell over. If he wasn't dead, he was badly hurt. The Negroes and copperskins raised a cheer.

"Who's next?" Frederick called. Nobody answered him, not the way the first man had reviled the Liberating Army.

Frederick slithered towards a boulder. Once he got behind it, he aimed his longarm at an upstairs window and waited. Sooner or later, somebody would shoot from that spot. Sooner, he judged: it let a marksman look down on targets he wouldn't be able to spot from ground level.

Was that movement there? Sure enough, a gun barrel poked out the window. He pulled the trigger. When the hammer came down on the percussion cap, the cap spat flame into the black powder in the firing chamber. The rifle musket punched his shoulder. Yes, the percussion system beat the devil out of any flintlock ever made. No hang fire, no delay, nothing but instant murder-if your aim was good.

And Frederick's was. The white man up there toppled forward when he was hit, and hung half inside, half outside the window. Several bullets spanged off the boulder after that. The cloud of gunpowder smoke hanging above it might have said Here I am! Shoot me!

Off to one side, the pig he'd seen wallowing let out a squeal of agony. Roast pork after we win, he thought.

A copperskin came out of the barn with a lantern in his hand. Fire and oil made a deadly combination-if he could chuck the lantern into the big house without getting shot down. He raced toward the white men's shelter. Bullets whipped past him, but he threw the lantern through a window-glass crashed-and then turned to dash for safety. A round caught him then, in the small of the back. He fell forward and kept on trying to crawl away. More bullets bit him after that. Before long, he stopped moving.

Why didn't the big house explode into flame? Had the white men smothered the fire? Had it gone out? Frederick swore. He didn't want his followers to give up their lives for nothing.

Out of the barn trotted several men carrying a stout pole. Frederick realized at once what they had in mind. A battering ram would knock in the front door… if they could get close enough to use it. "Shoot at the front windows, fast as you can!" he shouted to his men. "Everybody with a pistol, now's the time to use it!"

He pulled out his own. The range was long for good shooting from a revolver, but he could keep the defenders ducking. Right now, that counted for more than accuracy.

He and his men banged away at the big house. The copperskins and Negroes with the pole thundered forward. Whites popped up to shoot at them. One of the whites caught a bullet in the face. He slumped back into the big house. A moment later, a copperskin on the pole grabbed his leg and fell. The rest kept coming. Another man was wounded as they climbed the stairs to the porch.

"Come on!" Frederick yelled. "Charge!" If the battering ram broke in, the Liberating Army would win the fight all at once. If it didn't… He didn't care to think about that.

He rushed toward the big house. When you were running, not thinking came easier. His fighters were charging the place with him. He would have been mighty lonely had they hung back-but not for long. After that, he would have just been dead.

Thud! After so many gunshots, the noise of the pole slamming into the door didn't seem like much. The door sagged in on its hinges, but didn't open. The men with the battering ram hit it again. One more of them fell, shot from behind the door, but they knocked it in. Then they dropped the pole in the doorway, so the whites inside would have a harder time shoving the door closed again.

Frederick seemed to fly up the stairs. A few men were ahead of him, but not many. A white stood in the doorway with a shotgun. The twin barrels looked wide as a railroad tunnel to Frederick. But one of the slaves shot the white before he could pull the trigger. He fell backward, and sent the charge into-through-the roof of the porch. It blasted a hole big enough to pitch a turkey through. It would have done the same to Frederick's midsection. Yes, not thinking was easier.

Then he was inside the house, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. That was a mad melee. The whites still on their feet swung muskets and shotguns club-fashion-they had no time to reload. One of them smashed a Negro's head with a blow so hard, it broke the stock off his weapon. Another Negro bayoneted him. He squealed like a stuck pig. "Here's another one, you fucker!" the black roared. "And another one! And another one!" A man often needed a lot of sticking before he died. That defender got every bit he needed, and more besides.

Another white man was grappling with a copperskin when Frederick bayoneted him just above the left kidney. He threw his arms out wide and went rigid. It was the pose Frederick imagined a man struck by lightning might take. He didn't hold it long-the copperskin brained him with a hatchet. Something warm and wet splashed Frederick's face. He wiped it away with his sleeve, which showed both red and grayish pink.

His stomach didn't turn over, as it surely would have a couple of weeks before. He was getting hardened to the horrors of fighting.

Quite suddenly, it was over. A couple of whites still writhed on the ground, but the men of the Liberating Army finished them off, one with a bayonet in the throat, the other with a bullet through the head.

"Let's go on upstairs," Lorenzo said as he took the chance to ram a fresh charge of powder and a bullet down the barrel of his rifle musket. "Better make sure nobody's hiding up there."

Frederick nodded. "Do it." A party of copperskins and Negroes hurried up the curving stairway. He didn't think they would find anyone. Whatever else you could say about the white men who'd tried to defend Eb St. Clair's plantation, they didn't lack for courage.

But he hadn't thought things through. The screams that rang out there were torn from women's throats. And those screams went on and on. A few minutes later, Andrew came downstairs doing up his trousers, a sated smirk on his face. "Never reckoned I'd get even with the master that way," he said.

"Uh-huh," Frederick said uncomfortably, looking up from the place where the defenders had managed to smother the fire from the lantern before it took hold. He hadn't wanted this kind of thing to happen, but he wasn't surprised it had, even if it wasn't his idea of sport. Whether all the men had revenge on their minds or nothing more than a brief good time, he couldn't have said. What he did say was, "We've got to knock them over the head when we're through with them. Can't have them telling tales on us. That'd only make things worse if the white folks catch some of our people."

Andrew nodded. Then he looked around at the ghastly aftermath of the fight. "Best thing we can do with this whole place is burn it down. Then nobody outside will know for sure what all happened here."

Frederick remembered that he'd said he wanted to see the St. Clairs' big house burn. He had his reasons for what he was saying now. That didn't make them bad reasons, though. And Frederick found himself nodding back. "Yes, we'd better do that. And we'd better make sure we're ready to fight as soon as we do. The white folks'll figure out enough of what happened, anyways, and they'll send a real army against us the next time, not just a little gang like this here one."

"Always the swamp if things go wrong," Andrew said.

"I know," Frederick answered through the screams that still rang out from upstairs. "It's there, but how much good will it do us?"

Andrew took pride in setting the big house alight. Frederick made sure the Liberating Army salvaged all the weapons and bullets and cartridges in the place before firing it. He had more people to arm: Ebenezer St. Clair's slaves were eager to join his force. "We got a lot to pay back, we do," a copperskin said. The rest of the bondsmen and -women nodded agreement.

Even as the big house's pyre rose into the air, Frederick wondered from which direction the white folks would try to hit back. If it was an army, he guessed it would come openly. Like the small contingent that had tried to save the St. Clair plantation, the whites wouldn't really believe their property could fight. They wouldn't sneak through the woods to get close.

"One thing we need," Lorenzo said. "We need to put stuff in front of us to stop bullets and keep the whites from spotting us."

He could have put it more elegantly, which didn't make him wrong. Some kind of barricade would be a lifesaver and a spirit lifter… if the Liberating Army put it in the right place. In the wrong place, it would be worse than useless. Now if only I were sure where the right place is, Frederick thought. He had his guesses, but that was all they were.

Then he realized he could make those guesses more likely to come true. He talked for a while with one of the young women who'd seemed most zealous about getting her own back against everything and everyone that had conspired to make her a slave. Her name was Jane.

"What happens to me afterwards?" she asked when he got done-also the first question he would have thought of.

"Chance you take," he answered honestly. "Maybe you can find some way to slip off, or maybe they'll reckon you were a poor dumb nigger who didn't know any better. But maybe not, too. I can't make you go tell 'em lies. All I can do is ask."

"I'll do it," Jane said at once. "Don't think I'll ever get a better chance to give 'em one in the teeth."

The story she would tell the local whites was calculated to make them move even faster than they would have anyway. That meant the Liberating Army had to move fast, too. Like Lorenzo, Frederick wanted that barricade so badly he could taste it. The Negroes and copperskins he set to work building it promptly started complaining. "I'm workin' harder here than I did in the cotton fields," one man said.

"Everything you did there went straight into your master's pocket," Frederick told him. "Everything you're doin' here sets the white folks up for a kick in the balls. Which one you like better?"

"Huh," the fellow said, and went back to work.

Slaves from all over the countryside kept coming into the Liberating Army's encampment. "You got the white folks jumpin' like fleas on a hot griddle," one of them said. "They're bellowin' like bulls. Everybody's speechifyin', goin' on about what a mess they'll make out o' you."

"Well, they can try," Frederick answered. It was what he wanted to hear, which didn't mean he trusted it. If he could send lies out to the white folks, nothing stopped them from sending lies in to him.

When he explained that to Helen, her eyes widened. "It's a wonder you trust a living soul," she said.

"I trust you. I trust Lorenzo. I'd trust Davey, if he didn't stop that shotgun charge with his chest," he said. "Past that… Past that, I make sure I cut the cards. Twice. Wouldn't you?"

He had no reason to doubt that the local militia had been called up. The only reason the militia existed was to crush slave uprisings. If the whites didn't call it up, they were fools.

And then word came that they were moving on the St. Clairs' plantation. Frederick imagined a straggling file of men singing marching songs left over from the war where their grandfathers-and his own-beat the English. Maybe it wasn't really like that, but that was how he saw it.

His own men-and the occasional woman who carried a rifle musket or one of the old-style guns the Liberating Army had taken from the plantations they'd overrun-started to grumble about staying close to the barricade. "You didn't want to build it, and now you don't want to use it?" he said. "Where's the sense in that?"

And then, early the next morning, a big cloud of dust rising from the road that went by the St. Clairs' place warned that the white militiamen were getting close. After that, Frederick had no more trouble getting his fighters to take their places. He wondered if any of them would leg it for the friendly swamp. He didn't catch anybody doing that, anyhow.

He could see the militiamen pretty soon. They were coming the way he wanted them to. Maybe they would have anyhow, or maybe they'd listened to brave Jane. Some of them wore gray uniforms like Atlantean regular soldiers. Others had on ordinary farm and town clothes. They showed no better order than his own followers-worse, if anything. But he gulped when he saw them manhandling along a small fieldpiece. He didn't have anything that could answer a cannon.

"Let them start shooting first," he told his troops. "They think they can scare us away." He hoped the whites were wrong. If they were as overconfident as he thought, they would get too close before they opened up. That would make them easier targets. "And…" He told off a handful of his best marksmen. "Shoot the fellows serving that cannon. The faster you kill 'em, the less harm it'll do."

"Right," one of them said tightly. They were nervous. Well, so was he, but he had to do his best not to show it.

A white man with a flag of truce stepped out in front of the militia's ragged battle line. "You slaves better give up now!" he bawled. "You do, and we'll let some of you live-the ones who ain't leaders or anything. You fight, though, and there'll be no quarter for you."

The Negroes and copperskins crouched behind their barricade looked toward Frederick. If answering was up to him, he'd make things as plain as he could. "Go fuck yourself!" he shouted back.

"All right, nigger," the militiamen's herald said in a voice like iron. "If that's how you want it, that's how it'll be." He turned on his heel and walked back to his men. He evidently trusted his foes not to violate a flag of truce, anyhow. Frederick wondered why. The white man pointed toward the barricade. "Fire!" he roared.

His men delivered a rippling volley. The cannon thundered. The men tending it plainly had little expertise. The ball flew high over the barricade and smashed into the St. Clairs' barn on the fly. A few musket balls struck people who'd been peering over the barricade at the militiamen. Howls of pain rose into the humid air. The Liberating Army had no surgeons. They would have to learn battlefield medicine on the fly or do without.

The militiamen stood there in the open while they reloaded. Were they begging to get killed? If they were, Frederick was happy to oblige them. "Fire!" he yelled, and drew a bead on the enemy commander, whose coat was splendid with gold epaulets and buttons.

He missed. The man stayed on his feet, waving and shouting orders. What those orders were soon grew plain: he wanted his troops to charge the slaves' barricade. Did he really believe the sight of white men advancing on them-most of the militiamen didn't even have bayonets-would make the copperskins and Negroes crouching there break and run? If he did, he was too stupid to live, even if Frederick hadn't knocked him down at the first try.

Boom! The cannon fired again. This time, the ball flew just over the heads of the Liberating Army. The men at the piece could be deadly dangerous if they got the chance to figure out what they were doing. But Frederick's sharpshooters were making sure they wouldn't last long enough. In the whites' wrath and inexperience, they'd pushed the gun too far forward-it sat within easy rifle-musket range. One after another, the artillerymen went down. Wounded or dead hardly mattered here. As long as they couldn't aim and fire the field gun, one would do as well as the other.

Frederick looked for the enemy commander again. He didn't see him-somebody else must have shot him. The whites advancing on the barricade leaned forward, as if into a heavy rainstorm. But rain wasn't hitting them; bullets were. Most of their foes had longarms better than the ones they carried themselves. The copperskins and Negroes weren't great shots, but they didn't have to be to do what they were doing.

A white man in a gray uniform tunic and wool homespun pants stopped to shake his fist at the rough wall from which fire and death spat. "You shitasses don't fight fair!" he cried, as if the Liberating Army's fighters were supposed to. No one stood up to answer him, which might have proved his point. He gathered himself and kept coming.

He got shot a few paces closer to the barricade. Maybe that proved his point. Frederick didn't care one way or the other. Fighting fair wasn't his biggest worry. Fighting to win was.

A couple of militiamen who seemed to know what they were up to remained at the cannon. The men who tried to help them plainly had no idea what they were supposed to do. The experienced artillerists shouted and gestured, which made them more obvious targets for Frederick's marksmen. They went down one after the other. The cannon kept firing after that, but wildly.

Some of the whites actually reached the barricade. It did them less good than they'd thought it would. The Negroes and copperskins on the other side didn't run away. They went right on shooting. At close quarters, they used the bayonet. As Frederick had seen inside Ebenezer St. Clair's house, it gave them a big reach advantage on men trying to fight with clubbed muskets.

"Godalmightydamn!" That was Lorenzo's joyful shout. "We really can lick these sorry sons of bitches!" Some wonder was mixed with the delight. Had he doubted it before? Frederick sure had, though it would have taken hot pincers to tear the admission from him.

The whites-those of them still on their feet-took longer to reach the same conclusion. When they did, it seemed to suck the spirit out of them. Fear swallowed fury. They turned and ran back the way they had come. Some of them threw away their muskets and shotguns to run faster.

None of them, Frederick noted, tried to surrender. That was just as well. He had no idea how he would have tended to prisoners of war. His men were as happy to shoot their enemies in the back as they had been to shoot them in the chest. Happier: now the whites weren't shooting back.

A few militiamen escaped. It took a lot of bullets to hit a man, especially in the heat of battle, when fighters weren't aiming so carefully as they might have. But only a few got away. "Lord Jesus!" Frederick said in wondering tones. "We just shot down most of the white men for miles around."

"Serves 'em right," Lorenzo said. "They weren't gonna worry about how many of us they shot."

"I know," Frederick said. "But what'll they do now? What can they do now?"

"They can leave us the hell alone, that's what," the copperskin said. "What else do we want, except to stay free and live in peace?"

"Ain't gonna happen," Frederick said sorrowfully. "They can't afford to let us do that. They'd have uprisings all over the slave states, and slaves runnin' off to come live with us instead of the white folks they belong to."

"Good." Lorenzo's voice was savage.

"Good for us, sure. Not so good for the white folks," Frederick said. "They aren't stupid. They'll see that for themselves. They'll see they've got to finish us off no matter what."

"You should have thought of that before you rearranged Matthew's face," Lorenzo said.

"Oh, I did," Frederick answered. "Not a lot of hope here, but no hope at all livin' the way I was livin'."

"Speaking of finishing off, that's what we'd better tend to with all the wounded whites on the ground," Lorenzo said.

Frederick didn't need to give orders for that. The men and women of the Liberating Army were tending to it on their own. They climbed over the barricade and started looting the corpses-and making sure the bodies they looted were corpses. Bayonets were more useful for that than clubbed muskets would have been, too.

They didn't just take weapons and money, though those delighted them. But they also harvested shoes and clothes-many of which would have to be soaked in cold water before anyone could wear them again-as well as pocket knives and other such small prizes. By slavery's modest standards, the fighters were newly rich.

They didn't want to bury the bodies. Frederick had to cajole them into digging a long, shallow trench into which they tossed them. Otherwise, the stink and, probably, the disease would soon have become unbearable. Yellow fever hadn't followed them from the Barfords' plantation, for which he thanked heaven. He didn't want other plagues coming down on their heads.

"Gonna be a while before the white folks try and mess with us again," Lorenzo said proudly. "We learned 'em a real lesson, by God."

"We did. We really did." Frederick sounded almost as surprised as Lorenzo had before him. For now, he was master of all he surveyed.

For now.