Liberating Atlantis

Frederick held up a hand to show he hadn't finished. "Other thing is, with a little luck they won't know we got our hands on these fine guns. They'll come along like we're a bunch of no-accounts. They'll figure they can lick us easy as you please. Are they right?"

"No!" the copperskins and Negroes shouted.

"I can't hear you." Frederick cupped a hand behind his ear, the way he'd seen preachers do when they were riling up their flocks. "Tell me again, people-are they right?"

"No!" the men and women of the Liberating Army howled.

"That's right. They're go

They shouted loud enough to make sure the trees and the rocks heard. Frederick's ears rang. They had the spirit, all right. Whether they would keep it once the white men started shooting at them…

"Reckon we can win one fight the way you said-we'll take 'em by surprise, like," Lorenzo said quietly. "But what do we do after that?"

"If we win one fight, we get us more guns and more bullets," Frederick said. "That'll make us stronger. It'll give the white folks somethin' to worry about. And if word of the uprising spreads amongst 'em, it'll spread amongst the slaves, too. What you want to bet this won't be the only hot spot the whites got to pour water on?"

"Hmm." Lorenzo contemplated that. "Well, maybe," he said at last. "It better not be, or we're all as dead as honkers."

"They say some of them big dumb things're still alive, way off in the back country," Frederick said.

"They say all kinds of stupid things," Lorenzo replied. "And even if it's true, not enough of 'em are left to do anybody any good-not even themselves."

"Anybody who doesn't want to stay here can run off on his own. I've told folks that before," Frederick said.

"I want to be here. I want to win," Lorenzo said.

"Good," Frederick answered. "So do I."

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 Fe

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 go

"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 ru

"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 go