Liberating Atlantis

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 go

"Oh." Frederick left it right there. That was one of the special miseries black and copperski

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 go

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.