Liberating Atlantis

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 ru

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 tu

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.