Liberating Atlantis

XVI

A supply column that came northeast from New Marseille brought fairly recent papers from the West Coast city and older ones from New Hastings. Leland Newton wasn't delighted at the headlines, but he also wasn't much surprised. No one anywhere seemed happy with the army's progress-or rather, lack of progress-against the insurrectionists.

New Marseille reporters and editors found a simple explanation for the failure: as far as they were concerned, the army was a bunch of bunglers led by idiots. The New Hastings Chronicle-the one daily in the capital that took a pro-slavery line-had a similar opinion. The other papers from the capital took a different tack, one Consul Newton enjoyed more.

"Here. Listen to this," he said to Jeremiah Stafford, holding a month-old New Hastings Daily War Whoop out at arm's length so he could read it without his spectacles. " ' The way the blacks and copperskins in southern Atlantis have succeeded in resisting government forces for so long proves the point Atlanteans from the north have been making for many years: men are men regardless of color. Courage is not the exclusive property of whites. The sooner this is recognized by all, of every hue, the sooner peace will return to our republic.' "

"I'm glad they sent it," Stafford said. Before Newton could show his surprise at such a sentiment, his colleague explained, "It will wipe my backside better than a handful of old leaves."

Patiently, Newton said, "You can use the paper however you please. That doesn't make what's printed on it any less true."

"Lies! All lies! Every single word!" Stafford's voice was too loud, and sounded like a cracked bell. Little drops of spittle flew from his lips as he spoke. One of them landed on Newton's sleeve.

Newton eyed it with distaste, distaste leavened by alarm. "Jeremiah, I mean no offense, but you are talking like a fool, or maybe like a madman. You may not care for everything the papers say, but much of it is true whether you care for it or not. This rebellion is more difficult and intractable than you dreamt it would be when the campaign against it began. And the rebels are different from what you thought they would be. Can you blame the papers for noticing what you must have seen, too?"

"Yes!" Stafford said, which was not what Newton hoped to hear. "If things are the way they say they are-if they are the way you say they are-then dickering with the insurrectionists becomes the only practicable course. I tell you frankly, sir, I should rather die a thousand deaths."

Leland Newton believed that, believed it beyond a fragment of a doubt. His own voice gentled as he replied, "Would you rather Atlantis died a thousand deaths? What else lies ahead on the track you have chosen for the country?"

"I want the insurrectionists to die a thousand deaths," Stafford said savagely. "That might begin to repay them for their atrocities. It might."

"It might also be beyond our power to arrange," Newton said. "If that is not the lesson of the past few weeks, they have none."

"We have not done what we wish we would have. It does not follow that we cannot do it," Stafford said.

"How?" Newton asked.

For the first time since seeing the newspapers, some of the other Consul's dreadful certainty leached out of him. He no longer looked as if he were going to give the Preacher a run for his money. His mouth sagged unhappily. So did his shoulders. His answer came in a much smaller voice: "I don't know."

"Well, we are on the same trail there, anyway, because I don't know how to do that, either," Newton said.

"But we must!" Pain filled Stafford's words.

"What do we name someone who insists we must do something that cannot be done?" Newton answered his own question: "If he is lucky enough to be young, we name him a child. Otherwise, we call him a fool. If he keeps on insisting… we have asy lums for such people."

Stafford turned the color of a sunset. But before he could come out with whatever he'd been about to say, musketry started up off to the north. The encampment boiled like coffee in a tin pot. Soldiers ran this way and that. Before long, quite a few of them purposefully trotted north.

"We have another chance now to do what we came here for," Stafford did say at last.

"What do you think the chances are that this next battle will settle the insurrection once for all?" Newton asked.

"I don't know," the other Consul said, "but I do know they're better if we win than if we lose."

"Are they what a man might call betting odds?" Newton persisted.

"I don't know that, either." Stafford sounded as if he wanted to change the subject, or else drop the whole conversation. Which he did, for he went on, "I am going up to the front, to see what our brave soldiers and militiamen can do. You are welcome to accompany me, if you care to."

If you aren't yellow, he meant. Stung, Newton said, "There is not a place on this campaign where you have gone and I have not." If the other Consul tried to quarrel with that, Newton was ready to box his ears.

But Stafford said only, "Come on, then," and hurried off toward the sound of the firing. He drew his eight-shooter as he went.

Sighing, so did Newton. The idea of shooting insurrectionists did not delight him, as it did his colleague. All the same, he could not believe the copperskins and Negroes would spare him for the sake of his belief in individual liberty. So many bullets flew almost at random; no one could do anything about those. If someone at close quarters aimed at him in particular, he intended to fire first. He might favor individual liberty, yes, but not at the price of his own survival.

That thought made him miss a step and almost stumble. The insurrectionists were risking their lives for individual liberty. No wonder they made such difficult foes!

By the time he and Stafford got to the scene of the firing, it was already dying away. They'd passed a couple of parties of stretcher-bearers taking wounded men back to the surgeons, and one foul-mouthed corporal going back under his own power cradling a bleeding wrist in the crook of his other arm.

"Only a skirmish, your Excellencies," said the middle-aged first lieutenant who seemed to be in command of the Atlantean soldiers thereabouts. "They probed to see if we were ready to receive 'em, they found out we were, and then they faded off into the woods again."

"Didn't much care for the reception, eh?" Stafford said, still holding his revolver at the ready.

"No, sir." The lieutenant scratched at his graying side whiskers. Was this the kind of glorious action he'd imagined when he joined the Atlantean army in the flower of his youth? Leland Newton had trouble believing it. But then, the difference between what you imagined and what you got was one of the yardsticks by which you measured your passage into adulthood.

Out in the ferns and barrel trees from which the insurrectionists had opened up, a wounded man screamed his guts out. One thing Newton had noticed: all badly hurt men sounded the same. Maybe that said something in favor of the basic equality of the races. Hoping so, Newton proposed it to Stafford.

His colleague snorted. "Huzzah," he said sourly. "If I shoot this horse here, it'll make pretty much the same noises, too. Shall we pick it for Consul next term, the way Caligula did with Incitatus?"

"Well… no," Newton said. Stafford was just the kind of man who would remember the name of the mad Roman Emperor's cherished charger and trot it out when it did him the most good.

"All right, then. Don't waste my time with foolishness," he snapped, and turned away. Had the injured Negro or copperskin lain out in the open, Stafford probably would have tried to finish him off, or to hit the fellows who came out to pick him up and do what they could for him. Newton didn't think that was a sporting way to make war. He also didn't think Stafford cared a cent's worth for sport.

Something in Colonel Sinapis' long, sad face told Jeremiah Stafford the army's senior officer didn't want to listen to him. Too damned bad, Colonel, Stafford thought. A colonel who didn't listen to a Consul wouldn't stay the army's senior officer for long.

"We need a decisive victory over the insurrectionists," Stafford declared. "We need to break their fighting force, and we need to break their spirit."

"Such a victory would be desirable-yes, your Excellency." Was that resignation in Sinapis' voice? It had better not be, Stafford thought.

"We need to go after that kind of victory more aggressively," he said.

"I shall certainly be as aggressive as seems advisable," Colonel Sinapis said.

"Be more aggressive than that," Stafford told him.

One of the colonel's shaggy eyebrows rose. "Do you want me to lead the army into a trap, sir?"

"No, damn it! I want you to trap the insurrectionists-trap them and smash them," Stafford said.

"If you smash a glob of quicksilver, all you have are smaller globs here, there, and everywhere," Sinapis said.

"Fine," Stafford said. The Atlantean officer gave him a look-that wasn't the answer Sinapis had expected. Consul Stafford went on, "After we smash the big glob, we can destroy the smaller bits one by one at our leisure."

"Ah." Sinapis relaxed fractionally. He hasn't gone round the bend after all. The colonel didn't say that, but Stafford saw it in his eyes. A beat slower than Sinapis might have, he resumed: "That may be possible. I hope it is, but I would be lying if I said I was sure."

"If we don't make the effort, Colonel, why the devil did we ever leave New Hastings?" Stafford asked, and answered his own question: "We came to fight the insurrectionists. We came to beat them. Let's do that, then."

Balthasar Sinapis sketched a salute. "Very well, your Excellency."

Stafford had learned that Very well, your Excellency could mean anything-or nothing. When Colonel Sinapis got an order he didn't fancy, he saluted, promised to obey, and then sat on his hands. Stafford didn't aim to let him do that this time. Sinapis' fingers wouldn't be warm under his behind-they'd be flaming in the fire.

But Stafford didn't have to hold Sinapis' hands to the fire this time. The colonel sent his men against the insurrectionists with what struck the Consul as almost a devil-take-the-hindmost enthusiasm. Sinapis might have been thumbing his nose at Stafford, in effect saying, Well, this was your idea. If it goes wrong, blame yourself, because it's not my fault.

If it went wrong, Stafford supposed he would have to do that. If he didn't blame himself, Leland Newton damned well would blame him… and would make sure all the papers back in the more civilized parts of Atlantis blamed him, too. He could see headlines in his mind's eye. They would scream about his recklessness-and about his fecklessness, too. They would ask why he overrode a professional soldier's judgment. That would make a painfully good question, too.

No one was happier than he, then, when it didn't go wrong. The Atlantean soldiers fell upon and routed a good-sized force of copperskins and blacks. The insurrectionists hardly formed a line of battle. They fired a few shots and fled. The soldiers killed over a hundred of them, and captured close to a hundred more. Casualties among the whites were seven dead and seventeen wounded.

"You see?" Stafford said exultantly, eyeing the unhappy prisoners. "We really can do this. We just have to push hard."

"It worked this time," Sinapis said, and not another word.

The Consul jerked a thumb toward the captives. "We ought to hang the lot of them, is what we ought to do."

"You agreed we would not, your Excellency," Colonel Sinapis reminded him. "Harming prisoners is a game both sides can play. Nor would your colleague approve of breaking the agreement."

Stafford backtracked: "I didn't say we would. I said we ought to. And I still believe that. After this war is won, there will be a great reckoning. Slaves have to learn they cannot rise against their masters."

"What comes afterwards is politics." As Sinapis was in the habit of doing, he spoke the word as if it tasted bad. "That is your province. I have nothing to say about it. While the fight goes on… there, I am obliged to tell you what I think."

"Yes, yes." Jeremiah Stafford made himself nod. Sinapis could croak as much as he pleased. If he wanted to think he was obliged to imitate a chorus of frogs, he could do that, too. But, if he thought Stafford was obliged to listen to him, he needed to think again. Stafford did some more talking of his own: "Keep on pressing them, I tell you. It is our best hope of victory."

"You are one of the men in a position to give me orders." By the way Sinapis said that, he didn't care for it, either. Even his salute, though technically perfect, felt somehow reproachful. "Of course I shall obey them… and then, your Excellency, we will see what comes of that."

Frederick Radcliff didn't like falling back before the white soldiers. During his life, though, he'd had to do any number of things he didn't like. He couldn't imagine a slave who hadn't. And so he retreated, and retreated again. The Atlantean regulars and the militiamen who reminded him of hyenas skulking along next to lions came after his men.

Lorenzo fancied retreating no more than he did. "We've got to pin their ears back," the copperskin said.

"That would be good," Frederick agreed. "But how do we make sure they don't pin ours back instead?"

"Ambush 'em," Lorenzo answered at once. "Only way to teach 'em respect. Only way to make 'em keep their distance, too. Bastards have been eating pepper-they're right on our heels."

"If we can, I want to give them a jolt," Frederick said. "My only worry is that they'll slide around our flank the way they did before."

"We need to find a place where the ground won't let 'em," Lorenzo said. "Plenty of people carrying guns on our side who'll know about places like that."

"If there are any places like that," Frederick said.

"Bound to be some," the copperskin insisted. "Let me ask around-I'll see what I can come up with."

Frederick didn't tell him no. He didn't want the Atlantean army hounding his rebels, either. And, before long, Lorenzo found a mulatto (or maybe he was a quadroon-he was nearer yellow than brown) who said he knew about a place where the main road ran through a valley wooded on both sides. "They go in there, a bunch of 'em don't come out the other side," the man said.

"That sounds good," Frederick replied. "Next question is, can we get there without hanging out a sign telling the white folks why we're heading that way?"

Lorenzo sent him an admiring glance. "That's the kind of thing you wouldn't've worried about when we started. Neither would I, chances are."

"Long as you live, you better learn somethin' from it," Frederick said. "Only wasting your time if you don't."

"Got that right," Lorenzo said. He put his head together with the light-skinned Negro. When the two men separated, Lorenzo was smiling. The white men leading the Atlantean army would not have rejoiced to see that smile. To top it off, Lorenzo nodded. "I think we can do it without making the buckra suspicious."

That made Frederick smile in turn. Every slave used the word buckra from time to time to refer to white men. Every Negro slave Frederick had known insisted it came from an African language. No copperskin he'd ever heard of claimed it sprang from Terranova, but that didn't stop copperskins from coming out with it.

And Lorenzo and the high-yellow local slave turned out to know what they were talking about. The valley-Happy Valley, the local man called it-was the perfect place for an ambush. Frederick's fighters retreated toward the northeast and passed through the valley. They seemed to, at any rate. A lot of them melted away to either side instead. After the white Atlanteans charged forward, the insurrectionists would make them pay.

Only one thing went wrong: the Atlantean soldiers didn't charge forward. They paused at the southern end of Happy Valley and sent patrols forward to see what was going on in there.

At Frederick's orders, and Lorenzo's, no one fired at the white scouts except what appeared to be the retreating rebel army's rear guard. The idea was to make the white soldiers and militiamen believe the insurrectionists hadn't posted men in the woods to ravage them when they stormed after the withdrawing Negroes and copperskins.

It was a good idea. Frederick remained convinced of that even afterwards. So did Lorenzo-but then, of course, he would have, because it was his. The one trouble was, it didn't work.

The white scouts seemed to know something smelled like rotting crayfish right away. Instead of pressing on after the tail of the withdrawing rebel army (a tail now much stronger than the body of which it had been a part), the white men studied the trees and ferns to either side of the dirt road. They scratched their heads and rubbed their chins and generally acted like men who didn't like what they were seeing.

Come on in! The water's fine! Frederick thought at them, as loudly as he could. By the intent expression on Lorenzo's face, the copperskin was also doing his best to will the white men forward. Which only went to show that willing someone forward was a hell of a lot easier to talk about than to do.

Little by little, the Atlantean army advanced till it was close to the edge of the woods. The field artillery unlimbered and sprayed as much of the forest as the guns could reach with cannon balls and canister. Frederick hoped his fighters had had the sense to scoot back when they saw the cannon taking aim at them. If they hadn't, it would be too late for some of them.

"How many of those white bastards can you see?" Lorenzo asked. "Are they screening us so they can go around to our right or our left before we cipher out what they're up to?"

Frederick wanted to say no. He couldn't, not when the Atlantean army had repeatedly done that before. He peered through a purloined spyglass, then passed it to Lorenzo. "Doesn't seem like they are," he said. "Or does it look different to you?"

After a long stare of his own, Lorenzo said, "I don't think they are. Harder to be sure, though, now that they've got all those God-damned militiamen alongside the regulars. I hate those sons of bitches."

"Well, Jesus Christ! Who in his right mind doesn't?" Frederick said. "The soldiers are just… soldiers. They've got a job to do, and they do it. But most of the militiamen are the shitheels who bought and sold us. They want to keep on doing it, too."

"And killing us. And fucking us," Lorenzo added.

"Yes. And those," Frederick said heavily. "Are we going to let that keep on happening?"

"Maybe they can still kill me. We've already killed a lot of them, but nowhere near enough. The rest…" Lorenzo shook his head. A lock of his straight black hair flopped down over his eyes. He brushed it back with the palm of his hand. "No one's gonna own me any more, not ever again."

He was bound to be right about that. If he and Frederick were unlucky enough to be captured, they wouldn't be returned to slavery, as some of the men and women who followed them might. No, they would die whatever lingering, instructive death the ingenuity of the whites who'd taken them might devise.

Frederick had always known such things were possible, even likely. That was why he always kept a last bullet for himself in his eight-shooter. What slave didn't have such knowledge? Fear of consequences, fear of failing, kept insurrections rare-but made them all the more desperate when they did break out. Right now, Frederick didn't care to dwell on all the things that might happen to him and his followers if they failed. He aimed to keep from failing if he possibly could.

Because he did, he went back to dwelling on what the white Atlantean soldiers and militiamen were up to. "We've taught 'em respect," he said slowly. "They've learned they'd better not just rush up like a herd of cows. We carve 'em into steaks when they try."

"Too bad they've figured that out," Lorenzo said. "They were easier to fight when they played the fool."

The white Atlanteans had taught Frederick a lesson, too: not to keep his own scouts too close to the main body of his army. When the whites did try another flanking maneuver, he found out about it in time to shift part of his own force and delay the enemy. That let the rest of his men take new positions at their leisure. Seeing that the flanking move was doomed to fail, the white men broke it off early.

Both armies held their positions for a while. Frederick sent out raiders to try to wreck the enemy's supply columns. His own men foraged from the countryside; he thought the whites would have more trouble doing that. To his disappointment, he turned out to be wrong. When the whites got hungry, they didn't stop at chickens and ducks and geese. They ate turtles and frogs and snails, the same as his men did. Maybe they drew the line at katydids, but so what?

"Only proves what we already knew," Lorenzo said. "They're nothing but a bunch of thieves."

"What does that make us, then?" Frederick asked in wry amusement.

"Folks with sense," the copperskin answered. "Don't know about you, but I'd sooner eat frog stew and fiddlehead ferns any day of the week, not their rancid salt pork"-he made a face-"and-what do they call them?-desecrated vegetables."

"Desiccated," Frederick said.

"What's the difference?" Lorenzo asked.

Frederick only shrugged. He knew he had the word right, though. When you soaked the dried vegetables in water, they regained a faint resemblance to what they'd been once upon a time. You could eat them, even if Frederick, like Lorenzo, had trouble seeing why anyone would want to.

Lorenzo waved the question aside and came back to more important things: "What are we going to do to stop the white devils? Sure doesn't look like we can starve them back to New Marseille."

"No. It doesn't," Frederick admitted glumly.

"Well, then?" Lorenzo's voice seemed sharper than a serpent's tooth. The comparison came from the Bible, though Frederick couldn't remember exactly where.

But he did have an answer for his copperskinned marshal, even if Lorenzo hadn't expected him to: "As long as we don't lose, we win. As long as we keep on fighting, keep on making trouble, we win. Sooner or later, the United States of Atlantis'll decide we cost more than we're worth-too much money, too much time, too much blood. That's when they decide they better start talkin' instead of fightin'."

"You sound sure, anyway." By the way Lorenzo said it, he was far from sure himself. He did unbend enough to ask, "How come you sound so sure?"

"On account of that's the way my grandfather licked the redcoats," Frederick answered. "He hung around and he hung around and he hung around, till finally they got sick of the whole business. That's why there are the United States of Atlantis today."

"And a fat lot of good they do us, too," Lorenzo said.

"Oh, things could be worse," Frederick said. "Some of the islands south of here-the ones the Spaniards still hold-the way they treat slaves makes Atlantis seem like a kiss on the cheek. And the Empire of Huy-Braseal, in southern Terranova, that's supposed to be just as bad, or maybe even worse."

"But I ain't in any one of those places. I'm here," Lorenzo said pointedly. "If they catch me, they'll kill me. How does it get any worse than that?"

Frederick had had a similar thought not long before. "Don't suppose it does," he replied. "Thing is, then, not to let 'em catch us, right?"

"Right." Lorenzo's head bobbed up and down. "First sensible thing you've said in quite a while-you know that?"

"Well, I try," Frederick said. They both laughed. Why not? They were-for the moment, for as long as their followers could hold off the white soldiers, or until the Atlantean government got sick of what looked like an endless, hopeless war-free men. Despite all the qualifications, this tenuous freedom was as much as Frederick had ever had. While he had it, he aimed to make the most of it.

Jeremiah Stafford fixed Colonel Sinapis with a glare that would have reduced any government functionary back in New Hastings to a quivering pile of gelatin. "We aren't pressing them anywhere near so hard as we might," Stafford said. He could have made the statement sound no more ominous had he demanded Have you stopped beating your wife? Whatever Sinapis answered would be wrong.

Or so Stafford thought. The officer, however, declined to turn gelatinous. "You wanted us to rush into that Happy Valley, too, your Excellency," Sinapis said. "How many casualties do you suppose that would have cost us? It would have been the worst disaster since Austerlitz, or maybe since Arminius massacred the Romans in the Teutoberg Forest in the year 9."

Quinctilius Varus! Give me back my legions! Stafford remembered the Emperor Augustus' anguished cry from his own slog through Suetonius in his university days. Consul Stafford! Give me back my soldiers! just didn't have the same ring. But would it have come to that? He didn't think so.

"We could have whipped those savages," he said.

"I'm sure Varus thought the same thing," Colonel Sinapis replied. "Sometimes, your Excellency, you have to know when not to fight."

That was bound to be true, in war as in a barroom argument. All the same, Stafford said, "It sometimes seems to me that you abuse the privilege of not fighting, Colonel."

"Isn't that interesting?" Colonel Sinapis said. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

Stafford gaped. He'd been a Senator before he was chosen Consul, and a prominent man before he was elected Senator. How could it be otherwise? Only prominent men reached the Senate; one measure of an Atlantean's prominence was whether he reached the Senate. No one had had the nerve to be openly rude to him for many years.

"Come back here, you!" he snapped, as if Sinapis were an uppity house slave.

The colonel stopped, but did not return. "No," he said calmly, and made as if to walk off again.

Before he could, Stafford's voice went deadly cold: "Have you a friend with whom my friends may discuss this matter further?" Dueling might be illegal in every state of the USA, but that did not make it extinct. Men from the south, especially, were still apt to defend their honor with pistols.

As calmly as before, Colonel Sinapis said "No" again. That made Stafford gape once more. The colonel continued, "Your military regulations wisely forbid officers from dueling. Otherwise, your Excellency, please believe me when I say that I should take no small pleasure from killing you. Good day." Sketching a salute, he ambled off as if he had not a care in the world.

What had been in his eyes as he responded? If it wasn't a pure, wolfish pleasure at the idea of bloodshed, Stafford had never seen any such thing. He reflected that he didn't know what kind of fighting man Sinapis was; army commanders seldom got to display their mettle in the front line. Maybe he was lucky not to find out the hard way.

Maybe, just maybe, he was very lucky indeed.

I was not afraid, he told himself. He wondered how much that mattered, or if it mattered at all. A man might not fear an earthquake or a flood or a wildfire-which wouldn't keep a natural disaster from killing him. Something told Stafford that Balthasar Sinapis held about as much compassion as fire or flood or temblor.

How exactly had Sinapis come to Atlantis? What were the circumstances under which he'd lost his position in Europe? Was it because some prominent man-a government minister, say, or a prince-got ventilated in a quarrel or a formal duel? Stafford hadn't thought so, but…

His encounter with Sinapis didn't stay quiet. By the nature of things, encounters like that never did. Everybody was talking about it the next day. Not much of what people said was true, but when did that ever stop anyone?

"I hear the good colonel wanted to load you into a cannon and fire you at the insurrectionists," Consul Newton remarked.

"No such thing!" Stafford said, which was true-not that truth had ever outrun a rumor. With such dignity as he could muster, the Consul went on, "I keep trying to spur him to more activity against them."

"From what folks are saying, you keep trying to get yourself killed," his colleague observed.

"If you wade through everything folks are saying, you'll need to hold your nose and take a bath before you reach down to the truth," Stafford said. "The smell will tell you what you're wading in, too."

"You didn't challenge him to a duel, then?"

"What? Yes, of course I did. I might have won, too."

Newton's raised eyebrows said everything that needed saying about how likely he thought that was. And chances were he had a point, too; Colonel Sinapis was bound to get more pistol practice than Stafford did, and to have got more for many years. If Stafford was to win the duel, he would need luck on his side. Sinapis would need only routine competence. That, he had.

"The idea, you know, is to work with the colonel," Newton said. "If you make him hate you, you won't have much luck with that."

"He's a soldier. Soldiers do what you tell them to do," Stafford growled. But he knew you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. There was a difference between obeying orders from a sense of duty and obeying them because you really wanted to. The latter got good results. The former…

Again, the other Consul needed no words to let Stafford know what he was thinking. "We are gaining ground against the insurrectionists, you know," Newton said, turning the subject.

"We're in deeper, anyhow," Stafford answered. "I'm not so sure about gaining ground. What they do to the wagon trains coming up from New Marseille…" He angrily shook his head. "They have no business doing such things, God damn them to the blackest pits of hell."

Leland Newton smiled thinly. "I never thought I'd learn how tasty frog-and-snail stew could be," he said.

"I never thought I would have to find out," Stafford said. "We were guarding the wagon trains well for a while, but things have slipped again."

"If you put everything you have into going forward, doing anything else with your soldiers is going to slip," Newton pointed out. "Even with the militiamen along, we're stretched too thin for that not to happen."

Stafford grunted and turned away, almost as rudely as Colonel Sinapis had turned away from him. Doing anything else would have meant admitting some of the army's failures were his own fault, and he was damned if he would. Newton didn't challenge him to a duel, although no regulations (except the laws of the United States of Atlantis, which a gentleman could ignore if he chose) prevented one Consul from meeting the other on the field of honor.

Newton's voice pursued him: "Don't you think we'd be better off talking with the insurrectionists and seeing if there isn't some way we might all live together peacefully? This is the only home any of us have, you know."

That made Stafford turn back. "We had been living together peacefully for many years, under a system that assigned everyone his proper place-"

"From a white man's perspective," Newton broke in. "From a Negro's or a copperskin's, maybe not. Easier to be impressed, I daresay, if you're doing the buying and selling than if you're bought and sold."

"You sound like you're selling nigger equality, Newton," Stafford said. "You may huckster as much as you please, but I'm here to tell you I'm not buying."

"Oh, I can see that," the other Consul answered. "Better to let Atlantis tear itself to pieces than to change one iota of the way we do things. Iota… That goes all the way back to the theological controversies of the fourth century, you know: the difference between homo-ousios, of the same nature, and homoi-ousios, of like nature. One little letter, and plenty of blood spilled over it. A few hundred years from now, will our quarrels seem as foolish?"

"No," Stafford said, and then, "It would, no doubt, be pointless to remind you that our Lord accepted the idea of slavery."

By Newton's face, it would indeed. He credited the parts of the Bible that pleased him and ignored the rest. Stafford didn't pause to wonder whether he did the same thing himself.