He put men in the woods to keep the Atlanteans from outflanking his position by surprise. He posted men behind the barricade, too. Why let the enemy have an easy time tearing it down?

He knew when the soldiers drew near. They raised a column of reddish dust that hung in the dusty air. The Barfords had always complained about road dust when they visited friends and relations. Clotilde Barford said-over and over-the problem would go away if the government (sometimes it was the state government, sometimes the national) only macadamized or cobbled the highways. She wanted the government (whichever government it was on any given day) to start with the one that ran next to the Barford plantation.

Frederick might have been a slave, but he could see the trouble with that. He'd never set eyes on a macadamized road, or even a cobbled one, but he knew what they were and what making them entailed: lots of rocks (whether crushed or fist-sized), lots of labor, and lots of money. The government might not have to pay slaves in work gangs, but it would have to feed them and water them and doctor them, and it would have to pay their owners for their services and for their time away from the fields. Where would the government get money like that, especially since white folks squealed like hurt hogs about every cent they grudgingly coughed up in taxes?

People who liked paved roads talked about other advantages besides their being dust-free. The most important was that you could use them in any weather. Rain didn't turn them to muck.

But horses' hooves did better on dirt than on cobblestones or macadam. And dirt roads didn't have to be expensively rebuilt. They didn't have the added cost of maintenance, either. They were just… there. And odds were they would go right on being there for many years to come.

Frederick examined his preparations one more time. He turned to Lorenzo. "Are we ready?" he asked. "Did we forget anything?"

The copperskin started to answer. Then he caught himself and took another long look at things himself. Frederick liked that. The more you checked, the less you took for granted, the better off you were likely to be. At last, Lorenzo said, "Only thing I wish we had are some cannon of our own."

"Me, too," Frederick said. "Don't know what we can do about that, though, except maybe grab some from the white folks."

"If we'd taken New Marseille-" Lorenzo began.

Frederick cut him off with a sharp chopping motion of his right hand. "Too late to worry about that now, 'specially since we might not've taken it."

"Still looks to me like we could've," Lorenzo said stubbornly.

They might have gone on arguing-it was nothing they hadn't done before-but several Atlantean cavalrymen rode out from under their army's dust cloud and trotted forward to look over the rebels' dispositions. "Hold fire!" Frederick yelled to his men. The clouds of powder smoke would tell the white horsemen just where their foes waited.

For a wonder, the men under his command did as he asked. The cavalrymen stared at the rise and the barricaded road and the woods off to the side. Then they rode back to report to their own superiors. Frederick's stomach knotted. It wouldn't be long now.

XIV

Jeremiah Stafford peered at the insurrectionists' position through a spyglass. He couldn't judge how many men they had behind that stone wall. Enough to let them think they could challenge the Atlantean army, anyhow. They couldn't possibly be right… could they?

By the way Colonel Sinapis lined up his men with fussy precision, and by the way the corners of his mouth turned down, he wasn't so sure. Instead of sending the foot soldiers forward to sweep aside the riffraff of Negroes and copperskins, Sinapis advanced his field guns till they weren't far out of musket range. "Hit the wall with everything you have," he told the artillerymen.

"What good will that do?" Stafford asked him.

Patiently, the Atlantean officer answered, "A stone wall will protect the men behind it from musketry. If they think they are safe from cannonballs… Inexperienced troops often make that mistake." He turned back to the men with the red chevrons and piping on their uniforms. "Now!" he commanded.

The field guns belched fire and smoke. They scooted backward from the recoil; a few artillerymen had to step smartly to keep the carriages from running over them. As soon as the recoil stopped, the gun crews wrestled their pieces back into position, swabbed the guns' iron and brass throats, and started reloading them.

Several roundshot smacked into the fence that protected the insurrectionists. From the way Colonel Sinapis had talked, Stafford thought the guns would smash down the wall all at once. They didn't. But through the spyglass he saw turmoil among the men on the far side. Something was going on, sure enough.

When he asked about it, Sinapis answered, "The balls break the stones they hit. You stand behind a stone wall that gets can nonaded, it is like standing up under shotgun fire. Those little bits of stone can kill you and will hurt you if they do not kill."

"Ah," Stafford said, enlightened. The cannon went on thundering. The commotion on the far side of the stone wall got worse. Here and there, roundshot bit chunks out of the wall. Even when they didn't, the copperskins and Negroes stirred like bees when their hive was kicked.

"So we shall see how they like that for a while, and then we shall see how steady they are after a cannonading," Colonel Sinapis said. "Artillery is what inexperienced troops commonly fear most. If it unsettles the-what do you call them?-the insurrectionists, yes, they will be easy enough for our infantry to handle."

"I expect they will be," Stafford said. "It's not as if they were white men, after all." He wondered how he would like to face artillery fire from behind a stone wall that offered less protection than he'd expected. Chances were he wouldn't like it much, but he didn't dwell on that.

Something gleamed in Colonel Sinapis' dark eyes. But the colonel didn't call him on it. The fieldpieces thundered again and again, hurling cannonballs up the slope. The whack!s the roundshot made when they hit the fence were shorter and sharper than the blasts that flung them forth.

Sinapis waved. The cannon fell silent. The officer turned to the bugler beside him. "Blow Forward," he said.

"Yes, sir," the man replied, and raised his battered brass bugle to his lips. Under the subtropical sun, it gleamed like gold. The imperious notes rang out.

"Hurrah!" the soldiers shouted as they started toward the enemy. They advanced with fixed bayonets. The sunshine also glittered from the sharp steel. Bayonets were another thing that made raw soldiers' knees knock. Somehow, it was easier to put up with the notion of taking a bullet than to imagine yourself screaming your life away, pierced by a foe who'd come all that way to stick you and who had within himself not a drop of the milk of human kindness.

While the main force advanced on the fence, a smaller group of soldiers moved against the barricade blocking the road. Copperskins and Negroes popped up from behind the fallen trees and fired at the oncoming men in gray. And plenty of insurrectionists in back of the fence blasted away at the Atlanteans moving toward them.

"They have nerve," Sinapis said.

"They have their nerve!" Jeremiah Stafford exclaimed, which meant something altogether different.

"I had hoped we could get in among them without needing to fire," Sinapis said. "That does not seem likely now."

Sure enough, the Atlantean infantrymen began shooting back at the foes behind the fence. Then they had to reload under fire from the enemy, which nobody in his right mind could have been enthusiastic about. Some of them got shot ramrod in hand-as ignominious a way to go out of the fight as any Stafford could think of.