Too late. Frederick swung the hoe in a deadly arc, an arc powered by a lifetime's worth of smothered fury. Smothered no more. The heavy blade tore away half the overseer's face. Blood gouted, astoundingly red in the bright sunshine. Matthew let out a gobbling shriek. The knife fell in the dirt as he clapped both hands to the ghastly wound.

He tried to stagger away from Frederick. Frederick hit him again, this time from behind. The heavy hoe blade bit into Matthew's skull. The overseer crumpled. He thrashed on the ground. Frederick hit him one more time. The thrashing slowed, then stopped. The white man's blood soaked into the thirsty soil.

The slaves working to either side of Frederick gaped at him in commingled astonishment, horror, and awe. "Lord Jesus!" one of them burst out. "What did you go and do that for?"

"We're all in trouble now!" the other one added. He stared at Matthew's huddled corpse. "Big trouble, I mean."

"Not if we grab those guns in the wagons," Frederick answered, more calmly than his drumming heart should have let him speak. "Not if we make all the white folks pay for what they've done to us."

Matthew's dying cries made more Negroes and copperskins hurry over to see what was going on. They all eyed the overseer's bloody corpse with the same look of disbelief, as if they'd never dreamt they might see such a thing. And yet how many of them would have wanted to slaughter him themselves?

"They're gonna kill you," a copperskin said. A moment later, he mournfully added, "They're gonna kill all of us."

"They will if we let 'em," Frederick said. "So let's not let 'em. Let's do some killing of our own-as much as it takes till we're free the way we're supposed to be. The United States of Atlantis are so damned proud of their precious Proclamation of Liberty. But they reckon it stops with white folks. Don't you think mudfaces and niggers deserve their share, too?"

He waited, still clutching the gore-spattered hoe. Their other choice was to kill him now. If they did that, they might convince Henry Barford they hadn't had anything to do with murdering Matthew. They might. Or the planter might decide they had had something to do with it, and were using Frederick's death to cover their own guilt.

Or Barford might be down with the yellow jack himself by now. The way things were going, nobody could guess anything he couldn't see.

"Do you want to stay slaves the rest of your days?" Frederick asked. "Wouldn't you sooner be free?"

They looked at him. They looked at Matthew's body. Flies with metallic bodies-blue, green, brass-were already buzzing above it. "Don't seem like we got much else we can do," a Negro said slowly. "They gonna kill us any which way. Might as well kill some of them before we's dead."

One by one, the other slaves nodded. It wasn't the grand war cry Frederick had dreamt of, but when did reality ever measure up to dreams? He'd made them move. That much, anyhow, he'd foreseen.

"Let's go," he said. "We got to get those guns."

Leaving the overseer's corpse where it lay (though Frederick took the dead man's knife), they marched on the big house.

Frederick did remember to plunge the hoe blade into the dirt to clean it, and to rub more dirt on the handle to hide the blood-stains. He didn't want to alarm the Atlantean soldiers till the slaves got in among them.

He also didn't want to alarm Henry Barford. He didn't hate his owner. He hadn't even particularly disliked Barford till he got shackled to the whipping post and then sent to the fields. But he saw no way to let the planter live, not in the middle of a slave rebellion. Too bad-but a lot of things that happened were too bad.

"What do we say when they ask us how come we're comin' back in the middle of the day?" the copperskin called Lorenzo asked.

"We'll tell 'em a snake bit the overseer," Frederick answered- he'd been wondering about that, too. "Tell 'em he's mighty bad off." He chuckled grimly. "An' he damned well is."

The squat red-brown man grinned in admiration. "You think of everything."

"If I'm gonna run this… whatever it is, I'd better, don't you reckon?" Frederick said. Lorenzo nodded. Nobody else challenged Frederick's right to lead the uprising. Maybe that meant all the field hands thought they could have no one better at their head. Perhaps more likely, it meant they figured he was the one on whom all the blame would land. And it would all land on him. But it would land on them, too. Whites had never shown any mercy to slaves who rose up. In their place, Frederick didn't suppose he would have, either.

There was the big house. There were the wagons with the precious rifle muskets. Without them, the revolt would be stillborn. A couple of troopers dug in the burial plot. If that didn't mean Lieutenant Torrance had died, Frederick would have been very surprised. Too bad, he thought, even though the slaves would have had to kill the officer had he pulled through. Torrance might personally disapprove of slavery, but Frederick had no doubt the Croydonite would have done his professional duty against any rising.

A soldier puffed on a pipe in front of one of the wagons. Sure enough, he became curious if not exactly alert when he saw the slaves straggling in from the cotton fields. "What're you doin' here so God-damned early?" he asked-the very question Lorenzo had foretold.

"You know anything about curin' snakebite?" Frederick asked in return. "Coral snake done bit the overseer, an' he's in a bad way."

"Son of a bitch!" the trooper exclaimed. "I bet he's in a bad way. Those bastards'll kill you deader'n shit."

He might be foul-mouthed, but he wasn't wrong. Coral snakes didn't go out of their way to bite people, as some of the bigger poisonous snakes did. But, like a good many frogs in the south of Atlantis, they wore bright colors to warn enemies that trying to make a meal off them wasn't a good idea. If a coral snake did bite you, you were much too likely to die.

"Whiskey or rum'll make his heart stronger," the cavalryman said as the slaves came up to him. "That and praying're about all I know that can help him."

No, he wasn't suspicious-certainly not suspicious enough. He let the slaves surround him; he couldn't believe they meant him any harm. But what you believed didn't always match what was real. Frederick got behind the trooper and stabbed him in the back.

The white man lurched. He groaned. He tried to draw his revolver, but another Negro clamped a hand on his wrist and didn't let him. When he screamed, more blood than noise came out of his mouth. His knees buckled. A sudden foul stench said his bowels had let go. Down he went.

Frederick grabbed his eight-shooter. "Get his knife, too," he said. One way you got to give orders was by coming out and giving them. If people followed them, you could give more, and they'd be more likely to follow those. Lorenzo took possession of the dagger.

"What do we do now?" someone else asked.

"Let's go get the ones who're digging in the graveyard," Frederick answered. "Doesn't look like they noticed anything goin' on here, and that's good." He stuffed the pistol into the waistband of his trousers and let his shirt droop down over it. "We'll try and do with them like we did with this fellow. Shooting's noisy-we don't start till we have to. Lorenzo, reckon you can let the air out of one while I do the other?"

"Turn me loose," the copperskin said confidently.

"All right." Frederick grinned. "But listen, everybody. If they look like they're gonna pull their guns, just jump on 'em any which way. If they start shootin', they can hurt us bad. Got me?" He waited for nods. As soon as he had them, he nodded at the troopers, who weren't digging much faster than slaves would have. "Soon as we bag them, Master Henry next."