Opening Atlantis a-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Victor only wished he could say the man was wrong.

  Ravens and vultures spiraled down out of the sky to feast on the dead. The ravens didn't mind pecking at the dying, either, though the vultures shunned anything that still moved. Roland Kersauzon had seen plenty of dead and dying men before, but never so many all in one place. Quantity, he discovered, had a quality all its own.

  Then a red-crested eagle struck at one of his men walking over the battlefield and badly wounded him. Roland had thought the enormous birds of prey were gone from eastern Atlantis, but evidently not. He wondered what they ate with honkers hunted nearly to extinction hereabouts. This one, plainly, wanted to eat man's flesh. It fought with wings and beak and talons and furious screeches when his soldiers tried to drive it from its screaming victim. One of them finally knocked it over the head.

  Stretcher bearers carried the injured man back to the surgeons. His shrieks would go unnoticed there among so many others. Roland had to make himself go watch the medicos at work and comfort men as they endured bullet probings and amputations with nothing to dull the pain but a leather strap to bite on or, if they were lucky, a slug of rum.

  "Why did you come at all, Monsieur?" one of the surgeons asked. The man's leather apron was all bloody. So were his arms, to the elbows. He sounded genuinely puzzled as he continued, "The rest of us are here because we have no choice."

  "Yes, I understand." Roland fought not to wrinkle his nose against the butcher's reek of blood. His wave took in the charnel house and the rest of the field. "But all this is my responsibility. I'm glad to accept the victory, but how can I without seeing what it costs?"

  "Believe me, Monsieur, most commanders have no trouble whatever," the surgeon said. Along with two burly aides, he went on to the next wounded man. "Hold him tight, boys," he told them. "Can't let him run away while we ply our trade, eh?"

  The soldier screamed. How could he help it, when an iron probe penetrated his pierced flesh? Roland turned away, working hard to control his face and his stomach.

  He was relieved when a junior officer came up to him. That gave him something to think about besides suffering. "Excuse me, sir," the lieutenant said, "but the English prisoners wish to know what is to be done with them."

  "I will talk to them," Kersauzon said. "My English is not of the best, but it will serve. And some of them, it may be, will know a little French."

  "Yes, that is so," the lieutenant replied. He took Roland to the prisoners, who looked as apprehensive as the French commander would have in their boots. Since those boots were finer than the ones a lot of his soldiers had, the redcoats probably counted themselves lucky to be wearing them still. Some of the Englishmen stood in their stocking feet, so they'd already met plunderers.

  "You are safe," Roland told them in his rusty English. "Your lives are safe. You will not be armed…uh, harmed."

  "Will you parole us, sir?" asked a man whose chevrons proclaimed him a sergeant.

  "You will agree not to fight again until exchanged?" Kersauzon asked, first in his language and then in theirs. Sure enough, a few English soldiers did speak French. They translated for the others. Inside of half a minute, all the prisoners were nodding eagerly.

  "We will, sir," the sergeant said, "and thank you for the handsome offer."

  Roland wondered whether he ought to hold some of them as hostages, to make sure the rest kept their word. He decided that would give the redcoats ideas they didn't need. They were professionals; they had honor.

  "You will give your paroles to my men in charge of receiving them." Roland resolved to appoint such men as soon as he left the prisoners. "Then you may go north, if that is what you desire." He knew his English was stilted, but it served.

  "Can we get back what your men stole from us when we surrendered?" That sergeant, like any good underofficer, was always looking to turn an inch into a mile.

  But Kersauzon shook his head. "Be joyous-uh, be thankful-they did not hit you on the head. Did you never plunder a foe?"

  "Who, me, your Excellency? Oh, I might have done that a time or two." The sergeant didn't waste breath denying it. Roland Kersauzon would have called him a liar if he had. With a grin, the saucy fellow went on, "Couldn't hurt to ask."

  "Nor help." Roland turned away.

  Before long, the redcoats were giving their names to the French settlers Roland chose to take them. The military clerks wrote the names on paper borrowed from the bookkeeper over his protests. The few Englishmen who could write signed their names beside the transcriptions. The rest made their marks. Then, still showing the formidable discipline they'd displayed in battle, they marched away, heads high, backs straight. By their pride, they might have won.

  "What will you do now, Monsieur?" one of the clerks asked. "Will you go into Freetown? With their army shattered, the English can hardly stand against us."

  Part of Roland thought he ought to do exactly that. The enemy would be dismayed and disorganized. But he was dismayed and disorganized himself. The sight of a real battlefield would do that to anyone. And his own force, if not dismayed, was also disorganized. The men who'd volleyed with the redcoats had fallen in windrows. The English might be good at only one kind of warfare, but they were monstrously good at that.

  And so Roland temporized. "First we shall bury the dead-ours and theirs. When that is done, I shall decide where to go next."

  "Oui, Monsieur." The clerk didn't argue. He even explained why: "You beat them. You showed you know what you are doing."

  Bodies thudded into long trenches, some for the French settlers, others for the redcoats and English settlers. Priests read prayers above them. Maybe even the enemy heretics, or some of them, would reach purgatory and not burn forever in hell. Kersauzon hoped so, anyhow.

  He ordered Major General Braddock buried in a grave of his own, and had a wooden marker with Braddock's name set over it. Even when caught in a trap, the English commander had fought gallantly. His wounds were at the front, as befit a brave man.

  After that…After that, Roland ordered the army to camp for rest and recuperation. He still stood in English-settled territory. His own settlers had smashed English professionals. He was satisfied for the time being.

  One of his lieutenants was not. "Monsieur, do you know what Hannibal's aide told him when he did not march on Rome as soon as he beat the legions at Cannae?"

  "No," Roland replied, "but I suspect you are about to tell me."

  Ignoring the sarcasm, the junior officer nodded. "He said, 'You know how to win a victory, but not what to do with it.'"

  Roland only laughed. "I will take the chance. And I will say to you that Freetown is hardly Rome. We do not win the war by taking it, and we do not lose the war if we leave it in English hands for a while."

  "We cannot go farther while the English hold it," the lieutenant said stubbornly. "New Hastings, Hanover…"

  "They are far away. One thing at a time," Roland said. The lieutenant sighed, but he didn't argue any more.

  Victor Radcliff found having the paroled redcoats back in Hanover caused more trouble than it solved. They knew they wouldn't be fighting any more for a while, and jeered at their comrades who'd escaped without getting captured. Several fistfights followed in short order.

  Sending the paroled men north solved some of the problem, but only some. The Englishmen who remained under arms still seethed with resentment. As long as they all shared the same risks, no one thought anything of it. When some did while others didn't, the less lucky ones naturally disliked the idea of marching into battle while their friends stayed away.

  The mere idea of parole bewildered Blaise. "No one has to feed prisoners this way," Victor explained. "When we capture French soldiers, we'll send them back under parole and put a like number of our men into the army again."

  "Why not put them in now?" Blaise asked. "The French, they don't know."

  "If they recapture a paroled man who isn't properly exchanged, they can shoot him," Victor replied. "It's a questio
n of honor, too."

  "What is honor?" Blaise asked.

  Victor thought of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. What is honor? a word. What is that word, honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. It is insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it: honor is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism.

  That would be more than Blaise needed to know, and in the wrong spirit, too. Victor tried a different approach: "Honor is keeping promises, even if keeping them isn't to your advantage. If both sides in a fight have honor, they can trust each other to follow the rules of war. It means we treat prisoners and enemy civilians well, knowing the enemy will do the same."

  Blaise scratched the tightly curling hair on top of his head. "You and the French do this?" he asked.

  "We do," Victor said, not without pride.

  "You are both mad, then," Blaise declared.

  "It could be that you are right." Radcliff fell into French, in which tongue the Negro was still more fluent. "But if we are both mad the same way, it makes fighting the war easier for the helpless without changing who wins or loses."

  "Honh," Blaise said, a sound wordless but eloquent in its skepticism. "Prisoners the French take, prisoners you take, you should sell for slaves."

  That shocked Victor. "We don't enslave whites!" he exclaimed.

  "I know. You should. Then you would know more about slavery than you do," Blaise replied, still in French. "The man holding the whip, he thinks one thing. The man tasting the whip, he thinks maybe something else."

  "You are a free man here," Victor said in English, reminding the Negro he'd come out of French-held territory. If slavery paid more up here in the land of wheat and maize and lumber, it might have caught on better in English Atlantis, too. Radcliff didn't mention that.

  "Plenty black men, plenty copper men, not free down south," Blaise replied, also in English. "You say to them, 'Help us and you free,' you get big army fast. French, Spaniards, they much unhappy."

  He was probably right. Whether he was or wasn't mattered only so much to Victor Radcliff. The white man touched his left epaulet with his right forefinger. "You see this, Blaise? I am a major of Atlantean volunteers. I do not decide things here."

  "C'est dommage," Blaise said, and then the same thing in English: "Pity."

  "I suppose so," said Victor, who had never tasted the lash. He wondered whether spreading a promise to free slaves where they were now would be honorable. Reluctantly, he decided it wouldn't. It would involve the French in a guerrilla war against their own servitors, with all the horrors that entailed. War as it was fought these days was a business of army against army, and impinged on civilians as little as possible. A slave uprising couldn't help doing just that.

  "You want to win this war, eh?" Blaise said.

  "Well, yes. We wouldn't be fighting it if we didn't," Radcliff said.

  "Give blacks and copperskins guns. Best way." The Negro seemed ruthlessly matter-of-fact. "Make French sorry at home, they no fight up here no more."

  "You may be right," Victor said. That was polite, and committed him to nothing.

  To his surprise, Blaise realized as much. "You waste a chance," he said. "You not get many better ones. You have to do all your fighting yourself. War is harder. Maybe you lose. What then?"

  Victor hadn't seriously imagined losing. He wondered why not. The French settlers had just devastated some of the best infantry in the world. Why wouldn't they do the same to the redcoats' remnants and to the settlers' odds and sods who were all that was left between them and New Hastings and Hanover?

  Maybe they would.

  "I think I would pack up and go somewhere else. Avalon, perhaps, or the Terranovan mainland," Victor said. "I'm not too old to make a new start. But we aren't whipped yet, either. Not even close."

  "No, eh?" Blaise let the question hang there.

  "No, by God," Victor Radcliff insisted. "If Kersauzon had pushed us hard, we might have fallen to pieces. But he didn't, and we won't. We're getting stronger by the day, with more Atlantean recruits coming in."

  "Honh," Blaise said again. He didn't believe it. He saw the English soldiers and paroled prisoners quarreling among themselves, and he thought that meant the whole army was weak.

  He might have been right, too. Victor didn't want to believe it, which didn't mean it wasn't true. We won't win if we give up, Victor thought. As long as he remembered that…he wasn't giving up. So what? He might lose anyhow.

  XIX

  "F orward!" Roland Kersauzon shouted. He gestured to the buglers and drummers. Their martial music underscored and amplified the order.

  Several thousand men moved at his command, as if he were a puppet master manipulating marionettes. And so he was, though he used obedience, not actual strings. Still, it was a heady feeling, like a slug of barrel-tree rum sliding hot down his throat into an empty stomach.

  A courier rode up from the south and handed Roland a letter.

  Roland examined both the man and the seal with care. He would not have put it past the perfidious English to sneak in a false but French-speaking courier with a forged message to confuse him and his troops. But both the courier and the impression stamped into the wax seemed authentic. Kersauzon broke the seal with a clasp knife, unrolled the letter, and read.

  "What does it say, Monsieur?" a lieutenant asked. "Have we been reinforced, the way the English-speaking Atlanteans were?"

  "As a matter of fact, we have," Roland said. "If this is true, two thousand of King Louis' men have landed at Cosquer and are on their way north to us." He turned to the courier again. "How far behind you are they, do you think?"

  "They're foot soldiers, sir," the fellow replied, with a horseman's natural scorn. "I left them in my dust as soon as I set out."

  "Well, yes. Of course," Kersauzon said. "And you were riding relays of horses, so that made you all the faster. We can't expect them for some time, then."

  "I would think not, sir," the courier agreed.

  "Nom d'un nom," Roland muttered unhappily. "I don't want to wait for them-we've already waited long enough. But I don't want to go into battle without them, either. What to do? What to do?"

  "It's your decision, sir," the lieutenant said.

  Roland Kersauzon could have done without the reminder. He'd been the soul of decisiveness marching up into English territory. He'd got his backwoodsmen and half-trained militiamen a victory even he thought improbable against Braddock's professionals. Now he wanted to rest on his laurels. He wanted to, yes, but he feared that if he tried he soon would have no laurels to rest on. Maybe he'd even made a mistake pausing after the battle. If he'd pressed on right away…

  Well, he hadn't. But he would now. He turned back to the courier. "Go tell the soldiers from the mother country I am advancing," he said. "I look for their support as soon as they are able to give it."

  "Oui, Monsieur." The courier repeated back the message. Roland nodded-he had it right. Neither the man nor his horse seemed thrilled at hurrying back in the direction from which they'd come. But the rider sketched a salute and rode off.

  "In the meanwhile…" the lieutenant said.

  "In the meanwhile, we go on," Kersauzon said firmly. "We would go on even if the King of France left all his men across the sea."

  "What will you do, sir, if the French from France"-the younger officer smiled at his circumlocution-"have an officer with them who wants to take command, the way General Braddock took command for England?"

  Spit in his eye, Roland thought. But he couldn't say that. If there was such an officer, it would surely get back to him. And so Roland was circumspect for once in his life: "I will point out to him that I am more familiar with local conditions than he is likely to be. I will also point out that General Braddock's misfortunes demonstrate how important familiarity with those conditions may prove."

  "What if he chooses not t
o listen?" the nosy lieutenant persisted. "What will you do then?"

  Hope he has an unfortunate accident. Roland Kersauzon couldn't say that, either. The theoretical officer slogging up the coast behind him would surely believe he aimed to arrange such an accident…and the usurping dog wouldn't be entirely wrong. "I will do the best I can," Roland said. "I will do the best he permits me to do."

  "Surely he will value your experience," the lieutenant said.

  "But of course," Roland murmured. He didn't believe it, even for a moment. A French officer sent to Atlantis would feel the same way prisoners said the English officer sent to Atlantis had felt: as if he were exiled from civilization. And it might be true; an officer who'd disgraced himself at the court might well suddenly find himself carried across the sundering sea to do what he could for a country that didn't care to look him in the eye any more.

  Now Roland had to do things quickly and do them right, before the hypothetical officer could take charge and make a mess of whatever he touched. He swore at himself for all the delays he'd tolerated.

  Well, he'd tolerate them no more. "Can't you move faster, you lazy lugs?" he shouted. "What are you waiting for? Are your feet stuck in the mud? They'd better not be, by God!"

  One of the soldiers grumbled that Roland had some part of himself stuck somewhere else. He was not talking about feet or mud. Roland listened without rancor. Soldiers were going to grumble; it was part of what made them soldiers. As long as they grumbled while they marched, Kersauzon didn't mind a bit.

  "If you want us to hurry so much now, why didn't you start us sooner?" A sergeant had the nerve to ask that to his face. Atlanteans who spoke English always bragged about how frank they were and how they spoke their mind to anyone, no matter who and no matter when. The French settlers here didn't waste their time bragging about such things. They just did them.

  And the sergeant expected an answer. Sighing, Roland gave him the straightest one he could: "Because I didn't know my own mind till now."

  "Ah." The underofficer weighed that, then nodded. "It happens, sir. I kind of wish it didn't happen here, though."