"And who would command such a party?" the lieutenant-colonel asked. "You?"
"If you like, sir," Victor said. "I have done a lot of exploring in the interior. I know I could find plenty of men who wouldn't starve in the woods."
"Very well. That's one thing," the Englishman said. "You told me there were others, so I presume you have at least one more in mind."
"I do, sir," Victor Radcliff agreed. "We could take boats and land down the coast in French territory, do our raiding, and then either come back the way we went or go into the interior, depending on which seemed best."
The English officer studied him. "Again, I presume you would command this mission?"
"I'm suited for it. I don't know anyone who has a better chance of making it work," Victor said.
"Which would you do if you had the choice?"
"I believe I'd go in by land, sir," Victor said. "That way, we start giving the enemy a hard time all the sooner."
"You wouldn't take so large a party as to hurt our chances of defending against the French here?"
"Oh, heavens, no, sir! We couldn't victual that kind of party, anyhow," Victor said. "A relative handful of men, moving swiftly and raising havoc-that's what I've got in mind."
"I see." The lieutenant-colonel nodded. "Well, why don't you recruit such a party and set it in motion? I think you will do the French some harm with it, and I also suspect you won't be sorry to have me out of your hair." He gave the Atlantean a crooked grin.
Victor Radcliff grinned back. "That cuts both ways, unless I'm sadly mistaken. You won't be sorry I'm not nagging you any more."
"Who, me?" The English officer gave back a look of exaggerated innocence. "Ah, if only we were on the same side!" They both laughed. Radcliff stuck out his hand. The lieutenant-colonel took it. What began as a clasp ended up a trial of strength. They were still laughing when they broke it off, neither sure who had won or if anybody had.
Whatever Roland Kersauzon had been expecting in a French general, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon, wasn't it. He had fair, curly hair, blue eyes, a cupid's-bow mouth, and the beginnings of a double chin. He also had an illustrious pedigree on both sides of his family. With shortcomings like those, Roland should have hated him on sight.
He should have, but he didn't. Despite the marquis' failings of appearance and birth, two things were plain. He was an honest man: if he weren't, he wouldn't have been a soldier, and he wouldn't have let himself get sent to Atlantis. And he was a soldier, all the way down to the tips of his elegantly manicured fingers.
"You did well to beat them once," he told Roland. "Pitting raw troops against regulars is a dangerous business, but you got by with it. Now there are regulars on your side as well. We should take advantage of it."
"Oui, Monsieur," was all Roland could manage, as if he were a raw recruit himself. A general from the mother country who actually wanted to fight! No, Roland hadn't expected that. Oh, Braddock had wanted to fight, but he'd made a hash of it. Kersauzon didn't think this much younger Frenchman would.
"We'd better win soon," Montcalm-Gozon added. "If we don't, I doubt we shall win later. The trouble we had getting men across the sea once…I doubt we'll try it again. If we do, I doubt we'll succeed. The English are alert now. They have more ships than we do, and better sailors. They can bring more soldiers to Atlantis any time they choose. We are not so lucky."
"They have more settlers, too," Roland said. "It seems strange, and most unfair. France is a larger country than England. But England has more ships and more folk who want to live here. Where is the justice in that, I ask you?"
"France is more sufficient unto herself than England," said the general from the mother country. "England needs to draw more things from the sea, and from across the sea. And her poor peasants come here or go to Terranova to find something better than they have at home. Try to convince a French peasant that there is anything better than what he has at home. He will laugh in your face for your trouble."
"It is a pity," Roland said.
"Many things are," Montcalm-Gozon agreed. "Now-I understand a fieldwork ahead troubles your line of advance. I should like to go forward with you and reconnoiter, if you don't mind."
"But of course, Monsieur." To say anything else would have left Kersauzon open to an imputation of cowardice. "May I offer one suggestion first?"
"I would be delighted to hear it."
"Put on the habiliments of a common soldier. Drawing attention to yourself without reason is the height of foolishness, and some of the riflemen in this fort can hit a target at a startling range."
The marquis frowned. "I mislike doing such a thing. After all, I am who I am. Do you intend to do the same?"
"I do. It is not lack of courage that provokes me, Monsieur. But I do not care to entrust the campaign to my second-in-command. If you feel otherwise…Well, in that case you will do as you please."
They approached the makeshift earthwork in ordinary clothes. Louis-Joseph proved a fine horseman. Roland might have known he would. The nobleman eyed the countryside with keen interest. "Such curious plants! My botanical friends in Paris would be most intrigued."
"I believe it, your Excellency," Roland replied. "I have heard that the natural productions of Terranova are more like Europe's than are those of Atlantis."
"I have heard the same," Montcalm-Gozon said. "I believed it before I came here. Now I am convinced of it."
"I wonder why it should be so. Terranova is farther from Europe than Atlantis is," Roland said.
The marquis shrugged. "You ask the wrong man. Perhaps the savants I mentioned might find an explanation for you. Me myself, however? No, I regret to say. I am but a simple soldier."
A soldier he was, indubitably. Simple? Roland Kersauzon smiled to himself. He'd heard men mock themselves before. He knew the peril of taking one of them seriously when he did.
Montcalm-Gozon would have ridden right up to the fort if a musketeer inside hadn't fired a warning shot in his direction. That was only a smoothbore piece, and didn't come particularly close. It did say the green-coated men inside would pay more attention if the French officers didn't desist.
"Well sited, well made," Montcalm-Gozon murmured, more than half to himself. "Yes, I can see that it would be an obstacle."
"How do we get around-or get through?" Roland asked.
"They seem light on artillery," the French general replied. "If we cannonade them, it could be that soldiers might break in under cover of the bombardment. It seems to me worth a try, in any case. My own artillery train is considerably more extensive than yours."
"Let's prepare, then." Roland Kersauzon was glad French regulars would share the butcher's bill with his men. It would be high if things went wrong. He caught motion from the corner of his eye. "A messenger! I wonder what he wants."
He didn't wonder long. The man delivered his news in a staccato burst: "The damned English have sent a raiding party-or maybe an army-over the border to the west. They are stealing and burning and committing God only knows what other outrages besides."
Roland swore. So did Montcalm-Gozon. Expecting the English to sit around waiting for trouble would not do. They wanted to go out and cause it instead. Now locals and regulars had to figure out what to do about that.
XX
W ar was wicked and evil and woeful. So the Good Book insisted. War brought pain and misery and suffering. So anyone with an eye to see could tell. War ruined hopes and buried young men and sent years of patient toil up in smoke.
And when everything that went up in smoke belonged to the enemy, when he hurt and was miserable and suffered, war could be a devil of a lot of fun. So Victor Radcliff discovered as his band of brigands swooped down on one plantation after another.
No border guards tried to keep them out of the French settlements in Atlantis. Maybe there were guards farther east, but not where he broke in. It wasn't far from the place where he and Blaise and the two copperskins from Terranova had escaped the untender w
elcome of the French settlers. Victor wondered what had happened to the Frenchmen who'd been here then. They were probably with the army south of Freetown.
"Your old master anywhere around here?" he asked Blaise.
The Negro shook his head. "No, sir. Farther south."
"We're far enough south already. Too far, by God," a raider said, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve. By his accent, he came from Croydon or one of the other towns north of Hanover. No, he wouldn't be used to weather like this, especially not in November. Ferns here sprouted from the sides of stone fences-sometimes from the sides of stone buildings. Barrel trees grew in abundant profusion. Lizards as long as a man's leg scurried through the undergrowth. Some of the snakes were big enough to eat men.
And Victor asked, "Are there crocodiles in the rivers down where you were?"
"Oh, yes." Blaise nodded matter-of-factly. "But crocodiles in Africa, too. Be careful, mostly no trouble."
"Mostly?" The man who came from somewhere near Croydon didn't sound reassured.
"Life is life," Blaise said with a shrug. "Mostly no trouble as good as it gets. The French now, they has mostly got trouble."
His grammar stumbled-on purpose?-but he wasn't wrong. Barns and plantation houses went up in flames. The raiders hadn't come to set black and copperskinned slaves free, but they didn't stop them from plundering and taking off for the north.
"Why do you do this?" an old woman asked Victor as a stately home where her family might have lived for generations burned to the ground. "Have I ever done anything to you, Monsieur?"
He bowed. "By no means. But an army of French settlers-and, by now, I daresay, French regulars as well-has invaded lands that belong to my king and my countrymen. Shall we let them get by with that without repaying it where and as we can?"
"Go fight these other soldiers, then. They have wronged you, it could be. I have done you no harm." The old woman started to cry. "Ruins! Everything ruins!"
Victor didn't know whether the redcoats and English settlers below Freetown were strong enough to fight the French straight up. He knew the force he commanded wasn't strong enough to do anything of the sort. But he knew some other things, too. "If we make your settlements howl," he said, "your generals will have to leave the land they invaded and come back to defend their own."
"What good does that do me?" the woman howled as the roof on the house collapsed in a shower of sparks.
It did her no good at all, as Victor knew. But that wasn't his worry. He aimed to make all the French settlements howl the way she did. With the small force at his disposal, that might have been more than he could reasonably expect to do. If you thought small, though, you wouldn't end up with much.
"March on!" he shouted to his men, and march they did.
Some of the plantations had young women on them, as well as or instead of old ones. Some unfortunate things happened-the young women would surely have agreed. Victor tried a couple of soldiers at drumhead courts-martial, and hanged them when they were convicted. Afterwards, those kinds of outrages stopped…or, if they didn't, the offenders got more careful. As Blaise said, mostly no trouble was about as much as you could hope for.
"Why you slay them?" the Negro asked. "They hurt enemy, too."
"Rape is a crime even when a soldier does it," Radcliff said.
"You think the French, they don't fuck English women?" With a limited vocabulary, Blaise could be very blunt.
"They probably do," Victor answered with a sigh. "But if they get caught, French officers will punish them. They use the same laws of war we do."
"Laws of war." As before when he heard that phrase, Blaise was bemused. "You white people plenty smart, but sometimes I think you crazy, too."
"Maybe we are. But if we're all crazy the same way, it evens out," Victor Radcliff said.
Some of the French were crazy in a different way: crazy enough to try to fight back against half a regiment's worth of men. They paid for their folly. Victor made a point of ensuring that they wound up dead. He also made a point-though a quieter one-of looking the other way when his men took their women in among the trees.
"Maybe you not so crazy after all," Blaise remarked.
"Maybe not," Victor said with a sigh. "Or maybe the extent to which I am a beast marks the extent to which I am a sane man."
The Negro frowned. "Don't understand that."
"Don't trouble your head about it." Radcliff set a hand on his shoulder. "I'm not sure I understand it, either. I'm not sure I want to understand it."
His raiders pushed east and south, in the direction of the ocean. He didn't expect to wash his hands in the Atlantic. Pretty soon, the French would scrape together enough militiamen to bar his way. The farther east the English went, the more towns and villages they ran into. And towns and villages had lots of men in them. Men with muskets hastily pressed into service didn't make the best soldiers. But Victor was uneasily aware his own men had been amateurs not long before. If you lived through a couple of skirmishes, you got an idea of what needed doing.
Again, Blaise had his own idea of what needed doing. "Should say all niggers here free, M'sieu Victor. Copperskins, too. You get more fighters. And the French settlers, they can't do a thing without those people."
He was bound to be right about that. Slowly, Victor said, "I have no orders to do any such thing."
"Why you need orders?" Blaise demanded.
"If we win this war, I think England will take away the French settlements in Atlantis," Victor said. "Maybe the Spanish settlements, too."
"And so?" Blaise cared nothing for that. "Most niggers and copperskins are free in English lands now."
"Slavery makes no money up in the north. The crops won't support it," Victor replied. "Things are different here. How can you raise cotton or indigo or rice or even pipeweed without plantations? How can you have plantations without slaves?"
Blaise looked at him-looked through him, really. "We don't use money in Africa. Maybe we lucky. You put money ahead of free?"
"If all the slaves down here are suddenly freed, everyone in these parts is liable to starve, Negroes and Terranovans and whites alike," Victor said.
"Pay people to work the farms," Blaise said. "They do it, I bet."
"It could be," Victor admitted. "Say it is."
"Then everybody free!" Blaise exclaimed.
"Maybe. Or maybe everyone is free to starve. Paying workers costs more than keeping slaves. If there is no profit, the plantations go to ruin," Victor said.
Blaise was a shrewd man, no two ways about it. "Make people who buy from them pay more," he said.
"And all the plantations in Terranova will undersell us, so we go to the dogs just the same. They grow cotton and rice and indigo in India, too, and I hear they will grow pipeweed there soon," Radcliff said.
"I hear about Terranova," Blaise said. "Where is this India place?"
"Beyond Terranova and an ocean-on the far side of the world."
"More world than ever I think," the Negro said. "Terranova, yes, I hear some about it-copperskins' talk, you know. They use slaves in this India place?"
"I have no idea." Victor Radcliff had never worried about it. All he knew about India was that it was supposed to be rich, and it had tigers and elephants. He'd seen a tiger once, in a zoological garden some high-minded cousin had set up in Hanover. It looked hungry. It looked angry, too, prowling its too-small cage and lashing its tail.
But Blaise persisted: "If they don't use slaves, how you say we need slaves?"
"All I said was, I don't have the authority to free slaves," Victor answered. "Politicians have to do that sort of thing; soldiers can't. I can tell slaves to run off-that's a measure of war. Freeing them is more than I can do."
"I have reason the first time," Blaise said, which showed he still knew more French than English. "White people are crazy."
Despite cold rain and mud, French regulars marched in perfectly dressed ranks and columns, just like English redcoats. And, as the F
rench settlers had maneuvered the redcoats into a trap, so the English settlers tried to return the disfavor. Their fort had fallen, but they sniped at the French from whatever cover they could find. And they refused to fight fixed battles.
"What ridiculous excuse for warfare is this?" Montcalm-Gozon demanded indignantly.
"It is what I warned you to expect," Roland Kersauzon replied. "They fear your men would win in any stand-up fight-"
"As we would," the commander from the mother country broke in. "Oh, no doubt, Monsieur," Roland said politely. He didn't want to argue with the nobleman. That didn't necessarily mean he thought Montcalm-Gozon was right. His settlers had shocked the English redcoats. Maybe the English settlers could do the same to French regulars.
"As I said before, this is curious country," Montcalm-Gozon remarked. "Where it is settled, it seems European enough. Where people do not dwell, though, the plants and animals are quite different. Now and then you will see a familiar tree or bush or animal living amongst the native oddities, but only now and then."
"In my grandfather's day, I am told, you would never have seen such a thing. Settlements then were smaller and stuck closer to the coast," Roland said. "Since those days, we have brought in more plants and animals that suit us. Deer and foxes roam the forests now. Rats and mice infest our homes and barns. Cats hunt them-and whatever else they can find. Dogs run wild, too. So do chickens and our ducks and Terranovan turkeys."
"So you believe the native productions will vanish?" Montcalm-Gozon asked. "A pity to see sameness imposed on the world."
"I am, I hope, a modern man, your Excellency," Kersauzon said. "If that which comes from Europe or from Terranova serves our needs better than Atlantis' native productions, why should we not have it? In the early days here, men feared to go outdoors, because red-crested eagles might slam into them from behind and chew at their kidneys as the vulture chewed at Prometheus' liver. Now those flying monsters are few and far between, and I confess I miss them not a pin." He remembered how horrified he'd been when an eagle attacked one of his settlers.
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