On came the wagons, oblivious to danger. Hooves thumped in the dirt of the roadway. Axles squeaked. Wheels rumbled. As the wagons got closer, Victor could make out the jingle of harness and the drivers laughing and talking to one another.
"Fire!" he shouted. The woods exploded in flame and smoke.
Down went most of the draft animals. Others, wounded but not slain, screamed and reared and tried to bolt. Some of the men in the wagons screamed, too. A handful had the presence of mind to grab for pistols and muskets and fire back. They even hit a couple of settlers as Victor's men swarmed out of the woods and over the wagon train.
"Don't let any of them get away to the south!" Victor shouted. "We don't want the enemy to know what we're doing."
This time, with surprise so complete, obeying his order was easy. The settlers rounded up the luckless drivers and guards. They put wounded animals out of their misery. Some of them started butchering dead ones. Roast ox would be tough, and horse steak would be gluey, but Victor had eaten plenty worse. So had many of his men.
They also plundered the wagons, and came away with everything from wine and brandy to pigs of lead. "Burn what we can't use," Victor said. "Don't leave anything Montcalm-Gozon's men would want."
Maybe the fires would draw French regulars. If they did, the French would find that the settlers had got loose. The enemy settlers wouldn't find the settlers themselves, though. Victor had them marching down the Graveyard Road less than an hour after horror descended on the wagon train.
And they rounded a bend that afternoon and almost ran into another northbound wagon train. "Get 'em!" Victor commanded: not the most precise order ever issued, maybe, but one that told what he wanted done.
He got it, too. The Frenchmen, outnumbered twenty to one, never had a chance. They couldn't turn around, and they couldn't fight back. He feared one or two of them did manage to escape from the rear of the train. If someone there jumped on a horse and galloped south as fast as the beast would take him, he could get out of musket range before any settlers came close to him.
"It won't be so easy next time," Radcliff told Blaise as the wagon train's funeral pyre rose into the sky.
The Negro only shrugged. "We can still do it."
Victor nodded. "Yes, I think we can, too."
They came across no more wagons before they camped for the night. Victor sent a company led by locals cross-country to the road called the Honker's Beak. If the French aimed to use the poorer road to sneak past him, they'd be doomed to disappointment.
He also told off some men to bury the lead they'd taken. His force had plenty for its needs. More important now was denying it to Montcalm-Gozon. The settlers to whom he gave the order grumbled, but he'd expected nothing else. Somebody had to do it.
"A good day's work," he said just before rolling himself in a blanket. "A mighty good day's work."
"Can't you go any faster?" Roland Kersauzon called to his men. "The marquis will need us. I only hope he doesn't need us already."
"Begging your pardon, Monsieur, but you're up there on a horse," one of the French Atlanteans replied. "Easier to go from here to there on a fine gelding than it is on shank's mare." He was gaunt and poorly shaven. He'd done about as much marching as a man could do. All he had with him were a musket and a bullet pouch and a powder horn. When he got the chance, he could fight. What more did you want from a soldier?
Roland sketched a salute. "You shame me. Would you rather ride for a while? I can walk."
The settler shook his head. "No. What difference does it make now? And I suppose you need to be up there so you can give orders and make people pay attention to you."
No doubt he was right. All the same, for the rest of the day Roland felt guilty about riding.
He also fumed, as he'd fumed ever since he reached the southern shore of Spanish Atlantis just too late and found the English fled. No, he'd been fuming longer than that: ever since Don Jose refused to let him enter Spanish Atlantis. Well, Don Jose had paid for his stupidity. But the French cause was paying, too.
What was Montcalm-Gozon doing now? What were the English regulars-and the English Atlanteans, damn them-doing against him? What were they doing to him? Messengers had told Roland all was well with the French regulars up in English Atlantis…but he hadn't had any messengers from Montcalm-Gozon the past couple of days.
Maybe that didn't mean anything. Maybe the marquis had nothing new to report. Or maybe he was too busy attacking Freetown to have time to deal with anything less important. Maybe. Kersauzon had a hard time believing it. The other maybe was that maybe something up north had gone wrong.
"Keep moving!" Roland called again the next morning. "Pretty soon we'll be over the border. Then we'll be living off the enemy, not our own countryside."
Before they got to the border between French and Spanish Atlantis, they found out some of what had happened up toward Freetown. A man riding what was obviously a cart horse reined in in front of them and shouted, "It's all buggered up!"
"What's all buggered up?" Roland demanded.
"Everything!" The teamster seemed bound and determined to give as little information as he could.
"What happened to you? What happened to your friends?" Roland asked.
Little by little, he teased the story from the man. The English were waylaying supply trains. How long could Montcalm-Gozon go without food and munitions? How had the English broken out of Freetown? When the teamster said the attackers wore green jackets, Roland got his answer to that. Those were Victor Radcliff's men, the men he hadn't caught in Spanish Atlantis. Like quicksilver-like his own troops-they could slip through any tiny opening. He wasted a few seconds swearing at them again, and at Don Jose.
"Well, it's up to us, then," he said. "If we can break through and open the supply lines, the regulars will take care of the English." As long as the army holed up in Freetown doesn't get more reinforcements by sea, he thought uneasily. The Royal Navy was stronger than the French sea forces, just as the English Atlanteans had more ships than their French and Spanish counterparts.
But he couldn't do anything about that. He could only fight on land. And if the English settlers lay athwart his path, he was ready-no, eager-to bull them out of the way. The sooner he did it, the better, too. He could see that all too plainly.
"How much trouble is the French general in?" he asked.
"Monsieur, I have no idea," the teamster said. "We never got close enough to find out."
"Nom d'un nom," Roland muttered. He wanted to order double time. No matter what he wanted, he didn't do it. Even if he'd ridden more than he'd marched, he had a good idea of how much his men had left. If he exhausted them before they ran into the English settlers, his fight was lost before it started.
How much did the enemy have left? They'd done a lot of marching and fighting, too. Yes, they'd sailed back from Spanish Atlantis, but ocean voyages didn't build a man's strength. Considering the horrible food aboard ship, even a forced march cross-country might be easier.
Or it might not. Pretty soon, he wouldn't have to wonder any more. One way or the other, he would know. So would Victor Radcliff.
If my ancestor hadn't sold your ancestor the secret of Atlantis for a mess of salt cod… Kersauzon shook his head. Three hundred years too late to fret about that now. The first Kersauzon, the one from Brittany, made the mistake. Everyone else had been paying for it ever since.
"What will you do, Monsieur?" The teamster sounded uncommonly worried. Roland blamed him not a bit. Uncommon worry just proved the man understood the situation. Roland was uncommonly worried himself.
He gave the only answer he could: "Go forward. Find the foe, wherever he is. Fight him. Beat him. What else is there?"
"Nothing." The teamster hesitated. "I only hope the stinking greenjackets don't pop up out of nowhere on you, the way they did with us. If I hadn't been on one of the last wagons in the train, I never would have got away."
"You didn't know what you were running into. Than
ks to you, we do," Roland said. "They won't surprise us. If they beat us, they will have to beat us when we know where they are. By God, my friend, I don't believe any Englishmen ever born, on this side of the sea or the other, can do that."
"I hope you're right," the man said. Me, too, Roland thought. But he would never share that with anyone else. Had he had his way, he wouldn't even have shared it with himself.
Victor Radcliff tried to be thorough. He tried to be cautious. So many things could go wrong in war even when you knew as much as you could about what the low, sneaky scoundrels on the other side were up to. Major General Braddock and too many of his men had discovered, to their cost, the difference between as much as you could and enough.
He and his settlers were moving south, away from Marquis Montcalm-Gozon's men. If they were going to run into trouble, or if trouble was going to run into them, it was most likely to come up from the south toward them.
But likely chances weren't the only ones. Along with stationing scouts ahead of the band of settlers and out to either side, Radcliff also put some men well behind his main body. He perplexed Blaise. "That Frenchman, he wants Freetown," the Negro said. "He not going to come after us."
"Just in case," Victor replied. "I want to be like a hedgehog, so no one can bugger me by surprise."
Then he had to explain what a hedgehog was, because Atlantis had none. Blaise got it in a hurry. "Oh! A-" He said something unpronounceable, at least by a white man. "We have them in my country. I not know you know them."
"Well, I do. They have them in England and France and Spain, too." Again, Victor wondered why Atlantis was missing so many creatures common in Europe. A lot of those beasts, or ones much like them, were also common in Terranova to the west. So far as he knew, though, Terranova had no hedgehogs.
And he had more urgent things to worry about than hedgehogs and honkers. One of the scouts he'd left behind in the north rode into camp that evening on a lathered horse. "They're on the move!" the man exclaimed. "They're heading this way!"
"Who? The French?" Radcliff was astonished. "Why? We might have made them hungry, but not that hungry, not this fast."
"Don't know why," the scout said stolidly. "Ain't my station to cipher out why. You set me there to tell you what. I done did that."
"Yes. You did." Victor nodded. Why was his job, and he understood what Montcalm-Gozon was up to no better than he understood the Atlantean dearth of viviparous quadrupeds. "Are a lot of French regulars moving, or only a few?"
"Looked like a bunch," the scout replied.
"Something's gone wrong for them up at Freetown, then. Has to be so," Victor said. The scout only shrugged. "What can we do about it now?" Victor wondered aloud. He dreamt of catching Montcalm-Gozon in an ambush to repay the French for what they'd done to Braddock. To his own regret, he knew he didn't have the men for it. "Were English soldiers chasing them?" he asked hopefully.
"How the devil do I know?" the scout said. "I saw those bastards in blue a-coming. When I did, I stuck around long enough to see it was a good mob of 'em, and then I got out o' there."
"You did right," Victor said. He muttered to himself. Now he knew more than he would have without those carefully placed scouts. But however much he knew, it wasn't as much as he needed to know. He would have to decide-and to act-with incomplete knowledge. All generals had to do that. How many of them got their noses rubbed in it like this, though?
"Done with me?" the scout asked. "My backbone's trying to saw clear through my stomach."
"Go eat. They're roasting a couple of beeves over there." Victor pointed. The beeves were actually oxen from the French supply wagons, but if you complained about every little thing… "Tell them I said to give you a mug of wine, too-and they'd better not have drunk it all up."
"Now you're talking!" The scout hurried away.
Victor was gnawing on roast-well, half-charred, half-raw-beef himself when another scout rode in, this one out of the south. "There's a bunch of damned Frenchmen camped down there, Major," he reported.
"French regulars? Or French settlers?" Victor asked. The answer to that might tell him something about which side was winning the naval war in the Atlantic.
"Settlers," the scout answered, eyeing the toasted meat on a stick with a longing that said he'd had no supper. "Same buggers who've been dogging us all along."
"Kersauzon marched the legs off them to get them up here so fast," Victor said. The scout only shrugged. He didn't care. "Go get yourself something to eat," Victor commanded. "I'll worry about the rest of this."
The scout seemed only too glad to obey. And Victor did worry. He'd wondered if he could catch Montcalm-Gozon's troops between his anvil and a hammer of redcoats. Now he wondered if he'd got caught between hammer and anvil himself. As far as he could tell, neither group of French soldiers knew the other was close by-and neither knew his settlers lay between them. As long as he could keep them ignorant like that, he was fine. If they started acting together, he was a long way from fine. He was in more trouble than he knew what to do with.
Have to keep them from finding out, then. But how? He could wait for Montcalm-Gozon. Or he could wait for Kersauzon. He couldn't wait for both of them at once. If he tried, they would smash him between them.
All at once, he started to laugh. Then he summoned his officers-and several sergeants who had their wits about them. He didn't name Blaise, but no one said anything when the black man joined the council. Radcliff found he was glad to have him there. No one could say Blaise couldn't take care of himself, and help others do the same. No one tried to do any such thing, either, which Victor found interesting.
He spent a couple of minutes summing up the evening's news. "Bread on both sides of us, and we're the meat in the middle," he finished. That kind of quick meal struck him as a damned good idea.
"How do we make sure we aren't dead meat in the middle?" asked the sergeant named Philip, puffing on his pipe. The English settlers had lifted plenty of pipeweed on their raid through French and Spanish Atlantis.
"Well, that's why I called you together. Here's what I've got in mind." Victor spoke for another couple of minutes, then asked, "What do you think?"
Philip puffed again. The pipe jerked up and down against his teeth as he said, "We will be dead meat if you're wrong…sir."
"Now tell me something I didn't know," Victor answered dryly, which drew a chuckle of sorts from the veteran underofficer. Victor went on, "But we can't stay where we are and let them grind us to powder. Does anyone think I'm wrong?" No one admitted it. Thus encouraged, Victor went on, "And we can't slide off to the west and let the two French groups get together again. That would cost us more trouble than we want, now and later." He waited again. Again, nobody contradicted him. He spread his hands. "This looks to me to be the best we can do."
Off to one side, Blaise nodded. In the fading firelight, his dark skin should have left him next to invisible. Somehow, it didn't. People noticed Blaise. Were he an actor, he would have upstaged the others in the company at every turn. And it wouldn't have been because he was a ham; it was because he was who he was.
A lieutenant said, "Well, if it doesn't work out the way you think it will, chances are we can get away from regulars."
Blaise nodded again. So did several other sergeants. So did the officers at the council. With that lukewarm approval, Victor's plan went forward.
A rifle banged. The report was distinctly sharper and louder than a smoothbore musket's. Something seemed to tug at Roland Kersauzon's hat. He took it off. It had two neat holes through the crown, perhaps an inch-perhaps less than an inch-above the top of his head.
Another rifle spoke. A lieutenant riding a few feet away from him swore and clutched at his left thigh.
"Skirmishers forward!" Only on the second word did Roland's voice break like a boy's. He'd needed a moment to realize just how close a brush with death he'd had.
French settlers trotted north. More gunfire greeted them. A little more slowly tha
n he should have, Roland realized those weren't mere snipers harrying his force. Somebody didn't want his men going forward. Somebody, here, could only be the English.
Redcoats or settlers? he wondered. By the way the foe fought, he guessed he faced settlers. They didn't come out into the open in neat lines. No-they fought from under cover of ferns and from behind trees. They fought like his men, in other words. Now…How many of them barred the way?
Only one way to find out. He'd had more men than Victor Radcliff when he was chasing the English leader. He thought he still did. He sent soldiers forward on the open ground and through the woods. If the enemy wanted to stop them, he was welcome to try.
Here and there, French settlers going forward fell. But not very many of them went down, and they didn't fall across a broad front. Roland smiled to himself. Bluff, as he'd thought. They couldn't stop him. They were just trying to slow him down.
He sent more settlers up against Radcliff's men. He also sent orders for runners to come back and keep him informed about what was going on. They told him the English weren't standing and fighting. In his mind, that confirmed that they were nothing but a harassing band.
"Press them!" Roland shouted. "Break them! Close in behind them and wipe them out!" He rode forward himself, though he stayed in the open so runners could find him at need. He fired a pistol at a man in a green jacket. The English settler stayed on his feet. Roland swore and pulled his other pistol from his belt. By then, the enemy soldier had vanished among the pines.
Roland's men couldn't quite break the English settlers. They forced them into headlong retreat-but only so much of it. Wherever the woods grew thicker, the foe fought harder. There turned out to be more of them than Roland had thought at first, too. They weren't just a thin skirmishing line to be thrust back and then broken or shoved aside. They had reserves cunningly placed to make life difficult for an advancing opponent.
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