United States of Atlantis a-2

by Harry Turtledove

  His men burst into cheers when they entered Weymouth. Victor felt like cheering himself-he'd got there ahead of General Howe. He wondered how long it had been since Weymouth heard much in the way of cheering. The town stank of cod. With Hanover to the north and New Hastings to the south, it would never get very big or very prosperous. A lot of the shops hadn't been painted or spruced up for a long time. Why bother? the shopkeepers seemed to say.

  Some of them came out into the street to clap as the Atlantean army went by. Barmaids handed out mugs of beer and kisses. Church bells clanged. Dogs yapped as if possessed.

  Not all the locals seemed delighted to see the settlers in arms. One weathered fellow, a cigar clamped in his jaws, looked more as if he was counting them than applauding them. Would he slip off and tell General Howe what he knew, as Victor's scouts had been doing for him? The chances seemed good. Both sides in this fight would have plenty of spies.

  With the arsenal evacuated, Victor could have let Howe have Weymouth. Sooner or later, though, the Atlanteans would have to fight If they let the redcoats march here and there unhindered, they weren't an army at all-they were only playing at being one. Victor looked for favorable ground on which to make a stand.

  He found what he wanted about five miles north of the town. A stout stone wall led from the road to the beach. A grove of apple trees off to the left covered that flank. All he had to do was barricade the roadway and he would block the redcoats' path and force them to fight

  Axes rang out among the apples. Men and oxen dragged fallen trees to block off the space between the grove and the stone wall. Victor set up his fieldpieces where they could rake the oncoming English soldiers. He wished they didn't burn so much powder at every shot. Yes, he'd got that store out of Weymouth, but even so…

  The sun was setting in the direction of the Green Ridge Mountains when he got the position strong enough to suit him. That was just as well; scouts said Howe's men were only a few miles away. The Atlanteans ate at their posts. They bragged about what they would do to the enemy come morning. And then, like any innocents, they slept.

  Chapter 4

  Drums and fifes woke the Atlantean rebels with the eastern sky going from gray to pink. The men staggered out of tents and uncocooned from tight-wound blankets. They yawned and rubbed their eyes and swore sleepily. It was as if they only half remembered-or didn't want to remember-what lay ahead.

  The cooks served bread and meat and coffee. The men might have hit their wives if they'd got food like that at home. Here, they ate without complaint. They seemed glad to get any food at all. Gnawing on a chunk of half-raw beef between two slabs of badly risen bread, Victor remembered from the way his belt'd pinched in campaigns gone by that they were right to be glad.

  Up ahead, musketry in the distance said farmers and hunters were still harassing the redcoats. They weren't even militiamen, and had no connection to the Atlantean Assembly or anyone but their neighbors. If Howe's men caught them, the usages of war said they could hang them. But catchmg frana-ttreurs wasn't easy. All they had to do was hide their firelocks, and then they were just men ambling down country tracks. Shoot at redcoats? The idea would never once cross their minds!

  Victor stepped out in front of the abatis to survey the ground once more. The English would have to charge uphill to come at his men. That would make things harder for them, too. He nodded to himself. He wanted to make things as hard as he could for the enemy, because he knew the redcoats were better soldiers than his own men were.

  A fieldpiece boomed. Maybe Howe's troopers had got a good shot at some of their tormentors. Maybe they just wanted to scare them off. Victor thought they had a pretty good chance of doing it, too. Men who'd never had cannon aimed at them found it terrifying. Radcliff had faced field guns before, and he wasn't enthusiastic about it, either.

  Here came the redcoats. Mounted men rode out ahead of the main column on foot. When the riders spied the obstruction ahead, they wheeled their mounts and galloped back to report the news.

  "Won't be long now, men!" Victor called to his own army. "Pretty soon, we'll give the damned English what they deserve!" The Atlanteans raised a cheer. They didn't know what they were getting into, not yet. Pretty soon, they'd find out. They would never be the same again, neither the ones who died nor the ones who lived.

  Watching the redcoats deploy from column into line, Victor tried to fight down his jealousy. He'd put the Atlanteans through their evolutions in the fields outside New Hastings. He knew how raw they were. Seeing those same evolutions performed by professionals for whom they were second nature rubbed his nose in it.

  Lines perfectly dressed, regimental banners and Union Jacks waving in the breeze off the ocean, the English troops advanced. Victor looked nervously out into the Atlantic. To his vast relief, he saw no warships. Their fire could have enfiladed his line and made him fall back, and he had no answer for them.

  Three hundred years earlier, a fishing boat with a few swivel guns helped in the Battle of the Strand. Blasting Sir Richard Neville off his horse made sure Atlantis would have no native kings. Naval gunnery had come a long way in those three centuries. And now the artillery was on the king's side.

  "Come back, General!" someone called from behind the abatis. "You don't want to make yourself a bull's-eye for them."

  Victor's uniform wasn't so resplendent as all that. He would have felt embarrassed-to say nothing of weighted down-by all the gold braid and medals and buttons English generals wore to declare who they were. But a man standing out in the open in front of his side's works was bound to be a target. Victor picked his way back through the abatis' tangled branches. It wasn't easy; that was why the obstruction was there.

  Thinking of the way the opposing general dressed reminded him of something. "Riflemen-aim at their officers!" he shouted. "The more of them we kill, the better off we are."

  He didn't have that many riflemen. Most of the ones he did have came from the backwoods, where every shot had to count. A rifle was accurate at three or four times the range of a smoothbore musket, but was also slower to reload and quicker to foul its barrel.

  An Atlantean field gun roared. Victor watched the ball kick up din in front of the English line and bound forward. It bowled over two redcoats like ninepins. Other soldiers smoothly stepped forward to take their places. More Atlantean guns fired. Enemy field-pieces replied. A rending crash said a ball smashed a gun carriage. That cannon was out of action for the rest of the battle.

  Enemy bugles blared. The soldiers in the first two ranks brought their muskets down to the horizontal. Their bayonets flashed in the sun. Barbarians facing the Roman legions must have known that shock of fear as the legionaries' spearheads all glittered as one. It had lost none of its intimidation over the centuries between Caesar's day and Victor Radcliff's.

  The bugles blared again. Here came the redcoats, at a steady marching pace. The first ranks' muskets probably weren't even loaded. General Howe wanted them to win with the bayonet. If they got in among the Atlanteans, chances were they would, too. Only a few of Victor's men had the sockets and long knives that turned muskets into spears. The rest would have to fight back with clubbed guns or with knives.

  A cannon ball tore through the redcoats' ranks. Injured men fell or fell out. Others moved up to replace them. The soldiers

  knew getting killed or maimed was all part of the job. They didn't get excited about it-unless it happened to them.

  Atlantean riflemen started firing. A captain or major, his epaulets proclaiming his rank, clutched at his shoulder and went down. Another officer fell a moment later, and then another. The ones who remained kept coming. English officers weren't professionals like the men they led. That didn't mean they lacked courage, though. On the contrary-a man who showed fear in front of his fellows was hardly a man at all.

  "Wait till you can see what they've got on their buttons. Then blow 'em all to hell!" a sergeant shouted to the musketeers he led. Good advice: their guns weren't accurate muc
h farther out than that

  "Now!" someone else yelled, and a blast of fire ripped into the English soldiers. Redcoats staggered. Redcoats stumbled. Redcoats screamed. Redcoats fell.

  And the redcoats who didn't stagger or stumble or scream or fall came on. Another volley tore into them, and another. The third one was noticeably more ragged than the first. By the time it came, the enemy was almost to the wall and the abatis. The blast of lead proved more than even the bravest or most stoic flesh and blood could bear. Sullenly, the redcoats drew back out of range, now and then stopping and stooping to help a fallen comrade.

  Cheers rose from the Atlanteans. "We whipped 'em, by Jesus!" somebody cried, which set off new rejoicing.

  Knowing the men his army faced, Victor wasn't so sure. And damned if the redcoats didn't re-form their lines and make ready to come at the Atlanteans again. Their field guns turned on the abatis across the road. The fallen trees might hinder soldiers, but they didn't keep out roundshot. A man hit square by a cannon ball turned into something only a butcher would recognize. And a man speared by a branch a cannon ball tore loose was in no enviable situation, either.

  A few Atlanteans couldn't stand the cannonading and fled. They were raw troops, men who'd never come under fire before Most of the new men stood it as well as any veterans. Victor was proud of them. He was also astonished, though he never would have told them so.

  On came the Englishmen again. This time, they sent fewer troops against the stone wall and more against the area protected by the abatis. This time, too, they stopped and delivered two volleys of their own before rushing the Atlantean field works.

  Bullets snapped past Victor's head. A wet thud! said a man next to him was hit. The Atlantean clutched his chest and crumpled to the ground, his musket falling from his hands. Victor snatched up the firelock. He aimed at a redcoat pushing through the abatis-a man from Howe's forlorn hope. If the gun wasn't loaded… What do I lose? he thought, and pulled the trigger.

  The musket bucked against his shoulder. The redcoat went down, grabbing his leg. Victor had aimed at his chest. With a smoothbore, you were glad for any hit you got. Another man from the forlorn hope fell, half his jaw shot away. But the English soldiers were making paths their friends could follow.

  And follow the redcoats did. Some of them fell. More stepped over corpses and writhing wounded and set about doing what they knew how to do: massacring amateurs who presumed to stand against them. The Atlanteans were brave. In close-quarters fighting like that, it probably did them more harm than good. They rushed forward, clutching any weapons they had-and the redcoats emotionlessly spitted them with their bayonets. The Englishmen had the edge in reach, and they had the edge in training, and they used both without mercy.

  Victor might have fed his whole force into the fight, as a man fed meat into a sausage grinder. The Atlanteans would be gone… and they would have gone down. He saw as much, a little more slowly than he might have. "Back!" he yelled. "Fall back!"

  The Atlanteans obeyed him with more alacrity than they'd ever shown marching north from New Hastings. They'd had enough-they'd had too much-of the horrible redcoats. Watching them break away from the English troops, Victor tasted gall. He wondered if the rebellion would smash to bits at the first test.

  "Form ranks!" he shouted, hoping they would. "Give them a volley!" he added, praying they would. "Show them you're not whipped!" he said, fearing they were.

  And damned if the Atlanteans didn't obey him again. The ranks weren't neat enough to delight an English drillmaster's heart. The volley was on the ragged side, too. But it was enough to knock the redcoats back on their heels. They'd come after the settlers, aiming to break them all at once-and they'd got a nasty surprise "Withdraw fifty yards and give them another one," Victor commanded. The men he led did as he told them to. This volley was fuller, thicker, than the one before. More English soldiers went down.

  Now the redcoats, seeing that they couldn't force a decision with the bayonet alone, began loading their muskets again, too. They rebuilt their own battle line with marvelous haste-and much bad language from their sergeants. And they traded several volleys with the Atlanteans, both sides banging away at each other from less than a hundred yards. That was warfare as it was practiced on the battlefields of Europe: organized mutual slaughter.

  More bullets cracked past Victor Radcliff than he could keep track of. None of them bit. He had no idea why not: either God loved him or he was luckier than he deserved. He'd begun to think he was luckier than he deserved in the men he led, too. They stood up under that pounding as well as the redcoats. Oh, a few men slipped off toward the rear, but only a few.

  Victor told off several companies of New Hastings troops to serve as his rear guard. No settlement, not even Croydon in the north, despised royal authority more than New Hastings. Having disposed of one would-be king on their own soil, New Hastings men had little use for anyone else who tried to tell them what to do.

  They held off the redcoats and let the rest of the army fall back toward Weymouth. Then they too broke free. General Howe showed little appetite for the pursuit: less than Victor would have in his place Maybe that said something about him. Maybe it said something about what the Atlanteans had done to his army, even in defeat.

  Victor Radcliff looked around for Blaise. He found the Negro with a bloody rag wrapped around the stump of his left middle finger. "Stupid thing," he said. "Hurts like a mad bastard, too." He looked more angry than stunned, as wounded men sometimes seemed.

  "Get some poppy juice from the surgeons," Victor told him.

  "It will dull the pain a little, anyhow."

  "Plenty need it more than I do," Blaise said.

  "Plenty need it less, too. Go on. That's an order," Victor said. What point to being a general if you couldn't tell a sergeant what to do?

  Blaise's "Yes, sir" was as mutinous an acceptance as Victor had ever heard. But it was an acceptance. He'd take what he could get. He hadn't beaten the English, but he'd given them a better fight than they must have dreamt of in their wildest nightmares. He'd take what he could get there, too. The retreat went on. He had no choice about taking that.

  The Atlanteans fortified Weymouth. If General Howe wanted to break into the seaside town with men shooting at him from behind barricades and out of windows and ducking back around corners, he was welcome to try. So Victor thought, anyhow.

  His men also seemed ready for another crack at the English. "Hell, yes! Let 'em come," one of them said. "We'll give 'em a bloody nose and whip 'em back to their mamas."

  General Howe, unfortunately, didn't seem inclined to play Victor's game. His warships, perhaps slowed by contrary winds, arrived two days later. They lay offshore and bombarded the town. The Atlanteans' field guns fired back, but that was more to make the men feel better than for any other reason. Three-and six-pounders couldn't reach the men-of-war and might not have been able to pierce their thick oak timbers even if they had.

  When a ball from a twenty-four-pounder hit a house or an inn, on the other hand, the building was likely to fall down. And when a ball from a twenty-four-pounder hit a man, or several men… what happened after that wasn't pretty. The gravediggers got more work than the surgeons did.

  The ships were still there the next morning. As soon as the sun climbed up out of the Atlantic, they started cannonading Weymouth again. They fired slowly and deliberately, one round-shot every few minutes. Again, the Atlanteans returned fire, but with no great hope of success. They fearfully awaited each incoming cannon ball.

  Flash and smoke came first. After them-but well after, proving sound traveled slower than light-came the boom from the gun. Victor had the displeasure of watching each roundshot arc through the summery air toward Weymouth. Then another crash would announce more destruction.

  The slow, steady bombardment had a horrid fascination to it. Victor almost forgot to breathe as he waited and tensed himself before each new explosion. He hoped each round would fall harmlessly, yet feared each
one would not. Surgeons and dentists worked as fast as they could, to get the agony over with in a hurry. The Royal Navy here operated in just the opposite way. Their officers wanted the Atlanteans to suffer for a long time.

  Victor Radcliff figured that out right away. The Royal Navy officers also wanted something else: they wanted to use the deliberate cannonading to blind the Atlantean rebels to everything else that was going on. They got what they wanted, too. Along with everyone else in Weymouth, Victor spent the day staring fearfully out to sea, bracing himself for the next thunder from a gun.

  "Sir? General Radcliff, sir?" By the exaggerated patience in the man's voice, he'd been trying to draw Victor's notice for some little while.

  "Huh?" Victor said. In less than a minute now, one of the guns on the fleet out there would speak. What else mattered next to that?

  He found out. "Sir, we've had a deserter come in. You'd better hear what he's got to say about General Howe's army."

  "General… Howe's army?" Victor said slowly. He realized that, confident in the works in and around Weymouth, he'd almost forgotten about the redcoats. And he belatedly realized that wasn't the smartest thing he could have done.

  He blinked, then blinked again, like someone coming out from under the spell of that French charlatan, Mesmer. Flash! Boom! A roundshot bigger than his clenched fist flying through the air, swelling, swelling… Crash! The Royal Navy did its best to keep him bemused.

  But he'd been distracted. Pulling him back under the spell wasn't so easy. "All right. Bring this fellow to me."

  He'd seen a lot of English soldiers like this one. The two chevrons on the fellow's left sleeve proclaimed him a corporal. He was short and skinny and pockmarked. He had two missing front teeth. His pale eyes wouldn't light on Victor. He looked like a man who would cheerfully murder for the price of a pot of ale. He also looked like a man who would keep coming forward no matter what any opponent tried to do to his battle line.