"Thank you," Victor said. Not until later did he wonder about the propriety of a commanding general thanking a common soldier. At the moment, he asked Matthew Radcliffe, "Will you undertake, either in your own person or through your fellow westerners, to convey Master Paine to Avalon as expeditiously as may be, and thence to one or another of the English towns of eastern Terranova, whichever may seem most advantageous at the time?"
"I will. General," Matthew replied. To Paine, he added, "Rest assured, you also have my thanks and that of the Atlantean Assembly." Victor also didn't marvel at that till after the fact
"Let me lay hold of my chattels, such as they are, and I am your man from that time forward," Paine said. "Using barbarians to lay waste to civilization is to me unconscionable. If the king's ministers and admirals fail to find it so, what are they but mad dogs who deserve no better than to be hunted out of this land?"
Without waiting for an answer, he plunged out into the rain. "Afire-eater," Matthew Radcliffe observed, making ready to follow him.
Victor Radcliff shook his head. "Not quite. He is a fire-kindler. Others will eat the flames he sparks-and may they choke on them."
"Amen." Matthew squelched off into the night after Thomas Paine.
General Howe seemed content to enjoy his control of most of the northeastern coast of Atlantis. In his shoes, Victor might have felt the same way. The redcoats held most of the richest parts of the land, and most of the towns that deserved to be styled cities. From London, that might have seemed almost the same as crushing the Atlantean uprising underfoot.
On bad days, it also seemed almost the same as crushing the uprising to Victor Radcliff. But only on bad days, when he looked at all the things he'd failed to do. Holding Hanover and New Hastings topped the melancholy list. Beating the English in a pitched battle anywhere came next. He'd come close several times-which did him less good than he wished it did.
If he could have given the redcoats a black eye in any of their fights along the Brede, New Hastings would still lie in Atlantean hands. The Assembly would send its decisions and requests to the settlements from the oldest town in Atlantis, not from the grand metropolis of Honker's Mill. An edict coming out of New Hastings seemed much more authoritative than one emanating from a backwoods hamlet with a silly name.
Winter gave Victor the chance to drill his troops. New recruits kept coming in, both from the interior and from the coastal regions where King George nominally reigned supreme. That was encouraging. Less so were the Atlanteans who headed for home when their enlistment terms expired. There were at least as many of them as raw replacements.
Victor sent a letter to the Assembly, urging it to enlist troops for longer terms: for the length of the war, if at all possible. The Assembly forwarded the letter to each settlement's parliament. Maybe those august bodies-the ones not under the English boot, anyhow-would do as he asked. Or maybe they wouldn't. Neither he nor the Atlantean Assembly could compel them.
Sometimes he wondered whether the Atlanteans wanted to rule themselves, or whether they wanted no rulers at all. They didn't give their Assembly much to work with. The English Parliament had the power to tax its own folk. It wanted the power to tax the Atlanteans, too. Victor's people didn't aim to put up with that They didn't aim to put up with taxes from the Atlantean Assembly, either. Anyone who tried to tax Atlanteans did so at his peril.
Victor also wondered how his people expected to pay for the war if they weren't taxed. The Assembly was doing the best it could, issuing paper money it promised to redeem with gold or silver once the war was won. When the uprising began, that paper was almost at par with specie. But it seemed to lose a little value every day.
How long before the Assembly's paper was worthless? Victor feared the time would come sooner than he wished. What would the Assembly do then? He didn't have the slightest idea, and suspected they didn't, either.
In the meantime, the war went on. His drill sergeants did their best to turn the recruits into men who could march and deploy and follow orders without fussing about it too much. Despite his great chest, Tom Knox died of some lung ailment. Victor mourned the English deserter-he might have ended up a major had he lived.
The Atlanteans did get a handful of a new kind of recruits: professional soldiers from Europe who saw a need across the sea and hastened to meet it. Some of them were frankly horrified at what they found.
"A proper soldier," one said in a thick German accent, "you tell him what to do, and by God he does it or he dies trying. You Atlanteans, you always must know why before you do anything. It is of time a waste. It is a-a foolishness!" By the way he said that, he couldn't think of many worse names.
"Well, I'll tell you, Baron von Steuben" Victor said. Steuben was no more a baron than he himself was a king. The German captain also had no right to the aristocratic von. But he was far from the first man to improve his past on coming to Atlantis. And the idea of being drilled by a European nobleman appealed to the Atlantean soldiers. Victor went on, "And what I'll tell you is this: officers can be wrong, too. Knowing why they want you to do something isn't so bad. The men do fight hard. They've stood up to the redcoats plenty of times." They hadn't stood up quite well enough, but he didn't dwell on that.
"English regulars is-are-good troops," Steuben admitted. "But maybe your men win if they move faster, if they don't spend time with questions always. Foolishness!" Yes, that did seem to be the nastiest printable word he used.
"Maybe." Victor didn't think so, but he didn't feel like arguing the point. He did want to make sure the German captain knew what he was up against. "No matter how fine a drillmaster you may be, sir, I don't think you'll cure Atlanteans of needing to know why. That would take an act of God, not an order from a mere man."
"I shall petition the Lord with prayer," Steuben said. "If He loves your cause, He will do what is needful."
"They do say the Lord helps those who help themselves," Victor remarked. "We're trying to do that against the English."
He kept sending out little bands to harry the redcoats. Moving small units and keeping them supplied was easier than moving and subsisting his whole army would have been. He gave men who performed well on the practice field the chance to test what they'd learned against some of the sternest instructors in the world. If his raiders won, they came back proud and delighted. And if they lost-which they did sometimes-they didn't lose enough to endanger his main body or to hurt morale much.
One band of horsemen reached the sea near Weymouth. "It's not redcoats everywhere," Habakkuk Biddiscombe reported to Victor. "They're like any other men. They mostly stay where it's warm and cozy. If we broke in amongst 'em with a big enough force, they wouldn't know what the devil to do."
"It's a thought," Victor said. His own soldiers, as he knew full well, wanted to stay warm and cozy, too-and who could blame them? If they got through the winter and started the second year of the war as a force in being, wasn't that a sizable achievement all by itself? It seemed so to him.
The young captain, a born attacker, had different notions. "If it all goes well, we might threaten Hanover. We might even run them out of it. One of the prisoners we took says they haven't got that many men there. They can't garrison and campaign very well, not at the same time."
"Neither can we," Victor said mournfully. A solid company of Croydon men had just marched off to the north. Their enlistments were up, and they didn't intend to stay around one minute longer than they were obliged to. The English occupied the town that gave their settlement its name? If that bothered them, they hid it very well.
"We ought to try," Biddiscombe persisted. What would happen to a junior officer in a European army who kept on arguing with the general commanding? Victor wondered if he ought to ask "Baron"
"von" Steuben. He enjoyed watching the German gutturally sputter and fume. Victor was sure a persistent captain like this one would be hanging his career out to dry.
But Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn't have a military career to worry
about. When the war ended-in victory or defeat-he would go back to whatever he'd done beforehand. And so he didn't worry about speaking his mind now.
"We could use a win," he told Victor, as if the general didn't know. "And I think we could get one without a great deal of trouble. The redcoats aren't within miles of being ready for us."
They don't mink we'd be stupid enough to do any serious campaigning in the wintertime, Victor thought. He hadn't expected the Atlanteans would, either. The younger officer's enthusiasm made him wonder if he was making a mistake by doing what the English looked for. They look for me to have an ounce of sense-maybe even two ounces.
Still, if he fought the kind of war General Howe would approve of, wasn't he bound to lose? Howe had the professional soldiers. The Atlanteans, by the nature of things, were amateurs. They had fire and dash to offer, not stolid obedience. Shouldn't he take advantage of that? If he could make the English react to him, instead of his having to respond to Howe's every carefully planned advance…
"Do you know" Victor said slowly, "I believe I shall hold an officers' council. If we decide the attack can go forward with some hope of success, I expect we'll put it in."
Captain Biddiscombe stared. "D'you mean that?" He answered his own question: "You do mean that! By God, General, I never dreamt I'd convince you, never in a thousand years."
"Life is full of surprises," Victor Radcliff said. "May King George's soldiers not enjoy the one they get soon." Officers' council or not, he'd made up his mind. Now, if he could bring it off…
The weather had gone from rain to freezing rain and sleet to snow. Victor hoped it would stay cold. He wanted the roads frozen so his men could make good time on them. If the Atlanteans had to slog through mud to get at the redcoats, they could come to the battle late and worn out.
His first target was a fort on the outskirts of a town named Sudbury. It was farther north than Weymouth, farther south than Hanover, and about thirty miles inland. General Howe had run up several such fortresses to try to keep the Atlantean army away from the prosperous and well-settled seacoast. The intrepid Biddiscombe's raid was one thing. An attack by all the force the Atlantean Assembly could muster would be something else again.
I hope, Victor thought.
He didn't let his men conceive that so much as a single, solitary worry clouded his mind. Much of the art of command consisted of acting unruffled even-or rather, especially-when you weren't. "Press on, lads! Press on!" he called. "Before long, we'll subsist ourselves on good English victuals. We'll wear good English boots on our feet."
Again, he hoped. Quite a few of the Atlanteans weren't wearing anything resembling good boots now. The men who'd served longest and done the most marching suffered worst. Some of them had wrapped cloth around their boots to hold uppers and soles together and to try to keep their feet dry. A few soldiers had only cloths-or nothing at all-on their feet. They tramped along anyhow. If they eagerly looked forward to a little plundering…well, who could blame them?
In earlier times, Sudbury had made turpentine from the conifers in the dense Atlantean forests. After some years of settlement, those forests were nowhere near so dense as they had been once upon a time. These days, wheat fields replaced woods. The Atlantean army marched past snow-covered stubble.
More snow swirled around them. Victor blessed it; it helped cloak them from the garrison inside the works on the western edge of town. The sentries the Atlanteans seized were too astonished to let out more than a couple of yelps that the wind drowned. They seemed almost relieved to be taken: it gave them the chance to go back to the Atlanteans' camp and get out of the cold.
"Forward! As fast as you can!" Victor called. "If we get ladders up against their palisade before they start shooting, the fort's ours."
He almost managed it. His men were throwing fascines into the ditch around the palisade when a redcoat on the wall fired at them and raised the alarm. Victor heard soldiers inside the fort yelling in dismay. He also heard their feet thudding on the wooden stairs leading up to the walkway.
"Hurry!" he shouted. "Hurry for your lives!"
Ladders thudded into place against the wall. Atlanteans swarmed up them. The redcoats tipped one, spilling soldiers into the ditch. An Englishman killed the first greencoat coming up another ladder. But the second Atlantean shot the defender in the face. The English soldier fell back with a howl, clutching at himself. By the time another redcoat neared the ladder, the Atlanteans were already on the walkway.
After that, taking the fort was easy. The attackers badly outnumbered the men who were trying to hold them back. Before long, white flags went up and the redcoats threw down their muskets.
"We never looked for you blokes," a sergeant complained to Victor. "Most of our officers are still in town, like."
"Are they?" Victor said tonelessly, and the underofficer nodded. The English officers probably had lady friends in Sudbury, Once the town was retaken, people who'd favored King George's soldiers were liable to have a thin time of it. Well, that was their lookout. Victor sent men into Sudbury with orders to capture any redcoats they found there. He added, "If you can, keep them all from getting away. With luck, we'll be able to roll up several of these forts. Maybe we will push all the way to the sea." The ease with which the fort by Sudbury fell made him think of grander things.
One English officer wearing a shirt and nothing more leaped onto a horse and made his getaway. Victor wouldn't have wanted to try that in warm weather; the Englishman's privates were going to take a beating. Several other officers and other ranks, less ins trepid, gave themselves up.
"What are you doing here?" a captured lieutenant asked with what sounded like unfeigned indignation.
"Fighting a war in the name of the Atlantean Assembly and of the Lord Jehovah," Victor told him. "What art you doing here, in this land you only oppress by your presence?"
"Obeying the orders of my king and my superiors." The lieutenant had nerve: he added, "He is your king, too, I remind you."
"My king would not send soldiers to invade his country. He would not arrest subjects who had done him no wrong. Neither would he tax subjects who have no say in his governing councils," Victor replied. "If King George stopped doing such things, he might be my king. As it is?" He shook his head. "As it is, you are welcome to him."
The English officer would have argued more. He might have surrendered, but he hadn't changed his mind. But Victor Radcliff took a winner's privilege and walked away from him. He didn't have to listen to nonsense if he didn't feel like it.
His men plundered the fort and their prisoners-and Sudbury, too, for it had lain quiet in enemy hands. They marched away better fed, better shod, better clothed, and better armed than they'd arrived. They marched away with silver and a bit of gold jingling in their pockets, too. After nothing to spend but Atlantean paper of shrinking value, hard money seemed doubly welcome to them.
Two days later, they fell on Halstead, fifteen miles south of Sudbury. The Englishman unencumbered with trousers had ridden north, so Victor dared hope the redcoats in Halstead didn't know his army was on the march. And so it proved; the fort there, which was weaker than Sudbury's, fell even more easily than the first one had.
And Halstead hadn't stayed quiet while occupied. Only a few days before the Atlanteans arrived, someone had knocked an English corporal over the head. And so the whole garrison there stayed in the fort. Victor thought he swept up every last redcoat in the neighborhood.
"If I can seize one more fort," he told Blaise, "that will open the way for a march to the sea."
"Why not?" the Negro replied.
Chapter 8
Due south of Halstead, only an easy day's march away, lay Pitt-man's Ferry. The English had a fort there, too, not far from the creek that necessitated the ferry and made the town spring up near it. Town and fort both lay on the north bank of Pittman's Creek. That helped determine Victor to move down and attack it: he wouldn't have to worry about gathering boats to cross in a rush.
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He set his men on the southbound road the morning after Halstead fell. They showed more confidence than they had when they were approaching Sudbury. With two English forts behind them, why shouldn't they expect the next one to be easy? They were better fed and clothed and shod and accoutered than they had been then, too. The men who. carried bayoneted muskets seemed especially proud of them. The redcoats had used them to fearsome effect. Now Atlanteans could, too.
Pistols boomed, up in the vanguard. "Don't like the sound of that," Blaise remarked.
"Nor do I," Victor Radcliff agreed. "Well, we'll have to see what it was."
A rider eventually came back to tell him. "They had pickets posted on the road, damn them," the man reported. "We went after 'em good, but I think some of 'em got away."
"Damnation!" Victor said, and then something really flavorful. The cavalryman stared at him-did generals talk that way? This one did when he got such news. Taking a fort by surprise was one thing. Taking a fort that was ready and waiting was something else again.
"We can do it," said a soldier who'd heard the news. In an instant, the whole army seemed to be chanting: "We can do it!"
Pulling back would wound their spirits-Victor could see that at a glance. Going on would hurt a lot of their bodies. The general commanding needed to be no prophet to foresee that. What he couldn't see was how to withdraw in the face of their insistent chant. He wished he could.
"Well, we'll have a go," he said at last. The redcoats might have heard the cheers in Pitt man's Ferry. In case they hadn't, he added, "Double-time, boys. We'll get there before they expect us."
Drummers and fifers gave the army its new marching rhythm. The men weren't far from Pittman's Ferry. They wouldn't get too worn to fight, even if they double-timed it all the way. Victor hoped they wouldn't, anyhow.
He rode forward himself with the vanguard to reconnoiter the fort. The untrimmed pine logs from which it was built made it a dark blot against the snow and against the painted planks of Pitt-man's Ferry. Now Victor swore at the swirling snow as he raised the spyglass to his eye to survey the structure. He wanted to sec as much as he could, but the weather hindered him.
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