"Fire!" victor yelled as the English drew near. Flintlocks clicked. Priming powder around touch-holes hissed. Then the muskets boomed.
Some of the redcoats went down. The rest kept corning. They didn't fire. If they could stand the gaff, if they could get in among their foes, they thought they could win the battle with the bayonet. They'd seen how much the Atlanteans feared cold steel in earlier fights.
Another volley tore into them. More English soldiers fell. By then, the survivors were very close. They were close enough, in fact, to see that most of the Atlanteans also carried bayoneted muskets, as they had in the skirmish on the hillcrest. All that plunder from the English forts was corning in handy.
True, the greencoats weren't masters of the bayonet the way the English were. But they were most of them big, strong men. Skill counted. But so did reach and ferocity. And so did numbers, and the Atlanteans had the edge there.
As the two lines met in bloody collision, Victor wondered how much weight each factor carried. Before long, one side or the other would give way. Flesh and blood simply couldn't stand going toe to toe like this for very long.
Spirit oozed from the redcoats first. Victor sensed it even before they began to fall back. Part of it, he judged, was their surprise and dismay at not sweeping everything before them. They should have known better. They'd beaten the Atlanteans in the summer, yes, but they'd never routed them-and the Atlanteans had just forced many of them back into Weymouth.
Now they were routed themselves. Some fled back across the snow toward the town. Others raised their hands in surrender. And still others, the stubborn few, went on fighting and made Victor's men pay the price of beating them.
"Give up!" Victor called to the knot of embattled Englishmen. "Some of your friends have got away. What more can you hope to do now?"
They kept fighting. Then the Atlanteans wheeled up a couple of fieldpieces and started firing canister into them. One round from each gun was enough to make the redcoats change their minds. The men still on their feet laid their muskets in the snow and stepped away from them. The ones blown to rags and bloody shreds didn't need to worry about it any more.
Victor's men hurried forward to take wallets and muskets, boots and breeches and bayonets. He told off enough greencoats to ensure that the prisoners wouldn't be able to get away. With the rest of his army, he pressed on toward Weymouth.
Had the remainder of the English garrison wanted to fight it out street by street and house by house, they could have made taking the place devilishly expensive. Victor might have made that kind of fight. It didn't seem to occur to the redcoats. Perhaps that sniper had killed Major Lavery the day before, and taken the linchpin out of their resistance. Badly beaten in the field, the English survivors must have concluded they couldn't hope to hold Weymouth.
They chose to save the remains of their army instead. They marched off to the south, toward New Hastings, in good order, flags flying and drums beating. They might have been saying that, if Victor wanted to assault them, they remained ready to give him all he wanted.
Later, he wondered whether he should have swooped down on them. Maybe their demeanor intimidated him. Or maybe he focused so completely on taking Weymouth, he forgot about everything else. Whatever the reason, he let them go and rode into Weymouth at the head of his army.
Some people in the seaside town greeted the greencoats with cheers. Here and there, a young woman-or sometimes one not so young-would run out and kiss a soldier. Victor suspected a baby or two would get started tonight, and not by the mothers' husbands.
But some houses and shops stayed closed up tight, shuttered against the new conquerors and against the world. Victor knew what that meant. The people in those places would have been too friendly toward the redcoats. Now they feared they would pay for it. And they were likely right, if not at his hands then at those of their fellow townsfolk.
That was a worry for another time. Victor had plenty to worry him now. The Royal Navy frigates naturally realized Weymouth had changed hands. They started bombarding the town. One of their first shots smashed a house belonging to somebody Victor had tagged as a likely partisan of King George's. The unhappy man, his wife, and two children fled.
"My baby!" the woman screamed. "My baby's still in there!"
The man wouldn't let her go back. "Willie's gone, Joan," he said. "He's-gone." He dissolved in tears. His wife's shrieks redoubled.
That's what you get for backing England. Victor almost said it, but checked himself at the last moment However true it might be, it was cruel. He would only make these people hate him more-he wouldn't persuade them that they should take up the Atlantean cause. Better silence, then.
He pulled most of his men out of range of the frigates' guns. But he also fired back at the warships with a couple of six-pounders he ran out onto the strand. He'd made that gesture of defiance before, and felt good about doing it again. Weymouth is ours! it said.
This time, though, the frigates were waiting for it. They opened a furious fire on the field guns. One roundshot took off an artilleryman's head. Another pulped a man standing on the opposite side of the six-pounder. Yet another wrecked the other fieldpiece's carriage and killed a horse.
Victor got the intact gun out of there right away, and the surviving gunners and horses with it. The other gun lay on the sand till night fell, a monument to the folly of repeating himself
"We did it! You did it!" Blaise didn't let a small failure take away from a larger success.
"So we did." Victor didn't want all the credit. "Now we have to see if we can hold what we've taken."
They couldn't. However much Victor Radcliff wanted to believe otherwise, that soon became plain to him. It wasn't just because the Royal Navy kept sending heavy roundshot crashing into Weymouth. But people friendly to the Atlantean cause sneaked up from New Hastings to warn him that General Howe was getting ready to move against the captured town with most of his army.
Getting a large force ready to march didn't happen overnight for anyone. And Howe valued thorough preparation over speed. Victor had the time to hold an officers' council and see what the army's leaders thought.
To his amazement, some of them wanted to hold their ground and fight the redcoats. "General Howe purposes bringing a force more than twice the size of ours, with abundant stores of all the accouterments of war," he said. "How do you gentlemen propose to stand against him?"
"We can do it-damned if we can't," Habakkuk Biddiscombe said. "If we lead 'em into a trap, like, we can slaughter 'em like so many beeves."
Victor couldn't tell him he was out of his mind. The French Atlanteans had done that very thing to General Braddock's army of redcoats south of Freetown. Victor counted himself lucky to have escaped that scrape with a whole skin. He did say, "Beeves are rather more likely to amble into a trap, and rather less so to shoot back."
That won him a few chuckles. But intrepid Captain Biddiscombe was not so easily put off. "If we do thrash 'em, General, we throw off the English yoke once for all. They can't treat us like beeves, either."
"I don't intend to let them do any such thing," Victor said.
"Cut! Good!" von Steuben boomed. "No point throwing away an army on a fight we don't win."
"Thank you. Baron," Victor said, and then, to Biddiscombe, "How did we learn of Howe's planned movement?"
"Patriots from New Hastings told us," the captain answered at once.
"And do you not believe traitors from Weymouth are even now telling General Howe of our debate?" Victor said. "Only the Englishmen will style them patriots, reckoning our patriots traitors."
The cavalry officer opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. "Well, that could be so," he said, his tone much milder than it had been a moment before.
"We cannot hope to lay a trap where the foe is privy to our
plans," Victor said. "Can we beat him in a stand-up fight?"
"Anything is possible." Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn't want to admit the Atlanteans weren't omn
i capable.
"Anything is possible," Victor agreed. "Not everything, however, is likely. I find our chances of success less likely than I wish they were. Since I do, I should prefer to retire rather than fight."
Debate didn't shut off right away. If Atlanteans were anything, they were full of themselves. Everyone had to put in his penny's worth. Baron von Steuben was rolling his eyes and muttering by the time Victor's views carried the day. The greencoats got ready to abandon Weymouth.
Quite a few locals also abandoned the town. They'd given King George's partisans-the ones who hadn't escaped-some rough justice. If General Howe's troops returned, they feared a dose of their own medicine.
"We are not running away," Victor told anyone who would listen. "We won every battle we fought. We returned to the Atlantic after the English thought they had barred us from our own sea-coast. We proved that Atlantis remains hostile and inhospitable to the invaders."
He got cheers from the men who marched with him, and more cheers from the families that were leaving Weymouth to go with the greencoats. Not one word he said was a lie. He still wished he could have told his army something else. He wished he could have followed Captain Biddiscombe's advice and fought.
Back in the last war, he might have. No defeat he suffered then would have ruined England's chances and those of the English Atlanteans against the French. Now all of Atlantis' hopes followed his army. He couldn't afford to throw them away.
And now he was older than he'd been then. Did that leave him less inclined to take chances? He supposed it did.
General Howe has to win. He has to beat me, to crush me, he thought.
All I have to do is not to lose. If I can keep from losing for long enough, England will tire of this fight. Dear God, I hope she will.
But his doubts were for himself alone. He kept on exuding good cheer for the men around him. Maybe Blaise suspected what his true feelings were. Blaise would never give him away, though. And he'd proved one thing to General Howe, anyway. The Atlantean uprising was not about to fold up and die.
Chapter 9
Victor Radcliff admired his splendid new sword. The blade was chased with silver, the hilt wrapped in gold wire. The Atlantean Assembly had given it to him in thanks for his winter campaign that-briefly-brought the rebels back to the sea.
Blaise admired the weapon, too. "You going to fight with that?" he asked.
"I can if I have to," Victor said. "They gave it to me as an honor, though, and because it's worth something."
How much that last would matter was anyone's guess. Yes, if things went wrong he might be able to eat for several months on what he got from selling the sword. But, if things went wrong, odds were the English would catch him, try him for treason, and hang him. What price fancy sword then?
Blaise changed the subject: "Not going to snow any more, is it?"
"I don't think so," Victor answered. "Can't be sure, not here, but I don't think so." The west coast of Atlantis, warmed by the Bay Stream (Custis Cawthorne had christened the current in the Hesperian Gulf), already knew springtime. The lands on the east side of the Green Ridge Mountains had a harsher climate.
"By God, I hope it isn't!" The Negro shivered dramatically. "I never knew there was such a thing as cold weather, not like you get here." He shivered again. "The language I grew up talking, the language I talk with Stella, has no word for snow or ice or hail or sleet or blizzard or anything like that. In Africa, we didn't know there were such things. Frost? Frostbite? No, we never heard of them."
"Spring seems better after winter," Victor said. Blaise, who'd grown up in endless summer, looked unconvinced. Victor tried again: "And winter has its advantages. Do you like apples?" He knew Blaise did.
"What if I should?" Blaise asked cautiously.
"Apple trees will grow where there's no frost. They'll flower, but they won't bear fruit. They need the frost for that. So do pears."
Blaise considered. "If I had to give up apples or give up snow, I would give up snow," he said. "What about you?"
"Well… maybe."' Victor had seen lands without snow. It rarely fell on Avalon, and never on New Marseille. But he didn't hate cold weather the way Blaise did. "Depends on what you're used to, I suppose. I wouldn't want it hot and sticky all the time-I know that."
"Neither would I. It should be hot and dry sometimes," Blaise said. "One or the other was all I knew till I came here."
"Before long, it will be hot and sticky again," Victor said. The Negro nodded and smiled in anticipation.
They could talk about the weather forever without doing anything about it. One of the reasons to talk about the weather was that you couldn't do anything about it. Before long, Victor would have to decide what he could do about the English invaders. Even now, they might be trying to decide what to do about him.
He stepped out of his tent. Blaise followed. Everything was green, but then everything in Atlantis was green the year around unless covered in snow or imported from Europe or Terranova. Fruit trees and ornamentals did lose their leaves. Along with rhymes and songs, they let Atlanteans imagine what winters were like across the sea.
Greencoats marched and countermarched. They would probably never grow as smooth in their evolutions as the professionals they faced, but they were ever so much better than they had been.
A robin perched in a pine burst into song. Englishmen said Atlantean robins behaved and sang just like the blackbirds they knew back home. Atlantis had birds the people here called blackbirds, but they weren't much like Atlantean robins-or the smaller, redder-breasted birds that went by the same name in England, or even English blackbirds. It could get confusing.
The war could get confusing, too. Both sides had got some unpleasant surprises the first year. Victor hadn't imagined King George's government would send so many men to Atlantis, or that they would secure the coast from Croydon down to New Hastings. And General Howe hadn't looked for the kind of resistance the Atlanteans had put up. So deserters assured Victor, anyhow.
He wondered what Atlantean deserters told the English general. That Atlantean paper money lost value by the day? That morale went up and down for no visible reason? That equipment left a lot to be desired? All true-every word of it.
But if the deserters told Howe the Atlantean army didn't want to fight, he had to know they were liars. They couldn't match the redcoats' skills or their stoicism, but they didn't lack for spirit.
And how were the English soldiers' spirits these days? Victor's best measure of that was also what he learned from deserters. If what the Englishmen who came into the Atlanteans' lines said was true, their countrymen were surprised and unhappy the war had gone on this long. Before they crossed the ocean, their officers told them they would put down the rebellion in weeks if not days.
Radcliff discounted some of what he heard from them. They had to be discontented, or they wouldn't have deserted in the first place And they wouldn't have been human if they didn't tell their captors what they thought the Atlanteans wanted to hear.
Still, he did think they were having a harder time than they'd expected. He wanted them to go on having a hard time. If they had a hard enough time for long enough, they would give up and go home.
Or they might decide they weren't doing enough and send in more soldiers. As far as Victor knew, the mother country was righting nowhere else at the moment. England had more men than Atlantis. She could raise more troops-if she had the will.
And if she stayed untroubled elsewhere. Victor wondered how Thomas Paine was doing among the English settlements of northeastern Terranova. If those towns and their hinterlands also rose in rebellion, King George's ministers wouldn't be able to focus all their attention on-and send all their redcoats to-Atlantis.
If Paine had turned the Terranovan settlements all topsy-turvy, word of it hadn't come back to Atlantis. Victor shook his head after that thought crossed his mind. Word of whatever Paine was doing hadn't reached him. That wasn't necessarily the same as the other. News crossed th
e Green Ridge Mountains only slowly. And, if Terranova did have trouble, word of it might have reached English officers in Croydon or Hanover or New Hastings without spreading any farther. Those officers certainly wouldn't want him to find out.
He pulled a small notebook and pencil from a waistcoat pocket. More spies in cities-Paine? he scribbled. One of these days, if and as he found the time, he would do something about that or tell off someone else to do something about it.
He started to put the notebook away, then caught himself. He jotted another line: Copperskins around Atlantis? He'd heard next to nothing since sending his hundred men against the Terranovan savages the English had landed south of Avalon to harry the west coast.
If anyone on this side of the mountains knew more about that than he did, it was his distant cousin, Matthew Radcliffe. Victor sent a rider off to the Atlantean Assembly with a letter for him.
The man came back a few days later with a letter from Matthew. My dear General-I regret to state I can tell you nothing certain, the Assemblyman wrote. Only rumor has reached me: or rather, conflicting rumors. I have heard that our men have routed the Terranovan
barbarians. Contrariwise, I have also heard that the copperskins have
slaughtered every Atlantean soldier sent against them, afterwards denuding the corpses of hair and virile members as souvenirs of their triumph. Where the truth falls will, I doubt not, emerge, but has yet to do so. I remain, very respectfully, your most obedient servant. His signature followed.
"Drat!" Victor folded the letter as if washing his hands of it.
"Is the news bad, General?" Like any messenger, the fellow who'd brought the letter wanted to be absolved of its contents.
"Bad?" Victor considered. He had to shake his head. "No. The principal news is that there is no sure news, and that is bad-or, at least, I wished it to be otherwise."
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