United States of Atlantis a-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "They are Atlanteans," Victor said again. "They have given aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States of Atlantis. They have tried to kill us. By God, sir, they have killed us, most recently at the start of this siege. How can you-how can your commander-reckon them anything but traitors?"

  "They are not traitors to the king. Until this war began, all Atlanteans were, and saw themselves as, his Majesty's subjects. How can you condemn these men for holding to their prior allegiance?"

  "Aha!" Victor Radcliff aimed a finger at him as if it were a sharpshooter's rifle. "I have you now! I might be prepared to accept your claim for men who fought against us from the beginning. But you will know as well as I, sir, that Habakkuk Biddiscombe served in the army of the United States of Atlantis until, dissatisfied with his prospects amongst us, he suddenly discovered an undying loyalty to King George. He turned his coat, in other words. If that does not make him a traitor, I am hard pressed to imagine what would. The same holds true for most of his followers."

  "General Cornwallis sees the matter differently," Grimsley said. "In his view, these men were but rediscovering their original allegiance."

  "That's pretty," Victor said. "It means nothing, but it's pretty.

  You go tell him I want those men. If he should choose not to yield them, the siege will continue until we storm the breach. The cannonading from the ships offshore will also continue. How long before famine does our work for us?"

  Grimsley bit his lip. He had no answer for that. Neither did Cornwallis, or he would not have asked for terms. At last, the English captain said, "May I beg a truce of twenty-four hours to take your words back to my superiors for their consideration?"

  "Certainly," Victor said. "But unless their answer suits me, I fear the conflict must continue."

  "I understand, sir. Please accept my assurances that I wish with all my heart circumstances were otherwise." With that, Captain Grimsley took his leave.

  Naturally, the line the Atlanteans and Frenchmen held around Croydon ran from sea to sea. As naturally, some parts of it were held with greater force than others. The redcoats manned their line the same way. They concentrated most of their strength against the saps and parallels that brought their foes up close to their works. And Victor Radcliff likewise kept most of his troops in and near those precious trenches. Anything else would have invited disaster.

  Later, he realized he should have wondered when the redcoat asked for a truce stretching through the night. But that was later. At the time, the request seemed reasonable enough. Grimsley had refused a condition Victor saw as essential. Cornwallis and his leading officers might well need some time to decide whether to yield up the men who'd fought so ferociously on their side.

  For that matter, Victor felt he needed his own council of war. "If they insist on our keeping Biddiscombe and his men prisoners of war like any other, how shall we respond?" he asked his officers. "Shall we allow it for the sake of the victory, or shall we say we must have the villains' heads?"

  "Let the pigdogs go," Baron von Steuben said at once, "The surrender wins the war. That is the point of the business."

  "We can win the war even if the redcoats don't surrender," an Atlantean retorted. "The redcoats wouldn't ask for terms if they weren't at the end of their rope."

  "That's where Biddiscombe and his buggers ought to be-at the end of a rope." Another Atlantean officer twisted his head to one side, stuck out his tongue, and did his best to make his eyes bulge: a gruesomely excellent imitation of a hanged man.

  The laugh that rose in the tent held a fierce, baying undertone. Victor wasn't the only one there who wanted Habakkuk Biddiscombe dead. But did he want Biddiscombe dead badly enough to make it an issue that might disrupt Cornwallis' surrender? Most of his officers certainly seemed to.

  As councils of war had a way of doing, this one produced more heat than light. Several men had to get between a captain who favored flaying Biddiscombe and sprinkling salt on his bleeding flesh before hanging him and a major who thought letting him be treated as an Englishman was a reasonable price to pay for a surrender.

  Wearily, Victor dismissed his subordinates. "What will you do, General?" one of them asked.

  "Make up my mind come morning," he answered.

  "Then why did you call the council?" the man said.

  "To learn whether I might be able to make up my mind tonight," Victor told him. "But, as both sides have strong arguments in their favor, I need more time to decide what best serves us at this crucial hour."

  His officers had to be content with that. Muttering, they went off to their own tents. Victor turned to Blaise. "The man in me wants to see Biddiscombe at the end of a rope," he said. "The general says I should do as von Steuben suggests and let him go for the sake of victory."

  "Chances are you get the victory anyway," Blaise answered.

  "I know," Victor said. "But there's also the chance that something may go wrong if I delay. I know not how badly those French ships worsted the Royal Navy. If an English fleet should suddenly appear off Croydon, all our work would of necessity commence again."

  "Not all of it," the Negro said. "We have got close to the redcoats' line now. When we break in, what can they do?"

  Victor Radcliff smiled. "Yes, there is that. You know as much

  of siege warfare these days as any Atlantean officer."

  "More than a stupid nigger would, eh?" Blaise said, not without an edge to his voice.

  "Do I maltreat you or reckon you less than a man because your skin is black?" Victor asked. He waited. At last, Blaise shook his head. "All right, then," Victor said. "Where, before you came to Atlantis, would you have learned of saps and parallels? It is not a matter of stupidity, my friend-only inexperience. Set me amongst your folk, and I should make the most useless of spearmen."

  "Ah." Blaise considered that. "Yes, it could be. But you would be able to learn."

  "I hope so. You have certainly learned a good deal here," Victor said.

  "Not always things I want to learn," Blaise said.

  "I shouldn't wonder." Victor followed the words with a yawn. He stepped out of the tent and looked over toward Croydon. Most windows in the town were dark or showed only the dim sunset glow of banked embers. Firelight did pour from two or three buildings. In one of those, Cornwallis and his officers were probably still hashing out what to do. Victor wished he could have been a fly on the wall at that conclave.

  His breath smoked. His ears started to tingle. He would have been a chilly fly on the wall-he was glad to duck back under canvas. It wasn't warm inside the tent, but it was warmer.

  "You'll sleep on it, then?" Blaise said.

  "Yes, I'll sleep on it." Victor nodded. "Maybe I'll be wiser come morning. Or maybe I'll seem wiser, at any rate."

  He pulled off his boots and shed his hat Other than that, he lay down on the cot fully dressed. Even with two thick woolen blankets, he was glad for every extra bit of cloth between him and winter. Would he really be, or at least seem, wiser after the sun came up? He could hope so, anyhow. He closed his eyes. Before long, he slept.

  "General! General!" Shouts pierced dreams of an earthquake. No, the world wasn't falling down around him. Someone was shaking-had shaken-him awake.

  It was still dark. "What's gone wrong?" Victor asked blurrily. Something must have, or they would have left him alone till dawn.

  "There's fighting, General, over in the northeast, on the far side of the line," answered the man who'd been doing the shaking.

  "A pox!" Victor groped for his boots, found them, and tugged them on. The far side of Croydon from the encampment was also the weakest-held part of his lines. "Are the redcoats breaking out?" If they were going to do it anywhere, they were most likely to try there.

  "Somebody sure as hell is," the Atlantean soldier said.

  Victor hurried outside. He could hear muskets boom from that direction, and could see muzzle flashes piercing the night like fierce fireflies. Not all the booms came from muskets. E
ven at this distance, a trained ear like his could tell pistol shots from musketry. There were quite a few of them…

  He suddenly thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Biddiscombe!" he exclaimed, and it was as much a howl of self-reproach as a naming of the man likely leading that attack. "The Horsed Legion!"

  What had been going on all night in Croydon? Why, General Cornwallis and his officers were trying to decide whether to throw Habakkuk Biddiscombe and his troop of horsemen over the side to keep the French ships and the Atlantean and French armies from pounding them to jelly. Captain Grimsley had insisted that Cornwallis would never abandon Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion. But if the redcoats would never abandon their local allies, why were they talking deep into the night about doing exactly that?

  Why indeed?

  Now, too late, Victor could read Habakkuk Biddiscombe's thoughts. If the English army changed its mind and decided to give him and his men to the rebel Atlanteans, they were all as good as dead. And if the redcoats refused to cough up the Horsed

  Legion and the rebel Atlanteans and the French broke into Croydon-which seemed all too likely-he and his followers were also as good as dead.

  Breaking out offered more hope than either of those chances. Or maybe Cornwallis had gone to Biddiscombe and said something like, I wish things were otherwise, but they are as they are. I have no way to protect you. Flight seems your best hope. If you attempt it I shall look the other way whilst you ready yourselves.

  Cornwallis was bound to deny any bargain like that. So was Habakkuk Biddiscombe. Victor doubted he would ever be able to prove a thing. But he could see the scene in his mind's eye all the same.

  "What do we do, sir?" asked the soldier who'd wakened him.

  "Try to stop them, of course," Victor snapped.

  But some of them would break through-no, some of them had already broken through. Victor could see that by the places from which the gunfire was coming. They'd hit the weakest point in his line, all right. Was that good generalship? Was it fool luck? Or had someone gone over and told them where to strike? In a fight like this, with so much betrayal on both sides, could you be sure of anything?

  Victor was sure of one thing. "From this moment on, those men are outlaws, to be run down like wild dogs. They will leave tracks in the snow. As soon as we have light by which to follow them, we shall hunt them to destruction."

  "What if the whole English army goes after 'em?" the soldier said.

  "Look at Croydon." Victor waved toward the town, which was quiet, and even darker now than it had been before he went to bed. "Not the slightest sign of that. No, it's Biddiscombe, trying to get away while the getting is good."

  And Cornwallis, glad to rid himself of an embarrassment, he added, but only to himself. He couldn't prove that now. Odds were he would never be able to. Which didn't mean he didn't believe it, and didn't mean he didn't respect and even admire the English commander for so neatly disposing of his problem.

  Captain Horace Grimsley gave Victor another of his precise salutes. "General Cornwallis' compliments as before, sir, and he bids me tell you no outstanding reason remains that he should not accept the terms of surrender you proposed yesterday."

  "My compliments to your commander in return," Victor said. "You may also tell him we have slain or captured a good many members of Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion, and that we hope to be rid of every one of the villains before too long. It was… convenient for your principal that they chose to decamp under cover of darkness."

  The English officer looked back at him with no expression whatever. "General Cornwallis wishes me to assure you that he had no prior knowledge of Colonel Biddiscombe's intentions, and that neither he nor anyone else in our force assisted or abetted the Horsed Legion in any way."

  "I bet he wants you to assure me of that!" Victor said.

  "Do you presume to doubt his word, sir?" Grimsley asked coldly.

  "Damned right I doubt it," Victor answered. "Whether I doubt it enough to throw away the truce and tell those French ships to start firing again… That is another story. Once we've disarmed your lot, we'll be able to send more of our men after Biddiscombe. With the war as good as won, not so many people will care to help or hide him."

  "It could be so," Captain Grimsley admitted. Then he said, "If you have truly cast off his Majesty King George's rule, shall we now commence to style you King Victor the First?"

  "No," Victor said, and then again, louder, "No! We shall endeavor to make do without kings from here on out."

  "Foolishness," Grimsley said.

  "Perhaps it is. But it is our own foolishness, which is the point of the matter," Victor said. "And we reckon it a worse one to owe attachment to a sovereign across the broad sea, a sovereign who knows little of us and cares less, a sovereign in whose Parliament we are suffered to have no members. Better no sovereign at all, we think, than such a sovereign as that."

  He wondered if he would get through to the redcoat. But Captain Grimsley only shrugged. "Sometimes it's better to have a king who pays you no heed than one who pays too much. Look at Frederick of Prussia-you can't walk into a backhouse there without paying a turd tax to some collector."

  Victor smiled. All the same, he said, "Better not to have to worry that the next King of England will take after Frederick, then. And from this day forth, Captain, no King of England, good, bad, or indifferent, shall tell us what to do."

  "I cannot speak to that, sir," Grimsley said. "Have you the terms of surrender properly written out for me to convey them to General Cornwallis?"

  "I do," Victor said. "You will note I have lined through the provision pertaining to Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion and initialed the deletion. I should be grateful if General Cornwallis did likewise, along with signing the document as I have done"

  "Your courtesy is appreciated," Grimsley said. "If all proves satisfactory to the general, shall we set the formal ceremony of surrender for noon tomorrow? Should any questions arise before then, you may be certain I shall come out to confer with you concerning them."

  "Noon tomorrow. That is agreeable to me" Victor held out his hand. After momentary hesitation, Captain Grimsley shook it.

  The Englishman also saluted after the handclasp. "When I came here, I never dreamt it would end this way," he remarked.

  "That is always true for one side in a war," Victor answered. "The United States of Atlantis no more wish to be England's enemies than we wished to be her subjects. As equals in the comity of nations, one day we may become friends."

  "I suppose we may," Captain Grimsley said. "I doubt, however, whether it will be any day soon." Having won the last word if not the last battle, he took the surrender terms back into Croydon.

  Victor Radcliff wore the best of his three general's coats and the better of his two tricorns. Under the tricorn, he'd even donned a powdered, pigtailed periwig for the occasion. His general's sash stretched from one shoulder to the other hip. On his belt swung the Atlantean Assembly's gold-hilted sword.

  His men were drawn up in neat ranks outside of Croydon. They looked as spruce and uniform as they could. After long service in the field, not all of them could boast clean breeches. Their green jackets were of many different shades. Most of them wore tricorns. A few, even in wintertime, had only farmers' straw hats. More than a few went bareheaded.

  But they all had muskets, and most of them had bayonets. The long steel blades glittered in the cold sunlight. They might not be so elegant as their English counterparts, but they'd proved they could fight.

  Across the way, the Marquis de la Fayette had assembled the soldiers he'd brought from France. They looked more nearly uniform than the Atlanteans did. They'd proved themselves in battle, too. Victor waved to de la Fayette. The Frenchman returned the gesture.

  Inside Croydon, church bells began to ring the hour. Victor had a pocket watch, which ran fairly well when he remembered to wind it. At the moment, it was five minutes slow-or, possibly, Croydon's clocks were five minutes fast. One way or
the other, it hardly mattered. General Cornwallis would have no doubt that noon had come.

  And he didn't. The redcoats formed on the frozen meadow in front of the town hall. Then, flags flying and band playing-at first faint in the distance but soon louder and louder-they marched toward the assembled Atlanteans and Frenchmen.

  "What tune are they playing?" Blaise asked in a low voice.

  After cocking his head to one side and listening for a moment, Victor answered, "I think it's called The World Turned Upside Down.'"

  "Is it?" The Negro grinned. "Well, good."

  "Yes." Victor sometimes thought Blaise found white men's music as curious as anything else in Atlantis. The songs Blaise had brought from Africa had different rhythms-not less complex

  (in fact, perhaps more so), but undoubtedly different.

  Then again, that also mattered little. Here came the English army. As the redcoats left their works and came out into the open between the ranks of the Atlanteans and the French, the band finished "The World Turned Upside Down" and started a new tune. Not the most musical of men, Victor needed a moment to recognize "God Save the King."

  Some Atlantean patriots had tried writing new words to the old music. Victor had heard several different versions, none of which he liked. Maybe one day someone would come up with new words that really described what the United States of Atlantis stood for, what they meant. (And maybe that wouldn't happen for a while, because who could really say right now what this untested country stood for?) Or maybe a musician would find or make another tune better suited to this new free land in the middle of the sea.

  One more thing Victor could worry about later, if he worried about it at all. He caught the Marquis de la Fayette's eye again. At his nod, both commanders rode forward to meet General Cornwallis, who was also on horseback.

  A bugle at the head of the English army blared out a call. A leather-lunged sergeant echoed it in words: "All-halt!" The redcoats did. Then the sergeant bawled another command, one that had no equivalent in horn calls: "Stack-arms!"