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 roundshot 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.
“Well?” Victor said.
“Well, it’s like this, your Honor,” the corporal said in a clotted London accent. “General ’Owe, ’e’s moving inland, around your bloody flank. ’E aims to get between you and New ’Astings, ’e does.”
“Sweet suffering Jesus!” Victor said. That would put him—and the Atlantean Assembly—in a very nasty spot . . . if it was true. He eyed the deserter. “And you came in to tell me this because . . . ?”
Flash! Boom! Flying roundshot. Crash! The redcoat hardly seemed to notice, let alone get excited. “Why, your Honor? I’ll bloody well tell you why.” He brushed his c
hevrons with a scarred hand. “On account of over there I’ll be an old man by the time I make sergeant, if I ever do. I took the king’s shilling to keep from starving. Well, I’ve done that, any road. But if I want to make summat of myself, if I want to be a lieutenant, say”—like a lot of Englishmen, he pronounced it leftenant—“I’ve got a better chance ’ere than I ever would’ve there. And so I lit out, I did.”
Lots of Englishmen came to Atlantis because they thought they could do better here than in the cramped, tradition-filled mother country. This corporal wasn’t the first deserter from Howe’s army: nowhere near. But none of the others had brought such important news. “What’s your name?” Victor asked him.
“Pipes, your Honor,” he answered. “Daniel Pipes.”
“All right, Pipes. I’m going to send out riders to check what you’ve said.” Victor feared he knew what they would find. The deserter’s news had a dreadful feel of probability to it. He went on, “If they show you’re telling the truth, you’re Sergeant Daniel Pipes on the spot. How high you climb after that is up to you.”
The redcoat stiffened to rigor motris—like attention. His salute might have been turned on a lathe. A couple of watching Atlantean soldiers sniggered. That kind of stern discipline was what they were fighting against. But Victor knew it had its merits in winning wars.
“Much obliged, your Honor!” Pipes said.
Flash! Boom! Victor watched the cannon ball come in. Crash! “I think we’re the ones obliged to you,” he said. How big a march had General Howe stolen? How much bigger would it have been if not for Daniel Pipes?
Radcliff sent out the riders. He’d let the ships distract him, but he wouldn’t make that mistake any more. What other mistakes he might make . . . he would discover only by making them.
A new question rose in his mind. How often could he count on help from English deserters? That brought up another new question. How often would Atlantean deserters help the enemy? He knew he’d already lost some men to desertion. He hadn’t thought till now about how much it might mean.
Flash. Boom! Pause. Crash! Screams followed this shot—it must have come down on a building with people inside. Victor swore. No wonder the Royal Navy had been able to mesmerize him for a while.
The next roundshot missed him by only about twenty feet. “Nasty thing,” Pipes observed. He hadn’t flinched as the big iron ball bounded by. Neither had Radcliff. It wasn’t the same as a bullet snapping past. Victor didn’t know why it wasn’t, but he was sure of the fact.
A couple of hours went by. The bombardment went on. He thanked heaven the cannonading hadn’t started a fire in Weymouth. That was nothing but luck, as he knew too well. Fire was any town’s biggest nightmare. Once it took hold, it was next to impossible to quell.
Hoofbeats clopped on dirt as a horseman trotted in. “Well?” Victor called.
“They’re moving, all right,” the scout answered. “Heading around our left flank. But I think you can still pull out all right.”
“That’s what she said,” Victor remarked, and the horseman laughed.
His men weren’t sorry to leave Weymouth. Who in his right mind would have been? He marched away from the little seaside town as quietly as he could. The longer the Royal Navy took to realize he was gone, the better. Boom! . . . Crash! (He couldn’t see the flash or the flight of the ball any more. The sound, though, the sound pursued.)
“Can those ships do this at New Hastings, too?” Blaise asked.
“We do have forts there, but I don’t know if they would stop them,” Victor answered.
“Mm-hmm,” the Negro said, a fraught noise if ever there was one. “How are we ever going to win the war, then?”
That was a better question than Victor Radcliff wished it were. “Most of Atlantis is out of the range of the Royal Navy’s guns,” he said. That was true. He was less sure how helpful it was. If the Atlantean Assembly’s army couldn’t safely stay by the coast, the enemy gained an important advantage.
Atlantis had ships of its own, as befit a land that made much of its living from fishing and whaling and slaving and trading with the mother country (and, when the mother country wasn’t looking, trading with other people, too). Some of them went armed. Piracy wasn’t what it had been in the wild days of Avalon, more than a hundred years before, but it wasn’t dead, either. How many carried enough guns to face a Royal Navy frigate? Any? Victor knew too well none could face a first-rate ship of the line.
“If Howe comes at us and the ships come at us, can we hold New Hastings?” Blaise persisted.
“We can try,” Victor said. That didn’t sound strong enough even to him, so he added, “We have to try.” Blaise nodded and didn’t say anything more. It was less of a relief than Victor had thought it would be.
General Howe’s skirmishers pushed toward the coast. The Atlantean army’s skirmishers pushed them back and took a few prisoners. They hauled one of them in front of Victor Radcliff. The redcoat acted more aggrieved that he’d been caught.
“What are you buggers doing marching along down here?” he said. “They told us you were still back in bloody Weymouth.”
“Well, you’ve learned something, then, haven’t you?” Victor answered.
The prisoner scowled at him. “What’s that?”
“Not to believe everything you hear,” Victor said blandly. What the redcoat said then wasn’t fit for polite company. The Atlanteans gathered around him laughed. He seemed even less happy about that. The Atlanteans thought he got funnier as he got louder.
General Howe began pressing harder on the Atlantean army’s flank. That was a problem Victor could deal with, though. A small rear guard sufficed to slow down the redcoats and let the rest of his men get ahead of them on the road down to New Hastings.
He wondered what would happen when he got there. By now, the Atlantean Assembly would know he hadn’t held Weymouth. Would they take his command away from him? He shrugged. If they did, they did, that was all.
The next interesting question would be whether he could hold New Hastings. It certainly had better works than Weymouth did. But, like Weymouth, it was a seaside town. If the Royal Navy wanted to lie offshore and bombard it, Victor didn’t know how he could respond.
He shook his head. That wasn’t true. He knew how: he couldn’t. He didn’t like that, but he knew it.
And if he lost New Hastings, the echo of its fall would reverberate throughout Atlantis. If New Hastings came under the redcoats’ boots . . . Would the rest of the land think the fight was still worth making? Victor really had no idea about that.
Nor did he want to find out. The best way to keep from finding out would be to hold New Hastings. He hoped he could.
Another rider came in from the west. “They’re starting to turn in on us for true, sir,” he reported.
“They would,” Victor said, and then, “Did you see any fence or stone wall that runs more or less north and south? Something we could fight behind, I mean?”
“Plenty of ’em,” the man answered. “These New Hastings folk, they’re as bad as the people up by Croydon for walling themselves away from their neighbors.” By the way he talked, he came from somewhere close to Freetown, well to the south of New Hastings. He could sneer at New Hastings folk as much as he wanted, but his own settlement held a far higher proportion of men loyal to King George.
He wasn’t, though—and he’d given Victor Radcliff the answer the Atlantean commander wanted to hear. “Good,” Victor said. “If they want to charge us across open country, they’re welcome to pay the butcher’s bill.”
They’d done that north of Weymouth, and come away with a victory anyhow. Victor hoped General Howe didn’t care for what he’d paid to get his victory. He shouted orders, swinging the Atlantean army out of its retreat and off to the west to face the redcoats again.
He also sent more horsemen out ahead of his infantry. He wanted them to lead the English army straight toward his. That way, he wouldn’t—he hoped he wouldn’t—get ta
ken in the flank.
Once he’d set things in motion, he turned back to the courier who’d brought word of Howe’s swing. “Take us to one of these fences.”
“Glad to do it, General.” The man brushed the brim of his tricorn with a forefinger—probably as close to a salute as Victor would get from him.
The first fence to which he led the Atlanteans wasn’t long enough to let all of them deploy behind it. Victor didn’t want them out in the open trading volleys with the redcoats. The English were better trained than the settlers. They could shoot faster, and could also take more damage without breaking. And, if it came down to a charge and hand-to-hand fighting, all the redcoats had bayonets.
And so they went a little farther northwest, and found a stone wall that seemed perfect. It was more than a mile long, and almost chest high. If the musketeers steadied their firelocks on top of it as they shot, they were likely to do better than smoothbores commonly could, too.
Sheep grazed in a broad meadow on the far side of the fence. They looked up in mild surprise as the Atlanteans took their places. They didn’t know enough to run. If General Howe declined this engagement, Victor Radcliff suspected a good many of his men would enjoy a mutton supper tonight.
But Howe did not decline. Victor saw the rising cloud of dust that marked the redcoats’ approach. He listened to occasional pistol shots: those would come from the two sides’ horsemen skirmishing with one another. Some of the Atlantean mounted soldiers wore green coats. Others were in homespun, and had only weapons and determination to mark them as fighting men.
They took refuge at either side of the Atlantean position. The English horsemen, by contrast, recoiled when they saw the enemy in arms in front of them. They didn’t push the attack—nor would Victor have in their place. Instead, they rode back to give their commander the news that the rebels were waiting for them.
Howe’s infantry came out onto the meadow not quite half an hour later. Victor peered at them through a brass spyglass. A golden reflection caught his eye. He had to smile. There stood an English officer—General Howe himself?—staring back through a telescope almost identical to his own.
The United States of Atlantis Page 7
