A messenger from the Atlantean Assembly rode out to meet him halfway between Bredestown and New Hastings. Victor eyed the man with (he hoped) well-hidden apprehension. What new disaster had the Assemblymen sent him out to report?
“General, I am told to inform you—”
“Yes? Out with it!” Maybe Victor’s apprehension wasn’t so well hidden after all.
“Several hundred new recruits await your attention on your return, sir. I am also told to let you know that more than a few of them gave as their reason for volunteering the strong opposition the forces under your command have offered against the English tyrant’s murderers.”
“You are? They do? The Atlantean Assembly sent you to me for that?” Victor couldn’t hide his surprise. Bad news usually traveled faster than good. And with reason: bad news was the kind you had to do something about right away . . . if you could. Most of the time, good news could wait.
But the courier nodded. “That’s right, sir. Mr. Fenner and Mr. Cawthorne both told me to tell you they know you are doing the best you can, and the rest of Atlantis seems to know it, too.”
“Well, well,” Victor said. That didn’t seem enough somehow, so he said it again: “Well, well.” The splutters bought him a few seconds to think. “Please convey my gratitude to the gentlemen of the Atlantean Assembly, and particularly to Mr. Cawthorne and Mr. Fenner.”
“I’ll do that, sir,” the messenger said.
“Thank you. I’ll thank the recruits myself when I get back to the coast,” Victor said. “The Assembly has been gracious enough to note that I did not despair of the republic. The same holds true for these volunteers, and in rather greater measure. If I fall, finding a new general will be easy enough. But if no one chooses to fight for Atlantis, our cause is dead, dead beyond any hope of resurrection.”
“That’s a fact.” Now the man who’d come out from New Hastings sounded surprised. “Not a fact you think about every day, though, is it?”
“Maybe not.” Victor knew damn well it wasn’t. The powers that be didn’t want potential fighting men to realize how the shape of the future lay in their hands. If they sat on those hands, no war could go on for long.
The messenger sketched a salute. “Well, then, I’m off. I’ll pass things on like you said, and I know your sergeants will whip the new chums into shape pretty damn quick.” His chuckle held a certain amount of anticipation. Gloating? That, too, Victor judged.
He felt better the rest of the way back to New Hastings. He wondered why. Nothing had changed. General Howe had still seized Bredestown, the second- or third-oldest city in English Atlantis. The redcoats were still likely to move on New Hastings. A regiment’s worth of raw volunteers wouldn’t slow them down, much less hold them back.
But the spirit that brought forth a regiment’s worth of raw volunteers would . . . eventually. If Atlantis didn’t lose the war before England got sick of fighting it. That could happen. It could happen much too easily, as Victor knew much too well.
“I have to make sure it doesn’t, that’s all,” he murmured. Easy enough to say something like that. Keeping the promise might prove rather harder.
Small bands of Atlantean cavalry still roamed north of the Brede. Every so often, they managed to cut off and cut up a column of supply wagons coming down to General Howe. Some of what they took supplied the Atlantean army instead. Some they kept. And some they sold. They thought of it as prize money, as if they were sailors capturing enemy ships.
Prize money, though, was a long-established official custom. Theirs was anything but. Victor didn’t complain. He wouldn’t complain about anything that made his men fight harder.
They didn’t just loot. He would have complained if they were nothing but brigands. He’d been back in New Hastings only a few hours when a troop of horsemen brought in a glum-looking prisoner.
“We caught him in civilian clothes, General, like you see,” one of the troopers said. No wonder their captive looked glum—the laws of war said you could hang an enemy soldier caught in civilian clothes. What else was he then but a spy?
“How do you know he’s a soldier at all?” Victor asked the Atlanteans who’d brought in the captive.
“We found this here on him, sir.” One of the men handed him a folded letter.
Radcliff unfolded it and read it. It was a letter from General Howe to the officer in charge of the Royal Navy detachment that was harrying New Hastings. “You were going to give some kind of signal from the shore, and they’d send a boat for you so you could deliver this?” Victor asked the captive.
The man stood mute—for a moment. Then one of the Atlanteans who’d brought him in shook him like a dog shaking a rat. “Answer the general, you silly bugger, if you want to go on breathing.”
“Uh, that’s right,” the captive said unwillingly.
“Did you men read this?” Victor asked the Atlanteans who’d caught him.
“Enough to see what it was,” one of them answered. “Enough to see that you needed to see it right away.”
“And I thank you for that,” Victor Radcliff said. “But I’d like to read you one passage in particular. General Howe writes, ‘As before, the resistance offered by the Atlanteans in Bredestown was unsettling, even daunting. They withdrew in good order after inflicting casualties we are barely able to support. This rebellion has a character different from and altogether more serious than what we were led to believe before we embarked upon the task of suppressing it.’ ” He folded the paper. “That’s you he’s talking about, gentlemen!”
“Think he’ll pack up and go home, then?” asked the big man who’d shaken the prisoner. “If he thinks he can’t win, why keep fighting?”
Reluctantly, Victor shook his head. If Howe kept advancing in spite of his losses, Victor wasn’t sure he could keep him out of New Hastings. He didn’t tell that to the Atlanteans, lest they be captured in turn or infect their comrades with the doubt they’d caught from him. What he did say was, “No, I think we need to give him a few more sets of lumps before he’s ready to do that.”
“Well, we can take care of it,” the big Atlantean said. The others nodded. They knew less than Victor. They didn’t worry about things like why they didn’t have more bayonets or where the gunpowder for the battle after the battle after next would come from. That made them more hopeful than he was. Maybe their hope would infect him.
Plaintively, the Englishman they’d captured asked, “What will you do to me?”
“Ought to knock you over the head and pitch you into the Brede. Better than you deserve, too,” one of the Atlanteans said. The prisoner turned pale.
“No, no,” Victor said. “Can’t have that, or Howe’s soldiers will start knocking our men over the head after they catch them. I’ll fight that kind of war if I must, but I don’t want to. We’ll keep him as a prisoner till he’s properly exchanged, that’s all.”
“Thank you kindly, your Honor,” the Englishman said. “If you let me go, I’ll give my parole not to fight until I’m exchanged.”
“Sorry. I think we’d do better to hold you for now,” Victor replied. “Let General Howe think his letter’s been delivered.” He turned to the Atlanteans who’d captured the man. “Keep him with our other prisoners, and keep an eye on him. We don’t want him slipping away while our backs are turned.”
“Right you are, General,” the big man said. He set a hand the size of a ham on the prisoner’s shoulder. “Come on, you.” The Englishman perforce came. The Atlantean soldiers led him away.
Victor Radcliff slowly read through Howe’s letter once more. He nodded to himself. Nice to learn he wasn’t the only commander with worries, anyhow.
After taking Bredestown, the redcoats lay quiet for a fortnight. Licking their wounds, Victor thought, though he had no idea whether that was the explanation. Then General Howe cautiously began moving skirmishers down the Brede toward New Hastings.
Atlantean skirmishers met them right away. Victor didn’t want Howe coming after hi
m. Maybe a show of force would persuade the English that an attack on the oldest town in Atlantis would prove more trouble than it was worth.
On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. The redcoats kept pushing forward. Victor sent more of his army back toward the west to delay them. He wished he could write General Howe a stiff letter. The continual pressure the Englishman applied to his forces struck him as not the least bit sporting.
Then nature took a hand. It rained buckets, sheets, hogsheads. The Brede turned into a raging brown torrent that threatened to burst its banks and lay New Hastings waste before Howe could. Every road for miles around became a knee-deep quagmire.
And every firearm became no more than a fancy club or a wet spear. If steel squelched when it struck flint, no spark flew. And keeping powder in the priming pan dry was a separate nightmare. Victor wished for a thousand armored knights all carrying lances. As long as the rain lasted, they might have driven the redcoats from the field.
But it wouldn’t last. He knew that all too well. He set his men to work on field fortifications north and south of the Brede. If the English army wanted to try to bull through to New Hastings, he aimed to set as many obstacles in its path as he could.
No matter what a man aimed at, he commonly got less. Victor did here. Earthworks sagged to muddy lumps as soon as they were built. Trenches turned to moats just as fast. And rumbles of mutiny came from the soldiers.
“They think you’re trying to drown them,” Blaise reported. He eyed the general commanding. “Maybe they’re right, too.”
“No.” Radcliff shook his head. “That is not so. I’m trying to keep them from getting shot when the fighting picks up again. But . . .” The rain drummed down on his tent. He was standing in mud. He had a cot, that being one of the privileges a general enjoyed. So he slept dry—except when the tent leaked. Too many of his men slept in the open if they slept at all. He sighed. “We’ll give it up, then. Sooner or later, though, the sky will clear.”
After a week and a half, it did. General Howe tried to get his army on the move as soon as he could, which turned out to be too soon. Wagons and guns bogged down in the gluey mud. The redcoats’ advance stopped almost before it got started.
“If we could get at ’em, we could slaughter ’em,” reported a scout charged with keeping an eye on the enemy. “Some of their oxen are in it up to their bellies.”
“So are ours,” Victor replied. “And what sort of time did you have coming back to bring your news to me?”
“Well . . .” The cavalryman grimaced. “It wasn’t what anybody’d call easy—I will say that.”
Victor didn’t attack. The sun made everything from the grass to the soldiers’ wet clothes steam. Victor wondered how much of their powder was dry. Enough to fight a battle? Enough to shoot at all? He had a few men fire their muskets. Most of the firelocks went off. That was about as much as he could have hoped for. Even in the driest weather, misfires were all too common.
Scouts reported hearing musket fire from the redcoats, too, though they’d thought better for the moment of moving forward. No doubt General Howe was also making sure his soldiers could shoot if they had to.
Sergeants exhorted men to push oily rags through their musket barrels to hold rust at bay. Radcliff could only hope the stubbornly independent Atlanteans would listen. Over in the English army, other underofficers would be telling the men they led the same thing. The redcoats would obey—Victor was mournfully sure of that.
At last, slowly and cautiously, they did edge forward once more. Victor’s men skirmished and sniped from behind fences and trees. The Englishmen caught a sniper who was wearing a green coat and cut his throat, leaving his body for his comrades to find.
“We ought to do that to the next redcoat we catch!” a rifleman raged. “If they want to fight filthy, we can fight filthy, too!” His comrades shook their fists and shouted agreement.
Do you intend this to be a war without quarter? Victor wrote to General Howe. If you do, sir, we shall endeavor to oblige you. But murdering men taken prisoner only adds cruelty to the conflict without in the least changing its likely result. He added details about the killing and sent off the note under flag of truce.
An English junior officer carrying a white flag brought the enemy general’s response the next day. Please accept my apologies and my assurances that such distasteful incidents shall not be repeated, Howe wrote. The men responsible have been punished.
He didn’t say how. Victor Radcliff muttered to himself. Was it enough? Victor used a penknife to trim a quill, then dipped the tip of the goose feather in a bottle of ink. So long as these assurances be respected and observed, we shall not reply in kind, he wrote. But if we meet with such barbarities again, you may rely on our ability and intention to avenge ourselves by whatever means seem fitting. Very respectfully, your most obedient servant . . . He signed his name.
The subaltern who’d brought General Howe’s reply waited for Victor’s. The young man saluted as he might have done for his own commanding officer. He took Victor’s letter, performed a smart about-turn, mounted his horse, and rode off toward his own lines.
War’s politesse, as formal as a gavotte’s, Victor thought. It doesn’t stop us from killing one another. It doesn’t even slow us down much. But it does make sure we do it by the rules.
His chuckle held a distinctly wry edge. Blaise had never got used to those rules. He thought they were nothing but white men’s foolishness. He might have been right. Still and all, though, the whole business might have ended up even worse without them.
A few days later, Victor was wondering how the whole business could end up any worse. The redcoats probed at the lines he’d tried to set up to hold them away from New Hastings. They probed, and they found that the lines weren’t nearly so solid as he’d wished they were.
Too many of his men hadn’t learned how to stand up under an artillery bombardment. Most cannon balls harmlessly buried themselves in wet earth or went skipping over the landscape, dangerous only if you were rash enough to try to stop one with your foot. Every so often, though, a roundshot would mash a man—or two or three men—into a crimson horror not usually seen outside a slaughterhouse. It was worse when the cannon ball didn’t kill right away. Then the luckless soldier’s shrieks spread his agony to every man who heard them.
And when the Atlanteans, having seen a few red horrors and heard a few agonized shrieks, streamed out of a length of trench, their opponents, ruthlessly competent, went in and took it away from them. That threatened more Atlantean companies with enfilading fire. Clever enough to see as much, the men from those companies would pull back, too. And so, little by little, Victor’s defensive position dissolved like a salt statue in the rain.
He wished for more rain. The sun smiled down from a bright blue sky. The small, puffy clouds drifting across it only mocked his hopes. He had to fall back two or three miles closer to New Hastings and try to set up new positions from which to withstand the English advance.
One of his captains asked, “What’s to keep that bastard Howe from doing the same thing all over again?”
Victor Radcliff gave him a bleak look. “Nothing I can see.”
He did set his riflemen to sniping at the English artillerists. If the redcoats had trouble serving their guns, they wouldn’t be able to hurt his men so much the next time around. He could also hope they wouldn’t be able to intimidate the Atlanteans so much.
And he sent a message back to New Hastings, warning the Atlantean Assembly he might not be able to hold the town. You must prepare yourselves to leave expeditiously, he wrote. Much as I regret to state it, I cannot promise New Hastings’ security nor your safety in the event the city falls.
He was watching the redcoats get ready to assault his newest makeshift defensive works when a horseman leaned down and thrust a folded sheet of paper into his hand. “From the Atlantean Assembly, General,” he said.
“Thank you,” Victor said, though he didn’t want his elbow jogg
led at just that moment.
No matter what he wanted, he unfolded the paper. He had to hold it a little farther from his eyes than he would have liked; his sight was beginning to lengthen. But Isaac Fenner’s hand was large and clear. Thank you for alerting us to what may come, Fenner wrote. If need be, we shall evacuate confident the fight will continue even without this town and expecting you to bloody the tyrannous foe here as you did at Bredestown.
“Is everything all right, sir?” Blaise asked, and then, a moment later, “Is anything all right?”
“Now that you mention it,” Radcliff replied, “no.” Isaac Fenner was a very clever man—no doubt about it. No doubt, also, that he would never make a soldier. The Atlanteans had had an easy retreat from Bredestown. If they were driven into New Hastings, where would they go once driven out again? Yes. Where? Victor asked himself. He might need an answer soon.
“Anything I can do?” the colored sergeant inquired.
“Can you make the redcoats disappear? Can you give the Atlantean Assembly a dose of common sense?” Victor said.
“Let me have a rifle, sir, and I’ll see what I can do about General Howe.” Blaise never lacked for confidence.
Marksmen with rifles did their best to pick off enemy officers. Deliberately trying to assassinate the English commander, however, struck Victor as surpassing the limits of decency. Moreover, the redcoats were altogether too likely to try to return the disfavor. He hoped that consideration didn’t influence him too much when he replied, “I’m not sure how much point there would be. His second-in-command is said to be a skillful officer.”
“Kill him, too.” Blaise was ready to be as ruthless as the situation required—or a bit more so.
“If the opportunity arises,” Victor said, and not another word. Blaise snorted; he knew Victor wouldn’t do anything along those lines.
The United States of Atlantis Page 10
