Victor did send out more snipers to try to discourage the redcoats from advancing. They picked off a few Englishmen. Maybe they slowed the enemy’s movements a little. Victor knew too well they didn’t slow them much.
General Howe methodically formed his men for the assault on the Atlanteans’ positions in front of New Hastings. He put most of his strength on the right. Watching that, Victor realized what it meant: if the English attack succeeded, Howe would try to pin the Atlanteans against the Brede and pound their army to pieces.
It had better not succeed, then, Victor thought. He shifted men to shore up his own left, and moved cannon to cover that part of the field, too. He also posted a couple of companies to try to hold the road east to New Hastings in case his army had to retreat down it. By holding them out of the battle, he made it a little more likely that the army would need to retreat. But he also made it more likely that the force as a whole would survive. To him, that counted for more.
Howe opened with a cannonading like the one that had frightened the Atlanteans out of their lines farther west. This time, to Victor’s vast relief, his men seemed less alarmed. Atlantean guns fired back at the English troops. Every so often, a roundshot would knock down a few men. The redcoats stolidly re-formed and held their ground. Victor hated and admired them at the same time. They were too damned hard to beat.
On they came, advancing to the music of fife, drum, and horn. Sunfire flashed from their bayonets. The inexperienced soldiers facing them feared cold steel almost as much as they feared artillery. They had reason to fear it, too: it gave the redcoats the edge in the hand-to-hand.
Atlantean muskets thundered. The volley was sharper than it would have been when the uprising began. Victor’s men couldn’t match Howe’s in drill or discipline, but knew more of the soldier’s trade now than they had when the fighting started.
A great cloud of grayish smoke obscured the field . . . and Victor’s view of the oncoming Englishmen. Not even his spyglass helped. He swore. How could he know what was going on through that manmade fogbank?
Here and there, fresh shots rang out from the Atlantean position. Some musketeers, having fired once, could reload fast enough to send another three-quarter-inch ball against the redcoats before the foe reached them. Most men, unfortunately, weren’t so skilled—or so lucky.
For a few seconds, Victor let hope run away with him. Maybe the insurrectionists’ fearsome volley had knocked Howe’s men back on their heels. Some storms of lead were too much to bear. He’d seen that himself, fighting against the French settlers in the last war and in the fight north of Weymouth only a few weeks before.
Some storms were . . . but not this one. The English soldiers burst through the smoke and began jumping down into the trenches that sheltered the Atlanteans. Not only were the redcoats’ muskets bayoneted, they were also all loaded, while too many of Victor’s men still struggled with powder charge and wad and ball and ramrod.
The Atlanteans fought hard. Victor had seldom seen his summer soldiers do anything else. If courage and ferocity were all it took to win the day . . . But cold-hearted professional competence also had its place. And the redcoats had more of that than his men did, while they also didn’t lack for courage.
Fighting and cursing, the Atlanteans fell back. One well-sited gun loaded with canister shredded half a dozen redcoats. No matter how perfectly disciplined the Englishmen were, that horrific blast slowed down their pursuit. Victor wouldn’t have wanted to storm forward when he was all too likely to get blown to cat’s meat, either.
Half an hour later, seeing that Howe’s infantry would let his battered army escape again, he said the best thing he could: “Well, we’re still in the fight, by God.”
“Yes, sir,” Blaise agreed. “And we still stand between the enemy and New Hastings.”
“So we do.” But for how much longer? Victor wondered. He didn’t care for the answer he foresaw. Because he didn’t, he called for a messenger.
A young man on horseback rode up and touched two fingers of his right hand to the brim of his shapeless straw hat. It might have been a salute; it was more likely nothing but a friendly wave. “What do you need, General?” the youngster asked.
“Take word to the Atlantean Assembly,” Victor said. “Tell them they’d better get out of New Hastings while the going is still good.”
By the time Victor’s battered force limped into New Hastings, the Atlantean Assembly was already gone. Some people claimed the leaders of the rising against King George had fled north across the Brede and then west, towards Atlantis’ sparsely populated interior. Others said they’d gone south, in the direction of Freetown and the formerly French settlements beyond.
Victor had no sure way to judge which report was true. When he rode into New Hastings from the west, men who had reason not to desire the return of English rule were abandoning the city in both directions. Had the Royal Navy not lain offshore, he suspected plenty of people would also have fled by sea.
He wondered which way to take the army. He was tempted to make his best guess about which way the Atlantean Assembly had gone, then head in the opposite direction. That way, he could fight General Howe without the useless advice and even more useless orders the Assembly gave him.
Reluctantly, he decided that wasn’t the proper course. This wasn’t his solo struggle against the redcoats; it was Atlantis’ fight. If anybody represented Atlantis, the Assembly did. And if it was cantankerous and confused . . . it accurately portrayed the people it served.
After some thought, he took his own force north over the Brede once more. In the French settlements, his men might be thought of as invaders no less than General Howe’s. They would also be reckoned no less English than the redcoats, at least by the inhabitants who’d dwelt in those parts longer than ten or fifteen years.
He sent messengers to the seaside forts, ordering their garrisons away with the rest of his force. They were precious far beyond their numbers. In Atlantis, skilled artillerists didn’t hatch from honkers’ eggs. (Or maybe they did, for the big flightless birds and their eggs were regrettably scarce these days, especially in the better-settled eastern regions.)
The artillerists also brought out their lighter guns, the ones that could keep up with the army. They drove spikes into the touch-holes of the heavier cannon and broke up their carriages, doing their best to deny them to the enemy.
Some of his men carried bits of this and that with them as they crossed the bridge over the Brede: loot from New Hastings shops. Victor kept quiet about it. Many of those shops had been abandoned. The proprietors who stayed behind were mostly men who favored King George. Radcliff would lose no sleep to see them plundered.
Fires broke out in the old town even before the Atlantean army finished evacuating it. Victor did hope the ancient redwood church would survive. It had already seen two wars and three centuries. Losing it now would be like losing a piece of what made Atlantis the way it was.
Such considerations didn’t keep him from blowing up the stone bridge after his army was over it. The artillerymen from the forts did a first-rate job, dropping part of the elliptical arch into the Brede. General Howe’s men would take some time to repair it. With luck, that would mean they’d have a hard time pursuing the battle-weary Atlanteans.
Victor hoped for luck. As far as he could see, his side hadn’t had much up till now. He was sure the English commander would laugh at him and complain that the redcoats hadn’t caught a break since the fighting started. No general since Sulla had ever thought of himself as a lucky man.
“Come on! Come on!” Victor called. “We can stand here gawping while New Hastings falls, but we can’t stop it. What we can do is get away and keep fighting. We can—and we’d better. So get moving, boys! We’ll beat them next time—see if we don’t!”
He wondered if they would laugh at him or jeer at him or just ignore him and go their separate ways. If they did, he didn’t know what he could do about it. He didn’t have much in the way of c
oercion ready to hand right now. Armies sometimes fell apart, and damn all you could do about it.
To his surprise—no, to his slack-jawed amazement—the soldiers raised a cheer. He doffed his tricorn to them. The cheers got louder. “We’ll whip ’em yet, General!” somebody shouted. “You see if we don’t!”
“Damned right!” somebody else yelled.
“Huzzah for General Radcliff and the National Assembly!” someone else said. That won him three cheers, each louder than the one that had gone before.
The Assembly had voted him their thanks because he hadn’t despaired of the cause after a defeat. The men he led seemed to deserve those praises more than he did. He doffed his hat again, and waved it, and waited for the cheering to subside.
“Thank you, men. Thank you—friends,” he said huskily. “Thank you for the faith you show in me, and thank you for the faith you show in Atlantis. As long as Atlantis has faith in you, I know we cannot possibly lose this war. The redcoats have more training, but you are fighting for your country, for your homes. In the end, that will make all the difference in the world.”
Over on the other side of the Brede, General Howe’s soldiers would be marching into New Hastings. They already held Hanover and Croydon farther north, and most of the smaller towns along the coast in those parts, too. They had to think they were strangling Atlantis’ freedom, the way Hercules strangled the serpents in his cradle.
When Victor was down, as he was now, he had to think they were right. But were they? Fighting had hardly touched the southern settlements or the west coast of Atlantis. And, more to the point, it had barely reached into the interior. No English soldier had come within many miles of chasing Margaret off the Radcliff farm.
Maybe I’m not lying to these fellows after all, then, Victor thought. By God, I hope I’m not. England sees the coast, because that’s what she trades with. But Atlantis is bigger than that.
Atlantis was, when you got right down to it, several times larger than England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland put together. One of these days, it would grow richer, stronger, and more populous than King George’s realm. When you looked at things that way, how outrageous of George’s soldiers to try to hold this land down by force!
For the moment, though, England was a man grown, Atlantis only a stripling. No matter how much promise Atlantis held, England was stronger—and better able to use the strength it had—now. Staying in the fight, wearing the enemy down . . . that was what Atlantis would have to do.
“Let’s go, men,” Victor called. “We need to get away. We need to make sure the damned redcoats can’t catch us till we’re ready for them.” He respected Howe’s engineers too much to imagine a blown bridge would keep them on the wrong side of the Brede very long. “And we need to get in touch with the Atlantean Assembly again, to find out what they require of us.”
Did I just say that? he wondered. But he did, no doubt about it, even if he’d been at least half glad the Assembly wasn’t telling him what to do every chance it got. If he had to decide everything on his own, he would turn into something closer to king than to general. The only thing he knew about kings was that he didn’t want to be one.
Dark clouds blowing over the Green Ridge Mountains swept in front of the sun. The day got cooler in a hurry. All at once, the air tasted damp. More rain was coming. For that matter, fall was coming. How much longer would either side be able to campaign in any serious way?
One thing rain would do: as it had before, it would turn the roads to mud. The redcoats would have a devil of a time catching up to his army in bad weather. Their force would bog down worse than his, in fact, because they had more artillery and a bigger, more ponderous baggage train.
His horse snorted softly. Its nostrils flared. If that didn’t mean it smelled rain, he would have been surprised.
If I have a winter’s worth of time away from the English, a winter’s worth of time to train my men, to turn them into proper fighters . . . Victor Radcliff nodded to himself. Even now, the Atlanteans proved they could confront hardened professional soldiers from across the sea. With drill, with discipline, wouldn’t they be able to rout the redcoats? He hoped so. Sooner or later, Atlantis would likely need victories, not just hard-fought defeats.
VII
Victor Radcliff was a much-traveled man. All the same, he didn’t think he’d ever been in Horsham before. He wasn’t completely sure; if Atlantis had less memorable places than Horsham, he’d long since forgotten about them. A couple of taverns—one of which had a few rooms for benighted travelers and called itself an inn—a few shops, a gristmill, a smithy, a few streets’ worth of houses . . . Horsham.
The Atlantean Assembly had come through the town. He heard that at least a dozen times as he ate half a greasy capon at the tavern that didn’t put on airs. The men of the Assembly had kept on heading northwest, which only proved they had better sense than Victor had credited them for.
“They could have stayed here. I don’t know why they didn’t,” said the girl who brought him the capon and fried parsnips and beer.
He could have told her. But she’d doubtless lived her whole life here, and so didn’t know any better. Besides, she was blue-eyed, snub-nosed, and full-figured. That had more to do with his discretion.
Even with rain pattering down, he preferred his tent to anything Horsham’s inn offered. He was about to blow out the candle when a sentry nearby challenged someone. Victor reached for a pistol. He’d told Blaise he didn’t want to play the game of assassinations. He had no guarantee General Howe felt the same way.
A voice came out of the darkness. It was a vaguely familiar voice, but Victor couldn’t place it, especially through the muffling rain-drops. Then the sentry stuck his head into the tent. Despite a broad-brimmed hat, water dripped from the end of his nose. He sneezed before he said, “Your cousin Matthew’s here to see you, General.”
“Bless you, Jack. And for God’s sake tell him to come in before he drowns,” Victor said. He and Matthew Radcliffe were cousins, but hardly more than in the sense that all men were brothers. Still, the Atlantean Assemblyman from Avalon wouldn’t have come back from wherever the Assembly had gone unless something urgent was going on. Victor hoped he wouldn’t have, anyway.
Once inside the tent, Matthew shook himself like a wet dog. He was as soaked as the sentry, or maybe worse. He sneezed, too. Victor produced a flask of barrel-tree brandy. “Here,” he said. “A restorative.”
“You’re a good man, General. Damned if you’re not.” Matthew Radcliffe took a hearty nip. “Ahh! That’ll warm me up, or I hope it will. I hope to Jesus something will.”
“Did you see Noah’s Ark when you rode back here?” Victor asked gravely after his own pull at the flask.
He didn’t faze the man from the west. “See it? The old man dropped me off just outside your camp.”
“Generous of him.” Victor wasn’t about to let anybody out-calm him. But small jests went only so far, especially by the dim light from a candle. “Why did you need to see me in weather like this?”
“Because in Honker’s Mill—which is where the Assembly is right now, and may stay a while—I met a man who’d come over the mountains with news from Avalon.” Matthew Radcliffe punctuated that with another sneeze.
“God bless you.” Victor drank from the flask again. “I don’t suppose the news is good. If it were, it could have waited. The bad is what they have to tell you as soon as they can.”
“Too right,” his distant cousin agreed. “And I have bad news to give you, all right. The English, damn their black hearts, landed a band of copperskin warriors from Terranova south of our town. They’ve got hatchets and bows and arrows—and muskets and powder and ball the Englishmen gave ’em—and they’re robbing and killing and burning and raping as they please. To tell you the truth, they’re having a rare old time.”
“Good Lord!” Victor had talked about copper-skinned mercenaries with Isaac Fenner, but he’d really expected to have to deal with German
s. Terranova’s east coast, across the Hesperian Gulf from Atlantis, was dotted with Dutch and English and Spanish settlements. There had been French settlements there, too, but King Louis lost those along with the ones he’d ruled here in Atlantis.
White men were spreading into the interior of northern Terranova, but more slowly than they were in Atlantis. The barbarous copperskins fought against them—or sometimes, as here, fought for them.
“What can we do, General?” Matthew Radcliffe asked. “Can you spare men to send over the mountains or around the coast by sea? The Avalon militia is trying its best, but a lot of our men have already come east to fight the redcoats.”
Traveling across Atlantis’ mountainous spine still wasn’t easy. Small bands could make it, living off the land as they went. With farms and villages few and far between, a real army was liable to starve on the way west.
Most of the time, sailing would have been a better bet, in merchantmen or in fishing boats. Now . . . Now the Royal Navy was much too likely to snap them up like a cat killing mice that tried to sneak past it. “If I send a hundred men, most of them ought to get to Avalon,” Victor said slowly. “And most of the ones who do ought to be able to fight. How many copperskins did the English turn loose over there?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Matthew Radcliffe replied. “I’m not sure anyone does know—except the savages and the damned sea captain who brought ’em, may the Devil fry his soul as black as his heart is already.”
“Well, are a hundred soldiers and your militiamen enough to put paid to them?” Victor asked. “If they aren’t, I fear you have more trouble than I know what to do with.”
“Me, I fear the same thing,” Matthew said. “But God bless you, General. I’ll take your hundred men, and gladly. They’re a hundred more than I reckoned you’d give me.”
“We have to hold Avalon. It’s our window on Terranova,” Victor Radcliff said. “One of these days, travel across Atlantis will be easier. The west will be more settled. Avalon’s the best harbor there, far and away—New Marseille doesn’t come close. If the Royal Navy ties up in Avalon Bay, if the Union Jack flies on the hills there, they’ve got us by the ballocks. And they’ll squeeze, too. They’ll squeeze like anything.”
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