But Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn’t have a military career to worry about. When the war ended—in victory or defeat—he would go back to whatever he’d done beforehand. And so he didn’t worry about speaking his mind now.
“We could use a win,” he told Victor, as if the general didn’t know. “And I think we could get one without a great deal of trouble. The redcoats aren’t within miles of being ready for us.”
They don’t think we’d be stupid enough to do any serious campaigning in the wintertime, Victor thought. He hadn’t expected the Atlanteans would, either. The younger officer’s enthusiasm made him wonder if he was making a mistake by doing what the English looked for. They look for me to have an ounce of sense—maybe even two ounces.
Still, if he fought the kind of war General Howe would approve of, wasn’t he bound to lose? Howe had the professional soldiers. The Atlanteans, by the nature of things, were amateurs. They had fire and dash to offer, not stolid obedience. Shouldn’t he take advantage of that? If he could make the English react to him, instead of his having to respond to Howe’s every carefully planned advance . . .
“Do you know,” Victor said slowly, “I believe I shall hold an officers’ council. If we decide the attack can go forward with some hope of success, I expect we’ll put it in.”
Captain Biddiscombe stared. “D’you mean that?” He answered his own question: “You do mean that! By God, General, I never dreamt I’d convince you, never in a thousand years.”
“Life is full of surprises,” Victor Radcliff said. “May King George’s soldiers not enjoy the one they get soon.” Officers’ council or not, he’d made up his mind. Now, if he could bring it off . . .
The weather had gone from rain to freezing rain and sleet to snow. Victor hoped it would stay cold. He wanted the roads frozen so his men could make good time on them. If the Atlanteans had to slog through mud to get at the redcoats, they could come to the battle late and worn out.
His first target was a fort on the outskirts of a town named Sudbury. It was farther north than Weymouth, farther south than Hanover, and about thirty miles inland. General Howe had run up several such fortresses to try to keep the Atlantean army away from the prosperous and well-settled seacoast. The intrepid Biddiscombe’s raid was one thing. An attack by all the force the Atlantean Assembly could muster would be something else again.
I hope, Victor thought.
He didn’t let his men conceive that so much as a single, solitary worry clouded his mind. Much of the art of command consisted of acting unruffled even—or rather, especially—when you weren’t. “Press on, lads! Press on!” he called. “Before long, we’ll subsist ourselves on good English victuals. We’ll wear good English boots on our feet.”
Again, he hoped. Quite a few of the Atlanteans weren’t wearing anything resembling good boots now. The men who’d served longest and done the most marching suffered worst. Some of them had wrapped cloth around their boots to hold uppers and soles together and to try to keep their feet dry. A few soldiers had only cloths—or nothing at all—on their feet. They tramped along anyhow. If they eagerly looked forward to a little plundering . . . well, who could blame them?
In earlier times, Sudbury had made turpentine from the conifers in the dense Atlantean forests. After some years of settlement, those forests were nowhere near so dense as they had been once upon a time. These days, wheatfields replaced woods. The Atlantean army marched past snow-covered stubble.
More snow swirled around them. Victor blessed it; it helped cloak them from the garrison inside the works on the western edge of town. The sentries the Atlanteans seized were too astonished to let out more than a couple of yelps that the wind drowned. They seemed almost relieved to be taken: it gave them the chance to go back to the Atlanteans’ camp and get out of the cold.
“Forward! As fast as you can!” Victor called. “If we get ladders up against their palisade before they start shooting, the fort’s ours.”
He almost managed it. His men were throwing fascines into the ditch around the palisade when a redcoat on the wall fired at them and raised the alarm. Victor heard soldiers inside the fort yelling in dismay. He also heard their feet thudding on the wooden stairs leading up to the walkway.
“Hurry!” he shouted. “Hurry for your lives!”
Ladders thudded into place against the wall. Atlanteans swarmed up them. The redcoats tipped one, spilling soldiers into the ditch. An Englishman killed the first greencoat coming up another ladder. But the second Atlantean shot the defender in the face. The English soldier fell back with a howl, clutching at himself. By the time another redcoat neared the ladder, the Atlanteans were already on the walkway.
After that, taking the fort was easy. The attackers badly outnumbered the men who were trying to hold them back. Before long, white flags went up and the redcoats threw down their muskets.
“We never looked for you blokes,” a sergeant complained to Victor. “Most of our officers are still in town, like.”
“Are they?” Victor said tonelessly, and the underofficer nodded. The English officers probably had lady friends in Sudbury. Once the town was retaken, people who’d favored King George’s soldiers were liable to have a thin time of it. Well, that was their lookout. Victor sent men into Sudbury with orders to capture any redcoats they found there. He added, “If you can, keep them all from getting away. With luck, we’ll be able to roll up several of these forts. Maybe we will push all the way to the sea.” The ease with which the fort by Sudbury fell made him think of grander things.
One English officer wearing a shirt and nothing more leaped onto a horse and made his getaway. Victor wouldn’t have wanted to try that in warm weather; the Englishman’s privates were going to take a beating. Several other officers and other ranks, less intrepid, gave themselves up.
“What are you doing here?” a captured lieutenant asked with what sounded like unfeigned indignation.
“Fighting a war in the name of the Atlantean Assembly and of the Lord Jehovah,” Victor told him. “What are you doing here, in this land you only oppress by your presence?”
“Obeying the orders of my king and my superiors.” The lieutenant had nerve: he added, “He is your king, too, I remind you.”
“My king would not send soldiers to invade his country. He would not arrest subjects who had done him no wrong. Neither would he tax subjects who have no say in his governing councils,” Victor replied. “If King George stopped doing such things, he might be my king. As it is?” He shook his head. “As it is, you are welcome to him.”
The English officer would have argued more. He might have surrendered, but he hadn’t changed his mind. But Victor Radcliff took a winner’s privilege and walked away from him. He didn’t have to listen to nonsense if he didn’t feel like it.
His men plundered the fort and their prisoners—and Sudbury, too, for it had lain quiet in enemy hands. They marched away better fed, better shod, better clothed, and better armed than they’d arrived. They marched away with silver and a bit of gold jingling in their pockets, too. After nothing to spend but Atlantean paper of shrinking value, hard money seemed doubly welcome to them.
Two days later, they fell on Halstead, fifteen miles south of Sudbury. The Englishman unencumbered with trousers had ridden north, so Victor dared hope the redcoats in Halstead didn’t know his army was on the march. And so it proved; the fort there, which was weaker than Sudbury’s, fell even more easily than the first one had.
And Halstead hadn’t stayed quiet while occupied. Only a few days before the Atlanteans arrived, someone had knocked an English corporal over the head. And so the whole garrison there stayed in the fort. Victor thought he swept up every last redcoat in the neighborhood.
“If I can seize one more fort,” he told Blaise, “that will open the way for a march to the sea.”
“Why not?” the Negro replied.
VIII
Due south of Halstead, only an easy day’s march away, lay Pittman’s Ferry. The Engl
ish had a fort there, too, not far from the creek that necessitated the ferry and made the town spring up near it. Town and fort both lay on the north bank of Pittman’s Creek. That helped determine Victor to move down and attack it: he wouldn’t have to worry about gathering boats to cross in a rush.
He set his men on the southbound road the morning after Halstead fell. They showed more confidence than they had when they were approaching Sudbury. With two English forts behind them, why shouldn’t they expect the next one to be easy? They were better fed and clothed and shod and accoutered than they had been then, too. The men who carried bayoneted muskets seemed especially proud of them. The redcoats had used them to fearsome effect. Now Atlanteans could, too.
Pistols boomed, up in the vanguard. “Don’t like the sound of that,” Blaise remarked.
“Nor do I,” Victor Radcliff agreed. “Well, we’ll have to see what it was.”
A rider eventually came back to tell him. “They had pickets posted on the road, damn them,” the man reported. “We went after ’em good, but I think some of ’em got away.”
“Damnation!” Victor said, and then something really flavorful. The cavalryman stared at him—did generals talk that way? This one did when he got such news. Taking a fort by surprise was one thing. Taking a fort that was ready and waiting was something else again.
“We can do it,” said a soldier who’d heard the news. In an instant, the whole army seemed to be chanting: “We can do it!”
Pulling back would wound their spirits—Victor could see that at a glance. Going on would hurt a lot of their bodies. The general commanding needed to be no prophet to foresee that. What he couldn’t see was how to withdraw in the face of their insistent chant. He wished he could.
“Well, we’ll have a go,” he said at last. The redcoats might have heard the cheers in Pittman’s Ferry. In case they hadn’t, he added, “Double-time, boys. We’ll get there before they expect us.”
Drummers and fifers gave the army its new marching rhythm. The men weren’t far from Pittman’s Ferry. They wouldn’t get too worn to fight, even if they double-timed it all the way. Victor hoped they wouldn’t, anyhow.
He rode forward himself with the vanguard to reconnoiter the fort. The untrimmed pine logs from which it was built made it a dark blot against the snow and against the painted planks of Pittman’s Ferry. Now Victor swore at the swirling snow as he raised the spyglass to his eye to survey the structure. He wanted to see as much as he could, but the weather hindered him.
Frowning, he passed the telescope to the cavalry officer who commanded the vanguard. “Tell me what you think they’re up to, Captain Biddiscombe, if you’d be so kind.”
“All right, General.” Habakkuk Biddiscombe raised the glass, slid the brass tube in ever so slightly, and peered ahead. Puzzlement in his voice, he said, “They don’t seem to be up to . . . anything, do they?”
“Well, I didn’t think so,” Victor answered. “I wanted to know how it looked to you. Maybe they’re feigning this, to draw us on. Or maybe—who knows? We’ll find out pretty soon, though.”
When his foot soldiers came up half an hour later, he pointed them at the fort. They knew what to do. Some would attack two sides. As soon as the defenders rushed to hold them out, the rest would assault the other two.
And the fort at Pittman’s Ferry fell as easily as the one at Halstead had—more easily than the one at Sudbury. The Atlanteans dragged the dejected English captain in charge of the place in front of Victor Radcliff. “Didn’t you know we were on the way?” Victor demanded.
“No, dammit,” the redcoat said sullenly.
“Why not, Captain? Didn’t your pickets warn you? Our outriders thought some of them got away.”
“They did.” The English officer made as if to spit in disgust, whether over himself or Victor the Atlantean didn’t know. In any case, a growl from his captors dissuaded him. Angrily, he went on, “They came in, but I didn’t believe ’em. Who would? A winter campaign? Pshaw!”
“No wonder we surprised you,” Victor murmured. “None so blind as those that will not see.”
“The Devil may quote Scripture to his purpose,” the captain said.
“I am not the Devil, sir, and neither is that Scripture,” Victor said. “It is Reverend Henry’s commentary on the Book of Jeremiah, but it is not the prophet speaking in his own person, you might say.”
“I don’t care what it is, not to the extent of a fart in a thunder-storm,” the redcoat said miserably. “You will eventually exchange me or parole me, will you not?”
“That is the custom with prisoners of war, yes.” Victor spoke as if to an idiot child. What else were they to do with prisoners? Knock them over the head? It was easier than holding them and feeding them, but otherwise had little to recommend it.
So Victor thought, anyhow. The English captain saw things differently. “General Howe will skin me like an ermine when he finds out how I lost this fort. They’ll cashier me and disgrace my family’s name forever.” Sudden hope flared in the man’s eyes. “Will you uprisers take me on?”
“Well . . . no.” Victor needed to think about it, but not for long. True, the Atlantean army was short of trained, capable officers. But, while this fellow might be trained, he’d just proved himself incapable.
“A pity,” the captain said. “I don’t know how I am to go on. . . . Would you be kind enough to take me to some small room, lock me in, and lend me a loaded pistol, then?”
“No, I won’t do that, either,” Victor said. “If you choose to dispose of yourself, sir, that is between you and God. If you seek to make me a party to your deed, however, I must decline.”
He made sure the unhappy officer marched off into captivity with the rest of the English garrison. Once the campaign ended, and the need for secrecy with it, they could be properly exchanged.
Victor Radcliff couldn’t have been more delighted with what his ragtag force had done. It wasn’t so ragtag as it had been before the campaign began, either. The Atlanteans might have had a lean time of it during the winter, but their enemies were living well. Part of that came from supplies fetched across the ocean, part from plundering the countryside. Now the Atlanteans made some of the enemy’s bounty their own.
Still, what had he accomplished if he stopped here and drew back? Nothing that would last, and nothing that would more than annoy General Howe. Whereas, if he struck for the coast . . .
If you do, you may lose your whole army. Normally, that thought would have been plenty to hold him back. Not here. Not now. After the series of defeats he’d suffered during the summer, didn’t he have to remind the English that Atlantis remained a going concern? Didn’t they need to see they couldn’t march where they pleased whenever they pleased?
He thought they did, and so he ordered, “Now we move on Weymouth.”
One of these days, Victor supposed, Atlantis would be thickly settled north and south, east and west. That day wasn’t here yet. He was reminded it wasn’t with every mile toward the coast his army gained. General Howe wasn’t so foolish in trying to confine the rebels to the interior. Howe skimmed the fat off the rich, populous seaside regions that way, and left his foes with whatever they could gather from the rest.
Farms clustered close together here. Even though the English had occupied these parts for a while, plenty of livestock remained. Victor requisitioned what he needed, paying with the Atlantean Assembly’s banknotes.
“What makes you think I want these arsewipes?” a furious farmer howled. “They’ll never be worth more than the dingleberries they leave behind.”
“Would you rather we gave you the bayonet instead?” Victor asked mildly. The farmer’s bravado deflated like a pricked pig’s bladder.
The real trouble was, a good many people who dwelt near the ocean were loyal to King George. Some farms the Atlantean army passed were bare of livestock and of people. The men, women, and children had fled their own countrymen’s advance. That they should want to do such a thing
was demoralizing. It was also dangerous; they would bring word to the redcoats in Weymouth that the Atlanteans were coming.
“No surprises any more,” Victor said gloomily. “I wanted to descend on them before they knew I was there.”
“Won’t happen,” Blaise said.
“I know,” Victor answered. “When this war ends, we shall have to settle accounts with all the traitors still living amongst us. I fear it will prove neither quick nor easy.” His mouth twisted. One way or another, he was bound to be right about that. But if the redcoats prevailed, the hunt would be on for everyone who’d risen against King George. On for me and mine, he thought, which made matters unmistakably plain.
On pressed the army, northeast toward Weymouth. They made good time. The roads were frozen hard, and the men better shod than they had been at the start of the campaign. If English captives with rags on their feet came down with chilblains . . . too bad. Victor’s worst dread was a thaw that would turn the roads to mud. That would slow the army to a crawl.
Scouts reported an English detachment moving into place to block the Atlanteans. “How big a detachment?” Victor asked.
The men looked at one another. Almost in unison, they shrugged. “Don’t rightly know, General,” one of them answered. “They had horse out in front, so we couldn’t push on and take a good gander at the foot.”
“A pox,” Victor muttered. Was he rushing into a trap? Or were the redcoats trying to bluff him out of a prize he could win? “Well, from which direction do they come? From the northeast? Or from the southeast?” he asked. If the former, the English force likely came out of Weymouth’s garrison, which—he thought—was none too big. If the latter, then he might be heading toward the bulk of General Howe’s army, sallying from New Hastings. He knew too well how poor his chances were of beating it in the open field.
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