That won him a few chuckles. But intrepid Captain Biddiscombe was not so easily put off. “If we do thrash ’em, General, we throw off the English yoke once for all. They can’t treat us like beeves, either.”
“I don’t intend to let them do any such thing,” Victor said.
“Gut! Good!” von Steuben boomed. “No point throwing away an army on a fight we don’t win.”
“Thank you, Baron,” Victor said, and then, to Biddiscombe, “How did we learn of Howe’s planned movement?”
“Patriots from New Hastings told us,” the captain answered at once.
“And do you not believe traitors from Weymouth are even now telling General Howe of our debate?” Victor said. “Only the Englishmen will style them patriots, reckoning our patriots traitors.”
The cavalry officer opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. “Well, that could be so,” he said, his tone much milder than it had been a moment before.
“We cannot hope to lay a trap where the foe is privy to our plans,” Victor said. “Can we beat him in a stand-up fight?”
“Anything is possible.” Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn’t want to admit the Atlanteans weren’t omnicapable.
“Anything is possible,” Victor agreed. “Not everything, however, is likely. I find our chances of success less likely than I wish they were. Since I do, I should prefer to retire rather than fight.”
Debate didn’t shut off right away. If Atlanteans were anything, they were full of themselves. Everyone had to put in his penny’s worth. Baron von Steuben was rolling his eyes and muttering by the time Victor’s views carried the day. The greencoats got ready to abandon Weymouth.
Quite a few locals also abandoned the town. They’d given King George’s partisans—the ones who hadn’t escaped—some rough justice. If General Howe’s troops returned, they feared a dose of their own medicine.
“We are not running away,” Victor told anyone who would listen. “We won every battle we fought. We returned to the Atlantic after the English thought they had barred us from our own seacoast. We proved that Atlantis remains hostile and inhospitable to the invaders.”
He got cheers from the men who marched with him, and more cheers from the families that were leaving Weymouth to go with the greencoats. Not one word he said was a lie. He still wished he could have told his army something else. He wished he could have followed Captain Biddiscombe’s advice and fought.
Back in the last war, he might have. No defeat he suffered then would have ruined England’s chances and those of the English Atlanteans against the French. Now all of Atlantis’ hopes followed his army. He couldn’t afford to throw them away.
And now he was older than he’d been then. Did that leave him less inclined to take chances? He supposed it did.
General Howe has to win. He has to beat me, to crush me, he thought. All I have to do is not to lose. If I can keep from losing for long enough, England will tire of this fight.
Dear God, I hope she will.
But his doubts were for himself alone. He kept on exuding good cheer for the men around him. Maybe Blaise suspected what his true feelings were. Blaise would never give him away, though. And he’d proved one thing to General Howe, anyway. The Atlantean uprising was not about to fold up and die.
IX
Victor Radcliff admired his splendid new sword. The blade was chased with silver, the hilt wrapped in gold wire. The Atlantean Assembly had given it to him in thanks for his winter campaign that—briefly—brought the rebels back to the sea.
Blaise admired the weapon, too. “You going to fight with that?” he asked.
“I can if I have to,” Victor said. “They gave it to me as an honor, though, and because it’s worth something.”
How much that last would matter was anyone’s guess. Yes, if things went wrong he might be able to eat for several months on what he got from selling the sword. But, if things went wrong, odds were the English would catch him, try him for treason, and hang him. What price fancy sword then?
Blaise changed the subject: “Not going to snow any more, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” Victor answered. “Can’t be sure, not here, but I don’t think so.” The west coast of Atlantis, warmed by the Bay Stream (Custis Cawthorne had christened the current in the Hesperian Gulf), already knew springtime. The lands on the east side of the Green Ridge Mountains had a harsher climate.
“By God, I hope it isn’t!” The Negro shivered dramatically. “I never knew there was such a thing as cold weather, not like you get here.” He shivered again. “The language I grew up talking, the language I talk with Stella, has no word for snow or ice or hail or sleet or blizzard or anything like that. In Africa, we didn’t know there were such things. Frost? Frostbite? No, we never heard of them.”
“Spring seems better after winter,” Victor said. Blaise, who’d grown up in endless summer, looked unconvinced. Victor tried again: “And winter has its advantages. Do you like apples?” He knew Blaise did.
“What if I should?” Blaise asked cautiously.
“Apple trees will grow where there’s no frost. They’ll flower, but they won’t bear fruit. They need the frost for that. So do pears.”
Blaise considered. “If I had to give up apples or give up snow, I would give up snow,” he said. “What about you?”
“Well . . . maybe.” Victor had seen lands without snow. It rarely fell on Avalon, and never on New Marseille. But he didn’t hate cold weather the way Blaise did. “Depends on what you’re used to, I suppose. I wouldn’t want it hot and sticky all the time—I know that.”
“Neither would I. It should be hot and dry sometimes,” Blaise said. “One or the other was all I knew till I came here.”
“Before long, it will be hot and sticky again,” Victor said. The Negro nodded and smiled in anticipation.
They could talk about the weather forever without doing anything about it. One of the reasons to talk about the weather was that you couldn’t do anything about it. Before long, Victor would have to decide what he could do about the English invaders. Even now, they might be trying to decide what to do about him.
He stepped out of his tent. Blaise followed. Everything was green, but then everything in Atlantis was green the year around unless covered in snow or imported from Europe or Terranova. Fruit trees and ornamentals did lose their leaves. Along with rhymes and songs, they let Atlanteans imagine what winters were like across the sea.
Greencoats marched and countermarched. They would probably never grow as smooth in their evolutions as the professionals they faced, but they were ever so much better than they had been.
A robin perched in a pine burst into song. Englishmen said Atlantean robins behaved and sang just like the blackbirds they knew back home. Atlantis had birds the people here called blackbirds, but they weren’t much like Atlantean robins—or the smaller, redder-breasted birds that went by the same name in England, or even English blackbirds. It could get confusing.
The war could get confusing, too. Both sides had got some unpleasant surprises the first year. Victor hadn’t imagined King George’s government would send so many men to Atlantis, or that they would secure the coast from Croydon down to New Hastings. And General Howe hadn’t looked for the kind of resistance the Atlanteans had put up. So deserters assured Victor, anyhow.
He wondered what Atlantean deserters told the English general. That Atlantean paper money lost value by the day? That morale went up and down for no visible reason? That equipment left a lot to be desired? All true—every word of it.
But if the deserters told Howe the Atlantean army didn’t want to fight, he had to know they were liars. They couldn’t match the redcoats’ skills or their stoicism, but they didn’t lack for spirit.
And how were the English soldiers’ spirits these days? Victor’s best measure of that was also what he learned from deserters. If what the Englishmen who came into the Atlanteans’ lines said was true, their countrymen were surprised and unhappy the war had g
one on this long. Before they crossed the ocean, their officers told them they would put down the rebellion in weeks if not days.
Radcliff discounted some of what he heard from them. They had to be discontented, or they wouldn’t have deserted in the first place. And they wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t tell their captors what they thought the Atlanteans wanted to hear.
Still, he did think they were having a harder time than they’d expected. He wanted them to go on having a hard time. If they had a hard enough time for long enough, they would give up and go home.
Or they might decide they weren’t doing enough and send in more soldiers. As far as Victor knew, the mother country was fighting nowhere else at the moment. England had more men than Atlantis. She could raise more troops—if she had the will.
And if she stayed untroubled elsewhere. Victor wondered how Thomas Paine was doing among the English settlements of northeastern Terranova. If those towns and their hinterlands also rose in rebellion, King George’s ministers wouldn’t be able to focus all their attention on—and send all their redcoats to—Atlantis.
If Paine had turned the Terranovan settlements all topsy-turvy, word of it hadn’t come back to Atlantis. Victor shook his head after that thought crossed his mind. Word of whatever Paine was doing hadn’t reached him. That wasn’t necessarily the same as the other. News crossed the Green Ridge Mountains only slowly. And, if Terranova did have trouble, word of it might have reached English officers in Croydon or Hanover or New Hastings without spreading any farther. Those officers certainly wouldn’t want him to find out.
He pulled a small notebook and pencil from a waistcoat pocket. More spies in cities—Paine? he scribbled. One of these days, if and as he found the time, he would do something about that or tell off someone else to do something about it.
He started to put the notebook away, then caught himself. He jotted another line: Copperskins around Atlantis? He’d heard next to nothing since sending his hundred men against the Terranovan savages the English had landed south of Avalon to harry the west coast.
If anyone on this side of the mountains knew more about that than he did, it was his distant cousin, Matthew Radcliffe. Victor sent a rider off to the Atlantean Assembly with a letter for him.
The man came back a few days later with a letter from Matthew. My dear General—I regret to state I can tell you nothing certain, the Assemblyman wrote. Only rumor has reached me: or rather, conflicting rumors. I have heard that our men have routed the Terranovan barbarians. Contrariwise, I have also heard that the copperskins have slaughtered every Atlantean soldier sent against them, afterwards denuding the corpses of hair and virile members as souvenirs of their triumph. Where the truth falls will, I doubt not, emerge, but has yet to do so. I remain, very respectfully, your most ob’t servant. His signature followed.
“Drat!” Victor folded the letter as if washing his hands of it.
“Is the news bad, General?” Like any messenger, the fellow who’d brought the letter wanted to be absolved of its contents.
“Bad?” Victor considered. He had to shake his head. “No. The principal news is that there is no sure news, and that is bad—or, at least, I wished it to be otherwise.”
“What can you do about it?” the man asked.
Victor Radcliff considered again. He could go himself to investigate . . . if he didn’t mind entrusting command in the vital eastern regions to someone else. He could send someone he trusted to see what was going on around Avalon . . . if he didn’t mind depriving himself of that man’s services for some weeks. Or he could simply wait to see which rumors proved true.
Had any of the rumors Matthew Radcliffe cited been that the Royal Navy was about to try to seize Avalon, he would have despatched someone on the instant to investigate. As things were . . . With a sigh and a shrug, he answered, “I believe I shall await developments, both in the west and here. I do not think I’ll need to wait long in either case.”
Salty pork sausage, hard bread, and coffee enlivened with barrel-tree brandy—not the worst breakfast Victor Radcliff had ever had. As far as he remembered, his worst breakfast was some raw pine nuts and a roasted ground katydid. The flightless bugs grew as big as mice. You could eat them if you got hungry enough, and Victor had.
Atlantis hadn’t had any rats or mice till they crossed the Atlantic with the first settlers. Now they were as common in towns and in farms as they were back in England. Away from human settlement, the pale green katydids still prevailed.
As he had more than once before, Victor wondered why Atlantis had no native viviparous quadrupeds but bats. England and Europe did; so did Terranova. Yet Atlantis, which lay between them in the middle of the ocean, didn’t. It was as if God had arranged a special creation here.
Many of His former productions were far scarcer than they had been when Edward Radcliffe came ashore in 1452. Englishmen who felt unfriendly called Atlanteans honkers. Yet the great flightless birds were extinct in settled country east of the Green Ridge Mountains. They were rare anywhere east of the mountains, and growing scarce in the wilder west, too.
The same held true for the great red-crested eagles that had preyed on them—and that also didn’t mind preying on people and sheep. Atlantis used the red-crested eagle to difference its flag from England’s, but the bird itself was seldom seen these days.
Oil thrushes, though less drastically reduced than honkers or eagles, were less common than they had been. Few eastern farmers found enough of them to render them down for lamp oil. The first settlers’ tales said that had been a common practice.
Along with people, the oil thrushes had to worry about foxes and cats and wild dogs these days. Even in the woods, there were more and more mice. Oak and ash and elm and nut trees grew in the woods, too, while deer roamed where honkers had.
Taken all in all, Atlantis became more like Europe year by year. Victor resolved that it wouldn’t come to resemble Europe in one way: it wouldn’t supinely submit to rule from a tyrannical king. If General Howe didn’t understand that . . .
“General! Oh, General!”
When somebody called for him like that, Victor knew the news wouldn’t be good. He wished he’d poured more brandy into the coffee. He still could . . . but no. He gulped a last mouthful of sausage. For a second, it didn’t want to go down; he felt like a small snake engulfing a large frog.
Then it headed south and he stepped out of his tent. “I’m here,” he called. “What is it?”
“Well, General, now we know how come the redcoats ain’t come after us even with the weather getting good and everything,” the courier replied. He’d dismounted and was rubbing his blowing horse.
“Perhaps you do. If so, you have the advantage of me,” Victor said. “If you would be so good as to share your enlightenment . . .”
“Sure will.” The man went on rubbing down the horse. “There you go, boy. . . . The redcoats . . . Well, the truth of it is, most of the bastards in New Hastings climbed into ships and sailed away.”
“Sailed away where?” Victor demanded. “To Hanover? To Croydon? Back to England?” If it was back to England, they’d won the war . . . hadn’t they?
“Nope. None of them places,” the courier said. “Word is, the ships they were on sailed south.”
“South? To Freetown? To the settlements we took away from France?”
“General, I’m mighty sorry, but I don’t know the answer to that,” the man replied. “I don’t believe anybody does, except the damned Englishmen—and they didn’t tell anybody.”
“Too bad!” Victor Radcliff said. More often than not, somebody blabbed to a whore or a saloonkeeper or a friend. Maybe someone had, but the courier hadn’t got wind of it. Then something else occurred to Victor: “How big a garrison did they leave behind?”
“Not too big,” the courier said. “And if we try and take New Hastings away from them, what happens wherever they are heading farther south?”
That question had claws as sharp as those
of any red-crested eagle. “Are they taking the war into the old French settlements? If they seize tight hold of those, can they move up against us the way Kersauzon did?” Do I want to find out? He knew he didn’t.
“General, how in blazes am I supposed to know that?” The man who’d brought the news sounded reproachful.
Victor couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know the answer himself. He only knew England had widened the war, and he’d have to find some way to respond. He muttered under his breath. One more thing he didn’t know was how the still largely French population of the southern settlements would react when English and English Atlantean armies started marching and countermarching down there.
Many French Atlanteans resented England for taking their settlements away from King Louis and bestowing them on King George. But they also resented English Atlanteans for swarming down into their lands and grabbing with both hands after the conquest. And, of course, settlers from England and France had been rivals here since the long-vanished days of Edward Radcliffe and François Kersauzon.
Other related questions bubbled up in Victor’s mind. How much would the whites—French and English alike—in the southern settlements resent the redcoats if General Howe tried to weaken slavery down there? How much help would he get from the enslaved Negroes and copperskins in the south if he did?
And what would France do when a large English army started traipsing through lands that had been French less than a generation before? Maybe nothing, but maybe not, too. Even though France had lost settlements in Atlantis, in Terranova, and in India, she’d recovered from the late war remarkably well. If she wanted to resent English incursions, she could.
Or am I letting hope run away from reality? Victor wondered. He couldn’t judge what France was likely to do. He could think of three men from the Atlantean Assembly who knew more about that than he did: Isaac Fenner, Custis Cawthorne, and Michel du Guesclin.
The courier said, “You look like you just had a good idea, General.”
The United States of Atlantis Page 15
