He tried again: “How much of what you heard in your tavern crawl do you recollect? Anything interesting?”
“Maybe.” Blaise took another sip of the improved—no, here in French Atlantis, they would call it corrected—coffee. “People seem to think Cornwallis will come up on the west coast. One of them called it buggering a sheep.”
“Heh,” Victor Radcliff said uneasily. The redcoats could steal a march on him over there, sure enough. Atlantean forces, even counting the men sent west to fight the copperskins the English had imported, were thin on the ground. But, having landed there, what could Cornwallis do next? Cross the Green Ridge Mountains and return to the more settled parts of the country? Maybe, if he landed at New Marseille or one of the smaller towns south of Avalon. Hunting was still supposed to be very easy in the southwest. Even so . . . “How sure are these, ah, people? Did they hear his plans from some English officer? Or are they guessing, the way you will when you don’t know?”
“Some of them sounded pretty sure,” Blaise answered. “I don’t think I heard one of them say an Englishman told him what the redcoats were doing, but they thought they had a good notion.”
“All right.” Victor paused. Eyeing the Negro’s decrepit condition, he decided something more than that was called for. “I thank you, Blaise. You did everything you could, and you did Atlantis a good turn.”
“I hope so.” Blaise seemed to have gone through the mill, all right. “What are you going to do now?”
Even more than To be or not to be, that was the question. Victor had even more trouble than Hamlet had coming up with a good answer. Unhappily, he said, “I don’t know. Getting our army across to New Marseille . . . We might do it. Or we might lose two men out of three, sick or starving, if we try. Taking a lot of men across Atlantis has never been easy.”
“You were going to do it when we were down in the Spaniards’ country, till the Royal Navy came and took us back to Freetown,” Blaise said.
Still unhappily, Victor nodded. “We were in trouble, then—and we’d’ve been in worse trouble if we’d had to try it. And we had a lot fewer men then than we do now.”
“More settlers in the back country now than there used to be,” Blaise observed.
“That’s so.” Victor admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. But he went on, “Are there enough to subsist us on the way? I think not. Whatever we need, we’ll have to fetch with us.”
“Or kill along the way,” Blaise said.
“Honkers. Oil thrushes. Deer that run wild through the woods. Rabbits, too, I suppose. I hope we aren’t down to eating turtles and frogs and snakes by the time we get to the Hesperian Gulf. And we can’t very well kill cannon along the way. Somehow or other, we’ll have to get our field guns over the mountains. I don’t look forward to that.”
“Mountains down here are lower than they are farther north. Some tracks through them, too,” Blaise said. “I was thinking about running off that way, but I decided to go north instead. I hear there are villages of runaway blacks and copperskins across the mountains.”
“I’ve heard it, too,” Victor said. “I don’t know if it’s true.”
“Oh, I think so.” Blaise sounded more certain than he had when he was talking about what the English intended. How much did he know? How much of what he knew would he tell a white man? A good deal and not very much, respectively—that was Victor’s judgment. And, all things considered, who could blame him for that?
Marching west had all the appeal of grabbing a snake by the tail to find out if it was venomous. Not marching west struck Victor as even worse, though—that was waiting for the snake to bite you. And so, without enthusiasm but without shirking, he got ready to leave Cosquer behind.
He left a garrison in the town. He didn’t want the Royal Navy simply sailing in and retaking it as soon as he marched away. That also gave him an excuse to take fewer men over the Green Ridge Mountains. He gratefully seized on any excuse he could get.
He and the army hadn’t gone more than a few miles up the south bank of the Blavet when a rider from out of the west came up to them. Victor eyed the fellow in bemusement. Cornwallis couldn’t have got to New Marseille yet, could he? And, even if by some miracle of perfect winds and wild sailing he had, news that he had couldn’t have come back across the mountains.
And it hadn’t. Brandishing a rolled and sealed sheet of paper, the horseman said, “General, I bring you this from the Atlantean Assembly at Honker’s Mill.” He managed to invest the little town’s silly name with a dignity it certainly hadn’t earned.
This turned out to be the floridly official Thanks of the Atlantean Assembly, written in magnificent calligraphy by some secretary who probably had no other talent he could sell. Victor held it out for his soldiers to see, finishing, “They sent it to me, but it belongs to all of you.” The men cheered.
The courier handed him another, smaller, rolled and sealed sheet. “Isaac Fenner gave me this to give to you just before I set out.”
“Did he?” What Fenner said privately might be more interesting than the public proclamation it accompanied. Victor popped off the seal with his thumbnail and unrolled the letter. Fenner’s hand was legible enough, but small and cramped: nothing much beside the secretary’s splendid script.
Well done, the redhead from Bredestown wrote. You’ve given England one in the slats she’ll be a long time forgetting. And something more may come of it. Not quite certain yet, but the chances look better by the day. You’ll know when it happens—I promise you that. The whole world will know. His scribbled signature followed.
“What does Fenner say?” Habakkuk Biddiscombe asked with the air of a man entitled to know.
Since he was no such thing, he only succeeded in putting Victor’s back up. “That something important will be coming out of Honker’s Mill soon,” he answered, which had the virtue of being true and the larger virtue—in his mind, at least—of not being informative.
“Fenner is full of moonshine promises,” Biddiscombe said. “No wonder his hair is red—it shows he’s descended from a fox, and not descended very far, either.”
“If you feel that way, I’m surprised you’re not riding alongside King George’s men,” Victor remarked.
“Oh, I hope I’m a loyal Atlantean, which I hope I’ve proved by now, too,” the cavalry officer said. “But I also hope I know a rogue when I see one, and may I be damned if I don’t see one whenever I look towards Isaac Fenner.”
Victor Radcliff shrugged. “Maybe he is a rogue. But so what? If he is, he’s our rogue.”
“England has a great plenty of them. A few of our own may prove useful, as the mild dose of smallpox in inoculation commonly holds the stronger sickness at bay,” Major Biddiscombe allowed. “Still and all, I doubt I’ll be much impressed after Honker’s Mill labors to bring forth a ridiculous mouse.”
“Good to know you remember your Horace,” Victor murmured. “All we can do is wait to see what happens there while we do our best down here. Have you ever crossed the mountains before?”
“No, sir,” Biddiscombe said. “I like the comforts of civilization. I can live without them when I must, but I prefer not to.”
“Not the worst attitude. You seem to cope in the field well enough.”
“Your servant, sir.” Habakkuk Biddiscombe doffed his tricorn at the praise.
But Radcliff hadn’t finished: “We’ll need your talents as we travel, and those of the ruffians you lead. You’ll be widely spread out in front of the army, to find trouble before it finds us and to forage for the main body.”
“We’ll do all we can—you may rely on that,” Biddiscombe said. “And we’ll slaughter every honker and oil thrush we come upon.”
“Up in Hanover and New Hastings, I’ve heard people who style themselves natural philosophers say we should try to preserve the honkers and other unique natural productions of Atlantis, to let forthcoming generations see and study them alive rather than from specimens and stories,” Victor sai
d.
“General, meaning no disrespect to such people, but talk is cheap,” Biddiscombe said. “I’d like to hear them babble about not shooting honkers after they try to cross the mountains and get to New Marseille overland. If they didn’t declare that there ought to be a bounty on the big, stupid birds, I’d be astonished.”
“Well, now that you mention it, so would I,” Victor admitted. “An empty belly makes a stern taskmaster.”
Habakkuk Biddiscombe nodded. “I should say so! And how many ‘natural philosophers,’ so called, have ever known its pinch?”
“Why ask me? The next time you keep company with one, enquire of him,” Victor said. “And in the meanwhile, why don’t you go keep some order among your horsemen?” I’ve had enough of you, he meant, but he didn’t say it.
He would have if Biddiscombe had argued with him. But the cavalry officer, for a wonder, too, took the hint. “Just as you say, sir,” he replied, sketching a salute, and rode away.
“What does Fenner have in mind?” Blaise asked quietly.
As quietly, Victor answered, “I truly don’t know. He’s being coy. Whatever it turns out to be, I hope it proves as important as he thinks, that’s all.”
Nouveau Redon again, this time traveling from east to west. The town wasn’t what it had been. It never would be again, not unless someone found a way to resurrect the spring that had watered it. Several ingenious engineers and charlatans—the difference between the two wasn’t always easy to see in advance—had tried, but none with any success.
These days, Nouveau Redon drew its water out of the river that lay below the heights it commanded. That made it easy to besiege despite its still-formidable works. People said it was a sicklier place now than it had been when the spring gurgled up through the living rock. Victor didn’t know for a fact that that was true, but he’d heard it more than once.
He didn’t stop at the town, skirting it to the south. His foot soldiers didn’t seem sorry not to have to climb up to it. The cavalry, whose horses would have had to do the work, might have had a different view. Victor didn’t ask them. He was starting to find dealing with Habakkuk Biddiscombe as wearing as the intrepid horseman probably found dealing with him.
He wanted to force the march. If the redcoats got there before him . . . Then they do, that’s all, he told himself sternly. If he confronted them with a few hundred starving skeletons, he wouldn’t do Atlantis’ cause any good. And that would happen if he pushed too hard. He’d leave men behind all the way to the mountains, and all the way across them as well.
The quartermasters at Nouveau Redon were unenthusiastic about turning loose of what they held in their storehouses. That was, as Victor had seen before, an occupational disease of quartermasters. These fellows had a worse case than most.
Only a direct order made a couple of them condescend to come down and talk to him. “We’re here to protect these stores, General, and to preserve them,” one of the men said importantly.
“Why?” Victor Radcliff asked.
“Why?” the quartermaster echoed. He and his comrade looked at each other. That didn’t seem to have occurred to either of them.
“Why?” Victor repeated. “What’s the point of protecting and preserving the supplies in Nouveau Redon?”
Again, he’d taken the officers by surprise. At last, the fellow who’d spoken before ventured a reply: “I suppose, to keep them in readiness in case they were to be required by some military situation.”
“Aha!” Victor struck like a lancehead or some other southern viper. The quartermaster officers flinched as if he really did have fangs. He wished he did—he would have bitten both of them. In lieu of that, he said, “Do your Excellencies suppose a march west from here in the direction of the Hesperian Gulf might possibly be a military situation requiring the release of stores from Nouveau Redon?”
“It . . . might,” said the quartermaster who talked more. He wasn’t about to admit anything he didn’t have to—oh, no, not him.
“Let me ask the question another way, gentlemen.” Victor said in his iciest tones. “Do you suppose that, if you don’t turn loose of what I need, I won’t cashier the lot of you and clap you in irons?”
“You can’t do that!” the quartermaster gasped.
“Watch me,” Victor said. “I took Nouveau Redon back in the days when it didn’t need to haul water up from the Blavet. I can damn well take it again if I have to. Cornwallis and I were on the same side then. I didn’t think you were on his side now. Perhaps I was wrong.”
“General, that is an insult,” the man from Nouveau Redon said stiffly. His colleague nodded.
“Not by the way you act, it isn’t,” Victor told them. “This is a military necessity. You have the supplies I need. You can release them to me in accordance with the orders I am lawfully entitled to give by virtue of my appointment at the hands of the Atlantean Assembly—or you can declare yourselves the foes of Atlantis’ freedom. Which will it be, gentlemen?”
He drew his sword. The quartermasters, as befitted their un-military soldiering, were unarmed. But Victor didn’t assail them . . . directly. Instead, he drew a circle in the ground around their feet.
“Be so kind as to answer me before you step out of that,” he said, not sheathing the blade.
The quartermaster who’d been quiet up till then spluttered, “We are not Antiochus’ officers, General!” He’d had some classical education, too, then.
Victor grinned savagely. “That’s true. You’re my subordinates. Can you imagine what a Roman general would have done with a set of insubordinate officers? Lucky for both of you that we don’t crucify these days, or you’d have more in common with our Savior than you ever wanted.”
When the men from Nouveau Redon tried to retreat, he held them in place with the sword—they hadn’t answered him. “You’ll get what you want,” the talkier one said. With a sudden access of spirit, he added, “We commonly find it wiser to humor madmen.”
“If you drive me mad with excuses, who’s to blame?” Victor slid the sword back into its sheath. “Go on, both of you. And remember one thing: Atlantis isn’t big enough for you to hide in if you play me false once you get back inside those walls.”
They hurried away. Supplies started coming out of Nouveau Redon. Victor nodded to himself. He hadn’t expected anything else.
Blaise was of less sanguine temperament. Where Victor saw things going well, the Negro saw things that might go wrong. “What happens if, once we get farther away, they stop sending wagons after us?” he asked.
“Simple,” Victor answered. “I send back a detachment, and I start hanging quartermasters. Pour encourager les autres.” He quoted Custis Cawthorne quoting Voltaire.
Since French was the first white men’s language Blaise had learned, he followed with no trouble. He smiled like a crocodile—like a wolf, an English-speaker in a land where there were wolves would have said. “Yes, that will work,” he said. “Those people, they put on uniforms, but they would piss themselves if they had to fight.”
Victor nodded. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he said. “But have you seen how many soldiers do piss themselves or shit themselves when they almost get killed? You can’t always help it. I don’t think I’ve ever done it, but I know I’ve come close. What about you?”
“I’ve seen it,” Blaise replied. “I never quite did it myself. I wouldn’t admit I was close if you didn’t say the same thing first.”
“I’m the general. People will think I’m brave till I do something to show them I’m not,” Victor said.
“I wish they felt that way about me.” Blaise shrugged. “Won’t happen, not the color I am. Folks see a black man, they think, He’s a nigger. He’s a coward. Makes it easier for them to keep slaves, I reckon. They do the same damn thing with copperskins, too.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Victor said. He’d heard Africans were made house slaves more often than Terranovan natives were. They were reckoned less likely to stab their owners in th
e middle of the night and abscond after setting the house afire. But anyone who thought Blaise and a lot of blacks like him were docile would make his last mistake.
Nouveau Redon fell well behind. The Green Ridge Mountains rose higher in the west. Supply wagons kept coming. Blaise nodded in somber approval. “You did put the fear of God in them,” he said.
“Here’s hoping. The real worry is, what happens once we cross the mountains?” Victor said. “Wagons won’t be able to follow us then.”
“We manage. One way or another, we manage,” Blaise said, which left Victor wondering which of them was the sanguine one after all.
He also wondered what Isaac Fenner had been talking about in his last note. Usually, Victor grimaced whenever a courier from Honker’s Mill came up. The Atlantean Assembly couldn’t run his army from a distance, which didn’t always keep it from trying. That left him with the unwelcome choice between idiotic obedience and mutinous disobedience. If they told him what they wanted and then let him try to do it . . .
If he expected that to happen, he was sanguine, all right. Or possibly stark raving mad.
Now, though, he would have welcomed news from the backwoods capital. And, no doubt because he would have welcomed it, none came. He wondered whether couriers could follow over the mountains, too. He’d soon find out.
A rider caught up with the army just before it started heading up into the foothills. The man was brandishing a big sheet of paper even before he came up to Victor. “Proclamation!” he shouted. “The Atlantean Assembly’s proclamation!”
“Well, let’s see it,” Victor said gruffly. He sometimes thought the Assembly’s proclamations came three for a farthing. Two of the Conscript Fathers couldn’t blow their noses at the same time without convening a meeting to issue a solemn proclamation commemorating the occasion.
He quickly read through this one. “What does it say?” someone asked.
“It’s a—a proclamation of liberty,” he answered. “It says that King George has mistreated the settlements so badly, no one here can stand to live under him any more. It says the settlements are free, independent states from now on. And it says they come together of their own free will to form what it calls the United States of Atlantis. It says we’re as much of a country of our own as England or France or Spain or Holland. And it says we’ll fight to the death to hold the rights God gave us.” He waved the Proclamation of Liberty himself. “God bless the United States of Atlantis!”
The United States of Atlantis Page 21
