“Better we sail a little too far now, while the wind will let us,” Bartholomew Smith said. “If it swings around and blows out of the north—and it’s likely to do that, this season of the year—we don’t want it to leave us stuck where we can’t do anything.”
“You’re right, and we’ll do it,” Henry said at once. He set his hand on a swivel gun. The iron was cold, almost cold enough to make his flesh stick to it. He raised his voice to a shout: “Are we ready, lads?”
“Ready!” the fishermen shouted—the ones, that is, who didn’t shout, “Yes!”
“Then let’s do what we can do,” Henry said. “Let’s do what free Englishmen can do.”
Their cheers put heart into him, the way sweet French wine would have. His father had been the same way: more truly himself when magnified in the eyes of others. Richard didn’t have that—didn’t want it. Henry wondered why not. He also hoped his brother could find some of it in the days ahead. If he couldn’t, whatever the Rose did might not matter at all.
Richard Radcliffe didn’t know how many times he’d eaten honker half burnt, half raw. Here he was, doing it again. Grease from someone else’s oil thrush made the fire sizzle and sputter.
“We can beat them,” he said. “We can, and by God we will!”
Most of the men sitting by the fire nodded. They wouldn’t have been there if they didn’t think they could beat Warwick’s soldiers. All the same, one of them said, “Wish I had me a byrnie.”
“Sure need one on a fishing boat, don’t you, Carl?” another one said. “You fall in, you go straight to the bottom.”
“Wouldn’t make much difference to me,” Carl replied. “I can’t swim anyway.”
Surprisingly few sailors knew how. Richard was no great shakes in the water himself, though he could keep his head above water for a while—long enough to be rescued, if he was lucky. One more reason to be glad I don’t put to sea any more, he thought.
“Throw more wood on the fire,” he called to his men. “We want Warwick’s buggers to know we’re here.”
If Warwick’s men didn’t know their foes were encamped north of New Hastings, they were blind as well as stupid. Richard’s rebels had fed the fire on the beach all night long. They wanted the soldiers to come out against them. Richard thought they would get what they wanted, too. And when they did, they would find out whether they’d been wise to want it in the first place.
Richard looked out to sea. The Rose lay about where she ought to. How much difference she’d make…again, they would find out. When the plan spilled out of Henry, it sounded brilliant. But all sorts of things that seemed brilliant turned out not to be. You didn’t know till you tried them, which was liable to be too late.
Carl, sensibly, was looking toward New Hastings. He crossed himself. “They’re coming out,” he said.
Warwick’s forces advanced slowly and deliberately. Since the soldiers who’d come from England with him wore mailshirts, they couldn’t advance any other way. The earl himself had a fine suit of plate. He rode a horse big enough to bear him and the heavy armor. The rising sun struck fire from his lancehead.
Accompanying his troopers were men as bare of mail as Richard’s followers. Radcliffe ground his teeth. Those were settlers, men like the ones he led—except they’d chosen the other side.
“They have more men than we do,” Carl said quietly.
“I know,” Richard answered.
“They have armor, and we don’t,” the other man went on.
“I know,” Richard repeated.
“If they beat us, they’ll kill most of us—maybe all of us.”
“I know,” Richard said one more time.
“If it doesn’t work, I won’t forgive you.”
“If it doesn’t work, you’ll be too dead to forgive me, or I’ll be too dead to need forgiving, or else we’ll both be dead and things will even out.”
Carl gravely considered that. To Richard’s surprise, he chuckled under his breath. Richard clasped his hand. They took their places and waited.
One of Warwick’s men came up the beach toward them. He had no flag of truce, but held both hands out before him so Richard and his men could see they were empty. When he got within hailing distance, Richard shouted, “That’s close enough. Say your say.” The brisk northerly breeze flung his words toward the trooper. It would aid his side’s arrows, too—not a great deal, but some.
The trooper cupped his hands to his mouth. “Give it up!” he bawled. “You can’t hope to win.”
“Be damned to you,” Richard answered. His men raised a defiant cheer.
“My lord says, if you yield now, he will let you go into exile: go where you will, so long as it’s far from here, with your families, with whatever you can carry, and with one beast and one fowl for each person. Think on what you do. After this fight is won, you won’t find him so generous, those of you who don’t burn in hell.”
“Be damned to your lord, too.” Richard spat on the sand. All things considered, the offer was generous—so generous that Richard didn’t trust the Earl of Warwick to honor it once he’d got his way bloodlessly. He looked at his men. None of them seemed inclined to give in. That heartened him.
Warwick’s trooper shrugged mailed shoulders. “On your heads be it—and on your heads it will be.” He turned and walked down the strand. Richard was tempted to put an arrow through his kidneys. One more man he wouldn’t have to kill later. But no. The advantage wasn’t worth the risk. If he broke a truce, the enemy would show no mercy if they won. They might—not to him, surely, but to his comrades—if he stayed within the rules. The soldier reached his own line unpunctured.
Richard watched him shake his head and spread his hands. A moment later, Warwick’s lance swung down so that it pointed straight at the men who dared defy him. He didn’t charge, though, not yet. Richard’s men would have pincushioned him and his horse if he had. Longbowmen could stand against knights. They’d proved that time and again on the fields of France. Against a lone knight, they could have proved it with ease here in Atlantis.
Slowly, Warwick’s men advanced almost to the edge of archery range. His bowmen formed a line behind his troopers. What he had in mind was easy enough to see. The archers would keep Richard’s men busy while the troopers—and, presumably, Warwick himself—advanced against them. If Richard’s men fought the archers, the regular soldiers would close and slaughter them. If they aimed at the troopers, the bowmen would cut them down from long range.
“A plague!” Carl exclaimed. “My brother’s over there, the cursed, mangy hound.”
“And? Do you want us to try to spare him or try to shoot him down like the dog he is?” Richard asked.
Before Carl could answer, the troopers shouted, “Warwick!” and trudged forward, swords drawn, shields raised against the storm that would soon fall on them. Warwick’s archers began to shoot.
At first, their arrows hardly seemed to move in the sky. But then, terrifyingly fast, they were on Richard and his comrades. You could dodge one, but if you did you were likely to step into the path of another. Richard had never had so many men trying to kill him all at once.
“Shoot!” he shouted. “Pick your own targets!” A better general, or a more certain one, might have concentrated on the troopers or the archers. He hoped splitting the difference would serve well enough. If he was wrong…then he was wrong, that was all.
He let fly at a trooper, and missed. Swearing, he looked over his left shoulder. Where was the Rose? If she didn’t do what she was supposed to do pretty soon, he and his men would have to run. They couldn’t face armored soldiers with swords at close quarters. And if they started running, where would they stop? Wouldn’t they be doomed to outlawry and skulking through the woods the rest of their days?
She looked close enough to Richard, dammit. One of his men fell with a groan. He let fly again. His shaft pierced a shield, but evidently not the trooper behind it, because the soldier kept coming.
Richard’s q
uiver would run dry soon. His men couldn’t have many more arrows than he did. He’d also have to run when he couldn’t shoot any more. Henry had wanted to cut this close. But what was the difference between close and too close?
Simple, Richard thought, nocking another shaft as an enemy arrow hummed venomously past his head. If it’s too close, we lose.
The leadsman in the Rose’s bow cast the line again and again, calling out how much water lay under her keel. He’d already called out less water than she drew more than once. Why she hadn’t run aground Henry Radcliffe didn’t know. Maybe God loved her and hated the Earl of Warwick. Maybe she was just lucky. Either way, she was at last just about where she needed to be—and just in time, too. Or he hoped she was just in time, anyway.
He stood at the bow starboard swivel gun. Bartholomew Smith stood by the stern gun at the same side. “Ready?” Henry called.
“At your order, skipper,” the mate replied.
Henry sighted down the wrought-iron tube. It was loaded with stones and scrap metal and whatever else they could stuff into its maw. “Fire!” he shouted, and lowered a tallow-stinking torch to the touch-hole.
Boom! The thunderous noise terrified and exalted him at the same time. You could never be sure a gun would go off when you fired it. You could never be sure the barrel wouldn’t blow up, either. He whooped when Smith’s gun boom!ed a heartbeat after his. Then he peered through the choking, stinking smoke to see what the two shots had done.
He whooped again, pumping a fist in the air. They’d caught Warwick’s men from the flank, and torn them to bits. More than half the armored soldiers were down and kicking or down and suddenly still forever. And almost all the rest were running for their lives. They were battle-hardened, battle-ready men, but disaster striking out of nowhere stole the courage from anybody.
“Reload the starboard guns!” Henry shouted. The sailors leapt to obey, swabbing out each barrel, pouring in fresh powder, and then loading more junk to fire. Henry pointed his piece a little to the south, toward the Earl of Warwick. What did he think at the unexpected overthrow of his hopes? “Port bow gun—fire!” Henry yelled.
Boom! That one was aimed at the earl, too. Warwick was farther from the Rose—probably a quarter of a mile. Maybe God really was on the settlers’ side. Or maybe a horse made a bigger target than a man, for the noble’s mount staggered, then fell, pinning him beneath its weight.
Another chunk of iron or stone knocked over an archer behind Warwick. Together, the two downfalls made the rest of the settlers who’d taken the nobleman’s side realize they might not have decided wisely.
“Drop anchor!” Henry cried. It splashed into the sea. He didn’t want the wind to sweep them past the enemy’s archers. The Rose’s timbers groaned as she slowed. Boom! That was Bartholomew Smith’s gun, ready before Henry’s. More of the archers who’d backed Warwick fell. The rest ran faster than the armored soldiers. None of them would ever have faced gunfire before. A lot of them would never even have heard it. It was frightening enough when the gun wasn’t aimed at you. When it was…
Henry didn’t aim his piece at the fleeing settlers. Once Warwick was dealt with, they’d be good neighbors again. They would want to pretend they’d never been here, and he was willing to let them, though he wasn’t so sure Richard would be. The soldiers, on the other hand…If you wanted to keep your flock safe, you had to get rid of the wolves.
He lowered the torch to the touch-hole. Boom! The powder stank of brimstone, and Warwick’s men had to think hell was visiting them there by the strand. More of them toppled, writhing on the sand and mud.
“Reload!” Henry yelled again. His ears rang. The rest of the sailors’ must have, too. “We’ll give it to them one more time!”
Richard Radcliffe stood over the Earl of Warwick. Even with his dead horse dragged off him, he wasn’t going anywhere; he’d broken a leg in his fall. Pain twisted his face as he glared up at Richard. “Well?” he said through bloody lips. “You’ve won, villein. Make an end to it, if you’d be so kind. Damned saltpeter!”
“I ought to let you suffer first,” Richard said. “You killed my father.”
“Not in my own person. And you, in your own person, did murder my men and spur them to avenge in blood.”
“They were robbing him of what wasn’t theirs to take.” Richard didn’t need to argue any more—didn’t need to and didn’t intend to. He drew his bow and shot Warwick in the face. The nobleman kicked for a few minutes, then lay still. Richard let out a long sigh. The worst was over.
His men were finishing Warwick’s wounded troopers: cutting their throats or shooting them or knocking them over the head. A few troopers still slogged back toward New Hastings. If they surrendered, he supposed he would let them live. If they wanted to go on fighting, they wouldn’t last long, not with their liege lord dead.
One of the settlers who’d sided with Warwick lay on the sand, an arrow through his calf. He eyed Radcliffe apprehensively. “What are you going to do to me?” he asked as Richard approached.
“I was going to take out the arrow and bandage you up,” Richard said. “You were a bloody fool, Tim, but you won’t be that kind of bloody fool again.”
The wounded man started to cry. “God bless you,” he grizzled. “Oh, bless you.”
“Shut up, or you’ll make me sorry I don’t do something worse,” Richard said roughly. He’d never known what to do with praise. He knelt by Tim and cut away his breeches so he could see how the arrow had gone through. “I’m going to break off the head and then pull the shaft back through. It will hurt some, and you’ll bleed some—not too much, with luck.”
He cut through the shaft with his knife till he could snap off the head without moving the rest of the arrow very much. Tim groaned anyway. Richard didn’t suppose he could blame the other man for that.
“Ready?” he said. Then, before Tim could answer, he pulled the shaft out the way it had gone in. The other man howled and twisted. Blood poured from both ends of the wound, but it didn’t spurt, so Richard hoped the arrow hadn’t cut any major blood vessels. He bandaged Tim with the length of breeches leg he’d cut off. “If I get you a stick, can you walk?” he asked.
“Not yet,” the other man replied. “Better to wait till the bleeding’s stopped for a while.” Richard grunted; Tim made sense.
“We did it!” someone called from the sea. Richard looked up. His brother was coming ashore in the Rose’s boat.
“We did, by Our Lady,” Richard agreed. Henry jumped out of the boat and looked down at Warwick’s corpse. He stirred it with his foot, then stepped away. Richard said, “This sort of thing mustn’t happen again. Not ever.” He looked at his hands, which were red with Tim’s blood. Shaking his head, he washed them in the ocean. “We shouldn’t fight ourselves. There’s room here for all of us.”
“Well, when word of this gets back to England, the king will know better than to foist worthless nobles off on us,” Henry said. “He didn’t even mean to give us Warwick—that bloody skipper couldn’t find Freetown.”
Richard shrugged. “Freetown, New Hastings—what difference does it make? He would have plagued them the same way he plagued us. Atlantis shouldn’t be England’s dumping ground, dammit.”
“No, eh?” His brother’s grin was crooked. “Then what are we doing here?”
“Making our own lives, with nobody to tell us what to do or how to do it,” Richard said. “I like that fine, thank you kindly. Once we get all this nonsense settled, I’ll go back into the woods—it’ll be good to get away.”
“You’re welcome to them. A few nights under the trees were plenty to last me a lifetime.” Henry looked down at dead Warwick again, and then over at Tim. “I’m surprised you didn’t do for him, too.”
“Part of me wanted to,” Richard answered. “But with Warwick gone, he won’t be any trouble. It’s done. Better to let it go.”
“I thought so,” Henry said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“Well,
I do,” Richard said. “Enough is enough, or it had better be. If we don’t let it go, Tim’s great-grandson will be stealing my great-grandson’s sheep and burning his barn. We’ll have feuds here like a pack of damned Frenchmen. That’s not what Father wanted.”
“Father was no meek, mild man,” Henry said. “He stood up to Warwick when he could have bowed down before him. He was ready to fight if he had to.”
“If he had to.” Richard bore down hard on the words. “But he wouldn’t have troubled Warwick if Warwick didn’t trouble him. He never told anybody here what to do, not unless someone asked him for advice. That’s how I want things to go from here on out. Nobody should be able to order anyone else about.”
“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” Henry quoted the peasants’ cry in Wat Tyler’s rebellion ninety years before.
“Sounds fair to me,” Richard said. “Warwick didn’t want to work. He wanted to take what other people worked for. Well, he could get by with that in England till he made the king angry at him, but why should we put up with it here? He didn’t deserve what he stole. He deserved what he got.”
“I’m not quarreling with you, Richard,” his brother said.
“Good,” Richard Radcliffe replied. “You’d better not, not about this.”
The only building in New Hastings large enough to hold most of the crowd that gathered was the church. Bishop John had built big on purpose, as if planning a church for a town the size of the old Hastings from which they’d sailed.
But Bishop John (how had he got so gray and stooped?) wasn’t in the pulpit on this bright Wednesday morning. Henry Radcliffe was. Richard hadn’t wanted the job, and wouldn’t have done it well had he wanted it. Speaking to lots of people made him shy. Henry tried to imagine a shy man skippering a fishing boat. The picture wouldn’t form. He had his flaws, but that wasn’t one of them.
“We are one folk again,” he said, and his voice, which was big enough to reach from bow to stern through a gale, was big enough to fill the church, too. “One folk,” he repeated. “We fell out for a while, but that’s over. My father is dead. Warwick is dead, too. Men who backed both of them have died. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t the Battle of the Strand enough? Do we need to go on hating each other, go on killing each other, any more?”
Opening Atlantis Page 18
