“I think I might oblige you there.” William filled Marcus’ glass again, then his own. “Let me try this: if we ever see the promised Dutch and English ships, could I persuade you—and you persuade some of your backwoods fellows—to serve aboard my merchantmen, as marksmen at sea and as a landing force when we reach Avalon?”
“I know some people who don’t shy away from a fight, and that’s a fact,” Marcus said. “Don’t know whether they’d fancy one on the ocean. Don’t know whether I would myself, either. I have to cipher that out.”
“Chances are you’ll have all the time you require,” William Radcliffe said dolefully. “The next ship we see of those promised will be the first.”
“If my friends treated me that way, I’d make ’em sorry for it—to hell with me if I wouldn’t,” Marcus said.
“If my friends treated me so, I should make them sorry for it, too,” William replied. “The gentlemen who promised, however, are not my friends: merely associates with whom I share certain interests. I love them not, nor they me.”
Marcus drained the last of his wine. “Why put in with ’em, then?”
“Nothing simpler,” William said. “Because one of the interests we share is seeing Red Rodney Radcliffe, damn his black soul to hell, hanged in chains.”
“Signal flags!” Red Rodney Radcliffe exclaimed in high glee as he stood at the wheel of the Black Hand. “Do you ever reckon a bunch of bally freebooters’d fly signal flags like the bleeding Royal Navy?”
“Not me,” Ben Jackson answered. “We have enough trouble getting our own bastards to do like we say most of the time, let alone the buggers who fight for somebody else.”
“It’s a corsair fleet. It’s a corsair navy, by God!” Red Rodney raised his voice to call to the sailor who was raising the flags aloft: “Signal form line of battle, Quint!”
“I’ll do it, skipper,” Quint said, and he did. He’d served in the Royal Navy himself till he jumped ship at Stuart and made his way to Avalon. Piracy suited him better than shouts and curses and kicks from petty officers, with the lash or the yardarm waiting if he got too far out of line.
Almost every shallop and brigantine that sailed out of Avalon carried at least one man who’d been part of the Royal Navy and knew something about signal flags. Quite a few men who couldn’t write their own names or read them if they saw them were intimately familiar with dozens of flags.
In the Royal Navy, the admiral could and would punish any captain who refused his orders. Radcliffe wished he could do that. But he would have a war on his hands if he tried, and not the one he wanted. Besides, he wasn’t the admiral, not in the formal sense—he’d turned the job down.
The other pirate captains had done just what he hoped they would when they chose Michel de Grammont to lead them. De Grammont wasn’t even important enough to come to the meeting when he was named. The majority of the pirates of Avalon were English, which made it hard for them to take a Frenchman seriously. His ship wasn’t a big or a strong one. In other words, he made an ideal figurehead.
Red Rodney wished his own ship were built for him from the keel up, not sailed out of a Dutch port on the Terranovan coast in a hail of musket bullets. Then she could look the way she did in his mind’s eye, with the figurehead of a big black hand below the bowsprit. Everyone would know her from a mile off, and fear her—and fear him, too. That would be very fine.
Not everybody was falling into line. The other pirates didn’t want to follow his orders—or anyone else’s. Not for nothing were they called freebooters. Even if obeying someone else would do them good, they weren’t interested. If obeying someone else would save their necks? They were up against that now. It didn’t seem to matter.
The mate saw the same thing. “Maybe we ought to fight Dutch-style and not like Englishmen,” Jackson said. “Then it’d be every man for himself, like, and all the ships could do what they do best.”
“And they could get blasted out of the water one at a bloody time,” Rodney said.
Ben Jackson scowled. Like any other corsair, he liked his own conceits best. “It works for the Dutchmen,” he said stubbornly. “They make England bleed every time they tangle.”
“Of course they do,” Radcliffe replied. “They have ships to match the English men-of-war, so they can tangle with ’em one on one. Can we do that? Can any ship in Avalon take on a three-masted ship of the line by her lonesome?”
Jackson went on scowling. But he shook his bullet head. “Reckon not.” He didn’t want to admit it, but he didn’t have much choice.
“I reckon not, too,” Red Rodney said. “So we have to find some other way to beat those scuts. If it’s not fighting in a line, what is it?”
He meant the question to make the mate agree there was no other way. Instead, Jackson proposed one. That surprised Radcliffe. What surprised him more was that, the longer the mate talked, the better he liked the idea.
When Jackson finished, Red Rodney threw back his head and laughed out loud. He pounded the mate on the back. Jackson was bigger and probably stronger than he was, but Rodney staggered him all the same. “By God, we will do that!” he exclaimed. “We will, and we’ll see how the honest gentlemen of Stuart like it!” He laughed some more.
William Radcliff went down to the harbor almost every day. It wasn’t so much that he hoped to see warships gathered there. He did hope to see them—but, after so much disappointment, those hopes weren’t high. He went anyway. Merchantmen came into Stuart; others sailed out. Some were his; others belonged to his rivals. He kept an eye on as many of them as he could. If the man who ran a trading firm didn’t know what was going on, how could he tell the people who worked for him what to do?
“Sail ho!” The cry came from the east, from the lookouts who watched for incoming ships. Pirates had raided Stuart a generation earlier, and caught the town by surprise. That would never happen again.
Stuart had better walls and bigger guns on those walls than was true a generation earlier, too. It also had more men who could snatch up a musket and fight. A generation before, Stuart had been new and raw, a town on the edge of settlement. Now it was part of the hinterland. New, raw towns were springing up to the north and to the west.
“Sail ho! Sail ho!” The cry rang out again and again. Somebody added, “It’s a bloody forest of masts out there!”
William couldn’t see them yet. And then, all at once, he did. For a moment, alarm swept through him: that was no fleet of merchantmen. He’d planned to go after Avalon. Were the pirates aiming to beat him to the punch in spite of Stuart’s improved fortifications?
Then he breathed easier. Pirates didn’t sail three-masted ships. They didn’t have the crews to man them. Maybe a big fleet from Terranova was coming in. Or maybe, just maybe…
“By God!” William breathed, seeing the Union Jack flying from the mastheads of each ship. “They took their own sweet time, but they finally went and did it.”
Six ships of the line and six smaller vessels tied up at the quays. Sailors swarmed ashore to do what they would in Stuart’s taverns and brothels. And, in due course, Elijah Walton waddled off the largest man-of-war, the Royal Sovereign. Its figurehead, King Charles in a flowing, curly wig, was almost frighteningly realistic.
He gave William Radcliff a bow well flavored—perhaps overflavored—with irony. “Your fleet, Admiral—as much of it as the Dutchmen aren’t doling out,” Walton said. “I do not see them here. Have you any notion when they intend to make an appearance—or, indeed, if they do?”
“No, sir. I do not,” William replied evenly. “But then, up until your sails were sighted, I would have said the same of the Royal Navy.”
“Do you insult me?” Walton’s voice went silky with danger. “If you do, we can continue this discussion through our friends. After that, the fleet may find itself with a new admiral.”
“If you are a man insulted by plain facts, sir, I shall discuss the matter with whomever you please,” William said. “Had you let me finish,
you would have heard me counsel a bit more patience, so much already having been required.”
He watched Walton chew on that. At last, grudgingly, the Englishman replied, “Well, perhaps it were best to save our bullets for the blighters on the other side. Perhaps, I say. If you feel otherwise, I assure you I shall endeavor to give satisfaction.”
I’ll kill you if I can, he meant. The language of ceremony was a strange and wonderful thing. William Radcliff bowed. “If at the end we find each other incongenial, we can pursue it then. In the meanwhile, as you say, there are others we should oppose in arms. One thing at a time, sir.”
“One thing at a time,” Walton agreed. “Not the worst motto I’ve ever heard. Would you care to come aboard and view your flagship?”
“I should be pleased to do so, and thank you for the courtesy,” Radcliff said.
The Royal Sovereign differed from a merchantman not in essence but in scale. Elijah Walton rattled off the numbers as the two men strode the main deck and the quarterdeck. The ship was 234 feet long, had a beam of 49 feet, and displaced around 1,500 tons. She carried 780 sailors, most of them men who could find no easier way to earn a living or whose families had gone to sea for generations.
Walton didn’t say that, but William Radcliff knew it full well even so. He sprang from such a family, though not all the Radcliffes and Radcliffs were tied to the sea as they had been in the days of Edward the Founder. Marcus and many others had sunk deep roots in the soil of Atlantis.
“And you will want to see the guns,” Walton said.
“Indeed. They and the sails are the point of the whole affair, eh?” Radcliff said.
He ended up admiring them more than he’d thought he would. His merchantmen went armed, too, to beat back pirates if they could. He was intimately familiar with twelve-pounders and smaller pieces. That made him think the forty-two-pounders on the lower gun deck would have nothing new to show him. But he turned out to be wrong. The sheer brutal mass of those big iron monsters took his breath away.
When he remarked on it, Walton smiled. “A man who knows tabby cats may think he knows lions, too—he may, that is, until he hears a lion roar.”
“That have I never done,” William said.
“I have. It is the most astounding thing,” Walton said. “When you hear that sound, you are afraid. You may be the boldest warrior since Hercules, but you are afraid, at some level below conscious thought. It is as though the knowledge that this beast eats men were somehow stamped upon your soul.”
“Interesting. I should like the experience one day. Did you hear a lion in the wilds of Africa or at a London zoological garden?”
“The latter, I fear,” Elijah Walton replied. “I have been off the African coast—a place full of sickness, of no value to anyone but for the trade in slaves it affords—but I did not hear the creatures there. In London, yes. Strange, is it not?”
“It truly is.” Radcliff looked back toward the houses and shops of Stuart: a few built of stone, but more from the abundant Atlantean redwoods and pines. “This is a growing town. One day soon, we ought to have a zoological garden of our own, that our folk might see the marvels of other lands.”
“And of your own,” Walton said. “So much of what dwells in Atlantis is unique to it.”
William Radcliff shrugged. “Our folk are used to honkers and red-crested eagles and cucumber slugs and the like. Well, the explorers and settlers are. In regions inhabited for some little while, you understand, these creatures grow scarce and die out, to be replaced by productions more familiar to your common Englishman. Believe it or not, sir, much of Atlantis is a civilized land.”
“Let it be as you say.” That was also the language of courtesy, and meant Walton didn’t believe it for a minute.
One deck higher, the long twenty-four-pounders threw lighter balls than the carronades below, but threw them farther. “Let a couple of these tear through a lightly built pirate’s scantlings and watch the water pour in,” William Radcliff said with a certain gloating anticipation.
“How can they propose to stand against us?” Walton asked. “Our ships so greatly outweigh theirs, the fight scarcely seems fair.”
“I cannot imagine their opposing us on the sea,” William answered. “More likely, they will seek to keep us from entering Avalon Bay and from sacking their hellhole of a town. What other sensible thing could they do?”
“None I can see,” the Englishman said.
He was a sensible man. So was William Radcliff. They were too sensible to see that, when fighting sensible opponents, acting sensible himself might be the least sensible thing Red Rodney Radcliffe could do.
Aldo Cucari wasn’t even a pirate. He was a fisherman who put to sea from Avalon. He didn’t have enough to make stealing his small substance worth the corsairs’ while. They laughed at him for working so hard, but they bought his fish.
He spoke French with a funny accent, and English with a funnier one. But when he came to Black Hand Fort and asked to talk to Red Rodney, the ruffians at the gate let him through. He didn’t quite interrupt a tender moment between the pirate chief and Jenny, but he came close enough to leave her miffed. “Will we never be free of gabbling little nuisances?” she grumbled as Rodney dressed.
He only laughed. “Just goes to show you never raised a child, sweetheart.” And away he went, a pistol on his belt. He knew Aldo, but you never could tell.
Someone had given the fisherman a cup of wine. He had no pistol, nor even an eating knife. When Rodney strode into the room where he waited, he jumped up, set down the wine, and bowed almost double. “Ah, buon giorno, Signore Rodney Rosso, Signore Radcliffe!” he cried. “I is just in from out of the north.”
Red Rodney nodded. “That’s what they told me, by God.” Finding out what was going on up in the north was worth getting out of bed, even if Jenny didn’t think so. “What did you see up there?”
“Dutchmens,” Aldo Cucari said solemnly. “Three big Dutchmens, ships of the line. Six smaller Dutchmens, like to the ships that sail out of Avalon. They go east.”
“Bloody hell. Of course they do.” Three men-of-war, half a dozen brigantines or the equivalent. Six more men-of-war from London, with a like number of smaller supporters. However many merchantmen William clipped-e Radcliff could scrape together at Stuart, plus their auxiliaries. The merchantmen wouldn’t have the speed or the firepower of a first-rate ship of the line, but they’d be bad enough. Red Rodney glowered down at the small, swarthy Italian. “You swear this is the truth?”
“By the cross, signore.” Aldo Cucari crossed himself. You could be a Papist in Avalon, or a Protestant, or a Mahometan, or even a Jew. No one cared enough to kill you for it, which wasn’t true all over Atlantis. Aldo went on, “By my mother’s honor, signore.”
People laughed at Aldo for working hard, but no one had ever called him a coward. And if you challenged his mother’s honor—if you challenged the honor of any man’s mother—he was bound to kill you if he could. “All right, then,” Radcliffe said. “You’ve told me what I need to know, and I’m grateful.”
The fisherman bowed again. “It is my honor, too, Signore Rodney.”
“Honor’s all very well, but you can’t eat it. See what you can buy with these.” Red Rodney pressed two gleaming gold sovereigns into Aldo’s callused hand.
One more bow. “You is a man of great heart, signore, and a man of open hands as well. I hoped for one sovereign—I thought my news is worth one. But two? Two! Only a man of great heart would give two.” He stepped forward, embraced the pirate captain, and bussed him first on the right cheek, then on the left.
Frenchmen and Spaniards would do the same thing sometimes. Red Rodney clapped Aldo on the back and made a joke of it: “You aren’t pretty enough for that.”
“Ah, well.” The fisherman grinned and fired back: “If I is doing it for looks, you isn’t pretty enough, neither.”
He came very close to dying then, even with Rodney’s gold coins in his hand. Only
blood washed away insults in Avalon—if you decided they were insults. If you laughed them off, though…Rodney did. “I may be ugly, but I have fun. How about you?”
“Every so often I find a girl who—how you say?—she no see so good. Or maybe is too dark to see good. Who knows? Who cares? I has fun, too.”
Rodney shouted for more wine. The servant who brought it was a copperskinned Terranovan native. Everybody called him Old Abe; he’d been in Avalon almost as long as Rodney had been alive. Smallpox scars slagged his face, but he’d lived through the disease and never needed to worry about it again. A lot of copperskins turned up their toes in a hurry after they met Europeans or Atlanteans. That was one reason white settlement was spreading on the western mainland, though not so fast as it was in previously uninhabited Atlantis.
“Here’s to fun!” Rodney said, and Aldo Cucari drank with him. But even as the rough red wine slid down his throat, he was weighing the odds. Nine ships of the line? People farther east had hated Avalon for a long time. They’d always said they had, anyhow. Never till now, though, had they seemed serious. It was hard to get much more serious than nine ships of the line and assorted auxiliaries.
Well, they might be—they were bound to be—gathering at Stuart. But from Stuart to Avalon was a long way: long in terms of sailing, even longer in terms of the spirit that animated each town. Aldo, anyone might think, would have fit better in Stuart. But he’d lived there for a little while, and didn’t care for the dull, stolid burghers who ran the place. Whatever else Avalon was, dull and stolid it wasn’t.
The pirate captain poured wine with the same lavish hand he’d used to pass out money. Raising his cup, he shouted, “Here’s to frying my God-cursed cousin!” Aldo drank with him—why not? And Rodney Radcliffe laughed and laughed. “Yes, here’s to frying him, in his own damned pan!”
XIII
Opening Atlantis Page 22
