“I think so, too,” Radcliffe said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t drive them out again, though…does it?” He wished, too late, he hadn’t added the last couple of words.
Ben Jackson shook his head like a hunted animal—which, at the moment, he was. Red Rodney was another one, and he knew it. Well, some hunted animals had teeth and fangs of their own, and could turn the tables on their pursuers. Not many beasts in Atlantis did, but that wasn’t true through most of the world. The pirate chief aimed to fight back as long as he could.
A bullet cracked past him. He saw a marine down at the end of the street. He pulled a holdout pistol from his boot top and fired at the bullock. The marine let out a horrible howl and clutched at his shoulder. Rodney stared at the pistol in delighted surprise. He’d hoped to scare the man in the red coat. Hitting him was an unexpected bonus.
He wanted to recharge both his guns. He wanted to, but he had no chance. Jackson was shouting for freebooters to come up and join them. The wounded marine’s roar of pain brought his comrades at the double. They did look after one another, no doubt about it.
Marines and pirates smashed together in bloody collision. Red Rodney hacked and slashed. He threw one pistol in a bullock’s face. The marine went down, clutching at his nose. Radcliffe kicked him. Not far away, beset by three men at once, Ben Jackson fell, blood spurting from a belly wound and from his throat. Rodney feared he would never get up again.
Pirates and marines fell, clawing and biting at one another till they could fight no more. Red Rodney’s band had more men in it than did his foes’ party, but one marine was worth more than one corsair in this kind of brawl.
A bayonet had pinked Radcliffe’s leg. A sword had scored a bleeding line down his right arm. He wasn’t quite the last man standing, but the marines who still lived were hurt worse than he was, and drew back out of range of his cutlass.
Backed by three hale marines, a middle-aged man with a rapier came around the corner. When he said, “You are Rodney Radcliffe,” each individual word might have been chiseled from stone.
“Damn right I am,” Red Rodney snarled. “Who the bloody hell are you?”
The stranger bowed. “I have the honor—if that be the proper term—of being your cousin. William Radcliff, at your service.” He bobbed up and down again.
Rage ripped through Rodney. “You filthy bugger! You’ve ruined me!”
“Good,” William said coolly, “for that was my purpose. If you yield now, I promise you a quick end. I regret—though not very much—I have nothing better to offer.”
“I’ll give you something to regret!” Red Rodney shouted. “You’ll regret coming up against me face-to-face, by God! You won’t gloat over my carcass, that’s for sure.” He swung up his sword for a limping charge.
William Radcliff appeared unwounded. He also knew how to handle that long, thin, straight sword—a stop thrust almost skewered Rodney. Well, there were ways. Red Rodney smashed at the rapier. If he could break the blade, the other man was his meat.
But William proved a better man of his hands than the pirate had dreamt he could be. He took the slashes and turned them without batting an eye. He ran the point of his blade into Rodney’s left shoulder. And Rodney could not reach him, no matter how he tried.
Then one of the marines fired at point-blank range. The bullet slammed into Red Rodney’s chest. Blood filled his mouth. He knew it was a bad wound. Then he took another one, this time in the belly. He slumped to his knees.
“You don’t fight fair,” he choked out.
Through growing darkness, he saw William Radcliff nod. “Indeed not,” the merchant admiral replied. “I fight to win. Nothing less is worth fighting for.” A third musket bellowed, and Rodney knew no more.
William Radcliff eyed Ethel Radcliffe like a man eyeing a beautiful but poisonous snake. She’d already tried to knife him once. Now she was—he devoutly hoped—disarmed. “What am I to do with you?” he asked.
“You’d better kill me,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Christ knows I’ll kill you first chance I get.”
“I have no stomach for slaying children,” he said, “and we are kin, of sorts.”
“My shame, not yours,” Ethel said.
“If I send you to Stuart—”
“I will hunt you down,” the pirate’s daughter broke in.
She meant it. Whether she would mean it a few years from now was a different question. For the time being, though, she was as dangerous as a hogshead of gunpowder in a fire. “I have no quarrel with you,” William said. “Mine was with your father.”
“Well, I have one with you, for my father’s sake,” Ethel said. “Look to your life—more warning than a scorpion like you would give, Radcliff.” She somehow contrived to make him hear the missing e that separated his name, and his kind, from hers.
William thought he would laugh at a death threat from a child. At such a threat from most children, he would have. From Red Rodney Radcliffe’s daughter? No. She’d called him a scorpion. To him, she seemed to have all her father’s venom in a small, innocent-looking exterior. A strawberry-blond coral snake, he thought uneasily.
Trying to calm her, he said, “We’ve been merciful where we could. Ordinary pirates, men of no rank, who yielded to us may go free. Many of them will make good enough honest sailors. Nothing will happen to you, nor to…. Is that your mother?”
“Who? Jenny?” Ethel Radcliffe laughed in his face. “Jesus, no! Just one of my father’s doxies. He had enough of ’em.” She sounded as proud of Red Rodney as one of his men might have.
“Indeed,” William said stiffly. Where Ethel spat defiance, Jenny had offered anything she had to give to keep from meeting the gibbet. And she had a lot, as he’d found out to his pleasure and perhaps even to hers. He’d never intended hanging her, but she didn’t need to know that. What Tamsin, back in Stuart, didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her a bit. William made himself return to the business at hand. “What shall I do with you?” he asked Ethel again.
“I told you once what I aim to do. If you don’t care to listen, it’s your funeral.” She punned with vicious relish. She would probably kill the same way. It had to run in the blood.
He made up his mind. “I will send you to New Hastings,” he said. The old town was far enough from Stuart to leave him feeling safe. “You may learn a trade there, or pursue such education as fits your pleasure and abilities. And I will dower you, richly enough to let you marry and enjoy the blessings of domestic felicity.” Or as many of them as a hellcat can enjoy, at any rate.
Ethel Radcliffe looked him in the eye. She didn’t spit in his face, but he thought she wanted to. “Salve your conscience all you please, old man. I’ll kill you anyhow.”
He had her taken away then. She went peaceably enough. He wasn’t going to worry about her any more. He told himself he wasn’t, anyhow.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have other things to worry about. Elijah Walton wanted to place all of Avalon—indeed, the whole west coast of Atlantis from Avalon northwards—under the direct rule of the King of England. “He provided the wherewithal by which it was won,” he said.
“Piet Kieft will be surprised to hear it,” William remarked. “So will the House of Orange. And so am I. Did my armed merchantmen do nothing here? Did my backwoodsmen not take this town with the Royal Marines?”
“They made their contributions,” Walton said with a grace both easy and, Radcliff reckoned, false. “But truly, what difference does it make unless you are a damned Dutchman? His Majesty already rules the Atlantean settlements. This would but extend that rule.”
“It would not, for we have our longstanding rights and privileges to guard against tyranny and misrule,” William said. “Land ruled straight from London would not.”
“Say you that his Majesty is a tyrant?” Walton no doubt thought he sounded dangerous, but he’d had little to do with Ethel Radcliffe.
“I said nothing of the sort, sir, and will style you liar and knave should you publish it
abroad that I did,” William replied. “But king follows king as autumn follows summer. Who knows what the next reign may bring, or the one after that?”
Elijah Walton waved his words away. “You quarrel over the shadow of an ass.”
“I think not,” William Radcliff said. “Nor will the English settlements here. As for the French and the Spaniards here in this western land…”
“One more reason for the Crown to rule here: to protect you from them,” Walton said.
William laughed in the Englishman’s face, as Ethel had laughed in his. “As the Crown warded off the corsairs?” he inquired.
Walton reddened. “You mistrust the spirit in which this proposal is offered.”
“By God, sir, I do indeed,” Radcliff said. “And I tell you again, I am not the only one who will. If you wish to see insurrection against the Crown flare all through English Atlantis, you have but to persist in your mad policy.”
“You jest,” Walton said. “You bluff.”
“I am willing—I am even glad—to have the king rule me…from a safe distance, both in travel and in law,” William said. “Were his rule more intimate, it would prove less congenial. I am not alone in this sentiment, nor anywhere close to it. Heed me or not, as you like. I have told you the truth.” His warning was at least as determined as Ethel’s had been.
“His Majesty will not be pleased,” Elijah Walton warned. Radcliff only shrugged. And he carried the day. No one can stop the Radcliffs when they set their mind to something, he thought, and then, remembering Red Rodney’s daughter, he rather wished he hadn’t.
PART THREE
Nouveau Redon
XVI
Victor Radcliff squelched through muck. Englishmen weren’t supposed to come this far south in Atlantis. Radcliff thought he must have passed the French settlements and entered Spanish territory. At the coast, it would be. There, telling who lorded it over a piece of ground was easy enough. Everyone’s settlements faded toward nothingness the farther into the interior a man went.
New Hastings had been settled three hundred years before, but that was almost as true up there as it was anywhere else in Atlantis. People who liked exploring for its own sake were thinner on the ground here than they might have been. A lot of them went on to Terranova, beyond the Hesperian Gulf. A broader land, it offered that kind of man more scope.
But you could find something new here if you worked at it. Plenty of Englishmen crossed the Green Ridge Mountains to travel from New Hastings and Hanover (formerly Stuart) to Avalon, following a route pioneered by Richard Radcliffe when Atlantis was a strange new world. Some of them turned away from that route and founded little villages in the hinterland. No one knew how many such villages there were. A lot of the people who lived in them wanted nothing to do with the outside world, and kept to themselves.
Or you could range farther afield, as Victor was doing. So many things here in the south seemed strange to an Atlantean who’d grown up near New Hastings. The weather was a good place to start; it reminded him of a steam bath. New Hastings could get weather like that. So could Hanover. Down here, the news came when it wasn’t beastly hot and beastly muggy.
With the different weather went different plants. The theme was the same as it was all over Atlantis: conifers and what the Atlanteans called barrel trees and ferns. But instead of the pines and towering redwoods near New Hastings, instead of the firs and spruces north of Hanover that made such splendid masts, here most of the conifers were cypresses growing on knees half lifted out of the swamps. The rest, on higher ground, were scrubby pines different from the ones farther north. There were more varieties of barrel tree, too; both Frenchmen and Spaniards cooked up a formidable spirit from the sap inside some of them. And the ferns grew in riotous profusion wherever there was shadow and moisture—which is to say, almost everywhere. Victor had seen them sprouting from between the bricks of country homes. In every shade of green, in every size from smaller than his hand to twice as tall as he was, they formed the forest’s understory.
Something almost under Victor’s boot said, “Freep!” and jumped into the water with a splash. He froze for a moment: he hadn’t seen it till it moved and croaked. Only a frog, he thought. Down here, though, only wasn’t necessarily so. Some of the frogs here had bodies twice the size of a man’s fist. They ate anything that wasn’t big enough to eat them.
Others were of more ordinary size, but colored black streaked with vivid scarlet or gold or turquoise. Nothing ate them—not more than once, anyhow. They were poisonous. It was almost as if their colorful hides warned the world to leave them alone.
A flapjack turtle peered at Victor from the swamp. All he could see of it were its pointy-nosed head and snaky neck. Flapjack turtles made better eating than the frogs. But they could fight back. One that size could bite off a man’s finger with no trouble at all.
A lizard skittered away into some ferns. Another one, larger, eyed Victor from a cypress branch well out of his reach. Both of them were harmless. Some of the lizards down here, though, grew longer than a man was tall—and those were the ones that lived on land. It said nothing about the sawbacked monsters that haunted streams. The Spaniards called them all dragons even if they didn’t breathe fire. The name seemed fair enough to Victor. They were formidable beasts, with formidable teeth and claws. They couldn’t flourish up in the English regions of Atlantis; the winters were too cold. Victor didn’t miss them a bit.
When up in New Hastings, he also didn’t miss the snakes big enough to coil round these lizards, suffocate them, and swallow them. He kept a wary eye on the fern thickets through which he pushed. A snake big enough to kill and eat a dragon was big enough to kill and eat him, too.
They also had flying snakes down here, and you didn’t have to get into the barrel-tree juice to see them. Victor supposed they didn’t really fly, but the name had stuck. They spread themselves flat and glided from one branch to another or from a branch down to the ground either to escape from becoming something else’s dinner or to catch their own. Three or four different kinds had learned the trick; one was venomous, but the rest weren’t.
Victor’s nostrils suddenly twitched. He stopped in his tracks. His right hand fell to the stock of one of the flintlock pistols he carried on his belt. He smelled smoke. Smoke meant men, and men, even more than dragons or flying snakes, meant trouble.
Men could be doing any number of unsavory things. They could be backwoodsmen from English-speaking Atlantis like him, down to see what the Breton-and Basque-and French-and Spanish-speaking settlers were up to. They might come from any of the groups that didn’t speak English, and they might be spying on any of the others—or even on their own. They might be settlers who’d moved deep into the swamps because they wanted nothing to do with their own lords. They might be French or Spanish soldiers, coming after settlers who’d moved deep into the swamps.
Or they might be runaway slaves: Negroes or copperskinned Terranovan natives. New Hastings had a few slaves, and big, rich Hanover more than a few. Most of the blacks and Terranovans up there were domestics—cooks and maids, coachmen and body servants. Rich merchants owned them for the sake of swank, and treated them as they would have treated servants of a lighter hue. Most blacks and copperskins in English Atlantis were freemen and-women.
Things were different here in the south. Down here, slaves worked in the fields, and they worked hard. The plantations that raised indigo and cotton, rice and sugar cane, pipeweed and peanuts, couldn’t have functioned without them. Getting the most labor from slaves and giving them as little as was necessary to keep them working and to keep them from rising up was an art in these settlements.
It wasn’t an art the Terranovans and Africans appreciated. They took off whenever they saw the chance. Better to scratch out a free living in the swamps, they thought, than to live on their masters’ dubious bounty. And if they could get up to the English-speaking settlements, they would probably stay free. Litigation between settlements from one kingd
om and those from another could go on for years—or it could move a little slower than that.
Plantation owners and overseers hunted slaves with hounds and with guns and sometimes even with fist-trained eagles. Runaways fought back with mantraps and anything else their ingenuity could devise. Some of them—the Terranovans especially—were good bowmen. Victor Radcliff knew the first English settlers in Atlantis had been formidable archers. That was three centuries gone by, though. These days, any white who wanted to shoot something did it with a gun.
Victor thought about giving the campfire or whatever it was a wide berth and going on his way. Regretfully, he shook his head. He couldn’t be sure he’d be able just to go on his way. If he knew those strangers were out there in the swamp, one of them was liable to know he was here, too. All the undergrowth was made for snipers and bushwhackers. Maybe somebody was drawing a bead on him right now….
When you had a thought like that, your first instinct was to duck. If you had any brains, you followed that instinct, too. It might save you. Victor pulled in his head like one of those flapjack turtles. He ducked down so the ferns all around did a better job of hiding him. Then he crawled away.
Maybe he was crawling away from nothing. He didn’t know for sure. He didn’t mind making a fool of himself in front of turtles and frogs and oil thrushes and parrots. In fact, he ended up making a fool of himself in front of a mouse. It twitched its whiskers and vanished under a drooping frond a couple of inches above the ground.
“Damned things are everywhere,” Victor muttered to himself. There hadn’t been a mouse or a rat or a dog or a cat in Atlantis before settlers started coming. Now you found them even in the wilderness.
By contrast, honkers had grown scarce, especially in long-settled districts. Before long, they might all be gone. Victor shrugged. That wasn’t his worry.
He sniffed again, then crawled toward the fire. Follow your nose, he thought. Well, what else could he do when he couldn’t see the campfire or hear the people who gathered around it?
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