He wasn’t even likely to worry about it very long. A couple of muskets boomed up ahead. A high, shrill shout rose: “Les Anglais!”
The farm the French settlers fought to hold wouldn’t have been worth burning if they hadn’t defended it. But the families and friends who did their best to drive away the marauders couldn’t have understood that. They battled with grim determination from farmhouses and outbuildings, and would neither retreat nor give up.
“Cochons!” one of them yelled from a barn. “This is our patrimony! You will not take it from us!”
No matter how fierce and stubborn they were, they had about as much chance of beating Radcliff’s men as a five-year-old sent into the ring against a champion prizefighter. A rifleman picked off the French farmers one after another from a furlong away. Less accurate musket fire made them keep their heads down. Raiders worked their way forward and torched building after building.
Fire drove out some of the French settlers. Others grimly died in the flames. The defenders wounded a handful of men. They delayed the English advance by less than an hour. Smelling the stink of charred flesh, Victor shook his head. “Not worth it,” he said. “Brave, but not worth it.”
“Run is better,” Blaise agreed. “Things just…things.” He gestured. “Run. Get more things when more time go.”
“Later.” Victor gave him another new word. He also sent him a quizzical look. “So running is better, eh? You’re not a brave man, eh? You could have fooled me.”
“Brave when I have to. Brave if I have to,” the Negro replied. “If I no have to, I run. Brave again later, maybe.” His sly smile said he was showing off the new vocabulary on purpose.
“A redcoat or one of the French regulars would call you a coward for talk like that,” Victor Radcliff said.
Blaise only shrugged. “Don’t care. Live coward fix things. Dead brave fool…” He pointed toward the burning houses and outbuildings.
“Indeed,” Victor said. Blaise raised a questioning eyebrow. “I should say so!” Victor exclaimed. Blaise nodded—he got that. Victor fought to hide a grin. The Negro sergeant was too dark and too lean to make a proper Falstaff himself, but he would have enjoyed drinking with him. They were both a particular kind of practical man.
Victor hadn’t tried talking with Blaise about Falstaff, and not just because of the clown’s views about honor. He would have had to quote Shakespeare to have it make sense to Blaise, and even then it wouldn’t have made sense to him. Shakespeare had written only two lifetimes earlier, but English wasn’t the same now as it had been then.
“In Africa,” Victor said suddenly, “when old men talk about how their grandfathers talked and about how their grandsons talk, do they notice any difference?”
After some thought, Blaise answered, “They say young boys have not enough—” He frowned, looking for a word. “Like slave for master,” he offered.
“Respect,” Radcliff suggested.
“Thank you, sir. Respect. Yes. They say young boys have not respect for old, like in their day.”
Old men had been saying things like that since Adam started complaining about Cain and Abel. It wasn’t what Victor meant. “Do they say the words now are different from the way they were in the old days?”
“I no hear that. I never hear that.” Blaise shook his head.
“Oh, well.” Victor shrugged. He wondered how much French had changed since Shakespeare’s day. That might be an interesting question to ask Roland Kersauzon…if the two of them weren’t otherwise occupied trying to blow each other’s heads off.
Right now, that seemed unlikely.
Roland swept out his right arm. “There is another band of the accursed English brigands. Hunt them down!”
Baying like wolves, his soldiers swarmed after the fleeing men from the English settlements. (The phrase occurred to Roland even though he’d never seen or heard a wolf. So many of the stories that came from France featured them. He could picture them plainly: bigger than dogs, shaped like foxes, but gray and ferocious.)
A few of the men who’d come south to disrupt the French army’s supply lines still showed fight. Most of them, though, wanted no more than to get away with their lives. They’d had a high old time shooting teamsters and plundering wagons. They hadn’t come down here to fight when the numbers weren’t all in their favor. But when Kersauzon detached his settlers from Montcalm-Gozon’s regulars, they had no trouble overwhelming the company or so of men kicking up trouble along the coast.
Muskets bellowed. Puffs of gray smoke marked where shooters stood. That familiar, sulfurous smell made Roland smile. But he wished gunpowder didn’t so clearly point out every man who fired. If anyone ever devised a powder that didn’t smoke, he would win a great advantage in war.
In the meantime, his men and the enemy used what they had. The English settlers fought from cover instead of standing in a neat line till they got shot down. That didn’t change the result, but did make things take longer. Roland’s men were settlers, too. They advanced by little skittering rushes. Some of them fired to keep the English busy while the others moved up.
At close quarters, it came to bayonets and swords and hatchets and knives and fists and teeth. Only a handful of English settlers surrendered. Cursed raiders they might be, but they had courage.
“You aren’t supposed to be here, you damned nuisance,” a wounded prisoner told Kersauzon.
“That is the best place to be, where you are not supposed to,” the French commander replied. “Your friends thought so, oui?”
“Well, what if we did?” the prisoner said. “Jesus, this leg hurts. Nobody ever went and shot me before.”
“Quelle dommage,” Roland said, as if he meant it.
“What will you do now?” the captive asked.
“Go on and give your other band of raiders, the larger one, the same kind of surprise we just gave you, if God grants that that be possible,” Roland answered frankly. Why not? The prisoner wasn’t going to escape, steal a horse, and gallop off to tell Victor Radcliff an army was coming after him. Such things happened in romances, but not in life.
“What will you do with me?” the man inquired. Maybe he’d meant that all along.
“Give you to the surgeons, of course,” Kersauzon said. “We are not barbarians, to torment you for the sport of it. We are French. You are English. We are all civilized men, is it not so?”
“Boy, I hope it is,” the enemy muttered. Apprehensively, he went on. “What do you think the surgeons will do?”
“Remove the musket ball, unless they decide it is better left alone. This happens sometimes, but not often.”
“Remove it? Easy for you to say. It’s not your leg. Will they give me whiskey to drink and a bullet to bite on?”
“We use rum and a leather strap,” Roland said.
“Rum will do,” the English settler said eagerly. He didn’t compare the effectiveness of the bullet and the strap.
“Rum you shall have,” Kersauzon promised. He gestured to the prisoner’s guards. “Take him away.”
Away the man went. Wounded French settlers were already howling under the surgeons’ ministrations. Roland couldn’t distinguish the prisoner’s cries of torment from those of his own troops. Wounded men all made the same noises.
Roland wished he wouldn’t have had to waste time dealing with the seaborne raiders. They were only a nuisance…though Montcalm-Gozon, whose supply of victuals they’d interrupted, probably would have expressed a different view. Roland didn’t care about the fancy French nobleman’s opinions here. Neither did the men who followed him. They knew too well what Victor Radcliff’s bandits were doing to the property and persons of people who mattered to them. They aimed to stop the bandits as soon as they could.
He wondered whether, had he loosed his men as raiders, they could have wreaked as much havoc on the English settlements as the enemy was doing down here. Regretfully, he decided it was unlikely. Up in English-held territory, farms were smaller, villages
were more common, and people lived closer to one another. The English had a better chance of mustering a scratch force that could slow up raiders—and raiders who had to slow up were raiders in trouble.
None of the anguished messages coming out of the southwest made him think the English settlers had had to slow down much. If they wanted to, they could probably go all the way down into the subtropical settlements that belonged to the King of Spain.
Kersauzon blinked. If the English did invade the Spanish settlements, what should he do about it? Spain and France were allied against England in the European war. They were allies here, too—in theory. But Roland would have been most affronted—which was putting it mildly—had Spanish soldiers entered the French settlements. No doubt the Spanish authorities (assuming they woke up from their long, long siestas) would be just as unhappy about French settlers fighting on their steaming soil.
And yet the Spaniards were probably even thinner on the ground than the French. Victor Radcliff brigands could do a lot of damage down there. Who would stop them? Anybody?
“A messenger!” Roland shouted. He had paper and ink and a quill with him at all times: the responsibility that went with command. He was already writing when a young horseman came up and waited expectantly.
“What do you need, Monsieur?” the rider asked.
“Take a letter to his Excellency, Don José Valverde, the governor-general of Spanish Atlantis, in Gernika. You also need to know what it says, in case it should be damaged. I am asking Don José for permission to follow the English raiders into his territory if they go that way. I have no designs against Spanish Atlantis: I aim only to destroy the raiders. Give me that back, if you would be so kind.”
After several tries, the messenger had it straight. Roland sealed the letter (sealing wax being another essential for a man of his position) and handed it to him. Sketching a salute, the youngster rode off to the south.
Gernika, Roland thought. He’d never been there himself. He didn’t want to deal with the Spaniards under these circumstances. What you wanted, though, and what you got…
XXI
Even the trees down here were strange. Some barrel trees dwarfed barrels—and men. Others had round trunks full of sweet sap. Victor Radcliff had already enjoyed the rumlike drink the French and especially the Spaniards brewed from it.
Conifers were different, too. In floral wreaths, cypress meant mourning. Here in southern Atlantis, cypresses just grew. Locals used the timber in their buildings, even if it wasn’t as good as pine or redwood. The farther south Victor and his men went, the more mossy beards hung from cypress branches.
And the more snakes lurked in the trees and in the undergrowth.
One of the raiders was bitten; he died in short order despite having the wound cauterized and being given all the rum he could drink to keep his heart strong.
Some of the snakes had rattles at the ends of their tails, like many of the venomous serpents Victor knew farther north. Again like those farther north, some shook their tails before striking but had no rattles to warn their victims. And some simply skulked and struck. Some were probably harmless, but after the death Victor’s followers weren’t inclined to take chances. If it slithered and they saw it, it died.
“Do they have poisonous snakes in Africa, too?” Radcliff asked Blaise.
“Oh, yes. Here, you don’t have—” The Negro used a word in his own language. He drew a picture of the kind of snake he had in mind in the dirt. He used a twig with a confidence a lot of sketch artists might have envied. That broad flare behind the head…
“That must be a cobra,” Victor said. “They also have them in India, I believe. People there tame them and teach them to dance to music.”
“You see this? You know it is so?” Blaise asked.
“Well…no,” Victor admitted.
“Then it is a lie, I bet.” Blaise sounded very sure of himself. He was willing—no, eager—to explain why, too: “Mess with these, uh, cobras, you have to be mad. Crazy. Cray-zee.” He liked the sound of that word.
“I won’t tell you you’re wrong,” Victor Radcliff said. “It seems crazy to me, too. But people do crazy things sometimes.”
“You cray-zee with cobra snakes, you are not cray-zee long.” Blaise spoke with great conviction. Radcliff suspected he knew what he was talking about. Anybody who spent too much time fooling around with venomous serpents of any kind was taking his life in his own hands—and its fangs.
His scouts reported that the French settlers were moving against his men from the northeast, as he’d suspected they might. They had more men than he did: he was sure of that. Since he didn’t think he could meet them on even terms, he saw only two choices. He could try to ambush them, or he could avoid meeting them at all.
Had they been the regulars from France, he would have tried an ambush. One had worked against Braddock’s redcoats; another might well work here. But not against other settlers. They knew the tricks of the trade as well as Victor’s men. Since this was their country, they probably knew them better.
Avoid, then. Down the tracks that led south toward the Spanish settlements he went. Those tracks were truly wretched. Most of the real roads in the French settlements ran from east to west, from the seacoast to the interior. The same was also true in the English settlements, but to a smaller degree. With far more people starting to crowd a similar amount of land, the northern settlements needed and had a real road network.
Now the English settlers plundered more thoroughly and didn’t burn till after they’d robbed. They’d eaten up the supplies they’d brought with them, and were living off the countryside. Radcliff had known that would happen. It worried him all the same.
“What do we do if they burn in front of us?” Blaise asked one hot, sweaty afternoon. It was early spring, but it felt like what would have been high summer in New Hastings or Hanover.
Blaise had unerringly put his finger on Victor’s greatest fear. “We starve,” the commander answered.
“Ah.” Maybe Blaise hadn’t expected anything that blunt. On the other hand, maybe he had. He showed only what he wanted to show.
The French settlers didn’t burn their own homes and plantations to keep Victor’s force from moving forward. Maybe they didn’t think of it. Or maybe they were simply less ruthless than Radcliff and his colored sergeant. If they were, he wanted to make them pay for it.
He discovered he’d left French Atlantis and entered Spanish Atlantis when the lordlet whose house he’d just burned cursed him in most impure Castilian—actually, in the hissing Andalusian dialect more commonly used here and in Terranova. Victor surprised the hidalgo by returning the uncompliments in the same language.
“Why do you do these things to me?” the Spaniard cried, looking disconsolately from the English settlers running off his livestock to his house going up in flames.
“Our kings are at war,” Victor answered with a shrug.
“You are one of the settlers from the north,” the Spaniard said. “I thought you had no king.”
“England has a king, just as Spain has a king,” Victor replied. “If the King of England wars against the King of Spain, that makes the two of us enemies.” The English settlements in Atlantis, Victor reflected, remembered their loyalty to King George only when England warred against France or Spain. The rest of the time, the settlers were more inclined to complain about how England didn’t want them making things on their own or trading with other realms instead of buying from the mother country.
None of that mattered a farthing to the Spaniard. He saw his property burning and being stolen. “You offered no resistance,” Radcliff told him. “We spare your life because you didn’t. You can rebuild. You can start over.”
The Spaniard bowed, which didn’t hide the hatred smoldering in his eyes. “I hope you do not put yourself out too much, Señor, with this generous favor you grant me,” he said. “If ever we meet again, maybe I will do the same for you—but it would not be wise to count on such a t
hing.”
“Then I won’t.” Victor touched a finger to the brim of his hat. “Hasta la vista, Señor, and we shall see who does what to whom if we should run across each other again.”
“Whoever sees the other man first will do it,” the Spaniard said, which struck Victor Radcliff as all too likely.
Roland Kersauzon had heard that Englishmen complained Frenchmen moved too slowly to suit them. He thought the English settlers were jittery fools; Frenchmen moved at just the proper pace, as anyone but a fool could see. But, to him, the Spaniards seemed to have inbred with the fist-sized snails that gnawed on ferns and barrel trees down here in the south. The snails were excellent with garlic butter. Their speed, however—and that of his Excellency, Don José Valverde, of Spanish Atlantis—left something to be desired.
“Why does he not answer?” Kersauzon grumbled to anyone who would listen—and to people who got sick of listening.
God only knew what horrors the English settlers were wreaking on Spanish Atlantis. Well, actually, that wasn’t quite true. Roland had a pretty good notion: the same kinds of horrors they’d inflicted on French Atlantis. And yet the Spaniards promised that, if he presumed to enter their territory without Don José’s leave, they would fight him as hard as they fought the English, or even harder.
He believed them. Such idiocy perfectly suited Spanish notions of honor. Were they doing what was advantageous to them? Such a thought never entered their heads. They were doing what a hidalgo ought to do, as they saw it. Past that, as best he could tell, they didn’t think at all.
He wished the Devil would bread Don José Valverde and fry him for a cutlet over the hottest fire in hell. Satan had to keep a special chamber or firepit in which to torment people who wouldn’t answer their mail.
Roland knew too well that he couldn’t linger too much longer hard by the border of Spanish Atlantis. Keeping his army fed wouldn’t be easy. And, pretty soon, malaria and bloody fluxes and maybe even the dreaded yellow jack would break out. A force the size of his needed to keep moving if it was to stay healthy, especially in this miserable climate.
Opening Atlantis Page 37
