“Holy God!” someone bawled in French. “The general’s down!”
I got Montcalm-Gozon? Radcliff thought dazedly. “We take surrenders!” he shouted, also in French. The enemy soldiers started throwing down their muskets and throwing up their hands.
XXIV
They were breaking. Finally, after a running fight that had gone on all through the day, the English settlers in front of Roland Kersauzon’s men had had as much as they could take. They’d managed to get across a creek running east to the ocean, and were still defending the fords, but Roland was sure his army could force a crossing.
He looked west, toward the Green Ridge Mountains. They were barely a smudge on the horizon, but, as usual, clouds piled high above them. The sun was setting in blood as it sank into those clouds. “Can we get over this miserable stream once night falls?” Roland asked his lieutenants.
They looked at one another. Nobody spoke right away. At last, one of the junior officers said, “I’m afraid I don’t know where the shallow stretches are.” Several other men nodded, as if he’d said what they were thinking.
“Nom d’un nom,” Roland muttered. He dismissed the lieutenants and summoned sergeants and corporals. They made an older, more raffish group than the one he’d sent away. He put the same question to them.
“I can find a ford,” a weathered sergeant said confidently. “I used to run traps up here. I know what’s what.”
He’d poached, in other words, since this was English territory. Roland grinned. “Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. As soon as it’s nice and dark, we’ll get moving….”
But the English Atlanteans knew where the fords were, too. They started bonfires on their side of the creek at each one of them, to make sure Roland’s men couldn’t catch them unawares. Roland took the sergeant aside. “I know what you’re going to ask me,” the trapper said: “Did they miss any?”
“You’re right—that’s what I’m going to ask you,” Roland agreed. “Did they?”
“No, damn them,” the sergeant said. “Well, if you want to go five miles west, there’s sort of a ford they may not have covered. I can’t tell about that one from where we are now.”
Reluctantly, Kersauzon shook his head. “We’d get scattered all over the landscape if we tried it. And there’s no promise Radcliff’s men don’t have a fire burning at that ford, too, is there?”
“Monsieur, the only promise is, we’re going to die sooner or later,” the sergeant answered. “I want it to be later, in the arms of a beautiful woman. If her husband shoots me, even that’s not so bad. But I know you don’t always get what you want, not in this life you don’t.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth? Her husband, eh?” Kersauzon shook his head. The sergeant grinned and winked and nudged him. In spite of himself, Roland laughed—for a moment. But the smile slid from his lips as he went on, “We’ll have to pay more to cross that creek come morning.”
The uncouth, backwoodsy French Atlantean shrugged a shrug a Paris boulevardier might have envied. “Every business has its costs,” he said. “Since we aren’t going to go tonight, shouldn’t we grab what rest we can?”
“An excellent idea,” Roland said briskly.
Even when he wrapped himself in his blanket, sleep didn’t want to come. He knew he was keyed up. That accounted for some of his trouble—some, but not all. The English Atlanteans on the north side of the stream were godawful noisy. Raucous snatches of marching songs floated through the air. So did the sounds of tramping feet, as if large numbers of soldiers were on the march.
For a little while, Roland worried, there under that ratty, tattered blanket. Then he chuckled. Trying to bluff him, were they? Did they think he would believe they’d been reinforced, and hold off on account of that? If they did, they were making a bad mistake. Some of them were making their very last mistake. Chuckling once more, he slid headlong into sleep.
That veteran sergeant shook him awake. The earliest traces of morning twilight grayed the eastern horizon. “Time for the dance already?” Roland asked around a yawn.
“I think so.” The sergeant jerked a thumb toward the north, across the creek. “But those noisy baboons keep tripping over their own clodhoppers.”
“They want us to think every Englishman in Atlantis is hiding among those trees,” Kersauzon said scornfully. “Well, I don’t care what they want. I am not a four-year-old, to be fooled by such tricks. We’ll get our men fed, we’ll get them across the stream, and we’ll get back together with Marquis Montcalm-Gozon.”
Breakfast was less than he wished it were: stale hardtack and gamy sausage. But a little ballast in the belly was better than none. He took no more than any of his soldiers. As soon as the men were fed, he formed them in long columns, one in front of each ford. The troops at the head of each column would suffer. Not all of them would fall, though, as they charged through the waist-deep water. And they would drive the English Atlanteans before them once they got across.
Ferns rustled and quivered in the woods on the far side of the creek. Drums began to pound. Hearing those drums made the hair at the nape of Roland’s neck quiver. “No,” he whispered hoarsely. “It’s not possible.”
But it was. It was not only possible, it was true. Greencoats emerged from the greenery and formed up opposite his own men. There were more of them than he would have expected to find in a rear-guard detachment. That made one nasty surprise. Things got worse. As the drums continued to bray, redcoats broke cover and took their places beside the English Atlanteans. Their sergeants bellowed and swore till their alignment was perfect.
“What are those salauds doing here?” a soldier said. Maybe the question was meant for Roland, maybe for an uncaring God.
Roland feared he knew the answer. Only one seemed likely: somehow, Montcalm-Gozon’s French regulars had come to grief. The English had broken the siege of Freetown, and now they intended to break the French settlers, too.
“Monsieur, should we not withdraw?” a lieutenant asked urgently. “There are a devil of a lot of Englishmen on the other side of the stream.”
“Yes, there are.” Roland heard the bleakness in his own voice. “And they know where the fords are as well as we do. If we pull back, what will they do next, eh?”
The junior officer’s mouth twisted. He didn’t have to be Elijah the prophet to foretell the future here. “They’ll come after us.”
“Too right they will.” Kersauzon couldn’t even tell his men to give the foe a volley. Oh, he could, but it wouldn’t do much good. In his infinite wisdom, he’d ordered his force into an assault formation. Only the few soldiers at the head of each column could open fire. Whereas the English…
No sooner had Roland realized the English could open fire when and as they pleased than they did. The green-coated settlers simply started shooting as they saw fit. The English regulars delivered a volley under the direction of their officers and sergeants, then methodically reloaded for another one.
And Roland’s men lurched back. Not only could they not reply effectively, but they were so bunched up that not even smoothbore muskets could miss. Some of them fell. Others—the ones who could—reeled away from the southern bank of the stream.
Crash! That second volley tore through the French settlers. They broke, running for any cover they could find. Roland was surprised to find himself still imperforate. He yelled himself hoarse, trying to stem the rout. He might as well have saved his breath, because none of that yelling did any good at all.
Victor Radcliff rode across Stamford Creek. Bodies lay on the far bank. Other French settlers, wounded but not dead, stretched imploring hands out toward him. He went on past them. Somebody on his side would take care of them sooner or later. He wasn’t sure just how—maybe drag them off to the surgeons, maybe knock them over the head. If none of the wounded enemies pulled a pistol or tried anything else foolish, odds were most of them would survive.
The English lieutenant-colonel rode beside him. The young office
r’s face radiated enthusiasm. “By God, Major, I do believe we’ve really done it this time! We’ve broken them!” He waved happily. “And it’s mostly because your men held the French regulars in place until we could come down on them from behind. Well done!”
“Much obliged, sir,” Victor replied. “And much obliged to you for coming down on them when you did. We couldn’t have held much longer. They would have broken through us in another hour.”
“It was a bit of a near-run thing, wasn’t it?” the lieutenant-colonel said. “No one knew who’d be the heroes and who the goats till it all played out, eh?” Just for a moment, his grin slipped. “Pity about Brigadier Endicott, though.”
“Yes, sir,” Victor agreed politely. Brigadier Daniel Endicott had commanded the English regulars who’d landed in Freetown and given the force there strength enough to break the French siege. He’d had the bad luck—certainly for him—to put his face in front of a musket ball a few days earlier. Not ten minutes afterwards, his second-in-command got shot in the leg. That left the young lieutenant-colonel the senior English officer able to serve in the field.
None of which broke Victor’s heart. Endicott had looked to be even more of a book soldier than the late Major General Braddock, and Colonel Harcourt was no improvement. The lieutenant-colonel, by contrast, had begun to understand that war in Atlantis wasn’t the same as war on the manicured fields of Europe. Coming right out and saying so seemed the opposite of useful.
Musketeers fired from the woods ahead. Sudden puffs of smoke marked their positions—or where they’d fired from, anyhow. Anybody with a grain of sense would go somewhere else to reload and shoot again.
Not far from Victor, an English Atlantean swore, clutched his calf, and sat down in the dirt. He drew a knife and cut at his hose to get cloth for a bandage. “I’m out of the fight for a while,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You’ll do fine. The surgeons will fix you up in nothing flat.” Victor wondered how big a liar he was.
The English lieutenant-colonel shouted orders. Redcoats advanced on the wood. A few more shots came from it. One or two English regulars fell. The rest went on in among the trees. No doubt some French Atlanteans escaped from the southern edge of the forest. But when the redcoats emerged, several of them held up their bayonets to show the blood on them.
“Good show,” the lieutenant-colonel said. “We’ve dealt with the one bunch—now all we have to do is finish rounding up the other, and the war here is as good as over. Then we see where it all ends up at the peace table.”
That brought Victor Radcliff up short. To him, Atlantis was the world. But the English officer reminded him things didn’t work that way. England and France and their allies were also fighting in Europe, on the Terranovan mainland, and in India. A stroke of the pen, a swap of this settlement for that, could annul everything won here with blood and bullets.
“They wouldn’t trade away everything we’ve done…would they?” Those last two hesitant words showed that Victor knew they might.
“It’s not up to me, Major. Nor is it up to you,” the lieutenant-colonel replied. “The diplomats make those choices. Our task here is to ensure that they can bargain from a position of strength.”
More redcoats came out of the pine woods. They’d taken a couple of prisoners. They prodded the disgruntled French settlers along with their bayoneted muskets. One of the captives had a hole in his breeches and was bleeding, but not too badly. Victor guessed his prodding had been more forceful than he would have liked. The English Atlantean wondered what the prisoner had done to deserve it. Then he wondered if the man had done anything. The fellow likely counted himself lucky to be alive, even if he was injured. Victorious troops were supposed to take prisoners, yes. But in battle all kinds of things that were supposed to happen didn’t, and just as many things that weren’t supposed to did.
“We’ve smashed up Montcalm-Gozon’s regulars,” Victor said. “If we can do the same to Kersauzon’s settlers, we’ll be in about the strongest position we can—in Atlantis, anyhow. I hear the rest of the war is going pretty well.”
“I hear the same,” the lieutenant-colonel said. “By what the regulars newly come to Freetown tell me, we’ve smashed the French and their native nabobs in India.”
“That’s good news,” Victor said.
“It is indeed. They put up a better fight than we thought they could: I know that for a fact,” the English officer said. “And as for the remnants of the French forces here…Well, we should be able to settle them without too much trouble, I expect.” He might have been the picture of confidence.
“Sir,” Victor Radcliff said gently, “I do want to remind you that the late General Braddock said the same thing.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” The Englishman’s tone was indulgent. “But, whilst I don’t care to speak ill of the dead, General Braddock committed some serious tactical blunders. I hope we can avoid those.”
“Yes, sir.” Major Radcliff nodded. “So do I.”
Had the English pressed their pursuit harder, they might have bagged all the retreating French settlers. Roland Kersauzon was only too bitterly aware of that. Even as things were, he had to fight a couple of sharp rear-guard actions. He sacrificed men he couldn’t afford to lose to keep from losing everybody. There were bad bargains, and then there were worse ones.
“We’ll have a better chance inside French Atlantis,” he said again and again, trying to hearten the men he had left and trying to keep retreat from turning to rout. “If we have to, we can stand siege at Nouveau Redon. I’d like to see the damned Englishmen try to take it.”
“I wouldn’t,” someone behind him said. Roland’s head whipped around. He wanted to know who sounded so hopeless. But all the men close by tramped along with their heads down. None of them seemed ready to single out the fellow who’d spoken what probably lurked in all their minds.
It lurked in Roland’s mind, too, however much he wished it didn’t. No matter how he tried to cheer up his troops, his own spirits were at low ebb. How could it be otherwise? Discovering that the English settlers had escaped him in Atlantis was bad. Discovering that the settlers and redcoats together had put paid to Montcalm-Gozon’s proud regulars wasn’t just bad. It was catastrophic. He’d beaten redcoats once, when they obligingly marched into his trap. Trying to cross the creek to attack Victor Radcliff’s men, he’d stumbled into theirs.
Maybe we should see what kind of terms we can get. Had anyone else suggested that, Roland Kersauzon would have been furious. But he could make the suggestion to himself: he knew he wouldn’t follow through on it.
“They’re going to try to take away everything we’ve got left,” a sergeant said with weary cynicism.
Roland nodded. “That’s right—they will. That’s how greedy they are, the English cochons. So we won’t let them, eh? If you bother a turtle, what does it do? It pulls back into its shell. And good luck making it come out again.”
“You aim to pull us back into our shell, Monsieur?” the underofficer asked.
“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” Kersauzon replied. A lot of commanders might have said that for form’s sake. He meant it. But the sergeant only shook his head. Roland went on. “The longer we hold out, the better the chance something good will happen somewhere else. If it does…”
“We’re saved,” the sergeant said when he paused.
He nodded again, though what went through his mind was, Well, we may be saved, anyhow. If the English seized all of French Atlantis but for Nouveau Redon, things were unlikely to go back to the status quo ante bellum no matter how long a siege the town withstood. And the enemy might do just that—there wasn’t much resistance except for his settler army.
That raised another question: how long could the fortress hold out? Roland didn’t know the exact answer, not in days. But he knew the form the answer would take. Nouveau Redon would stay free as long as the food held out and as long as there was no treachery. Munitions were not an
issue; the fortress had plenty. A spring near the center of town ensured the fortress wouldn’t run short of water.
The food could last a very long time, especially if his army expelled civilians so it fed no useless mouths. Roland had overseen the victualing of Nouveau Redon himself. Hardtack and sauerkraut and smoked meat and dried fruit were uninspiring; anyone who said anything else was a damned liar. They could keep body and soul together a long time, though.
Treachery…Roland gnawed on the inside of his lower lip. The longer the siege went on, the more he’d have to worry about it. If someone decided relief was hopeless but thought he might cut a deal with the army investing the fortress…If that happened, Nouveau Redon was in danger.
As Roland rode south—back toward the border between English and French Atlantis—one other possibility occurred to him. If the plague broke out inside the fortress, he might have to surrender whether he wanted to or not. Disease was a roll of the dice. If the pestilence or dysentery or typhus struck the invaders, they would have to give up the siege.
“They deserve a pestilence, don’t they, God?” He aimed what was half a prayer, half a suggestion toward the sky. Maybe God would listen; maybe He wouldn’t. Any which way, Roland figured he’d made the effort.
Had the bridges over the Erdre been down, he probably wouldn’t have been able to get back to Nouveau Redon to stand siege. But they still stood. Roland and his men had come north over them…come north over them more than once, in fact. After crossing back into French Atlantis, he ordered the spans fired. He didn’t like that, but saw no other choice. Right now, slowing the enemy down was almost as good as beating him.
Almost. Roland and his survivors kept on retreating.
Victor Radcliff watched smoke rise up over the Stour. “They’re burning their bridges behind them,” he said: for once, literal truth and no cliché.
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