The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “Very good of you, sir.” John Fleming sketched a salute. “If I may look at the bodies, since you make this offer . . .” A grimace got past the correct mask he’d worn. “I fear my older brother, Captain James Fleming, is among the fallen. Several men saw him go down in front of that damned stone fence you defended so stoutly.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow! My deepest sympathies! You should have spoken sooner!” Victor exclaimed. “May I give you brandy or rum? As with an amputation, they will dull the worst pain a bit.”

  “No, thank you. I can in good conscience transact military business with you, but, meaning no disrespect, I would rather not drink with you.”

  “I understand. I am sorry.” Victor raised his voice and waved. When a messenger came up, he said, “Fetch a torch and lend Lieutenant Fleming here every assistance in examining the English dead. He believes his brother lies among them. If he should prove correct, Captain Fleming’s body will go back through the lines with him along with General Howe’s and as many others as a wagon may hold.”

  “Yes, sir.” The messenger nodded to the English officer. “That’s mighty hard. You come with me. We’ll do what we can for you.”

  “Very well. I am . . . as grateful as one can be under the circumstances.” Lieutenant Fleming followed the messenger toward the redcoats’ tumbled corpses.

  “More he takes, more we don’t have to bury,” Blaise remarked.

  “I don’t think one wagonload will make much difference.” Victor paused. “But I must admit I won’t be on the business end of a shovel, either.”

  “Worth remembering,” Blaise said. No doubt he’d been on the business end of a shovel during his days as a slave. But slaves worked as slowly as their overseers would let them get away with. Free men had a different rhythm. Victor had used a shovel often enough on his farm, in building fieldworks, and in burying his children when they died too young.

  After a while, the wagon rattled off toward the east. Victor didn’t ask whether Lieutenant Fleming had found his brother. It might matter to the redcoat, but it didn’t to him. He did what he had to do next: without waiting for morning, he sent a messenger off to the Atlantean Assembly with word of the victory. He also recommended that the Assembly get the news to France as soon as it could. When the French learned the locals had beaten English regulars in a pitched battle, they might have a higher regard for this uprising. Then again, they might not. But the Atlanteans had to find out.

  “If Custis Cawthorne can’t talk King Louis into coming in on our side, nobody can,” Major Biddiscombe said when Victor told his officers’ council what he’d done.

  “Just so,” Victor said. Of course, given how badly the French had lost in their last fight with England, the painful possibility that no one could persuade them to try again was very real.

  “We ought to chase the redcoats all the way back to Cosquer,” Biddiscombe added. “We ought to take the place away from them again.”

  “If we can. If they have no fieldworks in place around it, which I confess to finding unlikely. If the Royal Navy does not lie close offshore,” Victor said. “I am anything but eager to face bombardment from big guns I cannot hope to answer. I had enough of that up in Weymouth, enough and to spare.”

  Habakkuk Biddiscombe looked discontented. He sounded more than discontented: “Nobody ever won a fight by reckoning up all the things that might go wrong before he started.”

  “Perhaps not,” Victor said. “But plenty of officers—the late General Howe being only the most recent example—have lost battles by failing to reckon up what might go wrong. I trust you take the point, sir?”

  Biddiscombe didn’t like it. No matter how intrepid he was, though, he wasn’t blindly intrepid. He could smell something if you rubbed his nose in it. Reluctantly, he nodded. “I think I do, General.”

  “Good.” As Victor had with the English lieutenant, he threw his own subordinate a sop: “I also trust you will pursue vigorously. The more English stragglers we scoop up, the more muskets and wagons and, God willing, cannon we capture, the better our cause will look: here and up in Honker’s Mill and, in due course, in France.”

  Blaise said, “It would seem strange, fighting on the same side as France after going against her in the last war.”

  “The redcoats were on our side last time,” Victor reminded him. “War and politics are like that. When Lieutenant Fleming came in to ask for Howe’s body, he gave me General Cornwallis’ compliments. Our old friend—and I did count him a friend—now commands the enemy. Could something like that not happen in Africa, or do your tribes never change alliances?”

  “I suppose it could,” Blaise said. “But I think you white men are more changeable than we.”

  “It could be so,” Victor said. “Still, you’ve also talked about the things we know how to do that your people don’t. Learning such things comes with being changeable, too. I think it comes from being changeable. Don’t you?”

  “I suppose it could,” Blaise said again.

  “Well, it’s an argument for another time, not for a council of war,” Victor said: he could see that some of his officers would have said the same thing if he hadn’t. Better to beat them to the punch. He went on, “The argument for this council is how best to exploit our victory—the victory that you won, gentlemen!”

  They raised three cheers. They’d chewed over too many narrow but undeniable defeats. Victory tasted so much better!

  XII

  Cosquer didn’t fall easily. Victor had hoped it might, but hadn’t really expected it to. He remembered how well Cornwallis, then a lieutenant-colonel, had fortified Freetown after General Braddock fell. The new English commander was no less diligent now, his engineers no less clever.

  And the redcoats in the works remained ready to fight. Maybe they weren’t quite so eager to face the Atlanteans in the open field as they had been. But they didn’t mind letting Victor’s soldiers come to them. Why should they, when they hoped to bloody the locals on the cheap?

  But Victor didn’t oblige them. Attacking fieldworks was a fool’s game, or a desperate man’s. He wasn’t desperate, and he hoped he wasn’t that kind of fool, anyhow.

  Even if he had been tempted to assault Cornwallis’ entrenchments, knowing Royal Navy frigates and ships of the line lay offshore would have made him think twice. Their firepower didn’t reach far inland, but within its reach he had nothing that could reply to it. Heavy guns on land sat in forts. They moved slowly, if they moved at all. Ships carried them faster than unencumbered men could march, as fast as cavalry scouts could ride.

  “Can we starve them out?” Blaise asked.

  Unhappily, Victor shook his head. “Not as long as they rule the sea. They can bring in food from other parts of Atlantis, or even all the way from England.”

  “What are we doing here, then?” Blaise asked, a much more than reasonable question.

  “Holding them in,” Victor answered. “They can’t do anything much as long as we pen them there.”

  Blaise grunted. “Neither can we.”

  “Yes, we can.” Victor said it again: “We can. They have to beat us, to make us quit fighting. All we have to do is show them they can’t do that. As long as we stay in the field, as long as we prove to them they can’t do whatever they please in Atlantis, they will lose. I’m not sure they understand that yet. I’m not sure how long they will need to understand it. But we have to keep fighting till they do, however long it takes.”

  The Negro grunted again, but on a different note. “Anyone who knows you knows how pigheaded you are—”

  Victor assumed a pained expression. “Stubborn, please. People you don’t like are pigheaded. Your friends are stubborn, or hold to their purpose.”

  “Stubborn, then,” Blaise said . . . after a pause to show he was thinking it over. “You are, yes, but can you keep your army stubborn?”

  He knew how to get to the bottom of things, all right. He always had. Victor said the only thing he could: “I aim to try
, anyhow.”

  He wondered whether Cornwallis would get reinforcements from farther north. If the English officer did, Victor feared he had a decent chance of breaking out of Cosquer. What would he do then? What could he do? Fight more battles like the ones the redcoats and Atlanteans had tried the year before? What would that prove? That the redcoats were better than the settlers in the open field if they didn’t get careless? It might not even prove that. The Atlanteans were improving with every fight they had. They might not match Cornwallis’ veterans yet, but they were getting close.

  Green-coated riflemen sniped at the English soldiers in the trenches. That wouldn’t decide anything; Victor knew it, and Cornwallis had to know it, too. But it did sting the redcoats, and they seemed to be without riflemen of their own to reply in kind. Maybe it could sting them into doing something foolish.

  Victor also had to keep his own men from doing something foolish. Habakkuk Biddiscombe wanted to storm Cosquer. “We can beat them, General!” the cavalry officer insisted. “By God, we can! And then everything below the Stour is ours for good!”

  “If I order an attack, we will make one,” Victor said. “Until I order one, we won’t. I don’t think we can succeed.”

  “I do!” Biddiscombe said.

  “When you wear a general’s sash, you may use your men as you can find best,” Victor said, as patiently as he could. “For now, though, the responsibility still rests on my shoulders—and there are times when I think Atlas had it easy holding up the heavens, believe me.”

  “There are times when I think . . .” The cavalry officer left it there, which was bound to be lucky for both of them.

  Then General Cornwallis solved the Atlanteans’ problem, withdrawing from his fieldworks. He did it with his usual skill. He left fires burning in the works all night long to fool the Atlanteans into thinking his men still occupied them. By the time the sun came up to show they had gone, they were already back in Cosquer.

  And they, and the rest of the redcoats with them, were climbing into boats and going out to the warships anchored offshore. It was as if Cornwallis were saying, Well, if you want Cosquer so much, here it is, and be damned to you.

  Victor did want Cosquer, but not at the price of bringing his soldiers under the Royal Navy’s guns. If the redcoats were pulling out, he’d let them go. He unlimbered his field guns and fired at them from long range. He probably knocked over a few of them, but they had to know, as he did, it was only more harassment. It didn’t change their evacuation a farthing’s worth.

  Once the English army had boarded the warships, sails blossomed on their masts. Slowly at first but then building momentum, the ships sailed off . . . toward the south.

  “Where do they think they’re going?” Habakkuk Biddiscombe sounded angry, as if he suspected Victor had been listening in on Cornwallis’ deliberations and hadn’t told him. “Do they think they can land in Spanish Atlantis and then come back up and go on with the war that way?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they do,” Victor answered. “Have you ever had anything to do with the dons?”

  “Not me.” The prospect seemed to affront the major. English and French Atlanteans both looked down their noses at the Spaniards farther south. Spain had a rich empire in Terranova, but her Atlantean dominions were an afterthought, and had been for many years. Most Spanish settlers here were men who’d failed or hadn’t dared try in the broader lands beyond the Hesperian Gulf. The dons also had a reputation for being uncommonly cruel to their slaves: one reason uprisings always bubbled just below the surface.

  “For my sins, I have,” Victor told Biddiscombe. “They are the touchiest human beings God ever made. If Cornwallis landed at Gernika, say, without their leave, they would drop all their private feuds—of which they have a great plenty, believe me—to do him all the harm they could.”

  “I’m sure he loses sleep over that.” Scorn filled Habakkuk Biddiscombe’s voice. Spain had, and had earned, an unenviable military reputation. The only reason England hadn’t seized Spanish Atlantis at the end of the last war was that she hadn’t thought it worth seizing.

  But Victor said, “Rile a Spaniard and he’ll try to kill you without caring for his own life. A Spanish army is nothing much. Spanish bushwhackers . . . It’s no accident that ‘guerrilla’ is a Spanish word.”

  Biddiscombe said a few Spanish words Victor hadn’t thought he knew. When he ran out of foreign incendiaries, he added, “You can bet Cornwallis feels the same way about them.”

  “No doubt,” Victor said. “But the question is how they feel about Cornwallis—and about whether he purposes landing there at all.”

  “Where else would he go? Down to the islands?” Biddiscombe answered his own question with a shake of the head. “Not likely! That’d take him clean out of the war. He has to head for Spanish Atlantis.”

  “No one has to do anything.” Victor spoke with great conviction. By the way Habakkuk Biddiscombe eyed him, he might suddenly have started spouting Blaise’s language.

  Cosquer greeted the incoming Atlantean army the same way it had probably greeted the incoming English army: with indifference. New Hastings was a trifle older, but Cosquer’s founder, François Kersauzon, had stumbled upon Atlantis even before the Radcliffes. People in Cosquer remembered, even if hardly anyone else in these modern times did. They looked down their noses at all latecomers.

  Some of them still spoke buzzing Breton instead of French or English. Victor didn’t think all the strange names he heard riding into Cosquer were compliments. As long as no one did more than mutter in a half-forgotten tongue, he didn’t care.

  He went on to the quays, hoping some longshoreman or tapman or even doxy had heard where Cornwallis planned to sail. No one who might have seemed to want to tell an English Atlantean, though. The tapmen and doxies were willing enough to take his men’s silver. As for the longshoremen . . .

  “How soon will you get out of here?” asked one of the few who condescended to speak to Victor at all.

  “When we’re ready,” Victor said. “How soon will you learn some manners?”

  “When I’m ready,” the local answered cheekily. “Don’t hold your breath—manners are for friends.”

  “I am not your enemy. You should be glad of that,” Victor said.

  “Stinking Saoz,” the longshoreman said, and turned away.

  That one Victor did know: the fellow’d called him an Englishman. “Save that name for Cornwallis,” he said. “I’m an Atlantean, by God.”

  “A Saoz is a Saoz no matter where he’s whelped,” the longshoreman answered. “God may care about the details, but I don’t.”

  “God has better sense than you do.” Victor rode away to see if he could find answers anywhere else.

  But no one in Cosquer seemed to know anything. No one who did seemed inclined to tell it to a Saoz, anyhow. To Victor, they amounted to the same thing. Then he got a rush of brains to the head. He hunted up Blaise and handed him some money. “What’s this in aid of?” the Negro asked.

  “Take off your uniform. Put on some ordinary clothes, none too fancy,” Victor answered. “Wander through the taverns. Buy yourself a few drinks. See what you can hear about where the English went.”

  “Maybe I won’t hear anything,” Blaise said.

  “Maybe you won’t,” Victor agreed. “But maybe you will, too. Make them think you’re a slave on a toot. White people talk too much in front of slaves. They think the slaves aren’t listening or can’t understand.”

  Blaise raised an eyebrow. “I know things like that.” He brushed two fingers of his right hand against the back of his left to show off his black skin and to remind Victor how he knew. “Why do you know them?”

  Radcliff used the same gesture the Negro had. “Because I’m a white man myself, and I know how white men think. I would have thought the same way—I did think the same way—before I met you. I hope I know better now.”

  “Ah,” Blaise said, and then, “Well, maybe you do.�
� With that faint praise Victor had to be content.

  Off the Negro went on his mission of espionage. Victor fell asleep before he came back from it. Lamps weren’t bright enough to tempt the general to stay up long after the sun went down. He did wonder whether Blaise would remember what he’d heard come morning.

  And when he got a look at Blaise the next morning, he wondered even more. “Oh, my,” he said sympathetically. “Oh, dear.”

  With trembling hand, Blaise reached for a tin mug of coffee. He was badly the worse for wear, the whites of his eyes yellowish and tracked with red. “Don’t know why you brew that hellwater you call rum,” he said. “People feel mighty bad after they drink it. Mighty bad.” He gulped the steaming coffee, then gulped again, hoping it would stay down.

  “Most folks don’t worry about the day after while they’re drinking,” Victor observed. “That goes for blacks and copperskins and whites alike. I expect it goes for Chinamen, too, but I can’t prove it—I don’t know any.”

  After one more gulp, Blaise seemed to decide things would stay where he wanted them to. “Well,” he said, “no one will ever tell me I did not earn the money you gave me last night.”

  “No one is trying to,” Victor said. “Did you learn anything except that a hard night leads to a harder morning?”

  “Oh, doesn’t it just!” Blaise agreed with the fervor of a reformed sinner. Or perhaps not completely reformed: he held out the tin cup, saying, “Have you got any brandy to help me take the edge off?”

  Not many Atlanteans with pretensions to being gentlemen failed to carry a flask. Victor had one. You never could tell when you might need a nip against the cold or simply want one. Victor poured a careful dose into Blaise’s coffee.

  “Obliged, sir.” The Negro drank. He nodded. “Oh, yes. Much obliged.”

  “Better now?” Victor inquired.

  “Some.” Blaise nodded. He didn’t seem to fear that his head would fall off any more, or even to hope it would. Having been through some long drunken nights himself, Victor knew progress when he saw it.