The United States of Atlantis Read online

  Did he mean that as a figure of speech or literally? However he meant it, Victor shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good notion.”

  “Why not?” Biddiscombe swelled and turned purple. Victor wondered if he’d explode. No man was ever so enamored of his own schemes as the cavalry officer.

  But Victor ticked off points on his fingers: “Item—chances of success strike me as slim. Item—any men captured whilst making such an attempt would assuredly wear a noose soon thereafter. And, item—even if your plan should be accomplished in every particular, so what?”

  Habakkuk Biddiscombe gaped. “What d’you mean . . . uh, General? I told you what would happen then.”

  “Indeed. You did. But, I say again, so what? Someone might well capture me. If that unpleasantness came to pass, this army would continue the struggle under our second-in-command. We might do as well with him as we have with me. For all I know, we might do better, though I dare hope not. Why do you suppose the redcoats to be in a different situation?”

  “Well . . .” Biddiscombe faltered. “Isn’t the best man commonly placed in command?”

  “Again, in our case, I dare hope so. Yes, that may be true. But it is also possible that the general commanding is but the most senior officer present. General Cornwallis is not elderly and is clever, but I doubt he will ever be spoken of in the same breath with Gustavus Adolphus or Turenne. Another man, thrust suddenly into his place, might well match his accomplishments.”

  “Only reason you don’t want to try it is on account of I’m the one who came up with it.” Anger clotted Biddiscombe’s voice. “If you or your nigger thought it up, you’d be all for it.” He turned on his heel and stormed away.

  Blaise appeared as if by magic. “Did I hear somebody call me nigger?” He could hear that word where he might miss others. Well, who could blame him? What man with the faintest hope of being a gentleman wasn’t sensitive to slights?

  “He did. You did,” Victor said wearily. “He meant nothing by it, though. He was in a temper at me, not at you.”

  “Huh,” Blaise said: a wordless sound packed with disbelief. “Anybody says nigger, he means something by it, all right.” He spoke like a man very sure of what he was talking about. Chances were he had every right to be.

  Even so, Victor said, “I showed him how and why his harebrained scheme was harebrained, and he responded with all the gratitude you might expect.”

  “What scheme is this?” Blaise asked. Victor explained. The Negro grunted. “Well, you told him true. That scheme is harebrained from mouth to arsehole.”

  Victor would have said from top to bottom, which didn’t mean he disagreed with the more pungent phrase. “Sometimes Habakkuk simply needs to get things out of his system,” he said.

  Blaise grunted again. “If he’s costive, let him take one of those little pills. That’ll shift him.” He rolled his eyes. “Those little pills’ll shift anything.”

  “No doubt.” Victor knew the ones Blaise was talking about. They were made from antimony. If you had trouble moving your bowels, you would swallow one. A few hours later, you would think a barrel of black powder had gone off in your gut. They weren’t cheap, but they did the trick, all right. You could, if you were so inclined, rescue the little devil from the chamber pot, wash it off, and save it for the next time you needed it.

  “Ought to knock him over the head.” Blaise returned to the subject at hand. “That will get things out of his system, too. And it will save you trouble. You see if it don’t—doesn’t.” He corrected himself before Victor could.

  “He’ll be all right,” Victor said. Blaise rolled his eyes once more. He was as stubborn as Habakkuk Biddiscombe, if in a different way. He would have been highly offended had Victor said so, so Victor didn’t. He did remember the conversation for a long time afterwards. Every so often, a loyalist would take a potshot at Victor’s soldiers from behind a roadside tree, then try to get away. Rebellious Atlanteans who fired at redcoats marching past were heroes, at least to other rebellious Atlanteans. When Victor’s men captured the loyalist snipers, they hanged them without ceremony.

  Cornwallis’ soldiers did the same thing to the insurrectionist marksmen they caught. Every printer who favored the Atlantean Assembly damned them to Satan’s fiery furnace as murderers on account of it. Victor Radcliff noticed the irony, which didn’t mean he intended to stop hanging loyalist francs-tireurs.

  One of them put on a brave show, saying, “I am proud to die for my king.”

  “You won’t be once the rope goes around your neck,” Victor predicted. “And you aren’t dying for your king. You could have been as loyal to George as you pleased, so long as you didn’t fire at my men from ambush.”

  “I should prove myself a traitor to my sovereign did I not take up arms against those treacherously in arms against him.” Yes, the loyalist had pride.

  It did him no good. “You and your friends should have joined a properly enrolled company, then,” Victor said coldly. The man was hanged with the three or four other bushwhackers Victor’s soldiers had flushed out of the woods. They died hard, strangling from the nooses instead of getting their necks broken as a proper hangman’s knot might have done. Or it might not have, when they were hanged from branches instead of getting a long drop from the gallows.

  Blaise eyed the limp bodies and discolored faces with cold dispassion. All he said was, “They had it coming.”

  “I think so, too,” Victor said. “But if you listen to the likes of them, we’re the ones who deserve to dance on air.”

  “Dance on air.” The Negro tasted the words. “I like that.”

  “It’s not mine, I fear,” Victor told him. “I don’t know where I first heard it. Use it as you please. People will understand you when you do.”

  “All right.” Blaise glanced toward the corpses again. “They don’t dance.”

  They’d had their feet tied together and hands bound behind them. “I’ve seen livelier jobs, with the legs free,” Victor said, gnawing on the inside of his lower lip at the memory. “Only a cruel man could enjoy the spectacle, believe me.”

  “They are enemies,” Blaise said. “Why should I be sorry to watch enemies die?”

  “I have nothing against enemies dying,” Victor replied. “But rejoicing in suffering, even in an enemy’s suffering, strikes me as unchristian.”

  “Maybe I don’t make such a good Christian, then,” Blaise said.

  He and his wife had gone to church with Victor and Margaret most Sundays since the fighting in French Atlantis ended. He attended divine services with the other soldiers in Victor’s army. Radcliff suddenly wondered how much he really believed. How much of his piety was no more than fitting in where he had to live, and how much of his savage creed from Africa still lurked below?

  No matter what he wondered, he didn’t ask. Papists and Protestants of all sects and even Jews joined together in the Atlantean Assembly and in its army. If there was room for all of them, wasn’t there also room for one perhaps unregenerate African?

  Despite the snipers—most of whom, being as woodswise as Victor’s men, escaped instead of getting captured—the army pressed on toward Hanover. More loyalists, not daring or caring to meet it in arms, fled before it with nothing but what they could carry. Men who preferred the Atlantean Assembly’s cause gleefully swooped down on the homes and fields and livestock they abandoned. “Buggers made us sweat while they was in the saddle,” one man told Victor. “Now let’s see if they ever set eyes on what used to be theirs again.”

  Strict justice might have made Victor speak of courts and due process of law. “We’ll use them as they deserve,” he said, and the local nodded.

  A few days later, the army was camped near a village called Brandenburg. A cavalryman rode up to Victor. After a sketched salute, the man asked, “General, have you seen Major Biddiscombe? I needed to ask something of him, but he’s nowhere about.”

  “I haven’t got him,” Victor answered.

&nb
sp; He thought no more about it till the army was getting ready to move out the next morning. There was still no sign of Habakkuk Biddiscombe. A man who’d been on sentry duty said, “He rode out past me not long after we stopped here. He said he was going to reconnoiter what lay ahead.”

  “By himself?” Victor’s eyebrows leaped toward his hairline.

  The sentry only shrugged. “You know how he is.”

  Victor Radcliff did, much too well. “Even for Major Biddiscombe, that’s excessive,” he said. “When he comes in, I’ll give him a talking-to he’ll remember for a month of Wednesdays.” The sentry laughed, but Victor wasn’t joking.

  Only Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn’t come in. Victor feared he’d fallen into the hands of English scouts or local loyalists. The only trouble was, his own scouts turned up no signs that the enemy was operating anywhere close by.

  Another fear began to grow in him—and not in him alone. “How bad was that last quarrel you had with him, sir?” Blaise asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t good.” No one would accuse Victor of exaggerating, anyhow.

  “Uh-huh,” Blaise said thoughtfully. Then he asked, “How much harm could he do us if he went over to Cornwallis?”

  “He wouldn’t do that!” Victor squawked, and he could hear himself protesting too much. After a moment, he added, “I hope he wouldn’t do that,” which was nothing but the truth.

  XV

  Habakkuk Biddiscombe not only went over to General Cornwallis and King George, he reveled in his treason. To him, of course, it seemed anything but. What man ever acted for any save the highest motives? None: not if you asked the actor himself.

  A scout brought back a broadsheet from a village still under the redcoats’ control. It was called “The True Relation of Colonel Habakkuk Biddiscombe, Formerly of the Rebel Cavalry.”

  “Huh,” Blaise said when he saw that. “He won himself a promotion for running off, he did.”

  “Thirty pieces of silver,” Victor said bitterly. “I wonder if he would have stayed had I granted him higher rank.” He sighed. “We’ll never know now.”

  Biddiscombe—or, more likely, some pro-English hack purporting to be Biddiscombe—characterized the Atlantean Assembly as “a witches’ Sabbat of betrayal.” He called the army that fought on behalf of the Assembly “a pack of starveling hounds, remarkable alike for savagery and cowardice.” And he described Victor Radcliff as “the blackest traitor since Judas” (a man likely to be mentioned when anyone turned his coat) and “an oaf masquerading as a general: a leader utterly incapable of recognizing and acknowledging a clever stratagem.” Remembering the cavalry officer’s scheme he’d turned down, Victor suspected that, at least, came straight from Biddiscombe.

  “What do you aim to do about this—this arsewipe, General?” the scout inquired.

  Victor felt of the paper. “I think I’d sooner use a handful of leaves,” he said. The scout and Blaise both laughed. Victor went on, “What can I do about it? If the famous Colonel Biddiscombe should dare lead enemy horse against us, we shall try to shoot him out of the saddle. Of that I have no doubt—he betrayed the soldiers he formerly commanded more foully than any others here, for he enjoyed more of their trust. Other than killing him first chance we find, I know not what course to take.”

  “Me, I’d sooner catch him alive,” Blaise said. “Then I could roast him over a slow fire and turn him on a spit so he got done on all sides.” He grinned evilly. “Easy enough to tell with a white man, eh? And that would give the dirty scut plenty of time to think on his mistakes before he gave up the ghost.”

  “Devil take me if I don’t fancy the sound of that myself,” the scout exclaimed.

  “So long as we kill him, that will suffice,” Victor said.

  Blaise was born a savage, of course. But men who favored the Atlantean Assembly and those who remained loyal to King George were roasting each other over slow fires: oh, not where the main armies marched and countermarched, but in the countless little ambushes and affrays that would never make the history books or change the war’s result by one iota but went on nonetheless. And those men on both sides gleefully played the savage without Blaise’s excuse.

  “We’ll go on,” Victor said, as he had so many times. “If we can winkle them out of Hanover, that will be a great triumph for us and a great disaster to them. And if Habakkuk Biddiscombe has to sail off to England—on which he has never in his life set eyes—even that will be enough.”

  “Devil it will,” Blaise muttered, but not loud enough for Victor to call him on it.

  Victor was anything but sure they could squeeze Cornwallis out of Hanover. Even if they didn’t, they might reach the sea and cut the English coastal holdings in half. That would be worth doing in and of itself.

  Go on they did. Loyalists skirmished with them. Like King George’s Atlantean Rangers, these men fought as soldiers, not in ambuscades. Sometimes redcoats stiffened their ranks; sometimes they managed well enough on their own. Victor ordered his own men to treat them as prisoners of war when they were taken. “If they meet us fairly, we must return the favor,” he insisted.

  And his troops obeyed him . . . more often than not. Even so, an unfortunate number of such captives were shot “trying to escape.” He wondered whether he should issue harsher orders. In the end, he decided not to. Issuing orders that weren’t likely to be obeyed only damaged the force of other commands.

  Before long, a scout carried another broadsheet back into his encampment. This one announced the creation of something called “Biddiscombe’s Horsed Legion.” Volunteers in the Legion would “root out, eradicate, extirpate, and utterly exterminate the verminous rebels opposing in arms his brilliant Majesty, good King George.”

  Most printers worked in the coastal towns the English held. Victor found one back in Brandenburg who was loyal to the Atlantean Assembly. He had the man crank out a counterblast, one warning men who leaned toward King George that “no individual from the cavalry formation styled Biddiscombe’s Horsed Legion who may be captured by the armies of the Atlantean Assembly shall under any circumstances hope for quarter.”

  No Horsed Legion appeared. Victor wondered whether Cornwallis had had second thoughts—and, if he had, whether Habakkuk Biddiscombe was contemplating desertion from the English cause. Probably not, Victor decided—the cavalry officer had to know Atlantis would never take him back. Biddiscombe had made his bed. Now he had to lie in it, even if it proved uncomfortable.

  Victor also wondered when the French declaration of war would produce soldiers on the ground in Atlantis. Indeed, he wondered if it ever would. In the last war, the French managed to convey one small army across the Atlantic, all their later efforts failing. Their navy was stronger now. Was it enough stronger? It had better be, he thought. His own men made vastly better soldiers than they had when they first enlisted. All the same, he could use some cynical, hard-bitten professionals to show them by example how the job was done.

  Meanwhile, he used what he had. Redcoats and loyalists skirmished with his forces before falling back toward Hanover. Cornwallis seemed less interested in fighting big battles than General Howe had been before him. Maybe he was clever. Howe had tried to crush the Atlantean uprising. The only thing he’d proved was that he couldn’t. Cornwallis, by contrast, seemed to want to force the Atlanteans to crush him. As long as he held the towns on the eastern coast, the United States of Atlantis were only wind and air. They weren’t a nation, any more than a man deprived of his head was a man.

  And then, to Victor’s surprise, he got word that some of Cornwallis’ garrison in Hanover was putting to sea and sailing away. When he heard the rumor the first time, he had trouble believing it. But it came to him again the next day, brought by a man who didn’t know anyone else had carried word ahead of him.

  “Why would he do that, when we’re pressing him toward Hanover?” Victor asked. “I know the Englishmen make good soldiers, and I know Hanover has good outworks. All the same, if too many forts are empty of
men, the place will fall.”

  “Well . . .” His second informant was a plump merchant named Gustavus Vasa Rand, who plainly enjoyed knowing things the commanding general didn’t. The man steepled his fingers, then tugged at his ear before going on, “I hear tell the redcoats have themselves trouble somewheres else.”

  “Where?” Radcliff exploded. If it was anywhere in Atlantis, he thought he would have known about it. If the English had trouble anywhere in Atlantis, he hoped he would have helped foment it.

  But Gustavus Vasa Rand replied, “Over in Terranova, is what folks say. Some of the settlements there, they’ve decided they don’t fancy King George any more’n we do.”

  “Have they?” Victor breathed. “Well, well, well. Has anyone reported why they chose this moment to rise up?”

  “Don’t you know?” Yes, Gustavus Vasa Rand exuded the amiable scorn the man who’s heard things feels for the poor, ignorant twit he aims to enlighten. “Why, this past year or so a demon pamphleteer’s appeared amongst ’em. He’s tossed so much red pepper into the stew, even the boring old Terranovans can’t help breathing fire after they go and eat of it.”

  “I dare say he’s caused King George’s men in those parts a good deal of, ah, pain,” Victor remarked with malice aforethought.

  “Why, so he has.” One of Rand’s bristly eyebrows rose. “Funny you should put it so, General, for Paine’s his family name.”

  “And Thomas his Christian name,” Victor agreed. “I am acquainted with the gentleman, and with his qualities. Indeed, I sent him west across the Hesperian Gulf, hoping he would do exactly as he has done.”

  “Well, good on you, then,” the merchant told him. “The more toes England has on the griddle, the more hopping she needs must do.” Now the look he sent Victor was more speculative than pitying. A general who could work out a plot and have it come off the way he wanted wasn’t some harmless bumpkin, but a man who might need some serious watching.