The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “I am grateful for the news, believe me,” Victor said. “It will surely influence the way I conduct my campaign from this time forward.”

  “Ah? Influence it how, pray?” Gustavus Vasa Rand leaned forward, eager to be even more in the know than he was already.

  But Victor Radcliff only laid a finger by the side of his nose. “By your leave, sir, I’ll say no more. What you have not heard, no red-hot pokers or thumbscrews may tear from you should the redcoats decide they must learn all the secrets you carry under your hat.”

  “They wouldn’t do that.” Rand’s voice lacked conviction. Victor refrained from mentioning one other possibility: that the trader from Hanover might tell the English what he knew under no compulsion whatsoever. Some men tried to work both sides at once, or pretended to serve one while actually on the other. He had spies in Hanover; he had to assume Cornwallis played the same game.

  “Whilst the Hesperians make England divide her forces, you may be sure I shall do my best to keep the occupiers, ah, occupied here in Atlantis,” Victor said. “And, sir, you may publish that abroad as widely as you please.”

  “I’ll do it, General. You can count on me,” Rand said.

  Victor Radcliff smiled and nodded. Maybe the man from Hanover would. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, the world wouldn’t end; nor would the Atlantean uprising.

  And if he did, Victor hadn’t said a word about strategy. Of course Cornwallis would expect him to try to take advantage of what England had to do to try to put down the new rebellion far to the west. Cornwallis would be right, too. But how Victor would try to exploit the new situation . . .

  Cornwallis won’t know, Victor thought. He can’t possibly, for I haven’t the faintest idea myself. He didn’t believe that was what the military manuals meant when they talked about “the advantage of surprise,” but it was what he had. Now he needed to figure out how to make the most of it.

  Several rivers met at or near Hanover, which helped make it Atlantis’ most important harbor. (Some of the people who argued about such things argued that Avalon had a better site. They might well have been right. But Hanover faced towards Europe, Avalon toward Terranova. When it came to ships and cargoes heading in and out, that made all the difference in the world.)

  These days, cargoes heading in and out of Hanover did so for England’s benefit, not Atlantis’. Oh, dribs and drabs of what came into Hanover got smuggled out to the lands that owed the Atlantean Assembly allegiance, but only dribs and drabs. As General Howe had before him, General Cornwallis hoped that keeping his opponents poor would detach them from the United States of Atlantis and make them take another look at King George.

  What worried Victor Radcliff was that Cornwallis might be right. A patriot without a ha’penny in his pocket was only one long step—sometimes not such a long step—from discovering he was really a loyalist after all.

  The most important river that flowed into Hanover, the Severn, ran down from the north. Victor led his own army along the north bank of a smaller stream, the Blackwater, that approached from the west.

  “Why did they name it the Blackwater?” Blaise asked. “What’s in there looks like any other water to me.”

  “To me, too—now,” Victor answered. “But when we get a little closer to Hanover . . . Well, you’ll see.”

  Before they came that close to Hanover, they had to deal with a hastily run-up English stockade that blocked their approach to the city. One of the popguns inside the stockade boomed defiance at the Atlantean army. The roundshot it fired fell far short of Victor’s men. After the ball stopped rolling, one of his gunners picked it up. If it fit an Atlantean gun—and it probably would—it would fly back toward some redcoats one of these days.

  Instead of assaulting the little fortress right away, Victor marched his troops past it before halting. Maybe the soldiers inside hadn’t sent anyone east toward Hanover to warn Cornwallis of his advent. But if they had, the redcoats in the seaside city might sally forth to see if they could smash the Atlantean army between themselves and the garrison.

  “They may think they can get away with that, but I don’t aim to let them,” Victor told his assembled officers—and, inevitably, Blaise, whom everyone took for granted by now.

  “How will you stop ’em, General?” one of his captains asked.

  “I’ll tell you how, in the name of the Lord God Jehovah,” Victor said. “We shall attack the stockade at midnight tonight—that’s how. Once it has fallen, all their hopes of playing hammer and anvil against us fall with it.”

  The officers buzzed like bees. “Can we do it?” one of them asked.

  He might not have meant for Victor Radcliff to hear him, but Victor did. “We can, sir, and we shall,” he declared. “The idea may surprise you, but I intend that it shall flabbergast the poor foolish Englishmen mured up behind those pine and redwood logs. Flabbergast ’em, I say!”

  To that end, the Atlanteans encamped as they would have done at the end of any ordinary day’s march. They pitched tents. They built up cook fires. They ambled back and forth in front of and around those fires. Victor had learned his lessons watching the redcoats abandon positions they could hold no longer. If the enemy commander inside the stockade was watching the encampment through a spyglass, he would notice nothing peculiar.

  He wouldn’t be able to see, for instance, that the men silhouetted in front of the fires were always the same men: a group left behind to make the camp appear normal from a distance, even when it wasn’t.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the Atlanteans took care to stay out of the firelight. Victor Radcliff led them against the English works. The night was moonless and cloudy and dark. “Move as quietly as you can,” he called—quietly. “If you fall, pick yourself up with no loud, profane swearing.”

  “Indeed, for such vileness offends against God,” said a voice out of the blackness.

  “Well, so it does,” Victor agreed. “But it’s also liable to mark our advance against the foe. Unless you have such a clean conscience that you can meet your Maker sooner than you might have had in mind, keep your lips buttoned.”

  The Atlanteans did . . . for the most part. No cries of alarm rang out from the stockade ahead. The redcoats inside the log palisade kept big bonfires blazing. The red-gold light shone through chinks between one log and another, and also lit up the buildings inside the stockade: barracks that could double as a redoubt in time of need.

  Motte and bailey, Victor thought. The Normans used that scheme in England, and it’s still a good one. Would it be good enough to hold up against complete surprise? He had to hope not. He also had to hope he could bring off a complete surprise. That, at the moment, remained what barristers called a Scotch verdict: not proven.

  Those bonfires made advancing against the enemy position easier than it would have been otherwise. On a night this dark, Victor might have had trouble finding an unilluminated fort—and tramping past it would have been embarrassing, to say the least. No risk of that, not now.

  With so much light behind them, with their eyes not accustomed to gloom, the redcoat sentries up on the walls might also have a harder time spotting the Atlanteans moving up on them. Again, Victor dared hope so.

  No one raised the alarm as his men drew near. “Scaling ladders forward!” he hissed urgently. Forward they came. He pointed toward the fortress. “Do you see where to place them?”

  “We do that, General,” replied a soldier who’d surely been born in Ireland.

  “Then advance against the palisade—slowly till you’re discovered, and after that quick as you can.”

  Off went the ladders, one by one. Storming parties—he hoped they weren’t forlorn hopes—followed them. If everything went well, the fort would fall to the Atlanteans almost before the enemy inside realized it was under attack. But how often did everything go well? Not often enough, as Victor had seen . . . too often.

  Tonight, though, the scaling ladders were about to thud into place against the palisad
e before a redcoat up there let out a startled yelp: “Bloody ’ell! It’s the bleedin’ Atlanteans!”

  A moment later, a rifle barked. The sentry yelped again, this time in pain. He had been a dark blotch against the lighter background of the barracks hall. Now that blotch disappeared.

  “Atlantis!” Victor’s men cried as they swarmed up the ladders, and “The Proclamation of Liberty!” and “Down with King George!”

  Down with King George it was, at least in that one spot. So many men in green jackets got up onto the palisade and dropped down into the courtyard behind it, the defenders never had a chance. Only a few shots were fired before the gates swung open. Someone sang out in an Atlantean accent: “All yours, General!”

  “Well done,” Victor said as he walked into the little fortress. “Very well done indeed, boys!”

  The English captain who’d commanded the garrison didn’t think so. “A night attack? Not sporting,” he said sourly.

  “If you show me where Hoyle’s rules state I’m not allowed to make one, perhaps I’ll march away,” Victor said. “Or perhaps I won’t.”

  His men jeered. The captain glared, and then tried a different tack: “Another thing—one of your blighters lifted my pocket watch.”

  “Can you tell me which one?” Victor asked.

  “No, dammit.” The English officer shook his head. “He was tall. He was skinny. He had an evil leer and foul breath.”

  “Well, sir, as a matter of fact, so do you,” Victor said, which won him another glare. Taking no notice of it, he continued, “You do realize you’re describing more than half of my army?” He wasn’t exaggerating; most Atlanteans seemed tall to their shorter English cousins.

  “I shouldn’t wonder if more than half your army consists of thieves.” The captain didn’t lack for nerve.

  But Victor only laughed. “And you think yours doesn’t? By God, sir, I’ve served with redcoats before. I know better.”

  “We may be thieves, but we aren’t foul rebels,” the captain said.

  “Not yet, perhaps. You would be surprised, though, at how many in the Atlantean army took the King’s shilling first,” Victor responded.

  He couldn’t down the English officer, who said, “And what of Habakkuk Biddiscombe? Will you tell me he is the only Atlantean who at last came to see where his true loyalty should lie?”

  “All I’ll tell you of Biddiscombe is that sooner or later—likely sooner—he’ll quarrel with his English superiors, as he quarreled with me,” Victor said tightly. “And I wish them joy of him when he does.”

  That actually made the captain thoughtful. “Mm . . . I’ve met the man, and I must say I shouldn’t be astonished if you prove right. But, having antagonized both sides in this struggle, where can he go next?”

  “He can go to the Devil, for all of me,” Victor said. “I’ll tell you where I’m going next, though. I’m going to Hanover.”

  More often than not, the wind blew down from the Green Ridge Mountains toward the sea. When it did, it carried the spicy, resinous scents of Atlantis’ vast evergreen forests with it. Victor took that odor for granted. He noticed it only when it changed.

  As his army neared Hanover, it did. The breeze swung around to come off the Atlantic for a while. The ocean’s salt tang seemed to quicken Victor’s pulse. Was that because all Radcliffs and Radcliffes sprang from fishermen, and so naturally responded to the smell of the sea? Or did Victor’s excitement grow because the oceanic odor reminded him how near his goal he was? Some of each, he guessed; a man’s reasons were rarely all of one piece.

  Blaise pointed to the river beside which the army marched. “It did turn black, General, like you said. Why?”

  “Because it flows through peat beds under the meadows,” Victor answered. “You know peat?”

  “You can burn it,” Blaise said. “Like God was trying to make coal but didn’t know how yet.”

  Victor laughed in surprise. He wouldn’t have come out with anything so blasphemous, but he probably wouldn’t have come out with anything so apt, either.

  Before long, the breeze from the east brought more than the odor of the Atlantic to his nostrils. It carried the smell of smoke with it—and also, less attractively, the reek of sewage. That combination always proclaimed a large settlement not far away.

  “Cities stink,” Blaise complained.

  “Well, so they do,” Victor said. “Do your African villages smell any sweeter?”

  Blaise clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Er—no.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Victor said. “When I use the privy, it’s not angels that come out. No reason your folk should differ there.”

  The colored sergeant changed the subject, from which Victor concluded that he’d made his point: “How do you propose to take Hanover away from Cornwallis?”

  “I can’t answer that yet. I shall have to see just where the English have placed their lines and their forts, and how many men they can put into them now that they’re dealing with trouble in Terranova, too,” Victor said.

  “Ah,” Blaise said. “You do make fighting more complicated than it needs to be.”

  More complicated than you were used to in Africa, Victor translated. But anyone—black, white, or, he supposed, copper-skinned—took what he’d grown up with as the touchstone for what was right and proper the rest of his days.

  Before long, Victor had a pretty good notion of the lie of the English works outside Hanover, and of how many redcoats Cornwallis had in them. The enemy commander did his best to keep the locals inside his lines. Cornwallis didn’t want them bringing Victor such news.

  Cornwallis’ best wasn’t good enough. His lines leaked. The English captain at the fort had been right: there were plenty of loyalists and royalists in land held by the forces following the Atlantean Assembly. Sometimes they did go over to King George’s army, as Habakkuk Biddiscombe had done.

  But that coin had two sides. Hanover was a fair-sized city by anybody’s standards—not London, not Paris, but a fair-sized city. Of course it had its share of people who cheered behind closed doors when the United States of Atlantis were proclaimed. And of course some of those men, seeing liberation as one of Victor Radcliff’s outriders, would leave the city to tell him what they knew of its defenses and the soldiers who manned them.

  He made a point of separating his informants one from another. He interviewed them one at a time, and made a sketch map of what each described. If one of them told a tale different from the others’ . . . He wouldn’t put it past Cornwallis to try to lead him into a trap. He knew he would have done the same thing to the English general had he found the chance.

  Adding all the sketch maps together . . . By the time he called a council of war, he had a pretty good notion of what wanted doing. “We will feint here,” he told his assembled officers—and Blaise—pointing with the fancy-hilted sword the Atlantean Assembly had presented to him. “A good portion of our field artillery will accompany the feint, to make it seem the more persuasive. Having drawn Cornwallis’ notice thither, we strike here.” He pointed again, farther south this time.

  Blaise held up his right index finger. Victor nodded to him. “What do we do if Cornwallis hears of this plan?” the Negro asked.

  He did come up with cogent questions. “Well, that depends,” Victor said. “If I find out ahead of time that he’s heard of it, the real thrust becomes the feint and the feint the real thrust.”

  “What if you don’t find out, General?” a colonel inquired.

  Victor spread his hands. “In that case, we walk into a snare.” He waited for the startled laughter to die down, then added, “I shall endeavor to extricate the army from it with losses as small as possible.”

  At the beginning of this fight, the mere thought of losing a battle would have filled his officers with a curious blend of rage and panic. Now they took the possibility in stride. They would do everything they could to win. If that turned out not to be enough, they would pull back and try somethi
ng else later.

  What did the Bard say about such coarsening? Victor tried to remember his Hamlet. And he did—the line was Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness. Shakespeare was talking about gravedigging, but he might as well have meant war, the proximate cause of so much gravedigging. The Atlantean officers had that property of easiness now. They were veterans.

  The redcoats had worked the transformation. And now—Victor hoped—they would pay for it.

  General Cornwallis warded Hanover with a ring of forts. These weren’t timber palisades, like the one that had tried to bar the way down the Blackwater. Their outwalls were of thick earth. A roundshot wouldn’t demolish them, as it would smacking into wood or stone. Instead, it would sink deep and disappear without doing any harm.

  Trenches and covered ways let English soldiers move from one fort to another without exposing themselves to Atlantean riflemen and cannoneers. The enemy was as ready as anyone could reasonably be.

  So was Victor Radcliff. He thought he was, anyhow. In Europe, mortars—guns firing explosive shells at steep angles so they topped the walls of a fort and came down inside—had given attackers at least a fighting chance when assaulting works. The Atlanteans had a few iron and brass mortars smuggled in despite the English blockade. They had a few more their smiths had made, imitating the European models. And they had quite a few improvised from hollowed-out tree trunks bound with iron bands. Because a mortar’s barrel was so short, it didn’t have to withstand anything like the pressure an ordinary cannon did. The wooden mortars seemed to perform about as well as their stubby metal counterparts.

  No one came out to warn Victor the English had learned of his plans. He suddenly wished he would have established a homing-pigeon connection with Hanover. More than a century before, back in the days when Avalon was the wickedest city in the world, one of the piratical Radcliffes had done something like that. Victor consoled himself by remembering that the pirate—not a close kinsman of his—had gone down to defeat despite his pigeons.