The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “Well, no.” If that prospect pleased de la Fayette, he hid it very well. “But I find the climate in this country imperfectly equable. The southern regions suffer from excessive heat, while these parts seem to have a superabundance of both rain and snow. A more moderate regimen would be preferable—a regimen more like that of, exempli gratia, la belle France.”

  His reaching that particular conclusion amused Victor without much surprising him. The Atlantean general spread his hands. “I fear I cannot help it, your Grace. As I said a moment before, the weather is under the good Lord’s command, not mine.”

  De la Fayette crossed himself. “You have reason, certainly. I shall pray that He might extend to your country the blessings He has generously granted mine.”

  If God hadn’t changed Atlantis’ climate at least since the days when Edward Radcliffe founded New Hastings—and probably not for centuries before that—he was unlikely to alter it at the marquis’ request. De la Fayette had to know that as well as Victor did. All he meant was that he didn’t care for the way things were. Victor didn’t, either, not the way they were up here. He liked the weather around his farm much better. Which only proved he, like de la Fayette, liked what he was used to and disliked any departure from it. Blaise felt the same way, though his African norm was far different from either white man’s.

  “Leaving the power of prayer out of the question, we should discuss what we might best attempt now,” Victor said.

  “So we should.” The marquis sighed. “Such a pretty plan we had before. We would assuredly have surprised the redcoats with it.” He paused, considering. “I don’t suppose we could simply try it again.”

  That made Victor pause to consider, too. His first response was to call the suggestion ridiculous. The redcoats would be waiting for it. Or would they? The more he thought, the less sure he grew. He started to laugh. “Our stupidity in repeating ourselves would surprise them, at the least.”

  “Just so. Just so!” De la Fayette seemed to catch fire at the idea.

  “However insolent they are themselves, they would never believe we have the insolence to make the second stroke the same as the first.”

  Victor thought out loud: “Perhaps we should make the previous stroke the feint, and the previous feint the stroke.”

  “No. But no. Certainly not.” De la Fayette shook his head so vigorously, he had to grab his tricorn to keep from losing it. “That, they would anticipate. It is precisely the ploy an ordinary man, a man without imagination, might try, thinking himself clever beyond compare.”

  “I see,” Victor muttered, his ears burning. Well, he’d never thought himself anything but an ordinary man. De la Fayette seemed to agree with him.

  Unaware that he might have given offense, the Frenchman went on, “If we try something altogether different from our previous ploy, we may find success. If, contrariwise, we surprise them by our stupidity, we may also hope to triumph. The flaw lies in the middle way, as it commonly does.”

  And so it was decided.

  Even after it was decided, Blaise had his doubts about it. “If the redcoats look for this, they will slaughter us.”

  “That they will,” Victor agreed, which made the Negro blink. Victor went on, “But if we essay anything that they anticipate, they are likely to slaughter us.”

  “Hmm.” He’d made Blaise stop and think, anyhow. Then the black man delivered his verdict: “If we are going to do this, we had better do it quickly, lest a deserter betray the plan to the English.”

  That made excellent sense. Victor ordered the feint to go in at dawn the next morning, and the true attack to follow as soon as the redcoats seemed to have taken the bait. He also strengthened the picket line between his army and Cornwallis’. He didn’t know whether he could keep deserters from slipping away, but he intended to try.

  Both columns formed up in the chilly predawn darkness. Baron von Steuben volunteered to lead the attackers, replacing the late Major Hall. “Any cannon ball that hits this hard head will bounce off,” he declared in gutturally accented English.

  “Try not to make the experiment,” Victor said. The German soldier of fortune nodded. Victor added one more piece of advice: “Strike hard and strike fast.”

  “I do it. The Soldaten do it also. They fear me more than any piffling redcoats,” von Steuben said. Chances were he knew what he was talking about, too. A good drillmaster was supposed to inspire that kind of respectful fear in his men.

  To Victor’s ears, the feinting and attacking columns both made too much noise as they moved out. But he didn’t hear any shouts of alarm from the English lines. Very often, what seemed obvious to a worried man was anything but to the people around him. Even more often, his failure to realize that alerted those other people to the idea that something funny was going on. Don’t give the game away ahead of time, Victor told himself.

  He waited to hear what would happen next. The feint went in when he expected it to. He’d urged the men to fight especially hard so they’d make the redcoats believe they truly meant to bull their way through. He was sure they understood the reason behind the order. He wasn’t sure they would follow it. If anything, he feared them less likely to do so precisely because they understood why he asked it of them. Most of his men were veterans by now. They knew that, the more fiercely and ferociously they attacked earthworks, the better their chances of stepping in front of a cannon ball or a bullet or of meeting one of those fearsome English bayonets.

  If they were veterans, wouldn’t they take such mischances in stride? Redcoats would have. So would troops from the Continent—Baron von Steuben had taken such soldiering for granted till he got here. The Marquis de la Fayette still did, and got it from his Frenchmen. But Atlanteans were a different breed. They expected—no, they demanded—a solid return on their investment, regardless of whether they risked their time or their money or their lives.

  English cannon thundered. Blaise coughed to draw Victor’s notice. When Victor glanced his way, the Negro said, “The redcoats are going, ‘Here come those Atlantean madmen again. Don’t they ever learn their lessons?’ ”

  “Heh,” Victor Radcliff said uncomfortably. “Just wait a bit. Pretty soon, they’ll find out how mad we are in truth.”

  “No.” Blaise pointed at him. “Pretty soon you find out how mad we are in truth.” Since that was what Victor was afraid of, he grimaced and shook his head and kept his mouth shut.

  He wanted to go up and fight alongside the men in the striking force. Only one thing held him back: if Cornwallis’ troops recognized him there, they would be sure that second column was the one they needed to concern themselves with. The general commanding started to swear.

  “What now?” Blaise asked.

  “Bugger me blind, but I should have gone in at the head of the feint,” Victor said. “If anything would have made the Englishmen sure that was our principal column, my presence at its head was the very thing.”

  “And also the very thing to get you killed,” Blaise observed. Atlanteans were more pragmatic than Europeans about such things: less likely to get themselves killed over pointless points of honor. Blaise was far more pragmatic than most white Atlanteans. He added, “Besides, the fellow leading it don’t want you up there. If you are up there, the men pay attention to you, not to him.”

  Once more, Victor would have liked to find some way to tell him he was talking nonsense. Once more, he found himself unable. Major Porter was as much in charge of the feint as Baron von Steuben was in charge of the striking column. Both officers would do everything they could with what they had . . . and wouldn’t want anyone else in position to joggle their elbow.

  The feint went in. The racket of gunfire—and of shouts of rage and agony—grew and grew. So did the shouts of Englishmen rushing to their comrades’ aid. By the noise they were making, they thought the Atlanteans were hitting the place where they’d bluffed before. After all, no one could be stupid enough to try the same thing twice in a row.

  So d
e la Fayette had assured Victor, anyhow. It all sounded so lucid, so reasonable, so rational when the noble spelled it out. Then again, Frenchmen had a knack for sounding lucid, reasonable, rational. If they were as sensible as they seemed, why wasn’t France in better shape?

  Victor found himself cocking his head toward the left. He’d committed the feint. The redcoats were already responding to it. Baron von Steuben could get close to their line without their knowing it, as the luckless Major Hall had been doing when the heavens opened up.

  “When?” Blaise asked.

  “If I were up there with them, we’d go in—” Victor had wondered if he was nervous and fidgety and inclined to jump the gun. But he couldn’t even get now out of his mouth before von Steuben put in the attack.

  This cacophony made the other one small by comparison. Victor clenched his fists till his nails—which weren’t long—bit into his callused palms. If they broke through . . . If they broke through, de la Fayette’s Frenchmen would go in behind the striking column. They’d tear a hole in Cornwallis’ line that you could throw a honker through.

  And then what? Croydon? Victory? True victory at last? Cornwallis handing over his sword in token of surrender? Cornwallis admitting that the United States of Atlantis were here to stay?

  Till this moment, the fight for Atlantean freedom had so consumed Victor, he’d had scant opportunity to wonder what would come afterwards. If Cornwallis and the redcoats had to sail away from Atlantis forever, where would they go? Back to England? Or west across the broad Hesperian Gulf to fight the rebels on the Terranovan mainland? Suppose they won there. How would the United States of Atlantis cope with being all but surrounded by the unloved and unloving former mother country? Victor had no idea.

  There were worse problems to have. Losing the war against England instead of winning it, for instance. Not so long before, that had looked much too likely. Then, still unloved and unloving, the mother country would have set its boot on Atlantis’ neck and stomped hard.

  Which she might do yet. Victor knew he’d been building castles in the air. Any number of things could all too easily go wrong. He called to one of his young messengers—one who spoke fluent French. “My compliments to the Marquis de la Fayette, and please remind him to be ready to lead his men forward the instant the situation warrants.”

  “Right you are, General,” the messenger agreed. One of the usual slipshod Atlantean salutes, and away he went at a good clip. Victor smiled at his back. That kind of response would have earned the puppy stripes from Cornwallis—and, very possibly, from de la Fayette as well. Atlanteans did things their own way. It might not be pretty, but it worked . . . or it had so far.

  Victor had talked himself hoarse making sure Baron von Steuben understood he was to send word back as soon as he thought it likely he would penetrate the redcoats’ defenses. And the German officer did, but not quite the way the Atlantean commandant had expected. Instead of telling Victor what was going on in the middle of that cloudbank of black-powder smoke, von Steuben sent a runner straight back to de la Fayette.

  That runner and Victor Radcliff’s messenger must have reached the French noble at almost the same time. The first Victor knew about it was when de la Fayette’s soldiers surged forward, musicians blaring out their foreign horn and drum calls.

  For a heartbeat, Victor was mortally offended. Then he realized what must have happened. He also realized von Steuben had been absolutely right. If de la Fayette’s troops were the ones who were going to move, de la Fayette was the man who most needed to know when they were to move. If Victor’s laugh was rueful, it was a laugh even so. “Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me anything?” he said.

  “What’s that?” Blaise asked.

  “My own foolishness talking,” Victor said, which probably made less of an answer than Blaise would have wanted. Victor climbed up onto his horse. His factotum also mounted. Urging his gelding forward, Victor went on, “If we are driving them, I will see it with my own eyes, by God!”

  “And if by some mischance we are not driving them, you will ride straight into something you could have stayed away from.” Blaise was always ready to see the cloud to a silver lining.

  The firing ahead hadn’t died out. The redcoats were still plainly doing all they could to hold back the Atlanteans—and, now, de la Fayette’s Frenchmen as well. But, as Victor rode past the woods that had sheltered his striking column till the moment it struck, he realized their best wouldn’t be enough.

  “By God!” he said again, and this time he sounded like a man who really meant it.

  Baron von Steuben’s men had punched a hole through the English line better than a furlong wide. Victor had hoped they might be able to break through so splendidly, but hadn’t dared count on it. Counting on something ahead of time in war too often led but to disappointment.

  And the Atlanteans had done what they were supposed to do after breaking through, too. They’d swung out to left and right and poured a fierce enfilading fire into the redcoats in the trenches to either side. Arrows on a map couldn’t have more precisely obeyed the man who drew them. And if that wasn’t von Steuben’s doing, whose was it? The German deserved to be a colonel, if not a brigadier general.

  De la Fayette’s French professionals poured through the gap Atlantean ardor had torn. They too methodically volleyed at the Englishmen who tried to plug that gap. Victor was just riding into what had been the English position when the redcoats, every bit as competent as their French foes, realized they were playing a losing game and started falling back toward Croydon.

  “On!” Victor shouted to his own men, and then, in French, “Avant!” He fell back into English to continue, “If we take the town from them, they’ve nowhere to go after that!” If de la Fayette or some of his officers wanted to translate his remarks for the benefit of the French soldiery, they were welcome to.

  Croydon’s outskirts lay only a couple of miles away. Whenever Victor rode to the crest of some little swell of ground, he could see the church steeples reaching toward the heavens. One of them was supposed to be the tallest steeple in all Atlantis, a claim furiously rejected in Hanover and New Hastings.

  “I think we can do it.” Was that Blaise’s voice? Damned if it wasn’t. If Blaise believed Croydon would fall, how could it do anything else?

  Victor also began to believe his men would storm Croydon. And if they did . . . when they did . . . No one, yet, had thought to write a tune for the United States of Atlantis to use in place of “God Save the King.” Maybe some minstrel needed to get busy in a hurry, because what stood between those united states and liberty?

  Damn all Victor could see. His men were making for Croydon faster than the redcoats pulling out of their entrenchments and earthworks. If nothing slowed the Atlanteans and Frenchmen, they were less than half an hour from guaranteeing that the Union Jack would never fly over Atlantis again.

  If nothing slowed them . . . One more thought Victor Radcliff remembered a long, long time. No sooner had it crossed his mind than a band of cavalry—something more than a troop, but less than a regiment—thundered out of Croydon and straight toward the advancing Atlantean and French foot soldiers.

  The riders wore buff and blue, not the red of English regulars. Loyalists, then, Victor thought with distaste. Like any cavalrymen, they carried sabers and carbines and long horse pistols. Most would have a second pistol stashed in a boot. Some might carry one or two more on their belts.

  “Form line!” Victor shouted. “We can take them!”

  Blaise pointed. “Isn’t that—?”

  “God damn him to hell!” Victor burst out. Sure as the devil, that was Habakkuk Biddiscombe—and the riders had to be Biddiscombe’s Horsed Legion, which had been much spoken of but, till now, little seen. Victor wished he weren’t seeing it at this moment, which did him no good whatever.

  He wasn’t the only one to recognize the defector, the traitor, commanding the royalist Atlanteans. The cry of “No quarter!” went up from a dozen t
hroats at once. Anyone who fought for and alongside Habakkuk Biddiscombe knew the chance he took. Muskets boomed. Here and there, legionaries slid from the saddle and horses went down.

  But the horsemen who didn’t fall came on. They knew exactly what they were doing, and why. They despised the soldiers who fought for the United States of Atlantis at least as much as those men loathed them. And now at last they had the chance to show their hated kinsmen and former friends what they could do.

  “Death to Radcliff!” Biddiscombe roared. In an instant, every man he led took up the cry: “Death to Radcliff!”

  They slammed into the front of the advancing Atlantean column: into a line that hadn’t finished forming. They slammed into it and through it, shooting some soldiers and slashing at others with their swords. And, by their courage and ferocity, they stopped Victor Radcliff’s army in its tracks.

  “Kill them! Drive them out of the way!” Victor shouted furiously, drawing the gold-hilted sword the Atlantean Assembly had given him and urging his horse forward, toward the fight. “On to Croydon!”

  Against a force of infantry that size, brushing them aside would have been a matter of moments—nothing that could have seriously delayed the assault on the redcoats’ last sheltering place. But the horses of Biddiscombe’s Horsed Legion gave the men on them a striking power out of all proportion to their numbers.

  And so did the way they hated the men they faced. Victor might—did—reckon their cause and the way they upheld it altogether wrong. That didn’t mean their contempt for death and retreat was any less than his might have been under like circumstances.

  “Biddiscombe!” he called, brandishing his blade as he rode past his own men toward the fight. “I’m coming for you, Biddiscombe!”

  “Oh, just shoot the son of a whore,” Blaise said, which was bound to be good advice.