The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “Too late for that,” Victor Radcliff said. “We are going to fight them. The way things are, we cannot avoid fighting them. We have a better chance if I do what I can than if I don’t. I had to explain all this to my wife before we set out.”

  “I know,” Blaise said again. “I had to explain to my wife, too. I know what England has. Now I see what we have. I think I was a fool.” He didn’t say he thought Victor was a fool; that would have been rude. Whether he thought it or not was a different question.

  “No one is keeping you here against your will. You were a slave in French Atlantis. You are no man’s slave now—certainly not mine,” Victor said. “If you do not care to be here, you may leave. You may surrender to the English and tell them everything you know. Chances are they’ll make you an officer if you do.”

  “Thank you, but no,” Blaise replied with dignity. “Atlantis is my land, too, now. I do not want to leave it. My roots here are not as old as yours, but they are firm. I want to make this place better if I can.”

  Victor Radcliff held out his hand. “In that we are certainly agreed.” Blaise clasped hands with him.

  The Atlantean Assembly met in the church, it being the building in New Hastings best suited to containing their number. On Sundays, most of the Assemblymen worshiped there. Some few, from New Hastings and points south, were of the Romish persuasion, and found other ways and places to commune with God as they saw fit. And from Croydon in the north came Benjamin Benveniste, the Assembly’s one and only Jew.

  Some people said he was the richest man in Atlantis. Others, more conservative, called him the richest man not a Radcliff or Radcliffe. Benveniste would always laugh and deny everything. Victor didn’t know if the Jew was wealthier than some of his own merchant kinsmen. He was sure Benveniste had more money than he did himself.

  “What difference does it make?” Benveniste replied when another Assemblyman asked him just how rich he was. “The more I have, the more others think they can take from me. Wealth is a burden, nothing less.”

  The other Assemblyman was from New Grinstead, a backwoods town with not much wealth and not much else. Wistfully, he said, “I’d be a donkey if it meant I could carry more.”

  “Chasing money too hard will make an ass of anyone,” Benjamin Benveniste said—a shot close to the center of the target.

  “Well, what does that make you?” the other Assemblyman said.

  Benveniste sent him a hooded glance. “A patriot, sir—if you will let me be.”

  “We have room for everyone here,” Custis Cawthorne said before the man from the backwoods could reply. “Why, look at me—they have even made room for a scurrilous printer. Next to that, what does it matter if you’re Christian or Jew or Mahometan?”

  Plainly, several people thought it did matter. None of them felt like antagonizing Cawthorne, though—he could be as scurrilous in oral debate as he was when setting type.

  “I am able to care for myself, Custis,” Benveniste said.

  “I didn’t do it for you.” Cawthorne sounded surprised. “I did it for Atlantis.”

  “Ah.” The Jew nodded. “Well, that I have no trouble with.”

  By easy stages, the debate drifted around toward formally appointing Victor Radcliff commander of the Atlantean forces in arms against the British Empire. Nothing the Atlantean Assembly did seemed to move very fast. When men from all the settlements came together to protest to the mother country, that was one thing. When they aimed to conduct a war against that mother country, it was liable to be something else again.

  Victor wondered if telling the Assemblymen as much would do any good. He decided it would only put their backs up. He would have to work with them for—how long? Till the war was over, one way or the other. If it was the other . . .

  “We have to win,” Custis Cawthorne said. “If we lose, they will hang us pour encourager les autres. Do I say that correctly, Monsieur du Guesclin?”

  “If you mean it ironically, then yes,” replied the man from what had been French Atlantis. “Otherwise, you would do better to say pour décourager les autres.”

  “Getting my neck stretched would certainly discourage me,” Cawthorne said, “but I was alluding to the eminent Voltaire’s remarks about the reason why the English hanged Admiral Byng.”

  Several Assemblymen smiled and nodded. So did Victor Radcliff, who admired Voltaire’s trenchant wit. But a storm cloud passed across Michel du Guesclin’s darkly handsome features. “Speak to me not of that man, if you would be so kind. He believes not in God nor in the holy Catholic Church.”

  “Look around you, Monsieur,” Cawthorne advised, not unkindly. “I will not speak of any man’s belief in God save my own, and then only with reluctance, but you will find precious few of Romish opinions here in New Hastings.”

  “Oh, I understand that. But you are Protestants from the cradle, and so I can partly forgive your views since you know no better,” du Guesclin said with what was no doubt intended for magnanimity. “This thing of a Voltaire, however, knows and, knowing, rejects. For this he is far worse. God will have somewhat to say to him when he is called to account.”

  “He may render unto God the things that are God’s,” Cawthorne said. “What we’re engaged in doing here is ciphering out how not to render unto Caesar the things Caesar thinks are his.” He turned and nodded to Victor. “How do we best go about that, General Radcliff?”

  How many men had gone from major to general while skipping all the ranks in between? Victor couldn’t think of many. But Cawthorne’s question would have perplexed a man who’d held every one of those ranks—Victor was sure of it. “I have no detailed answer for you, sir, not knowing what the enemy will attempt,” he said. “In general, we should do our best to keep him from holding and occupying our leading towns, and not allow him to split Atlantis so he can defeat in detail our forces in the various parts.”

  “As always, the Devil is in the detail.” Cawthorne’s eyes twinkled behind his spectacles, so that he looked like a skeleton pleased with itself. Several Atlantean Assemblymen groaned or flinched at the pun; those who’d missed it looked puzzled. Still smiling slightly, Cawthorne went on, “And they are now strongest at Hanover?”

  “Yes, and at Croydon,” Victor Radcliff replied. “We must do everything in our power to keep their two armies from joining forces.”

  “That seems sensible,” the escaped printer said. “Nevertheless, we will try not to hold it against you.”

  Before Victor had to respond to that, Matthew Radcliffe asked him, “How do you view the situation in the west?”

  “Through a glass, darkly,” Victor told his distant cousin. A ripple of laughter ran through the Assembly. He wondered why; he meant it. “I have visited Avalon and New Marseille only once—most of my life has passed on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains, as you well know. I understand the importance of holding all we can there, but I would be lying if I said I had any certainty as to ways and means.”

  An Assemblyman he didn’t know said, “It sounds as though we have too much to do and not enough to do it with.”

  It sounded that way to Victor, too. Admitting as much would probably result in the army of the National Assembly getting a new commander on the instant. With a shrug, he replied, “Sir, I can but promise my best effort and full dedication to victory. I do not believe it will come swiftly. Anyone who does, in my view, has charged his brier with something stronger than pipeweed.” He got another laugh for something he didn’t intend as a joke.

  After more questions and more back-and-forth among the illustrious Assemblymen—they all thought they were, anyhow— they finally got around to calling the question. No one voted against putting Victor in charge of their makeshift army, although several Assemblymen abstained. If things went wrong later, they could say it wasn’t their fault.

  If things went wrong later, chances were what they said wouldn’t matter a farthing’s worth.

  Somewhere close to two thousand men had gathered outs
ide of New Hastings. Victor’s first order of business was to give them the rudiments of drill, so they could—with luck—perform as an army, not a mob. Veterans from the war against French Atlantis had some notion of marching and countermarching and deploying from column to line and other such mysteries.

  Understanding them well enough to teach them to men who had no notion they existed, though . . . In the whole encampment, Victor found two men he trusted with the job. One was a deserter from the redcoats, a barrel-chested sergeant who’d fallen in love with an Atlantean barmaid and changed sides because of her. Tim Knox had a manner that brooked no argument and a voice that carried halfway to Hanover.

  The other drillmaster was Blaise.

  A few people objected to taking orders from a Negro. Victor had seen that in the last war, too. After Blaise knocked the stuffing out of a couple of the grumblers, the rest of the men stopped complaining. Blaise took it all in stride. “In Africa, my clan wouldn’t want to do what a white man said, either,” he remarked.

  “Had you ever seen a white man before you were brought to the coast and sold?” Victor asked him.

  “Once. A trader. He died of a fever in our village,” Blaise said. “We took what he had—iron needles and little shears and the like. The women were so happy!” He smiled at the memory.

  “Poor trader wasn’t,” Victor Radcliff said.

  “True.” Blaise nodded. “You white men have learned all sorts of tricks we don’t know: everything from those good needles—ours are bone, and not so slender—to books and guns and ships. But you have not got the trick of staying healthy in our country.”

  Radcliff had heard the same thing from men who dealt in slaves off the African coast. They’d sounded irked, not—relieved?—the way Blaise did. Victor had another question for Blaise, one that mattered more than how Africans thought about white men: “Are we ever going to make soldiers out of these militiamen?”

  “Maybe,” Blaise said. “Chances are, about the time their enlistments run out.”

  “Ha!” Victor said, not that Blaise was kidding. Since the war that swallowed French Atlantis, militias had sadly decayed. There was no one left to fight—the Spaniards in the south weren’t going to cause trouble, so why worry about drilling? Unless Hanover went to war with New Hastings, people in Atlantis could live in peace, and they did.

  And, because they did, most of them didn’t know the first thing about soldiering. Even the young men who took up arms against England weren’t thrilled about learning, either.

  “Do the best you can, that’s all,” Victor said. “If we can keep our armies in the field for a while—and if we can keep the same people in them—the men will pick up what they have to know.”

  “If we can’t, we lose,” Blaise said.

  Radcliff nodded. “I know. I figured that out, too. Quite a few people in the Atlantean Assembly haven’t yet.”

  “But they are supposed to be the smartest men in Atlantis,” Blaise said.

  “So they are,” Victor agreed. “And if that isn’t a judgment on all of us, I don’t know what would be. One more thing, too.” He waited till the Negro made a questioning noise, then went on, “In their infinite wisdom, they’re the ones who chose me for chief general. Makes you wonder, eh?”

  Blaise said not a word.

  The courier rode into the encampment outside of New Hastings five minutes after Victor Radcliff had sat down to half a fat roasted capon with starberry sauce spooned over it. The green sauce, tart and sweet at the same time, came from one of Atlantis’ few native berries, a product of the thinly settled southwest. It went well with chicken, and even better with greasier fowl like duck and goose.

  A sentry let the courier into Victor’s tent, making him pause with a bite halfway to his mouth. “Yes?” he said.

  “Sir, the English are coming,” the courier said, and then, “Could I have a bite of that? I’m powerful hungry.”

  Victor liked white meat better than dark. He tore off the drum-stick and handed it to the newcomer. As the fellow started to eat, Victor demanded, “Where are the English coming?” The courier had interrupted his supper; he saw no reason not to return the disfavor.

  “Wumbumpf,” the courier said with his mouth full—that was what it sounded like, anyhow.

  “Would you care to try that again?” Victor asked.

  The man swallowed heroically. “Weymouth,” he managed, and took another bite, this one even bigger than the last.

  “Ah,” Victor said. That did make sense—an unpleasant amount of sense, in fact. Weymouth was a small coastal town that lay between New Hastings and Hanover, closer to the latter. Victor would have said the English were welcome to the place—if ever a town had a fine future behind it, Weymouth was the one—if only it didn’t have a sizable arsenal. He couldn’t afford—Atlantis couldn’t afford—to lose the tons of powder and lead bars stored there.

  As things were, he wasn’t sure how much he could do about it. If the enemy started out closer to Weymouth and moved first . . . Maybe he should just send as many wagons as he could, and hope to salvage at least part of the military supplies.

  “When did they march?” he asked. “How fast are they going? Is anyone trying to hold them back?”

  “Powerful thirsty, too,” the courier said. At Victor’s shouted order, he got a mug of beer. He drained it at one long, blissful pull, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed.

  Then he told Victor what he knew. General Howe wasn’t moving south very fast. He didn’t think he needed to, even though loyalists had told him about the armory. He didn’t believe the Atlanteans had an army that could fight his. He also didn’t believe they would even if they could.

  Militiamen and enthusiastic volunteers between Hanover and Weymouth were doing their best to make him think twice. They were shooting at his men from behind fences and from the woods. They were blocking the roads with barricades of rocks and fallen trees. One enterprising group had dammed a roadside stream and turned the roadbed to water and mud. No, the redcoats weren’t making good time.

  Which meant it behooved the Atlanteans to hurry if they wanted to hold Weymouth. Victor set them in motion the morning after he got the news the English were advancing on the town. He wanted to leave New Hastings at the crack of dawn. In fact, the army started marching more than two hours later.

  The column straggled much more than it should have, too. Men fell out whenever they grew tired or got sore feet. At every stream and pond, militiamen splashed water on their faces. When sergeants and officers screamed at them to keep going, the soldiers yelled back. As far as they could see, they were in this because they felt like it, or for a lark. That the war and what came from it might be important didn’t seem to have entered their heads.

  They might have advanced ten miles by the time they halted for the evening. A properly trained army would have gone twice as far. Seeing that, Victor was almost ready to despair.

  “If they get there before us—” he groaned.

  “Then we don’t stop them,” Blaise finished for him. The Negro grunted with relief as he took off his boots. “I’ve got sore feet myself. I’m more used to riding than to marching.”

  “Good for you!” Victor said, snapping his fingers. “You’ve reminded me of something, anyhow.”

  “What’s that?” Blaise examined his heels and the balls of his feet and the bottoms of his toes.

  “I can send horsemen ahead of the main body. Maybe they’ll keep the redcoats out of Weymouth till the rest of us get there.” Victor scowled blackly. “Or maybe they’ll stop at every tavern along the way, drink rum, pinch the barmaids, and never get there at all. Christ, maybe they’ll ride off toward the Green Ridge Mountains after butterflies! Nobody knows till I try it—I’m sure the dragoons don’t.”

  “I don’t . . . think . . . they’ll go chasing butterflies, General.” Blaise spoke with exaggerated care, as if humoring a lunatic.

  Victor Radcliff felt fairly lunatic just then. “
Well, maybe not,” he allowed. Though he had no enormous confidence they would do what he wanted, he summoned the leaders of the mounted infantry and gave them their orders.

  “You’re sending us off as a forlorn hope, then,” said a bright young captain named Habakkuk Biddiscombe.

  “Forlorn hope” was what people called the advance parties who tore up the abatis in front of enemy earthworks. Those parties got the name because not many of the men in them usually lived through the attempt. Radcliff shook his head. “No, Captain. I want you to delay the redcoats, yes. But I don’t want you to throw away your men’s lives or your own doing it.”

  “You want us to fire and fall back, then,” another officer said.

  “Yes!” Victor nodded gratefully. “That is exactly what I want of you.”

  “The only way we can fire and fall back is to get well north of Weymouth before we meet the enemy,” Habakkuk Biddiscombe said. “We’d best commence straightaway if we are to have any hope of gaining so much ground.”

  “Bless my soul,” Victor murmured. Someone grasped the essence of the situation, then. Radcliff made himself nod. “I couldn’t have put it better myself, Habakkuk.”

  “In that case, let’s get moving.” Captain Biddiscombe herded the other officers of dragoons out of Victor’s tent. A few minutes later, some loud and profane swearing came from the mounted infantrymen. A few minutes after that, aided by a waxing gibbous moon, they rode out of the camp, heading north.

  “Can they get there soon enough to do any good?” Blaise asked.

  “I don’t know,” Victor answered. “I do know they have a better chance setting out now than they would if they left tomorrow morning. And I think—I don’t know yet, but I think—Captain Biddiscombe will get everything they have to give from them, and maybe a little more besides. An officer like that is worth his weight in gold.”

  “And maybe a little more besides?” Blaise’s voice was sly.

  “Yes, by God!” Victor nodded. “Every once in a while, maybe a lot more besides.”