Opening Atlantis (34 page)

“Sure did.” The man looked from Aeneas Hand to Blaise and back again. “Offended him, did he? If he really went and got him mad, I reckon he'd be in pieces.”

“Wouldn't be surprised,” Victor Radcliff agreed. “Fetch a pail of water and souse Aeneas with it. He's learned a lesson. I hope nobody else in this company has to.”

Hand had begun to stir by the time the water cascaded over him. Sure enough, it revived him. Blearily, he looked up at Blaise. “You don't fight fair,” he said.

“Fight fair? Fight fair?” That startled the black man out of English and into profane French:
“Sacre merde!”
Blaise thought for a moment before going on, in English again, “You right. I no fight fair. I fight, I win. Only way to fight. I sergeant.” He tapped his stripes. “You mess me again, I kill you. Understand?”

Aeneas Hand nodded, then winced and looked as if he wished he hadn't. Water dripped off his chin and from the end of his pointed nose. “Reckon I do.”

“Reckon I do, what?” Blaise touched the chevrons again.

“Reckon I do, Sergeant,” the big recruit allowed.

“Good.” Blaise allowed himself a smile. He reached down and hauled Hand upright. “We get on now.”

And they did. Having been so thoroughly beaten, Aeneas Hand spread the word that Blaise was sudden death on two legs. A couple of smaller incidents with other recruits did nothing to show he was wrong. Victor Radcliff began to wonder whether he or his man would have worn the epaulets had Blaise been born with a white skin.

Gravediggers' spades tore into the soft brown earth. Dirt thudding on dirt had an ominously final sound. Roland Kersauzon watched as a priest gabbled quick Latin over the shrouded corpse, then jumped away. A sickly-sweet stench rose from the body. It wasn't because the young soldier had stayed unburied too long; he'd died that night, only a few hours before this dawn. But smallpox had its own fetor.

Roland muttered to himself. Too many soldiers were dying of smallpox and measles. Men who grew up on farms out in the countryside and spent their lives alone in the woods missed the diseases in childhood, when they were most often milder. Catch them then and you were immune forever after. Catch them as an adult…

He rubbed his arm. He had smallpox scars there, but nowhere else. He'd missed the sickness as a boy himself. He'd been inoculated with it at Nouveau Redon and taken a light case. Now he was as immune as if he'd been through a harsh bout caught by accident.

Inoculation had come to the French settlements from the English, to Atlantis from England, and to England, he'd heard, from Turkey. He wondered how widely it was practiced in English territory here. Were the English settlements' recruits less likely than his own men to come down sick? He hoped not—that could decide who won the war.

The gravediggers tipped the corpse into the hole they'd made. Both of them had smallpox-slagged faces; they feared no contagion. The priest was unmarked. No wonder he didn't want to stay by the body a moment longer than he had to. But a dying man, or a dead one, needed a hope of heaven. If a priest wouldn't shrive him, he'd surely go to hell instead.

If a priest died after shriving a few men, what then?

Then you find another priest,
Roland thought,
with luck a man who carries the scars on his own face.
That would be more…economical. Till this moment, Kersauzon had never thought of priests as expendable munitions of war, but they were. That they were also other things didn't mean they weren't.

A veteran sergeant—one who bore the marks on his face—came up to Roland and saluted. Voice as mechanical as an artisan's automaton, he said, “
Monsieur,
I'm sorry to have to report to you that in my company alone we have another half a dozen sick. Two of them, I fear, aren't at all well.”

If a veteran sergeant said something like that, the priest would perform his office again before long.
“Nom d'un nom!”
Roland burst out. “So many, and just from your company?”

“Oui, Monsieur.”
Who would have imagined the underofficer's voice could become even more colorless than it was already?

“And other companies will be reporting similar calamities?” Kersauzon persisted.

“If they are honest, I think they will.”

“How are we to go forward with so much sickness?”

The sergeant didn't answer that, not in words. His eyebrows said,
You're the commander. Why are you troubling me with that? It's your worry.
And it was. Kersauzon sighed. “Thank you for letting me know. You're dismissed.” He received another precisely machined salute, and the underofficer made his exit.

Other sergeants and lieutenants did report sickness in their men. One lieutenant reported himself unwell. The hectic flush on his face and a bright glitter in his eye said he'd be worse before long. Roland said nothing of that past telling him to lie down and take it easy.

“But we're in English territory,
Monsieur
,” the young officer protested. “We should move forward.”

“We will—in a while,” Roland said. “But we need to have a healthy army if we are to fight with any hope of victory,
n'est-ce pas?
”

“
Oui,
” the lieutenant said, and argued no more.

More and more reports came in. “This is a disaster!” Kersauzon cried. He'd expected the bloody flux among his men. But so many casualties from smallpox and measles took him by surprise.

The corporal who'd brought the latest word of men down with smallpox—and of others afraid to get anywhere near them—shrugged then. The marks on his face said he'd been through the disease and come out the other side. “It's war,
Monsieur,
” he replied.

“But if I attack now, it will be like trying to strike with a broken hand,” Roland said.

Another shrug from the corporal. “Then don't attack,
Monsieur.
Wait for the English to come to you. Chances are their army will have as much sickness as ours.”

Fifty years earlier, that assuredly would have been true. But, if the English inoculated more than his own side did, smallpox would trouble them less. And he knew they did inoculate more. The procedure had its risks; every once in a while, someone came down with a bad case of smallpox instead of the mild dose that gave immunity. Most of the time, though, a wild case was far more dangerous.

He consoled himself by remembering that the English couldn't inoculate for measles or fluxes of the bowels. And not all of their soldiers would have had pus from a smallpox sore rubbed into a cut on the arm. Some would still catch the disease on their own. Some, yes, but how many?

Fewer than were catching it among his own troops. Roland Kersauzon was glumly sure of that. He dismissed the corporal with more respect than he usually gave underofficers. The man had helped him make up his mind, which was more than that miserable lieutenant had done.

He stood on English territory. He decided he
would
stand for a while, till the sickness burned through his army and burned itself out. Freetown could wait.

Victor Radcliff rode into New Hastings from the north. Blaise rode with him. The Negro had never ridden a horse till he escaped from bondage. No one would ever mistake him for a polished equestrian now, but he stayed on the gelding and didn't complain about being saddlesore…though he did walk with the bowlegged gait of a man with rickets.

New Hastings' narrow, winding streets and half-timbered houses made Victor wonder if the Tudor age really had passed away. He laughed at himself as that went through his mind. The town was older than the Tudors; its founding lay in Plantagenet times. Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts—all gone. New Hastings went on.

“English ships, they come?” Blaise asked.

“That's what the semaphore said,” Victor answered. “Word passed from fishing boats still out to sea.”

“It is clever, the semaphore.” Blaise lapsed into French to say that, and went on in the same language: “In Africa, we have fires that go from hill to hill to pass messages.”

“Beacon fires,” Victor said in English.

“Beacon fires.” Blaise repeated the phrase. “I remember.” And he would, too. “But the semaphore, it is better than the beacon fires. It can say more of things.”

“Just
more things,
” Victor told him.

“More things.” Blaise also said that again. He shrugged. “It is a peculiar language, English.”

Victor found French and Spanish peculiar when they differed from the tongue he'd grown up speaking. To what strange African language was Blaise comparing English? Radcliff wondered how much trouble he would have learning it.

He had more important things to worry about. Those ships would carry English regulars to stiffen the ranks of the raw Atlantean troops. Victor assumed the redcoats wouldn't have to worry about the sicknesses that had weakened the colonial force. The regulars would already have lived through them by now.

He and Blaise rode past the big all-planked warehouses that stood near the harbor, and then out toward the quays. Their timing couldn't have been better if they were on the stage in Hanover. A first-rate man-of-war was just tying up, with several smaller, beamier transports right behind.

“Ahoy!” Victor called to the men on the ship of the line. He descended from fishermen, but the nautical word felt strange and unnatural in his mouth. “May I come aboard?”

“Who are you?” a mate asked. He pointed at Blaise. “And who's the monkey?”

A low growl from Blaise's throat said he understood that. Radcliff had hoped he wouldn't. The Atlantean officer answered, “I am Major Victor Radcliff, of the local militia. With me is my man, Blaise.” He stressed
man
more than he might have otherwise.

The mate stayed unimpressed. “And why should the general want to see the likes of you, eh?”

“Because his men and ours will be fighting the French?” Victor suggested.

“Well, 'is will,” the mate said. But then, just before Victor might have drawn his pistol, the fellow grudgingly nodded. “All right. I suppose you can see 'im. Won't do too much 'arm.”

He shouted orders. A gangplank thudded down. Victor came aboard, Blaise at his heels. Everything aboard the man-of-war spoke of order, discipline, restraint, confinement. At home in the wide woods of Atlantis, Victor immediately mistrusted the atmosphere.

Behind him, Blaise muttered in his incomprehensible native tongue. He would have crossed from Africa to Atlantis in the hold of a slave ship. Mistrust, Radcliff realized, was bound to be the least of what he felt here. But for those mutters and a hooded glance toward the mate, though, Blaise held his feelings in check.

“Ahh…Where do I find the general?” Victor asked.

“Lubber,” the mate muttered. Radcliff felt as offended, and as ready to punch him, as Blaise would have if the man had said
nigger
in the same tone of voice. With a resigned sigh—what could one do about the ignorant?—the mate pointed and said, “'Is cabin's on the poop deck, back at the stern.”

“Thank you,” Victor replied, meaning anything but.

Then the mate pointed again. “'Ere 'e comes now, so you don't 'ave to go back there. Wouldn't want you getting lost, would we?” Before Victor could rise to that sarcasm, the mate raised his voice: “Your Excellency! General, sir! This officer from the settlements”—his tone, and the way he jerked his thumb at Victor, showed he was giving him the benefit of the doubt—“would like to 'ave the honor of speaking to your Excellency for a moment.”

“Yes, yes.” The general commanding the English expeditionary force was refulgent in scarlet and gold. If the uniform made the man, he was a made man indeed. Personally, he was less prepossessing: about sixty, jowly, with a pinched mouth that said he'd lost most of his teeth. When he nodded to Victor, the wattles under his chin wobbled. “I am Major General Edward Braddock. And you, sir…?”

Victor saluted. “Major Victor Radcliff, your Excellency. I am pleased to welcome you to Atlantis.”

“More pleased than I am to be here, I shouldn't wonder,” Braddock replied. “I hoped they would give me a command on the Continent, but…” He shrugged, and that loose flesh swung back and forth again. “A man goes where he is ordered, not where he would. Tell me something of the French dispositions.”

“Sir, they are halted in our territory, about thirty miles below Freetown,” Victor said. No light of intelligence kindled in the general's eye, from which Victor concluded he did not know exactly where Freetown lay. With a mental sigh, the Atlantean added a gloss: “About a hundred ten miles south of where we are now.”

“I see.” Edward Braddock nodded, perhaps in wisdom. His next questions were cogent enough: “Why are they halted? Why didn't they go on to assail this place?”