Opening Atlantis (36 page)

And he was impressed at what the redcoats were doing to the French settlers in front of them. The settlers were brave; if they weren't, they couldn't have stood the gaff as long as they had. But they were getting chewed to pieces. The training that made an English regular would have been reckoned cruel if inflicted on a hound. On a man…But, cruel or not, it worked. The regulars delivered their fire with a speed and volume Victor wouldn't have believed if he weren't seeing it with his own eyes.

Blaise saw the same thing. “These men ugly. These men bad. But these men, they fighters,” he said.

Whoops and cheers from officers and sergeants announced the French debacle. “They're running, the cowardly dogs!” an underofficer shouted gleefully.

“Order the pursuit!” Braddock commanded in a great voice. Horns and human voices carried out his bidding.

“Hurrah!” the soldiers shouted as they tramped forward, still in neatly aligned ranks.

And all hell broke loose.

When volleys tore into the redcoats from both flanks, they left Victor confused for a moment. The enemy was in front of them. The enemy was broken, was fleeing…. The enemy was, he realized, leading them straight into a trap. No. Had led them.

Smoke rose from the left. Smoke rose from the right. More musketry tore into the redcoats from either side. Cannon boomed, their roar deeper than that from the flintlocks. The roundshot, enfilading the English, tore great holes in their lines.

And the French settlers who'd volleyed with Braddock's regulars hadn't fled incontinently, as Victor thought they had. Once they reached the cover that trees and ferns gave, they turned around and started shooting again. Each man blazed away as he saw fit. It wasn't the deadly hail of bullets a good volley produced, which didn't mean it wasn't galling.

The French settlers also proved to have field guns hidden in the woods to the rear of their lines. They fired roundshot and canister. The range was long for canister, but not too long. Regulars fell in clusters when the showers of lead balls struck home.

“My God! We are undone!” Major General Edward Braddock sounded astonished, disbelieving. “They tricked us, the dirty scuts!” By the way he said it, the French settlers had no right to do any such wicked thing.

“Can we break them?” Victor asked, more from duty than from hope. The veriest child could see that the English regulars, under fire from the front and both flanks, were the ones being broken.

So could Braddock. “No, this day is not ours, I fear me. Best we withdraw to save what we can, while—” He stopped, wincing, and set a hand on his prominent belly.

“You're wounded, your Excellency!” Victor said. Sure enough, blood stained the gray vest Braddock wore under his long red coat.

He still had spirit. “Nothing serious, my dear boy, I assure you. I—” He winced again. This ball struck the right side of his chest. “I say! Blighters are using me for a pincushion today.” He coughed and grimaced and flinched. Red foam burst from his nostrils. He would die, then. No surgeon could cure a wound like that, even if fever didn't take him after the bullet in the belly.

A musket ball gashed Victor's horse. The animal screamed and bucked. He fought it back under control. Another ball drew a bloody line across the back of his hand. The redcoats' lines, neat no more, were bloodied, too. They stolidly tried to fight back. In an impossible position, bedeviled by foes they couldn't see—foes who didn't fight the way they were used to—the undertaking was hopeless.

“Blow
retreat
!” Victor shouted to the buglers. He looked around for Blaise. The Negro hadn't fled. He hadn't got shot down. “Go to the other wing. Tell the buglers there to sound
retreat,
too. On my orders and General Braddock's.”

“Sound
retreat.
On your orders. Yes, sir.” If Blaise had any nerves, he kept them in a place where they didn't show. Off he rode.

“I'll get you out of here, your Excellency,” Radcliff told the English general.

“Kind of you to say so, young fellow, but I fear me I'm done for.” The red foam was on Braddock's lips now, too. “I know somewhat of wounds. I'll not go anywhere far, not with what I've caught.”

“Your courage does you credit, sir.” Victor could say that and mean it. Braddock faced death with as much equanimity as any man he'd ever seen.

He waved the praise away. “I've done good fighting in my day—and some not so good, I fear, here at the end. I've loved a lot of pretty women, too, and more than a few of them loved me back. I hoped to be shot at a more advanced age by an outraged husband, but no man gets everything he wants.”

“Come away, please. Maybe the doctors can do you some good.” Even as Victor spoke, he knew they couldn't.

So did Edward Braddock. “Quacks might kill me faster, you mean. But I die fast enough without them. Save yourself, Radcliff. Pay these backwoods Frenchmen back, if you see the chance. Go on. Your luck won't last if you stay here. Mine's already run dry.” He sagged in the saddle. He wouldn't be able to sit his horse much longer.

Tears stung Radcliff's eyes. “You'll be avenged, your Excellency. England will be avenged.”

“Yes, yes,” Braddock said impatiently. He coughed again. This time, a steady stream of blood came from his nose and dribbled out the corner of his mouth. His face was going gray.

Biting his lip, Victor turned his horse and rode back to the north. By ones and twos and in small groups, redcoats were stumbling out of the fight. Every so often, a man would turn and fire at what might have been pursuers. Most of the regulars wanted nothing more than to get away.

One of them nodded at Victor in a friendly enough fashion. “Cor, them Frenchies buggered us with a bleedin' pine cone this time, didn't they?”

“Well…” Victor admitted what he couldn't deny. “Yes.”

“Did the general make it out?” the redcoat asked.

“Afraid not. He's got two wounds—bad ones. Belly and chest. I don't think he'll live much longer,” Radcliff replied.

“Blimey!” the Englishman said. “So who's in charge, then? You?”

Victor looked around. He didn't see any officers who outranked him anywhere close by. “I think I may be, for now, anyhow.”

“Well, Mr. Atlantean, sir, wot the 'ell do we do next?” the soldier said.

“Let's get away from the enemy first,” Radcliff said. “Then we'll look around and see what we've got left. And after that, we'll try to decide how we can go on fighting. Or do you have a better idea? If you do, speak up. I'd love to hear it.”

“If you want ideas from the likes of me, things
are
buggered up,” the soldier said.

“Aren't they?” Victor asked, again in all seriousness.

The redcoat laughed. “They are indeed, sir, for fair. No, what you said sounds good enough—for starters, anyway.”

“Yes. For starters,” Victor agreed. “And that's about where we are now, isn't it? Starting from the beginning, I mean.”

“Oh, no, sir,” the Englishman said. “After wot 'appened to us, we'd better start before
that,
eh?”

Victor only wished he could say the man was wrong.

Ravens and vultures spiraled down out of the sky to feast on the dead. The ravens didn't mind pecking at the dying, either, though the vultures shunned anything that still moved. Roland Kersauzon had seen plenty of dead and dying men before, but never so many all in one place. Quantity, he discovered, had a quality all its own.

Then a red-crested eagle struck at one of his men walking over the battlefield and badly wounded him. Roland had thought the enormous birds of prey were gone from eastern Atlantis, but evidently not. He wondered what they ate with honkers hunted nearly to extinction hereabouts. This one, plainly, wanted to eat man's flesh. It fought with wings and beak and talons and furious screeches when his soldiers tried to drive it from its screaming victim. One of them finally knocked it over the head.

Stretcher bearers carried the injured man back to the surgeons. His shrieks would go unnoticed there among so many others. Roland had to make himself go watch the medicos at work and comfort men as they endured bullet probings and amputations with nothing to dull the pain but a leather strap to bite on or, if they were lucky, a slug of rum.

“Why did you come at all,
Monsieur
?” one of the surgeons asked. The man's leather apron was all bloody. So were his arms, to the elbows. He sounded genuinely puzzled as he continued, “The rest of us are here because we have no choice.”

“Yes, I understand.” Roland fought not to wrinkle his nose against the butcher's reek of blood. His wave took in the charnel house and the rest of the field. “But all this is my responsibility. I'm glad to accept the victory, but how can I without seeing what it costs?”

“Believe me,
Monsieur,
most commanders have no trouble whatever,” the surgeon said. Along with two burly aides, he went on to the next wounded man. “Hold him tight, boys,” he told them. “Can't let him run away while we ply our trade, eh?”

The soldier screamed. How could he help it, when an iron probe penetrated his pierced flesh? Roland turned away, working hard to control his face and his stomach.

He was relieved when a junior officer came up to him. That gave him something to think about besides suffering. “Excuse me, sir,” the lieutenant said, “but the English prisoners wish to know what is to be done with them.”

“I will talk to them,” Kersauzon said. “My English is not of the best, but it will serve. And some of them, it may be, will know a little French.”

“Yes, that is so,” the lieutenant replied. He took Roland to the prisoners, who looked as apprehensive as the French commander would have in their boots. Since those boots were finer than the ones a lot of his soldiers had, the redcoats probably counted themselves lucky to be wearing them still. Some of the Englishmen stood in their stocking feet, so they'd already met plunderers.

“You are safe,” Roland told them in his rusty English. “Your lives are safe. You will not be armed…uh, harmed.”

“Will you parole us, sir?” asked a man whose chevrons proclaimed him a sergeant.

“You will agree not to fight again until exchanged?” Kersauzon asked, first in his language and then in theirs. Sure enough, a few English soldiers did speak French. They translated for the others. Inside of half a minute, all the prisoners were nodding eagerly.

“We will, sir,” the sergeant said, “and thank you for the handsome offer.”

Roland wondered whether he ought to hold some of them as hostages, to make sure the rest kept their word. He decided that would give the redcoats ideas they didn't need. They were professionals; they had honor.

“You will give your paroles to my men in charge of receiving them.” Roland resolved to appoint such men as soon as he left the prisoners. “Then you may go north, if that is what you desire.” He knew his English was stilted, but it served.

“Can we get back what your men stole from us when we surrendered?” That sergeant, like any good underofficer, was always looking to turn an inch into a mile.

But Kersauzon shook his head. “Be joyous—uh, be thankful—they did not hit you on the head. Did you never plunder a foe?”

“Who, me, your Excellency? Oh, I might have done that a time or two.” The sergeant didn't waste breath denying it. Roland Kersauzon would have called him a liar if he had. With a grin, the saucy fellow went on, “Couldn't hurt to ask.”

“Nor help.” Roland turned away.

Before long, the redcoats were giving their names to the French settlers Roland chose to take them. The military clerks wrote the names on paper borrowed from the bookkeeper over his protests. The few Englishmen who could write signed their names beside the transcriptions. The rest made their marks. Then, still showing the formidable discipline they'd displayed in battle, they marched away, heads high, backs straight. By their pride, they might have won.

“What will you do now,
Monsieur
?” one of the clerks asked. “Will you go into Freetown? With their army shattered, the English can hardly stand against us.”

Part of Roland thought he ought to do exactly that. The enemy would be dismayed and disorganized. But he was dismayed and disorganized himself. The sight of a real battlefield would do that to anyone. And his own force, if not dismayed, was also disorganized. The men who'd volleyed with the redcoats had fallen in windrows. The English might be good at only one kind of warfare, but they were monstrously good at that.

And so Roland temporized. “First we shall bury the dead—ours and theirs. When that is done, I shall decide where to go next.”

“
Oui, Monsieur.
” The clerk didn't argue. He even explained why: “You beat them. You showed you know what you are doing.”

Bodies thudded into long trenches, some for the French settlers, others for the redcoats and English settlers. Priests read prayers above them. Maybe even the enemy heretics, or some of them, would reach purgatory and not burn forever in hell. Kersauzon hoped so, anyhow.