Opening Atlantis (37 page)

He ordered Major General Braddock buried in a grave of his own, and had a wooden marker with Braddock's name set over it. Even when caught in a trap, the English commander had fought gallantly. His wounds were at the front, as befit a brave man.

After that…After that, Roland ordered the army to camp for rest and recuperation. He still stood in English-settled territory. His own settlers had smashed English professionals. He was satisfied for the time being.

One of his lieutenants was not. “
Monsieur,
do you know what Hannibal's aide told him when he did not march on Rome as soon as he beat the legions at Cannae?”

“No,” Roland replied, “but I suspect you are about to tell me.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, the junior officer nodded. “He said, ‘You know how to win a victory, but not what to do with it.'”

Roland only laughed. “I will take the chance. And I will say to you that Freetown is hardly Rome. We do not win the war by taking it, and we do not lose the war if we leave it in English hands for a while.”

“We cannot go farther while the English hold it,” the lieutenant said stubbornly. “New Hastings, Hanover…”

“They are far away. One thing at a time,” Roland said. The lieutenant sighed, but he didn't argue any more.

Victor Radcliff found having the paroled redcoats back in Hanover caused more trouble than it solved. They knew they wouldn't be fighting any more for a while, and jeered at their comrades who'd escaped without getting captured. Several fistfights followed in short order.

Sending the paroled men north solved some of the problem, but only some. The Englishmen who remained under arms still seethed with resentment. As long as they all shared the same risks, no one thought anything of it. When some did while others didn't, the less lucky ones naturally disliked the idea of marching into battle while their friends stayed away.

The mere idea of parole bewildered Blaise. “No one has to feed prisoners this way,” Victor explained. “When we capture French soldiers, we'll send them back under parole and put a like number of our men into the army again.”

“Why not put them in now?” Blaise asked. “The French, they don't know.”

“If they recapture a paroled man who isn't properly exchanged, they can shoot him,” Victor replied. “It's a question of honor, too.”

“What is honor?” Blaise asked.

Victor thought of Falstaff in
Henry IV,
Part 1.
What is honor? a word. What is that word, honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. It is insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it: honor is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism
.

That would be more than Blaise needed to know, and in the wrong spirit, too. Victor tried a different approach: “Honor is keeping promises, even if keeping them isn't to your advantage. If both sides in a fight have honor, they can trust each other to follow the rules of war. It means we treat prisoners and enemy civilians well, knowing the enemy will do the same.”

Blaise scratched the tightly curling hair on top of his head. “You and the French do this?” he asked.

“We do,” Victor said, not without pride.

“You are both mad, then,” Blaise declared.

“It could be that you are right.” Radcliff fell into French, in which tongue the Negro was still more fluent. “But if we are both mad the same way, it makes fighting the war easier for the helpless without changing who wins or loses.”

“Honh,” Blaise said, a sound wordless but eloquent in its skepticism. “Prisoners the French take, prisoners you take, you should sell for slaves.”

That shocked Victor. “We don't enslave whites!” he exclaimed.

“I know. You should. Then you would know more about slavery than you do,” Blaise replied, still in French. “The man holding the whip, he thinks one thing. The man tasting the whip, he thinks maybe something else.”

“You are a free man here,” Victor said in English, reminding the Negro he'd come out of French-held territory. If slavery paid more up here in the land of wheat and maize and lumber, it might have caught on better in English Atlantis, too. Radcliff didn't mention that.

“Plenty black men, plenty copper men, not free down south,” Blaise replied, also in English. “You say to them, ‘Help us and you free,' you get big army fast. French, Spaniards, they much unhappy.”

He was probably right. Whether he was or wasn't mattered only so much to Victor Radcliff. The white man touched his left epaulet with his right forefinger. “You see this, Blaise? I am a major of Atlantean volunteers. I do not decide things here.”

“
C'est dommage,
” Blaise said, and then the same thing in English: “Pity.”

“I suppose so,” said Victor, who had never tasted the lash. He wondered whether spreading a promise to free slaves where they were now would be honorable. Reluctantly, he decided it wouldn't. It would involve the French in a guerrilla war against their own servitors, with all the horrors that entailed. War as it was fought these days was a business of army against army, and impinged on civilians as little as possible. A slave uprising couldn't help doing just that.

“You want to win this war, eh?” Blaise said.

“Well, yes. We wouldn't be fighting it if we didn't,” Radcliff said.

“Give blacks and copperskins guns. Best way.” The Negro seemed ruthlessly matter-of-fact. “Make French sorry at home, they no fight up here no more.”

“You may be right,” Victor said. That was polite, and committed him to nothing.

To his surprise, Blaise realized as much. “You waste a chance,” he said. “You not get many better ones. You have to do all your fighting yourself. War is harder. Maybe you lose. What then?”

Victor hadn't seriously imagined losing. He wondered why not. The French settlers had just devastated some of the best infantry in the world. Why wouldn't they do the same to the redcoats' remnants and to the settlers' odds and sods who were all that was left between them and New Hastings and Hanover?

Maybe they would.

“I think I would pack up and go somewhere else. Avalon, perhaps, or the Terranovan mainland,” Victor said. “I'm not too old to make a new start. But we aren't whipped yet, either. Not even close.”

“No, eh?” Blaise let the question hang there.

“No, by God,” Victor Radcliff insisted. “If Kersauzon had pushed us hard, we might have fallen to pieces. But he didn't, and we won't. We're getting stronger by the day, with more Atlantean recruits coming in.”

“Honh,” Blaise said again. He didn't believe it. He saw the English soldiers and paroled prisoners quarreling among themselves, and he thought that meant the whole army was weak.

He might have been right, too. Victor didn't want to believe it, which didn't mean it wasn't true.
We won't win if we give up,
Victor thought. As long as he remembered that…he wasn't giving up. So what? He might lose anyhow.

“F
orward!” Roland Kersauzon shouted. He gestured to the buglers and drummers. Their martial music underscored and amplified the order.

Several thousand men moved at his command, as if he were a puppet master manipulating marionettes. And so he was, though he used obedience, not actual strings. Still, it was a heady feeling, like a slug of barrel-tree rum sliding hot down his throat into an empty stomach.

A courier rode up from the south and handed Roland a letter.

Roland examined both the man and the seal with care. He would not have put it past the perfidious English to sneak in a false but French-speaking courier with a forged message to confuse him and his troops. But both the courier and the impression stamped into the wax seemed authentic. Kersauzon broke the seal with a clasp knife, unrolled the letter, and read.

“What does it say,
Monsieur
?” a lieutenant asked. “Have we been reinforced, the way the English-speaking Atlanteans were?”

“As a matter of fact, we have,” Roland said. “If this is true, two thousand of King Louis' men have landed at Cosquer and are on their way north to us.” He turned to the courier again. “How far behind you are they, do you think?”

“They're foot soldiers, sir,” the fellow replied, with a horseman's natural scorn. “I left them in my dust as soon as I set out.”

“Well, yes. Of course,” Kersauzon said. “And you were riding relays of horses, so that made you all the faster. We can't expect them for some time, then.”

“I would think not, sir,” the courier agreed.

“
Nom d'un nom,
” Roland muttered unhappily. “I don't want to wait for them—we've already waited long enough. But I don't want to go into battle without them, either. What to do? What to do?”

“It's your decision, sir,” the lieutenant said.

Roland Kersauzon could have done without the reminder. He'd been the soul of decisiveness marching up into English territory. He'd got his backwoodsmen and half-trained militiamen a victory even he thought improbable against Braddock's professionals. Now he wanted to rest on his laurels. He wanted to, yes, but he feared that if he tried he soon would have no laurels to rest on. Maybe he'd even made a mistake pausing after the battle. If he'd pressed on right away…

Well, he hadn't. But he would now. He turned back to the courier. “Go tell the soldiers from the mother country I am advancing,” he said. “I look for their support as soon as they are able to give it.”

“Oui, Monsieur.”
The courier repeated back the message. Roland nodded—he had it right. Neither the man nor his horse seemed thrilled at hurrying back in the direction from which they'd come. But the rider sketched a salute and rode off.

“In the meanwhile…” the lieutenant said.

“In the meanwhile, we go on,” Kersauzon said firmly. “We would go on even if the King of France left all his men across the sea.”

“What will you do, sir, if the French from France”—the younger officer smiled at his circumlocution—“have an officer with them who wants to take command, the way General Braddock took command for England?”

Spit in his eye,
Roland thought. But he couldn't say that. If there was such an officer, it would surely get back to him. And so Roland was circumspect for once in his life: “I will point out to him that I am more familiar with local conditions than he is likely to be. I will also point out that General Braddock's misfortunes demonstrate how important familiarity with those conditions may prove.”

“What if he chooses not to listen?” the nosy lieutenant persisted. “What will you do then?”

Hope he has an unfortunate accident.
Roland Kersauzon couldn't say that, either. The theoretical officer slogging up the coast behind him would surely believe he aimed to arrange such an accident…and the usurping dog wouldn't be entirely wrong. “I will do the best I can,” Roland said. “I will do the best he permits me to do.”

“Surely he will value your experience,” the lieutenant said.

“But of course,” Roland murmured. He didn't believe it, even for a moment. A French officer sent to Atlantis would feel the same way prisoners said the English officer sent to Atlantis had felt: as if he were exiled from civilization. And it might be true; an officer who'd disgraced himself at the court might well suddenly find himself carried across the sundering sea to do what he could for a country that didn't care to look him in the eye any more.

Now Roland had to do things quickly and do them right, before the hypothetical officer could take charge and make a mess of whatever he touched. He swore at himself for all the delays he'd tolerated.

Well, he'd tolerate them no more. “Can't you move faster, you lazy lugs?” he shouted. “What are you waiting for? Are your feet stuck in the mud? They'd better not be, by God!”

One of the soldiers grumbled that Roland had some part of himself stuck somewhere else. He was not talking about feet or mud. Roland listened without rancor. Soldiers
were
going to grumble; it was part of what made them soldiers. As long as they grumbled while they marched, Kersauzon didn't mind a bit.

“If you want us to hurry so much now, why didn't you start us sooner?” A sergeant had the nerve to ask that to his face. Atlanteans who spoke English always bragged about how frank they were and how they spoke their mind to anyone, no matter who and no matter when. The French settlers here didn't waste their time bragging about such things. They just did them.

And the sergeant expected an answer. Sighing, Roland gave him the straightest one he could: “Because I didn't know my own mind till now.”

“Ah.” The underofficer weighed that, then nodded. “It happens, sir. I kind of wish it didn't happen here, though.”

Roland Kersauzon sighed again. “I wish it didn't happen here, too, Sergeant. I hope to correct my error. I'm sorry if that means wearing out your boots.”

“So am I,” the sergeant said. “I hope we can fix things, that's all.”

“Me, too,” Roland said, and sighed one more time.

“The Frenchmen are coming! The Frenchmen are coming!” The frightened cry echoed through the encampment the English settlers and redcoats had made south of Freetown.

It also echoed through the streets of Freetown itself. Some of the townsfolk showed the confidence in the men defending them by packing whatever they could into wagons and carriages, or onto the backs of horses and mules, or onto their own backs, and heading north at the best turn of speed they could manage.

Blaise delivered a one-word judgment on that: “Yellow.” Then he asked, “Why is a coward yellow in English? Not in French. Not in my old tongue, either.”

Victor Radcliff only shrugged. “I don't know why. You might as well ask why we call a cow a cow and not a sheep. Because we do, that's all.”

“It doesn't help,” the Negro said reproachfully.

“I know it doesn't,” Victor replied. “I'm sorry. And I'm sorry that so many of the people in Freetown are sheep. They don't think we can hold the enemy. When one runs, the rest follow. And they all go, ‘Baa. Baa. Baa.'” He mimicked a sheep's bleat. “Well, what I have to say to them is ‘Bah!'”

He waited to see whether Blaise would notice the difference between a bleat and a sound of contempt. The Negro's broad smile—which seemed all the broader because his teeth showed up so well against his dark skin—said he did. No flies on Blaise, by God. That wasn't a saying in French, either, and probably also wasn't in the African's native tongue.

“‘Bah!' is right, sir,” Blaise said. “They is silly fools.”

“‘They are,'” Radcliff corrected. His body-servant-turned-sergeant nodded. He made fewer and fewer mistakes. Victor suddenly wondered if he threw one in every so often just to keep from making people suspicious. That wasn't the most reassuring thought he'd ever had. Instead of pursuing it, he went on, “Despite our losses, we have more men than they do, even now, and still more coming in all the time.”

“Yes, sir.” Blaise didn't sound impressed.

“It's true, dammit,” Victor said in some annoyance. There had always been more Englishmen than French—and Bretons, before they finally amalgamated here—in Atlantis. The English came to carve out farms, or to fish, or to take advantage of the marvelous lumber here. Some of the Bretons fished, too; that seemed to be in their blood. But more looked for the same kind of work most French settlers sought: as overseers on the broad, slave-filled estates that raised sugar and indigo and cotton and, lately, Terranovan pipeweed. That left them—and the Spaniards farther south still—thinner on the ground than the English were.

All the same, Blaise had good enough reason not to sound impressed. Numbers mattered only so much. The surviving redcoats had had their confidence jolted by marching into a trap. Seeing their captured comrades freed on parole hadn't helped their morale, either. And the militiamen from the local settlements weren't so eager as they had been before their first taste of battle.

Victor hoped they wouldn't run if they had to fight again. He hoped so, yes, but he couldn't be sure.

Blaise found a new and unpleasant question: “Is true, sir, they have real Frenchmen from France now, like Braddock, he real Englishman from England?”

“I hear it's true,” Radcliff said. “I don't know it is for a fact, but I hear it is. And if it is, someone in the Royal Navy needs a talking-to, by God.”

“Talking-to?” Blaise rolled his eyes. “Need to kick somebody in a boat, kick him…” He mimed clutching at his crotch.

“That would be good.” After a moment, Victor shook his head. “That would have been good. But it's too late to fret about such things now. The Frenchmen are here, and we have to stop them. If we can.”

“We do it.” Blaise sounded confident—but then, he generally did. Looking around to make sure no officers from England were in earshot, he added, “How you like command, sir?”

“Don't be silly,” Victor said. “I'm not in command here. That English lieutenant-colonel, the earl's son…”

Blaise laughed. “He don't—doesn't—know anything. But he not
so
dumb. He know he…doesn't know anything. Some men, they don't know anything, and they don't know they don't know anything, you know?”

“Er—right.” That bemused Victor Radcliff for a couple of reasons. The Negro's syntax, he was convinced, would have bemused anybody. And Blaise, all unknowingly—which fit his discourse well enough—was reproducing part of the argument from Plato's recounting of the
Apology
of Socrates.

Sure enough, the English officer approached Victor later that afternoon. “I hear the French settlers are on the march,” he remarked. He was a few years younger than Victor—in his early twenties, probably—and, with fresh features and baby-fine skin, looked younger still.

“Yes, your Excellency. I hear the same,” Victor said.

“If at all possible, we should stop their taking Freetown. Losing it would be a black eye,” the young Englishman said.

“Yes, sir. I quite agree,” Radcliff said.

“How do we go about doing that?” the lieutenant-colonel asked. “All too likely that they'll outnumber us. The result of another stand-up fight would be worrisome, to say the least.”

Victor nodded. “So it would, sir. I'm not sure about the numbers”—he wouldn't call the English officer wrong, not to his face—“but they're bound to have the advantage of morale.”

“What, what are we going to do, then? What
can
we do, then?” Raised in the traditions of continental European warfare, the young lieutenant-colonel thought standup battles were the only possible way two armies could meet. Seeing as much, Victor understood better how General Braddock had come to grief.

“Your Excellency, if I might make a suggestion…” No, Victor wasn't in command. He couldn't start throwing orders around. But if he could gently steer this overbred but willing youngster in the right direction…He talked for a while, hoping the Englishman would see reason.

“Well, well,” the young man said at last. “You wouldn't see such an approach taken in France or the Low Countries or the Germanies. Of that I am quite certain. Still and all, though, the so-called
klephts
in the Balkans might attempt an undertaking of this sort….”

Victor Radcliff would have had a better notion of whether the lieutenant-colonel approved or not had he ever heard of
klephts
before. Since he hadn't, he made do with the question directly: “Shall we go ahead and try it, then, your Excellency?”

The Englishman looked quite humanly surprised. “I thought I said so, Major.”

Maybe he had, but not in any language Victor understood. No matter, though. Saluting, Victor said, “Now it's so very plain, sir, that even a settler can understand it.” The lieutenant-colonel nodded. Victor had bet himself a shilling that the man wouldn't notice irony, and sure enough…Now he had to collect.
I'll take it out of the Frenchmen's hides,
he thought.