Opening Atlantis (41 page)

“I no hear that. I never hear that.” Blaise shook his head.

“Oh, well.” Victor shrugged. He wondered how much French had changed since Shakespeare's day. That might be an interesting question to ask Roland Kersauzon…if the two of them weren't otherwise occupied trying to blow each other's heads off.

Right now, that seemed unlikely.

Roland swept out his right arm. “There is another band of the accursed English brigands. Hunt them down!”

Baying like wolves, his soldiers swarmed after the fleeing men from the English settlements. (The phrase occurred to Roland even though he'd never seen or heard a wolf. So many of the stories that came from France featured them. He could picture them plainly: bigger than dogs, shaped like foxes, but gray and ferocious.)

A few of the men who'd come south to disrupt the French army's supply lines still showed fight. Most of them, though, wanted no more than to get away with their lives. They'd had a high old time shooting teamsters and plundering wagons. They hadn't come down here to fight when the numbers weren't all in their favor. But when Kersauzon detached his settlers from Montcalm-Gozon's regulars, they had no trouble overwhelming the company or so of men kicking up trouble along the coast.

Muskets bellowed. Puffs of gray smoke marked where shooters stood. That familiar, sulfurous smell made Roland smile. But he wished gunpowder didn't so clearly point out every man who fired. If anyone ever devised a powder that didn't smoke, he would win a great advantage in war.

In the meantime, his men and the enemy used what they had. The English settlers fought from cover instead of standing in a neat line till they got shot down. That didn't change the result, but did make things take longer. Roland's men were settlers, too. They advanced by little skittering rushes. Some of them fired to keep the English busy while the others moved up.

At close quarters, it came to bayonets and swords and hatchets and knives and fists and teeth. Only a handful of English settlers surrendered. Cursed raiders they might be, but they had courage.

“You aren't supposed to be here, you damned nuisance,” a wounded prisoner told Kersauzon.

“That is the best place to be, where you are not supposed to,” the French commander replied. “Your friends thought so,
oui
?”

“Well, what if we did?” the prisoner said. “Jesus, this leg hurts. Nobody ever went and shot me before.”

“
Quelle dommage,
” Roland said, as if he meant it.

“What will you do now?” the captive asked.

“Go on and give your other band of raiders, the larger one, the same kind of surprise we just gave you, if God grants that that be possible,” Roland answered frankly. Why not? The prisoner wasn't going to escape, steal a horse, and gallop off to tell Victor Radcliff an army was coming after him. Such things happened in romances, but not in life.

“What will you do with
me
?” the man inquired. Maybe he'd meant that all along.

“Give you to the surgeons, of course,” Kersauzon said. “We are not barbarians, to torment you for the sport of it. We are French. You are English. We are all civilized men, is it not so?”

“Boy, I hope it is,” the enemy muttered. Apprehensively, he went on. “What do you think the surgeons will do?”

“Remove the musket ball, unless they decide it is better left alone. This happens sometimes, but not often.”

“Remove it? Easy for you to say. It's not your leg. Will they give me whiskey to drink and a bullet to bite on?”

“We use rum and a leather strap,” Roland said.

“Rum will do,” the English settler said eagerly. He didn't compare the effectiveness of the bullet and the strap.

“Rum you shall have,” Kersauzon promised. He gestured to the prisoner's guards. “Take him away.”

Away the man went. Wounded French settlers were already howling under the surgeons' ministrations. Roland couldn't distinguish the prisoner's cries of torment from those of his own troops. Wounded men all made the same noises.

Roland wished he wouldn't have had to waste time dealing with the seaborne raiders. They were only a nuisance…though Montcalm-Gozon, whose supply of victuals they'd interrupted, probably would have expressed a different view. Roland didn't care about the fancy French nobleman's opinions here. Neither did the men who followed him. They knew too well what Victor Radcliff's bandits were doing to the property and persons of people who mattered to them. They aimed to stop the bandits as soon as they could.

He wondered whether, had he loosed his men as raiders, they could have wreaked as much havoc on the English settlements as the enemy was doing down here. Regretfully, he decided it was unlikely. Up in English-held territory, farms were smaller, villages were more common, and people lived closer to one another. The English had a better chance of mustering a scratch force that could slow up raiders—and raiders who had to slow up were raiders in trouble.

None of the anguished messages coming out of the southwest made him think the English settlers had had to slow down much. If they wanted to, they could probably go all the way down into the subtropical settlements that belonged to the King of Spain.

Kersauzon blinked. If the English did invade the Spanish settlements, what should he do about it? Spain and France were allied against England in the European war. They were allies here, too—in theory. But Roland would have been most affronted—which was putting it mildly—had Spanish soldiers entered the French settlements. No doubt the Spanish authorities (assuming they woke up from their long, long siestas) would be just as unhappy about French settlers fighting on their steaming soil.

And yet the Spaniards were probably even thinner on the ground than the French. Victor Radcliff brigands could do a lot of damage down there. Who would stop them? Anybody?

“A messenger!” Roland shouted. He had paper and ink and a quill with him at all times: the responsibility that went with command. He was already writing when a young horseman came up and waited expectantly.

“What do you need,
Monsieur
?” the rider asked.

“Take a letter to his Excellency,
Don
José Valverde, the governor-general of Spanish Atlantis, in Gernika. You also need to know what it says, in case it should be damaged. I am asking
Don
José for permission to follow the English raiders into his territory if they go that way. I have no designs against Spanish Atlantis: I aim only to destroy the raiders. Give me that back, if you would be so kind.”

After several tries, the messenger had it straight. Roland sealed the letter (sealing wax being another essential for a man of his position) and handed it to him. Sketching a salute, the youngster rode off to the south.

Gernika,
Roland thought. He'd never been there himself. He didn't want to deal with the Spaniards under these circumstances. What you wanted, though, and what you got…

E
ven the trees down here were strange. Some barrel trees dwarfed barrels—and men. Others had round trunks full of sweet sap. Victor Radcliff had already enjoyed the rumlike drink the French and especially the Spaniards brewed from it.

Conifers were different, too. In floral wreaths, cypress meant mourning. Here in southern Atlantis, cypresses just grew. Locals used the timber in their buildings, even if it wasn't as good as pine or redwood. The farther south Victor and his men went, the more mossy beards hung from cypress branches.

And the more snakes lurked in the trees and in the undergrowth.

One of the raiders was bitten; he died in short order despite having the wound cauterized and being given all the rum he could drink to keep his heart strong.

Some of the snakes had rattles at the ends of their tails, like many of the venomous serpents Victor knew farther north. Again like those farther north, some shook their tails before striking but had no rattles to warn their victims. And some simply skulked and struck. Some were probably harmless, but after the death Victor's followers weren't inclined to take chances. If it slithered and they saw it, it died.

“Do they have poisonous snakes in Africa, too?” Radcliff asked Blaise.

“Oh, yes. Here, you don't have—” The Negro used a word in his own language. He drew a picture of the kind of snake he had in mind in the dirt. He used a twig with a confidence a lot of sketch artists might have envied. That broad flare behind the head…

“That must be a cobra,” Victor said. “They also have them in India, I believe. People there tame them and teach them to dance to music.”

“You see this? You know it is so?” Blaise asked.

“Well…no,” Victor admitted.

“Then it is a lie, I bet.” Blaise sounded very sure of himself. He was willing—no, eager—to explain why, too: “Mess with these, uh, cobras, you have to be mad. Crazy. Cray-zee.” He liked the sound of that word.

“I won't tell you you're wrong,” Victor Radcliff said. “It seems crazy to me, too. But people do crazy things sometimes.”

“You cray-zee with cobra snakes, you are not cray-zee long.” Blaise spoke with great conviction. Radcliff suspected he knew what he was talking about. Anybody who spent too much time fooling around with venomous serpents of any kind was taking his life in his own hands—and its fangs.

His scouts reported that the French settlers were moving against his men from the northeast, as he'd suspected they might. They had more men than he did: he was sure of that. Since he didn't think he could meet them on even terms, he saw only two choices. He could try to ambush them, or he could avoid meeting them at all.

Had they been the regulars from France, he would have tried an ambush. One had worked against Braddock's redcoats; another might well work here. But not against other settlers. They knew the tricks of the trade as well as Victor's men. Since this was their country, they probably knew them better.

Avoid, then. Down the tracks that led south toward the Spanish settlements he went. Those tracks were truly wretched. Most of the real roads in the French settlements ran from east to west, from the seacoast to the interior. The same was also true in the English settlements, but to a smaller degree. With far more people starting to crowd a similar amount of land, the northern settlements needed and had a real road network.

Now the English settlers plundered more thoroughly and didn't burn till after they'd robbed. They'd eaten up the supplies they'd brought with them, and were living off the countryside. Radcliff had known that would happen. It worried him all the same.

“What do we do if they burn in front of us?” Blaise asked one hot, sweaty afternoon. It was early spring, but it felt like what would have been high summer in New Hastings or Hanover.

Blaise had unerringly put his finger on Victor's greatest fear. “We starve,” the commander answered.

“Ah.” Maybe Blaise hadn't expected anything that blunt. On the other hand, maybe he had. He showed only what he wanted to show.

The French settlers didn't burn their own homes and plantations to keep Victor's force from moving forward. Maybe they didn't think of it. Or maybe they were simply less ruthless than Radcliff and his colored sergeant. If they were, he wanted to make them pay for it.

He discovered he'd left French Atlantis and entered Spanish Atlantis when the lordlet whose house he'd just burned cursed him in most impure Castilian—actually, in the hissing Andalusian dialect more commonly used here and in Terranova. Victor surprised the hidalgo by returning the uncompliments in the same language.

“Why do you do these things to me?” the Spaniard cried, looking disconsolately from the English settlers running off his livestock to his house going up in flames.

“Our kings are at war,” Victor answered with a shrug.

“You are one of the settlers from the north,” the Spaniard said. “I thought you had no king.”

“England has a king, just as Spain has a king,” Victor replied. “If the King of England wars against the King of Spain, that makes the two of us enemies.” The English settlements in Atlantis, Victor reflected, remembered their loyalty to King George only when England warred against France or Spain. The rest of the time, the settlers were more inclined to complain about how England didn't want them making things on their own or trading with other realms instead of buying from the mother country.

None of that mattered a farthing to the Spaniard. He saw his property burning and being stolen. “You offered no resistance,” Radcliff told him. “We spare your life because you didn't. You can rebuild. You can start over.”

The Spaniard bowed, which didn't hide the hatred smoldering in his eyes. “I hope you do not put yourself out too much,
Señor,
with this generous favor you grant me,” he said. “If ever we meet again, maybe I will do the same for you—but it would not be wise to count on such a thing.”

“Then I won't.” Victor touched a finger to the brim of his hat. “
Hasta la vista, Señor,
and we shall see who does what to whom if we should run across each other again.”

“Whoever sees the other man first will do it,” the Spaniard said, which struck Victor Radcliff as all too likely.

Roland Kersauzon had heard that Englishmen complained Frenchmen moved too slowly to suit them. He thought the English settlers were jittery fools; Frenchmen moved at just the proper pace, as anyone but a fool could see. But, to him, the Spaniards seemed to have inbred with the fist-sized snails that gnawed on ferns and barrel trees down here in the south. The snails were excellent with garlic butter. Their speed, however—and that of his Excellency,
Don
José Valverde, of Spanish Atlantis—left something to be desired.

“Why does he not answer?” Kersauzon grumbled to anyone who would listen—and to people who got sick of listening.

God only knew what horrors the English settlers were wreaking on Spanish Atlantis. Well, actually, that wasn't quite true. Roland had a pretty good notion: the same kinds of horrors they'd inflicted on French Atlantis. And yet the Spaniards promised that, if he presumed to enter their territory without
Don
José's leave, they would fight him as hard as they fought the English, or even harder.

He believed them. Such idiocy perfectly suited Spanish notions of honor. Were they doing what was advantageous to them? Such a thought never entered their heads. They were doing what a hidalgo ought to do, as they saw it. Past that, as best he could tell, they didn't think at all.

He wished the Devil would bread
Don
José Valverde and fry him for a cutlet over the hottest fire in hell. Satan had to keep a special chamber or firepit in which to torment people who wouldn't answer their mail.

Roland knew too well that he couldn't linger too much longer hard by the border of Spanish Atlantis. Keeping his army fed wouldn't be easy. And, pretty soon, malaria and bloody fluxes and maybe even the dreaded yellow jack would break out. A force the size of his needed to keep moving if it was to stay healthy, especially in this miserable climate.

But if he went away, who won? Victor Radcliff did, damn his black heart.
He
had no compunction about roving through Spanish Atlantis. He wandered as he pleased, destroying whatever got in his way. And he didn't need to wait for permission from
Don
José blasted Valverde!

“We ought to boot these Spanish guards out of the way and do what we need to do,” one of Roland's lieutenants said.

“And then we would be fighting the English and the Spaniards for the rest of the war,” Kersauzon answered gloomily. “And the Spaniards
would
fight us, too. Never doubt it for a minute. They understand spite. They don't understand much else, God knows, but they understand spite.”

After what seemed forever and was really a week later than he'd hoped, a horseman finally came up from Gernika. Roland almost dragged him out of the saddle. The rider presented him with a letter gorgeous with multicolored ribbons and seals. When the Spaniards made something official, they made it
official.

All of which mattered not two pins to Roland. “What does the miserable thing say?” he demanded.

“
Monsieur,
I have no idea,” the fellow replied. “Another fellow gave it to me and said, ‘Here. Take it on to the French commander.'”

“Oh,” was all Roland said to that. It sounded more deadly than an hour's worth of inspired profanity.

He got a little satisfaction from tearing off the ribbons and cracking all the seals. Then he unfolded the letter. Some secretary must have written it; the handwriting was improbably perfect. The French in which it was written was also perfect—even a governor on a distant shore needed a decent command of the language of diplomacy.

And the letter was perfectly infuriating.
With all due respect to the French commander,
the governor of Spanish Atlantis wrote,
I am confident we shall be able to treat these English marauders as they deserve without requiring assistance from him or his men. Therefore, while appreciating his generous offer, I must decline it. I of course remain his most obedient servant….
The fancy squiggle under the body of the letter probably came from
Don
José's own hand.

“What
does
it say,
Monsieur
?” the horseman asked.

“It says that the governor of Spanish Atlantis is a God-cursed fool, that's what,” Roland answered. “If he hadn't used such rough paper, I would wipe my backside with it, and better than it deserves, too. As is…” He tore the letter in two and let it fall to the ground with the bits of ribbon and wax. Then he ground the pieces under his heel and stalked away.

His officers exclaimed in amazement and fury when he gave them the news. “The Spaniards couldn't catch the pox in a brothel!” one of them exclaimed. “How do they think they'll catch the English settlers? And why do they think they'll beat them even if they do catch them?”

“I have no answers for this,” Roland said. “Sometimes, observing another man's stupidity, you find yourself compelled to admire it. You want to watch and see exactly how it leads him to disaster. This seems to me to be one of those times.”

“What do we do now?” the captain asked.

Kersauzon made hand-washing motions, as if he were Pontius Pilate. “If
Don
José doesn't want our aid, he won't get it. I intend to leave some of our men here near the border. If the English settlers come back—no,
when
they come back—our soldiers can slow them down till we bring more troops to bear. With the rest, I aim to go north again. Montcalm-Gozon, at least, has the sense to know we men of French Atlantis are worth something.”

“The Spaniard will find out,” the captain said. “He'll also find out his own men have not the value of a counterfeit sou.”

“Yes, I do believe he will.” Roland Kersauzon spoke with the anticipation any man might show while contemplating the discomfiture of someone he despised. A slow smile spread across his face. “And soon, too.”

A company of Spanish settlers formed a line of battle, ready to stop the English invaders if they could. Victor Radcliff didn't want to show all of his men at once, for fear of making the Spaniards run away. He brought them forward out of the woods a few at a time. After exchanging a volley or two with the enemy with roughly even numbers, he could show more of his hand.

“Will you look at those old-fashioned buggers!” he said, staring at the swarthy soldiers a couple of hundred yards away.

“How do you mean?” Blaise asked—a handy question that fit almost any situation.

“Why, their officers are wearing helmets,” Victor answered. “A couple of them even have corselets—back-and-breasts. Armor.”