Opening Atlantis (48 page)

“We'll have a better chance inside French Atlantis,” he said again and again, trying to hearten the men he had left and trying to keep retreat from turning to rout. “If we have to, we can stand siege at Nouveau Redon. I'd like to see the damned Englishmen try to take it.”

“I wouldn't,” someone behind him said. Roland's head whipped around. He wanted to know who sounded so hopeless. But all the men close by tramped along with their heads down. None of them seemed ready to single out the fellow who'd spoken what probably lurked in all their minds.

It lurked in Roland's mind, too, however much he wished it didn't. No matter how he tried to cheer up his troops, his own spirits were at low ebb. How could it be otherwise? Discovering that the English settlers had escaped him in Atlantis was bad. Discovering that the settlers and redcoats together had put paid to Montcalm-Gozon's proud regulars wasn't just bad. It was catastrophic. He'd beaten redcoats once, when they obligingly marched into his trap. Trying to cross the creek to attack Victor Radcliff's men, he'd stumbled into theirs.

Maybe we should see what kind of terms we can get.
Had anyone else suggested that, Roland Kersauzon would have been furious. But he could make the suggestion to himself: he knew he wouldn't follow through on it.

“They're going to try to take away everything we've got left,” a sergeant said with weary cynicism.

Roland nodded. “That's right—they will. That's how greedy they are, the English
cochons.
So we won't let them, eh? If you bother a turtle, what does it do? It pulls back into its shell. And good luck making it come out again.”

“You aim to pull us back into our shell,
Monsieur
?” the underofficer asked.

“If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it,” Kersauzon replied. A lot of commanders might have said that for form's sake. He meant it. But the sergeant only shook his head. Roland went on. “The longer we hold out, the better the chance something good will happen somewhere else. If it does…”

“We're saved,” the sergeant said when he paused.

He nodded again, though what went through his mind was,
Well, we may be saved, anyhow.
If the English seized all of French Atlantis but for Nouveau Redon, things were unlikely to go back to the
status quo ante bellum
no matter how long a siege the town withstood. And the enemy might do just that—there wasn't much resistance except for his settler army.

That raised another question: how long could the fortress hold out? Roland didn't know the exact answer, not in days. But he knew the form the answer would take. Nouveau Redon would stay free as long as the food held out and as long as there was no treachery. Munitions were not an issue; the fortress had plenty. A spring near the center of town ensured the fortress wouldn't run short of water.

The food could last a very long time, especially if his army expelled civilians so it fed no useless mouths. Roland had overseen the victualing of Nouveau Redon himself. Hardtack and sauerkraut and smoked meat and dried fruit were uninspiring; anyone who said anything else was a damned liar. They could keep body and soul together a long time, though.

Treachery…Roland gnawed on the inside of his lower lip. The longer the siege went on, the more he'd have to worry about it. If someone decided relief was hopeless but thought he might cut a deal with the army investing the fortress…If that happened, Nouveau Redon was in danger.

As Roland rode south—back toward the border between English and French Atlantis—one other possibility occurred to him. If the plague broke out inside the fortress, he might have to surrender whether he wanted to or not. Disease was a roll of the dice. If the pestilence or dysentery or typhus struck the invaders, they would have to give up the siege.

“They deserve a pestilence, don't they, God?” He aimed what was half a prayer, half a suggestion toward the sky. Maybe God would listen; maybe He wouldn't. Any which way, Roland figured he'd made the effort.

Had the bridges over the Erdre been down, he probably wouldn't have been able to get back to Nouveau Redon to stand siege. But they still stood. Roland and his men had come north over them…come north over them more than once, in fact. After crossing back into French Atlantis, he ordered the spans fired. He didn't like that, but saw no other choice. Right now, slowing the enemy down was almost as good as beating him.

Almost. Roland and his survivors kept on retreating.

Victor Radcliff watched smoke rise up over the Stour. “They're burning their bridges behind them,” he said: for once, literal truth and no cliché.

“They'll have men defending the line of the river, then, if they be not utter fools.” The English lieutenant-colonel sighed wearily. “And utter fools they are not. They could not have caused us so much trouble if they were.”

“We'll get over the river,” Victor said. “Kersauzon's on the run. He won't leave enough soldiers behind to seriously hinder us.”

The English officer's eyebrow rose. For a moment, Victor wondered why. Then he realized he'd committed a solecism. He smiled. If the lieutenant-colonel could worry about his grammar as well as the campaign…more power to him. And, after a moment, the Englishman unbent enough to admit, “I think you make a good prophet.”

Although the French settlers had burnt what they could, the stone towers supporting the bridges' wooden superstructure still stood. And the redcoats had with them the usual contingent of military engineers, Victor hadn't expected to need their services until and unless the English army besieged the French, but they proved valuable here at the border.

One thing Atlantis had was an exuberant profusion of lumber. Axe blows rang out along the side of the river. The engineers did not try to re-create what the fleeing French settlers had destroyed. The redcoats cared only about making a way across. That they did. The Romans who'd bridged the Rhine for Julius Caesar would have approved.

“Well, well,” the lieutenant-colonel said after riding across one of those improvised bridges. “So this is French Atlantis.” He looked around. “Doesn't seem much different from English Atlantis, does it?”

“No, sir—except it's full of Frenchmen,” Victor replied. What had the English officer expected? Something that looked like France? In the towns, English Atlantis looked like England. Farms there grew European—and sometimes Terranovan—crops. But the countryside remained stubbornly Atlantean.

If anything, French Atlantis seemed more Atlantean than the country farther north. Far fewer people actually lived here. That meant the landscape had changed less than it had where Englishmen settled. Pines and barrel trees stayed common right up to the very edges of towns. Victor's soldiers had no trouble catching oil thrushes in the woods. They ate better than the redcoats, who relied on rations and viewed local foodstuffs with suspicion.

“I ain't gonna eat one of them funny-looking things,” an English sergeant declared. “Maybe if I was starving—but I ain't.”

Victor didn't think oil thrushes were funny-looking. He'd grown up with them, as he had with the good-sized thrushes with dull red breasts that English Atlanteans called robins. To him, the small, bright robin redbreasts of the home island would have looked strange—had he ever seen one.

Only men from Roland Kersauzon's rear guard and occasional free-lance bushwhackers slowed the English army's advance. When the redcoats caught a
franc-tireur,
they hanged him from the closest suitable tree as a warning to other locals. “If they want to fight us, let them put on uniforms and join an army,” the lieutenant-colonel said. “I would respect them then, and treat them as soldiers deserve to be treated. But this contemptible skulking must cease, and we shall make it cease by whatever means prove necessary.”

Here and there, English Atlanteans had picked up guns and attacked the invading French forces. No doubt Montcalm-Gozon's men had hanged the irregulars they caught. Did that stop the English Atlanteans from harrying them? Victor Radcliff doubted it, but he didn't quarrel with the English officer. That worthy had tradition on his side, and didn't seem inclined to listen to anyone who disagreed.

Besides, what was wrong with hanging Frenchmen? After all the trouble they'd caused, Victor wouldn't have shed a tear to see the lot of them strung up. Neither would Blaise. “Ought to hang everyone who buys and sells slaves,” he said.

That would touch off a revolt in French Atlantis. Victor was sure of it. The locals might understand and forgive the execution of guerrillas. Anyone who went off and did something like that took his chances. But the French Atlanteans—and the Spanish Atlanteans farther south—were convinced they had the right to own human chattels. And…

“Didn't Africans sell you to the white slave traders?” Victor asked.

Blaise nodded. “Hang them, too,” he said. “They serve it.” He made a face. “Deserve it.” His English got better by the day. It still had a long way to go, though.

Before long, the direction in which Roland Kersauzon's men were retreating grew obvious. “He's going to stand siege in Nouveau Redon,” Victor told the English lieutenant-colonel.

“Well, we'll just have to winkle him out of there, in that case.” The English officer certainly didn't lack for aggressiveness.

Whether he lacked for brains might be a different question. “It's a formidable place,” Victor warned. “It won't be easy to take.”

“He's never come up against proper engineers, either,” the lieutenant-colonel said.

“How much can engineers do against solid rock?” Victor asked.

The English lieutenant-colonel's smile was indulgent, almost sweet. “I believe you've got the question backwards, Major. You should ask, how much can solid rock do against engineers?”

Back where he started. Roland Kersauzon hadn't expected to return to Nouveau Redon except in triumph. He hadn't imagined the English Atlanteans stood a chance against brave French soldiers. He'd thought he could beat them with settlers. By God, he
had
beaten the redcoats with settlers! That should have decided things.

It should have, but it didn't. He failed to count on English tenacity. The enemy kept fighting. Their raiding band made Roland separate from Montcalm-Gozon—but he never did catch up with Victor Radcliff. He damned
Don
José all over again. He could deal with his enemies, but God protect him from people who claimed to be his friends.

And English tenacity also meant sending more redcoats across the ocean. No more French regulars came to Atlantis. Maybe the English wouldn't let them. But maybe King Louis and his ministers simply couldn't be bothered with sending reinforcements. Roland wouldn't have been surprised either way.

Ordinary people streamed out of Nouveau Redon. Roland wanted no one there who couldn't carry a musket. The fewer mouths he fed, the better. As long as he had soldiers on the walls and supplies in the storerooms, he was ready to defy the world—or, at least, those parts of it that spoke English.

One good thing sprang from the wreckage of his hopes: he worried a little less about disease than he had before. You couldn't catch smallpox or measles more than once. So the learned doctors promised him, and for once he was pretty sure they were right. The ones who could catch them already had, and had got better or died.

He posted a strong garrison of reliable soldiers around the storehouses. That didn't seem so important now, which was why he hastened to take care of it. If the garrison was in place before people started fretting about hunger, it would stand a better chance of stopping trouble—or making sure trouble didn't start—than if he put it in place after soldiers started tightening their belts. He hoped it would, anyhow.

For now, his men's fighting spirit was strong. “We'll whip those English
cochons
right out of their boots, won't we, sir?” said a youngster on the wall. He shook his fist at the north. “Just let them come!”

“But of course we'll beat them.” Roland wouldn't have weakened such enthusiasm for the world. As for letting the English settlers and redcoats come…He and the force he had left couldn't very well stop them. He knew that too painfully well. If he could have, he would have.

He made a point of checking the artillery. “We will dismay them with our range,” a grizzled gunnery sergeant said. “We're up much higher than they are, you comprehend. It gives us the advantage.”

“Yes, I comprehend perfectly,” Roland said. “They will be sorry that they have tried to rob us of the jewel in the crown of French Atlantis.”

The gunner's face lit up. “That is well said,
Monsieur
!”

“I'm glad you think so.” Roland Kersauzon had never particularly believed he had a knack for the telling phrase. If he came up with one now, it was bound to be as much by luck as for any other reason.

And how much would it matter one way or the other? If the enemy seized the rest of the crown, of course he would start prying at the jewel. Someone would have to come to its rescue. Someone would have to—but would anyone do it?