United States of Atlantis a-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "It is so moved," Fenner said. "Do I hear a second?" He heard several. Cawthorne's motion swiftly passed. Fenner nodded to Victor Radcliff. "You see? We do not despair of you, and may you never have cause to despair of us."

  "Thank you. And thank you all." Victor was more moved than he'd imagined he would be. "Let me also say I hope and pray we suffer no defeat worse than these two, for they truly were close, hard-fought struggles."

  "We have shown King George and his ministers that we can confront their minions in arms," Custis Cawthorne said.

  "We have not shown that we can beat them," Hiram Smith put in.

  "That may not prove necessary," Cawthorne said. "As long as we stay in the field, as long as we fight, as long as we annoy, we drain England's treasury and make her people despair of victory. Sooner or later-God grant it be sooner-they will tire of trying to force us to an allegiance we detest. There are more ways to win a war than by gaining glory on the battlefield."

  "None surer," Smith said. "None quicker."

  Isaac Fenner nodded to Victor. "What are your views in this regard, General?"

  "Winning in the field is victory," Radcliff replied. "Not losing in the field… may eventually be victory, depending on our continued resolve and England's eventual impatience. I prefer to win. If forthright victory eludes me, I will do what I can to maintain the fight."

  "That seems reasonable," Fenner said judiciously. "Try it anyway," Custis Cawthorne added. "As always, Mr. Cawthorne, your sentiments do you credit," Fenner said.

  "Credit is all very well, but cash is better," the printer replied. "As we are discovering to our dismay."

  Isaac Fenner's large ears twitched. Cawthorne had struck a nerve. The Atlantean Assembly had no sure power to tax. It could ask the parliaments of the several settlements for cash, but they were under no obligation to give it any. If they didn't-which happened much too often-the Assembly paid with promissory notes, not gold or silver. The war was still young, but merchants already traded those notes at a discount.

  "Have you gentlemen any further need of me?" Victor asked. "I thank you for the great honor you have conferred upon me, but I believe it would be best if I returned to my troops and saw to the defenses of this city."

  "I think we've finished with you." Custis Cawthorne looked around the Assembly. Seeing no dissent, he went on, "And I am glad today's resolution pleases you. It is, after all, worth its weight in gold."

  The full force of that didn't strike Victor till he'd left the old church. Then, belatedly, it hit him like a ball from a forty-two-pounder. He staggered in the street and almost bumped into a woman in a lacy bonnet. She sent him a reproachful glare as she sidestepped.

  "Your pardon, ma'am," Victor said. The woman only sniffed and hurried away. Victor shook his head, still chuckling under his breath. "That old reprobate! He ought to be ashamed-except he has no shame at all."

  Blaise looked at his hands. They hadn't been soft before. Even so, they were blistered and bloody now. "I dug in front of Nouveau Redon," he said. "Since then, I forgot how much of soldiering is pick and shovel work." Missing one finger couldn't have made things any easier. He rubbed grease on his abused palms. By his expression, it didn't help much.

  A privilege of being a general was not having to imitate a mole. Victor Radcliff clucked when that figure of speech crossed his mind. England had moles. So did the mainland of Europe, and so did Terranova. Atlantis had none, nor any other native viviparous quadrupeds but for bats. In their place, burrowing skinks went after worms and underground insects here.

  His ancestors had left England more than three centuries before. Habits of speech from the mother country still persisted, though. He wondered why.

  "Sometimes the spade is as useful as the musket," he said, trying to clear his mind of moles.

  "Sometimes being on the wrong end of the one hurts almost as much as with the other," Blaise replied tartly.

  He might have been right about that. Whether he was or not, fieldworks would help the Atlanteans hold General Howe's army away from New Hastings. Victor worried less about the Royal Navy here than he had up at Weymouth. Unlike the smaller town, New Hastings already had seaside works to challenge warships. They'd been built to hold off the French, but no law said they couldn't fire at men-of-war flying the Union Jack.

  Afterwards, Radcliff remembered he'd had that thought only a few minutes before the distant thunder of cannon fire from the coast made him jump. "Big goddamn guns," Blaise remarked.

  "Aren't they just?" Victor said, and ran for his horse. The beast stood not far away. He untied it, sprang up onto its back, and rode for the shore as fast as it would carry him.

  Sure as the devil, English frigates and men-of-war tried conclusions with the coast-defense batteries. If they could smash the forts and silence the guns, they would be able to bombard New Hastings at their leisure. The men-of-war carried bigger guns than any the forts mounted.

  But the star-shaped forts had walls not of oak but of bricks backed by thick earth. Their long twelve-pounders could shoot as far as any warship's guns. And they could fire red-hot shot, which was too dangerous to use aboard ship. If a red-hot ball lodged in a man-of-war's planking…

  Somewhere right around here, all those years ago, Edward Radcliffe and his first party of English settlers had landed. They'd killed honkers and fought against red-crested eagles. Now, reckoning themselves Englishmen no more, their descendants fought against redcoats and Royal Navy alike.

  Crash! A big cannon ball from one of the English ships smashed bricks in a fort's outer wall. But the earth behind the bricks kept the ball from breaking through.

  Cannon inside the fort bellowed defiance. Gray smoke belched from their muzzles. They might well be using the powder saved from Weymouth. At least one ball struck home. Victor could hear iron crashing through oak across close to half a mile of water. He hoped it was a red-hot roundshot, and that the English warship would catch fire and burn to the waterline.

  None of the Royal Navy vessels out there did. He might have known they wouldn't. That would have been too easy. They went right on exchanging murder with the seaside forts.

  And one of them noticed the lone man on the strand. Maybe a seagoing officer turned a spyglass on Victor and noticed he was dressed like an officer. Any which way, two or three cannon balls whizzed past him and kicked up fountains of sand unpleasantly close to where he stood.

  He wasn't ashamed to withdraw. One man armed with sword and pistol was impotent against a Royal Navy flotilla.

  Or was he? One man with sword and pistol was, certainly. One man armed with a working brain? Victor smiled to himself. He could almost hear Custis Cawthorne asking the question in just those terms.

  More than a hundred years before, the pirates of Avalon had discommoded a fleet of Atlantean, English, and Dutch men-of-war with fireships. A few fishing boats were tied up at the piers that jutted out into the sea. The wind lay against them, though. Whatever Victor came up with, that wouldn't work.

  Despite the cannonading, Atlantis' flag still flew defiantly over the forts: the Union Jack, differenced with a red-crested eagle displayed in the canton. From a distance, it hardly looked different from the flag the enemy flew. We need a better banner, Victor thought, one that says right away who we are.

  He suddenly started to smile again. "By God!" he said. Better banners came in all sorts-or they might.

  Victor shouted for runners and sent the young men to the forts. Before long, a new flag went up over them, as well as over the city as a whole. No doubt the officers of the flotilla could make out what that flag meant: it warned that yellow fever was loose in New Hastings.

  That flag told a great, thumping lie. The yellow jack hardly ever came this far north. It broke out in Freetown now and again, and more often down in what had been French Atlantis. But, while Atlanteans knew that, Englishmen might well not. The warning of flags wouldn't keep the Royal Navy from bombarding the forts. It might prevent a landing by Royal Marines
.

  And it might make General Howe think twice about assailing New Hastings. No general in his right mind would want to expose his troops to yellow fever. Howe would think the Atlantean rebels were welcome to a town stricken by the disease. He might even think it God's judgment upon them. Whatever he thought, he would think staying away was a good idea.

  That much Victor foresaw. He didn't tell the men of the Atlantean Assembly that the flags lied. Sometimes the less you told people, the better-or more secret. Some of them rapidly discovered pressing business well away from New Hastings. They preferred risking capture by General Howe to the yellow jack.

  Isaac Fenner came up to Victor and said, "I had not heard this plague was among us."

  "Neither had I." Victor didn't care to use the lie direct, even if the lie indirect troubled him not at all.

  The current speaker of the Atlantean Assembly raised a gingery eyebrow. "I… see. So the wind sits in that quarter, does it?"

  "It does," Radcliff replied. "And I will add, sir, that your discretion in this regard may keep it from swinging to some other, less salubrious, one."

  "Salubrious, is it?" Fenner's eyebrow didn't go down. "You've been listening to Custis again."

  "Better entertainment there than in most of the taverns," Victor said, "and less chance of coming away with a chancre or anything else you don't want. You may tell him, sir. I rely on his discretion."

  "Then you must believe all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds," Fenner said.

  "I do believe that, candidly," Victor said, and the speaker winced. Victor went on, "Whether the same may be said for the world in which we find ourselves may be a different question.''

  "So it may," Isaac Fenner agreed. "Cawthorne's experience, as he will tell you at any excuse or none, is that three may keep a secret-if two of them are dead."

  "I should hate to impose such terms on the illustrious members of the Atlantean Assembly, however tempting that might be," Victor said. Fenner grunted laughter. Victor added, "Do tell him. I don't want him haring out of town and risking his freedom for nothing."

  "I shall do that." Fenner glanced off to the northwest, where General Howe's redcoats hung over New Hastings like a rain-filled thunderhead. "And I trust that, if the need for us to hare out of town should arise, you will tell us in good time so we can tend to it without undue difficulty."

  "You have my word," Victor said. He wouldn't have minded if the Englishmen caught and hanged a few Atlantean Assemblymen. Nor would he have been surprised if Fenner also had a list of men he reckoned expendable. Comparing the two-and, say, Custis Cawthorne's-might have been interesting, to say nothing of entertaining. After the war is won, Victor told himself.

  He smiled to himself. Doing anything at all after the war was won would be very fine.

  Maybe rumors of disease in New Hastings gave the redcoats pause Maybe Howe would have gone after Bredestown any which way. The English commander seemed to like moving inland and then turning back toward the coast.

  Word of the deployment toward Bredestown reached Isaac Fenner as soon as it reached Victor Radcliff. That was no great surprise: Fenner came from Bredestown, and people from the threatened city naturally appealed to the man who represented them.

  Fenner came to the camp outside of New Hastings to confer with Victor. "Can you save Bredestown from the tyrant's troops?" he asked.

  "I'm… not sure," Victor said slowly. "Even by trying to do so, I risk losing that town and New Hastings both."

  "In what way?" Fenner asked, his tone leaving no doubt that anything Victor said would be used against him.

  Sighing, Victor answered, "That Royal Navy flotilla still lies offshore. If we march up the Brede toward Bredestown, the enemy is bound to learn of it. What save the fictitious fear of the yellow jack then prevents him from landing a force of bullocks and sailors and seizing New Hastings before we can return? If the seaside forts fall, as they may well from a landward assault, nothing hinders the English warships from adding their weight of metal to the small arms the marines and sailors will have to hand. Under these circumstances, I fear nihil obstat, to use the Popish phrase."

  "If we were to save Bredestown from the redcoats…" Like a lot of men from the city up the Brede, Fenner thought it was at least as important as New Hastings. Few people not Bredestown born and bred shared that opinion.

  Victor didn't. Instead of coming out and saying so, which would have affronted the speaker of the Atlantean Assembly, he replied, "We have no assurance of holding Bredestown even with all our forces collected in it. And I would rather not do that if I can find any alternative."

  "Why not?" Fenner asked sharply.

  "Because it lies on the north bank of the Brede," Victor said. "I have never yet seen a manual of strategy advocating taking a position on a riverbank if there is danger of being pushed back, which would be the case there."

  "What difference does it make?" Fenner said. "Several bridges span the stream at Bredestown."

  "No doubt, sir. But if we have to try to cross them in a hasty retreat, under fire from the enemy's guns…" Victor's shudder was altogether unfeigned. "Meaning no disrespect, but I would prefer not to have to essay that."

  "Would you prefer Bredestown to fall into the blood-dripping hands of King George's butchers, then?" Isaac Fenner's voice and the temperature of his rhetoric both rose dramatically, as if he were making a closing argument in a court of law.

  That didn't impress Victor Radcliff. "I know who the enemy is," he said. "I surely fought alongside a good many of the redcoats now opposing us when we conquered French Atlantis. They are not fiends in human form-although I may have to qualify that opinion if they import certain copper-skinned mercenary bands from Terranova."

  "Do you suppose they would?" Fenner asked anxiously.

  "If they use mercenaries at all, I think them more likely to bring in German troops: Braunschweigers and Hessians and the like. Germans are better disciplined and better armed." Victor paused. "On the other hand, copperskins cost less. That will matter to his Majesty's skinflint ministers, even if not so much to him."

  "Confound it!" Fenner said. "You are telling me Bredestown will fall, and we can do damn all to stop that. If we can't beat the damned Englishmen, why did we go to war against them?"

  "Because the other choice was submitting to tyranny and oppression," Victor said.

  "It looks as though we must submit to them anyhow," Fenner said.

  "You gentlemen of the Atlantean Assembly determined to take arms against King George. You summoned me from a peaceful life as farmer and author to lead them," Victor said. "If now you repent of your determination or you would sooner have some other commander, you need but say the word. I assure you, I will return without complaint and without regret to the life that late I led."

  "We entrusted you with command on the belief that you would lead our troops to victory against the redcoats," Fenner said. "Instead, we have suffered two sanguinary defeats. We face the loss of Bredestown. The safety even of New Hastings is far from assured."

  "Your Excellency, I will say two things in response to that" Victor Radcliff ticked them off on his fingers: "First, I strongly believe General Howe's victories to have been far more bloody than our defeats. He held the ground after both encounters, but paid a high price for it. And second, sir, mark this and mark it well-the only assured safety's in the grave. Anything this side of it is subject to time and chance"

  The speaker of the Atlantean Assembly sniffed loudly. "If you made as good a general as you do a philosopher, Mr. Radcliff, I would face the coming struggle with the utmost confidence"

  "I, on the other hand, knowing my limits as a philosopher, would face it with trepidation verging on terror," Victor replied.

  "Your limits as a general are what concern me," Isaac Fenner said. "We cannot simply abandon Bredestown to the redcoats. The Atlantean Assembly deplores the moral effect such an abandonment would have on Atlanteans and on Terranovans and Europeans fav
orable to our cause"

  "For the reasons I just outlined to you, your Excellency, holding it seems unlikely, and all the more so unless you intend to risk New Hastings," Victor said. "Or has the Assembly some clever stratagem in mind by which both towns may be preserved in our hands?"

  "We hope and trust, sir, that you are the repository of such stratagems," Fenner answered. He scratched his chin, then leaned close to Victor. "May I rely on your discretion here?"

  "If you may not, sir, you chose the wrong general."

  Fenner grunted. "A point-a distinct point. Very well, then. This is for your ears and your ears alone, do you understand?"

  "Say on," Victor told him.

  "If Bredestown must be lost, then it must." Fenner looked like a man with something sour in his mouth. Visibly pulling himself together, he continued, "But Bredestown must not be seen to be cravenly lost. We must not appear incapable of fighting for it even if we prove incapable of holding it. Does that make any sense to you at all, General?"

  "Whatever our weaknesses may be, you do not care to advertise them to the world," Victor said slowly.

  "That is the nub of it, yes." Isaac Fenner sounded relieved. Victor got the feeling that, had he failed to divine it, he would have returned to the retirement of which he'd spoken. The head of the Atlantean Assembly went on, "So-can you bloody Howe's men before you pull away?"

  "I can try, sir," Radcliff answered.

  "That is my home, you know. I shall rely upon you to make them pay a high price for it," Fenner said.

  "I'll do what I can, sir," Victor said. That satisfied Fenner, which was fortunate, because Victor knew (whether the speaker did or not) he'd promised nothing.

  Bredestown lay twenty miles up the river from New Hastings. Victor thought it was the second-oldest English settlement in Atlantis, but wasn't quite sure-Freetown might have been older. He knew some restless Radcliffe had founded it In those long-vanished days, twenty miles inland were plenty to get away from your neighbors. If only that were still true now!