Victor marched his field artillery, his riflemen, and a regiment's worth of musketeers up the Brede from New Hastings. He left the rest of his force behind to make the Royal Navy think twice about landing marines. The enemy admiral wouldn't be sure he hadn't left the whole army behind. The enemy general wouldn't be sure he hadn't brought everyone along. Neither of them would be able to talk to the other, not quickly or conveniently. And so, taking advantage of their uncertainty, Victor could do what Isaac Fenner wanted.
Whether that was a good idea… he'd find out As the redcoats advanced on Bredestown, riflemen harassed them from trees alongside the road. Victor made sure all the snipers he sent forward wore the green coats that marked uniformed Atlantean rebels. General Howe had started hanging snipers captured in ordinary coats. He'd sent the Atlanteans a polite warning that he intended to treat such men as franc-tireurs. Victor's protest that not all Atlanteans could afford uniforms and that green coats were in short supply fell on deaf ears.
Under the laws of war, Howe was within his rights to do as he did. And Victor knew some of the snipers were plucky amateurs.
not under his command or anyone else's but their own. He also knew hanging them was more likely to make Atlanteans hate England than to make them cower in fear. If General Howe couldn't see that for himself, he watered the rebellion with the blood of patriots. The more he did, the more it would grow.
The redcoats came on despite the snipers. The riflemen who obeyed Victor Radcliff's orders fell back into Bredestown. They went on banging away at the enemy from the houses on the northern outskirts of town. If the Atlantean Assembly wanted Victor to fight for Bredestown, he would do his best to oblige that august conclave.
General Howe went on learning from some of his earlier battles. He didn't send his men against Bredestown in neat rows, but in smaller, more flexible storming parties. If this is the game you're playing, he seemed to say, I can play, too.
And so he could… up to a point. But Victor had posted more riflemen in some of the houses closer to the Brede. As the redcoats pushed deeper into Bredestown after cleaning out the first few houses there, they got stung again.
English field guns unlimbered. A couple of them set up too close to their targets. Riflemen started picking off the gunners before the cannon could fire. The redcoats hastily dragged the guns farther away.
Cannon balls could knock houses down. A roundshot smashing into a wall sounded like a pot dropped on cobbles. Through his spyglass, Victor watched the redcoats cut capers when their artillerymen made a good shot. After a while, the riflemen fell silent.
That had to be what General Howe was waiting for. Satisfied he'd beaten down the opposition, he finally formed his men in neat lines and marched them into Bredestown.
Closer and closer they came. At Victor's orders, the surviving riflemen-a larger fraction than Howe would have guessed-held their fire. He wanted the redcoats to draw near. General Howe might have learned something from his earlier fights, but he hadn't learned enough.
Several houses in Bredestown concealed not riflemen but the meager Atlantean field artillery. The guns were double-shotted with canister. Half a dozen musketeers standing near Victor fired in the air to signal the field guns to shoot.
They roared as near simultaneously as made no difference The blasts of lead balls tore half a dozen great gaps in the English lines. Even from close to half a mile away, Victor heard the screams and moans of the wounded and dying.
He'd hoped such a disaster would give the redcoats pause He knew it would have given him pause. But he'd reckoned without the English soldiers' doggedness. They stepped over their dead and injured comrades, re-formed their lines, and trudged forward once more.
Two or three of the Atlantean guns fired again. Fresh holes opened in the ranks of General Howe's men. Again, the redcoats re-formed. Again, they came on. Teams of horses pulled some of the field guns back toward the Brede. Victor realized he would lose the rest-and lost guns were an almost infallible mark of a lost battle.
"Dammit, I didn't intend to win this one," Victor muttered.
But he hadn't intended to lose cannon, either. "What's that, sir?" Blaise asked.
"Nothing," Victor said, which wasn't quite true. Up till now, everything had gone the way he'd planned it. The field guns had taken such a toll among the redcoats, he'd started to hope they would cave in. If you let your hopes take wing like that, you commonly ended up sorry afterwards.
Victor did, in short order. His riflemen and musketeers fought from house to house, but they were outnumbered. And, he discovered, the redcoats didn't seem inclined to take prisoners in this fight. Anyone they caught, they shot or bayoneted. He didn't like the reports he got on that, but he also didn't know what he could do about it.
Some of the smoke that rose from Bredestown had the fireworks smell of black powder. More and more, though, brought a fireplace to mind. Dry timber was burning. How much of Bredestown would be left by the time the fight for the place was over?
A runner came back to him. "Colonel Whiting's compliments, sir," the man panted, "but he doesn't know how much longer he'll be able to hold his position. The redcoats are pressing pretty hard."
When Dominic Whiting said the enemy was pressing pretty hard, any other officer would have reported disaster some time earlier. From what Victor had seen. Whiting liked his rum, but he also liked to fight. Not only that, he was good at it, which not all aggressive men were.
"My compliments to the colonel, and tell him he's done his duty," Victor said. "I don't want him getting cut off. He is to retreat to the bridges over the Brede. Tell him that very plainly, and tell him it is an order from his superior."
"Yes, sir. I'll make sure he understands." The runner sketched a salute and hurried away.
Victor Radcliff sighed. When General Howe told one of his subordinates to do something, he could be confident the man would jolly well do it. Discipline in the English army wasn't just a matter of privates blindly obeying their sergeants. It ran up the whole chain of command.
An Atlantean officer would obey his superior… if he happened to feel like it, if he thought obeying looked like a good idea, if Saturn aligned with Jupiter and Mars was in the fourth house. He wouldn't do it simply because he'd got an order. If Atlanteans didn't love freedom and individualism, they never would have risen against King George. They wanted to go on doing as they pleased, not as someone on the other side of the ocean wanted them to do. A lot of the time, they didn't want to do as someone on this side of the ocean wanted them to do, either.
How were you supposed to command an army full of dedicated freethinkers, anyway? Carefully, Victor thought. It would have been funny-well, funnier-if it didn't hold so much truth. You could tell a redcoat what to do. He'd do it, or die trying. If an Atlantean didn't see a good reason for an order, he'd tell you to go to hell.
To Victor's relief, Dominic Whiting did see a reason for the order to fall back. So did his subordinate commanders. If he couldn't get his majors and captains to obey, he had as much trouble as Victor did with him. The order to retreat must have looked like a good idea to everybody-one more proof that Howe's men were pressing Whiting hard.
An old man leaning on a stick came up to Victor. "Look what they've done to our town!" he shouted in a mushy voice that proclaimed he'd lost most of his teeth.
"I'm sorry, sir," Victor said. The old man cupped his left hand behind his ear. Victor said it again, louder this time.
"Sorry? Sorry! Why didn't you stay away from Bredestown, then?" the graybeard said. "They would have, too, and everything would have been fine."
Things didn't work that way, no matter how much Victor wished they did. Explaining as much to the old man struck him as more trouble than it was worth. And he had other things to worry about. He'd picked troops to get his men back over the bridges in good order. The retreating soldiers didn't want to listen to them. Atlanteans seldom wanted to listen to anybody-one more demonstration of the thought that had occurre
d to him not long before.
He had hoped to have a cannon firing across every bridge to make sure English soldiers couldn't swarm after his own men. Losing some of the guns at the north end of Bredestown ruined that scheme. He posted three- and six-pounders where he could, and squads of musketeers where he had no guns.
The redcoats didn't push toward the bridges with great elan. They might have suspected he had something nasty waiting for them. Again, he'd lost the battle but mauled the enemy while he was doing it. He had, he supposed, met Isaac Fenner's requirements.
Once all the Atlantean soldiers made it to the Brede's south bank, Victor dealt with the bridges. Gunpowder charges blew gaps in a couple of stone spans. His men poured tubs of grease on the wooden bridges and set them afire. Without boats, General Howe's troops wouldn't cross here. The closest ford was another twenty miles upstream. He sent a detachment to hold it for a while.
"Well," he said to no one in particular, "we did what we came here to do." He would have felt happier about things if the moans of the wounded didn't make him wonder if it was all worthwhile.
Chapter 6
General Howe's army did not pursue Victor's as the Atlanteans fell back toward New Hastings. The redcoats seemed content- for the moment-with Bredestown. Victor Radcliff was not content to yield it to them. His men had fought well, but, again, not well enough.
A messenger from the Atlantean Assembly rode out to meet him halfway between Bredestown and New Hastings. Victor eyed the man with (he hoped) well-hidden apprehension. What new disaster had the Assemblymen sent him out to report?
"General, I am told to inform you-"
"Yes? Out with it!" Maybe Victor's apprehension wasn't so well hidden after all.
"Several hundred new recruits await your attention on your return, sir. I am also told to let you know that more than a few of them gave as their reason for volunteering the strong opposition the forces under your command have offered against the English tyrant's murderers."
"You are? They do? The Atlantean Assembly sent you to me for that?" Victor couldn't hide his surprise. Bad news usually traveled faster than good. And with reason: bad news was the kind you had to do something about right away… if you could. Most of the time, good news could wait.
But the courier nodded. "That's right, sir. Mr. Fenner and Mr. Cawthorne both told me to tell you they know you are doing the best you can, and the rest of Atlantis seems to know it, too."
"Well, well," Victor said. That didn't seem enough somehow, so he said it again: "Well, well." The splutters bought him a few seconds to think. "Please convey my gratitude to the gentlemen of the Atlantean Assembly, and particularly to Mr. Cawthorne and Mr. Fenner."
"I'll do that, sir," the messenger said. "Thank you. I'll thank the recruits myself when I get back to the coast," Victor said. "The Assembly has been gracious enough to note that I did not despair of the republic. The same holds true for these volunteers, and in rather greater measure. If I fall, finding a new general will be easy enough. But if no one chooses to fight for Atlantis, our cause is dead, dead beyond any hope of resurrection."
"That's a fact." Now the man who'd come out from New Hastings sounded surprised. "Not a fact you think about every day, though, is it?"
"Maybe not." Victor knew damn well it wasn't. The powers that be didn't want potential fighting men to realize how the shape of the future lay in their hands. If they sat on those hands, no war could go on for long.
The messenger sketched a salute. "Well, then, I'm off. I'll pass things on like you said, and I know your sergeants will whip the new chums into shape pretty damn quick." His chuckle held a certain amount of anticipation. Gloating? That, too, Victor judged.
He felt better the rest of the way back to New Hastings. He wondered why. Nothing had changed. General Howe had still seized Bredestown, the, second- or third-oldest city in English Atlantis. The redcoats were still likely to move on New Hastings. A regiment's worth of raw volunteers wouldn't slow them down, much less hold them back.
But the spirit that brought forth a regiment's worth of raw volunteers would… eventually. If Atlantis didn't lose the war before England got sick of fighting it. That could happen. It could happen much too easily, as Victor knew much too well.
"I have to make sure it doesn't, that's all," he murmured. Easy enough to say something like that. Keeping the promise might prove rather harder.
Small bands of Atlantean cavalry still roamed north of the Brede. Every so often, they managed to cut off and cut up a column of supply wagons coming down to General Howe. Some of what they took supplied the Atlantean army instead. Some they kept And some they sold. They thought of it as prize money, as if they were sailors capturing enemy ships.
Prize money, though, was a long-established official custom. Theirs was anything but. Victor didn't complain. He wouldn't complain about anything that made his men fight harder.
They didn't just loot. He would have complained if they were nothing but brigands. He'd been back in New Hastings only a few hours when a troop of horsemen brought in a glum-looking prisoner.
"We caught him in civilian clothes, General, like you see," one of the troopers said. No wonder their captive looked glum-the laws of war said you could hang an enemy soldier caught in civilian clothes. What else was he then but a spy?
"How do you know he's a soldier at all?" Victor asked the Atlanteans who'd brought in the captive.
"We found this here on him, sir." One of the men handed him a folded letter.
Radcliff unfolded it and read it. It was a letter from General Howe to the officer in charge of the Royal Navy detachment that was harrying New Hastings. "You were going to give some kind of signal from the shore, and they'd send a boat for you so you could deliver this?" Victor asked the captive.
The man stood mute-for a moment. Then one of the Atlanteans who'd brought him in shook him like a dog shaking a rat. "Answer the general, you silly bugger, if you want to go on breathing."
"Uh, that's right," the captive said unwillingly. "Did you men read this?" Victor asked the Atlanteans who'd caught him.
"Enough to see what it was," one of them answered. "Enough to see that you needed to see it right away."
"And I thank you for that," Victor Radcliff said. "But I'd like to read you one passage in particular. General Howe writes, As before, the resistance offered by the Atlanteans in Bredestown was unsettling, even daunting. They withdrew in good order after inflicting casualties we are barely able to support. This rebellion has a character different from and altogether more serious than what we were led to believe before we embarked upon the task of suppressing it.' " He folded the paper. "That's you he's talking about, gentlemen!"
"Think he'll pack up and go home, then?" asked the big man who'd shaken the prisoner. "If he thinks he can't win, why keep fighting?"
Reluctantly, Victor shook his head. If Howe kept advancing in spite of his losses, Victor wasn't sure he could keep him out of New Hastings. He didn't tell that to the Atlanteans, lest they be captured in turn or infect their comrades with the doubt they'd caught from him. What he did say was, "No, I think we need to give him a few more sets of lumps before he's ready to do that."
"Well, we can take care of it," the big Atlantean said. The others nodded. They knew less than Victor. They didn't worry about things like why they didn't have more bayonets or where the gunpowder for the battle after the battle after next would come from. That made them more hopeful than he was. Maybe their hope would infect him.
Plaintively, the Englishman they'd captured asked, "What will you do to me?"
"Ought to knock you over the head and pitch you into the Brede. Better than you deserve, too," one of the Atlanteans said. The prisoner turned pale.
"No, no," Victor said. "Can't have that, or Howe's soldiers will start knocking our men over the head after they catch them. I'll fight that kind of war if I must, but I don't want to. We'll keep him as a prisoner till he's properly exchanged, that's all."
"
Thank you kindly, your Honor," the Englishman said. "If you let me go, I'll give my parole not to fight until I'm exchanged."
"Sorry. I think we'd do better to hold you for now," Victor replied. "Let General Howe think his letter's been delivered." He turned to the Atlanteans who'd captured the man. "Keep him with our other prisoners, and keep an eye on him. We don't want him slipping away while our backs are turned."
"Right you are. General," the big man said. He set a hand the size of a ham on the prisoner's shoulder. "Come on, you." The Englishman perforce came. The Atlantean soldiers led him away.
Victor Radcliff slowly read through Howe's letter once more. He nodded to himself. Nice to learn he wasn't the only commander with worries, anyhow.
After taking Bredestown, the redcoats lay quiet for a fortnight Licking their wounds, Victor thought, though he had no idea whether that was the explanation. Then General Howe cautiously began moving skirmishers down the Brede toward New Hastings.
Atlantean skirmishers met them right away. Victor didn't want Howe coming after him. Maybe a show of force would persuade the English that an attack on the oldest town in Atlantis would prove more trouble than it was worth.
On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't. The redcoats kept pushing forward. Victor sent more of his army back toward the west to delay them. He wished he could write General Howe a stiff letter. The continual pressure the Englishman applied to his forces struck him as not the least bit sporting.
Then nature took a hand. It rained buckets, sheets, hogsheads. The Brede turned into a raging brown torrent that threatened to burst its banks and lay New Hastings waste before Howe could. Every road for miles around became a knee-deep quagmire.
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