English cannon thundered. Blaise coughed to draw Victor's notice. When Victor glanced his way, the Negro said, "The redcoats are going, 'Here come those Atlantean madmen again. Don't they ever learn their lessons?' "
"Heh," Victor Radcliff said uncomfortably. "Just wait a bit. Pretty soon, they'll find out how mad we are in truth."
"No." Blaise pointed at him. "Pretty soon you find out how mad we are in truth." Since that was what Victor was afraid of, he grimaced and shook his head and kept his mouth shut.
He wanted to go up and fight alongside the men in the striking force. Only one thing held him back: if Cornwallis' troops recognized him there, they would be sure that second column was the one they needed to concern themselves with. The general commanding started to swear.
"What now?" Blaise asked.
"Bugger me blind, but I should have gone in at the head of the feint," Victor said. "If anything would have made the Englishmen sure that was our principal column, my presence at its head was the very thing."
"And also the very thing to get you killed," Blaise observed. Atlanteans were more pragmatic than Europeans about such things: less likely to get themselves killed over pointless points of honor. Blaise was far more pragmatic than most white Atlanteans. He added, "Besides, the fellow leading it don't want you up there. If you are up there, the men pay attention to you, not to him."
Once more, Victor would have liked to find some way to tell him he was talking nonsense. Once more, he found himself unable. Major Porter was as much in charge of the feint as Baron von Steuben was in charge of the striking column. Both officers would do everything they could with what they had… and wouldn't want anyone else in position to joggle their elbow.
The feint went in. The racket of gunfire-and of shouts of rage and agony-grew and grew. So did the shouts of Englishmen rushing to their comrades' aid. By the noise they were making they thought the Atlanteans were hitting the place where they'd bluffed before. After all, no one could be stupid enough to try the same thing twice in a row.
So de la Fayette had assured Victor, anyhow. It all sounded so lucid, so reasonable, so rational when the noble spelled it out. Then again, Frenchmen had a knack for sounding lucid, reasonable, rational. If they were as sensible as they seemed, why wasn't France in better shape?
Victor found himself cocking his head toward the left. He'd committed the feint. The redcoats were already responding to it. Baron von Steuben could get close to their line without their knowing it, as the luckless Major Hall had been doing when the heavens opened up.
"When?" Blaise asked.
"If I were up there with them, we'd go in-" Victor had wondered if he was nervous and fidgety and inclined to jump the gun. But he couldn't even get now out of his mouth before von Steuben put in the attack.
This cacophony made the other one small by comparison. Victor clenched his fists till his nails-which weren't long-bit into his callused palms. If they broke through… If they broke through, de la Fayette's Frenchmen would go in behind the striking column. They'd tear a hole in Cornwallis' line that you could throw a honker through.
And then what? Croydon? Victory? True victory at last? Cornwallis handing over his sword in token of surrender? Cornwallis admitting that the United States of Atlantis were here to stay?
Till this moment, the fight for Atlantean freedom had so consumed Victor, he'd had scant opportunity to wonder what would come afterwards. If Cornwallis and the redcoats had to sail away from Atlantis forever, where would they go? Back to England? Or west across the broad Hesperian Gulf to fight the rebels on the Terranovan mainland? Suppose they won there. How would the United States of Atlantis cope with being all but surrounded by the unloved and unloving former mother country? Victor had no idea.
There were worse problems to have. Losing the war against England instead of winning it, for instance. Not so long before, that had looked much too likely. Then, still unloved and unloving, the mother country would have set its boot on Atlantis' neck and stomped hard.
Which she might do yet. Victor knew he'd been building castles in the air. Any number of things could all too easily go wrong. He called to one of his young messengers-one who spoke fluent French. "My compliments to the Marquis de la Fayette, and please remind him to be ready to lead his men forward the instant the situation warrants."
"Right you are, General," the messenger agreed. One of the usual slipshod Atlantean salutes, and away he went at a good clip. Victor smiled at his back. That kind of response would have earned the puppy stripes from Cornwallis-and, very possibly, from de la Fayette as well. Atlanteans did things their own way. It might not be pretty, but it worked… or it had so far.
Victor had talked himself hoarse making sure Baron von Steuben understood he was to send word back as soon as he thought it likely he would penetrate the redcoats' defenses. And the German officer did, but not quite the way the Atlantean commandant had expected. Instead of telling Victor what was going on in the middle of that cloudbank of black-powder smoke, von Steuben sent a runner straight back to de la Fayette.
That runner and Victor Radcliff's messenger must have reached the French noble at almost the same time. The first Victor knew about it was when de la Fayette's soldiers surged forward, musicians blaring out their foreign horn and drum calls
For a heartbeat, Victor was mortally offended. Then he realized what must have happened. He also realized von Steuben had been absolutely right. If de la Fayette's troops were the ones who were going to move, de la Fayette was the man who most needed to know when they were to move. If Victor's laugh was rueful, it was a laugh even so. "Why doesn't anyone ever tell me anything?" he said.
"What's that?" Blaise asked.
"My own foolishness talking," Victor said, which probably made less of an answer than Blaise would have wanted. Victor climbed up onto his horse. His factotum also mounted. Urging his gelding forward, Victor went on, "If we are driving them, I will see it with my own eyes, by God!"
"And if by some mischance we are not driving them, you will ride straight into something you could have stayed away from," Blaise was always ready to see the cloud to a silver lining.
The firing ahead hadn't died out. The redcoats were still plainly doing all they could to hold back the Atlanteans-and, now, de la Fayette's Frenchmen as well. But, as Victor rode past the woods that had sheltered his striking column till the moment it struck, he realized their best wouldn't be enough.
"By God!" he said again, and this time he sounded like a man who really meant it.
Baron von Steuben's men had punched a hole through the English line better than a furlong wide. Victor had hoped they might be able to break through so splendidly, but hadn't dared count on it. Counting on something ahead of time in war too often led but to disappointment.
And the Atlanteans had done what they were supposed to do after breaking through, too. They'd swung out to left and right and poured a fierce enfilading fire into the redcoats in the trenches to either side. Arrows on a map couldn't have more precisely obeyed the man who drew them. And if that wasn't von Steuben's doing, whose was it? The German deserved to be a colonel, if not a brigadier general.
De la Fayette's French professionals poured through the gap Atlantean ardor had torn. They too methodically volleyed at the Englishmen who tried to plug that gap. Victor was just riding into what had been the English position when the redcoats, every bit as competent as their French foes, realized they were playing a losing game and started falling back toward Croydon.
"On!" Victor shouted to his own men, and then, in French, "Avant!" He fell back into English to continue, "If we take the town from them, they've nowhere to go after that!" If de la Fayette or some of his officers wanted to translate his remarks for the benefit of the French soldiery, they were welcome to.
Croydon's outskirts lay only a couple of miles away. Whenever Victor rode to the crest of some little swell of ground, he could see the church steeples reaching toward the heavens. One of them was suppos
ed to be the tallest steeple in all Atlantis, a claim furiously rejected in Hanover and New Hastings.
"I think we can do it." Was that Blaise's voice? Damned if it wasn't. If Blaise believed Croydon would fall, how could it do anything else?
Victor also began to believe his men would storm Croydon. And if they did… when they did… No one, yet, had thought to write a tune for the United States of Atlantis to use in place of "God Save the King." Maybe some minstrel needed to get busy in a hurry, because what stood between those united states and liberty?
Damn all Victor could see. His men were making for Croydon faster than the redcoats pulling out of their entrenchments and earthworks. If nothing slowed the Atlanteans and Frenchmen, they were less than half an hour from guaranteeing that the Union Jack would never fly over Atlantis again.
If nothing slowed them… One more thought Victor Radcliff remembered a long, long time. No sooner had it crossed his mind than a band of cavalry-something more than a troop, but less than a regiment-thundered out of Croydon and straight toward the advancing Atlantean and French foot soldiers.
The riders wore buff and blue, not the red of English regulars. Loyalists, then, Victor thought with distaste. Like any cavalrymen, they carried sabers and carbines and long horse pistols. Most would have a second pistol stashed in a boot. Some might carry one or two more on their belts.
"Form line!" Victor shouted. "We can take them!"
Blaise pointed. "Isn't that-?"
"God damn him to hell!" Victor burst out. Sure as the devil, that was Habakkuk Biddiscombe-and the riders had to be Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion, which had been much spoken of but, till now, little seen. Victor wished he weren't seeing it at this moment, which did him no good whatever.
He wasn't the only one to recognize the defector, the traitor, commanding the royalist Atlanteans. The cry of "No quarter!" went up from a dozen throats at once. Anyone who fought for and alongside Habakkuk Biddiscombe knew the chance he took. Muskets boomed. Here and there, legionaries slid from the saddle and horses went down.
But the horsemen who didn't fall came on. They knew exactly what they were doing, and why. They despised the soldiers who fought for the United States of Atlantis at least as much as those men loathed them. And now at last they had the chance to show their hated kinsmen and former friends what they could do.
"Death to Radcliff!" Biddiscombe roared. In an instant, every man he led took up the cry: "Death to Radcliff!"
They slammed into the front of the advancing Atlantean column: into a line that hadn't finished forming. They slammed into it and through it, shooting some soldiers and slashing at others with their swords. And, by their courage and ferocity, they stopped Victor Radcliff's army in its tracks.
"Kill them! Drive them out of the way!" Victor shouted furiously, drawing the gold-hilted sword the Atlantean Assembly had given him and urging his horse forward, toward the fight. "On to Croydon!"
Against a force of infantry that size, brushing them aside would have been a matter of moments-nothing that could have seriously delayed the assault on the redcoats' last sheltering place But the horses of Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion gave the men on them a striking power out of all proportion to their numbers.
And so did the way they hated the men they faced. Victor might-did-reckon their cause and the way they upheld it altogether wrong. That didn't mean their contempt for death and retreat was any less than his might have been under like circumstances.
"Biddiscombe!" he called, brandishing his blade as he rode past his own men toward the fight. "I'm coming for you, Biddiscombe!"
"Oh, just shoot the son of a whore," Blaise said, which was bound to be good advice.
What were the redcoats doing behind Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion? Victor knew too well what he would be doing while such an outsized forlorn hope bought him time. Without a doubt, Cornwallis' men were doing the same thing: everything they could to hold their foes as far away from Croydon as possible
After what seemed a very long time, the survivors from the Legion galloped back toward the town. They'd bought the redcoats-King George's fellow subjects, they would have said-enough of that precious, impalpable substance to form a line across the neck of the peninsula on which Croydon sat. And, whether from out of the town or from their abandoned field works, the Englishmen had half a dozen cannon in the line.
"Don't like the looks of those," Blaise said.
"Nor do I," Victor agreed. No Atlantean artillery was anywhere close by. He didn't think the French had brought guns forward, either. Which meant… We're going to catch it, he thought sorrowfully.
The field guns spoke. Cannon balls and canister tore through the Atlanteans and Frenchmen. Two quick volleys from the dreadfully proficient foot soldiers followed. Men and pieces of men lay where they had fallen. The wounded staggered back when they could. When they couldn't, they thrashed and wailed and clutched at hale men, hoping to be helped away from the killing fire.
They got less help than they would have wanted. The Atlanteans were proficient in the craft of slaughter themselves by now, and gave back the redcoats' musketry as best they could. And more Frenchmen hurried forward to stiffen them should they require stiffening-and to shoot at the English any which way.
When the redcoats' cannon spoke again, one of their balls knocked a musketeer near Victor right out of his shoes. The musketeer howled-mercifully, not for long. At the start of the war, the Atlanteans never could have endured such carnage. Now they took it in stride, as sailors took the chance of being drowned. It was a hazard of the trade, no less and no more.
Regardless of how calm and brave they were, one thing seemed only too clear to Victor. "We shan't break into Croydon after all," he said bitterly. "God fling Habakkuk Biddiscombe into hell for ever and ever. May Satan fry him on a red-hot griddle for all eternity, and stab him with a fork every so often to see if he's done."
"Maybe it is happening even now," Blaise said. "Maybe he was killed in the fight at the front."
"Maybe he was. If God is merciful, he was," Victor said. "But then, if God were merciful, Biddiscombe would have died of the pox long ago."
With no hope of seizing Croydon, Victor reluctantly pulled his men out of musket range. The English guns kept banging away at them. But, by the same token, Atlantean riflemen picked off artillerists one after another.
Victor looked back over his shoulder. They'd forced the redcoats out of their lines, forced them to give up the field fortifications on which they'd expended so much time and labor. It was a victory: no doubt of that. If it wasn't quite the overwhelming victory he'd wanted when he set things in motion… well, what man this side of Alexander or Hannibal or Julius Caesar won such an overwhelming victory? For an amateur general with a formerly amateur army, he'd done pretty well.
Looking back over his shoulder also reminded him how close to sunset it was. His long-stretching shadow, and his horse's, should have told him as much already, but he'd had other things on his mind. He wondered if he had the nerve to fight a large night action, and regretfully decided he didn't.
"We'll camp here," he ordered, and then, to sweeten it as best he could, he added, "Here, on the ground we've won."
De la Fayette favored him with a salute. "You accomplished almost everything you intended, Monsieur le General," the French nobleman said. "It is given to few to do so much for their country."
"I thank you," Victor replied, returning the salute. "If only I could have done a little more."
That made the marquis smile. "A man who has much but wants more is likely to acquire it."
"I wanted it today," Victor said, and cursed Habakkuk Biddiscombe again.
Night brought only a nervous, halfhearted break in the hostilities. The redcoats also encamped on the held, not far out of gunshot range. Men from both sides went out to rescue the moaning wounded and plunder the silent dead-and if a few wounded were suddenly silenced in the process, so what? Englishmen and Atlanteans sometimes stumbled over one another in t
he darkness. They would grapple or open fire-except when both sides ran away at once.
The redcoats seemed busier than the exhausted Atlanteans. Victor didn't need long to realize why: they were digging in in front of Croydon. Rising earthworks partly hid their fires. They would have a much shorter line to hold now, even if they would also have far fewer men with whom to hold it
When the sun rose again, Royal Navy ships were tied up at Croydon's piers. They were only frigates, but their guns outweighed and outranged anything the Atlanteans could bring against them. If Croydon fell, it would have to fall by siege.
Chapter 22
"Damn the Englishmen!" Victor said when he'd ridden around the redcoats' new lines in front of Croydon. "God butter them and Satan futter them, they dig like skinks."
"Comment?" inquired the Marquis de la Fayette, who'd ridden the circuit with him. "Like what do they dig?"
"Like skinks," Victor repeated. De la Fayette's question puzzled him: the simile was common enough in Atlantis. Then he decided it might be common only in Atlantis. He cast about for a European equivalent, which he found after a moment: "Like moles, you might say."
"Ah. I see." The French nobleman did indeed look enlightened. But then he asked, "What are these skinks?"
"Why, lizards, of course. Peculiar lizards, though-I will say that," Victor Radcliff answered. "They're short and stout as lizards go. They have no eyes, but their front feet are broad and strong and their tongues uncommonly long and clever. They dig through dirt after worms and bugs-only in summer in these northern lands, but year-around farther south, where the weather stays milder. They can be pests in gardens or on well-mown lawns, on account of the furrows they leave."
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