The United States of Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  Instead of joking, Victor asked, “How do you know that . . . ah . . . ?”

  “My name is Eubanks, General—Barnabas Eubanks,” the local said. “As for how I know, did I not see him with my own eyes take a drink of spirituous liquor? ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging,’ the Good Book says, which makes it true. And did I not hear him most profanely take the name of the Lord in vain, that also being prohibited by Holy Scripture?”

  He could as easily have seen Victor drink rum or heard him blaspheme. The profession of arms lent itself to such pastimes, perhaps more than any other. If this Barnabas Eubanks didn’t understand that . . . But a glance at Eubanks’ stern, pinched features told Victor he did understand. He simply wasn’t prepared to make any allowances. Yes, he was a Croydon man, all right.

  “While I should be glad to see General Cornwallis in the infernal regions, I find myself more immediately concerned with his earthly whereabouts,” Victor said. “What did you hear from him besides his blasphemy?”

  “He and one of his lackeys were speaking of how they purposed making a stand in Pomphret Landing.” Eubanks’ mouth tightened further; Victor hadn’t believed it could. “The place suits them, being a den of iniquity,” Eubanks added.

  All Victor knew about Pomphret Landing was that it lay between Hanover and Croydon. Until this moment, he’d never heard that it was as one with Sodom and Gomorrah. “How is it so wicked?” he inquired.

  “I am surprised you do not know. I am surprised its vileness is not a stench in the nostrils of all Atlantis,” Barnabas Eubanks replied. “Learn, then, that Pomphret Landing supports no fewer than three horrid taverns, that it has a theater presenting so-called dramas, and”—he lowered his voice in pious horror—“there is within its bounds a house of assignation in which women sell their bodies for silver!”

  You silly twit! What do you expect sailors coming off the sea to do but drink and screw? No, Victor didn’t shout it, which only proved he was learning restraint as he grew older. He also wondered where the wanton women’s partners came by silver in these hard times. He didn’t ask that, either. All he said was, “The theater doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Oh, but it is,” Eubanks said earnestly. “The plays presented encourage adultery, freethinking, and all manner of other such sinful pastimes.”

  “I see,” Victor murmured. If we can drive the redcoats out of Pomphret Landing without smashing the theater or burning it down, I may watch a play there myself. One more thing he didn’t tell his narrow-minded, if patriotic, informant.

  Forcing Cornwallis to pull back from Pomphret Landing wouldn’t be so simple. The town sat on the east bank of the Pomphret. Cornwallis’ engineers had burnt or blown up the bridges over the river. Locals told Victor there was no ford for some miles inland. English artillerists fired their field guns across the Pomphret at his mounted scouts. Most of those shots missed, as such harassing fire commonly did. But de la Fayette’s Frenchmen butchered two horses that met cannon balls. And the Atlanteans buried a man who also made one’s sudden and intimate acquaintance.

  French engineers assured Victor they could bridge the Pomphret. “Fast enough to keep the redcoats from gathering while you do it?” he asked them.

  They didn’t answer right away. The way they eyed him said he’d passed a test, one he hadn’t even known he was taking. At last, cautiously, the most senior man replied, “That could be, Monsieur . It is one of the hazards of the trade, you might say.”

  “No doubt,” Victor said. “That doesn’t mean we should invite it if we don’t have to, n’est-ce pas?”

  The engineers put their heads together. When they broke apart, their grizzled spokesman said, “Perhaps if we began at night . . .”

  “You would be working by torchlight then, is it not so?”

  “We are not owls. We cannot see in pitch blackness, you know,” the senior engineer said regretfully.

  “Do you not believe the Englishmen might notice what you are about?” Victor asked.

  “This too is a hazard of the trade, I fear,” the engineer answered. “Having commanded for some little while, Monsieur le Général , I daresay you will have observed it yourself by now.”

  Shut up and quit bothering us, he meant. An Atlantean would have come right out and said so. The Frenchman knew how to get his meaning across without being ostentatiously rude. Either way, the result was frustrating. Victor looked up into the heavens. The moon rode low in the east. It would be full soon; against the daylight sky, it looked like a silver shilling with one edge chewed away. The pale-faced man in the moon didn’t wink at him—that had to be his imagination.

  And if his imagination was working hard enough to see such things . . . If it was, maybe he could make it work hard other ways as well. “Do you think you could bridge the Pomphret by the light of the full moon?”

  He made the engineers huddle again, anyhow. That was as much as he’d hoped for—he’d feared they would kill his scheme with genteel scorn. The graying senior man replied, “That is possible, Monsieur. Possible, I repeat. It is by no means assured.”

  “I understand,” Victor said. “Here is what I have in mind. . . .” He spoke for some little while.

  This time, the French engineers didn’t need to confer. Almost identical, slightly bemused, smiles spread across all their faces as near simultaneously as made no difference. “You have come up with something out of the ordinary, Monsieur le Général. No one could deny it for a moment,” their grizzled spokesman said. “Truly, I admire your original tenor of thought.”

  “And here I believed myself a baritone,” Victor said. The engineers flinched, as if at musket fire. Ignoring that, Victor went on, “Do you think the plan is worth trying, then?”

  “Why not?” the engineer said gaily. “After all, what is the worst that can happen?” He answered his own question: “We can get shot, fall into the river, and feed the fish and turtles and crayfish. Not so very much, eh?”

  “One hopes not,” Victor said dryly.

  “One always hopes,” the engineer agreed. “The fish, the turtles, the crayfish—they get fat regardless.”

  Against the dark blue velvet of the night, the moon glowed like a new-minted sovereign. Torches and bonfires blazed, turning night into day on this stretch of the Pomphret. Engineers shouted orders. Atlantean and French soldiers, most of them stripped to the waist, fetched and carried at the direction of the technically trained officers.

  Bridging a river was not quiet work. Bridging a river by firelight at night was not inconspicuous work. It drew English scouts the way those soldiers’ bare torsos drew mosquitoes. Some of the scouts fired horse pistols and carbines at the Frenchmen and Atlanteans out of the night. Others galloped away to bring back reinforcements. Victor heard their horses’ hoofbeats fade in the distance despite the din of axes and saws and hammers and despite the Pomphret’s gentler murmuring. He thought he heard those hoofbeats, anyhow. Maybe that was only his imagination again. He could hope so.

  Hope or not, though, he placed some field guns near the Pomphret’s west bank. If those reinforcements got here: no, dammit: when they did—they would have cannon with them. He wanted to be able to respond in kind.

  But Cornwallis’ artillerists would have every advantage in the world. His own guns had to try to wreck the carriages and limbers of enemy cannon hiding in the dark. The English gunners wouldn’t even care about his, not unless his men got very lucky. A growing bridge, all lit up by flames and by the brilliant moon, made the easiest target any fool could think of. Sometimes there was just no help for a situation, worse luck.

  Crash! A cannon ball tumbled six feet of bridge into the Pomphret. “Good thing nobody was standing on that stretch,” Blaise said.

  “So it was,” Victor agreed. “But I’m afraid we can’t play these games without losses.” Hardly had he spoken before another cannon ball jellied a French engineer’s leg. The man was carried off shrieking and bleeding to the surgeons. One quick, dismayed glance a
t the wound—even that was too much, because it made anyone who saw it want to look away—told Victor they would have to amputate to have any chance of saving the fellow’s life. A couple of minutes later, the engineer screamed again, even louder.

  “Poor devil,” Blaise muttered.

  Victor nodded; he was thinking the same thing himself. Then he rode out into the firelight to let the redcoats know he was there. It was important that they should understand he was personally supervising this operation.

  They didn’t need long to realize as much. Bullets cracked past his head. His horse sidestepped nervously. He didn’t draw back into the darkness till after a roundshot skipped past, much too close for comfort. And, thanks to the full moon, the darkness was less dark than it might have been. Enemy fire pursued him far longer than he would have wanted.

  “That was foolish,” Blaise told him after the English finally stopped trying to ventilate his spleen.

  “It could be,” Victor said. “But it was also necessary. Now they are certain this bridge has the utmost importance to our cause. They will be so very proud of themselves for thwarting its construction.”

  The Negro clucked reproachfully. “They would have been mighty damn proud of themselves for killing you. Oh, yes, that they would.”

  “True enough, but they didn’t.” Victor Radcliff made himself shrug. “You have to take chances sometimes, that’s all.”

  “We could have dragged you off to the surgeons, too,” Blaise said. “They would have shot the horse, and then carved it into steaks and ribs and whatnot. They would not do the same for you, even if it would have been a mercy.”

  “It happens,” Victor said. Horribly wounded men sometimes begged to die. If their wounds were dreadful enough, kind friends or appalled strangers would put them out of their torment. As Blaise said, what was mercy for a horse could also be a mercy for a man.

  He eyed the moon. It was starting the long, slow slide down toward the Green Ridge Mountains. After midnight, then. An English sniper shot an Atlantean running out to lay more wood on a bonfire. The wounded greencoat hopped away from the blaze. By the way he swore, he wasn’t too badly hurt. If blood poisoning or lockjaw didn’t carry him off, he’d probably be back in the fight in two or three weeks.

  Time dragged on. Try as the French engineers would, they seemed unable to push a bridge very far across the Pomphret. The redcoats mocked them from the far side of the river. Most of the mockery was in English, which few of the Frenchmen understood. They were the lucky ones.

  “Any man called me even a quarter of that, I’d kill him,” Blaise said.

  “We’ll have our chance before long,” Victor answered. “So I hope, at any rate.”

  At last, dawn began painting the eastern horizon gray and then pink. The engineers gave up. The redcoats jeered louder and more foully than ever. But now they were more visible to the French and Atlantean artillerists. The gunners answered with balls of iron.

  Having made sure their foes wouldn’t span the Pomphret here, Cornwallis’ men drew back out of range. They left a few soldiers near the river, where the men could keep an eye on their opponents and make sure the French and Atlanteans wouldn’t keep trying to bridge this stretch of the river.

  Which didn’t mean the French and Atlanteans wouldn’t try to bridge the Pomphret somewhere else. It only meant the redcoats wouldn’t expect them to bridge it anywhere else. Cornwallis’ troops made that unpleasant discovery a couple of hours after sunup.

  Pistol shots and carbines announced cavalry coming down from the north. The bigger booms from field guns announced that artillery accompanied the horsemen. Before long, crashing volleys announced that solid blocks of infantry accompanied the cavalry and field guns.

  General Cornwallis hadn’t sent his whole army north from Pomphret Landing: nowhere near. He’d sent enough men to keep the engineers from bridging the Pomphret where his scouts discovered them making the effort. He’d succeeded in that. Meanwhile, a few miles farther north, more French engineers quietly did bridge the river . . . and the English had no idea they were doing it till after it was done.

  Taken in the flank by the troops who’d unexpectedly crossed to the east side of the Pomphret, the redcoats fled south. Victor Radcliff crossed the river in a rowboat.

  He shook the hand of the Marquis de la Fayette, who’d led the larger detachment of Frenchmen and Atlanteans over the Pomphret to the north. “My compliments to your engineers,” Victor said. “They performed bravely here and splendidly in your position.”

  “My chief engineer, Major Flamel, extends his compliments to you, Monsieur le Général,” de la Fayette replied. “He assures me it was by your clever ruse alone that we gained passage over the river.”

  “Having an idea is easy. Turning it into something useful is anything but,” Victor said. “Major Flamel gets the credit for doing that.”

  “As I have seen before, you are a generous man,” the French noble said. “I presume you now intend to drive the Englishmen out of Pomphret Landing?”

  “That’s what I have in mind, yes. I don’t know what kind of works they’ve built north of town—it doesn’t do to underestimate Cornwallis’ engineers, either,” Victor said.

  “Sadly, I have also seen this for myself,” de la Fayette agreed. “But even if their fieldworks prove strong, what prevents us from marching past them to the sea and trapping the redcoats between our lines to the east and the Pomphret to the west?”

  “I’d like nothing better than to trap them inside Pomphret Landing,” Victor said. “If we do that, we win the war. So it seems to me, anyhow. And if it seems the same to General Cornwallis, he won’t let us do it. He’ll fall back on Croydon before we can cut him off. Croydon has the best harbor north of Hanover, and it sits on a peninsula easy to fortify. I would much rather stand siege there than in Pomphret Landing, especially with the Royal Navy easily able to supply the garrison by sea.”

  “With Cornwallis having so much of his force here, the enemy will not easily be able to bring in foodstuffs from elsewhere in Atlantis,” de la Fayette said. “Most of the land is under the control of the United States of Atlantis in your person.” He bowed.

  “There is some truth in that,” Victor said. “Some, but less than I would wish. True, most of the redcoats are here. But England could still land more Terranovan savages near Avalon, or a force of German mercenaries down by New Hastings. And forces loyal to King George—native Atlantean forces, I mean—still hold too much of the countryside.”

  “Custis Cawthorne and your other representatives in Paris spoke little of that,” de la Fayette observed. “They talked always of the war against oppressive England, not of the civil war against your own folk.”

  “Should that surprise you?” Victor said. “Don’t French diplomatists also paint the best picture they can of your kingdom’s situation and needs?”

  De la Fayette bowed again, this time in amusement mingled with rue. “No doubt they do. But one does not expect the vices of civilization from the folk of a land so new and vital. Eh bien, perhaps one should.”

  You aren’t such bumpkins as we thought. The marquis couldn’t very well mean anything else. Now Victor bowed to him. “Serving one’s country to the best of one’s ability is surely no vice, your Grace.”

  “Well, no.” De la Fayette seemed faintly embarrassed. “But so many of us were charmed by your seeming rusticity. Monsieur Cawthorne gives a masterly portrayal.”

  Victor had all he could do not to laugh himself silly over that. Could any man be compelled to enjoy himself more than Custis Cawthorne enjoyed playing such a role? While that might be possible, Victor found it most unlikely. “And how many pretty little French girls has Monsieur Cawthorne sweet-talked into his bed by playing the poor chap who needs to be instructed in such arts? And how many of them ended up astonished that he turned out to know so much already?”

  The Marquis de la Fayette looked astonished himself. “How could you know that?”

 
This time, Victor did laugh; if he hadn’t, he would have exploded. “I’ve known Monsieur Cawthorne many years. I have some notion of how his beady little mind works. Does he ask people to teach him card games, too, and take away their money with what he calls beginner’s luck?”

  “Nom d’un nom!” de la Fayette said, and not another word on that score, from which Victor concluded that Custis had some of the nobleman’s money in his pocket. Well, good for Custis, Victor thought. It was high time the United States of Atlantis turned a profit on something.

  The field fortifications north of Pomphret Landing were as strong as the talented English engineers could make them. All the same, Cornwallis used them to shield his withdrawal to the east, not to try to hold the town. “It turned out as you foretold,” de la Fayette said. “It could be that I should ask you to read my palm.”

  “I’m sure we both have better things to do with our time,” Victor said. After the Atlanteans and French rode into Pomphret Landing, he found one of those things: he sent a letter to General Cornwallis, urging him to surrender. Surely you can see your force is reduced to no more than a red-coated carbuncle on the fair face of Atlantis, he wrote.

  Before sending the letter to Croydon under a flag of truce, he showed it to de la Fayette. “A carbuncle on the face of Atlantis?” the Frenchman said after working his way through the English. “You prove yourself to be possessed of a noble heart, Monsieur le Général. Me, I would call him a boil on Atlantis’ arse.”

  Victor smiled. “That is what I was thinking, as a matter of fact. Whether I have a noble heart or not, I would not presume to say. But I am sure General Cornwallis has one. This being so, I am confident he will divine my meaning even if I state it obliquely.”

  “Obliquely?” The marquis savored that. “Not a word I would have used, which does not keep me from understanding you. As you speak English with me more often, I discover in it subtleties of which I would not previously have suspected it was capable.”