The United States of Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “You are generous, your Grace,” Victor Radcliff said, more sincerely than not. For anyone from France to allow that English might be subtle was no small concession.

  Having received de la Fayette’s approbation, the letter did go off to Croydon. Victor didn’t think he would have to wait long for Cornwallis’ reply, and he didn’t. The courier who’d taken Victor’s missive also brought back the English commander’s response. “I didn’t get to read it, General, on account of it was upsy-down to me while he was a-writing it, and he sealed it up as soon as it was done, but I don’t reckon he’s ready to chuck in the sponge,” the courier said.

  “The worst he can tell me is no,” Victor said, breaking the seal. “Even if he should, how am I worse off than I would have been without making the attempt?”

  He unfolded the letter. Sure enough, the missive was in Cornwallis’ own hand, with which Victor had been familiar since the last war, when they fought on the same side. Always a pleasure to receive even the smallest communication from you, my dear General Radcliff, Cornwallis wrote. If he was not a man with a noble heart, he certainly was one who flaunted his urbanity.

  Because this pleasure is so great, it pains me doubly to find myself compelled by circumstance to refuse you in anything, the English general continued. None the less, I am so compelled on this occasion. I do not believe our situation hopeless: very much the reverse, in fact. Whilst we do at present find ourselves occupying only Croydon, this may change at any moment, as you must be aware. The Royal Navy may come with orders for our embarkation, in which case we should land at some spot not well prepared to resist us. Or, contrariwise, ships may bring us reinforcements from across the sea. Should that come to pass, you and your foreign allies would soon have reason to look to your laurels. These things being so, continued struggle seems far preferable to craven surrender. I have the honor to remain your most obedient servant. . . . Cornwallis appended his signature, complete with a fancy flourish below his name.

  The courier had been watching Victor’s face. “He says no, eh?”

  “He does indeed. He has reasons he finds good for going on with the fight.”

  “Are they good reasons?” the courier asked.

  “They . . . may be.” Victor didn’t like to admit even so much. He imagined the Royal Navy taking Cornwallis’ redcoats down to Freetown or Cosquer. Their arrival would indeed come as a complete and most unwelcome surprise in those parts. And if transports brought five or ten thousand more English soldiers—or even mercenaries from Brunswick or Hesse—to Croydon, Cornwallis could sally forth against the Atlanteans and French with every hope of success.

  “What do we do, then?” the courier inquired.

  “I’m still ciphering that out,” Victor said slowly. It seemed a better answer than Damned if I know, even if they meant about the same thing. What really bothered him was that he would have trouble laying proper siege to Croydon. The Royal Navy didn’t have to take the redcoats down the coast or reinforce them to aid them against his army and the Frenchmen. As long as food and powder and shot came into Croydon, Cornwallis’ army was and would remain a going concern. And the Atlanteans could do very little to stop the Royal Navy from supplying the enemy.

  Victor Radcliff took Cornwallis’ reply to de la Fayette. The marquis read it with grave attention. “What he says is very much what I should say if I found myself in his position.”

  “And I,” Victor agreed. “Is there any chance the French navy might interpose itself between Croydon and the ships of the Royal Navy? Prevent Cornwallis from revictualing himself and he becomes vulnerable to all the usual hazards of a siege. That failing, he is in almost as enviable a position as the defenders of Nouveau Redon before the spring was put out of commission.”

  “I could wish you had chosen a different comparison,” de la Fayette said.

  “My apologies,” Victor said, “but you will, I trust, understand why it sprang to mind. Not only was I there, but so was General Cornwallis—Lieutenant-Colonel Cornwallis, as he was then.”

  “Indeed.” De la Fayette’s tone showed him to be imperfectly appeased. With an effort, he brought his wits back to the matter at hand. “As for our navy . . . I must confess, I know not whether that may be within its capacity.”

  “We should find out.” Victor’s enthusiasm spurred him on. “We truly should, your Grace. If we can cork up the Englishmen in Croydon, the war is ours, and the United States of Atlantis indisputably free. For what other purpose did you and your brave men leave France?”

  “For no other purpose,” the marquis admitted . . . reluctantly? He also found a notable difficulty with Victor’s scheme, and proceeded to note it: “How do you propose to inform the French navy that its services in these parts are desired? I have not the faintest idea where in the broad Atlantic—or even the not so broad Mediterranean—its ships of the line and frigates may be.”

  Enthusiasm or no, Victor Radcliff found himself compelled to contemplate the cogent question. Having contemplated, he delivered his verdict: “Damnation!”

  “Just so,” de la Fayette agreed.

  But, where he seemed to think the heartfelt curse settled things, Victor was less inclined to give in or give up. “We have as yet no Atlantean navy to speak of—” he began.

  “Indeed not, or you would give your own vessels the task of interdicting Croydon,” de la Fayette said, and then, “Interdicting? It is the right word, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes, it is, but I hadn’t finished yet,” Victor said. “We have no navy to speak of, but we have a good many merchantmen and a great plenty of fishing boats. If we send them forth in search of your warships, they should be able to find them before long, and to lead them back here to render our cause such aid as may prove within their power.”

  The Marquis de la Fayette blinked. “God has blessed you with an adventurous spirit—this is not to be denied. Have you any notion how very wide the ocean is, however?”

  “I do, sir,” Victor replied. “I have crossed it myself, and my ancestors made their living from it for centuries.” He didn’t mention that he was no sailor himself. De la Fayette might already know that, but what point to reminding him if he did? Victor went on, “With enough boats searching, the enterprise is bound to succeed in time—and, chances are, in not such a long time, too.”

  “Well, it could be.” De la Fayette didn’t seem altogether convinced. Victor wasn’t altogether convinced, either, but he was convinced it was worth a try. And the French nobleman seemed to admit that much, for he asked, “And what will our land forces be doing whilst awaiting the navy’s arrival—which may not prove altogether timely?”

  “I expect we will be doing what we would be doing if there were no such thing as the French navy,” Victor replied. “That is to say, we will be doing everything in our power to defeat Cornwallis’ army in and around Croydon. Had you anything else in mind for us?”

  “By no means, Monsieur le Général. I merely wished to make certain you did not intend to rest on our laurels, so to speak. The war still wants aggressive prosecution, and will fail without it.”

  “D’accord,” Victor said. De la Fayette smiled at the very French agreement. Victor continued, “My first target for prosecuting the war would be the English works defending the hamlet of Wilton Wells. If we drive them away from the village, we dent their lines in a way Cornwallis won’t care for.”

  “Splendid!” the marquis said gaily. “Let us proceed, then.”

  Proceed they did. But Cornwallis’ fieldworks bristled with cannon. Ditches and abatis kept the Atlanteans from getting close. The forlorn hopes that broke through the interlaced tree trunks and branches proved exactly that. The English guns sprayed them with canister. The men who could staggered back through the gaps they’d made in the abatis. The rest lay where they’d fallen, some writhing and moaning, others ominously still.

  Some of the forlorn hopes were French, others Atlantean. Neither commander had any excuse to blame the other’s soldiers
, for they’d failed together. All de la Fayette said was, “It could be that we will find an easier way toward Croydon than the one that goes through Wilton Wells.”

  “It could be, yes,” Victor said, admiring de la Fayette’s sangfroid . “I had not thought this one would prove so well defended.”

  “Not everything works,” de la Fayette said. “One of the tricks of the game is to keep trying even after a failure.”

  “True enough.” Victor had been a good deal older than the Frenchman was now when he’d learned that—which made it no less true.

  XXI

  The Atlanteans planned to feint at Wilton Wells again and strike a little farther east, just past Garnet Pond. Woods let them closely approach the redcoats’ line there, and it didn’t seem strongly held. If they could break through, Cornwallis’ men would have to fall back toward Croydon in a hurry. Victor and de la Fayette could concentrate their force and attack where they pleased. The redcoats, trying to hold a line well outside of Croydon, had to try to stay reasonably strong all along it. Reasonably strong, with luck, would prove not to be strong enough.

  With luck. Victor Radcliff had much too much reason to remember those two little, seemingly innocent, words after the thrust past Garnet Pond came to grief. The worst of it was, he couldn’t think of anything he should have done differently.

  It was sunny when the attacking column set out for Garnet Pond early in the morning. Sunny—he remembered that very well. Oh, the wind came down from the northwest, but what of it? Summer was over, and chilly winds were nothing out of the ordinary, especially in a northern settlement—a northern state—like Croydon.

  De la Fayette seemed as happy with the arrangement as Victor was himself. “This is a well-conceived plan,” he declared. Even if he was very young, his praise warmed Victor. “The false attack at the place we struck before will hold the English in place, or even, it could be, draw men from Garnet Pond to the position that seems more threatened.”

  “I hope so, yes.” Victor did his best to keep his smile sheepish and modest rather than, say, full of gloating and anticipation.

  “And we have deployed a full complement of sharpshooters and skirmishers to ensure that the true attack is not detected prematurely,” de la Fayette went on. “Nom d’un nom, Monsieur le Général , I cannot imagine what could possibly go wrong.”

  Maybe that was what did it. Had Victor been more pious, he might also have been more nearly certain it was. The Frenchman didn’t precisely take the Lord’s name in vain. He didn’t use the Lord’s name at all—not directly, anyhow. But wasn’t trotting out a euphemism just as bad, really? Assuming the Lord was listening, wouldn’t He know what was on your mind, what was in your heart, regardless of whether His name actually passed your lips? Victor wondered about it afterwards. But afterwards was too late, as afterwards commonly is.

  “Clouding up,” Blaise remarked not ten minutes after the attacking column set out.

  “Well, so it is,” Victor agreed. “What of it?” He tried to look on the bright side, even if that bright side was rapidly vanishing from the sky. The clouds were thick and roiling and dark. It hadn’t been warm before they swept across the sky; it got noticeably colder as soon as they did. The air seemed damper, too, although Victor tried his best to tell himself that was only his imagination.

  He might have managed to persuade himself. But Blaise’s broad nostrils flared. “Smells like rain,” he said.

  “I hope not!” Victor exclaimed. But he knew that wet-dust odor as soon as Blaise pointed it out. As a matter of fact, he’d known it before, even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it was there.

  No matter what he’d managed to talk himself into, he wouldn’t have stayed deluded much longer. When rain started coming down, it was impossible to believe the weather remained fine. And this wasn’t a light shower of the kind some of the people farther south called liquid sunshine. This was a downpour, a gullywasher, a cloudburst. . . . The ground under his feet turned to mud, and then to something a good deal more liquid than the stuff commonly known by that name.

  “What does the Bible talk about?” Blaise said—shouted, really, to make himself heard over, or through, that roaring rain. “Forty days and forty nights?”

  It hadn’t even been raining forty minutes then. All the same, Victor understood why the Negro asked the question. It had gone from cloudburst to deluge. Had Noah’s Ark floated by, Victor wouldn’t have been amazed (but why didn’t the Ark seem to contain any Atlantean productions?).

  “Maybe I should recall them,” Victor said. The Atlanteans would have a devil of a time shooting once they got past Garnet Pond—wet weather turned flintlocks into nothing more than clumsy spears and clubs.

  “Redcoats won’t be able to shoot at them, either,” Blaise replied, understanding what he was worried about.

  “Well, no,” Victor said. “But not all our men have bayonets.” At the beginning of the war, very few Atlanteans had them, giving the redcoats a great advantage when the fighting came to close quarters. These days, thanks to captured weapons and hard work at smithies all over Atlantis, most greencoats were as well armed as their English counterparts. “Or maybe I worry overmuch.”

  A few gunshots marked the moment when the feint went in. Victor admired the men on either side who’d managed to keep their powder dry. The shots rang out distinctly, even through the rain. But there were only a few. And no one had the slightest hope of reloading. After the scattered opening volley, both Atlanteans and Englishmen might have fallen back through time a thousand years, back to days long before the first clever artificer made a batch of gunpowder without blowing himself up in the doing.

  Instead of musketry, a few shouts and screams pierced the curtain of sound the downpour spread over the scene. They were enough to let Victor picture it in his mind. He imagined dripping, muddy men stabbing with bayonets and swinging clubbed muskets as if they were cricket bats. He imagined rain and blood rilling down their faces and rain trying to wash away spreading patches of red on their tunics. And, knowing soldiers as he did, he imagined them all swearing at the weather at least as much as they swore at one another.

  Off to the east, the main attacking party should have been able to gauge when to hit the English lines by the noise the men in the feint made. They probably couldn’t hear the men in the feint at all, though. The major commanding them had to use his best judgment about when to go on—or whether to go in at all.

  Victor Radcliff wouldn’t have blamed him for aborting the attack. But he didn’t. His men—and the redcoats facing them—also managed to get off a few shots. One cannon boomed. Hearing it go off truly amazed Victor. He had to hope it didn’t harm his men too much.

  And then he had to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. No messenger came back from the main attack to tell him how it was going. Maybe the officer in charge forgot to send anyone. Maybe the messenger got killed or wounded before he went very far. Or maybe he just sank into the ooze and drowned.

  If the attackers weren’t going to tell Victor what had happened, he had to find out for himself—if he could. He rode toward the woods through which the Atlanteans should have gone. He rode ever more slowly, too, for the rain rapidly turned the road to a river of mud. The horse looked back at him reproachfully, as if wondering whether it would sink out of sight. Not much farther on, Victor began to wonder the same thing.

  Where he had trouble going forward, he soon found out the Atlantean soldiers were managing to go back. “It’s no use, General!” one of them bawled through the rain.

  “What happened?” Victor asked.

  “We damn near drowned, that’s what,” the soldier answered.

  “That cannon ball blew Major Hall’s head off,” another man added, which went a long way towards explaining why the poor major hadn’t sent back any messengers. Losing your head metaphorically could distract you. Losing it literally . . . got everything over with in a hurry, at any rate. And whoever’d taken over for Hall must not have thought to
send word back, either.

  “We got in amongst the redcoats,” a sergeant said, “but we couldn’t get through ’em. Nobody could do anything much, not in this slop.” His wave took in rain and mud and bedraggled men.

  “Damnation!” Victor Radcliff shook his fist at the black clouds overhead. They took not the slightest notice of him.

  The storm lasted almost a week. By the time it finally blew out to sea, half the English earthworks had collapsed. Entrenchments on both sides were more than half full of water. Since the redcoats had so much trouble using their field fortifications, the Atlanteans might have walked into Croydon. They might have, that is, had walking anywhere not involved sinking thigh-deep in clinging muck.

  Victor thanked heaven his own quartermasters had managed to keep most of the army’s grain dry. That meant the troops could go on eating till the roads dried enough to bring in more wheat and barley and rye. Even oats, Victor thought. No one in these parts would have any trouble finding plenty of water for stewing up oatmeal.

  If Cornwallis chose this moment to try to drive the Atlanteans away from Croydon, Victor didn’t know how he would be able to hold back the redcoats. But the Englishmen, while working feverishly to repair their lines, didn’t try to come out of them. Before long, Victor realized he’d worried over nothing. Had the redcoats attacked, they would have bogged down the same way his own men did.

  “Are such storms common in these parts?” de la Fayette inquired, his manner plainly saying Atlantis wasn’t worth living in if they were.

  But Victor shook his head. “Down in the south, hurricanes are known,” he answered. “Rainstorms like this up here . . .” He shook his head again. “Bad luck—I know not what else to call this one.”

  “Bad indeed,” the French noble said. “And are we to expect blizzards next?”

  “God forbid!” Victor exclaimed, knowing too well that God was liable to do no such thing. But then, trying his best to look on the bright side of things, he added, “If we should have a hard freeze, the ground won’t try to swallow us up, anyhow.”