“You want lies, go home to your mistress,” Red Rodney answered. Most of the chieftains laughed. A few glowered: the ones, he guessed, who feared their mistresses were filling their ears with lies. He swigged from his mug of rum and went on, “The sheep are starting to think they’re wolves. The honkers are trying to grow eagles’ wings. The bastards in Stuart aim to kill us all.”
“And you know this because…?” Goldbeard Walter Kennedy inquired. He was an enormous man, several inches taller than Rodney, who was no stripling himself, and wider through the shoulders. The beard that gave him his sobriquet spilled halfway down his chest.
Radcliffe told exactly how he knew it, though he didn’t name his spy in Stuart. “We can let them pick us off a ship at a time, the way they’re bound to want to,” he said. “Or we can stand together and show ’em we’re not to be trifled with. Which would you rather?”
“How do we know you’re not lying so you get to tell us what to do?” Caradeuc inquired.
“Because I won’t lead us even if you bloody well ask me to,” Red Rodney replied. The renunciation hurt, but he knew he had to make it. “Pick somebody else. In this fight, I’ll follow him, whoever he is. If I have a quarrel with him, it can wait till later. Everything else can wait till later.”
He impressed them with that. He’d thought he would. They weren’t used to backing away from power. They were used to grabbing with both hands. They wrangled and shouted and swore, and finally chose Michel de Grammont to command. Fewer of them hated him than anyone else. That seemed a good enough reason to them. What kind of high captain he would make…They’d find out.
XII
William Radcliff was furious, in a cold-blooded Stuartish way. When he got command of a fleet to wipe the pirates of Avalon off the map, he rashly assumed the fleet would assemble some time before Judgment Day. Now he was wondering if he hadn’t been unduly optimistic.
It wasn’t as if Stuart lacked a fine harbor in which to assemble. Avalon boasted one as good, but assuredly no other anchorage in Atlantis came close. Two rivers and several islands met there, and Stuart lay at the heart of them all. No matter how the wind blew, ships could get in and out and find secure places to put up. William was hard pressed to think of a harbor in Europe or Terranova that could say the same.
He wondered why his several-times-great-grandfather hadn’t settled here rather than down at New Hastings. The only thing he could think of was that Edward Radcliffe must have been content to put down roots wherever the wind happened to blow him ashore. That only proved the Founder wasn’t so sly as people made him out to be.
And am I? William Radcliff wondered. He had authority to bind and to loose a whole fleet. The only difficulty was that, despite promises from both Elijah Walton and Piet Kieft, the fleet at the moment consisted of his own merchantmen and not one vessel more.
Merchantmen, by the nature of things, weren’t warships. They weren’t particularly fast: they were built to haul, not to sprint. And, most of the time, they weren’t heavily armed. He’d done what he could to correct that, but guns heavier than twelve-pounders were impossible to lay hold of in a peaceful settlement. Walton had promised heavier cannon to turn merchantmen into reasonable facsimiles of ships of the line, but so far the promised guns were as chimerical as the promised ships.
“You will drive trade away and make your friends repent of their friendship if you curse everyone who comes near you,” his wife remarked one afternoon, when his sarcasm curdled into blasphemy.
“I beg your humble pardon, Tamsin,” William answered. “Still and all, I would take oath—”
“You have sworn too many profane oaths already,” Tamsin Radcliff broke in.
“I would take oath,” William repeated stubbornly, “that the Devil has in hell a special firepit he stokes extra hot, for the purpose of properly tormenting souls who make promises they do not purpose keeping.”
“I am certain all will be as you wish in due course.” Tamsin had a sunny nature. She needed it, or the master merchant’s frequent glooms would have oppressed her more.
“If the promise be fulfilled in due course, that will not be as I wish,” Radcliff said. “Do you suppose they are sitting idly by in Avalon?”
“By no means,” his wife replied. “More likely than not, they are drinking and wenching and dicing and brawling. Why would they turn pirate, if not to do such things?”
She wasn’t wrong. All the same, William said, “Also, without the tiniest bit of doubt, they are readying themselves for our onslaught against them. They will surely have learned of it by now. Had we moved against them sooner, we might have taken them unawares.”
“You cannot move alone,” Tamsin said.
William nodded heavily. “If I could have, I would have long since. No, for a sea war on such a scale, I needs must have confederates. And a man who must rely on others to see that certain things are done is a man who must resign himself to knowing they may never be done.”
“And are the freebooters of Avalon better off in this regard?” Tamsin asked. “Can one man among ’em snap his fingers and have the others follow his whim like so many trained mastiffs? Or do they wait upon developments and quarrel over them the same way you and your friends do?”
He stared at her. Then he kissed her. She let out a startled squawk; that wasn’t something he commonly did in the middle of the day. “You are a wonder,” he said. “A wonder—do you hear me?”
“I hear you. I am glad to hear you,” Tamsin Radcliff said primly. “But why do you say it?”
“Because you remind me of something I almost forgot,” William answered. “I see all my own troubles, but none of my foes’. Yet they must have ’em, for are they not flesh and blood, even as am I?” He scowled. “Red Rodney, the mangy hound, is flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, as that fat toad of a Walton tires not of reminding me.”
“You are not to be blamed for it.” Tamsin was loyal to his branch of the family.
“Not by you, perhaps. In London and in Nieuw Haarlem, too many can’t tell the difference between a Radcliffe and a Radcliff.” He pronounced Red Rodney’s version of the family name with three syllables, as no Radcliffe ever born had done. His wife nodded, so she saw his point. He went on, “If half of them blame me for what he does—”
“All the more reason to be rid of him for good,” she said.
“All the more reason, yes—and all the less chance.” William drummed his fingers on his thigh. “I want to be at sea, not tied here waiting.”
“If the Dutchman and the Londoner fail you, you should put to sea by yourself,” Tamsin said. “All our ships put together can beat Red Rodney Radcliffe.” She pronounced the name with three syllables, too.
“We can beat Red Rodney, yes,” William said. “We cannot beat all of Avalon banded together. And the freebooters will fight like cornered rats, for they know what awaits them if they lose. Without marines to stiffen them, I doubt my men would fight so well. Why should they? They put to sea to trade, not to war. They will fight if forced to it, yes, but not for the sport of it.”
“They will fight for money—or some of them will,” Tamsin said shrewdly. “A big enough price on the heads of the pirate captains—”
“They’ve had prices on their heads for years.” William sounded as gloomy as he felt. “They’re out there yet, robbing and stealing and murdering. They make us all look like jackasses.” His hands balled into fists. “By God, Tammy, they trifle with us. I am no man to be trifled with, and anyone who thinks otherwise will to his sorrow discover himself mistaken.”
“Have you any way to hurry Kieft or Walton?” his wife asked.
He shook his head. “They trifle with me, too, and they think I shall forget it because we are on the same side. You know me. Do I ever forget anyone who does me a bad turn?”
“No. But, contrariwise, you never forget anyone who does you a good turn, either. Had you not the one quality to go with the other, I could not love you—and I do.”
>
“A good thing, too. I’d go on the rocks without you. But unless we lance this abscess on our western coast”—William’s mind kept coming back to what lay uppermost within it—“all of Atlantis will go on the rocks. And, regardless of what Piet Kieft and the sainted Elijah Walton may say, I do not intend to let that happen.”
Black Hand Fort had a crow’s nest. That was a funny name for it, but served well enough. It was a big wooden bucket mounted high atop a redwood trunk thicker than a mainmast. Red Rodney Radcliffe and his lookouts could go there, clambering up the lines nimble as monkeys, and see for miles in every direction.
Ethel could, too, and she loved to do it. Red Rodney wished she wouldn’t. He told her she mustn’t. He paddled her behind when she did—and he still found her in the crow’s nest when he went up one morning to look around.
She flinched when he scrambled over the edge and into the bucket. “I’m sorry, Father,” she said, and then, her spirit reviving, “I’m sorry you caught me.”
“Not as sorry as you will be soon,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in the threat. He had too many other things on his mind.
When he looked down at Avalon’s harbor, he didn’t like what he saw. Too many brigs and brigantines. Too many sloops. Too many shallops. A few race-built galleons, but only a few. Most of the pirates’ ships were small and swift, able to put up a great spread of sail and run after their prey or run away from danger. They could fight when they had to, but only when they had to.
How would the fleet of pirate ships stand up against a new English or Dutch ship of the line? Pirate ships rarely mounted anything bigger than twelve-pounders. They were made to take merchantmen and to flee from naval vessels. What if they couldn’t flee? What if they had to defend their home port?
He muttered under his breath. Even in the twenty-odd years he’d roamed the seas, ships of the line had grown larger and more deadly. A first-rate man-of-war could mount thirty forty-two-pounders, thirty twenty-four-pounders, twenty twelve-pounders, and twenty more smaller guns. A broadside from a ship like that would turn a brigantine to kindling and splinters in the blink of an eye.
In a fight out on the open sea, it wouldn’t matter, because brigantines and sloops and shallops could run away from any ship of the line ever built. But if the men-of-war were bearing down on Avalon…If they were doing that, the corsairs couldn’t very well run, not unless they wanted to run away from their town and their harbor and start fresh somewhere else.
Red Rodney didn’t want to do that. Neither did the other chieftains, or they wouldn’t have agreed to fight. But agreeing to fight wasn’t the same as knowing how to go about it. Another long look at the ships that lay at anchor inside Avalon Bay said as much.
“Pa?” That was Ethel. By the way she called to him, she’d been trying to get his attention for some little while. “Why aren’t you thumping me, Pa? You always do when you catch me up here.” Getting a thumping seemed better to her than seeing the regular order of things overturned. Some people were like that.
He gave her a straight answer, thinking her due one: “I’m trying to figure out how our little ships can beat the big ones our enemies are going to throw at us.”
“Well, that’s not so hard,” Ethel said with a child’s boundless confidence. “If they’re bigger, we’ve got to be faster and smarter, so we hit them and they can’t hit back.”
“Easier to say than to do,” Rodney warned.
“You say that? You?” Ethel sent him a reproachful look. “Don’t they call you the Horror of the Hesperian Gulf?” Pride at being a Horror’s daughter rang in her voice.
“They do,” Rodney agreed. “And I am what they call me.” He had pride of his own, plenty of it. He also had worries of his own, plenty of them. “If it were just the sea fight, I’d not worry. But those buggers back in Stuart want to close our shop down. They want Avalon, is what they want. The town can’t put on topgallants and spankers and sail away from their bloody fleet.” He could be more open about his fears with his daughter than with his henchmen or his fellow corsair captains. Come what might, Ethel wouldn’t call him coward.
She did point north, to the fort warding Avalon’s northern tip, to the galleys guarding the Gateway, and to the other fort on the northern spit that helped form the bay. “We can keep them out,” she said, confident still. “Red-hot rounds and chainshot will make the bally blighters sorry they ever tried to poke their noses in.”
Radcliffe grinned. His daughter not only thought like a pirate, she talked like one, too. He tousled her hair. “Well, chick, maybe you’re right,” he said. I hope to Christ you are, he thought, but that didn’t pass his lips.
Marcus Radcliffe was a lean, dark, weather-beaten man who wore a honkerskin rain cloak, feathered side out, above his shirt and breeches. He seemed out of place in settled Stuart, and especially out of place in William Radcliff’s elegant study.
Radcliff poured Radcliffe a glass of sherry. “Your health, cousin,” he said, smiling.
“And yours, coz,” Radcliffe said to Radcliff. They both drank. Marcus Radcliffe thoughtfully smacked his lips. “Not bad, not bad. I’m more used to ale and beer myself.”
“Well, you’re not the only one. I drink them a lot of the time myself,” William allowed. “But I try to serve my guests something finer.”
“Kind of you.” Marcus Radcliffe sipped again, and then again. By the way the level of the wine in his glass sank, he thought it fine enough.
William poured the glass full again. “Though the name is the same, or near enough, we are not close cousins, are we?”
“Not hardly.” Marcus had a harsher accent than William. “You come down through Henry, and I through Richard. My father would always say your line wanted money, and got it. My line wanted freedom, and we’re still looking for it. The more Atlantis fills up, the harder it is to come by.”
“Money buys freedom,” William Radcliff said. “Freedom from want, freedom from trouble…”
“You haven’t got troubles?” Marcus Radcliffe laughed. “Why’d you ask me here, then?”
“Because I have a question, and you seem the man best suited to answer it,” William replied.
“Long way from New Grinstead to Stuart, just for the sake of a question,” Marcus said.
To William’s way of thinking, it was a long way from New Grinstead to anywhere. The little town sat far back in the woods west of New Hastings, more than halfway to the Green Ridge Mountains. As far as William knew, no towns lay farther from the coast. From New Grinstead, Marcus Radcliffe and others like him could plunge into the Atlantean wilderness, with no one to tell them where to wander or when to come home.
And that was what made William’s distant cousin valuable to him. “Here is that question, and make of it what you will,” he said. “Do you believe you could lead an army of a thousand men, with all the necessities they would need for fighting upon their arrival, across Atlantis to Avalon by a date to be agreed upon?”
“Ha!” Marcus said, and then, “You really have it in for Red Rodney, don’t you? And he’s closer kin to you than I am.”
“In a word, yes,” William said tightly. “Well?”
“It’s not like Terranova.” Marcus Radcliffe seemed as thoughtful now as he had tasting the sherry. “We wouldn’t have to fight our way through tribes of copperskins. There’ll be a few in the woods, and a few runaway niggers from down in the south, but not many. And they’d run from an army that size. They wouldn’t try to fight. So that would be all right, anyhow, or I think it would.”
“Then you can do it?” William heard the eager hunger in his own voice.
“I didn’t say so. I’m still working it through. That’s a long march, that is—upwards of three hundred miles, even if you’re talking about starting from New Grinstead. Subsisting your soldiers…wouldn’t be easy, and it might not be possible.”
“Why?” William demanded. “Does not every man who goes into the woods acclaim the marvelous abundance and spl
endid hunting they afford?”
“That’s a fact,” Marcus said. “You want me to go to Avalon and be there on such-and-such a day ready to fight, I’ll do it. You want me and ten of my friends to go, I think we could do it. After that, it gets harder. No maize to eat, the way there would be amongst the Terranovans. No roads, so no supply wagons. Even horses have a hard time—sometimes the meadows are few and far between. And you’d have to have horses, for men can’t carry close to a month’s worth of food on their backs. They’d shoot some on the way, but a thousand men couldn’t shoot enough to stay fed. I don’t believe the woods hold enough to feed a compact mass of a thousand men.” He spread his hands. “I’m sorry, coz. The more I think on it, the worse the chances look. You start with a thousand soldiers, you might have a couple of hundred starving souls make it all the way to Avalon.”
William would have been angrier at his kinsman had he not feared the same thing. He did ask, “Are you sure?”
“Sure? Who can be sure of anything before it happens except the Lord?” Marcus answered. “But I do think it likely, and, in case your next question is whether I’d care to chance it, I have to tell you no. I’m not sure that’s your next question, mind, but I do think it likely.”
“Do you indeed?” William gave him a crooked grin. “Well, I wouldn’t have an easy time making a liar out of you.”
“Sorry not to be more help, coz, but I don’t care to shit my life into the chamber pot, either,” Marcus Radcliffe said.
“You have a pungent turn of phrase,” William observed. “You ought to write for the gossip sheet they started here. You would make everyone despise you, than which nothing, I am sure, would delight the publisher more.”
“No, thanks,” Marcus said. “Now that I’ve answered your question for you, I’m for New Grinstead again, and for wherever else I please.”
“As long as you came so far, will you tolerate two questions rather than one?” William asked.
“Well, I might,” his backwoods cousin drawled, “long as you pour me out another glass of that wine. Those grapes died happy for sure.”
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