Opening Atlantis (24 page)

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 splendid 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.”

“I think I might oblige you there.” William filled Marcus' glass again, then his own. “Let me try this: if we ever see the promised Dutch and English ships, could I persuade you—and you persuade some of your backwoods fellows—to serve aboard my merchantmen, as marksmen at sea and as a landing force when we reach Avalon?”

“I know some people who don't shy away from a fight, and that's a fact,” Marcus said. “Don't know whether they'd fancy one on the ocean. Don't know whether I would myself, either. I have to cipher that out.”

“Chances are you'll have all the time you require,” William Radcliffe said dolefully. “The next ship we see of those promised will be the first.”

“If my friends treated me that way, I'd make 'em sorry for it—to hell with me if I wouldn't,” Marcus said.

“If my friends treated me so, I should make them sorry for it, too,” William replied. “The gentlemen who promised, however, are not my friends: merely associates with whom I share certain interests. I love them not, nor they me.”

Marcus drained the last of his wine. “Why put in with 'em, then?”

“Nothing simpler,” William said. “Because one of the interests we share is seeing Red Rodney Radcliffe, damn his black soul to hell, hanged in chains.”

“Signal flags!” Red Rodney Radcliffe exclaimed in high glee as he stood at the wheel of the
Black Hand.
“Do you ever reckon a bunch of bally freebooters'd fly signal flags like the bleeding Royal Navy?”

“Not me,” Ben Jackson answered. “We have enough trouble getting our own bastards to do like we say most of the time, let alone the buggers who fight for somebody else.”

“It's a corsair fleet. It's a corsair navy, by God!” Red Rodney raised his voice to call to the sailor who was raising the flags aloft: “Signal
form line of battle,
Quint!”

“I'll do it, skipper,” Quint said, and he did. He'd served in the Royal Navy himself till he jumped ship at Stuart and made his way to Avalon. Piracy suited him better than shouts and curses and kicks from petty officers, with the lash or the yardarm waiting if he got too far out of line.

Almost every shallop and brigantine that sailed out of Avalon carried at least one man who'd been part of the Royal Navy and knew something about signal flags. Quite a few men who couldn't write their own names or read them if they saw them were intimately familiar with dozens of flags.

In the Royal Navy, the admiral could and would punish any captain who refused his orders. Radcliffe wished he could do that. But he would have a war on his hands if he tried, and not the one he wanted. Besides, he wasn't the admiral, not in the formal sense—he'd turned the job down.

The other pirate captains had done just what he hoped they would when they chose Michel de Grammont to lead them. De Grammont wasn't even important enough to come to the meeting when he was named. The majority of the pirates of Avalon were English, which made it hard for them to take a Frenchman seriously. His ship wasn't a big or a strong one. In other words, he made an ideal figurehead.

Red Rodney wished his own ship were built for him from the keel up, not sailed out of a Dutch port on the Terranovan coast in a hail of musket bullets. Then she could look the way she did in his mind's eye, with the figurehead of a big black hand below the bowsprit. Everyone would know her from a mile off, and fear her—and fear him, too. That would be very fine.

Not everybody was falling into line. The other pirates didn't want to follow his orders—or anyone else's. Not for nothing were they called freebooters. Even if obeying someone else would do them good, they weren't interested. If obeying someone else would save their necks? They were up against that now. It didn't seem to matter.

The mate saw the same thing. “Maybe we ought to fight Dutch-style and not like Englishmen,” Jackson said. “Then it'd be every man for himself, like, and all the ships could do what they do best.”

“And they could get blasted out of the water one at a bloody time,” Rodney said.

Ben Jackson scowled. Like any other corsair, he liked his own conceits best. “It works for the Dutchmen,” he said stubbornly. “They make England bleed every time they tangle.”

“Of course they do,” Radcliffe replied. “They have ships to match the English men-of-war, so they can tangle with 'em one on one. Can we do that? Can any ship in Avalon take on a three-masted ship of the line by her lonesome?”

Jackson went on scowling. But he shook his bullet head. “Reckon not.” He didn't want to admit it, but he didn't have much choice.

“I reckon not, too,” Red Rodney said. “So we have to find some other way to beat those scuts. If it's not fighting in a line, what is it?”

He meant the question to make the mate agree there was no other way. Instead, Jackson proposed one. That surprised Radcliffe. What surprised him more was that, the longer the mate talked, the better he liked the idea.

When Jackson finished, Red Rodney threw back his head and laughed out loud. He pounded the mate on the back. Jackson was bigger and probably stronger than he was, but Rodney staggered him all the same. “By God, we
will
do that!” he exclaimed. “We will, and we'll see how the honest gentlemen of Stuart like it!” He laughed some more.

William Radcliff went down to the harbor almost every day. It wasn't so much that he hoped to see warships gathered there. He did hope to see them—but, after so much disappointment, those hopes weren't high. He went anyway. Merchantmen came into Stuart; others sailed out. Some were his; others belonged to his rivals. He kept an eye on as many of them as he could. If the man who ran a trading firm didn't know what was going on, how could he tell the people who worked for him what to do?

“Sail ho!” The cry came from the east, from the lookouts who watched for incoming ships. Pirates had raided Stuart a generation earlier, and caught the town by surprise. That would never happen again.

Stuart had better walls and bigger guns on those walls than was true a generation earlier, too. It also had more men who could snatch up a musket and fight. A generation before, Stuart had been new and raw, a town on the edge of settlement. Now it was part of the hinterland. New, raw towns were springing up to the north and to the west.

“Sail ho! Sail ho!” The cry rang out again and again. Somebody added, “It's a bloody forest of masts out there!”

William couldn't see them yet. And then, all at once, he did. For a moment, alarm swept through him: that was no fleet of merchantmen. He'd planned to go after Avalon. Were the pirates aiming to beat him to the punch in spite of Stuart's improved fortifications?

Then he breathed easier. Pirates didn't sail three-masted ships. They didn't have the crews to man them. Maybe a big fleet from Terranova was coming in. Or maybe, just maybe…

“By God!” William breathed, seeing the Union Jack flying from the mastheads of each ship. “They took their own sweet time, but they finally went and did it.”

Six ships of the line and six smaller vessels tied up at the quays. Sailors swarmed ashore to do what they would in Stuart's taverns and brothels. And, in due course, Elijah Walton waddled off the largest man-of-war, the
Royal Sovereign.
Its figurehead, King Charles in a flowing, curly wig, was almost frighteningly realistic.

He gave William Radcliff a bow well flavored—perhaps overflavored—with irony. “Your fleet, Admiral—as much of it as the Dutchmen aren't doling out,” Walton said. “I do not see them here. Have you any notion when they intend to make an appearance—or, indeed, if they do?”

“No, sir. I do not,” William replied evenly. “But then, up until your sails were sighted, I would have said the same of the Royal Navy.”

“Do you insult me?” Walton's voice went silky with danger. “If you do, we can continue this discussion through our friends. After that, the fleet may find itself with a new admiral.”

“If you are a man insulted by plain facts, sir, I shall discuss the matter with whomever you please,” William said. “Had you let me finish, you would have heard me counsel a bit more patience, so much already having been required.”

He watched Walton chew on that. At last, grudgingly, the Englishman replied, “Well, perhaps it were best to save our bullets for the blighters on the other side. Perhaps, I say. If you feel otherwise, I assure you I shall endeavor to give satisfaction.”

I'll kill you if I can,
he meant. The language of ceremony was a strange and wonderful thing. William Radcliff bowed. “If at the end we find each other incongenial, we can pursue it then. In the meanwhile, as you say, there are others we should oppose in arms. One thing at a time, sir.”

“One thing at a time,” Walton agreed. “Not the worst motto I've ever heard. Would you care to come aboard and view your flagship?”

“I should be pleased to do so, and thank you for the courtesy,” Radcliff said.

The
Royal Sovereign
differed from a merchantman not in essence but in scale. Elijah Walton rattled off the numbers as the two men strode the main deck and the quarterdeck. The ship was 234 feet long, had a beam of 49 feet, and displaced around 1,500 tons. She carried 780 sailors, most of them men who could find no easier way to earn a living or whose families had gone to sea for generations.

Walton didn't say that, but William Radcliff knew it full well even so. He sprang from such a family, though not all the Radcliffes and Radcliffs were tied to the sea as they had been in the days of Edward the Founder. Marcus and many others had sunk deep roots in the soil of Atlantis.