Opening Atlantis (40 page)

“Not a good business,” Montcalm-Gozon grumbled.

“Certainly not,
Monsieur.
” Roland could hardly disagree with that. Adding
I told you so
would have been rude. A slightly superior manner conveyed the message just as well: they were both French, after all.

Another rider came up with more news of devastation from the south. Montcalm-Gozon heard him out, stony-faced. Roland tried to match the noble's dispassion, but it wasn't easy. To the man from across the sea, the plantations destroyed and the people killed or dispossessed were only pieces on the board. To Roland, the estates belonged to kinsmen and friends and acquaintances. The losses were personal.

“It could be, your Excellency, that I might have to detach my native soldiers to pursue this marauding
salaud
of a Radcliff,” he said.

“That would disturb the primary goal of this campaign, which is to seize Freetown,” Montcalm-Gozon said with a frown.

“Ensuring that the French settlements in Atlantis are not destroyed is also an important goal,
n'est-ce pas?
” Kersauzon returned.

“Feh.” The French general raised a hand. “The English attempt a nuisance raid, nothing more. If we weaken our striking force to contain them, we play into their hands.”

He had a point, and Roland knew it. Nevertheless, he quoted Matthew: “‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'”

Montcalm-Gozon aimed an unfriendly look his way. “I have to think of this struggle as part of one that goes on all over the world. We fight England in Europe, and in India, and in Terranova, as well as on these shores.”

“France fights England all over the world,” Roland Kersauzon said. “
I
fight England here. I have to think of what is best and what is worst for the French settlements in Atlantis.”

“What is best for them is what is best for France,” the marquis insisted.

“Not necessarily,” Roland replied. Now they aimed glares at each other. Montcalm-Gozon looked ready to aim a pistol at Roland as well. The Atlantean did not want to fight the French commander, and not only because he had no idea what would happen in a duel. Even if he won a duel against Montcalm-Gozon, he lost. So it seemed to him, at any rate.

In icy tones, Montcalm-Gozon said, “You had better explain yourself.”

“If we take Freetown, you win a grand and glorious victory for France,” Kersauzon said. “Then, very likely, you and your regulars sail away. If the English destroy everything we've built up farther south, what good does your grand and glorious victory do us?”

“They cannot,” the French nobleman said, but with an uncertain edge to his voice.

“If my soldiers accompany yours, marching away from the enemy invasion, what the devil will stop them?” Roland asked.

“You are a difficult man.”

“Only to my enemies…
Monsieur
.” Roland bowed in the saddle.

“Will half your men suffice to deal with these raiders?” Montcalm-Gozon inquired after a sour sigh.

They spent the next twenty minutes haggling, as if Roland were trying to squeeze a few extra sous from the nobleman at the fish market. Montcalm-Gozon finally consented to let Roland have two-thirds of the soldiers he thought his by right anyway. Kersauzon wanted more—he wanted all of them. But he took as many men as he could without pistols at dawn. As you got older, you learned that sometimes you had to be satisfied with less than everything you wanted from life.

Roland's men burst into cheers when he told them that most of them would be heading south. They knew as much as he did about what was going on down there—rumors spread like wildfire. He wondered how long it would have been before they started deserting. Not very, unless he didn't know them. He said nothing to Montcalm-Gozon about the cheers. The young marquis wasn't deaf. He could hear them, and draw his own conclusions.

What those conclusions were, he didn't discuss with Roland. And Kersauzon didn't ask him, either.

Messages took their own sweet time traveling from the English and local forces in front of Freetown and Victor Radcliff's raiders. He was on his own down in the French settlements. By the time he got news and reacted to it, it was badly out of date. And so he didn't worry—too much—when he heard that the locals and redcoats had fallen back into Freetown. What good did worry do?

The English lieutenant-colonel in charge of the defense had energy. Remembering another of Victor's suggestions, he sent a schooner full of men—mostly Atlanteans—down the coast to land behind the French force and waylay the supply wagons coming up to it. For a little while, his letters boasted of the havoc that little band was wreaking.
A fine piratical band,
he called them, perhaps not knowing that Victor's branch of the broad and spreading Radcliff(e) tree found nothing fine in piracy.

Then the English officer's tone changed.
I have not heard from the men sent south for some little while,
he wrote,
and fear they may have suffered a misfortune. God grant I be wrong.

Further despatches showed only too clearly that he wasn't wrong. Something final had happened to the raiders. Victor
did
worry about them, though he led far more men than the English officer had committed to the secondary raid.

“They shouldn't have been snuffed out like that,” he told Blaise. “They were too large a band to be extinguished like a candle with a brass lid over it.”

“Maybe they run into more men,” the Negro said. “Maybe more men run into they.”

“‘Them,'” Radcliff corrected absently. “But with all the French fighting men up near Freetown…” His voice trailed off.

“What you thinking?” Blaise asked.

Victor didn't like any of what he was thinking. He heard what the French were doing up in English territory. Of course the enemy would hear what he was doing farther south in Atlantis. And this was their native land, just as the English settlements had spawned his raiders. If Roland Kersauzon decided not to sit back and let Victor's men ravage plantations down here…If, marching south, he'd brushed aside that schooner's worth of harassers…

“I'm thinking we may have more difficulties ahead of us than I looked for a little while ago,” Victor answered.

Blaise frowned. “What you say?”

From a man who'd made his first acquaintance with the English language not long before, the question was reasonable. “French soldiers may be moving against us.” Forced to simplify his own thoughts, Victor got a lot into a few words.

“Ah.” Blaise understood him this time. “What we do?”

“Good question,” Radcliff replied. He wished he had a good answer, simple or complex. He gave the truth, as best he could see it: “I don't know yet. Have to find out how many Frenchmen are moving. Can we fight them? Do we have to run? What then?”

“War here harder than war in Africa,” Blaise said. “More things to think on.”

Of course. We're civilized,
was Victor Radcliff's first smug thought. But how civilized was war, no matter how you fought it? Not very, not so far as he could see. “We'll do the best we can, that's all,” he said.

They went on. At the first plantation where the locals didn't flee fast enough, he stole horses to add to the handful he already had. He sent riders out ahead of his main body, to make sure no suddenly returning French settlers surprised him. All the scouts he chose spoke fluent French. They could—and would—claim they were refugees if anybody wondered what they were doing riding around the countryside.

One of them winked at him before setting out. “If I find me a tavernkeeper's pretty little daughter, I may settle down right where I do,” the man said. “In that case, you'll never see me again.”

A military commander of the official—and officious—sort would have thrown a fit. Victor only laughed and said, “Do as you please, Herbert. But if we find the tavern, you'd best believe we'll burn it down.”

“God curse you English dogs to the most fiery pits of hell,” Herbert said hotly—his French was fluent indeed. Victor Radcliff laughed again, slapped him on the back, and sent him on his way.

In the back country, roads had been narrow, rutted tracks through the trees. Some of them probably started as honker trails. Victor knew that was so here and there in the English settlements. As his men pushed into more settled terrain, the roads got wider. The trees were cut back from either side. The ruts remained. If anything, they got deeper and muddier from greater use.

Parrots with yellow and orange faces squawked at the advancing settlers. Blaise said, “Parrots in Africa, too. These not just like, but close. Make me think of home across sea.”

“More of them here than farther north, though they come up there, too,” Victor said.

“
C'est curieux,
” Blaise remarked, and then, remembering his English, “Strange. Yes, strange. So many things here, there not same. But parrots in this place and in that place.” He smiled, coming up with the right word: “In
both
places. Why?”

“Well, there are parrots in Terranova, too,” Victor Radcliff said, “especially in the hot southern parts. Maybe that has something to do with it.”
And maybe it doesn't,
he thought. Europe and northern Terranova shared many plants and animals or had similar forms where nothing remotely like them existed in Atlantis. Natural philosophers had spilled barrels of ink trying to explain why. As far as Victor knew, none of them had come close to a satisfactory solution. If they couldn't agree about why so much of Atlantis' flora and fauna was so peculiar, he wasn't likely to find the answer on his own.

He wasn't even likely to worry about it very long. A couple of muskets boomed up ahead. A high, shrill shout rose: “
Les Anglais!
”

The farm the French settlers fought to hold wouldn't have been worth burning if they hadn't defended it. But the families and friends who did their best to drive away the marauders couldn't have understood that. They battled with grim determination from farmhouses and outbuildings, and would neither retreat nor give up.

“
Cochons!
” one of them yelled from a barn. “This is our patrimony! You will not take it from us!”

No matter how fierce and stubborn they were, they had about as much chance of beating Radcliff's men as a five-year-old sent into the ring against a champion prizefighter. A rifleman picked off the French farmers one after another from a furlong away. Less accurate musket fire made them keep their heads down. Raiders worked their way forward and torched building after building.

Fire drove out some of the French settlers. Others grimly died in the flames. The defenders wounded a handful of men. They delayed the English advance by less than an hour. Smelling the stink of charred flesh, Victor shook his head. “Not worth it,” he said. “Brave, but not worth it.”

“Run is better,” Blaise agreed. “Things just…things.” He gestured. “Run. Get more things when more time go.”

“Later.” Victor gave him another new word. He also sent him a quizzical look. “So running is better, eh? You're not a brave man, eh? You could have fooled me.”

“Brave when I have to. Brave if I have to,” the Negro replied. “If I no have to, I run. Brave again later, maybe.” His sly smile said he was showing off the new vocabulary on purpose.

“A redcoat or one of the French regulars would call you a coward for talk like that,” Victor Radcliff said.

Blaise only shrugged. “Don't care. Live coward fix things. Dead brave fool…” He pointed toward the burning houses and outbuildings.

“Indeed,” Victor said. Blaise raised a questioning eyebrow. “I should say so!” Victor exclaimed. Blaise nodded—he got that. Victor fought to hide a grin. The Negro sergeant was too dark and too lean to make a proper Falstaff himself, but he would have enjoyed drinking with him. They were both a particular kind of practical man.

Victor hadn't tried talking with Blaise about Falstaff, and not just because of the clown's views about honor. He would have had to quote Shakespeare to have it make sense to Blaise, and even then it wouldn't have made sense to him. Shakespeare had written only two lifetimes earlier, but English wasn't the same now as it had been then.

“In Africa,” Victor said suddenly, “when old men talk about how their grandfathers talked and about how their grandsons talk, do they notice any difference?”

After some thought, Blaise answered, “They say young boys have not enough—” He frowned, looking for a word. “Like slave for master,” he offered.

“Respect,” Radcliff suggested.

“Thank you, sir. Respect. Yes. They say young boys have not respect for old, like in their day.”

Old men had been saying things like that since Adam started complaining about Cain and Abel. It wasn't what Victor meant. “Do they say the words now are different from the way they were in the old days?”