United States of Atlantis

Chapter 21

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 settiement-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 General, 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 gully washer, 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 rolling 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."

"Well, no." If that prospect pleased de la Fayette, he hid it very well. "But I find the climate in this country imperfectly equable. The southern regions suffer from excessive heat, while these parts seem to have a superabundance of both rain and snow. A more moderate regimen would be preferable-a regimen more like that of, exempli gratia, la belle France."

His reaching that particular conclusion amused Victor without much surprising him. The Atlantean general spread his hands. "I fear I cannot help it, your Grace. As I said a moment before, the weather is under the good Lord's command, not mine."

De la Fayette crossed himself. "You have reason, certainly. I shall pray that He might extend to your country the blessings He has generously granted mine."

If God hadn't changed Atlantis' climate at least since the days when Edward Radcliffe founded New Hastings-and probably not for centuries before that-he was unlikely to alter it at the marquis' request. De la Fayette had to know that as well as Victor did. All he meant was that he didn't care for the way things were. Victor didn't, either, not the way they were up here. He liked the weather around his farm much better. Which only proved he, like de la Fayette, liked what he was used to and disliked any departure from it. Blaise felt the same way, though his African norm was far different from either white man's.

"Leaving the power of prayer out of the question, we should discuss what we might best attempt now," Victor said.

"So we should." The marquis sighed. "Such a pretty plan we had before. We would assuredly have surprised the redcoats with it." He paused, considering. "I don't suppose we could simply try it again."

That made Victor pause to consider, too. His first response was to call the suggestion ridiculous. The redcoats would be waiting for it. Or would they? The more he thought, the less sure he grew. He started to laugh. "Our stupidity in repeating ourselves would surprise them, at the least."

"Just so. Just so!" De la Fayette seemed to catch fire at the idea. "However insolent they are themselves, they would never believe we have the insolence to make the second stroke the same as the first."

Victor thought out loud: "Perhaps we should make the previous stroke the feint, and the previous feint the stroke."

"No. But no. Certainly not." De la Fayette shook his head so vigorously, he had to grab his tricorn to keep from losing it. "That, they would anticipate. It is precisely the ploy an ordinary man, a man without imagination, might try, thinking himself clever beyond compare."

"I see," Victor muttered, his ears burning. Well, he'd never thought himself anything but an ordinary man. De la Fayette seemed to agree with him.

Unaware that he might have given offense, the Frenchman went on, "If we try something altogether different from our previous ploy, we may find success. If, contrariwise, we surprise them by our stupidity, we may also hope to triumph. The flaw lies in the middle way, as it commonly does."

And so it was decided.

Even after it was decided, Blaise had his doubts about it. "If the redcoats look for this, they will slaughter us."

"That they will," Victor agreed, which made the Negro blink. Victor went on, "But if we essay anything that they anticipate, they are likely to slaughter us."

"Hmm." He'd made Blaise stop and think, anyhow. Then the black man delivered his verdict: "If we are going to do this, we had better do it quickly, lest a deserter betray the plan to the English."

That made excellent sense. Victor ordered the feint to go in at dawn the next morning, and the true attack to follow as soon as the redcoats seemed to have taken the bait. He also strengthened the picket line between his army and Cornwallis'. He didn't know whether he could keep deserters from slipping away, but he intended to try.

Both columns formed up in the chilly predawn darkness. Baron von Steuben volunteered to lead the attackers, replacing the late Major Hall. "Any cannon ball that hits this hard head will bounce off," he declared in gutturally accented English.

"Try not to make the experiment," Victor said. The German soldier of fortune nodded. Victor added one more piece of advice: "Strike hard and strike fast."

"I do it. The Soldaten do it also. They fear me more than any piffling redcoats," von Steuben said. Chances were he knew what he was talking about, too. A good drillmaster was supposed to inspire that kind of respectful fear in his men.

To Victor's ears, the feinting and attacking columns both made too much noise as they moved out. But he didn't hear any shouts of alarm from the English lines. Very often, what seemed obvious to a worried man was anything but to the people around him. Even more often, his failure to realize that alerted those other people to the idea that something funny was going on. Don't give the game away ahead of time, Victor told himself.

He waited to hear what would happen next. The feint went in when he expected it to. He'd urged the men to fight especially hard so they'd make the redcoats believe they truly meant to bull their way through. He was sure they understood the reason behind the order. He wasn't sure they would follow it. If anything, he feared them less likely to do so precisely because they understood why he asked it of them. Most of his men were veterans by now. They knew that, the more fiercely and ferociously they attacked earthworks, the better their chances of stepping in front of a cannon ball or a bullet or of meeting one of those fearsome English bayonets.

If they were veterans, wouldn't they take such mischances in stride? Redcoats would have. So would troops from the Continent-Baron von Steuben had taken such soldiering for granted till he got here. The Marquis de la Fayette still did, and got it from his Frenchmen. But Atlanteans were a different breed. They expected-no, they demanded-a solid return on their investment, regardless of whether they risked their time or their money or their lives.

English cannon thundered. Blaise coughed to draw Victor's notice. When Victor glanced his way, the Negro said, "The redcoats are going, 'Here come those Atlantean madmen again. Don't they ever learn their lessons?' "

"Heh," Victor Radcliff said uncomfortably. "Just wait a bit. Pretty soon, they'll find out how mad we are in truth."

"No." Blaise pointed at him. "Pretty soon you find out how mad we are in truth." Since that was what Victor was afraid of, he grimaced and shook his head and kept his mouth shut.

He wanted to go up and fight alongside the men in the striking force. Only one thing held him back: if Cornwallis' troops recognized him there, they would be sure that second column was the one they needed to concern themselves with. The general commanding started to swear.

"What now?" Blaise asked.

"Bugger me blind, but I should have gone in at the head of the feint," Victor said. "If anything would have made the Englishmen sure that was our principal column, my presence at its head was the very thing."

"And also the very thing to get you killed," Blaise observed. Atlanteans were more pragmatic than Europeans about such things: less likely to get themselves killed over pointless points of honor. Blaise was far more pragmatic than most white Atlanteans. He added, "Besides, the fellow leading it don't want you up there. If you are up there, the men pay attention to you, not to him."

Once more, Victor would have liked to find some way to tell him he was talking nonsense. Once more, he found himself unable. Major Porter was as much in charge of the feint as Baron von Steuben was in charge of the striking column. Both officers would do everything they could with what they had… and wouldn't want anyone else in position to joggle their elbow.

The feint went in. The racket of gunfire-and of shouts of rage and agony-grew and grew. So did the shouts of Englishmen rushing to their comrades' aid. By the noise they were making they thought the Atlanteans were hitting the place where they'd bluffed before. After all, no one could be stupid enough to try the same thing twice in a row.

So de la Fayette had assured Victor, anyhow. It all sounded so lucid, so reasonable, so rational when the noble spelled it out. Then again, Frenchmen had a knack for sounding lucid, reasonable, rational. If they were as sensible as they seemed, why wasn't France in better shape?

Victor found himself cocking his head toward the left. He'd committed the feint. The redcoats were already responding to it. Baron von Steuben could get close to their line without their knowing it, as the luckless Major Hall had been doing when the heavens opened up.

"When?" Blaise asked.

"If I were up there with them, we'd go in-" Victor had wondered if he was nervous and fidgety and inclined to jump the gun. But he couldn't even get now out of his mouth before von Steuben put in the attack.

This cacophony made the other one small by comparison. Victor clenched his fists till his nails-which weren't long-bit into his callused palms. If they broke through… If they broke through, de la Fayette's Frenchmen would go in behind the striking column. They'd tear a hole in Cornwallis' line that you could throw a honker through.

And then what? Croydon? Victory? True victory at last? Cornwallis handing over his sword in token of surrender? Cornwallis admitting that the United States of Atlantis were here to stay?

Till this moment, the fight for Atlantean freedom had so consumed Victor, he'd had scant opportunity to wonder what would come afterwards. If Cornwallis and the redcoats had to sail away from Atlantis forever, where would they go? Back to England? Or west across the broad Hesperian Gulf to fight the rebels on the Terranovan mainland? Suppose they won there. How would the United States of Atlantis cope with being all but surrounded by the unloved and unloving former mother country? Victor had no idea.

There were worse problems to have. Losing the war against England instead of winning it, for instance. Not so long before, that had looked much too likely. Then, still unloved and unloving, the mother country would have set its boot on Atlantis' neck and stomped hard.

Which she might do yet. Victor knew he'd been building castles in the air. Any number of things could all too easily go wrong. He called to one of his young messengers-one who spoke fluent French. "My compliments to the Marquis de la Fayette, and please remind him to be ready to lead his men forward the instant the situation warrants."

"Right you are, General," the messenger agreed. One of the usual slipshod Atlantean salutes, and away he went at a good clip. Victor smiled at his back. That kind of response would have earned the puppy stripes from Cornwallis-and, very possibly, from de la Fayette as well. Atlanteans did things their own way. It might not be pretty, but it worked… or it had so far.

Victor had talked himself hoarse making sure Baron von Steuben understood he was to send word back as soon as he thought it likely he would penetrate the redcoats' defenses. And the German officer did, but not quite the way the Atlantean commandant had expected. Instead of telling Victor what was going on in the middle of that cloudbank of black-powder smoke, von Steuben sent a runner straight back to de la Fayette.

That runner and Victor Radcliff's messenger must have reached the French noble at almost the same time. The first Victor knew about it was when de la Fayette's soldiers surged forward, musicians blaring out their foreign horn and drum calls

For a heartbeat, Victor was mortally offended. Then he realized what must have happened. He also realized von Steuben had been absolutely right. If de la Fayette's troops were the ones who were going to move, de la Fayette was the man who most needed to know when they were to move. If Victor's laugh was rueful, it was a laugh even so. "Why doesn't anyone ever tell me anything?" he said.

"What's that?" Blaise asked.

"My own foolishness talking," Victor said, which probably made less of an answer than Blaise would have wanted. Victor climbed up onto his horse. His factotum also mounted. Urging his gelding forward, Victor went on, "If we are driving them, I will see it with my own eyes, by God!"

"And if by some mischance we are not driving them, you will ride straight into something you could have stayed away from," Blaise was always ready to see the cloud to a silver lining.

The firing ahead hadn't died out. The redcoats were still plainly doing all they could to hold back the Atlanteans-and, now, de la Fayette's Frenchmen as well. But, as Victor rode past the woods that had sheltered his striking column till the moment it struck, he realized their best wouldn't be enough.

"By God!" he said again, and this time he sounded like a man who really meant it.

Baron von Steuben's men had punched a hole through the English line better than a furlong wide. Victor had hoped they might be able to break through so splendidly, but hadn't dared count on it. Counting on something ahead of time in war too often led but to disappointment.

And the Atlanteans had done what they were supposed to do after breaking through, too. They'd swung out to left and right and poured a fierce enfilading fire into the redcoats in the trenches to either side. Arrows on a map couldn't have more precisely obeyed the man who drew them. And if that wasn't von Steuben's doing, whose was it? The German deserved to be a colonel, if not a brigadier general.

De la Fayette's French professionals poured through the gap Atlantean ardor had torn. They too methodically volleyed at the Englishmen who tried to plug that gap. Victor was just riding into what had been the English position when the redcoats, every bit as competent as their French foes, realized they were playing a losing game and started falling back toward Croydon.

"On!" Victor shouted to his own men, and then, in French, "Avant!" He fell back into English to continue, "If we take the town from them, they've nowhere to go after that!" If de la Fayette or some of his officers wanted to translate his remarks for the benefit of the French soldiery, they were welcome to.

Croydon's outskirts lay only a couple of miles away. Whenever Victor rode to the crest of some little swell of ground, he could see the church steeples reaching toward the heavens. One of them was supposed to be the tallest steeple in all Atlantis, a claim furiously rejected in Hanover and New Hastings.

"I think we can do it." Was that Blaise's voice? Damned if it wasn't. If Blaise believed Croydon would fall, how could it do anything else?

Victor also began to believe his men would storm Croydon. And if they did… when they did… No one, yet, had thought to write a tune for the United States of Atlantis to use in place of "God Save the King." Maybe some minstrel needed to get busy in a hurry, because what stood between those united states and liberty?

Damn all Victor could see. His men were making for Croydon faster than the redcoats pulling out of their entrenchments and earthworks. If nothing slowed the Atlanteans and Frenchmen, they were less than half an hour from guaranteeing that the Union Jack would never fly over Atlantis again.

If nothing slowed them… One more thought Victor Radcliff remembered a long, long time. No sooner had it crossed his mind than a band of cavalry-something more than a troop, but less than a regiment-thundered out of Croydon and straight toward the advancing Atlantean and French foot soldiers.

The riders wore buff and blue, not the red of English regulars. Loyalists, then, Victor thought with distaste. Like any cavalrymen, they carried sabers and carbines and long horse pistols. Most would have a second pistol stashed in a boot. Some might carry one or two more on their belts.

"Form line!" Victor shouted. "We can take them!"

Blaise pointed. "Isn't that-?"

"God damn him to hell!" Victor burst out. Sure as the devil, that was Habakkuk Biddiscombe-and the riders had to be Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion, which had been much spoken of but, till now, little seen. Victor wished he weren't seeing it at this moment, which did him no good whatever.

He wasn't the only one to recognize the defector, the traitor, commanding the royalist Atlanteans. The cry of "No quarter!" went up from a dozen throats at once. Anyone who fought for and alongside Habakkuk Biddiscombe knew the chance he took. Muskets boomed. Here and there, legionaries slid from the saddle and horses went down.

But the horsemen who didn't fall came on. They knew exactly what they were doing, and why. They despised the soldiers who fought for the United States of Atlantis at least as much as those men loathed them. And now at last they had the chance to show their hated kinsmen and former friends what they could do.

"Death to Radcliff!" Biddiscombe roared. In an instant, every man he led took up the cry: "Death to Radcliff!"

They slammed into the front of the advancing Atlantean column: into a line that hadn't finished forming. They slammed into it and through it, shooting some soldiers and slashing at others with their swords. And, by their courage and ferocity, they stopped Victor Radcliff's army in its tracks.

"Kill them! Drive them out of the way!" Victor shouted furiously, drawing the gold-hilted sword the Atlantean Assembly had given him and urging his horse forward, toward the fight. "On to Croydon!"

Against a force of infantry that size, brushing them aside would have been a matter of moments-nothing that could have seriously delayed the assault on the redcoats' last sheltering place But the horses of Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion gave the men on them a striking power out of all proportion to their numbers.

And so did the way they hated the men they faced. Victor might-did-reckon their cause and the way they upheld it altogether wrong. That didn't mean their contempt for death and retreat was any less than his might have been under like circumstances.

"Biddiscombe!" he called, brandishing his blade as he rode past his own men toward the fight. "I'm coming for you, Biddiscombe!"

"Oh, just shoot the son of a whore," Blaise said, which was bound to be good advice.

What were the redcoats doing behind Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion? Victor knew too well what he would be doing while such an outsized forlorn hope bought him time. Without a doubt, Cornwallis' men were doing the same thing: everything they could to hold their foes as far away from Croydon as possible

After what seemed a very long time, the survivors from the Legion galloped back toward the town. They'd bought the redcoats-King George's fellow subjects, they would have said-enough of that precious, impalpable substance to form a line across the neck of the peninsula on which Croydon sat. And, whether from out of the town or from their abandoned field works, the Englishmen had half a dozen cannon in the line.

"Don't like the looks of those," Blaise said.

"Nor do I," Victor agreed. No Atlantean artillery was anywhere close by. He didn't think the French had brought guns forward, either. Which meant… We're going to catch it, he thought sorrowfully.

The field guns spoke. Cannon balls and canister tore through the Atlanteans and Frenchmen. Two quick volleys from the dreadfully proficient foot soldiers followed. Men and pieces of men lay where they had fallen. The wounded staggered back when they could. When they couldn't, they thrashed and wailed and clutched at hale men, hoping to be helped away from the killing fire.

They got less help than they would have wanted. The Atlanteans were proficient in the craft of slaughter themselves by now, and gave back the redcoats' musketry as best they could. And more Frenchmen hurried forward to stiffen them should they require stiffening-and to shoot at the English any which way.

When the redcoats' cannon spoke again, one of their balls knocked a musketeer near Victor right out of his shoes. The musketeer howled-mercifully, not for long. At the start of the war, the Atlanteans never could have endured such carnage. Now they took it in stride, as sailors took the chance of being drowned. It was a hazard of the trade, no less and no more.

Regardless of how calm and brave they were, one thing seemed only too clear to Victor. "We shan't break into Croydon after all," he said bitterly. "God fling Habakkuk Biddiscombe into hell for ever and ever. May Satan fry him on a red-hot griddle for all eternity, and stab him with a fork every so often to see if he's done."

"Maybe it is happening even now," Blaise said. "Maybe he was killed in the fight at the front."

"Maybe he was. If God is merciful, he was," Victor said. "But then, if God were merciful, Biddiscombe would have died of the pox long ago."

With no hope of seizing Croydon, Victor reluctantly pulled his men out of musket range. The English guns kept banging away at them. But, by the same token, Atlantean riflemen picked off artillerists one after another.

Victor looked back over his shoulder. They'd forced the redcoats out of their lines, forced them to give up the field fortifications on which they'd expended so much time and labor. It was a victory: no doubt of that. If it wasn't quite the overwhelming victory he'd wanted when he set things in motion… well, what man this side of Alexander or Hannibal or Julius Caesar won such an overwhelming victory? For an amateur general with a formerly amateur army, he'd done pretty well.

Looking back over his shoulder also reminded him how close to sunset it was. His long-stretching shadow, and his horse's, should have told him as much already, but he'd had other things on his mind. He wondered if he had the nerve to fight a large night action, and regretfully decided he didn't.

"We'll camp here," he ordered, and then, to sweeten it as best he could, he added, "Here, on the ground we've won."

De la Fayette favored him with a salute. "You accomplished almost everything you intended, Monsieur le General," the French nobleman said. "It is given to few to do so much for their country."

"I thank you," Victor replied, returning the salute. "If only I could have done a little more."

That made the marquis smile. "A man who has much but wants more is likely to acquire it."

"I wanted it today," Victor said, and cursed Habakkuk Biddiscombe again.

Night brought only a nervous, halfhearted break in the hostilities. The redcoats also encamped on the held, not far out of gunshot range. Men from both sides went out to rescue the moaning wounded and plunder the silent dead-and if a few wounded were suddenly silenced in the process, so what? Englishmen and Atlanteans sometimes stumbled over one another in the darkness. They would grapple or open fire-except when both sides ran away at once.

The redcoats seemed busier than the exhausted Atlanteans. Victor didn't need long to realize why: they were digging in in front of Croydon. Rising earthworks partly hid their fires. They would have a much shorter line to hold now, even if they would also have far fewer men with whom to hold it

When the sun rose again, Royal Navy ships were tied up at Croydon's piers. They were only frigates, but their guns outweighed and outranged anything the Atlanteans could bring against them. If Croydon fell, it would have to fall by siege.