United States of Atlantis

Chapter 4

Drums and fifes woke the Atlantean rebels with the eastern sky going from gray to pink. The men staggered out of tents and uncocooned from tight-wound blankets. They yawned and rubbed their eyes and swore sleepily. It was as if they only half remembered-or didn't want to remember-what lay ahead.

The cooks served bread and meat and coffee. The men might have hit their wives if they'd got food like that at home. Here, they ate without complaint. They seemed glad to get any food at all. Gnawing on a chunk of half-raw beef between two slabs of badly risen bread, Victor remembered from the way his belt'd pinched in campaigns gone by that they were right to be glad.

Up ahead, musketry in the distance said farmers and hunters were still harassing the redcoats. They weren't even militiamen, and had no connection to the Atlantean Assembly or anyone but their neighbors. If Howe's men caught them, the usages of war said they could hang them. But catchmg frana-ttreurs wasn't easy. All they had to do was hide their firelocks, and then they were just men ambling down country tracks. Shoot at redcoats? The idea would never once cross their minds!

Victor stepped out in front of the abatis to survey the ground once more. The English would have to charge uphill to come at his men. That would make things harder for them, too. He nodded to himself. He wanted to make things as hard as he could for the enemy, because he knew the redcoats were better soldiers than his own men were.

A fieldpiece boomed. Maybe Howe's troopers had got a good shot at some of their tormentors. Maybe they just wanted to scare them off. Victor thought they had a pretty good chance of doing it, too. Men who'd never had cannon aimed at them found it terrifying. Radcliff had faced field guns before, and he wasn't enthusiastic about it, either.

Here came the redcoats. Mounted men rode out ahead of the main column on foot. When the riders spied the obstruction ahead, they wheeled their mounts and galloped back to report the news.

"Won't be long now, men!" Victor called to his own army. "Pretty soon, we'll give the damned English what they deserve!" The Atlanteans raised a cheer. They didn't know what they were getting into, not yet. Pretty soon, they'd find out. They would never be the same again, neither the ones who died nor the ones who lived.

Watching the redcoats deploy from column into line, Victor tried to fight down his jealousy. He'd put the Atlanteans through their evolutions in the fields outside New Hastings. He knew how raw they were. Seeing those same evolutions performed by professionals for whom they were second nature rubbed his nose in it.

Lines perfectly dressed, regimental banners and Union Jacks waving in the breeze off the ocean, the English troops advanced. Victor looked nervously out into the Atlantic. To his vast relief, he saw no warships. Their fire could have enfiladed his line and made him fall back, and he had no answer for them.

Three hundred years earlier, a fishing boat with a few swivel guns helped in the Battle of the Strand. Blasting Sir Richard Neville off his horse made sure Atlantis would have no native kings. Naval gunnery had come a long way in those three centuries. And now the artillery was on the king's side.

"Come back, General!" someone called from behind the abatis. "You don't want to make yourself a bull's-eye for them."

Victor's uniform wasn't so resplendent as all that. He would have felt embarrassed-to say nothing of weighted down-by all the gold braid and medals and buttons English generals wore to declare who they were. But a man standing out in the open in front of his side's works was bound to be a target. Victor picked his way back through the abatis' tangled branches. It wasn't easy; that was why the obstruction was there.

Thinking of the way the opposing general dressed reminded him of something. "Riflemen-aim at their officers!" he shouted. "The more of them we kill, the better off we are."

He didn't have that many riflemen. Most of the ones he did have came from the backwoods, where every shot had to count. A rifle was accurate at three or four times the range of a smoothbore musket, but was also slower to reload and quicker to foul its barrel.

An Atlantean field gun roared. Victor watched the ball kick up din in front of the English line and bound forward. It bowled over two redcoats like ninepins. Other soldiers smoothly stepped forward to take their places. More Atlantean guns fired. Enemy field-pieces replied. A rending crash said a ball smashed a gun carriage. That cannon was out of action for the rest of the battle.

Enemy bugles blared. The soldiers in the first two ranks brought their muskets down to the horizontal. Their bayonets flashed in the sun. Barbarians facing the Roman legions must have known that shock of fear as the legionaries' spearheads all glittered as one. It had lost none of its intimidation over the centuries between Caesar's day and Victor Radcliff's.

The bugles blared again. Here came the redcoats, at a steady marching pace. The first ranks' muskets probably weren't even loaded. General Howe wanted them to win with the bayonet. If they got in among the Atlanteans, chances were they would, too. Only a few of Victor's men had the sockets and long knives that turned muskets into spears. The rest would have to fight back with clubbed guns or with knives.

A cannon ball tore through the redcoats' ranks. Injured men fell or fell out. Others moved up to replace them. The soldiers

knew getting killed or maimed was all part of the job. They didn't get excited about it-unless it happened to them.

Atlantean riflemen started firing. A captain or major, his epaulets proclaiming his rank, clutched at his shoulder and went down. Another officer fell a moment later, and then another. The ones who remained kept coming. English officers weren't professionals like the men they led. That didn't mean they lacked courage, though. On the contrary-a man who showed fear in front of his fellows was hardly a man at all.

"Wait till you can see what they've got on their buttons. Then blow 'em all to hell!" a sergeant shouted to the musketeers he led. Good advice: their guns weren't accurate much farther out than that

"Now!" someone else yelled, and a blast of fire ripped into the English soldiers. Redcoats staggered. Redcoats stumbled. Redcoats screamed. Redcoats fell.

And the redcoats who didn't stagger or stumble or scream or fall came on. Another volley tore into them, and another. The third one was noticeably more ragged than the first. By the time it came, the enemy was almost to the wall and the abatis. The blast of lead proved more than even the bravest or most stoic flesh and blood could bear. Sullenly, the redcoats drew back out of range, now and then stopping and stooping to help a fallen comrade.

Cheers rose from the Atlanteans. "We whipped 'em, by Jesus!" somebody cried, which set off new rejoicing.

Knowing the men his army faced, Victor wasn't so sure. And damned if the redcoats didn't re-form their lines and make ready to come at the Atlanteans again. Their field guns turned on the abatis across the road. The fallen trees might hinder soldiers, but they didn't keep out roundshot. A man hit square by a cannon ball turned into something only a butcher would recognize. And a man speared by a branch a cannon ball tore loose was in no enviable situation, either.

A few Atlanteans couldn't stand the cannonading and fled. They were raw troops, men who'd never come under fire before Most of the new men stood it as well as any veterans. Victor was proud of them. He was also astonished, though he never would have told them so.

On came the Englishmen again. This time, they sent fewer troops against the stone wall and more against the area protected by the abatis. This time, too, they stopped and delivered two volleys of their own before rushing the Atlantean field works.

Bullets snapped past Victor's head. A wet thud! said a man next to him was hit. The Atlantean clutched his chest and crumpled to the ground, his musket falling from his hands. Victor snatched up the firelock. He aimed at a redcoat pushing through the abatis-a man from Howe's forlorn hope. If the gun wasn't loaded… What do I lose? he thought, and pulled the trigger.

The musket bucked against his shoulder. The redcoat went down, grabbing his leg. Victor had aimed at his chest. With a smoothbore, you were glad for any hit you got. Another man from the forlorn hope fell, half his jaw shot away. But the English soldiers were making paths their friends could follow.

And follow the redcoats did. Some of them fell. More stepped over corpses and writhing wounded and set about doing what they knew how to do: massacring amateurs who presumed to stand against them. The Atlanteans were brave. In close-quarters fighting like that, it probably did them more harm than good. They rushed forward, clutching any weapons they had-and the redcoats emotionlessly spitted them with their bayonets. The Englishmen had the edge in reach, and they had the edge in training, and they used both without mercy.

Victor might have fed his whole force into the fight, as a man fed meat into a sausage grinder. The Atlanteans would be gone… and they would have gone down. He saw as much, a little more slowly than he might have. "Back!" he yelled. "Fall back!"

The Atlanteans obeyed him with more alacrity than they'd ever shown marching north from New Hastings. They'd had enough-they'd had too much-of the horrible redcoats. Watching them break away from the English troops, Victor tasted gall. He wondered if the rebellion would smash to bits at the first test.

"Form ranks!" he shouted, hoping they would. "Give them a volley!" he added, praying they would. "Show them you're not whipped!" he said, fearing they were.

And damned if the Atlanteans didn't obey him again. The ranks weren't neat enough to delight an English drillmaster's heart. The volley was on the ragged side, too. But it was enough to knock the redcoats back on their heels. They'd come after the settlers, aiming to break them all at once-and they'd got a nasty surprise "Withdraw fifty yards and give them another one," Victor commanded. The men he led did as he told them to. This volley was fuller, thicker, than the one before. More English soldiers went down.

Now the redcoats, seeing that they couldn't force a decision with the bayonet alone, began loading their muskets again, too. They rebuilt their own battle line with marvelous haste-and much bad language from their sergeants. And they traded several volleys with the Atlanteans, both sides banging away at each other from less than a hundred yards. That was warfare as it was practiced on the battlefields of Europe: organized mutual slaughter.

More bullets cracked past Victor Radcliff than he could keep track of. None of them bit. He had no idea why not: either God loved him or he was luckier than he deserved. He'd begun to think he was luckier than he deserved in the men he led, too. They stood up under that pounding as well as the redcoats. Oh, a few men slipped off toward the rear, but only a few.

Victor told off several companies of New Hastings troops to serve as his rear guard. No settlement, not even Croydon in the north, despised royal authority more than New Hastings. Having disposed of one would-be king on their own soil, New Hastings men had little use for anyone else who tried to tell them what to do.

They held off the redcoats and let the rest of the army fall back toward Weymouth. Then they too broke free. General Howe showed little appetite for the pursuit: less than Victor would have in his place Maybe that said something about him. Maybe it said something about what the Atlanteans had done to his army, even in defeat.

Victor Radcliff looked around for Blaise. He found the Negro with a bloody rag wrapped around the stump of his left middle finger. "Stupid thing," he said. "Hurts like a mad bastard, too." He looked more angry than stunned, as wounded men sometimes seemed.

"Get some poppy juice from the surgeons," Victor told him.

"It will dull the pain a little, anyhow."

"Plenty need it more than I do," Blaise said.

"Plenty need it less, too. Go on. That's an order," Victor said. What point to being a general if you couldn't tell a sergeant what to do?

Blaise's "Yes, sir" was as mutinous an acceptance as Victor had ever heard. But it was an acceptance. He'd take what he could get. He hadn't beaten the English, but he'd given them a better fight than they must have dreamt of in their wildest nightmares. He'd take what he could get there, too. The retreat went on. He had no choice about taking that.

The Atlanteans fortified Weymouth. If General Howe wanted to break into the seaside town with men shooting at him from behind barricades and out of windows and ducking back around corners, he was welcome to try. So Victor thought, anyhow.

His men also seemed ready for another crack at the English. "Hell, yes! Let 'em come," one of them said. "We'll give 'em a bloody nose and whip 'em back to their mamas."

General Howe, unfortunately, didn't seem inclined to play Victor's game. His warships, perhaps slowed by contrary winds, arrived two days later. They lay offshore and bombarded the town. The Atlanteans' field guns fired back, but that was more to make the men feel better than for any other reason. Three-and six-pounders couldn't reach the men-of-war and might not have been able to pierce their thick oak timbers even if they had.

When a ball from a twenty-four-pounder hit a house or an inn, on the other hand, the building was likely to fall down. And when a ball from a twenty-four-pounder hit a man, or several men… what happened after that wasn't pretty. The gravediggers got more work than the surgeons did.

The ships were still there the next morning. As soon as the sun climbed up out of the Atlantic, they started cannonading Weymouth again. They fired slowly and deliberately, one round-shot every few minutes. Again, the Atlanteans returned fire, but with no great hope of success. They fearfully awaited each incoming cannon ball.

Flash and smoke came first. After them-but well after, proving sound traveled slower than light-came the boom from the gun. Victor had the displeasure of watching each roundshot arc through the summery air toward Weymouth. Then another crash would announce more destruction.

The slow, steady bombardment had a horrid fascination to it. Victor almost forgot to breathe as he waited and tensed himself before each new explosion. He hoped each round would fall harmlessly, yet feared each one would not. Surgeons and dentists worked as fast as they could, to get the agony over with in a hurry. The Royal Navy here operated in just the opposite way. Their officers wanted the Atlanteans to suffer for a long time.

Victor Radcliff figured that out right away. The Royal Navy officers also wanted something else: they wanted to use the deliberate cannonading to blind the Atlantean rebels to everything else that was going on. They got what they wanted, too. Along with everyone else in Weymouth, Victor spent the day staring fearfully out to sea, bracing himself for the next thunder from a gun.

"Sir? General Radcliff, sir?" By the exaggerated patience in the man's voice, he'd been trying to draw Victor's notice for some little while.

"Huh?" Victor said. In less than a minute now, one of the guns on the fleet out there would speak. What else mattered next to that?

He found out. "Sir, we've had a deserter come in. You'd better hear what he's got to say about General Howe's army."

"General… Howe's army?" Victor said slowly. He realized that, confident in the works in and around Weymouth, he'd almost forgotten about the redcoats. And he belatedly realized that wasn't the smartest thing he could have done.

He blinked, then blinked again, like someone coming out from under the spell of that French charlatan, Mesmer. Flash! Boom! A roundshot bigger than his clenched fist flying through the air, swelling, swelling… Crash! The Royal Navy did its best to keep him bemused.

But he'd been distracted. Pulling him back under the spell wasn't so easy. "All right. Bring this fellow to me."

He'd seen a lot of English soldiers like this one. The two chevrons on the fellow's left sleeve proclaimed him a corporal. He was short and skinny and pockmarked. He had two missing front teeth. His pale eyes wouldn't light on Victor. He looked like a man who would cheerfully murder for the price of a pot of ale. He also looked like a man who would keep coming forward no matter what any opponent tried to do to his battle line.

"Well?" Victor said.

"Well, it's like this, your Honor," the corporal said in a clotted London accent. "General 'Owe, 'e's moving inland, around your bloody flank. 'E aims to get between you and New 'Astings, 'e does."

"Sweet suffering Jesus!" Victor said. That would put him-and the Atlantean Assembly-in a very nasty spot… if it was true. He eyed the deserter. "And you came in to tell me this because…?"

Flash! Boom! Flying roundshot. Crash! The redcoat hardly seemed to notice, let alone get excited. "Why, your Honor? I'll bloody well tell you why." He brushed his chevrons with a scarred hand. "On account of over there I'll be an old man by the time I make sergeant, if I ever do. I took the king's shilling to keep from starving. Well, I've done that, any road. But if I want to make sum-mat of myself, if I want to be a lieutenant, say"-like a lot of Englishmen, he pronounced it leftenant-"I've got a better chance 'ere than I ever would've there. And so I lit out, I did."

Lots of Englishmen came to Atlantis because they thought they could do better here than in the cramped, tradition-filled mother country. This corporal wasn't the first deserter from Howe's army: nowhere near. But none of the others had brought such important news. "What's your name?" Victor asked him. "Pipes, your Honor," he answered. "Daniel Pipes."

"All right, Pipes. I'm going to send out riders to check what you've said." Victor feared he knew what they would find. The deserter's news had a dreadful feel of probability to it. He went on, "If they show you're telling the truth, you're Sergeant Daniel Pipes on the spot. How high you climb after that is up to you."

The redcoat stiffened to rigor mortis-like attention. His salute might have been turned on a lathe. A couple of watching Atlantean soldiers sniggered. That kind of stern discipline was what they were righting against. But Victor knew it had its merits in winning wars.

"Much obliged, your Honor!" Pipes said. Hash! Boom! Victor watched the cannon ball come in. Crash! "I think we're the ones obliged to you," he said. How big a march had General Howe stolen? How much bigger would it have been if not for Daniel Pipes?

Radcliff sent out the riders. He'd let the ships distract him, but he wouldn't make that mistake any more. What other mistakes he might make… he would discover only by making them.

A new question rose in his mind. How often could he count on help from English deserters? That brought up another new question. How often would Atlantean deserters help the enemy? He knew he'd already lost some men to desertion. He hadn't thought till now about how much it might mean.

Hash. Boom! Pause. Crash! Screams followed this shot-it must have come down on a building with people inside. Victor swore. No wonder the Royal Navy had been able to mesmerize him for a while.

The next roundshot missed him by only about twenty feet. "Nasty thing" Pipes observed. He hadn't flinched as the big iron ball bounded by. Neither had Radcliff. It wasn't the same as a bullet snapping past. Victor didn't know why it wasn't, but he was sure of the fact.

A couple of hours went by. The bombardment went on. He thanked heaven the cannonading hadn't started a fire in Weymouth. That was nothing but luck, as he knew too well. Fire was any town's biggest nightmare. Once it took hold, it was next to impossible to quell.

Hoofbeats clopped on dirt as a horseman trotted in. "Well?" Victor called.

"They're moving, all right," the scout answered. "Heading around our left flank. But I think you can still pull out all right."

"That's what she said," Victor remarked, and the horseman laughed.

His men weren't sorry to leave Weymouth. Who in his right mind would have been? He marched away from the little seaside town as quietly as he could. The longer the Royal Navy took to realize he was gone, the better. Boom!… Crush! (He couldn't see the flash or the flight of the ball any more. The sound, though, the sound pursued.)

"Can those ships do this at New Hastings, too?" Blaise asked.

"We do have forts there, but I don't know if they would stop them," Victor answered.

"Mm-kmtn," the Negro said, a fraught noise if ever there was one. "How are we ever going to win the war, then?"

That was a better question than Victor Radcliff wished it were. "Most of Atlantis is out of the range of the Royal Navy's guns," he said. That was true. He was less sure how helpful it was. If the Atlantean Assembly's army couldn't safely stay by the coast, the enemy gained an important advantage.

Atlantis had ships of its own, as befit a land that made much of its living from fishing and whaling and slaving and trading with the mother country (and, when the mother country wasn't looking, trading with other people, too). Some of them went armed. Piracy wasn't what it had been in the wild days of Avalon, more than a hundred years before, but it wasn't dead, either. How many carried enough guns to face a Royal Navy frigate? Any? Victor knew too well none could face a first-rate ship of the line.

"If Howe comes at us and the ships come at us, can we hold New Hastings?" Blaise persisted.

"We can try," Victor said. That didn't sound strong enough even to him, so he added, "We have to try," Blaise nodded and didn't say anything more. It was less of a relief than Victor had thought it would be.

General Howe's skirmishers pushed toward the coast. The Atlantean army's skirmishers pushed them back and took a few prisoners. They hauled one of them in front of Victor Radcliff. The redcoat acted more aggrieved that he'd been caught.

"What are you buggers doing marching along down here?" he said. "They told us you were still back in bloody Weymouth."

"Well, you've learned something, then, haven't you?" Victor answered.

The prisoner scowled at him. "What's that?"

"Not to believe everything you hear," Victor said blandly. What the redcoat said then wasn't fit for polite company. The Atlanteans gathered around him laughed. He seemed even less happy about that. The Atlanteans thought he got funnier as he got louder.

General Howe began pressing harder on the Atlantean army's flank. That was a problem Victor could deal with, though. A small rear guard sufficed to slow down the redcoats and let the rest of his men get ahead of them on the road down to New Hastings.

He wondered what would happen when he got there. By now, the Atlantean Assembly would know he hadn't held Weymouth. Would they take his command away from him? He shrugged. If they did, they did, that was all.

The next interesting question would be whether he could hold New Hastings. It certainly had better works than Weymouth did. But, like Weymouth, it was a seaside town. If the Royal Navy wanted to lie offshore and bombard it, Victor didn't know how he could respond.

He shook his head. That wasn't true. He knew how: he couldn't. He didn't like that, but he knew it.

And if he lost New Hastings, the echo of its fall would reverberate throughout Atlantis. If New Hastings came under the redcoats' boots… Would the rest of the land think the fight was still worth making? Victor really had no idea about that.

Nor did he want to find out. The best way to keep from finding out would be to hold New Hastings. He hoped he could.

Another rider came in from the west. "They're starting to turn in on us for true, sir," he reported.

"They would," Victor said, and then, "Did you see any fence or stone wall that runs more or less north and south? Something we could fight behind, I mean?"

"Plenty of 'em," the man answered. "These New Hastings folk, they're as bad as the people up by Croydon for walling themselves away from their neighbors." By the way he talked, he came from somewhere close to Freetown, well to the south of New Hastings. He could sneer at New Hastings folk as much as he wanted, but his own settlement held a far higher proportion of men loyal to King George.

He wasn't, though-and he'd given Victor Radcliff the answer the Atlantean commander wanted to hear. "Good," Victor said. "If they want to charge us across open country, they're welcome to pay the butcher's bill."

They'd done that north of Weymouth, and come away with a victory anyhow. Victor hoped General Howe didn't care for what he'd paid to get his victory. He shouted orders, swinging the Atlantean army out of its retreat and off to the west to face the redcoats again.

He also sent more horsemen out ahead of his infantry. He wanted them to lead the English army straight toward his. That way, he wouldn't-he hoped he wouldn't-get taken in the flank.

Once he'd set things in motion, he turned back to the courier who'd brought word of Howe's swing. "Take us to one of these fences."

"Glad to do it, General." The man brushed the brim of his tri-corn with a forefinger-probably as close to a salute as Victor would get from him.

The first fence to which he led the Atlanteans wasn't long enough to let all of them deploy behind it. Victor didn't want them out in the open trading volleys with the redcoats. The English were better trained than the settlers. They could shoot faster, and could also take more damage without breaking. And, if it came down to a charge and hand-to-hand fighting, all the redcoats had bayonets.

And so they went a little farther northwest, and found a stone wall that seemed perfect. It was more than a mile long, and almost chest high. If the musketeers steadied their firelocks on top of it as they shot, they were likely to do better than smoothbores commonly could, too.

Sheep grazed in a broad meadow on the far side of the fence They looked up in mild surprise as the Atlanteans took their places. They didn't know enough to run. If General Howe declined this engagement, Victor Radcliff suspected a good many of his men would enjoy a mutton supper tonight.

But Howe did not decline. Victor saw the rising cloud of dust that marked the redcoats' approach. He listened to occasional pistol shots: those would come from the two sides' horsemen skirmishing with one another. Some of the Atlantean mounted soldiers wore green coats. Others were in homespun, and had only weapons and determination to mark them as fighting men.

They took refuge at either side of the Atlantean position. The English horsemen, by contrast, recoiled when they saw the enemy in arms in front of them. They didn't push the attack-nor would Victor have in their place. Instead, they rode back to give their commander the news that the rebels were waiting for them.

Howe's infantry came out onto the meadow not quite half an hour later. Victor peered at them through a brass spyglass. A golden reflection caught his eye. He had to smile. There stood an English officer-General Howe himself?-staring back through a telescope almost identical to his own.

Victor didn't much like what he saw. He hoped the enemy general was even less happy with what his spyglass showed him.

Field guns unlimbered and deployed to either flank of the redcoats. English artillerymen opened fire. Maybe they hoped the cannonading would terrify their raw opponents. A couple of balls slammed against the stone wall but didn't break through Then one took off the head of a tall soldier who was looking out at the martial spectacle in front of him. His corpse stood upright, fountaining blood, for several seconds before it finally fell.

Even Victor thought that might be plenty to frighten his men. But it didn't seem to. "Did you see Seth there?" one of them exclaimed.

"Didn't know he had so much blood in him," another replied.

"Sure went out in style, didn't he?" the first man said, nothing but admiration in his voice. In spite of himself, Victor Radcliff smiled. The Atlanteans were turning into veterans in a hurry.

General Howe's men were already veterans. Without fuss or wasted motion, they swung from column to line of battle, staying out of range of both muskets and rifles as they took their places. Victor ordered his handful of field guns into action. They knocked over a few redcoats. The rest kept on with their evolutions as if nothing had happened.

Drums and fifes moved the Englishmen forward. The field guns cut swaths in their advancing ranks. They closed up and kept coming. Victor wondered if they would charge with the bayonet again. He hoped so. He didn't think they would be able to stand the gaff if they tried.

But Howe proved able to learn from experience. Having suffered from one charge, he had the redcoats halt about eighty yards from the fence that sheltered the Atlanteans. The first rank went to one knee. The second stooped to fire over their shoulders. The third stood straight.

"Fire!" Victor yelled, and the Atlantean volley went in before the English soldiers could start shooting. Redcoats crumpled. Redcoats writhed.

And redcoats opened fire. Musket balls smacked the stone fence And they smacked soft flesh. Atlanteans screamed. Atlanteans reeled back, clutching at themselves.

The first three ranks of redcoats retired and began to reload. The next three stepped forward. The first of them went to one knee. The second stooped. The third stood straight. They all fired together. Then they retired and also began to reload. Three more ranks of English soldiers delivered another volley. By that time, the first three ranks were ready to fire again. They did. Then the regulars charged.

They'd taken casualties all through their volleys-the Atlanteans had blazed away at them, too. And Victor's men-those of them still on their feet-delivered a couple of more ragged volleys as the redcoats rushed at them. A few fieldpieces fired canister into the English soldiers. The sprays of lead balls tore holes in the redcoats' ranks. They came on regardless.

At the wall, they stabbed with their bayonets, driving the Atlanteans back. Then the Englishmen started scrambling up and over. More of them got shot doing that. Once they dropped down on the east side, they lashed out with those bayoneted muskets. Again, at close quarters Victor Radcliff's men had no good answer for them. Guts spilled out onto the trampled, bloodstained grass.

"Back!" Victor shouted. "Back! Form lines! Give them a volley!"

He wondered if the farmers and cobblers and millers and ropemakers and horse dealers would listen to him. They'd faced the redcoats twice now, and been forced from strong positions both times. Why wouldn't they want to break and run after that?

They didn't. Not so neatly as their foes would have done it, they drew back fifty yards, formed up, and gave Howe's men a volley. Fire rippled up and down their ranks. Any English sergeant worth his stripes would have screamed at them for such ragged shooting. Some of the Atlantean sergeants did scream at them.

Victor was just glad they'd fired at all. "Give them one more!" he yelled. "One more, and then fall back again!"

This volley was even more ragged than the one before had been. The Atlanteans remained in order, though: a force in being. They'd hurt the redcoats, too. Victor could see a lot of dead and wounded English soldiers on both sides of the wall. He could also see a lot of dead and wounded Atlanteans.

The army that held the field was the one that won the battle.

So it had been in ancient days, and so it was still. General Howe's army would hold this field, as it had held the one north of Weymouth-as it now held Weymouth itself. "

"They aren't so tough," somebody not far from Victor said the settlers withdrew "Give us big old knives on the end of our firelocks and we'll make em sorry-just see if we don't"

"Damn right Lemuel," the fellow next to him replied They both nodded, as if to say, Well, that's settled. Victor had lost two bat ties and one town. All of a sudden, he didn't feel nearly so bad.