"Well, it's up to us, then," he said. "If we can break through and open the supply lines, the regulars will take care of the English." As long as the army holed up in Freetown doesn't get more reinforcements by sea, he thought uneasily. The Royal Navy was stronger than the French sea forces, just as the English Atlanteans had more ships than their French and Spanish counterparts.
But he couldn't do anything about that. He could only fight on land. And if the English settlers lay athwart his path, he was ready-no, eager-to bull them out of the way. The sooner he did it, the better, too. He could see that all too plainly.
"How much trouble is the French general in?" he asked.
"Monsieur, I have no idea," the teamster said. "We never got close enough to find out."
"Nom d'un nom," Roland muttered. He wanted to order double time. No matter what he wanted, he didn't do it. Even if he'd ridden more than he'd marched, he had a good idea of how much his men had left. If he exhausted them before they ran into the English settlers, his fight was lost before it started.
How much did the enemy have left? They'd done a lot of marching and fighting, too. Yes, they'd sailed back from Spanish Atlantis, but ocean voyages didn't build a man's strength. Considering the horrible food aboard ship, even a forced march cross-country might be easier.
Or it might not. Pretty soon, he wouldn't have to wonder any more. One way or the other, he would know. So would Victor Radcliff.
If my ancestor hadn't sold your ancestor the secret of Atlantis for a mess of salt cod… Kersauzon shook his head. Three hundred years too late to fret about that now. The first Kersauzon, the one from Brittany, made the mistake. Everyone else had been paying for it ever since.
"What will you do, Monsieur?" The teamster sounded uncommonly worried. Roland blamed him not a bit. Uncommon worry just proved the man understood the situation. Roland was uncommonly worried himself.
He gave the only answer he could: "Go forward. Find the foe, wherever he is. Fight him. Beat him. What else is there?"
"Nothing." The teamster hesitated. "I only hope the stinking greenjackets don't pop up out of nowhere on you, the way they did with us. If I hadn't been on one of the last wagons in the train, I never would have got away."
"You didn't know what you were running into. Thanks to you, we do," Roland said. "They won't surprise us. If they beat us, they will have to beat us when we know where they are. By God, my friend, I don't believe any Englishmen ever born, on this side of the sea or the other, can do that."
"I hope you're right," the man said. Me, too, Roland thought. But he would never share that with anyone else. Had he had his way, he wouldn't even have shared it with himself.
Victor Radcliff tried to be thorough. He tried to be cautious. So many things could go wrong in war even when you knew as much as you could about what the low, sneaky scoundrels on the other side were up to. Major General Braddock and too many of his men had discovered, to their cost, the difference between as much as you could and enough.
He and his settlers were moving south, away from Marquis Montcalm-Gozon's men. If they were going to run into trouble, or if trouble was going to run into them, it was most likely to come up from the south toward them.
But likely chances weren't the only ones. Along with stationing scouts ahead of the band of settlers and out to either side, Radcliff also put some men well behind his main body. He perplexed Blaise. "That Frenchman, he wants Freetown," the Negro said. "He not going to come after us."
"Just in case," Victor replied. "I want to be like a hedgehog, so no one can bugger me by surprise."
Then he had to explain what a hedgehog was, because Atlantis had none. Blaise got it in a hurry. "Oh! A-" He said something unpronounceable, at least by a white man. "We have them in my country. I not know you know them."
"Well, I do. They have them in England and France and Spain, too." Again, Victor wondered why Atlantis was missing so many creatures common in Europe. A lot of those beasts, or ones much like them, were also common in Terranova to the west. So far as he knew, though, Terranova had no hedgehogs.
And he had more urgent things to worry about than hedgehogs and honkers. One of the scouts he'd left behind in the north rode into camp that evening on a lathered horse. "They're on the move!" the man exclaimed. "They're heading this way!"
"Who? The French?" Radcliff was astonished. "Why? We might have made them hungry, but not that hungry, not this fast."
"Don't know why," the scout said stolidly. "Ain't my station to cipher out why. You set me there to tell you what. I done did that."
"Yes. You did." Victor nodded. Why was his job, and he understood what Montcalm-Gozon was up to no better than he understood the Atlantean dearth of viviparous quadrupeds. "Are a lot of French regulars moving, or only a few?"
"Looked like a bunch," the scout replied.
"Something's gone wrong for them up at Freetown, then. Has to be so," Victor said. The scout only shrugged. "What can we do about it now?" Victor wondered aloud. He dreamt of catching Montcalm-Gozon in an ambush to repay the French for what they'd done to Braddock. To his own regret, he knew he didn't have the men for it. "Were English soldiers chasing them?" he asked hopefully.
"How the devil do I know?" the scout said. "I saw those bastards in blue a-coming. When I did, I stuck around long enough to see it was a good mob of 'em, and then I got out o' there."
"You did right," Victor said. He muttered to himself. Now he knew more than he would have without those carefully placed scouts. But however much he knew, it wasn't as much as he needed to know. He would have to decide-and to act-with incomplete knowledge. All generals had to do that. How many of them got their noses rubbed in it like this, though?
"Done with me?" the scout asked. "My backbone's trying to saw clear through my stomach."
"Go eat. They're roasting a couple of beeves over there." Victor pointed. The beeves were actually oxen from the French supply wagons, but if you complained about every little thing… "Tell them I said to give you a mug of wine, too-and they'd better not have drunk it all up."
"Now you're talking!" The scout hurried away.
Victor was gnawing on roast-well, half-charred, half-raw-beef himself when another scout rode in, this one out of the south. "There's a bunch of damned Frenchmen camped down there, Major," he reported.
"French regulars? Or French settlers?" Victor asked. The answer to that might tell him something about which side was winning the naval war in the Atlantic.
"Settlers," the scout answered, eyeing the toasted meat on a stick with a longing that said he'd had no supper. "Same buggers who've been dogging us all along."
"Kersauzon marched the legs off them to get them up here so fast," Victor said. The scout only shrugged. He didn't care. "Go get yourself something to eat," Victor commanded. "I'll worry about the rest of this."
The scout seemed only too glad to obey. And Victor did worry. He'd wondered if he could catch Montcalm-Gozon's troops between his anvil and a hammer of redcoats. Now he wondered if he'd got caught between hammer and anvil himself. As far as he could tell, neither group of French soldiers knew the other was close by-and neither knew his settlers lay between them. As long as he could keep them ignorant like that, he was fine. If they started acting together, he was a long way from fine. He was in more trouble than he knew what to do with.