"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.