He sent a messenger into town, calling on the English commander to surrender. "Tell him I am not sure I can answer for my men's behavior if they take Weymouth by storm," he instructed the man. "If he thinks us no better than a pack of bloodthirsty copperskins, it may frighten him into yielding."
"I get you, General." The messenger tipped him a wink. "I'll make us out to be most especially frightful."
He rode in under flag of truce. When he came back that afternoon, he handed Victor a note from the English commanding officer. I must respectfully decline your offer, the man wrote, and I fear I cannot answer for the conduct of my soldiers once they have a pack of rebels in Mr sights. I'm, sir, your most obedient servant. Major Henry Lavery.
"He won't quit. General," the messenger said.
"So I gather," Victor Radcliff replied. This Major Lavery did not lack for nerve or style. "Well, if they won't do it of their own accord, we shall have to make them."
He wondered if he could, and what the butcher's bill would be. He wondered all the more because a pair of Royal Navy frigates lay just offshore. Bombardment from the sea had hurt him when he held Weymouth. How much more would it hurt him while he was trying to retake the town?
Instead of trying to storm Weymouth, he sent his riflemen forward to take up positions as close to the outskirts as they could. "Whenever you see a redcoat's head, I want you to put a bullet through it," he told them. "Don't let the enemy move in the streets by day."
The riflemen nodded. But one of them asked, "What if they come out after us? We can shoot straighter than they can, but musketeers put a lot of lead in the air."
"If they come out, fall back" victor answered. "I do not ask you to personate the Spartans at Thermopylae. You are there to make their lives miserable, not to sell your own dear."
That satisfied the marksman and his comrades. They worked their way forward from tree to fence to woodpile. Before long, the rifles' sharp, authoritative reports began to ring out, now singly, now two or three at a time. The men would, Victor supposed, shift their positions after every shot or two. He wondered how the redcoats liked them.
He got his answer when a cannon inside Weymouth boomed. The roundshot smashed a pile of wood. But the sniper who'd fired from behind it had moved on ten minutes earlier. Victor was more than pleased to see the English waste such a good shot.
Atlantean rifles went on barking as long as the light lasted. They would take until the day before forever to wipe out the enemy garrison. But they made the redcoats shun the streets and slink around like weasels. One of the marksmen came back to Victor at sundown and said, "I shot me a major, or maybe even a colonel."
"How can you be so sure?" Victor asked.
"Well, General, if he wasn't a big officer, he must've been one of those what-do-you-call-'ems-peacocks-like, on account of he sure did have some fancy feathers," the Atlantean answered.
"All right. That's good news. Maybe it will stir the English out of their lair come tomorrow." Radcliff listened to himself Once he said that out loud, it struck him as much too likely. And he hadn't done anything about it. In the fading light, he ordered his musketeers and his fieldpieces forward. If the redcoats did come out, he wanted to be ready to receive them.
They didn't emerge right away. As soon as the eastern sky paled enough, his riflemen started shooting into Weymouth again. A horsefly couldn't do a horse much real damage, but could drive it wild anyhow. Victor hoped for the same effect.
And he got it. The redcoats in Weymouth sallied forth just after the church bells in town rang ten. As soon as they left the cover of houses and shops, the marksmen began to fire at their officers. As the sniper had said the evening before, those splendid uniforms made them stand out. They fell one after another, and so did the common soldiers unlucky enough to be stationed near them.
The English troopers advanced anyhow. Victor might have known they would. They barely needed officers to tell them what wanted doing. They went after the riflemen with professional competence and perhaps unprofessional fury.
Victor's marksmen fired and fell back, fired and fell back. Some of them didn't fall back fast enough. The ones the redcoats caught had a hard time surrendering.
Then the English force came into range of the Atlantean artillery, which lurked just inside an orchard. Cannon balls tore bloody tracks through the enemy's ranks. The attackers swung toward the guns. Victor wanted nothing more than for them to charge. Canister and grape would do worse than roundshot ever could.
But, even if many of their officers had fallen, the redcoats knew better than to expose themselves to that kind of murderous fire. They swung away again, and went back to chasing the riflemen.
"Forward!" Victor shouted, and the main body of the Atlantean army moved up to support the marksmen.
They outnumbered the soldiers who'd sallied from Weymouth. Their lines hadn't been thrown into disarray by a long pursuit. Encouraged by three easy wins and a successful skirmish, they thought they could do anything. That went a long way toward making them right.
The redcoats dressed their ranks faster than Victor would have dreamt possible. They thought they could do anything, too. They'd fought in Europe, in India, in Terranova. Some of them would have fought in Atlantis against the French. They'd also had good luck facing the rebellion from their own kinsmen here. No wonder they thought they could win again.
"Fire!" victor yelled as the English drew near. Flintlocks clicked. Priming powder around touch-holes hissed. Then the muskets boomed.
Some of the redcoats went down. The rest kept corning. They didn't fire. If they could stand the gaff, if they could get in among their foes, they thought they could win the battle with the bayonet. They'd seen how much the Atlanteans feared cold steel in earlier fights.
Another volley tore into them. More English soldiers fell. By then, the survivors were very close. They were close enough, in fact, to see that most of the Atlanteans also carried bayoneted muskets, as they had in the skirmish on the hillcrest. All that plunder from the English forts was corning in handy.
True, the greencoats weren't masters of the bayonet the way the English were. But they were most of them big, strong men. Skill counted. But so did reach and ferocity. And so did numbers, and the Atlanteans had the edge there.
As the two lines met in bloody collision, Victor wondered how much weight each factor carried. Before long, one side or the other would give way. Flesh and blood simply couldn't stand going toe to toe like this for very long.
Spirit oozed from the redcoats first. Victor sensed it even before they began to fall back. Part of it, he judged, was their surprise and dismay at not sweeping everything before them. They should have known better. They'd beaten the Atlanteans in the summer, yes, but they'd never routed them-and the Atlanteans had just forced many of them back into Weymouth.
Now they were routed themselves. Some fled back across the snow toward the town. Others raised their hands in surrender. And still others, the stubborn few, went on fighting and made Victor's men pay the price of beating them.
"Give up!" Victor called to the knot of embattled Englishmen. "Some of your friends have got away. What more can you hope to do now?"
They kept fighting. Then the Atlanteans wheeled up a couple of fieldpieces and started firing canister into them. One round from each gun was enough to make the redcoats change their minds. The men still on their feet laid their muskets in the snow and stepped away from them. The ones blown to rags and bloody shreds didn't need to worry about it any more.
Victor's men hurried forward to take wallets and muskets, boots and breeches and bayonets. He told off enough greencoats to ensure that the prisoners wouldn't be able to get away. With the rest of his army, he pressed on toward Weymouth.