"True enough." The English officer sighed, but he nodded. "I accept your assurances on that score."
"If you would like to take back as many other bodies as the wagon will carry, you may do so." Having won, Victor could afford to be generous about trifles. He did believe the redcoats would have returned the favor had things gone the other way.
"Very good of you, sir." John Fleming sketched a salute. "If I may look at the bodies, since you make this offer…" A grimace got past the correct mask he'd worn. "I fear my older brother. Captain James Fleming, is among the fallen. Several men saw him go down in front of that damned stone fence you defended so stoutly."
"Oh, my dear fellow! My deepest sympathies! You should have spoken sooner!" Victor exclaimed. "May I give you brandy or rum? As with an amputation, they will dull the worst pain a bit."
"No, thank you. I can in good conscience transact military business with you, but, meaning no disrespect, I would rather not drink with you."
"I understand. I am sorry." Victor raised his voice and waved. When a messenger came up, he said, "Fetch a torch and lend Lieutenant Fleming here every assistance in examining the English dead. He believes his brother lies among them. If he should prove correct, Captain Fleming's body will go back through the lines with him along with General Howe's and as many others as a wagon may hold."
"Yes, sir." The messenger nodded to the English officer. "That's mighty hard. You come with me. We'll do what we can for you."
"Very well. I am… as grateful as one can be under the circumstances." Lieutenant Fleming followed the messenger toward the redcoats' tumbled corpses.
"More he takes, more we don't have to bury," Blaise remarked. "I don't think one wagonload will make much difference." Victor paused. "But I must admit I won't be on the business end of a shovel, cither."
"Worth remembering," Blaise said. No doubt he'd been on the business end of a shovel during his days as a slave. But slaves worked as slowly as their overseers would let them get away with. Free men had a different rhythm. Victor had used a shovel often enough on his farm, in building fieldworks, and in burying his children when they died too young.
After a while, the wagon rattled off toward the east. Victor didn't ask whether Lieutenant Renting had found his brother. It might matter to the redcoat, but it didn't to him. He did what he had to do next: without waiting for morning, he sent a messenger off to the Atlantean Assembly with word of the victory. He also recommended that the Assembly get the news to France as soon as it could. When the French learned the locals had beaten English regulars in a pitched battle, they might have a higher regard for this uprising. Then again, they might not. But the Atlanteans had to find out
"If Custis Cawthorne can't talk King Louis into coming in on our side, nobody can," Major Biddiscombe said when Victor told his officers' council what he'd done.
"Just so," Victor said. Of course, given how badly the French had lost in their last fight with England, the painful possibility that no one could persuade them to try again was very real.
"We ought to chase the redcoats all the way back to Cosquer," Biddiscombe added. "We ought to take the place away from them again."
"If we can. If they have no fieldworks in place around it, which I confess to finding unlikely. If the Royal Navy does not lie close offshore," Victor said. "I am anything but eager to face bombardment from big guns I cannot hope to answer. I had enough of that up in Weymouth, enough and to spare."
Habakkuk Biddiscombe looked discontented. He sounded more than discontented: "Nobody ever won a tight by reckoning up all the things that might go wrong before he started."
"Perhaps not," Victor said. "But plenty of officers-the late General Howe being only the most recent example-have lost battles by failing to reckon up what might go wrong. I trust you take the point, sir?"
Biddiscombe didn't like it No matter how intrepid he was, though, he wasn't blindly intrepid. He could smell something if you rubbed his nose in it Reluctantly, he nodded. "I think I do General."
"Good." As Victor had with the English lieutenant he threw his own subordinate a sop: "I also trust you will pursue vigorously. The more English stragglers we scoop up, the more muskets and wagons and, God willing, cannon we capture, the better our cause will look: here and up in Honker's Mill and, in due course, in France."
Blaise said, "It would seem strange, fighting on the same side as France after going against her in the last war."
"The redcoats were on our side last time," Victor reminded him. "War and politics are like that. When Lieutenant Fleming came in to ask for Howe's body, he gave me General Cornwallis' compliments. Our old friend-and I did count him a friend-now commands the enemy. Could something like that not happen in Africa, or do your tribes never change alliances?"
"I suppose it could" Blaise said. "But I think you white men are more changeable than we."
"It could be so," Victor said. "Still, you've also talked about the things we know how to do that your people don't. Learning such things comes with being changeable, too. I think it comes from being changeable. Don't you?"
"I suppose it could," Blaise said again. "Well, it's an argument for another time, not for a council of war," Victor said: he could see that some of his officers would have said the same thing if he hadn't. Better to beat them to the punch. He went on, "The argument for this council is how best to exploit our victory-the victory that you won, gentlemen!"
They raised three cheers. They'd chewed over too many narrow but undeniable defeats. Victory tasted so much better!
Chapter 12
Cosquer didn't fall easily. Victor had hoped it might, but hadn't really expected it to. He remembered how well Cornwallis, then a lieutenant-colonel, had fortified Freetown after General Braddock fell. The new English commander was no less diligent now, his engineers no less clever.
And the redcoats in the works remained ready to fight. Maybe they weren't quite so eager to face the Atlanteans in the open field as they had been. But they didn't mind letting Victor's soldiers come to them. Why should they, when they hoped to bloody the locals on the cheap?
But Victor didn't oblige them. Attacking field works was a fool's game, or a desperate man's. He wasn't desperate, and he hoped he wasn't that kind of fool, anyhow.
Even if he had been tempted to assault Cornwallis' entrenchments, knowing Royal Navy frigates and ships of the Line lay offshore would have made him think twice. Their firepower didn't reach far inland, but within its reach he had nothing that could reply to it. Heavy guns on land sat in forts. They moved slowly, if they moved at all. Ships carried them faster than unencumbered men could march, as fast as cavalry scouts could ride. "Can we starve them out?" Blaise asked.
Unhappily, Victor shook his head. "Not as long as they rule the sea. They can bring in food from other parts of Atlantis, or even all the way from England."
"What are we doing here, then?" Blaise asked, a much more than reasonable question.
"Holding them in," Victor answered. "They can't do anything much as long as we pen them there."
Blaise grunted. "Neither can we."
"Yes, we can." Victor said it again: "We can. They have to beat us, to make us quit fighting. All we have to do is show them they can't do that. As long as we stay in the field, as long as we prove to them they can't do whatever they please in Atlantis, they will lose. I'm not sure they understand that yet. I'm not sure how long they will need to understand it. But we have to keep fighting till they do, however long it takes."