"Perhaps not. Then again, I am more fortunate than many in similar straits," Erasmus replied. "Not everyone has so much to fall back on when times get hard."
No sooner were those words out of his mouth than someone started pounding on his front door. The octagonal window in the office rattled in its frame at the insistence of the blows. "That doesn't sound good," Victor said.
"A knock in the nighttime is never good news," his cousin said, and he could only nod.
The pounding stopped as abruptly as it had begun. One of Erasmus' servants brought a plainly dressed man who smelled strongly of horse into the office, "Mr. Mitchell, from Croydon," the servant said. And so it was: Richard Mitchell was a leading goldsmith in the northern town, and a leading light in the struggle to turn Atlantis against the mother country. His pamphlet called Where Now? was banned wherever the English could seize it.
"For God's sake, Radcliff, give me a drink," he said. Without a word, Erasmus did. Mitchell, a squat, powerfully built man, gulped it. "Ann!" He seemed to notice Victor for the first time. "What? You here, too? Just as well! It's started up north."
"What do you mean?" Victor and Erasmus asked together.
"They heard we had guns. They marched to get them. They did, too, or some of them-but we gave them a black eye and a bloody nose in the getting. It's war up there, Radcliff's-war, I tell you! And it will be war here, too, war all through this land, unless you're a pack of spineless poltroons." He slammed down his mug. "Fill it up again! Atlantis and liberty!"
Chapter 2
Victor Radcliff looked at the English soldier. The redcoat, standing on a Hanover street corner, glowered back. He carried a flintlock musket; with its long bayonet, it was about as tall as he was. He had pale blue eyes, yellow hair, and pimpled skin almost pink enough to belong to an albino.
Had he known who Victor was, he might have tried to seize him. If the Atlantean settlements had risen against the unloved and unloving mother country, they would need someone to lead their soldiers. Without false modesty, Radcliff knew he had more practice at that than any other man born on this side of the ocean. No doubt some English officers knew it, too, but the knowledge hadn't trickled down to this spotty young fellow.
He just disliked being looked at. "Move along, you," he growled in a clotted, barely comprehensible Northern accent.
"Yes, indeed." Victor touched the brim of his hat. "I never argue with a man with a gun."
"Damned well better not," the redcoat said. Victor thought that was what he said, anyhow; he swallowed so many vowels, it was hard to be sure.
What Blaise swallowed was a chuckle. "Oh, no, you never argue with men with guns," the Negro said. "Not much, you don't."
"Hush." Victor looked back over his shoulder. To his relief, the redcoat was paying attention to a pretty girl crossing the street, not to him any more. "You don't want to give him ideas. He's liable to come up with them on his own even if you don't."
"Him?" Blaise didn't bother hiding his scorn. "He wouldn't know an idea if it walked up and honked in his face."
By such idioms did the Atlantean distinguish himself from the Englishman. The irony was that honkers had grown rare on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains. The enormous, flightless gooselike birds were, like oil thrushes, unlucky enough to hatch from the egg without fear of man. As settlers advanced, honkers retreated: or rather, they died in place, and their haunts grew ever scarcer and more remote.
Custis Cawthorne had written a pamphlet arguing that land should be set aside so honkers and other native productions of Atlantis could have somewhere to survive. It struck Victor as a good idea; most of Custis Cawthorne's ideas were good. That didn't mean it was likely to happen. People wanted to grab Land, not set it aside for anything.
Somebody shouted from a second- or third-story window: "The Devil fry all murdering English dogs!"
"There! There he is!" Victor might not have known just where that cry came from, but the young English soldier pointed like a hunting dog. At his shout, four more redcoats charged out of an eatery. When they saw where he was pointing, they rushed in.
A pistol shot rang out. Other gunshots answered it. A redcoat lurched from the building, right hand clutched to left shoulder. Blood welled out from between his fingers, brighter than the dyed wool of his coat.
More gunshots boomed. Victor heard the crash of breaking furniture and several voices high and shrill with pain and fury. A couple of minutes later, the other three redcoats came out dragging a wounded local. The man was bloodied and battered, but he had no quit in him. His head came up. "Atlantis and freedom!" he called in a great voice.
One of the redcoats hit him in the face. "Shut up, you bloody big-mouthed bastard!"
"Shame!" a woman screeched. "Atlantis and freedom!" the prisoner cried again. This time, the English soldier clouted him with his musket butt. The local went limp in the other redcoats' arms. "Shame!" the woman said again. M
"Maybe you'd better let him go," a bareheaded, shock-haired 'prentice said, his hands balling into fists.
"Maybe you'd better bugger off, sonny," a redcoat answered. He had a corporal's stripes on his sleeve and a scarred, weasely face that warned he'd give trouble no matter the mess in which he found himself.
"Maybe I'd better not." The 'prentice set his feet. Several other Atlanteans ranged themselves behind him.
More English soldiers came out of the cookshop. The sun glittered off the sharp edges of their bayonets. "Last chance, boy," the corporal said, not unkindly. "Otherwise, we'll stick you and we'll gut you and you'll end up dead never knowing why."
"What do we do?" Blaise asked in a low voice. "Try to keep the town from blowing up," Victor answered. "The time's not ripe."
No matter what he thought, his opinion turned out not to be the one that counted. One of the men behind the bushy-haired 'prentice stooped to grub a cobblestone out of the ground. He flung it at the redcoats. It caught a soldier in the ribs. He said "Oof!" and then "Ow!" and then "Fuck your bleedin' mother!"
A split second after the curse passed the redcoat's lips, muskets leveled at the crowd of Atlanteans. "Fire!" the corporal shouted. Triggers clicked. Descending hammers scraped flints on steel. Sparks fell into flash pans. The guns bellowed, sending up clouds of acrid gunpowder smoke.
Most of them bellowed, anyhow: flintlocks were imperfectly reliable. The English soldiery's muskets were also imperfectly accurate. Some of the shots went wide; one of them shattered a window well off to the side of the crowd. But men screamed.
Men fell.
And men who didn't scream or fall hurled more stones at the redcoats. One of them had a pistol, which he discharged. The ball hit the weasely corporal in the arm. What he said made the other soldier's obscenity sound like an endearment.
The sound of gunfire brought more redcoats at the run. More Atlanteans boiled out of houses and shops. The two sides hurried towards each other like lodestone and iron. The Englishmen had discipline and firearms and bayonets. The Atlanteans had fury and whatever makeshift weapons they could snatch up and numbers. The fury kept them from fleeing when the redcoats shot and stuck some of them. What the Atlanteans did to a couple of redcoats they managed to grab…
A paving stone sailed past Victor Radcliff's head. He ducked, as automatically and uselessly as a man did when a musket ball came too close for comfort. If it was going to hit you, it would before you could do a damned thing about it.
There were fights to join and fights to stay away from. This struck Victor as a fight to stay away from. He'd faced more dangerous enemies with qualms no worse than those of any reasonably brave man. When he had, though, he'd done it with some purpose in mind. If this melee had any point at all, he couldn't see it.