"On!" Victor shouted to his own men, and then, in French, "Avant!" He fell back into English to continue, "If we take the town from them, they've nowhere to go after that!" If de la Fayette or some of his officers wanted to translate his remarks for the benefit of the French soldiery, they were welcome to.
Croydon's outskirts lay only a couple of miles away. Whenever Victor rode to the crest of some little swell of ground, he could see the church steeples reaching toward the heavens. One of them was supposed to be the tallest steeple in all Atlantis, a claim furiously rejected in Hanover and New Hastings.
"I think we can do it." Was that Blaise's voice? Damned if it wasn't. If Blaise believed Croydon would fall, how could it do anything else?
Victor also began to believe his men would storm Croydon. And if they did… when they did… No one, yet, had thought to write a tune for the United States of Atlantis to use in place of "God Save the King." Maybe some minstrel needed to get busy in a hurry, because what stood between those united states and liberty?
Damn all Victor could see. His men were making for Croydon faster than the redcoats pulling out of their entrenchments and earthworks. If nothing slowed the Atlanteans and Frenchmen, they were less than half an hour from guaranteeing that the Union Jack would never fly over Atlantis again.
If nothing slowed them… One more thought Victor Radcliff remembered a long, long time. No sooner had it crossed his mind than a band of cavalry-something more than a troop, but less than a regiment-thundered out of Croydon and straight toward the advancing Atlantean and French foot soldiers.
The riders wore buff and blue, not the red of English regulars. Loyalists, then, Victor thought with distaste. Like any cavalrymen, they carried sabers and carbines and long horse pistols. Most would have a second pistol stashed in a boot. Some might carry one or two more on their belts.
"Form line!" Victor shouted. "We can take them!"
Blaise pointed. "Isn't that-?"
"God damn him to hell!" Victor burst out. Sure as the devil, that was Habakkuk Biddiscombe-and the riders had to be Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion, which had been much spoken of but, till now, little seen. Victor wished he weren't seeing it at this moment, which did him no good whatever.
He wasn't the only one to recognize the defector, the traitor, commanding the royalist Atlanteans. The cry of "No quarter!" went up from a dozen throats at once. Anyone who fought for and alongside Habakkuk Biddiscombe knew the chance he took. Muskets boomed. Here and there, legionaries slid from the saddle and horses went down.
But the horsemen who didn't fall came on. They knew exactly what they were doing, and why. They despised the soldiers who fought for the United States of Atlantis at least as much as those men loathed them. And now at last they had the chance to show their hated kinsmen and former friends what they could do.
"Death to Radcliff!" Biddiscombe roared. In an instant, every man he led took up the cry: "Death to Radcliff!"
They slammed into the front of the advancing Atlantean column: into a line that hadn't finished forming. They slammed into it and through it, shooting some soldiers and slashing at others with their swords. And, by their courage and ferocity, they stopped Victor Radcliff's army in its tracks.
"Kill them! Drive them out of the way!" Victor shouted furiously, drawing the gold-hilted sword the Atlantean Assembly had given him and urging his horse forward, toward the fight. "On to Croydon!"
Against a force of infantry that size, brushing them aside would have been a matter of moments-nothing that could have seriously delayed the assault on the redcoats' last sheltering place But the horses of Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion gave the men on them a striking power out of all proportion to their numbers.
And so did the way they hated the men they faced. Victor might-did-reckon their cause and the way they upheld it altogether wrong. That didn't mean their contempt for death and retreat was any less than his might have been under like circumstances.
"Biddiscombe!" he called, brandishing his blade as he rode past his own men toward the fight. "I'm coming for you, Biddiscombe!"
"Oh, just shoot the son of a whore," Blaise said, which was bound to be good advice.
What were the redcoats doing behind Biddiscombe's Horsed Legion? Victor knew too well what he would be doing while such an outsized forlorn hope bought him time. Without a doubt, Cornwallis' men were doing the same thing: everything they could to hold their foes as far away from Croydon as possible
After what seemed a very long time, the survivors from the Legion galloped back toward the town. They'd bought the redcoats-King George's fellow subjects, they would have said-enough of that precious, impalpable substance to form a line across the neck of the peninsula on which Croydon sat. And, whether from out of the town or from their abandoned field works, the Englishmen had half a dozen cannon in the line.
"Don't like the looks of those," Blaise said.
"Nor do I," Victor agreed. No Atlantean artillery was anywhere close by. He didn't think the French had brought guns forward, either. Which meant… We're going to catch it, he thought sorrowfully.
The field guns spoke. Cannon balls and canister tore through the Atlanteans and Frenchmen. Two quick volleys from the dreadfully proficient foot soldiers followed. Men and pieces of men lay where they had fallen. The wounded staggered back when they could. When they couldn't, they thrashed and wailed and clutched at hale men, hoping to be helped away from the killing fire.
They got less help than they would have wanted. The Atlanteans were proficient in the craft of slaughter themselves by now, and gave back the redcoats' musketry as best they could. And more Frenchmen hurried forward to stiffen them should they require stiffening-and to shoot at the English any which way.
When the redcoats' cannon spoke again, one of their balls knocked a musketeer near Victor right out of his shoes. The musketeer howled-mercifully, not for long. At the start of the war, the Atlanteans never could have endured such carnage. Now they took it in stride, as sailors took the chance of being drowned. It was a hazard of the trade, no less and no more.
Regardless of how calm and brave they were, one thing seemed only too clear to Victor. "We shan't break into Croydon after all," he said bitterly. "God fling Habakkuk Biddiscombe into hell for ever and ever. May Satan fry him on a red-hot griddle for all eternity, and stab him with a fork every so often to see if he's done."
"Maybe it is happening even now," Blaise said. "Maybe he was killed in the fight at the front."
"Maybe he was. If God is merciful, he was," Victor said. "But then, if God were merciful, Biddiscombe would have died of the pox long ago."
With no hope of seizing Croydon, Victor reluctantly pulled his men out of musket range. The English guns kept banging away at them. But, by the same token, Atlantean riflemen picked off artillerists one after another.
Victor looked back over his shoulder. They'd forced the redcoats out of their lines, forced them to give up the field fortifications on which they'd expended so much time and labor. It was a victory: no doubt of that. If it wasn't quite the overwhelming victory he'd wanted when he set things in motion… well, what man this side of Alexander or Hannibal or Julius Caesar won such an overwhelming victory? For an amateur general with a formerly amateur army, he'd done pretty well.
Looking back over his shoulder also reminded him how close to sunset it was. His long-stretching shadow, and his horse's, should have told him as much already, but he'd had other things on his mind. He wondered if he had the nerve to fight a large night action, and regretfully decided he didn't.
"We'll camp here," he ordered, and then, to sweeten it as best he could, he added, "Here, on the ground we've won."