Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"Come on!" Kersauzon shouted again and again. "We have to keep moving!"

But their progress got slower and slower. The English Atlanteans and regulars were continually reinforced. No more French settlers came forth from Nouveau Redon. Roland had put all his weight into the one blow. He'd had to hope it would prove enough. Now he wasn't so sure.

There was the Blavet, with only one more ring of trenches in the French settlers' way. "Come on!" Roland shouted once more. "By God, my friends, we can do it!"

He looked around. His men-his friends, as so many of them were-had melted away like snow in springtime. Most of the ones who came forward with him bled from one wound, or from more than one. He discovered to his surprise that he'd taken several wounds himself. He didn't remember getting any of them. The heat of battle could be like that.

Now that he knew he was hurt, all the little wounds started to pain him. He ignored them as best he could. If the French settlers could get past the last enemy trench, past the redwoods just beyond it…

But the greencoats and redcoats knew what the French had to do. Gunfire spat serpents' tongues of flame at the oncoming French settlers. The corporal next to Roland groaned as he took a bullet in the belly. He folded up like a concertina.

A fieldpiece thundered, and then another one. How had the English manhandled guns to where they were needed most? But how they'd done it didn't really matter. That they'd done it did. Canister tore through the oncoming French settlers. It blew one man right out of his shoes.

Roland sat down, hard. He looked at his right leg in absurd surprise. It wasn't bleeding…too much. He tried to stand again. He managed to do it, which proved the leg wasn't broken. It could take…some weight. He hobbled forward, brandishing his sword. "Hurrah!" the French settlers shouted as they threw themselves toward the last English defenses.

The English, settlers and regulars, still wouldn't come forth to fight the French man-to-man. They stayed in those earthworks and behind those trees and poured lead into soldiers who were in a desperately poor position to shoot back.

Another man near Roland dropped. Roland grabbed his musket and used it as a stick to help himself hobble forward. He was almost to the trench when a black man wearing sergeant's stripes took dead aim at him. He knew it was all over, at least as far as he was concerned.

Then the white man next to the Negro knocked the gun barrel to one side. "Surrender!" the white called in fair French. "You fought bravely. What more can you do?"

"I may die, but I won't surrender," Roland answered. "Come out here, Monsieur, and we will see which of us is the better man."

"What difference does that make?" the greencoat said. "I have the stronger kingdom, and that does make a difference. It makes all the difference in the world."

"If you want to fight like a coward, it does." Roland would have laughed at himself if things weren't too grim for laughter. He could barely stand up, and he challenged the English settler to single combat. If that wasn't suicide, what was?

This was, this whole charge into the teeth of the English position. He'd feared as much when he ordered it. But he still didn't see what else he could have done. Without water, Nouveau Redon would have had to give up soon. The attack had had some chance.

Some. But not enough.

"Last chance, Monsieur," the English settler warned.

"Be damned to you, Monsieur," Roland replied.

"I'm sorry," the greencoat said. "You're a brave devil, but that won't do you any good, either." He turned to the Negro beside him. "Go ahead, Blaise."

Roland tried to spring forward. It wouldn't have worked on two good legs. The musket ball caught him square in the chest. He fell on his face in the dirt. Blood filled his mouth. As his vision dimmed, a katydid the size of a mouse scuttled past his face and burrowed under a clod of dirt. He coughed. He choked. Blackness enfolded him.

"I never dreamt they'd come this far," the English lieutenant-colonel said.

"A few of them got through and got away," Victor Radcliff said. "I never thought they could do that. They were formidable."

"Were," the English officer echoed. "That's a lovely word, by God."

"Isn't it, though?" Victor looked around for his Negro sergeant-cum-body-servant, and saw that he was going through a dead enemy soldier's pockets. The victors take the spoils, he thought. Aloud, he continued, "If Blaise hadn't shot their leader there at the end, we might still be fighting."

He exaggerated, but not by much. When Roland Kersauzon fell, it took the heart out of most of the French settlers still on their feet. They threw down their muskets and rifles and swords and put up their hands. By then, the redcoats and English settlers were glad enough to accept their surrender.

Surgeons worked on wounded all the way from the riverbank up to the gates of Nouveau Redon. Where the fighting was sharpest, dead men in red and green, in French blue and colonial homespun, lay piled together in death, each one quiet now where he had fallen. The twin stinks of pierced bowels and blood-so much blood!-filled Victor's nostrils.

"Only one thing worse than a fight like this," he murmured, rubbing at a cut on his left arm. He was one of the lucky ones. But for that, he'd come away unscathed.

"What could be worse?" The lieutenant-colonel still seemed stunned at the struggle the French had put up.

"Losing," Victor said bluntly.

"Well, yes," the English officer admitted after a moment's surprise. "There is that."

So there was. Redcoats and greencoats robbed disconsolate enemy survivors of anything they happened to carry. Kersauzon's men were in no position to complain. Anyone who presumed to resent the thefts wouldn't live long. Had the French settlers triumphed, they would have done the same to their foes. Everyone on both sides knew as much.

"What are we to do with them?" The English lieutenant-colonel seemed to be talking more to himself than to Victor.

Victor answered anyhow: "The ones who are left, we may as well send home." His wave took in the windrows of corpses-far more French than English, because Kersauzon's men had pushed the attack, and pushed it in large measure out in the open. "Even after they get there, French Atlantis will have a great swarm of widows."

"And a great swarm of English settlers coming south to console them?" The lieutenant-colonel might be stolid and earnest, but he had a certain basic shrewdness.

"I shouldn't wonder," Victor said. "French Atlantis is ours now. There's no army left that can slow us down, much less stop us. Plenty of plantations, plenty of ordinary farms, plenty of shops in the towns that will need men to run them. There won't be enough Frenchmen to do it, not after we've killed off so many of them. And our settlements have always been more populous than theirs. Look at the way we're spilling across the Green Ridge Mountains. They have New Marseille over on the west coast, but that's just another little seacoast town."

Now the Englishman glanced up to make sure Blaise was busy plundering. In a low voice, he said, "How do you suppose your bonny English settlers will like turning into slaveholders?"

Victor Radcliff shrugged. "It's a way of life down here. How else are you going to run a plantation?"

"I don't care for it," the lieutenant-colonel said. "Slavery's against the law in England, you know."

"I don't, either, but it's not here. Not in our Terranovan settlements, either," Victor said. "Where slaves and money go together, who complains about slaves? Does that surprise you, sir?"

"Well, when you put it so, perhaps not," the English officer replied. "I shouldn't care to buy and sell other men myself, though."

"Neither would I…sir," Victor said slowly. "But I wear cotton when I don't wear wool or linen. Much of what I wear is dyed with indigo. I enjoy pipeweed. Sometimes I eat rice when I don't eat maize or wheat. Isn't it the same for you?"