Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"I didn't say so. I'm still working it through. That's a long march, that is-upwards of three hundred miles, even if you're talking about starting from New Grinstead. Subsisting your soldiers…wouldn't be easy, and it might not be possible."

"Why?" William demanded. "Does not every man who goes into the woods acclaim the marvelous abundance and splendid hunting they afford?"

"That's a fact," Marcus said. "You want me to go to Avalon and be there on such-and-such a day ready to fight, I'll do it. You want me and ten of my friends to go, I think we could do it. After that, it gets harder. No maize to eat, the way there would be amongst the Terranovans. No roads, so no supply wagons. Even horses have a hard time-sometimes the meadows are few and far between. And you'd have to have horses, for men can't carry close to a month's worth of food on their backs. They'd shoot some on the way, but a thousand men couldn't shoot enough to stay fed. I don't believe the woods hold enough to feed a compact mass of a thousand men." He spread his hands. "I'm sorry, coz. The more I think on it, the worse the chances look. You start with a thousand soldiers, you might have a couple of hundred starving souls make it all the way to Avalon."

William would have been angrier at his kinsman had he not feared the same thing. He did ask, "Are you sure?"

"Sure? Who can be sure of anything before it happens except the Lord?" Marcus answered. "But I do think it likely, and, in case your next question is whether I'd care to chance it, I have to tell you no. I'm not sure that's your next question, mind, but I do think it likely."

"Do you indeed?" William gave him a crooked grin. "Well, I wouldn't have an easy time making a liar out of you."

"Sorry not to be more help, coz, but I don't care to shit my life into the chamber pot, either," Marcus Radcliffe said.

"You have a pungent turn of phrase," William observed. "You ought to write for the gossip sheet they started here. You would make everyone despise you, than which nothing, I am sure, would delight the publisher more."

"No, thanks," Marcus said. "Now that I've answered your question for you, I'm for New Grinstead again, and for wherever else I please."

"As long as you came so far, will you tolerate two questions rather than one?" William asked.

"Well, I might," his backwoods cousin drawled, "long as you pour me out another glass of that wine. Those grapes died happy for sure."

"I think I might oblige you there." William filled Marcus' glass again, then his own. "Let me try this: if we ever see the promised Dutch and English ships, could I persuade you-and you persuade some of your backwoods fellows-to serve aboard my merchantmen, as marksmen at sea and as a landing force when we reach Avalon?"

"I know some people who don't shy away from a fight, and that's a fact," Marcus said. "Don't know whether they'd fancy one on the ocean. Don't know whether I would myself, either. I have to cipher that out."

"Chances are you'll have all the time you require," William Radcliffe said dolefully. "The next ship we see of those promised will be the first."

"If my friends treated me that way, I'd make 'em sorry for it-to hell with me if I wouldn't," Marcus said.

"If my friends treated me so, I should make them sorry for it, too," William replied. "The gentlemen who promised, however, are not my friends: merely associates with whom I share certain interests. I love them not, nor they me."

Marcus drained the last of his wine. "Why put in with 'em, then?"

"Nothing simpler," William said. "Because one of the interests we share is seeing Red Rodney Radcliffe, damn his black soul to hell, hanged in chains."

"Signal flags!" Red Rodney Radcliffe exclaimed in high glee as he stood at the wheel of the Black Hand. "Do you ever reckon a bunch of bally freebooters'd fly signal flags like the bleeding Royal Navy?"

"Not me," Ben Jackson answered. "We have enough trouble getting our own bastards to do like we say most of the time, let alone the buggers who fight for somebody else."

"It's a corsair fleet. It's a corsair navy, by God!" Red Rodney raised his voice to call to the sailor who was raising the flags aloft: "Signal form line of battle, Quint!"

"I'll do it, skipper," Quint said, and he did. He'd served in the Royal Navy himself till he jumped ship at Stuart and made his way to Avalon. Piracy suited him better than shouts and curses and kicks from petty officers, with the lash or the yardarm waiting if he got too far out of line.

Almost every shallop and brigantine that sailed out of Avalon carried at least one man who'd been part of the Royal Navy and knew something about signal flags. Quite a few men who couldn't write their own names or read them if they saw them were intimately familiar with dozens of flags.

In the Royal Navy, the admiral could and would punish any captain who refused his orders. Radcliffe wished he could do that. But he would have a war on his hands if he tried, and not the one he wanted. Besides, he wasn't the admiral, not in the formal sense-he'd turned the job down.

The other pirate captains had done just what he hoped they would when they chose Michel de Grammont to lead them. De Grammont wasn't even important enough to come to the meeting when he was named. The majority of the pirates of Avalon were English, which made it hard for them to take a Frenchman seriously. His ship wasn't a big or a strong one. In other words, he made an ideal figurehead.

Red Rodney wished his own ship were built for him from the keel up, not sailed out of a Dutch port on the Terranovan coast in a hail of musket bullets. Then she could look the way she did in his mind's eye, with the figurehead of a big black hand below the bowsprit. Everyone would know her from a mile off, and fear her-and fear him, too. That would be very fine.

Not everybody was falling into line. The other pirates didn't want to follow his orders-or anyone else's. Not for nothing were they called freebooters. Even if obeying someone else would do them good, they weren't interested. If obeying someone else would save their necks? They were up against that now. It didn't seem to matter.

The mate saw the same thing. "Maybe we ought to fight Dutch-style and not like Englishmen," Jackson said. "Then it'd be every man for himself, like, and all the ships could do what they do best."

"And they could get blasted out of the water one at a bloody time," Rodney said.

Ben Jackson scowled. Like any other corsair, he liked his own conceits best. "It works for the Dutchmen," he said stubbornly. "They make England bleed every time they tangle."

"Of course they do," Radcliffe replied. "They have ships to match the English men-of-war, so they can tangle with 'em one on one. Can we do that? Can any ship in Avalon take on a three-masted ship of the line by her lonesome?"

Jackson went on scowling. But he shook his bullet head. "Reckon not." He didn't want to admit it, but he didn't have much choice.

"I reckon not, too," Red Rodney said. "So we have to find some other way to beat those scuts. If it's not fighting in a line, what is it?"

He meant the question to make the mate agree there was no other way. Instead, Jackson proposed one. That surprised Radcliffe. What surprised him more was that, the longer the mate talked, the better he liked the idea.

When Jackson finished, Red Rodney threw back his head and laughed out loud. He pounded the mate on the back. Jackson was bigger and probably stronger than he was, but Rodney staggered him all the same. "By God, we will do that!" he exclaimed. "We will, and we'll see how the honest gentlemen of Stuart like it!" He laughed some more.

William Radcliff went down to the harbor almost every day. It wasn't so much that he hoped to see warships gathered there. He did hope to see them-but, after so much disappointment, those hopes weren't high. He went anyway. Merchantmen came into Stuart; others sailed out. Some were his; others belonged to his rivals. He kept an eye on as many of them as he could. If the man who ran a trading firm didn't know what was going on, how could he tell the people who worked for him what to do?