Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"Oh, well." Victor shrugged. He wondered how much French had changed since Shakespeare's day. That might be an interesting question to ask Roland Kersauzon…if the two of them weren't otherwise occupied trying to blow each other's heads off.

Right now, that seemed unlikely.

Roland swept out his right arm. "There is another band of the accursed English brigands. Hunt them down!"

Baying like wolves, his soldiers swarmed after the fleeing men from the English settlements. (The phrase occurred to Roland even though he'd never seen or heard a wolf. So many of the stories that came from France featured them. He could picture them plainly: bigger than dogs, shaped like foxes, but gray and ferocious.)

A few of the men who'd come south to disrupt the French army's supply lines still showed fight. Most of them, though, wanted no more than to get away with their lives. They'd had a high old time shooting teamsters and plundering wagons. They hadn't come down here to fight when the numbers weren't all in their favor. But when Kersauzon detached his settlers from Montcalm-Gozon's regulars, they had no trouble overwhelming the company or so of men kicking up trouble along the coast.

Muskets bellowed. Puffs of gray smoke marked where shooters stood. That familiar, sulfurous smell made Roland smile. But he wished gunpowder didn't so clearly point out every man who fired. If anyone ever devised a powder that didn't smoke, he would win a great advantage in war.

In the meantime, his men and the enemy used what they had. The English settlers fought from cover instead of standing in a neat line till they got shot down. That didn't change the result, but did make things take longer. Roland's men were settlers, too. They advanced by little skittering rushes. Some of them fired to keep the English busy while the others moved up.

At close quarters, it came to bayonets and swords and hatchets and knives and fists and teeth. Only a handful of English settlers surrendered. Cursed raiders they might be, but they had courage.

"You aren't supposed to be here, you damned nuisance," a wounded prisoner told Kersauzon.

"That is the best place to be, where you are not supposed to," the French commander replied. "Your friends thought so, oui?"

"Well, what if we did?" the prisoner said. "Jesus, this leg hurts. Nobody ever went and shot me before."

"Quelle dommage," Roland said, as if he meant it.

"What will you do now?" the captive asked.

"Go on and give your other band of raiders, the larger one, the same kind of surprise we just gave you, if God grants that that be possible," Roland answered frankly. Why not? The prisoner wasn't going to escape, steal a horse, and gallop off to tell Victor Radcliff an army was coming after him. Such things happened in romances, but not in life.

"What will you do with me?" the man inquired. Maybe he'd meant that all along.

"Give you to the surgeons, of course," Kersauzon said. "We are not barbarians, to torment you for the sport of it. We are French. You are English. We are all civilized men, is it not so?"

"Boy, I hope it is," the enemy muttered. Apprehensively, he went on. "What do you think the surgeons will do?"

"Remove the musket ball, unless they decide it is better left alone. This happens sometimes, but not often."

"Remove it? Easy for you to say. It's not your leg. Will they give me whiskey to drink and a bullet to bite on?"

"We use rum and a leather strap," Roland said.

"Rum will do," the English settler said eagerly. He didn't compare the effectiveness of the bullet and the strap.

"Rum you shall have," Kersauzon promised. He gestured to the prisoner's guards. "Take him away."

Away the man went. Wounded French settlers were already howling under the surgeons' ministrations. Roland couldn't distinguish the prisoner's cries of torment from those of his own troops. Wounded men all made the same noises.

Roland wished he wouldn't have had to waste time dealing with the seaborne raiders. They were only a nuisance…though Montcalm-Gozon, whose supply of victuals they'd interrupted, probably would have expressed a different view. Roland didn't care about the fancy French nobleman's opinions here. Neither did the men who followed him. They knew too well what Victor Radcliff's bandits were doing to the property and persons of people who mattered to them. They aimed to stop the bandits as soon as they could.

He wondered whether, had he loosed his men as raiders, they could have wreaked as much havoc on the English settlements as the enemy was doing down here. Regretfully, he decided it was unlikely. Up in English-held territory, farms were smaller, villages were more common, and people lived closer to one another. The English had a better chance of mustering a scratch force that could slow up raiders-and raiders who had to slow up were raiders in trouble.

None of the anguished messages coming out of the southwest made him think the English settlers had had to slow down much. If they wanted to, they could probably go all the way down into the subtropical settlements that belonged to the King of Spain.

Kersauzon blinked. If the English did invade the Spanish settlements, what should he do about it? Spain and France were allied against England in the European war. They were allies here, too-in theory. But Roland would have been most affronted-which was putting it mildly-had Spanish soldiers entered the French settlements. No doubt the Spanish authorities (assuming they woke up from their long, long siestas) would be just as unhappy about French settlers fighting on their steaming soil.

And yet the Spaniards were probably even thinner on the ground than the French. Victor Radcliff brigands could do a lot of damage down there. Who would stop them? Anybody?

"A messenger!" Roland shouted. He had paper and ink and a quill with him at all times: the responsibility that went with command. He was already writing when a young horseman came up and waited expectantly.

"What do you need, Monsieur?" the rider asked.

"Take a letter to his Excellency, Don Jose Valverde, the governor-general of Spanish Atlantis, in Gernika. You also need to know what it says, in case it should be damaged. I am asking Don Jose for permission to follow the English raiders into his territory if they go that way. I have no designs against Spanish Atlantis: I aim only to destroy the raiders. Give me that back, if you would be so kind."

After several tries, the messenger had it straight. Roland sealed the letter (sealing wax being another essential for a man of his position) and handed it to him. Sketching a salute, the youngster rode off to the south.

Gernika, Roland thought. He'd never been there himself. He didn't want to deal with the Spaniards under these circumstances. What you wanted, though, and what you got…

E ven the trees down here were strange. Some barrel trees dwarfed barrels-and men. Others had round trunks full of sweet sap. Victor Radcliff had already enjoyed the rumlike drink the French and especially the Spaniards brewed from it.

Conifers were different, too. In floral wreaths, cypress meant mourning. Here in southern Atlantis, cypresses just grew. Locals used the timber in their buildings, even if it wasn't as good as pine or redwood. The farther south Victor and his men went, the more mossy beards hung from cypress branches.

And the more snakes lurked in the trees and in the undergrowth.

One of the raiders was bitten; he died in short order despite having the wound cauterized and being given all the rum he could drink to keep his heart strong.

Some of the snakes had rattles at the ends of their tails, like many of the venomous serpents Victor knew farther north. Again like those farther north, some shook their tails before striking but had no rattles to warn their victims. And some simply skulked and struck. Some were probably harmless, but after the death Victor's followers weren't inclined to take chances. If it slithered and they saw it, it died.