Roland swore. So did Montcalm-Gozon. Expecting the English to sit around waiting for trouble would not do. They wanted to go out and cause it instead. Now locals and regulars had to figure out what to do about that.
XX
W ar was wicked and evil and woeful. So the Good Book insisted. War brought pain and misery and suffering. So anyone with an eye to see could tell. War ruined hopes and buried young men and sent years of patient toil up in smoke.
And when everything that went up in smoke belonged to the enemy, when he hurt and was miserable and suffered, war could be a devil of a lot of fun. So Victor Radcliff discovered as his band of brigands swooped down on one plantation after another.
No border guards tried to keep them out of the French settlements in Atlantis. Maybe there were guards farther east, but not where he broke in. It wasn't far from the place where he and Blaise and the two copperskins from Terranova had escaped the untender welcome of the French settlers. Victor wondered what had happened to the Frenchmen who'd been here then. They were probably with the army south of Freetown.
"Your old master anywhere around here?" he asked Blaise.
The Negro shook his head. "No, sir. Farther south."
"We're far enough south already. Too far, by God," a raider said, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve. By his accent, he came from Croydon or one of the other towns north of Hanover. No, he wouldn't be used to weather like this, especially not in November. Ferns here sprouted from the sides of stone fences-sometimes from the sides of stone buildings. Barrel trees grew in abundant profusion. Lizards as long as a man's leg scurried through the undergrowth. Some of the snakes were big enough to eat men.
And Victor asked, "Are there crocodiles in the rivers down where you were?"
"Oh, yes." Blaise nodded matter-of-factly. "But crocodiles in Africa, too. Be careful, mostly no trouble."
"Mostly?" The man who came from somewhere near Croydon didn't sound reassured.
"Life is life," Blaise said with a shrug. "Mostly no trouble as good as it gets. The French now, they has mostly got trouble."
His grammar stumbled-on purpose?-but he wasn't wrong. Barns and plantation houses went up in flames. The raiders hadn't come to set black and copperskinned slaves free, but they didn't stop them from plundering and taking off for the north.
"Why do you do this?" an old woman asked Victor as a stately home where her family might have lived for generations burned to the ground. "Have I ever done anything to you, Monsieur?"
He bowed. "By no means. But an army of French settlers-and, by now, I daresay, French regulars as well-has invaded lands that belong to my king and my countrymen. Shall we let them get by with that without repaying it where and as we can?"
"Go fight these other soldiers, then. They have wronged you, it could be. I have done you no harm." The old woman started to cry. "Ruins! Everything ruins!"
Victor didn't know whether the redcoats and English settlers below Freetown were strong enough to fight the French straight up. He knew the force he commanded wasn't strong enough to do anything of the sort. But he knew some other things, too. "If we make your settlements howl," he said, "your generals will have to leave the land they invaded and come back to defend their own."
"What good does that do me?" the woman howled as the roof on the house collapsed in a shower of sparks.
It did her no good at all, as Victor knew. But that wasn't his worry. He aimed to make all the French settlements howl the way she did. With the small force at his disposal, that might have been more than he could reasonably expect to do. If you thought small, though, you wouldn't end up with much.
"March on!" he shouted to his men, and march they did.
Some of the plantations had young women on them, as well as or instead of old ones. Some unfortunate things happened-the young women would surely have agreed. Victor tried a couple of soldiers at drumhead courts-martial, and hanged them when they were convicted. Afterwards, those kinds of outrages stopped…or, if they didn't, the offenders got more careful. As Blaise said, mostly no trouble was about as much as you could hope for.
"Why you slay them?" the Negro asked. "They hurt enemy, too."
"Rape is a crime even when a soldier does it," Radcliff said.
"You think the French, they don't fuck English women?" With a limited vocabulary, Blaise could be very blunt.
"They probably do," Victor answered with a sigh. "But if they get caught, French officers will punish them. They use the same laws of war we do."
"Laws of war." As before when he heard that phrase, Blaise was bemused. "You white people plenty smart, but sometimes I think you crazy, too."
"Maybe we are. But if we're all crazy the same way, it evens out," Victor Radcliff said.
Some of the French were crazy in a different way: crazy enough to try to fight back against half a regiment's worth of men. They paid for their folly. Victor made a point of ensuring that they wound up dead. He also made a point-though a quieter one-of looking the other way when his men took their women in among the trees.
"Maybe you not so crazy after all," Blaise remarked.
"Maybe not," Victor said with a sigh. "Or maybe the extent to which I am a beast marks the extent to which I am a sane man."
The Negro frowned. "Don't understand that."
"Don't trouble your head about it." Radcliff set a hand on his shoulder. "I'm not sure I understand it, either. I'm not sure I want to understand it."
His raiders pushed east and south, in the direction of the ocean. He didn't expect to wash his hands in the Atlantic. Pretty soon, the French would scrape together enough militiamen to bar his way. The farther east the English went, the more towns and villages they ran into. And towns and villages had lots of men in them. Men with muskets hastily pressed into service didn't make the best soldiers. But Victor was uneasily aware his own men had been amateurs not long before. If you lived through a couple of skirmishes, you got an idea of what needed doing.
Again, Blaise had his own idea of what needed doing. "Should say all niggers here free, M'sieu Victor. Copperskins, too. You get more fighters. And the French settlers, they can't do a thing without those people."
He was bound to be right about that. Slowly, Victor said, "I have no orders to do any such thing."
"Why you need orders?" Blaise demanded.
"If we win this war, I think England will take away the French settlements in Atlantis," Victor said. "Maybe the Spanish settlements, too."
"And so?" Blaise cared nothing for that. "Most niggers and copperskins are free in English lands now."
"Slavery makes no money up in the north. The crops won't support it," Victor replied. "Things are different here. How can you raise cotton or indigo or rice or even pipeweed without plantations? How can you have plantations without slaves?"
Blaise looked at him-looked through him, really. "We don't use money in Africa. Maybe we lucky. You put money ahead of free?"
"If all the slaves down here are suddenly freed, everyone in these parts is liable to starve, Negroes and Terranovans and whites alike," Victor said.
"Pay people to work the farms," Blaise said. "They do it, I bet."
"It could be," Victor admitted. "Say it is."
"Then everybody free!" Blaise exclaimed.
"Maybe. Or maybe everyone is free to starve. Paying workers costs more than keeping slaves. If there is no profit, the plantations go to ruin," Victor said.
Blaise was a shrewd man, no two ways about it. "Make people who buy from them pay more," he said.
"And all the plantations in Terranova will undersell us, so we go to the dogs just the same. They grow cotton and rice and indigo in India, too, and I hear they will grow pipeweed there soon," Radcliff said.
"I hear about Terranova," Blaise said. "Where is this India place?"