"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?
"Sail ho!" The cry came from the east, from the lookouts who watched for incoming ships. Pirates had raided Stuart a generation earlier, and caught the town by surprise. That would never happen again.
Stuart had better walls and bigger guns on those walls than was true a generation earlier, too. It also had more men who could snatch up a musket and fight. A generation before, Stuart had been new and raw, a town on the edge of settlement. Now it was part of the hinterland. New, raw towns were springing up to the north and to the west.
"Sail ho! Sail ho!" The cry rang out again and again. Somebody added, "It's a bloody forest of masts out there!"
William couldn't see them yet. And then, all at once, he did. For a moment, alarm swept through him: that was no fleet of merchantmen. He'd planned to go after Avalon. Were the pirates aiming to beat him to the punch in spite of Stuart's improved fortifications?
Then he breathed easier. Pirates didn't sail three-masted ships. They didn't have the crews to man them. Maybe a big fleet from Terranova was coming in. Or maybe, just maybe…
"By God!" William breathed, seeing the Union Jack flying from the mastheads of each ship. "They took their own sweet time, but they finally went and did it."
Six ships of the line and six smaller vessels tied up at the quays. Sailors swarmed ashore to do what they would in Stuart's taverns and brothels. And, in due course, Elijah Walton waddled off the largest man-of-war, the Royal Sovereign. Its figurehead, King Charles in a flowing, curly wig, was almost frighteningly realistic.
He gave William Radcliff a bow well flavored-perhaps overflavored-with irony. "Your fleet, Admiral-as much of it as the Dutchmen aren't doling out," Walton said. "I do not see them here. Have you any notion when they intend to make an appearance-or, indeed, if they do?"
"No, sir. I do not," William replied evenly. "But then, up until your sails were sighted, I would have said the same of the Royal Navy."
"Do you insult me?" Walton's voice went silky with danger. "If you do, we can continue this discussion through our friends. After that, the fleet may find itself with a new admiral."
"If you are a man insulted by plain facts, sir, I shall discuss the matter with whomever you please," William said. "Had you let me finish, you would have heard me counsel a bit more patience, so much already having been required."
He watched Walton chew on that. At last, grudgingly, the Englishman replied, "Well, perhaps it were best to save our bullets for the blighters on the other side. Perhaps, I say. If you feel otherwise, I assure you I shall endeavor to give satisfaction."
I'll kill you if I can, he meant. The language of ceremony was a strange and wonderful thing. William Radcliff bowed. "If at the end we find each other incongenial, we can pursue it then. In the meanwhile, as you say, there are others we should oppose in arms. One thing at a time, sir."
"One thing at a time," Walton agreed. "Not the worst motto I've ever heard. Would you care to come aboard and view your flagship?"
"I should be pleased to do so, and thank you for the courtesy," Radcliff said.
The Royal Sovereign differed from a merchantman not in essence but in scale. Elijah Walton rattled off the numbers as the two men strode the main deck and the quarterdeck. The ship was 234 feet long, had a beam of 49 feet, and displaced around 1,500 tons. She carried 780 sailors, most of them men who could find no easier way to earn a living or whose families had gone to sea for generations.
Walton didn't say that, but William Radcliff knew it full well even so. He sprang from such a family, though not all the Radcliffes and Radcliffs were tied to the sea as they had been in the days of Edward the Founder. Marcus and many others had sunk deep roots in the soil of Atlantis.
"And you will want to see the guns," Walton said.
"Indeed. They and the sails are the point of the whole affair, eh?" Radcliff said.
He ended up admiring them more than he'd thought he would. His merchantmen went armed, too, to beat back pirates if they could. He was intimately familiar with twelve-pounders and smaller pieces. That made him think the forty-two-pounders on the lower gun deck would have nothing new to show him. But he turned out to be wrong. The sheer brutal mass of those big iron monsters took his breath away.
When he remarked on it, Walton smiled. "A man who knows tabby cats may think he knows lions, too-he may, that is, until he hears a lion roar."
"That have I never done," William said.
"I have. It is the most astounding thing," Walton said. "When you hear that sound, you are afraid. You may be the boldest warrior since Hercules, but you are afraid, at some level below conscious thought. It is as though the knowledge that this beast eats men were somehow stamped upon your soul."
"Interesting. I should like the experience one day. Did you hear a lion in the wilds of Africa or at a London zoological garden?"
"The latter, I fear," Elijah Walton replied. "I have been off the African coast-a place full of sickness, of no value to anyone but for the trade in slaves it affords-but I did not hear the creatures there. In London, yes. Strange, is it not?"
"It truly is." Radcliff looked back toward the houses and shops of Stuart: a few built of stone, but more from the abundant Atlantean redwoods and pines. "This is a growing town. One day soon, we ought to have a zoological garden of our own, that our folk might see the marvels of other lands."
"And of your own," Walton said. "So much of what dwells in Atlantis is unique to it."
William Radcliff shrugged. "Our folk are used to honkers and red-crested eagles and cucumber slugs and the like. Well, the explorers and settlers are. In regions inhabited for some little while, you understand, these creatures grow scarce and die out, to be replaced by productions more familiar to your common Englishman. Believe it or not, sir, much of Atlantis is a civilized land."