Fire drove out some of the French settlers. Others grimly died in the flames. The defenders wounded a handful of men. They delayed the English advance by less than an hour. Smelling the stink of charred flesh, Victor shook his head. "Not worth it," he said. "Brave, but not worth it."
"Run is better," Blaise agreed. "Things just…things." He gestured. "Run. Get more things when more time go."
"Later." Victor gave him another new word. He also sent him a quizzical look. "So running is better, eh? You're not a brave man, eh? You could have fooled me."
"Brave when I have to. Brave if I have to," the Negro replied. "If I no have to, I run. Brave again later, maybe." His sly smile said he was showing off the new vocabulary on purpose.
"A redcoat or one of the French regulars would call you a coward for talk like that," Victor Radcliff said.
Blaise only shrugged. "Don't care. Live coward fix things. Dead brave fool…" He pointed toward the burning houses and outbuildings.
"Indeed," Victor said. Blaise raised a questioning eyebrow. "I should say so!" Victor exclaimed. Blaise nodded-he got that. Victor fought to hide a grin. The Negro sergeant was too dark and too lean to make a proper Falstaff himself, but he would have enjoyed drinking with him. They were both a particular kind of practical man.
Victor hadn't tried talking with Blaise about Falstaff, and not just because of the clown's views about honor. He would have had to quote Shakespeare to have it make sense to Blaise, and even then it wouldn't have made sense to him. Shakespeare had written only two lifetimes earlier, but English wasn't the same now as it had been then.
"In Africa," Victor said suddenly, "when old men talk about how their grandfathers talked and about how their grandsons talk, do they notice any difference?"
After some thought, Blaise answered, "They say young boys have not enough-" He frowned, looking for a word. "Like slave for master," he offered.
"Respect," Radcliff suggested.
"Thank you, sir. Respect. Yes. They say young boys have not respect for old, like in their day."
Old men had been saying things like that since Adam started complaining about Cain and Abel. It wasn't what Victor meant. "Do they say the words now are different from the way they were in the old days?"
"I no hear that. I never hear that." Blaise shook his head.
"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.