"Let's go down to the sea," he said. "We've come all this way-we shouldn't leave the last few miles undone."
The ocean here was nothing like the cold, green-gray one off Hanover's muddy beaches. The water here was turquoise. It looked warm enough to bathe in. The sand leading down to it was golden as a pretty girl's hair. An enormous black bird glided past overhead; it had a leathery red sac under its throat.
Several crocodiles unhurriedly ambled off the beach and into the ocean. Too bad, Victor Radcliff thought. With so much firepower at hand, they would have been easy to kill. And, even though crocodiles were ugly, they made better than tolerable eating.
Victor focused on the crocodiles and the frigate bird. Blaise was the one who pointed farther out to sea and said, "What ships are those?"
"Damnation!" Victor exclaimed. Several frigates cruised along on that lovely blue sea. His first horrified thought was that some French or Spanish admiral had got much too clever for comfort. It could cause him all kinds of trouble. If he didn't move his men off the beach, those ships could bombard them, and damn all he could do about it. Or they could land raiding parties, strike at him, and then get away before he could respond. Just by being there, they denied him the seacoast. He felt trapped between their anvil and the hammer of Roland Kersauzon's French settlers.
"What to do, Monsieur?" Blaise asked.
"Good question," Radcliff answered dully. He raised a spyglass to his right eye for a closer look at the ships. If they were French frigates, he might persuade their skippers he and his men were Spaniards. Conversely, if the ships were Spanish, maybe he could fool the captains into thinking he was Kersauzon. It might work for a little while, anyhow, though what good it would do he wasn't quite sure. He was looking for something-anything-to try, that was all.
He slid the shiny brass tube out a little farther to bring the frigates into sharper focus. Then he started to laugh. And, once he started, he had a hard time stopping. He wanted to keep on braying idiot mirth up to the sky that was only a couple of shades lighter than the sea.
Somebody not far away said, "He's gone clean round the bend, he has."
"What you see?" someone else asked. That was Blaise, his accent distinctive.
Reluctantly, Victor lowered the telescope. "Those ships out there…" He couldn't go on. He started laughing again instead.
"You better tell us." Now Blaise sounded almost threatening. Several of the white men around Victor looked the same way.
He took a deep breath and held it as long as he could. Then he let it all out and did the same thing again, trying to flush the laughter from his system. Only after that did he try to speak once more: "Those ships out there…They're English." That got him a load of profanity and obscenity covering as much relief as he felt himself.
As usual, Blaise was a man of direct action. He snatched the spyglass from Radcliff's hand and raised it to his own eye. He didn't understand how the lenses bent light-he thought it was magic. (Well, Victor didn't understand why the telescope worked, either. He did doubt whether witchcraft had anything to do with it.) Lack of understanding didn't mean he couldn't focus. Like Victor, he accepted the color-fringed, upside-down images as the price of magnification.
And, like Victor, he started to laugh, even if not so loud or so long. "Fuck me," he said reverently. "They are English shipses."
"What are they doing here?" someone asked, which had also crossed Victor Radcliff's mind. "Are they waiting for us?"
"Maybe they are, by God," Victor said. "But whether they are or not, they can give us a ride home." The phrase deus ex machina ran through his mind. If those ships weren't the visible hand of Providence stretched out on the waters…If they weren't, then they were Somebody's idea of a cruel joke. Victor refused to believe that. He called out an order: "Show all the Union Jacks we have-the bigger, the better."
The flags had grown tattered in their journey through French and Spanish Atlantis. Victor didn't care. They wouldn't be mistaken for the emblem of either enemy kingdom. They wouldn't be-and they weren't. The nearest frigate sailed closer yet. Victor imagined its captain peering shoreward through a spyglass just like his own. Before long, the ship lowered a boat.
It stopped just out of musket range of the beach. "Ahoy!" shouted someone aboard, his voice coming thin over the water. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"
Victor explained. Then he asked the same question of the bosun or lieutenant or whoever he was in the boat.
"We were ordered down here to find you," the man replied. "Looks like we've gone and done it, too."
"What will you do now that you have?"
"Bring you back, of course."
"Good God!" Victor said. "Not that we aren't glad to see you, but who sent you down here? How did you know where we were?"
"I hear it was that army bastard, Lieutenant-Colonel What's-His-Name. Charlie," the sailor answered, showing his scorn for anything in a red coat. "He got your despatches, looked at a map, and said, 'Go there. You'll just about find him.' And we just about did, didn't we?"
"Bless my soul," Victor murmured. Thinking an Englishman stodgy just because he was an Englishman wouldn't do. The officer had used his imagination, and used it well. His scheme wouldn't have worked unless England ruled the seas, but England did, and he took advantage of it. And, with Roland Kersauzon's French settlers nipping at his heels, Radcliff was glad he did.
"What do we do?" Blaise asked.
"We go back to Freetown, that's what," Victor answered. "And we don't have to fight our way through Spanish and French Atlantis or plunge into the western wilderness to do it."
Blaise considered, but not for long. "Good," he said.
Leading the raiders onto the ships was a long, tedious job. Victor formed a rear-guard perimeter, and kept it in place as long as he could. After a while, it wouldn't have done much good. There weren't enough soldiers manning it. Had Kersauzon's troops descended on them then, it would have been embarrassing, to say the least. But luck had been with Radcliff all through the filibustering expedition, and it stayed with him now.
He and Blaise were the last two men from the raiding party to step into a boat. Blaise grimaced. "Last time I went in ship, they took me from Africa," he said.
Victor knew what hellholes slave ships-blackbirds, they called them-were. He knew, but Blaise knew. "This won't be that bad," Victor told the Negro.
"Better not," Blaise said. Grunting sailors pushed the boat into the sea. Their mates pulled them aboard. They plied the oars like clockwork automata. The land receded. The frigate drew nearer. Victor was delighted. If Blaise was, too, his face didn't know about it.
Roland Kersauzon stood on the golden beach, cursing Don Jose. He cursed the governor of Spanish Atlantis in his rising and setting, his waking and sleeping, his eating and shitting. He wished the governor's wife would take the pox from him, and he wished Don Jose would take the pox from his wife.
"If he'd made up his mind…!" Roland howled. "If only he had a mind to make up!"
The Englishmen were gone. They'd flown the coop. No, actually they hadn't-they could no more fly than honkers could. Roland had hoped to shoot them down the way settlers shot honkers, too. And he might have done it-he might well have done it, since he was sure he had more men than they did-if only Don Jose hadn't sent him away before urging him back. Had the governor of Spanish Atlantis been a woman toying with her lover, that would have been one thing. But he was a man of responsibility, toying with the fate of his settlements.
Yes, the English raiders were gone. Kersauzon had brought the French settlers through the madness of the slave uprising. They'd done their share-more than their share, probably, since the Spanish settlers seemed notably reluctant to fight-to quell it. They'd got on Victor Radcliff's trail. Thanks to the wreckage Radcliff's raiders left behind, a blind man could have followed it. But it ended here.