The Shadows of God (11 page)

After a long moment, the screw came off, fastened still by a cable from the inside, and a man stuck his head out. He wore a grenadier’s red, floppy hat.

After a moment, Oglethorpe heard him shout.

“ Tis clear! Eto
khorosho
!”

Two men skittered out of the thing like ants from a hole and manned the swivel guns.

Another of the ships surfaced, as fifteen men trooped off the first, throwing down a gangplank so they could cross to shore. Then yet two more ships breached the river’s skin. By the time the fourth had fully surfaced, there were upward of thirty men on shore, and that was too many.

Oglethorpe raised his hand and chopped it down, and the river sucked in blood and lead.

First to go were the gunners, though one managed to get a wild tear off into the forest, a lance of blue-white flame that charred what it touched but left no fire behind. A huge oak fell, cut in half. The gunner’s right eye blew out the back of his head, along with some of his brains, as a ranger’s bullet put an end to him.

Maroons shinnied into the overhanging trees and dropped grenades into the open hatches, and oily black smoke puffed up. The Russians and Tories on land returned fire as best they could, but mostly they died. Two of the ships sank again from sight, one with its hatch still open. Air boiled up furiously, and men with it. One ship had never opened its hatch, and it went down more smoothly.

After a volley or two, Oglethorpe gave the command to cease fire, and the sound of muskets trailed off raggedly and finally stopped. A few men were still clambering from the remaining amphibian, and about half of those on shore were dead. The others were trying to form a square, frantically loading and priming their weapons.

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Oglethorpe could see only one officer.

“Surrender, sir,” Oglethorpe called. “Surrender, and no more of you shall die.

Resist, and every man of you will be cut down.”

The officer, a Russian, stared hopelessly for another moment or two, then motioned for his men to lower their weapons. Instantly, Oglethorpe’s regulars moved in to confiscate them.

Oglethorpe confronted the officer.

“Do you speak English, sir?”

“Some.”

“You have ships down there. I want them up and open.”

“I have no more ships.”

“I just
saw
them. Man, how do you think we knew to be right here, at the very moment when you came to surface? Mar told us all. Not only that, he ordered his troops here to move elsewhere, so you would have no cover. Downstream, my men have already stretched chains, but they won’t be needed. At this range, we can use the same device we’ve used against your airships to render your amphibians powerless. I’d rather have them working, naturally, but I have one already, and that will do.”

The man hesitated a long moment. “I shall have to use the aquaphore in my ship. By the time the wretched smoke you filled it with clears enough, the others will either surface to fight or try to run. There is nothing I can do until the smoke clears.”

“That is if they surface.”

In the end, they ran. A detachment followed them down the river a safe distance from the captured ship, then used the devil gun. An hour later, two ships surfaced and floated until they fetched against the chains. The stuff of their hulls was too hard to break through with the weapons Oglethorpe’s men THE SHADOWS OF GOD

had, but they unmounted one of the blue-fire guns, took it downstream, and tried that. It cut the ships open quite nicely, and they sank. As they took on water, the hatches came open then, damn fast, and after the first three men on each had fallen dead from musket shot, the rest came out with hands raised high.

They marched the prisoners back to Oglethorpe’s mansion and added them to those chained in the servants’ quarters. Meanwhile, Oglethorpe set the more scientifically minded of his men to finding out who the pilots of the ships were.

“I want us to be able to use that ship by morning,” he said. “And I’ll need volunteers to learn its operation.”

“Sir, I’d like to do that!” MacKay said.

“You’ve experience in this line?”

“I ran a steam galliot against the Spanish, Margrave.”

“Good. You’ll be our chief pilot, then.”

“Thank you, Margrave.”

Oglethorpe nodded briskly. “Meanwhile, I want an order to go down for half of those redcoats laying siege to Nairne and his people to march south, away from here. Have Mar sign it, as he did the last.”

“Sir, this can’t last forever,” Parmenter said. “Sooner or later they will realize they’ve been tricked.”

“Indeed, and I will not count on this succeeding. But it is certainly worth trying.”

“And now what, General?”

“We move by morning, using the amphibian boat. We’ll attack from the river side, coming out of their own ship. They’ll never know what hit ”em. The real trick is to get Nairne to start something at the same moment, so we can have THE SHADOWS OF GOD

the confusion as great as possible.“

“I can do that, sir,” Parmenter replied.

“How?”

“I know that fort, sir. I can get near enough to put a message over the wall.”

“Without getting caught? Because if you’re caught, they’ll be onto us.

“I can do it, sir. I swear it.”

Oglethorpe regarded the ranger for a moment, thinking that he had never known a man with a more level head.

“Very well, Captain. How many men will you need?”

“Two will do, sir. If they’ll do it, I prefer Unoka and Jehpath.”

“Both Maroons?”

“Best for this sort of work.”

“And damned hard to see at night, eh?” Yes, sir.

“Go to it then.”

Two months ago,
Oglethorpe mused as he watched Parmenter go,
no white
man or Indian I knew trusted those Africans as far as they could spit. Now
we can hardly do without them, no more than we could do without the
Indians.

Because this was their sort of war, which by European standards was merely murder. But then, all war was murder. Why put an uglier face on this, or a pretty one on what he had seen at Vienna? He blinked away the memory of the Turks, practically swimming up siege trenches full of their own blood, falling under the ruthless rain of lead the Holy Roman army had loosed on them. For his own part, Oglethorpe had never even known if one of his own bullets killed THE SHADOWS OF GOD

or not. It was impossible to tell.

Here, he knew what he did, what he was responsible for. What he fought for.

He could look in his heart and feel no shame, despite it all. He did what he must.

They landed the ship without being seen. Fort Montgomery commanded a high bluff, and the land around it for nearly a league was pretty clear. An outer wall surrounding the town of Montgomery—a town of some two thousand souls

—had already fallen, and now trenches zigzagged very near the fort itself. The fort had been built sturdily, the lower wall of dressed stone quarried far up the Oconee River and ferried arduously down at great cost. It was worth it—a wooden fort would have fallen long ago. This one would have, too, if the invading army had sent its best artillery, or even the blue-fire weapons that he had captured yesterday. Or who knew? From what he had gathered, Mar had bungled the siege very badly, losing three aerial ships to Nairne’s devil gun.

Perhaps he had lost his firedrakes and seeking cannon as well. Nairne, after all, had Indian fighters aplenty.

Whatever the case, this was old-style warfare. Trenches snaked up the hill, the angle mostly protecting the diggers. Of course the diggers were taloi, and in fact the ground near the fort was littered with the broken forms of the automatons. Mar had tried at least one straight assault.

The battle would have ended today, however, with the weapons the amphibian boats carried.

A few redcoats came down to water, curious, as Oglethorpe’s men set up their artillery, but at that moment the fort loosed what was probably most of its remaining firepower, and there was even a sally from the gate. Oglethorpe’s men, dressed in Russian and English uniforms, quietly killed those who came to investigate. When they had their guns set up, they started to fire into the enemy’s rear.

At first things went well, and the new weapons did their work with awful efficiency. But then some enterprising English captain managed to get a charge together, and they came crashing through the withering fire.

Oglethorpe admired them, of course; but if they made it, he and all his men THE SHADOWS OF GOD

were doomed. If their line fell, there was nowhere to go but the river.

He wheeled around, shouting encouragement, firing his pistol. He found himself staring into the mouth of a musket less than ten feet away, and he took careful aim at the man, not flinching when the weapon belched and something hotter than fire seared along his cheek. Oglethorpe’s
kraftpistole
crackled, and the redcoat died. But the enemy surged forward in good order, reloading and firing even as they died.

His own men were turning skittish. They were good at what they did, but this was not what they did. He had made a mistake, and now his men and everyone from Azilia—everyone in the
world,
if Franklin was right—would pay.

And then, like the sun parting a cloud, the attack fell apart. The blue fire of the swivel guns from the amphibian ship blazed through one too many of them, the stench of their burning comrades snapped their courage, and they ran or threw down their arms or dropped to their knees in prayer.

And it was over. By three o’clock that afternoon, James Edward Oglethorpe and Thomas Nairne, governor of South Carolina in exile clasped each other like long-lost brothers and began to discuss what to do with a captured army twice the size of their own combined forces.

They did not spend long in celebrating. Mar still had men in the area, tricked into relocating by Oglethorpe’s false communiques. The two commanders dispatched troops to deal with them, and Oglethorpe sent for Mar to be brought to the more secure Fort Montgomery.

“You did well by me, Governer Nairne,” Oglethorpe said that evening, as they sat in a half-darkened room, poring over maps and papers taken from Mar’s things.

Nairne, a square-faced fellow with salt-and-pepper hair nodded wearily.

“Thank you, Margrave. I most sincerely tried to. For commanding the Continental Army, we all owe you immeasurably. I could not see your capital taken while you were elsewhere.” He leaned back and took a deep puff on his clay pipe, and the pungent scent of tobacco bloomed into the air. “Besides, where else to go?”

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“Another few days’ march would have had you in Apalachee territory, which has more easily defended forts,” Oglethorpe pointed out.

“And abandon good Englishmen?”

“I have taken to calling us Americans,” Oglethorpe said quietly. “After all, many who fight with us owe little to England. Our own colonies were enemies not long ago.”

“Aye. And I want that well mended,” Nairne said.

“I believe you do. Those in your Parliament who hate Azilia are with the Pretender now, as I see it. Out here, we are all brothers. Azilians, Carolinians, Maroons, Yamacraws, Apalachees.”

“Now you sound like our Mr. Franklin.”

“Mr. Franklin is wiser than I first gave him credit for.” Oglethorpe lifted his sherry. “I got this from the Apalachee. It was a gift from Don Sancho of San Luis. It is my last bottle.” He sipped it carefully. “Have we heard from Mr.

Franklin?”

“That he was in danger. We got word that the Pretender’s ambassador, Sterne, had gone ahead to the Coweta. Don Pedro—speaking of Apalachee bravos—followed after Franklin, to warn him.”

“What about his aetherschreiber?”

“As you must know, we’ve been having trouble with those. It’s my guess that the Russian warlocks have some method of intercepting their messages. We’ve stopped using them.”

Oglethorpe frowned, then turned to MacKay, who sat, half drowsing, at the end of the table.

“Captain MacKay, go invite the Earl of Mar to join us, please.” Yes, sir.

“And, MacKay, by ”invite,“ I mean ask civilly, but if he gives you any back talk, THE SHADOWS OF GOD

haul him here by his ears.”

MacKay winked. “Yes, sir.”

Mar was nearly apoplectic when MacKay brought him in.

“Good evening, my good earl,” Oglethorpe said. “Captain MacKay, you may release the gentleman now.”

“Very good, sir,” MacKay replied, letting the blustering lord’s very red ears go.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Have a seat, Mar, if you please.”

“I do
not
please. What more can you ask of me? I betrayed my entire army to you.”

“Indeed, and so you are several times a traitor. Do you think I’m grateful to you? You are a worm, sir, and so act like one. If you do not, I shall expend whatever energy is required to bring you ”round to your wormdom, though I doubt it shall need very much. I may not even need my Indians.“

“What do you want?”

“You’ve met Governor Nairne?”

“I have not.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” Nairne said. “I am very well pleased to see you here.

I hope you and your murderous friends have treated my city of Charles Town well, or I may be more pleased to have you with me than you can imagine.”

“Charles Town is quite well, and under proper English rule.”

“Oh, indeed? And how can English rule be proper without English law, which I have seen none of? Never mind, sir, we are not met here to debate.”

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“What then?”

“Governor Nairne has learned that you have been intercepting our aetherschreiber communiques. Where are they?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Oglethorpe drew his pistol, took careful aim, and shot Mar in the foot.

That set off a bit a of scurrying among the guards, but it was just as well. Mar wasn’t able to talk properly for a few moments, but he drew a packet of letters from the inside pocket of his coat.

“That’s all of them,” he said feebly.

“Sir,” Oglethorpe said, “I have let you keep as much dignity is possible, but you are trying me. I did not have your person searched, and see how you repay me.