"They do sound like moles," de la Fayette said, "save that they are of the reptile kind rather than being furry. But has Atlantis no true moles?"
"No more than we have any other viviparous quadrupeds except bats," Victor replied. "We have now the usual domestic beasts, and rats and mice plague our towns and houses. Deer and foxes course the woods, along with wild dogs and cats. Settlers brought all those beasts, though: this was a land of birds and scaly things before they came."
"And yet Terranova, beyond Atlantis, has an abundance of productions much like Europe's," de la Fayette said. "How could this be so?"
"The first man who learns the truth there will write his name in large letters amongst those of the leading savants of his day," Victor said. "But what that truth may be, I have not the faintest idea. I am more interested in learning how to winkle General
Cornwallis out of Croydon."
"You do not believe we can storm this line?"
"Do you?" Victor didn't like answering a question with a question, but he wanted to find out what the Frenchman thought
De la Fayette's shrug held a certain eloquence. "It would be… difficult."
Victor sighed. Steam puffed from his mouth and nostrils: the day was chilly. "They do have good engineers." The new English line before Croydon took advantage of every little swell of ground. It was also far enough outside the town to keep Atlantean and French field guns from bearing on the harbor. That meant the attackers couldn't keep the Royal Navy from resupplying Cornwallis. "Heaven only knows what kind of butcher's bill we'll pay to break in."
"One larger than we should desire, without doubt," de la Fayette said, and Victor could only nod glumly. The marquis added, "Our best course, then, appears to be to proceed by saps and parallels."
Formal European siege warfare had had little place in Atlantis. Victor and Cornwallis had invested Nouveau Redon, but they hadn't advanced towards it a line at a time. Cornwallis' clever engineers had stopped the spring instead, which made the defenders abandon the town for a sally with scant hope of success.
"That will take some time," Victor said.
"Are you urgently required elsewhere?" de la Fayette inquired.
"Well, no," Victor admitted. "But if the English choose to reinforce their garrison while we dig, we shall have wasted considerable effort."
"So we shall. What of it?" de la Fayette said. "We shall also have wasted considerable effort-and just as much time-if we merely encircle the English position. Better to do our utmost to force a surrender, n'est-cepas?"
"Mm," Victor Radcliff said. "When you put it that way-"
"How else would you have me put it?" the marquis asked. "And, once we have demonstrated to the English commander that we are capable of making the approaches effecting a breach, how can he do anything but surrender?"
"Is that the custom in Europe?" Victor said.
"Most assuredly," de la Fayette replied. "Continuing the battle after a breach is made would be merely a pointless effusion of blood, don't you think?"
"If you say so," Victor replied. If de la Fayette thought that way, Cornwallis likely would, too: they fought in the same style Victor thought there were times when he would keep fighting as long as he had one man left who could aim a musket. But he was only an Atlantean bumpkin-in the eyes of Europeans, just a short step better than a copperskin-so what did he know?
"I do say so," de la Fayette insisted.
"Saps and parallels, then," Victor said, and the Frenchman nodded.
Saps and parallels were part of a soldier's jargon. Even Victor Radcliff, who'd never used them or even seen them used, knew of them. And they were always mentioned that way: always saps and parallels, never parallels and saps.
In the field, though, the parallel always came first. People could argue about the chicken and the egg, but not about the sap and the parallel. One evening, under the profane direction of their engineers, French soldiers began digging a trench aligned with the stretch of enemy works the army would eventually assail. That was how the parallel got its name.
The Frenchmen threw up the dirt they excavated on the side where it would protect them from English fire. At that range- four or five hundred yards-only a lucky shot could hit anyone, but the game had its rules. And, when the redcoats realized what was going on, so many shots would fly through the air that some were bound to be lucky.
Realization came at sunrise the next morning. Cornwallis knew the same tricks as de la Fayette. They might have sprung from different kingdoms, but it was as if they'd attended the same college As soon as Cornwallis saw that growing parapet protecting the first parallel, he did what any other commanding officer in his unpleasant position would have done: he started shooting at it with everything he could bring to bear.
Musketeers banged away. By the lead they expended, they might have been mining the stuff under Croydon. Most of the bullets either fell short or thumped into the dirt of the parapet. A few, more likely by luck than by design, just got over the top of the parapet and into the trench it warded. Wounded men went howling back toward the surgeons. One unfortunate fellow caught a musket ball in the side of the head and simply fell over, dead before he hit the ground.
English field guns also opened up on the parallel. The parapet swallowed some cannon balls, but others got through. Some skipped harmlessly between soldiers. That was uncommon luck; a cannon ball could knock down three or four men, and too often did.
Cornwallis stayed busy back in Croydon, too. His men soon found or made mortars, as the Atlanteans had outside of Hanover. Mortars had no trouble at all throwing their shells over the parapet and down into the parallel. At least as often as not, that didn't matter. English fuses were as unreliable as the ones Victor Radcliffs artillerists used. Sometimes the mortar bombs burst in the air. Very often, they failed to burst at all.
Every once in a while, though, everything would go as the artillerists wished it would all the time. Then the shell would go off just when the gunners had in mind, and the exploding powder would work a fearful slaughter. But it didn't happen often enough to keep men out of the trench.
When the first parallel got long enough to satisfy de la Fayette's engineers, they-or rather, French soldiers (and now Atlanteans with them)-began digging a zigzag trench toward the English outworks: a sap. Because of the way the sap ran, it was harder to protect than the parallel had been. More mangled men went off to the surgeons. Some would get better after their ministrations'-although a good many of those, no doubt, would have got better without those ministrations. Others would get wounds that festered, and would slowly and painfully waste away. So war was; so war had always been; so, as far as Victor Radcliff could tell, war would ever be.
"Are the redcoats likely to sally?" Victor asked as the sap snaked closer to the enemy line.
"I don't think so, not yet," de la Fayette answered. "Look how much open ground they would have to cross before they could interrupt us. Our musketeers and your fine riflemen and the cannon would slaughter too many of them to make it worthwhile. When we draw closer… That may prove a different story."
Victor grunted. Like so many things de la Fayette said, the Frenchman's explanation made such good sense, Victor wondered why he hadn't thought of it himself. Of course Cornwallis would wait till they'd dug another parallel or two before trying to disrupt the excavations with his foot soldiers. Victor would have done the same thing himself.
He rode back to a high point so he could survey Croydon and his harbor with his spyglass. The Royal Navy frigates were gone, but several tubby merchantmen had taken their place. Tiny in the distance even through his lenses, stevedores carried sacks of grain off the ships and into the town. Victor swore under his breath. Atlanteans and Frenchmen would have to break through the defenses in front of Croydon, for they would never starve the redcoats out.
"No big guns there, then. No nasty warships, neither," Blaise said when Victor gave him that bit of intelligence. He added,
"Where did the Royal Na
vy go? When will it come back?"
"If I knew, I would tell you," Victor replied. "And, if you are about to ask me why the frigates set sail, I also know that not."
Blaise chuckled. "I could have done that well myself."
"So could any man here," Victor said. "Perchance, those frigates may return. Or first-rate ships of the line may take their place. Or, then again, the English may prove content with wallowing scows like the ones now tied up in Croydon. They give Cornwallis and his redcoats their necessary victuals and, no doubt, a copious supply of powder and lead."
"They have been shooting enough of it," Blaise agreed.
"Too much!" Victor said. "Damn me if they have not. Well, we did not think this war would be easy when we began it Most Atlanteans, I daresay, failed to believe we could win it"
"You did not always believe that yourself," Blaise reminded him. "You went around preaching that we must not lose, that so long as we stayed in the fight England would tire of it sooner or later."
"I did?" Victor Radcliff had to think back to what now seemed very distant days indeed. After a sheepish chuckle, he found himself nodding. "I did, sure enough. It may yet come to that, you know. Even if we beat them here, the English can mount another invasion-if they have the will to attempt it."
"What if they do?" the Negro asked.
Victor shrugged. "We fight on. We stay in the field. We refuse to own ourselves beaten, come what may. You see? The same song I sang before. We Radcliff's are a stubborn clan, say whatever else you will of us."
"Then you need someone stubborn enough to stay beside you," Blaise said, and tapped the chevrons on his arm. Smiling,
Victor slapped him on the back.
The second parallel. As before, the soil went up on the side facing Croydon's defenses. This trench being closer to the redcoats' works, the Frenchmen and Atlanteans who manned it took more casualties. The English artillerists got as good with their mortars as anyone could with those balky weapons. The besiegers dug shelters into the sides of the trench, and dove into them when the shells came hissing down.
Then it rained-not so hard as it had on the day when Victor's attack went awry, but hard enough. The rain softened the dirt, which should have made digging easier… but who wanted to dig when he sank ankle-deep in mud if he tried? The parapet in front of the trench displayed an alarming tendency to sag, too.
Firing from the English trenches slackened, but it didn't stop. The redcoats had had plenty of time to strengthen their works while their foes dug. Some of their men fired from shelters adequate to keep their powder dry. Some of their mortars still tossed hate into the air.
One shell splashed down into a puddle that doused its fuse. "Drown, you son of a bitch!" shouted the closest Atlantean infantryman. Within a day, half the Atlanteans were telling the story. So were a quarter of de la Fayette's French soldiers-it was easy enough to translate.
The rain changed to sleet, and the sleet changed to snow. The ground went from too soft to work with conveniently to too hard to work with conveniently, all in the space of a couple of days. Atlanteans and Frenchmen shivered in huts and tents. No doubt the redcoats were chilly, too, but they had Croydon's snug houses in which to lodge.
Watching smoke rise from chimneys in town, Victor said, "Sooner or later, they'll run short of firewood."
"Soon enough to do us any good?" Blaise asked.
"I don't know," Victor admitted. "How much wood did they have before the siege began? How cold will the winter be? How many of the Croydonites' chattels will the redcoats bum to keep from corning down with chilblains?"
"As many as they need to," Blaise said without hesitation.
"I shouldn't wonder," Victor said. Shivering Atlanteans would do the same-he was sure of that. Instead, they had plenty of timber close by. But wood freshly cut would smoke horribly when it went onto the fire. That wouldn't stop his men from using it, but the soot would make them look like Negroes if they kept on for very long.
"We need more picks, fewer shovels," de la Fayette said a couple of days later. "We are chipping at the ground more than digging through it."
"Well, so we are," Victor said. "Unless your blacksmiths feel like beating spades into picks-an eventuality of which the Good Book says nothing-I know not where we shall come by them."
"Off the countryside?" de la Fayette said hopefully.
"Good luck," Victor replied. "Maybe we can get a few. But unless we pay well for them, our own farmers will start shooting at us from ambush."
"They would not do that!" the marquis exclaimed.
"Ha!" Victor said, and then again, louder, "Ha!" That done, he proceeded to embellish on the theme: "Your Grace, chances are you know more about how they fight in Europe than I do. You'd better. But I promise you this-I know more about Atlantean fanners and what they're likely to do than you've ever imagined."
"It could be. Very probably, it is. French peasants, however, would not behave so," de la Fayette said.
"Next time I campaign in France, I'll remember that," Victor said. "For now, you need to remember you're campaigning in Atlantis."
"I am not likely to forget it," the French nobleman replied, tartly enough to suggest that, while he conceded he wasn't lost on the trackless prairies of northern Terranova beyond the Great River, he also didn't see himself as being so tar away from those buffalo-thundering grasslands. After pausing just long enough to let that sink in, he continued, "One reminder is the weather. How soon can we resume our excavations, even if we obtain picks? Will we be able to do so at all before spring?"
"Well, I don't exactly know." Victor held up a hand before de la Fayette could speak. "Nobody exactly knows the weather-I understand that. But I don't even approximately know. I do not spring from this part of Atlantis, and I have not spent sufficient time up here to have a good feel for what's likely to come."
"Some of your men will, though?" de la Fayette suggested.
"Can't hurt to ask," Victor said, and instructed one of his messengers.
Grinning, the youngster said, "I'd make my own guesses, sir, but I'm from down in Freetown myself, so they wouldn't be worth an at-" He broke off, flushing to the roots of his hair. "They wouldn't be worth much, I mean. I'll go fetch somebody who was born around here." He dashed away as if his breeches were on fire.
Victor Radcliff stared sourly after him. Wouldn't be worth an Atlantean, the messenger hadn't quite swallowed. When the Atlantean Assembly's own followers scorned the paper the Assembly issued… When such a thing happened, you knew that paper had lost more value than you wished it would have.
The messenger quickly returned with a sergeant who gave his name as Saul Andrews and who said, "I come from a farm about twenty miles from here. Never strayed far from it, neither, General, not till I picked up a musket and went to war with you." Sure enough, he used the flat vowels and muffled final fs of a Croydon man.
"Good enough," Victor replied. "How long do you expect this harsh cold spell to last?"
Andrews glanced up at the sky. Whatever he saw there only made him shrug. "Well, now, sir, that's a mite hard to calculate," he said. "If it's a hard winter, it could stay this way till spring. I've seen it do that very thing. But if it's not so hard, we'll get some warm spells betwixt and between the freezes. Which I've also seen."
"If you had to guess-?" Victor prompted.
Sergeant Andrews shrugged. "The good Lord knows, but He ain't told me. Only thing I can say is, we got to wait and see."
"All right, Sergeant. You may go," Victor said, stifling a sigh.
Andrews departed with almost as many signs of relief as the messenger had shown a few minutes earlier. Try as Victor would, he couldn't get angry at the man. Custis Cawthorne had tried using barometer and thermometer-both of which he'd had to make himself-to foretell the weather. And sometimes he'd been right, and sometimes he'd been wrong. Anyone who'd lived out in the open long enough to grow up could have done as well without fancy devices. So people delighted in telling Cawthorne, t
oo, till he finally gave up and sold the meteorological instruments for what the glass and quicksilver would bring.
"He does not know?" De la Fayette's English was imperfect, but he'd got the gist.
"No, he doesn't." This time, Victor did sigh. "I don't suppose anyone else will, either. As he said, we just have to wait and see."
"Very well." By the way de la Fayette said it, it wasn't But even a young, headstrong nobleman understood that a Power higher than he controlled the weather. "We shall just have to be ready to take advantage of the good and do our best to ride out the bad."
Victor Radcliff set a hand on his shoulder. "Welcome to life, your Grace."
In due course, the parallel advanced again. Then a blizzard froze the ground hard as iron, and digging perforce stopped. The wind howled down from the northwest. Snow swirled and danced. The redcoats' defensive works and their foes' saps and parallels vanished under a blanket of white.
Almost everything vanished, in fact. While the storm raged, Victor had trouble seeing out to the end of his arm. He wondered if he could turn that to his, and Atlantis', advantage. Cornwallis' men would have trouble seeing, too. Attackers might be able to get very close to their works before getting spotted. If anything went wrong as they approached, though…
Since he had trouble making up his mind, he held a council of war to see what his officers-and the French, most of whom needed translation-thought of the idea. As he might have guessed, they split pretty evenly.
"If anything goes wrong-even the least little thing-you've spilled the thundermug into the stewpot," one major said.
"If things go the way we want them to, we walk into Croydon," a captain countered. Both those notions had been in Victor's mind. His officers had as much trouble weighing them one against the other as he did.
"The glory of victory complete and absolute!" de la Fayette said enthusiastically. Whether his officers were or not, he was ready to attack.
He seemed so very ready, in fact, that he made "Baron" von Steuben stir. "We have in hand the game," the German veteran said. "With saps and parallels, sooner or later we are sure to win, or almost. An attack, even an attack in Schnee-ah, snow-and we all this risk. Why take the chance?"
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