“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 farmers 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 far 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 r’s 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, too, 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?”
“Only a snake could look at things in a more cold-blooded way,” de la Fayette said—not quite the insult direct, but close. A touchy officer might have called him out for it.
Von Steuben only smiled and bowed. “Do not down your nose at snakes look, your Grace,” he said. “There are in this world of them a great many, and most of them seem uncommonly well fed.”
“I should rather fight like a man,” de la Fayette said.
“No one says to on your belly crawl to the redcoats’ lines and bite in the leg an English sergeant. This is more likely you than him to poison,” von Steuben replied. The Atlantean officers laughed right away. After the joke was translated, so did most of the Frenchmen. Even de la Fayette smiled. Von Steuben went on, “Yes, you should like a man fight. But you should also like a smart man, not like some dumbhead, fight, is it not so?”
Plainly, de la Fayette wanted nothing more than to tell him it was not so. Just as plainly, the Frenchman couldn’t, not unless he wanted to make a liar of himself. All but choking on the words, de la Fayette said, “It is so.”
“Good. Very good.” Von Steuben m
ight have been patting a puppy on the head, not talking to his nominal superior. “You can things learn. Give yourself a chance longer to live, and you will more things learn.”
De la Fayette looked more affronted than von Steuben had when the French noble—the genuine French noble, Victor reminded himself—called him cold-blooded. But all von Steuben had accused him of was being young. Time would cure that . . . unless he did something foolish enough to get himself killed before it could.
The council of war went on a while longer after the exchange between von Steuben and de la Fayette. As Victor soon saw, though, men on both sides of the question were only kicking it back and forth in the same track.
That left it up to him. Well, it had always been up to him, but now he had to look the fact square in the face. “We’ll wait,” he said. “We’ll go on digging, as best we can. If matters develop differently from the way we now expect . . . Well, in that case, chances are Croydon will see another blizzard before winter’s out.”
“You took that German cochon’s word over mine,” de la Fayette said hotly as the council broke up.
“I will take good advice wherever I can find it,” Victor replied. “He was right: failure would cost more than we can afford, whilst success is apt to come down without the attack, if rather more slowly.”
“Are you a general or a bookkeeper?”
“I’ve been both,” Victor said. “One is not the opposite of the other.”
De la Fayette’s response was funny, sad, and pungently obscene all at once: very French, in other words. Then he added, “I wish I could change your mind.”
“A lot of people have said that down through the years,” Victor answered, with a shrug far more resigned than the ones he’d got from Saul Andrews. “Not many of them have done it, though. Radcliffs are good at going straight ahead or stopping short, not so good at turning.”
“Good at stopping short when you should go straight ahead,” de la Fayette observed, and walked off with the last word if not with what he wanted.
Bright sunshine greeted Victor when he got up the next morning. Squinting against its glare off snow, he knew his men would have got slaughtered had they tried to storm the English works. Even had he agreed to the attack the night before, he would have had to call it off now. Sometimes what a man wanted or didn’t want had nothing to do with anything: he simply had to make the best of the hand he got dealt.
Victor set his men to shoveling snow out of the entrenchments that worked toward the redcoats’ lines. Once they’d thrown out enough so they could move around fairly freely, they started hacking away at the frozen ground. The parallel advanced again.
Cornwallis’ soldiers shoveled snow out of their trenches, too. They made it as plain as they possibly could that they wouldn’t give up without a fight. They went right on shooting at the diggers in the parallel. Every so often, they hit somebody. Being able to go back to Croydon when they weren’t on duty, they had better quarters than the Atlanteans and Frenchmen investing their lines. English ships kept coming into port, too, which meant the redcoats were bound to be better supplied than their foes.
But the English soldiers remained shut up in one tiny corner of Atlantis. Cornwallis didn’t seem to think they had the strength to break out against Victor’s army. If they could be beaten here, they would have to try some massive new invasion to make the war go on. If . . .
In due course, the French engineers pronounced themselves satisfied with the second parallel. A new sap angled toward the English line. With muskets and mortars, the redcoats showed how little they appreciated the compliment.
Then a fresh snowstorm shrieked down from the north. The digging had to stop for several days. Victor Radcliff swore and fumed, but he could do no more about the weather than Blaise or Sergeant Saul Andrews or any other mortal. All he could do was hope the storm blew itself out before long—and hope his troops stayed healthy long enough to let them attack the Englishmen. He could do no more about that than he could about the weather.
“At least the weather is cold,” Victor said to Blaise. “There seem to be fewer sicknesses at this season than in warmer times.”
“What about chest fever?” the Negro retorted. “What about catarrh? What about the—what do you call it?—the grippe?”
“Well, those are troublesome,” Victor admitted. “But I was thinking of fluxes of the bowels, and of the plague, and even of smallpox and measles. They are seen more often in spring and summer—especially the first two.”
“They probably stay frozen in this snow and ice, the way meat does.” Blaise rolled his eyes. “Who would have thought you could keep meat fresh as long as you froze it? In the country I come from, we have to smoke it or salt it or dry it or eat it right away. I never saw ice—I never imagined ice!—till you white men dragged me here.”
“Kind of you to admit ice is good for something,” Victor said. “You are not always so generous.”
“If you could keep it in a box and use it for what it is good for, that would be fine,” Blaise said. “When it lies all over the countryside and tries to freeze off your fingers and your toes and your prong, then that is too much.” His shiver was melodramatic and sincere at the same time.
“We will be warmer once we break into Croydon,” Victor said. “I have said the same to the men advancing the sap. I can think of nothing better calculated to inspire them to dig.”
“It would inspire me, by the Lord Jehovah!” Blaise exclaimed. “But some of you white men like this weather. I have heard some of you say so. If you tell me now that these men are not mad, I will not believe you.”
“I also think they are.” Victor could take it no further than that, as he knew too well. Some Atlanteans—and some Frenchmen, too—did relish winter for its own sake. He liked cold weather himself: he liked coming in out of it, warming himself in front of a roaring fire, and sipping from a flagon of mulled wine or flip, the tasty concoction of rum and beer. Spending much time in it was a different story, as far as he was concerned.
Time dragged on. The sap moved closer to the redcoats’ line, which meant they sent all the more musket balls and mortar shells and roundshot at the men digging it. The third parallel would be very close indeed. The sap that led out from it would break into the English works. After that, and after a clash and a show of resistance, General Cornwallis could yield with honor.
He could, yes. But would he? In a fight to the finish, his men had at least some hope of beating the Atlanteans and Frenchmen opposing them. Since he led the last English force in Atlantis, mightn’t he feel obligated to fight as hard as he could? If he did win, he kept the war alive.
Every time Victor tried to decide what Cornwallis would do, he came up with a different answer. The English general certainly was conscious of his honor; Victor had seen that in the fight against the French settlers. Was he also conscious of the political demands his position imposed on him? How could he fail to be? And yet people weren’t always sensible or clever—far from it. There was no sure way to judge till attackers swarmed into the breach.
Then the Atlantean commander found something new to worry about, for a courier from Hanover brought him a letter in a hand he found far too familiar. He’d never dreamt he would recognize Marcel Freycinet’s script so readily. No matter what he’d dreamt, he did.
The letter was cheerful enough. Freycinet assured him that Louise was doing well, and that the slave and her owner both anticipated her safe passage through birthing time. Take heart, Monsieur le Général, and be of good cheer, Freycinet wrote. Such things have happened since the days of Adam and Eve. You have nothing to be ashamed of; rather, pride yourself on your virility.
Victor would have been happier to do that had any of the children Meg gave him lived to grow up. He could not wish for Louise’s baby to die untimely . . . but neither could he wish his sole descendant to be sold on the auction block like a cow or a sheep. Nor could he buy the child himself, not when doing so would show his wife he’d been
unfaithful.
That left . . . Victor burned Monsieur Freycinet’s letter on the brazier in his tent. It left nothing he could see. Nothing at all. He’d been scrabbling for a way out since he first learned his bedwarmer was with child. He had yet to find one, scrabble as he would.
Since he couldn’t do anything about what was going on far to the south, he threw his energy into the siege of Croydon. Even in the snow, he kept digging parties hacking away at the hard ground. A thaw came just after New Year’s Day. As the last one had, it turned saps and parallels into morasses and made parapets slump.
No doubt the redcoats were similarly discommoded. But their works were already in place. They weren’t trying to extend them and trying not to drown at the same time.
“Confound it, there has to be something between ground that’s rock and ground that’s soup!” Victor complained.
“What you want for it to be is summer again,” Baron von Steuben said. “And soon enough it will be.”
“It will be, yes, but not soon enough,” Victor said.
“For fighting? Maybe not. For anything else . . . Summer comes sooner every year,” the German said. “So does winter.”
He wasn’t much older than Victor was himself, which didn’t mean he didn’t have a point. Victor had noticed the same thing himself. Years used to stretch out deliciously ahead of him. Now each one seemed shorter than its predecessor. Before he had time to get to know it, it disappeared. And once time was gone, could even God call it back again?
Before long, Louise’s light brown baby would be born. Before long, the boy—or would it be a girl?—would be sold. Marcel Freycinet would pocket considerably more than thirty pieces of silver. Everyone would be happy . . . except Victor, and probably the little child who was flesh of his flesh.
Baron von Steuben said something. Whatever it was, Victor missed it. “Crave pardon?” he murmured.
The German pointed out to sea. “Here come more English ships,” he repeated. “May the woodworms eat them all below the waterline.”
The United States of Atlantis Page 39
