Opening Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  And the whole garrison got reminded they were in the middle of a war. “I’m almost grateful to the English,” Roland remarked to a sergeant after a man took a flesh wound. “They make sure we don’t go slack.”

  “Oui, Monsieur.” The underofficer nodded. Then he pointed out toward the river. “They stay busy themselves, too. See how much dirt and filth they dump into the clean water.”

  Sure enough, the Blavet had been clear enough to reflect the sky’s blue till it came alongside the English works encircling Nouveau Redon. But it ran brown and turbid as it flowed on toward the Atlantic.

  “They are a filthy people themselves, and it shows in everything they do,” Roland said. The sergeant nodded again. But Roland’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed that muddy stain in the river. “I wouldn’t have thought they were digging enough to put that much muck into the water.”

  “It doesn’t come from nowhere,” the sergeant said.

  “True enough. And the river was clean—well, pretty clean—east of here before they came.” Roland shrugged. No river that ran past a town could stay perfectly clear. But the Blavet hadn’t looked like that before.

  The redcoats and the English settlers were still working at their saps. Could they be working enough to make the river so muddy? Roland’s shoulders went up and down once more. As the sergeant said, the dirt didn’t come from nowhere. So the enemy had to be digging that much.

  Scornfully, the sergeant said, “I’ll bet they don’t have the sense to draw their water upstream and piss downstream.”

  Roland Kersauzon laughed. “I’ll bet you’re right.”

  Once, this little thicket of redwoods had shaded a house outside Nouveau Redon’s walls against the sun. Now it kept the French settlers shut up inside the town from seeing the opening to the mine under their mountain. Victor Radcliff wondered whether the English engineers were wasting time and backbreaking effort.

  “How long do you suppose all this will take, sir?” he asked the English lieutenant-colonel.

  “As long as it takes,” the officer replied. “Time is one thing we have plenty of.” He checked himself. “As long as the men stay healthy, anyhow.”

  “There’s always that,” Victor agreed. “And as long as the French don’t manage to bring any more regulars to Atlantis.”

  “They were lucky to do it once, by God.” The Englishman spoke with the unconscious arrogance of a man whose kingdom had got used to ruling the seas. “They’d be more than doubly lucky to do it twice.”

  “Here’s hoping you’re right.” Victor left it there, returning to his earlier question: “Can your miners even begin to guess how long they’ll need. Have you talked with them about it?”

  “I have,” the lieutenant-colonel replied. “But as long as it takes still seems to be the best answer I can give you. They will need some uncertain amount of time to dig their way under Nouveau Redon, and then some other uncertain amount of time to cast about for the root of the spring, so to speak. Adding one uncertainty to another can but yield a larger uncertainty, I fear. And, of course, there is no assurance that, even seeking, they will find what they seek. The siege, naturally, continues notwithstanding their success or failure.”

  “Naturally,” Victor echoed. He looked up at the fortress. As long as it held out, English rule over Atlantis remained uncertain. Once it fell, if it fell…Then the only way the French and Spaniards could regain power and influence was at the negotiating table—about which, Victor knew too well, he could do exactly nothing. If one of King George’s so-called diplomats cared nothing for land to which he couldn’t ride in a day or two…Well, in that case, so much of this fighting would have been for nothing.

  Victor made himself shrug. If his greencoats and the English regulars failed, those so-called diplomats would have less to work with. All he could do was all he could do. He aimed to do it.

  A miner, stripped to the waist and muddied all over, carried another basket of spoil on his back out of the tunnel opening. The dirt wouldn’t go into the river till after nightfall, to keep the defenders from realizing how much of it came from this one spot. The miner looked up at sky and sunshine as if he hadn’t seen them for years. “Bloody good to breathe fresh air,” he remarked to no one in particular.

  Victor believed that. He wouldn’t have wanted to scrape away far underground, in Stygian darkness illuminated only by candles and feeble lamps, never knowing if all the countless tons of earth and rock above him were about to cave in and crush him to jelly. Timber shored up the passage into the earth, but all the same…

  The man sighed. “Ah, well. Back to it.” He grabbed the empty basket and vanished once more into the bowels of the earth.

  “Brave fellow,” the English lieutenant-colonel said. He’d been watching the miner, too, then.

  “He is,” Victor agreed. “Can they really dig a straight line under the ground? Or will they lose their bearing?”

  “They check it by compass, inside and out,” the English officer replied. “So the chief engineer assures me. They have had a deal of practice at this sort of thing grubbing out coal on the other side of the ocean, you know.”

  “They’re beginning to do that here, too, up in the north,” Radcliff said. “Fewer trees close by where they’re needed than there were when settlers first found Atlantis. And coal burns better, which also has its uses. But I don’t think anyone could pay me enough to make my living underground.”

  “Nor me.” The lieutenant-colonel shuddered. He seemed glad to point upward toward the town at the top of the hill. “Could your riflemen snipe a bit more than they have been lately? We don’t want the foe to think we’ve given up on taking the fort by ordinary means.”

  “I’ll take care of it, sir,” Victor promised. “We don’t even have to hit them, so long as they know we’re shooting at them.”

  “Just so.” The English officer smiled. “A peaceable sort of war, is it not?”

  “It sure is,” Victor said. If this scheme worked, if the French gave up…

  A few days later, one of his riflemen came back swearing. “I had him in my sights—the French commander, old damned what’s-his-name,” the man said. “Had him in my sights, and I fired…and I missed. Bugger me with a redwood cone, but I missed.”

  “What kind of range?” Victor asked.

  “Not too long—a furlong and a half.”

  “Bad luck,” Victor said. “Shooting uphill like that—it’s hard, and you don’t practice it much.”

  “I should have got him.” The rifleman refused to be consoled.

  “Well, maybe you’ll get another chance,” Victor said.

  “Not one that good, dammit.” Still disgruntled, the other settler stomped away.

  He turned out to be right, too. At least, he didn’t come running back to Victor claiming he’d plugged Roland Kersauzon. Neither did anyone else. The commander of the French settlers went right on directing the citadel’s defense. Victor began to wonder whether Nouveau Redon would ever fall.

  Then, one day, the engineers digging far below the fortress ran out of the tunnel they’d labored on for so long. “Water’s starting to drip through the wall!” exclaimed a muddy man with a pickaxe clenched in his right fist. “We can hear it flowing by, too.”

  “By God!” Victor said. He solemnly clasped hands with the English lieutenant-colonel.

  “What do you do now?” the English officer asked his men. “How do you ruin the spring without drowning yourselves?”

  Three of them went back into the shaft they’d evacuated. Each man rolled a hogshead of black powder ahead of himself and trailed fuse out behind. After what seemed a very long time, the engineers emerged from the tunnel once more. One of them bowed to the lieutenant-colonel and said, “If you’d care to do the honors, your Excellency…”

  “I should be delighted.” The Englishman lit a twig at a small fire that crackled nearby. He touched it to each of the three fuses in turn. One by one, they hissed to life. With three, Victor thoug
ht, one of them will surely reach the powder.

  And at least one did. Boom! The ground shook under Victor’s feet. He shook hands with the English lieutenant-colonel again. “How long before we know whether we did what we wanted to do?” he asked.

  “Shouldn’t be long, Major,” one of the engineers replied.

  A few minutes later, water started flowing out of the tunnel mouth. Victor and the English officer and the engineers joined hands and danced around in a circle. What they could do, they’d done. Now they had to see what it did to Nouveau Redon.

  Boom! Roland Kersauzon was on the wall when the ground shuddered under his feet. A lot of gunpowder had gone off all at once…somewhere. But where? He looked back at his town. No great cloud of smoke rising there. His men hadn’t done their best to blow themselves up, then.

  The English? Not anywhere Roland could see. The bulk of Nouveau Redon hid some of their line from him, but he would have thought any explosion big enough to make things jump like that would have produced a sizable cloud of smoke. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe being up on the wall made the explosion seem bigger than it really was. A crew of cannoneers were also looking around, wondering what had happened. When their eyes met his, they shrugged, almost in unison. Laughing, he returned the gesture.

  Half an hour or so later, people started shouting his name. “Here I am!” he called. “What is it?”

  “The spring!” somebody called from the narrow, winding streets. “The spring’s gone dry!”

  “What?” Roland yelped. “That’s impossible!”

  “It may be impossible,” the man down there replied. “But it’s true.”

  “Merde!” Roland said. “Nom d’un nom d’un nom!” He hurried down off the wall. Going down stairs shouldn’t have made his heart pound like that. In fact, going down stairs didn’t make his heart pound like that. Fear did.

  Sure enough, no water gurgled from the mouth of the gargoyle who capped the spring. “It just—stopped,” a still-plump cook said. “A few minutes after the ground shook, it…stopped.”

  Roland cursed again, this time even more vilely than before. The cook gaped at him. Roland hardly noticed. He was seeing men far belowground, men working with spades and adzes and picks. He’d never dreamt they could penetrate to the living heart of his mountain. Underestimating what the English could do did not pay.

  “What now, Monsieur?” the cook asked. “Nouveau Redon has no cisterns. Who would have imagined we needed them?”

  “Who indeed?” Roland said dully. He looked up to the sky. A few white clouds lazily drifted across the blue. He wanted gray sweeping away the sun. He wanted rain, downpour, deluge. No matter what he wanted, God wasn’t going to give it to him.

  Men could live on half-rations for months, maybe even years. They could go with no food at all for a month. Take away their water and they were helpless inside a week.

  Not all the water inside Nouveau Redon had vanished, of course. But if no more came in, if the weather stayed fair, the way it looked like doing…What could the defenders do then?

  He saw only one answer. It wasn’t a good answer, but it wasn’t an impossible answer, either. Drawing himself very straight, he said, “We fight, by God!”

  Having decided to do that, he wasted no time. He sent runners hot-footing it all over Nouveau Redon. The sooner his men went out and assailed the English, the less they would suffer from thirst in the meantime. Rain might buy him a few more days, but—another glance toward the sunny heavens—no, no rain in sight.

  As his men gathered near the northern gate, he rose till he stood in the saddle and told them what they needed to know: “I am sorry to say it, my ducks, but the English have pulled the rug out from under our feet. They have murdered our spring—we have no more water coming into the town. But we are not without hope. Plenty of water flows down there, right below our feet. All we have to do is go take it. We’ve fought Englishmen before—and we’ve beaten them before, too. One more win, and the war is over. We can do it!”

  A great cheer rose. The French settlers certainly thought they could do it. Believing a thing possible went a long way toward making it so. Roland had a pistol on his belt, a pistol in each boot, and a slashing sword loose in the scabbard.

  “You will follow me,” he said. “You will not turn back till I give the order. And I will never give that order!”

  Another cheer rang out. “Forward!” a sergeant shouted in a great voice. In an instant, the whole army was crying out the word: “Forward! Forward! FORWARD!”

  The gates opened. The men streamed out of them and formed a line of battle. Enemy rifles began firing as soon as the French settlers came into sight. Here and there, a man fell. The settlers were veterans by now, and acted as stolid about losses as regulars could have.

  Roland pointed down toward the river. “Let’s go!” he cried. Cheering, the army went.

  Cannons roared. Fire licked at the French settlers from the trenches ahead. Neither English Atlanteans nor redcoats emerged to fight on open ground. The enemy fired from his earthworks. If he could shoot down the whole garrison from Nouveau Redon without exposing himself to much danger, he would do it without a qualm of conscience.

  A coward’s way to fight, or else a tradesman’s: so Roland saw it. Which didn’t make it ineffective. Oh, no. More soldiers came running through the spiderweb of trenches to take their places in front of the French settlers. Roland realized his men would have to break through before the English got enough fighters in place to stop them. Well, they were close to the first trench line now.

  A musket ball caught his horse in the neck. Blood fountained, impossibly red in the sunshine. The horse let out a bubbling shriek and staggered. Roland sprang clear before it went down. He brandished one of his pistols—the sword would have been more dramatic, but he could do more with the pistol—and shouted, “I’m still fine! Let’s go on and give them what they deserve!”

  His good sense proved itself a moment later. A redcoat swung a musket toward him. But Roland fired first. He missed, but he made the Englishman duck. The enemy’s shot went wild. Roland threw the pistol at the next closest redcoat, then drew his sword and jumped down into the trench.

  The sword got blood on it in short order. Roland got blood on himself, too, but it wasn’t his. An English regular almost spitted him with a bayonet, but got shot in the side before he could thrust again. The redcoat sank with a groan. Roland’s blade flickered like a viper’s tongue. It was quicker than any bayoneted musket, but the bayonets had more reach.

  French settlers swarmed over the English defenders. The French outnumbered them here, and also had desperation on their side. As soon as Roland was sure they’d killed or driven back enough enemies, he scrambled up onto the northern edge of the trench and ran on toward the next line. “Follow me!” he yelled again.

  Some of his men did. Others went through the trenches connecting the inner ring of works to that outside it. Had the English settlers and regulars had their wits about them, they could have plugged those connecting trenches with a few men. But the attack’s mad fury unnerved them, and the French settlers rushed into the next ring.

  How many of these battles will we have to win? Roland wondered, unchivalrously stabbing a greencoat in the kidney from behind. The man shrieked and dropped his musket, whereupon the French settler he was facing gutted him with his bayonet. But more and more greencoats and redcoats rushed to the fray. The English settlers and regulars might be too unnerved to fight with proper tactics, but they weren’t too unnerved to fight.

  Not all the Frenchmen who got into the second ring of trenches came out of it. And still more English soldiers poured into the brawl from the works all around Nouveau Redon. The longer clearing the trench took, the harder it got. “We have to move on, down toward the river!” Roland called. But what they had to do and what they could do might be two different things.

  Roland fired both his remaining pistols. He hit a redcoat with one ball; he wasn’t sure about the ot
her. In the mad mêlée all around him, he wasn’t sure of much. He hung on to one pistol, carrying it reversed in his left hand. Some swordsmen used a left-hand dagger to beat aside their foes’ weapons and to do damage when they could. The pistol worked about as well. Roland clouted a settler over the head with it when the man got too close for him to use his blade.

  “Come on!” Kersauzon shouted again and again. “We have to keep moving!”

  But their progress got slower and slower. The English Atlanteans and regulars were continually reinforced. No more French settlers came forth from Nouveau Redon. Roland had put all his weight into the one blow. He’d had to hope it would prove enough. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  There was the Blavet, with only one more ring of trenches in the French settlers’ way. “Come on!” Roland shouted once more. “By God, my friends, we can do it!”

  He looked around. His men—his friends, as so many of them were—had melted away like snow in springtime. Most of the ones who came forward with him bled from one wound, or from more than one. He discovered to his surprise that he’d taken several wounds himself. He didn’t remember getting any of them. The heat of battle could be like that.

  Now that he knew he was hurt, all the little wounds started to pain him. He ignored them as best he could. If the French settlers could get past the last enemy trench, past the redwoods just beyond it…

  But the greencoats and redcoats knew what the French had to do. Gunfire spat serpents’ tongues of flame at the oncoming French settlers. The corporal next to Roland groaned as he took a bullet in the belly. He folded up like a concertina.

  A fieldpiece thundered, and then another one. How had the English manhandled guns to where they were needed most? But how they’d done it didn’t really matter. That they’d done it did. Canister tore through the oncoming French settlers. It blew one man right out of his shoes.