"They won't act so bold when we cut them off from the river," the English lieutenant-colonel said.
Victor stared at him. Didn't he know anything about this place he aimed to besiege? "They don't depend on the Blavet for water, sir," the Atlantean said carefully.
"No, eh? Well, cisterns go dry, even if it takes longer."
"They don't depend on cisterns, either," Victor said. No, the Englishman really didn't know anything about Nouveau Redon. "They have a spring, and it's never been known to fail. We may be able to starve them out. We may be able to take the town with saps and parallels-"
"Won't be easy," the lieutenant-colonel said. Victor nodded. The ground rose sharply toward the citadel, and grew stonier the higher it got: not promising terrain for digging trenches.
"I'm afraid we'll be here quite a while," Victor said. "We just have to pray we can keep our own men supplied-and that sickness doesn't break out. If it does…" He spread his hands, as if to say, What can you do?
"We are going to take that fortress." The English lieutenant-colonel might have been an Old Testament prophet. He sounded utterly sure he was telling the truth. Radcliff envied him his certainty. The Old Testament prophets had had God on their side. Victor hoped his army did, too. He hoped so, yes, but he was less sure of it than people like Elijah had been.
The lieutenant-colonel shouted orders. Horns blared. Drums thumped. Soldiers moved out to encircle Nouveau Redon. The opening steps in a siege were as formal as those in a gavotte.
Then the Englishman gave his attention back to Victor. "Tell me, Major-have you read Caesar's Gallic War?"
"Yes, sir." Victor wondered why on earth the other officer chose this moment to ask that question. A bit touchily, the Atlantean added, "We aren't all barbarians on this side of the ocean. I can give you All Gaul is divided into three parts or talk about the aurochs and the other curious animals of the German forest. If you happen to have a copy with you, I can even make a stab at construing sentences, though I confess my Latin isn't what it was fifteen years ago."
"Don't fret. Don't fret," the lieutenant-colonel said, which only left Victor more fretful than ever. The English officer continued, "Upon my honor, Major, I meant no slight by the question. Please accept my assurances on that score."
"Very well, sir." Victor's voice stayed stiff.
The English officer pointed toward Nouveau Redon. France's fleurs-de-lys flag still fluttered defiantly up there. "Can you give me precise bearings on where inside the town that spring rises?"
"I can't-no, sir. But I'm sure you can find out if you inquire among my greencoats. Some of them will have spent more time inside than I have." Radcliff's curiosity roused. "Why, if I may ask?"
"Perhaps we can match the famous fate of Uxellodunum," the Englishman replied.
Whatever Uxellodunum's fate had been, it wasn't famous to Victor. He presumed it was set forth in the Gallic War. If it was, he didn't remember it. Suppressing a sigh, he said, "I fear you must enlighten me, sir."
Enlighten him the English officer did, finishing, "No guarantees, of course-there never are in warfare. But it strikes me that this is our best-and quickest-chance of securing a victory at reasonable cost."
Victor Radcliff did something he'd thought he would never do: he doffed his hat to the lieutenant-colonel. "If we can bring that off…If we can, I'd give twenty pounds to be a fly on the wall and see the look on Roland Kersauzon's face."
"He is a difficult man," the lieutenant-colonel said.
"I'm sure he thinks the same of you-and of me," Victor replied. "And chances are he's right-and so are you. All things considered, I would sooner lay siege out here than stand siege in there."
"As would I," the Englishman agreed. "Montcalm-Gozon had me mured up in Freetown, which was…less than pleasant. But my position was still open to the sea. Your settlers returned, and then we were reinforced from England. Only the angels could reinforce Kersauzon now."
"He won't ask for them, even if God would give them. He's a proud man," Victor said. "If you don't know that, you don't know him at all."
XXV
R oland Kersauzon hadn't thought a lot about what being besieged might be like. He'd never imagined it could bore him. But it did. One day seemed the same as another. He'd started losing track of how long he'd been shut up here. How much longer could he stay?
Till the storehouses emptied, and then a little while after that. But when they would had no simple answer. If he kept his men on full rations as long as the food held out…he was an idiot, or a man who expected to be relieved soon, assuming those two weren't one and the same.
Three-quarters rations? Half rations? When to swing from one to the other? Those were the worries that weighed on his mind. But what difference did it make if he decided tomorrow, not today? Not much, and he knew it.
Had he worried about water…He didn't, though. The spring was what it had always been, what it always would be. God had loved Nouveau Redon when He sent the cold, pure water bubbling up through the rock. He'd also loved the settler who first realized what that spring meant: an impregnable fortress for French Atlantis.
The English weren't even trying to take it, or not trying very hard. Oh, they were advancing their saps and parallels little by little. They had yet to bring cannon within range of the walls, though. Roland doubted whether they could. The ground rose steeply and grew rocky in a hurry. Every new move forward would get harder and go slower.
Once in a while, guns on the wall would fire. A cannon ball killed a team of oxen hauling something toward the closest trenches. The gunners whooped and capered, proud of their shooting.
"Magnifique," Roland said dryly when he learned what the celebration was about. "Now the damned Englishmen will have themselves a supper of beef."
That made the cannoneers' faces fall. They hadn't had a supper of beef for a while now. Oh, some beef went into the sausages they gnawed on, but no one in his right mind inquired too closely about what all went into sausages. Better not to know; better just to eat…as long as the sausages held out.
And Roland proved right. The redcoats and greencoats butchered the murdered oxen and roasted the carcasses. Mother Nature was in a cruel mood; the wind carried the savory smell of the cooking meat straight into Nouveau Redon. Roland's supper was a hard cracker, some barley mush, and a chunk of tough, stale sausage not quite so long as his thumb. His stomach growled enormously at the wonderful aroma wafting over the walls.
Also once in a while, riflemen-commonly settlers in green coats, which made them harder to spot-would sneak forward from the enemy lines and snipe at the defenders. A rifleman had a chance of hitting a man from more than a furlong. The surgeons got reminded they were there for a reason.
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 m
ore. 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 thought, 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!"
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