"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.