Why? Victor wondered-and worried. Were all the gunners dead on the field? The fight went on. It sounded as ferocious as ever. Had the fieldpiece knocked in the head of an enemy column advancing up that path from the west? Or had something else, something incalculable from back here, happened instead?
Victor decided he had to know. He swung up onto his horse. "I'm riding up to the hilltop," he told Blaise.
"You don't want to stop a bullet," the Negro observed.
"Who does?" Victor said.
Blaise exhaled sharply. "Not what I meant. Atlantis don't- doesn't-want you to stop a bullet."
"Atlantis doesn't want me to lose this battle, either, not when I might win it by giving orders without delay from messengers rushing back and forth," Victor replied. He started to trot off toward the hill.
"Wait!" Blaise called. Victor reined in. His not-quite-aide never sounded so imperious without good cause. Blaise mounted and came after him. "If you're going to play the fool, you should have some other fool beside you."
"Honored." Victor tipped his tricorn.
"Honor," Blaise said. "White men's madness." They'd gone round that barn before. Instead of starting around it again, Victor urged his horse forward with the reins and the pressure of his knees. Blaise followed. His elbows flapped as he rode. He bobbed up and down far more than a smooth horseman would have. All that might-and probably did-make better riders look down their noses at him. It didn't stop him getting from hither to yon, or even slow him much.
Wounded men staggered and limped down the east side of Redwood Hill, bound for the surgeons. Litter-bearers carried moaning soldiers too badly hurt to get down by themselves. One of the walking wounded waved to Victor. "You should've seen 'em, General!" he called.
"Seen whom? Seen them doing what?" Victor asked. But by then his horse had carried him past the injured Atlantean. He didn't want to slow down, even to find out more about mm, whoever they were.
Blaise understood, as Blaise commonly did. "You'll know soon enough, one way or the other," he said. Victor nodded.
Redwood Hill didn't look like much till you rode up it Atlantean soldiers trudging up the path toward the crest didn't seem sorry to stop for a moment and wave to their general as he went by. "Will we lick 'em?" a man asked.
"Of course we will," Victor answered, hoping he was right But a general who let his men see he had doubts didn't deserve his epaulets. If a general doubted, how could ordinary soldiers do anything else? And soldiers who doubted weren't men who would stand fast when a general most needed them to. A general had to seem confident, even-especially-when he wasn't.
"We still hold the crest." Blaise pointed to the line of greencoats ahead. They reloaded and fired at the enemy as fast as they could.
"We do." Victor fought to keep surprise from his voice, too. He wanted the words to convey that he'd been sure of it all along.
He dismounted before reaching the crest. After tying his horse to a sapling on the reverse slope, he finished the climb on foot. No point to giving the enemy a large target that shouted Here's the Atlantean general! His gaudy officer's uniform would take care of that well enough, or maybe too well.
The field gun stood ready and waiting. Most of its crew still stood, too. It had done what Victor hoped, not what he feared. Those two rounds he'd heard, loaded with canister, had torn the heart out of an English rush toward the crest. Dead and wounded redcoats lay in heaps in front of the gun, but they'd never reached it.
"Right warm work it was, General," said the artilleryman in charge of the piece.
"I see," Victor said. He heard, too. Few sounds raised more sorrow and pity than the cries of men who'd been hurt. Aristotle called sorrow and pity the essence of tragedy. He must have seen his share of battlefields, too. Even in the days before villainous saltpeter, they were no place for the faint of heart.
A musket ball cracked past his head. He and the gunner both gave it an automatic genuflection. They grinned sheepishly at each other as they straightened. Even the bravest man's flesh was less heroic than he might wish it.
Not many unwounded Englishmen and loyalists were visible. If nothing else did, their failed charge taught them not to show themselves, not on this field. And black-powder smoke and the dust both sides had kicked up helped mask everyone's movements.
A lieutenant held a rifle that, with its bayonet, was almost as long as he was tall. He sketched a salute. Victor returned it. At least half the time, nobody gave him proper military courtesy. A sketched salute seemed ever so much better than none. "How do we fare?" Victor enquired.
"Well, General, we're still here on the crest. With a spot of luck, the redcoats won't be able to take it away from us."
"Luck?" Victor didn't like the word. "We need to hold, come what may."
"Sure enough. But I won't turn luck down, either," the rifleman said. "That field gun got to the top just at the right time, fry me for an oil thrush if it didn't. Knocked the redcoats' charge clear down to the bottom of the hill again. If it ran late, we might be down at the bottom ourselves, over on the other side." He jerked a thumb back toward the east.
"So we might," Victor said uncomfortably. And if they were, Cornwallis would hurl the English regulars at them again, driving them in the direction of Hanover-or maybe driving them away from Atlantis' leading city so the Union Jack could fly there once more. Amazing to think how much a couple of rounds of canister could do.
One of these days, historians would write blow-by-blow accounts of the grand and furious Battle of Redwood Hill. Would the learned scholars and soldiers give the canister its due? Or would it fade into the general chaos of battle? Victor had been through several battles against the French Atlanteans and the French that the historians had got their hands on afterwards. The descriptions of the fights he'd read bore precious little resemblance to the fights he thought he remembered.
Which meant… what, exactly? Even now, Victor wasn't sure. Maybe the men who'd done their best to rival Thucydides and Tacitus knew better than he did. They'd questioned men from both sides; some of them had got access to French and English and even Atlantean officers' papers-including his own. But if what they wrote differed from his memories, he didn't have to take them seriously. He didn't intend to, either.
Three British fieldpieces unlimbered near the base of Redwood Hill. The gunners aimed them with fussy precision. Victor had never seen a muzzle pointed up so high, not even at the siege of Nouveau Redon. What he would have done for some mortars in his baggage train then! English and Atlantean long guns had tried to reach the French fortress, and hadn't had much luck. Now… "They're going to try to blow us off the crest," the lieutenant of riflemen said.
"So they are," Victor agreed. "The next interesting question is, can they do it?" He eyed the cannon apprehensively. Somehow, a gun's bore always seemed two or three times as wide when it pointed straight at you. "They don't look to have any mortars close by, anyhow, for which I'm duly grateful. I was just thinking about that."
"Mm-yes," the younger officer said. "I wouldn't want those nasty bursting shells coming down on my head, and that's a fact." He paused thoughtfully. "Of course, like as not the fusing'd leave somewhat to be desired."
Victor Radcliff only grunted in response to that. Atlantis' mortars, improvised and otherwise, had done yeoman duty in breaking the English lines outside of Hanover. But, as the lieutenant said, they would have done even more had the gunners been better able to control when the shells detonated. Artillerymen all over the world wrestled with the problem, none with much success.