French engineers assured Victor they could bridge the Pomphret. "Fast enough to keep the redcoats from gathering while you do it?" he asked them.
They didn't answer right away. The way they eyed him said he'd passed a test, one he hadn't even known he was taking. At last, cautiously, the most senior man replied, "That could be, Monsieur. It is one of the hazards of the trade, you might say."
"No doubt," Victor said. "That doesn't mean we should invite it if we don't have to, n'est-ce pas?"
The engineers put their heads together. When they broke apart, their grizzled spokesman said, "Perhaps if we began at night…"
"You would be working by torchlight then, is it not so?"
"We are not owls. We cannot see in pitch blackness, you know," the senior engineer said regretfully.
"Do you not believe the Englishmen might notice what you are about?" Victor asked.
"This too is a hazard of the trade, I fear," the engineer answered. "Having commanded for some little while, Monsieur le General, I daresay you will have observed it yourself by now."
Shut up and quit bothering us, he meant. An Atlantean would have come right out and said so. The Frenchman knew how to get his meaning across without being ostentatiously rude. Either way, the result was frustrating. Victor looked up into the heavens. The moon rode low in the east. It would be full soon; against the daylight sky, it looked like a silver shilling with one edge chewed away. The pale-faced man in the moon didn't wink at him-that had to be his imagination.
And if his imagination was working hard enough to see such things… If it was, maybe he could make it work hard other ways as well. "Do you think you could bridge the Pomphret by the light of the full moon?"
He made the engineers huddle again, anyhow. That was as much as he'd hoped for-he'd feared they would kill his scheme with genteel scorn. The graying senior man replied, "That is possible, Monsieur. Possible, I repeat. It is by no means assured."
"I understand," Victor said. "Here is what I have in mind____________________
"
He spoke for some little while.
This time, the French engineers didn't need to confer. Almost identical, slightly bemused, smiles spread across all their faces as near simultaneously as made no difference. "You have come up with something out of the ordinary, Monsieur le General. No one could deny it for a moment," their grizzled spokesman said. "Truly, I admire your original tenor of thought."
"And here I believed myself a baritone," Victor said. The engineers flinched, as if at musket fire. Ignoring that, Victor went on, "Do you think the plan is worth trying, then?"
"Why not?" the engineer said gaily. "After all, what is the worst that can happen?" He answered his own question: "We can get shot, fall into the river, and feed the fish and turtles and crayfish. Not so very much, eh?"
"One hopes not," Victor said dryly.
"One always hopes," the engineer agreed. "The fish, the turtles, the crayfish-they get fat regardless."
Against the dark blue velvet of the night, the moon glowed like a new-minted sovereign. Torches and bonfires blazed, turning night into day on this stretch of the Pomphret. Engineers shouted orders. Atlantean and French soldiers, most of them stripped to the waist, fetched and carried at the direction of the technically trained officers.
Bridging a river was not quiet work. Bridging a river by firelight at night was not inconspicuous work. It drew English scouts the way those soldiers' bare torsos drew mosquitoes. Some of the scouts fired horse pistols and carbines at the Frenchmen and Atlanteans out of the night. Others galloped away to bring back reinforcements. Victor heard their horses' hoofbeats fade in the distance despite the din of axes and saws and hammers and despite the Pomphret's gentler murmuring. He thought he heard those hoofbeats, anyhow. Maybe that was only his imagination
again. He could hope so.
Hope or not, though, he placed some field guns near the
Pomphret's west bank. If those reinforcements got here; no, dammit: when they did-they would have cannon with them. He wanted to be able to respond in kind.
But Cornwallis' artillerists would have every advantage in the world. His own guns had to try to wreck the carriages and limbers of enemy cannon hiding in the dark. The English gunners wouldn't even care about his, not unless his men got very lucky. A growing bridge, all lit up by flames and by the brilliant moon, made the easiest target any fool could think of. Sometimes there was just no help for a situation, worse luck.
Crash! A cannon ball tumbled six feet of bridge into the Pomphret. "Good thing nobody was standing on that stretch," Blaise said.
"So it was," Victor agreed. "But I'm afraid we can't play these games without losses." Hardly had he spoken before another cannon ball jellied a French engineer's leg. The man was carried off shrieking and bleeding to the surgeons. One quick, dismayed glance at the wound-even that was too much, because it made anyone who saw it want to look away-told Victor they would have to amputate to have any chance of saving the fellow's life. A couple of minutes later, the engineer screamed again, even louder.
"Poor devil," Blaise muttered.
Victor nodded; he was thinking the same thing himself. Then he rode out into the firelight to let the redcoats know he was there. It was important that they should understand he was personally supervising this operation.
They didn't need long to realize as much. Bullets cracked past his head. His horse sidestepped nervously. He didn't draw back into the darkness till after a roundshot skipped past, much too
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
close for comfort. And, thanks to the full moon, the darkness was less dark than it might have been. Enemy fire pursued him far longer than he would have wanted.
"That was foolish," Blaise told him after the English finally stopped trying to ventilate his spleen.
"It could be," Victor said. "But it was also necessary. Now they are certain this bridge has the utmost importance to our cause They will be so very proud of themselves for thwarting its construction.'' The Negro clucked reproachfully. "They would have been mighty damn proud of themselves for killing you. Oh, yes, that they would."
"True enough, but they didn't." Victor Radcliff made himself shrug. "You have to take chances sometimes, that's all."
"We could have dragged you off to the surgeons, too," Blaise said. "They would have shot the horse, and then carved it into steaks and ribs and whatnot. They would not do the same for you, even if it would have been a mercy."
"It happens," Victor said. Horribly wounded men sometimes begged to die If their wounds were dreadful enough, kind friends or appalled strangers would put them out of their torment. As Blaise said, what was mercy for a horse could also be a mercy for a man.
He eyed the moon. It was starting the long, slow slide down toward the Green Ridge Mountains. After midnight, then. An English sniper shot an Atlantean running out to lay more wood on a bonfire. The wounded greencoat hopped away from the blaze. By the way he swore, he wasn't too badly hurt. If blood poisoning or lockjaw didn't carry him off, he'd probably be back in the fight in two or three weeks.
Time dragged on. Try as the French engineers would, they seemed unable to push a bridge very far across the Pomphret. The redcoats mocked them from the far side of the river. Most of the mockery was in English, which few of the Frenchmen understood. They were the lucky ones.
"Any man called me even a quarter of that, I'd kill him," Blaise said.
"We'll have our chance before long," Victor answered. "So I hope, at any rate."