English field guns also opened up on the parallel. The parapet swallowed some cannon balls, but others got through. Some skipped harmlessly between soldiers. That was uncommon luck; a cannon ball could knock down three or four men, and too often did.
Cornwallis stayed busy back in Croydon, too. His men soon found or made mortars, as the Atlanteans had outside of Hanover. Mortars had no trouble at all throwing their shells over the parapet and down into the parallel. At least as often as not, that didn't matter. English fuses were as unreliable as the ones Victor Radcliffs artillerists used. Sometimes the mortar bombs burst in the air. Very often, they failed to burst at all.
Every once in a while, though, everything would go as the artillerists wished it would all the time. Then the shell would go off just when the gunners had in mind, and the exploding powder would work a fearful slaughter. But it didn't happen often enough to keep men out of the trench.
When the first parallel got long enough to satisfy de la Fayette's engineers, they-or rather, French soldiers (and now Atlanteans with them)-began digging a zigzag trench toward the English outworks: a sap. Because of the way the sap ran, it was harder to protect than the parallel had been. More mangled men went off to the surgeons. Some would get better after their ministrations'-although a good many of those, no doubt, would have got better without those ministrations. Others would get wounds that festered, and would slowly and painfully waste away. So war was; so war had always been; so, as far as Victor Radcliff could tell, war would ever be.
"Are the redcoats likely to sally?" Victor asked as the sap snaked closer to the enemy line.
"I don't think so, not yet," de la Fayette answered. "Look how much open ground they would have to cross before they could interrupt us. Our musketeers and your fine riflemen and the cannon would slaughter too many of them to make it worthwhile. When we draw closer… That may prove a different story."
Victor grunted. Like so many things de la Fayette said, the Frenchman's explanation made such good sense, Victor wondered why he hadn't thought of it himself. Of course Cornwallis would wait till they'd dug another parallel or two before trying to disrupt the excavations with his foot soldiers. Victor would have done the same thing himself.
He rode back to a high point so he could survey Croydon and his harbor with his spyglass. The Royal Navy frigates were gone, but several tubby merchantmen had taken their place. Tiny in the distance even through his lenses, stevedores carried sacks of grain off the ships and into the town. Victor swore under his breath. Atlanteans and Frenchmen would have to break through the defenses in front of Croydon, for they would never starve the redcoats out.
"No big guns there, then. No nasty warships, neither," Blaise said when Victor gave him that bit of intelligence. He added,
"Where did the Royal Navy go? When will it come back?"
"If I knew, I would tell you," Victor replied. "And, if you are about to ask me why the frigates set sail, I also know that not."
Blaise chuckled. "I could have done that well myself."
"So could any man here," Victor said. "Perchance, those frigates may return. Or first-rate ships of the line may take their place. Or, then again, the English may prove content with wallowing scows like the ones now tied up in Croydon. They give Cornwallis and his redcoats their necessary victuals and, no doubt, a copious supply of powder and lead."
"They have been shooting enough of it," Blaise agreed.
"Too much!" Victor said. "Damn me if they have not. Well, we did not think this war would be easy when we began it Most Atlanteans, I daresay, failed to believe we could win it"
"You did not always believe that yourself," Blaise reminded him. "You went around preaching that we must not lose, that so long as we stayed in the fight England would tire of it sooner or later."
"I did?" Victor Radcliff had to think back to what now seemed very distant days indeed. After a sheepish chuckle, he found himself nodding. "I did, sure enough. It may yet come to that, you know. Even if we beat them here, the English can mount another invasion-if they have the will to attempt it."
"What if they do?" the Negro asked.
Victor shrugged. "We fight on. We stay in the field. We refuse to own ourselves beaten, come what may. You see? The same song I sang before. We Radcliff's are a stubborn clan, say whatever else you will of us."
"Then you need someone stubborn enough to stay beside you," Blaise said, and tapped the chevrons on his arm. Smiling,
Victor slapped him on the back.
The second parallel. As before, the soil went up on the side facing Croydon's defenses. This trench being closer to the redcoats' works, the Frenchmen and Atlanteans who manned it took more casualties. The English artillerists got as good with their mortars as anyone could with those balky weapons. The besiegers dug shelters into the sides of the trench, and dove into them when the shells came hissing down.
Then it rained-not so hard as it had on the day when Victor's attack went awry, but hard enough. The rain softened the dirt, which should have made digging easier… but who wanted to dig when he sank ankle-deep in mud if he tried? The parapet in front of the trench displayed an alarming tendency to sag, too.
Firing from the English trenches slackened, but it didn't stop. The redcoats had had plenty of time to strengthen their works while their foes dug. Some of their men fired from shelters adequate to keep their powder dry. Some of their mortars still tossed hate into the air.
One shell splashed down into a puddle that doused its fuse. "Drown, you son of a bitch!" shouted the closest Atlantean infantryman. Within a day, half the Atlanteans were telling the story. So were a quarter of de la Fayette's French soldiers-it was easy enough to translate.
The rain changed to sleet, and the sleet changed to snow. The ground went from too soft to work with conveniently to too hard to work with conveniently, all in the space of a couple of days. Atlanteans and Frenchmen shivered in huts and tents. No doubt the redcoats were chilly, too, but they had Croydon's snug houses in which to lodge.
Watching smoke rise from chimneys in town, Victor said, "Sooner or later, they'll run short of firewood."
"Soon enough to do us any good?" Blaise asked.
"I don't know," Victor admitted. "How much wood did they have before the siege began? How cold will the winter be? How many of the Croydonites' chattels will the redcoats bum to keep from corning down with chilblains?"
"As many as they need to," Blaise said without hesitation.
"I shouldn't wonder," Victor said. Shivering Atlanteans would do the same-he was sure of that. Instead, they had plenty of timber close by. But wood freshly cut would smoke horribly when it went onto the fire. That wouldn't stop his men from using it, but the soot would make them look like Negroes if they kept on for very long.
"We need more picks, fewer shovels," de la Fayette said a couple of days later. "We are chipping at the ground more than digging through it."
"Well, so we are," Victor said. "Unless your blacksmiths feel like beating spades into picks-an eventuality of which the Good Book says nothing-I know not where we shall come by them."
"Off the countryside?" de la Fayette said hopefully.
"Good luck," Victor replied. "Maybe we can get a few. But unless we pay well for them, our own farmers will start shooting at us from ambush."
"They would not do that!" the marquis exclaimed.
"Ha!" Victor said, and then again, louder, "Ha!" That done, he proceeded to embellish on the theme: "Your Grace, chances are you know more about how they fight in Europe than I do. You'd better. But I promise you this-I know more about Atlantean fanners and what they're likely to do than you've ever imagined."