"It could be. Very probably, it is. French peasants, however, would not behave so," de la Fayette said.
"Next time I campaign in France, I'll remember that," Victor said. "For now, you need to remember you're campaigning in Atlantis."
"I am not likely to forget it," the French nobleman replied, tartly enough to suggest that, while he conceded he wasn't lost on the trackless prairies of northern Terranova beyond the Great River, he also didn't see himself as being so tar away from those buffalo-thundering grasslands. After pausing just long enough to let that sink in, he continued, "One reminder is the weather. How soon can we resume our excavations, even if we obtain picks? Will we be able to do so at all before spring?"
"Well, I don't exactly know." Victor held up a hand before de la Fayette could speak. "Nobody exactly knows the weather-I understand that. But I don't even approximately know. I do not spring from this part of Atlantis, and I have not spent sufficient time up here to have a good feel for what's likely to come."
"Some of your men will, though?" de la Fayette suggested.
"Can't hurt to ask," Victor said, and instructed one of his messengers.
Grinning, the youngster said, "I'd make my own guesses, sir, but I'm from down in Freetown myself, so they wouldn't be worth an at-" He broke off, flushing to the roots of his hair. "They wouldn't be worth much, I mean. I'll go fetch somebody who was born around here." He dashed away as if his breeches were on fire.
Victor Radcliff stared sourly after him. Wouldn't be worth an Atlantean, the messenger hadn't quite swallowed. When the Atlantean Assembly's own followers scorned the paper the Assembly issued… When such a thing happened, you knew that paper had lost more value than you wished it would have.
The messenger quickly returned with a sergeant who gave his name as Saul Andrews and who said, "I come from a farm about twenty miles from here. Never strayed far from it, neither, General, not till I picked up a musket and went to war with you." Sure enough, he used the flat vowels and muffled final fs of a Croydon man.
"Good enough," Victor replied. "How long do you expect this harsh cold spell to last?"
Andrews glanced up at the sky. Whatever he saw there only made him shrug. "Well, now, sir, that's a mite hard to calculate," he said. "If it's a hard winter, it could stay this way till spring. I've seen it do that very thing. But if it's not so hard, we'll get some warm spells betwixt and between the freezes. Which I've also seen."
"If you had to guess-?" Victor prompted.
Sergeant Andrews shrugged. "The good Lord knows, but He ain't told me. Only thing I can say is, we got to wait and see."
"All right, Sergeant. You may go," Victor said, stifling a sigh.
Andrews departed with almost as many signs of relief as the messenger had shown a few minutes earlier. Try as Victor would, he couldn't get angry at the man. Custis Cawthorne had tried using barometer and thermometer-both of which he'd had to make himself-to foretell the weather. And sometimes he'd been right, and sometimes he'd been wrong. Anyone who'd lived out in the open long enough to grow up could have done as well without fancy devices. So people delighted in telling Cawthorne, too, till he finally gave up and sold the meteorological instruments for what the glass and quicksilver would bring.
"He does not know?" De la Fayette's English was imperfect, but he'd got the gist.
"No, he doesn't." This time, Victor did sigh. "I don't suppose anyone else will, either. As he said, we just have to wait and see."
"Very well." By the way de la Fayette said it, it wasn't But even a young, headstrong nobleman understood that a Power higher than he controlled the weather. "We shall just have to be ready to take advantage of the good and do our best to ride out the bad."
Victor Radcliff set a hand on his shoulder. "Welcome to life, your Grace."
In due course, the parallel advanced again. Then a blizzard froze the ground hard as iron, and digging perforce stopped. The wind howled down from the northwest. Snow swirled and danced. The redcoats' defensive works and their foes' saps and parallels vanished under a blanket of white.
Almost everything vanished, in fact. While the storm raged, Victor had trouble seeing out to the end of his arm. He wondered if he could turn that to his, and Atlantis', advantage. Cornwallis' men would have trouble seeing, too. Attackers might be able to get very close to their works before getting spotted. If anything went wrong as they approached, though…
Since he had trouble making up his mind, he held a council of war to see what his officers-and the French, most of whom needed translation-thought of the idea. As he might have guessed, they split pretty evenly.
"If anything goes wrong-even the least little thing-you've spilled the thundermug into the stewpot," one major said.
"If things go the way we want them to, we walk into Croydon," a captain countered. Both those notions had been in Victor's mind. His officers had as much trouble weighing them one against the other as he did.
"The glory of victory complete and absolute!" de la Fayette said enthusiastically. Whether his officers were or not, he was ready to attack.
He seemed so very ready, in fact, that he made "Baron" von Steuben stir. "We have in hand the game," the German veteran said. "With saps and parallels, sooner or later we are sure to win, or almost. An attack, even an attack in Schnee-ah, snow-and we all this risk. Why take the chance?"
"Only a snake could look at things in a more cold-blooded way," de la Fayette said-not quite the insult direct, but close. A touchy officer might have called him out for it.
Von Steuben only smiled and bowed. "Do not down your nose at snakes look, your Grace," he said. "There are in this world of them a great many, and most of them seem uncommonly well fed."
"I should rather fight like a man," de la Fayette said. "No one says to on your belly crawl to the redcoats' lines and bite in the leg an English sergeant. This is more likely you than him to poison," von Steuben replied. The Atlantean officers laughed right away. After the joke was translated, so did most of the Frenchmen. Even de la Fayette smiled. Von Steuben went on, "Yes, you should like a man fight. But you should also like a smart man, not like some dumbhead, fight, is it not so?"
Plainly, de la Fayette wanted nothing more than to tell him it was not so. Just as plainly, the Frenchman couldn't, not unless he wanted to make a liar of himself. All but choking on the words, de la Fayette said, "It is so."
"Good. Very good." Von Steuben might have been patting a puppy on the head, not talking to his nominal superior. "You can things learn. Give yourself a chance longer to live, and you will more things learn."
De la Fayette looked more affronted than von Steuben had when the French noble-the genuine French noble, Victor reminded himself-called him cold-blooded. But all von Steuben had accused him of was being young. Time would cure that… unless he did something foolish enough to get himself killed before it could.
The council of war went on a while longer after the exchange between von Steuben and de la Fayette. As Victor soon saw, though, men on both sides of the question were only kicking it back and forth in the same track.
That left it up to him. Well, it had always been up to him, but now he had to look the fact square in the face. "We'll wait," he said. "We'll go on digging, as best we can. If matters develop differently from the way we now expect… Well, in that case, chances are Croydon will see another blizzard before winter's out."