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"I see," Victor murmured. If we can drive the redcoats out of Pomphret Landing without smashing the theater or burning it down, I may watch a play there myself One more thing he didn't tell his narrow-minded, if patriotic, informant.
Forcing Cornwallis to pull back from Pomphret Landing wouldn't be so simple. The town sat on the east bank of the Pomphret. Cornwallis' engineers had burnt or blown up the bridges over the river. Locals told Victor there was no ford for some mile inland. English artillerists fired their field guns across the Pomphret at his mounted scouts. Most of those shots missed, as such harassing fire commonly did. But de la Fayette's Frenchmen butchered two horses that met ca
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 ca
"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 ca
But Cornwallis' artillerists would have every advantage in the world. His own guns had to try to wreck the carriages and limbers of enemy ca
Crash! A ca
"So it was," Victor agreed. "But I'm afraid we can't play these games without losses." Hardly had he spoken before another ca
"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 ru