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"Busy. Lots to remember about fuses, sir."
"Are you getting enough to eat?"
Hank looked insulted. "Of course. Two hot and one cold a day."
Valentine had a hard time getting the next out: "Worried about your parents?"
"No." But the boy's eyes left his this time. Valentine went down to one knee so he was at the boy's level, but Hank's face had gone vacant. The boy was off in a mental basement, a basement Valentine suspected was similar to his own.
"Keep busy,"Valentine said, summing long experience into words. The boy looked like he needed more.
"Hank, I'm going to tell you something a Roman Catholic priest told me when I lost my parents. He said it was up to him to turn me into a man since my father wasn't around to do it. He'd never had kids, being a priest, so he had to use the wisdom of others. He used to read a lot of Latin. Roman history, you know?" For some reason Valentine thought of Xray-Tango and his groma.
"They had gladiators," Hank said.
"Right. A Roman statesman named Cicero used to say that 'no Roman in any circumstance could regard himself as vanquished." You know what vanquished means?"
"Uhhh," Hank said.
"What Cicero meant was that even if you were beat, you should never admit that you were. Especially not to the people who'd beaten you."
"Like Southern Command keeping together even after all this," Hank said. The boy's eyes had a sparkle of interest, so Valentine went on.
"Cicero said a man had to have three virtues. Virtus, which meant courage in battle. Not minding pain and so on. You also have to have gravitas, which means being sober, aware of your responsibilities, and controlling your emotions. Even if someone has you madder than a stomped rattlesnake, you don't let them know they've got you by the nose, or they'll just give you another twist. Understand?"
"Virte-virtus and gravitas," Hank said. "I see. But you said there was another."
"This is the most important one for you now. Simplicitas. That means keeping your mind on your duties, doing what most needs to be done at the moment. In fact, I'd better let you get back to yours. I don't want to keep the corporal and the rest waiting."
"Yes, sir," Hank said, saluting. The vacant look was gone. Valentine wanted to hug the boy, but settled for a salute. Gravitas required it.
* * * *
All through the following day the sound of distant trucks and trains could be heard.
That night, though the men were exhausted from laboring on what was now known as the "Beck Line," they danced and cheered at the news that Arkadelphia was liberated, and the Quislings were falling back in disarray. Southern Command would soon be knocking on the hilly gates of Hot Springs, barely fifty miles from New Columbia.
They'd had their own successes. The mortar crews had prevented repair gangs from working on the rail lines during the day, and the occasional illumination shell followed by 4.2-inch mortar airbursts slowed the work to a crawl at night.
But strongpoints with machine guns were now all around the base of the hill, and the mortars on Pulaski Heights had begun to fire again, scattering their shells among the buildings of Solon's Residence. Two men laying wire for field phones were killed when a shell landed between them.
Big Rock Mountain added a life when one of the women gave birth. The eight-and-a-half-pound boy was named Perry after one of the dead signals men.
* * * *
"That's pretty damn arrogant of them," Valentine said, taking his eye from the spotting scope the next day. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the hills were already stretching across New Columbia. "Bringing a barge up the river in daylight."
"I'd say the river's too tricky to do it at night," Post said.
"Then we'll make it too tricky for them to do during the day."
They stood at an observation post above the switchback road running up the southeastern side of the hill, looking through a viewing slit with the protection of headlogs. There were snipers at the base of the hill good enough to get them, even with an uphill shot. There had been minor wounds among the work parties until three-man teams of counter-snipers had been sent down the hill to hunt out the marksmen. Valentine knew there was a gritty war of precision and patience being waged through scoped rifles two hundred feet below, but he had to keep his mind on the river, or rather denying its use to the enemy.
"They're trying to time it so they can unload at night," Post said. The barge was still far from the docks, behind the old brush-covered roadway of the interstate loop.
"I'd like to see if Kessey's guns can make a difference. Durning, you're forward observer for this side, I believe?"
The corporal in the post looked up. "Yes, sir."
