The Fall ofthe WhiteCross.

The mine came in under the Post of Aragon a little before the noon bell, and the first that Brother Anzo knew of it was the water in the cup.

He had set the cup on the drumhead of a broken cask, to drink when the digging let him, and was watching the surface of the water when it shivered. Not from any wind. The air lay dead in the ditch, flat with the cold stink of turned earth and old smoke. The water shivered a second time, and rings ran out across it, small and perfect, the way they had run across the font at home when he was a boy and a fly had touched it. They are under us again. He set down his mattock and put his ear to the wall of raw dirt, as the German miners had taught him. The sound was there, far off and patient: the chock, chock, chock of picks in the dark, coming toward him through the body of the earth.

"Brother Loys," he said. He did not shout. A man did not shout under a mine. "Fetch Manuel. And tell the bailiff they have found the countergallery."

The young knight was beside him in a breath, mud to the elbows, his surcoat so filthed that the white cross on it had gone the color of the ditch. A Provencal, four-and-twenty and new-professed, sent down to the Post of Aragon two weeks past because the men who should have held it were dead. The wall went by nations, every langue its post. Aragon here, England beside it, then Provence and Italy and Germany down the line to the sea. The musters had a dry phrase for the sum of them, the brothers who are found at Rhodes. To a man who could hear it, that said how many were not. He had good hands and he did not weep, and Anzo had come to think well of him. In the sixth month of the siege of Rhodes that was as much as one brother could give another.

"How near?" said Loys.

"Near enough that we will hear them break through before we hear the bell for it." Anzo took up the mattock again. "Go."

Forty years at this trade, and he had never grown used to the mine. A man could meet a Turk on the wall and answer him with the sword. That was clean. That was the trade he had sworn to. The mine was the ground you stood on turning traitor. Somewhere beneath his boots other men filled the belly of the earth with barrels. When they lit it, the wall you had bled for went up like a wave and came down as a hill. Buried in it were brothers who had done nothing but stand where they were told to stand.