Alexander squinted, ignoring the pounding of the Turkish guns. “Yes.”
“Wait until I give you the signal.” He went on down the wall, keeping low, until he reached the Main Gate. There he had the men pour the heavy, stinking sheep’s oil over the wall onto the piles of brush in the ditches below. One man was killed doing that, and Rakóssy had his body taken down to the courtyard.
The Janissaries’ drums began to rattle. Rakóssy’s men were gathered up in the courtyard, holding the long-bladed pikes. Arpád stood at their head, looking grim.
Rakóssy called down to him to keep the pikemen inside the inner gate. “Never mind. Do what I say for once.”
The Turkish shot redoubled. The guns were concentrated on the area around the Main Gate, and they were aimed to strike the top of the wall, so that none of the men could do more than crouch behind the shuddering wall.
“Rakóssy!”
That was Béla.
“Look over there.”
Rakóssy looked across the river. A shadowed mass of men and horses was moving up along the far bank, toward the Countess Gate bridge.
“Never mind, they won’t be in any position to do us harm.”
“Maybe.” Béla crawled up beside him; his face was black with soot.
“Not tonight, at least.”
There was a monstrous howl from the plain. The Janissaries attacked, screaming. The Magyars could see them only vaguely through the drifting smoke and dust. Rakóssy crept down past the edge of the Turks’ fire and shouted to Alexander. He lifted his arm. Alexander was waiting with a slow match. The pipes and drums of the Janissaries wailed almost louder than the guns.
The guns on the wall near the Countess Gate opened up, cutting across the field, but the Janissaries were too far away. They raced on, screaming and beating their drums. They scrambled up over the earthworks, leapt down from the top, and hurtled on.
Rakóssy dropped his arm, and Alexander opened up with the Chapel Gate guns. Rakóssy was holding his breath. The air burned in his lungs. The fusillade from the Chapel Gate guns cut almost across the Janissaries’ charge. They could see where the scrap had gone by the lines of thrashing bodies. The two powder kegs exploded. The Janissaries recoiled from it. The dead sprawled on the ground around the earthworks in a fan shape around the kegs.
The Janissaries kept coming. Rakóssy reached for a torch and hurled it over the wall into the oil-soaked brush. The voices of the Janissaries were high-pitched and whining and the guns howled. The fire caught in the oil brush and flames leapt up, licking at the wall and shooting down the ditches with a soft crackling.
A wash of Turkish shot struck the top of the wall near where he was standing. He turned, shouting to the men around him to get down, feeling the rampart quiver and buckle under his feet. A gun blew up and a piece of iron clouted him across the knees. He fell and slid halfway off the rampart. His head pounded. The noise was driving him mad. Something heavy struck his shoulders and he almost lost his grip. He lurched up blindly and caught an iron brace on the wall. His fingers clamped around it. He felt the heavy thing slide away from him and heard it fall into the courtyard. The blood burst forth in a stream from his nose. He lay, panting, against the warming stone. He gulped and swallowed his own blood.
The guns stopped suddenly. The silence was like a benediction.
There was a long Magyar cheer. He wiped the blood from his face on his sleeve and looked around. Dead men and a wrecked cannon lay on the broken rampart. Another cannon was in the courtyard on its back.
The drums had stopped too. They must have retreated. He shut his eyes again. Feet ran toward him on the broken rampart and his men hauled him up, all soft words and exclamations. One of his legs was cut to the bone. They carried him to his bedroom. Mari screamed. Catharine directed them to put him down and help her undress him and bind him up.
He lay still, listening to Catharine’s voice. The men left and she pulled the covers up over him.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes.” He turned his head.
She dabbed at his forehead with a damp cloth. “You were really bashed up, my dear.”
He had a headache. “Something hit me on the head.”
“Whatever it was was no match for your iron skull.”
“Did we lose many men?”
“I don’t know. Don’t think about it. I’ll take care of you. Go to sleep.” She kissed his cheek. “Good night.”
Pál said, “They’ve broken in the gate.”
Denis stood up. “Let’s go take a look.”
“What will we do?”
Denis fought down the urge to say, “I don’t know,” and scream at the top of his lungs. He went down the corridor to the great hall, out that door, and stopped.
The gate was a mass of rubble. One of the big guns on the side of the gate had been knocked out. Two men were clearing away the dead. Denis went slowly across the courtyard, past the motionless turnstile, and looked out.
He could see straight down the slope to the Turkish guns. The infantry — they were not Janissaries; they were just infantry, and he was glad — were standing around talking.
“We have to block it,” he said. “What have we got?”
Pál shrugged.
“Get the furniture out of the great hall. It’s heavy enough. And the bedding from all the bedrooms. Go on. Get some of the others to help you.”
Zoltan came running toward him. “This is insane,” he said. His face poured sweat. “What do you think this is?”
“Thermopylae,” Denis said. “What brought you out of your hole?”
“Denis,” Zoltan said. “Denis, have you gone mad? Fighting — and killing, just like some wild young animal, all the things you hated your brother for, and justly, too. They offered you good terms, honorable terms, and you could end this meaningless, senseless—”
Denis spat. “Go back in your hole.”
He went up the ladder and climbed the rampart, sloping from the collapse of the gate, to the last of the heavy guns. They had lost four guns so far. Six men were sitting around the gun, eating bread and cheese.
“They’re damned cautious,” one of them said. “They could have attacked any time.”
“They’ll wait until dark.”
“How do you suppose they’re doing at Vrath?”
Denis took a deep breath. “If Vrath had fallen, we would have heard of it. They would have strung my brother up in seventeen pieces right in front of us.”
“As long as they hold out, we’re all right,” another man said. “We’ve got someplace to go if this heap gives out.”
“If? When.” The first man glanced at Denis. “How much food do we have, my lord?”
“Not much,” Denis said. “I’m going to start slaughtering horses.”
“Horses. You expect us to eat horses?”
“Wait until you start getting really hungry,” Denis said. “You’ll eat your own mother.”
“Why don’t we slaughter Anna?”
Denis laughed. “After the horses. And Zoltan.”
They laughed softly, rocking on their heels.
“I wonder what terms they offered Vrath,” Denis said.
“He probably offered them terms,” the second man said. “Christ, he’s a tough bastard. I’ll bet Béla’s sorry he ever threw in with him.”
“Ask him,” Denis said.
“I will when I get to hell.”
“Hungry?” One of the others offered part of his bread to Denis.
“I just ate,” Denis said.
The Turkish guns began to fire again. Denis said, “On your feet. Let’s see if we can get that big gun in the middle.”
Rakóssy was in bed for a long time, weak and sick. Catharine thought that he would limp for the rest of his life; she was worried that the wound would get infected.
Arpád and the others stood off a charge against the Chapel Gate bridge and a long, wearying attack on the Main Gate and the bridge together. The Turks seemed
to be testing, probing here and there, trying to find weaknesses rather than to take the castle by storm. They bombarded the walls now, forsaking the gates. The noise was continuous. Catharine sat up during the night, watching Rakóssy, and wondered how he could sleep through it.
After more than a week had passed he was suddenly much better and wild to get out of bed. Catharine would not let him. She locked the room when she left. He got out and walked around the room with a staff to lean on, and he made all the men come to him and tell him what was going on.
“We’ve got a lot of wounded,” Béla said. “A lot more than get killed. But they die. We’ve put them in the great hall.”
Rakóssy rubbed his leg. “I was lucky.”
Béla grinned. “No. You were Rakóssy.”
Catharine said, “Who is tending the wounded?”
“The women from the kitchen,” Béla said.
Rakóssy hauled himself around to face her. His face was leaner and his cheekbones looked higher and sharper. “Don’t you go down there, you hear me?”
His vehemence surprised her. “I hear you, János.”
The Turks hammered away with their heavy guns at the wall between the Main Gate and the Countess Gate, opposite the stable. They pounded at it from the plain and from across the river, never ceasing, but they tried no more charges. They had lost too many men and gained nothing.
Rakóssy left his room for the first time nearly three weeks after he had been wounded. He walked at first with a heavy staff. The Turks must have seen him on the walls; two Turks with bows rode in close to Vrath and shot arrows over the walls with messages tied to them. The messages were identical: “The Sultan congratulates the lord Rakóssy on his recovery.”
Rakóssy doubted that the Turks would try to mine under the castle wall because of the nearness of the river. He ordered pans of water set along the base of the wall nonetheless, so that if the Turks did go to digging, the water would show the movements of the ground.
“They must be feeling very disgusted with themselves out there,” Catherine said one day.
“Why?”
“Because they’ve been stood off by less than five hundred men.”
“We have more than five hundred. I doubt they’re feeling too badly about it. Most sieges are like this.”
“Still—”
“Do you think we’re low on morale?”
“Oh, no. Everybody’s wonderful.”
“That’s the way it’s always been.”
Mari had her baby, far too early, and it died. They buried it in the back courtyard, where the sheep had been pastured. Catharine wept bitterly over it, as if it had been her own. Mari and Arpád made it known that they would have another almost immediately.
The long heat broke in the beginning of June, and it rained for four days straight, a heavy smothering rain. Rakóssy covered his guns with straw and canvas. He did without the staff now, although he limped heavily. While the rain kept up he and his men built wooden roofs to protect the gun crews. The Turks merely sat on the plain waiting.
After the rain stopped, the bombardment began again. The Turks were sending out raiding parties. Rakóssy saw several troops of Spahis leave the camp in the week after the rain. He thought that the Sultan was getting restless.
“Do you feel proud?” Catharine said. “You and he — you are equals. You are matched together.”
Rakóssy looked at the green tent. The Sultan was sitting in a chair in front of it, talking with his officers. One of the officers was Mustafa.
“This is nothing more than a game to him,” Rakóssy said. “I’m nothing more to him than a fly he could crush with his riding whip.”
“No.”
Rakóssy shrugged. “The man’s been raised in silks and gold. He’s waited on by his slaves hand and foot and he’s always obeyed without question. He knows nothing of me and I know nothing of him. If I walked over there as a beggar he would give me alms.”
“And probably cut off your head.”
Rakóssy threw back his head and laughed. “Probably.”
“That’s enough for me,” she said.
“What a bloodthirsty little thing you are.”
In the middle of June he counted his men. He had had five hundred and forty at the beginning of the siege, and now he had three hundred and two who were healthy and seventy-three wounded in the great hall. The women from the kitchens tended them under the magnificent hangings and gold inlay of generations of Counts Malencz.
Catharine went down one day to see the wounded. She went through the high door and stopped short. The hall was full of beds and bodies. Two or three women moved among them. She went slowly forward and stopped at the first bed. It was a man of about Rakóssy’s age; there was a long wound in his throat and another in his chest, a hole as if someone had scooped out a handful of his flesh. The wound on his neck was bandaged but his chest was open and bare. She saw the maggots crawling around in the oozing flesh.
“Sania,” she said, and the woman came over.
“Look,” Catharine said. “Can’t you do anything?”
Sania shrugged. “The worms, they eat out the rot.”
Catharine turned and ran out of the hall and was sick in the corridor.
She went off to find Rakóssy, her stomach sliding around inside her. He was on the balcony, talking to Béla. She came up and took hold of his arm.
“Yes, my lord,” Béla said, and went out the door. Rakóssy looked down at Catharine.
“There’s a boy in the great hall,” she said, “and the worms are eating him.”
“There are seventy-eight men in the great hall,” he said, “and the worms are eating all of them. I told you not to go down there.”
“Isn’t there anything—”
“The women know all there is to be known.”
“A doctor?”
“A doctor would prescribe cobwebs and bleeding. A doctor can tend arrow wounds and sword cuts, but what can anybody do when somebody’s been blown up? Anyway we don’t have one. Don’t go down there again.”
A horn blew somewhere, and he looked up. He went to the rail and stared out. Catharine turned.
The Turk archers were running forward with their bows. A horseman galloped straight toward the Main Gate, coming from somewhere on the left. He swept down toward the gate, lashing his horse, while the arrows pelted the ground around him and flew past him. Rakóssy shouted, and his gun crews leapt to their cannon. They started up a covering fire.
Béla had come out of the building and was standing almost directly below, looking bewildered. Rakóssy leaned down and shouted, “Rider coming — a Magyar. Go to the gate.” And when Béla hesitated: “Get going, damn you.”
The horseman was past the shattered earthworks, coming on, closer; Catharine’s heart thundered and she held her breath. She could see the light sparkling on his horse’s bits and the colors of the hood of his cloak. She cried out to him.
The horse plunged to the ground and the man sailed off. He landed and was still, not twenty feet from the gate. Catharine screamed. Down by the Main Gate, Béla suddenly understood and fought his way through the tangled mess and rubble out to the plain. Rakóssy was straining forward over the railing, shouting to him. Béla ran to the fallen man and heaved him up onto his shoulder. He staggered back through the gate. Rakóssy whirled and ran from the balcony.
Béla got the Magyar through the litter of the gate and laid him down on the paving stones. Immediately he was surrounded by the others. Rakóssy appeared in the courtyard and shouldered and cursed his way through the mob. Catharine watched him, her lungs aching from her pent-up breath.
She saw the way he stood up and dismissed the crowd and she relaxed. He called up four men to carry the man into the great hall and started back into the castle. She could see the relief in the way he held his shoulders. He came back out onto the balcony, and she said, “It wasn’t Denis.”
“It wasn’t anybody I knew. Not from Hart.”
“Is
he dead?”
“No. He’s got an arrow through a lung, though.”
She turned and went to the door into the castle.
“Catharine,” he said.
She made her step more firm, more confident, and went on, down to the great hall.
The man recovered enough to say that he was from the King, that the King would raise the ban on Rakóssy if he would provide men and guns to fight the Turks. He told this to Béla, and Béla laughed in his face.
“Yes,” the man said. “Yes, very funny, isn’t it?”
Rakóssy was summoned, and he came to the man’s bedside. “The Emperor,” he said. “Has the King asked his help?”
“They won’t help us. None of them. The heretic has told them it’s God’s will, the coming of the Turks.” The man swallowed. A pink froth clung to the corner of his mouth. “Will I die?”
Rakóssy stared away, not listening.
“Will I die?” the man said.
“I’ll take care of you,” Catharine said.
Rakóssy went out into the corridor. He walked to the stairs and up to the door of the balcony. He could see through to the sunlight and the plain beyond the wall, and the light outside made the darkness just within the door more distinct.
The Emperor . . . chooses not to come. He thought, There’s no use for it. All the things I did, and they called me a traitor. He’s betrayed us all. That stupid boy. That Burgundian-Spanish-German and the Devil knows what else lout waving his sword at peasants. What was the use? I should go out now and give it up to him and let him kill me and at least the rest of them could live through it. Oh, God, you stinking —
He plunged out into the sunlight. He leaned his forearms on the rail and looked east toward the green silk tent, shaking in the wind. The Sultan in his chair was watching Vrath.
He stared at the Sultan, thinking about the Emperor fighting his wars in Italy and France and scratching where the heretic monk itched. The Emperor, who could not be bothered about a little war on the edge of Europe. The Magyars had always fought to keep out of the Empire, to keep from being hauled by the heels to the Hapsburgs in their golden chairs. It was hard to think of how the Emperor had decided it that way.
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