by Paul Kearney
“Well, get what stock have survived and secure them in their stalls. Lash them to the pens if you have to. This could be a long blow.” Hawkwood was beginning to feel like a parrot, repeating his litany to everyone he met.
Sequero nodded dully.
“What about the soldiers? How are they faring?”
“Drunk, most of them. Some of the older ones have been saving their wine rations. They thought they were going to die, and so decided to drown whilst drunk.”
Hawkwood laughed. “I’ve heard of worse ideas. What of Lord Murad?”
“What of him? He’s closeted with his peasant whore as usual.”
A violent lurch of the ship pitched them both into the stinking water. They struggled out of it spitting and cursing.
“Are you sure this thing won’t sink, Captain?” Sequero sneered.
But Hawkwood was already retracing his steps forward. Time to get back on deck and take up his proper place. He was blind down here.
I T had become a little lighter and the clouds seemed to have lifted above the level of the mastheads. The seas were just as mountainous though, great hills of water with troughs a quarter of a mile apart and crests as high as the carrack’s topmasts. They were running before the wind now, and the waves were rising around the ship’s stern, lifting her high into the air and then passing under her, leaving her almost becalmed in their lee. There seemed to be little danger of her being pooped, thanks to her construction, and would have to ride the storm out, letting it blow them where it willed.
Velasca had had hawsers sent up to the mastheads and there were men working in the tops, struggling to secure them. Others were double lashing the upper-deck guns and the two ship’s boats that had survived, though the passage of the run-away gun had smashed chunks out of both their sides. And to both larboard and starboard thick jets of white water were spewing out of the pumps as men bent up and down over them, trying to lighten the ship.
“Tiller there!” Hawkwood shouted down the hatch. “How’s she steering?”
“Easier, sir,” Masudi called back. “But the men are tiring.”
“Mihal and his mess will be up to relieve you soon. Steady as she goes, Masudi.”
“Aye, sir.”
For hour after hour the carrack rode the vast waves and careered before the wind roughly south-west, away off their course and into seas unknown even to Tyrenius Cobrian. Despite the fact that the yards were bare, her speed was very great as she was shunted forward on the shining backs of the enormous breakers.
The watch changed. Exhausted seamen were relieved by others scarcely less exhausted, but the hands remained on deck for hour after hour, pumping, splicing, repairing or simply remaining in readiness for the next crisis.
It grew colder. When Hawkwood estimated that their storm-driven run had taken them some forty leagues off course the balminess in the air vanished and the water took on a grey, chill aspect in the sunless dawn of the next day. All that day they continued to run before the wind, eating bread and raw salt pork when they could, feeling the salt in their clothing rasp their saturated skin and continuing the unending repairs.
After a second night and a second day they began to feel that they had never been warm or dry, and had never really known sleep before. They lost another man off one of the yards who had slackened his grip out of sheer weariness, and they threw overboard the bodies of three passengers who had died of the injuries sustained in the first, savage squall. And they continued south-west across the titanic, illimitable Western Ocean, like a stick of wood adrift in a millrace with a knot of frenzied ants clinging to it. There was nothing else to do.
EIGHTEEN
T HEY came with the dawn, as Martellus had said they would. Had it not been for the vigilance of the pickets they might have swarmed up to the very walls, so sudden was their onset; for the Merduks had elected to forgo a preliminary bombardment, preferring to gamble on achieving surprise. But the watching sentries set light to the signal rockets and flares, and suddenly the eastern barbican and the river were lit up with smoking red lights that described bright parabolas across the lightening sky and illuminated the bristling phalanxes of advancing troops below.
The garrison of the barbican rushed out to their stations. All along the walls, slow-match was lit and set to one side, men shouldered their arquebuses and powder and shot-carriers hurried up to the parapets with their vital loads.
The Merduk host, discovered, came on with a mighty roar, a rush of shouting and thumping feet that set the hair crawling on Corfe’s head. Once again, he beheld the teeming mass of a Merduk army assaulting walls, like a seaweed-thick tide lapping at a cliff face.
The sun was coming up. More powder rockets were launched, this time to help the gunners aim their culverins. The swarming mob of Merduks was perhaps two hundred yards from the walls when Andruw stabbed the slow-match into the touch-hole of the first cannon.
It jumped back with a roar and an exploding fog of smoke. At the signal, the other big guns of the fortress began to bark out also until the entire barbican was a massive reeking smoke cloud stabbed through and through with red and yellow flame.
Corfe was able to see the result of the first few salvoes before the smoke hid the advancing hordes. The Torunnans were using delayed-fuse shells that exploded in midair and scattered jagged metal in a deadly radius beneath them. He saw swathes of the enemy fall or be tossed into the air and ripped to pieces, like crops flattened by an invisible wind. Then they came on again, dressing their broken lines and screaming their hoarse battlecries. There were hundreds of ladders in their midst, carried shoulder-high.
“What of their numbers, Corfe?” Andruw shouted. “What do you make them?”
How to set a figure to that broiling mass of humanity? But Corfe was a soldier, a professional. His mind played with figures in his head.
“Nine or ten thousand in the first wave,” he shouted back, the smoke aching his throat already. “But that’s just the first wave.”
Andruw grinned out of a blackened face. “Plenty for everyone then.”
They were at the foot of the walls now, a roaring multitude horned with scaling ladders and baying like animals. The rising sun lit up the further hills, shafted through the billowing powder smoke and made something ethereal and beautiful out of it, the defenders seeming to be flat silhouettes in the fiery reek. The gunners of the lighter pieces depressed their guns to maximum and began firing down into the packed masses below, whilst the arquebusiers were holding fire, waiting for Andruw’s order.
Scaling ladders thumping against the battlements. Grapnels, ropes and a shower of crossbow bolts that knocked down half a dozen men in Corfe’s vision alone. The ladders began to quiver as the enemy climbed up them.
“Hold your fire, arquebusiers!” Andruw shouted. A few nervous men were already letting loose.
Faces at the top of the ladders, black as fiends from hell.
“Fire!”
A rippling series of explosions as two thousand arquebuses went off almost as one. Many ladders crashed back down in the press below, unbalanced by the death throes of the men at their tops. Others remained, and more of the enemy continued their climb.
“Fork-men, to the front!” the order went out, and Torunnans came forward bearing objects shaped like long-handled pitchforks. Two or three of the defenders would push these against the scaling ladders and send them out in a slow, graceful arc, packed with men, to swing down into red ruin in the massed ranks at the foot of the walls.
The assault paused, checked. The noise of men shouting and shrieking, the boom of cannon and crack of arquebus were deafening.
“Have they no strategy at all?” Andruw was asking Corfe. “They’re like a ram butting a gate. Do they reckon nothing of casualties?”
“They don’t have to,” Corfe told him. “Remember what Martellus said? Attrition. They are losing men by the thousand, we by the score. But they can afford to lose their thousands. They are as numberless as the sand of a beach.”
They stood near the gate that was the main entrance to this part of the fortress. The sun was rising rapidly and a rosy-gold light was playing over the scene. They could see through gaps in the smoke to where fresh forces were already being marshalled on the hills beyond. The Merduk guns were being brought into play now, but they were firing high. Most of their shots seemed to be falling into the Searil, raising fountains of white, shattered water.
“So they use explosive shells, too,” Andruw said, surprised.
It was something the Ramusians had invented only twenty years ago.
“Yes, and incendiaries. I hope we have enough firefighters.”
“Fire is the last thing we have to worry about. Here they come again.”
A fresh surge at the foot of the walls. Crossbow bolts came clinking and cracking against the battlements in a dark hail. Men fell screaming from the catwalks.
Another assault, the ladders lifted up and thrown down once more. The ground at the bottom of the fortifications was piled with corpses and wreckage.
“I don’t like it,” Corfe said. “This is too easy.”
“Too easy!”
“Yes. There is no thought behind these assaults. I think they are a cover for something else. Even Shahr Baraz does not throw his men’s lives away for no gain.”
There was an earth-shuddering concussion that seemed to come from beneath their very feet. Almost the entire gatehouse was enveloped in thick smoke through which flame speared and flapped.
“They’ve blown the gate!” Andruw cried.
“I’ll see to it. Stay here. They’ll make another assault to cover the breaching party.”
Corfe ran down the wide stairs to the courtyards and squares below. Torunnan soldiers and refugee civilians were running about carrying powder, shot, wounded men, match and water. He seized on a group of a dozen who possessed arquebuses and led them into the shadow of the gatehouse.
There in the arch a fierce fire was burning, and the massive gates were askew on their hinges, white scars marking the shattered wood. Already the Merduk engineers were swarming through the gaps and a hundred more were clustered behind them. It was like watching dark maggots writhing in a wound.
“Present pieces!” Corfe yelled to his motley command, and the arquebuses were levelled.
“Give fire!”
The volley flung back a score of Merduks who were clambering through the wrecked gates.
“Out swords. Follow me!” Corfe cried, and led the Torunnans at a run.
They stepped over wriggling, maimed men and began slashing and hewing in the burning gloom of the arch like things possessed. In a few moments there were no Merduks left alive inside the gatehouse, and those trying to force their way through the battered portals had limbs and heads lopped off by the defenders.
The fire spread. Corfe was dimly aware of men with water buckets. He hacked the fingers off a hand that was pulling at the broken gate. Then someone was tugging him away.
“The murder-holes! They’re going to use them. Out of the gateway!”
He allowed himself to be hauled away, half blind with sweat and smoke. The Torunnans fell back.
Immediately the Merduks were squirming through the gates again. In seconds a score of them were on the inside and more of their fellows were joining them by the moment.
“Now!” a voice yelled somewhere.
A golden torrent poured down on the hapless Merduks from holes in the ceiling of the gatehouse. It was not liquid, but as soon as it struck the men below they screamed horribly, tearing at their armour and dropping their swords. They flailed around in agony for long minutes whilst their comrades halted outside, watching in helpless fury.
“What is it?” Corfe asked. “It looks like—”
“Sand,” he was told by a grinning soldier. “Heated sand. It gets inside the armour and fries them to a cinder. More economical than lead, wouldn’t you say?”
“Make way, there!” A gunnery officer and a horde of blackened figures were man-hauling two broad-muzzled falcons into position before the gate. As the torrent of sand faltered the Merduks outside began clambering inside again with what seemed to Corfe to be arrant stupidity or maniac courage.
The falcons went off. Loaded with scrap metal, they did the remains of the gates little damage, but the Merduks in the archway were blown to shreds. Blood and fragments of flesh, bone and viscera plastered the interior of the archway.
“They’re falling back!” someone yelled.
It was true. The attack on the gate was being abandoned for the moment. The Merduks were drawing away.
“Keep these pieces posted here, and get engineers to work on these gates,” Corfe commanded the gunnery officer, not caring what his rank might be. “I’ll send men down from the wall to reinforce you as soon as I can.”
Without waiting for a reply, he ran for the catwalk stairs to rejoin the men on the battlements.
Another assault—the cover for the breaching party—had just been thrown back. Men were reloading the cannons frantically, charging their arquebuses, doctoring minor wounds. The dead were tossed off the parapet like sacks; time for the solemnities later.
Andruw’s sabre was bloody and his eyes startlingly white in a filthy face. “What about the gate?”
“It’s holding, for the moment. They’re persistent bastards. I’ll give them that. We sent half a hundred of them to join their prophet before they drew back.”
Andruw laughed heartily. “By sweet Ramusio’s blessed blood, they’ll not walk over us without a stumble or two. Was it as tight as this at Aekir, Corfe?”
Corfe turned away, face flat and ugly.
“It was different,” he said.
M ARTELLUS watched the failure of the assault from his station on the heights of the citadel. His officers were clustered about him, grave but somehow jubilant. The Merduk host was drawing back like a snarling dog that has been struck on the muzzle. All over the eastern barbican on the far side of the river a vast turmoil of rising smoke shifted and eddied, shot through with flame. Even here, over a mile away, it was possible to hear the hoarse roar of a multitude in extremity, a formless, surf-like sound that served as background to the rolling thunder of the guns.
“He’s lost thousands,” one of the senior officers was saying. “What is he thinking of, to throw troops bare-handed against prepared fortifications like that?”
A messenger arrived from the eastern bank, his face grimed and his chest heaving. Martellus read the dispatch with thin lips, then dismissed him.
“The gate is damaged. We would have lost it, were it not for the efforts of my new aide. Andruw puts his own casualties at less than three hundred.”
Some of the other officers grinned and stamped. Others looked merely thoughtful. They eyed the retreat of the attacking Merduk regiments—orderly despite the barrage that the Torunnan guns were laying down—then their gazes moved up the hillsides, to where the main host was encamped in its teeming thousands and the Merduk batteries squatted silent and ominous.
“He’s playing with us,” someone said. “He could have continued that attack all day, and not blinked an eye at the casualties.”
“Yes,” Martellus said. The early light filled his eyes with tawny fire and made a glitter out of the white lines in his hair. “This was an armed reconnaissance, no more, as I said it would be. He now knows the location of our guns and the dispositions of the eastern garrison. Tomorrow he will attack again, but this time it will not be a sudden rush, unsupported and ill-disciplined. Tomorrow we will see Shahr Baraz assault in earnest.”
H UNDREDS of miles away to the west. Follow the Terrin river northwards to where the gap between the Cimbric Mountains and the Thurians opens out. Pass over the glittering Sea of Tor with its dark fleets of fishing boats and its straggling coastal towns. There, in the foothills of the western Cimbrics, see the majestic profile of Charibon, where the bells of the cathedral are tolling for Vespers and the evening air is thickening into an early night in the s
hadow of the towering peaks.
In the apartments that had been made over to the new High Pontiff Himerius, the great man himself and Betanza, Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order sat alone, the attending clerics dismissed. The muddy, travel-worn man who had been with them minutes before had been led away to a well-earned bath and bed.
“Well?” Betanza asked.
Himerius’ eyes were hooded, his face a maze of crannied bone dominated by the eagle nose. As High Pontiff he wore robes of rich purple, the only man in the world entitled to do so unless the Fimbrian emperors were to come again.
“Absurd nonsense, all of it.”
“Are you so sure, Holiness?”
“Of course! Macrobius died in Aekir. Do you think the Merduks would have missed such a prize? This eyeless fellow is an impostor. The general at the dyke, this Martellus, he has obviously circulated this story in order to raise the morale of his troops. I cannot say I blame the man entirely—he must be under enormous pressure—but this really is inexcusable. If he survives the attack on the dyke I will see to it that he is brought before a religious court on charges of heresy.”
Betanza sat back in his thickly upholstered chair. They were both by the massive fireplace, and broad logs were burning merrily on the hearth, the only light in the tall-ceilinged room.
“According to this messenger,” Betanza said carefully, “Torunn was informed also. Eighteen days he says it took to get here, and four dead horses. Torunn will have had the news for nigh on a fortnight.”
“So? We will send our own messengers denying the validity of the man’s claim. It is too absurd, Betanza.”
The Vicar-General’s high-coloured face was dark as he leaned back out of the firelight.
“How can you be so sure that Macrobius is dead?” he asked.
Himerius’ eyes glittered. “He is dead. Let there be no question about it. I am High Pontiff, and no Torunnan captain of arms will gainsay me.”
“What are you going to do?”
Himerius steepled his fingers together before his face.
“We will send out riders at once—tonight—to every court in Normannia—all the Five monarchies. They will bear a Pontifical bull in which I will denounce this impostor and the man who is behind him—this Martellus, the Lion of Ormann Dyke.”