The smell of burning fuse was better than the smell of the swamp. He began to laugh. With all his might, he pulled on the oars, and the boat shot forward through the calm water, whisking down on the barges. Lumey roared with laughter. The fuses spat and glittered as they burned. He did not pause now even to drink. They saw him coming, the boatmen; he heard them yell, but they were too late. His boat crashed into the first of the barges. Leaning out to grab the high gunwale, he pulled his boat with its trails of raw smoke around to the barge’s bow and slipped between that bottom and the next; and by that means, as the fuses grew shorter and shorter and the boatmen shouted, he worked his little boat in among all the big unwieldy barges, until the fuses, crackling and sparkling, disappeared inside the powder kegs.
Then, only then, Lumey reached inside his coat for his jug. But he never drew it out again.
Don Federico clenched his fist on his reins. He was tired of waiting. His stomach churned from waiting too long.
He looked down the length of the pasture toward the riverward dike, where the musketeers knelt in two long rows, firing on the wall of the town. They were all in place now and shooting well in order, but their fire was not doing its business. The cannon on the wall still fired with an even rhythm, blasting the flat pasture in front of Don Federico, the land he had to cross to reach the wall, from which they had forced him to retreat. He bit his lip, wondering what had gone wrong. The musket fire should have driven the defenders back. It must be killing some of them. He swore under his breath.
When he had seen the girl chop open the sluice gate, he had told himself it hardly mattered. The water moved slowly, and they would hold The Brill before the flood covered the pasturage between him and the town. But now the water was lapping up nearly halfway over the scrubby ground, and the hole was widening in the dike. Diego was withdrawing those of his men who had crossed over the sluice gate to the far side of the dike, evidence enough that the dike was giving way there. In a little while, the whole place would be inundated, and The Brill could be on the far side of the ocean, for all its accessibility to Don Federico and his thousands of men.
He had to charge now, in the face of the cannon fire, lose whatever men he had to, take the town in a single rush, before the sea shut him off.
“Trumpeter! Sound—”
Before he could continue there was a low growl of sound behind him, far off. He twisted in his saddle. With a jangle of metal all his men turned too, to look behind them. The rumble swelled up behind the lacy fringe of trees that marked the swamp through which they had passed; it exploded into a great crash, and from beyond the trees there rose such a cloud of black smoke, peppered with bits of debris, and such a thunderous wash of sound, that Don Federico let out a yell.
“The boats!” One of his aides ran toward him, pale as a woman. “They’ve blown up our boats!”
Don Federico swung around in his saddle, his blood racing. Well, that left him no choice. He leaned forward, cocked like a pistol, toward The Brill. “Trumpeter! The charge—sound the charge—”
His men heard him. Even before the trumpet blasted, the men were shouting. Long held back, they burst forward, their pikes swinging down, and hurled themselves toward the little town that stood before them, at last given over to their rage.
“Here they come,” Jan shouted. “Fire as you will.”
He ran down the rampart toward his culverin, jumping across the guns and stacks of shot in his way, men darting out of his path. Mouse ran at his heels. They reached the big brass gun and turned.
The Spanish came like a horde of demons, their pikes pricking the air, their voices raised in a weird ululating howl. They came like a wave of water, so many of them there was no discriminating individual men among them; Jan saw them as a single great moving mass. He bent down over the culverin and sighted along her barrel.
This gun, so far from the dike, had suffered no casualties; some of the guns at the far end of the wall had lost their crews to the musket fire. The water flooding the field would cover that end of the wall. He looked up at the men around him and said, “Fire.”
Mouse leaned forward with the slow match. The gun bellowed. All down the wall the other guns went off, sending forth their shot in a ragged line of iron and stone across the intervening distance. The round hit the Spanish line, and blew holes through it, but the holes filled up at once with other men, coming on as swiftly as a fire through high dry grass, coming like an avalanche. Jan looked for a weapon. They would be fighting hand to hand soon. His men rushed around him, sponging the cannon, rolling powder packet and shot down into her long hot throat.
“Fire!”
The cannon thundered, and through the onrushing ranks of the Spanish army the shot sliced a red zone of bodies—screaming men and writhing, thrashing arms and legs. Yet they came in, enraged by their losses; they swung their pikes down level, and charged at the gate. Jan shouted. No time now for the cannon. Grabbing the ramrod, he vaulted down off the rampart into the street before the gate.
The others followed him, flooding after him toward the gate, which thundered and bowed inward over its bar under the impact of the army. From the street behind Jan, van Treslong ran, leading his own little army in a ridiculous order of columns. The gate burst open.
Jan shouted. Wielding the ramrod around his head, he rushed forward into the gap, and the first two Spanish pikemen who came through it he struck across the middle with the ramrod and hurled backward into their fellows.
An instant later, there were men all around him, his own people, standing shoulder to shoulder with him. The pikes lunged at their faces. With his ramrod he beat down the shining blades, and reversing the pole, he thrust the butt hard into the teeth of a soldier in front of him, felt the ramrod’s butt break bone and flesh, and saw the soldier fall.
“My sister,” he shouted. “For my sister!” Stepping forward, he trampled on that body while he struck and parried blows with another man behind it.
The gate jammed the charging Spanish close together, kept their arms pinned close, their pikes bound awkwardly, and Jan meant to hold them there, in the gate. He flailed at them with the ramrod; one fell back, but another lunged at him, the pike sliding over the haft of the ramrod, coming at him like a silver snake. He dodged it. The pike slipped past his elbow and bored into a man behind him. Jan grabbed the haft and yanked, and the pikeman came off-balance after his weapon. Jan got him by the throat and threw him backward onto the blades of his own men.
Now he had the pike for a weapon. He had never used one before; he thrust with it and saw how it sliced away the soldiers in front of him. They lunged at him, three at once, still confined in the narrow space of the gate. All around him his own friends fought them. He braced himself. No time to think, to plan. Seeing a face before him he drove the pike at it, awkwardly overhand, and the blade split the face with a shower of blood and caught somehow and was wrested from his hands.
Weaponless, he flailed out with his fists, ducked the oncoming pike of a Spaniard screaming prayers, and wrestled with him. Lifted the thrashing body in his arms just quick enough to catch another blade with the back of the soldier’s armor. The armor did no good. It broke under the impact and the blade came through and he pushed the dying soldier away at arm’s length while the blade pierced through back and chest and came out on Jan’s side, aimed at him, filthy with blood. He flung the body sideways and that carried the pike away too.
Still he had only his bare hands, and the Dutch around him were falling back, or dead, lying in the street, lying under the feet of the Spaniards pressing inward. He staggered back a step and tried to brace himself and could not. Back another step. He was losing. He thought of his sister, of Eleanor, of his ship. Flung up his arms to block a pike coming at him, and fended it off to one side, and somehow directed it into the body of one of his own men. He wailed, despairing.
“Hold on—hold on!”
The high clear voice penetrated the tumult like sunlight through a shadow. From bot
h sides, screaming, their hands flashing with knives, came the women.
He shouted. He surged forward, the men behind him lunging after him, and the women flung themselves on the Spanish from either side of the gate, and the Spanish faltered. Jan caught up a pike from the ground. He drove forward into their midst, seeing Eleanor in those women, wild to protect her. With the pike before him, he slammed the Spaniards back through the gate. A woman screamed in his ears.
“Eleanor,” he shouted. “Eleanor!” Blind with new fury he charged forward and thrust them backward another step, and another. The men around him were howling. The women joined them. At Jan’s side, now, a little girl was fighting, her white arms ending in long butcher knives.
The Spaniards staggered back, through the gate, and they splashed into water. The sea was rising behind them, flooding the pasturage. The men in the last ranks wheeled, their voices high and shrill with panic, and the sea lapped at their knees. The Dutch were swinging the gate closed on them. The sea swirled and dragged at them. Their trumpets blasted, urging them on, but the sea had them. Desperate, they raced toward the dry land, back beyond the landward dike, the safety of the onion fields. The sea rose around them and those that fell did not rise, held down in their armor under the waves.
Jan roared; he sprang toward the ladder to the rampart and clambered up beside his gun again. She still lay back in her trucks as her last shot had thrown her, and he had lost the ramrod. He ran to the next gun to take its ramrod and went back and cleaned the gun and loaded her, his hands trembling. Over his shoulder he saw the Spanish struggling in the rising sea. Many had died in the gate, and many more were drowning, but still some of them had reached the dry dike on the far side. He thrust the shot deep into the culverin and went looking for the slow match.
Now for the first time he saw the great plumes of black smoke rising from the trees behind the Spanish army, and he knew Lumey had burned their boats. He roared. A wild exultant laughter surged up through him, and he flung his fists up into the sky and shouted and stamped his feet on the rampart. His men were rushing up around him; far down the wall, a gun fired, and its scythe of shot cut down the Spanish struggling up from the mire to the safety of the land. All along the rampart men cheered and bent to the guns and fired.
Eleanor came toward him, blood staining her gray dress, smiling. He had made himself ready to die. It took him some effort to accept life again. All around him his people were cheering and leaping and hugging one another. He reached out for Eleanor, his life, and she came to him.
25
“Your sister died.”
He nodded, kicking at the sand; they were walking along the beach. There was a storm coming in, and the waves were pounding up well past the line of shell and weed that marked the usual high tide. He said, “She saved us. Had she not cut the dike, they would have taken The Brill.”
He slid his arm around his wife’s waist. For Hanneke he felt both grief and joy; for himself only grief, that he had lost her again, so soon after they had regained each other.
“Mouse told me he saved your life.”
“He did.” Jan gave a little shake of his head. His left arm throbbed painfully now; after the fighting was over he had found, to his surprise, that it was wounded through. “God help me, I felt sorry for him all this time, or contempt for him. He saved my life. There’s a lesson in that I do not mean to forget.”
She hugged him, her cheek against his chest. He did not say to her, You saved us all. She knew that. Everyone knew that.
They walked along the beach, into the teeth of the wind. The storm was sweeping in from the north. Great slate-colored shelves of cloud hung over the sea, and the setting sun stained the western edge dark red. A wave crashed against the beach and washed up toward them, a curling soapy edge of foam, and he steered her out of the way.
“Now what will happen?” she said.
“We have sent for Orange. When he comes …” He said no more. He had no idea what would happen next; it was all new, with no footing in the past, no way to judge it by the past. As if he had died in The Brill, his life was starting over. Like the fierce storm wind, a steady excitement enlivened him. Eagerly he looked forward into the future. It was right, he thought, that this new kingdom should be born here, on land the Dutch had made, on the edge of the world.
“Look!” Eleanor raised her arm to point. “An omen.”
The sun had sunk down under the edge of the cloud roof; its clear piercing light shot across the sea with a brilliance that blazed on every wave top and turned the sand to gold.
Jan made a sound in his chest. “We’ll have a long storm before the sun shines well on us again.” He wanted it; he needed the storm, the power of the storm to weigh his own power against. “Come along,” he said. “I have to make my ship safe.”
They turned and went back toward The Brill.
Many days later, the Prince of Orange entered Holland. The Sea Beggars met him at the border, to give him their homage and to recognize him as their leader. Jan van Cleef waited with the other captains, ready with some cold words for this aristocrat who arrived to take the glory after the deed was done.
They were standing on the flat northern shore, where the Prince was landing in a small boat. A harsh wind blew out of the north and drove the waves onto the beach with a boom and crash of sand-filled surf. The little boat nosed in through the breakers and struck the ground with its keel, and three men leapt out to drag it onshore.
Another man climbed out, knee-deep in the surf, and walked up to the rank of waiting captains. As he came, he smiled, and reached out his hand, first to van Treslong, and next to Dirk Sonoy.
“My friends,” he said. “I come here not to lead—you have proven you need no leaders but God Himself. I come to serve, as best I can, in our common cause.”
He put out his hand next to Jan, who was fumbling with the made-up speeches he had been turning over in his mind all morning. In the face of the Prince of Orange he could remember nothing that seemed fitting. The Prince, seeing his hesitation, lowered his hand.
“Do you have some reservations of me, Captain?”
Jan blurted out, “Many have died here, sir. Do you mean to stay here now, and keep faith with them, and not flee when the going’s hard?”
The other Beggars muttered, angry at that, but the Prince of Orange’s smile only broadened, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening into fans of wrinkles. Gently, he said, “I am here to make my grave in this land.”
Van Treslong strode forward. “Your Highness, van Cleef’s lost his sister, at The Brill; he is distraught—”
“He has won his rights here,” said the Prince. “I ask of him only the chance to win mine.” He reached out his hand again to Jan. “Have I the honor of your company, Captain van Cleef?”
Jan took his hand in a hard grip. “God be with us both, sir.”
“And we with God; we shall not fail.” The Prince nodded to him. With a gesture to draw them all after him, he walked up the beach, into Holland.
All the candles had gone out but one. The Duke of Alva leaned his forearms on the table and stared into the saffron light, his mind despairing.
He had driven back Louis of Nassau; he had won every battle he had fought. The news of his son’s disaster at The Brill had seemed at first like a minor annoyance. Another army would take The Brill. What did it matter? Why did it matter so?
The letter from his King lay open under the candlelight, the words marching neatly from side to side, the words that ordered him back to Spain, that told him he had failed.
He knew that—knew it in his stomach, in his bones, and in his heart—but he could not see how he had failed. He had won every battle. No one dared to stand against him. He slid his hands up to cover his face, blocking out the light.
About the Author
Cecelia Holland was born in Henderson, Nevada, in 1943 and started writing at the age of twelve. Starting with The Firedrake in 1966, she has published twenty-one independ
ent historical novels covering periods from the middle of the first millennium CE up through parts of the early twentieth century, and from Egypt, through Russia, central Europe, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Ireland to the West Coast of the United States. Most recently, she has completed a series of five novels set in the world of the Vikings, covering a period of about fifty years during the tenth century and following the adventures of Corban Loosestrife and his descendants. The hallmark of her style is a vivid re-creation of time, place, and character, all true to known facts. She is highly regarded for her attention to detail, her insight into the characters she has researched and portrayed, and her battle scenes, which are vividly rendered and powerfully described. Holland has also published two nonfiction historical/biographic works, two children’s novels, a contemporary novel, and a science fiction novel, as well as a number of historical essays.
Holland has three daughters. She lives in Fortuna, California, and, once a week, teaches a class in creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. Holland’s personal website is www.TheFiredrake.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by Cecilia Holland
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3999-4
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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