by Wilbur Smith
‘Ready?’ Hal looked up from his task.
Big Daniel plugged the final fuse in place with a handful of soft pitch. ‘Ready as we’ll ever be.’
‘Light the slow-match!’ Hal ordered, and Daniel struck the flint with the steel. The tinder caught. One after the other they touched a short length of slow-match to the flame, and watched it smoulder and smoke.
‘Shoulder the kegs!’ Hal ordered, and five fresh men, each chosen for his brawn, rose from where they had been squatting and came forward. Another rank was waiting behind them, ready to run forward and take up a keg if one of the porters was shot down by enemy musket fire from the walls of the fort.
Hal drew his sword, and strode to the edge of the forest. He peered from the cover across the open ground. There was still no sign of any defenders on the walls. He drew a deep breath and steeled himself. ‘Quietly, lads! Follow me!’
Without a shout or cheer they ran forward in a group. The bare feet of the heavily burdened seamen sank deep into the sandy soil with each pace, but they covered the ground fast and were almost to the gates when there was a yell and a shot from the battlement above the gates. Hal saw a turbaned head in the stone opening and the muzzle of a smoking jezail aimed down at them. The range was short and the ball took one of the running seamen squarely in his naked chest. The wounded man sprawled full length in the sand, and the keg rolled from his shoulder.
Big Daniel was running only a pace behind him, and scooped up the keg as lightly as though it were a ninepin. With it tucked under his arm he jumped over the dying man and was the first to reach the gates. He dropped the keg against the hinges, and beckoned to the men coming up behind him. ‘Here! Bring them here!’
As the first man came up, snorting and panting with the effort, Big Daniel snatched his burden from him. ‘Get back to the trees!’ he barked and laid the keg beside the other. ‘Well done, lad.’ He grabbed the next keg and stacked it in a pyramid upon the first two.
By now a crowd of shrieking Arabs was on the battlements above them, and a ragged fusillade of musket shots rang out as Daniel’s men tried to reach the cover of the treeline. Another was shot down and lay groaning in the open ground, with spurts of dust kicking up around him as the musketeers on the wall tried to finish him off. From the trees the seamen hidden there opened answering fire. Their musket-balls cracked against the stone blocks, and rained chips of coral down on the men crouched at the foot of the massive gates.
Hal knelt beside Big Daniel as he placed the fifth powder-keg on top of the stack. He blew on the smouldering end of the slow-match in his hand, and it flared up redly. ‘Get you gone, Danny,’ he told the big man. ‘I’ll see to the rest of it.’
But Daniel had his own slow-match smoking in his hand. ‘Beg your pardon, Captain, but I’ll give you a hand to kiss the devil’s daughter.’ He knelt beside Hal and touched the match to the fuse of one of the powder-kegs. Hal did not waste words in argument and bent to the same task. Working without haste, they lit each of the five fuses and waited to make certain that they were burning evenly.
By this time half the garrison of the fort was swarming along the wall above them, firing as fast as they could reload into the edge of the forest. Four hundred British sailors were yelling and cheering and sending in a withering fusillade over the battlements.
Hal and Daniel were protected from the fire of the men above them by the slight overhang below the battlements, but as soon as they left its shelter they would be fully exposed during their return across the open ground. Hal took a last look at the furiously burning fuses – only an inch or so protruded from the bung-hole of each keg – and rose to his feet. ‘I think the time has come to leave.’
‘I can see no reason to linger, Captain.’ Big Daniel grinned at him with his bald gums, and the two launched themselves side by side into the open.
Immediately the shouts from the battlements behind them redoubled, and every Arab on the walls turned his fire upon the running pair. The heavy lead balls whirred about their heads and ploughed into the soft sand at their flying feet. From the trees the seamen yelled encouragement and fired as wildly as the Arabs on the walls.
‘Seraph!’ they screamed. ‘Come on, Danny! Run for it, Captain!’
Time seemed to slow down for Hal. It was as though he was under water, each stride seeming to last many minutes. The line of the forest seemed to come no nearer, and the musket-balls flew around them as thick as hail.
Then Big Daniel was struck, not once but almost simultaneously by two balls. One hit him in the back of the knee, broke the bone, and his leg folded under him like a carpenter’s rule. The second ball struck him in the hip and shattered the neck of the femur. He went down in the sand with both legs twisted and useless under him.
Hal ran on four paces before he realized he was alone. Then he paused and looked back.
‘Go on!’ Big Daniel yelled at him. ‘You can’t help me. Both my legs are gone.’ His face had dived into the sand, and his eyes and mouth were filled with it. Hal whirled and ran back to him through the storm of musket fire.
‘No! No!’ Big Daniel bellowed, sand and spittle flying from his mouth in a cloud. ‘Go back, you fool. Go back.’
Hal reached him and stooped to seize his shoulders. He tried to lift him, and was appalled by the weight of the great body. With both his legs shot away, Daniel could not help him take the strain. Hal took another deep breath and readjusted his grip, then heaved up again. This time he lifted the top half of Daniel’s torso clear of the ground and tried to get his shoulder under the other man’s armpit.
‘It’s no use,’ Big Daniel gasped in his ear, swamped in agony as the shattered bones in his hip grated against each other. ‘Go on, save yourself!’
Hal had no breath to reply, so he gathered the last ounce of his strength and lifted, straining with every sinew and fibre of his body. At the effort his vision darkened and starred into whirling comets of light, but slowly Big Daniel’s huge frame lifted clear of the sandy earth and he threw his right arm around Hal’s shoulders. They stood there for a long moment, locked together, unable to move another step.
‘You’re mad,’ Big Daniel whispered, his lips an inch from Hal’s ear. ‘The powder’s going to blow—’
On the high battlements behind them an Arab musketeer poured a handful of coarse black powder into the muzzle of his jezail, and rammed down a wad on top of it. He was holding the ball between his teeth. It was an irregular lump of soft pig-iron that he had hand-forged to a rough fit in the barrel. He spat the ball into the muzzle and used the long wooden ramrod to drive it home. Then he reversed the weapon and laid the forestock across the stone sill of the embrasure. With shaking fingers, he poured a fine stream of powder into the pan of the lock, snapped the frizzen closed and drew back the hammer to full cock.
When he lifted the stock to his shoulder and peered down the long brass-bound barrel, he saw that out in the open ground the two infidels were still struggling helplessly, clinging to each other like lovers.
He aimed carefully at their heads, which were close together, then pulled hard on the stiff trigger. The hammer dropped and the flint struck a starburst of sparks from the steel of the frizzen. The powder in the pan ignited in a puff of white smoke, and for a moment it seemed that the jezail would misfire but then, with a deafening bellow, it leaped in his hands, kicking the barrel head high.
The beaten slug of pig-iron started to tumble end over end as soon as it left the muzzle. It whirred through the air to where Hal and Big Daniel were dragging themselves away. It had been aimed at Hal’s head, but it dropped so sharply in flight that it almost missed him completely. In the end it struck him with a loud thump on the side of his ankle, tore away his heel and shattered the fragile bones of his left foot.
As his foot was knocked out from under him Hal dropped under Big Daniel’s weight and the two lay side by side, flat upon the ground.
‘Run! In the name of God!’ Big Daniel shouted into Hal’s face. ‘The
kegs are going to go up at any moment!’
‘I can’t!’ Hal blurted through the pain. ‘I’m hit! I can’t stand!’
Big Daniel heaved himself up on one elbow and looked down at Hal’s foot. He saw at once that the wound was crippling, then glanced back at the pyramid of powder-kegs under the arch of the gate, only thirty yards from where they lay. One of the burning fuses reached the bung-hole and flared brightly in the plug of soft pitch. It was on the point of exploding.
Big Daniel seized Hal in a smothering bear-hug and rolled on top of him, forcing his face into the soft earth, covering him with his own great body.
‘Get off me, damn you!’ Hal struggled beneath him, but at that instant the bottom keg blew up, and set off an instantaneous sympathetic explosion in every one of the four others piled on top of it.
Two hundred and fifty pounds weight of black powder was consumed in a single flash and the blast was cataclysmic. It ripped the heavy doors from their hinges and blew their splintered beams across the courtyard beyond. It collapsed the stonework of the arch and brought the battlements tumbling down in an avalanche of coral blocks, mortar and dust. A score or more of the Arabs on the wall were brought down with it, crushed and buried in the rubble.
The smoke and dust shot two hundred feet straight up into the air, then boiled into the anvil head of a thundercloud. The shockwave blew out across the open ground in front of the walls and struck the edge of the forest, bringing heavy branches crashing down, bowing the palm trees and thrashing through their fronds like the winds of a hurricane.
Big Daniel and Hal lay full in the path of the blast. It swept over them in a rolling wave of dust and debris. It sucked the air from their lungs and hammered them into the earth like the hoofs of a herd of stampeding buffalo. Hal felt his eardrums balloon, and the shock clubbed his brain. His senses were driven from him, and he seemed to hurtle through black space with the stars bursting in his head.
He came back slowly from that far away dark place, and his damaged eardrums roared and sang with the memory of that terrible blast, but through it he heard the thin, disembodied cheers of his seamen as they charged forward from the forest. In a pack they raced past where he lay and reached the destroyed gateway. They scrambled and shoved each other over the piles of rubble that blocked it, then they fought their way through the dust and the smoke, and swarmed into the courtyard of the fort. With their cutlasses in their hands, giving tongue like a pack of deerhounds when the stag stands at bay, they fell upon the dazed defenders in a savage orgy of battle lust.
Blinded with dust, Hal tried to sit up but there was an immense weight on his chest that suffocated him and pinned him to the ground. He coughed, choked, and tried to blink the grit out of his streaming eyes. Though he clawed feebly at the huge slack body above him he did not have the strength to free himself.
Gradually Hal’s vision cleared and the roaring in his ears faded to the buzz of a hive of bees trapped in his skull. He saw Big Daniel’s face above him: his eyes were wide and staring and his head rolled from side to side as Hal tried to push him off. His toothless mouth gaped open, and his tongue lolled. A mixture of his blood and spittle dribbled warm over Hal’s cheek.
The horror of it goaded Hal, and he made a supreme effort and wriggled out from under the great slack body. Groggily he raised himself into a sitting position and looked down at the other man. By shielding him, Big Daniel had taken the full force of the blast. It had stripped away his clothing so that he was naked except for his boots and sword-belt. The driven sand had blasted away the skin from his back and buttocks, so that he looked like a freshly flayed deer. Chunks of stone and flying debris had ripped through his back and flanks, exposing the white bone shards of his ribs and broken spine.
‘Danny?’ Hal called. ‘Danny? Can you hear me?’ The question was futile, borne of his own stunned senses. He tried to move closer to him, but found his own legs would not obey his will. He glanced down at them. They were the only part of his body that had not been protected by Daniel’s. Both his legs had been stripped of the cloth of his breeches and Hal saw that his flesh had been mangled as though caught in the iron teeth of a revolving capstan. Splinters of white bone protruded from the bloody mess. There was no pain, so his mind discounted the evidence of his eyes. He could not believe that he had lost both his legs. He did not want to gaze upon that destruction any longer.
Hal used his elbows now to drag himself closer to Big Daniel, digging them into the soft soil and his shattered legs slithered along behind him. He lay beside the great body and gathered it in his arms. He rocked it gently as once he had soothed his infant son to sleep. ‘It will be all right. We’ll come through this together, like we always do,’ he whispered. ‘It’s going to be all right, Danny.’
He did not realize that he was weeping until he saw his own tears falling into Daniel’s upturned face, like warm drops of tropical rain washing away the white grains of sand that coated the staring eyeballs.
Dr Reynolds, coming up through the grove with his two surgeon’s mates, found them lying there.
‘Take care of Danny first,’ Hal pleaded.
‘God has already taken him into his care,’ Dr Reynolds answered gently, and between them they lifted Hal onto the stretcher with his legs dangling.
Tom looked back over the bay. From where they lay at the top of a low white dune he could see the two square-rigged ships a mile out beyond the reef, the graceful Seraph leading and the Minotaur, with her black sails, looking menacing and potent. As he watched they tacked in succession and turned back into the south, taking up their blockade station across the mouth of the bay.
Tom rose on one knee and stared over the top of the dune at the walls of the fort, two hundred paces away. The heavy mist of gunsmoke was dissipating, blowing away on the monsoon wind, streaming out to sea. The top of the wall was lined with hundreds of heads, dark bearded faces below their keffiya headcloths and turbans. The defenders were brandishing their muskets and dancing on the ramparts in triumph. Tom could hear the excited jabber of their voices, and even understood some of their shouted insults aimed at the two English ships:
‘May God blacken the face of the infidel.’
‘God is great! He has given us the victory.’
Tom started to rise to his feet. ‘Something has gone wrong. They should have blown the gates by now.’
Aboli reached up and seized his wrist. He drew him down to his side. ‘Steady, Klebe! Sometimes the cruellest part of the battle is the waiting.’
Then they heard musket fire from the far side of the fortress, and all the Arab heads along the breastworks turned in that direction. Their shouts and taunts died away.
‘The infidel is attacking the gates!’ a voice screamed in Arabic, and there was an immediate stampede. Even the gunners deserted their cannon and raced away along the catwalk to counter this new threat. In seconds the parapets were deserted, and Tom scrambled to his feet again.
‘Now is our chance! Follow me!’
Aboli pulled him down again. ‘Patience, Klebe!’
Tom struggled to break his grip. ‘We can’t wait any longer. We have to get to Dorry!’
Aboli shook his head. ‘Even you cannot fight a thousand men on your own.’
Tom stared across at the loophole in the top of the wall where he knew Dorian was incarcerated. ‘He should have the sense to signal, to show us where he is. He should wave his shirt, or something.’ Then swiftly he made allowance for his brother. ‘But he’s only a baby. He doesn’t always know what to do.’
From the far side of the fort the scattered sound of musket shots crescendoed into a furious fusillade.
‘Listen, Klebe.’ Aboli restrained him. ‘Danny and your father are laying the charges under the gates. It will not be long now.’
Then the blast stung their eardrums, and the thunder of the explosion stunned them. A tower of dust and smoke shot into the sky and boiled over at the crest, spreading out into a bulging thunderhead. The dustclou
d was thick with hurtling debris, with lumps of rock and burning fragments that spun smoke-trails against the blue. Tom watched a brass cannon thrown a hundred feet into the air. Human bodies and dismembered limbs were hurled even higher, along with heavy baulks of timber and other wreckage.
Before Tom could recover his wits, Aboli was on his feet and loping away across the open ground towards the fort. Tom leaped up and charged after him, but the skirts of his robe hampered him and he could not catch Aboli before he reached the foot of the wall.
Aboli knelt and made a stirrup with his intertwined fingers. Without pausing Tom placed one booted foot into it and Aboli boosted him high into the branches of a strangler fig tree, whose roots were woven into the joints between the stone blocks. Tom climbed upwards like a monkey: neither the sword scabbard banging against his legs nor the brace of pistols thrust into his belt could slow him. Aboli and the three other men followed him up, but Tom reached the top of the parapet ahead of them. He scrambled into the gap where the wall had begun to collapse and threw his legs over the top.
A startled brown face confronted him. One Arab had not been drawn away from his post by the tumult of the assault on the gates. With a shout of astonishment, he recoiled before Tom’s sudden appearance, and tried to level the musket in his hands, but the curved hammers hooked in a fold of his robe and while he struggled to free them the sabre flew from Tom’s scabbard as though it was a bird. His thrust caught the man in the throat and severed his vocal cords so that his next shout was stillborn. He tottered backwards and dropped, arms flailing, fifty feet into the courtyard behind him.