Over the last hill, and there were the bastions of San Lorenzo, peeping between the trees. The column of men fanned out now, moving in a thin line through the jungle, and came to a wide cliff’s edge where the land had slid, leaving the trees with their roots hanging out over the air. John parted the leaves with his standard and peered down.
“No more than six or seven feet,” he announced. “We can jump it easy.”
So the men pushed forward, dropping down one by one through the brush and scrambling to their feet below; and the first wave to land turned and stared about them amazed, and soon horrified.
The forest had been cleared from where they stood to the very walls of San Lorenzo itself, making an open plain where there wasn’t so much as a blade of grass to cover them. John could see the Spanish gunners on the near palisade grinning at them, they were that close. He had just time to notice that before he heard the first shots cracking, and a scream from somewhere on his left, and then John was scrambling for his life back up the slope to the cover of the jungle.
“Back! Back!” Bradley was howling, and something big struck the earth right by John’s head with a whap and traveled deep into the clay.
“Ba—” Bradley’s voice broke off. John reached desperately for the creepers, and saw Jacques and Blackstone reaching down to grab for him. He caught their hands and they pulled him to safety. Other men were being hoisted up, here and there among the trees. John saw Bradley being dragged out between two stout fellows, and him bleeding and cursing a blue streak. Down below, though, there lay a score of men who hadn’t turned in time, pierced through with shot or the arrows of the Indian archers. Some were crying for their mothers. Some were quiet for ever and aye.
The Spanish indulged themselves in catcalling and threatening no end, or at least that was what John reckoned they were doing. He was too busy binding up Bradley’s leg to pay much attention.
“What do we do, Captain?”
Bradley had bitten a dry stick clean in half, in his pain. Now he spat it out and glared at John.
“Bring up the grenades!” he said. “And send one of the boucaniers to reconnoiter. Where’s that damned thief? I’ll cut his heart out—”
“He’s down there,” said Blackstone, crawling close. “If he betrayed us, he’s been well and truly paid for his trouble.”
Some men crept up into the trees, and from the screen of leaves took potshots at the Spanish, who kept up an answering fire. In a while, Jago climbed back down.
“Pretty bad,” he said. “Other side of the field, deep deep ditch, the palisadoes they go up straight on the other side. He runs across the field alive, get his death falling down the ditch.”
“We ain’t getting at ’em that way,” said John. “We better fall back, sir, whiles we think what to do.”
“I’ll shoot you dead,” said Bradley, baring his teeth. “Come back here, you sons of bitches! Dick Norman! Take two squadrons with grenades and charge again! They’re only wooden walls!”
John, peeping out through the leaves, saw what he meant; for instead of being stone, San Lorenzo’s bastions were made of wooden planks shored up with posts. Fire might do for them; and John understood why so much trouble had been taken rowing all those barrels of grenades ashore. They were dragged forward now and handed around, and Captain Norman stepped to the fore and led his two squadrons down on that bare ground, where they rushed screaming for the walls.
It was a slaughter. They never got so far as the ditch; half their number were mown down on that field. Though one or two of them managed to hurl their grenades across the ditch and into the dry brush at the base of the palisades, it was no use. The fires caught readily enough, the weather being very dry, but the Spanish soon flung down enough sand to smother them. Bradley, propped up against a tree, watched it all and swore bitterly.
John watched too, and thought he had never seen such a close likeness of Damnation: the dead and dying sprawled across that bare field, frying in the heat and glare of the sun, and here and there a grenade bursting in the dead hand that clutched it, or sputtering down to add its acrid smoke to the smoke coming up out of the ditch.
Captain Norman ordered a retreat, like a sane man, and the survivors regrouped under cover of the trees. There proceeded a fierce debate amongst them, the two opposing points being: that they could not take San Lorenzo, and that they must take San Lorenzo. As these points went back and forth for the next hour, getting louder and more profane with each repetition, John listened close to his mother telling him that there was no sense in him getting himself killed.
He looked round on his messmates with a cool eye. The Reverend and his mates hadn’t been out yet; they sat quiet and pale, all three seemingly praying together. Jago and Jacques were enjoying a quiet pipe, passed between them. Blackstone had stretched out with his hat over his face, cold-blooded fellow that he was. The girl sat still, looking through the leaves at the battlements of San Lorenzo. John sidled up to her.
“See, now?” he said, quiet. “See what a nasty business this is? You’ve had your soldier march; it’s time to go back to the beach. Much safer place for a pretty girl. I’ll take you; let’s just slip away, sweeting, eh?”
She never so much as looked up at him. “I’d not have taken you for a coward,” she said. “A big man like you.”
John fell all over himself trying to deny he’d meant to desert; he was only afeared for her, on his life and honor, and had meant to come straight back and storm the wall himself, single-handed, once he’d seen her to safety. His mother wailed in his ear, asking was he mad, that he’d rather face death than disgust in the eyes of a slip of a girl. John made no answer to that.
The girl shrugged at his fine words anyway. “Not long until sunset now,” was all she said.
John walked away feeling like an empty wine-skin, and saw Blackstone sitting up, grinning at him.
“What are you smiling at?” said John, cross as a bear.
“The follies of the heart,” said Blackstone. “You may as well rest yourself, man. Unless they’ve sent out a party to come around and attack from the trees, we’re safe enough here; and when night falls it’ll be a different game altogether.”
And so it was. Bradley bawled and thundered, persuading the men they’d be worse off if they deserted now. Maybe all he’d needed to make him a decent commander had been pain and rage; if he’d shouted like that when he’d been cruising the Main, he’d have had better luck. Word went out that they’d try again come night, and all parties settled down to wait for dark.
The sun dipped low; the shadows slanted away, and the wind rose, and changed, and blew from the jungle out to sea. All around, in the underbrush, men were getting up and priming their muskets, and rummaging in the crates of grenades.
Then the sun was gone. Bob Plum got up in the purple gloom and led Reverend Hackbrace to the edge, and parted the branches to show him the Spanish gunners outlined against the red sunset. He began talking to him in a low voice. John saw the Reverend begin to shake and clench his hands.
Blackstone watched them sidelong as he wound a twist of slow-match through his buttonhole. Jago and Jacques appeared from somewhere—they came and went silent as cats—and waited beside him on the edge, looking through the screen of leaves. John glanced over at Captain Bradley, who was limping along looking up at the musketeers he’d stationed in the trees. Bradley muttered something to Norman; Norman turned and passed the word, and all along the ragged line men grabbed up grenades and poised themselves to drop.