That smoke made Jeremy cough. It also smelled familiar. He wondered why for a couple of seconds. He'd never stood near a cannon going off before. Then he knew what the odor reminded him of. He'd smelled it at parks on the Fourth of July, when they set off fireworks. Gunpowder then, gunpowder now. Pretty flowers of flame in the night air then. A cannonball flying now.
Jeremy saw the divot it kicked up when it hit. It kept rolling after it struck the ground, too. The Lietuvans in its path dodged. Jeremy had read about a Civil War soldier who tried to stop a rolling cannonball with his foot. He'd ended up having the foot amputated.
The cannon crew were reloading as fast as they could. Another man used a tool called a worm-like a short corkscrew on the end of a long pole-to drag out any chunks of wadding the swab might have missed. As soon as he finished, still another man set a bag of powder in the muzzle of the gun. A soldier with a rammer shoved it down to the back of the cannon. In went the cannonball. It got rammed down, too. So did rags-the wadding-which made the cannonball fit tightly inside the barrel.
At the rear of the cannon, a soldier poked a sharp spike into the touch-hole. He punctured the powder bag so fire could reach the charge inside. To make sure it did, he sprinkled a little finely ground gunpowder in and around the touch-hole. “Ready!” he yelled to the sergeant. All the men on the gun crew jumped to one side, so the recoiling gun carriage wouldn't run over them.
“Fire!” the sergeant shouted. A soldier with a length of slowly burning fuse-they called it match here-on the end of a long stick, a linstock, brought the smoldering end to the touch-hole. Jeremy heard a brief fizz as the fine priming powder there caught. Then-boom!-the powder in the main charge caught and sent the cannonball hurtling toward the Lietuvans. The whole cycle started over.
Other cannon on the walls of Polisso were shooting, too. The din was unbelievable. And the Lietuvans started shooting back. Not all of their guns could reach the wall. Every so often, though, the wall would shudder under Jeremy's feet when a ball thudded home.
And Lietuvan foot soldiers marched forward so they could shoot their muskets at the Romans on the wall. They didn't break up and spread out, the way modern soldiers in the home timeline would have. Instead, they stayed in neat formation. A cannonball plowed through one block of men. Half a dozen
Lietuvans went down one after the next, dead or maimed. The rest closed ranks and kept coming.
How did you train a man so he wouldn't run away when the fellow next to him got torn to pieces? This wasn't videogame blood. It was real. It would splatter you, all hot and wet. You could smell it. And you had to know it could have been your blood, it could be your blood next. But the Lietuvans advanced anyhow.
A gate opened-not one of the main city gates but a postern gate, a little one. Out thundered some of the heavy cavalry Jeremy had followed into the city not long before. The lancers roared toward a block of Lietuvan infantrymen.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Some of the matchlocks the Lietuvans carried went off. Two or three Roman horsemen and horses fell. The rest pitched into the Lietuvans, first with their lances, then with swords.
“Ha!” said a man near Jeremy. “We caught 'em by surprise. They didn't post pikemen out in front of their musketeers. Our lancers would've had a harder time then.”
He might have been talking about a football team not blitzing the quarterback on the other side. He wasn't a soldier. His tunic might have been twin to Jeremy's. But he spoke with a serious fan's serious knowledge. Civilians here knew how the game of war was played. Wars came along often enough to let the rules be known. They didn't change much from one to the next.
Out on the battlefield, more Lietuvan soldiers came up to help the men under attack. The Roman horsemen broke off the fight and galloped back toward the city. Behind them, Lietuvan muskets banged. Another couple of Romans slid out of the saddle. One of them thrashed and writhed on the grass. The other lay very still.
The rest of the cavalry got back into Polisso. The spectators and some of the soldiers on the walls cheered. Jeremy found himself yelling and clapping his hands along with everybody else. He wondered if he had lost his mind. This wasn't a football game. People were dying, really and truly dying, out there. How could you cheer?
Were the Romans better than the Lietuvans? Was Emperor Honorio Prisco III a finer fellow than King Kuzmickas? Not so you'd notice. But the Lietuvans were trying to break into Polisso and do horrible things to the people inside. Jeremy was one of those people, Amanda another. The Roman horsemen were fighting to keep the Lietuvans out. Wasn't that a reason to cheer for them? The locals thought so, and Jeremy had a hard time believing they were wrong.
After a pause, the Lietuvans moved forward again. This time, they did what the man by Jeremy had said they should. They put a double line of pikemen in front of the musketeers. If horsemen came out again, the long pikes would help keep them away.
Cannon kept booming from the wall. Every so often, a cannonball would knock people over like a bowling ball knocking down pins. But bowling pins didn't keep moving after they were hit. They didn't scream, either. Through the guns' thunder, Jeremy heard the shrieks of wounded men.
Again, though, the Lietuvans who weren't wounded kept right on coming. When they got close enough, the musketeers touched the smoldering ends of their matches to the vents of their guns. Bang! Bang! Bang! Flame shot from the muzzles of all the muskets. A fogbank of smoke swallowed up the Lietuvan soldiers.
Bullets cracked past overhead. A couple of them didn't crack past, but struck home with wet, meaty thunks. Blood poured from a Roman artilleryman's face. It was amazingly red. He let out dreadful gobbling cries of pain. One of his pals led him off to a surgeon. What could the locals do for a shattered jaw, though? That wound would have been bad in the home timeline.
And the man standing next to Jeremy clutched at himself and fell over. One minute, he was handicapping the war. The next, it reached out and grabbed him. He looked more astonished than hurt. He tried to say something, but blood poured from his mouth and nose instead. It poured from the wound in his chest, too. Jeremy gulped. He hadn't realized how much blood a man held. He had to step back in a hurry, or it would have soaked his shoes. After four or five minutes, the man on the flagstones stopped moving. He just lay there, staring up at nothing with eyes that would never close again.
More bullets whistled by. The civilians on the wall decided that wasn't a good place to stay. They went down inside Polisso in a disorderly stream. Jeremy gaped at the corpse that had been a happy, living, breathing man only minutes before. That could have been me, he thought. If the Lietuvans had aimed a little more to the left, that could have been me.
Death had never seemed real to him. At his age, it hardly ever did. But the sight-and the smell, for the man's bowels had let go-of that body made him believe in it, at least for a little while. So did the snap of another bullet, right past his ear. He didn't have to be here. He'd come up to see what war looked like. He'd found out more than he wanted to know.
Roman musketeers were shooting back at the Lietuvans as Jeremy went down the stone stairs and back into the city. He was nearer the end of the stream of civilians than the beginning. He took some small pride in that. As he walked back toward the house where he and Amanda were staying, he wondered why.