“Just a bit, if you would.”
“She is Guinevere. The gods are kind! I was unable to awaken the dormant souls of my men with a call to duty, but I think I can awaken her soul with love.”
The Irishman stared at him with the wondering respect one feels for a child who has done some tremendously difficult, absolutely pointless thing. “I wish you well,” he said.
“Thank you, Brian! I would like to say I am sorry for the way I—”
He was interrupted by a sudden jolt and rumble that seemed to come up through the floor. Duffy’s face changed in an instant, and he leaped up and sprinted to the front door, wrenched it open and stood there listening. Several patrons cringed at the gust of cold air and the louder hiss of the rain, but nobody dared voice any objections. After several seconds another sound cut through the rain: the strident clangor of the alarum bells in the tower of St. Stephen’s.
“My God,” Duffy breathed, speaking contemporary Austrian for the first time that day. “That was the wall.”
He ran back through the dining room, flinging several people out of his way, through the steamy kitchen and out the back door into the yard; splashing across to the stables, he dragged a reluctant mare out of the shelter, leaped and scrabbled up onto the creature’s bare back, and rode her out to the street, goading her to a gallop when they reached the southward-stretching, rain-swept expanse of the Rotenturm-strasse.
The echoing pandemonium of the bells was deafening as he drummed past the cathedral square. Though the rain was thrashing down out of the gray sky as hard as ever, quite a number of people were kneeling on the pavement. Make it count, you silly bastards, he thought grimly. If ever there was a morning for a high-density volley of prayers, this is the one.
Soon he could hear the thousand-throated roar of battle, and he had taken a left turn and ridden halfway down a narrower, slanting street when he saw ahead of him, dimly through the curtains of rain, half of a great, ragged-edged gap in the high wall, and a maelstrom of men surging back and forth over the hills of rubble. Even from this distance he could see the white robes of the Janissaries. “Holy God,” he murmured, then whirled out his sword and put his heels to the mare’s flanks.
The Viennese forces had been assembled within minutes of the mine-detonations, and were now grouped in two tightly packed divisions, trying by sheer weight and advancing force to drive back the waves of wailing Janissaries. This was desperate, hacking savagery, in which there was no thought except to press forward and kill. Long gone was the almost formal restraint of yesterday afternoon’s sortie. A culverin hastily loaded with scrap metal and gravel had been unbolted from its moorings and was being awkwardly manhandled by a dozen men along the top of the wall toward the jagged edge, where it could be re-positioned to blast its charge down into the massed Turks; but the rain made the use of matchlocks impossible—point and edge were the order of the day, with all the bloody intimacy of hand-to-hand combat.
Duffy charged headlong into one of the peripheral skirmishes that were clogging the wall street to the north of the main fighting. He parried a scimitar and then chopped down into a Janissary’s shoulder, and the force of the swing sent him tumbling off the back of the wet horse so that he rode the Turk’s body to the ground. Rolling to his feet with the sword he somehow hadn’t dropped, he waded into the mêlée with wide-eyed abandon.
For ten minutes the battle raged at a maniacal pitch, like a bonfire into which both sides were throwing every bit of fuel they could find. The culverin was wedged into an adequate position on the crumbled lip of the wall, and two men were hunched over the breech, trying to ignite the charge.
A blade rang off the slightly too large casque Duffy had earlier snatched from the head of a slain soldier, and the helmet skewed around so that one eye was covered and the other blocked by the chin-guard. With a yell of mingled rage and fright, the Irishman ducked his head and dove at his assailant, both his weapons extended. The scimitar edge, being whipped back into line, grated against Duffy’s jawbone, but his own sword and dagger took the man in the belly, and Duffy fell to his knees, losing the helmet entirely, as the Turk’s body folded. An eddy in the tide of battle left him momentarily in a corpse-strewn clearing, and he knelt there for a moment, panting, before unsheathing his weapons from the Janissary’s vitals, struggling to his feet and lurching back into the fight.
At that moment the culverin went off, lashing thirty pounds of scrap into the heaving concentration of Turkish soldiers and killing three of the gunnery men as it tore free of its new mooring and went tumbling away outside the wall.
As if it were one huge organism the Turkish force recoiled, and the Viennese soldiers crowded up to retake every slack inch of ground. Men were still being skewered and chopped and split by the dozens with every passing minute, but the Eastern tide had slowed to a pause and was now ebbing. The European force pressed the advantage, crowding the enemy back into the gap. At last the Janissaries retreated, leaving almost half of their number scattered broken and motionless across the wide-flung heaps of rubble. The rain made their white robes gray.
During the battle Duffy had eventually found himself among Eilif’s company of mercenaries and stayed with them; when the Turk retreat left the defenders clumped like driftwood on the new stone slope, the Irishman and Eilif were only a dozen feet apart. Eilif was bowed forward, hands clenched on his knees, gasping through a slack mouth, while Duffy sat down on the bright, unweathered face of a split block of masonry. The cold air was sharp with the acid smell of new-broken granite.
Finally Eilif straightened and took off his helmet, letting the rain rinse his sweat-drenched hair. “That... could have tilted either way,” he panted. “I don’t... like it that fast and hard. There’s no control. You can’t survive... many of those.”
“Spoken like a professional,” commented Duffy, wincing in mid-word at the flash of pain in his jaw. Hesitantly he fingered the gash—the cold rain seemed to have stopped most of the bleeding, but the edges of the wound were far apart, and he could feel fresh air in unaccustomed places.
“Damn it, lad!” exclaimed Eilif, noticing the cut. “They landed one on you, didn’t they? I can see one of your back teeth peeping through. As soon as we get reassembled and take roll, I’ll sew that up for you, eh?”
Duffy managed to unclench his sword hand, and the released blade clattered on rock. “You’ll sew it up? No chance—” Then he looked around and noticed for the first time the appalling casualties the Vienna force had suffered. There were arm-stumps to be cauterized and tarred, jetting wounds to be staunched, crushed limbs to be set and splinted or amputated—the surgeons would be far too busy during the next several hours to attend to so relatively minor a task as sewing up Duffy’s jaw.
“Half my boys need plucking from the fire,” Eilif said softly.
“Of course,” Duffy said, trying to speak out of the right side of his mouth. “I just don’t trust your seamstress skills. Look, I think Aurelianus is versed in the surgical arts. What would you think if I trotted back to the Zimmermann and had him stitch me up?”
Eilif regarded him narrowly, then grinned. “Why not? I’d probably sew your tongue to your cheek. And God knows we can’t leave you like this—you’d lose as much beer as you swallowed. In fact, you might be wise to catch a nap there, where there’s still a roof.” He pointed. “Their damned mine collapsed our barracks. Lucky most of us were outside. But I want you back here by midnight, understand? There will be a heavy watch kept here, and I’ll oversee our part of it until then.”