“I’ll be here,” Duffy promised. He stood up on fatigue-trembling legs, sheathed his sword and began picking his way over the wet, tumbled stones.
By the time he had walked all the way back to the Zimmermann Inn—God knew where the mare had wound up—the rain had stopped and his wound had started to bleed again, so it was a gruesome figure that finally pushed open the front door and lurched into the dining room. There was a large but silent crowd, and they all looked up fearfully at him.
The black man in the burnoose stood. “What news?”
Duffy didn’t relish the idea of a long speech. “The wall is down at one point,” he said hoarsely. “It was a near thing, but they were beaten back. Heavy losses on both sides.”
The man who’d asked looked around significantly and left the room, followed by several others. The Irishman paid no attention, but let his blurring gaze waver around the room until he saw Anna.
“Anna!” he croaked. “Where is Aurelianus?”
“The chapel,” she said, hurrying to him. “Here, lean on me and—”
“I can walk.”
The Irishman clumped heavily down the long, dark hall, and when he reached the tall doors he pushed through without stopping, stumbling over a half dozen brooms on the other side. In the chapel Aurelianus stood facing the same seven men that had been there the day before, but today each of them carried a drawn sword.
The midget looked around at the interruption. “Why it’s Miles Gloriosus. Out of here, clown.” He turned back to Aurelianus, extending a short blade. “Did you understand what Orkhan just said?” he asked, indicating the black man. “The wall is down. They’ll be in by dusk. Lead us to the cask now, or be killed.”
Aurelianus looked indignant, and raised a hand as if he were about to throw an invisible dart at the man. “Be grateful, toad, that I am at present too occupied to punish this trespass. Now get out of here—while you can.”
The midget grinned. “Go ahead. Blast me to ashes. We all know you can’t.” He jabbed the old sorcerer lightly in the abdomen.
The quiet, incense-scented air of the chapel was suddenly shattered by a savage yell as the Irishman bounded forward into the room, doing a quick hop-and-lunge that drove his sword-point through the midget’s neck. Whirling with the impetus, he slashed black Orkhan’s forearm to the bone. The copper-skinned man raised his sword and chopped at Duffy, but the Irishman ducked under the clumsy stroke and came up with a thrust into the man’s belly. Duffy turned to face the remaining four, but one of them cried, “Why kill Merlin? It’s the Dark we want!” The five survivors ran from the chapel, angling wide around Duffy.
As soon as they were running away down the hall he collapsed as if dead. Aurelianus hurried to him, rolled him over onto his back and waved a little silver filigreed ball of the Irishman’s nostrils; within seconds Duffy’s eyes sprang open and a hand came up to brush the malodorous thing away. He lay there and stared at the ceiling, doing nothing but breathing.
Finally, “What... just happened?” he gasped.
“You saved my life,” the sorcerer said. “Or, more accurately, Arthur did; I recognized the old battle-cry. I’m flattered that the sight of me in peril brings him out.”
“He... does the heroics... and leaves the exhaustion to me.”
“I suppose that isn’t quite fair,” said Aurelianus brightly. “And what have you done to your jaw?”
“Sew it up, will you? Surgeons too busy.” He flicked his eyes around without moving his head, and saw nothing but dusty pews to one side and shifting rain-tracks on the stained glass to the other. “Where did your Dark Birds go? Did I kill them all?”
“No. Two of them are dead on the floor over here—I’ll have someone come in and deal with the corpses—and five of them ran off to steal a sip of the Dark.” The old man had produced various pouches and boxes from under his robe, and was already cleaning and dressing the wound.
“Shouldn’t you be—ouch!—stopping them?” Aurelianus had got out a needle and thread and was stitching the cut now; Duffy felt no real pain, just a tugging sensation across his left cheek and temple.
“Oh, no,” the wizard said. “Gambrinus has defenses against such as those; as they probably suspected, since they wanted me to fetch the stuff for them. Still, desperate men will face almost anything, and trapped rats throw themselves into the catchers’ nets. I’m glad to let Gambrinus finish the job for us.”
“The wall is down, by the southeast corner,” Duffy muttered sleepily. “Wrecked our barracks. I’m going to sleep here, out in the stables where the Vikings were; I can’t remember anything about last night, not one isolated thing, but it certainly doesn’t feel like I got any sleep. Those Janissaries just kept coming, like it had been a dam that burst. There are corpses everywhere—if tomorrow and the next day are sunny, there’ll be plague. I wonder why they pulled back? That was the best chance they could have hoped for, with them in force and us completely taken by surprise.”
There was a snip sound, and Aurelianus stood up. “There,” he said. “You’ll have a scar, but at least the hole’s closed and it ought not to fester.”
Duffy rolled over, got up on his hands and knees, and from there to his feet. “Thanks. Eilif was going to do it. Probably would have got things inside out, so I could grow a beard in my mouth and taste things with my cheek.”
“What a disgusting idea.”
“Sorry. The charming, sprightly ideas aren’t so easy to come by anymore.” He picked up his sword, wiped it and sheathed it, and strode wearily out of the dim chapel.
Anna worried for a while about the five wild-eyed men who’d burst past her and clattered down the stairs to the brewing cellar, and when she heard thin, reedy screams faintly from below she got Mothertongue, for want of anyone hardier, to go down there with her to see what went on.
A charred meat aroma was blended not unpleasantly with the usual malt smell, and they found Gambrinus placidly juggling a number of small irregular spheres of ivory. He assured them that all was well, and Anna didn’t begin to feel ill until, back in the dining room, Mothertongue asked her where she supposed the brew-master had got those five little monkey skulls he’d been playing with.
At eleven the rain began to abate, and by noon the clouds were breaking up, letting a strained, pale sunlight play intermittently over the sundered section of wall. The gap was roughly two hundred feet wide, and the wall as it continued on either side—a surprising hundred-and-fifty feet thick in exposed cross-section—leaned dangerously outward. While sharpshooters with fresh loads hammered into their rifled guns watched the distant Turkish lines, hastily assembled gangs of soldiers and laborers built solid barricades in a straight line across the rubble-choked gap, and threw up a fifty-yard-radius semicircle of deep-moored open-frame wooden obstructions on the slope outside. Chalk dust was scattered thickly beyond the semicircle, most of it darkening into gray mud as it soaked up moisture from the wet ground.
Several smoldering fires started by the explosion were finally put out, a task that hadn’t been top priority because the rain had prevented them from spreading. All three corpse wagons were working their slow way across the devastated area, collecting their grisly cargo—one had already filled, left, and returned.
During that morning and afternoon the hunchbacked figure of Bluto was to be seen everywhere along the battlements, ordering the re-laying of many cannon and culverins, overseeing their cleaning and loading, shouting ignored advice down to the men outside who were building braces and buttresses to prop the leaning wall in place.