The wizard gave the wall another minute of silent, useless scrutiny, and then turned away. “You’re still a cipher.”
He led the way out of the room and the Irishman automatically followed him.
Duffy’s mind kept replaying for him the moment when he’d rolled Epiphany’s body over. Epiphany is dead, he told himself wonderingly as they made their way down the dark stairs, and soon you’ll become aware that that’s one whole chamber in your head that you can close up and lock, because there won’t ever be anything in it anymore. She’s dead. You came all the way back from Venice to kill her.
They walked together, without speaking, until they came to the Tuchlauben; there Aurelianus turned north toward the Zimmermann Inn while Duffy continued on in the direction of the barracks and the gap, though it was still well short of midnight.
Chapter Twenty
AT LONG LAST the waxing glow of dawn divided the irregularly edged paleness of the gap from the high blackness of the leaning walls; what had two hours ago been no more than three stippled lines of bright orange dots in the dark could now be seen to be three ranks of silent, kneeling harquebusiers along the crest of the rubble mound. Behind them, though still outside the new barricade, stood two more companies apiece of landsknechten and Reichshilfe troops, motionless except for the occasional bow of a head to blow on a dimming matchcord.
One of the companies along the mound was Eilif’s, and Duffy was crouched in the center of the front line. He unclamped his hand from the gunstock and absently stretched out the fingers. It seemed to him that in the depths of his mind a bomb had been detonated, which, though too far down to be directly perceptible, had blown loose great stagnant bubbles of memory to come wobbling up to the surface; and he thanked God for even this faintest first light, for it restored to him external things to focus his attention on. During the last five hours he had been staring into a cold blackness as absolute as Gustav Vogel’s final drawing.
The faint click of metal on stone, as one of the sentries up on the wall grounded his pike, finally snapped Duffy completely out of his terrible night-meditations. He breathed deeply the chilly dawn breeze and tried to sharpen his senses.
The man to his right leaned toward him. “You couldn’t get me up on those walls,” he whispered. “The mines have got them tottering.”
The Irishman raised his hand in a be-silent gesture. Damn this chattering idiot, Duffy thought—did I hear another sound? From the shadowy plain? He peered suspiciously along the barrel of his propped-up harquebus. Every patch-of deeper gloom on the plain beyond the white chalk line seemed to his tired eyes to seethe with wormy shapes, but he decided finally that he could see no real motion. He sat back, shivering.
Several long minutes passed, during which the gray light brightened by slow degrees. Through carefully cupped hands Duffy peered at his slowmatch, and was relieved to see that the dawn dampness had not dimmed its red glow. His mail coif was itching his scalp, and from time to time he instinctively tried to scratch his head, forgetting that he had on a riveted steel salade.
“I sure hope that hunchback’s kept his cannon-primings dry,” muttered the man on Duffy’s right again. “I think—”
“Shut up, can’t you?” Duffy whispered. Then he stiffened; he’d seen the gray light glint on metal a few hundred yards away, then at several points along a dark line. He opened his mouth to whisper a warning to the other men, but he could already hear the rustle as they flexed chilled joints and looked to their powder and matches. There was a low whistle from atop the warped wall, showing that the sentry too had seen the activity.
The Irishman screwed his match into the firing pin, made sure his pan was filled with powder, and then looked along the barrel at the furtively advancing line. His heart was pounding, his fingertips tingled and he was breathing a little fast. I’ll give one shot, he thought—two at the most, if they’re slow in getting over the obstruction-fence—and then I’m flinging this machine down and using my sword. I just can’t seem to feel really in control with a firearm.
Then there was the muted drum-roll of boots on dirt as the Turks broke into a run—they’re akinji, Duffy realized, the lightly armed Turkish infantry; thank God it isn’t the Janissaries, whom half the men expected to shift back to this side during the night. The man beside Duffy was panting and scrabbling at the trigger of his gun. “Don’t shoot yet, fool,” the Irishman rasped. “Want your ball to drop short? Wait till they reach the chalk line.”
In perhaps thirty seconds they reached it, and the gap in the wall lit up briefly as the first line of harquebuses fired, followed a moment later by a flame-gushing blast of gravel and stones from one of the culverins on the battlements. The front of the advancing akinji tide was ripped apart, scimitars flying from nerveless fingers as torn bodies tumbled and rolled across the dirt, but their maniacal fellows pressed on without a pause, over a wide segment of the fence that had been blown down. A rank of standing harquebusiers fired into the Turkish force, and then the akinji were mounting the slight slope below the wall.
There was clearly no time to reload, so Duffy tossed his still-sparking gun aside and, standing up, drew his rapier and dagger. I wish the light were better, he thought. “Two steps back, my company!” he called. “Don’t get separated!”
Then the Turks were upon them. Duffy sighted the man who would hit him, parried the flashing scimitar with his rapier guard and stabbed the man in the chest with his dagger. The jolt of impact pushed the Irishman back a step, but didn’t knock him over. A sword-edge rang against his helmet, and he gave its owner a quick slash across the face as another blade snapped in half against his hauberk. The defenders’ line was slowly giving way when a harsh call sounded from behind them: “We’re reloaded back here! Christians, drop!”
Duffy parried a hard poke at his face and then fell to his hands and knees even as a mingled roar of gunfire went off at his back and the cold air around him was filled with the whiz-and-thud of lead balls striking flesh. “On your feet!” he yelled a moment later, hopping up to meet the next wave of akinji as their predecessors reeled back and fell.
The man on Duffy’s right took a sword through his belly and, clutching himself, somersaulted down the slope, so that the Irishman suddenly found himself facing two—then three—of the akinji. All at once his cautious confidence in his own skill was eroding, and he sensed the nearness of real, incapacitating fear. “Get over here, somebody!” he yelled, desperately parrying the licking scimitars with sword and dagger. His troop of men had retreated away from him, though, and he hadn’t even a wall to get his back to. He took a flying leap at the Turk on his right, trusting his hauberk and salade to absorb the worst of the attacks of the other two; he swept the man’s scimitar away in a low line with both his sword and dagger, and riposted with a long thrust of the dagger that he accurately drove into the Turk’s throat. The other two akinji struck at Duffy then; one of them swung a hard cut at Duffy’s shoulder, and though the blow stung, the mail blocked the sword-edge and the scimitar flew into three pieces; the other lunged in with his sword extended straight, and his point, cutting through the Irishman’s leather doublet, found one of the gaps in his mail shirt and sank an inch into his side.
Duffy whirled back when he felt the shock of cold steel in him and sent the Turk’s wide-eyed head spining from his shoulders with a furious scything chop. The field momentarily clear, he scrambled a few steps up the slope and through one of the openings in the barricade that divided the rocky crest, to rejoin his fellow Austrians.