The bridge was coming down, casting its shadow over the solitary young knight, just as Bridier leaned back and hurled the fire hoop high in the air. It was a perfect cast, the hoop turning and turning in the air, flinging off burning jellied sparks from its rim as it spun, any one of which could have stuck to his flesh or hair and burst into an inextinguishable blaze. But he never turned away, he moved not an inch, waiting again as still and silent as an alabaster statue while the fire hoop spun like a Catherine wheel and then hit the down slope of the bridge and rolled forward into the oncoming dervishes.
Then the slender knight drew his long sword from its scabbard in his burnt hands and raised the blade to his lips and kissed it and then leapt onto the forward end of the bridge, following after the fire hoop, his sword cutting through the air like a whip.
Springing up from their stupor came running Smith and Stanley, Medrano and Lanfreducci, and Nicholas and Hodge ran too. Hodge grabbed a short billhook as he ran. Nicholas thought of his Livy, and Horatius keeping the bridge against Lars Porsena and his army, alone with his two comrades. Yet that had been but schoolwork, and this was life and death.
In the black smoke, the figure of Bridier twisted and turned and fought with all the fury of a Mohammedan dervish himself, revolving in the smoke like a demon, fair hair flying. The howling Bektaşis tried again and again to rush him, to over-run him with sheer weight of numbers, but again and again they fell back, blinded by smoke, howling not in religious ecstasy but raw pain as their clothes turned to liquid fire on their flesh, and that Christian sword sliced through limb after limb.
Broglia on the bastion turned the field gun and loaded it with a single fine iron ball, grapeshot being too diffuse at this range. He blasted it across into the far end of the bridge where the infuriated dervishes crowded, and it drove a platter-sized hole straight through one man’s belly before ploughing on into others behind. The gunners sluiced water on the barrel and cleared out the last wadding and loaded another pack of powder and a ball, and Broglia ordered the trajectory lowered to hit the bridge itself.
Bridier cut and thrust and slew, and the bridge being only wide enough for two men at a time, or a twin file of men to surge across in an attack column, none could get past him. Blood coursed over his fine silver breastplate and from around the arrow shaft stuck in his shoulder, he was cut across the cheek and over the eye, yet he seemed oblivious. Nothing could stop him. Nicholas suddenly realised where he had seen such a thing before. A wall painting in a church, that showed the warrior Archangel Michael treading down Satan on the day of wrath. That same slender figure, with hair as fair as the sun, the expression so lacking in hatred and serene.
Then a pistol cracked out and Bridier was suddenly no such immortal archangel but mortal flesh. He sank to his knees, and a great dervish, naked but for grubby white şalwar trousers, raised a huge curved sword over the exhausted knight’s bare neck. The sword was descending as Smith and Stanley came racing to Bridier’s side, Smith raising his shield over their wounded brother and fending off the mighty stroke just as Stanley drove his long pike straight through the fellow’s belly. Smith extended his other arm and loosed his horse pistol, at such short range that it blasted the huge Turk back again off the end of Stanley’s pike, and sent him crashing into his fellows behind. Then Smith and Stanley, with Lanfreducci and Medrano close behind them, pressed on forward, trying desperately to drive the enemy from the bridge.
At the Elmo end, the quick-witted Hodge was down on one knee, the billhook rising and falling rapidly. Woodcutter’s son. Nicholas stood over him, shield raised as if shading him from the sun as he worked. Two more soldiers came running up with smoking fire hoops, freshly dipped in tar, understanding that the black smoke would give the battered defenders vital cover at this critical time. They tossed them down over the posts of wooden scaffolding below, and flames roared up. Beneath Hodge’s beefy blows with the billhook, a brummock he’d call it, the first of the bridge’s two thick oak foresprits was quickly being cut through. The broad heavy blade fell again and again as with expert eye Hodge cut hard, left angle, right angle, a notch appearing, another left, another right, a bigger notch, and then straight down in a flurry of blows. Though the sprit was as thick as man’s thigh and seasoned hardwood, yet it was quickly going through.
‘The bridge is going down!’ yelled Nicholas. ‘Pull back!’
A further supportive shot from Broglia’s gun crew and then the knights, dragging Bridier with them, fought their way back, the dervishes snapping at them like a pack of wolves.
Behind the dervishes were coming four men with long muskets, marching in orderly fashion.
‘Take out the Janizary marksmen!’ roared Broglia. ‘Arquebusiers!’
From the north-west star point, some ragged fire came in on the four approaching musketeers, and they had to duck for cover, buying the retreating knights a few precious seconds.
Then the first foresprit suddenly cracked and the entire bridge gave a lurch and sagged to one side. Hodge in a trice was onto the second sprit, attacking it with scowling concentration. The knights came back at a shambling run, Bridier’s arm looped around Stanley’s broad shoulders, more dragged than walked. They hurried onto the stone parapet and down, and the sprit gave as the dervishes swarmed across. A last volley of arquebus fire slammed into them broadside and then the bridge fell seeming slowly into the great ditch below. An explosion of flame as the fire hoops flared up and the tumbling white robes caught alight. The knights stood back from the parapet at the blast of heat and the sound of agonised cries. The sound of the damned being hauled down to hell, the flames gouting up in leaping tongues around them. To complete their damnation, a group of Spanish infantrymen stepped forward and with the utter ruthlessness for which they were famed and feared, tossed down a couple of packs of gunpowder, three or four wildfire grenades and a couple more brass grenades, packed with a lacerating mix of gunpowder, naphtha, nails and shards of flint. All stood back and shielded their ears as the terrific explosion filled the ditch.
Afterwards, Nicholas glanced over the parapet. A field of white flowers mown flat, wide-spattered blood and dark gleaming puddles. A head sliced into two halves like a melon, dispossessed limbs. From both sides of the ditch, from Turks and defenders both, a moment of stunned silence. Nothing but the soft crackle of small fires below, and the drifting smoke between them.
They laid Bridier down and removed his breastplate.
‘Just a scratch or two,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll be back on the wall by nightfall.’
‘Silence now, brother,’ said John Smith, as gently as a nursemaid.
The pistol ball had gone deep in his side, perhaps into his lung, though the blood in his mouth showed no bubbles. The arrow was lodged still deeper in his shoulder, his face and arms were badly cut about, and his left foot was mangled. His face was paler than ever. They eased him onto a canvas stretcher and took him below.