The next moment a thirty-pound ball erupted through the sacks where he had just lain. They were blasted high into the air, ruptured into tatters, the contents falling back over where he and García huddled. But it was only earth, it could have been worse. He opened his eyes. The ball had gone on and destroyed yet more of the bastion, then rolled down into the inner yard, bounced over the hardpacked earth there and ended pummelling into a mound of heaped corpses.
Another ball hit two men crouching along the barricade not twenty yards down and they flew high into the air, limbs flailing, both dead already. One fell in the yard below, one landed stretched limp and near naked over a torn, toothed section of wall, his body obscenely elongated, innards spilling.
More balls came in, many marble. The deafening bang, the whine, eardrums batting and pulsing and nerves shredded. Splinters of hot stone shrapnel shearing through the tremulous heat haze of summer air, billowing clouds of soot-black dust, and then a volley of defiant musket fire from the defenders kneeling up once more, trying to take out any gunners careless enough to show themselves above their own breastworks. And everywhere gunpowder smoke bitter on the parched dry tongue, and so dense that the enemy might advance through it at a slow march and not be seen.
The enemy were advancing again.
The last defenders of Elmo dragged themselves back to the cordons of rubble, spat out gobs of cartridge paper, teeth blackened with cordite, reloaded, wondering how much powder and ball remained to them. They gulped down scoops of wine and water, wiped trickles of sweat-diluted blood from their eyes, spat blood and teeth, cried out to each other last words of encouragement and defiance. Lanfreducci even yelled out, seeing another movement among the Turks as they reformed beyond the bridge, ‘Aha, we’ve got ’em on the run now, boys!’
His forehead streamed with fresh blood from a shrapnel splinter, and he was dragging one leg behind him, but he seemed oblivious.
He would die laughing in the teeth of the enemy. They would kill him but they would not break him.
Nicholas gripped his sword hilt. Now let it come. He hoped to die like this if he must die, on the barricades, sword in hand. Let it be quick, but let him take some with him.
The Turks came swirling through the smoke of their own cannons, over now-toughened, scaffolded and reinforced bridges made of hardened Turkish pine from galley masts, lashed thickly together with ships’ rope. The last few battered defenders had no hope of firing and collapsing them as before. There were too many and they were too few.
Nevertheless a last gallant knight went down on a rope to try. He was shot by a Turkish marksman and left hanging there. They could not retrieve him.
Another fellow next to Nicholas was hit, an unlucky shot that ricocheted off his steel gorget and ploughed up into his throat. He gagged and fell backwards. Another shot whined off the stones nearby. Nicholas seized the man’s arm and hauled him back into the cover of the cordon.
‘Cursed luck,’ gurgled the soldier. ‘The ball’s just under the skin.’ His throat was filling with blood, but he seemed not seriously hurt. He pulled off his helmet and then one glove and groped about with his bare fingers. ‘I could almost pull it free myself.’
And then a heinous brass firebomb came arcing in over the cordon and exploded right above them. In the random way of such cruel weapons, not a splinter touched Nicholas, but four or five broad shards of ragged, superheated brass drove into the back of the fellow’s exposed head. He simply sat forward, the bloody mess of his head in Nicholas’s lap. The boy screamed despite himself. Then Stanley was beside him and taking the dead man by the shoulders and laying him back on the ground. Bullets and arrows and cannonballs seemed to fill the air around them as if they were in a storm, yet Nicholas was aware of nothing but the dead man, the back of his head blown away, the light in his eyes gone out.
Stanley shook him. ‘Get below, boy. Have some water and wine.’
Nicholas shook his head dumbly.
‘Get below!’ shouted Stanley, as belligerent as any master-sergeant. ‘And keep down!’
Nicholas crawled for the low bastion door.
He glugged down a scoop of water and wine, shook his head and breathed deep. He had no cloth he could use, and it was wrong to waste water. So he took a handful of dust from the ground of the inner court, and cast it over the front of his breeches. The dry dust quickly soaked up the black and purple mess of blood and brain adhering there, and he brushed it off with his sleeve. Then he crossed himself and prayed for the passage of the nameless soldier’s soul, and took another scoop of wine and water, and finally stopped shaking. He set back his shoulders and thought of his father, and then went to climb the stone steps back to the firestorm above.
A fine Janizary in tall white hat and scarlet waistcoat, wielding a mace, its wings deep-toothed, came dashing up the rubble of the shattered point, urging on those behind, slipping over the blood-slathered bodies of their fallen comrades. Stanley stood swiftly and shot his arquebus from the hip but it misfired and the imposing Janizary came on. He rested his left hand on the rubble barrier and leapt over in a clean vault, pirouettting and expertly swinging his mace, which struck Stanley, slow with exhaustion, a ferocious blow which met the knight’s ungauntleted right hand.
He reeled in agony and stepped back, the Janizary raising his mace for another swift and decisive blow. Nicholas raced up and thrust from behind and his blade glanced off. Beneath the Turk’s scarlet waistcoat was evidently a very fine steel breastplate. The Janizary turned, his eyes dark-browed and flashing with strange pleasure. He stepped back and forth. Nicholas hesitated. Here was one of the finest soldiers in the world, veteran of a hundred battles on three different continents. Guns roared about his ears, desperate cries that sounded like the last cries of men. Perhaps this was the end.
Stanley had collapsed back against a wall, clutching his hand to his chest, his face a rictus of pain.
Nicholas weaved left and right and then wide aside and raised the sword before his eyes as if sighting down a musket barrel. He saw the mace rise high in the air, but by that time he had already thrust forward and the blade was through and a foot of it out of the back of the Janizary’s throat. He pulled it cleanly out again and the man fell, blood pumping rhythmically from the front of his throat, and Nicholas finished him with another sharp stab straight through his broad forehead.
Onward surged the mix of Janizaries and less disciplined auxiliaries, Moors and Algerians. A dark fellow straight out of Ethiopia or the Nubian desert, barefoot and wearing bells on his anklets, a white wrap around his forehead and a loincloth, naked otherwise, came at him babbling and whooping. Nicholas wrong-footed him, leaping high onto the barrier and stuck the lean point of his sword straight through his heart. He pulled it free and leapt back again like a cat, the fellow falling dead against him, almost knocking him down.
‘Bravo!’ cried Lanfreducci.
He steadied himself. Never stop moving, never stop to admire your handiwork, fight on. Hit first, hit hard, and carry on hitting. Remember Smith’s lessons. Never look back. And get over there to Stanley.
Another younger Janizary, in a green tunic and white hat, carrying a long musket, died at a long broadsword backslash from Lanfreducci, and another Nubian, finely arrayed in leopard-skin topped with a leopard-skin hat stuck with orange feathers, was torn open by a close-range blast from a squat-barrelled arquebus packed with the devil knew what, for it was no clean ball that made that carnage. He flopped limp over the barrier and Nicholas pushed him clear, his tattered lungs dragging out on the sandbags. The attack began to falter, the shouting died down, the survivors retreated back across the bridge. There were more distant shouts of the Ottoman captains, lambasting their fleeing men.