Here and there a shot followed. Then all was silence. Around us the velvet of night lay gently. A faint breeze stirred in from die sea, and there was left a smell of burned wood, grass, and gunpowder.
Then there was another aroma ... fresh coffee! Some of the men had not tasted it, for the substance was new in England, yet Abigail had long been familiar with it from her travels on her father's ship in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
There was a cup for each of us, and a pleasant, warming drink it was.
Jublain and Pim came to me. "Will they attack again, think you?"
"I do not know. The ladders failed only because we were alert, but they will think their medicine was bad. We must wait and see."
The attack had lasted only minutes, and now all was still. We drank more of the coffee and some men returned to their rest. A slow hour passed by, and then another. There was a faint gray fight in the east, or perhaps I but wished it so.
Watkins came to me beside the parapet. "There's two ladders outside near the gate. Request permission to go out and get them."
I hesitated. To open the gates was a risk, but I wished to keep as many ladders from their hands as possible. Always before Indians had failed to succeed in attacks against stockades unless they could get in before a gate was closed.
"How many men will you need?"
"Twelve, I think. Two men for each ladder, the others to stand by in case of attack."
"Very well. Only it must be done quickly. At the first move from them retreat within the gate and close it."
We waited ... the creak of the heavy gates was unnaturally loud in the stillness. Surely, the Indians could hear it, but what would they think? That we were pursuing them?
Yet Watkins and his men moved swiftly indeed. Within minutes the gates had swung shut again, and at least two of the ladders were within.
He came to me. It had grown a little lighter and his grin was easy to see.
"There was a third we could not carry so I almost cut the rawhide bindings through," he said. "Wait until they try climbing that one!"
Watching toward the dark line of forest, I thought of Naguska.
The threads that hold a man to leadership be thin indeed, and he had trusted his success to a new thing, an un-Indian thing, and it had failed. Some of them were sure to think that it was this strange thing that led to their defeat, they would blame him. I could not but feel regret for him, for he seemed an able man, although I was sorry he respected his father so little.
Yet, might it not be that he secretly loved him? That all this was a mask, a thing to shield him from such an emotion? For few of the Indians we had met thus far regarded the father with veneration, for the maternal uncle was he who drew the respect we gave to a father.
We waited, and waited, yet no further attack came, and slowly the sky grew lighter.
Here and there we saw patches of darkness on the grass, left by the blood of a victim, but there were no bodies, alive or dead. All had been spirited away in the darkness. We found four more ladders, one abandoned almost at the edge of the brush.
How well for us and all who lived behind stockades that this new way of war had failed them. I wondered how often it might have happened-that a truly great discovery was cast aside because of initial failure. The ladders were well-made, the uprights notched slightly, and the crosspieces bound in place with rawhide.
Abigail had breakfast ready when I came below. She had not waited for the main table to be set, knowing I would be hungry. I told her of Naguska, and she looked at me, smiling with amusement. "You are a strange man, Barnabas, for you seem almost regretful that he failed, when his success might have meant death to us all."
"It was a new idea to them, Abby, the ladders. And he must have argued many hours to convince his warriors of their worth." I reflected. "Yes, I do feel regret for him, and someday I hope we can meet again ... under other circumstances. I would know more of this father of his. How he came to be here and what his name was. And whence he came."
Sakim and Pim came in to share coffee with me, and I told them of my thinking.
"How strange it is to think that all our knowledge, all our skills can seem worthless to a people not accustomed to them."
Sakim shrugged. "It was ever so. Long ago I was on a ship to the Moluccas, and we stopped by an island to trade. No steel was known there, nor any metal at all. The tools, axes, knives ... all were of stone.
"One such was beautifully made and I wished it for something to take home with me, and offered to trade a steel hatchet for his of stone. He looked at my hatchet, turned it over, used it, looked astonished at how easily it cut, then returned it to me and took up his own. He would not trade. He wanted what was known and familiar, not this strange tool of whose properties he knew nothing."
Sakim sipped his coffee. "It is good," he said, "but thin to my taste. I must show you someday how it is made in my country."
He put down his cup. "I have come tonight to talk to you of that."
"Of your country? My father knew a little, but too little. Peter talked some of the Eastern lands, but I know too little except that spices come from there, and gold and tea and coffee and much else."
Sakim smiled, and turned his cup upon the table. "Much else, indeed." He looked at me, his black eyes amused and a little doubtful, I thought. "That young man, Naguska. I am very like him in that I, too, have learning that may be despised, as his was."
"How so? I despise no learning, Sakim. That you know."
"Perhaps, my friend, and that is why I have decided to tell you what I have told no man since my first captivity to Europeans. It was easier to let them believe I was a Moor, for all understood what was a Moor, and to explain what I really was ... it would have been useless, and worse, puzzling.
"Men do not like puzzles, Barnabas. They prefer categories. It is far easier to slip a piece of information into a known slot than to puzzle over the unknown."
"You are not a Moor? But you are a Moslem?"
"Many who follow Mohammed are not Moors, nor even Arabs. They were a conquering people, those Arabs who came out of their deserts after the death of Mohammed, and they carried the sword and fire to many lands, including Persia, one of the oldest, and I, who now call myself Sakim, came from a far place known as Khurasan, from the city of Nisphapur.
"It was the home of my father, and of my father's father as well, and who knows how many others? We were scholars, sometimes of the law, often of medicine, always of philosophy.
"In the study of medicine we were far advanced, for were we not the heirs of Greece? But we had learned from India as well, and from Cathay. In Bagdad alone we once had sixty-five hospitals divided into wards for the separate treatments of various ills and diseases, with running water in every room ... and that was in the eighth century ... eight hundred years ago."
"So what happened?" Burke asked skeptically. "I have seen none of this great medicine."
"Genghis Khan came ... you have heard of him? And something like a hundred years later, Timur the Lame. He who in the West is called Tamerlane.
"You think you have seen war ... Timur made pyramids of skulls and the streets ran red with blood ... several times over a hundred thousand were put to the sword. No man truly knows how many, but he killed all ... at first.
"Later, when he became wiser, he tried to save the artisans and the scholars, but too many had died. The hospitals were destroyed, the books burned, the teachers slain.
"Those two conquerors set civilization back five hundred years, my friends, and only a few survived. Several were ancestors of mine who fled into the hidden fastnesses of the Pamirs, and others into the far desert, the Takla-makan.
"There they treated the ill, they taught their sons and grandsons, and in time returned to Nisphapur and to Marv and to Meshed.