“Hawkwood. Yes, it’s me.”
Hawkwood saw the pale ovals of faces in the lantern light, the shining flanks of a horse.
“How bad is it?”
Sequero splashed towards him. “What kind of ship’s master are you, Hawkwood? No one was told to secure the horses, and then the ship went on its damned side. They never had a chance. Why could you not have warned my people?”
Sequero was standing before him, filthy and dripping. Something had laid open his forehead so that a flap of skin glistened there, but the blood had slowed to an ooze. The ensign’s eyes were bright with fury.
“We had no time,” Hawkwood said hotly. “As it was we almost lost the ship, and I’ve lost some of my men putting her to rights. We had no time to worry about your damned horses.”
He thought for a second that Sequero was going to fly at him and tensed into a crouch, but then the ensign sagged, obviously worn out.
“I am no sailor. I cannot say whether you are in the right of it or not. Will the ship survive?”
“Probably. How many did you lose?”
“One of the stallions and another mare. They broke their legs when the ship went to one side.”
“What about the other livestock?”
Sequero shrugged. It was not his concern.
“Well, get what stock have survived and secure them in their stalls. Lash them to the pens if you have to. This could be a long blow.” Hawkwood was beginning to feel like a parrot, repeating his litany to everyone he met.
Sequero nodded dully.
“What about the soldiers? How are they faring?”
“Drunk, most of them. Some of the older ones have been saving their wine rations. They thought they were going to die, and so decided to drown whilst drunk.”
Hawkwood laughed. “I’ve heard of worse ideas. What of Lord Murad?”
“What of him? He’s closeted with his peasant whore as usual.”
A violent lurch of the ship pitched them both into the stinking water. They struggled out of it spitting and cursing.
“Are you sure this thing won’t sink, Captain?” Sequero sneered.
But Hawkwood was already retracing his steps forward. Time to get back on deck and take up his proper place. He was blind down here.
I T had become a little lighter and the clouds seemed to have lifted above the level of the mastheads. The seas were just as mountainous though, great hills of water with troughs a quarter of a mile apart and crests as high as the carrack’s topmasts. They were running before the wind now, and the waves were rising around the ship’s stern, lifting her high into the air and then passing under her, leaving her almost becalmed in their lee. There seemed to be little danger of her being pooped, thanks to her construction, and would have to ride the storm out, letting it blow them where it willed.
Velasca had had hawsers sent up to the mastheads and there were men working in the tops, struggling to secure them. Others were double lashing the upper-deck guns and the two ship’s boats that had survived, though the passage of the run-away gun had smashed chunks out of both their sides. And to both larboard and starboard thick jets of white water were spewing out of the pumps as men bent up and down over them, trying to lighten the ship.
“Tiller there!” Hawkwood shouted down the hatch. “How’s she steering?”
“Easier, sir,” Masudi called back. “But the men are tiring.”
“Mihal and his mess will be up to relieve you soon. Steady as she goes, Masudi.”
“Aye, sir.”
For hour after hour the carrack rode the vast waves and careered before the wind roughly south-west, away off their course and into seas unknown even to Tyrenius Cobrian. Despite the fact that the yards were bare, her speed was very great as she was shunted forward on the shining backs of the enormous breakers.
The watch changed. Exhausted seamen were relieved by others scarcely less exhausted, but the hands remained on deck for hour after hour, pumping, splicing, repairing or simply remaining in readiness for the next crisis.
It grew colder. When Hawkwood estimated that their storm-driven run had taken them some forty leagues off course the balminess in the air vanished and the water took on a grey, chill aspect in the sunless dawn of the next day. All that day they continued to run before the wind, eating bread and raw salt pork when they could, feeling the salt in their clothing rasp their saturated skin and continuing the unending repairs.
After a second night and a second day they began to feel that they had never been warm or dry, and had never really known sleep before. They lost another man off one of the yards who had slackened his grip out of sheer weariness, and they threw overboard the bodies of three passengers who had died of the injuries sustained in the first, savage squall. And they continued south-west across the titanic, illimitable Western Ocean, like a stick of wood adrift in a millrace with a knot of frenzied ants clinging to it. There was nothing else to do.
T HEY came with the dawn, as Martellus had said they would. Had it not been for the vigilance of the pickets they might have swarmed up to the very walls, so sudden was their onset; for the Merduks had elected to forgo a preliminary bombardment, preferring to gamble on achieving surprise. But the watching sentries set light to the signal rockets and flares, and suddenly the eastern barbican and the river were lit up with smoking red lights that described bright parabolas across the lightening sky and illuminated the bristling phalanxes of advancing troops below.
The garrison of the barbican rushed out to their stations. All along the walls, slow-match was lit and set to one side, men shouldered their arquebuses and powder and shot-carriers hurried up to the parapets with their vital loads.
The Merduk host, discovered, came on with a mighty roar, a rush of shouting and thumping feet that set the hair crawling on Corfe’s head. Once again, he beheld the teeming mass of a Merduk army assaulting walls, like a seaweed-thick tide lapping at a cliff face.
The sun was coming up. More powder rockets were launched, this time to help the gunners aim their culverins. The swarming mob of Merduks was perhaps two hundred yards from the walls when Andruw stabbed the slow-match into the touch-hole of the first cannon.
It jumped back with a roar and an exploding fog of smoke. At the signal, the other big guns of the fortress began to bark out also until the entire barbican was a massive reeking smoke cloud stabbed through and through with red and yellow flame.
Corfe was able to see the result of the first few salvoes before the smoke hid the advancing hordes. The Torunnans were using delayed-fuse shells that exploded in midair and scattered jagged metal in a deadly radius beneath them. He saw swathes of the enemy fall or be tossed into the air and ripped to pieces, like crops flattened by an invisible wind. Then they came on again, dressing their broken lines and screaming their hoarse battlecries. There were hundreds of ladders in their midst, carried shoulder-high.
“What of their numbers, Corfe?” Andruw shouted. “What do you make them?”
How to set a figure to that broiling mass of humanity? But Corfe was a soldier, a professional. His mind played with figures in his head.
“Nine or ten thousand in the first wave,” he shouted back, the smoke aching his throat already. “But that’s just the first wave.”
Andruw grinned out of a blackened face. “Plenty for everyone then.”
They were at the foot of the walls now, a roaring multitude horned with scaling ladders and baying like animals. The rising sun lit up the further hills, shafted through the billowing powder smoke and made something ethereal and beautiful out of it, the defenders seeming to be flat silhouettes in the fiery reek. The gunners of the lighter pieces depressed their guns to maximum and began firing down into the packed masses below, whilst the arquebusiers were holding fire, waiting for Andruw’s order.
Scaling ladders thumping against the battlements. Grapnels, ropes and a shower of crossbow bolts that knocked down half a dozen men in Corfe’s vision alone. The ladders began to quiver as the enemy climbed up them.
“Hold your fire, arquebusiers!” Andruw shouted. A few nervous men were already letting loose.
Faces at the top of the ladders, black as fiends from hell.
“Fire!”
A rippling series of explosions as two thousand arquebuses went off almost as one. Many ladders crashed back down in the press below, unbalanced by the death throes of the men at their tops. Others remained, and more of the enemy continued their climb.
“Fork-men, to the front!” the order went out, and Torunnans came forward bearing objects shaped like long-handled pitchforks. Two or three of the defenders would push these against the scaling ladders and send them out in a slow, graceful arc, packed with men, to swing down into red ruin in the massed ranks at the foot of the walls.
The assault paused, checked. The noise of men shouting and shrieking, the boom of cannon and crack of arquebus were deafening.
“Have they no strategy at all?” Andruw was asking Corfe. “They’re like a ram butting a gate. Do they reckon nothing of casualties?”
“They don’t have to,” Corfe told him. “Remember what Martellus said? Attrition. They are losing men by the thousand, we by the score. But they can afford to lose their thousands. They are as numberless as the sand of a beach.”
They stood near the gate that was the main entrance to this part of the fortress. The sun was rising rapidly and a rosy-gold light was playing over the scene. They could see through gaps in the smoke to where fresh forces were already being marshalled on the hills beyond. The Merduk guns were being brought into play now, but they were firing high. Most of their shots seemed to be falling into the Searil, raising fountains of white, shattered water.
“So they use explosive shells, too,” Andruw said, surprised.