Ethan Gage Collection # 1 (68 page)

“Miriam, it was always about more than just us. You know that.”

“No. Decisions hurt people. It's as simple as that.”

“Well, I've lost Astiza again.”

“And me too.”

But I could win her back, couldn't I? Yes, men are dogs, but women take a certain feline satisfaction in flogging us with words and tears. There is love and cruelty on both sides, is there not? So I'd take her scorn and fight the battle and then, if we survived, plot a strategy to paper over the past and get her back.

“They're coming!”

Grateful to have to face only Napoleon's divisions instead of Miriam's hurt, I climbed with the others to the top of the great tower. The plain had come alive. Every trench was a caterpillar of hurrying men, their advance fogged by the gun smoke of the furious cannonade. Other troops were dragging lighter field pieces forward to engage if a breach was effected. Ladders rocked as grenadiers crossed the uneven ground, and galloping teams hauled fresh cannonballs and powder to the batteries. A group of men in Arab robes had clustered near the half-destroyed aqueduct.

I snapped open my glass. They were the survivors of Najac's gang, by the look of it. I didn't see Silano or Astiza.

Smith hauled on my shoulder and pointed. “What the devil is that?”

I swung my glass. A horizontal log was trundling toward us, a massive cedar jutting from a carriage bed with six sets of wheels. Soldiers pushed from the sides and behind. Its tip was swollen, like a gigantic phallus, and coated, I guessed, with some kind of armor. What the devil indeed? It looked like a medieval battering ram. Surely Bonaparte didn't think he could start knocking against our ramparts with weapons centuries out of date. Yet the device's pushers were trotting forward confidently.

Had Napoleon gone mad?

It reminded me of the kind of makeshift contraption that might have delighted Ben Franklin, or my American colleague Robert Fulton, who prowled Paris with dotty ideas for things he called steamboats and submarines. And who else did I know who was an inveterate tinkerer? Nicolas-Jacques Conte, of course, the man whose balloon Astiza and I had stolen in Cairo. Monge had said he'd invented some kind of sturdy wagon to get heavy guns to Acre. This trundling log had all the markings of his makeshift ingenuity. But a battering ram? It seemed so backward for a modernist like Conte. Unless…

“It's a bomb!” I suddenly cried. “Shoot at its head, shoot at the head!”

The land torpedo had reached a slight downward incline leading to the moat and was beginning to accelerate.

“What?” Phelipeaux asked.

“There are explosives at the end of the log! We've got to set them off!” I grabbed a musket and fired, but if I hit the contraption at all my bullet bounced harmlessly off the metal sheathing at its tip. Other shots were fired, but our soldiers and sailors were still aiming for the men pushing alongside the wheels. One or two were hit, but the monster simply ran over them as they fell, the torpedo gathering speed.

“Hit it with a cannon!”

“It's too late, Gage,” Smith said calmly. “We can't depress the guns far enough.”

So I grabbed Miriam, brushing by her astonished brother, and pulled her to the rear of the tower before she could protest.

“Get back in case it works!”

Smith, too, was backing away, and Djezzar had already left to strut along the walls and cow his men. But Phelipeaux lingered, gamely trying to slow the rush of Conte's contraption with a well-aimed pistol shot. It was madness.

Then the rolling ram reached the lip of the moat and flew straight across, its snout crashing against the base of the tower.

The soldiers who'd been pushing ran, one pausing long enough to yank a lanyard. A fuse flared.

A few seconds, and then the device exploded with a roar so cacophonous that it blotted out my hearing. The air erupted with smoke and flame, and chunks of stone flew higher than the top of our tower, rolling lazily.

The edifice had shuddered under previous attacks, but this time it swayed like a drunk on Drury Lane. Miriam and I fell, me grabbing her in my arms. Sir Sidney held on to the tower's rear crenellations. And the front of the edifice dissolved before my eyes, sheering off and slipping into a hellish abyss. Phelipeaux and Jericho fell with it.

“Brother!” Miriam screamed, or at least that's the sound I interpreted her mouth making. All I could hear was ringing.

She ran for the lip until I tackled her.

Crawling over her squirming body, on a platform that was now half gone and dangerously leaning, I looked down into wreckage that was boiling smoke like the throat of a volcano. The front third of this strongest tower had simply peeled away, the rest of it exposed like a hollow tree and stitched together by half-destroyed floors. It was as if our clothes had been ripped away, leaving us naked. Bodies were entwined with stone in the rubble below, the moat filled to the brim with wreckage. A new sound impinged on my abused ears, and I realized that thousands of men were cheering, their roar just detectable in my addled state. The French were charging for the breach they had made.

Najac, I bet, would be with them, looking for me.

Smith had recovered his balance and had his saber out. He was shouting something the ringing in my ears made inaudible, but I surmised he was calling men to the breach below. I wriggled back
ward and hauled Miriam with me. “The rest of it may come down!” I shouted.

“What?”

“We have to get off this tower!”

She couldn't hear either. She nodded, turned toward the attacking French, and before I could stop her leaped off the edge I'd just crawled back from. I lunged, trying to grab her, and slid once more to the brink. She'd dropped like a cat to beams jutting from the tower floor below, and was climbing down the edges of the collapse toward Jericho. Swearing soundlessly to myself, I started to follow, certain the entire edifice would go over at any moment and bury us in a rock grave. Meanwhile bullets were bouncing like fleas in a jar, cannonballs were screaming in both directions, and ladders were reaching up like claws.

Smith and a contingent of British marines had half galloped, half bounded down the partially wrecked stairs behind us, and got to the breach when we did. They collided with French troops surging across the rubble in the plugged moat, and there was a blast of musket fire from both sides, men screaming. Then they were on each other with bayonet, cutlass, and musket butt. The French division commander Louis Bon went down, fatally shot. The aide-de-camp Croisier, humiliated by Napoleon when he failed to catch some skirmishers the year before, hurled himself into the fray. Miriam dropped into this hell shouting frantically for Jericho. So there I dropped too, dazed, nearly weaponless, black from powder smoke, face-to-face with the entire French army.

They looked ten feet tall in their high hats and crossed belts, throwing themselves at us with the fury and frustration that comes from weeks of fruitless siege work. Here was the chance to finish things, as they had at Jaffa! They were roaring like surf in a storm, stumbling forward over carnage, the end of the shattered cedar log splayed outward like an opened flower. Yet even as they pressed they came under a deluge of iron, rock, and bomblets hurled by Djezzar's Ottomans above, which dropped them like wheat. If the French were determined, we were desperate. If they punched through the tower
Acre was lost and all of us would certainly be dead. Royal Marines ran at them screaming, shooting, and chopping, the red and blue a mosaic of struggling color.

It was the most ferocious fight I'd been in, as hand-to-hand as Greek and Trojan, no quarter asked or given. Men grunted and swore as they stabbed, choked, gouged, and kicked. They surged and struggled like bulls. Croisier sank in the melee, shot and stabbed in a dozen places. We could see nothing of the wider fight, just this scrim on a hillock of rubble with the tower about to come down on top of us. I saw Phelipeaux, half buried, his back likely broken, somehow drag out a pistol from beneath himself and fire into his revolutionary enemies. A half-dozen bayonets entered him in reply.

Jericho had not just survived the fall, but dragged himself clear of the wreckage. His clothes were half burnt and blown off and his skin was gray with stone dust, but he'd found an iron bar, slightly bent, and strode into the oncoming French like Samson. Men backed from his maniacal energy as he whirled the staff. A fusilier came up behind with aimed musket, but Miriam had somewhere found an officer's pistol which she held with two hands and fired point-blank. Half the fusilier's head was blown away. A grenadier was coming from the other direction. I remembered my tomahawk and threw it, watching it spin before burying in the attacker's neck. He dropped like a cut tree and I pulled it back out. Then both Miriam and I managed to get hold of Jericho's arms and drag him backward a pace or two, out of the reach of the bayonets he seemed desperate to impale himself on. As we did so, fresh troops from Djezzar surged past to engage the French. A hedgerow of bodies was building. Smith, hatless, head bloodied, was slashing with his saber like a man possessed. Bullets whined, pinged, or hit with a thunk when they found flesh, and someone new would grunt and go down.

My hearing was back, dimly, and I shouted to Jericho and Miriam, “We have to get back behind our lines! We can help more from on high!”

But then something hummed past my ear, as close as a warning hornet, and Jericho took a bullet in his shoulder and spun like a top.

I turned and saw my nemesis. Najac was cursing, my own rifle planted butt first on the rubble as he began to reload, his bullyboys hanging back from the real fight but popping away over the heads of the struggling grenadiers. That shot was meant for me! They'd come for my corpse, all right—because they knew what was likely tucked in my shirt. And so I was seized with my own combat madness, an anger and awful thirst for vengeance that made me feel like my muscles were swelling, my veins engorged, and my eyes suddenly capable of supernatural detail. I'd seen the flash of red on the bastard's finger. He was wearing Astiza's ruby ring!

I knew in an instant what had happened. Mohammad had been unable to resist the temptation of the cursed jewel Astiza had flung away in the Crusader court. When we were sleeping he had pocketed it, ending his periodic demands for money. And so it had been he, not I, who'd been slain by Najac's longrifle shot as we fled along the aqueduct. The French brigand had checked to make sure the Muslim was dead and then seized the stone for his own, not knowing its history. It was a confession of murder. So I picked up Jericho's iron bar and started for him, counting the seconds. It would take him a full minute to load the American long rifle, and ten seconds had already passed. I had to fight through a thicket of French to be on him.

The bar sang as I wielded it in a great arc, as possessed as a Templar for Christ. This was for Mohammad and Ned! I felt invulnerable to bullets, ignorant of fear. Time slowed, noise paled, vision narrowed. All I saw was Najac, hands trembling as he shook out a measure of powder into the rifle barrel.

Twenty seconds.

My bar swung into that thorn field of bayonets like a sickle clearing a trail. Metal rang as I batted it aside. Infantrymen sheered away from my madness.

Thirty seconds. The rifle ball was wrapped in its wadding and nervously fed into the muzzle opening with the short ramrod.

Najac's French and Arabs were screaming and firing, but I felt nothing but wind. I could see the ripples in the smoky air as the bullets sped, the glint of frantic eyes, the white of bared teeth, the blood
spraying from somewhere across a young officer's face. The bar hit the ribs of a towering grenadier and he folded sideways.

Forty seconds. The stubborn ball was being rammed down.

I leapt across dead and dying men, using their bodies like rocks in a stream, my balance a spider's. Round me in a circle my bar sung, men scrambling as they had from Jericho, Smith running a chasseur through with his saber, one Royal Marine dying and two more sticking their prey with bayonets. The sky continued to rain debris from the walls above, and I saw blossoms of explosions behind Najac as grenades and shells went off. Even as I pressed forward, Ottoman and English reinforcements were surging behind me, clotting the breech with their numbers and blood. A tricolor wavered and went down, then rose again, swaying back and forth.

Fifty seconds. Najac didn't even take time to remove the ramrod but was fumbling to prime the pan with gunpowder and pull back the lock. There was fear in his eyes, fear and desperation, but hatred too. I was almost on him when one of his brigands rose before me, hands raised above his head with a scimitar, face distorted by howling, until my bar took him on the side of his skull and exploded it, bits of gore spraying in all directions. I could taste him in my teeth.

And now as I cocked my arm for a final swing, Najac's eyes wide with terror, there was a flash in the pan and a roar, a blast of heat and smoke, and my own rifle, ramrod still in it, fired straight at my breast.

I sat down hard, knocked backward. But before I could die, I swung low and my bar hit the thief in his ankles, shattering them. He went down too, troops surging over us, and realizing I still wasn't dead I crawled forward, wheezing, and seized him by the throat, cutting off his shrieks of pain. I squeezed so hard that the tendons in my own neck swelled with the effort.

His look was hopeless hatred. His arms thrashed, looking for a weapon. His tongue bulged out obscenely.

This is for Ned, and Mohammad, and Jericho, and all the other fine men you've cut down in your miserable, roach-scuttle of a life, I thought. And so I squeezed, as he turned purple, my blood dripping
onto my squirming victim. I could see the ramrod sticking out from my chest. What was going on?

Then I felt his hands on my waist and a tug as he grabbed my tomahawk. Having failed to finish me with my own rifle, he wanted to stave in my temple with my own hatchet!