The Sea Beggars (53 page)

A great yell went up from the wall beside the gate; the men there had seen the Spanish coming.

The rampart trembled under pounding feet. Jan turned, standing by the last of the cannon; there were too many people on the wall, and he shouted to them to clear it and let only the gun crews stay on the quaking wooden rampart, but no one heard him. The gate was opening to let in the women from the onion fields and the boy with his black and white cows.

As they went in, Hanneke ran out. She had an ax in one hand. Jan shouted at her, but she did not hear him; she started purposefully across the barren ground toward the sea dike. He leaned over the wall and bellowed her name.

She wheeled, raising her face toward him, and waved her free hand.

“Hanneke! Where are you going?”

“To open the dike,” she shouted.

“Hanneke!” He twisted his head to stare a moment at the dike. It was a good idea to open it, but in the course of their march the Spanish would reach the far end of the dike too soon. They would kill her. Someone else would have to go.

When he turned back toward her to order her inside again, she was already running away toward the dike.

“Hanneke!” he screamed. “Hanneke, come back!”

She wheeled once more and waved to him. He filled his lungs and shrieked her name, gripping the top of the wall with both hands, leaning out toward her. She waved, her white arm raised like a flagstaff. Oh, Hanneke. Turning, she ran lightly toward the dike.

“Hanneke!”

He turned and bore into the crowd pressing up against the wall, clogging the rampart. If he could reach the gate, go after her. He cast a fearful look toward the Spanish. Their pikes jabbed the sky just beyond the land dike; they were gathering there, under their fluttering banners, as leisurely and confidently as hunters after game. He clawed at the people in his way. Swiftly he glanced over his shoulder at the figure of his sister, running toward the sluice gate.

“Captain! Captain!” Someone rushed at him with questions.

“Jan, over here!”

She was too far away now. She was gone, and the Spanish were before him, and people were shouting questions at him. Now here came Lumey, climbing the ladder to the rampart. Jan wheeled.

“Get all these people off here! Only the gun crews can stay on this part of the wall. Get the rest of these people down on the street and arm them.”

Some of his crew were nearby and turned at once to do his bidding. He gave one last look toward his sister, now small in the distance, still running, her hair falling free of her headcloth, bright in the morning sun. He faced the Spanish. They were here at last; now finally he would know the answer to the questions that ached in his heart. He gathered himself, made himself think he might die, and to his surprise found himself ready. Let the Spaniards come. He turned toward Lumey, red-faced, stamping down the rampart toward him.

Don Federico drew rein, signaling the columns behind him to stop. Ahead was a low earthwork; over the top of it he could see to the little town beyond, built on its flat promontory between the river and the sea. Its landward wall was an old wooden rampart, built in an earlier, more barbarous time when people fought with clubs and arrows.

The Spanish general folded one arm over his saddlebow and looked from one side of the battleground to the other. There were people running across the fields outside the wall to the gate, and a comical little herd of cows, cantering in the bony awkward way of cows, hurried over the flat ground away from him; so the Spanish army had been noticed. Good. It would inspire fear in the enemy, perhaps even lead them to surrender at once.

His horse stamped, impatient. The slow march here from the far side of the island had scarcely stretched the stallion's legs, cramped after the long ride in the barge. Around him, behind him, the ranks of soldiers shifted their feet with a manifold clinking of corselet and helmet and talked in low voices, excited, pointing to their target.

Don Federico, to his satisfaction, saw an easy victory here. The wall would stop nothing, not even the charge of infantry, who would break through that gate in moments, and there could be no more than a few hundred defenders in the whole town. No matter that Federico had only half an army, del Rio's troops from Antwerp having inexplicably failed to appear.

Alva was wrong, though, for once. He had misjudged the seriousness of this problem. The Brill was more important than an invasion from France of poorly led foreign troops. If this town were allowed to stand, even to go lightly punished for its insolence, all over the Netherlands other towns would rise against the Crown. Don Federico intended to prove himself, here, more valuable than his father wanted to think: here he would throttle a genuine revolt.

He summoned his aides. “I see no difficulty in this. We will mount an assault on the main gate. Don Diego, I command you, take your musketeers over to that high ground”—Don Federico pointed to a long low earthwork extending along the riverbank, north of the town—“and prepare to give us an enfilading fire to cover our advance.”

He snorted, amused, seeing movement on the wall. The gate was closing. In their haste, the defenders had left someone outside, who danced and gesticulated at the foot of the wall. They were terrified in The Brill. They were wise in that; Don Federico meant to leave nothing standing higher than one stone upon another.

“They are waiting for us. We shall have some fighting to do. I trust your men are all shriven.” Excited by the prospect of battle, he could not keep back a tight smile; he saw in the faces of his aides the same impatient eager readiness, a keen edge. “Go, in God's name.” He crossed himself, and they dispersed to their posts.

Lumey was tramping up and down the rampart by the gate, his gaudy vestment splattered with old blood, ribbons in his beard. When Jan came up to him, he was turning away from the gate, which he had just ordered closed.

The admiral's face was bound up in a twitchy frown. He swung toward Jan and barked, “There's nothing for me to do here. You and van Treslong can do this.” He banged on the wall. “The guns don't move—the Spanish are straight in front of you—shoot when they come in range.” He started away toward the ladder to the street, now boiling with excited people.

Jan grabbed his sleeve. “Where are you going?”

Lumey flung out one arm like a blade toward the Spanish in the distance. “They must have come here in boats. I'm going to find them and hull them. God be with you.” He jerked free of Jan's grip and hurried away down the ladder.

The Baron van Treslong had come up the rampart to Jan's side. Amazed, Jan stood staring after Lumey, who plowed through the mob in the street, turned a corner, and was gone.

“Is he running away?” Jan asked.

Van Treslong grabbed his arm. “No—but he knows nothing of fighting on land. He is a sailor. Let him go. You captain the guns here; you are the master of that. I shall get these men ready to fight off an assault, if they charge the gate.” He threw one arm around Jan and hugged him tight. “Good luck. God watches over us; whatever comes is by His plan.”

Then he too was gone, down the ladder into the street, where his voice rose sharp with orders.

“Jan—Jan—”

He swung around, toward Eleanor, who was pushing and shoving through the thickness of bodies that lined the rampart. She flung out her arm toward him, and he caught her hand.

“Gather up all the women and the children,” he said, hustling her toward the ladder. “Take them down to the harbor. If any here survive, you can escape by sea.”

He twisted to look back over the wall at the Spanish army, which now was ranging itself along the landward dike. There were thousands of them. If they broke through, the women here would suffer long and pitifully before they died. He wheeled back to his wife.

“Jan,” she said. Her face was wild, her hair flying in wisps around her cheeks, the color high in her fine-grained skin.

“If none of us survives,” he said, “you must—you must—”

He flung his arms around her and held her so tight she groaned.

“I can't find Hanneke,” she said, standing back.

“She's gone.”

“Gone! Where?”

“To her destiny.” He held his wife's hands in his; he looked deep into her face. “I love you very much, dear Eleanor.”

“I love you, Jan.”

“Go. And do as I said, if …”

Her face tightened, grim with resolution. “I will.” She squeezed his hands in hers, turned to the ladder, and went down to the street. Jan stood there a moment longer, watching her go off into the town. When she disappeared into the swarming masses of people in the street, he turned back toward the wall, back toward the Spanish enemy.

From the pasture outside the wall, Hanneke could see nothing of the furious bustle on the rampart, but she could hear it: the boom of feet on the wooden platform, the shouting, the prayers, the clatter of weapons. She thought she heard her brother's voice. With the ax in her left hand, she set out for the seawall at the far end of the pasture.

From this level, the Spaniards were invisible at first, but as she walked she noticed above the land dike the pricks of their weapons lancing the sky and she heard the tramping of their feet. She broke into a run. The ax was heavy and she slipped and fell once to her knees on the dry salty earth. The knife-edged sea grass stung her legs. She held up her skirts with her right hand and ran awkwardly forward. Her breath came short.

Behind her Jan was screaming at her. She ran faster toward the dike.

Just as she reached the end of the seawall, a little troop of Spanish soldiers appeared at the other end. They carried muskets. She saw at once that they meant to line up along the top of the dike, to fire on the rampart where the Calvinist guns were so that the defenders could not shoot their cannon while the main army attacked. She ran up onto the dike, scrambling along the steep stony slope, her feet knocking loose clods of dirt and rocks to shower down behind her in a little cascade.

When she reached the top of the dike, the musketeers saw her, and a whoop went up from them. One threw his weapon to his shoulder and fired at her. Where the bullet went, she did not see; she ignored it, running along the top of the dike to the sluice gate.

Another musket fired. The bullet plinked off the stony ground by her feet.

Half the length of the dike separated her from them; they would never reach her in time to stop her. She lifted the ax and swung it in a round arc toward the top of the sluice gate. Down the dike, a Spanish voice snapped orders. She heard the rattle of their armor as the men knelt down to fire from rest. Hauling up the heavy ax, she drove it down against the iron-hard wood of the gate. Chips flew off from the notch she had made in the top.

The muskets went off in a light crackle of sound. The bullets swarmed around her like bees, ticking off the ground, and something burned into her thigh. She heaved up the ax, struck hard into the gate, and split it down from top to bottom. Again the muskets banged.

Like a needle through her, a pain lanced her chest. The gate was groaning, the weight of the water behind it pushing against the cracked wood, but still it held, and she swung the ax up, extending her body full length to get all the power she could behind the blade, and the bullets whispered in her ears and tore into her cheek and her arm. She drove the ax down into the gate with all her strength. A chunk of wood jumped up and sailed away to her left, and the gate broke, and the sea poured in.

She gasped. She could not move, balanced on her bleeding legs, teetering, the ax falling from her hand. She turned her eyes now from the broken gate through which the green water rushed to the musketeers at the end of the dike; she could hear the bullets strike her flesh, but she knew they were beaten. She had beaten them, she and the Dutch earth and God's sea. Slowly she fell down onto the dike, laid her head to the ground, and was still.

On the wall Jan saw her break open the sluice gate, and all around him the others saw and cheered, cheered the water rushing in onto the pasture, but Jan did not cheer, because he saw his sister die. The first. He faced the Spanish over the stretch of scrubby pasturage and said, “Fire.”

Beside him, Mouse reached out the slow match to the big brass culverin and lit the powder. The gun swallowed the scrap of fire and bellowed smoke and shot into the air.

The roar of the gun silenced the cheers. Jan went on to the next gun, Mouse at his side with the slow match. He did not think of Hanneke; he felt her dying like a knife in the heart, a fire in his own guts, a fury.

“Low,” Mouse said, and pointed.

The shot from the brass culverin had struck the dike below the line of Spanish soldiers, kicking up a spray of rocks and dirt high into the air; the enemy troops scattered away from it, and a horse reared and bugled in panic. Jan said, “Fire.”

This gun was an old iron gun from the
Christ the Redeemer
. Her voice was different—all the guns had different voices—this one a throaty roar and a rumble, and her shot whistled in the air, eerie, like a live thing.

The Spanish recoiled at the sound of the shot, the line swaying back away from the dike, but this gun was set higher and her belly's worth of iron flew over the dike and struck square into the mass of men retreating from it. There was a roar from the men on the wall of The Brill, and Jan's lips drew back from his teeth in an unpleasant smile. Pieces of bodies lay on the top of the dike, thrown there by the shot.

He said, “Good. Keep this one as it is, and fire as it's ready.” Stepping past the gun crew, Mouse at his side, he went on to the next cannon.

They had brought this gun, a light demiculverin, in from the smaller of van Treslong's ships; it did not fit its truck, and they had spent most of a day trying to rig it so that it would not jump off its bed when it was fired. The gun crew stood back as Jan came up to them. He glanced out at the Spanish, who were re-forming their lines; they would charge soon. They were only waiting now for the musketeers to line up on the seaward dike and open fire, to drive the defenders back off the wall.