The Sea Beggars (54 page)

They began to fire now, as he watched, and all along the rampart the gun crews ducked below the cover of the wall. At the far end, a man screamed and pitched back off the rampart into the street. Instantly another man took his place.

Jan said, “Fire.”

Mouse put the slow match to the bore of the demiculverin, and the gun went off with a howl.

As it went off the iron barrel rocked sideways, breaking away from its mounting; it swung around and struck the wall, and the wall gave way. The gun crashed through it, the ropes that bound it popping like small arms. Jan lunged after it, to save it, caught the heavy brass lip around the muzzle with both hands, and braced himself, his feet against the wall. The wall gave way. With the gun he pitched out into space.

He yelled. Desperately he twisted in midair and fell against the wall. He slipped a yard along the smooth wooden surface, his hands scrabbling for a hold, and one hand caught on the broken edge of the wall below the rampart. His body swung loose against the outside of the wall.

This was his answer, then. He was to die here. He thought of Eleanor; there flashed into his mind the picture of Hanneke lying on the top of the seawall. His feet kicked at the wood, helpless. The Spanish were firing on him. A bullet struck his left arm and he lost his grip.

He was falling. Then from above him on the rampart a hand grabbed his wrist and held him.

“Jan!”

He looked up, flailing at the wall with his feet and his free hand, and saw Mouse, bending down through the break in the wall to hold him.

“Let go!” If he fell he would drag Mouse with him. He knew the half-wit had not the strength to hold him long. One of his feet caught on a knot in the smooth planking of the wall and pushed him upward for an instant, up toward the gap in the wall; he swung his free hand up and caught on to the wall.

Mouse did not drop him. Standing up for leverage, the cross-eyed boy grasped Jan's wrist with both hands and pulled, and a moment later others of the men on the rampart rushed over and caught Jan's arm and his clothes and hauled him up through the gap, through the pelting Spanish bullets, back safe onto the rampart.

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

Heaving himself up onto his knees, he flung his arms around Mouse and hugged him fast. Mouse pressed against him.

“I saved you. I saved you, Jan.”

Jan kissed him. Standing up, he gripped the boy's hand. “You did that, certainly. Come along.” Stooping to take shelter from the top of the wall, they went on to the next gun, which fired low.

“Oh what will happen to us, what will become of us?”

“Hurry,” Eleanor said, and herded the young women with their babies on ahead of her toward the wharf, where the others were waiting. Some of the children had broken away from their mothers to play on the boats, and she shouted to the other women to keep them close. Behind them, in the town, there was the thunder of cannon.

“God help us.” The more timid of the women began to cry, and several knelt down on the stone wharf to pray. Eleanor walked up and down past them, twisting her hands together.

She could barely speak to them; none of them spoke French, and her Dutch was still uncertain. She wished Jan had found someone more suitable for this and let her help him on the wall.

The cannon fire now was nearly continuous. Above the roofs of the town, a massive cloud of black smoke was rising, and she thought she heard the light crackle of small-arms fire.

She could not stay here, waiting, doing nothing. She went back to the women and, waving her hands at them, did what she could to tell them to keep together and stay there; then she went off through the town, looking for stray people she could save. There was a huge shout from the wall, half cheer, half panic; she wondered what was happening. She wanted to be with Jan at the end, but he had told her …

In the little square before the town hall, she came on the stocks, and the sailors still writhing in them.

A hoarse shout broke from her throat. She ran up to the wooden frames and tugged at them. The men bellowed at her in Dutch. They wiggled their arms and legs comically at her, their faces red. The stocks were locked, of course; she could not open them with her hands, and she ran into the house across the street and rummaged through the kitchen until she found a stout knife.

Running out to the stocks again, she pried open the locks with the blade of the knife. The men climbed stiffly out of the yokes and ran away down the street, toward the sound of fighting. One stopped to grab Eleanor by the shoulders and paste a wet kiss full on her mouth. With a laugh, he ran limping after the others.

Eleanor went back into the house across the street and got out all the knives she could find, good long-bladed knives with sharp edges, and took them back to the wharf. There weren't enough to arm all the women, and many of the older children, too, could fight. She went back to find another kitchen to rob.

Lumey bent his back to the oars. The current of the river was so strong that he could make no headway against it, and so he had steered his little boat over to this bank. Here the water was shallow and still and the dark trees overgrew it, their branches dripping moss that dragged over the boat and his shoulders and head. The smell of the marsh was nauseating. He stopped to drink from the jug of wine he had brought, grunted to clear his throat, and picked up the oars again.

In the distance, he could hear the boom of cannon and the lighter music of muskets. They were fighting, back there, fighting in a way that profoundly annoyed him. On ships there was always the business of maneuver, judging the wind and the sea, changing sail and plotting a course, but here, damn it, what was there but a bang-bang punching contest?

The Spanish would win. He knew it; everybody knew it. They had the men and the metal and they would win, and the good work the Beggars had done all these years would be lost. At least the Dons would have to swim home. He hoped van Cleef and his other hotheaded friends would have the sense to hull their own ships before the Spanish took them.

It made him cry, actually cry tears, as he stroked the flat-bottomed boat with its load of liquor and little kegs of black powder on through the stinking marsh; he cried to think of his beautiful
Christ the Redeemer
falling into Spanish hands. He cried sensuously, enjoying it. He stopped to drink some more and cried all the while, until his boat ran aground.

Getting out, he stepped into water six inches deep and mud much deeper than that, up to his knees. With the boat's painter over his shoulder, he slogged on through the rotten black swamp, ducking streamers of moss and dangling branches like evil arms that tried to hold him back.

Now he did not cry, because now he saw ahead of him through the latticework of the trees the masts and square sails of the Spanish barges.

He stopped, catching his breath, applauding himself for his craft in knowing where they would be. Actually, anyone who knew the Spanish would have guessed they would come from the mainland at the narrowest point of the intervening water and anchor here, but in case they had shown more sense, he had meant to go on rowing around the whole island until he found them; yet here they were. He went back to the boat for his jug.

More cannon fire rolled from the land behind him. They probably thought he was a coward, running away from the fight. He had run away. He was a coward. He did not understand land fighting and never had; he had always been uneasy on the land. But he saw, with the shrewdness of long years of experience at fighting, that the land was where the great battles would be fought now. Something had changed, in the taking of The Brill; the course of the struggle with the Spanish had changed. The years of piracy and raiding were over, and a new kind of war had begun.

Not Lumey's war. But Lumey meant to make a grand exit from it.

He tucked the jug inside his coat and pulled the boat forward. The water was deeper here, and he could get back into the boat and row. He did not. He tied the boat up to a wet smelly branch and trudged through the mucky swamp toward the barges, to see how they lay.

The swamp dried up a little, here, making a reasonable landing place. Here the river swept on by to the north, and the island's eastern shore fell off to the south, forming a wide, calm anchorage—not deep, but deep enough for several dozen flat-bottomed barges. They were all crowded together, probably tied together; the army must have unloaded those farthest from the shore across the nearer ones. He could see men sitting around a little fire, off in the middle of the anchored barges, drinking: the boatmen.

He wiped his hands on his thighs. Pleased, he assessed his mind and found nothing that shrank from this. They had recoiled from his usage of priests. Now let them see that he used himself as violently as any other. He sloshed back to his boat.

He did not get into it at once. First he gathered up all the long fuses that led from the little congregation of kegs in the stern, tied the sulfurous lengths together, and lit them with his tinderbox. When they were sputtering and smoking healthfully alive, he climbed into the boat and bent to the oars.

The smell of burning fuse was better than the smell of the swamp. He began to laugh. With all his might, he pulled on the oars, and the boat shot forward through the calm water, whisking down on the barges. Lumey roared with laughter. The fuses spat and glittered as they burned. He did not pause now even to drink. They saw him coming, the boatmen; he heard them yell, but they were too late. His boat crashed into the first of the barges. Leaning out to grab the high gunwale, he pulled his boat with its trails of raw smoke around to the barge's bow and slipped between that bottom and the next; and by that means, as the fuses grew shorter and shorter and the boatmen shouted, he worked his little boat in among all the big unwieldy barges, until the fuses, crackling and sparkling, disappeared inside the powder kegs.

Then, only then, Lumey reached inside his coat for his jug. But he never drew it out again.

Don Federico clenched his fist on his reins. He was tired of waiting. His stomach churned from waiting too long.

He looked down the length of the pasture toward the riverward dike, where the musketeers knelt in two long rows, firing on the wall of the town. They were all in place now and shooting well in order, but their fire was not doing its business. The cannon on the wall still fired with an even rhythm, blasting the flat pasture in front of Don Federico, the land he had to cross to reach the wall, from which they had forced him to retreat. He bit his lip, wondering what had gone wrong. The musket fire should have driven the defenders back. It must be killing some of them. He swore under his breath.

When he had seen the girl chop open the sluice gate, he had told himself it hardly mattered. The water moved slowly, and they would hold The Brill before the flood covered the pasturage between him and the town. But now the water was lapping up nearly halfway over the scrubby ground, and the hole was widening in the dike. Diego was withdrawing those of his men who had crossed over the sluice gate to the far side of the dike, evidence enough that the dike was giving way there. In a little while, the whole place would be inundated, and The Brill could be on the far side of the ocean, for all its accessibility to Don Federico and his thousands of men.

He had to charge now, in the face of the cannon fire, lose whatever men he had to, take the town in a single rush, before the sea shut him off.

“Trumpeter! Sound—”

Before he could continue there was a low growl of sound behind him, far off. He twisted in his saddle. With a jangle of metal all his men turned too, to look behind them. The rumble swelled up behind the lacy fringe of trees that marked the swamp through which they had passed; it exploded into a great crash, and from beyond the trees there rose such a cloud of black smoke, peppered with bits of debris, and such a thunderous wash of sound, that Don Federico let out a yell.

“The boats!” One of his aides ran toward him, pale as a woman. “They've blown up our boats!”

Don Federico swung around in his saddle, his blood racing. Well, that left him no choice. He leaned forward, cocked like a pistol, toward The Brill. “Trumpeter! The charge—sound the charge—”

His men heard him. Even before the trumpet blasted, the men were shouting. Long held back, they burst forward, their pikes swinging down, and hurled themselves toward the little town that stood before them, at last given over to their rage.

“Here they come,” Jan shouted. “Fire as you will.”

He ran down the rampart toward his culverin, jumping across the guns and stacks of shot in his way, men darting out of his path. Mouse ran at his heels. They reached the big brass gun and turned.

The Spanish came like a horde of demons, their pikes pricking the air, their voices raised in a weird ululating howl. They came like a wave of water, so many of them there was no discriminating individual men among them; Jan saw them as a single great moving mass. He bent down over the culverin and sighted along her barrel.

This gun, so far from the dike, had suffered no casualties; some of the guns at the far end of the wall had lost their crews to the musket fire. The water flooding the field would cover that end of the wall. He looked up at the men around him and said, “Fire.”

Mouse leaned forward with the slow match. The gun bellowed. All down the wall the other guns went off, sending forth their shot in a ragged line of iron and stone across the intervening distance. The round hit the Spanish line, and blew holes through it, but the holes filled up at once with other men, coming on as swiftly as a fire through high dry grass, coming like an avalanche. Jan looked for a weapon. They would be fighting hand to hand soon. His men rushed around him, sponging the cannon, rolling powder packet and shot down into her long hot throat.

“Fire!”

The cannon thundered, and through the onrushing ranks of the Spanish army the shot sliced a red zone of bodies—screaming men and writhing, thrashing arms and legs. Yet they came in, enraged by their losses; they swung their pikes down level, and charged at the gate. Jan shouted. No time now for the cannon. Grabbing the ramrod, he vaulted down off the rampart into the street before the gate.