In perhaps thirty seconds they reached it, and the gap in the wall lit up briefly as the first line of harquebuses fired, followed a moment later by a flame-gushing blast of gravel and stones from one of the culverins on the battlements. The front of the advancing akinji tide was ripped apart, scimitars flying from nerveless fingers as torn bodies tumbled and rolled across the dirt, but their maniacal fellows pressed on without a pause, over a wide segment of the fence that had been blown down. A rank of standing harquebusiers fired into the Turkish force, and then the akinji were mounting the slight slope below the wall.
There was clearly no time to reload, so Duffy tossed his still-sparking gun aside and, standing up, drew his rapier and dagger. I wish the light were better, he thought. 'Two steps back, my company!' he called. 'Don't get separated!'
Then the Turks were upon them. Duffy sighted the man who would hit him, parried the flashing scimitar with his rapier guard and stabbed the man in the chest with his dagger. The jolt of impact pushed the Irishman back a step, but didn't knock him over. A sword-edge rang against his helmet, and he gave its owner a quick slash across the face as another blade snapped in half against his hauberk. The defenders' line was slowly giving way when a harsh call sounded from behind them: 'We're reloaded back here! Christians, drop!'
Duffy parried a hard poke at his face and then fell to his
hands and knees even as a mingled roar of gun-fire went off at his back and the cold air around him was filled with the whiz-and-thud of lead balls striking flesh. 'On your feet!' he yelled a moment later, hopping up to meet the next wave of akinji as their predecessors reeled back and fell.
The man on Duffy's right took a sword through his belly and, clutching himself, somersaulted down the slope, so that the Irishman suddenly found himself facing two -then three - of the akinji. All at once his cautious confidence in his own skill was eroding, and he sensed the nearness of real, incapacitating fear. 'Get over here, somebody!' he yelled, desperately parrying the licking scimitars with sword and dagger. His troop of men had retreated away from him, though, and he hadn't even a wall to get his back to. He took a flying leap at the Turk on his right, trusting his hauberk and salade to absorb the worst of the attacks of the other two; he swept the man's scimitar away in a low line with both his sword and dagger, and riposted with a long thrust of the dagger that he accurately drove into the Turk's throat. The other two akinji struck at Duffy then; one of them swung a hard cut at Duffy's shoulder, and though the blow stung, the mail blocked the sword-edge and the scimitar flew into three pieces; the other lunged in with his sword extended straight, and his point, cutting through the Irishman's leather doublet, found one of the gaps in his mail shirt and sank an inch into his side.
Duffy whirled back when he felt the shock of cold steel in him and sent the Turk's wide-eyed head spinning from his shoulders with a furious scything chop. The field momentarily clear, he scrambled a few steps up the slope and through one of the openings in the barricade that divided the rocky crest, to rejoin his fellow Austrians.
As he lurched up over the top, with the scuff and rattle of the pursuing akinji sounding loud behind him, he caught
a glimpse of soldiers standing behind a line of what appeared to be narrow, chest-high tables, and he heard someone's agonized yell: 'My God, dive for it, Duffy!'
He caught the urgency in the voice, and without pausing kicked forward in a long dive down the inward slope, ripping his leather gloves and banging his helmet and knees as he tumbled across the raw stones. Even as he moved, a quick series of ten loud explosions concussed the air in front of him like very rapid hammer-strokes; there followed two more stuttering blasts often, and then there was a pause.
Duffy had rolled to the gravelly bottom of the slope with his face down and his legs up, and by the time he'd struggled into a sitting position he realized what the tablelike things were - sets of ten small cannons braced together like log rafts, fired by putting a match to the trail of serpentine powder poured across all the touchholes.
Orgelgeschutzen, the Austrians called them, though from his stay in Venice Duffy thought of them as ribaldos, their Italian name.
'Quick, Duff, get back here,' came Eilif's voice. The Irishman got to his feet and sprinted ten yards to where the troops were clustered. 'Why did you stay out there?' Eilif demanded. 'You knew we were to fire two volleys and then fall back to let them run into the teeth of these things.' He waved at the ribaldos.
'I,' Duffy panted, 'figured our retreat would look more convincing if a man or two hung on.'
The Swiss landsknecht raised a dusty eyebrow and stared hard at Duffy. 'Really?'
There was another rush of akinji over the splintered barricade along the top, but it seemed dispirited; when two more bursts of the small-calibre cannon-fire whipped them apart, the survivors backed off fast, and a few seconds later the sentries on the wall called down the news that the akinji were retreating back toward their lines.
'Well of course really,' Duffy answered. 'What did you think, that I just forgot?'
Eilif grinned. 'Sorry.' He gestured at the new corpses on the crest and shrugged. 'I guess it was a clever move.' He trotted away to the slope and began climbing up to see in what direction the Turks retreated.
The Irishman felt hot blood running down his side and gathering at his belt, and suddenly remembered the wound he'd taken. He pressed a hand to it and plodded through the reassembling ranks, looking for a surgeon. His mind, though, wasn't on the sword-cut - in his head he was listening again to his brief dialogue with Eilif , and uneasily admiring his own quick improvisation. Because actually, he thought, your first suspicion was right, Eiif. I did forget. And what does that say about me?
The sun had risen above the eastern horizon, but the bulk of the ruined wall cast a shadow that was still dark enough to make readily visible the watch-fires up and down the street. Duffy stumbled about randomly until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, and very shortly he was surprised to see Aurelianus warming his hands over one of the fires. Their eyes met, so the Irishman reluctantly crossed the littered space of cobbles to where the wizard stood.
'Keeping the home fires burning, eh?' Duffy said with a pinched and artificial smile. 'And what brings you so uncharacteristically close to the front line?'
'This is childish enough,' the wizard said bitterly, 'without a theatrical rendition of ignorant innocence from you. What were you thinking, a - ach, you're bleeding! Come here.'
Newly awakened soldiers were dashing up from the direction of the barracks, shivering in their chilly chain mail and rubbing their eyes, and other men were dragging the wounded back inside. Duffy sat down beside Aurelianus' fire. The sorcerer had taken his medicine box
out of his pouch and fished from it a bag that was spilling yellow powder. 'Lie down,' he said.
Duffy brushed away some scattered stones and complied. Aurelianus opened the Irishman's doublet and lifted his rusty mail shirt. 'Why the hell don't you keep your hauberk clean?' he snapped. 'This doesn't look too bad, though. He obviously didn't lean into the thrust.' He tapped some of the powder into the wound.
'What's that stuff?' asked Duffy, frowning.
'What do you care? It'll keep you from getting poisoned, which is what you deserve, wearing a rusty hauberk.' He took a roll of linen from the box and expertly bandaged the wound, running strips around Duffy's back to hold it in place. 'There,' he said. 'That ought to hold body and soul together. Get up.'
Duffy did, puzzled by the harshness in the wizard's voice. 'What -' he began.
'Shut up. I want to know about your little trick last night. What were you thinking, an eye for an eye, a girl for a girl?'
The Irishman felt something that might become a vast anger begin to build up in himself. 'I don't think I understand,' he said carefully. 'Are you talking about my.. .the way I.. .the way Epiphany died?'