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Abruptly, with a peal of thunder that rattled his teeth, the pavement punched his running legs aside and rushed up to slam his chest and face and bounce him over onto his back. For an instant he lay dazed, choking on his own blood and watching the top of the wall, which was leaning inward toward him, slowly dissolving from an architectural structure into a churning cascade of bricks, stones and dust. Then he was rolling, tumbling and crawling back, his breath blowing in and out in wet wheezes, trying desperately in the seconds remaining to put as much distance as possible between himself and the collapsing wall.
It seemed to take forever to come down. His wounded-spider scuttling had taken him past the midpoint of the square when a vast hammer impacted on the street behind him and he was tossed forward in a multiple somersault that ended in a painful twenty-foot slide. He wound up lying on his side, and managed to sit up. His ears were ringing, and for almost a minute the air was so thickly opaque with smoke and dust that trying to breathe was a solitary nightmare of gagging and coughing.
Then he could hear gunfire, a lot of it, and the steady western breeze was blowing the mushrooming dust cloud back through the new gap, into the eyes of the charging Janissaries. Several companies of soldiers were trotting up in orderly formation as the hastily assembled harquebusiers fell back to reload, and trumpet calls were sounded to summon more troops. Duffy looked over his shoulder and saw Aurelianus fifty yards down the street hurrying away.
He took a long breath, coughed deeply twice, then got to his feet and plodded forward into the gathering press of European soldiers.
The two fallen segments of wall had left an unsteady tower between them, and for twenty furious minutes the
fighting seethed around it like waves crashing around an outcropping in the surf, with no ground really being gained by either side. Presently, though, the Viennese forces managed to bring some bigger guns to bear - six ten-barrelled ribaldos adding their rat-tat-tat snare drum detonations to the din, and a dubiously moored culverin, on the southern edge of the solid wall, that every five minutes rocked back and sent loosened stones clattering down as it whipped charge after charge of gravel into the ululating mass of white-robed Janissaries.
Through the early afternoon the Turkish troops kept advancing and falling back, and losing hundreds of men in a vain effort to summon up the impetus that would break the desperate ranks of Europeans. Finally at about three-thirty they retreated, and the Viennese forces took turns standing in the gaps, trooping outside to construct advance defense positions, and marching back in for a brief respite in which to sit and drink wine and croak queries and braggadocio declarations at each other.
The sun was well down the western side of the sky, silhouetting in red the rooftops and steeples of Vienna, when several hundred of the akinji came. yelling down along the wall from the north, evidently trying to shear off the body of Viennese soldiers that was outside. Eilif's company was out on the plain when they came, and led the way in a counter-charge that drove the Turkish footsoldiers back up to the Wiener-Bach, the narrow sub-canal that flanked the north half of the east wall. The mob of akinji - for they were too undisciplined to be called troops - broke at the banks of the little canal, and only those who retreated to the outer side of it managed to survive and return to the Turkish lines. As night fell the guns of both sides set about making the plain a hazardous no-man's-land of whistling shot and rebounding iron balls.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-one
The dirty water of the Wiener-Bach, agitated by the occasional spray of ripped-up earth or shattered stone, reflected the blasts of flame from the cannons on the battlements above, so that Duffy, standing by the bank a hundred yards north of the new gap in the wall, saw two flashes for each shot when he looked behind him. The Turkish guns returned fire, distant flares of red light in the gathering darkness.
'Back inside, all of you!' shouted Count von Salm from the battlements. 'They won't be coming back tonight -it looks like we're just going to trade shot for an hour or so.' As if to emphasize his words, there came the jarring thumps of a couple of Turk cannon balls falling short.
The three companies outside the wall trotted wearily south, and though Duffy tried to hold his position in the lead company, he fell gradually back and was among the last to stumble over the mounded jagged stones of the new gap. He heard a clanking, realized he was absently dragging his sword, and carefully sheathed it. It took some nicks today, he thought; I'll have to get them pounded out sometime.
Inside the wall the soldiers were gathering around a fire. Hey, Duffy!' barked a tired, dust-streaked Eiif. 'It's past six, and Vertot's crew will stand in the hole for a while. Come here and have a cup of mulled ale. You're looking bashed-about.'
The Irishman strode on stiff, aching legs to the fire, and sat down in front of it with a deep sigh. He accepted a cup of hot ale from someone and took a long sip, exhaled, and then took another.
'Ah,' he breathed, stretching like a cat after a minute of letting his muscles adjust to the luxury of sitting down. 'Well, you know, lads,' he said expansively, 'I wouldn't like an easy defense. It wouldn't give me the feeling my capabilities were being truly tested.'
The men paused from drinking and tying bandaged to laugh at that, for Duffy was paraphrasing an inspirational sermon a priest had made to the troops during a respite period that afternoon. There followed a few weak jokes speculating about the battle tactics that priest would probably employ, and how he'd be likely to disport himself afterward, and whether Suleiman's troops had to put up with similar speeches from God-knew-what sort of Mohammedan elders.
'Dead!' came a call from up the dark, rubble-choked street, extinguishing the men's good humor like a bucket of sand flung on a candle. 'Night call for the dead!' A creaking, high-sided cart appeared from the shadows, and no one looked at the grisly cargo stacked in it. The driver was gibbering garbled prayers between calls, and his eyes glittered insanely between his tangled hair and beard. Somehow, though, Duffy thought uneasily, I think I know that man.
A crew of anonymous laborers left off their attempts to clear the street of debris, and set about carrying the day's corpses to the wagon and flopping them into its bed. While this was going on the driver buried his face in his hands and wept loudly. Whoever he is, Duffy thought, he's clearly mad. The soldiers around the fire shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed and vaguely upset in the presence of lunacy.
'Why can't they get a sane man to do that?' one of them
whispered. 'We fight all day and then have to put up with this.'
'Listen,' said Eiif, wiping dust and ale from his moustache, 'he may have been sane when he started.'
The cart loaded at last, its tailgate was swung up and latched, and the vehicle squeaked and rattled away down the street, the driver once again voicing his melancholy cry.
Duffy knew he'd seen the man before, but these days he was not one to prod sleeping memories. 'More ale here,' he said. 'Top everybody up, in fact, and heat another pot of the stuff.'
Gradually, with the telling of a few jokes and the singing of an old ballad or two, the group around the fire regained their cautions, fragile cheer. Most of the soldiers who'd fought that day had plodded away to the barracks immediately; but, the Irishman reflected, there are always a few who prefer to stay up and talk for a bit, and get some distance between themselves and the day's events before submitting to the night's dreams.
After an hour they began to yawn and drift away, and a light sweep of rain, hissing as it hit the fire, sent the remaining men trudging off to their bunks. Duffy had just stood up when he heard a sharp call: 'Who's that? Identify yourself or I'll shoot!'
A moment later he heard a scuffle, and then the bang and ricochet of a gunshot, and a burly, redbearded man burst out of a doorway under the wall and came pelting up the street, running hard.
'Guards ho!' came a shout from behind the fleeing man. 'Stop him! He's a spy!'
Wearily, the Irishman drew his sword and dagger and stood in the man's path. 'Very well, Kretchmer, you'd better hold it,' he said loudly.
The bearded fugitive whipped out a sword of his own. 'Stand aside, Duffy!' he yelled.
