We were on the coastal plain as the sun rose, the Mediterranean an enticing silver platter blocked by our enemies. When we galloped, our pursuers, who’d been conserving their own steeds, did too. I’d been looking at them through the glass and recognized some of the horses they’d recaptured. They had new ones as well. Silano must have pushed them brutally. Our rest at the Crusader castle had cost us dearly.
Our only hope was surprise. “Astiza! When we near the camp, hold your white scarf aloft like a truce flag! We have to confuse them!”
She nodded, leaning intently over the neck of her sprinting horse.
Behind us, we heard shots. I looked back. Our pursuers were well out of range, but trying to alert the French sentries that we were to be arrested. I was betting on confusion, helped by the fact that we had a woman.
The last mile passed in a dead run, our horses’ foam-flecked, flanks heaving, our heads down as shots continued to pop behind us. The sentries were out, muskets raised, bayonets fixed, but uncertain.
“Now, now! Wave it now!”
Astiza did so, holding up one arm with the scarf trailing behind and straightening enough to give a look at her female torso, the wind flattening her gown against her breasts. The guards lowered their guns.
We thundered past. “Bandits and guerrillas!” I shouted. Najac’s bunch looked like ruffians. Now the pickets were tentatively aiming at our pursuers.
“Don’t slow!” I shouted to the others. We flashed by the hospital tents and jumped the tongues of wagons. There, was that Monge and the chemist, Berthollet? And was Bonaparte running out of his tent? We crashed through a campfire circle, men scattering and embers flying, and everywhere soldiers were standing from their morning breakfast and exclaiming and pointing. Their muskets were stacked in neat little pyramids, bayonets gleaming. Down the avenue-like corridor between a regiment’s tents we pounded, dust swirling. Behind I could hear cries and argument as Silano’s party reined up at the lines, pointing furiously.
We just might make it.
A sergeant aimed a pistol, but I swerved and the man was butted aside by the shoulder of my horse, the gun going off harmlessly. A quick-witted Mohammad snatched a tricolor and carried it, as if we were leading a charge on Acre all by ourselves. But no, now a hedge of infantry was forming between us and the city walls, still a mile distant, so we wove along the lines, leaping a dike of sand. Shots began to be fired. They buzzed past like insistent hornets.
Up on Acre’s walls, horns were blowing. What would Smith think, when I’d deserted him without a word?
There, a kitchen unit, the men weaponless and preoccupied with cooking. I turned my horse and thundered through it, scattering them. Their numbers gave us cover from other fire. Then across a trench, galloping alongside the old aqueduct toward the city…
Then I was flying.
For a moment I didn’t understand what had happened, and thought perhaps my horse had been shot or had suddenly burst its heart. I hit soft dirt and skidded, half blinded with dust. But as I rolled I realized Mohammad and Astiza had been thrown too, their horses screaming as the equine legs snapped, and I saw the rope that had been hastily staked to trip us. It snapped through the air, a cook hooting in triumph. Down, with our goal in view!
I got up, hands scraped raw, and ran back to the other two. More shots, balls humming past.
“The aqueduct, effendi! We can use it for cover!”
I nodded, pulling Astiza ruthlessly to keep up. She was wincing, her ankle twisted, but determined.
There was a stack of scaling ladders assembled for the next assault, and Mohammad and I seized one and threw it up against the old Roman engineering work. I pushed Astiza up from behind, rolling her over the top so we could collapse in the channel where water had run. It was a scrap of protection. Bullets pinged off the stone. “Stay low and follow this until we’re under the British guns,” I said. “Astiza, you go first with the scarf to signal them.” The plucky woman had held onto the thing even when her horse went down.
She shoved it at me. “No, it’s you they’ll recognize. Run and get help. I’ll follow as fast as I can.”
“I’ll stay with her,” Mohammad promised.
I looked over the edge of the aqueduct. The entire French camp was boiling. Silano had talked his way in and was pointing. Najac appeared to be loading my rifle.
No time to tarry.
I ran, the channel less than three feet deep, shots whining and pinging. Astiza and Mohammad followed at a pained crouch. Thank Thoth a musket can barely hit the side of a barn! Ahead, more French soldiers in advance trenches were turning to the commotion and raising their own guns.
Then an English cannon boomed from Acre, throwing up a gout of earth, and the French instinctively ducked back into their own trenches. Then another gun, and another. No doubt the defenders had no idea yet who they were shooting to benefit, but had decided that any French enemy must be their friend.
Then there was another bark, a scream, and a ball struck the pillars of the aqueduct. French cannon! The entire structure quaked.
“Hurry,” I yelled back at other two. I ran at a duck, waving the scarf like a madman and hoping for a miracle.
More puffs of smoke from a French battery, and more sizzles as balls sailed past, some bouncing over their own trenches. One hit, and the aqueduct shook again, and then again. A ball crashed through the upper rim, spraying me with rock splinters. I blinked and looked back. Astiza was hobbling grimly, Mohammad right behind. Another hundred yards! Cannon banged away on both sides, an entire battle swirling around our little trio.
Then Astiza cried out. I turned. Mohammad has jerked upright, stiff, his mouth round with surprise. His chest bloomed red, and he toppled over. I looked back. Najac was just lowering my rifle.
It was all I could do not to run back and kill the bastard.
“Leave him!” I shouted to Astiza instead. I’d wait for her.
But then the aqueduct between us exploded.
It was a perfect shot from big cannon. The French must have brought up new siege guns to replace the ones we’d captured at sea. The aqueduct heaved, ancient stone exploded in all directions, dust flew, and then there was a yawning gap between piers. Astiza and I were suddenly on opposite sides of a chasm.
“Jump down and I’ll pull you up!”
“No, go, go,” she shouted. “He won’t kill me! I’ll buy you time!” She ripped off part of her gown and began limping back, waving it frantically in surrender. The French fire slackened.
I cursed, but I had no means of stopping her. Heartsick, I turned and sprinted for Acre, fully upright now, gambling that speed would make me an elusive target.
If a longrifle were quicker to reload, Najac might have picked me off even then. But it would take him a full minute to get off another shot, and other bullets flew blind. I was beyond the forward French trenches now, to the point where the aqueduct’s end crumbled into rubble before reaching the walls of Acre, and even as cannon fire rippled on both sides I swung over its broken lip and dropped to the sand. Dust puffed from my boots.
I heard the thunder of hooves and turned. Najac’s Arabs were riding down the length of the aqueduct for me, I saw, bent over their steeds and heedless of English fire.
I sprinted for the moat. It was fifty yards away, the strategic tower looming like a monolith, soldiers on Acre’s ramparts pointing at me. It would be a near-run thing. Legs pumping, I ran as I’d never run before, hearing the pursuing horsemen closing the distance. Now men up and down the Acre wall were firing over my head, and I heard horses neighing and crashing as some went down.
At the moat’s end I slid over its edge like a Maine otter on a snow bank, tumbling to the dry bottom. The stench was nauseating. There were rotting bodies, broken ladders, and the abandoned weapons that make up the detritus of war. The breach in the tower had been sealed and there was no way up the wall. Men were peering down at me, but none seemed to realize yet who I was. No rope was offered. Not knowing what else to do, I ran down the moat’s dusty course toward where it joined the Mediterranean. I could see the masts of British ships, and guns continued to go off above my head. Hadn’t Smith said they were building a reservoir of seawater at the moat’s head?
New shouts! I looked back. The damned Arab daredevils had spurred some of their horses down into the moat with me and now they were galloping along, heedless of the soldiers overhead trying to shoot them, determined to take me. Silano clearly knew I had the book! Ahead was the ramp over the moat by the Land Gate, and a black, moist seawall of the new reservoir beyond it. Trapped!
And then there was another explosion, straight ahead. A roar, pieces flying, and the black wall dissolved in front of me. The blast knocked me backward, and I stared stupefied as a wall of green seawater turned to foam and began rushing down the moat at me and my pursuers. I got to my knees just as the flood hit. It knocked me back the way I’d come, carrying me like a leaf in a gutter.
I was in a tumble of foam, unable to get proper breath, unsure what was up and down. I tumbled. The water swept me into a tangle with my pursuers and something big struck me, a horse I guessed, fortuitously knocking me toward air. We were being washed down the moat back toward the central tower, all of us tangled with half-decayed corpses and the flotsam of siege debris. I thrashed, coughing.
And then I saw my chain! Or a chain, at any extent, drooping down the tower wall like a garland, and when we swept by I grabbed it.
It plucked me out of the water like a well bucket and began dragging me up the rough tower walls, scraping like sandpaper.
“Hang on, Gage. You’re almost home!”
It was Jericho.
Now bullets began banging off the wall around me and I realized I was a hanging target for the entire French army. One lucky shot and I’d fall off.
I tucked into a ball. If I could have shriveled any smaller I’d have disappeared.
Cannon boomed, and a ball that seemed big as a house crashed into the masonry a few yards from me, dissolving to shrapnel. The entire tower shuddered and I swung like a bead on a string. Grimly, I held on. Then another ball, and another. Each time the entire tower shook and the chain swayed, me dangling. Was this ever going to end?
I looked down. The flow of water was slowing but the Arab horsemen were gone, washed to who knows where. Wreckage dotted the water’s surface. A man floated belly up, like a fish.
“Heave!” Jericho cried.
And then strong hands were grabbing me and I was dragged, wheezing, over the crenellation and onto the Acre battlements, half drowned, scraped, burned, cut, bruised, heartsick at the love and companions I had lost, and yet miraculously unpunctured. I had the lives, and bedraggled look, of an alley cat.
I sprawled, chest heaving, unable to stand. People clustered around: Jericho, Djezzar, Smith, Phelipeaux.
“Bloody hell, Ethan,” Smith said in greeting. “Whose side are you on now?”
But I looked beyond them to the one who had instinctively caught my eye, hair golden, eyes wide and stunned, dress smeared with smoke and powder.
“Hello, Miriam,” I croaked.
And then the French guns really started up.
In my experience, it’s when you need to collect thoughts most carefully that there are the greatest distractions. In this case it was a hundred French artillery pieces, venting frustration at my survival. I stood and looked out shakily. There was a lot of activity in Napoleon’s encampments, units forming and moving to the trenches. I had, it seemed, something Bonaparte wanted back. Badly.
The wall was trembling under our feet.
Miriam was looking at me with an expression that was a cross between shock and relief, with a rising tide of indignation, a tributary of confusion, a reservoir of compassion, and more than a pitcher of suspicion. “You left with no word?” she finally managed.
It sounded worse the way she put it. “It was difficult to explain why.”
“What was the Christian running from?” Djezzar wanted to know.
“It appears to be the entire French army,” Phelipeaux observed mildly. “Monsieur Gage, they do not appear to like you very much. And we were thinking of shooting you as well, for desertion and treachery. Do you have any friends at all?”
“It’s that woman, isn’t it?” Miriam had developed a way of getting to the point. “She’s alive, and you went to her.”
I looked back. Was Astiza alive? I’d just seen my Muslim friend killed by my own gun, and Astiza turn back toward that villain Silano. “I had to get something before Napoleon did,” I told them.
“And did you?” Smith asked.
I pointed at the massing troops. “He thinks so, and he’s coming to get it.” Realizing an attack might be imminent, our garrison’s leaders began shouting orders, bugles sounding over the din of cannon.
I addressed Miriam. “The French sent me a sign that she might be alive. I had to find out, but I didn’t know what to say to you—not after our night together. And she was alive. We were coming here together, to explain, but she’s been recaptured, I think.”
“Did I mean anything to you? At all?”
“Of course! I fell in love with you! It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“I never fell out of love with her.”
“Damn you.”
It was the first profanity I’d ever heard Miriam use, and it shocked me more than a tirade of abuse from someone like Djezzar. I was searching for a way to explain, making clear that higher causes were at stake, but each time I started a sentence it sounded hollow and self-serving, even to me. Emotion had carried us away that night after the defense of the tower, but then fate and a ruby ring had drawn me off in a way I didn’t anticipate. Where was the wrong? Moreover, I had a golden cylinder of incalculable value tucked in my shirt. But none of this was easy to put when the French army was coming.
“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 backward 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!
Hardly thinking, I leaned forward so the ramrod he’d fired was against his own chest and heart. Its tip was shattered and sharp as a knitting needle, and finally I realized what must have happened. When he’d fired, the arrow-like projectile had hit me all right, but exactly where the cylinder holding the Book of Thoth was tucked into my shirt. Its blunt head had stuck in the soft gold, knocking me backward but not breaking my skin. Now, as he worked my tomahawk free and cocked his arm to strike, I leaned into him so I was pushing the ramrod with the cylinder, straight against his chest. The effort hurt like hell but it cracked the devil’s breastbone and then slid easily as a fork into cake. Najac’s eyes widened as we embraced, and I pierced his heart.
Blood pumped up out of him as if from a well, a widening pool, and hissing like the viper he was, he died, my name a red bubble on his lips.
Cheering, but in English this time. I looked up. The French assault was breaking.
I jerked the ramrod out, swayed upward to my knees, and at long last reclaimed my custom rifle. This was the worst charnel yet, a ghastly tangle of limbs and torsos of men who’d died grappling with each other. There were hundreds of bodies in the breach, and scores more in the soggy moat in either direction, assault ladders shattered and the walls of Acre dented and cracked. But the French were retreating. The Turks were cheering too, their cannon barking to bid the French good-bye.
Smith’s and Djezzar’s men didn’t dare pursue. They crouched, stunned by their own success, and then hastily reloaded in case the enemy came again. Sergeants began ordering a crude barricade at the tower’s base.
Smith himself spied me and strode over, the bodies compressing slightly as he walked across them. “Gage! That was the nearest-run thing I ever did see! My God, the tower! Looks like she could come down in an instant!”
“Bonaparte must have thought the same, Sir Sidney,” I said. I was gasping, trembling at every muscle, more exhausted than I’d ever been. Emotion had wrung me dry. I hadn’t caught breath in a century. I hadn’t slept in a thousand years.
“He’ll see it rebuilt and braced stronger than ever by the next dawn, if British engineering has anything to do with it,” the naval captain said fiercely. “By God, we’ve bested him, Ethan, we’ve bested him! He’ll throw every cannonball he has at us now, but he won’t come again after this thrashing. His men won’t allow it. They’ll balk.”
How could he be so sure? And yet he was about to be proved right.
Smith nodded. “Where’s Phelipeaux? I saw him lead the charge right into them. By God, that’s royalist courage!”
I shook my head. “I’m afraid they’ve done for him, Sidney.”
We picked our way over. Two bodies lay across Phelipeaux’s so we dragged them aside. And miracle of miracles, the royalist was still breathing, even though I’d seen half a dozen bayonets pierce him like a haunch of beef. Smith pulled him up slightly, resting the dying man’s head in his lap. “Edmond, we’ve turned them back!” he said. “The Corsican is finished!”
“What…retreated?” Though his eyes were open, he was blind.
“He’s scowling at us right now from that high hill of his, the best of his troops gutted or sent running. Your name will know glory, man, because Boney won’t take Acre. The republican tyrant has been stopped, and political generals like him don’t last past a bad defeat.” He looked at me, eyes gleaming. “Mark my word, Gage. The world will hear little of Napoleon Bonaparte, ever, ever again.”