24

Jan heard the bell toll; he sprang up onto the truck of the gun he was outfitting and looked east. What he saw raised the hair on his head and put a coiling snake of panic in his belly. Two long columns were making their way up the road toward him, visible to him now only as two rows of pikes beyond the dry-land dike. Even without seeing the pennant above them, he knew who they were.

He leapt down from the gun. The women from the onion fields were racing in toward the gate, their faces white, wailing with fear at what they had seen coming after them. A boy with a stick dashed out to herd the cows on the barren ground together and bring them inside the wall.

“Marten! Man the gate. When everybody’s in, bar it fast. Where’s Lumey? Jobst, fetch van Treslong here. Where the devil’s Lumey?”

He went along the rampart, from gun to gun, making certain of the supplies of powder and shot by each one, with his own hands checking the lashings that bound each cannon to its truck. Around him everyone seemed to be going mad. People screamed and shouted and ran up and down the wall; he had to push men out of his way to get to some of the guns. On the street below the wall a crowd was growing, their faces lifted toward him, pale and frightened. Mouse was fighting his way through the press of bodies, and down the street behind them Hanneke was running toward the gate.

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.

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.

The others followed him, flooding after him toward the gate, which thundered and bowed inward over its bar under the impact of the army. From the street behind Jan, van Treslong ran, leading his own little army in a ridiculous order of columns. The gate burst open.

Jan shouted. Wielding the ramrod around his head, he rushed forward into the gap, and the first two Spanish pikemen who came through it he struck across the middle with the ramrod and hurled backward into their fellows.

An instant later, there were men all around him, his own people, standing shoulder to shoulder with him. The pikes lunged at their faces. With his ramrod he beat down the shining blades, and reversing the pole, he thrust the butt hard into the teeth of a soldier in front of him, felt the ramrod’s butt break bone and flesh, and saw the soldier fall.

“My sister,” he shouted. “For my sister!” Stepping forward, he trampled on that body while he struck and parried blows with another man behind it.

The gate jammed the charging Spanish close together, kept their arms pinned close, their pikes bound awkwardly, and Jan meant to hold them there, in the gate. He flailed at them with the ramrod; one fell back, but another lunged at him, the pike sliding over the haft of the ramrod, coming at him like a silver snake. He dodged it. The pike slipped past his elbow and bored into a man behind him. Jan grabbed the haft and yanked, and the pikeman came off-balance after his weapon. Jan got him by the throat and threw him backward onto the blades of his own men.

Now he had the pike for a weapon. He had never used one before; he thrust with it and saw how it sliced away the soldiers in front of him. They lunged at him, three at once, still confined in the narrow space of the gate. All around him his own friends fought them. He braced himself. No time to think, to plan. Seeing a face before him he drove the pike at it, awkwardly overhand, and the blade split the face with a shower of blood and caught somehow and was wrested from his hands.

Weaponless, he flailed out with his fists, ducked the oncoming pike of a Spaniard screaming prayers, and wrestled with him. Lifted the thrashing body in his arms just quick enough to catch another blade with the back of the soldier’s armor. The armor did no good. It broke under the impact and the blade came through and he pushed the dying soldier away at arm’s length while the blade pierced through back and chest and came out on Jan’s side, aimed at him, filthy with blood. He flung the body sideways and that carried the pike away too.

Still he had only his bare hands, and the Dutch around him were falling back, or dead, lying in the street, lying under the feet of the Spaniards pressing inward. He staggered back a step and tried to brace himself and could not. Back another step. He was losing. He thought of his sister, of Eleanor, of his ship. Flung up his arms to block a pike coming at him, and fended it off to one side, and somehow directed it into the body of one of his own men. He wailed, despairing.

“Hold on—hold on!”

The high clear voice penetrated the tumult like sunlight through a shadow. From both sides, screaming, their hands flashing with knives, came the women.

He shouted. He surged forward, the men behind him lunging after him, and the women flung themselves on the Spanish from either side of the gate, and the Spanish faltered. Jan caught up a pike from the ground. He drove forward into their midst, seeing Eleanor in those women, wild to protect her. With the pike before him, he slammed the Spaniards back through the gate. A woman screamed in his ears.

“Eleanor,” he shouted. “Eleanor!” Blind with new fury he charged forward and thrust them backward another step, and another. The men around him were howling. The women joined them. At Jan’s side, now, a little girl was fighting, her white arms ending in long butcher knives.

The Spaniards staggered back, through the gate, and they splashed into water. The sea was rising behind them, flooding the pasturage. The men in the last ranks wheeled, their voices high and shrill with panic, and the sea lapped at their knees. The Dutch were swinging the gate closed on them. The sea swirled and dragged at them. Their trumpets blasted, urging them on, but the sea had them. Desperate, they raced toward the dry land, back beyond the landward dike, the safety of the onion fields. The sea rose around them and those that fell did not rise, held down in their armor under the waves.

Jan roared; he sprang toward the ladder to the rampart and clambered up beside his gun again. She still lay back in her trucks as her last shot had thrown her, and he had lost the ramrod. He ran to the next gun to take its ramrod and went back and cleaned the gun and loaded her, his hands trembling. Over his shoulder he saw the Spanish struggling in the rising sea. Many had died in the gate, and many more were drowning, but still some of them had reached the dry dike on the far side. He thrust the shot deep into the culverin and went looking for the slow match.

Now for the first time he saw the great plumes of black smoke rising from the trees behind the Spanish army, and he knew Lumey had burned their boats. He roared. A wild exultant laughter surged up through him, and he flung his fists up into the sky and shouted and stamped his feet on the rampart. His men were rushing up around him; far down the wall, a gun fired, and its scythe of shot cut down the Spanish struggling up from the mire to the safety of the land. All along the rampart men cheered and bent to the guns and fired.

Eleanor came toward him, blood staining her gray dress, smiling. He had made himself ready to die. It took him some effort to accept life again. All around him his people were cheering and leaping and hugging one another. He reached out for Eleanor, his life, and she came to him.