The Drawing of the Dark

Page 40

'Kretchmer and Werner won't know we're aware of their deceits, so I don't think they'll be hard to find. We'll go confront them, make them return whatever they took, and then you can kill them.
Duffy stared at him. 'I can't leave this area. I'm on call. I'm defending the West, remember? Hell, why don't you just go sift something deadly into their wine?' He started to leave, then paused. 'Oh, and I'd try to get them to admit some of it. It's just possible that Werner had some other reason to own that silent whistle. Here, I've got it - put some disabling venom in their wine, and then tell them they can have a sip of the antidote only after they've told you all. Then if they should somehow happen to be innocent, you can give them the antidote and apologize.'
Aurelianus shook his head. 'You're all right with a sword, Brian, but you'd make a hair-raising diplomat. No, I think Werner alone I can effectively crack without the stage props, and with his testimony I'll be able to get a dozen armed men to grab Kretchmer for me . . .assuming he's still in the city.'
'Ah. Well, good luck in capturing the pair.' Duffy yawned. 'I guess the main thing is that they didn't get Didius' Horrors, eh? And now if you'll excuse me there is a plateful of stew down there waiting for me to ladle it out of the pot, and beyond that, under an improvised canvas roof, is a cot waiting to fulfill its purpose in the scheme of things by letting me fall asleep on it.'
Good enough,' said the wizard. 'I'll go set my traps. Oh, and I've got to try to see von Salm, and tell him that the Turks are likely to re-form in the vulnerable east again, since Ibrahim no longer has any reason to sacrifice his thousand baptized souls.'
'Well, give him my regards,' Duffy said, his words made almost incomprehensible by a huge yawn. 'And thanks for this latest patch-up job.'
'You're welcome. Get a new hauberk, hmm?' Aurelianus turned and strode away West. Duffy pointed himself south, toward the stew. The sun was up now, shining through a break in the golden clouds, and Duffy had to squint against the glare.
Throughout the long morning, patches of light and shadow dappled the plain in shifting patterns, and once or twice veils of rain whirled across the city or the Turkish tents like the skirts of the passing clouds.
As Aurelianus had predicted, the Turkish troops were
shifting around to face the eastern wall with its gap like a missing tooth in a stony jaw. Sentries crouched to lay their ears against the pavement, and many claimed to hear the digging of miners at several points north of the collapsed section of wall. There was sporadic trading of booming cannon-fire, but, aside from a particularly heavy burst of Turkish firing by the south wall at about noon, the cannonade was little more than a desultorily observed formality.
Battle was anticipated, and the sellers of horoscopes and luck pieces did a good business among soldiers and citizens alike. Prostitutes and liquid vendors clustered around the makeshift landsknecht barracks, taking their own share of the weirdly inverted economy common to all long-besieged cities. The solace of Faith was free, but nothing else was - and food was much harder to buy than luck, sex, or a drink.
Duffy opened his eyes and crossed without a jolt from unremembered dreams into wakefulness. St Stephen's was tolling two, and the gray light that slanted in under the awning waxed and waned as the tattered clouds moved across the sun. He stood up and put on his boots, hauberk, doublet and sword, pushed the curtain aside and stepped out into the street. A wine vendor was wheeling his cart past, and the Irishman called for a cup. The man's young son trotted over with it and asked an exorbitant price, which Duffy paid after bestowing his fiercest frown on the unconcerned lad. His company wasn't due to muster until three o'clock, so he took the wine - which proved to be sour - over to a corner where the tumbled wall of a warehouse formed a rough bench.
He leaned back and closed his eyes, and ran one open palm over a gritty stone surface. He was mildly surprised to discover that he felt now none of last night's stark, guilty horror - just a tired sadness about the losses of a
lot of things, of which Epiphany was admittedly the most poignant. There was a distance to it, though - it was the sort of melancholy that can be taken down from the shelf and bitterly savored during a leisure hour, and not any longer the plain pain that is no more escapable than a toothache. He suspected that this not unpleasant abstraction was the numbing effect of emotional shock, and would, like the quick, natural anesthesia of a serious injury, wear off before long. It did not occur to him that it might be resignation to the idea of his own death.
Opening his eyes and straightening up, he was not surprised to see Aurelianus in the area again, fussily picking his way toward him over and around the scattered chunks of masonry. As he stepped closer Duffy noticed a new bandage tied around his forehead and under his ears that had blotted red over his cheek.
Duffy smiled, a little surprised to discover that he could find no anger toward the ancient sorcerer. 'What ho, wizard?' Duffy boomed politely when Aurelianus was in earshot. 'Did Von Salm take a poke at you with his rapier? You were probably explaining to him how things are not what they seem, am I right?'
'I didn't see von Salm,' Aurelianus said, trying to scratch his forehead under the bandage. 'They wouldn't let me up in the cathedral spire to speak with him.' He shook his head in angry exasperation. 'Damn it - if this impasse between Ibrahim and me didn't render the whole magical field so inert, he'd be no more necessary than a child with a sling-shot.'
'Well, you can still do' low-power magics, right? Couldn't you have got by those guards?'
Aurelianus sighed deeply and sat down. 'Oh, certainly. I could - with a mere gesture! - have given them all... some damn thing.. .the bowel-quakes, say, and made it impossible for them to stay at their posts. But it's so undignified And I know von Salm wouldn't listen anyway. Yes, the small-time country type spells still work as well as ever, but there's not any battlehandy magic in them - just homey lore on how to harvest your wheat, milk your cows and brew your beer, or how to foil a disliked neighbor's attempts to do those things. Hell. I hope Ibrahim is as discouraged as I am.' He looked up cautiously. 'You missed Mrs Hallstadt's wake.'
Again the Irishman felt a wash of the almost mellow regret, as if of events that happened centuries ago. 'Oh? When?'
Early this morning they.. .found the bodies. When the news reached the Zimmermann a spontaneous wake developed, and Werner wasn't due back until nightfall - he and Kretchmer are off somewhere, I don't know where - so the affair proceeded unhindered for several hours.'
'Ah.' Duffy sipped his inferior wine thoughtfully. 'So what are you going to do about our two poets?'
'I've got a half-dozen armed men waiting for them, led by my man Jock - Giacomo Gritti, remember? - and they'll capture them and bind them to await my interrogation.'
Duffy nodded. 'I see.' He emptied his cup and shuddered. 'Incidentally, what has made the bandage necessary? Did you cut yourself shaving?'
'Oh - no, I was on the wall watching Mothertongue's charge.'
Duffy raised an eyebrow. 'Mothertongue's charge?'
'Didn't you hear about it?'
'I've been asleep,' Duffy explained.
'Huh. I would have thought all the cannon-fire would have awakened you.' The wizard shrugged sadly. 'The poor idiot. He got a full suit of old plate armor from the stores somewhere, made somebody lock him up in it, and then rode his horse through an unguarded ferrier's door in the outer wall, right beside the Wiener-Bach - that little - stream that runs along the eastern side of the wall.'
'I think I know the door you mean,' Duffy said. 'I didn't know it had been left unguarded, though. So poor old Mothertongue charged off to save the day, eh?'
'That's right. All by himself, too, since Bugge and the northmen have finally convinced him that they don't want to be knights of the round table. He even carried a makeshift lance and banner, and recited a lot of poetry or something outside the wall before he galloped off. All the men on the battlements were cheering him on and making bets on how far he'd get.'
'How far did he get?'
'Not far. A hundred yards or so, I guess. He must have startled the Turk gunners - this high-noon charge by one rusty old knight. They soon got over their surprise, though, and touched off several guns. It was mostly canister and grapeshot for cutting down troops, but they even let go with a nine-pounder or two. That's how I cut my cheek - a few bits of flying metal or stone came whistling around the parapet.'
'And they got him...?'
'Mothertongue? Certainly. Blew him and his horse to bits. It served one purpose, at least - we sealed up that door and included it in the sentry's rounds.'
'Damned odd,' said Duffy. 'I wonder what pushed him over the edge.'
The hollow cracking of four cannons interrupted Aurelianus' reply. Duffy looked up at the battlements. 'Sounds like the twelve-pounders,' he observed. 'I guess Bluto figures the Janissaries have no business taking afternoon naps...
Two more cannon detonations shook the pavement, and then he heard the cracking of the sharpshooters' rifled guns. He was on his feet immediately. 'It must be a charge,' he snapped, and was running toward the square by the gap even as the cacophanous alarum bells began clanging across the city from the St Stephen's tower.
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.