fragments of bloodied brain splattered like a handprint on the bastion behind him. Jack nodded grimly in acknowledgement at the motionless soldier slumped against the stone embrasure and laid his retrieved treasure on the battlement pathway. There would be time for sentiment and reflection later tonight.
“Distribute these amongst the men and move that last pair along this alure to the third crenel from the corner turret,” Jack said, pointing out the tall, stone structure to avoid ambiguity. Sweat stung his eyes. “Have them harass that advancing party over there.”
Chauvin followed his gaze and confirmed with a nod, adding “aye sir,” as he moved off on his hands and knees to relay the order.
Jack knelt on one knee as he surveyed the scene through drifts of smoke. Artillery balls whistled above them. The musketry group had now drawn the attention of the enemy, and with it, a more concentrated fire—a direct result of the musketeers’ diligent and effective shooting. They had clearly become a threat. Jack saw the slaughter that they had caused below and smiled broadly. Just beyond the outer curtain wall in front of their position, the Protestant gunners had set up a small number of artillery pieces.
Jack peered cautiously from behind a stone bracing and scanned the line of cannons more definitively with the telescope he’d found. He could discern a gunner shielding his infant flame from the persistent wind that had arrived from the northwest as he touched the bowl of his pipe. Smoke wafted from the fired, recoiling gun many seconds before the rumble reached his ears. The ball dropped low on the wall, which the enemy gunner rectified with elevation adjustments. Further shots, however, were proving equally ineffective. Jack guessed that the calibre was inadequately light. Their cannons could splinter the merlons if they clipped the top of the battlements, but they barely grazed the main body of the wall. Their cannoneers would need to be particularly ardent with their accuracy if they were to significantly impact these robust defences.
Reloading his pistol, Jack set it beside his knee, examining the field closer to the walls. He was impressed and proud of the efficiency with which Chauvin’s band had implemented his tactics. The enemy infantry’s nerve had evaporated, and eventually soldiers ceased to advance towards the deadly pocket of muskets. The main east gate, however, was now under full attack as the assailants shifted their focus there. Jack hurriedly prepared to follow Chauvin and pass on his next order.
An enemy corporal had slowly crept to the right of their position and squatted at the base of a nearby ladder. Leaning on the body of a dead comrade, the soldier sat perfectly still, vigilant like an alerted stag, his eyes darting covertly along the battlements. The posture caught Jack’s attention; it was odd, unnatural—the body in an unlikely pose in an attempt to feign death. The corporal was within range, and Jack was a good free-hand shot. With a gelid smile, he mouthed the favoured question quietly to himself: Have you ever ridden beneath a Hunter’s Moon and kissed the prettiest maiden before the autumnal equinox? As a boy who initially struggled to manage the weight of a musket, or steady his outstretched hand while holding a pistol, his father had taught him to recite a short poem, hold his breath, aim and fire. This had been his first shooting lesson and he now knew from experience how the words sharpened his aim. His eyes centred in on the target in an unwavering, tunnelled focus. He snatched up and aimed his pistol, held his breath and fired. The trigger obeyed, and when the smoke cleared, the corporal lay dead, slumped on his right shoulder with blood pooling at his elbow and his foot twitching in lifeless spasms. The field below their fragment of wall was littered with many more corpses than before Jack’s systematic involvement with Chauvin’s small company of musketeers.
“Fine shot, sir,” the old Frenchman praised loudly from a distance, with warm approval in his voice. He sealed those words with the open grin of a veteran who recognised the note of a true marksman as one special grain of sand on a windswept beach.
“The sneaky, inimical bastard got too cocky, Chauvin,” Jack sneered, tilting his head as he yelled back over the din. “And it cost the idiot his life. They’re throwing considerable force against our main gate now and harrying the two gate towers. Their cavalry is sitting and waiting patiently on that distant hill, watching their infantrymen perform in this spectacle. They’ll cheer in unqualified support if our gate collapses.” Jack had moved up and knelt beside his corporal. He still had to shout to be heard.
Somewhere in the distance, a trumpet sounded distress. Chauvin followed Jack’s gaze and solemnly nodded in agreement as they both stared in the direction of the horn. The musketeers continued firing but less frequently now as their target’s numbers thinned.
“We need to move across to reinforce the gate’s defences. We’ll give them a long wait.” Jack’s grin was as infectious as a clown’s laughter at a circus. “I don’t know where your men learned their trade, but I haven’t seen such accurate shooting from French musketeers since the king was a boy.”
Jack continued smiling appreciatively as he bathed the corporal’s grey eyes with approval. “Leave that last pair where you placed them with two additional bandoliers. They can continue to pick off the stragglers and any others who try to advance on this section of wall. They must continue to hold and consolidate this position—cover our flank.” He emphasised his point by separating his outstretched hands. “Tell them to join us in about half an hour, but remind them that it’s vital to make their powder count.”
Searching through the shifting smoke, Jack looked around, re-appraising the scene, and added, “Gather the remainder and follow me.” After a brief pause, he asked, “Are you missing anyone?” He was momentarily confused, remembering that there had been eight in their group earlier.
“Legard is dead,” Chauvin replied morosely, reminding Jack of the comrade shot earlier on the wall. Their eyes met briefly—Chauvin’s blunted with sadness and loss and Jack’s subdued, sharing sympathy for the corporal’s struggling sense of perdition.
The musketeers made their way along the battlements towards the main gate, occasionally stopping to fire at easy enemy targets. Jack was a good shot with the pistol, but the group’s accuracy continued to astound him. One musketeer in particular took more difficult, longer-range shots and seldom missed. Jack simply nodded his head in amazement. They travelled slowly and hid sporadically behind cover, moving forward cautiously.
Jack finally halted his little group about 50 paces from the main gate. They were breathing hard. Below, the Protestant troops had clustered their numbers in a swarm and fallen on the barbican like locusts. They were firing steadily up at the towers skirting the eastern entrance to the city. The scene was anarchy. Corpses, piled up to three bodies high in places, concealed the mammoth timbers of the lowered drawbridge. It was a quilt of limbs and lifeless torsos. Blood dripped into the moat below, where the number of floating human carcasses steadily grew as the dying fell from the embrasures above, staining the water in the fosse the colour of rust. If not for the breeze, the opaque and etiolated scene of misery would have been totally obscured in a thick fog of smoke. Splintered airborne debris rained on those below. The ground shook. The stench of blood wafted in eddies, mixed with the stink of scorched flesh and the malodorous reek of sewage, sweat and vomit. The smell of fear was unmistakable.
The battle screamed in Jack’s ears. He wondered why they hadn’t brought their guns forward, recalled their men away to safe ground and bombarded the gate with their artillery. A concerted effort would have brought them a genuine opportunity to destroy the gate. A squandered chance, he mused.
Nevertheless, this situation gave Jack’s marksmen the opportunity to advance on their attackers, and he ordered them to disperse once again into pairs and fire independent volleys. This time, he sent Chauvin to retrieve more ammunition from the dead whilst he took the two spare pistols and musket and fired at the advancing infantry men. As the span proved too great for the pistols, he reloaded and placed them to the side, concentrating his attention on the musket. It was close-range work for the firearm, and he just couldn’t miss. Although slow to reload, the harquebus proved to be accurate at this short distance as the enemy soldiers massed their numbers in a wide, confronting arc around the gate and missing one resulted in invariably hitting another. The musketeers’ presence assisted the other defending soldiers in stemming the attackers’ thrust, and when Chauvin returned with the additional