To Tom's left, just visible above the storage houses built close under the wall in the northeast corner, he could see Guardsmen leaning out with guns to fire at targets right at the foot of the wall. As he watched, one of them jerked, his head fountaining up as someone below shot him. The body pitched back and then slumped forward. Beside him, he heard the pope mutter "Requiem aeternam dona eis domine . . ."
Tom felt his stomach heave. I've seen worse, lots worse, he told himself sternly. Somehow it still seemed to get to him.
Ruy was taking in the scene as well. "We have perhaps five minutes before they gain the walls," he said, in tones that spoke of a judgment formed from long experience. "The whole wall is engaged. There are no reserves. If the towers were not heavily engaged, those men would not need to lean over so. We may hope that the towers are protecting each other for the moment."
There was a loud cheer from beyond the wall, and Tom saw the head of a long, crudely lashed ladder slam into the wall close to the corner tower to their left. Seconds later, two more appeared farther along the wall. "Ruy," he said, "I think we should be leaving. That's right next to our way out, if we're going over the lowest part of the wall."
"A moment." Ruy was rummaging among a pile of planks and spars roughly stacked against the fortress wall. Tom recalled that the whole place had been sheathed in scaffolding a few days before, and realized that half of the work of readying the place for defense must have been taking all that down. And in these days before steel scaffolding poles and other modern conveniences of the building trade, scaffolding was lashed together. He joined Ruy.
Ruy beat him to it. "Here." He lifted up a sizeable coil of hempen rope. "Not ideal climbing rope, but it will serve."
"Right. I'll go first, we may need to clear a way. And, respect to you, Señor Sanchez, I do brute force and ignorance a whole lot better than you."
"The province of the young," Ruy said, smiling. Tom could swear there was a hint of sadness in that smile. Whether it was for youthful folly or in remembrance of his own days of brute force and ignorance, Tom didn't know.
The lack of reserves Sanchez had commented on had been more profound than Tom had thought. Men were streaming across the courtyard to get up to the walls, but they were few, pitifully few. There were a couple of hundred yards of wall to hold, and probably no more than three hundred men to do it. Tom didn't even bother to try to estimate the numbers as he strode—don't run, you might need the wind—around the inner castle toward the tower they had climbed in by.
Tom recalled that it had a lower parapet on the river side. If the Spaniards hadn't troubled to get around to that side, there might be an easier way over there. They were just reaching the door of that tower when he heard the sounds of hand-to-hand fighting, the clangs and screams of men close enough to smell each other locked in a struggle with edged weapons. Somewhere, someone was using grenades. The fizzing crack of the little iron pots of black powder seemed to be coming from the other side of the wall, so maybe that meant the defense was holding well somewhere. Other hand, they've got grenades too.
Twice in the time it took to get to the tower door, men fell from the parapet, and Tom couldn't help feeling glad he'd never been in this kind of fight. The sight of the oncoming Swabians at Suhl dying in dozen lots still woke him at night with the cold sweats. The last screams of wounded men falling thirty feet onto paving stones wasn't going to leave him any time soon either. Ruy was behind him, bringing the pope along.
Once inside the tower, the noise was if anything worse. "They're on the tower, Ruy," Tom said, guessing from the sounds he was hearing from above. "Do we fight our way through or look for another route?"
"I may have been optimistic," Ruy said, "but this is the quickest way to the top of the wall now. Señor Simpson, ensure your gun is fully charged."
"Right," Tom said. He worked the slide, checked that the magazine was full, and checked the safety. "Ready," he said. This was, if anything, going to be the easy part. Without even trying too hard he could get a shot off every second or so, and at these ranges even his notoriously poor marksmanship would be no handicap. And the guys coming over the wall were coming over with swords and knives and pikes. So long as he didn't let any of them in range, he was fine. Rate of fire, he murmured to himself, trying not to think about what actually happened to men who took a blast of heavy shot at close range. Especially when he'd have to be at close range to see it happen.