‘Don’t touch this one!’ Brother Robert shouted. ‘Wind her gently, I pray you!’
A stone the size of a helmet struck him, and tore him to gobbets like a doll worried by a dog. He seemed to explode.
I shook myself – I still see him. Bah! We wound that engine like demons. And perhaps his dead hands held the engine steady. Fiore pulled the handle and the beast leaped. For the first time, our dart just cleared the far wall and vanished into their tower.
Marc-Antonio handed me a scrap of cotton. I used it to wipe my face and it came away bloodied.
Now, I could hear the sound of combat. On the far beach, men were fighting. And dying.
At my feet, the fleet of the Order stood in, due south, under oars. It was too late for them to turn, and now they were going to run the gauntlet of the Pharos fortress’s plummeting stone and make for the beach of the Pharos Harbour.
Our tower took two more hits and some of our sailors began to flinch. And some of us began to take cover under the stone of the curtain wall. Men are only men and flesh and blood cannot stand against stone.
‘Again!’ I shouted. ‘Wind it again!’ I was on one drum, with Nerio, and Fiore and Miles were on the other. Juan had two Gascons and a Catalan winding the second machine.
I can’t tell you where the next stone hit us – only that we were all lacerated, one of the Gascons was messily dead and Juan had a gash from eyeball to ear and was stretched full length on the roof.
My handle came up to the stop.
So did Miles’.
Fiore moved the engine. No hesitation – he’d watched the Englishman serve the machine and he knew his mathematics. He stepped back – no expression on his face, and pulled the handle.
The iron dart leaped away, and the machine slammed back to the roof.
Miles ran to the other machine. He and one of the Gascons and another sailor worked to clear the corpses away from the base.
Fiore stepped across our dead and used his crowbar again, and pulled the lever, uncaring that the leaping monster crushed a dead man’s skull.
Men were cheering in the courtyard.
We were struck twice – slam, slam!
The Casteleto tower rocked.
Now there was a crack all the way along the middle of the roof.
I leaned out and saw the Order’s fleet standing in for the New Harbour beach. They were not going for the Porto Vecchio, where the king and the crusaders were mired in shallow water. They were running the gauntlet of the Pharos tower, using the gap we’d made by taking the Casteleto. Going to the New Beach.
Which was empty of enemy.
The galliot was nosing into the Casteleto dock. I didn’t need new orders to know what that meant.
The cheering in the courtyard went on. Fiore, with Miles and Nerio and the sailors, had the leftmost engine loaded just as a big rock – I swear, as God is my saviour that I saw it in the air a moment before it struck – crushed the engine that they had just abandoned. Pieces of wood as big as my arm flew, jagged splinters that were as sharp as swords, yet not a man was killed.
The crack in the tower’s roof widened and the whole building shook like a beaten drum.
Before I could shout a warning, Fiore pulled the handle on his machine and the dart soared away. I never saw what any of our last shots accomplished.
‘Down!’ I roared – or perhaps I squeaked it. Standing on a damaged stone tower while a heavy machine pounds your friends to pudding is not at all like fighting in harness, friends. I was so afraid I wanted to shit myself.