Time suddenly snapped back into focus and her awareness expanded to encompass everything around her. The bastion was alive with running men and blazing lights. Something had happened to drive the fog back, a stiff wind swirling off the main tower of the gate complex. Her men were still pouring over the wall, but now Persians in the courtyard below and in the other towers were filling the air with black arrows. Armenians clambering over the wall were pincushioned. A hundred feet away Nikos was firing back with his own bow. An arrow spanged off the wall next to Thyatis, and she dodged through the door the Persians had rushed out of.
The room was square and cluttered with the personal effects of the Persian soldiers. She overturned a table to block the far door and skidded to the top of a stairwell that led down into the tower. Some of her Bulgars reached the tower through the rain of arrows outside, panting with effort.
“Downstairs,” she snapped, pointing to the narrow circular staircase. “Clear the other floors so that we can get down into the courtyard.” They rushed past her, wolfish smiles on their faces. She stepped back into the doorway.
The rampart was littered with the bodies of the dead. Men continued to come over the wall, but.the Persian arrows were taking a heavy toll. Nikos had disappeared. She stepped farther out, desperate to see the positions of her men. She opened her mouth to shout for her second.
The sky to the south lit up, a terrific flare of white light that blew back the remaining tatters of fog and was followed, within an instant, by a blast of heated air and a tremendous thundering roar. Thyatis was knocked back against the outer wall, her arm flung up to shield her eyes.
At the end of the bridge, Galen paced among his guards. They loomed over him, hulking Germans in armor of iron rings sewn to a heavy leather backing. Below that they wore furs and sheepskins. Helms with cross-shaped eyeslits covered their heads, and their shields were heavy oblongs of wood faced with riveted leather. Galen was a slight figure among the Northerners, but no man moved save at his command. The last runners had reached him, bringing him word from along the banks of the river. All cohorts1 stood ready.
The silence, at first welcome, now seemed oppressive. The mist was beginning, almost imperceptibly, to lighten in the east. Galen felt the grains of time dropping one by one, crushing his plan. He raised his hand, and a man raised his bronze trumpet to his mouth. Galen stared into the mist. Nothing moved across the bridge. He sighed, preparing to order the attack.
A bell rang, dim and muffled in the fog. Galen started, his hand hanging in air. Another bell rang, and then there was a shrill of whistles and shouting men.
“We are discovered.” He groaned and motioned to the trumpeter. “Sound the attack!”
The trumpeter took a great breath and then sounded his horn. A clear ringing sound blared across the riverbank, cutting through the mist and its strange deadening effect. The trumpeter blew again and now other trumpets answered from the left and the right. Around the Emperor thousands of men were suddenly in motion. The Germans drew themselves tight around him, their shields interlocking to form a wall of sinew and wood. The tortoise creaked and then rumbled forward onto the bridge. Inside it a hundred men in heavy armor strained against the stanchions, pushing the massively heavy thing forward on its twelve wheels.
Archers ran past the hide-covered walls of the tortoise, their bows in hand and arrows at the ready. They sprinted across the bridge, looking up into the mist. The river echoed with the splashing of hundreds of boats and barges being rolled down the bank on logs. Men shouted as century after century scrambled onto the rafts and began poling them forward across the water. Boats and skiffs, gathered from the river and the marshes, scudded out between the rafts, packed with men.
Somewhere behind Galen and to his right, there was a sharp snapping sound as a siege engine released, its trunk-like pivot arm slapping up into a hide-covered rest. A thick sphere of mottled green glass whistled through the darkness to smash against one of the towers on the river side of the bastion. The tinkling sound of the impact reverberated through the darkness, and then there was a whoosh of flame and the tower lit up with incandescent phlogiston. Screams reached the Emperor’s ears then, as the guardsmen on the fighting platform jutting from the tower were wrapped in consuming fire. A lurid red-green glow stabbed through the murk.
The tortoise rumbled forward, legionnaires crowding onto the bridge behind it.
Galen stared into the murk, his nails digging into his palms until blood seeped around them.
Another glass sphere sailed overhead, unseen, but marked by the thrum of its flight.
There was a rush of wind from the bastion, and Galen covered his face as something howled past him, tearing away the veil of fog and mist that the Roman thaumaturges had raised to cover the preparations of the army on the near bank. Green light sputtered at the tops of the towers in the city, and suddenly the entire bridge and river were lit up. The river was black with men and boats and rafts, the first of which had only just managed to reach the far bank. From the battlements of the city there arose a great shout, and Galen could see that the walls were thronged with men. Arrows began to fall in a whispering rain onto the men packed into the boats below. Screams rose.
The second glass sphere burst on the battlement above the gate and blossomed into white-hot flame, clinging to the stones and hissing off the slate tiles that covered the towers. Persians wailed, writhing in flame, and plummeted into the river below. Along the battlement on the city side there was a red spark; a waterfall of red flame rushed down the side of the wall, spilling into a raft packed with Roman legionnaires below. The raft rocked as men rushed to leap from it into the water, but more were trapped by the bodies of their fellows and screamed horribly until the red flames filled their mouths and they fell silent.
Galen cursed, seeing the snarl of rafts on the river. The tortoise was too slow! It had not even reached the gates yet. He turned to order the retreat sounded on the bridge.
Something filled the world around him with blazing white light, and the Emperor felt himself slapped to the ground like a reed crushed under the foot of an ox. The Germans cried out in fear and then a massive boom, so loud as to fill the whole world with its sound, rushed over them on a hot wind. Galen was buried under the bodies of his guardsmen as they threw themselves down to protect him from whatever demon had raged into the world.
The stone walkway along the river rippled with the shock of the stones under the main gate rupturing in a blossom of white-hot flame. Zoe was hurled aside into Dwyrin, and the two of them fell into the river in a tangle of limbs. Eric, who had happened to be looking toward the gate when Dwyrin’s foundation stone erupted, was blinded by the flare of light and then spun around and thrown, afire, into the river. He wailed once as the dark waters closed over his head with a slap and then he was gone. Odenathus, who had been crouched at the very end of the walkway, felt a hot wind rush over him, and he clung tenaciously to the stones at his back.
The valves of the gate rose up in the air on a blast of white fire, torn from their hinges like impossibly large leaves. They tumbled over and over and then arrowed down into the river like giant axes, punching through the sides of two of the barges, spilling stunned Romans in heavy armor into the dark, crowded waters. The two towers on either side of the gate shook with the force of the blast but stood firm, though the men inside them were deafened by the shock of the sound. The inner courtyard behind the gate was filled with the shattered bodies of men wrapped in flame. The archers who had run forward to cover the advance of the tortoise were incinerated where they stood or smashed to the ground or thrown off the bridge into the river. The tortoise was blown back twenty feet, crushing the men inside to a pulp and then sliding another ten feet on the bloody grease that they made.