My hearing was back, dimly, and I shouted to Jericho and Miriam,
“We have to get back behind our lines! We can help more from on high!”
But then something hummed past my ear, as close as a warning hornet, and Jericho took a bullet in his shoulder and spun like a top.
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I turned and saw my nemesis. Najac was cursing, my own rifle planted butt first on the rubble as he began to reload, his bullyboys hanging back from the real fight but popping away over the heads of the struggling grenadiers. That shot was meant for me! They’d come for my corpse, all right—because they knew what was likely tucked in my shirt. And so I was seized with my own combat madness, an anger and awful thirst for vengeance that made me feel like my muscles were swelling, my veins engorged, and my eyes suddenly capable of supernatural detail. I’d seen the flash of red on the bastard’s finger. He was wearing Astiza’s ruby ring!
I knew in an instant what had happened. Mohammad had been unable to resist the temptation of the cursed jewel Astiza had flung away in the Crusader court. When we were sleeping he had pocketed it, ending his periodic demands for money. And so it had been he, not I, who’d been slain by Najac’s longrifle shot as we fled along the aqueduct. The French brigand had checked to make sure the Muslim was dead and then seized the stone for his own, not knowing its history.
It was a confession of murder. So I picked up Jericho’s iron bar and started for him, counting the seconds. It would take him a full minute to load the American long rifle, and ten seconds had already passed. I had to fight through a thicket of French to be on him.
The bar sang as I wielded it in a great arc, as possessed as a Templar for Christ. This was for Mohammad and Ned! I felt invulnerable to bullets, ignorant of fear. Time slowed, noise paled, vision narrowed.
All I saw was Najac, hands trembling as he shook out a measure of powder into the rifle barrel.
Twenty seconds.
My bar swung into that thorn field of bayonets like a sickle clear-ing a trail. Metal rang as I batted it aside. Infantrymen sheered away from my madness.
Thirty seconds. The rifle ball was wrapped in its wadding and nervously fed into the muzzle opening with the short ramrod.
Najac’s French and Arabs were screaming and firing, but I felt nothing but wind. I could see the ripples in the smoky air as the bullets sped, the glint of frantic eyes, the white of bared teeth, the blood 2 5 4
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spraying from somewhere across a young officer’s face. The bar hit the ribs of a towering grenadier and he folded sideways.
Forty seconds. The stubborn ball was being rammed down.
I leapt across dead and dying men, using their bodies like rocks in a stream, my balance a spider’s. Round me in a circle my bar sung, men scrambling as they had from Jericho, Smith running a chasseur through with his saber, one Royal Marine dying and two more sticking their prey with bayonets. The sky continued to rain debris from the walls above, and I saw blossoms of explosions behind Najac as grenades and shells went off. Even as I pressed forward, Ottoman and English reinforcements were surging behind me, clotting the breech with their numbers and blood. A tricolor wavered and went down, then rose again, swaying back and forth.
Fifty seconds. Najac didn’t even take time to remove the ramrod but was fumbling to prime the pan with gunpowder and pull back the lock. There was fear in his eyes, fear and desperation, but hatred too.
I was almost on him when one of his brigands rose before me, hands raised above his head with a scimitar, face distorted by howling, until my bar took him on the side of his skull and exploded it, bits of gore spraying in all directions. I could taste him in my teeth.
And now as I cocked my arm for a final swing, Najac’s eyes wide with terror, there was a flash in the pan and a roar, a blast of heat and smoke, and my own rifle, ramrod still in it, fired straight at my breast.
I sat down hard, knocked backward. But before I could die, I swung low and my bar hit the thief in his ankles, shattering them. He went down too, troops surging over us, and realizing I still wasn’t dead I crawled forward, wheezing, and seized him by the throat, cutting off his shrieks of pain. I squeezed so hard that the tendons in my own neck swelled with the effort.
His look was hopeless hatred. His arms thrashed, looking for a weapon. His tongue bulged out obscenely.
This is for Ned, and Mohammad, and Jericho, and all the other fine men you’ve cut down in your miserable, roach-scuttle of a life, I thought. And so I squeezed, as he turned purple, my blood dripping t h e
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onto my squirming victim. I could see the ramrod sticking out from my chest. What was going on?
Then I felt his hands on my waist and a tug as he grabbed my tomahawk. Having failed to finish me with my own rifle, he wanted to stave in my temple with my own hatchet!
Hardly thinking, I leaned forward so the ramrod he’d fired was against his own chest and heart. Its tip was shattered and sharp as a knitting needle, and finally I realized what must have happened.
When he’d fired, the arrow-like projectile had hit me all right, but exactly where the cylinder holding the Book of Thoth was tucked into my shirt. Its blunt head had stuck in the soft gold, knocking me backward but not breaking my skin. Now, as he worked my tomahawk free and cocked his arm to strike, I leaned into him so I was pushing the ramrod with the cylinder, straight against his chest. The effort hurt like hell but it cracked the devil’s breastbone and then slid easily as a fork into cake. Najac’s eyes widened as we embraced, and I pierced his heart.
Blood pumped up out of him as if from a well, a widening pool, and hissing like the viper he was, he died, my name a red bubble on his lips.
Cheering, but in English this time. I looked up. The French assault was breaking.
I jerked the ramrod out, swayed upward to my knees, and at long last reclaimed my custom rifle. This was the worst charnel yet, a ghastly tangle of limbs and torsos of men who’d died grappling with each other. There were hundreds of bodies in the breach, and scores more in the soggy moat in either direction, assault ladders shattered and the walls of Acre dented and cracked. But the French were retreating.
The Turks were cheering too, their cannon barking to bid the French good-bye.
Smith’s and Djezzar’s men didn’t dare pursue. They crouched, stunned by their own success, and then hastily reloaded in case the enemy came again. Sergeants began ordering a crude barricade at the tower’s base.
Smith himself spied me and strode over, the bodies compressing 2 5 6
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slightly as he walked across them. “Gage! That was the nearest-run thing I ever did see! My God, the tower! Looks like she could come down in an instant!”
“Bonaparte must have thought the same, Sir Sidney,” I said. I was gasping, trembling at every muscle, more exhausted than I’d ever been. Emotion had wrung me dry. I hadn’t caught breath in a century.
I hadn’t slept in a thousand years.
“He’ll see it rebuilt and braced stronger than ever by the next dawn, if British engineering has anything to do with it,” the naval captain said fiercely. “By God, we’ve bested him, Ethan, we’ve bested him!
He’ll throw every cannonball he has at us now, but he won’t come again after this thrashing. His men won’t allow it. They’ll balk.” How could he be so sure? And yet he was about to be proved right.