Chapter 326: The Bloody Gospel of Concordia

Hold the step, the old man had cried, and the drum was still beating the charge when the pistols ran out of ammunition.

It started at the corner and spread along the wall. Hammers fell on empty pans, click, click, click, until every sailor understood the situation.

A pistol without powder was an iron club, and that was about all it was good for now.

So they threw them. Pistols flew into faces all along the wall, breaking noses and splitting brows, while the last muskets were swung by their stocks like flails. Redcoats went down with teeth scattered across the walls, while their companions stepped over them because there was nowhere else to put their feet.

Across the ditch, the grenadiers had burned through their last fuses, some between their fingers, while the pioneers kept digging.

At the corner, Bran’s billhook went in behind a marine’s collar and dragged him off the top. The hook caught beneath his jaw, and she pulled hard enough to wrench his head sideways before his boots left the wall, sending him down onto his back.

She swung again, the blade slashing a redcoat across the face and cutting his cheek from the corner of his mouth to his ear. The Crows accompanied her rhythm, hook, haul, chop, as a gang cutting cane in a nightmare.

A bayonet came up between the rungs and pierced clean through her left forearm, right through the old scar. Bran snarled, twisted her wrist, and dragged herself backward until the bayonet tore free.

Blood washed down her hand and dripped from her fingers, but she carried on fighting regardless.

"Dos i’r diawl, y cythraul! Dos i’r diawl, a dos a dy fidog hefo ti, y mochyn!" ¹

The battle cry was followed by a great deal more Welsh, much of it made up of consonants that seemed to require a shovel.

Then every remaining ladder along the low ground struck the corner at once.

The Bonebreakers were waiting for them. Barrel caught a marine by each belt as their heads appeared over the earth, seized one with either hand, smashed their heads together, and threw them back like sacks being unloaded from a harbor.

That left him exposed, though.

Bayonets came up through the ladders and found Barrel’s belly. It entered beneath his ribs and came out through his back, cut across his side slashing his flesh from the belt upward. Blood dripped down his clothes in sheets, and the redcoats holding the weapons leaned into their thrusts, expecting him to fall.

He remained standing.

He had to hold that foothold.

"Ox." A bubbling breath. "Me sit... me get up, after?"

"No."

Barrel nodded, slowly.

"Ah."

He planted his feet in his own blood.

"Then no sit."

He caught a redcoat by the throat and drove his forehead into the man’s face, flattening his nose as blood burst over both their mouths.

His knees buckled, but his hands remained closed around the redcoat, then he leaned forward, leaned a little further, and went over the wall into the ditch.

Ox stepped into his place and put his shoulder against the nearest ladder, the timber groaning under the weight of the redcoats climbing it. The giant drove forward, and the ladder tilted, its upper end swinging backward until the whole thing went over with everyone on it.

Soldiers struck the ground headfirst, some still clutching the rungs as the timber crashed down on top of them.

For one breath the foothold was bare, with one enormous man standing in the middle of it.

"Fourth platoon! Wheel to the corner and give him the lot!"

"Platoon... pre-SENT! Steady now, gentlemen."

Ox didn’t flinch or duck. He sighted down the row of muzzles, taking his time, almost pleased.

"Line. Good line."

"Fi-iiire!"

The platoon emptied its cartridge boxes into the corner from almost no distance at all.

The shots struck Ox across the chest and shoulder, while some hit his belly and legs, tearing through cloth and flesh as the pirates behind him took the rest of the volley.

The blast washed the space with smoke.

When it cleared, Ox was down where he had stood, his great body folded, some pirates and militia lying in heaps around him. Blood spread beneath the fallen, dripping between the stones and into the earth.

"Fix bayonets! Up, you idle sods, up! They’re bare! So go and take it!"

A very large man emerged through the smoke, coming up the walls with a wounded man in his arms.

Anvil lowered the wounded man as gently as putting down a sleeping child, then folded a coat beneath his head. The wounded man was bleeding through his shirt, his breathing coming in short, wet pulls.

He made sure his head was supported before straightening and looking at the corner, at Ox, and at the edge where Barrel had fallen over.

Everyone on the wall knew Anvil. He carried the wounded and had never raised his voice in his life. He wanted to see a whale, and he had told anyone who cared to ask.

He took hold of the nearest ladder, which still had the King’s soldiers climbing it, and lifted until the timber came clear of the earth.

The redcoats on it grabbed at the rungs, but there was nowhere to go.

Anvil swung the timber over his head and threw it outward, rungs, timber, and marines included, straight into the ditch. The ladder struck the earth below with a heavy crash, sending the soldiers down beneath it.

It caught the next ladder on the way down, sending that one backward too, and those on both screamed all the way.

Then Anvil raised his voice.

The cry came out of him as a thunderous roar.

There were no words in it, but every soul on the wall heard him.

He took a handspike from a dead gunner’s hands and moved along the corner. The weapon came down on the first marine’s head with a crack that stopped him where he stood, splitting the skull as he dropped between the rungs.

Anvil struck the next across the shoulder, breaking the collarbone and driving him sideways into the soldiers behind. The next raised his bayonet, but he caught the barrel with one hand and brought the handspike down across his face, sending teeth and blood flying over the step.

Bayonets cut open his arm, his shoulder, and his sides. A blade sank beneath his arm and tore free as he turned, while another cut into his ribs.

Blood washed down his clothes, but he kept fighting, swinging the handspike with both hands whenever he could manage it.

"After the big lad, Crows! After him, mun, after him! Dewch, dewch!"

Bran howled, her left arm dripping blood.

"Will you let him have all the fun, look you?"

A cry broke from the battlefield, ragged, half terror and half awe.

The Crows accompanied Anvil, and the militia accompanied the Crows. They came over with hooks, knives, and whatever else they had managed to keep in their hands.

The redcoats’ foothold at the corner came off the step, and the whole stretch of it, from one end to the other, belonged to Concordia again.

The old conquistador standing on the platform saw what had happened.

He had stood on walls in worse places, and he knew what a line looked like when it was about to break. The ranks had no cartridges left, the grenades were spent, and in the rear soldiers were looking back at the halberds the sergeants had laid across while the tide began to tip.

The wall had one push left.

He brought his hand down.

"Todos a una, hijos míos! Con todo lo que Dios les dio! Empujen! AHORA!"¹

"All as one, boyos! Everything God gave you, see! SHOVE! Now, now, NOW!"

Every pike and boat hook went for a rung at the same moment. Along the whole wall, the ladders came away from the earth together and went backward, timber and marines falling with them.

Soldiers lost their grips and struck the ground headfirst, or were caught between the ladders and the ditch, crushed beneath the weight of falling timber and those still clinging to it.

The floor of the dead was waiting below, and the King’s soldiers who had reached the top were shoved off the walls, some falling backward into their own ranks.

Blocks came down on top of them, followed by rubble, the last kettles from the cookhouse, stones from the slings, and arrows from the hunters on the bastion.

Bran hurled her bleeding arm toward the ladders, and the blood flew off her fingers in a spray.

"Shove ’em back to hell where they came from, you black-feathered bastards, PUSH!"

The banners went down into the ditch, and no one bothered to pick them up. The drum stopped in the middle of a beat, its stick still hanging in the air.

"Hold! Hold, ye bluidy cowards! Hold, laddies, hold, for the love o’ Christ, HOLD!"

Where the drum had been, there was now only the sound of the wall breathing.

The halberds went first. The sergeants had laid them across the rear to stop soldiers from going home, but the front ranks came tumbling backward into the rear ranks and snapped them across their backs, sending redcoats sprawling over the broken shafts as those behind trampled them underfoot.

The sergeants went backward with the rest of them, knocked off their feet and disappearing beneath the crush. The line came apart as a cable breaking under load.

Ladders fell and picks fell. The redcoats who could still walk started walking, over the dead and out of step. Some limped, some held their arms against their bodies, and some left blood in the stubble as they went.

They crossed the stubble in a ragged tide, gathered at the cross-dyke, and went over it more slowly than anywhere else. The wounded stumbled against the redcoats ahead, while those behind pushed them onward.

Arrows followed them, wet with the little apple, along with sling-stones and curses in every language spoken on the island.

From the middle stake came the thunder of a boat cannon, followed by a mortar firing wide, to give the retreating formation some cover.

The crews dropped their handspikes and ran to their guns. The last bags went in, and the grapeshot swept the cross-dyke where the retreat was thickest.

The first discharge tore through the soldiers crowded at the bank. Bodies fell into the black water, and the surface jumped under the impact as blood spread through it, turning the water red, while the brown backs at the bank broke apart.

Behind the guns’ last cry, the wall’s battle cry changed. Hats went into the air, along with raised cutlasses, hoes, pikes, and boat hooks.

Some lads on the step started the hymn again. It reached the same point as before and stopped, leaving the whole wall waiting for the next line.

"It starts with ’AND’! Every verse in the book starts with ’and.’ Did none o’ yer mothers ever drag ye to chapel?"

The second verse came out flat and loud enough to knock down whatever remained of the navy.

While the wall cheered, Anvil sat down beside Ox on the step.

Beyond the stubble, at the edge of the battlefield, the Royal Navy reorganized in retreat.