her. Then he
thought, If Sir Guy is there, of course she must be with him. She is his voice. He could not do without her. He thought of having to turn his guns on the Arcturus if Verity were standing on the open deck. I will worry about that when the time comes, he decided, then answered his father. The Sprite and the Revenge are able to point higher. Between them they have twenty-four guns to Sir Guy's eighteen. Both Kumrah and Batula know these waters like lovers. Ruby Cornish is a babe in arms compared to them.' Mansur smiled with the reckless abandon of youth. 'Besides, we will make our stand here. We will send Zayn and his Turks running like curs with live coals tucked under their tails.'
'I wish I had the same confidence.' Dorian turned his spyglass inland, and they watched the besieging army inch inexorably towards the walls. 'Zayn has done this many times before. He will make few mistakes. See how he has begun to sap forward? Those trenches and the lines of gab ions will protect his assault forces until they are right under the walls.' Each day he instructed Mansur on the ancient science of siege making. 'See there, they are bringing up their great guns to position them in the emplacements they have prepared. Once they begin firing in earnest they will smash through the weak spots in our defences and shoot away any repairs faster than we can make them. When they have opened the breaches they will rush them from the head of the assault trenches.'
They watched the guns being dragged forward by the teams of oxen. Weeks earlier the remainder of Zayn's fleet had arrived from Lamu and had landed his horses, draught animals and the rest of his men on the other side of the peninsula. Now his cavalry patrolled the palm groves and the foothills of the interior. Their dust was always visible.
'What can we do?' Mansur sounded less certain of the outcome.
'Very little,' Dorian replied. 'We can sortie and raid the earthworks. But they are expecting us to do that. We will take heavy losses. We can shoot away a few of the gab ions but they will repair any damage we can inflict within hours.'
'You sound despondent,' Mansur said, accusingly. 'I am unaccustomed to that, Father.'
'Despondent?' Dorian said. 'No, not of the eventual outcome. However, I should never have allowed Zayn to trap us in the city. Our men do not fight well from behind walls. They love to be the attackers. They are the ones losing heart. Mustapha Zindara and bin-Shibam are having difficulty keeping them here. Even they want to be out in the open desert, fighting the way they know best.'
That night a hundred of bin-Shibam's men threw open the city gates and, in a tight group, galloped through the Turkish lines and escaped
into the desert. The guards were only just able to close the gates before the attackers rushed to exploit this opportunity.
'Could you not have stopped them going?' Mansur demanded, next morning.
Bin-Shibam shrugged at his lack of understanding, and Dorian answered him. 'The Saar do not accept orders, Mansur. They follow a sheikh just as long as they agree with what he asks of them. If they don't, they go home.'
'Now that it has begun, more will leave. The Dahm and the Awamir are restless also,' Mustapha Zindara warned.
At dawn the following day the enemy batteries in their deep, heavily fortified emplacements began to bombard the southern wall. Counting the flashes and the spurts of gunsmoke with each discharge, Dorian and Mansur determined that there were eleven guns of cavernous calibre. The stone balls they fired must have weighed well over a hundred pounds each. It was possible to watch the flight of the massive projectiles with the naked eye. Mansur timed the rate of fire: it took almost twenty minutes for each gun to be swabbed, loaded, primed, then run out, re laid and fired. Once the enemy guns had ranged in, the massive balls smashed into their target with disturbing accuracy, each one striking within a few feet of its predecessor. A single ball might crack a block in the wall, and the second, striking on the same spot, dislodged it entirely. If it struck the timber balks, which the defenders had used to repair the weak sections, it splintered them to toothpicks. By nightfall of the first day two breaches had been knocked through the walls. As soon as it was dark, teams of workmen under Mansur's command rushed forward to begin the repairs.
With the dawn the bombardment began again. By noon the repairs had been swept away, and the stone balls were chipping away to enlarge the breaches. Dorian's gunners dragged half of their guns round from the harbour side to reinforce the battery on the south wall, and steadily returned the fire. However, Zayn's guns were well set in their emplacements, with deep banks of sand-filled gab ions protecting them. Only the gaping bronze muzzles were visible, and these were tiny targets to hit at such ranges. When the defenders' balls struck the gab ions the sand filled baskets of woven cane absorbed the shot so completely that it made almost no impression at all.
However, half-way through the afternoon they scored their first direct hit. One of their twenty-pound iron balls struck the extreme left-hand gun full on the muzzle. The bronze rang like a church bell, and even that weight of metal was hurled backwards off its carriage, crushing the gun-crew behind it to mincemeat. The barrel stuck straight up in the
air. On the city walls the gunners cheered themselves hoarse, and redoubled their efforts. But by dusk they had not achieved another hit, and the breaches in the walls gaped wide.
As soon as the moon set, bin-Shibam and Mansur led a sortie into the enemy lines. They took twenty men each and crept up on the battery emplacement. Even though the Turks were expecting the raid, Mansur's party had almost reached the wall of the emplacement before they were spotted and one of the sentries fired his musket. The ball hummed past Mansur's head and he shouted at his men, 'Follow me!'
As he scrambled in through the embrasure, jumped up on the barrel of the gun and ran along the top of it, he stabbed at the throat of the man who had fired the shot at him. He dropped the musket he was trying to reload and grabbed the naked blade with both hands. When Mansur pulled it back the steel ran through the man's fingers, severing flesh and tendons to the bone. Mansur jumped over his twitching body and down among the Turkish gunners, who were dulled with sleep, and struggling out of their blankets. He killed another, and wounded a third before they ran howling with terror into the night. His men followed him in to join the attack. While they were busy, Mansur plunged the point of one of the iron spikes he carried in his pouch into the touch hole of the gun, and another of his men drove it home with a dozen lusty blows of the hammer.
Then they ran down the connecting trench to the adjoining emplacement. Here the gunners were fully awake, waiting to meet them with pikes and battleaxes. Within seconds they were a shouting, struggling mass, and Mansur knew they would never be able to reach the second gun. More of the enemy were rushing up the communication trench from the rear to repel them.
'Back!' Mansur yelled, and they clambered over the front wall, just as Istaph and the other grooms rode up with horses. They galloped back through the city gates with bin-Shibam coming in close behind them.
There they found they had lost five men killed and another dozen wounded. In the dawn light they saw that the Turks had stripped the corpses of the missing men and displayed them on the front wall of the emplacement. Between them, Mansur and bin-Shibam had managed to spike only two of the guns, and the remaining eight opened fire again. Within hours the stone balls had ripped away all the repairs that had been thrown up during the night. In the middle of the afternoon a single lucky shot brought twenty feet of wall tumbling down in a heap r masonry and rubble. Surveying the damage from the top of the minaret, Dorian estimated, 'Another week at the latest, and Zayn will be ready to launch his attack.'
That night two hundred of the Awamir and the Dahm saddled their horses and rode out of the city. The next day, as was customary, the muezzin gave his wailing call to the faithful from the minaret of the main mosque in the city. Both sides responded: the big guns stopped firing, the Turks took off their round helmets and knelt among the palm groves, while on the parapets the defenders did the same. Before he joined in the worship, Dorian smiled ironically at the notion that both sides prayed to the same God for the victory.
This time there was a new development to the ritual. After the prayers Zayn's heralds rode around the perimeter of the walls shouting a warning to the defenders on the parapets: 'Hear the words of the true Caliph. 'Those of you who wish to leave this doomed city may do so without let. I grant you pardon for their treachery. You may take with you your horse and your weapons and return to your tents and your wives. Any man who brings me the head of the incestuous usurper al Salil, I will reward with a lakh of gold rupees.'
The defenders jeered at them. However, that night another thousand warriors rode out through the gates. Before they went, two of the lesser sheikhs came to take their leave of Dorian. 'We are not traitors or cowards,' they told him, 'but this is not a fight for a man. Out in the desert we will ride with you unto death. We love you as we loved your father, but we will not die here like caged dogs.'
'Go with my blessing,' Dorian told them, 'and may you always find favour in the sight of God. Know you that I will come to you again.'
'We shall wait for you, al- Salil.'
The next day, at the time of prayers when the guns fell silent the heralds circled the walls again.
'The true Caliph Zayn al-Din has declared a sack of the city. Any man or woman who is found within the walls when the Caliph enters will be put to death by
