Other troops were dragging lighter field pieces forward to engage if a breach was effected. Ladders rocked as grenadiers crossed the uneven ground, and galloping teams hauled fresh cannonballs and powder to the batteries. A group of men in Arab robes had clustered near the half-destroyed aqueduct.
I snapped open my glass. They were the survivors of Najac’s gang, by the look of it. I didn’t see Silano or Astiza.
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Smith hauled on my shoulder and pointed. “What the devil is that?” I swung my glass. A horizontal log was trundling toward us, a massive cedar jutting from a carriage bed with six sets of wheels. Soldiers pushed from the sides and behind. Its tip was swollen, like a gigantic phallus, and coated, I guessed, with some kind of armor. What the devil indeed? It looked like a medieval battering ram. Surely Bonaparte didn’t think he could start knocking against our ramparts with weapons centuries out of date. Yet the device’s pushers were trotting forward confidently.
Had Napoleon gone mad?
It reminded me of the kind of makeshift contraption that might have delighted Ben Franklin, or my American colleague Robert Fulton, who prowled Paris with dotty ideas for things he called steamboats and submarines. And who else did I know who was an inveterate tinkerer? Nicolas-Jacques Conte, of course, the man whose balloon Astiza and I had stolen in Cairo. Monge had said he’d invented some kind of sturdy wagon to get heavy guns to Acre. This trundling log had all the markings of his makeshift ingenuity. But a battering ram?
It seemed so backward for a modernist like Conte. Unless . . .
“It’s a bomb!” I suddenly cried. “Shoot at its head, shoot at the head!” The land torpedo had reached a slight downward incline leading to the moat and was beginning to accelerate.
“What?” Phelipeaux asked.
“There are explosives at the end of the log! We’ve got to set them off!” I grabbed a musket and fired, but if I hit the contraption at all my bullet bounced harmlessly off the metal sheathing at its tip.
Other shots were fired, but our soldiers and sailors were still aiming for the men pushing alongside the wheels. One or two were hit, but the monster simply ran over them as they fell, the torpedo gathering speed.
“Hit it with a cannon!”
“It’s too late, Gage,” Smith said calmly. “We can’t depress the guns far enough.”
So I grabbed Miriam, brushing by her astonished brother, and pulled her to the rear of the tower before she could protest.
“Get back in case it works!”
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Smith, too, was backing away, and Djezzar had already left to strut along the walls and cow his men. But Phelipeaux lingered, gamely trying to slow the rush of Conte’s contraption with a well-aimed pistol shot. It was madness.
Then the rolling ram reached the lip of the moat and flew straight across, its snout crashing against the base of the tower.
The soldiers who’d been pushing ran, one pausing long enough to yank a lanyard. A fuse flared.
A few seconds, and then the device exploded with a roar so cacophonous that it blotted out my hearing. The air erupted with smoke and flame, and chunks of stone flew higher than the top of our tower, rolling lazily.
The edifice had shuddered under previous attacks, but this time it swayed like a drunk on Drury Lane. Miriam and I fell, me grabbing her in my arms. Sir Sidney held on to the tower’s rear crenellations.
And the front of the edifice dissolved before my eyes, sheering off and slipping into a hellish abyss. Phelipeaux and Jericho fell with it.
“Brother!” Miriam screamed, or at least that’s the sound I interpreted her mouth making. All I could hear was ringing.
She ran for the lip until I tackled her.
Crawling over her squirming body, on a platform that was now half gone and dangerously leaning, I looked down into wreckage that was boiling smoke like the throat of a volcano. The front third of this strongest tower had simply peeled away, the rest of it exposed like a hollow tree and stitched together by half-destroyed floors. It was as if our clothes had been ripped away, leaving us naked. Bodies were entwined with stone in the rubble below, the moat filled to the brim with wreckage. A new sound impinged on my abused ears, and I realized that thousands of men were cheering, their roar just detectable in my addled state. The French were charging for the breach they had made.
Najac, I bet, would be with them, looking for me.
Smith had recovered his balance and had his saber out. He was shouting something the ringing in my ears made inaudible, but I surmised he was calling men to the breach below. I wriggled back-t h e
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ward and hauled Miriam with me. “The rest of it may come down!” I shouted.
“What?”
“We have to get off this tower!”
She couldn’t hear either. She nodded, turned toward the attacking French, and before I could stop her leaped off the edge I’d just crawled back from. I lunged, trying to grab her, and slid once more to the brink. She’d dropped
