taken in raids and skirmishing. Djezzar paced his walls like a restless cat, muttering about the damnation of Christians and all infidels, and then sat in a great chair on the corner tower to motivate his soldiers by glaring with his fierce eye. I labored on my electrical scheme, but it was difficult to get Jericho’s help because the Butcher, Smith, and Phelipeaux kept sending down a steady stream of armory requests. In close combat on the ramparts, with little time to reload, steel would be as important as gunpowder.
The strain was showing. The metallurgist’s somewhat cherubic face had grown tauter, his eyes shadowed. The French guns banged around the clock, he seldom saw daylight, and he was uneasy about my growing closeness to Miriam. And yet he was the kind of man who couldn’t refuse anyone, nor allow a lapse in quality. He worked even when Miriam and I collapsed in opposite corners of the armory, in fitful, exhausted sleep.
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Thus the ironmonger awakened us in the predawn darkness of March 28 when the tattoo of the French guns accelerated, signaling an impending attack. Even deep in Djezzar’s cellar, the beams overhead trembled from the bombardment. Dust filtered down. The quaking made sparks fly up from the forge.
“The French are testing our defenses,” I guessed groggily. “Keep your sister down here. You’re both more valuable as metallurgists than targets.”
“And you?”
“It’s not ready yet, but I’m going to see how my chain might be used!”
It was four in the morning, the stairs and ramps lit by torches. I was swept up in a tide of Turkish soldiers and British sailors mounting the walls, everyone cursing in their own language. At the parapet the bombardment was a rolling thunder, punctuated by the occasional crash as a cannonball hit the wall, or a shriek as one sailed overhead.
There were stabs of light on the French line, marking where their cannons were.
Smith was there, a weird smile on his lips, pacing behind a contingent of Royal Marines. Phelipeaux was racing madly up and down the walls, using a garbled mixture of French, English, Arabic, and anxious hand gestures to direct the city’s cannon. At the same time signal lanterns were being hoisted on the corner tower to elicit naval support.
I looked into the gloom but couldn’t see the enemy troops. I borrowed a musket and fired to where I guessed they might be, in hopes of drawing answering pinpricks of light, but the French were too disciplined. So I followed Phelipeaux to the tower. It was trembling like a tree being chopped at.
Now our own cannon were beginning to bark back, their flashes interrupting the steady drum of French fire, but also giving the enemy artillerists a reference for aiming. Shot began flying higher, and then there was a bang as a cannonball clipped the wall’s crenellation and rock fragments spewed like the pieces of a grenade. A Turkish cannon was dismounted and flopped over, blinded men screaming.
“What can I do?” I asked Phelipeaux, trying to contain the natu-1 4 6
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ral shake in my voice. The whole business hurt my ears. The walls and moat tended to echo and amplify the crashes, and there was that acrid, intoxicating stench of burnt powder.
“Get Djezzar. He’s the only man his men are more frightened of than Napoleon.”
I was grateful for an excuse to run back to the palace, and almost collided with Haim Farhi in the pasha’s chambers.
“We need your master to help stiffen his soldiers!”
“He can’t be disturbed. He’s in the harem.” By Casanova’s trousers, the ruler could rut at a time like this? But then a door opened on a stairway leading upward and the Butcher appeared, shirtless, bearded, his eyes bright, a cross between a satyr and the prophet Elijah. Two pistols had been stuffed into his sash and he held an old Prussian saber. A slave brought a rusty coat of medieval mail and a felt undershirt. Before he closed the door behind, I could hear the excited chattering and weeping of the women.
“Phelipeaux needs you,” I said unnecessarily.
“Now the Franks will come close enough that I can kill them,” he promised.
The first pale light was silhouetting Napoleon’s observatory hill when we returned to the tower. British ships had moved close inshore in Acre Bay, I saw, but their fire couldn’t reach the assault column.
Now I could make out a mass of men in shallow trenches below, like a great dark centipede. Many were carrying ladders.
“They’ve made a breach in the tower just above the moat,” Phelipeaux reported. “It’s not big, but if they get inside the Turks will bolt.
There’ve been too many rumors about what happened at Jaffa. Our Ottomans are too nervous to fight and too frightened to surrender.” I leaned over the edge to look at the black pit of the dry moat far below. The French could get into it easily enough, but could they get out? “Use a barrel of gunpowder,” I suggested. “Or half a barrel, and the rest nails and ball. Drop it on them when they try the breach.” The royalist colonel grinned. “Ah, my bloodthirsty
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The Butcher spat. “That is what I think of their marksmanship.” His mail shirt swung at the hem as he strutted from side to side of the tower, making sure his soldiers stood fast. “Don’t think my eye isn’t upon you!”
