The entire upper works of the middle gatehouse’s western side had been shattered and fallen outward. When it went it had taken the wall to his right with it. He looked down, saw rubble and bodies strewn like some giant child had a tantrum in front of the gate.
John decided then that sandstone was fine for most purposes, and looked pretty, but he would have preferred granite, especially for the outer defenses. The outer and middle gatehouses of the Lahore gate complex weren’t backed by earth like the inner gate, making them eggshells in comparison. It was like sitting in a thin stone box while someone hammered it with steel sledgehammers.
Comparisons between his current predicament and the storied race between John Henry and the steam drill came to mind, making him chuckle.
Don’t matter one bit to the stone whether its muscle, steam, or black powder driving the sledgehammer.
His mad chuckle ended in a dust-choked cough that made something grate in his chest.
Guns started to speak again as he looked for a way down from his perch.
Either that or his ears had recovered enough to hear such noises over the ringing.
He looked over at the sound of the guns and saw a few of the silvery tips of Sikh helmets working over the long barrels of Talawat’s .45-70 rifles. Long plumes of gunpowder reached out from the walls.
Hope those guns shoot as good as they look…Never did name ’em…His thoughts sluggish, like molasses in winter, John shook his head.
What was I doing before the gatehouse fell on me?
“Bertram!” he croaked. The down-timer had been just behind him on the stairs. He spat. Hacked. Spat again. There was blood in the mud that dribbled from his mouth.
He tried again: “Bert!”
“Doan…call…medat.”
John looked around, but still couldn’t see Bertram. “What?” he said.
A coughing fit gave away Bertram’s position.
A shiver ran down John’s spine. Bertram was about ten feet above John. How he’d ended up there, John didn’t even want to guess.
“Don’t. Call. Me. Bert.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
Something slashed through the air beside John’s head and buried itself in the stones between him and Bertram. Both of them spent a moment stupidly watching the arrow quiver like a flower reaching for the sun.
“Move, John!” Bertram yelled.
John was already crawling across the broken stone toward the uncertain safety of Bertram’s perch as fast as his injured shoulder, brutalized lungs, and the unstable surface would allow.
Another cannonball struck nearby, making the stones beneath him shiver. Much more abuse, and there might be another collapse.
He had more immediate threats to concern himself with, though, as arrows and the occasional bullet cracked and clattered around him. He slipped, or the rubble he was climbing shifted.
I am not dying here.
John crawled faster, ignoring the pain in his shoulder as he kept losing ground. The crawl became a mad scramble as the falling rubble seemed to pick up speed, sliding from beneath his hands, his feet.
He started to fall.
Shit, I might die here.
Bertram was screaming, reaching for him.
John reached, missed.
Bertram did not. The down-timer’s hand clamped on John’s arm, slid to his wrist as the full weight of the falling up-timer came to bear.
They both screamed.
“Quick, for God’s sake,” Bertram gasped.
John didn’t need encouragement. He grabbed Bertram at the other armpit and started to pull himself up. Ignoring the increasingly vicious pain in his shoulder, he climbed.
With a final heave he collapsed atop Bertram.
“Get. Off,” Bertram gasped.
John flopped onto his back, breathless and giddy with the narrowness of his escape.
“John, you need to lose some weight,” Bertram groaned.
“For you, Bert, anything,” John returned, coughing again. He took it as a sign of how much pain Bertram was in that the down-timer didn’t bother to comment on or correct John’s abbreviation of his name.
He coughed again and, wheezing, rolled on his side.
After a few careful breaths, John figured he was relatively intact, and ought to consider contributing to the battle raging around them. He looked around to find the dust was settling, the smoke clearing, and the sun rising.
Or perhaps the sun had been up for a while. How else had he seen Bertram? It hurt his head to think.
He shook his head. The sun wasn’t the only thing rising: several hundred of Aurangzeb’s men were scaling the inner wall to the west of the gatehouse. They were using what looked more like a scaffolding than a ladder, men without the saffron robes and heavy armor of the warriors assembling the structure with astonishing speed.
The tower to the east of them still had archers manning it, if the arrows that fell among the climbers were any indication. He watched an arrow strike home through a man’s saffron kaftan, his chain mail, and exit the other side of his thigh. The stricken man merely leaned out from the ladder and used one hand to snap the arrowhead off before resuming his climb.
“Jesus,” he breathed.
“The Sikhs, John!” Bertram called.
John saw them at the same time: two rows of about twenty helmeted men appeared atop the bastion. Their officer raised his scimitar. The first rank lowered their shotguns and took aim. The scimitar dropped. Twenty barrels belched fire, smoke, and buckshot at the men scaling the scaffold not twenty yards distant. The man John had seen struck by the arrow fell at last, his seeming immunity to pain rendered irrelevant by trauma and blood loss from the weight of lead from several shotguns.
The officer’s sword turned, blade flashing in the dawn light. Obscured by gun smoke and distance, John could only imagine the trooper’s fingers shifting to secondary triggers as they’d been drilled endlessly in the last few months.
The sword rose, fell. Another volley, another tide of men ripped from their perches to fall in the deepening pile of corpses at the base of the walls.
“Jesus,” Bertram said, surveying the ruin just twenty men had made.
John didn’t want to see more dead men, and so kept
