Blood Ties Read Online Free PDF Page B

causing his harness to barely shift. The only regular sound was the faintest pat pat pat of the pebbles on the drum’s taut skin. At first it was like the tapping of bees trapped behind leaded glass, then slowly it built, multiplied, until the packed earth beneath them, the rough walls, the shoring timbers, all began to vibrate with the rhythmic blows being struck barely a hand’s span away. Twenty pairs of ears strained for the moment that sound would change, when a tip of metal would poke through and two pockets of fetid air would rush to meet and mingle. For at that moment, the tapping would end and men would begin to die.
    It changed. A pickaxe point hit one of the stones the Fugger had embedded in the wall’s surface. The ping , a harsh cry in a world of near silence, was lost in the roar that followed. The Fugger had gouged faultlines over his earthen barrier and along them the wall imploded.
    Hush, then a harsh whisper, a single, Spanish phrase, terror, prayer.
    ‘Mother of God!’
    On his knees, Haakon’s fingers circled the hole bored in the top of the tromba, the other hand bringing the glowing cord down. The searing of the gunpowder in its rough pan lit his face, illuminated, for the briefest of instances, the separate tunnels now made one. Naked to the waist, two men held pickaxes, the one buried before him where his blow and the collapse of the wall had taken it, the other man’s raised high to strike. Behind them, the flash fell on faces lined with shock, glinted on the weapons slowly rising as if to ward off some invisible blow. Only these swords, these short spears and shovels moved, as if they alone had life, the humans holding them frozen in some fresco of fear.
    That was the instant the powder took to reach the chamber in the tromba and then the subterranean world exploded in sound and flame and searing metal. There were torches the enemy side of the gap, thrust into embrasures in the walls and they showed men who were there and then were not, and the roar of it deafened those on both sides, those who were not already dead or dying. Thus their cries sounded faint to those that lived – though the bellow from directly behind Haakon was strong enough to reach his consciousness:
    ‘A Haakonsson! A Haakonsson!’
    Leaping over his father, lying prone where the exploding tromba had thrown him, Erik’s cry preceded him down the tunnel, just ahead of his one drawn scimitar.
    ‘Erik!’ Haakon struggled onto his knees, then up. Shaking his head, still ringing from the explosion, he pulled his battle-axe from its sheath and bellowed, ‘For Siena! Hoch Hoch!’
    Then he chased after his son.
    The Fugger, buffeted aside by the rush of men, called out, ‘Haakon! Not too far. I will blow it soon.’
    But the backs disappeared down the tunnel, the sound of battle joined further down his only reply. Pointing at the men with the powder kegs, he gestured for them to follow, and moved up into the enemy mine.
    Erik had cleared the fallen bodies like a horse going over hedges, and it was a good twenty paces before he found someone to oppose his sword. A muzzle flashed before him, a lead ball zinged past his ear. Imagining where there was one there would be more, Erik crouched and ran crab-wise along one wall. Two more bullets testified to his caution before he was among the three shooters, their weapons raised to block, vainly, the scimitar’s slicing arcs.
    The torches were further spaced here, and Erik barely saw the shovel. There was not room for a full swing, but the blow caught him flat across the head with enough force to send him crashing into the wall, white spots whirling before his eyes. Through them he sensed rather than saw, the shovel pulled back, the edge of it now turned toward his face. His scimitar was pinned under him, and he could only throw up a fragile hand to defend himself.
    Oh well , he thought, the Fugger manages well enough with only one!
    The shovel hovered, then there was a crash, and it