Their own intelligence network would have told them to expect the assault even if they didn't know the time or the configuration. But they would be ready to defend the breaches, holding their breath in the same silence as their attackers.
The fine hairs on the back of her neck lifted, and Cesar shifted his hooves and whinnied softly.
Then the dreadful waiting silence was broken by a thundering war cry as the cheering British troops rushed through the outer ditches to reach the walls. Mortars roared in response from the ramparts, and the night was split with gunfire and exploding shells.
Tamsyn closed her eyes involuntarily as the noise became hideous, every pause in the firing filled with piercing screams, and the clarion calls of the bugles repeatedly sounding the advance. A violent light flashed across her eyelids, and she opened her eyes to see two brilliant fireballs flaming against the sky as they were shot from the ramparts to fall to the ground half a mile away, where they continued to blaze, illuminating the ghastly scene.
In the burning light Tamsyn discerned a group of men sheltered from the gunfire behind a small mound but still within range of the shells. The unmistakable figure of the Duke of Wellington stood out in the light thrown from a torch held by an officer beside him.
She urged the reluctant Cesar forward and joined the outskirts of the group, where men stood by their horses in alert readiness but at a discreet distance from the commander in chief, who was writing orders in the light of the torch. The screams of the wounded were clearer here, mingling with the long, drawn-out groans of the dying. Again and again the bugles signaled the advance, and the men hurled themselves up the ladders, to face the deadly resistance of the defenders, who hurled firebombs and barrels of gunpowder with short fuses into the ditches below, where they exploded, casting up burning bodies in a ghastly fountain of death.
Men rode up on lathered horses with information for the commander in chief from the thick of the fighting. The message was always one of failure. Every attempt was being beaten back; the troops were exhausted, decimated, their officers slaughtered like flies as the defenders hurled them back from the summit of the ladders. Wellington's face was white granite in the flickering torchlight as he received the stream of desperate communications, but he seemed to Tamsyn to be unflustered, writing more orders calmly, speaking in collected tones to his staff gathered close around him.
Then the bugle calls changed, and she recognized the note of recall. Over and over it sounded, but she could neither see nor hear any diminution in the savage conflict. The earth continued to throw up flame and burning bodies, whose hideous screams warred with the bellowing of the guns and the exploding mines. It was impossible to imagine anyone emerging alive from that inferno, and she stood by her nervous horse in a kind of numbed trance of horror, wondering why men would do this, would engage in such wholesale slaughter just to take over an insignificant heap of bricks and mortar.
But coherent reasoning wasn't possible, and her thoughts and emotions finally centered on the name of Julian St. Simon, repeating itself over and over again in her head like the refrain of a song that wouldn't be banished. He became the focus of the conflagration, the only reality her mind could grasp, but she couldn't manage to speculate where he was, whether he was alive, or whether he was lying somewhere under a heap of bodies, screaming in his agony, suffocating in the blood of others, or whether he was now only a cold, pale lump of bleeding clay.
It was half past eleven, an hour and a half after the murderous mayhem had begun, when an officer galloped ventre a terre through the group, his horse foam flecked around the bit, his flanks lathered.
Wellington turned as the horse came to a heaving, panting halt beside him. The exchange was short, but it was clear to the bystanders that something had changed.
“Gentlemen, General Picton's taken the castle.”
Lord March turned from the duke's side to make the announcement. “He's withdrawn troops from the trenches to enable him to maintain his position. We should have the city secured shortly.”
So they were in… or a toehold, at least. Tamsyn mounted her horse amid the murmured jubilation and rode slowly down toward the city walls. They were in, but at what horrendous cost. The bodies were piled high, the screams and groans as loud as ever. For the wounded and dying, Picton's success came too late. She rode along the walls, heedless of the firing that still continued along the ramparts. The ladders, warm and slippery with blood, still stood against the breaches, littered with severed limbs and tangled corpses.
Had Julian St. Simon survived? It seemed impossible to imagine anyone still living. But even as she thought this, a great cry of triumph went up from within the city walls, and a bugle sounded an exuberant note of victory. The city of Badajos had finally fallen to the besiegers.
Cesar threw up his head and pawed the earth frantically at the smell of blood and this new sound. Tamsyn steadied him and he stood still, obedient to his Mameluke training, but he was quivering with fright, nostrils flared, lips drawn back from the bit.
“All right,” she said softly. “Let's get out of here.”
She turned him away from the city, intending to leave him in Elvas and return on foot, but she hadn't gone more than a few yards when a man in the green tunic of a rifleman hailed her.
Tamsyn drew rein as the man, pouring blood from a shattered jaw, stumbled over to her. He was trying to hold his jaw together with one hand, while he gestured frantically into the darkness behind him.
Tamsyn dismounted swiftly, tearing off the bandanna she wore around her neck. She was used to wounded men and didn't flinch from offering what assistance she could. The fact that she swooned dead away at the sight of her own blood was a mortifying secret that only Gabriel knew.
She bound up the man's jaw with deft, sensitive fingers. “Mount my horse and I'll take you to the rear.”
The rifleman shook his head, gesturing again behind him, his eyes as eloquent as his mouth was dumb. She stepped into the darkness and almost tripped over a man groaning in the wet mud. Blood pumped from a gaping wound in his thigh, and he was using both hands to hold the severed flesh together as if it would stanch the flow.
“Me mate,” he whispered. “Get 'im to the 'ospital. 'E's got a chance. I'm done fer.”
“He's not going to leave you,” she said softly, bending over him. “I'll use your belt as a tourniquet, and if you can get onto Cesar, we'll have you with the surgeons in no time.”
She worked fast, aware even as she did so that the man's chances of survival were slim. His face was already assuming the ashen cast of a man who looked upon the grave. But his friend wouldn't leave him, and she understood the power of such loyalties.
With almost superhuman strength his friend lifted him into his arms and somehow onto Cesar's back.
“Mount behind him so you can hold him steady,” Tamsyn instructed, stroking Cesar's damp neck.
The rifleman hauled himself up into the high-backed, cushioned saddle. The expression in his eyes said clearly that he didn't much relish his position atop this restless white steed, but he took a firm hold of his comrade as Tamsyn began to lead the horse toward the rear.
The way was now thronged with limbers and drays bringing the wounded off the field now that the enfilading fire from the ramparts had ceased. People glanced curiously at the small figure, androgynous in the darkness, trudging along beside the magnificent beast and its wounded riders, but everyone was too occupied to do more than stare in passing.