Ring of Fire III (22 page)

Jeremiah chuckled. “I don’t imagine so, either. But what can we do for Richard here?”

“We can take care of him for what little time he has left, and allow him to die in peace, without anyone battering at him with useless unpleasantness. There’s no more that anyone can do.”

“That has merit, as a Christian act. Still, before bringing in a house guest, especially an invalid, your mother must have her say.”

“True enough. I’ll ask her, then.”

“No, I’ll ask her.”

A step sounded by the office door. “Ask me what, Jeremiah?”

* * *

Supper was long past, yet in high summer there was still plenty of light coming through the windows of the bindery. Rant and Thorndike were doing what they could to speed things along, putting the last few signatures of the body of the book into proper order, and passing them to Master Higgs and his two journeymen to sew. Daniel Brantley came through the open door.

Rant looked up from his work. “What word, Daniel?”

“The last sheets of the index are on the press now. They tell me three hours until they’re dry enough to carry here. They advise slip sheets, if they’re to be bound tonight.”

“Good. You’d best wait there for them, lest they wander away in that time and forget to let you back in. I would very much regret Richard passing from us without holding the completed work in his hands and seeing the words he has wrought. I didn’t like the account you gave of his breathing this morning. We leave for your house the moment the work is finished; the moon will be up by then. You have something to study meanwhile, don’t you?”

“Yes, Latin grammar seems to be inexhaustible for that purpose.”

John grinned at the memory. “Good enough. Until your return.”

Daniel left again for the print shop.

* * *

It was one thing after another. Inexplicably, two entries in the index had their page numbers transposed. Fortunately, Daniel proofread the thing while the ink was still wet, and the pressman made the correction. Still, it wasted time. The pressman ran off the corrected sheets, several sets for good measure. Daniel was off to the bindery, and the pressman closed up. The first attempt to collate the last signature was done too soon, and it smeared. It was good that there were extra sets, but they had to wait longer for one to dry sufficiently. With everyone tired, Thorndike got the signature collated wrong. The journeyman sewed it, but Master Higgs had seen everything that could possibly go wrong in bookbinding at one time or another in his long life. He caught it before it went into the binding. They took it apart and put it right. Finally it was done, but the sun was already up when Daniel and John Rant reached the Brantley house.

As Daniel led John in, the family was at the breakfast table, except for Daniel’s mother, who was coming down the stairs. Father looked up and asked, “How does he fare, Abigail?”

“Poorly. His breathing hesitates, I can hardly hear it. He was able to take some small beer, but none of the porridge. I take it you’ve brought the book, Daniel?”

John laid down his bag by the door. “I have it.” He reached in and produced it.

“Best you take it to him quickly.” She turned and went back up, the others following.

Richard was propped up, several pillows supporting his back. The morning sun through the window fell where his hands rested on the coverlet. He turned his face toward the door and saw the book in John’s hand. “ ’s that...?”

“Yes, your work, finished and in print. Here it is.” He held it out as Richard raised his hand to take it. Richard got it propped up in his lap, then opened it about three quarters of the way in and flipped pages. The sun fell full on the book.

“Ch’ter eight. Ne’er saw’t in print b’fore.” He began reading. After five or ten minutes his hand began to tremble heavily.

Nathan looked over to John and Daniel, and said, “You go down and have something to eat. I’ll stay and hold the book for him.”

As they left the room, a horn sounded from the river. Father glanced out the window, then turned as well. “I must go down and receive a shipment, it seems.”

* * *

Once again the sun was above the horizon. The morning light and the stirrings below awoke James Bright in his chair by the bedside. Everyone who could read Latin had assisted Leamington at one time or another the previous day. It mattered not that Bright had none; he’d taken his turn keeping company with the sick man while he slept.

It came to him as his head cleared that he heard nothing but the birds outside and the family below. He looked, and could see no movement, not even an irregular rise and fall in the man’s chest. He hesitated but a moment, then called out, “Master Brantley! I think he’s gone.”

* * *

Nathan was the first up the stairs, but everyone else down to Cook and old Edmund was close behind. He’d seen death enough in the wars. He looked at the gray of Richard’s face, and the unmoving partly open eyelids. It was hardly necessary to feel for a pulse in his neck or listen at his chest, but he did anyway. He straightened up and sighed. “You’re right. He’s dead, Jim. An hour, perhaps.”

“What now, then?”

“He really has no family but the college itself. They’ll see to him. You have a delivery in Cambridge today, if I remember correctly?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Daniel said, “We can take him in the wagon, then. I’ll go with you and give the news to the dean of the chapel. He has the arrangements in hand, and awaits only the word and Richard himself.”

Nathan asked, “And the book?”

John answered that. “This first copy will go to the university library. All of us who worked on it have autographed the flyleaf, Richard included. I think it will remain in print for a great long while. And now, after I offer a prayer for Richard’s soul, I must gather my things and be on my way to Lynn.”

“You’ll breakfast with us first, certainly. But won’t you stay for the funeral?”

“No, I’m overdue in Grantville. I’ve put them off as long as I decently could, finishing this work. I must meet the faculty as soon as may be, and set to work preparing my lectures.”

Daniel looked at him. “What are you to teach at the high school, then?”

“Not the high school, the college. You haven’t seen John Pell’s latest letter to Dr. Comber, posted in the hall?”

Daniel shook his head. “No.”

“He tells us that the combined faculties have fulfilled the conditions Congress imposed for the founding of the college. They were required to prepare a complete set of examinations in the subjects required for at least one technical degree. They accomplished this for the Bachelor of Science in physics. One Eve Zibarth, a student of the late Charnock Fielder, has passed. Accordingly, the state vocational school was renamed the Thuringia-Franconia State Technical College with a greatly increased curriculum and added faculty. It conferred its first diploma at the founding ceremony.

“As for me, I’m to teach advanced calculus, in Latin. Possibly in English as well, but that’s still to be decided. And I intend to carry my own studies as far as possible. I expect there will be examinations offered by the time I’m ready to sit for them. I hope to return in a few years with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics.”

Nathan gave him a thin smile. “Mm-hm. Did I see a certain familiar weapon in your bag when you took out Richard’s book?”

“Yes, he gave it to me some months ago. He said he could no longer use it.”

“No doubt. The question is, can you use it? Have you practiced with it? Do you know what to do with it, and how to keep it in good order?”

“I’ve done some shooting with it, and cast more shot. I can hit a target.”

Nathan snorted. “At leisure, on the shooting range, I expect you can. Stay the day with me, and I’ll give you a concentrated session of army training. The roads have been quiet these many months, but I’ll feel happier if you know how to fight with that fancy toy. Call it my last debt to Richard.”

Author’s note:
Except for Richard Leamington and Daniel Brantley, the university characters are historical. Their actions are fictional, though extrapolated from available biographical information. The remaining characters are fictional.

A Relation of the Late Siege and Taking of the City of Yerevan by the Turk Including an Authentic Narrative of the Death of the Persian Commander and an Account of the Destruction Wrought by Terrible New Engines of War

Panteleimon Roberts

Mir Arash Khan looked out at the trenches of the Ottoman army and marveled at his enemy’s industry. It had been scarcely seven days since the Ottoman cavalry had arrived and chased all his soldiers inside the walls, and already the city of Iravan was surrounded by their works. The Ottomans had moved with astonishing speed, appearing just five days after his spy’s first report of their advance from Sivas had reached him. The messenger had nearly killed his horse carrying that report—no army Arash had ever heard of had been able to march so quickly. He had been confident when he was appointed by Shah Safi to defend the city the locals called Yerevan and that the Ottomans had called Revan until Shah Abbas had recovered it thirty-one years ago, but the suddenness with which a force of thousands of Ottoman cavalrymen had appeared had shocked him. He had expected at least a week after the warning arrived to prepare for the arrival of the Ottoman army. That had been a costly mistake—his troops outside the walls had been scattered bringing in supplies or working on extensions to the fortifications. Many of those close to the city had made it inside the walls, but he had lost almost five thousand men on that first day. Of course, that had still left him with over thirty thousand—nearly three times the usual garrison. Indeed, his men were packed so tightly inside the walls that they were all but walking on each other.

He had so many soldiers because the Ottomans had been expected. The shah’s English friends had shared with him information about Murad obtained from the magicians from the future who had appeared in the Christian lands. They had said that Murad would attack Iravan this year. Murad was supposed to have refused to believe in the stories told, indeed, to have refused to believe in the magicians, but Shah Safi had clung to the predictions. As a result, he had decided to reinforce Iravan. He had also decided to execute Tahmasp Quli Khan, the man who, in the magicians’ histories, had commanded the city and who had yielded it to Murad. The execution had been an excruciating affair, the sort of thing that left one with disturbing dreams. Arash knew this because, when he had been plucked from obscurity to command the defense, he had been forced to witness it as an encouragement to do his duty. Of course, if he surrendered to Murad, there would be little Safi could do to him, but his family had remained in Esfahan. And on that first day, watching as the
sipahi
s had ridden his men down, he had feared that even his best efforts might be to no avail. The second day had been no better, as the Ottomans had rapidly dug a network of trenches and begun to raise gun platforms, and his watchers had reported seeing flashes of the distinctive headgear of the janissaries in the trenches. When the tents of what could only be Sultan Murad’s pavilion had been erected, tantalizingly just out of reach of even guns laid by his best gunners, he believed his worst fears had been realized. But on the third day, he had begun to wonder. The guns in the Ottoman emplacements seemed to be awfully light for siege artillery. Indeed, opposite this gate they seemed to have only a single cannon mounted on an odd high-wheeled carriage and to be using a sort of fireworks rocket to try to fill in. The rockets were a bit frightening, and dangerous to anyone near when they burst, but they seemed to need a long time to set up—so far the shortest interval had been five minutes apart—and they were not any danger to the walls.

And then there were the empty trenches. He had sent out raiding parties to try to disrupt the progress and perhaps gather in a prisoner or two to get a better feel for what faced him. They had not brought him a single prisoner. The men who returned said that, when they reached the first line of trenches, they were empty. It was only as they explored them that they ran into sudden ambushes. This experience was repeated on the next two nights. It was possible, of course, that the Ottoman commander was withdrawing his men as Arash’s men approached in order to lead them into ambushes. Certainly it seemed to be an effective tactic—only about three in ten of his men came back. But to detect all his raiding parties in time to carry out such a withdrawal (for there had been no sudden firing along the front to suggest that any of the parties were annihilated at the first line of trenches) stretched credulity to the breaking point.

In fact, he was beginning to suspect that the force surrounding him might not really be the Ottoman army at all. Mir Arash Khan was increasingly convinced that what faced him was only the vanguard of that army. Murad was young and inexperienced. He was also supposed to be confident of his physical prowess, his skills with weapons, and his horsemanship. It wouldn’t be the first time a man had let ability in one area convince him he had ability in all. And to a young, strong, and impetuous man, the allure of the glory that could be attained by dashing ahead with his cavalry to try to seize the city could have been overwhelming.

If he was right—if all that Murad had with him was his cavalry and a few soldiers who had run along with them—then it was possible that glory would go to Mir Arash Khan for ending the war by defeating—perhaps even killing or capturing—the Ottoman Sultan. The English had taught his men how to stand against cavalry on an open field, and he had more than enough men to mount an assault on the trenches if all the soldiers available were the mounted troops Murad could have mustered. If he acted decisively before the bulk of the enemy army could arrive, then his chances of victory were great.

And so he had planned a counterattack. The plan was simple. He would send five thousand of his men out this largest of the three city gates against the Ottomans. Fortunately, the works he had constructed immediately outside the gates had not fallen on that first mad day, and so he still controlled enough ground to allow a substantial force to be assembled. He had put his best guns and gunners on the gun platforms that had been built flanking the gate. He had had many to choose from—if all the guns that had been brought into the city were fired, they would use up all the gunpowder in a day—and he knew that they could keep the Ottoman cavalry from interfering with his troops as they formed up. They would also be able to keep the Ottoman artillery and musket men from being effective against his men as they formed up—the few guns the Ottomans had in place might have sufficed to break up a small sortie, but against an attack of the scale he planned they would be useless even if allowed to fire unimpeded. In fact, the works the Ottomans had built opposite the gate were just strong enough to fend off the sort of small attack usual in sieges. Only one real cannon, although there were some odd-looking assemblies of what seemed to be musket barrels on high-wheeled carriages like that of the cannon—and the fireworks, of course. It seemed his opponent had decided to concentrate his men and resources in accordance with an Ottoman plan of attack. Another sign of inexperience, not thinking that one’s enemies might not act in accordance with one’s plans.