A Burning Sea by Theodore Brun (i am reading a book txt) 📕

volley of flaming arrows into the Byzantine defences. Beneath them, engineers toiled desperately to throw down planking and siege ladders across the moat. Most were being shot to pieces by Byzantine arrows and other projectiles as fresh garrison troops raced from north and south to the aid of the outer gate’s beleaguered defenders.

Atop the inner wall, the Byzantines worked their death-dealing machines. Onagers slung huge crude-cut rocks into the maelstrom below, cutting down swathes of men like barley. Elsewhere, longbow frames shot bolt after bolt, impaling two, sometimes three, men on a single shaft. And still the Arabs flooded forward. But for all their stubborn determination, Katāros knew the Arabs would never breach the gate.

Not without victory in the other fight.

Katāros eased backwards towards the inner rampart. He took care not to draw the attention of the other imperial observers. Naturally, all their focus was on the storm raging on the western side of the fortifications. Only he knew to look down onto the eastern side. And what he saw made his heart lurch with hope.

There were three hundred of them, at least. The Mujahideen, the elite of the Umayyad army, distinctive in their spiked helms swathed in black cloth, their dark green tunics hidden under leather lamellar and shirts of mail. Ranged against them were no more than fifty Byzantines.

Those odds were good, but still he cursed Abdal-Battal for a complacent fool. Three hundred? He should have sent twice that number to guarantee success. Four times, even. By Christ’s blood, Maslama could spare them! But Katāros forced down his flare of savage anger; the chance was still there for the taking.

Yet, even as this thought was forming, a guard along the wall gave a roar of alarm. More shouts rose as more defenders perceived the threat inside the walls. Katāros’s jaw clenched. His lips moved in a murmur. He was praying, praying to any god who would do his bidding, praying to the Devil if it would only make a difference. . .

Praying that it was already too late.

Wrathling slashed down in a streak of steel. The Arab’s arm flew off at the elbow, spraying blood over friend and foe. Blood-spattered spearpoints bristled thick as thorns but past the point the kill was easy enough. Erlan’s thighs burned from the breathless sprint up the steep hill from Blachernae to the Karisios Gate.

Petronas’s men had split the Arab intruder force in two like a piece of firewood, bottling up the dozens of spearmen still pouring out of the doors of the Virgin’s basilica into the square. There was one hell of a fight raging back there. But many of the intruders had already broken through and had pushed on for their objective: the inside of the Karisios Gate. With hardly a few dozen Byzantines, Erlan and Einar had set off in headlong pursuit up the hill. But the Arabs had a long start on them and reached the gate first.

Slowed by his ankle, Erlan was one of the last to the inner gates. By the time he joined the fray, the dead lay all around, the air was already rank with blood. Curses rose in clouds above the skirmish line and now arrows began hailing from the walls above as the defenders at last registered the danger. Ahead of him was a riot of slaughter. He was still fifty yards from the gates when the Arabs let out a bellow of triumph. The air groaned with splintering wood. Iron hinges shrieked and a shard of light broke through the gateway.

The gates were opening, and buoyed by the tantalizing glimmer of success, the Arabs whipped themselves to still greater fury, slamming the huge doors against the stone walls and pouring into the killing ground beyond.

‘That ain’t good!’ yelled a voice in Norse. Erlan turned and saw Einar close by him, his face daubed with gore thick as paint. ‘If they take the outer gate, the city will fall.’

Erlan nodded, seeing in his mind a flash of the horrors that would befall the citizens of Byzantium if these troops broke through. Lilla. . . ‘On me, Fat-Belly,’ he snarled, then plunged onward into the canyon of hell.

The raiders raced on, blind to all danger, thirsty to breach the last barrier that held back the fury of ten thousand killers from the city. The fate of the world rested on their shoulders. But the two Northmen flew among them, slaying left and right. Above them the walls of the gatehouse towered, sheer and pitiless, boxing them in while boiling water, flaming arrows, rocks, bricks and burning pitch rained on them in a cataract of death. The screams were deafening, from men dying or fearing death. One man swung his arms blindly, his torso engulfed in a furnace of flames. Another was bludgeoned to the ground as a rock the size of a fist crumpled his helmet. There was a crash a few yards in front, a great hiss of steam, Erlan’s face smarted with flecks of scalding water and a boiling mist billowed past like a ghost. An Arab dropped his spear and clutched at his face, turning blindly. Erlan sank the length of Wrathling into his guts, then tore the blade free in a burst of blood and foul liquid.

He screamed then, a long loud bellowing cry, feeling a killing rage burn cold inside him.

‘Makes you feel sort of homesick, don’t it, lad?’ Einar yelled, laughing like a man who’d lost his reason. And together, they surged on into the frenzied flood.

Below him, the fighting was descending into savagery. Katāros couldn’t imagine any man coming out of that deadly tempest alive. Yet still some few Arabs ran on, and fewer still Byzantines ran amongst them, jackals among lions.

More Byzantine troops were spilling out of a postern gate further north into the gap between the walls. Katāros swore under his breath, then swore again when he saw another postern to the south disgorging yet more troops on the raiders’ southern flank.

Time was running