Nobody's Slave by Tim Vicary Page B

watching the spittle sizzle on the sun-warmed barrel of his gun. ‘A few dozen rounds on they gates’ll soon have 'em down. And then look at all the friends we got!’
    The Sumba army was indeed huge, ringing the city in all directions. Tom saw little groups moving about on the hills and the edges of the forest everywhere, like hordes of busy ants. And by mid-afternoon, when the king had deployed most of his forces on the hill behind the town, their numbers became even more apparent. Several thousands, certainly - the grass of the low hills was entirely blotted out by them as they formed up, swarm after swarm, just out of bowshot of the walls. Then they began their drumming, roll after roll of it, punctuated by deep menacing yells of defiance, when a thousand throats opened together like the voice of the hillside itself.

10. Attack
    T HE ATTACK began the following afternoon.  Hawkins had surveyed the scene, and persuaded the Sumba kings to divide their forces. Most of them went to the far side of the town, away from the river, to attack from there. The remainder, several thousand strong, stayed with Hawkins outside the main gates.
    The Sumba warriors clustered in ranks on the meadow in front of the main gates, just out of arrow range.  The cannon prepared to fire from their safe position on the far bank of the river. The English gunners crouched around them, waiting for the order to fire. Tom and all the English sailors who were not manning the cannon crossed the river in a boat, and stood together in two ranks beside the Sumba. A dozen men armed with long muskets – arquebuses – stood to the left. On his right, a group of crossbowmen waited in line, a small fire blazing behind them.
    Tom, like most of the sailors, was sweating under a stout leather jerkin, his cutlass and pistols ready in his belt. John Hawkins and the other English officers wore gleaming armour and helmets. Hawkins was studying the scene keenly, but beside him, Tom noticed, the tall, disdainful figure of Lord Fitzwilliam was affectedly humming a madrigal, while he examined a flower he had picked as though it was the most important thing in the world.
    The defenders on the city walls were less phlegmatic. They chanted defiantly back, clashed their spears across their shields, and then burst into hoots of mocking laughter as a stuffed pigskin was hung over the wall, wearing a blue feather headdress like that of the Sumba king, with a spear stuck up its backside.
    ‘All right, it’s time to begin,’ Hawkins said. He raised his hand in signal to Robert Barrett, who was in charge of the cannon across the river.
    The flat boom of the first cannon stilled the jeering racket to a shocked hush, an echoing silence fanned by the flurried wings of flamingoes fleeing into the air from the river, staining the sky pink for a moment as though sunset had come too soon. Tom looked back across the river, and saw the glow of Andrew Baines's slowmatch as he applied it to the touch-hole of the second cannon. There was a fizz and smoke of powder, and then, a clear second later, the roar of the cannon as it leapt back against its restraining ropes. Then the gunners ran it forward, sponged it out, poured the next charge in, loaded the wad and the shot, while the next gun went off, and then the next, the stunned silences between broken only by the shrill screaming of a child somewhere behind the town wall.
    ‘Two and five are too high,’ Hawkins said. ‘They need to drop down a little and aim for the white marks.’
    But Robert Barrett had noticed this too. Looking back across the river Tom saw him talking urgently to the gunners, and pointing at the white scars the shot had made in the wood of the gates, halfway up.
    The guns fired again, this time to a rippling roar of triumph from their allies massed around them. The Sumba army surged forward towards the town, chanting and clashing their spears on their shields, but a shower of arrows drove them back. Several Sumba