Taking down the siege tower.

Tannhauser crept along the alure and peered around the merlon. Although the presence of the siege tower was no surprise, the sight at close range filled him with a bowel-watering terror. It was at most twenty feet away and he could see the upper third, which tapered to an open-topped platform that permitted four musketmen abreast to squat behind an iron-sheathed gate. From here they fired directly down into the fort. Behind the first four men waited a second rank of four, and behind those a third. The front rank had just discharged their guns and Tannhauser watched as these men peeled off, two to each side, and scurried past the rear ranks and down ladders at the back to a lower gallery, where they could reload in safety. The second rank now moved to the fore and scoured the Borgo for prey. He reckoned that from that vantage their range took in a good third of the town, the workers on the breaches of Castile, and anyone exposed on the wall walk as far as the bastion of Germany.

...

The whole tower was proofed against bullets by layers of raw ox hides and sheets of chain mail. Here and there the hides were scorched and smoldering and the smell of burned hair mixed with the gun smoke. Voices shouted orders and praised Allah within. Fresh marksmen clambered the rearward ladders to refill the third rank. They were eager and well drilled, the alliance of men and machine as smooth as it was ingenious. The tower creaked and swayed with the antics of the snipers and the recoil of the nine-palm muskets, but taut ship’s cables ran from stanchions at each upper corner and were anchored to stakes in the ground to provide stability.

...

“She’s a beauty,” said Tannhauser. La Valette grimaced in agreement.

“And cunningly placed too. None of our cannon can mark it and we can’t locate a new battery under their fire. We tried. The lower galleries of the tower are also loaded with musketmen. When Sieur Polastron launched a sally from the gate they were cut down on the threshold. Not a man reached the end of the drawbridge. If I committed, we could overwhelm it, but Mustafa would launch his cavalry from the heights. The cost in lives would be ruinous and, unlike Mustafa, lives is the one resource we can’t afford.”

“Wildfire?” asked Bors.

“The hides won’t burn,” said Starkey. “They keep them watered with brine. They’re pouring aimed shots into the fort for no reply. If they have the patience, they can whittle us to the bone before launching their next assault.”

...

“It rolls on six spokeless wheels,” said Starkey. “The lowest platform is twice the area of the uppermost. The four main stanchions are galley masts. Spars, rigging, cross bracing, stones for ballast. The lower gallery is open and unarmored, to allow them to mass their fire against a ground assault—as they did earlier.”

Tannhauser hadn’t encountered such machines before. He rifled his mind for lore, the ten thousand tales of a thousand battles that he’d heard swapped and embroidered over the years. Despite such an archive he could dredge up no memory of towers or how to thwart them. Yet something else stirred. He leaned over the edge of the stair to look at the foot of the inner wall forty feet below. It was composed of massy limestone blocks of various sizes, up to three feet by two, and laid in an ashlar bond.

“How thick is the wall at the base?” he asked.

“Through the batter?” said Starkey. “About twelve feet.” The idea in Tannhauser’s mind almost withered there and then; but La Valette looked at him and Tannhauser could see that he got it and was already making calculations for the task.

“When Suleiman invaded Hungary in ’32,” said Tannhauser, “the stiffest fight was for a little town of such paltry importance I can’t recall its name. Guntz? No matter. Eight hundred defenders held off thirty thousand Tartars and Rumelians for more than a week. At one point, as I heard it told, the Magyars knocked a hole through their own wall so as to train their cannon point-blank on the enemy charge.” Bors and Starkey peered down simultaneously at the huge blocks below, and then upward at the titanic weight of masonry stacked above. “It was no doubt a puny wall,” added Tannhauser, “and I’m no engineer. But if it were possible to cut a passage through twelve feet of stone without giving notice, and run out a sixteen pounder, you could blow the legs from that engine and watch it fall.”

...

Leather-aproned Maltese masons armed with chisels, crowbars, and lump hammers collected around La Valette at the base of the wall and a brief discussion ensued as to how best to excavate a passage to the foot of the tower. The master mason sized up the arrangement of stones in the ashlar bond and, on an instinct that he made no attempt to explain, quickly marked them with chalk in a numbered sequence. They then went at it with a phlegmatic proficiency that astounded all who watched. The mortar and stones were cut out as if the wall was made of biscuit, and within half an hour a crude arch yawned through the batter, wide enough for two men to enter abreast. Beyond was a mass of tight-packed rubble, the average rock the size of a goat’s head. Timbers, crowbars, and shovels were plied and as the rubble was prized free and stacked aside, carpenters braced the roof of the emerging cavern.

The cannon was wheeled up—a bow chaser stripped from a galley and mounted on a carriage—and the gunners charged and primed it. The bow chaser could take a forty-eight-pound iron ball. La Valette’s choice for the first load was that exact weight of musket balls at twelve to the pound. He ordered the balls commingled with a shovelful of lard. The carpenters laid and trued a gangway of planks over the rough floor of the cavern and within an hour of the rubble’s first exposure two masons toting sledgehammers went inside to dislodge the outer stones of the batter.

Tannhauser nudged Bors and they took their long guns up to the embrasures. A peek revealed the Turkish marksmen on the platform just as one of them pointed groundward and alarm flared among them and together they angled their muskets down toward the hole now erupting from the wall. Tannhauser and Bors rose up and benched their guns on the merlon and fired. Twin gouts of brain matter showered the platform’s occupants and the dead were flung in a tangle among their comrades. As the Turks fought to master their confusion, a dozen arquebusiers rose up along the bastion of Provence and plowed a raft of lead into the tangle. Tannhauser craned his head over the battlement.

From the hole in the wall half-a-thousand musket balls and a torrent of flaming pork fat vomited point-blank into the unlucky mass of men exposed inside the tower’s lowermost gallery. A vortex of smoke befouled the engine’s base and within its reeking coils seethed a gruesome microcosmos best not imagined. Powder stores and fire grenades ignited in deafening bursts, and burning and mutilated bodies tumbled forth to writhe and flail the dirt in anonymous anguish. The captains and overseers screamed at the mass of blackamoors huddled in the lee of the wall and they rushed to unfasten the guy ropes that anchored the tower. With spear point and lash, others were driven into the choking smog to breast the hauling spars and stanchions, and the Christian marksmen took to gunning them down from their embrasures. As the engine creaked into retreat along the roadway of larded planks, slaves slipped in the blood and grease beneath the enormous spokeless wheels and there were dismembered, their screams and the crunch of their bones hardly noticed in the commotion.

The overloaded tower had crawled but five yards when the bow chaser roared again from its tunnel in the wall. The Religion’s gunners had honed their skills through firing at enemy shipping from the rise and fall of a galley deck. The tower thirty-odd feet distant was the easiest mark they’d ever had. The ball smashed into the right main corner stanchion where it was cross-braced by the lower gallery roof. A whirlwind of splinters blew through hapless flesh, and the blinded and eviscerate donated their portion of sorrow to the howling carnage. The tower lurched out of true with a loud groan. Men began leaping from the upper tiers, aiming to cushion their landing on their squirming comrades below. Two gazi drew swords and charged into the hole to take out the bow chaser and its crew. Tannhauser stepped back from the wall to swab and reload his rifle. As he measured powder down the bore he looked down into the fort where the gunners reprimed their cannon. When the two invading gazi emerged from the smoking archway, the Maltese masons set about them with their hammers, and with aprons swiftly besmeared like those of meatcutters they dragged the pulverized remnants aside so the cannon could trundle down its gangway once again. It was a testament to the tower’s construction that five more blasts were required before it buckled and toppled to the clay. The draft of its fall stoked the burning base and a column of flame shot skyward, and a triumphant roar from the defenders drowned the wails of the last living wretches trapped inside.
-TR, pg.595-601