Beneath the terrace, in an arched crypt, two men pumped the handles of massive bellows to blast cold air into one of the fortress’s three furnaces. Other men, using long-handled cradles, tongs and pokers, rolled iron shot onto the coals which, in the fire’s deep heart, glowed white as the air hissed through the bellows’ iron nozzles. The furnace, hidden in the crypt so that its light would not glow on the fortress walls at night, was like a glimpse of hell. Red light flickered on the stone arches and glistened on the naked torsos of the men laboring about the roaring, seething incandescence.
The first six shot, each one an iron ball weighing twenty-four pounds, glowed red. “It’s hot, sir,” a sweat-soaked man shouted through the crooked passage that led from the furnace crypt.
“We’re ready!” an officer outside the crypt called up to the nearest battery.
The guns had already been charged with their bags of powder over which had been rammed thick layers of felt that had been soaked with water. The felt was there to stop the red-hot shot prematurely igniting the powder.
“Bring the shot!” a man shouted from the battery.
A dozen men manhandled the red-hot round shot onto their cradles. The cradles were like stretchers and, at their centers, were shallow iron dishes for holding the heated shot. “Quick now!” the officer said as the men hurried from the crypt and up the stone steps to the waiting guns. The round shot cooled quickly, losing their glow, but the officer knew the heat was deep in the iron’s heart and, when the great guns fired, the redness would come back. A thoroughly heated twenty-four-pound shot could cool for an hour and still retain enough fire in its belly to ignite wood. They were lethal against ships.
“Wait!” a new voice called. The commander of Kronborg Castle, a lieutenant-general who had been hastily summoned from his bed, hurried up the battery steps. He wore a tasseled nightcap and had a black woollen gown over his long nightshirt.
“The shot’s newly heated, sir,” the battery officer, a captain, pointed out respectfully as the furnacemen lowered the cradles beside the waiting barrels where the gunners had giant pincers ready to maneuver the shot into the cannons’ muzzles. The Captain wanted to ram the first six guns and hear the felt wadding hiss. He wanted to see the round shot glowing as they seared across the sea to leave six streaks of redness in the dark, but the fortress’s commander would not give the order to load. Instead the General climbed onto the lip of an embrasure and just gazed out to sea.
Countless ships were entering the channel. They looked ghostly in the night for their white sails were touched by the wan moonlight. They seemed motionless, for there was small wind this night. The General stared. There were hundreds of ships out there, far too many for his handful of guns, and those spectral vessels were bringing guns, horses and men to Denmark. Beyond the fleet, on the Swedish shore, a scatter of glimmering lights showed in the town of Helsingborg. “Have they fired on us?” he asked the Captain.
“No, sir,” the Captain said. The redness was fading on the waiting shot. “Not yet, sir.”
But just then a dull boom sounded from the distant fleet and the General saw a flash of red illumine one of the black-and-yellow hulls.
“Sir!” The Captain was impatient. He wanted his guns to pour their red heat into the dark bellies of the British fleet. He imagined that fleet burning, saw its sails writhing with flame and the sea shivering with fire.
“Wait,” the general said, “wait.”
Another gun fired at sea, but there was no trundling sound of round shot in the air and no splash of a falling shot. There was just the cannon’s dull boom fading in the night, then renewing itself as a third gun fired. “They’re making a salute,” the General said. “Return it. No shot.”
“We salute them?” The Captain sounded incredulous.
The General wrapped his nightgown tighter against the night’s chill, then stepped down from the embrasure. “We are not yet at war, Captain,” he said reproachfully, “and they are offering us a salute, so we shall return the compliment. Fifteen guns, if you please.”