Templar's Acre

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

It was a morning to praise God, Abu al-Fida thought. He stared at the city looming before him, the sun rising over her double walls as though pointing out his enemy.

The creaking of the machine was always alarming before the first shot. Even now, after months of construction and preparation, he was anxious as the new timbers settled. Each arm would last for many hundreds of shots, with luck, but some failed and shattered with an ear-splitting crack, either when being dragged down like this, or when they were being fired. He had seen both — and each shot, each preparation for a shot, brought the same anticipation of disaster. There was to be no disaster today, however. He nodded to the master of the gynours, who gave the bellow for the arm to be hauled down. There was a windlass, and the men were already sweating as they chanted, heaving on the ropes.

Al-Mansour was a simple design, but built on a vast scale. The arm was a long baulk of timber, with a steel hinge one quarter from the base, about which the arm could move easily. He had ensured that plenty of grease had been applied to that steel pin. At the bottom was a basket filled with rocks, lead and sand, and when resting, the arm stood vertical with this basket underneath. But as they pulled the arm down, the basket rose, that ponderous weight acting on the arm, and when released, the arm was snapped up to vertical and beyond. The sling fixed to the top of the arm had one end loose that hooked over a projecting steel bolt. When it flicked up, that came free, and the rock held in the sling was unleashed to fly through the air towards the target. A simple, but a massively effective weapon.

Gradually the great arm was dragged down against the weight of the bucket. Ropes and timbers creaked and complained, while men rolled the first of the rocks from the wagon and used levers to position it on the wooden track under the arm. A loop of rope dangled from beneath the sling. As the arm reached its lowest position, the master himself pressed this through a metal ring on the bed of the machine and put a steel pin through the loop to hold it in place. A long cord was fastened to this pin, and the master held on to this as he watched the men ready the sling.

Another command and all the men fell back, eyes on the arm, moving well away in case of accidents. Abu al-Fida himself stepped away from behind. Rocks had sometimes flown from their slings to hurtle backwards, destroying all in their paths. Slings could break, fixings tear loose, steel might shatter or shear, and the effect on a human body was devastating.

Abu al-Fida lifted his arm and stared over to the east, along the line of the army. There, he could see the nearest officer on his horse.

He waited.

* * *

Baldwin felt the tension in the air as he gazed across at the line of machines. The men had been moving about them, but were now standing aside. Baldwin could only imagine the expectation on their part. For him, this was torture. He needed to go to a latrine, but he dared not turn his back on those missiles. The thought of their sudden deadly impact was terrible. Rather that, he thought, than a protracted death from a gangrenous knife wound or arrow — but surely if a man had no body, he could not be raised from the dead? Would a crushing death mean no journey to Heaven?

It was a hideous thought, and it was that which kept him here, peering out over the first wall at the enemy.

He wanted to see his doom flying towards him, not be hit in the back like a coward.

Abu al-Fida heard the bellow, saw the officer’s arm drop, and let his own fall.

His firer pulled the cord, and the arm was loosed. All the energy in the machine was unleashed in a rattling slither of stone and leather. A shudder, a lurch, and the sling was moving, the rock surging up the track, and then it was in the air. The arm swept up, accelerating, the rock whirling, and then the arm was up and over the vertical, and the sling released.

Abu al-Fida felt the freedom in his own heart as the rock rose, suddenly as light, apparently, as a pebble, and from here he could follow its trajectory. It continued up, and up, and then seemed to pause in mid-air, and only then did he become aware of the other rocks, a hundred at least, which also hurtled on towards the city. It was a moment fixed in time. He could see the rocks for what seemed like an age, and then they were falling, a rain of death on the people of Acre.

* * *

Baldwin heard someone shout something incomprehensible. They could all see the rocks now, a wave of them, passing effortlessly through the air with the majestic grace of buzzards on the wind. It was almost beautiful.

Then they began to crash to the ground.

It was as if the very land was rejecting the Christians. Baldwin felt the shock through his legs, the wall shivering as a rock slammed into it near the Patriarch’s Tower. Another moaned past a hundred yards distant, and there was a flat, crunching sound as it fell on the road outside the castle. A third hit a tavern, and in the blink of an eye, it was gone, just a mass of mud wall, broken timbers and ragged cloth where an awning had been only moment before.

Baldwin felt his mouth open. A cloud of dust was thrown up beyond the wall in Montmusart where another had landed, and he wondered briefly where it was. Surely not at Ivo’s house, he hoped. The thought that Pietro or Edgar had been crushed was appalling. He dared not think of Lucia being killed.

Already, when he turned to look, the arms were being dragged down once more. He saw the rocks being rolled, men with levers laboriously shoving them on, until they were fixed in place. Other men set the slings about the rocks, and as soon as they were ready, the rocks were launched.

Nearest him, the missiles were not flying with precision. The second threw up a great gout of sand as it landed thirty or more yards outside the walls, and there was a wave of derisive laughter from around Baldwin. A second landed at the foot of the walls, causing more merriment. The third took off the top of the outer wall’s hoarding below Baldwin, and the laughter stopped abruptly as men saw the bloody smear where four men had stood. It was as if a cockroach had been crushed under a boot. All that remained was an indistinct mark where before, four living creatures had stood.

A shivering percussion now. The stones on which Baldwin stood were trembling as though fearing collapse as more rocks thundered into the walls. The catapults which had been set too far away were moved closer so that they might execute their own devastation on the city, and now screams and shouts could be heard all over as more and more men were injured.

And then there was a groaning reverberation, and Baldwin looked up to see that the tower above him had loosed their first stone. It rose into the sky, urged on by a cheer from the men all around, and they watched as it dropped, only to hurtle into the sand fifty yards from the enemy.

‘They have the machines for this,’ Baldwin’s neighbour muttered.

‘So do we,’ Baldwin said. ‘It’s just a matter of time, before they come closer and we can hit them as hard.’

The older man stayed staring out at the machines.

‘We’ll need to,’ he said.