Templar's Acre

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

Abu al-Fida had stood at his machine’s side all that long day. Al-Mansour was performing with exemplary reliability. They had used seven slings, and had had to replace the beam arm a week ago, but apart from that, nothing had gone wrong.

He watched the final shot loaded, the beam arm straining and creaking under the weight pulling at one end, and nodded to the gynour at the pin. The gynour yanked at his rope, the pin slipped out, and the arm rose, the leather sling scraping the rock along the channel, and up. The sling’s upper loop came away, and the projectile was launched. In the gathering darkness, he lost sight of it in an instant. He thought he could discern it at the uppermost point of its trajectory, but then it disappeared from view again. There was only the flat-sounding crump as it landed.

It did not matter. They had hurled many rocks at the city today, and he had seen the result: the collapse at the gates, the destruction of the final towers nearby, the immense faults showing in the walls themselves. Acre must soon be theirs.

‘Emir, the Sultan asks that you join him.’

Abu al-Fida nodded perfunctorily to the bowing messenger and called for his horse. If the Sultan wanted him, he had better hurry.

Sitting on his horse and cantering from the army of Hama all about the northern edge of the plain until he came to the Sultan’s pavilion, gave al-Fida a measure of just how enormous the force was that Sultan al-Ashraf had accumulated for this holy task. There were men from all over the Sultan’s lands, even a few from the wild Nubian plains west of Cairo. Terrifying men, with their black features and fierce glares.

He dropped from his horse at the entrance to the Sultan’s pavilion, passed his sword to the men standing guard, and bowed low just inside the doorway.

‘I am glad to see you here, Emir. Your catapult is serving us well.’

‘We are pleased to serve you.’

‘And the memory of your son.’

‘Of course.’ Abu al-Fida looked up at that. He would not bow to any man in his sorrow for the loss of Usmar.

He did not like this new Sultan. His father had been a hard man, determined and dangerous. This, his son, was already blooded in deceit and politics. He had killed off those whom he felt had threatened him. Even the mention of Usmar sounded to Abu al-Fida like a threat, as though his determination to avenge his son was to be doubted.

The Sultan eyed him narrowly. ‘Tomorrow, you will increase your rate of discharge at dawn.’

‘We do not have many more missiles,’ Abu al-Fida objected. ‘If we send them too speedily, we must exhaust our resources. We have been throwing them every day for over a month.’

‘I know, Emir. However, there will be little need for you to maintain your firing for too much longer.’

‘You will storm tomorrow?’

‘Early, yes. By nightfall we shall own the city.’

‘Then may I respectfully ask that I join the storming parties?’

Sultan al-Ashraf stared at him with a bemused expression. ‘You realise the danger? The Franks have many men still. The storming parties will suffer terrible losses.’

Abu al-Fida looked at him with a steady eye. ‘I do not care. If I can help win the wall, I will be content.’

Baldwin, Ivo and the others were at the gates again the next morning an hour before dawn. Edgar and Pietro stood near, while Baldwin and Ivo arranged the last of their vintaines into a group. Hob was still alive, but had a gash under his right eye from a spear. It was still bleeding, but he grinned with the other side of his face. ‘Looks good, eh, Master? The girls in London will all want a piece of me when they see this!’

‘I am sure that will make a pleasant change for you. It improves your looks greatly,’ Baldwin joked weakly.

Lucia had also come to the front.

‘I can help,’ she said. ‘We women will bring stones to fill in holes in the ramparts. We can throw stones, too.’

‘It’s dangerous.’

‘More dangerous than sitting at home and waiting for them to come? I’d prefer to die at the gate, near you, than alone.’

They were arrayed in the third row, Baldwin on the far left next to Ivo, and Edgar and Pietro on the right. Before them were some few Knights Hospitaller and two Templars, for it was clear that this was one of the weakest parts of the wall. During the night, women and others had slaved over the barricades, and now at the top of the rampart was a thick line of baskets, palliasses, a trolley and a cart, with stones and rubble filling in all the gaps.

‘They are coming!’

Baldwin glanced up at the man high on the Accursed Tower as he set his helmet on his head. The sentries atop had the best view of the enemy. Baldwin gripped his spear more tightly, and shifted his feet.

And then he heard it: the steady tramp of thousands upon thousands of feet, the brazen blaring of trumpets and the nightmare din of hundreds of kettledrums all being pounded at once.

‘’Ware the missiles!’ came a bellow, and suddenly the air was full of the hammer-blows of rocks as they slammed into the walls, splinters cracking off and hissing through the air. Baldwin saw one run along a man’s neck, cutting bone and sinew at the same time, and the man collapsed like a pole-axed ox. A rock touched the top of the inner parapet, bursting pieces of mortar and stone in all directions, then ploughed into a line of men hurrying to the front. All were crushed. A leg remained where a man had stood only a moment before.

Another struck the tower at full tilt, and Baldwin saw it wobble, a vast crack opening in the side, and as he stared, the tower seemed to rotate. Another hit would bring it down, he thought, but then there was a crash, and he found himself staring through his eye-slots, up at the blue sky overhead.

He was hot, and wanted to pull off his helmet and breathe clean air, but he couldn’t. There was a weight on him, and when he managed to lift his head and look, he saw a man lying over him. All around were more men, most crushed. Slivers of stone lay all about, and as Ivo came and hauled the body from him, Baldwin saw another projectile slam into the Accursed Tower.

It tilted, and as he was helped to his feet, the outer wall seemed to fold in upon itself, and the top of the tower began to move. A crease appeared, as if the tower was made of a mere fabric — and then it tumbled. He could see the sentries at the top, clinging to the parapets, as though that would save them, another man leaping, falling perhaps eighty feet onto the loose rubble.

More rocks: thundering into the walls near the tower, and then the arrows began to fall. Lancing down in great swathes, rattling like a child’s toy on the stones all about. But their impact, when they hit men, was deadly.

‘Get up!’ Ivo was bellowing at him. Baldwin stood, still dazed, and as he did so, an arrow struck the side of his helmet, and bounced away. ‘Shit!’

‘Aye, well, get used to it!’ Ivo snapped.

The line had been demolished by the impact of the rock. The remains of Ivo’s men were huddled in a group, Hob among them. A splinter had opened his groin, and his blood had washed the stones around him.

‘Look after these arses, Master,’ he managed, but then his eyes fixed on something far, far away that Baldwin could not see.

There were shrieks and sobbings all along the line of men, but then came a warning shout, and men were pointing out over the walls.

‘Form again!’ Baldwin yelled. ‘Here they come!’

They had waited since before dawn, and as he heard the first cries of the muezzin calling them to prayer, Abu al-Fida dropped to his knees and bent his head to the ground.

The process of the ritual was enough to calm his nerves. Any alarm at the thought of the battle was washed away, and he found himself viewing a scene in his mind’s eye of how Paradise must look. It would be blue and clean, always. There would never be any yellow colours, he decided. Yellow and ochre were the colours of sand, of heat, of thirst. Paradise would have no reminders of such things. He would be thirty-three once more, and he would recline on a couch inlaid with precious stones, while his house would be built of bricks of gold and silver. Servants would place foods before him that were so delicious, he would eat and never wish to stop.

But he would stop, when his darling Aisha came to him. His lovely wife would kiss him and respect him. And they would again know that perfect happiness from their love-making. And he would see his son once more.

It was a beautiful scene in his mind. A picture that a man might hold on to for the rest of his days.

A trumpet sounded, and then he was marching with his men. There was no time now for foolish reflections. This was a time for stern duty.

There were three hundred camels arrayed behind the army, and as he turned to his men and ordered them forward, the kettledrums began to pound. There were two per camel, and their rhythm was a solemn call to arms, to death. But today Abu al-Fida felt more alive than he had in the whole of the last year. Today would bring about the end of the Franks in his land. Once they were gone, he could die happily.

The trumpets and drums continued, and as he marched the hundreds of yards to the walls, he heard the first of the rocks humming and whooshing through the air. So many, they seemed to hit with one enormous concussion that threatened to shake the earth itself.

And then he recalled the scenes from that other siege so many years ago, and his heart quailed within him.

A man on his left disappeared, and glancing down his line, he saw others toppling, or screaming and shouting as arrows found them. So many arrows were falling, it was like walking in the rains and trying to avoid each drop. He set his face, breathing in deeply, thinking that if he was to be hit and killed, better to get the business done.

‘Run!’ he shouted.

They were at the first, outer walls now, and there, before them, was the ruin of the city gate, a rampart of rubble paved with Muslim bodies.