Templar's Acre

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

When Lucia would finally allow him to rise, Baldwin was fretting badly. Uther was a changed animal, and while his injuries had healed already, his heart would not. He ate his food, but when a new noise came, he shivered uncontrollably and tried to hide. If a man knocked at the door, the poor creature would slink away, to conceal himself in any dark hollow.

Baldwin at last managed to limp his way to the walls, leaving the little dog with Lucia. On the walls, with a crutch fashioned from a broken beam at a house, he stared out bleakly.

‘Master Baldwin, I’m glad to see you well,’ Hob said. ‘We were wondering when you would come back.’

‘Or whether you would,’ Nicholas Hunfrey added.

Baldwin had a feeling of great comradeship up here with them. Anselm and his brother were squatting near the wall playing dice. Nicholas Hunfrey had a half-cooked chicken leg that he was chewing with relish, and others stood taking their ease, idling the day away, while Hob stayed at the parapet, staring out at the Muslims. He ducked quickly as the wall shook, an eruption of thick black smoke rising from a fresh missile. Then he was up again, peering over at the enemy.

‘If others had their way, I wouldn’t be here now,’ Baldwin said. ‘What has been happening?’

‘They loose arrows at us,’ Nicholas said, ‘so we loose them back; they run at our walls, we throw rocks, oil, everything at them, and they die or run away. But they’re tunnelling, I don’t doubt. You can hear them at the rocks below, if you listen carefully.’

‘Will the walls survive this onslaught?’

‘The men who built this city knew what they were doing,’ Hob said. He yawned.

‘How are the men?’ Baldwin asked, gazing at them all.

‘We survive. But we need to keep them busy.’

‘It’s this waiting that drains a man,’ Baldwin said. ‘If we could get out there and fight, it would be better. We should plan more offensives, like the Templars’ attack.’

‘Perhaps,’ Hob said heavily, ‘but we all saw the after-effects of that. The leader over there by the catapult had the Templar bodies brought round in front of the walls where we could see them, and had them beheaded. They were used to decorate the Templar mounts they captured, and were led around the front of their army to the Sultan. We could see the horses being presented to the Sultan himself. We don’t need more attacks like that.’

‘No,’ Baldwin agreed. He clenched a fist and rested it on the parapet before him. ‘I just want to know when we are likely to fight! I want to get at the bastards.’

‘A siege can last a long time.’

‘I once heard that it took a whole year to surrender to King Richard, a hundred years ago,’ Baldwin said.

‘God forbid!’ Hob winced.

* * *

Buscarel was still very weak when he walked out of the Temple. He looked at the ships in the harbour and leaned on a wall while a bout of shivering overwhelmed him. His condition was not from any injury, but a result of the two fevers he had suffered. Leaving the undercroft, he felt as weak as a kitten, and the play of the sun on his face was as delicious as the caress of a beautiful woman.

A rock crashed into the buildings behind him, and he turned with a start. A house only a block or two up from the Venetian quarter suddenly crumbled before his eyes, the outer wall dissolving into dried mud and masonry. It woke him from his reverie. If the missiles could reach him here, then surely his own house would be in danger.

Hobbling, he made his way up into the Genoese quarter, until he came to his own road, to his own house. He must have come the wrong way, he told himself. This wasn’t his road. This wasn’t where his house had stood.

But it was.

There was nothing left. Where once there had been a tall, strong property, with space for his family, now there was a void, one of many, in which masonry and timbers lay in haphazard piles. He stepped forward, two, three paces, and stood staring in disbelief. His throat swelled; he tried to swallow, but the lump was too big. There was a vast emptiness within him, as if someone had reached in and plucked out his heart.

‘Cecilia,’ he managed hoarsely. Where was she? Where was his family?

‘Cecilia?’ he shouted, and then he screamed her name, again and again, his voice swallowed up in the cacophony of the battle.