The Alchemist's Revenge

by Martin Archer

  The seven archers who remained behind were there in case the company’s regular position on the wall and its adjacent camp needed to be defended whilst most of its men were gone. Wherever possible, each of the seven was to be armed with one of the Company’s bladed pikes in addition to their longbows. Henry was charged with making sure they had them.

  Two nights later the captain, lieutenant, and first sergeant of every galley company on the wall was required to prove he knew exactly where to lead his company’s men in the event the states’ forces mutinied—the three men, without the men of their company, were required to double time along the wall and find their company’s assigned position and its place holders in the dark.

  Even my father did his part, although he neither liked my order nor understood it—he and his crew of carpenters began taking apart the catapults they had painstakingly built and lined up on either side of the Farmers Gate in the outer wall, and moving them to similar positions inside the city’s inner wall.

  ****** Commander George Courtenay

  I spent most of the days following the meeting at the Black Swan making sure Aron’s ribaldis were ready to be used. He had completed eleven of them and was working on number twelve. All but two involved hardwood logs he and his helpers had painstakingly hollowed out to hold the lightning powder and rocks, and then wrapped tightly with ropes to prevent them from coming apart when the lightning occurred.

  What Aron and his helpers had not finished doing was getting them to where they were needed—on to wagons that the men assigned to them could pull along the top the inner defensive wall. The ribaldis needed to be placed on wagons that were atop the wall so they could be pulled into positions overlooking the wall gate that the men of the Greek army thought Adam and his fellow traitors would be opening for them.

  Unlike horses which could be blindfolded and led up the narrow stone stairs that stood near the gate and ran up to the top of the wall, it turned out to be no small task to get a wagon up on to the city’s inner wall in a location from which our men could drag it along the wall to its assigned place above the gate.

  The problem was solved by bringing in Harold and a hundred or so of the Company’s sailors from the harbour. I naively assumed they would know how to set up and use pulleys and tackles to hoist the wagons and ribaldis up on to the wall so we could move them into place the night before the Greeks’ dawn attack. I was wrong. Hoisting wagons and ribaldis, I learned, was not the same as hoisting sails.

  Harold and his sailors ended up getting their job completed the old-fashioned way—the wheels were taken off the wagons and everything was carried up the nearest stairs by a great mob of sailors, and then reassembled; the ribaldis were then carried up the stairs and placed on the wagons by a large number of sweating and swearing sailor men using a net the sailors made of many ropes to hold them from bumping on the stone steps.

  At the same time, whilst all that was going on, others of the sailors carried up the rocks that would be packed in the tubes and around them to contain the wood fragments if the tubes came apart despite the lines that were wrapped around them to hold them together.

  And, of course, there were the inevitable mistakes that had to be corrected. The biggest of which was a ribaldi that was carefully placed and prepared only to discover that the opening was pointing in the wrong direction and the wagon on which the ribaldi was mounted could not be turned around because the roadway on top of the wall was too narrow.

  Everything was done several miles from inner gate so that the Greek spies in the city would not associate the wagons with the gate. I personally walked along the top of the wall with Harold to make sure the sailors would be able to pull the wagons from their initial locations on top of the wall to their positions above the gate and on either side of it.

  The sailors needed three full days to get the wagons up on to the wall and loaded with the ribaldis to Aron’s satisfaction. It was interesting to listen to the sailors as they worked. It was likely that never before have so many foul oaths and profane words been heard in one place, probably because the sailors did not know why they were doing it and thought it was useless busywork whose only purpose was to keep them occupied and out of trouble.

  It probably would have been even worse if they had known they would be staying to help pull the wagons to their assigned places on the inner wall. On the other hand there was tavern at the bottom of the steps the sailors had to use so they happy to be working where they were working even though they had to walk back to the harbour at night to eat and sleep.

  Somewhere along the way I decided that placing a couple of the ribaldis over the gate in the outer wall might be helpful as well—with their open ends pointing toward the states’ forces encampment instead of the Greek camp. So Harold and I walked to the outer gate to see if it might be possible to pull them there. We determined that it was if some of the stones in the wall were dug out moved. Accordingly, moving two of them to the outer gate was added to the plan.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Battle preparations.

  Adam continued to lead the process of gulling the Greeks. In the middle of Friday afternoon he led what was left of my guard of horse archers in a march through the entire states’ forces enclosure from the outer gate to the inner gate. With them were an entire galley company of foot archers and their Greek-gobbling auxiliaries. I rode wearing a chosen man’s tunic once again.

  Our constantly repeated message was a simple warning.

  “Get out. Leave immediately to get inside the city’s inner wall. Run for your lives. Hurry. The gate in the outer wall has been nobbled and the Greeks will be here in force before the sun comes up in the morning.

  “The archers are falling back to the city’s interior wall because they know they cannot hold the outer wall now that the gate is broken. That is why they have been moving their catapults back for the last several days.

  “You must relocate immediately to the square just south of the central market. There is a place to camp and food and water there. Hurry. Run. Save yourselves before it is too late.”

  ******

  Chaos, confusion, anger, and tearful hysteria reigned as we spread out into a skirmish line and moved through the states forces encampment sounding the warning that “the Greeks are coming.” The result was pandemonium. Tents were quickly struck and desperate men and women began gathering up their possessions. Panic-stricken people and their carts and wagons were soon hurrying up the road towards the inner gate.

  Within minutes a steady stream of distressed and sweating states’ soldiers and their camp followers and sutlers began pouring into the city through the gate in the inner wall. The Greek spies would report that Adam and his mates had kept their word; they were doing what they had been bribed to do.

  Only a handful of guards and a single company of horse archers remained on the ground at the outer gate. Everyone else was on the wall watching the states’ force abandon their camp. It was very hot in the merciless late afternoon sun so the horse archers dismounted and their horses were kept tight against the wall to stay in its shade. The men in the galley companies on the wall above them sought shade wherever they could find it and argued over the choicest spots.

  My guard of horse archers and I turned to ride back to the outer gate after we had gotten about halfway through the camp of the states’ forces. The foot archers from the galley, the men many of us were beginning to refer to as Marines, continued towards the inner gate spreading the word. They would take up new positions on the other side of the inner gate along with the Marines from three other galley companies.

  We were not the only ones making changes. The Greek encampment in front of the wall had been a beehive of activity all day long despite the heat. It was clear to everyone that something big was about to happen.

  Indeed, several warnings to that effect came from the Citadel late Friday afternoon. Both Eric and my father had ridden separately to the Commandery to tell me the Empress’s spies had reported that
the Greeks were preparing for a major attack as early as the next morning.

  Eric and my father also reported that the city had been restless all day with several flare-ups of looting that the Empress’s guards had been hard-pressed to put down. And they were both particularly concerned because the states’ forces appeared to be abandoning their camp along the roadway between the gates and retreating into the city.

  “The city is alive with rumours,” Eric said to me.

  “Yes, I know the states’ forces are leaving their camp in a panic and moving into the city. I cannot say that I blame them. They heard a rumour that the archers were pulling back because the drawbridge over the outer moat cannot be lifted and the gate in the outer wall cannot be fully closed.

  “Unfortunately, the rumour is true. Both the bridge and the gate of the outer wall have been nobbled, and so has the drawbridge over the inner moat. It was probably an inside job when the states’ forces were passing through the gate on a sally and we were not watching.”

  My saying that the gate in the outer wall and both of the moat bridges had been nobbled and could not be repaired appeared to shock them both.

  “Our men are working to repair the gate in the outer wall as we speak. If we cannot repair it, I will almost certainly have to begin moving some of my archers tonight to fill whatever defensive gaps are left in the inner wall by the departure of the states’ men.”

  “What about the moat?” my father asked. “Can you raise the moat bridge or tear it down in order to keep the Greeks away from the gate?”

  “Unfortunately the windlass used to raise the bridge was also badly damaged.”

  “Are you sure you can keep the Greeks out of the city?” Eric asked anxiously. “Or is it time for me to take the Empress and her family to safety out of the city? The chain across the Golden Horn is keeping the Venetians out of the rivers. We could get the family out on one the Company galleys you have in the rivers.”

  “Oh, I do not think it necessary for the Empress and her family to run,” I replied, “at least, not yet. Although you are right to be concerned; we may have to retreat to the inner wall if we have to send so many archers to replace the states’ forces that we do not have enough archers to hold the outer wall.”

  It was all lies, of course, both about the gate and the bridge over the moat being irretrievably nobbled, and also about the need to send archers to replace the states’ forces who had been panicked by the situation into fleeing. But they were useful lies because they explained why our archers would be moving to new positions as soon as it got dark.

  I did not tell them the real reason the archers were moving to new positions because I had begun to get suspicious of Eric—and I did not know why.

  ******

  I stood with Nicholas at an archer slit above the outer gate whilst we waited for total darkness to fall on Friday. It seemed to take forever. When it finally did arrive, I stood in the moonlight and gave the “quietly take up position number five” order. It was immediately passed along the wall from man to man such that it quickly reached every captain. The galley companies on the wall picked up their arrow bales and water skins and began hurrying to their mutiny positions overlooking the states forces’ camp.

  Many people had abandoned the states’ camp, but there were still a surprising number of people in it when darkness fell. Whether they would still be there when the Greeks arrived in a few hours was a good question. An even better question was whether any of them would resist and, thus, how long it would take the Greek army to reach the inner gate.

  I had made one last effort to save them about an hour before sundown.

  “Nicholas, please find Captain Fiennes and ask him to lead his men on another swing through the states’ camp even though it is dark. Give him my compliments and tell him that I would like him to ride through the camp all the way to inner gate, and then ride back here whilst once again repeating the order to leave.

  “I will wait for him here. Oh yes, and please tell Captain Fiennes his men that they are to suggest to everyone they meet that only traitors will be remaining behind to greet the Greeks—and they will be dealt with most severely by the Empress’s guards before the Greeks arrive. Maybe that will get them to move.” I knew that many of the remainers did not gobble the crusader French that some people are now calling English. But some of them did and they would tell the others.

  Henry and Richard were not with me when, about two hours later, I gave the order for the galley companies on the wall to begin moving quietly along the top of the wall to their mutiny positions. Henry was on the interior wall near the inner gate awaiting the arrival of the galley company whose archers would be on that wall and closest to the gate; Richard was across the way in a similar location on the interior wall on the other side of the road.

  All the companies were soon moving along the wall to their new positions. They came past me one after another. As soon as they arrived at their assigned position, Richard and Henry would move up the wall to the next position to wait for the next company to arrive. In that way they would insure that each of the companies was in its proper place, and also work their way back along the wall until they ended up atop the gate through which the Greeks would pour in a few hours when we threw it open.

  I would not be with them—as soon as the outer gate was up and secured, I intended to mount a horse and gallop to the inner gate to take command there.

  The moonlight was too weak for me to actually see the Greek army in the camp on the other side of the moat. But I could periodically hear noises in the distance as the Greek army tried to assemble in the moonlit darkness.

  But would they actually try to rush into the states’ encampment through the nobbled gate and move towards the inner gate in force?

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chaos and treachery.

  It was the middle of a clear Friday night with a partial moon when Henry, Richard, and I shook hands, wished each other good luck, and went off to carry out our respective assignments. Henry and Richard went off to once again make sure the archers who had moved on to the interior walls were properly placed, and I went down the stone stairs with a couple of burly archers to crank the gate up far enough such that a man could walk under it without hitting his head.

  Nicholas and a couple of sailors who were good at tying knots followed me down the stairs. The three of them would crawl on their bellies under the gate as soon as it was high enough and tie ropes to the drawbridge over the moat so it could be raised up without using the windlass that was inside the wall next to the gate—by men pulling on the ropes from atop the wall.

  Somewhat similarly, as soon as I shouted up to the men on the wall that the gate had been raised high enough, they would tie it in its raised position with rope lines. Then my helpers and I would remove the chain and crank handle. Once that was done, the gate could be lowered by cutting the lines that were holding it up—but it would not be able to be raised back up once the lines were cut and it was lowered.

  My plan, or perhaps I should say my hope, was that a large part of the Greek army would rush through the raised outer gate into states’ camp, and then run several miles through it to get to the inner gate which they expected to find open—and there they would be forced to stop because it would not be open.

  Once the Greeks were inside the states’ camp, the draw bridge over the outer moat would be pulled up using the lines Nicholas and his sailors attached, and the gate in the outer wall would be closed by cutting the lines that were holding it up. The gate would then drop to the ground and be closed with no way to open it.

  If either of those two things happened the invaders would be unable to get back to their own camp—they would be trapped inside the states’ camp with archers all along the walls that surrounded them.

  To make sure that the Greeks did not get back to their camp, there would be more than a thousand archers on each side of the long narrow roadway. They were heavily concentrated near the gate in the city’s inn
er defensive wall. That was where the Greeks would mass whilst waiting for the inner gate to be opened by Adam and the archers posing as his fellow traitors.

  It was a fine plan since every inch of the states’ encampment could be reached from atop one of the walls that surrounded it. My two lieutenant commanders and I had spent several days wondering how long our plan would last after the first Greek soldier came through the outer gate and entered the encampment of the states’ forces.

  “About ten minutes,” was Henry’s cynical estimate.

  ****** Commander George Courtenay

  The archers assigned to the section of the outer wall which included the gate were waiting on the parapet behind me as I cautiously made my way down the stone steps in the moonlit darkness. The sailors with them were in the process of throwing the bridge-lifting ropes down to Nicholas and his sailors, and getting other ropes ready to tie the gate in place as soon as it was raised.

  There was no shortage of ropes on the wall for the sailors to toss and tie. Harold had sent several wagon loads of them to us from the stores of the galleys that had been pulled ashore. Usually the ropes were used to raise and lower sails and anchors. Using them to hoist wagons to the top of the wall may have been difficult for our sailors, but not tying knots that would not slip. Knots were something every sailor knew how to tie.

  A few moments later I was standing next to the gate and watching in the faint moonlight as the gate was partially raised and Nicholas and his knot-tying sailors slipped out under it to tie ropes to the drawbridge over the moat. The gate was soon cranked up far enough so the Greeks could get in. A few minutes later Nicholas and his sailors ran back through the gate and headed up the stairs to the top of the wall. They had tied overly long ropes to the draw bridge that could be gathered in and used to pull it up.