City of God

by S. J. A. Turney

  The ship to the right hit the land, and its ramp swung. It grazed the wall a couple of times, men shouting in alarm from both the wall top and the gantry itself.

  To the left the enemy were going to be trouble. That long bridge had slammed against the parapet and before it could be moved or anchored by either side, the first figure was attacking. The enemy had learned. Early on they had sent their fast-moving, lightly armed men to man the gantries, keeping the weight down. Now, given the new stability of the twin hulls, they had taken the chance of putting their best men on the mobile bridges.

  The knight who leaped from the bridge to the top of the next tower along with the grace of a cat wore a hauberk of chain, his head covered with a full helm, a surcoat emblazoned in blue, shield and heavy sword held ready.

  He landed steadily and swung at a spearman, who literally fell back to the ground to avoid the cut. The man regretted his leap in an instant as two Warings appeared as if from nowhere, axes flying, and turned the man into sliced meat, but he was only the first, and before he had stopped screaming, two more men had leaped from the bridge. The two newcomers managed to cut down a pair of spearmen before they were submerged beneath Byzantine soldiery.

  Arnau chewed his lip. They were pushing hard, but if it held like this, they stood a chance. He peered back to his right. The ship there was still in trouble. The sailors were doing their best to push forward despite the land lying in the way, their bridge swinging this way and that, unable to quite find purchase.

  He glanced down. The forces that had landed were increasing in number all the time, fed from that transport that had now grounded, and they fought hard. A group were already bringing up a hefty, hand-held battering ram, and several siege ladders had been brought ashore. Arnau was about to be caught up in the action.

  Somehow he felt it before it truly made itself known. Just a breath that brushed the wisps of hair poking out from his mail coif. Then a gust. He closed his eyes for a moment. The Devil had lent his strength to the Venetians.

  A moment later the wind began to blow from the north, across the water, the first gust strong enough that men paused, surprised, in the middle of the action to be certain. The Venetian ships, their sails down in the hope of this very thing, suddenly burst into life. The great canvas sheets billowed and filled and the ships all along the walls suddenly lurched forward, even those already grounded. Men fell over in the bridge on the ship to Arnau’s left. To his right that gantry that had failed to connect properly was suddenly slammed against the tower’s timber top. With a roar of defiance, and before Arnau could yell at him to stop, Sebastian had turned and run that way, lending his blade to the defence of that stretch of wall. Torn for a moment, Arnau almost went after him, only restraining himself with recollection of Ramon’s warning.

  The gust went in a heartbeat, and the ships rocked, but then came another, pushing the ships against the walls. This time, the Venetians were ready for it. As the ships lurched, men threw out ropes and grapples, catching the timbers of the parapet, looping their ropes around stays and masts and whatever came handy to prevent them sliding free.

  Pinned now to the walls, the gantries were solid and steady, and men rose all along them and rushed the towers to either side. Arnau felt his confidence slip as armoured knights threw themselves onto the tower tops and began to hack and cut and chop at the Byzantine defenders. Unless someone did something there was the distinct possibility that they would lose the towers, and if they did that…

  ‘Here they come,’ Ramon shouted, and Arnau ripped his attention from the endangered towers to either side, returning to his own peril.

  Below, the ram was now swinging back and forth, held by a dozen men as it thudded repeatedly against the timbers of the gate. The young Templar knew how the gate itself had been strengthened with extra bars and blockages. He also knew it could still take only so much punishment and, perhaps due to lack of foresight, it had been given less attention than the more major gates, this being little more than a postern.

  A ladder hit the wall top just in front of Arnau and he momentarily tucked his mace beneath the shoulder of his shield arm, lending his strength to the Byzantine spearman who was trying to push it back. With Arnau’s help, he managed to push the ladder a couple of feet from the wall, where another infantryman managed to get a Y-shaped pole behind it and push, grunting with effort. The ladder arced away, teetered for a moment, and then fell back among the men who had raised it, cries of panic arising from those men who had already been climbing it and even now were tumbling back to the ground, breaking bones.

  Arnau pulled his mace free again. Another ladder had come up nearby and the defenders were trying to heave it back. Ramon lent his own hand, but the Venetians and Franks were better prepared this time. Arrows and crossbow bolts came in a cloud in an attempt to clear the battlements before the ladder. Arnau watched several Byzantines fall backwards with cries of pain and alarm, shafts jutting from their bodies. The air filled with curses and sprays of blood. For just a moment, Arnau’s heart lurched as Ramon fell back with a shout, but the older knight recovered a moment later, straightening and turning so that he could see how the bolt had punched into his shield. It was almost in the centre and had probably grazed Ramon’s arm. The older knight discarded the shield, and Arnau noted that the bolt’s passage had snapped one of the leather grips inside, making it unwieldy.

  Men were at the battlements now, climbing up that ladder. Franks and Venetians both wrestled with the defenders, pushing to crest the parapet. Just as Arnau was contemplating rushing over to help, a thud announced a second ladder here. He leaped forward with two other Byzantines to shove the ladder away, and was met with another barrage of missiles. An arrow took the man to his right in the throat just below the jaw, throwing him backwards. The one to the left dropped like a stone, hiding behind the battlements as shafts flew past. Arnau pushed on alone, only realising his folly as an arrow struck him on the helmet above his right eye. The impact almost knocked him over, sending him staggering back, his hearing overcome with a ringing noise.

  As he righted himself slowly, several paces back on the wall, shaking his head, he realised his helmet was pressing against his brow, dented by the blow. Other men ran for the ladder, and Arnau felt his heart skip as he watched Hell unfold in the blink of an eye. One moment the tourmarch and two infantry were running forward as the archers below reloaded, reaching out to push the ladder. The next, all three had gone. The Venetian galley before the walls had found its mark with the catapult mounted on the deck. The stone had hit the parapet, wrecking the top rungs of the ladder, but smashing through the timbers of the newly raised battlements. The stone itself had struck the tourmarch, obliterating him in a heartbeat as the ragged pieces that remained rained down over the burned-out city inside the walls. The men to either side of him were flensed by a cloud of splinters of shredded timber, some a foot long. Arnau stared in horror at the pair as they hit the wall walk, still alive and moaning as the blood pumped from a hundred wounds around the wooden points that covered them like some dreadful parody of a hedge-pig.

  Arnau took time from the panic on the wall top to swap hands with his mace again, rip the misericorde from his belt and quickly dispatch the pair with as much care as possible to prevent the dreadful, lingering death they faced. Rather than put it away, he gripped the narrow dagger in his off hand now, the shield still on his arm, mace in his right.

  There was an odd stillness for a moment in the aftermath of the horror, broken suddenly as a man appeared atop the ladder and threw himself over the shattered parapet onto the wall walk.

  Arnau bellowed formless noises of rage and threw himself forward, mace raised. The man delivered a strong sword blow to the nearest Byzantine and looked around for his next target, eyes widening as they lit upon the red cross of the Templar before him, just before the mace came down and smashed into his kettle helmet, mangling the iron and driving it deep through cracking bone and into the Frank’s brain. He shook,
made an odd gurgling noise as red and grey matter leaked down his brow from his ruined cranium and he fell away to die, shuddering, on the wall.

  But another man was behind him now, and another just climbing over. A third ladder hit nearby, and arrows slithered through the air once more. Greek defenders fell back, peppered with shafts.

  Arnau glanced left and right, and his morale slipped once more. Both towers were in real trouble now. The one to his right was the scene of vicious fighting as men struggled to prevent a strong force of men widening their hold on the top. To the left, though, the news was worse. The Franks totally controlled the tower’s top. Small groups of colourful knights were already beginning to push outwards along the wall top, some of them naturally closing the gap between that breach and where Arnau fought desperately to hold ground above the gate. Worse still, men were pouring along the gantry over there, and then splitting up to either support the push along the wall one way or the other, or piling through the doorway and heading down into the tower, fighting for control of the floors below. His momentarily wandering gaze caught brief sight of Sebastian off to his right, fighting like a madman, still alive and spattered with blood.

  ‘The walls are falling,’ he bellowed in the direction of Ramon, who was engaged in single combat with a man in a blue and white surcoat, head enclosed in a full helmet. Ramon either failed to hear in the press or ignored him, intent on his own troubles.

  Suddenly, Octa was next to Arnau, nursing a wound on his left arm but hale as ever besides that. ‘You should leave. We cannot guarantee your safety now.’

  Arnau had to laugh at the absurdity that in this violent melting pot of Hell, the Waring still thought they were protecting the Templars. ‘You need every hand.’

  ‘We need the hand of God,’ snarled the big northerner, then pushed past him, roaring and swinging his massive axe. An unwary Venetian, looking smug as a Byzantine victim fell away, continued to look smug even as his head left his shoulders with the mighty swing of the sharp axe. The body crumpled, folded and fell forward as the head tumbled out over the wall to fall back among his comrades.

  Swallowing his dismay at the turn in the tide of the war, Arnau stepped back, allowing the Warings to take the lead here, then started to jog towards where Ramon was struggling to hold back a pair of men with swords and bright surcoats, and without a shield.

  There was a terrible sudden noise and Arnau felt his sword arm flower in a dozen points of pain, like Greek fire splashing across the flesh. He staggered, turned and stared. Another shot from the catapult had struck the parapet. Men standing where Arnau had been only moments before were flailing on the floor, pinned with a hundred hard timber spears torn from the walls and sent forth in a cloud. Octa was gone, the only sign of his erstwhile existence his axe rocking slowly to a halt on the floor. Only one of the Warings was visible, and he was staggering this way and that, clutching his head.

  Arnau, suddenly more than well aware of the pain in his arm, looked down.

  His mail shirt had probably saved the arm, but it had not prevented damage. The sharpest of the splinters flying here at the periphery of the explosion had forced their way between the links and drawn blood, which was even now beginning to stain the steel. He flexed his arm. It hurt like Hell itself, but it moved and nothing seemed torn or broken. Gritting his teeth, he knew he could still swing the mace, as long as he tried to ignore the pain. At least his rib had long since healed.

  ‘I shall acknowledge the Lord by his rightfulness; and I shall sing thanks and praise to the name of the highest Lord.’

  And he meant it. Had he not been moved for some reason to turn from his duty there and go to the aid of his friend, he would even now have been with Octa at the gates of Paradise.

  He lived.

  God had saved him. He must not throw away that gift. Gritting his teeth, he ran on, mace rising, fiery pain rippling all along his weapon arm. The man on the right facing Ramon had no inkling of danger until Arnau’s mace smashed into his shoulder, shattering bones and pulverising flesh. His shield fell away from useless fingers as he shrieked. He turned, but even had he had the strength in his agony to fight, he was not fast enough. Arnau’s mace flew again, taking the man full in the face mid-swing, ripping his jaw away, mashing his nose and pulping his eye. The dying, ruined man fell away, keening in an odd, eerie way from his broken face.

  Ramon, free of the trouble of having to hold off two men at once, swiftly and neatly dispatched the other with a swipe to the neck. As his victim fell away with a yelp, Arnau looked this way and that.

  ‘This stretch of wall is falling.’

  Ramon followed the direction of his gaze, nodding slowly. The next tower was now being used as an entry point for more and more men, and the other tower, which had been harder fought, was finally under Frankish control. Parties of enemy knights and men-at-arms were busy fighting their way along the wall top from both directions, heading towards this gate. Any time now they would meet, and anyone above this gate was doomed, utterly trapped, with men to both sides along the walls, and below outside, still climbing ladders. Indeed, even now more men were pouring up and over onto the gate top over the ruined parapet. The enemy had stopped loosing stones and arrows up here, for fear of hitting the Frankish knights who would now be able to secure the parapet without a great deal of difficulty.

  Suddenly, out of the chaos and through the mess left by the last terrible blow, Arnau spotted Sebastian staggering towards them, mace in hand, drenched with blood and clutching a limp arm.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he yelled across.

  Sebastian’s eyes danced wildly for a moment before settling on Arnau. He nodded slowly. ‘I think so. My arm. Broken, I think.’

  Arnau turned to see another man clutching a shoulder and limping. He pointed at the unknown Byzantine and yanked his imperial scroll from his belt pouch. ‘Get him back to the Blachernae and find a doctor for you both.’

  The soldier gratefully took the document and gestured for Sebastian to accompany him. The squire looked uncertainly at Arnau for a moment, and the Templar grinned. ‘Those were your own tears, Sebastian. Today’s not your day.’

  They descended the nearest staircase beside the gate, returning to the ground inside the city where Sebastian bade them farewell, staggering off with the limping infantryman, heading for the palace and relative safety. Men were running this way and that along the walls, shouting, others toppling from the parapet with alarming regularity. Small units of Warings were running in to lend fresh support, but the current focus seemed to be the sound of fraught combat from within the gatehouse.

  The walls looked lost, but that had happened once before and the tide had yet been turned by the Warings. As long as the gate below held, there was still hope. Ramon had clearly come to the same conclusion, for when their eyes met again, the older knight gestured into the archway of the gate with his chin. Arnau nodded and the two men hurried inside, pushing their way in amid a tangle of Byzantine defenders, making to support those holding the gate. He reached the portal with some difficulty, Ramon at the far side, weapons out and heaving their bulk against the wood to help hold it against the battering of the enemy. Already the timbers shook under repeated blows. Arnau cringed as the great wooden portal thudded into his shoulder, dust scattering down from the archway above in a choking cloud. He could hear the shouts outside; no words were audible – just sounds of anger and violence.

  With a heart-stopping crack, the shining steel curve of an axe blade appeared through the timbers mere inches from Arnau’s face. Splinters of wood flew in a dozen directions, one drawing blood from the young Templar’s nose as it passed. Even in the midst of this terrible fray, he found the time to say a quick prayer in thanks that only his nose had been blooded. Many a knight had lost an eye or more to the splinters of a lance, after all. A bloody nose was nothing.

  The door shook again. He looked up instinctively. The white surcoat, emblazoned with the crimson cross of the order, was visible on the
far side of the gatehouse. Ramon, a shining pure-white beacon amid the dun and grey of the local men-at-arms, shook his head with a grim expression. The gate was lost. It was only a matter of time.

  An arrow thrummed through one of the many small holes that had already been smashed through the gate, taking a swarthy spearman in the throat and hurling him back to the cobbles to cough and gurgle out his last moments. Arnau paid him no more heed than any of the other poor victims of this terrible fight. He had boundless sympathy for these people, yet even that had been stretched with the chaos, death and disaster all around them.

  ‘The gate is falling,’ his fellow knight shouted across the rattle of local tongues, somewhat unnecessarily. Anyone could see now that the gate was done for – certainly the young Templar with the bloody nose.

  Before they could do anything more there was a dreadful crack, and the huge, heavy beam that now constituted the last obstacle gave a little, the iron loops in which it sat coming away from the door with a metallic shriek. The entire gate scraped inwards by a foot, a gap opening in the middle. Arnau could see them outside now – hungry and afire with the desire to kill and maim. He had seen those looks in another such desperate defence, at Rourell half a decade ago. These men would not be satisfied with anything less than grand slaughter and total victory.

  Arnau lurched back as the gate groaned inwards, and a pike thrust through the gap tore through the surcoat at his shoulder, taking wisps of material with it and grating across the chain shirt beneath. This second close call drew another prayer of thanks from the young Templar even as he brought his mace down and smashed the head from the pike in the press. Beside him, a man in a gleaming scale shirt suddenly jerked upright, arms thrust into the air and weapons forgotten as a spear slammed into the gap beneath his arms, impaling organs and robbing him of life.