At last, in the middle watch of the night, he gave up. He pulled on his chemise and a leather jack, bound his sword-belt about his waist, and made his way into the night, waking Pietro so that the grumbling old man could relock the door after him. Baldwin left Uther behind. The dog would only trip men. It was too dangerous.
It was dark on the walls. Torches were lighted at the towers, but for the most part the men had no need of them. Their attention was focused on the fires outside the city. Baldwin could not count them. From shore to shore, all was a blaze of light: a dramatic sight. He leaned on the wall and stared out in despair. No city in the world could withstand an assault from so mighty an army.
‘Master Baldwin, could you not sleep?’
Baldwin found that Sir Otto de Grandison had walked up behind him. ‘You couldn’t sleep either?’
‘Not with their infernal din,’ the tall Swiss said. He was clad in a tunic and hosen, a cloak over his shoulders. ‘I think it will begin in the morning.’ He was peering over the parapets with an eye trained in gauging distance. ‘See that great device over there? That is to be brought a little closer, but I fear it is such a monster, it will never be within the range of our own catapults. A shame. A rock landing on that would give the city cause for cheer, eh?’
‘There are dozens of them,’ Baldwin commented, seeing machines at every point. ‘Where did they get them from?’
‘Those machines they call “The Black Oxen”, I am told. I think there could be eighty – perhaps more. It is those two I dislike the most. That one over there, aiming at the Templars, and this one at the point of the wall.’
Throughout the Muslim army, Baldwin could see the moving men. ‘Do none of them sleep?’
‘They will sleep in the morning, if need be. When their machines are prepared, they will leave the firing to the gynours. Until the walls are reduced, there is no point in attack.’
‘I see.’
‘You are feeling the belly wobble, eh? The heart is a little affrighted? Do not be alarmed. When you have seen as many sieges as I have, the sight of another host of men preparing to attack just stiffens the thews and sinews, gives you a sense of being alive!’ Sir Otto said with a grin.
Baldwin tried to return it, but his eyes slid back towards the lines of Muslim warriors. They looked terrifying in the flickering light of the fires, like demons preparing pits for fresh souls.
Baldwin woke shivering, wrapped in a cloak, sitting on the steps with his back to the St Nicholas Gate, under the little drawbridge that led to the door from the wall. He looked up blearily, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, gazing about him as he yawned prodigiously and stretched. He remembered sitting here sometime towards dawn, when the sight of the men in the distance had grown more familiar than terrifying. He was not sure he would be so sanguine when their missiles started flying towards him, however.
Smelling fresh bread, he saw a boy with a basket passing rations to the guards. Baldwin took a loaf when it was offered, and mounted the stairs again, pulling it apart and eating.
The lines had changed, he saw. Where before there had been a mass of moving men, now flags and pennons fluttered along the lines, with the massive frames of the trebuchets looming behind them. Wooden towers were rising, and other devices to aid the scaling of the walls. But there was a strange quiet: no shouts, no rattling of swords against shields, no drumbeats. Just that malevolent silence, with the grim lines of horses and men staring over the broad plains before the city.
Baldwin chewed his bread, looking out at the immense force. There was no sign of movement. Perhaps this was all a ruse to increase the tension of the besieged. If so, it was working. Along from him, two sentries stood sweating under their helmets; one had a nervous tic under his eye that he kept hitting with a crooked finger, as though knocking away a fly. The other did not blink. He just stood staring, as though disbelieving the proof of his own eyes.
A company of riders rode along before the lines, and Baldwin wondered who they might be. He thought, for a moment, that they were riding to the front of the lines and would soon give the call to charge, and the whole dread host would begin to move forward. In his mind’s eye he could see them, an implacable black tide that would come forward and roll over the walls, smothering everything and everyone in their path.
The riders continued at a canter to the sea at the far side, before turning round and riding back towards the middle, opposite the barbican. There, the soldiers of the Muslim horde parted to create a pathway, and the riders galloped down it, to take their station at the rear of the men.
A drum thundered. All of a sudden there was a great roar, and the entire army crouched to the ground.
‘They pray,’ the blue-eyed sentry said. ‘They think their poxy god will help them.’
The other hawked and spat. ‘They reckon He will help them if they give Him the numbers. I’ll tell you this: they’ve done well on that measure.’
‘Swyve ’em. Let ’em come here,’ the first said, patting his sword-hilt. He wore a heavy-bladed falchion in a black scabbard. ‘My blade has one edge for the one God, and I’ll see them in Hell before this city falls.’
‘You’ll get your moment of glory soon enough,’ the older man responded, but with a touch of sadness in his voice.
Baldwin watched the enemy’s religious devotions with a sense of urgency shackled in time. He wanted to go and find his men, but his legs were rooted to the spot. It was like being in a dream, in which time passed with extreme slowness.
The chanting rose and fell, and Baldwin suddenly felt his breast tingling. He bolted the last of his bread. A boy came past with a bucket of water, and Baldwin took a ladleful, drinking it quickly, then splashing a little over his face, giving it a rub, and when he looked out again, the drums were beating once more.
Then there came a single, enormous thud that Baldwin felt like a blow throughout his body. A bellowed order, and the men started to move, first over on the left, then the right, and finally the middle, a mass of men driven by hatred and fury. And a moment later, the drumming started again.
The beat seemed to echo in Baldwin’s head and chest and belly, a sullen pounding like the beat of death. And he heard another sound over the drumbeats: a squeaking and rattling, as of chains being tightened. Baldwin could see that the machines had already begun to move forward. There were the mantelets, just as he had heard, and the great catapults rolled behind them, mangonels with their lower, wide shapes squat and ugly, the tall trebuchets wobbling a little as the gynours pushed and shoved and heaved their massive equipment.
‘When will they be in range?’ Baldwin wondered aloud.
‘The archers will know,’ Hob said. He had appeared as if from nowhere, and now he stood scowling at the approaching men.
‘Will they come to the walls themselves?’ Baldwin wondered aloud.
‘Nay, Master,’ the older guard chuckled without humour. ‘They won’t want their men cut down before they’ve killed as many of us as they may. They’ll keep back as far as they can.’
Baldwin nodded, watching the advance of the machines. The sight was daunting: immense catapults and mangonels surrounded by the tiny figures of the gynours. Overnight, timbers had been hammered vertically into the ground, and now men hauled on ropes that were attached to pulleys on these piles, and the machines were pulled slowly forward, while over the cool morning air could be heard the cries urging the men on. It was like listening to shipmen as they drew up heavy canvas sails.
There was a shout, a loud double crash on a drum, and the plain fell silent.
The sudden absence of noise was like the moments sitting on a horse before a charge. The anticipation was gut-wrenching. Baldwin would remember it later as a series of memories, each distinct, but each fitting into a fast-encroaching terror.
First he was aware of the flapping and crackling of the flags all about. There was no sound from the men of the garrison, not even a rattle of mail or creak of the ropes over the catapults, and their sil
ence was itself intimidating. Baldwin had a feeling that he was a solitary man, that he alone stood before that immense horde. It was a shocking idea.
But then he saw the enemy with a fresh acuity.
About the massive catapults, Muslim soldiers hurried. Some hauling on the ropes that would drag down the huge arms against their counterweights, while others brought the ox-carts filled with rocks specially shaped for flight.
Baldwin began to pray.
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.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
After a day of bombardment, Baldwin found that his fear of the artillery weapons had reduced to a manageable anxiety. Despite the constant reverberations, it soon became clear that the weapons themselves were entirely random. The mood of the men of Acre was already changing: the haphazard nature of the enemy’s weapons had made them less intimidating. Instead of inspiring terror, the catapults had become a focus for hatred – symbols of the enemy’s cowardice, hurling rocks from the safety of their lines at the women and children of the city. It left the men determined to exercise an unrelenting ferocity when the
y closed with their foe at last.
Baldwin found that his fear increased greatly at night. When, in the darkness, that low thrumming sound came, he was convinced that the rocks were heading directly towards him. When he did hear the reports as they crashed into buildings, it was still some moments before he could bestir himself, the terrror was so intense.
He was with Hob and the men when the new panic began.
They had endured a day of the rocks, and were having a pot of wine and some bread with cheese in a tavern when Baldwin heard a new sound – a whistling, screaming sound – and he stared up at the awning overhead in alarm. They had all been lounging on the floor, but now he rose and hurried to the open window, eyes fixed skywards, still chewing.
‘What was that?’ he demanded. Even as he spoke, there was a sudden whoosh, and a burst of black smoke told of a fresh disaster. ‘Some new machine they have worked on?’
Hob was at his side, and he shook his head, muttering to himself.
‘What is it, Hob?’
‘Greek fire. They’ll use it to burn us to death, if they may.’
Baldwin frowned at him. ‘Greek fire? What’s that?’
‘They throw it in big clay pots, like the rocks, and when the pots land, the clay shatters and the fire is released over everything in its path.’
It sounded to Baldwin like a new work of the Devil, but later that same day he saw the missiles in the sky. Enormous pots, they were, with a trail of grey smoke flying from them. One burst in mid-air, and a gout of flame was vomited at the city, scorching the wall, but missing its target. Another, later in the day, detonated as the catapult arm was released. Baldwin saw it distinctly, the arm springing up, while a flash of fire was sprayed over the machine and the men standing about it. There was a thick, roiling black smoke that rose heavenwards, and strange figures could be seen, cavorting and whirling in the midst of the flames. It was only when one ran out, burning like a torch, that Baldwin realised it was a man. Men from the next catapult raced over to him, smothering him, trying to put out the flames, but it could have served no useful purpose.
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