‘Now shoot,’ yelled Robin. ‘Shoot. Reload, and shoot again.’ And with a leathery ripple of noise, the defenders fired as one man, and a hail of black quarrels sliced down and smacked into the crowd below. Dozens of Christians dropped out of the press before the Tower door, staggering back punctured by deep wounds in the neck, shoulders and head. One man in a red hood snarling up at the Jews on the battlements received a quarrel through the eye. He fell to his knees and was trampled by the mob. Some of our men followed Robin’s example and, after firing their crossbows, picked up stones from the piles by the battlements and hurled them down on the attackers with terrible force. Others methodically reloaded, hauling back the powerful cords with their leg and back muscles, loading a quarrel into the groove, leaning over the parapet and shooting into the mass of folk below again and again.
The slope was now littered with wounded and dying townsmen, and a few women, too, caught up in the fire of zealotry. More Christians surged over the earth and log causeway from the bailey, taking the places of their fallen neighbours, boiling around the little iron door and battering at it with axes, swords, even plain wooden staves. They had no chance. The black quarrels flew thick and fast, a swarm of death, punching into the unarmoured bodies of the people below and doing appalling slaughter. Robin, beside me, had regained his bow. He had an arrow nocked and was searching the crowd for a particular target. And I knew who it was. Richard Malbête, surrounded by men-at-arms, was urging the mob forward from the back of the press around the door with oaths and loud cries of ‘God wills it!’ I saw Robin mark him, pull back his bow cord the final couple of inches to his ear and loose. It flew straight and true but, at the last minute, the man-at-arms next to Malbête threw up his kite-shaped shield and caught the arrow, with a flat thump, an inch or two below the curved top edge. Robin cursed and pulled another arrow from his bag. I saw Malbête staring directly at us, his feral eyes glittering madly, and then he began to move away, squirming backwards through the crowd like an eel, keeping low. He gave us one parting glance of sheer hatred before he turned and disappeared back across the causeway into the bailey courtyard.
The fight below us was not over, but there were signs that the people’s ardour was fading under the terrible onslaught of quarrels and stones. A young man, thin and agile, his face burning with religious fervour, in desperation tried to climb the rough wooden exterior of the Tower using two thick knives, driving them into the wood to give him handholds. I leaned over the parapet and shot him in the throat with a bolt from my crossbow. It was the first shot I had loosed, and I watched with a numb feeling of regret as he tumbled away, rolling down the slope, choking on his own blood, dying and scrabbling at the thick black shaft that protruded from his neck.
And then suddenly it was over. The townspeople were streaming back over the causeway to the bailey, helping their wounded friends to limp along, but leaving more than two score of bodies scattered on the bloody grass of the mound below us. A few of the Jews loosed bolts at their retreating backs, but they missed, and Robin shouted: ‘Cease shooting, stop! Save your quarrels.’ And suddenly we were a gang of grinning, cheering men, panting and sweating, slapping each other on the back, shaking but alive and, for the moment, victorious.
The sound of hammering was relentless, a ceaseless pounding that seemed to attack directly a spot at the base of my skull. It began almost as soon as the last citizen had retreated into the bailey and continued for hours. Worse than the noise was the knowledge of what they were building: ladders. We had not defeated them in the bloody skirmish by the Tower’s gate; they would return, and in a much more business-like fashion.
The Jews were jubilant, however, and as one company was sent down to the ground floor to rest, replaced by a fresh group of warriors, there was much singing and joking, and men exaggerating the numbers they had personally slain. I went down with them, out of the sunlight, and took bread and cheese and a mug of ale from Ruth in the dim ground-floor hall. She was glowing with happiness, eyes sparkling as she passed around food to the hungry men.
I had an uncomfortable feeling that she thought the battle was over. But I could not bring myself to disillusion her: I knew we were in for a much harder fight before we could count ourselves the victors. And every Christian we killed would harden opinion against us when Sir John Marshal and his troops finally returned from wherever they had been.
Robin found me dozing against the wall of the hall; he had brought Reuben with him and three other Jews. They were all armed with swords, and two of the men I didn’t know carried shields. Reuben’s sword was unlike any I had ever seen before: it was slim, delicate even, and slightly curved. I stared at it wondering how a man could wield such a girlish weapon.
‘They will attack again soon,’ Robin said without any preamble. ‘And they will attack from all sides, with ladders.’ He stopped and looked speculatively at the three men with Reuben. ‘We may be able to hold them, but if they do get over the parapet, you Alan, with the help of Reuben and these good men, must repel them. Stay back from the fight, the five of you, and watch for breaches. Your job is to be a stopper, Alan, like a cork in a bottle, to fill any gap that may open in our defences. Clear?’
I nodded. Robin grinned at me. ‘Good. Alan, you are in command, and - remember - we’re all relying on you,’ he said with a grin and then he was gone. We clumped up the stairs again to the roof and took up a position in the centre of the open space. It was mid-afternoon, and even in the weak March sunlight it was pleasantly warm up there. We were fifteen paces from each of the four sides of the battlements; and I could see the logic of Robin’s decision to deploy us as he had. If the enemy got over the wall, we five could charge them in a few heartbeats and should be able to push them back. I pulled out my old battered sword and began to run a whetstone along the long blade. The shriek of stone on metal made a counterpoint to the hammering from the bailey, a sort of unearthly martial music. I found I was timing my strokes of the stone to fit in with the sound of the hammers. And then, all of a sudden, the hammering stopped.
I got up and walked over to the parapet, telling my little troop of ‘Stoppers’ to stay where they were. The courtyard of the bailey was once again filled with men, but this time there seemed to me many more men-at-arms in scarlet and sky blue in the throng and fewer townsmen. I could see ladders being passed hand to hand over the tops of people’s heads and then suddenly there was the blast of a trumpet and the whole mass of humanity began to move towards the Tower.
‘Here they come again,’ shouted somebody and, glancing to my left and right, I saw the grim faces of the Jewish defenders, knuckles white on the stocks of their crossbows, bracing their legs on the wooden floor as if to resist a physical impact. Once again Robin insisted that they did not shoot. ‘Wait till they begin the attack,’ he was yelling. ‘Wait till I give the signal. Wait.’
The attackers split into two groups and, ignoring the steep wooden steps up to the iron-bound gate that had defeated them before, two streams of men flowed around the base of the huge earth mound on which the Tower was built. They were almost out of effective crossbow range and, anyway, Robin insisted that we should save our quarrels for a proper attack. But they were within earshot. Some shouted curses at us as they passed by at the foot of the mound, others waved swords and spears and jeered, others grimly ignored us. They formed up in two loose bodies, to the west on the banks of the Ouse, and to the north on the flat piece of ground before the beginning of the town itself. Then a figure stepped out from the mass of men to the north, accompanied by a man-at-arms holding a white flag. It was Sir Richard Malbête. I saw Robin with his war bow in his left hand reaching for an arrow from the linen bag at his waist and Josce putting a hand on his arm to restrain him. ‘Let us hear what he has to say,’ said the old Jew in a low, reasonable tone. Robin frowned but let the arrow fall back into his bag.
‘Jews of York,’ shouted Malbête; his words were faint but quite audible. ‘Jews of York,’ he repeated. ‘Release the Christian children you hold captive, come down from the King’s Tower and we shall be merciful.’
There was a murmur of astonishment on the roof of the Tower. ‘What children?’ somebody shouted. ‘What are you talking about? Are you mad?’
‘Release the Christian children: give us back the two boys you have kidnapped; our two little blond Christian angels. Restore them to their mother unharmed and we shall be merciful,’ boomed Sir Richard.
Josce stepped up to the parapet. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. ‘We have no Christian children here. Whoever says that lies. There are no Christian children in this place. Why do you make war on us?’
Malbête turned his back on the Tower to face the crowd. A man-at-arms stepped forward protectively, raising his shield to cover the knight’s back. ‘They have murdered them,’ he shouted. ‘They have murdered our little angels. Shall we leave them in peace? Shall we walk away and leave these baby-killers, these unbelievers to work their foul sorcery?’
In unison, the crowd yelled back the negative. A trumpet blew, two blasts, and both enemy forces, to the east and the north, lumbered forward towards the Tower, ladders held high.
I saw little of the attack as I stood back to back with my Stoppers, our swords drawn, in the centre of the roof. But the noise was nearly deafening: the shouts of rage from the attackers, the screams of the wounded, the snap and hiss of a crossbow bolt being fired down on to the enemy, the occasional crash of sword on shield. All three companies of Jewish crossbowmen had been called to the roof to defend the Tower, but my Stoppers and I were aloof from the fray. A pair of parallel poles with perhaps one or two crossbars would appear at the top of the battlements, and immediately a mob of Jews would rush over to it and shoot, reload and shoot again down the length of the ladder, clearing it of attackers. Then someone would grasp the ladder and hurl it away from the walls. Another one would appear and the rush would begin again. Robin was shooting his war bow, but sparingly. I knew he had only brought two dozen arrows with him and, by the look of it, his arrow bag was already half-empty.
Despite the mad energy of our crossbowmen, there were many hundreds of enemies and they had dozens of ladders. The time gap between the appearance of a ladder-top and its rejection by the Jews began to grow and sometimes we could even see a head appear at the top of the ladder before it was transfixed by a hasty quarrel. And then, suddenly, as if in a dream, there were enemy spilling over the parapet to the west in a three heartbeats, there were half a dozen Christians on the roof; and more men were tumbling over the wall, picking themselves up, lifting their weapons ...
The Stoppers rushed forward as a tight group, myself in the lead, unsheathed sword in my right hand and poniard in my left. I cut hard at a man just as he was rising from the floor of the roof, hacking into his neck with my sword, and then whirled and plunged the poniard, underhand, into another man’s belly. I felt the hot spray of blood on my fist, twisted the foot-long blade and pulled it free. I blocked a cut at my head with my sword and punched forward again with my poniard, hearing a scream close to my ear as the blade licked into the flesh of a man’s upper leg. I was moving automatically, blocking and cutting, hacking and slashing, never still, always trying, as I had been taught, to think not about the move I was making at the time but about the counterstroke, the natural follow-on from a strike, and even sometimes the third and fourth plays as well.
I felt as if another man was controlling my body; the thousands of hours of training making my body move and react like some mechanical device. I had no thoughts in my head; I just cut, and parried and stabbed and dodged in the midst of my enemies. Blood spurted, men screamed, faces loomed before me and I smashed them away with my sword. I was aware that there were several enemy men-at-arms around me, behind me, but I left them for Reuben and the other Stoppers and cut my way forward, ever forward, hacking, grunting, heaving mail-clad men aside, heading straight for the ladder top which was still disgorging enemy men-at-arms. I nearly slipped on a slick of fresh blood, but recovered and pounded my sword hilt into a bearded face at the top of the ladder - he disappeared and I leaned out over the edge and cut down into the forearm of another man standing lower down clutching a rung. He screamed and fell away. An arrow whizzed past my face from the mound below and I jerked my head back from the ladder top. The blood was singing in my veins, I felt as if I was in the grip of a powerful apothecary’s drug; I could hear Reuben and the men behind me grunting and screaming as they fought enemies I had already wounded. But I ignored their struggles, trying to dislodge the ladder with my weapons still in my hands.
A man-at-arms already on the roof lunged suddenly towards me from the left, an axe in his bloodied hands, and I drove him away with two feints and then a flick-fast sword-lunge that opened his throat. As he dropped to his knees, gurgling and spewing blood, another head had appeared over the parapet, and I desperately turned and stabbed at his eyes with my dagger. He pulled back from the poniard thrust and swinging round I thumped my sword into the side of his helmeted head. I must have half-stunned him for he released his grip on the rung and dropped straight backwards like a stone, knocking the man below him off his precarious perch. As I peered over the battlements, I saw that the ladder was almost clear, save for a nervous man near the bottom, who was in no hurry to climb up to his death, and so I dropped my weapons at my feet and grabbing the wood, twisted the rungs at the top of the ladder, to the left and then right, until he jumped clear; then I hurled the wooden frame away from the walls with as much force as I could muster.
I gathered up my bloody blades and turned to see what had happened to my men. The roof was now thick with enemy dead - townsmen and men-at-arms, perhaps a dozen, lay entwined and still in their own gore, while few more men were twitching and groaning, flopping about in agony. One man-at-arms was on his knees, disarmed, badly wounded and being gradually hacked apart by two of the Jews, who were screaming in rage and holding their swords two-handed as they battered at his ripped chainmail, slicing into his naked hands as he tried to ward off their blows. The third Jew from my little troop of Stoppers was standing upright, swaying slightly, unbloodied sword by his side, a huge crimson stain in his side where an enemy sword had pierced him. He was dying on his feet, his eyes wide with fear as the dark, wet patch widened and grew until it soaked the whole side of his tunic. He dropped to his knees, then tipped over, face forward to the wooden roof, and lay still.