Authors: Tom Harper
When Godfrey and his knights were in place, and the priests had mumbled a quick prayer, we took up the strain on the hawsers fixed to the base of the tower. My hands
were still too sore to grasp it; I knotted the rope around my chest, harnessing myself to the beast behind and making myself its slave.
As heavy as the ram had been, this was worse. The tower stood almost ten times taller, so that every time we hauled I felt that we might pull the entire edifice crashing down on us. The halter around me dug into my chest, and there was no roof over my head to protect me from the sun or the rain of missiles. Whereas the previous day we had at least been able to make the first part of our approach in safety, this time we had no relief. The advantage of surprise we had gained two nights earlier was gone, and no sooner had the tower started to stagger forward than a volley of stones rose up from behind the walls. They spun slowly in the air, seeming to float so gently that I thought they might never land. And then suddenly they were almost upon us, dropping down with ravenous speed, rushing towards us. Watching in horror, I could see that these were not the pebbles and rocks that had harried us the day before, but full-sized boulders, heavy as a man, flung from mangonels. The defenders must have moved them up in the night – and ranged them with deadly accuracy. All three of the missiles in that first wave struck within a dozen yards of the tower, tearing into the lines of men who drew it. One struck a man’s head and pulped it like a melon; another toppled five men in a row before it came to rest. Men ran to move the boulder out of the path of the tower, while the bodies of the fallen were left to be crushed under its wheels.
Now it became a war among giants, a
titanomachia
between the tower stumbling forward like a blinded Cyclops, and the invisible arms behind the walls, which hurled out boulders as children skip stones on a pond. From our own lines, the Franks’ mangonels answered with fire of their own. I was merely a beetle scuttling about at their feet, while flights of rocks raced across the sky above. Death was sudden and everpresent. Several stones struck glancing blows on the sides of the tower, ripping away the skin. Another actually passed clear through one of these holes, plucked one of the knights inside from his perch and dashed him to the ground. But it was we on the ground who suffered most – crushed, shattered, torn apart or simply bowled over. Some of the soldiers who followed tried to help us: they brought up wooden hurdles covered with wicker and skins and held them in front of us. But those were designed to stop arrows, not rocks; they added nothing but debris to the battle. The soldiers’ bodies made better shields.
All I could do was keep my head down and pray for mercy. Even if I could have picked out the boulders flying towards me, I could not have done anything to avoid them. The taut rope that tied me to the tower also tied me to whatever fate God granted me. Perhaps I grew numb to the fear, or perhaps the mere fact of survival when so many around me were dying gave me courage, but gradually – against all reason – it seemed that the bombardment was lessening. I could still hear boulders hurtling through the air – could even hear the snap of the
mangonels behind the walls now – but they did not seem to be striking us with such frequency or ferocity.
I risked a glance up. The bombardment still went on, but now the missiles sailed over our heads – almost over the tower itself. We had come through the onslaught, and were now so close to the walls that the missiles could not strike us. The Fatimids had not moved their catapaults to adjust for the change: perhaps they could not.
A ragged cheer went up from our ranks – and died as swiftly. Our progress had not made us safe, merely exposed us to new danger. Now we were in range of the walls, and the defenders unleashed a storm of small stones and arrows against us. They filled the air like locusts, preying on the men who strained to pull the tower forward. Our auxiliaries ran forward with the hurdles again and tried to shield us, though they could not guard every man. More useful to us was the tower. It stood a good six feet higher than the walls, offering the men on its top storey a commanding platform from which they could rake the ramparts with their arrows.
A horn sounded from its height. ‘Into the breach!’ bellowed Grimbauld. An arrow stuck from his shoulder, another from his leg, but they had not felled him. While those of us on the ropes strained to pull the tower closer, a tide of pilgrims swept around us and poured through the gap in the outer wall that the ram had made the day before. I could see its charred remains, still breathing wisps of smoke, beneath the inner walls. The pilgrims swarmed over it with hatchets and axes, pulling apart the burned
wood and scattering the ashes. I heard several screams of pain as men grabbed pieces where the fire had not yet cooled – and more screams as the Fatimids on the wall tipped down stones and boiling water. At least the water must have doused what remained of the fire. The wreckage of the ram was pulled free, and the way lay open for the tower.
‘This is it,’ said Sigurd next to me. He had not bound himself to the tower as I had; he carried his rope over his shoulder, his vast arms bulging with the strain. His shield and his axe were slung over his back, ready for the moment when we could put down this terrible burden. ‘Stay beside me.’
I nodded, unable to speak. We had reached the place where the incline steepened, where the ram had run away from us the day before, and I wondered how we would ever get the tower down it. If we let it go here, it would surely either topple over or career into the walls and shatter. But once again, the land had changed. A company of masons had come out in the night with picks and hammers to level the path, which now led gently down to the breach in the outer wall. We rolled the tower down the incline. A firestorm of arrows, balls of blazing pitch, hammers wrapped in burning rags and jars of flaming oil engulfed it, but the great beast Magog rolled on impervious as they slid or bounced off the skins that covered it. It passed through the breach, and came to rest at last in the space between the walls, a few yards from the inner rampart. For an instant, an awestruck silence gripped the
battlefield as the men on the tower and the men on the walls stared at each other, almost face to face.
‘
Deus vult!
’
The silence broke; the battle resumed. With the tower so close to the walls we could no longer pull it from the front, only get behind it and heave. But having been near the vanguard, I could not now get around the scrum of men who surrounded the tower. For a terrible moment, I found myself exposed in that lethal enclosure. A firm hand grabbed me and tried to pull me away – but I stayed rooted to the spot.
‘
For Christ’ sake, let go of that rope
.’
I still had the hawser tied around my waist. Fumbling, I drew my sword and managed to slice through the strands. Before I had finished, two hands had reached in and ripped the remainder apart.
‘
Get down
.’
The same hands pushed me to the ground, knocking the breath out of me. Aelfric crouched beside me, covering me while I twisted my shield around and pulled it off my back. Only when I had it in place did I have a chance to look around.
‘Where’s Sigurd?’
He jerked his head to his right. Peering out from behind my shield, I saw Sigurd on one knee with his shield raised, while Thomas squatted behind him and hurled stones at the battlements with a sling he had torn from a dead man’s tunic. To my left, the tower still crawled forward. Now that I saw it from a distance I could see it had suffered terrible
punishment in the approach. Several of the wicker panels had been torn off, and one of its corner-posts actually seemed to have splintered in two, so that the upper levels sagged alarmingly. Miraculously – there was no other word – the golden cross at its peak remained unharmed, gleaming in the sun that now shone almost directly above.
Inch by inch, hair’s breadth by hair’s breadth, it ground forward. Up on the walls, the defence seemed to waver. Fewer arrows filled the air: I thought perhaps the Fatimids had lost heart at the sight of our progress. But they had prepared for this moment. They seemed to be lifting some massive object up over the battlements, hauling it out on pulleys that hung from the adjacent towers. At first I could not see what it was; then, as it swung free of the ramparts, it became clear. It was a long tree-trunk, suspended by chains and bristling with iron. Swords and knives, sickles and spikes, nails and hooks all sprouted from its sides like branches, while the wood itself was covered in a black coat of oily slime. It fell to the ground as the men above let go the chains, bounced once, then slid down the slope until its iron claws dug into the front of the siege tower. In an instant, a volley of burning arrows flew into it. A wall of flame rose up in front of the tower, engulfing it, and I groaned. No one could survive that inferno. Nor could they extinguish it with water, for when a nearby knight tried to throw some on the fire it merely exploded back at him in a massive gout of flame. This was a diabolic fire that could turn even opposing elements to its purpose. At the top of the tower I could see Duke Godfrey and his
knights frantically pulling open the walls and looking down in terror, while at the bottom the men inside found they could not get out through the crowd of men who were still trying in vain to push the tower forward.
But Godfrey was not trying to escape. Instead, so far as I could see through the smoke, his men were manhandling some heavy object to the opening they had made in the side of the tower. Had they not noticed that this was a fire that could not be drowned?
A torrent of water cascaded down the front of the tower and the barrel tumbled after it, one more morsel for the fire. I closed my eyes. There was a hiss, as if all the waters of the earth boiled, and a wall of heat blasted over me. It seared my mouth, my hands, even my closed eyes. And yet – I lived. My hair had not caught fire, nor was my skin peeled away. I opened my eyes and peered out through my fingers. Incredibly, though the spiked tree-trunk still burned, it had not erupted into the pillar of flame I had expected. Nor had the fire taken hold of the siege tower. And the hot, moist air was saturated with the tart smell of vinegar.
The men on the tower pushed another barrel to the edge of the platform and tipped it over. Now that the flames were lower it did not evaporate in an instant but splashed around the wood. Some of it settled in a small pool in a hollow in the gound. Without thinking, I ran there and knelt beside it, scooping up the vinegar into my mouth before it could melt into the earth. It burned my tongue like acid, but it was the first moisture I had tasted
in hours. Meanwhile, a team of Franks picked up the chain that had held the tree-trunk and dragged it away. The spikes and blades ploughed sharp furrows in the ground.
Now the battle took on a new, more dreadful intensity. The Fatimids had tried to break the tower with rocks and burn it with fire, and none of it had worked. Now they had nothing to rely on but their desperation. It might still be enough: they knew what vengeance the Franks would take on them in defeat, and they fought as only condemned men can. I thought of Bilal, and – even in the fury of battle – hoped he was not on those walls.
The siege tower was so close that the men at the top could almost stab their enemies with their spears, but they were still too far out to bridge the gap. The Fatimids redoubled their efforts, hurling fire against the tower even as they bombarded those of us on the ground with arrows, while we tried to shield ourselves from the onslaught and retaliate in kind to force them back off the rampart. With no more firepots to hurl, they fashioned crude balls of hair and wax, doused them in oil and set them alight. Most of them slid off the slick hides that dressed the tower and bounced down into the crowd at its base. One fell on the back of my hand, scorching a livid blister into the skin; I screamed, but did not drop my sword. I was lucky: some men found that the fire fell into the folds of their tabards or lodged in the gap between helmet and hauberk, setting them ablaze.
There were fewer arrows falling on us now, but more stones. One struck my shield and deflected harmlessly
away; when I glanced at it, I saw in surprise that it had the crisp edges and smooth face of a brick. In their desperation, the Fatimids seemed to be tearing down the very walls that defended them in order to hurl them at us. But we were hardly better off: we could do little more than pick up the pieces and hurl them back. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Thomas whirling his sling at the battlements. I wished he would take cover, for he made a tempting target.
Another rock struck me, this time on my shoulder, and my arm went numb. I could not stay out there. To my left, a hole gaped in the side of the tower where one of the panels had been torn off. Shouting over my shoulder to Aelfric, I ran to it, ducked underneath the splintered lintel and stepped inside. Instantly I was in darkness – a sweaty, heaving crush of men all pushing blindly forward, trying to drive the tower those precious final feet to the wall. Unthinkingly, I threw myself into the effort. Other men piled in behind me, but through the open hole in the side I could see the battle still raging. For all the Fatimids’ frantic defence, the tide seemed to be turning against them. The ditch between the walls was filling with men, and though the Fatimids killed many, they could not turn back the inexorable swell. Ladders came forward and were lifted to the battlements; the defenders were quick to shatter their rungs with rocks before any man could climb them, but the Franks had learned their lesson from the first assault and had more in reserve. In perhaps the most unnatural sight of all that day, I saw a column of priests,
all dressed in white, marching forward with a ladder held above their heads as they sang the words of the psalm:
You will not fear the terror of the night,
or the arrow that flies by day,
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
or the destruction that wastes it at noon.
Not one of them lived to see the ladder touch the wall.