In many ways the siege seemed less of a real war, than some kind of a laborious game with scores to tally and acts of prowess to perform.
Our task had been to cover the retreat of Christians coming from the tunnels with rubble from the tower’s foundations, and to return the fire of Moslems up on the walls whose own task was to prevent them. John Hideman laboured with the miners. Jos held the heavy shield we’d been issued from the Bishop’s armoury to catch the bolts as they flew in, while I sought groups in place of single heads along the walls to give my arbalest shots the best chance of finding living marks. Repeatedly I stooped and loaded, aimed and loosed the quarrels. Repeatedly Jos used both arms to raise and angle the steel mantlet. We worked together as we’d always done, as any tradesmen work to do the best job that they can, and while we worked at our own trade of arms we talked of anything that crossed our minds.
‘Well Jos, what have I brought you to?’ I asked one noontide, when the sun was like a hammer pounding at the rocky anvil that was Acre, and every inch of us inside our clothing ran with sweat. ‘I’ll warrant that you little thought that as my squire you would be dragged through rivers, fried on shipboard, carried half across the world to starve in camp, and then be roasted in…’
‘My jacket, Sir? No more I did,’ Jos agreed. ‘A country boy like me? I never looked to travel further than from Haywards Heath to Lewes as a fact. Nor thought to see a sight more wonderful than our smith’s daughter, Fat Hamanda, on her back and serving us a raspberry slice with both her knees ’longside her ears!’
He pulled a face and wiped his hands on the grey buckram of his gambeson, collecting more dust than he shed. And that was Jos the jester, who never would be serious if he could make you smile.
‘So wouldn’t you as soon have stayed home, now that you can see how many soldiers we have out here to uphold…’
‘…The Christian cause, Sir Garry? Well every little helps, as Jack the sailor had it as he pissed in the sea.’
My squire’s blue eyes were on the battlements. ‘Not being funny,’ he added while the mu’adhdhin’s third wailing call to prayer inside the city signalled an end for us of that day’s duty. ‘But I’m your man, Sir Garry. That’s the shape of it, an’ ever will be I daresay so long as God’s above the Devil.’
It was in so many words what he’d told Hugh when I took up the cross at Lewes, and in spite of the familiar grin I knew he was in earnest.
The mu’adhdhin were silenced, every one, when we moved into Acre. But when I heard them at his graveside, and later on the road to Joppa, I recalled what Jos had said.
King Richard’s coming with the queens and Guy de Lusignan changed everything completely.
At first sight of his fleet of ships, all loaded to the gunwales with men and horses and the latest instruments for breaking sieges, it was clear to all – to soldiers and Pullani, friends, foes and everyone, that Acre had not the faintest hope of holding out against him. And everyone was right. The King of France rose from his sickbed to welcome the royal party. A huge area was cleared behind the Templars’ tents for King Richard’s gold pavilion and the Queens’ marquee – for their household offices, an armoury, a barracks and a stables, and for five thousand soldiers. Then, while his sappers visited the mines beneath the moat and his artillery began assembling petraries and calculating ranges, and all in camp got drunk at his expense, the King declared an armistice in which to send the Sultan his own terms for treaty.
The gossip in the laundry was that what King Richard chiefly sought from Saladin was acceptance of his vassal Guy de Lusignan as ruler of Jerusalem, with Queen Jehanne (herself descended from a Latin king) beside him on the throne. It was the reason, all supposed, that he had brought Jeanne from Sicily and kept Guy at his side – to add the client Kingdom of Jerusalem to his empire. King Richard offered to parley in his person with the Sultan, and sent him as a gift a handsome black youth from the slave market in Messina.
‘Used him as a bum-boy while they were on the seas,’ said Guillemette, ‘an’ likely thinks ol’ Sallydin ’ud find a black arsehole a nice change from the pink.’ And when I told her sharply not to spread such falsehoods, she’d blessed me as an innocent and winked at Jos.
The King’s terms were refused in any case, and after two more days of peace he launched his main attack on Acre.
What happened to the black boy no one knew.
In its last weeks, the siege moved from an unreal sort of order to something close to chaos. Having started arse-first with
Terms For a Surrender, the King’s approach to siegecraft was to throw all aspects into it; redoubling the sea blockade of Acre whilst at the same time sending his own sappers underground and increasing the bombardment of its walls. For every ballistic engine the King of France provided, King Richard set up two or three of twice the size and range, and had torsion mangons from the castles of his ships remounted onto wheels to batter at the cracks that were beginning to appear. Twelve tall sling-trébuchets like children’s see-saws on a massive scale tossed quicklime, burning pitch, baskets of scorpions and bees, and buckets of infected faeces over the battlements into the city streets. King Richard threw everything he had at Acre, and what it could, the Moslem garrison threw back.
King Richard sent out the towering, sixty-foot siege castle he called ‘Mategriffon’, with men inside it like the horse of Troy – an edifice assembled from the beams and sections he’d brought with him and covered with wet ass-skins drenched in urine to protect it from Greek fire. But the Moslems simply siphoned feu grégeois in through the space beneath its roof, to consume the tower with all the shrieking men inside it in less time than it took to roll it to the city wall. Their charred flesh smelled of roasted pork. Then through the smoke the garrison sent mirror-signals to the Sultan’s cavalry, to bring them from the hills in their defence.
Our orders from Bishop Walter were to hold the south defences of the camp against a Saracen assault – and looking back, the hours, the scores of hours we spent exchanging fire with Moslem horsemen galloping from left to right down to the city, or else from right to left back to the hills, all seem to blur into one hot unending day.
Others rode to battle, wielded swords, gained reputations. Others, not us. Ours was the dull duty of holding a position that we knew was safe. And while we manned our barricades, exciting news came up the lines of actions elsewhere in the fray. Word was that Saphadin, the Sultan’s brother, had been forced into retreat with his Egyptian cavalry by none other than the Marquess Conrad, who’d lately joined the French King’s army. We heard King Richard had a fever, but rather than allow King Philippe to command, had had himself wrapped in a quilt, and carried on a stretcher to direct the fire of the great mangonel á tour they’d fished out of the Rhône. Then finally we heard the news that we’d so long awaited. As King Richard’s sappers fired the timber stanchions of his mines, a gaping crack had opened in the north face of the Maledicta Tower.
‘The Cursed Tower is breached,’
his criers shouted through the Bishop’s camp. ‘Richard, King of England, Duke of Aquitaine and Normandy, Count of Poitou has authorised the offer of three gold bezants for every stone that’s drawn out from the city wall and carried to the trébuchet known as The Lord’s Avenger!’ And because, in real life as in chess, a king outranks a bishop, it was an offer we could not refuse.
It’s well known to all commanders that sober soldiers are less willing to take risks. So in addition to the gold, they gave us each a long pull on a skin of burgundy for every stone we dropped behind the trébuchet. The wine was full of sediment and tasted of corroded metal. But it helped.
‘And if they’re giving us a choice, then I’d as soon go with a skinful of the red stuff,’ Jos confessed, ‘to meet Saint Peter with a blithesome face.’
But that was early in the piece; and after three hours in the blazing furnace of the fosse, we had been anything but blithesome – dry as dust as grey as ghosts and drunk as Munster’s monk.
It’s easiest up here to see things from a distance, looking back and looking down from high above the city, soaring like an eagle above the fleet, the yellow strand, the vast blue mantle of the sea. Easiest to see myself as I was then, a tiny insect in a seething mass of thousands, climbing over one another in the dust to move the debris from a broken nest. Up here in Heaven I’ve become a god, poking at an anthill with a stick. It crushes, smears the insects. Kills some, leaves others writhing. One staggers sideways with a flattened abdomen. Do ants make sounds that can’t be heard by human ears? The injured ones will die and shrivel in the heat – their death, the death of ants, the death of men from this high viewpoint miniature and unimportant.
But now I’m back amongst them – to feel the stone dust boiling round us, gritting in our lashes, clogging in our throats, even with our cotton scarves tied round our faces – and to see the sun glow through it like a firebrand.
With both eyes closed, I can still feel as much as hear the blare of the King’s clarions, the din of voices beating in my ears, the odd sounds of people coughing and convulsed with sneezes. Figures loom and disappear. It feels as if we’ve entered hell to suffer all the torments of the damned. I see a lump of masonry scythe down to punch a red hole through the mayem to our left. Ahead of us the city walls are streaked with blood and pitch. The enemy hurl rocks into the breach as fast as we can haul them out. The sky is raining rocks.
Yet still the tower holds.
Our world is made of wall – rising sheer above us, strewn about us, falling from one state into the other. I catch a glimpse behind me of Jos’ curls. No longer red but powdered with grey dust, and know that John is in the same disguise. We are no longer warriors with enemies to charge, but moving targets, climbing through the rubble and the bodies of the fallen. It takes all three of us to free a single block of rough-hewn stone, to haul it out with blistered fingers, push it, pull it, guard it jealously from others who would steal it from us, manhandle it across the littered surface of the ditch.
So many make the crossing with us, to queue for our gold pieces and our wine, that in the end the press is such that none of us can move at anything but a back-breaking shuffle, with nothing to distinguish knights from common soldiers or Pullani. Stooping as we shuffle. As if a crouching posture could protect us from an arrow or a falling block of stone.
Will she mourn me if I die?
Was it the third time that we climbed leaden-footed to the breach? It could as well have been the fourth or fifth. I only know for sure it was the last.
I had just slipped and nearly fallen, felt John’s hand beneath my elbow, just regained my feet. As I looked up a shadow crossed the red eye of the sun. And I will never know if it was instinct or the downrush of hot air that flung me to one side. Then all at once a mighty crash, an acrid cloud of dust. And pain!
It took a moment more to know that I was on my back with something sharp and heavy on my foot. More pain, intense and burning as I wrenched free, rolled over. Tried to rise. But it was only when I used the slab to haul myself erect, that I saw what it covered.
Death stands at every soldier’s shoulder. I should have been prepared, but I was not.
His feet were kicking, fingers clutching at the air, as if he was – as if he could have been alive still with that great block of limestone crushing his poor head! For some reason that I can’t explain I had half-drawn my dagger. Then I was shouting, screaming for John Hideman to help me move the block – cursing, weeping as we fumbled, sickeningly dropped it, raised it with the help of others, rolled it back.
The flies were there before us, alighting on the pulp of shattered bone and brains. On traces of red hair and bubbling blood where Jos’ freckled face had been. Crushed now like an eggshell.
I was too shocked to think or speak. The muscles of my stomach clenched and heaved. I fell onto my knees beside his body to vomit in the dust.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When you lie flat on your back the sky fills all your vision, blue as a throstle’s egg and limitless – as if such things as clouds had never been and never will be in the future. The blue goes on forever.
You have to squint, the sun’s so bright. You think of silence, but there’s no such thing. The air is full of sounds – of buzzards whistling, and of a skylark somewhere singing like an angel.
Upward, upward wings the lark, singing out his heart in flight; cares abandoned in the dark...
If only I could fly. If only I could fly with him into the dazzling light, instead of feeling earthbound and so heavy and so weary. I could be anyone, a nun, a dairymaid – a body in the sun…
There’s scarce a breath of wind and we have had no rain. The plums are ripening; crabs and cobnuts swelling on the bough. It’s going to be a record harvest, bound to be.
They’re out there now in Middle Field, an army of them – neatmen with their boys, their wives and daughters and their cousins and their aunts. Their figures shimmer in the heat. The boys crouch with their longbows by the wall of uncut barley, waiting with the dogs to take any hares or foxes that run out. Hod’s out there somewhere in the stubble helping to set sheaves up on their legs, with little Edmay and Odette, and Bruno – which is lucky for he’d never let me lie here otherwise in any sort of peace.
It’s like the day last year when we came haymaking, but hotter much. The earth looks tired as though the heat has sucked the goodness from it. The shadows are all shorter, greens all darker now the sun’s so high. I came to help, not to be idle. I should be out there with them shocking down, making sure that all is as it should be – but can’t find the energy to do it.