00 - Templar's Acre (51 page)

‘My love.’

He looked up to see Lucia. She and other women were going from man to man with food and buckets of water. She knelt before him, and brought the ladle to his lips. ‘My love,’ she
repeated. ‘Oh, I wish I could help you! You look so lost.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’ He managed a smile. ‘I am not dead yet.’

‘I wish I had spent more time with you.’

‘Perhaps we will escape. I could take you home and show you to my brother. That would make him jealous.’

‘You tease me.’

‘No. No, I would never do that.’

He stared at her, drinking in her beauty like water. Just now, knowing that he must surely be close to death and would never see her again, she had never looked so painfully lovely. Her
wonderful eyes, her regular bones, her clear complexion, all contributed to her perfection. If he could, he would die with her face in his mind, he resolved. The Blessed Virgin Mary Herself could
not be so peerless.

There was a shout, then the rattle of arrows clattering on the stones. ‘Quick! Go!’ he said, pulling his helmet back on and rising with an effort. He drew his sword, but when he
glanced back, she was still there, dread upon her face.

‘Damn their black souls to Hell,’ he muttered. ‘I shall not die here! Lucia, run – go away. Back to the house. I will see you there!’

She nodded, and was gone.

The first roaring charge knocked the first line back three feet, and Baldwin and the remaining lines must form behind and shove, heaving and sweating, to recover that yard.
Baldwin felt a rip in his left shoulder, and glanced down fearfully, thinking he had been stabbed, but it must have been a muscle tearing. There was no injury visible, no weapon nearby.

A loud bellowed command, and the men began to push, more piling in behind, their weight adding to that of the line, and gradually they started to succeed. There was a shout, a sudden command,
and Baldwin felt more men, fresher, eager, behind him. Looking back, he found himself staring into the face of Guillaume de Beaujeu.

‘Come! You think to let these sons of the Devil push you around? Like a boy in the stable-yard? Push, my friends, push! Heave for all you are worth! Are you Christians? Then prove it!
PUSH
!’

Baldwin could feel the line advancing. Step by dogged step, they climbed to the top of the rampart once more and then they were over the top, where the wicker baskets had been trampled, and
could stand waiting for the enemy to group again and charge. But now, when Baldwin looked up, the sky was darkening in the west, and he realised with a vague surprise that the enemy was pulling
back now that night was drawing in.

Someone gave a shout of triumph, but Baldwin could not join in. All he felt was utter bone-deep weariness. He watched while the others all waved their weapons, some derisively, most with
exhausted gratitude, and the women reappeared, bearing fresh containers full of rocks and rubble, while men began to sift through the bodies, seeing if any of the injured could be saved.

Baldwin suddenly saw Ivo and Pietro with bent heads over at the far side of the breach, kneeling beside someone lying on the ground.

He knew it before he saw the face.

Sir Jacques d’Ivry was dead.

Lucia saw him as soon as he walked in through the door. He stood there a moment, his helmet in the crook of his arm, and she went to him. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No. Sir Jacques is dead.’

‘Oh!’ She placed her hand against his heart, face torn. ‘He was always so kind to me.’

‘To all. He loved one woman, and when she was taken from him, he joined his Order in order to serve her as much as God, I think.’

Baldwin closed his eyes and shuddered. The sword at his waist was a painful burden that threatened to pull him to the ground. His left forearm had a deep scratch, but that, the slash to his
thigh and barked knuckles were his only wounds. The men in the front ranks had been far less lucky.

‘He fell. I think he carried on for too long, but he wouldn’t have admitted it.’

The door opened and Pietro and Ivo entered, one after the other. As Ivo collapsed onto his bench, he began: ‘Hoi, Pietro, go and . . .’ He stopped, and stared at Pietro.

His bottler blinked slowly. The bandage about his head was stained and grimy.

‘Sweet Jesus, you look in a right old state,’ Ivo said wonderingly.

‘Which isn’t surprising, after the last days,’ Pietro said with a trace of his old asperity.

‘True. Come – sit here. I’ll fetch you some wine.’

‘Eh? No, you can’t. It’s
my
place to serve
you.’

Ivo rocked forward to bring himself to his feet again. ‘Ach, this old body is too used to easy cushions as it is. Pietro, I
command
you as my servant to sit there.’

He walked off and before long had returned with a tray of cups and two of his largest jugs, filled with wine.

‘This is the last of the wine from Beirut,’ Ivo said sadly, pouring. ‘I don’t think I need worry about keeping it.’

‘I am sorry about Sir Jacques,’ Baldwin said hesitantly. He was shrugging off his coat, and Lucia hissed and muttered under her breath at the blood. She washed his wounds and cleaned
them with damp towelling, while Baldwin sat, wincing.

‘I knew him a long time,’ Ivo told him. ‘He and I came here with the Prince many years ago. His woman and mine, they were friends, and then she got that damned disease, and
went to the convent. He felt the need to serve as she did. He never seemed to regret it.’

‘He was a good man,’ Baldwin said.

‘Aye. One of the best.’ Ivo nodded glumly to himself and then lifted his cup in a silent toast. Sir Jacques had been his oldest friend.

Pietro was almost asleep, head nodding. Ivo looked at him with great sadness. You poor old whoreson, you’re too old for this. Same as I am, he thought.

‘We won’t survive this onslaught for long,’ Baldwin said. ‘They must break through before too long.’

‘They will, I think,’ Ivo said. He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘Well, I won’t save my bleeding wine for a bleeding Muslim soldier to guzzle after he’s killed me.
Drink up, boy! Drink up, Edgar. Lucia, you need a drink too. We drink to Acre, to my friend Jacques, to my wife Rachel, my son Peter, and all the others who’ve died in this damned land. And
once we have been kicked out, I pray that no other Christian army ever comes here again, for God has forsaken it – and us,’ he finished viciously. He dashed away the tears as he took
more wine.

Baldwin and Lucia drank their wine with him, but left soon afterwards, going to Baldwin’s room where they made love as though it would be their last time.

And so it was.

Abu al-Fida had stood at his machine’s side all that long day. Al-Mansour was performing with exemplary reliability. They had used seven slings, and had had to replace
the beam arm a week ago, but apart from that, nothing had gone wrong.

He watched the final shot loaded, the beam arm straining and creaking under the weight pulling at one end, and nodded to the gynour at the pin. The gynour yanked at his rope, the pin slipped
out, and the arm rose, the leather sling scraping the rock along the channel, and up. The sling’s upper loop came away, and the projectile was launched. In the gathering darkness, he lost
sight of it in an instant. He thought he could discern it at the uppermost point of its trajectory, but then it disappeared from view again. There was only the flat-sounding crump as it landed.

It did not matter. They had hurled many rocks at the city today, and he had seen the result: the collapse at the gates, the destruction of the final towers nearby, the immense faults showing in
the walls themselves. Acre must soon be theirs.

‘Emir, the Sultan asks that you join him.’

Abu al-Fida nodded perfunctorily to the bowing messenger and called for his horse. If the Sultan wanted him, he had better hurry.

Sitting on his horse and cantering from the army of Hama all about the northern edge of the plain until he came to the Sultan’s pavilion, gave al-Fida a measure of just how enormous the
force was that Sultan al-Ashraf had accumulated for this holy task. There were men from all over the Sultan’s lands, even a few from the wild Nubian plains west of Cairo. Terrifying men, with
their black features and fierce glares.

He dropped from his horse at the entrance to the Sultan’s pavilion, passed his sword to the men standing guard, and bowed low just inside the doorway.

‘I am glad to see you here, Emir. Your catapult is serving us well.’

‘We are pleased to serve you.’

‘And the memory of your son.’

‘Of course.’ Abu al-Fida looked up at that. He would not bow to any man in his sorrow for the loss of Usmar.

He did not like this new Sultan. His father had been a hard man, determined and dangerous. This, his son, was already blooded in deceit and politics. He had killed off those whom he felt had
threatened him. Even the mention of Usmar sounded to Abu al-Fida like a threat, as though his determination to avenge his son was to be doubted.

The Sultan eyed him narrowly. ‘Tomorrow, you will increase your rate of discharge at dawn.’

‘We do not have many more missiles,’ Abu al-Fida objected. ‘If we send them too speedily, we must exhaust our resources. We have been throwing them every day for over a
month.’

‘I know, Emir. However, there will be little need for you to maintain your firing for too much longer.’

‘You will storm tomorrow?’

‘Early, yes. By nightfall we shall own the city.’

‘Then may I respectfully ask that I join the storming parties?’

Sultan al-Ashraf stared at him with a bemused expression. ‘You realise the danger? The Franks have many men still. The storming parties will suffer terrible losses.’

Abu al-Fida looked at him with a steady eye. ‘I do not care. If I can help win the wall, I will be content.’

Baldwin, Ivo and the others were at the gates again the next morning an hour before dawn. Edgar and Pietro stood near, while Baldwin and Ivo arranged the last of their
vintaines into a group. Hob was still alive, but had a gash under his right eye from a spear. It was still bleeding, but he grinned with the other side of his face. ‘Looks good, eh, Master?
The girls in London will all want a piece of me when they see this!’

‘I am sure that will make a pleasant change for you. It improves your looks greatly,’ Baldwin joked weakly.

Lucia had also come to the front.

‘I can help,’ she said. ‘We women will bring stones to fill in holes in the ramparts. We can throw stones, too.’

‘It’s dangerous.’

‘More dangerous than sitting at home and waiting for them to come? I’d prefer to die at the gate, near you, than alone.’

They were arrayed in the third row, Baldwin on the far left next to Ivo, and Edgar and Pietro on the right. Before them were some few Knights Hospitaller and two Templars, for it was clear that
this was one of the weakest parts of the wall. During the night, women and others had slaved over the barricades, and now at the top of the rampart was a thick line of baskets, palliasses, a
trolley and a cart, with stones and rubble filling in all the gaps.

‘They are coming!’

Baldwin glanced up at the man high on the Accursed Tower as he set his helmet on his head. The sentries atop had the best view of the enemy. Baldwin gripped his spear more tightly, and shifted
his feet.

And then he heard it: the steady tramp of thousands upon thousands of feet, the brazen blaring of trumpets and the nightmare din of hundreds of kettledrums all being pounded at once.

‘’Ware the missiles!’ came a bellow, and suddenly the air was full of the hammer-blows of rocks as they slammed into the walls, splinters cracking off and hissing through the
air. Baldwin saw one run along a man’s neck, cutting bone and sinew at the same time, and the man collapsed like a pole-axed ox. A rock touched the top of the inner parapet, bursting pieces
of mortar and stone in all directions, then ploughed into a line of men hurrying to the front. All were crushed. A leg remained where a man had stood only a moment before.

Another struck the tower at full tilt, and Baldwin saw it wobble, a vast crack opening in the side, and as he stared, the tower seemed to rotate. Another hit would bring it down, he thought, but
then there was a crash, and he found himself staring through his eye-slots, up at the blue sky overhead.

He was hot, and wanted to pull off his helmet and breathe clean air, but he couldn’t. There was a weight on him, and when he managed to lift his head and look, he saw a man lying over him.
All around were more men, most crushed. Slivers of stone lay all about, and as Ivo came and hauled the body from him, Baldwin saw another projectile slam into the Accursed Tower.

It tilted, and as he was helped to his feet, the outer wall seemed to fold in upon itself, and the top of the tower began to move. A crease appeared, as if the tower was made of a mere fabric
– and then it tumbled. He could see the sentries at the top, clinging to the parapets, as though that would save them, another man leaping, falling perhaps eighty feet onto the loose
rubble.

More rocks: thundering into the walls near the tower, and then the arrows began to fall. Lancing down in great swathes, rattling like a child’s toy on the stones all about. But their
impact, when they hit men, was deadly.

‘Get up!’ Ivo was bellowing at him. Baldwin stood, still dazed, and as he did so, an arrow struck the side of his helmet, and bounced away. ‘Shit!’

‘Aye, well, get used to it!’ Ivo snapped.

The line had been demolished by the impact of the rock. The remains of Ivo’s men were huddled in a group, Hob among them. A splinter had opened his groin, and his blood had washed the
stones around him.

‘Look after these arses, Master,’ he managed, but then his eyes fixed on something far, far away that Baldwin could not see.

There were shrieks and sobbings all along the line of men, but then came a warning shout, and men were pointing out over the walls.

‘Form again!’ Baldwin yelled. ‘Here they come!’

They had waited since before dawn, and as he heard the first cries of the muezzin calling them to prayer, Abu al-Fida dropped to his knees and bent his head to the ground.