“Where are the knights?”
“What could knights do? They be trained for hand-to-hand combat, ye know that. They’ll be good when the wall tumbles, nocht before.”
“I don’t see any signs that it will ever tumble. When was it built?”
“I canna say, but I’ll find out. But we air assaulting the wall e’en so. See there, that stone caster beyond the rock.”
“I can hear it anyway.”
“And another on yer left. See?”
Indeed the field was dotted with machines of various designs, called petrariae by some, beliers by others, in any case different-size catapults (or mangonels) which fell into two groups no matter how they were named: the smaller ones designed like giant crossbows with low trajectories, best for hurling huge spears; the larger more like slingshots with high trajectories, best for throwing stones and casks of boiling oil over the wall.
“What exactly is Greek fire?” I asked.
“We doona have the exact formula, but we knaw it has naphtha and sulfur in an oil mix. It explodes upon contact and canna be put out by water. It clings to whatever it touches, like burning glue.”
As he spoke, a small machine burst into flames right before our eyes and covered the field with a thick black smoke.
“They’ll beat us in the air!” I cried.
“Nay, lad, the battle will be won underground. We mun mine the wall and make a breach.”
“How is that possible?”
“Some luckless wight will dig a tunnel to the foundations, fill the hole with oil and brush, light it and blow himself and the wall to Hell. A martyr for king and country.”
I shuddered for this poor unknown mole.
“I mun gae work on the king’s machines,” Enoch said abruptly. “Will ye be all right here alone?”
“Of course.” In fact, I couldn’t wait to be alone.
“I’m nocht sure. Bairn, ye would tell me yif …” He stopped, uncertain and a little embarrassed.
“You could come back for me at the end of the day,” I said.
“I mane to. All right, then …” He climbed down the ladder.
I took my parchment and stylus in case he looked back on me before he left and wrote a description of the terrain. Then I walked to the window to gaze across to where King Philip was preparing to attack, despite King Richard’s warning. At that point—I know not whence, or how I could not have seen the varlet—something whizzed by my ear and rattled on the floor behind me. Puzzled, I turned and saw an arrow lying at my feet!
It was a Norman arrow.
I picked it up in wonder, still not grasping its significance. I thought it was a mistake; someone had bad aim. Only slowly did I realize that no one has such poor aim that he shoots an arrow backward over his shoulder! Acre’s wall stood in the opposite direction. Furthermore, no arrow yet made could whiz from the field below to where I stood.
Someone had shot at me intentionally. And at close range.
Instantly I fell to the floor. Nothing more happened. I listened for sounds. With Enoch gone, I was vulnerable both from the window and from below. I crept on my stomach to the edge of the platform and with enormous effort pulled the ladder up to my floor. There, anyone wanting to approach would have to shout.
A pox on writing about King Philips attack. By the end of the day he would have won or failed, and I would make up what happened between. Nothing would make me expose myself at that window again.
I then took the secret cache of materials I had gathered this morning and began laboriously to construct a new prick.
DID ENOCH NOTICE my new shape?
I thought he did, but knew not whether that was good or no. For the first time, I wondered if I’d erred in judgment. True, the new member I’d devised was more clever by far than my former models, its subtle swelling much closer to the real shape, but ’twas also true that it hadn’t been there this morning.
If he noticed at all, Enoch immediately forgot my transformation when he saw the arrow.
“Yif ye’re right, someone wants ye dead,” he said. He sighed deeply. “Alex, air ye sure we must crusade to get Wanthwaite? We could leave for Paris—there be many ships sailing til and fra—pick up our writ, and git rid of Roncechaux through Assize court.”
“Not with Osbert as judge,” I reminded him. “Northumberland won’t give up his own land.”
“I’m willing to do the ordeal,” he reminded me in return. “I’ll fight Roland in single combat.”
And leave me with half an estate. Besides, I’d made a promise to Richard … I turned away.
When I turned back, he was still studying me. “Be it the king quhat keeps ye?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
KING PHILIP HAD LOST HIS BATTLE. His favorite machine called “Bad Neighbor” had been destroyed by Greek fire. Whether from disappointment or God’s vengeance, the French king now became sick with King Richard’s malady. The loss of both leaders cast a terrible pall on the fighting. Then through sheer force of will, King Richard rallied and took over the leadership, though he couldn’t walk or ride. He governed from an improvised hammock with a webbed canopy, which he called a testudo. His first order was to raise the foot soldier’s pay from three aurei to four aurei per month, thus wooing the volunteer army from Philip.
His second command was to swale the orchards and groves around the city in order to starve the men of Acre. Soon smoke and soot garbed us so we looked like Bedouins.
His third, and most ominous, was to summon Enoch.
“Lord Enoch, you have the best engineer’s mind in my entire company.”
“Thank you, Your Highness,” the Scot answered warily.
“You are also acute and brave.”
Enoch merely nodded.
“Therefore I would like your opinion. How can we best break the stalemate of Acre’s battle?”
“You have to lower the wall,” Enoch answered promptly.
I began to get the drift of Richard’s questioning and suddenly recalled: I’ll get rid of the Scot. And Enoch: Some luckless wight will blow himself to Hell. How diabolical of the king!
“Exactly.” The king nodded approval. “At what point?”
The Scot studied the situation briefly in the field below us. “ ’Tis obvious. The largest tower at the corner there, on the southeast.”
“Right again, what we call the Accursed Tower. And how should I proceed?”
Don’t answer, I signaled mentally. Pretend you don’t know.
This time Enoch frowned for some time. “You’ll tunnel in a northeasterly direction at least twenty feet under, for the girth of the wall indicates a base of fifteen feet or more. Then you fire the tunnel and collapse the wall’s foundation.”
Richard gave the Scot a fixed look. “Do it.”
“Me, Your Highness?”
“My best engineer.”
“Except that I’ve had no experience in sapping, Your Grace. With your whole strategy riding on its success, and with the considerable risk of life to your men both above and below, I humbly suggest that there may be someone better for the task, someone more knowledgeable.”
The king became as angry as his depleted energies allowed. “Someone with courage, you mean. You have your order: see to it! And don’t lag your foot unless you would lose a foot. I mean to be in Acre within the month.”
Enoch’s lips pressed tight, he bowed and walked quickly away.
I ran after the Scot as he strode and caught him at our tent where he swilled a methier of ale, his eyes blank.
“I’ll speak to him!” I cried. “You’re right, ’tis woodly to attempt such a task for the very first time. And you told me yourself that ’twas sure death!”
Enoch shook his head. “Spare yerself the blither, bairn. The king knows what he wants. There’s an expression among these kings of chivalry in breme battle; I believe ’tis ‘enfants perdus,’ meaning that some men be ‘lost children,’ expendable. I be yer lost child.”
NEVERTHELESS, I DID SPEAK TO Richard the very next day.
“You show your ignorance, boy. I’ve given your brother an opportunity for great glory. By George, I envy him! I can’t imagine a better way to die.”
“I don’t want him to die!” I protested without thinking.
Instantly the king’s visage froze. “The Scot is expendable; Acre is not. His sacrifice can serve double purpose.”
I looked at him, appalled. Could he possibly believe that I would want the Scot murdered? For I clearly saw now that that was what the king was about, the deliberate slaughter of my Scottish friend. Didn’t he know that I needed Enoch?
I started again to speak, saw the king’s eyes as he looked around, and fell silent. But I prayed, Please God, don’t let Enoch die. God had so favored me in my recent prayers that surely He must grant this.
I DECIDED NOT TO TELL ENOCH of my failure with the king but to try to cheer him however I could. When I returned to camp with this intention, I found him standing by the tent, a puzzled expression on his face; in his hands he held two dead pigeons.
“Are you going to make pigeon pie?” A great favorite of mine.
He spoke portentously. “Alex, these birds be murdered.”
“Of course, but that’s a strange way to say it. We don’t eat live birds.”
“Murdered,” he repeated. “Poor little martyrs fer our sakes.”
I thought the strain of being Richard’s sapper had made him woodly
“Sit down, Enoch,” I said as kindly as I could. “Let me cook the pigeons for a change, and you talk to me about the history of Scotland.”
“The dinner be prepared,” he said stiffly. “There, liver and oats, but doona touch it yif ye value yer life.”
“What?”
“I’m tellin’ ye, these birds ate of our meal and promptly died. Someone hae poisoned our food.” He tossed the pigeons into a ravine. “By the smell, I’d say with monkshood.”
I sat down weakly. “The Saracens. Aye, ’tis said they sneak into camps and pick off one Crusader at a time by all sorts of devious means—poison, scorpions, snakes.”
“Aye, mayhap.” Enoch remained standing. “Anely I be not so sure that the Saracens be the best suspects.”
King Richard?
No, the king would never stoop to such lowly perfidious tactics. Nor would he chance that I might eat the poison instead of Enoch.
It must be the Saracens who’d chosen our camp by chance. I sighed with relief. Terrible as it was, it was not likely to happen again.
DEO GRATIAS, KING RICHARD wanted his tunnel to succeed more than he wanted Enoch to perish. Therefore he selected another group of enfants perdus to sacrifice so that his own sappers could work in peace, namely King Philip’s sappers who dug in another direction. He explained exactly how he was doing it.
“Now, see there, Alex, to your left, the entry into Philips tunnel. He’s chosen the wrong goal so it’s expendable, and a concentration of fighting close to his tunnel will distract the Saracens from our more important digging.”
He thereby ordered four lords to assemble their knights and make a foray in a manner which pointed like an arrow to King Philip’s men.
“But won’t they die, Your Highness?”
He shrugged impatiently. “Probably, but that’s the difference between strategy and random death. Hundreds die here daily, but if we carefully select which men will die and for what purpose, we make their deaths a stepping stone to victory. Diversionary tactics lose men, but don’t waste them. You see?”
I wondered if men so used would agree, but I kept my counsel. The king glanced at me obliquely.
“I spoke to Enoch, by the way. Since you were so vehement, I gave him a choice.”
“Oh, thank you, Your Highness!” I cried. “When will he be replaced?”
“Why, never. He wants the job, just as I thought. Or,” he amended, “he wants the reward.”
“What reward did you offer?” I asked, much amazed.
“Ask him.”
I waited a decent interval, then dashed to find the Scot and do just that.
He was evasive. “Aye, yif I live and yif I get back home, I’m to have reward.”
“Yes, but what? Gold?”
He turned his look on me, his eyes still blank and almost hostile. “Put it this way, bairn: yif I want to stay in the Holy Land at all, I have to dig this hole. Then I also get reward. Yif not, I have to leave.”
There was a long silence as I absorbed his hidden message: the king would be rid of him one way or another and, though the Scot knew it, he had elected to stay with me. I turned away to hide my grief
DAY AFTER DAY ENOCH GREW grimmer. He never laughed or japed, rarely talked. He descended like a mole each morn before sunup and climbed out marrow-weary, black with ooze and powdered with dust, his eyes heavy, his spirit depressed in a way I’d ne’er seen before. Other Crusaders spoke of him as a marvel of ingenuity and labor, soothly a wizard of mining, but he took their comments with stoic disregard. It frightened me to see him so and I mourned for his former abrasive self. King Richard might replace knights and bishops in his game, but Enoch was unique. Hadn’t I learned it when he fell into the Rhône? I didn’t need the same lesson twice. But what could I do?
King Philip’s tunnel was fired and made a breach in the wall at the cost of two hundred seven Frenchmen dead, including his engineer Jean de Brun. The Saracens stood in the crack and jeered at the Christians who still couldn’t approach the wall because of the deep moat at its base. But, as Richard pointed out, the breach had its encouraging effect, and every day he urged his men to scale the wall. The point here, he explained, was that the enfants perdus were the advance for the men who would get over the wall and were thus preparing them spiritually for the Herculean task.
Twice the king had relapses of his disease while Philip continued to improve. During these periods the French king took command, but on the day Richard’s tunnel was to be fired the English king was there.
I helped Enoch prepare, rubbed his woad onto his back and legs.
“This micht be farewell, Alex.”
I saw that he was serious and felt my heart thud to my feet.
“The king is certain you’ll succeed—I’ve heard him say so. Soothly Enoch, many times.”
He nodded, lips twisted. “Aye, that we schal. The tunnel will blow, the wall will fall. But it still micht be farewell. As a Scot I tell thee true: my chances be about the same as a snow blizzard this day.”
Fanfare blared in the distance and he took my arms.
“List to me lad, and hear me good. Yif I die today, doona continue on this Crusade.”
His blazing eyes frightened me near to a swoon.
“What do you mean? Where would I go?”
“Home, home to Wanthwaite. Gae to Malcolm first in Paris and ask him to help. I mun gae, so pay heed: there’s a bundle tied under Twixt’s pillion for ye to use for expenses yif it cums to that.”
He was offering me money. I felt such a mix of gratitude, terror and astonishment that I couldn’t speak.
“Buy passage on the next ship. And Alex, forgit the king. Nay, dinna deny that ye dote on him—anyone can see it. Ye’re a silly bairn and he’s a great hero sae it’s to be expected, but such a fate be nocht in yer stars.”
“What fate?” I couldn’t help asking.
“I doona think I need to explain. Promise!”
To keep him from worrying more, I promised, for I, too, couldn’t explain. Yet, I remembered well from Messina, the king had warned me that if I tried to leave the Crusade I would lose Wanthwaite.
The Scot took my cheeks and kissed me, then ran down the hill. I washed off the woad and somberly followed him.
I joined the king at his pavilion where he mounted his litter to be carried onto the field while foot ran beside him supporting his testudo overhead, a hurdle roofed with wicker-work and hides. I took a quiver of heavy steel quarrels for his arbalest, for there was an opening i
n his bombproof for him to aim his deadly arrows. Enoch had been furious that I was to go into the field but I wore my helmet, could crouch behind Richard’s shield; there was an inpenetrable aura around the king which made all of us close to him secure.
A declivity had been dug for his leopard skins with a good view of where the tunnel would explode and we all kept our eyes anxiously on the spot. The Muslims were still at prayers, the Christians should have been at Matins. We watched, silent, hardly breathing.
Enoch’s still alive, I thought, but three heartbeats from now he may be dead. What would the world be like without Enoch? Once before I’d faced the possibility and almost died myself.
Then it began, an uneasy rumble and sway in the earth’s gut, an explosion of smoke and fire to rival Mount Etna as flames shot upward carrying huge rocks as if they were feathers. Right before us the Accursed Tower cracked, shuddered, leaned and stayed at an impossible angle as soldiers below scurried away from its imminent fall and Turks in the gap behind stared with disbelief at their sudden exposure.
“Good work!” the delighted king shouted. “Into the breach, men! Climb the wall!”
Meantime I turned to the tunnel’s entrance awaiting the emergence of the first sappers. Soothly they must have survived—no bodies had shot upward. Yet how could they live through such hellfire? One by one they crept out, blackened, exhausted, exhilarated men.
And Enoch was there!
“He’s alive!” I said triumphantly.
“Of course,” Richard replied, then registered my tone and continued coldly. “I surmise that he didn’t tell you what his reward is to be, Alex. You should follow the Plantagenet method of dealing with the Scots and learn to use them, but never trust them.”
I wanted to answer, but this was not the time. Also, a thought stirred that I’d repressed in my fear: Was Enoch’s reward connected to Wanthwaite? Was his willingness to risk his life more connected to my property than to me?
BY LATE AFTERNOON THE KING was waxing angry, for no one could reach the wall across the wide deep moat.
“After them, you cowards! Pull it down! Two gold bezants for a stone off the wall!”
Alix of Wanthwaite 01 - Shield of Three Lions Page 38
