00 - Templar's Acre

by Michael Jecks

  Buscarel glanced at him. He was a short, grizzled fellow with the arms of an archer – immensely strong shoulders and biceps. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I managed to get a splinter of rock on my head,’ the man said. ‘It took off my helmet, and I was bleeding so much, they thought I wouldn’t last long. Then someone noticed I was breathing. You were the same.’

  ‘You said I was lucky – why? How did I get here? I remember the ship sinking, and the sea washing me away . . .’

  ‘A fisherman found you and brought you in. He thought you were too far gone but the brothers reckon you’ll be all right.’

  Buscarel remembered. The water, lapping over his nose and mouth, the saltiness on his tongue, the desperate thirst, while he clung to the ship’s oar. Every so often he would see the battlefield and glimpse the rocks flying, the darkening of the sky as arrows were loosed at the walls of Acre. And then there would be a wave under him again, and it would pass on to the shore, while he was concealed from that world of pain and anguish.

  He had thought of letting go. Of sinking, to drown slowly. Men said it was not so painful. But others talked of the monsters beneath the waves, the little fishes that would feast on a man’s flesh, the crabs that would pick at his eyes, the jelly-like creatures, the slugs, all eating his body . . . and he knew he couldn’t submit. To do that would be to give away his entire body, and what would he then have on the day God called to the dead to rise again? So he had gripped that piece of timber, and refused to let go, while the shore slipped away, further and further, and the currents pulled him out to sea.

  A man clad in brown robes moved along the palliasses, a bucket in one hand, a ladle in the other. He stopped, providing drink to those who needed it, and Buscarel realised he was parched. He swallowed, and called. The monk saw him and nodded, but continued his progress. One man did not move. The monk sighed, placed the bucket on the ground, the ladle inside it, and pulled the man from the palliasse, leaving him on the stone flags, then carried on.

  There was a smell about the room, Buscarel noticed now. A fusty odour of old damp stone and mortar, overlaid with a thick, cloying stench. It was the smell of death.

  Lucia was in the garden still when Pietro opened the door, and she rose with a start on seeing Sir Jacques helping Baldwin inside, an arm about his shoulders.

  Sir Jacques still managed to smile with his ruined mouth as he released his patient and passed him to Pietro. ‘Take care of Master Baldwin,’ he mumbled. ‘He will need that wound seen to.’

  ‘What has the fellow done to himself?’ Pietro demanded, standing back and peering down.

  He was pushed aside as Lucia reached him. ‘Oh, oh!’ She fell to her knees and pulled at his hosen, staring at his injured leg with her mouth curled in horror. ‘Quick, to his bed, and then fetch me a cloth and hot water!’

  ‘Eh? I suppose I don’t have enough to do already?’ Pietro muttered truculently, but did as he was bid, while Lucia turned to Sir Jacques.

  ‘Nay, child, not me,’ he protested quickly. ‘I am not permitted to be touched by a woman.’

  ‘You think you will lose yourself in passion for me?’ she said curtly.

  He took a step away, a grin twisting his bloodied features. ‘Baldwin has, has he not? Go to him, child. He needs you more than I, and I have men who can see to my face. Go on! Go!’

  She frowned quickly, but then turned and went back to Baldwin.

  His leg was a mess. The cut had gone deep. It was fortunate that the bleeding seemed only slow, but he must surely rest it, she thought.

  ‘It was a dismal failure,’ Baldwin panted. ‘I should have warned them. I saw the Muslims fail in the same way when they attacked us in the desert.’

  She placed a hand on his breast, and the gentle rumble of his voice made her hand tingle. ‘I prayed for you, and you returned, so I am happy.’

  ‘A hundred didn’t. They’ll remain out there. And what will become of us, I don’t know.’

  ‘Do not worry. You need to rest your leg, let it heal.’

  ‘No, Lucia, I can’t. I have to get back to the walls tomorrow. I have men to command,’ he fretted.

  ‘You must have a physician look at your leg,’ she insisted. Pietro had entered, for once silently, and placed a bowl of hot water at her side. She took a ball of muslin and soaked it, before beginning to wipe at the blood about his wound. The lips opened wide and she could see the blood moving thickly within, while the white flesh pulling away made it look strangely obscene. She dabbed and cleaned the gash as best she might, then called for Pietro.

  ‘Yes? Can’t a man get any rest?’ he grumbled as he reached the door.

  ‘I need some egg-white. Give the yolk to Uther, and bring me the white.’

  ‘And then, I suppose get used to watching over the man all day long,’ she heard him grumbling as he turned and walked back to his kitchen. Soon she had the egg, and could smear it all over the wound.

  ‘There! That is the best I can do for you,’ she said, wrapping his leg in a fresh piece of muslin. ‘You must rest now.’

  ‘I don’t want to rest. How is Uther?’

  ‘I think he will live. He will be better if I bring him in here. The two invalids may soothe each other,’ she added with a twinkle in her eye.

  ‘It will be some time before I can sleep with you again,’ Baldwin said sadly.

  ‘If that is all you can think of, you are already mending.’

  ‘Please, lie here with me.’

  Fifteen minutes later, Pietro passed the chamber and saw the two lying together. Lucia was asleep, her head on Baldwin’s breast, and Pietro saw that Baldwin’s hand was clutching hers. It was enough to waken a pang of jealousy, but he refused to give in to that. He continued past them, recalling his own woman. Long dead now, of course. Along with his family.

  ‘Pietro! Get over here!’

  He sighed, fitted the accustomed scowl to his face, and shuffled reluctantly to the man who had saved him then, and who was still the only man for whom he would willingly die. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Sir Jacques needs wine. Quickly, man.’

  Pietro was soon back with a jug, and he set it down beside the two men, passing them cups before he bent, grunting, to serve them both.

  Sir Jacques found it difficult to talk. His mouth was terribly battered and bruised, and Pietro could hardly take his eyes from the injury.

  ‘It was a man’s gauntlet,’ Sir Jacques said, seeing Pietro’s look. ‘A Brother Templar was lancing a Muslim, and his arm flew up and hit me. Hardly the kind of honourable injury I’d expected,’ he added wryly.

  ‘Master Baldwin, he said a third of the men were lost?’ Pietro said.

  ‘I think so. The knights returned, but of the sergeants and squires, I fear we lost many. It was a bad game. Very bad,’ Sir Jacques said.

  ‘What of Master Baldwin?’ Ivo asked.

  ‘He was as bold as a youth could be. He rode himself up with the rest of the force, and made his way to the front, and he saved the Marshal of the Temple, I think, when Sir Geoffrey was sorely pressed. He was a credit.’

  ‘I am glad,’ Ivo said. He stared up the garden to where Baldwin’s chamber lay.

  ‘But even with him, we’ll find it difficult to survive,’ Pietro finished for him.

  ‘You still here? If I need advice from a servant, I’ll ask for it,’ Ivo muttered, but without heat.

  ‘He is right,’ Sir Jacques said. He took an olive from the dish between them and carefully placed it in the right side of his mouth, away from his wound. ‘If we receive no more help, we will fail. There is food and water aplenty, and we have no lack of weapons, but we need more men. We cannot afford to lose almost a hundred in an evening.’

  ‘I know,’ Ivo said. ‘We shall have to hope that more men arrive.’

  ‘We must pray for our dead companions,’ Sir Jacques said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ivo replied gruffly. ‘Of course we must.’

  * * *

  Ivo walked with Pi
etro to the wall the next day. Baldwin wanted to join them, but Ivo threatened to have him restrained if he did not agree to remain with Lucia.

  ‘What, do you think that the city can afford to lose any more men?’ he demanded. ‘You have a duty to heal yourself. The city won’t fall this morning just because you have stayed back, boy!’ Ivo had taken a good look at his injury already that morning, and was sure that it was not a life-threatening one.

  ‘Come, Pietro,’ he said as he and his servant climbed the stone stairs to the inner walls.

  Pietro’s face was hard as he took in the scene. Where the hoardings had stood only a week ago, now there were only shattered remains. The incessant bombardment had done its job in reducing them to firewood, and from the walls all could see the full sweep of the army facing them, and the machines working constantly. Even as Pietro took it all in, there was a thundering detonation behind them, and he span round, startled. It was only Ivo’s hasty grab for his sleeve that prevented him from toppling over the edge. ‘Careful!’

  ‘Yes, Master,’ Pietro said, staring at the orange flames and coils of thick black smoke that rose from the rubble.

  There was a warning shout, and men dropped to their knees or cowered as a quartet of stones and pots of Greek fire slammed into the walls. Three hit the outer wall, but the fourth lazily swooped down towards them on the inner wall. Ivo thought for an instant it would breast the battlements, but at the last moment it dropped, and they all felt the stones beneath them shudder with the impact.

  ‘Christ Jesus! These whoresons are getting serious!’ Pietro managed after a moment.

  ‘Aye, that they are,’ Ivo said.

  ‘Master Ivo, this is not a war we can win, is it?’ Pietro said.

  Ivo stared out across the plain. In his heart he was certain that this city must fail, like Tripoli, like Lattakieh, like all the cities which the Christian crusaders had taken over the years. There was no survival against such numbers.

  ‘God will save us,’ a man said from the wall nearby.

  Pietro was staring at Ivo, almost like Uther staring at Baldwin, a pathetic look of hope in his eyes.

  Ivo forced a smile to his face. ‘Of course He will,’ he said. ‘You seriously think God would allow us to lose His lands?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  When Lucia would finally allow him to rise, Baldwin was fretting badly. Uther was a changed animal, and while his injuries had healed already, his heart would not. He ate his food, but when a new noise came, he shivered uncontrollably and tried to hide. If a man knocked at the door, the poor creature would slink away, to conceal himself in any dark hollow.

  Baldwin at last managed to limp his way to the walls, leaving the little dog with Lucia. On the walls, with a crutch fashioned from a broken beam at a house, he stared out bleakly.

  ‘Master Baldwin, I’m glad to see you well,’ Hob said. ‘We were wondering when you would come back.’

  ‘Or whether you would,’ Nicholas Hunfrey added.

  Baldwin had a feeling of great comradeship up here with them. Anselm and his brother were squatting near the wall playing dice. Nicholas Hunfrey had a half-cooked chicken leg that he was chewing with relish, and others stood taking their ease, idling the day away, while Hob stayed at the parapet, staring out at the Muslims. He ducked quickly as the wall shook, an eruption of thick black smoke rising from a fresh missile. Then he was up again, peering over at the enemy.

  ‘If others had their way, I wouldn’t be here now,’ Baldwin said. ‘What has been happening?’

  ‘They loose arrows at us,’ Nicholas said, ‘so we loose them back; they run at our walls, we throw rocks, oil, everything at them, and they die or run away. But they’re tunnelling, I don’t doubt. You can hear them at the rocks below, if you listen carefully.’

  ‘Will the walls survive this onslaught?’

  ‘The men who built this city knew what they were doing,’ Hob said. He yawned.

  ‘How are the men?’ Baldwin asked, gazing at them all.

  ‘We survive. But we need to keep them busy.’

  ‘It’s this waiting that drains a man,’ Baldwin said. ‘If we could get out there and fight, it would be better. We should plan more offensives, like the Templars’ attack.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Hob said heavily, ‘but we all saw the after-effects of that. The leader over there by the catapult had the Templar bodies brought round in front of the walls where we could see them, and had them beheaded. They were used to decorate the Templar mounts they captured, and were led around the front of their army to the Sultan. We could see the horses being presented to the Sultan himself. We don’t need more attacks like that.’

  ‘No,’ Baldwin agreed. He clenched a fist and rested it on the parapet before him. ‘I just want to know when we are likely to fight! I want to get at the bastards.’

  ‘A siege can last a long time.’

  ‘I once heard that it took a whole year to surrender to King Richard, a hundred years ago,’ Baldwin said.

  ‘God forbid!’ Hob winced.

  * * *

  Buscarel was still very weak when he walked out of the Temple. He looked at the ships in the harbour and leaned on a wall while a bout of shivering overwhelmed him. His condition was not from any injury, but a result of the two fevers he had suffered. Leaving the undercroft, he felt as weak as a kitten, and the play of the sun on his face was as delicious as the caress of a beautiful woman.

  A rock crashed into the buildings behind him, and he turned with a start. A house only a block or two up from the Venetian quarter suddenly crumbled before his eyes, the outer wall dissolving into dried mud and masonry. It woke him from his reverie. If the missiles could reach him here, then surely his own house would be in danger.

  Hobbling, he made his way up into the Genoese quarter, until he came to his own road, to his own house. He must have come the wrong way, he told himself. This wasn’t his road. This wasn’t where his house had stood.

  But it was.

  There was nothing left. Where once there had been a tall, strong property, with space for his family, now there was a void, one of many, in which masonry and timbers lay in haphazard piles. He stepped forward, two, three paces, and stood staring in disbelief. His throat swelled; he tried to swallow, but the lump was too big. There was a vast emptiness within him, as if someone had reached in and plucked out his heart.

  ‘Cecilia,’ he managed hoarsely. Where was she? Where was his family?

  ‘Cecilia?’ he shouted, and then he screamed her name, again and again, his voice swallowed up in the cacophony of the battle.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Acre was sombre that morning. Despair was like a blanket, smothering hope throughout the city as Baldwin and Ivo walked to the walls. The Hospital was keen to launch another night attack. Baldwin suspected that they wanted to show their age-old rivals at the Temple how a midnight raid should be conducted. They gathered a force of some two hundred and fifty men, with fifteen knights and the rest made up of well-armed sergeants and men-at-arms, and on a moonless night, they issued from St Anthony’s Gate, formed into battle order, and set off for the towering mass of al-Mansour.

  Their attempt was doomed from the first. The Muslims had learned from the abortive attack of the Templars, and before the Hospitallers had crossed half the distance, a series of fires were lighted and the army roused. For a brief space, those on the walls saw the Hospitallers’ weapons glinting in the firelight, and then they charged – a glorious, determined gallop across the plain that began as a disciplined band of warriors, but soon degenerated into a simple race for the Muslim lines, and as they went Baldwin saw the sharp gleams and flashes as bodkin arrows plummeted down.

  Horses plunged headfirst into the sand as arrows struck. Baldwin saw a knight grasping at an arrow in his throat, both hands desperately scrabbling for it before he tumbled from the saddle. Men fell on all sides, and the horses were driven mad with pain. One lost direction, and rode parallel with the city walls, b
etween defender and attacker, his rider holding on for dear life, while more and more arrows were loosed at them, until a merciful shot drove into the horse’s skull and the rider broke his neck in the fall.

  The Marshal led his men on, while his companions overtook him and went on to slam individually into the line of spears set into the sands. Horses were impaled. Baldwin saw a rider, thrown by a reluctant beast, hurled onto a spear, where he wriggled, his screams carrying clearly back to the city. Two Muslims stood by him, but did nothing to stop his agony. He took a long time to die, while his companions tried to hack their way past the outer perimeter and in towards their objective.

  Baldwin saw the swords rising and descending, the forward surge of the men and horses, their falling back, only to regroup and move forward again, and yet there was nothing the gallant Hospitallers could do against the numbers forming against them. As they struggled to make headway, more and more Muslims were augmenting the force opposing them, and eventually the men of the Hospital had to withdraw. The Marshal called his men back, the standard-bearer turning and taking the lead, but even now the Hospital must endure the trial of a long ride under constant assault from the archers and slingers, and even two mangonels which were brought into action. One bolt passed through two riders and then slammed into a horse, killing all three outright. And then it was over. The men reached St Anthony’s Gate, and passed inside again.

  Now, staring out at the plain, all the bodies could be seen clearly in the daylight. No one moved to take them away. It was as though the Muslims were taunting the men of Acre by leaving them to rot in the sun.

  ‘Everyone knows,’ Edgar said. He had joined Baldwin that morning and now stood peering over the parapet with an expression of resolution on his face.

  ‘About the Hospitallers?’

  ‘No, about our chances of survival. If Temple and Hospital cannot force a way through, then we are all held here. And with a hundred or more catapults working day and night, the walls will fail.’ His tone was reflective, but matter-of-fact.