Prince of Legend

by Jack Ludlow

  ‘How would you have them behave, friend?’ Tancred enquired, for the barb about Normans was aimed at him, even if he was the son of a Lombard. ‘Such men must eat, and since no lord will feed them and they cannot fight, how are they to live?’

  ‘Let them spend your uncle’s gold, perhaps when they have left his coffers bare it will dent his pride.’

  ‘And what if they do, by building him a siege tower?’ Tancred asked. ‘Who then will have the plundering of Ma’arrat?’

  That brought silence: any tower built for Apulians would not be gifted as a weapon to the Provençals, which set up another bout of murmuring, though this time it had a deeper and more irate tone that made Tancred think of a disturbed beehive. They had so recently been talking about what they could each gain if Ma’arrat fell; his claim had got them to consider the unpalatable fact that they might secure nothing.

  ‘My friends,’ he called, getting to his feet, ‘I thank you for the hot wine and the talk.’

  Standing at the same time, Bardel clasped Tancred’s hand. ‘Drop by as you please, for you are ever welcome.’

  The sound then emitted from some of the others gave a lie to his words.

  ‘And I invite you to join us in our lines, perhaps in the manège we have set up by the Aleppo road.’

  ‘Do you Normans never cease to test each other?’

  ‘No, Bardel, and in truth, if it hones our skills it also eases the boredom. You would be well to take up my offer, for I fear you will be sitting round your fires for so long your skills will rust along with your weapons.’

  The message came to Bohemund the next day, given to him as he and his knights emerged from their daily session of practice, each still heaving from their exertions. There had been fighting on foot with sword and shield in the manège, but no lance work; as yet the Apulians had been unable to replace their fighting destriers, horses trained to be fearless in battle in the very same kind of sand-filled enclosure in which they had just been exercising their combat skills.

  Even if they could have found mounts of the right kind, a breed common in Normandy and now Apulia, while being unknown in Asia Minor, they took years to train to the pitch where they would be steady in battle. Such horses had been sent for and at great expense, the beginnings of a breeding herd, but until they arrived, mated, foaled and their offspring then grew to full strength, it would be several years before they could be employed. Not that such a thing mattered here: you could not ride any horse into battle in a siege.

  ‘Raymond has sent messengers back to Antioch, nephew, to fetch the English carpenters, as well as a large sum of money to ensure they come in haste, which is something you did not discover in your meanderings.’

  Tancred was careful not to smirk; if he was not surprised at the speed with which his lie about Bohemund doing the same had reached the pavilion of the Count of Toulouse, the way it had been acted upon was astonishing.

  ‘He will have them build a siege tower.’

  ‘It is a clever notion, Tancred, but not one that favours us if it comes to pass.’

  Feeling slighted, Tancred was sharp. ‘Yet it is not a course you would have adopted.’

  ‘I have sent to Apulia for destriers, which you know very well, just as you can guess from that I lack the depth of Raymond’s purse. Added to that, these carpenters are Anglo-Saxons, even if they came at the behest of King William Rufus. How much more would I have to disburse to get them to work for a Norman who is not their overlord?’

  ‘Of which I was aware, and others were not, when I threw the stone onto the water.’

  ‘You?’

  There was no need to respond, the truth was in the expression of Tancred’s face, nor was there any requirement to outline the fact that Raymond would no more permit the Apulians to use any siege tower he built, always assuming he could do so, than would be gifted if the positions were inverted; it would be reserved for his own men.

  ‘So now, Uncle, we must put our minds to how we might take advantage of a weapon of which we will be given no use.’

  ‘I have a feeling you have thought of that too.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Let me see if I can guess. Raymond, if he has a siege tower, will draw the defence to the part of the walls at which he sets it …’

  ‘Leaving gaps elsewhere that we will be able to exploit. I have talked to those who tried the assault before we arrived and failed to overcome the walls.’

  ‘As did we, nephew.’

  ‘Even if they lost many of their confrères in the attempt, I was told the defenders seemed not so numerous that they can cover every part of their walls at the same time.’

  ‘Yet you have in mind to repeat their failure?’ Bohemund responded.

  ‘I had in mind to do so with a set of sturdy frames, not single ladders.’

  That got a slow nod; if it was a rare tactic it was one that had been known to work against a stretched defence. A long climbing frame allowed the attackers to spread out, as well as to ascend in numbers, the effect of that being to also extend the defence. As a tactic singly employed it was less than perfect, but if the Provençals drew the best of the defenders, the small knot of the governor’s retainers, it might get the Apulians over the walls and onto the parapet before Raymond’s men could debouch from their siege tower.

  ‘I daresay Toulouse had already sent out cutting parties to find suitable timber; I suggest, Uncle, we would be advised to do the same.’

  The haste with which those Anglo-Saxon carpenters came from Antioch testified to the fact that Raymond had dug deep into his purse, for they were known to be an avaricious bunch who demanded and received high fees and they had not been idle in a recently captured city in which much required to be rebuilt, not least those mosques reconsecrated as Christian churches, places where their skill at carving was in high demand.

  Like all men of their trade – only cathedral-building stonemasons were worse – they had arrogance too, which came from the knowledge that for all their fighting ability the mail-clad knights often required their skills to overcome a stout defence. Antioch had tempered that somewhat, there being only one small section of wall at which a siege tower could be used, so they had been employed in fortress building, bastions that shut access to the gates of a city near impossible to assault.

  Ma’arrat an-Numan was not simple either because no tower could get close to the walls due to that deep ditch, added to which, aware of the shortage of time, Raymond was asking for a rough-hewn edifice, not some smooth example of the carpenter’s art. If they were disgruntled to be rushed they were even happier to be well paid and they demanded to be properly fed, which caused resentment in an encampment where food was now being rationed. No fool, Raymond was disbursing his money in stages to ensure he had oversight of their work, while always present in person demanding haste.

  The Apulians were busy too, though eager to keep their heavy frames out of sight, buried, once constructed, under piles of brushwood. Any Provençal knight approaching their lines would see the ladders they had built of a standard size and weight, which led to amusement as they contemplated these rivals for plunder enduring the same fate as had been visited on them. Not that their liege lord of Toulouse, or his captains, gifted them much time to gloat, for a roadway had to be made and the dry moat had to be filled in.

  The place chosen was adjacent to one of the towers, which, if it told the defenders precisely where the attack would come and by what means – they could hardly avoid observing what was being constructed just out of the range of their archery – also served as a sign of the determination of the attackers to overcome them. The Muslim garrison dare not essay out to disrupt the effort: standing by was a strong force of knights to kill anyone who tried.

  Just like the construction of the siege tower, the filling in of the dry moat had to be done with haste: there was no time to construct a bombardment screen as well, so Raymond’s men were obliged to cram it by running towards the wall with a shield over their
head and a large stone in their one free hand, that cast at the base of the wall before they could beat a hasty retreat. It was a run for safety that some did not make, either felled by a rock themselves or caught by the burning pitch and oil the defenders cast down on their heads.

  ‘At least with what they are casting down,’ Bohemund said, his tone mordant, ‘the infidel are contributing to their own downfall.’

  Rocks on their own did not suffice to create a crossing over which the wheels of a siege tower could move forward. Once the ditch was filled to a certain point it had to be topped by a combination of pebbles and earth. Day after day the Apulians watched as their Provençal counterparts risked being killed or maimed to make good that pathway, sometimes seeing their efforts washed away by rain, while all the time the siege tower rose behind them, until after ten days the Count of Toulouse pronounced himself satisfied and proper preparations could be made for an assault.

  Bohemund sent a message to Raymond offering to act in concert with his men and to attack any point of the walls he chose to allot to them. The reply that came back was uncivil in the extreme: he would prefer Bohemund’s men to stand and observe, but since he could not stop them if they wished to make an assault, it was a matter of indifference to him where they chose to do so.

  ‘I have had many occasion to regret that we are on Crusade, Tancred, and this is just another one of them. In any other place, on any other purpose and at any time, Raymond and I would have settled this dispute by a contest of arms. Bishop Adémar kept us from that while he was alive.’

  ‘And now his spirit does the same.’

  ‘Partly. But who could so throw their reputation to the wolves by engaging in battle with a fellow Crusader?’

  Tempted to say that his uncle was equally at fault, Tancred, as he had done these many months, held his tongue. All around him were the sounds of men making ready for battle, swords being honed on stone wheels, mail and the straps that held it tight being checked, as well as the murmured prayers of those who would do battle in the morning, going into action immediately after they had been shriven by the accompanying priests.

  It was at these times that men wondered at being in such a place at such a time, thought fondly of home and hearth, perhaps of wives and children, which was a rosy glow not tempered by the knowledge of reality. In their lives they rarely sat by a home-built fire, for they were a caste of warriors who made their way in the world by fighting, not by tending sheep, cattle or hauling a plough along behind the fat arse of an ox.

  They would attend and say Mass in the knowledge, while indifferent to the fact, that death might await them. Each man would swallow the Eucharist and the wine, which represented the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and commend his soul to God before setting out to kill any fellow man with whom he fought, and once the battle was over, to then take, in the form of anything of value, what he could from those who survived.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Raymond was slow to start, letting dawn, the normal hour for an assault, pass by before he gave the order to form up, that extended by several more turns of sand passing through the narrow neck of glass. It was near to noontime before the first horn blew and the tower began to move, a red-backed flag with its golden Occitan cross fluttering in the stiff morning breeze. Not that it was very obvious the sun was at its zenith, hidden as it was in a grey and cloudy sky that looked to threaten rain.

  Many of the stones that now filled that dry moat had come from the roadway that led to the western curtain wall – it would be madness to try to take one of the many towers, naturally higher in construction, so the siege tower was rolled slowly forward with a relative ease that decreased the closer it came to the masonry. There the pathway narrowed considerably: in the killing zone it had been harder to make it so wide and so smooth and the continued forward motion on less than perfect ground now made the structure rock to and fro and from side to side in what looked, from a distance, to be an alarming degree.

  The men who suffered most from the movement were the archers on the very top level, there to engage in an exchange with their counterparts of the walls, who started firing flaming bolts as soon as it came in extreme range, aimed at setting the less solid parts of the tower alight, especially the brushwood screens that lined each level. With Raymond’s bowman was a gigantic huntsman blowing endless loud calls on his horn to encourage his confrères and, he hoped, frighten the defence.

  Below the archers and behind a solid screen were gathered the small body of knights who would undertake the initial assault, the screen when dropped acting as a platform on which they could begin a fight designed to push the defenders back onto their own parapet. With the heavily armed knights stood a quartet of lightweight milities whose task was to cast grappling irons upon which they would then haul in an effort to ease the task of the whole mass pushing below.

  Originally, at ground level and in front of the tower, the milities and camp followers had been pulling on ropes, but that was abandoned as soon as the arrows began to fly. Now they were behind and pushing hard, partly screened from harm by the structure, lined up on either side of the supporting knights, ready to aid their confrères by rushing up the internal ladders to join as soon as the fighting began. That had to wait till the tower was stationary: too many bodies on the floors made it impossible to move.

  Given they were pushing and the ground was less even, progress slowed until even a snail would have outrun its progress, its four great wheels creaking as it edged forward, the weight of the tower enough on its own to send out wisps of smoke from the greased axels. Waiting along the wall was a frisson of pikes, as well as swordsmen ready to cut those grappling-iron ropes, while as soon as they came within range javelins were cast in a high arc in an attempt to draw first blood by looping over the screen.

  There had been yelling from both sides, to go with that relentless horn blowing, since the tower first moved but the closer it got the louder such shouting became as men sought to bolster their courage by exhortation, until the air was filled with the combination, the cursing of both faiths now loud enough to fill the air. If Raymond could be blinded by his pride he was no tyro as a general: an attack with ladders was launched against the northern wall to split the defence. In plain sight the archers atop the tower saw some of the defenders rush off to contain that assault and they were not alone.

  Bohemund was watching events with as keen an eye as his rival, just as earlier he had listened to his Armenian interpreter, Firuz, who had been sent to sniff out Raymond’s tactics and came to report the surreptitious preparations for the supplementary attack, making an assessment of when to launch his own attempt against the southern ramparts, which if they were not unguarded should have few men in place to repulse him.

  ‘It will not remain thus,’ were the words he had employed when he outlined his thinking to his senior captains, as dawn rose prior to the opening of the battle. ‘Raymond’s northern attack will draw off strength from his main effort but they will soon see that for what it is, a diversion.’

  Canny as ever, Bohemund had held back this conference till it could be delayed no longer, for his men needed time to get into position. Where he would launch his attack – on the east wall or to the south – was a secret he had held close, for the very simple reason that if no one knew it could not be betrayed either by a loose tongue or a needy purse. Also his delay in deploying was designed to make Raymond think he might stand aside to await the outcome of the Provençal effort, only moving when he was sure of its success.

  ‘If our task is to get onto the southern curtain wall, there is to be no attempt to get into the city from there.’ That got many a raised eyebrow and quite a few low-voiced comments. ‘Once we have cleared the parapet, seek out a tower and take it. Once in our possession it is to be held regardless of who seeks to dislodge us.’

  If the first remark had set minds working, those closing words had an even greater effect: that the Muslims of Ma’arrat would seek to dislodge them could
be taken as a fact; ‘regardless of who’ could only mean Raymond’s men, which was quickly acknowledged by their commander, but with a sharp caveat.

  ‘Kill as many infidels as you like, but spill a drop of Christian blood and you will answer to me. The task is to take and hold the towers so that even if the Count of Toulouse takes the city he does not hold it without our cooperation.’

  Tancred spoke up and it was clear by his tone of voice he was far from happy. ‘This is a repeat of Antioch.’

  ‘No, nephew, it is a reverse of Antioch.’ Aware of a shifting of feet among his other captains Bohemund was quick to add, ‘There are those of you who are bent on Jerusalem, and that is so of many of the men you lead. I say here and swear that nothing I will do will ever keep you from that goal.’

  There was temptation to reprise all the things he had said to Tancred: Antioch must be held if the Crusade was to have any prospect of success and it had to be in the hands of a man who could repulse any attempt by the Turks to retake it, while no faith could be placed in Alexius Comnenus and Byzantium to do that for them.

  That he, Bohemund, was set upon holding the city even against the Emperor, and if any man saw that as covetousness, it was not something for which he was prepared to seek approval, for if he could gain remission for past sins in the Holy City he would gain little else. Instead, the thought of Alexius – the reasons he had lost to him in Thessaly and Macedonia all those years past – gave him a better way to appeal to these men.

  ‘Antioch is the most vital trading city in Syria, if not the richest between Constantinople and Cairo, so no words of mine are needed to tell any one of you what opportunities exist for a man bent on gaining prosperity in my service. Those of faith who serve with me but wish to fulfil their vow must do so and go on to Jerusalem. But know this, once that task is completed, they will be welcomed back to my banner should they choose to return. Any man who wishes to stay with me in Antioch I will ask to aid me in holding the city and the province in my name.’