The Seal Read Free

engineers
are like rabbits,’ Marcus shouted back, above the chanting of the Mameluks. ‘At
every moment there are new ones coming to make holes and we are run out of
stones! What are we to throw down to pound them, Etienne – our own carcasses?’
    Jacques went to
the apertures and put an arrow to his bow. He waited for movement below and
drove the last of his shafts through the wide grates. There was a cry from
below.
    The men waited.
Overhead a multitude of arrows tipped with torches made a path towards the
roofs and stables and burst into flames. Some came down over the wall and
pierced the flesh of those wretched victims whose terror-filled screams were
wedded to the din coming from the Saracens. Below, the city was a maze of
fires, since there were none to tend them as all men were upon the wall, and
what was left, the old, the women and children, had long since headed for the
quays or were shut up in their houses waiting for death.
    Two days before,
the armies of Hama and Damascus and the army of Mameluks began to fill the moat
with the bodies of dead men and horses. Drummers on camels had encouraged the
enemy on ladders over the walls and a thousand engineers protected by storms of
arrows were sent to mine the twelve towers. The Accursed tower fell first, then
the gate of St Nicholas by catapults and battering rams. The army
of infidels began pouring into the city and were forced back after a
long battle with the Temple and the Hospital. Torches and the last of the oil
were thrown into the moat then to burn the rotting carcasses and to make a wall
of flame that sent plumes of smoke into the parched air. The troops of the
commune of Acre dragged what had not been killed in battle to the ramparts, cut
off first the hands and then the heads and threw them into the conflagration.
It so enraged the enemy that by that night the Saracens had once again breached
the fortifications and the Franks were forced to take refuge behind the inner
wall, upon which the Templar garrison now stood perched.
    At the northern
end of the battlements, where the water lapped at the seawall with tempers of
its own, the Templars heard the sound of the great kettledrum and a battery of
trumpets and cymbals, and they knew this to be the sultan’s word for the final
on-fall to begin. The Order of Hospitallers and the Teutons, the Venetians and
Pisans knew it also, and what was left of them began to make for the stairs,
leaving the troops of the commune of Acre to stand alone.
    ‘Shall we go?’
Etienne said.
    Marcus made a
shrug. ‘Almaric’s troops are gone . . . the King’s brother will be halfway to
Cyprus by now!’
    Jacques de
Molay, all frown and sharp eyes, lifted his head over the wall a little. ‘More
siege towers have arrived, tall enough to reach heaven, and a hundred columns
of a thousand men each. Sixty-six times a thousand on horses!’ He took up his
weapons.
    Etienne glanced
upwards to where another wave of lit arrows curved and poised poetically before
falling with a whish over the city. There were more cries of agony from the
walls and from below and the smell of burning flesh filled Etienne’s nostrils.
‘What shall men tell of this day?’
    Jacques raised a
frown-full brow. ‘They shall say the Temple deserted the people and left them
to die . . . They will say nothing of the Devilry between the Pisans and the
Genoese who took sides against one another and made pacts with the heathens,
nor of the truces that were broken. Nor shall they speak of Brother William’s
effort to make the people listen to the sultan’s conditions. They called him a
traitor! Now look at them! Forty days of this . . . and to end it all, a
massacre! They could have paid a piece of gold for every citizen. It was a
small price.’
    Etienne took off
his metal cap and moved a hand to where a wound had made itself under his nose
guard. He wiped his brow. ‘You believe they shall say this?’
    ‘I know they
will.’ Jacques turned his old eyes on