Siege of Heaven

Grimbauld turned to the pilgrims. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he screamed. ‘Bring more wood!’

The battle raged all afternoon. Each time we piled on fresh kindling, the Fatimids retaliated with a new torrent of water. With each subsequent attempt, the pile of wood and straw around the ram grew higher, until its vast bulk was almost buried, but even then it could not overcome the Fatimids’ defence. There seemed no limit to the water they had in that city — and that, too, drove us to despair. The air was thick with smoke and hot steam that scalded my lungs; I felt that I must have fallen inside a vast black cauldron and be boiling inside it. Only when we managed to bring up jars of oil and soak the wood with that did we at last make a fire that the Fatimids could not quench. The flames licked up high over the wall: I doubt there was a man in the garrison who could have endured the heat and smoke, but though the wall sat undefended we could not go near it. The fire for which we had fought so hard, first to quench and then to light, had become our enemies’ best defence. As the shadows lengthened and darkness fell, we left the walls behind and limped back to our camp.

46

Another day dawned — Friday. This time there was no great rallying of the army, no processions or speeches. We crawled up from the places where we had fallen asleep and massed around the base of the tower. I did not even need to get dressed, for I had slept in my armour on the ground where I collapsed, dead to the world until the trumpets summoned me. Pain racked my body: my limbs felt as though they had been disjointed and then hammered together with iron nails, and my hands were still bloody and raw from pushing the ram. Worse than that was the thirst: my mouth felt as though it had been swabbed with quicklime, but there was no water to slake it. We had spent all our supplies putting out the fire on the ram.

‘Friday in Jerusalem. I suppose it’s a good day to die,’ muttered Aelfric as we mustered at the tower.

‘Or to defeat death,’ Thomas reproved him. His cheeks had sunk in and his beard was ragged, so that he looked like a prophet stumbling out of the wilderness, far older than his years.

‘Better to defeat the Egyptians,’ said Sigurd. ‘It has to be today. The army won’t stand any more.’

‘Has anybody heard how the battle went for Count Raymond yesterday, in the south?’ I asked.

‘Badly. Saewulf told me. He tried to bring his tower up to the walls but had to withdraw it. The defenders knew exactly where he was coming — they had ten mangonels waiting to bombard it with stones and fire. They say that afterwards the count could not persuade any of his knights to enter it again.’

In the mean, shrivelled husk that had become my heart, I thanked God for that.

A quarter of an hour after dawn, Duke Godfrey and his retinue mounted to their positions within the tower. I watched them jealously, wishing myself in their place. As well as his regular arms, Godfrey carried a broad crossbow to use from the top deck of the tower, and the sight of it reminded me of a similar weapon, many years and miles ago, that had first coaxed me onto the road to Jerusalem. I looked at Thomas to see if he remembered, but his eyes were dull and fixed elsewhere.

When Godfrey and his knights were in place, and the priests had mumbled a quick prayer, we took up the strain on the hawsers fixed to the base of the tower. My hands were still too sore to grasp it; I knotted the rope around my chest, harnessing myself to the beast behind and making myself its slave.

As heavy as the ram had been, this was worse. The tower stood almost ten times taller, so that every time we hauled I felt that we might pull the entire edifice crashing down on us. The halter around me dug into my chest, and there was no roof over my head to protect me from the sun or the rain of missiles. Whereas the previous day we had at least been able to make the first part of our approach in safety, this time we had no relief. The advantage of surprise we had gained two nights earlier was gone, and no sooner had the tower started to stagger forward than a volley of stones rose up from behind the walls. They spun slowly in the air, seeming to float so gently that I thought they might never land. And then suddenly they were almost upon us, dropping down with ravenous speed, rushing towards us. Watching in horror, I could see that these were not the pebbles and rocks that had harried us the day before, but full-sized boulders, heavy as a man, flung from mangonels. The defenders must have moved them up in the night — and ranged them with deadly accuracy. All three of the missiles in that first wave struck within a dozen yards of the tower, tearing into the lines of men who drew it. One struck a man’s head and pulped it like a melon; another toppled five men in a row before it came to rest. Men ran to move the boulder out of the path of the tower, while the bodies of the fallen were left to be crushed under its wheels.

Now it became a war among giants, a titanomachia between the tower stumbling forward like a blinded Cyclops, and the invisible arms behind the walls, which hurled out boulders as children skip stones on a pond. From our own lines, the Franks’ mangonels answered with fire of their own. I was merely a beetle scuttling about at their feet, while flights of rocks raced across the sky above. Death was sudden and everpresent. Several stones struck glancing blows on the sides of the tower, ripping away the skin. Another actually passed clear through one of these holes, plucked one of the knights inside from his perch and dashed him to the ground. But it was we on the ground who suffered most — crushed, shattered, torn apart or simply bowled over. Some of the soldiers who followed tried to help us: they brought up wooden hurdles covered with wicker and skins and held them in front of us. But those were designed to stop arrows, not rocks; they added nothing but debris to the battle. The soldiers’ bodies made better shields.

All I could do was keep my head down and pray for mercy. Even if I could have picked out the boulders flying towards me, I could not have done anything to avoid them. The taut rope that tied me to the tower also tied me to whatever fate God granted me. Perhaps I grew numb to the fear, or perhaps the mere fact of survival when so many around me were dying gave me courage, but gradually — against all reason — it seemed that the bombardment was lessening. I could still hear boulders hurtling through the air — could even hear the snap of the mangonels behind the walls now — but they did not seem to be striking us with such frequency or ferocity.

I risked a glance up. The bombardment still went on, but now the missiles sailed over our heads — almost over the tower itself. We had come through the onslaught, and were now so close to the walls that the missiles could not strike us. The Fatimids had not moved their catapaults to adjust for the change: perhaps they could not.

A ragged cheer went up from our ranks — and died as swiftly. Our progress had not made us safe, merely exposed us to new danger. Now we were in range of the walls, and the defenders unleashed a storm of small stones and arrows against us. They filled the air like locusts, preying on the men who strained to pull the tower forward. Our auxiliaries ran forward with the hurdles again and tried to shield us, though they could not guard every man. More useful to us was the tower. It stood a good six feet higher than the walls, offering the men on its top storey a commanding platform from which they could rake the ramparts with their arrows.

A horn sounded from its height. ‘Into the breach!’ bellowed Grimbauld. An arrow stuck from his shoulder, another from his leg, but they had not felled him. While those of us on the ropes strained to pull the tower closer, a tide of pilgrims swept around us and poured through the gap in the outer wall that the ram had made the day before. I could see its charred remains, still breathing wisps of smoke, beneath the inner walls. The pilgrims swarmed over it with hatchets and axes, pulling apart the burned wood and scattering the ashes. I heard several screams of pain as men grabbed pieces where the fire had not yet cooled — and more screams as the Fatimids on the wall tipped down stones and boiling water. At least the water must have doused what remained of the fire. The wreckage of the ram was pulled free, and the way lay open for the tower.

‘This is it,’ said Sigurd next to me. He had not bound himself to the tower as I had; he carried his rope over his shoulder, his vast arms bulging with the strain. His shield and his axe were slung over his back, ready for the moment when we could put down this terrible burden. ‘Stay beside me.’

I nodded, unable to speak. We had reached the place where the incline steepened, where the ram had run away from us the day before, and I wondered how we would ever get the tower down it. If we let it go here, it would surely either topple over or career into the walls and shatter. But once again, the land had changed. A company of masons had come out in the night with picks and hammers to level the path, which now led gently down to the breach in the outer wall. We rolled the tower down the incline. A firestorm of arrows, balls of blazing pitch, hammers wrapped in burning rags and jars of flaming oil engulfed it, but the great beast Magog rolled on impervious as they slid or bounced off the skins that covered it. It passed through the breach, and came to rest at last in the space between the walls, a few yards from the inner rampart. For an instant, an awestruck silence gripped the battlefield as the men on the tower and the men on the walls stared at each other, almost face to