He looked from one to the other of his listeners. “So much for Christianity and its supposed unity. But look, too, at Islam. Is it different? No, it is not, not in the sense I am talking about here, because it, too, is run by the men of God. They call themselves imams and mullahs and a range of other names, but they are priests and bishops in every way that we would recognize, in that they seek to control the minds and the lifelong behavior of their fellow men and they live off the goodwill and wealth of the common people. And even they, from the beginning, have fostered divergence in their struggling for power from the outset. No sooner was the Prophet Muhammad declared dead than his followers began to squabble over who would succeed him and control the power of Islam. And mark that word ‘control.’ It is remarkable how often you will find it cropping up, in dealings with the men of God.
“So today, within Islam, you have Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, each tearing at the other’s throat at every opportunity, and each convinced, because their men of God insist it must be so, that Allah is great, as is Muhammad His Prophet, but these others, be they Sunni or Shi’ite, have debased God’s wishes and become the enemy, to be damned and obliterated in God’s holy name. Shi’a Muslim and Sunni Muslim, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian. Bigotry and jealousy and fearful bloodshed entrenched in all four, and four bowed necks beneath the heels of the men of God.
“Would you like to hear more of what I believe, or have I said enough to provoke you, perhaps, into thinking for yourselves?” He looked again from face to face. “Enough? Excellent. We three may or may not meet again, but if we ever do, I would ask you to avoid directing my thoughts again towards the sweet men of God. Shall we ride on? We are yet far from journey’s end.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY, having found Alec Sinclair and completed the first part of his quest, Andre talked his new friend Harry Douglas into taking him on a tour of the siege works, which were enormous, far and beyond anything St. Clair had imagined. His focus during his first week in Outremer had been on finding his errant cousin, so that he had really not taken time to look about him and observe the conditions in force here. But now, he was awestricken by the scope of the activities.
Acre had been under siege now for two years, and the assault had long since lost all of its initial excitement and momentum, settling down into grinding routine and the extended periods of boredom common to all static forms of warfare, with only brief and terrifying clashes occurring occasionally between the two opposing forces. And the extent of the siege works was so vast that Andre had great difficulty in comprehending the complexity of the strategies involved on both sides. Acre itself, now held by a stubborn garrison of mixed Saracen warriors, was one of the oldest ports in Palestine. Built up to prosperity by the Phoenicians hundreds of years earlier, it had developed into a polyglot and extremely wealthy community, attracting merchants and trading fleets from all over the world, and before its capture by Saladin in 1187, it had been renowned as one of the most notorious fleshpots anywhere.
Under the rule of Muslim law, all of that changed. The fleshpots had vanished overnight, the Christian churches were stripped of their crosses and bells, and the mosques of the city were refurbished and reopened, but the conquering Saracen army turned its attention immediately to strengthening the city’s walls and defenses, and for four years now that work had been continuing.
Then, when the original Frankish army had arrived two years later, under the command of Guy de Lusignan, a new momentum had been established. The Christian fleet, composed mainly of Genoese and Pisan fighting ships that dwarfed the Arab dhows and galleys, immediately took command of the seas surrounding the city and established a naval blockade, and it was left to Guy and his small army to blockade the landward side of the city, an undertaking more easily described than achieved.
The city of Acre was vaguely triangular in layout and built on a hook-shaped promontory, its north–south axis tilted slightly to the northeast and southwest, so that the sea fronted it west and south, and it boasted both an inner and an outer harbor, the inner harbor defended by a massive chain that could be raised against incoming ships. On the landward side, the city was protected by a brace of high, parallel walls reinforced by barbicans and towers, the latter spaced closely enough to permit withering crossfire to be laid down against any attacker. These walls had been built by the Templars and the Hospitallers, whose presence in the city in the years before the battle at Hattin was ubiquitous. In the earliest days of the siege, the Frankish attackers came to appreciate how well those walls had been built and quickly learned the folly of attempting to engage the enemy by attacking them directly. Instead, they set up their siege engines and catapults and concentrated all their heaviest firepower on what was estimated to be the strongest but most vulnerable point in the walls, a right-angled corner in the northeastern salient controlled by a high tower known as the Accursed Tower. Settling in to the siege, however, they were acutely aware that their backs were vulnerable, their entire rear exposed to attack should the Sultan bring his armies to the relief of Acre.
It was at that point, Douglas explained to St. Clair, that the Trench was thought of, and for more than a year the Latins labored to build a wide, fortified ditch that stretched two miles inland from the sea and cut off the city from help from the landward side. Saladin’s army began to arrive piecemeal soon after that, but they were unable to challenge the Latin besiegers who sat safely inside their Trench, attacking Acre from the one side and defending themselves against attack by Saladin from the other. But Saladin set up a blockade of his own, on the landward side of the Trench, establishing a heavily manned presence along a three-mile line that effectively curtailed most of the Frankish efforts to bring in supplies. Only occasionally could they land supplies from the sea, because their ditch had a very narrow intersection with the beach, and the Saracen forces concentrated there were constantly on the alert for attempts to smuggle material ashore. Food and supplies did manage to filter through, from time to time, but never enough, and never often enough. In recent months, however, according to Harry Douglas, more and more reinforcements had begun pouring in from every land in Christendom to swell the ranks of the besiegers, and the Christians knew that the city garrison was starving and would not be able to hold out much longer.
On the twentieth day of April 1191, Philip Augustus of France landed in Acre and assumed the overall command of the siege from his nephew, Prince Henry of Champagne. He quickly established his French command post in front of the Accursed Tower and added his own siege machines to the heavy concentration of catapults, trebuchets, and mangonels already in place there, fortifying his own artillery pieces with redoubts made of iron and stone.
That day, having climbed to the highest point of the defensive earthworks on the Trench, facing Acre, Andre and Harry stood watching the French catapults lobbing horse-sized boulders remorselessly at the walls of the Accursed Tower—so called, Harry said, because legend had it that the thirty pieces of silver used to pay Judas Iscariot had been minted there. But something else caught St. Clair’s attention, a strange-looking device, a long cylinder of sorts, save that it had been cut in half and laid lengthwise on the ground, its far end snug against the wall of the tower that loomed over it.
“What’s that thing, over there?” he asked, pointing at it.
Harry squinted, not quite knowing what he was referring to at first, but then he made a harrumphing sound. “Oh, that. That’s what they call a cat.”
“A cat. It’s obviously a siege engine of some kind, but what does it do?”
“You don’t know what a cat is? Have you never seen one before? They’ve been around since the days of the Caesars, in one form or another.”
Andre shook his head. “I have heard of them, but I have never seen one. This is my first siege.”
“Well, it works like the old tortoise formations the Romans used to use to defend themselves against falling volleys of arrows. This thing is an armored half cylinder, mounted on wheels. You can see them along the bottom if you look closely enough. The top surface is smooth metal, strong enough to repel anything thrown or dropped down onto it, including Greek fire, the gelatinous mix of pitch and naphtha that clung and burned with a fury unmatched by anything else in nature. Inside, beneath the roof, teams of sappers move it into place, right up against the walls, and then they dig down and in, undermining the walls.”
“Does it work?”
Harry shrugged. “In theory, yes, and I’ve seen it work on several occasions in the past, but not here. These people have been digging away down there for months, since long before Philip arrived, and to this point they have been less than successful.”
“Hmm.” St. Clair turned away and looked to his right, to where the royal standard of France hung limply above Philip’s pavilion. Nothing moved there, and there were no signs that the King might be in residence, although the standard’s presence indicated that he was. “That reminds me,” he said. “Guy de Lusignan arrived in Cyprus a
