family butchered, our silver stolen?’
‘You are fortunate that you are not dead,’ interrupted Robin coolly. ‘Would you not agree?’ He paused for a beat or two, but the red-haired man said nothing. ‘Fortunate that that pack of murderous lunatics’ — Robin flung out an arm and pointed to the door that led outside and down to the bailey — ‘did not tear you apart.’ There were growls of anger from the crowd. ‘But that aside,’ said Robin continuing calmly, ‘at this moment you are fortunate in other matters, too. Firstly, in this Tower; this is a stronghold designed to be held by a handful of warriors against a much bigger army. And we have those warriors. Before me I see men of courage; men who are willing to fight as hard as any knight and, if necessary, to die, in defence of their families, in defence of their pride, and their honour as men.’ I saw a few of the younger Jews nodding.
‘I see men of courage before me, men ready for battle, and in that we are most fortunate,’ Robin went on. ‘With good men such as you, we can hold this Tower until the heavens fall. We have food, we have water and ale, and we have brave men. So, I say, we are fortunate.’ I saw then that the mood had changed subtly; it was something that I had noticed before when Robin spoke. He could command men’s feelings; he had a trick of making them feel that they were better than they truly were. The Jews were standing more erect now, shoulders more square, stomachs pulled in, heads high. There saw themselves as warriors, not sheep to be driven by a hate-filled mob, but hard fighters, men of blood and iron.
‘The second piece of good fortune is that we have these,’ said Robin, lifting the crossbow off his shoulder and holding it up in the air. ‘We have more than three dozen of these weapons, and enough quarrels to send a thousand souls to Hell.’ He took the crossbow and cradled it in his arms. ‘With this weapon, and the others we have here, we can easily hold fast, until this evil sickness which has seized the townspeople releases them. We can keep the Devil at bay until they return to their senses or until help comes. So I say again that we are fortunate. We have the men, we have the weapons, and we have the guts to use them. God smiles on us. We… are… fortunate.’
The crowd of Jews actually cheered him. It was an astonishing turnaround: a few moments ago they had been a sullen, frightened herd of persecuted sheep, now they saw themselves as a band of noble warriors ready to do or die.
‘Now listen closely to me, my friends,’ said Robin. ‘These weapons are very simple to use, but quite deadly.’ As I watched him demonstrate how to load the crossbow, I caught his eye and he shot me a surreptitious grin and a wink.
It was indeed a simple weapon to use. The stiff crossbow cord is pulled back using the power of the whole of a man’s body. You put your right foot in the stirrup at the end of the machine and haul back the cord with both hands while extending the right leg, until the cord is locked into place with a pair of iron teeth near the stock. Then you place a quarrel in the groove on the top of the weapon, put the weapon to your shoulder, aim and pull up the trigger, or tickle as it is known, below the stock. The iron teeth are pulled down by the tickle, releasing the bow cord, which springs forward and shoots the quarrel away at man-killing speed. It was quite accurate at close range, and packed enough power to penetrate chainmail at fifty paces.
‘Take off your hood, Alan, and hold it out to the side,’ Robin suddenly addressed me as I lounged against a stack of boxes by the wall, trying to look confident — and I felt my heart sink. I knew what he was in his mind. I sighed but, loyal as ever, I took my headgear off and held it out as far as possible from my body, close to the rough wooden planks of the wall.
There was a twang, and my beautiful hood was snatched from my grasp and pinned to the wood by a foot of steel-tipped oak. ‘Everybody see that?’ said Robin. ‘Right, form a line, everyone gets one shot at the hood,’ he gave me a grin of pure mischief, ‘and then Alan will issue each one of you with a crossbow and a dozen quarrels.’
I passed an uneasy but largely uneventful night, curled up below the battlements and sleeping only fitfully. Without my hood my head was cold. The one excitement during the night was that one of Robin’s bold new warriors had managed to shoot himself in the foot with a crossbow bolt and had to be carried down the stairs, weeping with pain, while his fellows jeered at his ineptitude.
Dawn broke on a dismal scene. More townspeople seemed to have arrived during the night to swell the ranks of the besiegers — there were now perhaps five or six hundred people milling around below the Tower, occasionally shouting up insults and making threatening gestures but largely ignoring us.
There was no sign of the garrison of the castle, or Sir John Marshal, the Sheriff of Yorkshire. One of the young Jewish men had told me that there had been a handful of soldiers when the first refugees arrived at the Tower, but they had departed as soon as the place began to fill with Jews. That made me uneasy. It sounded as if they had orders to leave the Tower to the Jews — why else would they abandon their posts? Had it been somebody’s plan to lure all the Jews into one place where they could more easily be killed? No, surely that was madness.
The sun was high in the sky, about halfway to its zenith, and the bells of York were ringing out for the office of Terce, when Brother Ademar, the mad white monk, began to preach again. As had been the case the night before, the foxy knight Malbete stood beside him, towering over the short monk as he ranted about God and the Devil, the Holy Pilgrimage and the deaths of Jews. I could not actually make out the full sense of the monk’s words, but small snatches caught on the breeze and wafted his hatred to my ears like the smell of rotting filth. His audience, however, seemed to appreciate his speech. At one point, he bade everyone kneel and he blessed them before leading the crowd in the Pater Noster. Then he resumed his hate-filled ranting, thumping the ground with his cross-staff.
Robin had divided his fighting men into three groups, or companies, of about fifteen men, a mix of ages and abilities. At all times, one company would be resting on the ground floor and two would be on duty defending the castle. There were enough crossbows for each man on duty to have one, and several men had found swords and even a spear or two with which to defend themselves.
‘When they come,’ said Robin to the thirty-odd Jewish men, the two companies who were to take first turn at the Tower’s defence, ‘they will be confident. We let them come close, closer than is comfortable and then we smash them. Utterly. With luck we can make them regret they ever challenged us. Does everybody understand?’ There were murmurs of assent.
‘I’m going to repeat it anyway. When they come we let them get close. Nobody is to shoot until I give the order. Is that clear? If anybody shoots before I give the order, I will personally throw him off the walls and feed him to the Christians. Is that clear?’
The man who had interrupted Robin’s speech the night before muttered something inaudible into his big, red bushy beard. But when Robin looked hard at him, he said nothing. I caught Reuben’s eye in the throng of Jewish warriors and we exchanged wry smiles. He looked tired, but he held the crossbow casually as if he had been born with it in his hands.
‘Now it’s just a question of waiting,’ said Robin and he sat down in the shade of the battlements and stretched out his long legs. Pulling his hood over his eyes, he appeared to be readying himself for sleep. He had his long war bow unstrung beside him, and he put one hand on it, lifted up a corner of his hood with the other hand and glanced at me. ‘Keep an eye on things, will you Alan,’ he said, and yawned. ‘Wake me in two hours if nothing has happened.’ And then he fell asleep.
The Jews were mystified by his nonchalance. But they too began to find comfortable places to sit with their backs to the battlements. Food was passed around, and wineskins, and some men even began to sing quietly to themselves, a weird and wonderful tune of the like I had never heard before. Their eerie music did not seem to obey the golden rules of that art that I had so painstakingly learnt from my former music master, the French trouvere Bernard de Sezanne, who now served Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, the mother of King Richard — and yet it was truly beautiful.
As ancient Jewish music drifted around me, I looked out over the bailey at the crowd of misguided Christian fools listening to the hate-blasted preaching of Brother Ademar, and loosened my blades in their scabbards. My own loaded crossbow was propped against the battlement, and I had a dozen quarrels stuffed in my belt. There were times when I could almost understand Robin’s mistrust of the Christian faith — times like these, when a holy representative of God on earth was exhorting Christians to slaughter their fellow countrymen — but I knew in my heart that it could not be Jesus’s teachings that were at fault. The evil did not come from Him, it must come from the Devil, or from Man’s original sinfulness. Only Christ held the answer, only Christ could rid the world of evil, I
