‘I cannot deny it, but let those who wonder at his claim to Antioch, and the zeal with which he pursued it, think on what he saw well before any of us: that if he wished to profit from our endeavours and his ability it was not going to be where we now stand.’
‘Think what troubles we would have if he was here,’ Flanders replied.
This induced a hoot of laughter from his companion; if relationships were troubled now, the addition of a pugnacious Bohemund, sure of the rightness of his view, would have plunged them to new depths.
‘Our God moves in strange ways, his wonders to perform.’
The response was caustic. ‘And do we not need those wonders now?’
Even if they had been united, neither time nor the tactical means to overcome the walls were on their side. Yet after only six days the first assault was launched, a bid to take the city by sheer force of their passion. A lack of growing timber around Jerusalem obviated the ability to make ladders and the only one existing, a rickety frame, had been made by Tancred’s men, that from a stack of well-hidden wood found only by the pressing need to evacuate a set of loose noble bowels in private.
The mass of the host sought to drive back the defenders from the walls with lances and arrows, fired from ground level at men well above their heads, which was soon seen as ineffectual. The Apulians had at least a chance to fight on more equal terms, albeit if being perched on a strand of wood, your shield used as much as a hook to keep you from falling as it was for defence, with either sword or axe being swung from a position which diminished the weight behind it, could be called anything like parity. Yet that was enough to get them over the secondary wall and then, with the ladder shifted, onto the main defences.
It got harder from there: one giant fellow on the battlements was wielding a two-handed executioner’s blade, so heavy and weighty it sliced through the mail and took off the arm of one of the Apulian knights in a single blow. Then he was threatening to repeat the act until Tancred, at the next victim’s side, thrust his sword up into the ribs beneath the executioner’s upraised arm, twisting it to catch the bones and drag the fellow forward so that both he and his weapon fell to the ground below.
Despite that small victory the attack was close to fiasco on all fronts and the Crusaders were forced to withdraw; Jerusalem was not going to fall with ease and no one with an ounce of vision could doubt the difficulties ahead. Godfrey, with some subtlety, let it be known that his pride would not stand in the way of a conference and Raymond, really with no choice once that had been covered to him, sent a message to imply that he was willing to arrange one, only insisting it took place in his pavilion.
‘Make him come to you,’ Tancred insisted.
That got a sigh. ‘To what purpose?’
Flanders and Normandy spoke in unison, suggesting it would dent his conceit.
That brought forth a smile from burly de Bouillon. ‘No weapon is that potent, my friends. We must speak to each other or our endeavour has no hope of progress and never let it be said that I was the cause of the failure by my intransigence. I will, however, hold no grudge against anyone who declines to join me.’
‘Of course we will support you,’ Tancred said.
‘Has anyone ever told you what a cunning old fox you are?’ Flanders asked, for it had been a loaded offer.
That got a bellow at the jibe, which was, to be fair, delivered with a grin. ‘With such rascals around me do I not need to be?’
‘These walls will not be overcome without siege towers, Duke Godfrey,’ Toulouse said, adding, in a tone he might have used with a dunce, ‘I take leave to suggest even you will agree.’
The reply came with suppressed irritation. ‘Count Raymond, my agreement does not make it practicable. We lack timber and we lack also the tools to build a device that will not fall to pieces the moment we seek to move it.’
Flanders cut in, his voice as bitter as his expression. ‘And we will die of thirst in the time it takes to construct one.’
A party of his men had, the previous day, been ambushed while seeking to fetch in water from wells further afield, cut down by one of the now numerous Muslim bands that roamed the countryside, able to cut off small groups of Crusaders. Not that he had suffered alone; every lord present had lost men to such snares.
That many succeeded in bringing in water, often fighting off attacks, was a positive, even if that commodity, carried in animal skins that had been given no time to cure, tasted foul when consumed. Another hazard existed to match the arrows fired at the Pool of Siloam; the skins sometimes came with leeches inside, which if ingested by men drinking greedily led to a painful death.
Talk was unlikely to bring about a solution, but that did not debar the employment of it, with Raymond coming close to suggesting they were wasting their time, which annoyed de Bouillon.
‘I am sure not one of us here has any notion other than to press home our attack?’ asked Godfrey, in a confrontational tone and a sweeping glare. ‘If so, I state now I will remain on my own and find a way to overcome these walls.’
Tancred replied, he hoped for all bar Toulouse. Godfrey, and it was well known, had a soft spot for the younger man, for both his nature and the fact that he had been party to the saving of his life when he had been attacked by that bear.
‘No one suggests such a thing, My Lord.’
‘What no one is suggesting,’ Raymond barked, ‘is a solution to our dilemma. Without we have the means to meet those Fatimids on equal terms we are pissing into the wind.’
If there had been bells in the siege lines they would have rung out to the news that a Genoese flotilla, laden with supplies, not least amphorae of wine, had anchored at Jaffa, this being brought to them in person by one of the ships’ captains. Added to his welcome, the princes were brought to the realisation that what they had been told about the port by their informers had been lies bordering on wild exaggeration: it was not a formidable city at all, for the sailors had found only a weakly manned and dilapidated tower from which the tiny garrison had fled before they could set foot ashore.
An expedition was despatched immediately to escort the cargo to Jerusalem, or to put it more truthfully, several separate expeditions, since it seemed that noble mistrust extended to any faith that a princely confrere could be relied upon to undertake such a task properly. In the end, if their God had smiled upon them by the arrival of that fleet, he had also done so by the fact that the forces that went to Jaffa, when confronted, were, once combined, strong enough to fight off the enemy they faced.
Godfrey’s men were to the fore, a dozen knights and fifty men under a captain called Geldemar Carpinel, this party shocked to find themselves barred from any progress by a force of Muslims larger than they thought possible to assemble; the whole plain before them was covered in the enemy, a good proportion of them cavalry. Carpinel had no notion to back off from a fight, however outnumbered he might be, and immediately engaged — he assumed his enemies to be a scratch force — only to find that they were disciplined warriors that soon had him in some difficulty.
It was Raymond Pilet, leading sixty of Toulouse’s knights on what remained of the Provencal mounts, who came to his rescue. Instituting a charge, the mailed lances sliced into the Muslim lines and, with their weight and brio, scattered them like chaff. Soon the field was strewn with enemy bodies, the horizon dotted with those fleeing from the fight.
If there was enmity between the contingent leaders, that did not always extend to their followers and success in battle easily cemented over any resentment, so it was a jolly band combined that entered Jaffa to see the cheering sight of half a dozen Genoese vessels riding high at anchor, even more heartening to see the quayside and jetty lined with their discharged cargo, an order going out to immediately gather to that place all the carts and donkeys in Jaffa.