“The tide’s coming in. It will cut us off from the wall. The enemy held us long enough.”
Once the officers in charge realized that was so, there was nothing to do but trudge back to camp. The freckled youth looked so disconsolate that John clapped him on the shoulder.
“Cheer up,” he said. “We’ll get another chance tomorrow.”
“He will,” said a voice that hadn’t quite finished changing. “You might not.”
John turned to face a gangly adolescent a year or two younger than his companion with the freckles.
“Sir Oliver wants to see you,” the squire said.
Stooped, wrinkled and silver-haired, Sir Oliver looked too old for war. He should have been drowsing before his hearth with his grandchildren playing around his chair. But his narrowed blue eyes and scowl still bespoke martial ferocity, or perhaps merely dissatisfaction with what he saw when he regarded John from behind a desk heaped with maps and other sheets of parchment.
“You don’t look like a saint,” the old man growled at length.
“I’m not,” John replied.
“Yet I’m told,” Sir Oliver said, “you led the band that killed the sorcerer in the hills to the north.”
“That’s true.”
Shortly after the Crusaders’ arrival, sickness had broken out. In and of itself, that was only to be expected. But the physicians failed to recognize this particular malady, it seemed to spread with unnatural speed, and when a rumor went round that an old Moorish warlock had laid a curse on the Christians, they sent a patrol to see if it was so.
If it was, it should be easy enough to deal with him. Though a nobleman as well as a wizard, he dwelled in an unfortified, essentially indefensible manor house with a mere handful of retainers. But, when the patrol camped beside the road a mile or two shy of their destination, an eerie moaning sounded from all sides. Balls of blue light drifted among the trees, and shadows crept and slithered in the gloom. One man fell, thrashing in a seizure. Others fled shrieking into the night.
When the members of the patrol found another the following morning, most balked at the prospect of proceeding with their mission. John, however, volunteered to go forward, and, rather to his surprise, three others offered to accompany him. Together, they breached the sorcerer’s home, killed the guards, and beheaded the scholar himself. Then, upon returning to camp, they learned the sickness had run its course.
“How were you able to manage it?” Sir Oliver asked.
“The sorcerer’s weapon was fear,” John said. “If you didn’t give in to it…” he shrugged.
Indeed, there were moments when he suspected the so-called warlock hadn’t wielded any true magic at all, that the sickness had simply been sickness, and the phantasmal phenomena, trickery. But his friends took pride in having overcome the power of Satan, and it seemed kinder to keep his doubts to himself.
“Well,” Sir Oliver said, “however you did it, your superiors took note of the fact that we have men capable of overcoming witchcraft and the Devil’s wiles. Apparently we need such men again.”
“How so?”
“It’s slow going breaking into the city with belfries and stone-throwers. So we’re trying a mine as well. Unfortunately, the sappers believe that from time to time, they sense a hostile something watching them as they work. These are experienced diggers, mind you, not prone to panic simply from being underground. A priest went down to exorcise the presence but, according to the miners, failed, which makes the situation that much more frightening. Still, the sappers are willing to continue, but only if the four men who killed the sorcerer are down in the tunnel to protect them.”
Aboveground, John was certain, the sunlit day was frantic and noisy, with thousands of his fellow Crusaders milling between the ships drawn up on the shore and the siege lines. Some were sawing and hammering, building a new ram and rolling towers to replace the ones the Moors had burned. Some operated the trebuchets that hurled stone after stone to crash against the city walls. Perhaps others howled in outrage as the enemies manning the battlements defiled crosses with their spit and piss. Calling to one another, still more foraged in the fruit orchards, vineyards, and olive groves outside the city.
Belowground, though, everything was dark and quiet. Only yellow lantern glow contended with the eternal night, and only the crunch of pick and spade biting into earth and the rumble of the barrows carrying the dislodged dirt away disturbed the silence.
John had found he liked it better in the mine, the grime and the dust that stung his eyes notwithstanding. No one had sensed the sinister lurking presence in the two days since he and his comrades had joined the sappers, and in the phantom’s absence, it was peaceful down here, or perhaps numbing was the better term. His grief still ached, but less persistently than before.
Understandably, the sappers didn’t share his fondness for their current environs or the labor required to push ahead. But, reassured by the presence of their new protectors and the seeming cessation of ghostly visitations, they worked hard anyway, some out of devotion to their holy cause and others because they expected a handsome reward should their efforts prove instrumental in the fall of the city.
Currently at the head of the crew, broad-shouldered, black-bearded Amadour swung his pick. As one of the wizard killers, he wasn’t required to lend a hand with the digging but perhaps, proud as he was of his considerable strength, would have felt unmanly had he not. The resulting impact made an unexpected rasp, as though he’d struck something harder than packed earth. He swung thrice more, producing the same noise every time and pattering like falling pebbles an instant later.
The Norman picked up a lantern to examine the spot he’d been battering. “I’m hitting brick,” he said.
John advanced and saw Amadour was right. Their tunneling had indeed fetched up against a brick wall. He peered through the face-sized breach his fellow miner had made. Some sort of man-made passage or cellar lay beyond.
Among his companions, the discovery was cause for excitement. They jabbered to one another and, each eager to look through the hole, crowded forward in the close quarters of the mine.
The purpose of a mine was often to bring down a castle or city wall. King Afonso, however, had directed the sappers to dig a longer tunnel that would enable Crusaders to come up well inside Lisbon and attack by surprise. By the looks of things, the miners might well have succeeded.
John tried to share in the general enthusiasm. Inwardly, though, he felt dismay that his days in the soothing darkness might have reached an end. Scowling, he told himself his feelings didn’t matter, only his duty.
“All right,” he said, “let’s find out exactly what this is.” He held out his hand, and one of the miners gave him a pick.
Working together, he and Amadour smashed away enough brick for a man to squirm through the hole. A brick-lined tunnel ran away at right angles to the mine.
Amadour peered through the opening, then grinned, revealing the gap in his front teeth that was the result of an altercation with an even bigger soldier from the German camp. “Still no sign of witches and such” he said, his tone a gibe at the sappers who’d imagined such creatures skulking about. “We just need to find a way to sneak up into the city.”
“And hope the Moors haven’t already come down,” John replied.
The sappers had started digging their mine far back from the city wall. With luck, that had prevented the enemy from discerning what was happening, but it would be unwise to count on it. Sometimes a defending army set out bowls of water to warn of miners, and tremors in the earth agitated the contents. Or someone could have noticed surface soil shifting when the burrowing beneath disturbed it.