My handle came up to the stop.
So did Miles’.
Fiore moved the engine. No hesitation — he’d watched the Englishman serve the machine and he knew his mathematics. He stepped back — no expression on his face, and pulled the handle.
The iron dart leaped away, and the machine slammed back to the roof.
Miles ran to the other machine. He and one of the Gascons and another sailor worked to clear the corpses away from the base.
Fiore stepped across our dead and used his crowbar again, and pulled the lever, uncaring that the leaping monster crushed a dead man’s skull.
Men were cheering in the courtyard.
We were struck twice — slam, slam!
The Casteleto tower rocked.
Now there was a crack all the way along the middle of the roof.
I leaned out and saw the Order’s fleet standing in for the New Harbour beach. They were not going for the Porto Vecchio, where the king and the crusaders were mired in shallow water. They were running the gauntlet of the Pharos tower, using the gap we’d made by taking the Casteleto. Going to the New Beach.
Which was empty of enemy.
The galliot was nosing into the Casteleto dock. I didn’t need new orders to know what that meant.
The cheering in the courtyard went on. Fiore, with Miles and Nerio and the sailors, had the leftmost engine loaded just as a big rock — I swear, as God is my saviour that I saw it in the air a moment before it struck — crushed the engine that they had just abandoned. Pieces of wood as big as my arm flew, jagged splinters that were as sharp as swords, yet not a man was killed.
The crack in the tower’s roof widened and the whole building shook like a beaten drum.
Before I could shout a warning, Fiore pulled the handle on his machine and the dart soared away. I never saw what any of our last shots accomplished.
‘Down!’ I roared — or perhaps I squeaked it. Standing on a damaged stone tower while a heavy machine pounds your friends to pudding is not at all like fighting in harness, friends. I was so afraid I wanted to shit myself.
But we got Juan through the trap door. Miles got him to me and I threw caution to the winds because the steps were cracking and jumped to the second storey floor, cradling his head. I dropped him, but we were down.
A piece of the roof fell, a corbel.
‘Down!’ I yelled. ‘All the way out of the tower!’
In fact, we might have taken our time. The roof didn’t fall in for three days. But the next rock split the tower the way an axe splits a big billet of wood.
Juan recovered his wits in the galliot. He threw up twice, drank some water, and shook himself. For as long as it took us to reach the beach, he could only speak his native Catalan. The ways of the mind are strange.
Behind us, the Admiral’s banner continued to fly from the Casteleto, and the machine on the tower of the Pharos threw great stones at it. But most of them fell short, and they loosed very slowly.
We left the oarsmen and sailors as a garrison, with Fra Ricardo as castellan. My part in that battle was done.
I landed almost dry shod, and I had had the whole run down the harbour to don my harness with Marc-Antonio working like an automaton at my side. As soon as my breast and back were closed, he went to the others. Juan armed last, when the stern of the galliot was drawn well up the beach and the horses were going over the sides on the transports.
Oh, yes. The horses.
There was my Gawain, shining in the sun of Outremer.
There seemed no hurry at all. Men came and shook my hand, and the legate embraced me and Saracens came to the walls of their town, just half a bowshot away. Guillaume Machaut says we were showered with arrows, and Nerio was hit, so I suppose that this must be true, but I have no memory of darts or arrows. I only remember the feeling of calm, of confidence, that Father Pierre inspired in that hour. He wore no harness, only a fine gold and silk stole over one of his Carmelite robes. He had no weapon in his hand, but held a simple wooden cross. The only order he gave was to demand that the Knights of the Order would maintain the sanctuary of churches in the event we broke into the city, that we kill no women or children, that we behave as soldiers of God.
And then the Knights of the Order were mounted — a hundred of them, a block of scarlet. I’m not sure when the world had seen a hundred Knights of the Order all together on their chargers — perhaps not since the fall of Acre. The sight was so noble as to steal my breath.
I got up on Gawain. Marc-Antonio got me a lance, and I began to form the donats and the volunteers. We had lost a good number of men at the Casteleto. Their ranks were filled by d’Albret and his Gascons and Savoyards, who were, strictly speaking, crusaders and not volunteers or Donats, but they were there and had their mounts. I still did not question what they were doing with us.
I had formed my volunteers in a wedge at Fra Peter’s command and D’Albret came up behind me. He pushed right in, his visor open. ‘I like this better,’ he said. ‘Ah, monsieur, now perhaps we will see some fighting.’
He was grinning ear to ear.
It was not at all like being pounded by stone balls.
Ser Nerio brought his destrier up so that his right knee tucked behind my left. Ser Fiore brought his charger to where his left knee was behind my right. In the next rank, d’Albret was pinned between Miles and Juan. And do on, until our last rank was ten wide.
Off to my right, by the water’s edge, the men-at-arms and turcopoles, the Order’s light horsemen, were arming as fast as they could. John and Marc-Antonio, having got us into our armour, were now pulling maille shirts over their own heads and trying to find their own mounts in the herd of horses now swimming or walking on to the beach. There seemed to be horses everywhere.
Miles’ uncle advanced the papal standard.
Fra William got his turcopoles formed. He had about a hundred squires and ‘light’ cavalrymen and they did not form a wedge, but instead cantered out to form an open line to our front.
Fra Peter rode out of the central wedge and rode along our front.
‘Christians!’ he called. ‘For this you have trained. For this you have endured the penance of your harness and the taste of your own blood. Now is your hour!’
Four hundred voices roared. And were silent.
Four hundred men.
The legate was in the centre of Fra Peter’s wedge. As safe as the knights could make him, and our three squadrons began to ride along the foreshore, toward the keening sounds of combat.
The sun was high.
It was just noon.
Fra William took the turcopoles up the beach, formed at an order so open that there was twenty yards between horsemen, but that meant that his hundred covered almost the whole width of the beach and the sandy plain below the city walls. I had seen them practice this ‘screen’ on Rhodes, and I had assumed it was a matter of deception because even a very thin line of horses raises enough dust to cover most movements.
But the screen covered more than movement. Because the men in the screen had bows and crossbows, they could deter enemy light cavalry. They could also see and scout obstacles and could react far more quickly than we armoured knights to changes in the field or sudden sallies. Best of all, they were themselves very difficult to hit; at twenty yards apart, each horseman was an individual target. A single horseman can slow or speed, angle left or right, and if he knows his business, he can tie down a good amount of archery. You might argue that the archers could simply shoot over him or past him at the serried ranks of knights behind, but that is not the way of men in war. Men in war shoot at the target closest to them and most immediately dangerous.
At any rate, the confidence and calm of the Order was so great, and I think that Father Pierre’s presence had something to do with it, that I had time to admire the precision of our formations, and the advance of the line of light horse was splendid.