The King’s Tower was packed with Jews — from doddery old crones to strapping young men and suckling babes in their mother’s arms, there must have been at least a hundred and fifty souls squashed into the three storeys of the keep like salted fish in a barrel. And two good Christians. Well, one Christian and Robin. I had never seen so many Jews in one place before, and it was a strange experience for me. They spoke English or French to each other but occasionally dropped briefly into another guttural language that I could not understand; very few of them had brought arms with them when they had come to the Tower, which seemed strange to me for people under threat of violence, but it was no matter as the keep was already well stocked with weapons. And they argued constantly about everything. But the strange thing was that, although they could be shouting at their fellows or family members one minute, the next, they had hugged and kissed and all was calm again; and they never came to blows with each other no matter what insults had been exchanged. I was astounded. In a Christian community, the aggressive tone of their disputations alone would have been enough to start the fists flying.
They were a sober, orderly lot, too, courteous and kind to me; and so I liked them. They had all brought food too, and it was comforting to know that while we had to shelter in the Tower, there would be plenty to eat.
There was precious little room in the lower part of the Tower for equine accommodation, but we managed to make our horses reasonably comfortable with food bags and water within reach of their noses. Then Robin and I climbed three storeys to the roof of the Tower by a narrow staircase in one corner of the building. As we surveyed the area around the castle keep, it dawned on me that we were surrounded. The King’s Tower had been built for defence, it was undeniably a secure fortress, but for us it was also a trap from which we could not easily escape. To the southwest ran the river Ouse, deep and slow; a fit man could swim it easily but what about a horde of Jewish grandmothers and suckling babies? There was no escape for us there. To the east ran the river Foss, once again unpassable except by one small bridge. To the north there was a line of campfires burning in the evening gloom around which milled scores of men-at-arms and townsfolk, clearly beginning to prepare their suppers. To the south was the bailey of the castle, now filling with the very people, the maddened Jew-haters, we had had to run from in the streets. It was full dark by now, but the bailey was so well lit with torches and fires that the scene was easy to make out. Hundreds of folk were milling around in confusion in the open space at the centre of the bailey, but a knot had gathered around a short speaker in a light-coloured robe by the chapel on the western side, who was holding a large wooden staff with a cross piece tied to it to make the holy symbol. He was haranguing the crowd and thumping the earth with his cross to emphasise his points, and I recognised the white-robed monk from that afternoon. His message seemed to be the same vile spew of poison as then, for every now and then he would fling out his arm and indicate the Tower. Beside him stood a tall knight in chainmail, a long sword at his waist, carrying a shield with the device of a scarlet clenched fist on a pale blue field. He looked familiar, but it was only when two men-at-arms approached with lit torches and stood beside him that I caught sight of his face. He had a shock of white hair in the centre of his forehead, standing out clearly from the russet mass of the rest, and I recognised the illiterate, feral-eyed foxy knight from my encounter with Prince John.
Just then Josce of York appeared beside us, his grey beard awry and out of breath from climbing the Tower’s stairs too fast, and the three of us stood at the battlements and stared out over the bailey. I was straining my ears to make out the white monk’s hate-filled words, when Robin spoke: ‘Who is that ill-looking knight?’ he asked Josce.
‘He is Sir Richard Malbete, sometimes called the Evil Beast,’ the tall Jew replied. ‘Some say he is part demon, for it is whispered that he loves the pain of other men more than he loves meat and drink. My friend Joseph of Lincoln holds his note for twenty thousand marks. He is a ferocious one, Malbete, and he hates all mankind, but especially he hates Jews. More than just for his great debts to us, I believe; he hates us with a passion that surpasses all earthly reason. Perhaps he really is a demon.’
‘He is a close friend of Prince John,’ I added. And both Josce and Robin looked at me in surprise. ‘He was at Nottingham two weeks ago.’
Robin nodded and then said to Josce: ‘And the other man, the white monk. Who is he?’
‘He is Brother Ademar, a wandering lunatic who formerly belonged to a Premonstratensian canonry; he escaped the cloister walls and has been preaching hatred against the Jews for a more than a month now, since your Christian season of Lent began. But the people listen to him for all his lunacy. They say he has been touched by God.’
Robin said nothing. But I remembered his comment earlier in the day: Someone should cut down that madman before he drowns the world in blood.
‘Can we hold out here until things become calmer — or the King sends help?’ asked Josce; he sounded more weary than worried. Robin looked around the small square of the Tower’s ramparts. About a score of angry-looking young Jewish men were watching the bailey from behind the crenellations, occasionally replying in kind to the insults from below. And every five yards or so along the parapet there was a pile of a dozen stones, each one about the size of a man’s head, which could he hurled down on any attacker with devastating effect. Robin always said that the main weapon in any castle’s armory was its height, and we were a good fifty feet above any adversaries. Stones that had been laboriously hauled up to the top by members of the former garrison could be sent back down again at great cost in blood to the enemy.
‘I believe so,’ said Robin. ‘We have enough men to see them off until help arrives or they come to their senses. It would be better if this place were stone-built. But I think we may hold them. As long as that rabble doesn’t get hold of any artillery.’ He looked at me. And I remembered with a shudder how, at the battle of Linden Lea, Sir Ralph Murdac had brought up a machine for throwing great boulders and how, once he had the range, the massive missiles had smashed through our wooden walls as if they were made of straw.
Josce seemed satisfied. ‘Will you come down and speak to everybody?’ he asked. ‘I think it would help.’
Robin stared at him for a second. His eyes were blank and metallic and the silence went on for an uncomfortably long time. ‘I will be down in a few moments. I must speak to Alan, first,’ he said finally.
Josce bowed his balding head. ‘Thank you. I will call everyone together,’ he said and he gathered up his robe to free his feet and moved away to the stairs.
When the old man had gone, Robin took me by the arm. ‘You must go, Alan. You can get out, you know.’ I merely stared at him in disbelief. He continued: ‘Wait until midnight, and take a rope from the stores. You just have to shin down the walls and swim the Ouse; even if you’re caught, as a Christian, you will be safe.’
‘We could both go,’ I said, testing him, although I knew what his answer would be.
‘I can’t leave,’ Robin looked me full in the face. ‘I need Reuben. Reuben is the money and the connection; I need to keep Reuben alive, or… well, I must keep him alive,’ he said simply, then: ‘I think this is going to be very bad, very bad indeed, and so I must urge you to leave — tonight. This is not your fight.’
I squared my shoulders, and looked back into his pale, grey eyes. ‘When I first entered your service,’ I said stiffly, ‘I swore that I would be loyal to you until death. I will not break that oath. If you will stay here and face battle against these madmen, then I will remain with you.’
‘You really are an idiot, Alan,’ said Robin but in a kindly voice, ‘a sentimental idiot. But thank you.’ And he smiled and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘So be it, then. We fight. Now I suppose I’d better go and rally the troops.’
With that, he was gone. I remained at the battlements staring out into the darkness and wondering whether I had made an enormous, possibly fatal mistake. The bailey seemed to be settling down for the night and I saw in the light of the few remaining torches hundreds of people making up beds under the eaves of the castle buildings while others, armed any-old-how with rusty spears and axes, rakes and scythes were standing guard, almost like regular soldiers. The white monk had ceased his shouting and gone, and of Sir Richard Malbete there was nothing to be seen. I looked down to my right, at the black Ouse, and saw that dozens of campfires had been now built between the bottom of the Tower mound and the river. The Jew-hating rabble had not dispersed, not at all: they appeared to have grown in number, and someone was organising them, almost certainly a soldier — for they surrounded us like a besieging army. Whatever Robin had said, it would not have been easy for me to escape. The blood-hungry mob had not gone away, back to their homes, calmed by the falling of night, they were there to stay. And, come morning, they would try to get into the Tower. We were in for a hard fight. My hands went to my waist, to the hilts of my poniard and sword on either side of my body. If I were to die the next day, I would take a few of these damned lunatics with me, I said bravely to myself, but the ice-snake in my belly gave a little slither of fear.
Just then a small hand touched my arm and I jumped like a startled rabbit, jerking the poniard half out of its scabbard. Ruth was at my side, and she was proffering a steaming wooden bowl. ‘Don’t do that,’ I said crossly, ‘don’t sneak up on people. I could easily have killed you.’
She frowned. ‘I am sorry for frightening you like that,’ she said.
‘You did not frighten me,’ I said, still annoyed. ‘I was merely regarding the enemy and considering our best stratagems for tomorrow.’ I was being pompous and I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.
She said nothing, but handed me the bowl of fish stew, gesturing that I should eat. I sank down on to the floor of the parapet, back against the thick wooden wall and began to spoon the mixture into my mouth. She crouched down beside me, watching. The food was absolutely delicious, and I was surprised that somebody had bothered to make a proper hot meal in these difficult circumstances. I flashed a smile at her, and she smiled back. Friends again.
‘I never thanked you for escorting us here,’ she said. Her brown eyes above her veil filled with warmth and gratitude. ‘I was so scared and you were so brave, like a hero, like Jonathan fighting the Philistines…’
I seemed to be losing my appetite as I stared into those deep twin pools. Gruffly, I said: ‘I’m no Jonathan, I was merely doing my duty…’ I couldn’t think of anything more to say, there was a lump in my throat and my cheeks were glowing. I was secretly very glad that she thought me a hero. But I hoped she could not see my blushes in the darkness.
‘Will you stay and protect us against…’ she made a sideways jerk of her head, indicating the bailey of the castle, ‘… them?’ I put down the nearly empty bowl and took her hand. ‘My lady,’ I said awkwardly, too loud for the quiet of the night, ‘I shall protect you from these evil men, even at cost of my own life. They shall never harm you.’ Ruth lifted her free hand to my cheek and softly stroked the downy skin. ‘Thank you, Alan,’ she said.
I shudder now, looking back after more than forty years, to hear my young self making such rash promises. And I can scarcely bear to remember what happened afterwards — but recall it I shall, as I swore to do so. And perhaps by remembering the past unflinchingly, I shall be granted forgiveness by Our Lord for my sins in those dark days.
I followed Ruth down the spiral staircase in the corner of the Tower, watching with great interest the narrow waist and the way she swayed her hips as she walked, and on the ground floor, we came across a gathering of all the Jewish men of fighting age. They did not look a very formidable force. There were about forty of them, ranging in years from fourteen to fifty, mostly dark or grey haired and with a beaten, hangdog look. They looked ashamed, frightened; no one man wanting to meet another’s eye. Ruth slipped away and I watched as Robin, confidence personified, strode into the centre of the square space and stood on an old wooden box so that everyone could see him. He had an unloaded crossbow held casually over his shoulder, and began, as he had put it, ‘to rally the troops’.
‘My friends, be quiet and listen to me for a moment,’ he said loudly. ‘Give me your ears, my friends, and I will give you the good news, the excellent news about our situation.’ The Jews looked at him curiously, as if they had another madman in their midst. ‘We are fortunate,’ Robin began again, even more loudly, and there was a stirring and muttering in the crowd. ‘I say, we are fortunate because we are here — ’
One man stepped out from the loose circle that had formed around Robin; a big, sturdy man in a dark blue robe with a magnificent bushy red beard. His angry voice cut straight across Robin’s speech. ‘Fortunate, how? Fortunate to be hunted like wild pigs through our own city? Fortunate to be driven from our homes, our friends and 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 was sure. Or almost sure.
The attack came not long after noon. I had been half-listening to the sounds of the crowd as Ademar whipped them with his words, while Robin snored gently at my feet. The crowd sounded like the roar and crash of the sea breaking on a shingle beach; in a strange, horrible way, it was soothing; just a big ceaseless, sound, seemingly unconnected with any evil. Then suddenly there was movement in the bailey; Brother Ademar had ended a long harangue with a great shout, there was a louder that usual roar from the masses and he plunged into the crowd of listeners, and forced his way through the bodies like a man swimming in a sea of humanity. He was followed by Malbete, surging forward through the populace in the wake of the monk, and surrounded by a knot of half a dozen men-at-arms, wearing surcoats in scarlet and sky blue, the colours of the Evil Beast himself.
Ademar emerged from the press at the gate of the bailey, and entrance of the rammed-earth causeway leading up to the Tower. He turned to the packed masses behind him and shouted a last exhortation; at this distance I could hear him clearly, and I swear he bellowed: ‘These Christ-killing lice must be swept from the earth! The earth must be cleansed! God wills it! God wills it!’ And his words were answered by another great roar from the crowd. He raised his six-foot wooden cross and, alone, he charged up the earth ramp, and on to the wooden steps that led the last few yards up to the Tower. And with a crazed howl that froze my heart, the crowd of screaming Christians, the good citizens of York, rushed after him like a river in spate.
I had long since woken Robin and he was passing along the file of Jews lining the parapet, giving encouragement. Each Jew was clutching a crossbow, but many looked terrified. ‘Do not shoot, do not shoot,’ Robin was shouting, his freshly strung war bow in one hand, and it was hard to hear him over the deep booming hatred of the crowd below. ‘When I give the signal, we will crush these vermin, not before, hold your peace until I give the order. Do. Not. Shoot.’
Miraculously, not a Jew fired his crossbow, not a javelin or stone was hurled. ‘Wait for it, wait for it,’ Robin was shouting, and then I noticed him doing a strange thing. He put down his bow and reached for a boulder, one of hundreds that had been piled in heaps around the battlements. He took it in both hands, holding it to his chest. It was about the same size as a man’s head. Then he looked out over the parapet and down at the surging mob below. The white monk was at the iron-bound gate of the Tower; he was hammering at the oak door with the butt end of his cross, ordering the Jews to open it in the name of Christ, and making no discernable impact at all. Robin leaned out over the battlements, lifted the great boulder out over the edge, paused for a second to take aim and then hurled the great lump of stone almost straight downward on to the head of the white monk.
The monk’s head exploded like a smashed egg, splashing glistening blood and brain over the dull wood of the steps. His body collapsed, the feet jerked once and then he was still.
I swear, I swear on Mary the Mother of God that for just an instant, the whole blood-crazed mob stopped, stock still, frozen in shock at the holy man’s death. And then, Richard Malbete, who was in the middle ranks of the mob, raised his sword and bellowed ‘Kill them, kill them all,’ and the crowd screamed as if in terrible pain and surged forward again.
‘Now shoot,’ yelled Robin. ‘Shoot. Reload, and shoot again.’ And with a leathery ripple of noise, the defenders fired as one man, and a hail of black quarrels sliced down and smacked into the crowd below. Dozens of Christians dropped out of the press before the Tower door, staggering back punctured by deep wounds in the neck, shoulders and head. One man in a red hood snarling up at the Jews on the battlements received a quarrel through the eye. He fell to his knees and was trampled by the mob. Some of our men followed Robin’s example and, after firing their crossbows, picked up stones from the piles by the battlements and hurled them down on the attackers with terrible force. Others methodically reloaded, hauling back the powerful cords with their leg and back muscles, loading a quarrel into the groove, leaning over the parapet and shooting into the mass of folk below again and again.
The slope was now littered with wounded and dying townsmen, and a few women, too, caught up in the fire of zealotry. More Christians surged over the earth and log causeway from the bailey, taking the places of their fallen neighbours, boiling around the little iron door and battering at it with axes, swords, even plain wooden staves. They had no chance. The black quarrels flew thick and fast, a swarm of death, punching into the unarmoured bodies of the people below and doing appalling slaughter. Robin, beside me, had regained his bow. He had an arrow nocked and was searching the crowd for a particular target. And I knew who it was. Richard Malbete, surrounded by men-at-arms, was urging the mob forward from the back of the press around the door with oaths and loud cries of ‘God wills it!’ I saw Robin mark him, pull back his bow cord the final couple of inches to his ear and loose. It flew straight and true but, at the last minute, the man-at-arms next to Malbete threw up his kite-shaped shield and caught the arrow, with a flat thump, an inch or two below the curved top edge. Robin cursed and pulled another arrow from his bag. I saw Malbete staring directly at us, his feral eyes glittering madly, and then he began to move away, squirming backwards through the crowd like an eel, keeping low. He gave us one parting glance of sheer hatred before he turned and disappeared back across the causeway into the bailey courtyard.
The fight below us was not over, but there were signs that the people’s ardour was fading under the terrible onslaught of quarrels and stones. A young man, thin and agile, his face burning with religious fervour, in desperation tried to climb the rough wooden exterior of the Tower using two thick knives, driving them into the wood to give him handholds. I leaned over the parapet and shot him in the throat with a bolt from my crossbow. It was the first shot I had loosed, and I watched with a numb feeling of regret as he tumbled away, rolling down the slope, choking on his own blood, dying and scrabbling at the thick black shaft that protruded from his neck.
And then suddenly it was over. The townspeople were streaming back over the causeway to the bailey, helping their wounded friends to limp along, but leaving more than two score of bodies scattered on the bloody grass of the mound below us. A few of the Jews loosed bolts at their retreating backs, but they missed, and Robin shouted: ‘Cease shooting, stop! Save your quarrels.’ And suddenly we were a gang of grinning, cheering men, panting and sweating, slapping each other on the back, shaking but alive and, for the moment, victorious.
The sound of hammering was relentless, a ceaseless pounding that seemed to attack directly a spot at the base of my skull. It began almost as soon as the last citizen had retreated into the bailey and continued for hours. Worse than the noise was the knowledge of what they were building: ladders. We had not defeated them in the bloody skirmish by the Tower’s gate; they would return, and in a much more business-like fashion.
The Jews were jubilant, however, and as one company was sent down to the ground floor to rest, replaced by a fresh group of warriors, there was much singing and joking, and men exaggerating the numbers they had personally slain. I went down with them, out of the sunlight, and took bread and cheese and a mug of ale from Ruth in the dim ground-floor hall. She was glowing with happiness, eyes sparkling as she passed around food to the hungry men.
I had an uncomfortable feeling that she thought the battle was over. But I could not bring myself to disillusion her: I knew we were in for a much harder fight before we could count ourselves the victors. And every Christian we killed would harden opinion against us when Sir John Marshal and his troops finally returned from wherever they had been.
Robin found me dozing against the wall of the hall; he had brought Reuben with him and three other Jews. They were all armed with swords, and two of the men I didn’t know carried shields. Reuben’s sword was unlike any I had ever seen before: it was slim, delicate even, and slightly curved. I stared at it wondering how a man could wield such a girlish weapon.
‘They will attack again soon,’ Robin said without any preamble. ‘And they will attack from all sides, with ladders.’ He stopped and looked speculatively at the three men with Reuben. ‘We may be able to hold them, but if they do get over the parapet, you Alan, with the help of Reuben and these good men, must repel them. Stay back from the fight, the five of you, and watch for breaches. Your job is to be a stopper, Alan, like a cork in a bottle, to fill any gap that may open in our defences. Clear?’
I nodded. Robin grinned at me. ‘Good. Alan, you are in command, and — remember — we’re all relying on you,’ he said with a grin and then he was gone. We clumped up the stairs again to the roof and took up a position in the centre of the open space. It was mid-afternoon, and even in the weak March sunlight it was pleasantly warm up there. We were fifteen paces from each of the four sides of the battlements; and I could see the logic of Robin’s decision to deploy us as he had. If the enemy got over the wall, we five could charge them in a few heartbeats and should be able to push them back. I pulled out my old battered sword and began to run a whetstone along the long blade. The shriek of stone on metal made a counterpoint to the hammering from the bailey, a sort of unearthly martial music. I found I was timing my strokes of the stone to fit in with the sound of the hammers. And then, all of a sudden, the hammering stopped.
I got up and walked over to the parapet, telling my little troop of ‘Stoppers’ to stay where they were. The courtyard of the bailey was once again filled with men, but this time there seemed to me many more men-at-arms in scarlet and sky blue in the throng and fewer townsmen. I could see ladders being passed hand to hand over the tops of people’s heads and then suddenly there was the blast of a trumpet and the whole mass of humanity began to move towards the Tower.
‘Here they come again,’ shouted somebody and, glancing to my left and right, I saw the grim faces of the Jewish defenders, knuckles white on the stocks of their crossbows, bracing their legs on the wooden floor as if to resist a physical impact. Once again Robin insisted that they did not shoot. ‘Wait till they begin the attack,’ he was yelling. ‘Wait till I give the signal. Wait.’
The attackers split into two groups and, ignoring the steep wooden steps up to the iron-bound gate that had defeated them before, two streams of men flowed around the base of the huge earth mound on which the Tower was built. They were almost out of effective crossbow range and, anyway, Robin insisted that we should save our quarrels for a proper attack. But they were within earshot. Some shouted curses at us as they passed by at the foot of the mound, others waved swords and spears and jeered, others grimly ignored us. They formed up in two loose bodies, to the west on the banks of the Ouse, and to the north on the flat piece of ground before the beginning of the town itself. Then a figure stepped out from the mass of men to the north, accompanied by a man-at-arms holding a white flag. It was Sir Richard Malbete. I saw Robin with his war bow in his left hand reaching for an arrow from the linen bag at his waist and Josce putting a hand on his arm to restrain him. ‘Let us hear what he has to say,’ said the old Jew in a low, reasonable tone. Robin frowned but let the arrow fall back into his bag.
‘Jews of York,’ shouted Malbete; his words were faint but quite audible. ‘Jews of York,’ he repeated. ‘Release the Christian children you hold captive, come down from the King’s Tower and we shall be merciful.’
There was a murmur of astonishment on the roof of the Tower. ‘What children?’ somebody shouted. ‘What are you talking about? Are you mad?’
‘Release the Christian children: give us back the two boys you have kidnapped; our two little blond Christian angels. Restore them to their mother unharmed and we shall be merciful,’ boomed Sir Richard.
Josce stepped up to the parapet. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. ‘We have no Christian children here. Whoever says that lies. There are no Christian children in this place. Why do you make war on us?’
Malbete turned his back on the Tower to face the crowd. A man-at-arms stepped forward protectively, raising his shield to cover the knight’s back. ‘They have murdered them,’ he shouted. ‘They have murdered our little angels. Shall we leave them in peace? Shall we walk away and leave these baby-killers, these unbelievers to work their foul sorcery?’
In unison, the crowd yelled back the negative. A trumpet blew, two blasts, and both enemy forces, to the east and the north, lumbered forward towards the Tower, ladders held high.
I saw little of the attack as I stood back to back with my Stoppers, our swords drawn, in the centre of the roof. But the noise was nearly deafening: the shouts of rage from the attackers, the screams of the wounded, the snap and hiss of a crossbow bolt being fired down on to the enemy, the occasional crash of sword on shield. All three companies of Jewish crossbowmen had been called to the roof to defend the Tower, but my Stoppers and I were aloof from the fray. A pair of parallel poles with perhaps one or two crossbars would appear at the top of the battlements, and immediately a mob of Jews would rush over to it and shoot, reload and shoot again down the length of the ladder, clearing it of attackers. Then someone would grasp the ladder and hurl it away from the walls. Another one would appear and the rush would begin again. Robin was shooting his war bow, but sparingly. I knew he had only brought two dozen arrows with him and, by the look of it, his arrow bag was already half-empty.
Despite the mad energy of our crossbowmen, there were many hundreds of enemies and they had dozens of ladders. The time gap between the appearance of a ladder-top and its rejection by the Jews began to grow and sometimes we could even see a head appear at the top of the ladder before it was transfixed by a hasty quarrel. And then, suddenly, as if in a dream, there were enemy spilling over the parapet to the west in a three heartbeats, there were half a dozen Christians on the roof; and more men were tumbling over the wall, picking themselves up, lifting their weapons…
The Stoppers rushed forward as a tight group, myself in the lead, unsheathed sword in my right hand and poniard in my left. I cut hard at a man just as he was rising from the floor of the roof, hacking into his neck with my sword, and then whirled and plunged the poniard, underhand, into another man’s belly. I felt the hot spray of blood on my fist, twisted the foot-long blade and pulled it free. I blocked a cut at my head with my sword and punched forward again with my poniard, hearing a scream close to my ear as the blade licked into the flesh of a man’s upper leg. I was moving automatically, blocking and cutting, hacking and slashing, never still, always trying, as I had been taught, to think not about the move I was making at the time but about the counterstroke, the natural follow-on from a strike, and even sometimes the third and fourth plays as well.
I felt as if another man was controlling my body; the thousands of hours of training making my body move and react like some mechanical device. I had no thoughts in my head; I just cut, and parried and stabbed and dodged in the midst of my enemies. Blood spurted, men screamed, faces loomed before me and I smashed them away with my sword. I was aware that there were several enemy men-at-arms around me, behind me, but I left them for Reuben and the other Stoppers and cut my way forward, ever forward, hacking, grunting, heaving mail-clad men aside, heading straight for the ladder top which was still disgorging enemy men-at-arms. I nearly slipped on a slick of fresh blood, but recovered and pounded my sword hilt into a bearded face at the top of the ladder — he disappeared and I leaned out over the edge and cut down into the forearm of another man standing lower down clutching a rung. He screamed and fell away. An arrow whizzed past my face from the mound below and I jerked my head back from the ladder top. The blood was singing in my veins, I felt as if I was in the grip of a powerful apothecary’s drug; I could hear Reuben and the men behind me grunting and screaming as they fought enemies I had already wounded. But I ignored their struggles, trying to dislodge the ladder with my weapons still in my hands.
A man-at-arms already on the roof lunged suddenly towards me from the left, an axe in his bloodied hands, and I drove him away with two feints and then a flick-fast sword-lunge that opened his throat. As he dropped to his knees, gurgling and spewing blood, another head had appeared over the parapet, and I desperately turned and stabbed at his eyes with my dagger. He pulled back from the poniard thrust and swinging round I thumped my sword into the side of his helmeted head. I must have half-stunned him for he released his grip on the rung and dropped straight backwards like a stone, knocking the man below him off his precarious perch. As I peered over the battlements, I saw that the ladder was almost clear, save for a nervous man near the bottom, who was in no hurry to climb up to his death, and so I dropped my weapons at my feet and grabbing the wood, twisted the rungs at the top of the ladder, to the left and then right, until he jumped clear; then I hurled the wooden frame away from the walls with as much force as I could muster.
I gathered up my bloody blades and turned to see what had happened to my men. The roof was now thick with enemy dead — townsmen and men-at-arms, perhaps a dozen, lay entwined and still in their own gore, while few more men were twitching and groaning, flopping about in agony. One man-at-arms was on his knees, disarmed, badly wounded and being gradually hacked apart by two of the Jews, who were screaming in rage and holding their swords two-handed as they battered at his ripped chainmail, slicing into his naked hands as he tried to ward off their blows. The third Jew from my little troop of Stoppers was standing upright, swaying slightly, unbloodied sword by his side, a huge crimson stain in his side where an enemy sword had pierced him. He was dying on his feet, his eyes wide with fear as the dark, wet patch widened and grew until it soaked the whole side of his tunic. He dropped to his knees, then tipped over, face forward to the wooden roof, and lay still.
And then there was Reuben. Reuben was dueling with a mail-clad man-at-arms, no mere angry townsman with a rusty rake but a professional soldier. Reuben’s slim, girlish blade was everywhere, feinting high and cutting at his ankles, lunging for the eyes and then suddenly turning the blow into a sweep at the neck. He was masterful; I should have gone to his aid but it was clear that he did not need my help. The soldier had no chance, his clumsy swings with his heavy, straight-edged sword came nowhere near Reuben’s body. And then, in a flash, it was over: Reuben took two small steps forward, knocked the man’s weapon out of the way with a steely snap of his wrist and almost delicately passed his curved sword through his throat. The man dropped to one knee, white hands clasped at his neck, his life pissing away in great, spurting red arcs.
The attack was over, too. I could see defeated men — townsmen and men-at-arms — streaming back into the bailey, and looking over the parapet I saw the mounds of dead — scores and scores, some sprouting black quarrels like hedge pigs — and a host of wounded who were unable to walk. Many had broken legs from falling from the ladders. The Jews were unmerciful and Robin did not try to stop them. They loaded crossbows, leant out over the parapet and shot bolt after bolt into the injured men below. And then they hurled the enemy dead, and the wounded too, over the parapet to crash and roll down the grassy slope of the mound twenty feet below.
We had taken casualties as well. Apart from my Stopper, who was being tended to by his comrades, we had two dead men killed by thrown spears, one with a bad arrow wound and several men slashed by the swords of our attackers as they pushed the ladders away from the wall. But, all things considered, the damage done to us was slight; and we had held them off once again.
As the sun set on our battlefield, the mood in the Tower was fiercely defiant. The men had been attacked twice and had fought off their enemies with great courage. As always for me after battle, I felt a great wash of sadness, and was almost close to tears. And when the excitement was over, and my heart returned to its normal state, I felt a great weight on my soul; a sorrow for all those Christians who would never see another sunrise. I fell to my knees on that rooftop and prayed to Almighty God to receive the souls of the slain into His Grace, and to forgive them for their sins. I also offered up a small prayer of thanks for keeping me safe through the blood and carnage of that day. Then I began to clean and oil my weapons. I knew I would need them again before long.