We kept watch that night, by companies — two companies on watch, one resting — but they did not come again. The enemy picket lines around the Tower remained; we could glimpse bodies moving about in the light of small campfires, but there was no attack. Instead, in the centre of the bailey courtyard, they built a great bonfire and by means of a tripod, they suspended a great cauldron over the blaze and filled it with river water. It took several hours for the water in the huge iron bowl to come to the boil, but by the time it was merrily bubbling away, a crowd had formed in the darkness around the fire and the great cooking pot. I had assumed that the Christians were making some great pottage to feed the hundreds that had gathered to watch the Jews in the Tower being murdered, but I was wrong. Horribly wrong.
In the crowd around the cauldron I saw two men in the dark vestments of priests and the tall figure of Sir Richard Malbete; one of the priests seemed to be holding a service of some sort, he was chanting psalms and leading the crowd in the recitation of prayers; then there was a ripple from the crowd and a large oddly shaped parcel was ejected from the mass and plumped down on the ground beside the bonfire. Then it moved and I saw that it was a girl, thin, terrified, badly beaten and tightly bound.
Someone gave a sharp cry of pain beside me on the parapet and I turned to see a portly Jew in a good quality robe, mouth hanging open in anguish, pointing out at the bailey and the girl bound on the ground. He was soon surrounded by his fellows who comforted him and tried to pull him away from the battlements. ‘It’s his daughter,’ said a voice beside me and I turned to see Robin, looking grim, and leaning on his bow staff. ‘Whatever they do to her, it’s not going to be good for him to see it,’ he said. His voice was icy and flat.
A young man leaned out over the wall and shouted into the darkness below in the direction of the nearest picket fire. ‘Hey, Christian! Hey, you.’
No reply. So the man leaned out even further, his comrades holding his legs. ‘Hey Christian, talk to me.’
There was a short silence and then a voice shouted back from the darkness. ‘What do you want, you damned Jew? Stop making so much noise and let us sleep.’
‘What’s going on in there, in the castle, they’ve got Mordecai the silversmith’s daughter; what are they going to do with her? Tell me, Christian, for the love of God, tell me. She is only ten years old, and has never hurt a soul.’
There was a muttered conference in the darkness below. Then there was raucous laughter and a new voice spoke. ‘She’s a dirty Jew and they are going to thoroughly wash her, you pig. They are going to baptise her, and send her soul to Jesus, who will no doubt take one look and send her to Hell where she belongs!’ There was more laughter, not a pleasant sound, a ragged cackling like the mirth of devils.
Robin and I stared over at the far side of the bailey, where the religious service seemed to be coming to an end. ‘How far would you say that distance was, Alan,’ Robin murmured to me, ‘here to the cauldron, two hundred and twenty-five yards?’ he might have been asking a question about the weather for all the emotion in his voice.
‘Nearer to two thirty, I’d say,’ I replied, trying to emulate his lack of concern. But then I was held in rapt horror by the unfolding scene before me.
As the two men-at-arms picked up the bound girl, her head fell back and I caught a flash of her white, terrified face as her dark hair tumbled behind her. The men-at-arms lifted her high, the priest made the sign of the cross, there were scattered shouts from the crowd — and with a heave they plunged her into the boiling water. I can hear her blood-curdling scream of utter torment even now after more than forty years. It shriveled my soul, my ball sack contracted violently and every muscle in my body became taught as iron. But beside me Robin was moving. As the awful howls of that scalded girl echoed round the Tower like a Banshee riding the wind, Robin had pulled an arrow from his bag, nocked it to the bow and loosed in one swift fluid movement. The arrow flew in a shallow arc, the white ash wood flashing as it passed through pools of light in the darkness and smacked home right on target into the chest of the unfortunate girl. The screaming ended as abruptly as if her head had been cut off with an axe. It was a staggering bowshot, impossibly accurate at that distance and in that light, miraculous, and yet Robin had made it. The figures around the cauldron were frozen in shock; one minute they had been watching a Jewish girl scream her lungs out in excruciating agony, the next she was a corpse floating in the bubbling water, bobbing in the roil like a loose white dumpling in a pan of stew.
Robin loosed again, and again his shot was almost supernatural. The arrow thumped home into the belly of the priest who had conducted the service; his horrified expression as a white shaft appeared in his fat stomach was truly comical, but as he stared down at his midriff in disbelief, the crowd realised the danger and split into fragments, finding cover where they could. There was no sign of Richard Malbete. Once again, at the first signs of trouble he had disappeared.
I heard Robin curse softly beside me, and turned to look at him. He was looking into his empty arrow bag and muttering to himself a stream of utterly foul obscenity. I saw then that he had only one arrow left, the one in his hand. He caught my eye, and shrugged, as he nocked it, and then he loosed it at a man-at-arms who was running across the bailey to the shelter of the chapel. The arrow took the man full in the back, even at two hundred yards piercing his chainmail hauberk and hurling him to the ground. He was still moving feebly but Robin ignored him and turned to me.
‘I should have brought more shafts, Alan. That was a mistake.’
‘We didn’t plan to fight a full-scale battle,’ I said.
‘True; but mistakes like that that can get a man quite badly killed.’ And then, with a wry smile, he turned away and made his way towards the staircase and the hall below.
I stayed at the wall, standing that whole night as a mad, pointless, utterly foolish tribute to that little girl; thinking about the her and the swift, merciful death that Robin had given her; and thinking of Sir Richard Malbete, too.
In the first grey light, Ruth came to me, bringing ale and bread, and I finally eased my stiff legs down, lowered my rump to the floor and began to eat. But I was started from my breakfast by the sound of trumpets. With my fellow warriors, I gathered at the parapet to watch a cavalcade of fifty knights and a hundred or so foot soldiers, followed by a great train of ox-wagons carrying what seemed to be huge squared lengths of timber, ride into the bailey through the eastern gate. Sir John Marshal had returned to his castle.
Feelings were mixed among the besieged Jews of the Tower: some men assumed that they were saved now that the King’s representative had returned; others of a darker cast of mind saw only reinforcements for our enemies.
‘At the least now we should be able to negotiate,’ said Reuben to me as we stood side-by-side, leaning on the battlements and looking over the bailey. He had brought his own breakfast and was munching on a crust as we surveyed the soldiers spilling into the courtyard. Directly below us the bodies of the dead lay undisturbed, except by the ravens who had gathered in their scores and who pecked at Christian flesh with a glassy avian disregard for human dignity.
‘May I see your sword,’ I asked Reuben presently. And he obligingly pulled the slim curved blade from its ornate scabbard and passed it hilt first to me. It felt light, too light in my hand. I made a few experimental passes in the air. It was like waving an ash wand; it had none of the brute power of my own weapon. But, by God, a man could strike fast with this blade. Then Reuben took a flimsy silk scarf from around his neck and asked me to hold out the sword at arm’s length. He held the scarf over the weapon and dropped it. The silk was cut in two, merely by its own weight. I was astounded. I had never seen a blade as keen in my life; I tested the edge of the sword and immediately cut deep into the ball of my thumb. Sucking the injured digit ruefully, I asked Reuben where he had obtained such a fine weapon.
‘It is a scimitar, in the Arabian pattern,’ he replied, not quite answering my question. ‘If we live through this siege and you travel with the King to Outremer, you will see many more swords of this type — and perhaps you may wish you had not. It is a common weapon in the great army of the warlord you Christians call Saladin.’
I asked him again, looking directly at him: ‘But where did you get it?’
He sighed. ‘Where do you think I am from, Alan?’
‘Why, York, of course. Although I have heard it said that you also have a dwelling in Nottingham.’
‘Look at my skin, my eyes, my hair — do I look as if I come from the north of England?’ he said.
‘Well, you are a Jew,’ I said, acknowledging the hazelnut hue of his face and his midnight eyes, ‘so I suppose that at one time your family must have come from the Holy Land.’
‘Do I resemble these others?’ he indicated the Jews at the battlements beside us.
‘Of course, well, a little… actually, not very much.’ I could not believe that I had not noticed it before but Reuben was much darker than all the other Jews; some of the crossbowmen at the battlements had red-gold hair, some even had blue eyes.
‘We are all equally the children of Israel,’ Reuben said, ‘but these good Jews are from northern France and their families lived there for many generations before they came to try their luck in England.’
‘So you are from Outremer?’ I asked. I was fascinated. I had never really thought about Reuben’s antecedents before, He had just been Robin’s friend, the Jew, the merchant and moneylender from York. To hail from Outremer, where Christ’s blessed feet had walked, the sacred land of John the Baptist, and Moses, and King David, and Samson and Delilah, and all those other figures from the Bible… it seemed impossibly exotic and mysterious.
‘I am of the Temanim, a Jew from the far south. I come from a land far beyond Outremer, which the Arabs call al-Yaman — it was once known as the land of the Queen of Sheba,’ he said, a note of pride in his voice.
This seemed even more fabulous. Beyond Outremer? He might have said that he came from the Moon. Tuck had told me the story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, but it had all seemed so long ago, so far away. A legend. It was as if I had just come face to face with a unicorn.
‘What is it like — al-Yaman?’ I asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar name, but imagining a perfumed land flowing with rivers of wine, where jewels grew in the earth like flowers, and sweet cakes grew on trees.
‘It’s a desert, mostly, sand and rock and merciless sun. But it is home, I suppose, in a way. Or it would be home if any of my family still lived.’
I said nothing at this point, and just stared at him, willing him to tell me the story; listening with my eyes. He smiled at me again, indicated that we should sit with a graceful wave of his hand, and then, settling himself down, with his back to the battlements, his beautiful sword across his knees, he began.
‘My father, may his soul rest with God, was a sword-maker. He made this very weapon,’ he said laying a hand reverently on the ornate silver-chased scabbard. ‘We were a wealthy family, business was very good, and for the most part there was harmony between the Jews of our town and the Arabs. I was trained in the use of arms by the best teachers my father’s money could buy; and taught languages — Greek and Latin — as well as history, philosophy, a little medicine and courtly manners. I was happy. It was my father’s dream that I should be a gentleman, a poet perhaps, or a musician like you, Alan, not an artisan, not a sword-smith such as himself, sweating over a forge fire all day in a leather apron. And I was content with that ambition; I attended the best parties, mixed with the sons of other rich men, and there was talk of a marriage between myself and the daughter of a wealthy merchant from a neighbouring town. Life was very good.’ He paused here and closed his eyes, savouring that youthful happiness for a moment or so. Then he continued. ‘When I was sixteen, a wandering Muslim cleric came to our town. He was dressed almost in rags, but his eyes burned with passion and he preached with great eloquence to the faithful in the local mosque. His preaching was considered sublime; people came from far and wide to hear his words. He was inspired by the Prophet himself, praise be upon him, the people said. But what he preached was purity. Only by keeping himself pure, he said, could a Muslim reach paradise at the end of his life. Only by living a saintly life and eschewing all defilement, could a true Muslim honour God in the proper way. All impurity was to be shunned; it must be swept away, banished, and if it could not be banished then it must be destroyed. And we Jews, said this so-called holy man, were impure.’
I was beginning to see where this story was going. There was a note of deep bitterness in Reuben’s voice, and I thought of the evening when Robin and I had arrived at his house to be greeted with a thrown knife. But I held my peace, and waited for Reuben to continue.
‘At first, the cleric merely preached avoidance of Jews, but in our town we had been living together peacefully for many hundreds of years. Jew lived next door to Muslim, we ate in each other’s houses; we respected each other, our children played together in the streets. And so, seeing that the majority of his flock was not heeding his message of separation, the cleric began preaching to the young Muslim men of the town. He met them at night, preaching almost in secret, and telling them that they had a holy mission to cleanse the town of Jews. He called it jihad.’ Reuben spat out the word as if it were poison on his tongue.
‘Most of the young men ignored this mullah, and drifted away; despite being so eloquent, he was clearly mad: how could the town be cleansed of a quarter of its population? Jews were part of its life, part of its very fabric, and always had been. But some of the young men, the wild ones, the unhappy ones, the lost souls, they listened. And they began to hate.
‘One night a gang of them, perhaps fifteen or twenty young men, came to our house; they were drugged on hashish and maybe a little drunk, too, and they burnt our house down and killed my father and mother when they came out to protest. My younger brother fought them, and killed two before he was overcome and killed himself. They burnt other Jewish houses too, and many families lost beloved ones that terrible night. I happened to be away, by chance, visiting friends in a town fifty miles away, and I suppose that saved my life. The very next day the mullah was driven from the town with stones and curses — both Jews and Muslim wanted him gone, and the young men who had committed the outrage submitted themselves for punishment to the elders of the town and were severely punished; two were executed, the ringleaders, and the others had one eye put out, as punishment and a mark of their shame. But despite this restitution, the town was never the same again. The seed of hatred had been planted, and it grew, watered by the tears of the families destroyed by the violence. Those whose sons had been half-blinded began to hate the Jews; the Jews whose friends had been killed by the young men began to hate and fear their Muslim neighbours.
‘I could not live in the town any more after the deaths of my family. I was afflicted with a great guilt; if I had been there I could have protected them, I told myself. It was not true, of course, and a part of me knew this too; I would have died with them but for my absence. But I felt the guilt of one who survives a catastrophe. I could not stay in that town, and I gathered the money, the horses and camels, that my father had left to me and took to the open road. For three years I travelled Arabia and the lands around. I visited Alexandria and Baghdad, Jerusalem and Mecca; I lived like the young prince my father had wanted me to be, travelling in great splendour, staying only at the best houses, spending a fortune on food and wine, perfumes and jewels — and then, one day, inevitably, the money ran out. And I found myself in Acre, a Christian city on the coast of Palestine; penniless and with no idea what I should do with the rest of my life.’
Reuben closed his eyes for a moment, remembering.
‘So what did you do?’ I prompted. He sighed.
‘You must understand that I am ashamed of this, Alan, and while this is no excuse, it might help to explain: I was still in despair over the deaths of my parents, and I had no clear direction in which to travel, no goals, and no money and so, for a while I became a brigand, a thief, robbing the rich camel-trains on the roads of Outremer. I took many innocent lives that year, and I got to know the secret ways of the desert. After a season, though, I was thoroughly sickened by my profession and I hired myself out as a guard on the caravans that plied the dusty roads all the way south to al-Yaman. I was, you might say, a poacher turned gamekeeper, an outlaw who became a forester. I felt that if I could protect the merchants that I had previously robbed I would somehow, in God’s eyes, be making amends for my sins.
‘After two years of eating caravan dust, and seeing off would-be predators — many of them calling themselves Christians, I might add — after two years of saddle blisters and thirst, and half-healed wounds, I tired of that too. I happened to be in Acre once again, unemployed, and I was resting out of the hot sun in a beautiful garden, with neatly clipped grass, and trimmed orange trees that perfumed the air. It was so green, so soothing. A fountain was bubbling nearby and I felt a deep sense of calm. I could hear Christian monks chanting, a beautiful sound, pure and Godly; although, believe me Alan, I have never been tempted to abandon the faith of my fathers. But I admit felt close to God in that Christian garden. I looked down at my feet — they were dirty, scratched, distorted with callouses and scars and one sandal had a broken strap — and I came to a realisation. I wanted two things from this life. I wanted to live somewhere where it was not always so hot; and I wanted to be rich.’
‘So you came to England?’ I suggested, with a note of incredulity in my voice.
‘As you say, young Alan,’ Reuben replied. ‘I came here. It took me two years to get here, and I was penniless when I arrived, and reviled by almost everyone as a wandering Jew, but I have prospered since then.’
I knew what he was going to say next before he said it. ‘It was Robin who first helped me, actually. And I will never forget his kindness. It was Robin who advanced me the initial money to set up my business, and I honour him for it. For what it is worth, he will always have my loyalty and my friendship, no matter what he may do.’
‘Usury,’ I said, with a touch of asperity. It was a mortal sin, and I did not like the fact that Robin was mixed up in it.
‘You disapprove? What else could I do? As a Jew, I am barred from almost every other profession. I have a good deal of medical training, but I cannot treat Christians as a doctor; I have been trained to fight, but I would not be welcome in the ranks of Christian men-at-arms. So, yes, usury.’ He looked at me directly, brown head tilted on one side. ‘Think of it as a service,’ he said. ‘People need to borrow money from time to time and I provide that service.’
I was not disposed to argue with him after he had so generously shared his life story with me — and I was saved from making a comment by the blast of a trumpet. As we scrambled to our feet and looked out over the parapet, I saw that a delegation of mounted knights and men-at-arms was coming across the bridge, under a white banner of truce. In front of the cavalcade was a richly dressed knight, in the full shining panoply of war. It was Sir John Marshal. And beside him, on a raw-boned piebald destrier, was the tall form of Sir Richard Malbete.
The Sheriff of Yorkshire halted his horse a few yards from the door of the Tower, well within range of a crossbow bolt but confident that his white flag would protect him, and he stared up at the ramparts.
‘Jews of York,’ he shouted. ‘You must release the Christian children that you hold and come down from the Tower. We will spare your lives if you accept baptism into the True Faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Beside him Malbete looked up at us and gave a little smirk. And I shuddered and remembered the ‘baptism’ in boiling water that the little Jewish girl had suffered the night before.
‘Why do they keep talking about children?’ I asked Reuben. He looked at me hard. ‘Evidently, someone has been libelling us. It is not unusual. They are no doubt saying that we have kidnapped a couple for children to eat as a light snack before supper; and these Christian fools believe it.’
I saw that Josce was standing in the centre of the battlements, looking down on Sir John Marshal. Robin was nowhere to be seen. I assumed he was deliberately staying out of Sir John’s sight.
‘As I told your henchman, Sir Richard Malbete, we have no Christian children here,’ the old Jew shouted. ‘And we will not abandon our faith. What guarantees can you give us for our safety if we come out? Can you protect us against them?’ He gestured beyond Sir John and his troops, to where the townspeople of York had been gathering in a mass at the far side of the causeway. The crowd looked ugly, many sporting bloody bandages or walking with crutches. Most were armed. There were some angry shouts, and fists shaken, in reply to Josce’s words.
‘This is the King’s Tower. I order you in the name of the King to come down and hand over your weapons. Or I will expel you from royal property by force of arms. I say for the last time: surrender and hand over your weapons.’
‘Come and take them,’ muttered Reuben and then he said something in a strange tongue that I didn’t understand: ‘Molon labe,’ he said, ‘Molon labe, you bastards.’
Josce was conferring with an elderly rabbi, as the priests of the Jews are called. He leaned over the parapet and said: ‘We cannot surrender our weapons unless we receive guarantees for the safety of our families.’
‘You have until noon to come out, unarmed, under a flag of truce; after that I will expel you by force,’ shouted Sir John angrily, and he turned his horse and rode back over the causeway. Sir Richard Malbete vouchsafed us one last smirk and followed him back into the bailey.
I looked at the sky; it was mid-morning. And once again, in the bailey courtyard, the hammers began to ring out.
In the permanent gloom of the ground floor of the Tower, a furious argument was in progress. Half a dozen Jews were shouting at the tops of their voices, none listening to the other, some wringing their hands in despair, other gesticulating with raised hands. Robin and I sat apart from the tumult, sharing a loaf of bread on a bench in a corner and feeling alien in this chaos of shouting Jewry. Finally Josce managed to establish some sort of order, after bellowing for silence and hammering on a table with a pewter mug.
‘Brothers,’ he said, when he had at last managed to achieve some quiet. ‘Pray be quiet and listen to what our revered Rabbi Yomtob has to say.’
The old Jewish holy man, who had been sitting quietly at the table, rose with difficulty. He was an aged man, grey and full bearded and venerable, with red-rimmed eyes that seemed even older even than his bent body.
‘My friends,’ he said quietly, and the noise in the Tower ceased immediately as people strained to hear his words. ‘I was born a Jew. I have lived all my life according the Commandments of Moses and the laws of the Torah; I will never give up the faith of my fathers. This talk of baptism, of the Christians’ forgiveness, is a lie; if we leave this place, today, tomorrow, we will die, our wives will die, our children will die. We may not all suffer unspeakable torture before we die, but die we will. And I would rather die as what I have always been, a devout Jew, than suffer the indignity of death at the hands of these blood-crazed maniacs. Remember our forefathers at Masada, the followers of Elazar ben Ya’ir; when they were surrounded by the forces of the mighty Roman Empire they chose to take their own lives, as free Jews, rather than accept slavery or a degrading death at the hands of their oppressors. I plan to follow their example.’ I noticed Reuben, on the other side of the room, staring at the rabbi intently, his dark face strangely pale. The whole Tower now seemed as silent as a tomb.
‘Tonight, as we all know, is Pesach,’ the old man continued, ‘the holy night when, through the protection of the Almighty, the Angel of Death took the first-born sons of Egypt, but passed over the sons of Israel, and gave us our freedom from slavery. Tonight, after we have eaten our matzo bread, and drunk a glass of wine, I will take a knife and take the life of my own first-born son, Isaac there’ — a frightened-looking young man in the throng took an involuntary step backwards — ‘and I will take the life of my beloved wife of fifty years, and my daughter. I invite all of you to do the same. And then we will draw lots as to who should kill whom, among the surviving men. Tonight we shall all be Angels of Death, and give freedom to our families, and I pray that the Lord God of Moses and Isaac will forgive us. I have spoken.’ And he sat down.
For a few heartbeats the silence was held, and then there was bedlam. Half the Jews were wailing, lamenting Rabbi Yomtob’s extraordinary words, some were weeping, others were angrily shouting about fighting to the death, taking Christian dogs with them. Robin took me by the arm and said: ‘Let us go up to the roof.’
I was dazed by Rabbi Yomtob’s speech; it seemed to rob me of breath as I climbed the stairs. It was an extraordinary, and grossly sinful attitude to take, I felt. I had been in hopeless situations before — well, one at least, at Linden Lea — but it would never occur to me to take my own life.
On the roof, I took up my familiar position overlooking the bailey, and my heart sank even further.
‘Do you know what that is?’ asked Robin, pointing out into the bailey, where a huge wooden structure was being erected by many busy craftsmen from the town. It was not a question that required a reply. The hammering once again was giving me the most colossal headache. The workmen had finished the frame, a square of foot-thick beams, nailed and lashed together and set on solid wooden wheels. The upright bars were in place, too, topped by a cross piece looking for all the world like a gibbet. In the centre of the structure, in a spider’s web of thick ropes and pulleys, was a great wooden arm, with what looked like a giant spoon attached to the far end. I knew what it was, all right. And I shuddered. It was a mangonel, a siege weapon capable of hurling huge boulders at the Tower, a sort of catapult that I had seen reduce the stout palisade of a fortified manor house to kindling.
‘Once they start with that,’ said Robin, ‘we have only hours before this place is falling around our ears.’ He sounded completely detached, almost relaxed, as if just idly remarking on an interesting phenomenon.
‘What are we going to do,’ I asked him, trying to keep my voice firm and practical, though a sick feeling had lodged in my stomach.
‘If I had a dozen arrows, I could slow them down a bit,’ mused Robin. Then he shrugged. ‘I tell you one thing, Alan. We are not going to kill ourselves.’ And he gave me a grin, which I managed to return as bravely as I could.
There was no more parlaying with Sir John Marshal, which I admit I had been secretly hoping for. It seems he intended to stay true to his word for, as the sun was at its height, the first missile sailed up from the mangonel, almost slowly, and came smashing into the lower part of the wall of the Tower with a shrieking crash that rocked the whole building. I had watched the townsmen, supervised by a squad of men-at-arms hauling back the great spoon-like arm, loading a massive rock into the cup, and releasing the ropes that held it captive.
There was just one ray of hope; they seemed to be slow at loading the machine, perhaps because, as civilians, they were unused to it, and there seemed to be a shortage of missiles, too. But the boulders that they hurled were having a devastating effect on the Tower. By mid-aftemoon, they had managed to strike it five times. One corner of the building was sagging slightly, huge splinters of wood hanging free; a narrow window on the second floor had been smashed into a much wider space, which we hastily covered with nailed planks. And a high shot had smashed through a section of the battlements, on the left facing the bailey, killing two men instantly and plunging through the floor of the roof and two storeys below to maim a woman preparing food on the ground floor. Then, thank the Lord, the bombardment stopped. The men tending the great killing machine sat about idly, drinking from a great barrel of ale that had appeared in their midst and, after a while, when the ale had cheered them, capering around and baring their arses at the Jews in the Tower. I perceived then that they had run out of missiles. And hope blossomed in my breast — perhaps there would be no more damage done today — only to be dashed when a great cart rumbled through the open gates of the bailey filled with huge stones. The men stirred themselves, the arm was once pulled back with stout ropes, the cup was filled with a block of grey stone, the ropes were loosed and another chunk of hate-sent masonry crashed into our defences. And another. And another. Fat jagged planks of wood were falling free with each strike by now, and another hole had been smashed in the wall to the right and slightly above the iron-bound door. We blocked it as best we could with a large oak table, and a couple of benches, but I knew as I sweated and heaved the heavy furniture into place, that a single strike on our makeshift patching would blow the hole wide open in less than a heartbeat. As Robin had predicted, the place was falling around our ears. As another boulder boomed against the walls, I felt black despair clawing at my heart. When this mighty Tower was reduced to a splintered woodpile, the men-at-arms would come again and, with swinging axe and stabbing spear they would swallow us in a huge red wave of priest-whipped hatred.
On the roof again, averting my eyes from the great hole in the floor, I felt the battlements rock unsteadily under the light touch of my hands. The ground floor I had just left was by now filled with the wounded, most with splinter wounds; as the boulders crashed into the walls with demonic force, spears of wood, sharp as a barber-surgeon’s knife, would burst free from the inside wall, lancing through unarmoured bodies like a hot needle through butter. The stench of blood filled the dank air inside the Tower, and the cries of wounded and bereaved, the frightened women and children, aye, and a few men, echoed around like the moaning of lost souls. We were in Hell. And there was no escape.
And then there was a miracle. I heard the great bells of the Minster ring out, their cheerful peal, a hideous joke in the blood and carnage of the Tower. It was Vespers. The bells rang out endlessly and as I listened, and offered up a prayer to the Virgin to keep me safe, I noticed that the bombardment had stopped. It must have been a quarter of an hour since the last shattering strike. The sun was very low in the sky, and I saw that the mangonel had been all but abandoned by the men who served it. A lonely man-at-arms sat on the front bar of the machine, looking up at the ramshackle remains of the Tower, hunched, battered and bleeding, wooden planks hanging off in crazy shapes. My prayer to the Mother of God had been answered — but as the Vespers’ bells continued to ring out I realised that there might be another explanation for our miraculous respite. It suddenly occurred to me that it was Good Friday, and our Christian tormentors were observing a Truce of God on this holy evening. The bailey was less full than before, though the circle of steel-clad men-at-arms around the Tower was still intact; all who could be excused from the task of keeping us penned in were attending Mass.