Up until that moment – despite my terror, the burning in the back of my throat, the feeling of lassitude that threatened me from fatigue and fear, the spike of pain at the base of my guts, and the annoyance of finding that my unscabbarded sword was cutting into my hose – despite all of that, time had passed very slowly.
After the sentry across the water sounded his gong, everything seemed to break apart like a dropped glass, and my memory of the rest is fragments.
I got a leg over the wall and jumped. It was farther than I expected, a man’s height or more, to the catwalk and I landed hard.
There were no enemies on the walls. Instead, a dozen men were blinking in the grey light, standing in muslin shirts and skullcaps on the pavement of the courtyard, and they saw me about the time I saw them.
They had bows.
I remember running down the inner face of the wall – there were steps, and by God’s mercy they ran the right way, so that I was shielded from their archery.
One of them paused to point up where I had come. I assumed Nerio had made the wall. I was in the courtyard, among hen-houses and a pile of wood that in daylight turned out to be the castle’s palings and hoardings. I moved behind it.
Arrows were loosed.
I found that there was a crawl space behind the palings. And I moved along it.
I suppose I charged the archers. My next memory is fighting. I do not know if I fought well or badly; somehow, the archers had lost track of me, or never knew I came down the wall. Or, like soldiers the world over, they engaged the enemy they could see, the men coming up the ladders.
But the grace of Our Lady was with us, and none of my friends took a hit, and then the archers were dead and Fiore was by me, and Nerio and Sabraham and Juan and Miles and Marc-Antonio and John the Turk and we were clearing the galleries at either end. Men came out of doorways and died, or leaned out of towers and loosed one arrow before the men on other catwalks ran them down.
The only moment in the fight that I remember is when Fiore killed an archer by throwing his sword. It was incredible.
Then it was over.
We moved through the castle like an ill wind. The last watch in their barracks were waking, and we slaughtered them at the doors and by their pallets. We gave no quarter. There is no other way, in a storming action.
It was a military castle and had, thank God, neither women nor children. Fiore had the admiral’s great banner, and he carried it to the top of the central donjon.
From there, we could see the morning.
I would have said that it had taken us an hour to land and storm the Casteleto, but when we looked, the sun was still low in the pink and gold sky. Over to the west of us, we could clearly see the white and red sails of the crusader fleet, many marked with crosses as big as whole ships, as they entered the Old Harbour in two lines. Closer, almost at our feet, lay the magnificent tower of Pharos just across the mouth of the New Harbour, perhaps a long bowshot away.
To our right, out to sea, lay the Order’s fleet – four galleys and ten transports as well as a few of the smaller galliots and round ships.
More than a hundred crusader ships were trying to make enter the Old Harbour. The great lines stretched like frayed rope out to sea, and there were gaps – the galleys needed no wind, and made better time, and many ships had left their place in the line and proceeded, so that there were collisions. But that was not the worst of it: even as we watched, ships attempting to go into the beach struck the shallows. A Venetian galley rolled her mainmast overboard.
Still the king’s great red galley crept closer and closer to the land. Aboard the king’s ship, someone was conning them through the deepest channel.