The Seal

1

THE FALL OF ACRE

Babylon is fallen, is fallen . . . that great city.

Revelation 14:8


Acre, 9 May 1291

It was near dawn when the armies of Al Ashraf came again at the double walls of Montmusard. In the half-light, where the ramparts met the sea, the Templars beheld the mantle of torches spread across the hem of the sky and the rolling of mangonels and catapults questing for the city of Acre. It was a scene spurned by heaven and earth which journeyed toward no end but stretched on forever.

The three men, crouched beside the wall, observed the figures of their companions from the Hospital who stood some distance away near the tower of their castle, shouting something and waving their arms through the storm of ash and arrows and smoke.

‘What is it?’ Marcus said.

‘I do not understand it,’ said Jacques, ‘there is too much smoke to see.’ The tall Templar called Etienne squinted. ‘Sappers,’ he told them. ‘They come again to mine the wall! They wish us to pound them . . .’

‘Those engineers are like rabbits,’ Marcus shouted back, above the chanting of the Mameluks. ‘At every moment there are new ones coming to make holes and we are run out of stones! What are we to throw down to pound them, Etienne – our own carcasses?’

Jacques went to the apertures and put an arrow to his bow. He waited for movement below and drove the last of his shafts through the wide grates. There was a cry from below.

The men waited. Overhead a multitude of arrows tipped with torches made a path towards the roofs and stables and burst into flames. Some came down over the wall and pierced the flesh of those wretched victims whose terror-filled screams were wedded to the din coming from the Saracens. Below, the city was a maze of fires, since there were none to tend them as all men were upon the wall, and what was left, the old, the women and children, had long since headed for the quays or were shut up in their houses waiting for death.

Two days before, the armies of Hama and Damascus and the army of Mameluks began to fill the moat with the bodies of dead men and horses. Drummers on camels had encouraged the enemy on ladders over the walls and a thousand engineers protected by storms of arrows were sent to mine the twelve towers. The Accursed tower fell first, then the gate of St Nicholas by catapults and battering rams. The army of infidels began pouring into the city and were forced back after a long battle with the Temple and the Hospital. Torches and the last of the oil were thrown into the moat then to burn the rotting carcasses and to make a wall of flame that sent plumes of smoke into the parched air. The troops of the commune of Acre dragged what had not been killed in battle to the ramparts, cut off first the hands and then the heads and threw them into the conflagration. It so enraged the enemy that by that night the Saracens had once again breached the fortifications and the Franks were forced to take refuge behind the inner wall, upon which the Templar garrison now stood perched.

At the northern end of the battlements, where the water lapped at the seawall with tempers of its own, the Templars heard the sound of the great kettledrum and a battery of trumpets and cymbals, and they knew this to be the sultan’s word for the final on-fall to begin. The Order of Hospitallers and the Teutons, the Venetians and Pisans knew it also, and what was left of them began to make for the stairs, leaving the troops of the commune of Acre to stand alone.

‘Shall we go?’ Etienne said.

Marcus made a shrug. ‘Almaric’s troops are gone . . . the King’s brother will be halfway to Cyprus by now!’

Jacques de Molay, all frown and sharp eyes, lifted his head over the wall a little. ‘More siege towers have arrived, tall enough to reach heaven, and a hundred columns of a thousand men each. Sixty-six times a thousand on horses!’ He took up his weapons.

Etienne glanced upwards to where another wave of lit arrows curved and poised poetically before falling with a whish over the city. There were more cries of agony from the walls and from below and the smell of burning flesh filled Etienne’s nostrils. ‘What shall men tell of this day?’

Jacques raised a frown-full brow. ‘They shall say the Temple deserted the people and left them to die . . . They will say nothing of the Devilry between the Pisans and the Genoese who took sides against one another and made pacts with the heathens, nor of the truces that were broken. Nor shall they speak of Brother William’s effort to make the people listen to the sultan’s conditions. They called him a traitor! Now look at them! Forty days of this . . . and to end it all, a massacre! They could have paid a piece of gold for every citizen. It was a small price.’

Etienne took off his metal cap and moved a hand to where a wound had made itself under his nose guard. He wiped his brow. ‘You believe they shall say this?’