‘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.