Shriven and feeling bolstered by the obvious grace of God, the procession made its way back to their lines. The Fatimids showed how much they cared for what had taken place and how much such obvious faith affected them by showering the march with arrows and catapulted rocks, killing several of the worshippers, including several priests.
‘Two days hence,’ Godfrey swore, ‘you will pay for that insult to us and to God.’
‘We will strip the skin off their bones,’ Raymond added, his arm clasped in that of his so recent rival. ‘They cannot see into our souls, but we will see into theirs.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Fatimids knew the Crusaders were coming long before dawn, just from the noise of their preparations, added to the amount of darting torchlight that had illuminated their night-time activity. They were at their places while it was still dark, sweating on what was a hot and humid mid-July night, nervously awaiting the final sound that would bring on the assault — the sound of the battle horns blowing the advance.
First the sky took on a hint of grey, which failed to provide enough light to show the ground before the walls or the great hulking silhouettes of the towers before the Quadrangular Tower and the Zion Gate. The gradual increase in the level of daylight did begin to touch the upper frame of the siege engine built by Raymond of Toulouse.
But the men facing the expected attack from the contingents led by Godfrey de Bouillon were confounded by the absence of what they expected to see, until it became obvious that before the Quadrangular Tower the ground was completely clear — Godfrey’s siege engine had disappeared and so had his entire encampment; all that was now visible was the clear pathway along which the defenders had anticipated the siege tower would advance.
News was swift to arrive that the very construct was now being hurriedly assembled before the St Stephen’s Gate, a story initially disbelieved by every Fatimid commander from Iftikhar ad-Daulah down, for what they were being told was that the impossible had occurred. Only the man on the spot knew it to be the undoubted truth for he could see the very same lengths of timber being put together by a positive army of willing hands furiously wielding hammers.
In employing Gaston of Bearn, the Lotharingian Duke Godfrey had been gifted a craftsman of genius, a man who had built siege towers many times before in his life and thought long and hard on ways to improve their efficiency. The better axles he had designed made it possible to move it more quickly — not that it was ever swift — giving the defence less time to interdict its progress, but that did not obviate the major tactical flaw, the need to move it in a straight line from its start position to its final deployment.
Try as he might Gaston had never been able to come up with what he so keenly sought, a way of turning off a true course an engine that weighed several tons, for the leverage to change direction was beyond human endeavour. But in Godfrey he had found a magnate willing to experiment and had been given leave to put together a tower that, in the space of a dark night, could be dismantled to its very base, the last part of which was of a weight that men were able to manoeuvre.
Since it was put back together with like speed it was now taking proper shape opposite a section of the walls of Jerusalem ill-prepared to receive it, and at the same time, protected by framed wattle bombardment screens, men, women and children, no doubt the pilgrims so eager to see the Holy City fall, were progressing forward, levelling out, by clearing and filling, the new ground over which the tower must now pass, which led directly to the easternmost tower that framed the St Stephen’s Gate.
Before the sun was far above the rim of the horizon the engine itself was on the move, the great wheels grinding across the earth to send forth a terrifying sound, yet it was halted well before it came within range of the defences, the hope being that by seeing it so close it would instil greater fear, this while the mangonels, also moved from before the Quadrangular Tower, moved well forward of the tower and began to fire their deadly missiles to subdue what was a scratch defence, given Iftikhar ad-Daulah had yet to sanction the movement of the men needed to meet this shocking development.
The only part-protection they had, set to either side of the St Stephen’s Gate, was a low curtain wall that made any approach to the main fortifications impossible and to counter that Godfrey was about to employ the great battering ram. The Fatimids would have assumed it to be used to pummel against one of the wooden gates, to the mind of such men as Gaston uselessly, given gates had been buttressed since time immemorial to withstand such a weapon.
Now its purpose was clear, if not its progress, for it was a beast of an edifice to move; where the huge wheels of a siege tower could, by their sheer dimensions and the numbers employed in moving it, overcome obstacles, the smaller orbs on the battering ram meant even the most minor impediment, even a small stone, was a problem. Yet as the men on that struggled forward, the inner walls and undermanned ramparts were peppered with missiles — rocks and balls of burning sulphur and pitch bound with wax, designed to make any counterstroke hazardous.
With a supreme effort, and this by heavily muscled knights more accustomed to wielding personal weapons, the ram was brought close enough to the outer curtain to be employed. Eschewing protection the men pushing got it up to the speed of a fast walk, so that when the metal tip hit the stonework, secured only by mortar, it went crashing straight through, filling the intervening space with rubble into which the defence, fearful of being immediately overcome, poured their own incendiaries, that wasted as an effort at killing since none of the Crusaders could cross the area due to the fallen stonework.
What it did do was set the ram alight: the great single block of timber would have needed a great deal of time and inflammables to cause it to catch fire, but it was full of staves driven through from one side to the other, this the means by which it had been pushed forward. Those lighter pieces of timber went up quickly and threatened to carry the fire to the inner part of the ram, which had the alarmed Crusaders rushing to douse the whole with water before the massive tree trunk could ignite, this being carried out under a constant rain of arrows.
The Crusader effort proved fruitless even if the flames were doused. The aim was to repeat the battering exercise against the main wall and likewise drive that in to make a breach, which would, when the siege tower was employed, further divide the defence, given men would have to man both the upper parapet and breach in a situation that would make mutual support impossible.
Yet not only was the head of the ram buried by masonry, the very success of the initial effort had made any further forward movement impossible. Try as they might, and most of the rest of the day was thus employed, there was no amount of force which could get those small wheels over the mound of debris and it was clear that if it was left there it would be right in the path of the siege tower when that was employed.
Orders were sent forward to set alight a weapon the flames of which the men who had been pushing it had only just managed to extinguish, which led to what many saw as a farce. With Crusaders seeking to set it alight, the Fatimids, who wished it, for obvious reasons, to remain an obstacle, sought by throwing great tubs of water over it to snuff out the flames. So it became a battle to keep it burning, this finally achieved when the whole was so much ablaze that no amount of drowning could put out the conflagration.
That accomplished, Godfrey’s men withdrew, the fight being over for the day. If there was disappointment, the employment of the ram had been a positive, for the under-resourced defence had used against it weapons that would have been better employed against the real and soon-to-be-employed threat, Gaston of Bearn’s siege tower.