Four days later there were developments.
The Saracens began massing in lines up and down the siege works. Behind them several engines of some kind were dragged up and men stood by them, as if waiting for a signal.
‘Don’t like it,’ Hugh muttered. ‘Looks like Khalil is pressing to close in and start the fun.’
As they watched a single trumpet bayed. It was taken up and along the line, then as one each soldier raised a wicker shield.
Urgent warning shouts passed along the walls and men hustled up from below. In the towers soldiers readied with stands of arms – and the Saracens moved forward.
The reason for the protection became apparent: to shield the men hauling the engines forward. As they came into range a cloud of arrows fell on them from the walls and towers. Men dropped, the first blood of the siege, but the advance went on at a steady and ominous pace.
‘What are they doing?’ Jared asked anxiously.
‘Them’s mangonels. Throws stones and fire but they need to get in close enough. We’ve got ours and we’ll give ’em a pounding while they’re at it but they’re nasty brutes and I’m not staying about to say hello. Come on – all them arrows means we’ve got more work on our plate.’
The first mangonels fired. In an ungainly swing each hurled an object in a lazy parabola that descended from up in the sky to meet the wall with a splintering crash and a force enough to be felt through the feet. Others, aimed higher, came down in the city streets in a crazy rampage of destruction, stones half as big as a man.
The distant sounds made Jared freeze. Perkyn’s eyes met his in terror.
‘Don’t be a-feared, lads,’ Hugh rumbled. ‘They can’t reach in more than a hundred yards or so. We’ll be safe.’
Jared tried not to think of the ordeal of those whose duties kept them at the wall.
There was now a tense, brittle atmosphere. In the refectory men spoke little, keeping their thoughts to themselves.
A strange implement was brought in to the forge with instructions that it be restored and returned with all haste. With a crooked handle and spiked and splayed blade it looked like nothing Jared had seen before but the repair was obvious and a strong fire-welding had the unusually stout haft reattached.
‘All speed – you’d better get it to ’em yourself,’ Hugh threw at him.
He was told where to find the unit but wasn’t prepared for what he came to – a square hole with a pulley arrangement set in the ground some yards in from a tower.
‘Get in, then!’ he was urged.
Jared was lowered down near twenty feet to a chamber. Leading off it was a passage, the darkness relieved only by occasional dim lights at the far end. A tunnel hacked through raw earth, it reeked of damp and foul effluvia. As he went forward the confined space pressed in on him. From the direction it seemed they were going under the wall, an immense weight of stone above that could collapse on him at any moment.
Gulping, he finally made it to the end where men were working by the light of rush dips, stark jerking shadows flung on the jagged surface of the tunnel. They were hacking at the face at a furious speed and he saw what his implement was for: as one wielded a pick the other would reach through his legs and with a stab and twist bring out the debris with the tool.
The repair was snatched from his hand and put into immediate use by the sweating crew without a word in the fetid, breathless air.
Jared lost no time in reaching sunlight, then finding Hugh.
‘Not good,’ he muttered. ‘They’re countermining, m’ friend. Means that Khalil is getting serious – he’s mining under the towers, wants to bring ’em down.’
He went on: the mangonels were terrifying but not the menace they seemed. On their own the fortifications could withstand the battering as the plunging missiles always hit at an angle. The real threat was invisible and deadly.
The Saracens had started shafts from the safety of their lines headed underground directly towards the walls of Acre. The impregnable twenty-feet-thick walls and high towers were helpless against their insidious creeping and when they had undermined the massive stonework, without any kind of warning the walls and towers both would collapse into rubble, leaving a gaping breach.
Those Jared had seen when he’d delivered the repair were frantically working against time to intercept the advancing menace. At any moment they could break through the earth into an enemy tunnel and then it would be the horror of brutal combat in the cramped darkness.
How could the Saracen miners doggedly drive their shaft ever closer in the certain knowledge that when the moment of consummation came it would mean their instant crushing or suffocation under tons of collapsing earth and stone?
That night sleep was denied Jared. As he lay in the warm darkness it was impossible to keep at bay the thought of the thousands out there dedicated to tearing down their defences and slaying them all without mercy.
The next day it was crossbow bolts again but this time repairing the many score of retrieved quarrels that had been shot by the Saracens at the men on the walls as they fought to fell the hundreds working the giant mangonels.
It was unsettling to hold in his hands instruments of malice that the enemy had sent against them: blunted and bent by their impact on stone, some with blood smears still on them. They were much as their own bolts, individual hammer marks where they’d been rushed to a finish but with a crudeness that could have done nothing for their accuracy. But with thousands a day fired it was vital to keep up stocks. He bent to with renewed purpose.