Джеймс Миченер - The Source

The arrogant boast of the Mameluke general that he would invest the castle within a week had long since been proved empty: he had leveled the mosque; he had taken the Roman and the Maronite churches and had torn them down, but the Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene still resisted, and at the end of the third week the siege had bogged down in the bottom of the moat, except for three towers that had been inched close to the main walls, where for the time being they rested, inactive. Each morning the ballistas would hurl great rocks and the mangonels would let fly their piercing arrows, but the siege seemed to have ground to a halt; so each night at midnight the count and his son sent the signal: “The fires of Ma Coeur are still burning.”

But the miners were at work. Deep in the heart of old Makor, down below the level of the Roman times, below the potsherds of the Greeks and Babylonians, the Mameluke slaves were digging a tunnel under the main tower of the outer wall. As they inched forward, other slaves came behind bearing stout wooden props which they forced into position to support the tunnel. And at the close of each day one of the Mameluke captains entered the tunnel with a white string to measure how far the digging had proceeded, and when all were satisfied that it must have gone well beyond the inner face of the wall, the general ordered a huge cave to be widened under the tower foundations.

Now the miners dug rapidly, and hundreds of posts were lugged through the darkness to shore up the cave until the vast emptiness looked like a forest that had died. At this point all work ceased and attacks on the castle were halted, while the three white flags were once more prominently displayed, after which the red-faced Mameluke general and his assistants rode over the drawbridge and into the beleaguered fortress. Nodding gravely he dismounted and ordered the scar-headed captain from Saphet to stretch out the measuring string, while another drew with chalk the circumference of the underground cave. Then he said, “Knight, our cave lies under this tower.”

Count Volkmar looked at the ominous circle and said, “I believe you.”

“We have not yet moved in the brush,” the Mameluke said in his broken Arabic. “We offer one last chance. Then the brush.”

“The terms?” Volkmar asked.

“As before.” There was a pause. “Your answer?”

“As before.”

“Farewell. We shall not speak again.”

“Yes, we shall,” Volkmar contradicted. “For when you get through that wall you must also get into the castle. And every night at midnight I shall speak to you with my signal fire. It will take you much longer than the week you said.”

The Mameluke made no reply, and that afternoon the defenders of the castle watched as long lines of slaves carried brush into the cave. But the torment of the digging had stopped, and in the quiet respite Volkmar dispatched one of his last pigeons, bearing fatal news that would be correctly interpreted in Acre:The basilica has fallen. The mining has ended, they have shown me the circumference of the cave under the principal tower, and the brush has been moved in. We wait in silence, but we cannot hope. The tower must fall, and then we shall be forced into the castle. Go to the church of SS. Peter and Andrew, the patrons of Galilee, and pray for us. We shall hold out for weeks but seek your plea for divine help.

That night the Mamelukes lighted the brush in the cave, and in a sighing, smoking fire the wooden posts began to burn away, producing a final blaze that heated the tower walls and cracked them, so that when the under-supports were gone the foundations began to collapse, and there came a shudder in the wall and wild shouting from the Mamelukes as the long-impregnable tower of Ma Coeur came crashing down. Turbaned warriors leaped across the hot stones to drive the Crusaders away from the outer battlements and into the castle; but at midnight from the highest parapet the signal fire blazed forth, assuring Acre that all was Still well.

Now came the grim days when the hand of defeat was close to the throat of the defenders, for the Mameluke general methodically directed his thousands of slaves to smooth out the stones of the fallen tower and to build a level road over which his huge wooden structures could be wheeled, along with the ballistas and the mangonels. Patiently the turtles were moved against the castle itself and miners began their laborious job of undercutting the gate, and with no display of haste or bitterness the Mamelukes proceeded to bite away at the foundations. The siege was now in its fifth week, and since the ballistas and sheitanis were closer, the Crusaders began to lose more men. Worst of all, throughout the day, throughout the night, those who survived could hear the tapping of the hammers and the picks far below them, while the castle’s supplies of Greek fire diminished and had to be used more sparingly, so that the attackers grew more bold.

Now came the sickening part of the siege, the subtle, fearful whisper that could creep through the strongest walls of a castle and into the minds of everyone defending it. When this sound first arrived no man was exempt from fear; and later, no matter how casually he came to live with the sound, in the base of his mind there lurked always fear. It was the distant noise of pickaxe against stone, of men digging deep in the earth, and because they tapped against the fundamental wall the sound was carried through all the stones of the castle, not echoing madly as when a rock plunged through a roof, tearing all away with it, but insidiously, like the aching of a tooth that does not yet require pulling but which warns: “This ache is not going to stop.”

How persuasive the sound became. The count would look at his wife, and she would say nothing, but he could see in her eyes the reflection of each tapping sound as it carried to her feet and up through her chair and into her brain. On some bright mornings, when the tapping stopped for a moment, the Crusaders would look at each other in alarm and then return to normal as the almost noiseless echo resumed.

So far the great rocks tossed skyward by the Mameluke engines had not penetrated the circular chapel, and here the countess and the women spent most of their days, contemplating the errors which had brought their men into this grave position and wondering as to what might happen in the last hours of the siege, for none had hopes that she would escape; the tapping was too insistent and too close. Countess Volkmar, leaving the chapel now and again to help care for the wounded, thought: It wouldn’t have mattered if I had married into some other castle. They’re all doomed. But I wish we’d sent Volkmar to Germany.

The boy, less susceptible than others to the psychological pressure of the tapping which echoed through the castle, busied himself about the inner ring of turrets, running from one group of defenders to the next, as the knights fought to keep back the giant wooden towers that seemed to inch forward by themselves and were now almost touching the outer faces of the wall. Several times in recent weeks men had been killed near where young Volkmar stood, and he must have known that his castle was doomed, but he displayed no fear. For him—as for his father—the best part of each anxious day came at midnight, when they climbed together to light the fires which always seemed at first to give only a feeble blaze but which in the end illuminated the countryside in an eerie light, disclosing the Mameluke tents in the olive grove and the rolling hills of Galilee.

At the end of the fifth week the besieging forces halted offensive operations and once more raised the three white flags, but this time the red-faced general took no part in the parley. He sent the Saphet captain, who said simply, “The tunnel under your gate is ready for its brushwood. Do you now surrender?”