Stronghold (2 page)

Why were feathered shafts whistling back and forth through the frigid air? Why were Welshmen dropping where they stood?

Then she saw the English archers. Having donned leather over their mail as camouflage, they emerged in packs from the trees on either side. The graceful curve of their longbows, as they were strung and drawn with professional speed and precision, was as distinctive as it was terrifying.

"Earl Corotocus!" she cried. "What is this?"

"War cannot just be extinguished, my lady, like a candle you snuff, or an ember you put your foot upon." Corotocus mused. "Though putting one's foot down is an apt phrase at this moment."

The Welshmen in the valley ran in all directions, but arrows flew with unerring accuracy. Like fleeting streaks of light, their steel heads buried themselves in flesh, muscle and bone. Very soon, the valley bottom was dotted with the wounded and dying. Some of those still standing attempted to forge to the valley sides, where they could grapple with their tormentors. But the crossfire was so thick that they were riddled with shafts and dropped like human pincushions, or, if they managed to make it, received a knife in the ribs or the crushing blow of a war-hammer to the top of their skull.

Countess Madalyn watched through tear-blurred eyes.

"You traitorous pig!" she wept. "You gave us your word."

"One does not give one's word to country oafs and expect to be taken seriously, countess. These men are outlaws. They lived as such, and will die as such."

Some Welshmen struggled back towards the valley head, as though to retrieve their weapons. But Navarre and others of the earl's personal mesnie greeted them with laughter and double-handed sword strokes, lopping their legs from under them, sundering their necks at the shoulder. More knights, these mounted, appeared at the lowest end of the valley, where the open, tussocky sward made it safe for their horses. Most wore the earl's red and black livery, but there were others, tenant knights from his wider demesnes, who sported personal devices on their surcoats and shields. It made for a colourful scene as they cantered back and forth, lowering their lances to skewer the Welsh as they ran, or hacking them down with longswords and mattocks. Some fell to their knees and begged for mercy - but were simply ridden over, their bodies torn and trampled by smashing, iron-shod hooves. One stout fellow attempted to grab the lance of a knight decked with blue and white chevrons. The knight released his weapon, but circled around, drew his battle-axe and clove the fellow's cranium.

Even those lying injured were not spared; hunting spears were flung at them as riders galloped past. One older Welshman, his jaw hanging shattered and left eye dangling from a crushed socket, crawled to the river's edge, only to have his face pressed under by a hoof until he drowned. Owen Anwyl, the disinherited Welsh noble who had first seized Grogen Castle, was spared the butchering blade, but buffeted again and again by horses and struck with the hafts of axes and the pommels of swords, his visage streaked with gore from his lacerated scalp. Eventually a halter was looped around his neck and tightened, and he was hauled around the valley on his back.

Countess Madalyn shrieked as rude hands were now laid on her.

It was Navarre, his lopsided face written with goblin glee. He dragged her from the saddle and threw her to the ground. She struggled, but could not stop him plucking the pearls from her throat or the rings from her fingers. When she spat and clawed at him, he punched her - not hard enough to knock her unconscious, though his fist was like a bone mallet inside its rawhide glove. She was left stunned by the blow, only vaguely aware that her daughter was also pulled screaming from the saddle and divested of her jewels.

After that, the two women were violated.

Countess Madalyn's fustian gown and the fine silk under-tunic were torn wide open, and her breasts exposed. She winced as Navarre kneaded them like two lumps of dough, sobbed aloud as he feasted on them, suckling, biting, chewing until her blood flowed.

Earl Corotocus and Hugh du Guesculin sat through it all, unmoved. As Corotocus surveyed his triumph, he summoned his page and accepted a chicken drumstick and a goblet of mulled wine.

In time, the carnage drew to a close. Spiked maces, caked with brains and bone fragments, still crashed onto heads and shoulders. Flailing hands were still severed at the wrist, but few Welshmen were left on their feet. Tiring of the sport, Corotocus's knights took those few surviving and hanged them from the surrounding trees. One by one, their gibbering pleas were lost in gargled chokes.

At the sight of this, Countess Madalyn wailed like a baby, but she was struck dumb when she saw her daughter, every scrap of clothing now stripped from her body, trussed with rope and thrown over the front of her horse like a deer. Holding her rent garments together with one hand, the countess tried to intervene, only to be knocked to the ground by Navarre. Laughing, he jumped up behind the captive girl and slapped her naked buttocks.

"Your daughter will be held as surety for your good behaviour," Earl Corotocus said. "At some point in the future, if this land remains at peace, it may please me to marry her to a henchman of my choice - someone I can rely on to treat her in the manner to which she will soon become accustomed."

"You whoreson!" the countess hissed, kneeling upright, her emerald eyes burning with outrage. "You goat's whelp!"

"Insult me all you wish, my lady, but understand one thing. There is more at stake here than the pride of your piffling people. I am lord of the Clun March, but I am more than just a name. In France, I was charged with defending the king's Gascon possessions. We were overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but the king heard about the destruction I wrought on his foes, how my men and I slew hundreds, thousands. He was grateful, and I was rewarded with lifelong investment not just in this - the most difficult corner of his realm - but with lordships all across Wales. Be under no illusion, I intend to hold my possessions and, in due course, to expand them. But these constant revolts are becoming tiresome. I cannot have the king suspecting that his trust was misplaced. Du Guesculin!"

"My lord?" the banneret said.

"Du Guesculin, by my reckoning, there are twenty villages between here and Grogen Castle. Lay waste to them. Torch the houses, scatter the women and children, hang the men and boys. And make a good show of that, du Guesculin - I want gibbets on every hill and every crossroads, each one laden to breaking point."

"Of course, my lord."

"Earl Corotocus, you will pay for this!" the countess snarled.

"Countess Madalyn, we all pay in the end."

Before he left, he made a special example of Owen Anwyl, having his hands bound behind his back, his legs broken with a pollaxe, and then suspending him by the feet from a tree-limb at the highest point of the valley.

CHAPTER TWO

The castles that King Edward built in Wales after his first war of conquest, some twenty years earlier, had formed a stone collar intended to choke the spirit of native resistance. Designed by the master military architect, James of St. George, they were each one a towering, impregnable bastion, a glowering fastness that came to dominate and oppress the land for miles in every direction. Their very names had now become a byword for invincibility: Conway, Ruddlin, Flint, Harlech.

Grogen Castle was no exception.

It stood on the north shore of the River Tefeidiad, right on the water's edge, and was approachable only from the west due to hilly moorland and thickly wooded terrain in the north and east. It consisted of an outer curtain-wall, some fifty feet high, a fortified Gatehouse, a Barbican, a Constable's Tower, and an Inner Fort, the walls of which stood eighty feet. Inside the Inner Fort were the main buildings - the halls, kitchen, barrack-house and the final defensive structure, the Keep. When Corotocus's men first came in sight of Grogen, there were mutters of awe - due as much to its appearance as to its size. In England it had become the fashion for wealthy nobles who owned privately licensed castles to paint them in glowing colours - white, blue or red - so that they shone from the leafy landscape like objects in fairy tales. But King Edward's Welsh castles were different animals. They were military strongholds so bereft of adornment or luxury that the Welsh poet Euan the Rhymer had described them as 'spikes of Hell thrust out through Cymru's fair hide.'

Grogen fulfilled that vision perfectly. It was comprised entirely of grey granite cemented in huge blocks. Its colossal walls and towers were sheer and bleak, and fitted with projecting upper gantries, which were massively crenelated and equipped with swinging timber panels from behind which an avalanche of stones, darts and boiling oil could be launched. Its only windows were narrow slits through which arrows could be shot and javelins thrown.

However, much more of a shock to Corotocus and his men was not the pitiless nature of this fastness, but the many figures manning its awesome defences.

"What the hell is this?" the earl swore, reining his horse at the front of the column. He slammed his visor open. "Du Guesculin, what in Satan's name is this?"

The banneret lifted his wide-brimmed helmet and, shielding his eyes against the early-morning sun, focussed on the figures dotting the top of the curtain-wall and the parapet of the Barbican. At this distance it was impossible to discern who they were, but there were plenty of them and their blades and helmets glinted.

Others of the earl's men now rode up, among them William d'Abbetot, his chief engineer, Captain Garbofasse of his mercenary battalion, and Craon Culai, who commanded a company of the king's infantry attached to the earl's retinue for the duration of the war. They were equally surprised and, having been assured that the castle was theirs for the taking, not a little alarmed.

"Someone tell me what's happening here!" Corotocus bellowed. He rarely allowed himself to get angry in front of underlings, but now he'd lost face. His cheeks reddened, there was froth on his lips. "Did some of Anwyl's dogs stay behind? How could the bloody place have been reoccupied when he only abandoned it yesterday? Someone explain this to me!"

"Why do none of them move?" Culai wondered. A tall, thin man with pinched features, he seemed spooked by what he was seeing, and it was indeed an eerie sight - the figures on the wall were silent and motionless. Too motionless, some might say, to be living men.

"Are they dead?" Garbofasse asked.

"Neither dead nor living," came another voice. Ulbert FitzOsbern, an older knight wearing a red and blue harlequin mantel over his mail, cantered to the front of the column. "My lord, most likely they're scarecrows."

"Scarecrows?" Corotocus said.

Ulbert nodded. "I saw this done often during de Montfort's rebellion. Castles expecting siege but held by only a handful of troops, would create scarecrows - dummies stuffed with straw - and prop them on the battlements. Given an iron cap and a spear each, it looked to all the world as if the place was strongly garrisoned."

Corotocus laughed loudly, partly to conceal his relief. "Of course. That Breton wastrel de Brione only had a few men. When he heard the Welsh were coming, he'd have panicked. Once again Ulbert, we're grateful for your wisdom and insight." He regarded his other lieutenants sternly. "It comes to something when a homeless knight, an errant wanderer who is only with us to pay off his family's debts, provides a solution while the rest of you stand around like frightened children."

They hung their heads, abashed.

There was still, of course, the possibility that this could be a trap. The earl's force might approach the castle's main entrance thinking it safe, only to be struck by a deluge of missiles. So lots were drawn and ten men selected to go forward. The rest of the army, six hundred in total, arrayed itself on the western bluff to watch.

While to the south Grogen Castle was bordered by the deep, broad flow of the Tefeidiad, it was surrounded on its three other sides by a moat, which had been hacked from the living rock on which the fastness was built. This moat was about ten yards across and thirty feet deep. During the spring thaw, mountain streams emptied into it from the north, but at present it was dry and filled with rubble. The only way to cross over it was via an arched stone bridge at the castle's southwest corner. Having managed this, an enemy force would be required to follow the 'berm' path, a narrow footing running between the base of the south-facing curtain-wall and the inner edge of the moat. This turned at the castle's southeast corner, passed alongside the east-facing wall and the north-facing wall, until finally reaching the main entrance, which was set between the Gatehouse and the north-facing wall in the castle's northwest corner. By this time, of course, the enemy would have been subjected to prolonged attack from overhead as it was forced to circle the entire stronghold.

As the ten chosen men readied themselves, donning not just their helms and shields, but additional plating on their elbows, shoulders and knees, the rest of the army waited. Among them were Ulbert FitzOsbern and his twenty-two year old son, Ranulf.

One of the duties the father and son had been given was to guard Countess Madalyn's daughter. Partly of their own volition, but also at the instigation of Father Benan, the earl's chaplain, who thought it unseemly that Gwendolyn should be naked among so many men, they'd loosened her bonds and given her a cloak to wrap herself in. Though streaked with dirt and tears, she sat upright on her pony, taut with anger but determined to maintain her dignity. When Ranulf offered her a drink from his water bottle, she didn't lower herself to reply.

"It's your choice," he said, turning back to the castle.

The FitzOsberns were tall, well-built men. Age had wizened Ulbert's neck and thickened his paunch, but, thanks to countless clashes in battle and tournament, his son was flat bellied, barrel-chested and stout of limb. He had grey eyes and a lean, square jaw. When he pulled back his mail coif, he shook out a mop of sweaty, straw-yellow hair; sure proof that his family - though they'd intermarried many times with Norman stock, hence their surname - had its origins in Saxon England.