Stronghold (24 page)

The countess stepped back. Gwyddon's eyes narrowed.

"If I was as treacherous as you fear," Ranulf said. "Wouldn't I plunge these blades into your two hearts right now? Instead of vowing to plunge them into Earl Corotocus when I return to Grogen?"

"This is true," the countess said. "He has taken quite a risk to come here. It would be easy for him just to kill us."

"He seeks only to save his men, so they may fight another day," Gwyddon argued.

Ranulf laughed. "After their experiences here, I doubt any of 'my men' - as you call them - would ever glance past Offa's Dyke again, let alone enter Wales. We'll leave our weapons, our booty. I promise we'll march home and harm no-one. Think, madam, how that would help your position once King Edward arrives. I can plead with him on your behalf. Tell him how you punished the criminal Corotocus, but spared the rest of us. Could there be a greater gesture of good will?"

She gazed at him intently, as if he was slowly persuading her. She was about to speak when there came a frantic shouting from outside the pavilion. It was in Welsh, but Ranulf knew enough of the border tongue to recognise an intruder alert - apparently the English were in the camp.

"See how he lies and manipulates!" Gwyddon roared. "See how he buys time for his assassins!"

The countess's expression froze with outrage.

"Ignore my offer at your peril," Ranulf said as he backed towards the entrance. "You've thrown your lot in with a pagan sorcerer. Continue on this path, and who knows - when you get to Hell, you may share your dungeon with Corotocus himself."

He turned and dashed outside, where he met another of the young priests at the stockade gate. The priest had a scimitar in his hand, but was too stunned by the sight of the intruder to react. Ranulf slashed his throat and knifed him in the heart.

Beyond the stockade, there was no immediate response from the dead, who still lay motionless in the undergrowth. But several dozen yards to his right, behind a wall of black and twisting trees, flames were blazing into the night. A great mechanical outline, with a huge throwing-arm, was engulfed in fire. There were more wild shouts. Some were gruff, some sounded panicked. A half-naked figure came weaving between the trunks, stumbling over corpses. It was Tallebois, the squire.

Ranulf dashed to intercept him, grabbing his arm and bringing him to a halt. The squire squawked with fright.

"What happened?" Ranulf demanded.

"We found the scoop-thrower. We brought coals from the campfire and piled straw beneath it. Now the whole thing's burning. We cut its torsion springs as well, broke its winch and pulley-bar. They'll never use it again." Tallebois laughed hysterically.

"FitzOsbern, where the devil have you been?" came an angry voice.

Garbofasse lumbered into view, with the others at his heels. He was slick with sweat, his pale flesh shining between streaks of soot and grease.

"I tried to find the countess," Ranulf said. "How ineffective would the Welsh snake be with its head removed as well as its sting?"

"And?"

"She's around here somewhere, but now there's no time."

As he said this, a terrible voice sounded through the trees to their rear. Ranulf recognised it as Gwyddon's. The druid was chanting discordantly, intoning some hideous spell. As one, the corpses strewed between the trees began to stir, to shudder, to twitch.

"Dear God!" Tallebois screamed.

"Back to the castle!" Garbofasse shouted.

"We'll never make it across the moor," Ranulf said, ushering them downhill rather than back along the bluff. "Head for the river."

"The river?"

"Do as I say!"

But on all sides, grotesque figures were rising quickly to their feet. Paston, standing further away from the others, squealed like a calf as an axe clove his skull from behind.

"This way!" Ranulf bellowed, racing downhill.

The others followed, pell-mell. But it was a chaotic flight. They tripped over roots or were clawed at by spectral shapes emerging from the mist on either side. Garbofasse fell heavily, injuring his knee. Ranulf stopped and turned as the others ran ahead.

"Go!" Garbofasse cried, hobbling back to his feet. "Get away!" He was already hemmed in by mewling figures, so he picked up a longsword and swept it at them with both hands. Two went down, sundered at the waist, but a third, fourth and fifth were soon on top of him. "Go!" he shrieked again, wrestling with them as they snapped at him with their foul teeth.

He managed to invert one and drop it on the top of its head. Another, he ran through with the sword, though it still lunged at him. More joined the fray, bearing him to the muddy ground.

"Go!" was the last thing Ranulf heard the mercenary captain say, though it became high-pitched and incoherent as his larynx was bitten through.

Ranulf ran on down the hill, striking on all sides with sword and dagger. The others were already much further ahead. Even Red Guthric, personally bonded to Garbofasse, scrambled down the slope without looking back - until he too fell. A corpse had dropped on him from a tree. It was a naked stick figure, its skin hanging in empty folds, but it had sufficient strength to knock him to his knees, whereupon it clamped its teeth on the nape of his neck. Ranulf galloped alongside and drove his dagger so deeply between its ribs that its blade was wedged there. The spindly monster dropped Red Guthric and rounded on Ranulf. He slammed his curved sword through the middle of its chest, entirely transfixing it, but still it tried to grapple with him. Leaving both his weapons behind, Ranulf stepped away, stumbling on downhill. Red Guthric was back on his feet and came as well, but on wobbling legs. When another form blundered into his path - this one a bloated mass of swollen, purple flesh - and wrapped him in a bear-hug, he was unable to resist. Helpless, barely able to scream, Guthric was raised and broken across the monster's knee like a plank.

Ranulf ran on. FitzUrz and Tallebois were just ahead but, as the moon slipped behind clouds, they found themselves fleeing through complete darkness. When FitzUrz turned his ankle, it snapped like a stick. He howled as he fell. Ranulf swerved towards him, but before he could reach him another dead thing, gargling black filth but armed with a massive club, ghosted around the trunk of the nearest tree. Ranulf veered away as it commenced to land blow after blow on FitzUrz's unprotected skull.

Ranulf and Tallebois were now the only two left. Both were fleeing neck-and-neck when they skidded out from the trees onto the open bluff to the west of the castle. Vast numbers of the dead were already gathered there and now - as one - turned slowly to face them.

Tallebois slid to a halt, his mouth locking open, his eyes bulging. Ranulf grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him southwards rather than straight down the slope.

"There are too many!" the squire gibbered.

"Towards the river! Fast as you can!"

Ranulf buffeted more corpses out of their way as they ran. Claws slashed at them; he had to duck a mighty stroke from a long-handled Dane-axe. But the slope was at last dropping towards the Tefeidiad, the moonlit surface of which glittered just below them.

The last fifty yards were perhaps the worst.

"Use your strength, your weight... anything you've got!" Ranulf panted, as the dead closed in again.

Tallebois still had his dagger. When a woman, whose severed head hung down her back on a few sinews, reached out and caught him, he smote her hand off at the wrist.

"That's the way!" Ranulf shouted. He himself had managed to pick up a war-hammer. A corpse stumbled towards him and he swung the mighty cudgel, crushing its cranium. Another came towards him and he smashed its forehead - with such force that a soup of liquid brain matter spurted from its eye sockets.

The river was now tantalisingly close. Though a great mob of the dead were descending from behind, only a relative handful - three at the most - were in front.

"We can make it!" Ranulf shouted.

Tallebois was so racked with terror and fatigue that his voice squeaked. "We'll drown!"

"If you can't swim, just stay afloat. The current will carry us past the castle. We might be able to get ashore on its east side!"

"
Might
be able to?"

"Now you see why we aren't wearing mail!"

The final few feet of slope were steep, muddy and strewn with loose stones. They skidded and tripped their way to the bottom, blundering headlong into the final clutch of corpses. Ranulf hit the first one head-on, barrelling into its chest, catapulting it backward into the river. Tallebois wasn't so lucky. The other two caught hold of him, one wrapping its arms around his waist and burying its teeth into his naked left thigh, the other looping a skeletal arm around his neck, trying to throttle him. With gurgling bleats, Tallebois hacked with his dagger, but it had no effect. The would-be throttler bought its leering visage close to his tear-stained face. He slashed it back and forth, mangling it, chopping it away in chunks, exposing the grinning skull beneath, but not slowing its attack in the least. Its pendulous green tongue quivered as it hung from the chasm where its lower jaw had once been. It raked its bony claws across his chest and belly, drawing five crimson trails through the sooty grease.

And then Ranulf took its legs from under it.

He swept in with a two-handed blow so fierce that both the creature's knee joints were shattered, and the lower portions of its limbs sent spinning into the darkness. It fell thrashing to the ground. The other monster ceased its gnawing on Tallebois's thigh and swung around to face Ranulf. Its nose was missing, along with its upper lip, but its ivory teeth were fully intact and coated with blood. Taking possession of the sobbing squire's dagger, it came hard at Ranulf, aiming a blow that would have skewered him through the heart. He dodged it, spun around and brought the hammer full circle, catching the creature at the base of its backbone, breaking it clean through.

"Into the water!" he shouted, grabbing Tallebois, yanking him to his feet and hurling him over the last few feet of ground into the river.

Before Ranulf followed, he turned just once.

The rest of the revenants were only yards away, looking for all the world like some vast assembly of reeking remains ploughed from a plague pit, yet tottering down through the darkness towards him. The one whose spine he'd just broken was still on its feet, but now the upper part of its body had folded over until it hung upside down - as though it was made of paper.

Shaking his head at the sheer perversity of what he was witnessing, Ranulf threw the war-hammer into the midst of them, turned and dived into the Tefeidiad
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

"I saw great heaps of munitions, my lord. Nails, chains, piles of pebbles from the river shore.
Ahhh
..."

Squire Tallebois gasped as Zacharius inserted another suture through his ripped-open thigh, using a needle that looked like a fishhook. Having washed the filth off with buckets of water from the well, both the squire and Ranulf were now warming themselves at a brazier inside the main stable block. Earl Corotocus, Navarre, du Guesculin and several other senior household knights stood around them, listening to their report. Fiery shadows played on their attentive faces as Tallebois spoke.

Ranulf, who had pointedly said nothing so far, climbed tiredly into his mail leggings. He and Tallebois had managed to scramble out of the river on the east side of the castle, but only with great difficulty. Having met no more of the dead there, they'd needed to clamber back down into the moat and squeeze themselves along the drain. Thankfully, the earl's men had pulled them up the garderobe chute, but by this time they'd been completely exhausted and the last thing Ranulf had wanted was a face-to-face interrogation.

"They were restocking the scoop-thrower, as we feared," the squire jabbered, a vague light of madness in his eyes. "By cockcrow tomorrow, I fancy we'd have been facing the iron hail again. All over again! The iron-"

"But you destroyed the blasted machine?" Corotocus asked.

"Absolutely, my lord. It can't be used any more,
ahhh
..." Tallebois gasped again as a particularly gruesome gash was closed with a single tight thread. "But there is something else. They had also piled up colossal blocks of stone, which looked as if they'd been freshly quarried. The sort a mason might use to lay foundations with."

"And?"

The squire shrugged. "The dead don't build, my lord... do they? Captain Garbofasse thought they were projectiles. He said this meant they were bringing the mangonels to the western bluff. That'd they'd be ready either later today or maybe tomorrow."

Du Guesculin sucked in his breath. "My lord, the iron hail would merely sweep the Constable's Tower roof, but from that close range the mangonels will destroy it! We must retreat to the Keep at once."

Corotocus said nothing.

"My lord, do you hear me? We should fill the Keep basement with supplies-"

"We will retreat to the Keep, du Guesculin, as and when the situation demands it," the earl interjected.

"But my lord, great blocks of stone...?"

Ranulf buckled his hauberk in place, feeling even deeper scorn for the household banneret than he usually did. It was a pity du Guesculin hadn't been so frantic in his concerns when the south wall defenders had had to face these missiles.

Earl Corotocus now turned to Ranulf. "What's your opinion of this enterprise? Did it succeed?"

Ranulf shrugged. "I always said the mangonels would be brought against the west wall in due course, my lord."

"And the scoop-thrower? It's completely disabled?"

"I didn't see that. So I can't comment."

The earl's eyebrows arched. "You didn't see it? How can that be?"

"He wasn't with us," Tallebois piped up. "He went to find the countess."

"You... went to find the countess?" Corotocus repeated slowly, his eyes suddenly burning into Ranulf like smoking spear-points.

"To cut the head off the snake," Tallebois added. "That was what he said."

There was an amazed silence in the stable, broken only by the snuffling of horses and popping of coals in the brazier. Corotocus continued to gaze at Ranulf, a gaze the young knight returned boldly as he adjusted his coif. At last, Navarre stepped forward.