Heretic (38 page)

“Tomorrow, lord,” Gioberti said. “It takes time to set the loam. We’ll load tonight and shoot at daybreak.”

Next morning the gun fired three shots, all of them solid bars of rusted iron that succeeded in tearing the castle’s gates off their hinges. It began to rain and the drops hissed and steamed when they hit Hell Spitter’s metal. The townsfolk cowered in their houses, flinching every time the massive noise of the gun shook their window shutters and made their kitchen pots rattle. The castle’s defenders had vanished from the battlements and that emboldened the crossbowmen who moved even closer.

The gate was gone, though Joscelyn could still not see into the castle’s courtyard for that lay higher than the gun, but he assumed the garrison would know that an assault must come through the gate and doubtless they were preparing defenses. “The trick of it,” he declared at midday, “is not to give them time.”

“They’ve had time,” Sir Henri Courtois pointed out. “They’ve had all morning.”

Joscelyn ignored Sir Henri who he thought was nothing but a timid old man who had lost his appetite for battle. “We attack this evening,” Joscelyn decreed. “Signor Gioberti will fire an iron into the courtyard and we shall follow while the noise still cows them.”

He picked forty men-at-arms, the best he had, and he ordered them to be ready at sunset and, to ensure that the defenders had no warning of his attack, he had men hack holes in the house walls so that the attackers could approach the castle through the town’s buildings. By going through the walls, sneaking from house to house, the attackers could get within thirty paces of the gate without being seen and, as soon as the gun fired, they were to erupt from their hiding place and charge the castle’s archway. Sir Henri Courtois offered to lead the attack, but Joscelyn refused. “It needs young men,” he said, “men without fear.” He glanced at Robbie. “Will you come?”

“Of course, my lord.”

“We’ll send a dozen crossbowmen first,” Joscelyn decreed. “They can shoot a volley into the courtyard and then get out of our way.” They would also, he hoped, draw the arrows of any English archers who might be waiting.

Sir Henri drew a diagram on a kitchen table with a scrap of charcoal to show Joscelyn what lay inside the courtyard. The stables, he said, were to the right and should be avoided for they led nowhere. “Facing you, lord,” he said, “are two doorways. The one on the left leads down to the dungeons and, once down there, there is no other way out. The one on the right is at the top of a dozen steps and that leads to the halls and battlements.”

“So that’s the one we want?”

“Indeed, lord.” Sir Henri hesitated. He wanted to warn Joscelyn that Sir Guillaume was an experienced soldier, that he would be ready. The siege proper had only just begun, the gun had been working for less than a day, and that was when a garrison was at its most alert. Sir Guillaume would be waiting, but Sir Henri knew that any caution would only incur Joscelyn’s dismissive scorn and so he said nothing.

Joscelyn ordered his squire to prepare his armor, then gave Sir Henri a careless glance. “When the castle is taken,” he said, “you will be castellan again.”

“Whatever your lordship orders,” Sir Henri said, taking the insult of his demotion calmly.

The attackers gathered in St. Callic’s church where a Mass was said and a blessing given to the men in their mail coats, and afterwards they filed through the crude doorways hacked in the house walls, climbing the hill, going secretly to a wheelwright’s shop that opened onto the square in front of the castle. They crouched there, weapons ready. Men pulled on helmets, said their silent prayers and waited. Most had shields, but some preferred to go without, claiming they could move faster. Two had huge axes, weapons to strike terror in a small space. They touched their talismans, said more prayers and waited impatiently for the roar of the huge gun. None peered around the doorway for Joscelyn was watching them and he had given strict orders that they were to stay hidden until the gun fired. “There is still a reward for every archer taken alive,” he reminded them, “but I’ll give it for dead archers too.”

“Keep your shields up,” Robbie put in, thinking of the long English arrows.

“They’ll be dazed,” Joscelyn said, “and cowering from the noise. We just go in and kill them.”

Pray God that was true, Robbie thought, and he felt a twinge of guilt that he was fighting against Sir Guillaume, whom he liked, but he had sworn his new allegiance and he was convinced he was fighting for God, for Scotland and for the true faith.

“Five gold coins apiece,” Joscelyn said, “for the first five men up the steps and into the keep.” Why the hell did the gun not fire? He was sweating. It was a cool day, but he was hot because the greased leather coat under his plate armor was thick. That armor was the best that any of the attackers owned, but it was also the heaviest and Joscelyn knew it would be a struggle to keep up with the men in the lighter mail. No matter. He would join the fight where it was thickest and he relished the thought of cutting down screaming, desperate archers. “And no prisoners,” he said, wanting his day to be crowned by death.

“Sir Guillaume?” Robbie suggested. “Can we take him captive?”

“Does he have estates?” Joscelyn asked.

“No,” Robbie admitted.

“Then what ransom can he promise?”

“None.”

“So no prisoners!” Joscelyn called to his attackers. “Kill them all!”

“But not their women,” a man suggested.

“Not their women,” Joscelyn agreed, and regretted that the golden-haired beghard was not in the castle. Well, there would be other women. There were always other women.

The shadows lengthened. It had rained all morning, but the sky had cleared since and the sun was low, very low, and Joscelyn knew that Signor Gioberti was waiting until the last bright rays shone clean through the gate to dazzle the defenders. Then would come the noise, the evil-smelling smoke, the terrible crash of the iron striking the courtyard wall and, while the defenders were still stunned by the tumult, the armored men would erupt in pitiless fury through the gate. “God is with us,” Joscelyn said, not because he believed it, but because he knew such a sentiment was expected of him. “Tonight we feast on their food and women.” He was talking too much because he was nervous, but he did not realize it. This was not like a tournament where the loser could walk away, however bruised and cut. This was death’s playground and, though he was supremely confident, he was also apprehensive. Let the defenders be sleeping, or eating, he thought, but let them not be ready.

And just then the world was filled with thunder, flame-seared iron screamed through the gate, smoke boiled up the street and the waiting, thank Christ, was over.

They charged.

S
IR
G
UILLAUME,
the moment the gun first appeared in Castillon d’Arbizon, had readied the garrison for an attack. He gave orders that ten archers were to be in the courtyard at all times, five on each side of the yard so their arrows would slant in at the open space where the cannon’s bolts had demolished the main gate. The castle’s curtain wall, which was undamaged, sheltered them from any crossbowmen in the town. Then, during the morning that the gun demolished the gate, Sir Guillaume tore down most of the stable walls, but left the posts supporting the roof in place so that the archers had a place to shelter their bowstrings when it rained. The horses were taken up the steps into the lower hall, which became their new stables.

The timber from the stable wall, the byres and the shattered main gates were used to make a barricade across the courtyard. It was not as high as Sir Guillaume would have liked, and there was not enough timber to make it heavy enough to withstand a determined assault, but any kind of obstacle would slow down a man in armor and give the archers time to place another arrow on their cords. The first iron bolts shot from the gun were added to the barricade, and then a barrel of rancid olive oil was fetched up from the undercroft. With that, Sir Guillaume was ready.

He suspected Joscelyn would attack sooner rather than later. Sir Guillaume had spent enough time in the new Count of Berat’s company to understand that Joscelyn was an impatient man, too eager for victory, and Sir Guillaume also reckoned the attack would either come at dusk or dawn and so, as the first full day of the gun’s firing tore down the gates and cracked the bastion at one side of the archway, he made sure the whole garrison was armored and ready well before dusk.

In mid-afternoon he had been certain the attack would come very soon for, in the long space between the gun’s shots, he had crouched on the undamaged part of the gate rampart and heard the strange sounds of hammers and splintering, and he guessed the enemy was breaking a path through the house walls so they could approach the open space in front of the castle unseen. And when evening came and the gun did not fire, Sir Guillaume knew it must be waiting until the attackers were ready. He crouched by the gate and heard the chink of armor from the houses across the square, and when he peered round the arch he saw that more men than usual had gathered on the ramparts above the west gate to watch the castle. They might as well have sounded a trumpet, he thought scornfully, to announce their intentions. He ducked out of sight just a heartbeat before a crossbow quarrel slammed into the arch where he had been lurking.

He went back to his men-at-arms. “They’re coming,” he told them and he pushed his left forearm into the leather loops of his shield that showed the faded badge of the three hawks.

There was a relief in that knowledge. Sir Guillaume hated being besieged, and he had hated the calm menace of the first days when Sir Henri had kept to their agreement for, even though that was a safe period, there was still the frustration of being mewed up in a castle. Now he could kill some of the besiegers, and to a soldier like Sir Guillaume that was far more satisfying. When the gun had first come to the town Sir Guillaume had wondered whether Joscelyn would offer him terms, but then, when the gun first fired to wrench the heavy gates askew, he understood that Joscelyn, hot-blooded, incautious and ungenerous, wanted nothing but death.

So now he would give it to him.

“When the gun fires,” Sir Guillaume instructed his men, “that’s when they’ll come,” and he squatted beside the gate, on the enemy’s side of the barricade, and hoped he was right. He waited, watching the sunlight creep across the flagstones of the courtyard. He had eighteen fit archers and all of them were behind the barricade, while sixteen men-at-arms waited with Sir Guillaume. The rest had deserted, all but half a dozen men who were ill. The town was quiet except for a barking dog that suddenly yelped as it was struck to silence. Beat them off here, Sir Guillaume thought, and then what? He had no doubt he would beat them off, but he was still hugely outnumbered and his garrison was far from any help. Perhaps, if the besiegers were well beaten here, then Joscelyn would talk terms. Sir Henri Courtois would certainly take an honorable surrender, Sir Guillaume thought, but did Sir Henri have influence over the hot-headed Joscelyn?

Then the gun fired, the noise of it seeming to shake the castle, and an iron bar hammered through the gateway to drive a great chunk of stone and white dust from the tower wall next to the steps leading into the keep. Sir Guillaume tensed, his ears ringing with the echo of the terrible sound, and then he heard the cheers and the sound of heavy boots on the cobbles of the square outside and he prized the loosened lid from the barrel of oil and then kicked the tub over so that the greenish liquid spilt across the flagstones by the gateway. Just then he heard a voice bellowing outside. “No prisoners!” the man’s voice was distorted by a helmet with a closed visor. “No prisoners!”

“Archers!” Sir Guillaume called, though he doubted they needed to be alerted. In Thomas’s absence the bowmen were led by Jake who did not much like the responsibility, but he like Sir Guillaume and wanted to fight well for him. Jake said nothing to his archers; they did not need any orders. Instead they waited with bows half drawn, bodkin arrows on their strings, and then the gateway was filled with a group of crossbowmen, and behind them were the men-at-arms, already shouting their battle cries, and Jake, as ordered, waited a heartbeat until the first men slipped on the olive oil and only then did he shout, “Loose!”

Eighteen arrows tore into the chaos. The first attackers through the gate were sprawling on the stones, the men behind tripped over them and then the arrows ripped into the confusion. The assault was still ten paces from the barricade, yet already it was checked because the castle’s narrow gateway was blocked by the dying and the dead. Sir Guillaume stood to one side, sword drawn, doing nothing as yet, just letting the archers finish their work. He was astonished at how fast they had another arrow on the string, then watched as the second and third flights pierced mail and skewered flesh. A crossbowman crawled out from the tangle and bravely tried to raise his weapon, but Sir Guillaume took two steps and brought his sword hard down on the nape of the man’s unprotected neck. The other crossbowmen, evidently sent in the front rank to deliver a volley at his archers, were dead or dying. Joscelyn’s men-at-arms were mingled with them, arrows jutting from mail and shields, and in the gateway the crush of men could make no headway. Jake now directed his arrows at them, volley after volley, and then Sir Guillaume waved his men-at-arms forward. “They want no prisoners,” he shouted to them, “you hear me? No prisoners!”

Sir Guillaume and his men were attacking from the left side of the courtyard, so Jake took his archers to the right and shot only through the gateway at the few figures left under the arch. And after a few seconds all the arrows stopped, for so many of the attackers were dead, and those that lived were trapped by Sir Guillaume’s sudden assault from the corner of the yard.

It was a massacre. The attackers, already half beaten by the arrows, had assumed any defenders would be behind the barricade, and instead the men-at-arms came from their flank, and Sir Guillaume’s men, informed that the enemy had wanted all their deaths, were in no mood to offer mercy. “Bastard.” John Faircloth stabbed at a fallen man-at-arms, working his sword through a rent in the man’s mail. “Bastard,” he said again, cutting the throat of a crossbowman. A Burgundian was using an axe, crushing helmets and skulls with one efficient blow after another, spattering the oil-slicked stone with brains and blood. One enemy rose snarling from the pile, a big man, strong and useful, who stepped on bodies to carry the fight to the garrison, but Sir Guillaume took the man’s sword blow on his shield and plunged his own sword into the man’s throat.