The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (21 page)

Nonetheless, many hundreds of men-at-arms had been collected together and were milling about at the north-eastern base of Château Gaillard, a mere four hundred paces away as the eagle flies, and a hundred paces beneath us. Many were drinking from looted earthenware jugs and big leather mugs; some quaffed straight from small kegs of wine, splashing their faces red with the liquor. The two knights took turns to speak, standing on a barrel so as to be seen, their arms waving towards the castle but their words indecipherable. Priests and monks passed through the throng, giving out blessings and anointing the men with holy water. I could easily imagine the well-worn message the knights and clergy were delivering – that all the vast riches of the town, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, was now inside the castle; that the English defenders were demoralised, broken and weak after their recent defeats by French prowess; and that God, of course, and all the saints in Heaven were on their side.

I was looking down on them once again from the north tower of the outer bailey, the tower that guarded the narrow oak door that was the only way into our detached bastion, with Robin, Kit and two dozen archers from the Wolves. Aaron and his engineers had, on Robin’s instructions, dismantled Old Thunderbolt and moved the unwieldy springald and its stand of massive iron bolts to the south tower, which formed the apex of the triangular shape of the outer bailey, so as to make room for the Wolves, who were now stringing their six-foot war bows and selecting their straightest, sharpest and best-fletched arrows.

After more than an hour, in which I watched the enemy drink and shuffle around each other and shout out threats and curses and occasionally listen briefly to the exhortations of their betters, they began to straggle up the hill towards us around the middle of the afternoon. Drunk or sober, they were still brave men. The two knights came first, with fifty well-mailed followers in a tight pack around them, and then came the rank-and-file men-at-arms in a loose and disorderly mob several hundred strong. Among the foremost of the tight knightly group, I spotted ten men carrying between them a large, iron-capped tree trunk, with crude handles carved into the wood, and six men wielding long axes.

They began to die a hundred yards from our walls. Before they had even reached halfway up the chalky track, the arrows and crossbow bolts of the garrison were falling thickly upon them in a killing rain. There had been no attempt to disguise the point of attack nor to provide the attackers with any more protection than their armour and the shields they carried, and they died in their scores as the steel-tipped yards of ash from Robin’s bowmen punched through mail as if it were linen, and the quarrels driven by powerful crossbows from de Lacy’s men in the middle bailey sank into arms and legs, piercing torsos and skulls, and nailing fallen men to the earth. From my post, I could clearly see blood gouting from almost every strike, and a handful of men dropping, wounded or dead, at each beat of my heart as they slogged up the steep path, still shouting and waving their weapons, through a dense cloud of destruction. Every half-decent bowman in Château Gaillard, that sunny September afternoon, killed and wounded and maimed to his heart’s content. I even heard Robin’s archers calling out targets to their fellows and wagering on a hit or miss. By the time the French came within thirty yards of the main gate, their numbers had been thinned by perhaps half, and skewered bodies and broken men were sprawled everywhere, and still the black missiles whizzed and thumped home and the running men spun and dropped, coughing blood from pierced lungs, tugging at transfixed limbs and crying out to God. The lead knight, a bold fellow if ever there was one, was thickly feathered, sheeted in his own blood, yet he urged the men onward to attack the gate. The bravest man among brave men. But the gate was narrow, built of foot-thick oaks reinforced with five fat strips of black iron, and de Lacy had more than a hundred men-at-arms on the walls above it, in the gatehouse itself and in the two round towers on either side, hurling javelins and spears and huge rocks down on the unfortunates below. More than a few able-bodied townsmen had joined them, taking revenge for the loss of their homes. Skulls were crushed like dropped eggs, strong backs were impaled by spears, bones snapped and flesh was ripped by spear and quarrel. From the outer bailey, Robin’s archers poured one withering volley after another into their flanks, the destruction truly terrible to see; they nailed enemies’ bodies one to another with their wicked shafts.

Through a murder hole directly above the main gate a gallon of boiling oil sizzled down on the half-dozen souls below who were desperately battering at the oak with the ram. The men around it screamed like the souls in Hell as oil many times as hot as boiling water splashed down upon them and seeped through their ring-mail to scorch the skin beneath. They dropped their burden, stumbling blindly away, the skin of their faces sloughing off like melted butter from a skillet. Then the French force broke; they ran blindly from the pain and death, falling down the track, jumping, tumbling, down and away, leaving more than a hundred bodies in the lengthening shadows below our walls.

We lost one man, a young townsman killed by an enemy crossbow at the fiercest pitch of the fight. Another half-dozen took scratches, bruises and minor cuts – some of them inflicted accidentally by comrades in the fever of battle.

Morale is a strange beast. Before the French assault, I had seen the strain of fear etched on many of the faces of the Petit Andely refugees. After the attack failed, with the French lying in bloody, writhing mounds before our walls, the faces of the townsmen shone with joy and our men-at-arms walked with the swagger of merchant-venturers whose ships had just come safely home.

Robin did not seem affected one way or another. When I complimented him on the performance of his archers, he shrugged and said, ‘Yes, they did well, kept their discipline. We’ll see how they fight in a real battle.’

‘You do not consider that battle to have been real?’ I said, surprised at his dismissal of a bloody action, in which a hundred brave men had uselessly died.

‘King Philip is over there,’ he said, pointing across the river to the French encampment. ‘He – the King of France himself, God’s duly appointed prince on Earth – came here to take this castle, and he is not going to let one petty skirmish and the deaths of a handful of his men alter his intent. I think, Alan, you will find that we have many hard months ahead of us; with fighting of such ferocity that this little dust-up will one day seem like a jolly summer picnic.’

I looked at the heaps of dead and wounded before the walls, at the crushed heads, staring eyes, broken limbs and puddles of blood, and acknowledged the truth of Robin’s words. This, I knew, was only the beginning.

‘Be a good fellow, Alan, and take a squad down there,’ my lord said, nodding at the carnage before the gatehouse, ‘and gather up as many unbroken arrows as you can; cut them out of the bodies, if you have to. We are going to need every one.’

The French sent a pair of heralds the next morning, and two trumpeters as well, all dressed in blue and yellow and under the banner of the King of France, a gorgeous azure field covered in golden fleurs-de-lis. The party picked their way up the track on horseback, unmolested by our bowmen, and halted at a spot some twenty yards from the main gate, and the trumpeters formally announced their presence with an elegant but unnecessary fanfare – the walls of the castle were already thick with gawping men and Roger de Lacy himself was standing in the roof of the gatehouse, resting his hands on the breast-high parapet and looking out at the advancing foe.

‘His Royal Highness, Philip Augustus, King of France, by the Grace of God Almighty, lawful overlord of John, rebellious Duke of Normandy, sends you his greetings,’ intoned one of the heralds.

‘And I, Roger de Lacy, Castellan of Château Gaillard, vassal of His Royal Highness King John of England, Duke of Normandy, return them,’ said de Lacy. ‘What is His Highness King Philip’s pleasure this day, my noble lords?’

‘The King instructs and commands you to take up your arms and all your goods and chattels, your servants and your animals and to quit this place and surrender it willingly to His Royal Highness by the end of this day. In doing so, you will earn his everlasting gratitude, and the favour of God Almighty for the lives saved and the blood not uselessly spilled over this matter. You will be allowed to ride from this place as free men, untroubled by our forces, with all your arms and your honour intact. But if you refuse, mark this well, the King bids me to tell you that his wrath will know no bounds and he will surely expel you and all your men by force of arms and there shall be no guarantee that any life shall be spared, nor that any man-at-arms however noble or exalted shall go unpunished.’

De Lacy frowned at the heralds. In truth, despite the dire threat to slaughter every man in the castle if it fell, it was a generous offer; a free pass to leave with honour. Many a man would have grasped at it; but de Lacy was cut from finer cloth.

‘That, my lords, I shall not do,’ he said gravely. ‘My master King John has commanded me to hold this castle in his name against all-comers, and hold it I shall. I will never willingly surrender this place until I am dragged from it by my heels at the tail of the King’s horse. That is my last word on this matter.’

The heralds nodded solemnly. ‘If that is your last word, so be it. But first, our noble King craves a truce for this day, and this day only, until the hour of midnight to remove the bodies of his dead for burial and the wounded for their succour.’

‘So be it,’ said de Lacy. ‘A truce until midnight.’

All that day parties of Frenchmen came up to the walls and carried away the dead and the few wounded who had survived the night. I saw the enemy men-at-arms stepping among corpses and looking curiously, perhaps fearfully, at our walls and more than a few jeers and jests were exchanged. But I had no time for taunting our foes, as I was busy as a bee at a task set for me by Robin – an examination of the defences of our outer bailey and an accounting of the stores of food and weapons at our disposal.

In the outer bailey we had one hundred and seventeen fighting men under Robin’s command. They were mostly Wolves – and I was pleased to see so many familiar faces: Vim, Robin’s mercenary captain, who had shed the drunken lassitude I witnessed at Christmas and seemed filled with a deep happiness by the imminent danger; one-eyed Claes, the vintenar who had fought with Robin and me in our southern adventure a few years before; Christophe Scarecrow, veteran of so many of Richard’s wars. Little Niels, who was hanging off the battlements watching the French clear away their dead and wounded, called out to me as I passed through the crowded courtyard below with a vast armful of bloody arrows.

‘Looks like we’ve won the battle, sir. Does that mean we can all go home now?’

‘Everyone else can – but not you, Niels,’ I replied. ‘Get down here. Your job is to clean and sharpen these arrows. I want them spotless, properly dried and stacked in the armoury by sundown.’

‘And if I do a right good job of that, sir, will you make me an officer?’

‘No, Niels, I won’t make you an officer yet – but I’ll tell you what I will do. If you don’t make a decent job of this task, I will shove my right foot so far up your little arse you’ll be smelling my boot leather from now till Christmas.’

About half of Robin’s men were archers; we also had thirty-one men-at-arms from the castle garrison, and half a dozen engineers who answered to Aaron. This would have made the outer bailey a snug billet in ordinary circumstances but, as well as the fighting men, it was crammed to the rafters with more than two hundred men, women and children from the ville. Each side of the outer bailey’s triangle was only fifty paces long, and while there were three floors in each tower, and several wooden buildings in the courtyard that could be used to house folk, much of the space was occupied by armour, weapons, baggage and stores. In order to move around, I had to squeeze through men, women and children sitting on their possessions, not knowing what to with themselves. It was my job to feed them, find them places to sleep, and keep order. It was no simple task, I may assure you.

To begin with, I organised all the townsmen of military age into work parties and set them to clearing the rubbish and rubble from the moats around the outside of the outer bailey, and to deepening these dry ditches until they were at least three times the height of a man. There was a good deal of grumbling from some of the softer-bellied townsfolk, those whose previous occupations had not necessitated hard outdoor labour, merchants, shopkeepers and the like, but I put it to them in the most simple terms: if they did not work, they would not eat.

The women and older children were put to cleaning the outer bailey from top to toe, scrubbing every table and stool, every nook and store cupboard, even the stones of the floor and the walls themselves, with hot water and vinegar. For I knew that in such a crowded stew one of the worst dangers we faced was disease. The older folk, less nimble on their feet, and the halt and the lame, were set to mending the clothes of the soldiers and making bandages from old clean linen rags.

I divided the fighting men, excluding the engineers, into three watches of forty men. Several townsmen with a small amount of military experience had volunteered to join the defending force, taking our numbers up to more than a hundred and twenty men. I mingled the castle men-at-arms and the volunteers with the Wolves, and divided each watch into ‘tower squads’ – three squads of ten men, who were to man each of the three large towers, and two squads of five men for each of the two small towers. When their watch was on duty, they were required to man the roof of their towers and keep a sharp, sober lookout. Any man caught sleeping or drunk at his lookout post would be hanged, I assured them earnestly. It was Lord de Lacy’s decree, not mine, but I meant to enforce it. So, at any moment of the day or night, one watch was on duty in each of the five towers, the second watch was in reserve, on stand-by, and the third watch was off duty, resting, sleeping or eating.