The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (29 page)

We fought like demons. We killed and killed, our blood-slick swords, when we could free them, reaching over our shields to stab into the faces of our enemies. The men jammed up behind us lanced over our heads with spears, or swung long-handled axes with terrible effect. We shoved back the enemy with all our might, but he was constantly replenished. How ever many we killed, his numbers never decreased, and we were gradually being pushed back, back.

Now the enemy was on the battlements – a bridgehead of a dozen men, but with more leaping to join them with every beat of my heart. My command had been forced into two, split by the pressure of the advance, and I saw Vim’s despairing face on the other side of the seething mass of our bloodied attackers, as he sliced and hewed at the foe like a hero of old. Yet we were being forced back, back and back – the enemy was inside the outer bailey, leaping from the bridge and landing freely on our walls.

I shouted, ‘Hold them, hold them!’ and summoned the last of my strength. I smashed my shield into a roaring face, battered Fidelity down on to a helmet, then punched my cross-guard into a man’s eyes. I managed to push forward a pace, ducked a swinging axe, and stabbed the man through his armpit. A crossbow bolt cracked into my helmet and I staggered back, dazed. Then felt Kit’s hand on my back steadying me. I charged forward once again, lunging, stabbing, screaming, ‘Westbury!’ and killing a terrified man with a brutal chop to the neck.

I heard the distinctive crack of the springald being loosed. I snatched a look at the belfry’s bridge, expecting to see that another bloody swath had been cleared through the crush of enemies charging over it, and my first thought was that Aaron had missed. The iron bolt of the springald was sunk up to half its length into the ox-hide-covered side of the machine and, curiously, a length of rope was extending from the end of the bolt back to the north tower.

The rope snapped taut.

I dodged a sword swing, stepped forward and crashed the side of my shield into a man’s face. I stabbed once, twice, into the press of Frenchmen before me, but I was not truly giving the foe the whole of my attention.

I stole a glance behind to the north tower and saw Robin’s archers had laid down their bows and were all of them, some twenty men, hauling on the stout rope. Surely the bolt must come loose, I thought to myself – fending off a French knight who came at me like a tiger with sword and dagger – surely they will pull it free of the belfry like a cork from a bottle?

It was in that moment the battle’s fortunes were decided. Over the sea of screaming enemies before me, on the battlements on the other side, I could see Vim’s men were suddenly more numerous. There was no sign of the mercenary captain, but I could see Sir Joscelyn Giffard and thirty men-at-arms boiling out of the south tower and coming to join us. At the same time I felt a fresh surge of pressure from behind, as we too were reinforced by a flood of men from the middle bailey who even now were shoving their way eagerly into battle.

And the belfry began to lean. The iron bolt had not come loose. The archers, back and arm muscles strengthened by years of practice with powerful bows, hauled the rope towards them, foot by foot, yard by yard. I could hear Robin’s brazen voice clearly over the clash and screams of battle, ordering his men to ‘Heave, you weaklings! Heave like men!’

The belfry leaned further to the left. The French on the bridge were screaming in terror now – some tried to turn back but the flow of men against them was too strong. The belfry swayed back, leaned again and, with a crash that seemed to shake the foundations of the earth, it tottered, toppled and thundered down into the half-filled ditch. The siege tower burst apart under its own weight, and the weight of its unfortunate occupants, as it hit the earth and clouds of white dust boiled up, along with the muffled screaming of hundreds of men.

We roared our approval and surged forward hungrily at the score of bewildered French men-at-arms now isolated on the battlements. We killed them all, I regret to say – for not a man among us was in the mood to take a single prisoner.

The toppling of the belfry, and its destruction and the destruction of all its fighting men, should have signalled the end of the attack. But Philip had somehow put a holy fire into his troops. Indeed, I saw the King himself at the end of the causeway, wisely out of range of Old Thunderbolt, with a group of his household knights. I believe I even spotted the blond locks of my cousin Roland among them, and I willed him to stay away from these walls, not to join in the assault, for the attack was resumed within a quarter hour of the belfry’s fall.

I do not think I have ever been more exhausted. I could barely lift my sword and shield after that bloody onslaught on the battlements. My ears were ringing. I counted seventeen fresh dents on my helmet. But Robin came among us with a dozen of the archers and brought buckets of watered wine with honey – God knows where he found it – with sops of bread mixed into the liquor, and we scooped wine and bread into our parched mouths with our hands. It was ambrosia. And it gave us strength for a little while longer.

The French came at us with long ladders: an old-fashioned escalade. A couple of hundred men charged along the causeway. They leaped into the ditch, leaned their ladders against the walls and, joined by the survivors of the fall of the belfry, the pitiful few who had been hiding among its dusty ruins, they swarmed up the walls.

It was difficult to take the escalade seriously, after the grave danger of the belfry. Robin’s archers picked the climbing enemy off from both sides; Aaron’s lethal springald smashed into the flanks of the packed ladders, wiping away men and leaving hideous red smears on the grey walls. We showered them with spears. We hurled rocks and timbers on their heads. In short, we slaughtered them.

To make matters far worse for the attackers, their ladders were too short. It seems they had miscalculated the depth of the ditch before the outer bailey, and the raised ladders were still a good ten feet from the top of the battlements. We killed them at our leisure as they gazed up at us with impotent rage. A few brave souls, perhaps a couple of dozen men, used daggers to climb the final part of the wall, jamming the blades into crevices in the stonework and hauling themselves up. We killed them, too. By the time each of these bold men had hauled themselves to the top, there were at least five of our fellows waiting to dispatch them.

So the French attack on the outer bailey ended. The survivors limped back along the causeway to Philip’s Hill in shame, the dead and dying lying in thick drifts below our unbroken walls.

The heralds came within the hour. They congratulated us civilly on our victory and begged a truce for the recovery of the wounded. De Lacy, pride-swollen like a bullfrog because we had seen off a major assault with relatively little loss of life, agreed the terms of the truce happily. Twenty-one Wolves breathed no more and another thirty-eight were wounded to varying degrees, including Vim, who had suffered a broken leg; many were likely to die of their wounds. But Robin had his archers out the minute the heralds rode away, recovering as many arrows as possible and searching the corpses and the wounded for any scraps of food. De Lacy decreed that the belfry must be broken up and brought inside the castle for firewood.

I was shocked by the loss of life on the French side – some four hundred, perhaps five hundred good men had been destroyed. And nothing, from the French point of view, had been achieved. It had been a great victory for us, I realised dully, and found myself being hailed as something of a hero. It was not, I must admit, entirely disagreeable.

Tilda came to seek me out in the outer bailey as I was having my wounds tended by Kit on the first-floor chamber of the north tower. Thanks to my expensive Rouen mail, I had nothing more than a few scrapes, cuts and bruises, but Kit, who was also mercifully unharmed, insisted on daubing the broken skin with witch-hazel. That meant I was dressed only in my braies, the none-too-clean linen undergarments that covered my loins, when Tilda came into the room.

My body was a pitiful sight; our scanty diet had stripped away the fat from my torso, leaving the muscles starkly outlined like twisted ropes, and I was dappled with reddish bruises from neck to waist. My bare legs had equally been knocked about. I looked like one of those unfortunate men who make their living by going from fair to fair and challenging local men to fistfights or wrestling bouts, and who must take a battering in every parish to earn their bed and board – not at all like the fine gentleman I hoped Tilda to take me for. But she seemed fascinated by the ugly patterns of bruises and lacerations on my body, and when she spoke she seemed unable to tear her eyes from my chest and look into my face.

I was embarrassed by my near nakedness and asked Kit to fetch my chemise so as to cover myself. But Tilda forbade it.

‘I have interrupted you while your squire is tending to your hurts, the fault is mine, I insist you continue your physicking as if I were not here. But if you would be so good as to give me an account of the battle, Sir Alan, while you are being tended to, I would esteem it a great favour.’

So I told her how the French had come on, and how we held them at the battlements, only very slightly exaggerating my own heroic stand against the open door of the belfry and the disgorging horde of ferocious French men-at-arms. I took care to praise her father’s timely arrival with reinforcements, too.

Tilda was no fool. ‘Surely, Alan, it was the toppling of the belfry that was the key to our victory. Can you tell me how that came about?’

Slightly irritated that she did not want to hear more about me single-handedly stemming the tide of howling foemen on the battlements, I explained that Robin had conferred with Aaron and constructed, with the help of the castle blacksmiths, a few special iron bolts for the springald with a ring at one end to hold a rope and a barb at the point so that once fixed into the side of the belfry it could not be pulled out.

‘After that,’ I told her, ‘it was just a question of hauling on the rope. Brute strength, really.’

‘Well, it was a famous victory,’ said Tilda, ‘and you are all to be congratulated on your prowess. Perhaps, now, Philip might be persuaded to leave us in peace.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. But I did not believe it.

The bombardment of Château Gaillard by Philip’s castle-breakers began again the instant the truce was over. With renewed zeal. Perhaps at royal urging, the five machines ranged against us increased the frequency with which they loosed their missiles, and all of their balls were targeted at one spot: the south tower of the outer bailey. All day missiles cracked against the limestone of the tower and while the construction of that bastion was mighty, the bombardment frayed at our nerves and sometimes I imagined the walls were shaking under the almost constant impacts.

On the afternoon of the second day of the renewed attack, I was in the south tower with Kit checking over the arrangements for a feast for the council and the senior knights to celebrate our victory over the belfry, when a ball cracked against the outer wall and I heard an ugly, splintering sound like a tree being felled, and the floor planks seemed to shift under my feet.

I ran across the courtyard to the north tower and climbed the spiral staircase to the flat roof. With Kit holding my legs, I leaned out over the parapet to try to see the outside of the wall on the south tower. And I saw something; it might have been a shadow or a stain on the walls, or it might have been something a good deal more ominous. I could not be certain.

After nightfall, when the most important men of the castle had been summoned by Robin to the south tower for a feast – or what passed for one in those straitened days: horse stew, a thin bean and onion pottage, oat cakes sweetened with honey and some weak ale brewed from herbs and a little malted barley – I decided to step outside the bailey and take a closer look at the odd mark on the wall of the south tower.

I had not been invited to the feast. Robin had required me to take command of the outer bailey while he was busy with his guests: Roger de Lacy, Sir Joscelyn Giffard, Father de la Motte and a dozen knights of illustrious birth – even Sir Benedict Malet had been invited. But I did not resent this lack of inclusion. I was in no mood for company – indeed it seemed to me foolhardy to tempt Fate with victory celebrations when we had done no more than see off an attack. Besides, I was glad of the opportunity to make a thorough examination of the damage done to the walls. I placed Vim in charge of the watch on the towers, dressed myself in dark hose and tunic, and stepped out of the postern gate at the base of the north tower and on to the planks leading across the ditch. In the darkness the stench of the battlefield seemed stronger. Although the bodies had been removed three days since, the ditch reeked like a market shambles. It was an eerie feeling to be outside the walls, but it felt strangely liberating, too, and for a moment I entertained the fantasy of just walking into the darkness, never to return to the confines of the Iron Castle. It was vain fancy, of course; the French earthworks surrounded us, though I could not see them, and I might well have been hanged as a spy if I stumbled into a French patrol. It would have been dishonourable, too, to abandon my lord and my comrades to their fate. There was Tilda to consider as well. But, for a few brief moments alone in the darkness, I admit I harboured these cowardly thoughts, and had to force myself back to my duty with no little difficulty.

I walked on the outer edge of the ditch before our walls, climbed over the causeway and found myself standing before the pale round walls of the south tower. I could not see anything in the masonry, except a good many fresh dents and divots where the missiles of the enemy had struck over the past three days. My fear that a gaping crack had opened in the base of the tower seemed unfounded. But to be absolutely certain, I turned and walked twenty paces from the walls to grant myself a different view.

And I saw it.

From an arrow slit halfway up the tower, a flash of yellow light and then a pause, then another blaze, another pause, and another gleam of light. Three flashes with two heartbeats of darkness between each. How curious, I thought, someone is playing with a dark lantern, opening and shutting the panel to allow the candlelight inside to glow briefly.