Warlord (Outlaw 4) (5 page)

We were safe.

We had lost twenty-three men in that mad gallop through the enemy ranks – nearly a quarter of my force. And while the survivors, many with light wounds, grinned at each other, swapped jests and slapped backs, I could not help feeling that I should have handled things better. So much for Alan the great warlord: I had lost one fourth of my men and my second in command in the first clash of arms, and we still had to hold this castle for several days until King Richard arrived with the relieving army. So, while I was surely happy to be alive and unwounded, I was not in the least proud of myself. And I was already missing Owain – his kindly face and reliable strength. I offered up a prayer for his soul and begged God’s forgiveness for not reaching him in time to save him.

This was not the moment for self-recrimination, however. The angry French horsemen had followed us down towards the gates and I speedily sent as many archers as I could to the battlements to take some revenge for their fallen comrades. After a dozen French knights and men-at-arms had been pierced with the bowmen’s pin-accurate shafts, the enemy withdrew out of bow-shot and contented themselves with shaking their fists at us and bawling inaudible threats.

The castellan, a tall spare leathery Norman knight, came over to greet me as I was checking Shaitan’s glossy black hide for injuries. He named himself as Sir Aubrey de Chambois and welcomed me to his command. I thanked him for his timely opening of the gates and he merely shrugged: ‘It is I who should thank you, Sir Alan. You have saved us; in another day we would have had to render ourselves to Philip. Our walls could not have borne much more battering and the next full-scale assault would have swamped us.’

And he gestured with his hand around the courtyard and walls of his stronghold. I saw then, clearly for the first time, what a desperate situation the defenders were in.

The castle of Verneuil, which had been built in King Richard’s grandfather’s day to protect the southern flank of his duchy of Normandy, was square in shape, covered roughly an acre and sat on the north bank of the River Avre. It was rather small by the standards of some of the castles I had known; in truth it was not much bigger than a fortified manor. On three sides, north, east and west, it was protected by a three-foot thick wall, made of the grey local stone, about fifteen foot high, with a walkway all the way round it on the inside that allowed a man to stand and fight with only his helmeted head exposed between the crenellations. At each of the four corners of the castle was a strong square tower. In the centre of the northern wall was the gatehouse and the gate we had just tumbled through in such scrambling haste – a stout wooden construction, I was pleased to see, reinforced with heavy oak cross-beams on the inside. To the south, the wide slow brown Avre and its boggy, reed-covered banks formed a formidable barrier against metal-clad attackers – and the stone exterior of a mill, a brewhouse and several store houses built of brick created the castle’s defensive wall on that side. I did not believe the enemy could come at us successfully from that quarter; the south, at least, was safe.

The northern wall on the eastern side of the gatehouse, however, had been severely pounded by the French siege engines – a gap the height of a man and wide enough for three men abreast had been smashed clear through the stonework at the top of the wall. It had been patched by Sir Aubrey’s men using the rubble from the breach itself and an assortment of old sheep hurdles, wine barrels and a dozen lengths of freshly cut wooden planking. The repairs looked a little rough and untidy, but I reckoned the patched section still presented a difficult obstacle for an attacking infantry force to
overcome. However, it was a sign of what terrible destruction the boulders hurled by the trebuchets could wreak on the old masonry of the castle. Several of the wooden buildings in the courtyard had been reduced to loose piles of timber and kindling, smashed by barrel-sized stone missiles that had overshot the walls. While the small hall at the rear of the courtyard was still intact, in other buildings fires had plainly broken out, probably caused in the chaos of the trebuchet bombardment.

An old stable block against the eastern wall had been converted into an infirmary and I could see through its open doors that the straw-strewn floor was covered with wounded men. A priest was kneeling beside one and giving him the last rites. My eye lingered on the priest for a moment, then I continued to survey the interior of the castle. Over on the western side was an old chapel and in the graveyard outside it I could see row upon row of newly dug graves. The sour scent of charred wood, fear-sweat and human and animal waste hung in the air, overlaid with a strong whiff of pus and rotting flesh – it was a particular combination of foul odours that I had smelled before.

It was the smell of defeat.

I had been expecting a garrison of a hundred men, or maybe more but I could see only a score of local men-at-arms on their feet who were not wearing one of the dark green cloaks that marked out Robin’s fellows. As it turned out, the full, unwounded strength of Verneuil, including our newly arrived troops, now numbered little more than a hundred and twenty men in total. Given the vast numerical superiority of the French, any determined attack might overwhelm us. I looked around at the courtyard, my heart in my boots, and asked Sir Aubrey what he planned to do if Philip’s men got over the walls. He gave a grimace but no reply, merely inclining his head towards the biggest structure in the courtyard.

In the centre of the castle was a square stone tower – the keep, the dungeon, the final redoubt. It stood on a slight rise, though
not much of one, and climbed about thirty feet into the air. I had very little confidence in the tower as a refuge of last resort. It was not high enough, for a start, and it had already been considerably battered by Philip’s artillery. Chunks of elderly, crumbling masonry seemed to have been ripped out of the north-eastern corner leaving semicircular indentations in the line of the walls – as if a stone-eating giant had taken a couple of large bites out of the corner of the building. Even the untouched walls looked shaky, the big square stones loose in powdery mortar. I could easily imagine that a good kick from a horse, or a single wrench from a crowbar would tumble them out of their settings. And I wondered if the tower could survive even one more full trebuchet strike without collapsing in on itself.

We had no alternative: we would have to hold the outer walls against the foe; if they fell, we were doomed. It was as simple as that. Had I been Duke of Normandy, I’d have seen to it that a much higher round stone tower was built as the core of this castle – the rounded walls allowing the missiles of an enemy to slide off more easily like water from a duck’s back. I’d have built a keep, a stronghold that would stand for a thousand years.

Nonetheless, as Sir Aubrey and I climbed the rickety wooden stairs inside the building that led to the flat roof of the tower, I realized that, for all its obvious shortcomings, in the flat country around Verneuil it did give a commander an excellent vantage point from which to watch the enemy. As we stood there enjoying the cool breath of a spring breeze, I saw that my squire Thomas had caused Robin’s wolf’s head standard to be raised next to King Richard’s golden lions. I smiled at the sight and then frowned as I looked out over the enemy dispositions. Our bloody charge through the French camp had stirred up a storm of activity among our foes; servants were bustling, knights were riding to and fro along the edges of the camp with a purposeful air. The centre of this tempest was the big white gilded royal tent, where the
fleur-de-lys fluttered proudly. Men in armour dashed in and out of the tent, leaping on horses as they emerged and galloping off to deliver orders. I could see that companies of men-at-arms were being formed up and horsemen and their grooms were preparing their mounts for battle. The area around the trebuchets was like a hive of bees in high summer. My heart was sinking as I turned my eyes heavenwards: the sun shone merrily down on us mortal men from the very top of the sky.

‘They are going to come at us this afternoon with everything they can readily muster,’ I said quietly to my companion.

‘I know it. Can we hold them off?’ Sir Aubrey looked at me, and I noticed how tired the man was; he had been defending this position, against impossible odds, for more than a week now. I doubted he had shut his eyes once in that entire time.

I smiled confidently and clapped him on the shoulder: ‘I believe we can, Sir Aubrey, I believe we can – and if God wills otherwise, we shall make such a good bloody fight of it that our courage and defiance shall live for ever in the memories of brave men.’

I divided the bowmen into two groups of about twenty men under a vintenar, an experienced archer who would act as their commander, and posted them at the towers in the north-eastern and north-western corners of the castle on either side of the gate-house. Mercifully, the packhorses had made it through the French lines without mishap, and we had plenty of spare arrows. From the archer’s enfilade positions they could rain lethal shafts down on anyone approaching the front gate, and also each group could defend against attack on the side walls to the east and west.

Sir Aubrey’s remaining crossbowmen, reinforced with a score of my best men-at-arms, stood over the patched section of the wall. I was fairly sure that the enemy’s attack, spawned out of rage at our insolent violation of their camp, would come directly at us and surge up against the front gate. But in case I was wrong, I
posted the rest of the men at regular intervals along the east and west walls and in the top storey of the mill at the south side of the castle to ward against an attack across the river – and to two handpicked men, heavily muscled but not especially bright, I allocated a very special duty, and gave their command into my little squire Thomas’s thirteen-year-old hands.

As I was directing the dispositions of the castle – Sir Aubrey had agreed to a joint command as I had the greater number of living men-at-arms – my squire came to me and in his quiet, steady way, said: ‘Sir Alan, I think I have found something that will be of interest to you.’ And he stood there waiting for my attention.

I was extremely busy, overseeing the distribution of the castle’s remaining bundles of light javelins to the men on the walls, and it had been on the tip of my tongue to rebuke him, but one glance at his solemn face and I bit back my retort. He led me to a storeroom by the river on the southern side of the castle and wordlessly indicated a tun, a very large wooden barrel that stood at the rear of the space. I walked over and examined it closely, detecting a familiar scent even through the thick oak staves.

‘Is it full?’ I asked my squire.

‘To the brim, sir,’ he replied.

I looked into his deep brown eyes and grinned. ‘Well done, Thomas, very well done. I will give you two men and you shall prepare it for us. Yes?’

Thomas nodded gravely. And I left him in the store house, shouting for carpenter’s tools, kitchen implements and firewood, and ordering two big Locksley men-at-arms around, a little shrilly in his unbroken voice, but with the ease of a born captain.

I made my rounds of three sides of the stone perimeter – ignoring the south wall: trying to put heart into the men for the coming contest. And I was pleased that I could detect little fear among the men-at-arms and bowmen on that sunny afternoon. The archers strung their tall yew bows and examined their shafts individually
for tiny flaws, and tightened their bracers, the leather sleeves that protected the soft skin on the inside of the left forearm from the lash of the bowstring. The men-at-arms sharpened their spearheads and swords and adjusted the straps on their shields. I was not alone in making my rounds: the castle’s only priest accompanied me as I moved along the walkway and, as I made manly, warlike comments to the men and trotted out age-old jokes, the priest intoned words of prayer over their weapons, blessing the soldiers and assuring them that God was with them this day, and would humble the French King for breaking the sacred truce between himself and our divinely ordained lord King Richard.

As we moved along the narrow walkway behind the stone wall, stopping at each little knot of men, I kept shooting glances at the priest. I could not help myself – the trepidation I felt at the onset of such a one-sided battle was far outweighed by my curiosity about this man. His name was Jean de Puy; he was in his middle forties, with a kindly well-worn face and thinning light brown hair cut in a tonsure, and he spoke good, educated French and better Latin when he uttered the sacred words of prayer for the men. He seemed to be a genuinely good and holy man – not venal and corrupt, or lazy and cynical, as some small-town priests so easily become. At one point, standing with a group of our men-at-arms on the eastern rampart, I completely lost myself in contemplation of him, pondering the kind of man he must have been in his youth. I had to be jerked back to reality by a crude jest from one of the men, a huge, powerful warrior called Sam. I returned the jest with an even cruder suggestion concerning his mother and a selection of farmyard animals, then walked down the steps back into the courtyard, side by side with Father Jean. At the bottom of the steps, the priest turned and looked me square in the face.

‘My son, your countenance seems to me to have a very familiar aspect. May I make so bold as to ask, have we met before?’

‘No, Father,’ I said. ‘We have not met before this day. But I
heard much about you from an old priest in Lisieux who told me that twenty years ago you used to be a chorister at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris – as my father was. Indeed, you are the true reason I am here in Verneuil.’

Chapter Three

I would have spoken further with Father Jean but I was interrupted by a fanfare of trumpets. ‘I must go, Father, but I would speak with you again when I have more leisure.’

‘I shall be in the infirmary with the wounded,’ said Father Jean, indicating the stable block on the eastern wall I had noted before. ‘I think I understand what you wish to speak to me about and, when you are next at liberty, you will find me there.’ And with that he nodded, turned on his heel and strode away to the western side of the courtyard.