Warlord (Outlaw 4) (6 page)

I hurried to the gate, bounding up the wooden steps to the walkway to the right of the castle’s main entrance. I peered over the parapet and saw, as I had expected, two horsemen in gorgeous surcoats of blue and gold, each holding a French royal standard and mounted on superb horses, white as lilies. They were enemy heralds-at-arms.

I waved merrily at them, and grinned, and they stared up from their saddles in surprise: it was hardly appropriate behaviour in the circumstances, but I had no herald of my own, not even a trumpeter. And a strange feeling of reckless cheer had come over me, as if I
were drunk on strong wine. Nothing seemed important, least of all chivalric conventions and proper knightly etiquette – given the odds that we faced against these teeming French hordes, in a few hours I’d likely be dead.

‘Hello there!’ I called. ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it.’

The left-hand herald coughed into his slim, pale hand and began intoning in a solemn carrying voice: ‘His Royal Highness Philip Augustus, King of France, by the grace of God Almighty rightful overlord of the rebellious Duke of Normandy, sovereign lord of the territories of—’

‘Sorry, didn’t catch that – who did you say?’ I shouted down to the herald. I had an almost overwhelming urge to giggle like a naughty schoolboy.

The herald was completely thrown by my flippancy. He looked up at me in bafflement and said in a slightly questioning, uncertain tone: ‘Ah, His Royal Highness, um, Philip, the King of France, by the grace of God rightful overlord of the rebellious Duke of Normandy, sovereign lord—’

I cut him off again, saying cheerfully, ‘Oh,
him
– you mean Old Mace-Dick. And what does
he
want?’

The second herald, who had been studying the rude chalk drawing on the outside gate, had gone red in the face. He was clearly furious and it was he who answered the question for his now-speechless colleague.

‘His Royal Highness instructs and commands you to leave this castle forthwith, to come forth in the garb of penitents and to surrender your persons to his royal justice, trusting in his mercy—’

‘I don’t think so. Not today, thank you. We are rather busy. Perhaps some other time,’ I said. There were a few guffaws from along the battlements: our men were enjoying my cheeky performance even if the heralds were not. I continued: ‘God be with you both – but we have far more important matters to attend to. So I must ask you to go now and leave us in peace.’

‘His Royal Highness Philip Augustus, by the grace of God, the King of France, instructs and commands you, on pain of death—’

‘I said “Go”.’ My voice hardened. ‘Get ye hence. Quit this place. Be gone. Go.’

‘But the King of France—’

‘If you are not away from this gate by the time I count to five, I will order the bowmen to shoot you down.’

The heralds gawped at me. Their mouths working like land-drowning carp. To offer injury to a herald during a parley was a grave crime of war, and a terrible sin to boot.

‘One,’ I said.

The angry left-hand herald said: ‘So then, you formally defy King Philip’s rightful demand—’

I said: ‘Two.’ And his fellow herald cut him off with a gentling hand on the arm. They both shot me a glare of deep hatred, but when I said: ‘Three,’ they turned their horses smartly and cantered away.

The men on the battlements cheered as the two heralds rode back to the French encampment, their refined spines as straight as the poles that carried the royal standards, and it felt as if we had won a victory, even if it had been won in such an absurdly childish fashion. I was pleased that my tomfoolery had put some heart into the men – although I knew that we could expect no quarter if the enemy breached the walls.

‘Men of Verneuil,’ I shouted, and I was glad that the castle was small enough so that every man could make out my words. ‘Men of Verneuil, you may take comfort in the knowledge that your true liege lord is very close at hand. King Richard is no more than one or two days’ ride away, and if we can only hold here for a little while we will earn his undying gratitude. Any man who fights valiantly here today with all his heart and soul, and lives to tell the tale, can expect a rich reward from our royal master.’

I could hear noises of approval all along the battlements – not exactly cheers, but a pleasing mumble of approbation.

‘My friends, a storm is coming, the bitter storm of battle. Those high and mighty Frenchmen think that they can run over us, and stamp us into the dust. But they are wrong. I swear to you, on my honour as a knight, that we can hold them; and we can beat them – but only if you will fight like lions. So, I ask you: Will you fight?’

There was a muted rumble of assent. I repeated myself, louder this time. ‘Will you fight?’

A shout came back at me, and I believe every man on those battlements replied in the affirmative.

Once again I asked: ‘Will you fight?’

And the answer was a deep roar flung back at me from more than a hundred lusty throats. It sounded like a mountain being torn up by the roots: ‘
We. Will. Fight
!’

The enemy host formed up just out of bow-shot, about five hundred men in four divisions – or battles, as these formations are called. On the left and right flanks stood great blocks of enemy foot soldiers, perhaps a hundred and fifty men in each, dismounted knights and men-at-arms. Even at three hundred yards distance I could see that they carried long ladders, and it was plain that they meant to scale the walls both to the right and left of the gatehouse at the same time. In the centre, I saw with a sinking heart a huge black shape, at least thirty foot long, with a swarm of men fussing around it with ropes and pulleys attaching it to an enormous wheeled cradle. It was a felled tree-trunk, a battering ram, its hammer end sheathed in beaten iron. Nearby, carpenters were constructing a pointed roof with steeply sloping sides, tiled with wooden shingles – this was known as a penthouse – and its role was to shield the men who would swing the heavy ram against the front gate from our arrows. Clearly the central battle intended to come straight through the front door, smashing it to kindling in
the process. And with that great ram, they might easily do it. Behind the battering ram was a battle of knights on horseback, a hundred men strong, beautifully arrayed, helmet plumes nodding, spear pennants flying, the trappers of the big horses bright splashes against the drab trampled field. When the gates of Verneuil had been smashed open and our brave men on the battlements overrun, these gaudy horse-borne killers would ride into the castle and complete the slaughter with lance and sword.

However, my mood of reckless cheerfulness had not deserted me. I was fairly certain that we were doomed, but there was still a chance of survival – and, as I had said to Sir Aubrey, if God willed that we die, we would make a fight of it that would live on in song and legend for ever. And two things were in our favour: as far as I could tell, King Philip was not attempting any subtle manoeuvres – he was not bothering with any further artillery bombardment; he was just coming straight at us in overwhelming strength; and, the second and more important point was, we had an ample supply of arrows.

I stripped all the men from the rear of the castle, leaving one single man to watch in case of an attack over the River Avre. I posted ten men-at-arms on the western wall, ten on the eastern, and kept the archers on the two northern corners of the castle. The rest of the fit men, about sixty in total, I divided between myself and Sir Aubrey and we took up our positions on either side of the main gate; myself on the left, Aubrey on the right.

I had not expected subtlety from King Philip, and I did not receive it. I had barely organized my handful of men, and made sure they had two or three javelins apiece, when the trumpets and drums started up and the two massive squares of men on the left and the right of the French lines started moving forward. At two hundred yards, when you could clearly hear the chink and stamp of three hundred marching men, I nodded to the vintenar of the archers of the north-western corner of the castle, a steady young
man named Peter, and watched with pride as, with a great creaking of wood, these twenty men drew back their massive yew bows until the flights of their arrows tickled their right ears, and loosed a small grey cloud of shafts into the clear spring air.

The arrows punched down on to the enemy like deadly hail, rattling off shields and helms but sinking deeply into flesh wherever they found a gap in the armour. The French began to die. Men dropped by the killing shafts were trampled by their fellows; others, screaming in pain from an embedded missile, staggered out of the ranks, bleeding and clutching at the feathered shafts that sprouted from their bodies. But after the first barrage, the French held their shields above their heads and crowded tightly together, and my archers had time for only one more volley before the attacking French were given the signal to charge. Suddenly the enemy were running at us as fast as their legs would carry them, ladders to the fore, straight at the castle walls. My archers loosed once more, and I saw another handful of men falling, dying, skewered by the yard-long shafts, but nothing could stop their momentum now. In what seemed like a few brief moments the French men-at-arms were crowding under the very walls of the castle and staring up at us with pale, furiously frightened faces, as I shouted for javelins to supplement the arrow storm and we rained down death from above into the jostling, heaving mass of yelling foemen below.

Bows creaked and twanged as our archers poured their killing skill down upon the enemy surging below us. Our men flung down javelins, spears, cut-down lances, even lumps of jagged masonry to crush the seething mass of Frenchmen – but a dozen ladders were rising, swinging up and banging against the stone wall of the castle, and the bravest enemy knights were already swarming up the frail wooden rungs with terrifying speed.

Wherever we could, we hurled the ladders away from the walls, pushing them clear with wooden pitchforks or long poles cut and
tied in the shape of a cross, tumbling the brave men who climbed them with oaths and shouts and the thump of flesh and crack of bone on to the earth below; but there were too many of them. Hanno and I had grabbed the end of a ladder, and were twisting the top of it with our combined strength, left and right, spilling the climbers, when I looked to my left and saw a Frenchman come screaming over the wall. He parried a sword thrust from one of Robin’s men-at-arms and struck the man’s head clean off with his riposte. Another knight crested the stone battlements two yards away and landed neat as a cat on to the wooden walkway behind it. I took two fast steps towards him and lunged for his throat, but he was swordsman of no little skill and he deflected by point and counter-attacked with a lightning stab at my heart, followed by a hard cut at my shoulder. I twisted to avoid his blade and went down on one knee; he swung at my head and I blocked his blow with my shield, but from the corner of my eye I could see another Frenchman rolling over the top of the wall into the gap the first man had created, and another. I had to plug this hole in our defences – and fast – or we were all dead men! I came up from my crouching position and lunged; a low, vicious blow that slid through the front slits of his mail coat and sliced up through his braies into the meat of his soft inner thigh. He screamed like a soul in torment and clutched at the fork of his legs, scarlet blood gushing from the wound, and he dropped. I left him to his fate and smashed my shield at the head of a man who was just appearing above the castle wall, cutting deep into his face with the edge; he fell straight backwards out of view. But there were enemies all around me now. I whirled and hacked with my long sword into the back of the neck of another Frenchman who was duelling with a green-cloaked man-at-arms; he fell away inside the castle walls, yelling in pain. I saw Hanno, wielding an axe, cave in the skull of a man in the act of climbing over the wall. I killed a man on the walkway to my right – my
sword Fidelity spearing into his throat. I blocked a wild sword swing and cut deep into the thigh of a Frenchman to my left. Another head poked above the wall nearer to me and I darted forward, slicing into an eye and causing the head to disappear as if by some conjurer’s trick. A burly archer and I both grabbed the ladder top at the same time, and we heaved it away bodily, causing three climbing Frenchmen to spin off and crash to the hard ground in a cloud of flying dust and foul curses.

And suddenly there were no more ladder tops and the wall to the west of the gatehouse was clear of the enemy. I peered over the battlements, and jerked away just in time as a crossbow quarrel clattered against the stone inches to the right of my face. But I could see that the French were pulling back on our side, taking their wounded, but leaving a score of their dead in a bloody heap below our walls.

I shouted: ‘Archer, archers …’ But there was no need. Robin’s well-trained bowmen, under young Peter’s direction, were already harassing the retreating French with deadly accuracy, their shafts easily punching through the mail coats that covered the running men’s backs, and dropping their victims in their tracks. I looked across at Sir Aubrey’s command and he too seemed to have fought off the first onslaught, though he was leaning on his sword, holding his side with his left hand, and I saw with deep regret that there was a dark quarrel shaft sticking from his waist, and a wet stain was spreading beneath his hand. He was not the only man to have received a grievous wound from among our ranks: more than a dozen of our archers and men-at-arms had been wounded or killed during the attack on both sides of the gatehouse. But we had held them off.

Yet that day’s bloody work was only just beginning. The two enemy battles on the flanks had moved out of range of the deadly war bows of Robin’s men, but they had not dispersed into the camp. They waited, loosely formed, mauled but still menacing.
And in the centre, trumpets rang out once again, and with dread I saw that the great ram was being hoisted on to its huge wooden cradle under the penthouse, surrounded by hundreds of men-at-arms bearing the five-foot-high, flat-topped, flat-bottomed, light wickerwork shields that were sometimes used to protect crossbowmen on the field of battle.