The Dragon Hammer (Wulf's Saga Book 1) (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven:
The Wall

The Sandhaveners threw another set of siege ladders against the wall, and a line of men began climbing up. Some tried to do it quickly and uncovered; some tried to climb with one hand, holding shields over their heads.

Stones and arrows smashed down. When a man got to the top, he was met with poleaxes and spears. A sword point could normally not puncture plate mail, but a poleaxe thrust with enough power could get through. Sometimes it didn’t even take that. A push from a spear could knock an attacker off balance and send him flailing off the wall.

After one ladder had been cleared of attackers, Rainer helped four other townsmen topple it. Even from this distance Rainer could hear cries and groans of pain when the ladder fell onto those below.

There was no time to wait. Rainer ran down the wall hoarding to the next ladder and helped pitch it off as well. An arrow from below sunk into the wood near his head, but Rainer ignored it and pushed as hard as he ever had pushed to get the ladder off the wall of Raukenrose.

The attack had come from the northeast. The Sandhaveners had encircled the town, but their main force of what was supposed to be three or four thousand men according to some estimates was concentrated north and east. At least, that was the way it appeared.

Rainer knew there might be a nasty surprise coming, maybe an attack from the south, or even somehow up from the river and out of the west. Or it could be something else.

Otto has a lot on his mind, Rainer thought. But there’s nobody who can handle it better.

In a way, he was glad the duke himself was cut off while out hunting. Rainer hoped he, Wulf, and Ravenelle were all right. But the duke in the confused state his mind had fallen into lately was a terrible bet to lead a defense of the town. His son Otto most definitely
was
the right man.

Otto was brave, but not reckless. He liked to think things through. Rainer had seen him scratching out pro and con lists on wax tablets when he had a decision to make. He might not be as smart as Wulf or Adelbert, true, but he was steady and nobody’s fool.

Because most attacks in the history of the mark had come from the south, the north wall was not as well tended as the south. Fortunately, the town had advance warning of the attack. Lord Otto had taken command of the township forces, which mainly consisted of the castle garrison and the town sheriffs, plus any other able-bodied man or woman who could lend a hand.

There was not any walkway hoarding on the north wall, so the first task was to take what there was out of storage and install it. They had robbed the south wall of its hoarding planks to finish the task. It was a gamble. The attackers might circle around the town and try to force the south gate, and then the hoarding would have to be put back in place.

But the attack was from the northeast. There were some sections still putting up hoarding even then, but most of the walkways had been finished. Archers were peering over the top of the wall. Otto had taken a position at the northeast corner bastion and sent his captains to direct the defense from other bastions along the northern and east walls, and in the barbican tower at the eastern gate.

Rainer was near Otto’s position. He’d sought out his foster brother as soon as he’d received standard plate armor as well as a battle-ax and buckler from the north township armory. The men had helped one another buckle on the plate before reporting for duty. But to Rainer’s disappointment, Otto had immediately made him a runner. When the ladders had been thrown against the wall, Rainer had been returning from delivering messages far down the eastern wall. Things were quiet there, and he had nothing to report to Otto from his southernmost commander, so Rainer had thrown himself into helping the defenders get rid of the siege ladders.

After the Sandhaveners were blocked from overrunning the wall in that spot, Rainer headed for the bastion where Otto and his command group were stationed.

“All quiet to the far south,” he reported to the duke’s son. “But there was some fighting just down from here, and we threw off three ladders and killed or wounded . . .” Rainer rapidly did the calculation in his head. “About twenty or thirty men.”

Otto turned his grave face toward Rainer. “We?” he asked.

“I helped as best I could.”

“Be careful,” his foster brother said. “You have a lot of fighting spirit, brother, but remember, your first duty is to deliver my orders.”

“Yes, m’lord,” Rainer answered. “Has the commander any further orders?”

“Not at the moment, but stay near,” Otto answered. “I have a feeling Siggi or Trigvi or whoever is out there is about to pitch everything he’s got at us.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

Arrows were flying overhead in clouds. The Sandhavener archers seemed to be shooting in union, so Rainer risked a glimpse through the bastion loopholes between volleys.

There were a lot of Sandhaveners on the mud-flat plain to the northeast. There was no way he had enough time to count them, but he was sure it was thousands, and not hundreds. This was going to be a very long day.

An arrow flew past Rainer’s cheek, and the fletching cut a thin line into his skin as it passed. Rainer ducked down, but it was too late. Some archer had made a perfect shot through the loophole and almost killed his man. So much for the theory that he could look out between volleys.

Rainer mouthed a quick thanks to God.

The Sandhaveners had hurried to make their attack, and they hadn’t built any stone slinging equipment or shielded siege towers. For the moment, they would have to depend on exposed ladders. The east gate was also vulnerable. It was made of great oak slats banded together with iron. Though the wood had been doused repeatedly with water in the past few hours, the gate might be forced or burned if fire could be applied long enough. But Otto had concentrated his defenders there, and archers were perched in every window of the guard tower, with a dozen human and bear-man longbow archers on the roof.

Rainer was good with a bow, but the longbowmen were true masters. The best longbows were made from the Osage orange tree, and bow staves made from the tree were a well-known export product of the mark. A longbow stave was a hand taller than the man who used it.

The bow wood came from a triangular stave slice made from the sapwood under the bark inward to the dense heart of the tree called latewood. The sapwood was wonderfully bendable, but the heartwood was strong. It held the shape that the bow would return to after the bowman took his shot. Bowstrings were made of carefully worked hemp. Faun-grown hemp was considered the best.

A bow was useless without the man who could handle it. A longbowman had to pull the string back to his ear. It was almost impossible for a normally muscled man. Rainer had enough work pulling a regular bow’s string back and getting a shot on target. Good bowmen, even amateurs, practiced every day and shot hundreds of arrows in a week. Their arms were bare so they could easily put on armguards. Even from here Rainer could see the beefed-up muscles the longbowmen developed in order to shoot their weapons.

For the bear men a longbow was the same as a regular bow. They still had to repetitively practice, but a normal bear man was already strong enough to shoot a longbow.

Thousands of arrows in barrels had been stacked in the rooms on the three floors of the barbican. The archers shooting from windows helped themselves to more when they ran out. Many of the arrows had a brand near the fletching, a pickax, showing that it had been made by bowyers in Kohlsted. Those made in Raukenrose had the sign of the Raukenrose bowyer guild, a tree shape that represented the Olden Oak.

Rainer’s father owned stock in a large shop where dozens of men and women made arrow after arrow. He’d visited one day with his father when he was on summer vacation. The place smelled like boiling glue. Inside were rows of craftsmen and women. Some turned the shafts on treadle lathes. Some dressed the goose feather fletches. All of the arrows were fletched with goose-feathers imported from Sandhaven and the Chesapeake Bay, where millions of geese spent their winters. The feathers came in huge burlap bags labeled as left wing and right wing, because all the fletching on an arrow should be from the same side wing.

Other craftsmen made the hardwood hickory nocks with small saws and files. A row of smiths turned out triangle-shaped barbed arrows for hunting and for maximum flesh wounds in battle, and the narrower bladelike bodkins for piercing armor. Then there were the assemblers, mostly women, who glued all the pieces together and set the finished arrows to dry on huge racks.

The town’s fauns ran barrels of arrows to the archers. The fauns were as surefooted as mountain goats and streaked up and down inclines and stairways.

Arrows were made from Shenandoah birch or from a type of cedar wood brought in from the far west. Rainer liked birch arrows the best because you could straighten them with your hand just before you shot them. But when the idea was to get off ten shots for every twenty breaths, cedar was best.

Now we’re trying to kill the men who sold us the fletching, Rainer thought. And the Sandhaveners were shooting at the defenders of Raukenrose with bows made by Raukenrose bowyers from Shenandoah Osage orange trees.

“They’ve got fire!” a lookout yelled. Rainer glanced out and saw a line of arrows being lit by a man with a torch passing down a row of archers with drawn bows. Moments later a rain of arrows with burning ends wrapped in tow cloth soaked in birch pitch and lashed on with hemp cord flew over the wall.

Many landed in the streets of the town behind the wall. Rainer looked back and didn’t see anyone hurt. People had found cover or gone back into the town. He saw a row of arrows that had buried their tips in the cross timber of a building. It looked like a shop with a couple of stories of family rooms over it. They were catching the building on fire.

Eight people carrying a ladder together, men and women, ran up and were followed by other people bringing rope-handled wooden buckets sloshing with water. Others were doing the same thing where other flaming arrows hit.

Rainer turned back to see what was going on in the bastion.

“Curse the Sandhaveners!” Otto yelled. “If they burn the town, they get nothing.” He motioned his couriers to gather round. “Tell the captains to send every bowman they have to the wall. Drive those fire archers out of range. Go, go, go!”

Rainer spent the next watch running the hoarding, delivering Otto’s orders. Some townsmen had by now been hit, and they’d bled on the hoarding. Twice he almost slipped on blood-slick boards and tumbled off. If he hadn’t been wearing his hobnail boots, he probably would have. He nearly pushed a man off himself. The fellow had come away from the wall, dropped his pants, and was pissing off the edge of the walkway.

Archers on the wall had a lot better view of what they were shooting at than the enemy below did. Even though most of the militia archers were townsmen with a bow, a lot of them were very good shots. Plenty of townsmen added to the family cook pot by going hunting every few days for quail and turkey, deer and squirrels, in Bear Valley up on Massanutten Mountain or in the forests of the Dragonback Mountains nearest town. There were also hunting clubs that rented property from landholders, including the duke.

The practice was paying off. Their steady rain of arrows was driving the Sandhavener fire archers back. Shooting a flaming arrow was not easy even for someone trained to do it. You couldn’t pull the arrow as far back as you could with a regular shot so your range was less. Also, the operation took at least two people, because someone besides the archer had to set fire to the wrapped tow cloth on the end of the arrow while the bowman held his draw.

Finally the steady shooting from the walls made the Sandhaveners pull back out of range for fire arrows, and they switched back to normal arrows with deadly tips—but no flame.