The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (36 page)

Robin raised his eyebrows at me. ‘He’s one of the Wolves, sir,’ I said. ‘A well-seasoned fighting man. The one they call Scarecrow. I was with him at Falaise and he spoke to me then of mining against castles in Aquitaine with King Richard.’

It was strange to observe, once again, the power of the Lionheart’s name. Or perhaps not so strange in this castle where his memory was written in every stone.

‘This fellow is one of the Lionheart’s miners, is he?’ said de Lacy. ‘They had a reputation for getting the job done. Well, if he thinks we can counter-mine without bringing the walls crashing down on our heads, perhaps we should reconsider it.’

And that was that. I had not even spoken to Christophe about the possibility of a counter-mine; the idea was not even in my head an hour before, but I did know when to keep my mouth shut. The fact that he had been one of Richard’s men decided it. That, and the fact that de Lacy was desperate. He knew that, barring the miraculous arrival of King John in the next week or so, his walls would surely fall. And, even if his walls did not fall, he could not hold out much longer without food. Already a dozen or more men were unable to rise from their cots every day for lack of proper nourishment; each week one or two just gave up and died. De Lacy clearly recognised the straw I offered – and he clutched at it with both hands.

I conferred with Robin immediately after the meeting, waiting for him outside the keep. ‘You got what you wanted, Alan,’ he said. ‘Do you know what you’re about?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I cannot sit on my hands again while they dig through the battlements.’

‘I’ll set men to watch the cat and report the enemy’s movements to you. I’d offer my aid in the fighting underground but I can’t. I’m needed elsewhere.’

‘I know.’

‘You would make use of my Wolves?’

‘Some, with your permission, but I will ask any man in the castle who has experience of this kind of work to join me.’

‘Have a care, Alan,’ said Robin, gripping my shoulder. ‘This type of warfare is dangerous. More deadly, I think, than any you’ve engaged in before. Go carefully.’

In the end I selected fifteen of the fittest Wolves under Christophe Scarecrow, and five men from the castle garrison – two of whom were Cornishmen, brothers who had worked in the tin mines in their land, and three big Norman fellows, still in reasonable condition despite the dearth of food, who looked as if they knew their way around pick, spade and shovel.

We gathered in a tight group that afternoon in the courtyard, as the drizzle fell on us from a slate-grey sky, and Christophe explained that the most important thing was for the French to remain ignorant of our workings. We must not speak when in the mine, he told us, not even a whisper, and our digging must be slow, silent and steady.

Christophe knelt on the wet ground and, in the mud with his finger, created a rough map of the corrugated walls on the inner bailey south of the gatehouse. We would dig our counter-mine to come in at an angle against theirs. It would not be possible, he said, to dig below the foundations of the walls – they were half as deep as they were high; it would take weeks and many more men than we had to achieve that – we would go straight through the stone.

‘But, do not worry, Sir Alan,’ he told me with a grin, ‘these walls are not solid rock.’ He slapped the limestone with one big paw. We were standing on the far side of the inner bailey, on the western side – for some superstitious reason I wanted our discussions to take place as far from the mine as possible. ‘This outer layer of shaped stone is only a yard thick,’ Christophe said. ‘It will take maybe half a day to get through it, being very quiet. Then comes the loose stuff, rock and chalk and mud; a day to cut a tunnel through twenty foot of that, putting in our supports as we go along. We will come to their diggings about halfway through the wall. Then we must be as quiet as mice; we listen hard, we locate them and then cut as close as we can to their chamber. When the time is right we burst through the wall into their mine and slaughter them all. Ha-ha!’

He made it sound easy.

It was not.

We began immediately, that very afternoon, half of the men working, half resting, and decided we must work all night and all day until the thing was done. It was almost impossible to work quietly; every blow of mallet against chisel seemed to ring out like a church bell sounding the alarm. I tried muffling the iron with cloth but it made it difficult to hit the chisel end accurately. Then we tried timing our blow to match theirs – for we could still hear the chink-chink of their miners working even through the battlements – but when they stopped our blows sounded even louder, and I feared they would discover what we were about. At dusk the French stopped their labours, and Robin’s watchman atop the gatehouse reported that the miners and their guards were cooking something that smelled delicious – pork, he said – under the cover of the cat.

Roger de Lacy was good enough to issue our work party with extra rations that evening, but it was far from delicious – a thin gruel of sprouting barley with a few shreds of salted horse meat added to it, and a dozen roughly baked oat cakes that tasted mainly of sawdust. I thought longingly of the plump rats we had eaten at our Christmas feast. Then we went back to work, scraping gently, painstakingly, at the mortar between the stones with long blades. By midnight, we had removed four oblong stones from the inside of the wall. But the men were exhausted and I ordered a halt. We’d sleep, I said, and resume our labours at dawn.

The next morning, once we were through the stone facing, I delegated four of the ten men on duty to make the supports – essential if the tunnel were not to collapse on our heads. They were hollow squares, like thick window frames, a yard long on each side and made of oak. In fact, from wood salvaged from the enemy’s belfry, which gave me a good deal of satisfaction. The plan was to wedge the supports into the face of the tunnel, affix each one securely with wedges of wood and stone and then dig out the tunnel inside the square. Every yard we stopped and put in another support, and thus the tunnel burrowed into the earth.

It was dirty, cramped, exhausting work, and the further we dug, the more anxious we became about our proximity to the enemy. I rotated the man at the rock face every half-hour, measured by a burning candle, and took my turn with the spade, too. There was a further unpleasantness, apart from the cruel demands of the labour: crouched in the gloom with only the guttering light of a candle stub, I would imagine the whole weight of the fortress bearing down on me. I could not shake from my mind the idea that the fifty feet of stone and rock above my sweating head would suddenly collapse and squash me like a beetle under a brick. Each time my shift ended, and I crawled up and out of the tunnel, I gave thanks to God for my deliverance, and my soul rejoiced to see the pale sun again. And each time it came around again, I had to force myself to crawl into that heavy darkness.

The two Cornish brothers, Jago and Denzell, both short, muscular, sandy-haired fellows, proved their worth time and again in that hellish tunnel. Not only could they move more rock and earth than any of the Wolves in a half-hour, they seemed totally unafraid of the oppressive darkness and cramped conditions.

It was Denzell who came out of the hole halfway through his shift to tell me we were getting close.

‘I hear them, zir,’ he told me in his strange Cornish-inflected English. ‘I hear ’em chattering like monkeys. And banging, zir, banging away something awful. Nailing up beams, is my own guess.’

I gathered my courage and began crawling down the dark mouth into the belly of the earth. The tunnel might have only been twenty feet or so long but it seemed to take an age to work my way to its lowest point, which was now occupied by a shallow but foul-smelling pool of water, and then up again towards the face. It was as dark as Hades, for I had forgotten to bring the candle, but I found that it concentrated my hearing. And when my fumbling hands eventually found the rock face and I pressed my cheek to it, I could easily hear three or four men seemingly inches away talking in rapid French about a woman they knew intimately.

I squirmed out of the tunnel as quickly as I could and sent Christophe inside. It was growing dark and we had been working hard all day, but the grimy faces around me in the gloaming were keen, alert, eager at the prospect of battle. When Christophe emerged, silent but nodding in a business-like manner, I gathered the men by the wood-working area under the western wall, far from the tunnel’s mouth.

‘We are this far from them,’ Christophe said, holding his hands about a foot apart. ‘From now on we do not go forward, we spread out, keeping the wall between us and them.’ He moved his hands apart, to indicate this. ‘We cannot make even the slightest noise now. Remember, if we can hear them, they can hear us.’

‘We dig out a large chamber,’ I told the men, ‘a space big enough to hold four or five men, and do it tonight. We dig all night, in strict silence, and just before dawn we break through the wall and fall on them while they sleep. We think there are seven, maybe eight miners and men-at-arms in there now and they must all die.’

I caught every eye in turn by the light of the setting sun, to be sure every man understood. ‘Then comes the truly hard work.’

I saw more than a few eyebrows lift in surprise.

‘If we just butcher them and leave, the French will merely return with new men. We must fill in their mine, and our tunnel, with rock and stone and mortar brought in from this side. We will burn the cat, and Robin’s archers will ward the French away from the walls while we work, but it is vitally important that we rebuild the foundations of the walls from the underside. Jacques, here, is a mason’ – I indicated one of the Norman fellows, who nodded solemnly in agreement – ‘and he will ensure the damage the French have done is repaired to the best of our ability.’

Having made sure every man understood his task, I left Christophe in charge of the night diggers – Jago and Denzell as usual volunteered to take the first shift – and went to report to Robin.

Once again I found Robin with the high council on the middle floor of the keep. I was tired but deeply excited about being able to strike a blow against the miners and the hated cat. And perhaps I let my excitement show too much.

I explained to Robin, and the rest of the council, that we would be ready to attack the miners at dawn, and I asked Robin if he would make sure his men were ready to give us protection when we began the task of rebuilding the foundations.

The rest of that night remains foggy in my memory. I went down the tunnel twice to see how the chamber was progressing – the Cornish lads were working miracles, labouring half an hour on and half an hour off all through the night. As the chamber expanded we were able to get more men at the face, although that did increase the opportunity for noise. An hour or two after midnight, I sent everybody out of the tunnel and went in myself, alone, with a candle. The chamber was big enough for three or four men to crouch in with moderate comfort – and I decided it was enough. I pressed my ear to the wall between the chamber and their mine; I was almost certain I could hear the sound of snoring men. Good.

I stood down all the men and allowed them two hours for sleep – but I was too tightly strung myself for slumber. I dressed in my hauberk and a plain steel cap from the armoury, sharpened the needle-point of my misericorde on a stone, and selected a heavy mace as my back-up weapon, tucking it into the belt at the back. The iron blades of the short-handled wooden spades had been sharpened by the men before they retired to their cots. There would be no room to swing Fidelity in the mine; it would be close, dirty work only – dagger, mace and spade – and while I prepared myself, I found I was thinking of poor Kit, and my heart lurched. I would have given almost anything to see his cheerful face beside me. I sent up a brief prayer to St Michael, asking the archangel to care for the soul of Kit, and to guard me in the coming battle, as he had done so many times before. I prayed, too, for the souls of the French miners whom I was about to slay. They were my enemies, yes, and they sought my destruction, but I found I did not bear them any great malice.

When the sky in the east was just showing the first streaks of grey, I took a firm grasp of my spade and, with Christophe at my shoulder, crawled into the dark tunnel.

With four big men crouched in the chamber – myself, Christophe and two veteran Wolves armed with crossbows – the air seemed clotted and hard to breathe. And when we snuffed the candle it seemed even closer in there. Four more armed Wolves lay head to toe along the tunnel, and the rest of the men waited in the courtyard beside a trough of freshly mixed mortar and the piles of masonry, some stones excavated by us, others taken from the castle walls.

At my signal Christophe and I planned to dig like badgers – we knelt beside two convex patches of wall that had been very carefully dug away until there were no more than a few inches of earth and rock between us and the enemy. Christophe had tested the thickness with a cautious knife blade and we hoped to burst through in a matter of heartbeats and be at the throats of the foe in the time it takes to say a single Our Father. The two Wolves would follow us in and the rest of the pack would scramble along the tunnel and join the fight as quickly as they possibly could.

The plan would stand or fall depending on the element of surprise. It crossed my mind that they could be in there waiting for us – dozens of men, with swords and axes raised, waiting to chop us down as we emerged. I quickly pushed that thought away. It was time. I gave the signal, a tap on Christophe’s shoulder, and we began to dig.

I attacked the wall before me with all the vigour that fear can bring to a physical enterprise. I hacked at it overhand, with my right shoulder giving the spade its power, as it smashed into earth and rock. Silence was abandoned, speed was more important.

My spade sank inches deep into the wall and I levered out a small mountain of rubble that cascaded over my knees. I swung the spade again, the noise hellishly loud, the clang of iron on rock, and again, and suddenly it went through, clear and free and, praise God, there was a patch of grey in the dark of the earthen wall.