The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (39 page)

I stared at Robin. ‘All this then has been in vain? How, how…’

‘The letter was lobbed over the walls last night, roped to a trebuchet ball. It is genuine. Captured from one of the King’s messengers, apparently, some months ago. I know John’s seal well enough to tell it is real. De Lacy does too. There is no doubt about it. But listen to me, Alan: no one in the castle must know – for now. My lord de Lacy has threatened death to anyone who speaks of this.’

‘What did it say?’

‘He orders de Lacy to hold out as long as he can and then do what he thinks best. It seems clear that, even back then, even before Christmas, he had no intention of coming to our rescue. He abandoned us to our doom three months ago.’

‘Do what he thinks best? De Lacy must do what he thinks best? Then surely there is no point in continuing the fight. We can make terms. Philip will accept our surrender, I am sure of it. He does not want to lose any more men. If de Lacy were to send out heralds—’

‘De Lacy is determined to fight to the end.’

‘What?’ I was utterly astounded. ‘For God’s sake, why?’

‘God knows. He says he has made a vow to hold the castle and swears he will hold it – come what may. His honour is at stake, he says. I say he’s a vainglorious, mutton-headed idiot.’

‘So we must all die for his honour?’

‘No.’

I looked at my lord. ‘What then?’

‘I’m working on that. Give me a little time and I will find a way to get us out of this place. I’m not going to die for a faithless King, nor for a bloody-minded baron with a death-wish – and neither are you, and neither are any more of my men, if I can possibly help it. Give me a day to get something in place. Can you do that, Alan? Can you hold this breach for a day, for me?’

I swallowed. ‘I’ll try, my lord.’

‘Hold this for one day, for one single day, Alan, and I promise you, I’ll get us out of here this very night.’

When Robin left me, I looked out through the U-shaped rubble lip of the breach at the shut gates of the middle bailey, a mere forty yards away, and the walls either side where hundreds of curious French heads were watching us from the battlements.

I looked behind me at the roof of the keep where I could see nearly a score of Robin’s archers and a dozen crossbowmen. I could even make out the shape of the twin arms of Old Thunderbolt, and Aaron bent by its side, fussing over something. Perhaps we might just be able to hold back the enemy for one day, I thought. Given a big slice of luck. I had no choice but to trust Robin. And I did. He would get us out of there tonight, I was sure of it. All I had to do was hold the breach.

For a day.

I squinted at the stone bridge that jutted out of the half-demolished gatehouse and spanned the deep ditch around the whole of the inner bailey. The bridge was narrow – only two yards wide – and the French would have to funnel their men across it before they could come at the hole in our walls.

It was a killing ground.

‘Father de la Motte tells me you made a gift to the wounded of a handsome parcel of viands,’ said de Lacy. I had not noticed his approach. He was standing behind me in full mail, sword at his hip, looking furious.

‘Would you care to tell me how you came about such a cornucopia?’

I looked him in the eye, thinking, You would kill me for your personal honour, would you? You would hold out to the last man in this doomed place to satisfy your lust for glory? But I actually said, ‘I cannot tell you, sir’ – quite truthfully. I could not tell him because I could not allow Tilda to be hanged for the crimes of her father and Benedict. Anyway, after the terrible news Robin had given me, I did not much feel like giving him the whole truth.

‘I found the food in one of the storehouses,’ I said, again truthfully. ‘And I brought it directly to Father de la Motte in the infirmary – did I do wrong?’

Before de Lacy could reply, I saw movement over his shoulder and said, ‘I think, sir, that we have more to worry about than a few crumbs of food. Look.’

The doors in the gatehouse in the middle bailey swung slowly inwards until they were wide open and through them I could see the flattish patch of ground outside it where the Useless Mouths had gathered and begged for readmission. Once again it was teeming with agitated folk – this time not starving supplicants but an enemy host. Hundreds of men-at-arms, perhaps half a thousand. Drawn up in squares and columns outside the gates and disappearing from view down on the slope below the castle: foot soldiers with long spears, Genoese crossbowmen with their out-sized shields,
conrois
of knights bright in mail and coloured surcoats.

All the might of Philip’s army arrayed for war.

De Lacy told me I was to command a squad of thirty men-at-arms to hold the left side of the breach until I was relieved. Sir Joscelyn was to hold the right with a similar force and de Lacy would hold the middle with the largest squad of forty men. Not counting the bowmen, about two-thirds of the castle’s uninjured men were engaged in holding the breach – the remaining third, some fifty men in total, manned the battlements of the inner bailey and formed a reserve that could be brought in to plug gaps or relieve any section that required it.

There could be no thought of surrender, de Lacy told us all.

I gathered my Wolves on the left of the breach, keeping them in the shelter of the tumbled stones of the gatehouse and behind its remaining wall. While the castle-breakers were idle, there was no guarantee the French had not just paused in their bombardment in order to tempt us to line the open breach with our precious flesh and blood, whereupon they might resume their onslaught and smash their missiles through our ranks.

I looked to my right and saw Sir Joscelyn and his band of knights and men-at-arms. He refused to meet my eye. I wondered what the men he commanded would say if they knew that he and his accomplice Sir Benedict Malet had been quietly stealing and eating their food for months. They would rip him limb from limb – and rightly so. But I could say nothing without endangering the life of Tilda. I bit my tongue. Now that I looked at Sir Joscelyn I could see he was in better condition than the other men in his squad. And Benedict, too, who was acting as his second-in-command that day, had not lost a pound from his ample frame. How had I failed to notice this? In a garrison that was now, to a man, whip thin, faces gaunt, skin tight over bones, how had I not seen the glow of good health on these two men? There would be a reckoning, I told myself, but not on this day, not on this day of battle. To hold the breach, we needed every man – even greedy, thieving scoundrels.

I looked around at the men I had the honour to command. Good men, mostly Wolves. Familiar faces, confident grins, bright eyes: there was Claes, the one-eyed vintenar, waiting patiently for my orders; there were Jago and Denzell, the Cornish brothers to whom I owed my life, who both favoured long spears and round oak shields; there was Jacques, the big Norman mason, without the tools of his craft but carrying a long, old-fashioned bearded axe and looking grim. And somewhere below my feet was the crushed body of Christophe, the brave engineer entombed in an enemy mine, near the place that had nearly become my own tomb.

Another good man dead – for nothing.

‘We hold this breach until we are relieved; those are the orders. And we will do exactly that. We do not take a single step backwards. We hold them here. I will rotate you, so that each man has a chance to rest at the rear of the shield wall. But know this: if we let them in, we are dead. So we hold them. Understood?’

The response was a faint chorus of muttered assent.

‘What? You want to live for ever?’ I showed them my teeth. ‘This is where the war is today.’ I rapped a piece of broken masonry with my mail-covered knuckles. ‘This is where the war is and we are its warriors. So here is where we fight. Here is where we will show the kind of men we are. And if we fall, so be it, but we shall have made such a battle that we will be remembered for ever. For we are the Wolves!’

I threw back my head and howled like a madman.

And every man in that squad, whether they were Wolves or not, opened wide his jaws and howled with me.

The French came up the hill and through the gates of the middle bailey – at least two hundred men – spearmen in the front ranks, dismounted knights and men-at-arms behind them, and crossbowmen on the flanks. They shouted ‘
Saint Denis
!’ invoking the headless holy man they venerated in Paris and ‘
Vive le Roi!
’

The attack began with ordered ranks and files of men, but once through the gates of the middle bailey, they filled the air with their roars and charged forward as a mob. The French were brave men, fighting for their lord, and the first rank of men, those facing the greatest danger, were particularly valorous. But they died just the same. The first iron bolt of Old Thunderbolt ploughed into the mass of shouting men on the stone bridge when they were no more than twenty yards from the breach. It slashed through their ranks like a giant scythe, leaving a bloody furrow through the press of humanity; a dozen men were maimed or killed by that one strike. Then Robin’s archers and crossbowmen loosed their shafts – and showered the bridge with death. Like a swooping flock of deadly birds, the arrows hummed into the staggering men. Steel bodkin heads punched through padded gambesons, leather armour, even mail, and sank into tender flesh. Evil black quarrels punctured limbs and torsos, faces were gashed, bones were smashed, men were knocked flying. There were bodies falling, left and right, tumbling into the ditch below. The war cries turned to screams. The first volley from our bowmen was followed, moments later, by a second – only of arrows this time, war bows being faster to draw and loose than crossbows – then a third. Chaos screamed across that awful bridge, stealing souls, hurling men into destruction. One moment there were two score spearmen on the bridge, charging towards the breach, their long spears stretching out to us, the next it had almost been wiped clear, save for the bodies and the blood and the writhing wounded, men stuck here, there and everywhere with slim feathered shafts. I saw one with half a dozen shafts in his body, still moving feebly. Of forty who charged so valiantly, only three made it to the other side of the bridge – but they still bounded up the loose rubble slope, yelling their fury, stabbing with their spears – and were cut down with ease by the dozen eager Wolves who leaped forward to meet them at the top.

I had not yet drawn my sword.

The attack was far from over; more spearmen were coming forward from the gatehouse in the middle bailey, following in the bloody footsteps of the first, stepping cautiously on to the bridge, their shields held high, spears levelled, helmeted heads tucked in behind, shafts hammering down on them like hailstones. They came on still in their disciplined squads, many scores of them, some stepping through the carnage, slipping a little on the blood, some falling, some hesitating but most coming forward inexorably towards us; and yet more of the enemy, fifty men at least, were pouring down into the ditch on the right of the bridge, the southern side, nearest the breach, and that deep-dug defence was soon full of jostling, angry men shoving each other up the slippery chalk side, standing on shoulders and boosting each other, scrambling up and on to the tumbled stones of our broken walls.

Robin’s men were no longer loosing volleys – the archers picked their targets and almost every arrow claimed a life. But they could not stem that flood of foes.

Old Thunderbolt cracked again from high up behind me and a black bar of death hurtled through the air into the first men clambering out of the ditch and beginning their determined scrabble up the rubble slope to the breach. Two French men-at-arms were smashed apart, quite literally ripped limb from limb by the spinning yard-long steel bolt – and Robin’s bowmen were dropping quarrels and shafts on the heads of the milling horde in the ditch.

Many died, but yet more of them came forward.

A dozen men were now on the scree of loose masonry, and climbing towards us, shields held out before them, using spear and sword as staffs to speed them onwards and upwards. Into the mouth of battle. Into the cauldron of Hell. A volley of crossbow bolts lashed into them; two dropped, another staggered sideways, a quarrel in his belly. But on they came.

I drew my sword.

Despite Aaron’s devilish work with Old Thunderbolt, and the slaughter wrought by our bowmen, the enemy were upon us.

I stepped up to the lip of the breach, the highest point in that stony hole in our walls, and waited a couple of heartbeats for the first French man-at-arms to puff and pant his way up towards me. Claes was at my right shoulder and Jacques the big mason at my left. Below us the enemy swarmed like angry ants. By now a dozen, a score, two score fighting men were boiling out of the ditch and scrambling their way towards us. It was time.

I howled once, long and hard, and plunged into the mass of the enemy, my sword swinging like a butcher’s cleaver.

The first man-at-arms died easily, Fidelity slicing into his waist almost of its own accord. There was another man, directly behind him, lunging at me with a sword. I swerved to avoid the blade and hacked into his arm, smashing Fidelity into his elbow joint. He screamed, dropped his shield and my back-swing chopped into his face, just below the ear. But, in the few heartbeats it took to free my blade from his gripping skull, a third man was on me, a knight in fine mail with a flower device on his shield. He hacked at my head, I ducked … and Jacques split his skull with one blow of his bearded axe.

The enemy were all around us, and the Wolves either side of me were killing them with barely restrained fury. I chopped and sliced with Fidelity, I lunged and smashed my blade into the enemy. I shoved men back with my shield, and over our heads the deadly shafts whistled and buzzed, knocking down men just as they reached the top of the breach. The enemy seemed to pause, to reel back all at the same time, and I grabbed the two Wolves on either side and bawled at them to form a shield wall with me, here, and they sprang into the formation with admirable speed, those mindless hours on the Rouen training ground paying off; a dozen Wolves were at my back and both sides, shields high, plugging the left side of the breach with our armoured bodies. The French rallied and surged forward: a wave of men crashed against us, shouting stabbing, scrabbling with their feet to shove us back. I kept my shield up, though the downward pressure on it was enormous, and stabbed hard over the top, aiming under the rim of steel helmets at faces that seemed to be all red, screaming mouth – I thrust and jabbed with my sword, piercing cheeks and bursting eyes. The wounded enemy fell away but were instantly replaced by fresh yelling faces, and the weight on my shield never seemed to slacken. It was brutal work merely to keep your footing on the tumbled masonry – and twice I felt the rubble lurch beneath my feet and twice I felt the crunch of steel blades against my mail-clad shins – but to stumble and fall meant death by trampling in the scrum of snarling, hacking, screaming, dying men and, by God’s grace, I kept my feet in that mêlée.