The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (40 page)

I snatched a glance to my left and saw that de Lacy and his closest knights were fighting in the centre and beyond them I caught a glimpse of Sir Joscelyn killing foes with compact, well-trained strokes of his sword. The French were still boiling up over the lip of the ditch and sprinting across the bridge, scrambling to get at us, but by now they had to trample their own dying and dead to reach our shield line. Old Thunderbolt cracked again, smashing into five attackers who came at us in a group, swiping them all away and leaving only a bloody smear and a scatter of severed limbs. But still the enemy flung themselves at us, reckless of their own lives, inviting us to slaughter them. I dropped man after man, my sword red from hilt to tip, my face and mail dripping, my voice hoarse, my ears deafened by the roars and the screaming.

Then a spear reached out from the second rank of the mass of enemies before me, driving towards my face. I ducked my head behind my shield and felt the jolt of the blow and the steel blade scrape harmlessly against my helmet. Something else crashed against the steel, making my head ring, but I felt the pressure against my shield ease momentarily and I bullocked forward blindly, forcing a wavering Frenchman backwards with brute strength, breaking our own wall but freeing my sword arm, to lunge and pierce his groin. He fell; another man appeared and I punched my hilt into his face, saw flying teeth, blood; I kicked another fellow in the belly; I sliced at an enemy, a vicious scything blow to the head, but a rock turned under my right foot and I missed – we were all surging forward by now and I could hear the Wolves behind me howling in victory and feel shields and hands shoving me down the slope. The French were melting away, falling back, crying, bleeding, streaming away across the bloody, corpse-strewn bridge, running for the gatehouse and safety. I called out for our men to halt and return to the breach, and they did, red-faced, joyous, panting, eyes bright as jewels, bodies wet with blood.

We had held. We had kept the French out.

For now.

I looked to my right, at de Lacy’s men and Sir Joscelyn’s fellows on the far right. They seemed intact, although the tidemark of dead and wounded before their position was thinner than before ours. Evidently, being closest to the stone bridge, we had borne the brunt of the battle. I sent the foremost Wolves back into the rear ranks to rest, with my praise ringing in their ears; the men who had been behind them in the shield wall now came forward. The rubble slope below us was thick with dead, forty or fifty men, many still moving, lay in their gore and in a litter of arrow shafts. Half a dozen of my men would never breathe again, and two would be cripples for life – if they survived their wounds.

I sent five hale men down to gather unbroken arrows and told the rest of the Wolves to stand down and take shelter, lest the bombardment begin again.

This battle was not over, far from it. Even as we strapped up the wounds of our comrades and gulped down bowls of cold nameless soup, I could see the enemy massing again in even larger numbers through the open gate of the middle bailey. Now there were scores of horsemen disgorging from Philip’s Hill and milling about on the slope below the gates, three
conrois
at least, perhaps a hundred mailed men in bright surcoats on large, high-spirited horses: the knights.

I left Claes in charge of the men, telling him to keep them sheltered and distribute as much water as he could – our water supplies, thank God, had not diminished all through the siege. I took the arrows we had salvaged – a scant two dozen – and climbed to the top of the keep to deliver them personally to Robin.

My lord was grim-faced when I approached. He was conferring with Aaron by Old Thunderbolt and directing two of Aaron’s engineers as they moved the springald into a new position with the utmost care. He thanked me for the arrows and admitted they were sorely needed.

‘We are down to fewer than three shafts a man,’ he said. I looked round at the twenty or so men on the keep and saw their despondency. Even with the arrows I had salvaged, these men had only enough shafts for a full-pitched battle lasting about thirty heartbeats. Then they were done.

Robin said, ‘I’m worried about those horsemen.’ He nodded at the four score or so mounted men still moving about on the slope below the walls of the middle bailey. ‘We don’t have enough arrows to stop them on the bridge. If a dozen horsemen get across it, and if they can get their horses to mount the slope and climb it, we are all finished. They will punch through your men like a hammer through a horn window, and the foot soldiers will follow in their path. If they can get enough horsemen up to the top of the breach, it’s all over.’

‘Do you think horses could be made to climb that slope?’

‘If they are fairly well trained, and with ruthless use of the spur – yes.’

‘Then we are all dead.’

‘Well, not quite. I did have an idea that might just work, with a bit of luck. And if we have enough time. We will make a wall that no horse will ride through.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you about it in a moment. Come over here.’ He led me to the northern lip of the keep, and pointed down at the shimmering grey waters of the Seine.

‘What do you see there, Alan?’

‘The river.’

‘No, there, by the quay.’

It was a large boat, moored on the east bank. I realised it was the place where, had God permitted it, we would have unloaded the convoy of food the Wolves had rowed down from Rouen all those months ago. Indeed, it looked exactly like one of the boats we had used to make our disastrous attack on the pontoon bridge.

‘We go tonight,’ said Robin. ‘I have ropes and ladders. We go – you, me and the surviving Wolves – when the world is asleep, we will leave this place, over the walls and down that cliffside. Quiet as mice. And we will seize that craft, cut it free and it will carry us away, downstream to Rouen and safety. What do you think?’

‘It could work,’ I admitted. ‘It could truly work. We could actually escape.’ I felt hope flame, a fire kindled to warm my heart.

‘You keep that thought in your head. And keep your head down for the rest of the day,’ said my lord. ‘Tonight we will shake the dust of this accursed place from our feet. Now about that wall…’

He gathered two of his bowmen and we went down the stairs of the keep into the stables. The men collected two bales of straw apiece and then we scooped up a small barrel from the smithy where somebody had set it to warming on a ledge by the forge. Then, to the breach, and with plenty of willing help from the Wolves, we all got our hands extremely dirty.

An hour later, standing high on a shard of broken masonry that jutted out from the remaining wall on the left side of the breach, I could clearly see, over the fortifications of the middle bailey, the French knights on the slope below. They had formed into two distinct groups, dismounted and standing by their chargers, on the left and, further away, on the right. The horses were clad in brightly coloured trappers that covered them from head-band to hock, the men standing beside them in matching surcoats over grey mail. Cheerful pennants fluttered from the ends of the lances, held upright in young squires’ hands and grounded in the mud. They all looked impossibly grand in the strong March sunlight; noble, brave, almost joyful. And between the groups of dismounted horsemen, a battle of men-at-arms sitting on the thin grass, perhaps two hundred, armed with spear and sword. There were black-clad priests moving among the men and horses, blessing them, offering words of comfort and fragments of the Host and sips from silver chalices. My belly grumbled merely at the thought of that holy feast, the body and blood of Christ. I thought about the bundle of food I had taken from Sir Joscelyn and Tilda, and pondered my decision to give it to Father de la Motte without even tasting the merest bite. What a fool I was, I thought. I could have gorged, I could have filled my belly many times over. I could have felt the warm glow of the well-fed all over my thin, tired and battered body. And my body
was
battered: my shoulders, back and both legs were a sea of aches, every movement a jolt of fire. I wanted nothing more than to lie down; not true, I wanted more than anything to eat. And who would have known if I had gorged from the bundle? No one. And if I had wolfed it all, perhaps I would be stronger for the coming fight. Perhaps if I had swallowed down at least some of that forbidden food, just a leg of the capon, perhaps, or a slice of the game pie, I would be serving my fellow men in this castle well, by fortifying my body in readiness to face the foe …

I blushed for shame at that silent sophistry. It was dirty meat, dishonoured bread, and no matter how much I drooled over its memory, I knew in my heart I had done the right thing. I would be no better than those three skulking thieves in the storeroom who robbed their comrades to stuff their fat faces, if I had partaken of the feast. I had stolen food myself once or twice when a lad, out of dire need, so I was not without that sin on my conscience, but never in time of siege, and never from men who would die hungry because of my thievery. I was a better man now, too, I hoped. I was a knight. I was a leader of men. I was hungry, yes, but I had my honour, by God, and I would not sell it for a bellyful of food stolen from starving comrades. But now this knight must prove his honour on an echoing belly, I reflected. For I could see the French knights in the left
conroi
stirring; the noblemen, now helmeted, fully armoured, were being heaved into the saddle by their squires.

The knights swung up on to the backs of their big destriers, accepted their lances and, as a trumpet called out, formed up into a column of twos, a long snake of pairs of horseman stretching across the slope. Shields hefted, lances were tucked firmly under the right armpit, another trumpet rang out and the snake began to move towards us.

They came through the gate of the middle bailey at a bouncy trot and by the time they had crossed the courtyard and their iron hooves were hammering on to the stone bridge they had reached a full canter. A pounding, clattering, bellowing river of muscle and mail charging straight towards our position – and we did nothing. Not an arrow flew, not a spear was cast. The horsemen surged over the gore-dyed bridge unchallenged, the leading two knights jumped their horses on to the rocky slope and with much skittering of iron-shod hooves on loose rubble, and harsh cries of ‘
Vive le Roi!
’ they began to urge their mounts up the scree.

A single arrow looped down from the top of the keep, the head of the shaft a red-orange flag. It slammed into the rubble a bare three yards ahead of my waiting Wolves, who were crouched among the stones at the lip of the breach, and immediately a fat line of pine tar-soaked straw that Robin had caused to be stuffed into the cracks burst into dancing flame. A second fire arrow followed, again with perfect accuracy, and a third – but no more were needed for the sticky black road of straw that ran all the way across the breach from wall to wall flared into life in a couple of heartbeats. The flames jumped up higher than a man, the fuel roaring and crackling like a beast of Hell, clouds of thick smoke boiling upwards. Through this wall of fire and smoke I watched the leading horse, two paces from me, rear up in terror, its forelegs paddling the air and the knight on its back falling helplessly backwards to crash down on the slope. A second horse, too, was shying and rearing, barging into the horse behind it. The animals were neighing, screaming almost, in atavistic fear of the flames. They would not charge forward into fire, which was now leaping ever higher and higher. On that treacherous incline, the horses stumbled and fell, their frail legs snapping like kindling, crashing into their fellow beasts as they tumbled, crushing riders between slope and saddle as more and more knights forced their way off the bridge and into the crush.

And into that chaos of panicking horse, shouting knights and roaring flame, into that holocaust of dying men and burning animals, Old Thunderbolt loosed his first deadly iron shaft.

At a distance of fifty yards, the shaft sliced through men and horses like a giant blade, punching away two or three mounts and riders in a burst of guts. And then the arrows began to zip through the leaping flames – Robin had held back all his stocks of shafts, save for the three fire arrows, until this moment. Yard-long shafts tipped with bodkin points smacked into thick horse muscle and mailed bodies alike, and the men on the other side of that wall of leaping flame tasted the horror of damnation before they left this good, green Earth. Crossbows cracked and hissed through the fire, thumping into the foe, tumbling them back.

I could see only intermittently through the blaze, and I was grateful for it. For the little I saw, sickened me to my soul. Blood upon blood, men stuck like hedgehogs, falling forward to roast in the pine-tar fire, burning alive, their hair flaring briefly like torches; massive horses flailing helplessly on their sides or backs, broken limbs flopping obscenely; a brave man here or there, dismounted but miraculously unhurt, trying to charge the fire-wall and being slammed off his feet by a quarrel or bow shaft. Then Old Thunderbolt loosed again and swiped another bloody channel through the mayhem. And, at that, the French knights had had enough. A pathetic handful – the fortune-blessed tail-enders of the forty-strong column – clattered back across the bridge, back into safety, back into life.

Not one enemy knight made it through the wall of fire.

We had not lost a single man.

We sluiced down cold well-water as if it were wine; and we felt a euphoria overcome us, lift us, send our souls soaring joyfully to Heaven. God was surely aiding us, as well as Robin’s cunning trick, and between them they had wrought destruction on our foes. We had utterly destroyed the enemy knights who came against us, the cream of the French forces, with not a single loss to ourselves. They and their horses had torn themselves apart on the treacherous slope, the corpses reeking and twitching and the wounded crawling away to die in the ditch. We were victorious. Is there any better feeling that a fighting man can have? The men sang snatches of song, laughing and calling out the old jests to de Lacy’s men next to us, and I even caught a careless smile from Sir Joscelyn on the far right of our line, where he stood and surveyed the carnage through the dying flicker of the pine-tar flames.