Sword of Justice

by Christian Cameron

  ‘I wouldn’t miss this for anything,’ Fiore said. ‘We are about to become the greatest knights in the world.’

  The citadel hovered above us in the pale moonlight.

  We were only halfway to the top.

  Gospel Mark was sitting on the ground, head in his hands. Ewan had retched himself dry and was drinking Catalan wine.

  ‘Bring the ladder,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Gospel Mark shot me a look of pure venom. Ewan dragged himself to the sturdy steppe pony that Marc-Antonio was holding for him. But both men mounted, and then we were riding into the darkness.

  The fortress was so large that it took time to ride up to the second gate. We rode for perhaps the length it takes a priest to say the prayers over the Eucharist – maybe less. I was in quite a bit of pain by then, and I wasn’t thinking well. But when we reached the gate, we found it strongly held, and young Francesco had all the men-at-arms and archers dismounted.

  ‘Five shafts a man,’ Rob Stone said to me.

  That was bad. The only way to clear a wall so that the ladders could be used was to shower it in arrows – to drop so many shafts into the space around the ladders that no sane enemy would try to throw them down or to hold the ladder-heads.

  ‘We have the only other gate,’ I said to Nerio. ‘Couldn’t we just starve them out?’

  ‘And when a relief force comes from Athens?’ Nerio said. ‘We’ll be caught between armies.’

  ‘Besides,’ Fiore said, ‘we want to have a great reputation, do we not?’

  That may seem a reasonable thing to say, but in the firelit night, with slingstones raining on us and my shoulder throbbing as if a giant was squeezing it, it sounded insane. Glory goes to all the wrong men anyway, or so it often seems to me.

  But Nerio agreed.

  ‘I have a device,’ he said. ‘It will only work once – maybe not even once.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Something I bought,’ he said. ‘It burns like Greek fire.’ He turned, so that his hawk-nosed profile showed against the fires burning behind the second gate. ‘I wanted to save it for the citadel.’

  The big mule was now explained.

  ‘Ever seen one of the alchemical siege engines?’ Nerio said.

  I had, too, and German handgonners as well. Italy was teeming with the foul stuff – smells like hell, burns like pitch. Faster than pitch. In the summer of 1367, I had no idea that the damn things were going to be part of my profession for the rest of my days. And, to be fair, we still thought of the alchemical powder as magic, or leastways unnatural.

  Two pages stripped the straw panniers off the mule and from the wicker basket came an engine, like a cauldron of bronze. It had flanges cast into the rim, or what would have been the rim of a cooking pot, and each of the flanges had a hole in it.

  ‘Spikes,’ Nerio said. He produced a handful of black iron spikes, almost invisible in the darkness.

  ‘How many men do you think they have on the gate?’ I asked.

  Fiore had gone forward, all the way to the dangerous zone where the crossbowmen could hit him, and returned. ‘I think it’s the same men we drove off the wall,’ he said. ‘Slingers and a handful of armed men.’

  ‘Why are they fighting so hard?’ l’Angars asked. It was a good question, a routier’s question.

  ‘They are well-paid, or they fear their master,’ Nerio said.

  ‘Or they think we slaughtered their women,’ I said.

  Nerio frowned. ‘You didn’t?’ he asked.

  ‘No, we drove them from the gatehouse. I broke a woman’s nose,’ I admitted.

  ‘Not the most chivalrous thing to do,’ Fiore snapped.

  ‘She was trying to kill me,’ I said.

  Nerio shook his head. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  I pointed into the rocks off to our left, which rose almost sheer and lay below a rise in the inner wall.

  ‘I suppose that you spotless knights will object if I round them up and offer to execute them if they don’t hand over the gate?’ Nerio asked.

  It was difficult to know whether he was serious.

  L’Angars laughed. It was a deep, resonant laugh, the last thing you’d expect to hear in the hellish dark of a storming action.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the Gascon said. ‘It was the first thing I thought of. I was trying not to say it.’

  ‘No,’ Fiore said. ‘We will not stoop to such a thing.’

  ‘Won’t we?’ Nerio asked.

  ‘We slaughtered every armed man in the tower,’ l’Angars said.

  ‘It’s different and you know it,’ Fiore argued.

  L’Angars shrugged. ‘Threatening the women might even save lives,’ he said.

  ‘Tell yourself any story you like,’ Fiore said.

  Nerio looked at me. I could see him clearly because of the glow of the fire behind the wall. He looked like a mild-mannered Satan. ‘And you, William?’ he said.

  I wanted to say, my shoulder hurts, and let’s get this over with. But chivalry is all about who you are when your shoulder hurts and you’ve had no sleep.

  ‘My whole life depends on taking this gate,’ Nerio said.

  I took a deep breath. I thought of the Passion of Christ. Say what you will – Christ has a lot to teach a knight.

  ‘If your whole life depends on this gate,’ I said, ‘then let us take it in a manner that all of us will be pleased to remember.’

  Fiore lit up. He didn’t light up often; joy was not his usual way of responding, even to pleasure. But he smiled broadly, and what I remember best is that, unthinkingly, he slapped me on the left shoulder.

  I cried out and dropped to one knee.

  And I’m not ashamed to say that I played it for all it was worth. Oh, he hurt me cruelly, but, regardless, I whimpered a bit and moaned, and Nerio called Fiore a stupid arse, and they were all contrite, and the moment passed when Nerio might have turned on Fiore. Or me. Or ordered a massacre.

  I love Nerio. We are closer than friends. But, like me, he is a very bad man working hard to be good, and he doesn’t always see that the easy way is the wrong way.

  ‘Tell us about your engine,’ I muttered.

  All of our archers moved forward in a spread line, about five paces between them. All of them had an arrow nocked and another to hand.

  We carried the bronze bucket between us. That is, Nerio and Fiore carried it – l’Angars and I were too badly hurt to carry something that weighed as much as a man.

  I was having some trouble walking by then, and I thought that the stars were dimming overhead. Dawn was out there somewhere.

  Our archers kept moving forward when crossbow bolts began to skip in among us, the shafts moving like snakes, invisible in the darkness, passing with a hiss before the snap or crack of the crossbow string could be heard. Rob called out every time they slowed. Men were tired; tired men take fewer risks.

  Rob kept them going.

  When the wall was less than a hundred paces away, and one of ours was lying silent with a bolt through him, Rob called out for the archers to halt.

  Instantly forty heavy bows came up.

  I lumbered into a fast jog. I could no longer manage a run. The slope was steep, but the road was paved. The archers were out to the sides of it in the broken, rocky ground. I just powered along, my smooth, leather-soled fighting shoes slapping against the paving stone, my greaves biting into the top of my feet despite a near-perfect fit, my padded hose weeping sweat, my brigandine weighing on my shoulders like a man’s life of sin, my basinet a demon on top of my head.

  A bolt struck the top of my helmet, and whanged off into the darkness. I didn’t fall. I was, if it makes sense, too tired to fall. I jogged on.

  I can’t really imagine what it was like for Nerio and Fiore, carrying the whole weight of a church be
ll between them.

  Slingstones began to strike me. One hit me in the chest and only my shambling run saved me; I had my weight well forward.

  Another struck me. Those slingers were excellent. I got a stone in my left shoulder and I roared in anger and in pain, and managed a burst of speed that was more like the gallop of an old horse, and then I was in the shadow of the huge gate: double doors, ten layers of oak boards almost perfectly sheathed in iron bars.

  Despite my injuries, I was first. Nerio and Fiore came in behind me, and l’Angars was down.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, and went back into the dark.

  I was hit immediately. I was hit three times like an armourer hits a rivet: bang bang bang. They knew we were going for the gate and they were afraid of us. After all, so far we’d beaten them like a drum.

  I couldn’t see. My visor was closed and everywhere was dark. I remember moving my whole head back and forth, looking for some point of light to orient myself, it was that dark.

  My basinet had a high back point, a little like an onion, and it shed blows well, but the rock that hit me next knocked me to my knees and jammed my basinet down around my throat. I had heavy padding in there, and the stone drove my helmet down on my head, bounced off the back plates of my brigandine and rolled away. I was on my knees, and I thought my neck was broken.

  I lost a few minutes. I remember nothing but darkness, and the smell of blood. And then I was moving again, getting hit by slingstones. I think that the crossbowmen were afraid to come to the wall; no bolts hit me while I was an obvious target.

  Someone threw a torch down, and then another, to light me up.

  I saw l’Angars. He was crawling, and his left leg was bent under him.

  ‘Got you,’ I said. My neck was odd; my head didn’t want to turn. I wanted my helmet off. I was having trouble seeing, and I was sure something was wrong with the helmet or my head or both, but what mattered was l’Angars. I got his hands and pulled. I was probably hit by more stones, but I don’t remember anything. I dragged him about forty feet, from where he lay in the fire-shot darkness to the base of the wall.

  I heard a loud hammering.

  ‘Help us!’ shouted Nerio, and turned into the gateway.

  They were using the iron spikes to nail the bronze cauldron to the gate.

  It was a brutal job, because so much of the gate was covered in iron bars and nail heads that it was impossible, or nearly impossible, to find purchase for a spike on the gate, and the spikes had to be driven home tight, or so Nerio shouted.

  Really, we were saved by the men on the wall, who were throwing more and more torches, looking for us.

  I plucked my little war hammer off my plaque belt and managed to grasp a spike with my armoured hand.

  ‘Low,’ I growled.

  ‘Low?’ Fiore asked.

  ‘We don’t need a hole four feet in the air,’ I panted. ‘Put it on the ground.’

  Fiore complied immediately; he had been holding the cursed thing up on the gate. He pressed the mouth of the bell against the gate, and I probed with my good hand, running the head of the spike back and forth …

  I found something soft, and swung my hammer. My left arm shot pain from shoulder to wrist, but I had other concerns, and I got the spike in.

  Nerio was no laggard and he got a spike in on his side, and then we were kneeling in the dust of a big gate. I remember noting that there was a pat of horse dung right where the gates closed, under my knee, and thinking that Marc-Antonio was going to hate me, and then the last spike was in the gate, and we stumbled back.

  ‘Oil!’ l’Angars shouted.

  I got out of the gate in time to see the stuff being poured down the wall. I got him under the shoulders, dragging him into the shadow of the gate. His heels were just ahead of the spreading, dark, inky stain of the stuff, and smoke rose from it.

  ‘Loose!’ called Rob Stone in the darkness, and there was a scream above us.

  ‘Now!’ Nerio said. ‘Outside, now!’ He took a sputtering torch from the ground and pressed it to the dangling string of nitre-impregnated thread that coiled from the bronze engine’s apex, and fire raced up the thread even as I dragged l’Angars back from the arch of the gate. I stepped in the oil; it was scalding hot, but not deadly.

  To the left of the gate, a fallen torch caught a pool of oil and the flames leaped up.

  I was going to shout a warning when the Hell Engine exploded.

  I have no idea what it did. I’ve used them since, so I know what a petard is now, but at the time, I was unprepared for the sound, the incredible burst of flame and heat, and I had a stone corner between me and the blast. Fiore was knocked flat, Nerio lost all one side of his beard, and none of us could hear for minutes.

  My left foot was on fire. The oil had caught. I stamped, and l’Angars, on the ground, got his hands on it and put it out. Everything happened silently.

  I was stunned. I couldn’t think; putting out the fire on my foot just about used up my reserves.

  Fiore rose like Lazarus. He had his sword in his fist, and he pointed at the gate. He opened his mouth, and I could see his tongue and his teeth; perhaps he was shouting.

  He ran.

  I followed him. I had enough sense to guess that he was telling me that the gate was open.

  And it was. The force of the engine had blown a six-foot hole in the gate. Behind should have been a second gate, or a portcullis. But the inner gate was open, wide open, and we were inside, stumbling in deafened silence up the stone steps.

  The garrison ran. They ran along the walls to the right and left above us, and as our archers poured in behind us, they began to chase the enemy down, or at least to push them to run faster.

  Nerio and I got the wrecked gate open.

  Young Francesco burst through the gate on horseback, and behind him were Giannis and Giorgios and twenty other armoured men. They went straight up the hill to the citadel, still two hundred paces above us. Marc-Antonio brought me Gabriel, and I mounted. That is, Marc-Antonio and my Greek boys pushed me into the saddle and acted as human mounting blocks. Marc-Antonio handed me my war hammer, which I had lost in the scuffle, and tried to tell me something, patting his head.

  The citadel was above us. Between the second gate and the citadel was a small town: a fine church, an Italianate palazzo of some quality, if a pain-shot glance in moonlight can be any judge, and forty or fifty good stone houses. Everything was dark, but there were cressets burning in baskets on some of the buildings and on the walls of the citadel.

  I was behind Francesco, but I caught him up easily. He was cautiously moving our knights through the town. I couldn’t hear him, so I played no part except to motion for him to continue giving orders. I was still getting over the stunning nature of the explosion; I couldn’t hear, but I could feel pain from all my little wounds and abrasions, and, to add to the scene, the charred remnants of my fighting shoe came off my left foot in mounting, so I was fully armed except for sabatons, and yet my left foot was bare. My head was pounding and my visor wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t have time to fix anything.

  Well. The things you remember.

  We felt our way through the town, men facing every street. This is another skill practised only by routiers – covering streets as you move, so you do not get surprised. Town and cities are terrible traps, worse than canyons and gorges.

  But the town was small, and in a few minutes we were on the last switchback, past the palazzo on the right, and a stone barn or warehouse on the left. Above us towered the three turrets of the citadel, a thousand paces above the sea far below.

  Francesco was trying to speak to me. I pointed at my ears and he shrugged.

  He ordered all the men-at-arms to dismount. I only knew that when I was the only one mounted. Above us were about a hundred steps, and on the steps stood a huddle of Catalan men-at-arms. I think th
ere were only three. At the time, they seemed like a hundred, and they were above me.

  Spirit is everything in battle. If this had happened earlier, I might have hesitated, but by the Virgin, I was a hundred stone steps from the top.

  I dismounted, took a spear – a short one – from Marc-Antonio and, barefoot and all, I went up the steps. There were no slingstones or bolts flying, and we were in range of the gate. That was a good sign. They were out of crossbowmen and slingers.

  Fiore was commanding men lower in the town, and Nerio was nowhere to be seen. L’Angars was wounded. I had young Francesco Gatelussi, Sir Giannis and Marc-Antonio.

  We all had spears, and we started up the steps. The Catalans didn’t come down to us, which I think was an error. They waited, and we climbed, and I can’t remember how often we stopped to rest, but we did. I did. I remember stopping just four or five steps below them. I suppose they said things, but I couldn’t hear, so I just stood there, panting, my bare foot curiously cold on the stone.

  Then I turned and gave Francesco and Marc-Antonio a little shove, spacing them out, so that I was in the middle, one step above them, and they were on the outside of the steps. The steps had been built into the steepest part of the rock; the citadel above us was lit in the grim grey of a false dawn.

  Both of the Catalans in front had poleaxes.

  Behind them, the other two had spears. They all wore armour that was a little antiquated – double maille with some heavy plates, leg armour that was more modern, Milanese or Brescian maybe, and kettle helmets.

  I tell you this because Fiore had taught us that the first thing you do in an armoured fight is evaluate your opponent’s armour.

  I held my spear high. It’s not a good garde, but when you fight on steep stone steps in the dark, there aren’t really any good gardes.

  I went up the steps. I went up against the two men in front and the two in back because that’s how I wanted it; I trusted my squire and Francesco to cover my shoulders. I wanted space.

  I knew we were better, man to man. Fiore gave us that. And like fear, fatigue and injury fell away as I saw his axe-head come forward. In that one move, taking a guard with his heavy weapon head forward, my chosen target forfeited all his advantage of height and strength of weapon, and showed me how little confidence he had.