by Angus Donald
Time to go.
I snatched up a shield by the door as I left. And, weapons wiped and sheathed, I edged along the side of the hut, its bulk between me and the barbican. With my back pressed against the wall, I peered out at the gatehouse. The shouts and screams of the six men I had dispatched had not gone unnoticed on the castle walls. I could see many men moving on the battlements; shouted commands and torches flaring.
Already the wood at my back was growing warm.
I cautiously stepped out, away from the hut. Shield high. A bow twanged. An arrow smashed into the wall next to my ear.
‘I’m a friend,’ I shouted. ‘A friend. Stop shooting, for God’s sake.’
Silence from the bulk of the barbican.
‘I’m coming forward,’ I shouted again. ‘Don’t loose your bows.’
‘Who are you?’ came a voice from the darkness. A voice I recognised.
‘I’m Sir Alan Dale – alone. In God’s name, don’t shoot.’
I took a few steps towards the walls.
‘Come into the light where I can see you. Sir Alan – fuck me sideways with an overgrown marrow – it is you!’
‘Maybe later, my friend,’ I said, stifling a madman’s cackle, ‘I am a little too cold, wet and exhausted for that sort of caper.’
It was Mastin.
Chapter Nine
An hour later, warm, dry and spooning down a big bowl of hot mutton broth – it tasted heavenly after the night’s exertions – I gave Robin the news from Cousin Henry about the list of targets the King planned to attack in the north, that Kirkton was likely to be besieged. I had already told him Fitzwalter would not be coming to our rescue and he had absorbed the information silently but with no great air of surprise, or so it seemed to me.
‘That’s Hugh’s problem,’ he said. ‘There is nothing we can do from inside here. Kirkton is strong and there are enough men there to keep out all but a proper royal army with siege engines. You were wise to send Robert and your Westbury folk there, Alan,’ he said. ‘They will be quite safe, I am sure. And by the way, it is good to have you back with us, with or without the Army of God.’
There was a faint note of disdain in his voice when he mentioned the grandiose name of Fitzwalter’s force, but it was his only hint of emotion.
‘If we surrender to the King swiftly, there will be no danger to Kirkton or our people,’ I said.
‘We will put it to d’Aubigny this morning,’ my lord said, ‘but I do not think it likely.’
The soup was warm in my belly. My eyelids were leaden and my limbs submitted to the lassitude that comes with combat’s blessed end. I fell asleep pondering Robin’s words.
I reported to William d’Aubigny, lord of Rochester Castle, on the same south tower in the keep from which he had dispatched me just over two weeks before. He listened in silence, his tawny brown eyes searching my face as if to ensure that I spoke the truth. I say in silence, for he did not speak till I was finished, but my report was punctuated every so often by the ominous crack of stone on stone. And when I looked beyond him over the occupied town of Rochester, I could see that King John had not been idle in my absence.
To our right, to the west, on a patch of rising ground called Boley Hill, no fewer than five huge siege engines had been set up in a semicircle, just out of bowshot, all being served by scores of leather-clad men in dark cloth caps. The engines, known as trebuchets, were vast catapults that hurled great stones, some as heavy as three hundred pounds in weight, from a leather sling attached to a long timber arm. They were slow to load, for the arms had to be drawn back by many ropes pulled by human muscle power alone to raise the great semi-circular counterweight at the front of the engine. Then a round missile the size of a large sheep was rolled on to the leather sling spread out flat on the ground behind the machine. When all was secure, the trigger mechanism was released, the counterweight dropped and the arm sprung upwards, hauling the sling behind it, and hurling the stone up in a giant arc to shatter against the masonry of the wall of the outer bailey.
The trebuchets had obviously been active for some time, for they were all well aimed and briskly served by the engineers and their servants, and each missile crashed more or less against the same target: a square, squat tower in the wall of the outer bailey almost directly below our position. I could see cracks in the curtain wall where the missiles had struck. The pounding from the five engines was slow but relentless. It would serve its purpose.
I tore my eyes from our crumbling outer defences and tried to concentrate on what d’Aubigny was saying.
‘… they were mostly townspeople, those who were too stubborn or too bloody stupid to go with you to Boxley. Many were sick, old and feeble, and some of our wounded went with them. I was certain that even John would not harm them, as they came out under a flag of truce. But our so-called King, that black-hearted bastard, had a platform set up before the cathedral and every man – and woman and child – that we sent out was seized and held down by his mercenaries and …’ the burly lord swallowed, hesitating, ‘… and each one had both hands and both feet hacked clean from their living bodies.’
I stared at d’Aubigny. I felt suddenly ill, my stomach moving like the wild sea.
‘Thirty-seven unarmed folk maimed in a morning. Cut up before our very eyes like so much meat at a shambles. And for what? So that this monstrous King can demonstrate to us that he is serious about punishing those who defy him.’
I could taste last night’s greasy mutton soup, sour at the back of my throat.
‘That would doubtless be our fate, if we were to fall into the King’s hands,’ said d’Aubigny. ‘Even under a flag of truce.’
‘You see, Alan, surrender is not an option,’ said Robin.
D’Aubigny left us a few moments later, and Robin and I stared out over the town below. I could see that while a goodly number of the houses had been burned to the ground, some efforts had been made to stamp out the fire. And many dwellings, shops and warehouses remained. There were rough-looking men in mail and leather armour strolling along the high street. The cathedral’s doors were wide open and a constant stream of men was heading in and out – some of them leading horses. I blinked in shock. He is using this venerable House of God as a common stables, I thought. His cavalry mounts are shitting and pissing in the space where generations have offered up their earnest prayers. Is there no end to his depravity?
‘How long will the outer walls hold?’ I asked Robin.
‘A week, maybe two, at most,’ said my lord.
A stone, perhaps lighter than the others, flew right over the outer bailey wall and crashed to pieces against the lower part of the keep. I flinched.
‘But it’s not the trebuchets that concern me the most. See there!’ Robin pointed to a low wooden structure, a plain box about the size of a villein’s cottage, on the sloping ground due south of us, behind and a little to the left of the siege engines and about three hundred yards away. It looked innocuous. I knew it was not. As I watched, a pair of burly men with long-handled shovels over their shoulders, as small as a child’s toys at that distance, came out of the mouth of the box, chatting casually to each other.
‘They are mining the walls?’ I said. ‘Already?’
‘John wants this castle – and as fast as possible. Winter is coming, Alan, and though his men are snug in the town, you know what happens when an army stays in one place too long. So, yes, he’s already mining under our walls.’
I did know. Disease seemed to hover about all large gatherings of men, although no man could say why. An army that stayed put for some months could lose a third of its strength to the bloody flux, slowly bleeding their lives away through their ever-running arseholes, without the besieged enemy even raising a blade to them.
‘Christ,’ I said, letting out a long breath. ‘He has overwhelming force; we cannot surrender; and he will have battered apart or undermined our walls in a week or two. We are all dead men.’
‘You should have stayed
in London, Alan,’ said Robin. But then he favoured me with a grim smile. ‘Come on, old friend, we’re not dead quite yet. What do you say to a cup of wine and game of chess?’
The wine was sour and well-watered to make it go further, and I was trapped and soundly beaten on the chessboard by Robin in a shamefully short time. In truth I could not concentrate. Even in the great hall, the noise of the trebuchets battering the outer bailey was a constant irritation, alarming, jarring, a pounding pulse that counted down to our doom. Robin, damn him, was thoroughly cheerful as he destroyed me in the second game we played, too. When the bell rang for dinner and all the knights who were not on duty gathered at the long trestle table in the second part of the divided hall by the big wall-set fire, I had another unpleasant shock, for the meal we sat down to was as meagre as any I have eaten: a watery stew of carrots and onions, a few slivers of cheese, rough maslin bread that seemed to be half sawdust and more of the sour wine.
‘Oh,’ said Robin casually, when I mentioned it, ‘we have almost run through the stores since you’ve been gone. They are down to the bottom of the barrels in the granary. We never had the resupply that your friend Fitzwalter promised us. We’ll be eating rats and sparrows before long, and we’ll be grateful to have them.’
I remembered a great siege in Normandy that Robin and I had endured more than ten years ago, and shuddered. I had been worn down to skin and bones and towards the end of that affair we had subsisted on a watery concoction of old bones, spiders, beetles, moss, uncured leather, anything we could boil up for some scrap of nourishment.
‘So do you think we will starve to death first,’ I asked Robin, ‘or be slaughtered by the King’s mercenaries when the castle is no more than a heap of smoking rubble?’
Robin actually laughed. ‘That’s the spirit, Alan. Keep up these merry, thigh-slapping jests and we will never have to worry about becoming downhearted.’
I opened my mouth to say something cutting – and then closed it. What was the point? We would fight; we would do our duty as men, as knights – I had no doubts about that – and then we would die. No doubts there either.
After dinner was done, I found myself standing beside Osbert Giffard, a bald, middle-aged knight I knew slightly, by the fireplace in the south-western half of the hall. He was staring into the flames with a gloomy expression on his long face, which was scarcely surprising; I doubt my own mien was a picture of joy. He grunted an offhand greeting, looked again at my face and appeared to recall something.
‘Am I right in thinking that you were at Château Gaillard, Sir Alan, during the great siege … oh, it must be eleven years ago?’
I admitted it.
‘So you know what we can expect here then.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I wish I did not. It will go hard for us.’
He nodded. ‘A cousin of mine was at Château Gaillard,’ he said. ‘He said it was very bad. Though he managed to survive it. He’s dead now, of course. Murdered by some brigands in the north, we were told.’
I said nothing for a while, but I found my hand was resting lightly on Fidelity’s hilt. I was almost certain he was referring to Sir Joscelyn Giffard, who had been with me at Château Gaillard. Tilda’s father. Shortly after the siege, I had killed him in a duel, man to man. But, if Sir Osbert did not know this, I was not about to tell him that I had slain one of his kinsmen. His remarks put Tilda into my mind. I wondered if she was still sitting under the willow by the stream at Westbury, forlorn, destitute.
I said, as casually as I could, ‘Sir Joscelyn had a pretty daughter, I recall. Do you know what became of her after her father died?’
He gave a snort of derision. ‘Oh yes, Matilda. A slut. Quite the little whore. She was betrothed to Henry, my eldest, but she set out to seduce my second son William when he was just fourteen. She can’t have been much older than my boy at the time. My wife Sarah caught them at it, going like a pair of stoats in one of the barns on the estate. Caused no end of trouble between my two boys. Sarah sent Matilda packing, straight back to her father quick as thought, you may be sure of that.’
Even though I knew it to be true, I resented hearing Tilda called a whore by this priggish old baldicoot. There was no reason to fall out with him over a woman who had sought my destruction but, nevertheless, it rankled.
‘What happened to the girl when her father was gone?’
‘Joscelyn always said he would put her away in a nunnery, get the Church to beat the sin out of her. She’s probably singing psalms and praising Jesus in some chilly cloister about now. Who cares, anyway. She was no good, that one, and her father wasn’t much better, if you ask me. Never trusted him. Good riddance to both of ’em.’
‘So you would not find a place for her in your household, if she came to you now, say, in some kind of trouble?’
‘God, no. Sarah would never allow it. She is a bad apple, Matilda. Let the Church keep her, do what it will with her, so long as she’s kept away from my door.’
I do not know why I had continued to pursue my questions with Sir Osbert – some bizarre feeling of guilt maybe, because I had shunned Tilda when she came to me in need. In a confused way, I may have felt that I should at least try to find her somewhere to lodge, and this cousin of her father’s had seemed an appropriate person to ask. But it was quite clear that even her family would have nothing to do with her. From my own experience of the woman, I concluded that they were wise. I vowed to put Tilda from my mind. Her troubles were not mine, her future not my concern, and like Sir Osbert, I should endeavour to keep her away from my family at all costs.
Over the next few days, d’Aubigny set me to work. He gave me command of a conroi of knights – unhorsed, of course, as there is little call for a cavalry charge inside a castle’s walls – thirty-two good men, many of them younger, stronger and fitter than I, and most of much more illustrious parentage, but under my authority nonetheless. Sir Thomas and Miles were my lieutenants – although I was slightly worried about the reliability of Miles, who according to his father was growing increasingly bored by confinement within our battered walls – and I was given the whole of the southern half of the outer bailey to defend, some two hundred yards of wall in the shape of a wide V, with its square south tower at the point of the V, the main gatehouse at the eastern end and the muddy beach at the River Medway at the western. It was a goodly stretch of the defences to watch with only a handful of knights, but most of them had servants, pages, squires and common men-at-arms in their retinue so, in fact, including a handful of my Westbury men, I had near a hundred under my command.
I gave half to Sir Thomas and posted them to the western wall, and my half looked after the eastern stretch between the main gatehouse and the south tower. I emptied the tower of men by day – a controversial order that had d’Aubigny knitting his eyebrows when I reported to him in the great hall at the end of my long, exhausting first stint on duty. He was seated at the table with one of his clerks examining a parchment roll that listed the remaining stores. He saw my approach, dismissed the clerk and nodded at me pleasantly.
I told him of my plan and he frowned and said: ‘Why?’
‘The outer bailey’s south tower is the target of the full force of the enemy artillery,’ I said. ‘It is not so difficult to divine that they mean to make a breach there and attack it with overwhelming force. And there is nothing we can do to stop the trebuchet battering, except perhaps to sally out and try to kill the engineers and burn the siege machines. But I am told you’ve forbidden any of our men to make sorties.’
‘No attacks outside the walls,’ said d’Aubigny. ‘I’m not wasting men’s lives in daredevil adventures that will likely achieve almost nothing. Even if you drove off the guards and burned the machines, the King has the resources and men to build more in a few days.’
‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘Neither do I wish to waste men’s lives. But only this morning one man was killed inside the south tower and another two were injured on the walls by flying splinters
of stone. Three casualties in a couple of hours. I need those men for when the tower falls and a breach is opened.’
D’Aubigny said: ‘You plan to sit idly by while they knock a hole in my walls?’
‘Not idly. The trebuchet barrage ceases at dusk, when my men and I will go into the tower and with the help of the castle’s carpenters and masons we will do whatever we can to shore up the damage and strengthen the walls. But that tower will fall. The only uncertainty is when. By day, my men, on either side of the tower, clear of the flying shards, will wait and watch for a breach. When that happens we will plug the gap with our bodies and hurl the enemy back. I need every man fit and ready for that hour. That is the moment of greatest peril. If we can stop them, hold them, keep them out till nightfall, the masons may be able to repair the breach overnight. They will have achieved nothing for their pains.’
‘You will have to be alert and quick off the mark, when it happens. You know the King’s men will be swarming into that hole the moment it is opened.’
‘We will be ready,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said d’Aubigny. ‘Yes, very good, Sir Alan. I’m allocating you another ten knights to strengthen your numbers. Sir George Farnham and his Surrey men will report to you at dawn. That will be all.’
He dismissed me and looked back down at the parchment roll.
‘Sir, might I ask something?’
‘What is it?’
‘Some of the men have been asking what our strategy is – and I do not know what to tell them.’
‘You may tell them our strategy is to defeat King John here at Rochester, teach him a lesson, force him to reissue the great charter and bring peace to England.’
‘With the greatest respect, sir, that is not a strategy, that is a series of rather vague war aims. How exactly are we going to achieve this?’