by Angus Donald
I thought I’d gone too far but d’Aubigny smiled.
‘Very well, Sir Alan, if you prefer plain speaking, I will indulge you. Though I will leave it up to your conscience whether to tell your men. Our strategy is to hold the King here for as long as we can, to defy him and deny him this castle until Lord Fitzwalter or any of our other so-called friends grows a pair of balls and comes to our rescue. How likely is that to happen? Well, that is in God’s hands. But our duty is clear. We deny John this castle until the last of us lies dead among the ruins. Or, more likely, till we can no longer stand from lack of food and are too weak to defend ourselves.’ He tapped the parchment roll under his hand. ‘Our strategy is to die here. And to die hard. Is that plain enough for you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
My own strategy of emptying the south tower by day was sound enough, but King John’s response set it almost at nought. As Robin had rightly said, John wanted this castle and he wanted it now.
His men kept up a series of attacks on the southern walls, four or five every day that had my men running here and there to respond to the peril. None of the attacks was pressed hard enough to present a real danger of the enemy actually over-running the walls, yet each one had to be treated seriously. Two score or so of men-at-arms carrying ladders, or knotted ropes with iron hooks attached, would run screaming at a section of outer bailey wall under a lethal cloud of crossbow bolts from the town walls and would attempt to scale it and come at us with the most foolhardy kind of bravery. When the alarm was called, our knights would immediately rush to the section under attack, hurl boulders or sometimes boiling oil or water down on to the attackers’ heads, loose a few crossbow bolts and push the scaling ladders from the walls with pitchforks. The handful of the enemy who actually reached the top of the wall would be cut down in instants by half a dozen of my young knights. It might last for a quarter of an hour, perhaps even less, but this was a furious period of blood and noise and blurring steel, of screaming men and pumping hearts, before the surviving foes below the wall would retreat, shaking their fists and hauling their wounded behind them as they ran back to the safety of the town.
Each attack like this, while a small victory for us, might cost a man or two injured or, mercifully less frequently, dead; some to crossbow quarrels from the town walls, some to wounds from the sword-storm on our walls, some just from a well-aimed javelin. And, despite the hundreds of King’s men we cut apart, crushed, boiled alive or hurled to their deaths from the walls, this steady erosion of our manpower, day after day, was lethal to our cause. We had fewer than two hundred men under arms in the whole castle garrison and every man who died was irreplaceable.
John had thousands of men, mostly mercenaries who had no claim on his loyalty beyond their pay, and he had more than enough mailed bodies to waste a few hundreds against our walls. And from atop the keep, where Robin’s archers had been posted, from time to time yet more companies of men were spotted coming up the road from Dover to join the King’s banner.
Worse than the constant draining away of our men was the grinding fatigue we all suffered day after day. My forty knights and their serving men had to be awake at all hours and ready for battle at a moment’s notice, for these petty assaults took place by night as well as in the daylight hours, and every time the cry of ‘To arms, to arms,’ was heard echoing along battlements, we must all of us haul ourselves to our feet and run in the direction of the alarm and enter the fray once more.
I spelled the men, each day pulling one man in three from the battlements to give them a few hours of rest in the straw-filled barns inside the walls, but that made the scramble to repel an attack even more frantic from those fewer numbers still on the watch. And with each day that passed, the tired men on duty were slower to react to an alarm and slower in the mêlée, too. More men died. More men were needlessly wounded.
The King’s strategy to wear us down was succeeding. All day long the five trebuchets beat again and again, crack, crack, crack, against the crumbling corners of the south tower. The relentless noise of our coming destruction wore away at our spirits, at our courage, like the missiles, chip-chip-chipping away at the stones of the tower. The knowledge that our doom approached a little closer, every day, every hour, made even the bravest knight a little more fearful, brought a little closer to his own breaking point.
But even worse than the fatigue was the hunger.
The store barrels were empty. There was no flour left to make bread. The root vegetables were almost gone. Every rat, cat and dog in the castle had long disappeared.
Hunger was our constant companion, the ache of empty bellies, the lassitude and weakness of our limbs. My mind dwelt on the many feasts I had enjoyed in my long life, of dripping roasts, pigeon pies and milk puddings, of fresh bread smothered in butter and sweet preserves, of fat cheeses, lush fruit, salty ham. I wanted to gorge till I puked, then sleep for a year and a day.
Every day at noon, the castle cooks would haul a cauldron of hot soup up to the walls, a salty slop thickened with a handful of dusty oats that contained less and less nourishment as the days went by – a scrap of onion each, perhaps, a tiny piece of turnip. And yet when we heard the noon bell and queued for it, bowl in hand, there was not a man whose mouth was not awash in anticipation.
After I had been captain of the southern walls for just over a week, they started killing the horses.
Chapter Ten
Horse meat is good. If you have never had to eat it, and I pray you are so fortunate, I may tell you it tastes very similar to beef, but gamier. There is a guilty tang, too, a sickening sweetness at the back of the throat, that comes with spooning down a bowl of something that was once a loyal companion to a man.
William d’Aubigny ordered that his own destrier, a fine black stallion worth a hundred pounds at least, the equivalent of ten years’ revenue from my lands at Westbury, be killed first. That was the mark of the man – once the decision had been taken to begin slaughtering these noble beasts, he would not let another’s valuable mount feed the garrison before surrendering his own to the castle butchers. It was a gesture, for we knew that all the horses would be eaten eventually, yet it was well received by the knights under his command. When we wolfed down our horse-meat soup at noon and sipped our cups of water, tinged pink with a few drops of wine, Sir George Farnham, a bluff, stout fellow, called out a toast to our gallant commander, praising his generosity and valour. It put heart into us all – just those few scraps of good red meat – and when the alarm was sounded a few hours later for an assault on the main gatehouse, I noticed a new vigour in the knights as they contained and countered the attack of the onrushing Flemings.
It did not last. For a fighting man, one bowl of soup a day, even fortified with scraps of horse meat, is not enough to keep his body strong and his courage high.
I took a rare break from the walls on the eleventh day of November. It was the feast day of St Martin – a Roman knight who renounced violence and became a peace-loving bishop. I wondered if there were a lesson for me there and thought about my conversation with Abbot Boxley – although I could not renounce my duty, nor could I celebrate the saint’s life with a feast. In fact, I quit my post because I needed to see Robin about an urgent matter that I could not discuss with anyone else. I had done my tally at midnight of the men who were still fit to fight – and come up one man short. He was still missing the next morning – and I felt a chill in my soul. I left Sir George in command of my section of wall and sought out my lord in his post at the top of the southern tower of the keep.
I found him there with Mastin and a broad-chested, brown-faced man called Simeon, the archer captain’s second-in-command, and a dozen bowmen on duty, gazing beyond the outer bailey walls below and over at Boley Hill, where the trebuchets were being served. As I came up through the arched doorway, Mastin was in the act of drawing a bow – and what a bow it was. Bigger than any I had seen before. The stave was more than seven feet in length and as thick as my wri
st at the centre. I could see the huge muscles on Mastin’s arms and shoulders bulge and writhe as he pulled this beast of a weapon back to its fullest extent. He loosed and the arrow flew up and away over the walls, over the dry moat, over a straggle of huts before the semicircle of trebuchets, and flashed down to skewer the lower leg of a man loading one of the catapults. The man’s cry of pain was audible even at this distance: a high animal yowl. Robin and Mastin – his hairy face sweating with the effort of the shot – congratulated each other excitedly.
I had never seen an arrow shot so far before – three hundred yards, maybe even a shade more – and to hit its target at the other end was not far short of miraculous.
I joined in the words of praise.
‘It’s no more than dumb fucking luck,’ said Mastin. ‘We allow ourselves six arrows a day, no more, and I’ve only hit two of the bastards in the past week.’
‘Are we short of shafts, then?’ I asked.
‘Oh, we’re not too badly off,’ said Robin, taking the bow from Mastin. I watched as Robin selected an arrow, nocked it and attempted to haul back the cord. My lord was a strong man – no one could doubt it. But he only managed to pull the cord about halfway back, a foot and a half, perhaps, before loosing. Even that half-draw left him purple in the face and panting. The shaft sped over the wall of the outer bailey and lost itself in the scrubby no man’s land on the other side of the ditch.
Robin smiled ruefully at Mastin and his second, Simeon. ‘You need to build a bit more beef up here, sir,’ said Simeon, slapping his own foot-thick chest.
I saw then how gaunt Robin’s face and body had become after weeks without adequate food. ‘That was a foolish waste of an arrow, for sure,’ he said. ‘And we must husband them for the assault. I think that’s enough for today, Mastin. So, Alan, tell me: how goes it on the walls? Is that south tower ready to come down yet?’
Exactly at that moment, a trebuchet ball crashed into the outer bailey’s south tower below, creating a vast puff of stone dust, and I swear the whole structure shook with the impact like a willow trunk in a gale.
‘Can’t be long,’ I said. ‘But I’m not here about that. Can I speak to you in private, my lord?’
Robin waved everyone away and we went to the corner of the roof out of earshot.
‘It’s about Miles,’ I said.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘What do you mean gone? Damn you, Alan – is this how you tell me my son is dead …’ Robin’s face was as pale as milk.
‘Not dead, as far as I know. Gone. Disappeared. He hasn’t been seen since he finished sentry duty at dusk last night.’
Robin looked at me. ‘He’s not among the dead and wounded – you are sure?’
‘I checked – twice. I think, Robin, I think he has gone over the walls.’
I let my words sink in. Robin let out a deep breath.
‘Don’t mention this to anyone,’ he said. ‘If you are asked, say he is with me. If it became known that he deserted … My God, d’Aubigny would hang him for sure. And I dare not think what King John would do if he were caught.’
‘I won’t tell a soul, I swear it.’
A little after dusk, I was inside the outer bailey’s south tower, on the middle floor with a mason and his two assistants. A huge crack ran diagonally up the wall, from the floor below to the floor above. At its widest point I could get my clenched fist inside the fissure easily.
‘Yes, sir, we can fill the crack with mortar – but it won’t get anywhere near dry overnight,’ the mason was saying. He was a dusty little man called Jackson. ‘And when they start again tomorrow, most of it will just slop straight out again. But I suppose it might make it a bit stronger, for a little while. But I would not put my trust in it.’
‘Could we set fires or braziers to speed the drying?’ I said.
‘Might work,’ he said, scratching his unshaven chin. ‘But lime mortar can take weeks, even months, to dry properly – and that’s in the good warmth of high summer. Still, I don’t see that it could hurt to try …’
At that moment, Sir Thomas’s head poked round the door.
‘Sir Alan,’ he said, ‘I think you had better come and see this.’
I gave the mason his orders and followed Thomas out of the tower and along the south-western stretch of wall to a wooden hut that protected sentries from the worst of the weather. Inside, I found Miles with William d’Einford and Thomas de Melutan sitting on stools against the wall. They were devouring a whole roast chicken and a loaf of bread, tearing at the food with their bare hands.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ I said to the boy.
‘Foraging. In the town,’ he said, and gave me his cheekiest grin. ‘There’s plenty of food in the sack, Sir Alan, that is if you’re feeling at all peckish.’
I opened the sack and saw, all jumbled together, a dozen loaves of bread, another cooked chicken, a whole ham, some small round cheeses and about a score of green apples. My mouth flooded with water; my belly mewed like a begging cat.
‘Right, all this goes to d’Aubigny,’ I said, swallowing thickly. ‘He will distribute it as he sees fit.’ I plucked a half-eaten chicken leg out of Miles’s hand, tossing it into the sack.
‘You will come with me, now,’ I said to him, ‘your father is expecting you.’
I dragged a protesting Miles across the outer bailey, into the keep and up to the roof of the south tower.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said Robin icily, when presented with his errant son, who was half-smirking, half-cowering as if expecting a blow.
I left them together and lugged the sack of food back down the stairs, heading for d’Aubigny’s private apartments. I heard the terms ‘irresponsible … ill-disciplined … disobedient … and God-damned reckless’ floating down the spiral stair behind me, and then the words ‘foraging … depriving the enemy of stores … legitimate tactic of war … and I was so hungry’ wafting on their heels.
It occurred to me then, as I hefted that life-giving sack down the stairway, that Miles’s exploit – sneaking both in and out of the castle and returning with an abundance of enemy food – was exactly the sort of madcap thing his father would have done at his age. Did Robin recognise it? Probably not. But I could not think too badly of Miles for his actions. He had been reckless but there was no denying the boldness, imagination and skill with which he had achieved his ends.
Truly, the acorn does not fall far from the tree.
I was tempted by that sack, I will admit. I was as hungry as anyone and I had a week’s worth of food in my hands. Divided between the garrison it would mean less than a mouthful each. By God, I was sorely tempted. It crossed my mind that nobody would ever know if I finished off Miles’s chicken leg before I handed the rest of the sack over to d’Aubigny. Perhaps it was even my due as captain of the walls? Perhaps I deserved it for all my efforts. But I resisted temptation. With difficulty. And, ultimately, I was glad I did.
I gave the heavy sack to the constable of the castle and he greeted the gift with wonder. ‘I won’t ask where you got this, Sir Alan, for I suspect that I would not like the answer at all. My order stands that there must be no sorties, no sallies, no excursions outside the walls by any man. But thank you,’ said d’Aubigny. ‘It will make a welcome change from horse-meat slop for the wounded.’
I did not trust myself to speak, I merely nodded, mourning the half-eaten chicken leg, and turned to go.
At that moment, I felt a stony thump under my boot soles, heard a sound like the tearing of a mountain and a great rumbling crash. I spun away from d’Aubigny and peered out of the window of his chamber. But all I could see was a huge cloud of yellow-grey dust where the outer bailey’s south tower had once been. I rushed for the doorway.
‘Sir Alan,’ my commander said, as I reached the door. I turned in time to see a small round object coming at me at some speed. I grabbed it out of the air a few inches from my face. It was an apple, large, crisp, green a
nd bursting with sweet-tart juice. I took a bite. I swear that right then it tasted more delicious than anything I had ever eaten.
‘To keep your strength up,’ said d’Aubigny. ‘You’re going to need it today.’
Back on the walls of the outer bailey, I ran along the parapet into the slowly clearing dust cloud shouting: ‘To arms, to arms!’ but I saw that it was hardly necessary. Sir George Farnham had the men rallied and they were converging on the breach where the tower had stood.
And not a moment too soon. Even before the fog of masonry grit cleared, I could see the enemy advancing on the breach from several directions – for the trebuchets had smashed a hole twenty paces wide in the wall of the outer bailey, and in the place of the south tower was now a saddle of rubble a mere ten foot above the surface of the outer bailey. The tumbling of the wall had created a rough natural stair of rubble astride the fortification. An active man could easily scramble from one side to the other, from the dry moat to the interior of the castle in about the time it takes for a man to say a Pater Noster. If he was allowed to pass without a fight, that is.
On the eastern side of the saddle, looking west along the wall, I could just make out Thomas Blood and a band of twenty or so men-at-arms, covered from head to toe in a fine powder and scrambling into the breach.
Sir Thomas and I both stepped gingerly on to the inward rubble slope at the same time, the loose stones shifting dangerously under our feet. We met in the middle, at the highest point of the breach, and looked south over the dry moat, now half-filled with broken rock, and beyond it, past an open space of mud and scrub, through a gate in the town wall and down a broad street – along which marched a company of spearmen two hundred strong in yellow-and-black surcoats. They were a mere hundred and fifty paces away and coming on at a trot. To my right, beyond the trebuchets, I could see a crowd of horsemen with nodding plumes and tall lances, mustering with many an excited cry. And crossbowmen, dozens of those evil bastards, creeping towards us from the town gate in ones and twos, carrying their huge shields.