The Iron Castle

by Angus Donald

  I made matters worse between us by embarrassing her and making a fool out of myself on the third day of Christmas. I went to the storeroom in the middle of the afternoon meaning to ask her to take a stroll with me around the battlements, for the snow had made the surrounding countryside quite beautiful – and since the French bombardment had ceased, it seemed safe to do so.

  I asked the man-at-arms who guarded the door where she was and he smirked knowingly and told me the Lady Matilda was in the back of the store-cave. I didn’t like his grin and pushed past him roughly, entering the cool limestone cave with its weird greenish walls. My heart sank to see the depleted state of the stores. Three months before this place had been packed tight, with boxes, barrels and sacks of grain piled high against the walls – now those near the entrance were bare and reflecting a ghostly light from outside, and one had to enter deep into the dim recesses, down wide tunnels that twisted and turned, to find anything worth consuming. I did not want to alarm Tilda, and so I called her name only softly, as I advanced.

  After a dozen yards I saw a shape moving on a mound of grain sacks. Bigger than a woman, but I could definitely see arms and legs. I called Tilda’s name again and heard a sharp cry of terror as her face came into the light. It was my beloved and there was a man grappling with her, assaulting her, or so it seemed.

  I took three fast steps, grabbed a handful of cloth with my left hand, and pulled the fellow away from Tilda. My right fist, with my full shoulder behind it, smashed into the man’s large, pale face – a beautiful punch, perfectly timed and containing all my strength – and he was hurled away to crash against the walls and fall limply to the floor.

  At the instant of my hitting him, I realised the obvious. It was, of course, Sir Benedict Malet, and he had been trying to defile my beloved girl with his filthy fat-boy lust. I pulled Fidelity from its sheath and was preparing to slaughter the half-conscious dung-heap as he lay bleeding on the floor, when Tilda jumped on me and grabbed my sword arm with both her hands.

  ‘Do not do it, Alan, for my sake. Do not hurt him any more!’

  ‘After what he was trying to do to you? He needs to die.’

  ‘No, no, you mistake the situation. He was helping me. He was trying to help.’

  I looked at her in confusion. She released my sword arm.

  ‘It is all just a silly misunderstanding, Sir Alan,’ she said, smiling prettily at me through wide, teary eyes. ‘Bennie would never hurt me. There was a spider caught in my hair; it had crawled in under my headdress, and I stupidly cried out and Bennie gallantly came to my aid. He was trying to help me get the spider out. That is all.’

  I stood there feeling like the biggest fool in Christendom. Benedict was shaking his bloody head and trying to get to his feet.

  I said formally, ‘Sir Benedict, I must crave your pardon. I acted rashly and without thought.’ I took a step towards him and held out my right hand to help him to his feet. He cringed away as if I had offered to strike him again. His nose streamed with blood; from its misshapen look, I guessed it to be broken.

  I did not know what to do.

  ‘I hope you can forgive me, Tilda,’ I said. ‘I am truly sorry.’

  ‘Well, yes, I forgive you, Alan. But perhaps you might leave us in peace now and I will tend to Bennie’s hurt. Can’t you see you are frightening him?’

  ‘Ah, yes … Benedict, I am very sorry, old fellow, you see I thought that—’

  ‘Alan. You will leave us now. This instant, if you please,’ said Tilda, with more than a little steel in her tone.

  I left.

  The next day, when I went to receive the rations, I tried once again to make things right with Benedict. His nose was hugely swollen and there were purplish-red marks under both his eyes. Tilda was nowhere to be seen.

  He accepted my apology brusquely and said, ‘It was a mistake, Sir Alan. Yes, I understand that you behaved like a brute with your cowardly surprise attack and I accept your contrition. But I would prefer if we did not speak of the matter again.’

  I did not care much for the word ‘cowardly’, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him whether he wished me to give him satisfaction for the blow. I would have been most happy to meet him with sword or dagger at any time he chose to name. But I managed with some difficulty to hold my tongue. Slaughtering the porky bastard would not get me back into Tilda’s good graces.

  The siege wore on. My new suit of mail which fit me perfectly in August now sagged alarmingly. By January our stores were nearly exhausted. The snow fell almost every day. There were few rats to be found in the castle, and the dogs and cats had long since disappeared. Then Roger de Lacy gave the order that the war horses should be killed, one by one. A truly desperate measure – for a good war horse was worth two or three times the annual revenues of Westbury. We were eating money, or so it seemed. They started with the least expensive animals, cutting their throats and saving the gushing blood to make puddings. The meat was salted – we had plenty of stocks of salt, for some reason – or made into stew with the last of the beans. But four hundred men-at-arms take a lot of feeding and the horse was eaten up, hooves, hide, the lot, inside a week. Towards the end of January, Robin went out of the castle and into the French camp in the dead of night. He acquired a leg of mutton, a bag of onions and a loaf of stale bread, which Kit, Vim and I ate with him – guiltily on my part, for I knew I should be sharing it with the other men. But Robin pointed out that it was his meat, he had risked his life for it, and he would share it with whomever he chose. Nevertheless, I palmed a slice of the meat and later gave it to Tilda, who told me she would share it with her father. I saved the bone, onion skins and scraps to make soup for the sick of the outer bailey, for they were many. Months of bad food had taken their toll on the entire garrison, and we had scores of men down with various fevers, fluxes and agues. A dozen had died already. But, as always, our lot seemed comparatively good when one looked over the walls at the huddled shapes down the slope towards the Seine.

  The Useless Mouths were mere ghosts now, no longer wholly human. Most lay unmoving in crude shelters, listless, dying or dead, but a few wandered the snow-covered slopes like ragged black skeletons, skin over bone, their eyes huge with suffering, searching for anything that might fill their bellies. They ate each other – horrible as it is to contemplate, it is true. Flesh was stripped from the newly deceased by a mob of ghouls with flashing knives and swallowed down in thick purple gobbets. I saw this obscenity with my own eyes. More than a few souls killed themselves, or asked their fellows to cut their throats for them. Some drowned themselves in the Seine. Whenever possible, I kept my gaze averted from that terrible hillside and I prayed their suffering would soon be over.

  In February His Royal Highness King Philip of France returned to Château Gaillard with his mighty host. I stood on the north tower of the outer bailey, swathed in two thick woollen cloaks over my mail, my legs wrapped in old blankets, for hunger made me feel the cold as keenly as if I were naked, and watched his royal banners, and those of his closest barons and counts, ascend the hill opposite the castle and stand erect over the fortification. It was a beautiful day: a wide blue sky and pale golden sunshine that reminded you of happier times, but with an icy wind to tell you that spring was not yet come. I could hear cheering coming from the enemy camp, the cheering of men scenting victory, now the King was here and they were reinforced. The entire encampment was alive with warlike vigour, and it came to me that, despite all our suffering, we had been slumbering during the long winter and it was time to awaken. We had been huddled like bears in a state of sad hibernation, and our enemies, too, had been sleeping all winter long. But, with the sunlight, with the promise of spring, the bears must come out of their caves – and fight.

  Robin put it another way that evening when we were sharing a bowl of watery bean soup, a lump of stale maslin bread the size of my fist and two beakers of hot herb-water. ‘Philip has come to finish us,’ he said, with a wry smile at me. ‘We have h
ad it nice and easy till now, Alan. Now we’re truly going to earn our silver.’

  Chapter Twenty

  The King of France’s first act on his arrival at Château Gaillard was one of mercy. He caused the gates set in the ramparts before the town of Petit Andely to be flung open and allowed the surviving Useless Mouths to pass through. He even fed them lavishly with white bread and roast meats and cheeses from the royal stores, I heard later. He gave them wine, too, and sweetmeats. Most died as a result of his largesse, their shrunken stomachs unable to digest the rich food. A grim jest, that.

  Philip stirred his men-at-arms into action, too. The digging began once again.

  The French started two parallel trenches heading from Philip’s Hill, aimed directly at the eastern side of the outer bailey. The men dug day and night, protected from our arrows and bolts by thick, square, sloping, wooden shields on wheels, which were faced with wet ox-hides. The spoil the diggers threw up went to build a causeway between the two trenches, a wide earthen road that crossed the saddle of land between Philip’s Hill and the outer bailey, the loose earth packed down hard by more workmen, as well protected by mobile wood and ox-hide shields as the diggers in their ditches. A great tongue of earth seemed to be rolling out, slowly, slowly, a few yards a day, from Philip’s Hill to our battlements. I knew what would come next. They were building a road along which to assault our walls with siege towers. The road was aimed like an arrow, almost due west, at Robin’s bastion.

  This, of course, was exactly what the outer bailey had been designed for. The Lionheart had realised that the only practical way to attack the Iron Castle was from the south or south-east. The other sides were too well protected by the fall of the land. So he caused the outer bailey to be built, a separate and powerful castle all of its own that must be overcome before the real fortress could be assaulted. I knew how strong the outer bailey was: its walls were eight feet thick, it had five mighty towers from which we could pour down destruction on the attacking enemy men-at-arms, and the defenders were Robin’s Wolves – iron-hard mercenaries who had hardly grumbled at the severe privations they had suffered during the long winter. And if by some quirk of fate these defences were overcome, which I did not believe could happen, we could always retreat in good order to the middle bailey.

  Nonetheless, we did all we could to impede the progress of the earthen causeway and harass the workmen. Robin picked out the two finest archers in each watch, and these six men were declared the only ones allowed to loose arrows. They received a dozen a day. We had a goodly store of them – some four thousand shafts, if I recall correctly – but they must be kept in reserve for the assault, Robin decreed. The six marksmen’s task was to sow fear among the diggers and to thin their ranks when the opportunity presented itself. The favoured technique was to wait until the diggers grew careless – which they did after some time without an arrow being loosed – and began to show themselves, or parts of themselves, outside the shield. For these archers, some of whom I knew from the old days in Sherwood, all they needed was the sight of an arm or leg, displayed only for a heartbeat, to skewer it with a yard of ash. When they had pierced an unfortunate digger, his comrades would huddle together behind the shield and the archers would loose shafts high in the sky to drop vertically behind it. So we killed a dozen men a week, and kept them fearful. But the causeway advanced and the French responded by beginning the bombardment once more. This time there was nothing lackadaisical about their methods. All five siege engines focused their venom on the outer bailey and from that day, the crisp, repetitive ringing of stone ball on stone wall was only silenced by the fall of night.

  Carpenters’ hammers rang out, too, on Philip’s Hill and before long we saw the bones of a monstrous structure rise up on the horizon: tall, square-built, with five platforms constructed one on top of the other and connected by ladders. It was roughly the same size as the tower on which Robin and I stood.

  ‘A belfry,’ said my lord. ‘That clever devil. I have not seen one of those in an age. Philip is building himself a belfry.’

  I threw him a puzzled look. I was not familiar with this type of siege engine and a little surprised by Robin’s respectful tone.

  ‘It has been used in battle since the days of the Ancient Greeks but, because it requires a good deal of shaped timber and hundreds of fresh ox-hides and many skilled engineers to construct, it is a very expensive contraption to manufacture. Many lords do not have the depth of purse to build one – Philip does, of course – but it can be devastatingly effective. Richard used one at Acre, don’t you remember?’

  I looked at Robin and shrugged.

  ‘No, no, of course, you were sick and delirious at the time. Forgive me. Well, it is not much more than a series of big boxes, one on top of the other, all set up on two pairs of wheels,’ he continued. ‘You fill it with fighting men and wheel it to the castle walls. A door drops down on to the battlements from the topmost box and the fighting men charge out directly. There is none of that murderous unprotected scramble up the ladders you get when you are trying to take a fortress in the usual way. Though, of course, you have to build a causeway, perfectly flat, that leads right up to the walls, but Philip is doing just that, isn’t he? The devil. Oh, this is going to be a real fight, Alan, you mark my words. A proper all-or-nothing dust-up.’

  The hammering continued for several days, insect-like men crawled all over it, and wooden flesh was put on the bones of the belfry. It looked formidable, intimidating, even from four hundred yards.

  I found it deeply frustrating to watch the French preparations for the assault, standing impotently by while the diggers excavated deep trenches on either side of the causeway, which reached closer and closer every day. Fresh ox-hides were nailed to the exterior of the belfry, which I knew would make it impervious to our arrows and to fire. I could not see how we could defeat this monstrous tower when it finally came against us, and said as much to Robin.

  ‘Oh, there are ways,’ he said, coolly. ‘Nothing is invincible.’

  I had not seen much of him in the past few days as he had been spending a good deal of time with Aaron the engineer, tinkering with Old Thunderbolt, which had been moved back to the north tower, and working for long, dirty hours at a small forge in the middle bailey with one of the castle blacksmiths.

  I was impatient with our inactivity. And it occurred to me no law stated we had to sit still and wait for their attack. ‘I want your permission to make a sortie, sir,’ I told Robin one brisk sunny morning.

  ‘To what end?’ he said.

  ‘I want to take a squad of men and go out there and disrupt their work, slaughter the workmen who are building the causeway, cause terror, havoc, mayhem…’

  ‘Do you think King Philip has a shortage of men who know how to dig?’

  I scowled at Robin’s acidic comment.

  ‘I cannot sit still any longer, it is driving me to the edge of madness. I think I shall explode if I do not do something.’

  ‘Very well,’ said my lord. ‘Take Kit and half the men of the second watch and cause some mayhem. But be careful and remember: we cannot afford to lose good men; Philip can.’

  Our plan was simple: we would attack a little after noon, when the diggers had had dinner and were resting, hopefully sleeping, in their diggings. We would charge out of the little postern gate at the base of the north tower of the outer bailey, sprint the hundred yards or so to the earthworks and fall upon the workmen with sword and fury. Kill as many as we could, fire their tools, wheelbarrows and equipment and the big shields that protected them, and then get safely back to the outer bailey within a quarter of an hour.

  The plan went wrong almost immediately. We crossed the wooden planks over the ditch before the walls and, wearing only light armour – a thigh-length hauberk and plain steel helmet for my part, while the men-at-arms wore mail or leather as they chose – Kit, myself and twenty men rushed as quietly as possible towards the diggings on the northern side of the causeway. We were met
fifty yards out by a hail of crossbow bolts from a dozen men-at-arms who had specifically been assigned the task of protecting the diggers. I had counted on some element of surprise in our attack, but this was foolish of me. For many hundreds of French eyes watched the castle, just as carefully as we watched the movements in their encampment. The crossbowmen were ready and waiting behind wooden screens and, working in pairs, one man shooting, the other loading, they kept up a withering rain of death. The bolts whipped and cracked around us – and four men were down before we were within thirty yards of the diggings. Unhurt men were hugging the turf as the quarrels zipped over their heads, and the attack was in danger of being bogged down like a pregnant cow in a marsh. A crossbow bolt cracked off my shield, and I looked at Kit who was crouched at my boots, his face ice-white with fear. Do we fight on? I asked myself. Or do we go back?

  I made the wrong choice.

  I hauled Fidelity from my scabbard.

  I shouted, ‘Westbury!’ and hurled myself the last thirty yards up that gentle slope.

  I felt the wind of a bolt pass my cheek. Then I leaped into the muddy trench behind the big screen, screaming my war cry with Fidelity swinging like a flail. I split the head of one crossbowman, wrenched my sword free and rammed the point into the guts of another fellow as he ran at me. I felt a hammer blow to my shield, and saw the point of a quarrel sticking right through the wood and leather two inches above my left forearm. The crossbowman swung his discharged weapon at my head. I blocked and jammed the cross-guard of Fidelity into his eye. Then the red rage came down upon me. I chopped, I hacked. I sliced, I slew. A spray of blood half-blinded me, but I cuffed my eyes clear and killed again. I remember killing three men with three sweeping blows of Fidelity, and thinking, My God, this is easy. For they were not knights but untrained, unarmoured peasants. A big man came at me with a spade and I took the clumsy blow on my shield and flicked open his throat with my sword tip. He dropped to his knees, the blood streaming from his neck. I chopped down another man, slicing through the backs of his knee as he tried to run from the trench. Kit was fighting beside me, I knew, and finishing off the men I wounded with short hard lunges of his sword. And I was aware that Wolves were all about me, snarling and howling, battering men with sword and mace and axe, trampling them into the mud.