The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  It was a longer climb than it looked from the base, and I went up and up, angling around the corpse of the dog, and worried that his evil, bony and fanged smile was an omen. The whole stretch stank of urine, and then I was at the top of the collapsed rubble, looking down into the town, and no one stood against me.

  The streets were empty. Well, the Greeks were not fools; they’d known an attack was coming, and every householder had locked his doors. No Greek had any reason to love or trust the Franks.

  I paused at the top of the breach, looking for something – anything.

  I had taken a dozen towns by escalade in my routier days, and the tactics yet escaped me. When we went into a town, we looted it to the doors. The garrison would either come down from the citadel and fight us, or sit tight and watch the town destroyed.

  This was a different game.

  I was going for the citadel. I had been there as a disguised slave; I knew the steps to the gate, having carried water there more than a few times just a week ago. It seemed to me that the gate might be open.

  ‘Follow me,’ I said.

  I trotted down the slope of destroyed wall, and into the undefended town. I admit freely that part of my plan was to keep moving forward so that the Turks could not take the initiative. Equally, I wanted to keep my people moving and where I could see them, so they couldn’t wander off and start looting.

  I got lost in the winding streets, no more than two men wide, with shacks and old stone and masonry houses packed tight, and wooden second storeys and balconies that touched above us.

  But before I could acknowledge my error I found steps going up, and I took them – stone steps carved into living rock. We turned once, and I looked back, and there was my whole company trailing along behind me.

  Then through a narrow tunnel with arrow slits, a turn to the left, and we came out into the brilliant sunshine. It was perhaps the sixth hour of morning; a muezzin was calling in the citadel, and we were on the main street that rose to the citadel with ramps and stairs. Between one breath and the next I knew where I was.

  I paused, because I was winded, and I assumed all the men behind me were winded too.

  We stood, or bent, and panted.

  ‘One run, all the way to the top,’ I said.

  L’Angars nodded.

  Fiore reached past me and pulled the pins on the pieces of my ruined visor. He showed them to me, complete with the piece of Turkish arrow that had penetrated the right ocular, and then he tossed it down the steps, and it rattled.

  ‘Then what?’ Fiore asked.

  He was always like that.

  No commander likes to be asked ‘then what’ in public.

  But it made me think. ‘We take a tower, if we can get one,’ I said. ‘And hold it. The citadel gate. It’s a goodly tower.’

  Fiore nodded sharply. ‘Good,’ he said.

  Mark laid an arrow to his bow, and Hector Lachlan and three of his Irish pushed their way to the front. They wore no leg harness, and Lachlan kicked off his shoes and was barefoot and bare-legged. The Davids, only two of them now, kicked off their shoes and hose and got in behind the Irish. They had more plan than I did.

  L’Angars looked at his sabatons but left them on. Young Francesco stood and breathed like a bellows. His German squire hefted a big spear.

  I grinned at the German. I barely knew him, but he clearly knew how to do this.

  In a way, we’d all done this before. This was escalade, and if there’s one thing at which routiers excel, it is this.

  ‘Everyone ready?’ I panted.

  I held up my gauntleted hand, and counted down: five, four, three, two, one …

  I turned the corner and did my best to sprint. Did I mention the gravel in my shoes? Now that I was on a cobbled street, the gravel was like walking on knives.

  Hector Lachlan shot past me in ten strides, and all his Irish, or Scots, and the Welsh.

  It was as well.

  Fifty paces away, the gate to the citadel tower yawned like the mouth of Hell.

  A horn sounded.

  A man on the walls gesticulated.

  Another horn, muffled in my helmet. At least I could breathe. My visor was gone.

  One arrow in the face and I was a dead man.

  An arrow arched out from the walls and vanished over my head.

  I was two paces closer to the gate. Hector was in the lead, flying, already ten paces ahead of me.

  Another arrow, this one better aimed, plucked an Irishman. He took it in the chest, went down in a tangle, the Welsh leaping over him like salmon in spawn, and then he got to his feet as if the whole thing had been a stunt.

  The two great doors of the citadel, solid wood and studded with iron, began to close. But they had no portcullis, and the doors were not on a machine, like one of the king’s castles in England, or the lord’s in Verona. They had the right door almost closed, and the left yet open about a pace, when Hector’s shoulder struck it.

  It moved.

  The other two Celts hit it, full tilt, and one actually bounced, but again the door moved; a man inside called out in pain.

  L’Angars struck the gate, and Marc-Antonio, and Aldo, and all three Welsh; Aldo was as big as Hector. They were all ahead of me, that’s how slow I was. Red Bill was one pace behind me, broken arm and all.

  I didn’t go for the doors.

  I went through the gap, and began killing, and Fiore came in behind me, slim and steel-bright, and as if we’d practised storming towers, I went to the right and he to the left, killing the men pushing the doors. Most of them were unarmoured, and at least two were baggage slaves.

  The thing I remember best is that they’d pushed a bench across the closing gates, and somehow I managed to jump it, in full harness, and so did Fiore.

  And then we killed them.

  The doors crashed against their falling bodies and pushed them raggedly over the cobbles, painting the floor in ordure, but I had already turned for the stairs, even as a rush of armoured men came through the other end of the gate.

  The old Romans must have been very confident in their soldiers; they put stairs inside the gate tower. In an English fortress, the only stairs to the second level are located elsewhere, to prevent just exactly what I was doing.

  Storming the gate.

  I left Fiore and the men who had slammed back the doors to fight the sortie, and I went up those wooden stairs. The second level was a barracks room, hung in carpets; there were perhaps six men – two arming, another standing with a bow, the last three fully armed.

  I roared a war cry and charged the standing men.

  The archer loosed at me and missed. My sword snapped out and his bow exploded into fragments, and I cut back, left to right, very flat. My man missed his cover, or only got a piece of my blade, and I hit his steel cap and he slumped, but I could not finish him, for his mate was on me. I covered his hasty blow and pressed close, my left hand now at mid-blade, what we call ‘half-swording’. I saw in his eyes the realisation that he was now dead before I rammed my point home like a pick, and then ripped it out and swung my hilt like an axe at the next man.

  I missed and lost my sword as my opponent stumbled back, my quillons caught in his aventail, and my own blade cut my hands. But he was just drawing, and I got my left hand on his wrist, stopped his draw, and my dagger went in under his arm and he was down.

  To my left, l’Angars finished the archer, and behind me, Aldo beat another man to the ground with huge sword strokes – heavy, overhand blows.

  I went down on one knee.

  Fiore bounded up the steps, sword all blood, and went right past us for the curving steps to the third level.

  I reached out and grabbed the emperor’s sword. The man I’d struck with the hilt was alive, collarbone broken. He went for me while I tried not to kill him, and I got a steel-clad t
humb in his eye.

  And then I was climbing the last steps to the tower, and Fiore was fighting cautiously, guarding himself from three men. Two more were down. Aldo took a wound, and then they were all dead, and we had the tower.

  ‘That took you longer than I expected,’ Fiore said. He didn’t even seem tired. He wiped his sword fastidiously and handed me the bit of rag he always carried.

  I wiped my sword and my gauntlets. Then I went to the steps. There was a fourth level.

  ‘Why did I just clean my sword?’ I asked the world.

  The third level had two doors, out to the walls, I assumed, as did the second. The fourth would stick up above the walls.

  ‘Block those doors,’ I said. I leaned down into the stairwell. ‘Block the doors,’ I roared.

  Marc-Antonio called something from below.

  ‘Come on,’ Fiore said, as if I was holding him back.

  ‘What of the gates?’ I called down.

  Marc-Antonio answered again.

  The whole tower shook.

  ‘They’ll close the trap!’ Fiore said.

  He went up the steps without me. But Aldo was right by him, sword over his knight’s shoulder like a spear, and l’Angars went up next.

  ‘Get the bar on the gates!’ I roared down the tower. God, how I wanted water. And the gravel out of my shoes.

  Then I went up into the last steps.

  When I got to the top, no one was fighting.

  The two men who’d shot from the top of the tower were unarmoured. One was dead, and one bleeding out, both hands severed at the wrist. Even as I watched, Fiore finished him with a thrust.

  The top was roofed, but open. It had hoardings, but they weren’t built out, and heavy oak shutters that could be closed.

  An arrow struck Fiore in the back and bounced off his back-plate.

  ‘Sweet Christ,’ he said.

  I cut the rope over my head, and the big shutter crashed into place. There were crescent-shaped loopholes every few feet, but the sun was cut off.

  Another arrow struck the heavy shutter.

  I looked out of the nearest loophole.

  The citadel’s yard was full of men. There must have been two hundred men, some armoured, some not.

  ‘Archers!’ I called down the stairwell. ‘Rob Stone! Get up here, now!’

  Aldo, despite the cut to his arm, was throwing the other shutters down.

  Fiore sat suddenly. ‘I’m fatigued,’ he admitted.

  I didn’t have time to be fatigued. I ran back down the tower, four flights of steps, passing Mark and Rob and all the archers coming up, and the gravel was still there, thanks. All the way to the charnel house of the ground floor, where there were a dozen corpses on the cobbles and the cobbles themselves were sticky. But the gates were closed in both directions, and huge iron bars had been slid across. Hector Lachlan was covered in blood. He’d cuts to his face, his legs, and one arm. But he was standing leaning on his axe behind the closed gate with Red Bill, who, despite a broken arm, was still standing.

  On the other side of the gate, I could hear men shouting in Turkish.

  ‘Fuckin’ lost it there aweel,’ Lachlan said, as if we’d been speaking all morning. ‘A mickle bett’r now, thanks.’

  I nodded and smiled, as if this was all perfectly normal. Right beside us was a man I’d known since Poitiers time and after, lying with his head half-severed in the near darkness, and every time I looked at him, I thought he might be alive. I couldn’t remember his name. Gaston? Arnaud?

  The inner gate rang like a bell.

  ‘Found an axe, I reckon,’ Lachlan said. ‘I ha’ one, as weel.’ He grinned.

  I nodded and left him in the darkness, and went back to the second level.

  Pierre Lapot and a dozen men-at-arms and squires were piling corpses, furniture and anything they could lay hands on against the doors. And looting.

  I tried to look on the best side of it. We were trapped, but then, none of my people was looting his way through the town, either.

  I remember very little of the next hour. The archers emptied the courtyard; ten shafts, and the Turks were gone into the stables and the other towers, leaving new corpses to bleed out on the cobbles. But they had an engine, a mangonel, and they loosed it from the stables at the gate. A pair of very brave men began to try the inner gate with axes, while what seemed like fifty Turks rained shafts on our shutters, but Rob leaned out and feathered one and ducked back before he was feathered in turn.

  They turned the mangonel on the fourth floor and shot at our shutters. The first bolt slammed in and ripped the left side of the huge oak frame off its overhead hinge. Mark dropped one of the Turks loading the thing.

  The next shaft brought the whole shutter down off its hinges. Immediately Gaspard, one of our Gascon archers, died with two Turkish arrows in him, and Rob ordered the top floor abandoned.

  The loopholes in the third and second floor were for crossbowmen. But the better archers could use them, although they had difficulty picking targets.

  The axes started again.

  ‘You know what I wish?’ I said to Fiore.

  He smiled. ‘Is this a joke?’ he asked.

  I laughed, despite everything. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Although I agree that men in our position might wish for a wide variety of things.’

  L’Angars laughed and slapped his armoured thigh. Then he pointed at my hands. ‘You are bleeding, Monseigneur.’

  I had completely forgotten the cut across my hands from my own sword. My gauntlets were soaked.

  ‘What do you wish for?’ Fiore asked, while Marc-Antonio helped me get them off.

  He made tutting noises, and I noted that he was confident enough in his own survival that he could dread cleaning my harness.

  ‘I wish we had a banner,’ I said, ‘so that the Green Count and the prince might know we are here.’

  Fiore made a face.

  L’Angars was a hard man, but a thoughtful one. He looked at me, and then ripped a white linen sheet from one of the Turkish beds, and pulled from the wall a fly whisk hung there by one of the dead occupants, probably because flies were a menace even when there weren’t a dozen corpses and a stew of blood and other foul juices on the floor. With the fly whisk as a brush, and with his own hands, he painted a cross on it in blood. The floor was covered in the stuff; some of it was mine.

  My knees were shaking. I’d lost a fair amount of blood; I was curiously cold, I remember that.

  While l’Angars did the grisly work with the horsetail fly whisk, I sat in a carved chair and ordered Marc-Antonio to get my sabatons and shoes off. The relief was almost miraculous.

  Then there were axes coming against the second floor doors. There was little we could do but wait.

  I put the bed-sheet on a spear shaft. Marc-Antonio sewed it on, so it wouldn’t fall, and I slung a rope from head to iron, knotted through knife-slits in the sheet so that it couldn’t fall.

  Marc-Antonio got my shoes and sabatons back on. Without stones, thank God.

  ‘Don’t wait up for me,’ I said, and crawled up the steps to the fourth storey. But I was no fool; I didn’t show myself above the parapet, and I tied the ropes I’d secured to the top and bottom of the spear shaft securely, and then dropped it over the wall facing the sea.

  I had no way of seeing whether it was visible.

  There was no satisfying answering roar.

  I crawled back to the stairwell, and slithered down the steps like an armoured snake as a dozen shafts clattered around the oak floor, launched at random.

  By then it must have been nones or even later. I really can’t tell you.

  Later, we’d discover the well in the ground floor; discover, in fact, that there was a whole level under the gatehouse, a cistern I hadn’t seen on my first visit and a little room. There were two
Turks in the little room – our first prisoners.

  Then one of the second floor doors gave way. We had lots of warning, and the iron strapping held. The Turks tried to throw fire through the door, and Mark shot one through the opening the poor bastard had just made.

  ‘You lads still have our ladder?’ I asked.

  The archers brightened up.

  I looked out from the third and second levels, to make sure, but it still appeared that the outside of the citadel was free of Turks. I ordered the outer gate opened – just the left half, which had a portal, or sortie gate in it. I slipped out and waited for death, but none came. I was alone in the town, in broad daylight.

  Maurizio di Cavalli, Pierre Lapot, l’Angars and a dozen other routier veterans joined me in the street. Mark and Rob appeared on either side of the now-assembled scaling ladder we’d brought from Lesvos, and it went up to the second level parapet.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. I hate heights, and I hate ladders, but the price of captaincy is measured in willingness to go first – at least with men like mine – and I went first up the ladder. It seemed to me the bravest thing I’d done that day, my back burning, my hands flayed, and sweat and blood everywhere.

  I went over the wall and onto the catwalk, and I was twenty paces behind the party trying to put fire into the gatehouse.

  They had no place to run. Our adversaries in the yard tried to support them with archery; Bill Vane shot down from the fourth floor, perhaps the bravest act of the day, exposed to archery with every shaft. But he put down two Turks and the rest began to flinch, and Cavalli and I cleared the door. But I got pinked in the thigh and my right greave got deformed at the ankle from well-aimed archery. I threw myself into the tower through the remains of the door, and the Devil take the consequence. Then I hauled Cavalli in after me, and below us, in the street, Lapot took the ladder down and came back into the tower.

  I hadn’t even thought to look up at the tower, but Lapot reported our cross of blood was hanging beautifully in full sun.

  ‘Blood’s already brown,’ he complained.

  Following Bill Vane’s lead, the other archers went into the top storey; they drove the Turks off the courtyard again. At the time, I thought it was their superior height and perhaps English marksmanship, but later, when John rejoined us, he told me that their archers were probably out of arrows. They had expended them recklessly in the first hour, and the inner doors of the gatehouse looked like a rich woman’s pincushion.