by Angus Donald
The arrows punched down on to the enemy like deadly hail, rattling off shields and helms but sinking deeply into flesh wherever they found a gap in the armour. The French began to die. Men dropped by the killing shafts were trampled by their fellows; others, screaming in pain from an embedded missile, staggered out of the ranks, bleeding and clutching at the feathered shafts that sprouted from their bodies. But after the first barrage, the French held their shields above their heads and crowded tightly together, and my archers had time for only one more volley before the attacking French were given the signal to charge. Suddenly the enemy were running at us as fast as their legs would carry them, ladders to the fore, straight at the castle walls. My archers loosed once more, and I saw another handful of men falling, dying, skewered by the yard-long shafts, but nothing could stop their momentum now. In what seemed like a few brief moments the French men-at-arms were crowding under the very walls of the castle and staring up at us with pale, furiously frightened faces, as I shouted for javelins to supplement the arrow storm and we rained down death from above into the jostling, heaving mass of yelling foemen below.
Bows creaked and twanged as our archers poured their killing skill down upon the enemy surging below us. Our men flung down javelins, spears, cut-down lances, even lumps of jagged masonry to crush the seething mass of Frenchmen — but a dozen ladders were rising, swinging up and banging against the stone wall of the castle, and the bravest enemy knights were already swarming up the frail wooden rungs with terrifying speed.
Wherever we could, we hurled the ladders away from the walls, pushing them clear with wooden pitchforks or long poles cut and tied in the shape of a cross, tumbling the brave men who climbed them with oaths and shouts and the thump of flesh and crack of bone on to the earth below; but there were too many of them. Hanno and I had grabbed the end of a ladder, and were twisting the top of it with our combined strength, left and right, spilling the climbers, when I looked to my left and saw a Frenchman come screaming over the wall. He parried a sword thrust from one of Robin’s men-at-arms and struck the man’s head clean off with his riposte. Another knight crested the stone battlements two yards away and landed neat as a cat on to the wooden walkway behind it. I took two fast steps towards him and lunged for his throat, but he was swordsman of no little skill and he deflected by point and counter-attacked with a lightning stab at my heart, followed by a hard cut at my shoulder. I twisted to avoid his blade and went down on one knee; he swung at my head and I blocked his blow with my shield, but from the corner of my eye I could see another Frenchman rolling over the top of the wall into the gap the first man had created, and another. I had to plug this hole in our defences — and fast — or we were all dead men! I came up from my crouching position and lunged; a low, vicious blow that slid through the front slits of his mail coat and sliced up through his braies into the meat of his soft inner thigh. He screamed like a soul in torment and clutched at the fork of his legs, scarlet blood gushing from the wound, and he dropped. I left him to his fate and smashed my shield at the head of a man who was just appearing above the castle wall, cutting deep into his face with the edge; he fell straight backwards out of view. But there were enemies all around me now. I whirled and hacked with my long sword into the back of the neck of another Frenchman who was duelling with a green-cloaked man-at-arms; he fell away inside the castle walls, yelling in pain. I saw Hanno, wielding an axe, cave in the skull of a man in the act of climbing over the wall. I killed a man on the walkway to my right — my sword Fidelity spearing into his throat. I blocked a wild sword swing and cut deep into the thigh of a Frenchman to my left. Another head poked above the wall nearer to me and I darted forward, slicing into an eye and causing the head to disappear as if by some conjurer’s trick. A burly archer and I both grabbed the ladder top at the same time, and we heaved it away bodily, causing three climbing Frenchmen to spin off and crash to the hard ground in a cloud of flying dust and foul curses.
And suddenly there were no more ladder tops and the wall to the west of the gatehouse was clear of the enemy. I peered over the battlements, and jerked away just in time as a crossbow quarrel clattered against the stone inches to the right of my face. But I could see that the French were pulling back on our side, taking their wounded, but leaving a score of their dead in a bloody heap below our walls.
I shouted: ‘Archer, archers…’ But there was no need. Robin’s well-trained bowmen, under young Peter’s direction, were already harassing the retreating French with deadly accuracy, their shafts easily punching through the mail coats that covered the running men’s backs, and dropping their victims in their tracks. I looked across at Sir Aubrey’s command and he too seemed to have fought off the first onslaught, though he was leaning on his sword, holding his side with his left hand, and I saw with deep regret that there was a dark quarrel shaft sticking from his waist, and a wet stain was spreading beneath his hand. He was not the only man to have received a grievous wound from among our ranks: more than a dozen of our archers and men-at-arms had been wounded or killed during the attack on both sides of the gatehouse. But we had held them off.
Yet that day’s bloody work was only just beginning. The two enemy battles on the flanks had moved out of range of the deadly war bows of Robin’s men, but they had not dispersed into the camp. They waited, loosely formed, mauled but still menacing. And in the centre, trumpets rang out once again, and with dread I saw that the great ram was being hoisted on to its huge wooden cradle under the penthouse, surrounded by hundreds of men-at-arms bearing the five-foot-high, flat-topped, flat-bottomed, light wickerwork shields that were sometimes used to protect crossbowmen on the field of battle.
The trumpets blared, the drums sounded and the three foot-divisions began to advance. They were coming at us again. I looked to the west to the sun, which hung low in the blue vault of heaven. I judged that we had at most two hours of daylight left. I sent runners to the eastern and western walls and called the men I had posted there to me; I even sent a man down to the infirmary to summon any lightly wounded. I wanted every man who could stand on two feet and wield a sword on the castle’s front wall.
The battering ram under its sloping shingle roof crept forward at the pace of a crippled old man. But it came on steadily, pushed by men-at-arms inside the housing and by a line of steel-helmeted, mail-coated shield-men on the outside. Once within range of our bowmen, we began to take our toll of these outside men, though four arrows out of five thumped and lodged into the long wicker-work shields that they bore on their outer arms, or skittered harmlessly from the shingle roof of the penthouse.
At fifty yards, we had dropped only half a dozen shield-men and, at a shout of command from inside the penthouse, the pace was quickened and the entire contraption began to trundle towards the gate at increasing speed. At the same time, the two infantry battles on the left and right, howling like mad dogs, charged into the fray seeking revenge and I realized that we simply did not have enough archers even to slow their furious charge.
‘This is it, lads,’ I shouted. ‘This is it. If we hold them now, we’re safe. Hold them, and we’ve won the day.’
The foe was surging below us once more, the ladders were swinging up against the walls and banging against the crenellations. And we hurled the last of our javelins down upon the sea of taut white faces and red shouting mouths below us, following those missiles with rocks, earthenware jugs, even iron cooking pots. Anything and everything we had that could cause harm was hurled into the boiling sea of humanity below — but it seemed that nothing could stop the fear-spurred French from flying up the ladders and flooding over the wall in vast numbers.
Boom! The battering ram was at the gate and its first blow seemed to shake the very foundations of the earth.
A roaring bearded face appeared before me, framed by the rungs of a ladder, and I hacked with Fidelity, crunching deep through gristle and bone laterally across his broad nose; the man was hurled backwards in a spray of gore, but almost immediately another
head appeared, and an arm waving a sword, too. I cut down hard, all but severing the arm at the elbow, and the man dropped away.
Boom! The ram struck again, accompanied by a hideous splintering sound, and I realized that the castle gate was not going to last long under this ferocious assault. I placed my mailed hand on the empty ladder rung and pushed with all the strength of my left arm; it lifted an inch or two from the face of the castle wall, skidded to the right and slipped away. But to my right, from another ladder — one of dozens now against the wall — a well-armed French knight, his face protected by a flat-topped tubular helmet, was leaping over the crenellations, then slicing down savagely into a man-at-arms a few yards from me. His blade bit deep, through the poor man’s green cloak and padded aketon, cutting into his chest cavity and the man dropped with a panting, gurgling moan.
I quickly turned my head and shouted: ‘Thomas, Thomas. Now’s your time! Come now.’
And was rewarded by a high, clear voice from the castle courtyard, shouting: ‘Yes, sir; coming, sir.’
The French knight, armed with sword and mace, stepped nonchalantly over the green-cloaked body of my dying comrade and came directly towards me, a challenge on his lips. His sword hissed at my head, and I parried. He swung the mace in his left hand hard at my body. I caught the blow on my shield, unbalancing myself, and momentarily blocking my line of sight, but recovered and swept low with my sword, smashing the blade into the back of the knight’s left knee. And while my blade did not penetrate the tough steel links of his leg mail, it swept him off his feet and, as he floundered on his back in front of me on the walkway, I leapt forward. My sword tip found the eye slit in his helmet and I put my weight above it and crunched the blade down hard. The whole walkway was a mass of struggling men by then, scores of Frenchmen hacking, clawing, biting and butting; locked in life-and-death combat with our surviving green-cloaked men. The air seemed to be misted with blood. The noise was appalling: screams and shrieks and the clang and clash of metal. And more Frenchmen were coming over the walls with every passing moment. Wrenching Fidelity free of the dead man’s helmet, I paused to take a fast breath and looked beyond him and espied Thomas, clutching two burning pinewood torches, incongruous on that golden afternoon, skipping up the steps that led from the courtyard to the right of the gatehouse. Behind him, lumbering with difficulty up the wooden steps, came the two burly men-at-arms I had allocated to him. In their hands, clasped between two long, pole-like wooden holders to protect them from the heat, was a huge cooking pot, a great cauldron of smoking walnut oil that had been heated to boiling on a fire in the courtyard below.
Boom! The battering ram struck once more, and I felt the wooden walkway shiver beneath my feet. A squat French man-at-arms hopped over the wall right in front of me — an axe in one hand and a round shield in the other. He swung at me, and I ducked and counter-attacked purely by instinct, chopping my sword into his outstretched arm, then knocking him back with a punch from my boar-shield.
‘This way! This way. Bring it here,’ a shrill voice was shouting. And I quickly turned to see Thomas’s cauldron-carrying men levering the smoking pot up to the edge of the battlement at the very centre of the gate — tipping the sizzling oil, perhaps half a dozen gallons of it, straight down on to the penthouse roof below.
Even above the dreadful clamour of battle, I could hear the agonized screams of a dozen shield-men below who were splashed by boiling oil: an unholy cacophony of white-hot pain. As I glanced over the edge of the wall, I saw the oil slicked across the wooden shingles of the penthouse below in a yellow, glistening, smoking sheet, and dripping through the cracks to scald the unfortunate men in the space below. Then Thomas hurled the two burning torches on to the sloping roof and with a huge, crackling roar the entire wooden structure of the penthouse burst into bright flame.
Almost immediately the men began to run from inside the burning ram-housing, discarding shields, ripping off burning surcoats, some shrieking wildly and beating at flames on their arms and chests where the dripping oil had ignited. These human torches ran, oil-soaked aketons doggedly ablaze, flesh scorching and blackening, hair exploding in a puff of flame to leave raw pink oozing scalps. Some fled heedlessly to their encampment as if trying to escape their own burning skin, while the wise ones dropped and rolled on the ground to extinguish the flames.
I had no time to watch the agonized antics of my enemies below — the battle for the walls was very nearly lost. ‘Throw them back, throw them back, kill them, kill them all,’ I shouted, and charged a few steps along the walkway to my left, sword whirling, hacking into the struggling mass of men there. Feeling the familiar black fury of combat rise from the pit of my stomach, I screamed a war cry that blasted from my lungs like a trumpet and plunged into the battle on a wave of soaring, joyful madness. I sliced and cleaved and battered. I was snarling, spitting, barging, shoving, hacking and stabbing like a man possessed. My sword swung in great glittering arcs, crunching into flesh and bone with every cut, and the enemy quailed before me. I thrust the living enemy off the walkway with my shield, or cut them down without mercy. I felt all-powerful, invincible, imbued with the power of God and the saints. I know that I received blows in turn — I saw the brutal patchwork of purple bruises later on my arms and legs — but my costly mail suit kept the blades from my flesh, and in my battle-rage I scarcely felt them. Then Hanno was beside me and we were tramping grimly forward, shoulder to shoulder, unstoppable, blocking the width of the walkway with our bodies and chopping down Frenchmen with axe and sword like a pair of country scythe-men reaping the corn. Some of the enemy ran back to their ladders, some leapt down to the courtyard floor and surrendered to our men down there; others hung from the outside of the wall and dropped the fifteen feet to the hard ground, stumbling away on jarred and twisted joints. But many of them died, chopped into meat beneath our swinging blades.
Suddenly I found myself face to face with Peter the vintenar, a battle snarl on his lips, a bloody sword in his fist — and the red fog in my mind slowly began to clear; I realized that the walkway was now clear of living enemies. Taking a huge gulp of air, I looked over the wall and saw that the whole attacking force was in full retreat. The surviving men beside me atop the gatehouse wall jeered them as they ran, our faces ruddy, and streaming with sweat from the heat of the conflagration below the front gate. My mail was thickly clotted with blood, my sword felt as heavy as a bar of lead, and my beloved boar-adorned shield had been battered and hacked out of shape and was now mangled almost beyond recognition.
But we had won.
With the sun low in the west, a mere two fingers above the horizon, I knew the enemy would not come again that day. But our victory had come at a heavy price. On my side of the gate, there were fewer than a score of our men still standing, and many of them were sorely gashed and bleeding. And below us, in the centre of the wall, the big wooden gate, our bulwark, our main defence, was beginning to char and blister and burn. Unless we acted swiftly, the fire that was consuming the ram and its penthouse would take the gate with it and leave our entrance open to attack the next day.
I organized the whole and only lightly wounded men — and there were not fifty of them among the entire castle’s garrison — into a bucket chain and we relayed water from the River Avre to men at the top of the gatehouse which they used to sluice down the outside of the front gate to keep it from burning all the way through. It was hot, dirty, sopping work, and I took my place in the chain, too. The men could only stand at the top of the gatehouse for a few moments before being driven back by the heat — but the water kept coming, bucketful by bucketful, and gradually the blaze was defeated. It was well after dark when the oily fire was finally doused, and the ram was left a charred, smouldering spine among the blackened ribs of its housing. Even then I did not let the men rest: we built a ramshackle inner gate behind the scorched outer portal, not much more than a breastwork of boxes, tables, chairs, empty barrels, bales of straw… anything that a man could stand behi
nd and fight. Hanno bullied the men with urgent energy and no little cruelty to keep them at their tasks: but even he was haggard and drawn when at last we agreed that there was nothing more that could be accomplished that night. After organizing a skeleton sentry roster, we went in search of food and water and somewhere to curl up and sleep.
In the morning, we would fight again — and I was certain that we would not be able to keep them out this time.
In the morning, the French knights, hungry for their vengeance, would easily smash through the charred gate, leap their great destriers over the chest-high tangle of barrels and chairs and stable-yard detritus, and the final slaughter inside the castle would begin.
In the morning, we would all die.
Chapter Four
In the morning, when I awoke — stiff, my whole body bruised and aching, my blond hair and eyebrows singed — King Philip and the bulk of his army were gone.
It seemed a miracle, and I gave thanks on my knees to God and St Michael, the warrior archangel, whom I felt certain had preserved us. We were still besieged, of course, but the great royal tent with the fluttering fleur-de-lys was nowhere to be seen, and more than half the enemy’s strength had departed. The siege engines were still there, the trebuchets and the mangonel; companies of men-at-arms still marched about the camp; French breakfasts were still being cooked over hundreds of small fires; and scores of horses were still tethered in their neat lines — but, astoundingly, our doom had been lifted. I watched the enemy encampment with Sir Aubrey from the roof of the tower, and though I tried very hard, it was impossible not to believe that we were saved.