Warlord oc-4

by Angus Donald

  ‘No, William, I said no.’ Richard seemed a little irritated that his orders were being questioned. ‘It will be very hot, hard, bloody work, and I want Mercadier’s ruffians to bear the brunt of it. Once they have taken the outer wall, your men can tackle the keep. Will that satisfy you, you old gore-guzzler?’

  The Marshal had merely grunted his assent.

  Beyond the bellicose Earl of Striguil sat the Navarrese captain in earnest discussion with Sir Aymeric de St Maur, a Templar knight, who with another of his Order, Sir Eustace de la Falaise, commanded half a dozen black-clad Templar sergeants. Sir Aymeric was an old adversary of mine and Robin’s, with whom we were now publicly reconciled. He was a pious man and a renowned warrior, a serious, impressive fellow, and yet I could not respect him — this knight had tried to have Robin burnt as a heretic the year before, and had threatened me with dire torture. We had both evaded his malice and Robin had made an arrangement with the Templars — conceding his lucrative frankincense business to them to keep the peace. And so we were reconciled, although it could not be said that we were bosom friends. The Templars would not be taking part in any fighting during this campaign — it was contrary to their vows to fight their fellow Christians without a direct order from their Grand Master or the Pope himself. They were here as observers, to report the events back to the Master of their Order in London, and ostensibly to urge Richard to make peace with his fellow Christian monarch, Philip Augustus.

  As I looked along the line of knights that flanked the King, I was struck by the noble profiles of the men as they gazed out over the castle, and I noticed a curious thing: every man had had himself shaved that morning in preparation for the battle — apart from the Templars, of course, who as was their custom sported neatly trimmed beards. I felt my own lightly stubbled chin, and silently cursed myself for not thinking of having Thomas do the same for me. I felt untidy, and so a little angry with myself. As I had been so recently dubbed, I did not want to stand out from the other knights, or to look foolish or unkempt or peasant-like in any way. But my stubble was light and fair, and I persuaded myself that nobody would notice.

  Richard had divided his heavy artillery in two unequal halves: the weaker company — six big siege engines, mangonels and trebuchets, and half a dozen smaller onagers and balistes, manned by engineers and experts in this type of weapon — was on the left of our position, east of the main road and near the banks of the River Indre. Their objective was to reduce the outer wall, to knock a gap at least twenty foot wide between the main gate and the first strong tower on the east of the castle wall. The second, stronger artillery company — consisting of ten thirty-foot-tall ‘castle-breakers’ — was placed on the right of the main road, to the west, and they had the more difficult task of pitching their missiles in a long arc over the outer wall to batter at the north-western corner of the massive keep.

  As I watched, with the sun only a finger’s width above the eastern horizon, even at that hour an impossibly bright yellow stain that promised a furnace-like day to come, the first trebuchet on the eastern side of the road prepared its missile. The twenty-five-foot-long solid oak arm was winched back by the muscle-power of a dozen men-at-arms, the massive D-shaped iron counterweight rising into the warming air. The arm was then firmly secured by stout ropes, and pegs driven deep into the ground. A boulder the size of a fully grown sheep was carefully rolled into the broad reinforced leather sling attached to the end of the long arm. A shout of command; the ropes were loosed; the lumpen counter-weight swung ponderously down; the arm flashed up, dragging the sling and its missile behind it; at the top of its arc, the throwing arm crashed into a padded wooden bar, stopping its path dead; the sling whistled over the top and the boulder was catapulted towards the outer wall. With a shattering crash, the quarter-ton missile struck the top of the target close to a small tower, exploding in a storm of flying masonry.

  I winced, imagining the fate of the men on the wall in that deadly maelstrom of scything stone chips — the faces ripped and gashed, limbs crushed, bodies pulped by airborne lumps of razor-like rock. Agonized screams floated to us on the still morning air. And after only one strike I could see a dent in the smooth line of the top of the wall. And then a second trebuchet arm swung up, loosed its load, and a second missile crashed into the wall with a spectacular cracking boom and shower of shards. And a third. And a fourth.

  And all the fury of Hell was unleashed on the defiant castle of Loches.

  Even from our positions a good quarter of a mile away from the point of impact, the noise was deafening. The creak and thump as the arm pounded into the padded bar, the crash of stone against stone, the shouts of the trebuchet captains, the cheers of their men, the pain-soaked yells, cries and curses of men defending the walls, crushed, ripped and sliced by flying slivers of rock.

  Then the second, the yet more powerful artillery company on the right of the road began its own deadly tattoo, looping their missiles at a higher trajectory over the walls to dash against the corner of the massive keep.

  The engineers and their well-trained sergeants knew their work. I watched one team around a thirty-foot-tall trebuchet, known by its crew as the ‘Wall Eater’, and counted my heartbeats with a hand on my wrist — and I saw that they were able to loose a fresh boulder at the castle almost every fifteen beats. It was a staggering pace, and I wondered how long they could keep it up. But their diligent work meant that, with almost every one of my heartbeats, a missile from one of the sixteen engines on either side of the road crashed into the castle — crack, crack, crack, crack. It felt almost like sitting before a giant’s forge with a mad blacksmith hammering determinedly at a stone anvil without pause. The horses were a little frightened by the noise at first, but after a half-hour they became calmer, and accepted the hellish banging as a natural part of the sounds of the day.

  The pounding went on and on. The artillery men on the left smashed boulder after boulder into the outer wall with surprising precision. A few missiles missed their mark and sailed over the wall or went wide, but eight stones out of ten crashed and splintered into the same twenty-foot stretch of outer wall. The more powerful company on the right were less accurate — theirs was a difficult, vertical target — but, by my count, at least six out of every ten of their missiles smashed into the corner of the tall keep.

  After an hour’s solid battery from both sides of the main road, I heard a huge cheer from the artillery company on the left, and looked up to see a great crack appearing in the outer defences just to the left of the main gate. An hour after that, and whole chunks of masonry began to fall, almost slowly, from the crumbling outer wall.

  The King was in high spirits; he smiled and joked with the men around him, the sunlight reflecting from his red-gold hair and the simple gold band he wore to keep it from his eyes. He leaned over to Robin and, punctuated by the crash of stone missiles on masonry, he shouted: ‘I think, Locksley, that we shall see this matter concluded today!’

  ‘Indeed, sire,’ replied Robin in his battle-voice. ‘That outer wall will be practicable by noon at the latest, I’d say.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the King. ‘I agree. Noon, if not earlier. Pass the word to Mercadier to be ready to attack by noon.’

  Robin looked at me. ‘Would you be so kind, Alan?’ he said, with much more formality than I was used to from an old friend. Clearly he had still not forgiven me.

  I guided Shaitan down the slight hill to a hollow on the left of the road where Mercadier and his men were encamped. As my destrier picked his way through a sea of low grubby tents, campfires and lounging routiers — an evil-visaged crew if ever I saw one, who stared at me with varying expressions of sullen contempt and indifference — I heard another cheer, this time coming from the far side of the road, and turned round in time to see a great eye-tooth-shaped chunk of stone slide from the north-western corner of the enormous keep.

  As I rode up to his tent, Mercadier was shaving himself, dipping a long dagger in a bucket of muddy water bet
ween strokes, glaring into a polished steel helm at his dark reflection, and carefully guiding the blade, which must have been extraordinarily keen, around his Adam’s apple.

  My hand went unthinkingly to my own bristled chin. I did not wish to fall out with Mercadier on this day, a day when he would be facing mortal danger and I would very likely be safe from the fighting, and so I said in my most civil tone: ‘The King requests that you have your men ready to attack the outer wall at noon.’

  ‘Yes, fine, noon it is,’ he said, his Gascon accent particularly nasal.

  I waited a moment for any further communication, and when he said nothing but merely continued to scrape away carefully at his jawline, I turned Shaitan and began to make my way towards the King.

  While my back was turned, and I was a dozen yards away, I heard him speak: ‘Not with your precious priest today, Sir Knight?’

  Scenting mockery, I turned in the saddle and saw that he was smiling crookedly at me, the bright sunlight making even more of a contrast between the long, puckered off-white scar and his half-shaven face. After weeks of campaigning, I noticed, his complexion was almost as dark as a Moor’s.

  ‘Not today,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you keep him safe, Sir Knight. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to such a saintly old man. That would be a terrible tragedy.’ And he laughed; a horrible dry sound.

  I paused for a moment, groping for some rejoinder, but nothing came to me; and so I turned Shaitan’s head and rode on, a wave of grating laughter lapping in my wake.

  Mercadier’s parting taunt turned my thoughts in the direction of Brother Dominic. We had been reunited at Tours and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal, his feet healing steadily thanks to Elise’s charms and unguents. I discovered that he belonged to the Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Vendome — the abbey in which the current abbot, who also had the dignity of the title cardinal, was… the erstwhile Bishop Heribert, author of my father’s expulsion from Notre-Dame.

  ‘Oh yes, the Cardinal is still in very good health for his years, praise God,’ quavered Dominic when I questioned him about his spiritual lord. This information lifted my heart — the Almighty had put this doddery old monk in my path, I was quite certain, for a reason, and I felt that the mystery surrounding my father’s death might not prove so impenetrable after all. It caused me to alter my plans for Dominic. When he was fit to travel, I hoped to send him back to Cardinal Heribert with a letter humbly requesting an audience. I had asked King Richard at Tours if I might be permitted to leave the army and pay a visit to the Cardinal myself, but I chose the wrong moment, it would seem. The King was in conference with a gaggle of his senior knights and barons, and was displeased to be interrupted with a petition such as mine. He had gruffly refused my request for leave and repeated what he had told me in Verneuil: that he could not spare me, he needed every sword, but that I might be permitted to pursue my quest at a later date.

  As I headed back towards the ridge where Robin and the King were positioned, I saw that the outer wall of Loches Castle now had a gaping hole beside the main gate, which the defenders were making heroic efforts to plug with barrels and boxes and pieces of broken masonry. Before the wall, a loose and rocky ramp had been formed by tumbled stones and rubble from the defences. It was a rough and treacherous stair, but one that would make it possible for Mercadier’s nimble routiers to climb up and attack the breach. The enemy, however, had by no means given up: it was heart-breaking to watch those scurrying ant-like men hopelessly trying to patch the breach in their defences, for every few moments another huge stone missile would crash into the hastily repaired section, smashing the new wooden barricades to splinters and crushing the heroic men who were struggling to close the gap.

  The massive keep, too, had been severely knocked about. The north-western corner had been gnawed away by Wall Eater and the other engines on the right-hand side of the road and a large section of the corner was missing, while the rest was pocked and scraped where the boulders had struck the masonry.

  As I walked Shaitan up the slope towards the royal party, there was a flurry of activity in the eastern artillery company. Four of the big siege engines ceased their pounding, and four teams of oxen were led to the massive wooden frames and yoked up to them. The company was changing its point of attack. Whips cracked, sharp goads stabbed, the oxen leaned into their wooden yokes and the four machines rumbled fifty yards closer to the castle — though still well out of bow-shot. There was much shouting, and a scrum of men heaved at the engines as they were re-situated, but by the time I had rejoined the King and Robin, they had been secured in their new positions. And the pounding began anew — but this time joining their efforts to those of the big machines on the right of the road. Now fourteen ‘castle-breakers’ were concentrating their fury on the north-western corner of the keep.

  In the diminished left-hand company, two smaller mangonels continued their ravaging of the open breach on the outer wall, pulverizing any man who dared to show his face for too long, and they were reinforced by a pair of onagers — simple spoon-like catapults that used the power of twisted leather to hurl rocks the size of a man’s head — and four balistes, gigantic crossbows mounted on a wooden frame that shot four-foot iron bolts at the enemy.

  The sun was high above and it must have been noon, or nearly so. I saw that Mercadier had formed up his men, perhaps four hundred of them, and they were waiting patiently in three long lines, sweating in their leather and mail armour under Mercadier’s black banners, each dark as pitch but adorned with three bright golden coins. These waves of frail men would soon hurl themselves at the breach in the outer wall and try to force an entrance.

  It must be time to go, I thought, it must be time. The breach could now easily be scaled by an able-bodied man, even one encumbered by shield and sword or spear. I wondered what the delay was — what was Richard waiting for? — and then I realized what it must be. The King was waiting for a similar breach to the one on the outer wall to be made in the great keep. He wanted to take the castle in a single bloody surging attack, his men sweeping through the outer walls, across the courtyard and into the keep in one long screaming rush.

  Sensible, I realized. At the siege of Nottingham earlier in the year, Richard had taken the outer defences of the castle but failed to batter a hole in the stone core of the keep before the initial assault. As a result, his soldiers, once in the courtyard below the keep, had been easy victims to crossbowmen in the heart of the castle, defenders who were secured from the attackers’ anger by unbroken high stone walls.

  Richard was not prepared to risk making the same mistake again. Crack… crack-crack… crack… the battering continued, missiles smashing relentlessly into the corner of the keep of Loches. My head was throbbing from the din of the bombardment and the heat of the day. I realized I was terribly, desperately thirsty, but before I could slake my desire, at that very moment, with a roaring, tearing, thunderous rumble, a noise that seemed to shake the foundations of the world, a whole section of the north-western corner of the keep crashed to earth. Through the clouds of stone dust I could actually glimpse the interior of the castle — a hall of some kind with flapping tapestries and a long trestle table and benches.

  ‘That will do,’ said Richard, nodding to William the Marshal. ‘Send word to Mercadier, and get your own men in position. You are to follow his lads in there only after they have cleared the breach in the outer wall. You will go in when the outer wall has been taken. Is that clear, William!’

  ‘As a mountain stream,’ said the Marshal, somewhat grumpily, and without another word he spurred his huge warhorse down the slope to the east.

  To watch a battle is to take part in it only in spirit — and yet, when it was over, I felt almost as exhausted as if I had single-handedly fought the entire French garrison myself.

  Mercadier’s lines of footmen moved forward almost casually, covering the three hundred or so yards to the wall at a brisk trot. As they reached the first loose stones bef
ore the breach they were met with a withering hail of crossbow fire, and I saw a score of men in the front ranks fall. The sole weakness of Richard’s plan was that the garrison knew full well where the attack would come, and when our punch would be delivered, and I could see hundreds of defenders gathered at the breach — nearly the whole garrison I guessed — crowding together, their arms glinting in the hot sun, light bouncing from polished helms as they prepared to defend to the death their walls. A last giant quarrel from a baliste on the eastern side of the road smashed into the jostling crowd of foemen in the breach, smashing two of them away — and yet more men eagerly filled the ranks, their steel points glittering as they awaited our assault. A shout of rage erupted from hundreds of throats as Mercadier’s men, now less than thirty yards away, began scrambling up the loose piles of rock and stone, shields on their backs, helmeted heads tucked low, clambering up the treacherous rubble using hands and feet like a swarming herd of human beetles — launching themselves into the maw of Hell.

  They were rascals, bandits, priest-murderers and gutter-born thieves — but Mercadier’s men did not lack for raw courage. They swarmed up the loose rubble towards the breach in the outer wall of the castle — and were met with a devastating volley of crossbow bolts, spears, and loose rocks hurled down upon them. Many men fell under this onslaught, crushed by hurled boulders, spitted by quarrels, and those who reached the top of the stone stairway were swiftly cut down by the well-trained knights and men-at-arms at the top, their swinging swords spilling light and spraying blood as they hacked into the desperate, yelling horde of men surging towards them. Mercadier’s men boiled up the rocky slope — and died in their scores at the top, and yet more men came on behind them, trampling their dead and wounded comrades, mashing their bodies into the uneven stony incline as they forged upward, screaming taunts and lunging madly at their enemies.