Lord of the Sea Castle

by Edward Ruadh Butler

  ‘When the time comes, I shall need a warrior who will stand his ground,’ he said, remembering Ferrand’s history. ‘Until then, report to Borard and tell him that I am going up onto the headland to investigate the fort. Tell him that we need to have everything out of the ship and inside the walls by nightfall. After that you can get out on the promontory and start fishing for my supper. You will find everything you need on board Waverider.’

  Ferrand nodded sternly as he pulled a thin piece of cloth around his face to mask his affliction. ‘I won’t let you down, Raymond. I am here to fight with you whatever the odds. You will never stand alone in battle while I live. That is my pledge and, with God as my witness, I hope to die having accomplished this oath.’

  Raymond nodded suspiciously at the leper. ‘With any luck our presence here will remain secret until Lord Strongbow arrives. Only then will the real fighting will begin. Geoffrey!’ he shouted suddenly back towards the ship. A head popped up from amongst the ship’s stores. ‘Come here and bring William de Vale with you.’ He watched as Geoffrey of Abergavenny disappeared only to re-emerge on the beach with the other young man at his side. Raymond’s esquire trotted towards him, leaving William trailing behind.

  ‘Sir,’ Geoffrey greeted his captain eagerly as he came to attention. William de Vale was less enthusiastic as he dawdled up the beach huddled in his cloak.

  ‘Your sister is happy?’ Raymond asked Geoffrey as they waited. William gave Ferrand a wide berth as the leper walked in the opposite direction towards the ship.

  ‘She did not enjoy the crossing, and...’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she is still angry,’ Geoffrey said but did not elaborate as William de Vale finally sauntered up to the pair.

  ‘Lovely morning,’ he said sarcastically, grabbing Geoffrey around the neck, playfully wrestling with him.

  ‘Let’s get moving,’ Raymond said as he pointed towards the small path which led from the beach steeply up onto the headland. Why was Alice angry, he wondered? He wagered that the hero Roland, or any of his paladins, did not have his problems. Not for the first time, he cursed his awkward ways with the fairer gender.

  The twenty-foot climb up the face of the cliff was not as gruelling as Raymond had thought it would be. Opportunely, the three men discovered a path well-worn into the hillside and they quickly scaled the sand and clay cliff face. The wind buffeted Raymond’s face as he approached the top, almost blowing him back down the path to the beach below.

  ‘Careful,’ William de Vale warned as he pushed his captain back into the wind as it tumbled across the peninsula. ‘Oh my, what a place to call home,’ he added with a cynical look plastered across his face. They stood at the neck of the small headland. Two hundred paces away over a flat and grassy expanse, another cliff face fell away into the sea. Sea sprayed over the high cliffs as the stiff morning gale rocked the small daisies which grew there. Few trees punctured the landscape as he looked south towards the sea. Raymond could barely tell the difference between land, sea and cloud.

  ‘So where is this fort?’ asked William.

  Raymond turned around and, looking over the cove where their ship was beached, indicated to the promontory which pointed eastwards like an arrowhead.

  ‘Sir Hervey told Strongbow that it was out there. Let’s walk that direction and take a look at it. Keep your eyes open for the freshwater spring too. It’s on the north side close to the beach.’ It was a hard haul as they stomped half a mile into the wind through the long grass, bushes and brambles which covered the sand and shale ground, but they eventually came across the curling defensive stone wall partially hidden by vegetation.

  ‘It’s well made, though a bit low.’ Geoffrey had to shout to Raymond over the roar of the waves and wind as he laid his hand on the piled stones.

  Raymond looked at the heavy blocks and nodded in approval of the craftsmanship. ‘The walls are old but they are solid. They must have been part of a bigger, circular fort that used to stand here. The rest must have fallen into the sea a long time ago.’

  ‘Who the hell would want to live out here?’ William shouted back as another wave sprayed another white cloud of water over the cliff.

  ‘Sir Hervey said it was called Domhnall’s fort.’

  ‘Domhnall must have been a proper dullard,’ William added, though low enough that Raymond could not hear.

  The Norman captain leapt up onto the wall. The youngsters clambered after him to investigate within the elliptical fort defences. They quickly identified the overgrown remains of several stone buildings in the middle of the old village which Raymond suggested could be made comfortable with minimal effort.

  ‘We could knock down this part of the wall to make a gate, and use the blocks to reinforce the wall,’ Geoffrey shouted. He turned and waved down to the men unloading the ship on the beach below.

  ‘There are loose blocks on either side too,’ William de Vale said as he knelt on the inside of the fortifications. ‘The wind has scattered them, but we can make the wall higher than it is now should make us pretty secure.’

  ‘What about the coursers?’ Geoffrey asked his captain.

  Raymond stared northwards and did not answer. It was only in the distance that he could see woods, vast and dark which stretched in all directions. A sheet of rain blurred his sight.

  William de Vale answered the question for his lord. ‘The horses can remain outside the walls under guard for one night, but then we will have to make them stables to protect them from this wind.’ William’s eyes flicked up towards Raymond to make sure that he had answered correctly, but his captain still stared inland and remained silent. ‘Makes you wish that we had a castle here,’ William grumbled and shuddered as the wind and rain whistled through the settlement again.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Raymond shouted down to William from his place on the low wall. ‘It is a castle! This,’ he stamped his foot on the ancient fortifications, ‘will be our citadel, the sea cliffs which surround us, our impregnable motte. A castle needs a bailey,’ he swept his hands across the headland to the north and west, ‘and here it is.’

  William jumped to his feet and crawled up beside Raymond. He considered his warlord’s words for a few minutes and soon saw their sense. ‘We are missing an outer wall to our new castle,’ he said, nodding at the open grassland before him which Raymond had identified as the bailey.

  ‘Well,’ his captain replied with a grin, ‘I brought my shovel, I hope you brought yours.’

  Mud plastered Raymond’s face as he dumped another spade full of earth from the belly of the ditch onto the heavy woollen blanket. Sunlight sparkled on his sweating brow as it did on the distant ocean beyond the wall.

  ‘Haul away,’ he shouted up to the Welsh archers with whom he had been paired. He and Geoffrey of Abergavenny paused and panted as they watched the two men tug on the ropes attached to the blanket. Both archers grunted audibly as they dragged the heavy soil up to the top of the ten-foot-high earthwork.

  ‘I bet you wish you had stayed an oblate now,’ Raymond joked to Geoffrey, who raised an eyebrow rather than waste any energy answering. Perspiration poured from the boy’s brow and his thin, sunburnt arms shook with the effort of the work. Up and down the length of the peninsula men toiled in fours to create a second wall inside the first rampart, which they had completed five days before. The stone, mud and wattle double enclosure would form the outer defences to their fortifications, stretching two hundred paces across the narrowest point in the headland to give Raymond’s army extra space outside the stone walls of the tiny Gaelic fort. Work was already complete on the wooden stockade which crowned the outer earthworks and Raymond listened to the drumming of metal on wood as more of the tall trunks were trimmed and forced deep into the soil on top of the inner palisade.

  ‘Have they remembered to seed the outer earthworks with grass?’ Raymond called up to the archers’ commander, a tall, dark man called Caradog ap Tomos. The Welshman stopped his work and shouted inaudibly
across the wall at someone on the far side of the defences.

  ‘They say that the grass seed is going in now,’ Caradog called down to the Norman captain in his sing-song French. ‘A sprinkling of rain and the grass will pop up in no time.’

  Raymond grunted at the response and began to shovel more soil onto the blanket. He made a mental note to check the work on the outside embankment for he knew that if his men did not plant foliage on the muddy banks then the first heavy rain could destroy their building work in minutes. Roots from vegetation would hold together the mud foundations better than any mortar.

  ‘Check to see if we are high enough,’ Raymond shouted up at Caradog after the Welshman and his partner hauled the next blanket of mud upwards. The archer finished his exertions before disappearing from view. He returned with a long stick, which he laid across the ditch from the top of the embankment upon which he stood to the finished outer wall. Two bowstrings dangled from the middle of the stave and brushed the bottom of the ditch next to Raymond and Geoffrey.

  ‘Looks high enough to me,’ Caradog shouted down to his captain. At Raymond’s side Geoffrey whooped in relief that his toil was over.

  ‘Not so quick,’ Raymond cheerfully told him. ‘You still have to help with the timber palisade while I see if the others need help completing the digging.’ Caradog and Geoffrey groaned like petulant novice monks, but did not argue.

  Raymond knew that the wooden wall which crowned the battlements would take no time to construct in comparison to the earthworks which would hold the heavy posts in place. However, getting their hands on timber to use in the building works had proven problematic. Because the land on the isthmus was sparsely populated by little other than limp trees and coarse bushes, Raymond had despatched Amaury de Lyvet into Banneew Bay in Waverider. There the warrior had discovered the remnants of the fort which Raymond’s uncle, Robert FitzStephen, had used during his invasion of the year before. Amaury had scavenged all the serviceable timber from FitzStephen’s wall and transported it across the bay to use on Dun Domhnall’s much grander defences. It had not been enough, and Amaury had been forced to journey further into the interior of the island where the forests grew to cut down the many heavy trunks required for the wall.

  ‘At least the sun has come out,’ Raymond joked to the exhausted Geoffrey as he slugged away at a skin of spring water. The weather had indeed improved from the dreadful conditions of their first night in Ireland. Though cloudy, it was incredibly warm and the men sweated profusely as they worked. However, Raymond found the digging of the fortifications most rewarding, the pleasant summer heat toasting the sweat from his bare back. Exercise, as always, was a welcome distraction from the calculations and assessments that accompanied command. Geoffrey was not enjoying it quite so much, and was suffering greatly from blisters on his hands. The esquire grimaced as he poured water on the open wounds.

  ‘My father always told me that manual labour makes a warrior great,’ Raymond told his esquire. ‘It builds up strength better than swinging swords –’

  ‘Bertran de Born did that,’ Geoffrey interjected.

  ‘And it gives you stamina,’ Raymond looked meaningfully at Geoffrey’s blistered palms. ‘You should go back to the fort and get your hands bathed and bound. I’ve heard that vinegar can help harden them.’ He paused. ‘Get your sister to help you.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Geoffrey replied gruffly and spat on his flayed palms.

  Raymond nodded, appreciative of his esquire’s show of hardiness. ‘Good lad, but I also want you to rustle up lunch for the workers.’ He threw his shirt over his head and began walking towards the inner gate. ‘I am heading to the other end of the wall to see how the work is going there. You are welcome to come with me and lend a hand to inspect the new defences?’

  Geoffrey thought about the long, dark walk to the far end of the fortifications by the outer gate. Over two hundred paces on a cold, muddy path of little more than a carpet of brambles and hay, and enclosed on both sides by the new walls – a walk which did not appeal to the youngster.

  ‘Lunch,’ he repeated, listening to the sound of chopping wood, spades digging into earth. ‘I suppose that I could head back up to the citadel and see to that,’ he chanced. ‘Is fish alright?’ he shouted at Raymond.

  ‘Like we have anything else,’ the captain joked. ‘Give my regards to your sister,’ he added quietly as he reached out to test the strength of the timber frame on the inner gate. It felt smooth beneath his hand but for the knots where his men had sawn off stray branches. He gave it a shake but the structure did not budge.

  ‘I will,’ Geoffrey replied as Raymond pushed into the dark and windy tunnel between the battlements.

  It was noticeably colder in the tight five-yard gap where the wind howled up from the sea cliffs. The mud underfoot did not make it any easier and his toes froze as his sabatons partially disappeared into the cold sludge. Raymond made a mental note to have more woodchips and loose stones put on the pathway to make walking in the cramped confines less arduous. If a fight did occur he did not want his warriors bogged down moving between the battlements rather than fighting atop them. The mixed mud and gravel walls on either side of Raymond were cloaked in heavy wattle sheets, pegged in place by long wooden hooks to give extra stability to the structure. He ducked under the wooden allure which crowned the outer rampart and gave the sheets a quick tug to make sure that the construction was secure. It was and, reaching up above his head, he hoisted himself up onto the raised platform from where his archers would fight. Immediately he felt the sun warm his face, despite the increased breeze. The wooden planks beneath his feet creaked and he jumped twice to test the allure’s strength. It withstood his weight easily and he smiled at the good work his men had performed in so short a time. Next, Raymond placed his hands on the heavy timber trunks which defended his army’s temporary home. He gave them a brief shake but they too were immovable. Before him lay shimmering flat land that stretched into the distance where the hills began. Heat from the blazing sun made the air next to the ground flicker and blur, making the land to the north of the Dun Domhnall peninsula look like a gently rolling green sea. It was beautiful, he decided, as well as the perfect bridgehead. However, his army could not stay in the castle by the sea forever.

  ‘You absolute bastard,’ a Welsh voice interrupted his pleasant daydream. Someone had struck their fingers with a hammer as they laboured on the fortifications. Raymond laughed as he saw one archer hopping around in front of the walls holding his hand. Inevitably, grumbles had emerged from the Welshmen left behind to construct the walls. They were angry that the horsemen, who had been sent out on scouting missions, were not pulling their weight and taking their turn at the shovel. Raymond had silenced their complaints when he had stripped off his crimson and gold surcoat to get stuck into the earth-moving alongside them.

  His men worked both outside and inside the fortifications as he walked towards the barbican above the cliffs on the western side of the headland. As the captain strolled, he signalled to those who still laboured on the inner wall and joked with those men outside the defences. Some sprinkled grass seed onto the earthen bank while others drove short, thin, sharpened stakes into the soft earth in front of the wall, to aid structural strength and slow up anyone who made it far enough to attack the walls. Raymond had observed first-hand the damage that a stake could do if a man impacted with one of the savage spikes.

  The walk to the western end of the battlements took only a few minutes along the allure, and it was there that he found Borard directing the workers putting the finishing touches to the outer barbican. Raymond was about to congratulate his men on a job well done when a war horn sounded in the distance. He looked up at the horizon where four ragged horsemen approached the fort. Behind them, and wrapped in a cloud of dust were more men and animals of a number unknown.

  ‘Is it our men?’ one archer outside the fort shouted up to his captain on the vantage point.

  ‘Difficult to tell from
this distance,’ Raymond replied. ‘Nevertheless, I think this would be a good time to test that the gates close properly.’

  With one final glance at the distant warriors he issued his orders: ‘Everyone get inside the fort and make ready to repel ladders,’ he shouted. ‘To arms!’

  Raymond wished it had indeed been an enemy who had approached Dun Domhnall, but, rather than an opponent that he could meet across a shield wall, his visitor was an ally with whom he would rather not have met at all.

  ‘Those women you brought with you will be nothing but trouble, Sir Hervey,’ Raymond told his guest. He had to raise his voice so that he could be heard above the echoing sound of the waves on the cliffs below his quarters.

  Sir Hervey de Montmorency ignored Raymond’s statement and instead poked him in the middle of his chest with a gnarled finger. ‘You will have the men build sheds for the cattle outside the fort’s outer walls. I cannot stand their stink so I want them out. Then I want each of your lieutenants to give me their reports. You will see to the sentinels tonight,’ he said as he picked at the fish and bread meal which Geoffrey of Abergavenny had provided. Raymond frowned as Hervey forced a section of bread between his decaying teeth, sliding it around in his mouth until he was able to swallow. For all his time spent with warriors, Raymond had never grown accustomed to the sort of table manners which Hervey was displaying. It infuriated him enough to speak his mind to his earl’s uncle.

  ‘My men report to me and the cattle will be housed inside the bailey wall. I will of course see to the picket line, for what sort of commander would I be if I did otherwise?’

  Hervey did not miss Raymond’s jibe. ‘You will do as I tell you,’ he replied, his mouth and lips plastered with half-chewed bread and fish meat.

  ‘My men, my fort, my command,’ retorted Raymond.

  Hervey’s eyes narrowed. ‘Siol Bhroin is mine and Dun Domhnall is in Siol Bhroin. Therefore this fort, and every soldier in it, is mine.’