‘For God’s sake, open the gates,’ the desperate voice came from below him again, but Sir Hervey had no eyes for the frantic conrois left outside the battlements. He was surrounded and he did not know how to save himself.
‘Open the damned gates!’ the voice pleaded and twenty more shouted similar demands of him. The stink of human sweat and horse faeces emanating from below the barbican pulverised his senses, adding to the others which beset him.
‘Sir Hervey!’ another anxious voice, belonging to Borard, called from the inner wall. He turned around and stared across at the other palisade.
‘You need to get some archers onto the walls and kill those Ostmen. You need to do it now!’
‘Shut up, shut up, shut up and let me think!’ Sir Hervey groaned and put his hands to his face. Following Geoffrey of Abergavenny’s warning about the Ostman vessel, he had waited apprehensively for the expected appearance of an enemy fleet from beyond the western landmass, and had despatched all of the archers in the fortress to the cliffs above the beach with orders to bombard them when they made land. Much to his relief no further ships had followed the first and when the vessel had swept past the western beach, he had convinced himself that the crew would trouble him no more. He had been wrong and while he had taken charge of the work to ready Waverider for withdrawal to Waesfjord, the Ostmen had struck. Having burned his ship they had climbed the cliffs from the beach and were now attempting to attack his gates.
‘Let me think, please, let me think!’ Sir Hervey whispered again and, from between his fingers, he watched the white smoke as it pumped from his stricken ship on the beach. He could see the top of her rigging as the flames tore through it. The mast was already ablaze and as he watched it cracked and crumbled from sight. He appealed to God for an escape route, for an army from Waesfjord, or a friendly fleet to appear on the horizon; anything that would save him from inevitable death. He had seen with own eyes what a victorious army did to a fallen enemy, and had taken part in those excesses too, but in a savage land like the one in which he found himself he believed that it would be worse again. The Gael were animals who would murder prisoners with their bare hands, or mutilate them by carving out their eyes or cutting off their genitals. At best a defeated foe could expect to be sold into slavery at one of the great markets at Dubhlinn or Veðrarfjord. Sir Hervey promised that he would throw himself from the cliffs rather than face such an end as that.
It was all Raymond de Carew’s fault, he decided. It had been Strongbow’s captain who had prevented him from launching his offensive against Veðrarfjord when the Ostmen were not expecting an attack. It would have been an unequivocal victory, of that he was sure. Instead of attacking the enemy, Raymond, the fat dolt, had ventured upriver to talk to Cluainmín where he had no doubt eaten and drank his fill before coming back to Dun Domhnall with little more than a verbal agreement of friendship – and how had that benefitted the Normans? Raymond had bypassed Sir Hervey’s authority and had led the army to the brink of utter destruction.
He turned to look at his rival. He felt the hatred course through his veins at the sight of the younger man. The dullard was attacking the eighty-strong crew of the longship with only one other warrior by his side. As Hervey watched, the Ostmen quickly formed into a shieldwall but not before Raymond speared one of their number who lagged behind the rest. Sir Hervey loathed Robert FitzStephen, Raymond’s uncle, and was jealous of his success in capturing Waesfjord the summer before. But Raymond he truly hated. Sir Hervey hated his good nature. He hated his plump, jolly face. He hated that like him, Raymond was a younger son without a penny to his name. He hated that he was enduringly carefree, as if he was too stupid to understand the injustices of the world which saw men like them spend their lives in penury whilst elder brothers lived in opulence. That Raymond had embarrassed him on the first day he had arrived in Dun Domhnall would not be forgotten, but it was that Raymond believed himself to be better than he that truly crawled beneath Sir Hervey’s skin. He promised that if he was ever in a position to kill Raymond de Carew, he would take the opportunity.
Anger seemed to clear Sir Hervey’s mind and he removed his hands from his face and turned towards the warrior who stood next to him. ‘We’ll send an emissary out to negotiate,’ he ordered.
The man, Rechin, was one of the warriors that he had brought back following his last trip to England. He claimed to have served in the north against the Scots, but Sir Hervey had not recognised any of the names of the lords he said that he had served. Sir Hervey was convinced that he was a deserter, perhaps from the Normans who had fought with King Malcolm. Not that it mattered, for Rechin had proved himself to be capable and loyal to the money which Hervey gave him from that earned by his four prostitutes.
‘Why would they want to talk?’ Rechin replied and looked at the army which gathered less than a mile from their walls. ‘They outnumber us by at least twenty to one, and they’ve burned our only means of escape. It’s time to fight,’ he said gruffly and half-drew his sword from the scabbard at his side, testing the edge with his thumb.
Sir Hervey was about to argue, to tell him that it was pointless to battle such a force, but he stopped when he felt a strange sensation course through his lower limbs, the feeling that the whole barbican was moving beneath him.
‘What is that?’ he asked only for Rechin’s answer to be lost beneath a cry of exultation arising from Raymond’s horsemen. ‘The gates,’ Hervey exclaimed and leaned out over the outer wall to see the painted, wooden gateway swing open and Geoffrey of Abergavenny step out from the shadow and begin waving the conrois inside. ‘You damn fool boy, close the gates!’ he shouted towards Raymond’s esquire as Geoffrey grabbed his pretty sister’s bridle and physically dragged both woman and steed through. Yells of anger and the sounds of horses beginning to panic seeped through the hewn wooden walkway beneath Sir Hervey. The horsemen, still mounted, had knocked aside the archers and forced their way to the front where, in their hurry to escape the threat of the enemy, a bottle-neck had formed as each fought to find the safety inside the walls. Sir Hervey had to grab hold of the pointed post as the milites pressed into the small, noise-drenched entrance way. The barbican shook beneath him. Such was the crush that only a trickle of Norman warriors had been able to enter through the gate and even then the congestion seemed to have seeped between the battlements. A more distant cry of acclamation sounded and Sir Hervey turned sharply towards the pumping column of smoke.
‘St Denis, protect me,’ he whispered, his voice chastened by dismay, for the band of warrior Ostmen were no longer advancing in the slow, lumbering shieldwall. They were charging at the open entrance to Dun Domhnall like the berserkers of old. Long hair and beards flapped beneath armoured helms as the wild-eyed mob sprinted along the line of the fortifications, their shields a haze of many colours and their weapons a forest of steel upon them. A few of the twenty Norman warriors on the wall launched spears at the passing enemy ranks, but most fell short or missed the screaming, sprinting pack of Ostmen. Sir Hervey was momentarily frozen by fear, and merely stared open-mouthed at the stampede of leather-bound raiders from the sea.
‘Hurry up, damn you,’ the Frenchman finally stuttered in the direction of the horsemen, but their increased efforts to enter the fortress was nothing to do with his words, and did not speed up their progress.
‘We need archers, where are my archers?’ Sir Hervey demanded of Rechin.
‘You sent them to watch over the beach,’ the mercenary replied and pointed a stubby finger towards the west.
‘Then get those gates closed yourself!’ Sir Hervey demanded. ‘I don’t care if you have to kill all of Raymond’s men, get them closed!’
Rechin hesitated. ‘I’ll need help,’ he called over the commotion of horses and men all fighting to get through the small gap between the double entrenchments.
‘Just do it!’ Sir Hervey ordered as Rechin disappeared onto the battlements. He looked back to the terrifying charge of the Ostmen, now onl
y fifty paces away, and knew instinctively that there was no hope for anyone in Dun Domhnall. Those trying to get through the outer gate would be quickly slaughtered by the Ostman crew and then, with the defences breached, they would turn their axes on those twenty Normans left on the outer wall - and that included Sir Hervey. It would be a massacre. He pictured the brutish enemy screaming heathen curses and clambering between the gaps in the crenulated wall to hack down anyone remaining alive in Dun Domhnall.
Sir Hervey was already scrambling down the ladder from the barbican to the rampart when the first Ostman blades fell upon the archers below, and he was running along the allure towards the inner gate, screaming for them to let him pass, when he heard the Gaelic war horns sound in the distance.
Death approached the Norman fort.
Noise, everywhere noise. Even blinkered by his coif and enclosed by his heavy steel spangenhelm, Raymond was assailed by sound. Monosyllabic peals of panic and rumbling, ascending anger, the thump of running feet, the screams of frightened horses, impact upon impact of weaponry, it surrounded him. His hot breath rasped around his sticky brow, unable to escape through the tiny circlets of steel which protected his jaw and neck. It was not enough to dull his ears to the clamour. At his back, the sea rolled and tumbled and slowly chewed at the black rocks upon which he had built his little fort. On the beach the inferno still crackled and hissed and roared in glory as it triumphantly consumed the hull of Waverider. And to the north Ragnall of Veðrarfjord’s army gathered, their thick cattle-skin drums booming like thunder, intermingling with the flat, metallic din of horns and trumpets. But it was directly ahead, where the sharp, staccato clash of steel pierced most keenly, that Raymond focussed his attention.
Sir Reginald de Bloet, Walter’s father, had once told Raymond that a clever warrior should be able to read the emotions of a battlefield like a good shepherd could the weather, or an experienced sailor might the tide. Any warlord worth his salt could pick a good battlefield, Sir Reginald had told him, and even the most cloddish could use the lay of the land to his advantage, but the best captains also knew how to clear their minds and listen to the sounds going on around him, to discern their meaning.
Read the emotions on a battlefield, he had told his esquire.
It had taken a long time for Raymond to realise the truth in the old man’s advice. He had been midway through his knight-apprenticeship at the time, angry and newly impoverished by his father’s loss of the Barony of Emlyn, and all he had wanted to do was to fight the Welsh rebels who had wronged his family. Sir Reginald had prevented him from running away and joining a battle that he was, at that time, ill-equipped to win, and so he had continued his education in the ways of the frontier warrior. It was only after experiencing hundreds of small skirmishes in the hills of Gwent by Sir Reginald’s side that he had come to understand his master’s words and what they meant, for battle was not glorious and ordered, it was a confusing tumble of action where dust blinds and rain deafens, where well-formulated strategies were defeated by unforeseen circumstances, and commanders lose all sense of control over their armies. Raymond had seen how, in the heat of combat, men quickly became disorientated and had even watched as members of the same conrois had hacked at each other before realising they were on the same side. He had experienced the crush and the collapse of a shieldwall, and had seen the lost look on men’s faces as they were squashed and jostled so that they no longer knew from which direction an enemy blade would fall. Yet Sir Reginald de Bloet’s advice was true: only by deciphering the raw emotions of a battle could a commander form a clear picture and could anticipate how to emerge victorious.
When Jarl Sigtrygg’s crew had made their unexpected charge, Raymond had been forced to flee out of their path rather than be swamped by their sudden move, and by the time he had Dreigiau settled and turned, the first Ostman blows were already beginning to rain down upon his outnumbered conrois in the shadow of the barbican. Swirling dust and shadow had partially obscured his view, but he had quickly spotted the yawning gates of Dun Domhnall over the heads of the charging crewmen of Veðrarfjord. The sounds coming from that fight – as well as the effect that he could see on the agitated men stationed upon the outer wall – told him that his conrois were dying and his fortress about to fall.
Raymond had rarely been afflicted by rage, but in that moment he felt it all: every insult and injustice, each blunder and regret, the bounds of his ambition, the fury of his passions, and the depths of his hates. Basilia, Alice, Sir Hervey, his father, Strongbow, poor Bertram d’Alton, Jarl Sigtrygg, and Roger de Quincy, all their faces came to him. Cowhand, Ragnall had called him. Fury rose in Raymond’s chest and forced the stale breath from his lungs in short, ever quickening bursts. In his hand the lance was sticky with blood and shining sweat, but he barely noticed as he sought glimpses of the fight by the outer gate. Caradog’s archers had wasted their stock of arrows at the causeway, yet they refused to submit and desperately defended themselves with short swords and hand-axes against the armoured Ostmen who attacked them. Beside the Welsh, his conrois had dismounted and fought alongside their old enemy in defence of the gates, and he could even see two of the older esquires, mere boys, with abandoned lances in their blood-covered hands. But it was to no avail, for the Ostmen outnumbered those defending the gate by four to one, and as Jarl Sigtrygg’s men advanced Raymond could see twitching figures of Welsh and Normans left prone upon the ground, the trampled soil soaking deep red around them. One man cried out loud, his hands full of his blue innards as they spilled from below his leather hauberk to rest upon his lap. He cried for his mother in his native Welsh before he was silenced by a single downward cut of a battle-axe.
Raymond could feel the frenzy rising in his heaving chest, and from nowhere the words from the Song of Roland came to him: ‘My sword is in its place at Roncevaux, scarlet I will it stain,’ he softly sang the boast of the Saracen general before he left to ambush Charlemagne’s rearguard. ‘Find I Roland the Proud upon my way I’ll fall on him or trust me not again. And Durendal I’ll conquer with this blade, Franks shall be slain, and France a desert made.’
The great song was Raymond’s favourite and he had delighted in its telling when it had heard it played by visiting minstrels to Strongbow’s hall at Striguil. He had always thought it a fanciful story of Christian bravery victorious over Saracen deceit, of Roland’s brave stand against an overwhelming horde of pagan warriors. Now the flowing, pugnacious verse came to the young captain and every memorised word spoke of primitive horror, not glorious combat. The acts of Aelroth and Olivier, of Falsaron and Turpin, of Oger and Corsablis were played out before him as his outnumbered conrois engaged Jarl Sigtrygg’s warband. And in the distance, Ragnall played the part of King Marsilla perfectly, bringing the main body of his army to bear as if he was singing from the same sheet music that Raymond imagined. In this fight there was no elephant horn for the Normans to summon help from afar. He had no magical sword to give him an advantage, and nor was Dreigiau a charger like swift Veillantif. He was not fighting on God’s behalf against the infidels, and no saint would hear his cry for divine help.
I am no Roland, Raymond thought, and neither could any man in his conrois claim to be as skilled as Charlemagne’s famed paladins. His warriors were outlaws and miscreants, reviled as invaders in their own country, and treated as criminals in that of their king. They were the sworn swords of a beggared lord sent west on a fool’s quest for a crown. Yet it was not Strongbow’s ambition, but Raymond’s, that had brought the band of a hundred to this end; for he could see no conclusion other than the utter destruction of his army, his fort, and of Strongbow’s dreams.
In this theatre, he played treasonous Ganelon, the bringer of destruction on his own kin.
Had the outer gates held, he might have been able to inflict enough damage on Ragnall’s army to allow some of his people to live, to force his enemy to negotiate, but that was no longer likely and all that was left for Raymond de Carew to do was to die be
side his comrades.
‘Shame take him that goes off: if we must die, then perish one and all!’ he sang, again from the Song of Roland, and thought once more of sweet Basilia de Quincy, of how she looked at the feast in Striguil. She would never understand that it was for her that he had set himself upon this path, to prove that he was a man deserving of her love, that he was a man worthy of her, a captain who warranted the hand of an earl’s daughter. That dream lay in tatters. All his hopes relied on him winning great renown on the field of battle. But there could be no victory against this enemy. A hundred could not defeat five thousand.
It was for glory that Raymond charged; for ambition and greed, for revenge, and for love. It was for honour and hate and friendship. He felt the emotions collect in his throat and issue forth in an incoherent scream as his heels clipped Dreigiau’s flanks and they jumped forward together, gaining speed as they cantered towards the huddle of Ostmen. He had no plan and no expectation of survival. He simply wanted to lose himself in the fight.
‘Montjoie!’ he screamed Roland’s war cry as he stabbed his lance downwards towards the first Ostman who turned to meet him. As the bearded warrior tumbled to the ground, Dreigiau stamped on him while Raymond deftly reversed his weapon and struck three times at another assailant who came from his right side.
Lord of the Sea Castle Page 33