He took the wine from her, carefully. She stayed quiet awhile; when she spoke again she was half asleep. ‘Do you remember years ago telling me a story?’ she asked. ‘About how my great uncle Jesse broke his heart when my grandmother wouldn’t marry him, and killed his friend, and how that was somehow the start of everything he did… It seemed so real, I’m sure that was how it must have been. Well, I can finish it for you now. You can see the Cause and Effect right the whole way through. If we… won, it would be because of grandfather’s money. And the money’s there because of Jesse, and he did it because of the girl… It’s like Chinese boxes. There’s always a smaller one inside, all the time; until they get so small they’re too small to see but they keep on going down and down…’
He waited; but she didn’t speak again.
For days the castle rang with activity; Eleanor’s messengers rode out to scour the countryside around bringing in more men, provisions, meat on the hoof. The great lower bailey was prepared for the animals, pens and hurdles lined against the outer walls. The steamers toiled once more bringing cattle cake and baled hay from Wareham, chugging down the road with trailers empty, clanking back through the outer gate to discharge their cargo in heaps on the flattened grass. Everything possible was shifted under cover; what stacks remained exposed were covered by tarpaulins, and turves and stone rubble strewn on top.
The fodder would be a prime target were the enemy to bring fire machines with them. All day the hoists clattered and most of the night too, taking the provisions down to the cellars, bringing up quarrels for the crossbowmen, powder and ball for the harquebusiers, charges for the great guns. The semaphores seldom stopped. The country was aflame; Londinium was arming, levies from Sussex and Kent were marching towards the west. Then came worse news. From France, from the castles of the Loire, men were streaming to fight in the Holy Crusade while to the south a second armada was embarking for England. To Eleanor, John sent no word; but his intentions were plainer than speech. Her Ladyship redoubled her efforts.
Steamers towing vast iron chains scythed the banks of the wet ditch; working parties fired the scrub from the castle motte, the bushes and trees that had seeded themselves there over the years; and down over the blackened grass went ton after ton of powdered chalk. The slopes would glow now in starlight, showing up the silhouettes of climbing men. Through it all the sightseers came, parking their little cars in the village square, flooding into the castle, through the gates and across the baileys, staring at the guns and the sentries on the walls, poking their noses into this, their prying fingers into that, impeding everybody nearly all the time. Eleanor could have closed her gates; but pride forbade her. Pride, and the counsel of the seneschal. Let the people see, he murmured. Invite their sympathy, appeal to their understanding. Her Ladyship would need all the support she could get from the country in the coming months.
On the thirtieth day after the massacre the seneschal rose and dressed at dawn. He walked down softly through the still-sleeping keep, through chambers and corridors let honeycomb-fashion into the huge walls, past arrow slits and fenestellas pouring livid grey light. Past a sentry, dozing at his post; the man jerked to attention, bringing his halberd shaft ringing down onto stone. Sir John acknowledged the gesture, raising a hand thoughtfully, mind far away.
Outside, in the raw air of the upper bailey, he paused. Round him the curtain walls loomed from the night, massive shadows topped by the tinier shadows of men; the breath of the guards showed in wisps above their heads. Far below huddled the roofs of the village, dim and blue, odd lights burning here and there; out on the heath a solitary glow showed him where some mason’s boy trudged lantern in hand to work. He turned away, eyes seeing but not recording, mind locked inward.
At this dawn hour it seemed as always that Time might pause, turning and flowing in on itself before speeding again, urging in the new day. The castle, like a great dim crown of stone, seemed to ride not a hill but a flaw in the timestream, a node of quiet from which possibilities might spread out limitless as the journeyings of the sun. No one, not the seneschal and certainly no one else, could have understood his thoughts at that time. The old thoughts, the first thoughts of the first people ever; for the seneschal was of the ancient kind.
At the tip of the second bailey the squat Butavant tower jutted over the precipice of burned grass like a figurehead from the prow of a ship. The seneschal paused at the lower door, queer eyes on the horizon, swivelled slowly to face the Challow tower. And instantly, gracefully, the jointed arms began to flap.
He climbed the tower steps, feet shuffling on stone, hearing a drum behind him and a voice. A Page-Signaller scuttled across the bailey; something not more than a lad, hose wrinkled and tabard askew, message pad in hand, knuckling his eyes. Far out over the heath, in the cobalt intermingling of sea and sky, a light gleamed and was lost. Then another and another, and a patch of lighter dark that could have been a sail. As if a fleet had come to anchor, lay dressing its ranks and waiting.
At the top of the stair a locked door gave access to a tiny cell set in the thickness of the stone. To that door, the seneschal alone held a key. The key itself was strange, a little round-headed thing that carried instead of wards a wavy crest of brass. He inserted it in the lock, twisted; the door swung open. He left it ajar behind him; his hands worked deftly, assembling the apparatus of magic the Popes in their wisdom had long since disallowed.
Shapes of brass and shapes of mahogany tinkled and clattered; a tiny spark flashed blue; his name and questionings fled into an undiscovered Ether, invisible, silent, faster by a thousand times than the semaphores. He smiled quietly, took down paper and stylus and began to write. Footsteps clunked overhead; a voice called urgently. He ignored it, lost to sensation, all his being focused on the thing that sparked and flashed between his fingers.
Behind him the door swung inward. He heard the intake of breath, the scrape of a shoe on stone; he half turned, papers in his hands. Behind him the thing on the table clacked shrilly, untouched and unbidden. He smiled again, gently. ‘My Lady..-.’
She was backing off staring, hand to her throat clutching the wrap she had flung across her shoulders. Her voice husked hollow in the shaft. ‘Necromancy…’
He left the machine, pattered after her. ‘Eleanor…" He caught her at the bottom of the stair. ‘Eleanor, I thought you had more wit…’ He took her wrist, drew her after him. She moved unwillingly, pulling back; above her the device banged and tutted frantically. She edged round the door, lips parted, one hand flat against the stone, saw the little thing chattering devil-possessed. He started to laugh.
‘Here. It isn’t good for your people to see.’ The door was closed behind her; the lock shut with a snap. Her mouth trembled; she couldn’t take her eyes from what lay on the bench. ‘Sir John,’ she said falteringly.’ What is it…?’
He shrugged impatiently, hands busy. ‘A manifestation of the electric fluid; known to the Guild now for a generation.’
She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. She said wonderingly, ‘This is a
language?’ She drew nearer the bench, no longer afraid.
‘Of a sort.’
‘Who speaks it to you?’
He said shortly, ‘The Guild of Signallers. But that is unimportant. My Lady, the semaphores will clack all day. That is what they will say; are saying…’
Before he could finish a voice sounded over their heads; it came thickly through the
stone, full of resonance and wonder.
‘Caerphilly has taken arms…!’
She jerked sharply, staring up; her mouth moved, but no sound came.
‘And Pevensey,’ said the seneschal, reading. ‘And Beaumaris, Caerlon, Oxford… Bodiam has declared for the King, Caernarvon has burned its charter. And Colchester, Warwick, Framlingham; Bramber, Cardiff, Chepstow…’
She heard no more but ran to him, laughing and swinging her arms round his neck, waltzing round in the tiny space, upsetting wires and batte
ries and coils. And all day long the noise from the hill went on as the messages came lagging through on the old arms that were no longer of any use. All day till nightfall and far into the dark, spelling out the names in streaming arcs of flame; the old places, the proud places, Dover and Harlech and Kenilworth, Ludlow, Walmer, York… And from far out of the west, calling through the sea mist, the words that were like the tinkling of old armour; Berry, Pomeroy, Lostwithiel, Tintagel, Restormel; while the lights crawled forward from the heath, and far out on the sea. At midnight the arms stopped working; by next morning Corfe Gate was invested, and nothing moved on the semaphore towers but the swaying bodies of men.
The rising of the royal and baronial strongholds in every part of the country spared the defenders the main weight of the armada; the armies pushed inland, moving hurriedly and by night, harried by Eleanor’s artillery as they passed through the gap in the hills. Some five hundred men remained to lay siege to Corfe. They brought with them or built on the spot a whole range of engines, ballistas, and mangonels; and these with the three great trebuchets Persuader, Faith of Rome, and Dierwolf made play at the walls from the valley and surrounding hillsides. But so extreme was the range, and so great the elevation, that few of the missiles so much as cleared the outer curtain. Mostly they struck the stone below the battlements, bouncing back with hollow booms; the odd shots that landed in the baileys were welcomed by Eleanor’s men as additions to their own supplies.
The machines set up by Her Ladyship had better sport, and with the great guns caused such havoc that the lines of the besiegers were soon withdrawn beyond the wet ditch. From there the Pope’s men mounted attack after attack, varying their methods in the hope of taking the defenders by surprise; but they were invariably driven back. Mantlets were employed, each carried on the backs of a dozen men; sharpshooters blew off the legs of the wretches beneath, tumbling them and their engines back into the stream, leaving long swathes of redness on the flanks of the mount.
An attempt at mining was watched with more sympathy than concern, while belfries could only be employed against the outer gate. One was constructed, out on the heath beyond long cannon-shot; a heavy tower hung with wetted hides and with three storeys inside it for snipers. It made its approach one dawn, rumbling through the village street, propelled by a hundred sweating soldiers; but Growler, entrenched behind a triple line of sandbags, disembowelled it with a single shot, blowing men and parts of men into the great ditch to either side.
After that there was a lull in the fighting; and the besiegers hailed Eleanor, promising her the forgiveness of John (which wasn’t theirs to offer) and asking her what she intended, if she thought she could war with the entire world. Then they sent a herald, with letters purporting to be from Charles, telling her the cause was lost and she must yield to Rome.
Him she dismissed; though she offered, if he came again on such a bogus errand, to load him in the sling of a trebuchet and send him back by an airy and quicker route. There followed a greater bombardment than ever. All day long the stones roared in the air, while dust rose from the nearby quarries where roughmasons toiled to shape more rocks for the slings. Men charged the scarps, urged on by officers with primed muskets who offered to shoot waverers in the back.
Eleanor taught a terrible lesson. The defenders withdrew, seemingly in confusion, from an entire section of the lower wall. The attackers, yelling like frightened fiends, ran for the Martyr’s Gate, bunched there hammering and tearing at the bars of the portcullis. They realised their mistake too late to save themselves. The outer grating, hauled out of sight in the stone, slid down, imprisoning them like animals in a cage; and through the vents above their heads poured the scalding oil. Then the besiegers, rendered more cautious, sat down in earnest to starve the castle out; but when November came round, and Christmas and the New Year, the flags still flew above the high keep, the oriflamme and the flowers and leopards of Eleanor’s house.
Still there was no word of the King; neither thaumaturgy nor wireless telegraphy availed the seneschal now, the land was dumb. Then at last there was news, brought by a Serjeant of Signallers who worked his way through the enemy lines one dusk, dying already from an arrow broken off short in his back. Beaumaris had fallen, and Caerlon, and the mighty Tower of Dubris had taken forty days before abandoning the fight.
Eleanor stayed up late that night, walking the tower rooms and the baileys, heaped now with the debris of the battle. To her came the seneschal, in the dim time before dawn when the torches burned amber and guttering, when the sentries nodded at their posts or started up alarmed at the whisperings of oiled silk windowpanes. The mist was rising on the Great Heath, and the moon eclipsed by cloud.
‘Tell me, Sir John,’ she said, and her voice was lost and tiny, barely stirring the harsh air. ‘Come to the window here, and tell me what you see…’
He stood silent a long time. Then, heavily, ‘I see the night mists moving on the hills, and the watch fires of our enemies…’
He made to leave her; but she called him sharply. ‘Fairy…’
He paused, back turned to her; and as he stood she used his proper name, the sound by which he was known among the Old Ones. ‘I told you once,’ she said acidly, ‘when I required the truth, then you would know. Now I charge you. Come to me again, and tell me what you see.’
She stood close while he thought, head in hand; he could feel the warmth of her in the night, scent the faint presence of her body. ‘I see an end to everything we know,’ he said at last. ‘The Great Gate broken, John’s banners on the walls.’
She pursued him. ‘And me, Sir John? What for me?’
He didn’t immediately answer and she swallowed, feeling the night encroach, the
dark slide into her body. ‘Is there death?’ she said.
‘My Lady,’ he said gently, ‘there is death for everyone…’
She threw her head back then and laughed, as she had laughed months before in the face of Rye and Deal. ‘Why then,’ she said, ‘we must live a little while we can…’ And that morning they sallied before it was light, fifty strong, and burned Direwolf; his bones still lie there on the hill. And the long gun Prince of Peace broke the arms of his fellows, arms so stout and long there was no wood to replace them. So they brought the great gun Holy Meg, and she and the culverin talked to each other across the valley till the smoke rolled back between the hills like steam from a boiling pot.
They heard of his coming from the telegraphs. It was a fine summer day when he crossed with his retinue into Purbeck Isle. They were still closely invested; in fact the besiegers had launched a heavy attack, their first for many months, and in the confusion he arrived almost unheralded. The first they knew was when the guns in the valley fell silent. A strange silence it was too, a breathing hush in which one could hear the wind soughing over the heathland. They saw his banners in the village, the horses and the siege train winding across the heath, and the seneschal hurried to find his mistress. She was in the second bailey; they had the culverin mounted beside the Butavant tower and were playing him at the men trying to climb the slope below. Eleanor was dirty with smoke and a little bloody, for one of her people had been hurt by the fire from an harquebus and she had helped bind the wound. She straightened when she saw the seneschal, his grave features and bearing. He nodded quietly, confirming what she had already seen in his face. ‘My Lady,’ he said simply. ‘Your King is here…’
She had no time to change or make any preparations, for the royal party was already in sight of the lower ward. She ran on her own, down across the sloping bailey to the gate, the seneschal pacing a distance behind. Nobody else moved, not the gunners, not the bowmen and snipers lining the walls. She stopped by Growler, still standing where he had stood from the first, and leaned on his barrel. Before her were the tossing banners and the armour, the horses champing their bits and dancing from the smell of powder, the waiting soldiers with their guns and swords.
He rode forward alone, disdaining protection. He
saw the gatehouse towers, stained now by smoke and scarred by shot, the portcullis sunk into the ground where it had fallen over a year before and not moved since. He stared a long time at Eleanor, standing fists clenched by the gun; then he reached forward, rattled his whip against the bars in front of him and gestured once with the stock of it. Up…
She waited, the hair blowing round her face; then she nodded tight-lipped to the people above. A pause; and the chains creaked, the counterweights swung in their carved channels. The gate groaned and lifted, tearing aside the rank grass that had seeded round its foot. He rode forward, ducking his head beneath the iron as it climbed up into the stone; they heard the hooves of his horse on the hard ground inside. He dismounted, going to Eleanor; and only then did the cheering spread, through the village and the soldiers and the ranks of people on the walls, up and away to the tower of the Great Keep. So the place yielded, to its liege-lord and to no other.
She spoke to the seneschal once more before she left her home. It was early dawn, the sky pale and grey-blue, the mist lying cloud-thick on the heathland promising a sweltering day. She sat her horse stiffly, back straight, and stared round her. Down across the baileys to where the guns stood limbered by the outer gate; across the parched, spoiled grass, over the lines of neat crosses where the dead were buried inside the walls they had helped defend. Above her the great donjon-face loomed, pale in the new light, empty and desolate and waiting. Below her, fifty yards away, the King of all England sat surrounded by his soldiers. He looked stooped and prematurely old; exhausted by months of campaigning, of haggling and manoeuvring and bartering, fighting desperate men who knew they stood to lose at best their homes and living, at worst their lives. He had won, if it could be called a victory; the boiling land was quiet again. The question they asked Eleanor, he had answered for himself.
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