by Gordon Ryan
He knew what most of the other boxes held. Food, of course. Clothing. Spare armor. Weapons. But they’d sapped lethality from the weapons: swords with dull edges, blunt lances, bows with arrows designed to splinter rather than puncture, half-weight maces with blunted spikes.
This box was lethal. It was stuffed with crossbow bolts. But the ends were not padded, and the bolts were heavy, he noted as he picked one up. The tip was brass, and sharp. In the heat of battle, who would notice if you changed the ammunition of your crossbow? It was too dark to see well, so he pushed his fingers into the box to confirm that there were bolts all the way down.
Henri, for all his bluster, reached over the shoulder to pick up one of the bolts. “Nice.”
“I don’t get it,” Dmitri said. “Why not sniper rifles and sub-machine guns? Better yet, some plastic explosives?”
“Don’t be an idiot, we’re just a mile or two offshore. What do you think is going to happen after twenty, thirty minutes of gunfire? And plastic explosives? Yeah, that will draw attention.” Henri put down the bolt. “Now shut the box. Hurry.”
There were several more precut branches behind the tree, which they used to cover the chest. Moments later, they’d returned to the group.
Very soon, Dmitri and Henri would be on the inside of the castle. The lethal crossbow bolts would remain outside.
#
Niels Grunberg grabbed Tess by the elbow as they prepared the first march to the castle and gave her two warnings, the first for everyone to hear, the second meant for her ears only.
“Watch the sky,” he said in a loud voice. “My engines are going to pummel your castle to dust.”
She returned the boast. “You build a trebuchet that doesn’t collapse the first time it fires and I’ll dance naked on the walls in dumbfounded admiration.”
She tried to pull away to join the others but he tightened his grip. A frown crossed her face. What was this, intimidation?
He leaned close and whispered. “You’ve got a traitor. Not my guy. Watch yourself.”
He let her go and she moved to the front of the group, next to her friends Lars and Dmitri, suddenly wary. Did Niels think she’d fall for it? It was a classic tactic, to sow doubt, to start a witch hunt that ended only when the army dissolved into fear and mistrust.
But then she realized she knew of a traitor already. She was the traitor. She wanted inside that castle, and not just to defend it. She meant to rob the king of his treasure.
Could that be what Niels was talking about? Dmitri or Lars had said something careless, and Niels Grunberg, ear to the ground, had picked it up. He didn’t know who, or what, but he wanted to warn her?
“He’s a good match for you, don’t you think?” Peter said. “I can’t wait to see the two of you face off, see who comes out on top.”
“Yeah, uh huh.” Her mind was still on Niels’s warning.
There were powerful men here and more on the way. There had to be agendas, rivalries, and hatreds. Like Dmitri, Lars, and Tess and their animosity to Alexander Borisenko for his artifact looting. She found herself studying Peter, then Henri, then the Japanese guy she didn’t know who watched her when he didn’t think she was looking. And there was someone from Scotland who’d sat by himself on the ship, staring back toward Burlington the entire time. Hadn’t he been talking to the Japanese guy when they were unloading the docks? In Japanese?
And now she was distrustful of everyone. And wasn’t that what Niels was up to?
The prickles of rain turned back to sleet. Tess huddled in her cloak and walked next to the horses, which puffed and labored to haul the wagon up the hill. Most of the men remained at the ship, unloading crates and chests. It would be a long night for them, but she needed to get to that castle and study its defenses.
It was maybe a mile to the castle. The trees thinned at its approach, but all Tess could see at first was the hill on the northern end of the island. And then, what she’d taken for a rocky ledge came into focus. The castle.
Two gate towers, an outer curtain that stretched from the bedrock itself. Very good. Mining would be impossible. The keep stretched from the back side of the castle like a giant rook on a chess board. She hoped to never use it; by the time you’d retreated to the keep you were in trouble.
A lantern hung on either side of the gates, but it wasn’t enough to see what she was looking for. She grabbed the lantern from Lars and quickened her pace. Her exhaustion was gone and her mind raced.
She stopped dead in front of the gates. Oh, god. Talk about playing with a bad hand. Niels Grunberg would be delighted.
“You’ve got no gate,” she said when Peter joined her. Lars came up a moment later, but she sent him back to tell the others to stop before they came within earshot.
“What are you talking about?” Peter asked. “Of course I do.”
“Not a proper one. Where’s the moat and drawbridge, for a start? You know, you pull the bridge up so nobody can stand right next to the castle and yank off the portcullis. I thought this was a perfect replica, what’s the original castle look like?”
“I don’t know. It was a military headquarters in the Second World War, destroyed in a Luftwaffe raid in 1940 and never rebuilt.”
“Well, you can bet the entrance was better protected. Your road goes straight to the gates with the no obstacles. And the gates themselves are just two wooden doors. Quite pretty, really. But what kind of reinforcing have you got on the back side?” She nodded at his blank look. “That’s what I thought. Are there murder holes in the passage between the gatehouse towers? Something we can use to punish anyone foolish enough to break down your gates?”
“Yes, it’s got that. They’re still blocked up with windows. You know, heat conservation in the winter.”
“That’s no problem. They’ll come out easily enough.”
She took the lantern and reached up to feel the portcullis, which was half-drawn. It wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared, as it was good and heavy. She walked through the passage to the inner doors. They were solid but not reinforced with iron and a couple of men with crowbars could pry those hinges right off.
She opened the doors and stepped into the bailey, ignored the two men who came to greet Peter. He gave them quick instructions and they went down to help guide the horses and wagon into the castle.
Buildings lined the interior of the castle: barracks, a blacksmith, a great hall. The keep—the final, defensible tower, should the castle walls and bailey fall—sat on the northeast corner. She was relieved to see that it did, at least, have a moat and drawbridge.
Tess waved Peter over. “The outer curtain looks strong enough, and the keep is good. But those gates are a problem. Niels is going to see a great big welcome mat.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Here’s the thing. Winning any battle—really, warfare in general—boils down to two principles. First, strong against weak. You punch a guy in the kidney, not in the rib cage. You attack the flank. You go for the gate, not the strongest point of the castle’s outer curtain.”
He nodded. “Right. So the key is to keep strengthening your weak point until it’s as strong as anything else.”
“Exactly. That’s what you’re doing with armor, or with the gate towers. Force the other side to increase his strength to match you. Worked so well that most large castles were simply never attacked. You either bypassed the castle or you starved out the garrison.”
“You said two factors. What’s the other one?”
“It’s a corollary of the first, really,” Tess said. “But it’s absolutely critical if you want to destroy something powerful, like a castle. It’s called multiplication of force.”
“Explain.”
“You could lie down, put a sheet of plywood over your body while I stack a hundred bricks on your chest. You’d labor for breath, but it wouldn’t hurt you. But what if I stuck a dagger through the plywood before putting it on you? How many bricks would it take to drive that dagger into your gu
t? Two? Three? The plywood spreads the weight of the bricks. The dagger concentrates it.”
“What does that have to do with defending the castle?” Peter asked.
“Put these two things together,” she added, “and you’ve given me a problem. I’ve got a perfectly serviceable castle, but the point where I need the most protection, I’m helpless. Those gates are ornamental, not defensive. Niels Grunberg is going to shove his dagger right there.”
The men finished unloading crates from the wagon. Some set about carrying supplies into the rooms. A small garrison of half a dozen men had come out of the keep and the barracks and they left with some of the others toward the docks to get the next load.
“So we’re screwed,” Peter said. “Maybe we should plan for an eventual retreat to the keep. It’s strong enough, and it’s got a moat.”
“If this place has been a private home for the last hundred years, I’m willing to bet there are basements, replica dungeons, cellars, and underground service tunnels. I’ll want to inspect all of them.”
Peter said nothing to this. He would no doubt be thinking of his secret stash of artifacts and wondering how to hide it from her. He turned slightly to look back at the keep. He was a handsome man, and never more so when he had that flushed, manic look.
Tess had always been drawn to confident men. Bright men with goals and yes, wild schemes. But a man like Peter was crap in a relationship. Oh, he was fantastic at first: romantic, witty, attentive. But then the thing with the ziggurat had come along, and it had been a struggle to keep his attention. And then it had ended, abruptly, with no warning whatsoever. It was this castle and this war that swept him away.
Why? What was this about? It couldn’t just be a game for overgrown boys. Sure, he was a thrill seeker, given to Richard Branson-esque excitement—skydiving, race cars, and the like—but that was fun stuff.
“But I’m not willing to give up on the outer defenses yet,” Tess said. “By the time you’re retreating to the keep, you’re in deep trouble. You’d better contest every inch of the castle if you want to win, starting with those gates. Let’s look at the third principle of warfare.”
“I thought you said there were two principles.”
“Two? No, of course not. There are hundreds. Those are just my favorites. You don’t understand them and you won’t even make the battlefield.” She smiled. “Number three is deception.”
“Deception?” Peter asked.
“Right. Conceal your weakness. Or, in this case, your strength. Because here’s what I’m thinking. Niels Grunberg is going to drool when he sees those gates. He’ll see us frantically and ineffectually trying to strengthen them. Maybe he’ll get greedy. Overreach. And we’ll be ready. We’ll be luring him into a trap. A very deadly trap that will end the battle in a single, bloody skirmish.”
“I like that.”
“I thought you would,” Tess said. “But that brings me to the fourth principle of warfare.”
Peter laughed. “Okay. What’s that?”
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Tess said. “That Niels is going to come up with his own brilliant plan. That skirmish could very well be our own men, lying in puddles of blood—fake blood, if we’re lucky—while they chase us to the top of the keep and massacre us.”
“Nice. Well, that’s not the kind of show I want my son to see.”
Tess stared. “Your son? Nick is here?”
She pictured Niels Grunberg’s army in the field below the castle. A steady rain of missiles pummeling the walls, smashing through roofs inside. She imagined a battle in the courtyard in the shadow of a wall, mined and collapsing. And a little boy, curious, wandering into the middle of a battle.
“Are you serious?” she asked.
“Of course. I couldn’t leave him with a nanny for six weeks.”
“Peter,” she said. “What are you thinking?”
Chapter Seventeen:
Niels Grunberg took five seconds to reject each one of Alexander Borisenko’s suggestions. He knew it was just a brainstorm, but some of these were dumb.
He’d come to Lord Borisenko’s tent, which was only marginally warmer than the outside air, but at least protected from the wind. A flag with a double-headed eagle flapped in front of the tent. Two men in chain mail stood guard outside. Inside, Alexander Borisenko and his wife, Yekatarina. She wore a fur-lined cloak with matching gloves. Borisenko himself sat at a desk, writing with a feathered pen. He handed a sheet of paper to Niels.
“Ladders are problematic,” Niels said. He kept his tone neutral. Hard to say how the Borisenkos would react to criticism. It was understood that Borisenko was the Lord, but Niels was the general.
“How so?” Borisenko asked.
“Unless you catch them asleep, they’ll just push them over the edge. And the way the bedrock juts out from the outer curtain, you’d need about a fifty meter ladder.”
Niels considered the next thing on the list with a wrinkled brow, as if giving it the full weight of thought. “Again, you can’t mine, for the same reason. That’s granite under there. Short of dynamite, I don’t know how you’d tunnel under the walls.”
The rest of the army had arrived by ship that morning. Together with Niels and the three men who’d tried to keep Peter and Tess from docking, they made one-hundred-seven men, plus six women. They made camp a few hundred meters back from the gate towers and immediately set to felling trees by axe. Niels also ordered the ship stripped of anything useful that wouldn’t also make it sink.
They only had two weeks of food, plus what they could forage from the island. Peter said there were deer, and he could probably find rabbits.
“What about this?” Borisenko asked. He pointed to the third item on his list.
Niels squinted. He rubbed a thumb against the paper, trying to clear away the mud, but only succeeded in smearing it. “Lure them out? Why would they fight us in the open? This isn’t a real siege, where they know we might be here for six months or a year until they starve.”
“Of course not,” Yekatarina said. “But that’s not what he means by luring them out. This is a war, right? All Peter’s friends expect some good fighting.”
Niels nodded. He thought he saw where she was going. He dropped his voice. It was noisy outside, and would be difficult to eavesdrop, but he worried that his own camp might have a traitor, just as Tess’s did. “Go on.”
“We put our men on short rations,” she said. “And we sit down here and ignore them. They’ll get bored. They’ll start to complain. They’re not real foot soldiers, remember. A bunch of mercenaries and spoiled rich men. Peter will start to nudge Tess and finally, she might snap.”
“Yeah, well, knowing Tess, she might sweep into our camp one night anyway, hoping to wipe us out with a surprise attack. Tonight would probably be the best night.”
“Tonight?” Borisenko asked. “We’re just getting established.”
“Exactly. Not saying it will happen, but we should be on our guard. As for the last suggestion, it isn’t a bad idea. Problem is, I’m one of those anxious men.”
Not rich, he didn’t need to point out. He might just be the poorest man in the group, as his combined salary and book royalties amounted to about seventy thousand euro a year, the kind of money Borisenko could spend on a small party.
He nodded. “I’m here to match wits against Tess Burgess. If I lose, well, I lose. But I don’t want to fight to a draw. Or worse, sit on my ass to a draw.”
“Right,” Borisenko said. “I’m of the same mind.” His wife, however, said nothing. “But if that’s the way you feel, then I don’t see what else there is to do but mount a frontal assault.”
“Right. There’s that gate. Like a big, open invitation. Only open invitations make me nervous. So I wanted to see if we could come up with anything else.”
“Not yet, but I’ll keep at it,” Borisenko said. “In the meanwhile, I’ve got wo
rk to do to get this camp in order. You keep at your engineering. I’ll send for you if I need you.”
Niels’s smile did not make it to his face. He was not a proud man, not in the short term, at least. He was perfectly willing to feign weakness, let others take the credit. Bide his time. If Borisenko wanted to believe he was in charge, let him.
He turned toward the door. “As you wish,” he said with a bit of a flourish that might have been overdone. “I’ll be working on my machines.”
Niels stepped into the open air, pulled his cloak tight. No snow yet, but a few big flakes fell from the sky and it was gray to the east and north. Men dug fire pits or chopped kindling. From behind the meadow, the sound of chopping axes, shouts, and the crash of a tree. They had four draft horses and these were well-worked, pulling stones or dragging logs.
He looked up at the castle wall, spotted a couple of men walking the perimeter, protected behind the battlement. Smoke rose from the gatehouse, and also from the keep. For a moment, he envied Peter and Tess, protected on the inside, warm, with the luxury of a castle to defend, instead of the hopeless task of assaulting all those meters of bare stone.
The castle looked almost right to Niels’s eye. Not the gatehouse, unprotected by a moat and suffering those pathetic doors, but everything else looked like an authentic reconstruction. But there was something else missing. In the middle ages, the same castle would have been painted white, or even red, not left as exposed stone. Once they’d lost their defensive purpose, European castles had been allowed to weather for so many generations that people forgot they’d also been homes of powerful lords at one time, and decorated appropriately.
Although, come to think of it, hadn’t this castle been some rich industrialist’s second home? Peter spent a good chunk of money to strip out modern comforts and remake the castle in the image of its medieval predecessor. But was it possible there were relics of its previous function? Hadn’t Peter removed a helipad from the roof of the keep, for example? And Niels remembered hearing that a previous owner had kept a collection of exotic and antique cars, never to be driven, obviously, or why bring them to the island? But where had he kept them? Surely not parked in the inner bailey, exposed to the elements.