Even as William was led forward the defenders of the castle loosed a flurry of arrows. Having watched until the catapult’s location was certain, the garrison now belatedly sought to discommode their enemy. On either side of the mangonel other siege-engines were deployed, three were springalds, ballistas capable of firing heavy bolts charged with fire into the wooden ramparts. William also caught a glimpse of a huge catapult which, he would learn, they called a trebuchet.
William was aware that the low grumble of a congregation of many men now increased to roars as one side shouted insults at the other. The desultory siege was, with the arrival of the engines, now taking a more serious turn. An arrow struck the heavy timber gantry of the mangonel that loomed before him, glanced aside it hit the ground some three or four feet away from him. Another followed. Then he was at the side of the great engine, behind the rough protection of a wicker-work shield. The catapult seemed huge, swarming with men in steel helmets and leather hauberks; men with hard faces and harder hands who first lifted William then passed him on so that, in a seeming trice and with little dignity, he found himself thrown into the basket. He would always recall the bounce of the wicker-and-leather contraption which, at the end of the throwing arm, was half-cocked. Winding the arm down fully would have concealed the King’s intention from the men whose dark silhouettes against the grey sky, topped the rude wooden palisade of the castle.
‘Stand-up, boy!’ a voice shouted, and William rose shakily to his feet, his hands gripping the rough rim of the basket, his brown hair lifting in the wind. Somewhere below him a trumpeter blew a parley and the half-hearted volleys of arrows ceased. The besieged were clearly not anxious to expend their limited stock too precipitately, saving the greater part of them for the assault that would follow the bombardment. William took his eyes from the castle as it stood against the sky, his attention diverted to the advance of a horseman who rode forward, half way between the King’s lines, marked by their sharpened calthrops, and the bottom of the tall palisade. All along the lines silence had fallen and men ceased their labours and stood, watching.
‘By order of my Lord the King, you are commanded to capitulate! Throw open your gates within the next hour and my Lord will grant thee honour and compassion, notwithstanding the defiance you have maintained this last sennight against the King’s power! Fail to obey the King’s command and an attack will commence which can only have one outcome: death and dishonour! And to seal my Lord the King’s intention you shall first have the son of thy traitorous master thrown at you! On his innocent head fall all the consequences of thy wanton rebellion and the treasonable disloyalty of you all, men of John the Marshal!’
The final phrases of this lengthy oration were issued in tones of powerful contempt. The strange silence seemed to William to grow in intensity, the only sound that of the wind and the beating of his heart, for he was now conscious of the grave peril in which he stood and his breast was torn by conflicting emotions. The comforting presence of King Stephen was no longer with him. He looked about but could see no sign of the King, his friend. For the first time he felt his isolation keenly. He did not want to fly through the air and be dashed to the ground like an unwanted kitten hurled to death from the tower of Hamstead Marshal. But neither did he want his father’s men to give-in, to dishonour the Marshal’s name, though he could not divine why his father had thrown up his connection with King Stephen for so fickle an undertaking as espousing the cause of the Empress Mathilda. William had grown to like the King, the first man of rank to show him any kindness beyond mere duty. Why, the King had smiled when William beat him at the game of ‘knights,’ and told him that, if he lived, he might himself one day be a great soldier.
‘But only of you live, Will, and live long enough,’ the King had concluded quietly, his face twisted into a wry smile the meaning of which the boy could not interpret beyond the obvious necessity of survival. That he had discerned some other vague meaning that lay beyond his powers of comprehension marked the boy’s natural intelligence. But now it looked as though his life-span was to be circumscribed precipitately; he felt a strong urge to cry out; but who to? His father had abandoned him; his mother made no secret of her dislike for her son, while Angharad…
The thought of Angharad stiffened him as it had before. He must bear himself well. Perhaps that was what his foul-featured father had meant when he demanded knight’s service. But it was Angharad who came to his rescue now. ‘You have a destiny, Will,’ she had said to him once in her low Welsh voice. ‘I ’ave see it, boy, so whatever your circumstances, take courage. You were not marked by the devil, but by grace, Will, whatever the priests say. Hold fast to that, Will, hold fast to that…’ He had only half understood her. He had no knowledge of his mark, never having seen it. His mother’s mirrors were forbidden him and locked away. All he knew of it was a faint wrinkling of his skin when he put his left hand over his right shoulder and touched the naevus with his extended finger-tips. Now he gripped the sides of the basket more firmly with those same fingers, and drew the air into his lungs as he had been taught before striking his first blows in the tilt-yard. And then the answer came from the wooden ramparts of Newbury castle.
There had been some movement of the dark heads; they appeared to give way to one who was slightly elevated, as though standing upon a box, or log. All along the King’s lines, silence reigned as they awaited the response.
‘Throw the boy hence and we shall catch him! He is our own!’ William recognised the voice of his father’s steward, Geoffrey FitzJohn, and his heart leapt with hope. Could they possibly catch him? Suppose he fell short? Or sailed above them? There was no word about surrender, just that defiant challenge. Suddenly, as a murmur rose from the King’s ranks, the basket shuddered. William was aware that the catapult arm was dropping lower as the men on the windlass turned the barrel and the twisted ropes drew the basket lower and lower. He lost his footing under the vibration and sat on his buttocks with a heavy thump. The basket continued to descend and suddenly he was level with men’s heads; they stared at him, their faces blank, indifferent now.
In the distance William heard a command and the murmuring fell away, then a barked order. For a dreadful second, he thought he was about to be launched into the future where he would learn what it felt like to be a bird before being dashed to pieces – or caught by some miraculous intervention of God, or Geoffrey FitzJohn. Did not such things occur in the Bible? Had not the walls of Jericho…
The mangonel shuddered and instead of the release of tension flinging William high into the air, a dark cloud lifted off the ground, arched upwards against the sky with a soughing like a gust of wind. For a distracted instant William though himself already dead, dead of shock and elevated, half-way to heaven as he watched his poor abandoned body flung towards his father’s men. But there followed a rattling as some arrows struck the palisade, a few hit home, and men cried out as others sailed over the top.
Then things happened very quickly. William recalled seeing the other siege-engines being loaded, four or five of them. From somewhere men were running up with large, heavy stones and filling the baskets. First to be fired were the springalds, their bolts bearing smoky, burning pitch; then a helmed figure wearing a red, gold-emblazoned surtout rode up, behind him another knight bore a standard of like colours. The first man reached a mailed hand into the basket.
‘Give me your hand Will, quickly now…’ In a trice the boy was over the rim of the basket and settled upon the saddle bow of the King himself. As Stephen jerked the head of his destrier round he bellowed, ‘Fill it with fire and stones! Newbury will be mine ere nighfall!’
An instant later William found himself standing somewhat shakily next to the knight who had led him forth, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
‘See the boy is safe, Hubert, or answer for it to me.’
‘Aye, my Lord King.’ William felt a mailed fist on his shoulder. He was bodily turned to stare at the catapult from which he had just escaped. ‘See, l
ad, what thou hast just escaped…’
The artillerists had already filled the basket with stones and a flaming ball of pitch. Almost as he blinked, William saw the pawl knocked out and the catapult arm released from its confinement. The arm flew up and over in an arc of such speed that it seemed marvellous, ejecting the stones and the smoking and flaring ball of pitch on a trajectory aimed to pass over the rampart. He saw, quite clearly, the group of rocks, black against the sky, diverge in their flight, spreading, some to strike the rampart, some to skim its top, or to pass over it to drop into the enceinte below. The fire-ball flew higher, dropping out of sight.
In the hours that followed, until nightfall, Newbury castle was subjected to an assailing of stones, rocks and combustibles. It was noticeable that the flights of arrows, so vigorously fired by FitzJohn’s men that morning, had by the evening, fallen away to nothing.
*
‘Well?’ John the Marshal looked up from the small table at which he sat in the small chamber out of which rose the ladder to his wife’s chamber above. It was his private quarters where he slept when not sharing the Lady Sybil’s bed and where he conducted his private business.
‘The boy is well, my Lord. The King keeps him close, but will not harm him,’ reassured Angharad ap Gwyn.
‘So you told me before, but I am not fool enough to see that a shadow lies upon your divinations. I do not recollect it there before…’
‘I…’ began Angharad, faltering before gathering her thoughts. She was about to speak when John the Marshal asked:
‘Tell me, to assuage my own curiosity, from where do you conjure your divinations? I see no device, no mirror or silver surface, no smoke, nor any ash twig…’
Angharad looked at the mask of the Marshal’s face and felt that sharp twinge of revulsion and fascination. It was easy to conceive him an agent of Satan, as some said he was, recalling the rumour that he had sired his second son for the Devil’s service and threw him up to King Stephen’s mercy in firm conviction that Satan tended his own. But Angharad was a woman and not immune to the other qualities of her Master whose physique would turn any woman’s head; moreover, she was flattered to be his confidante.
‘In the silence, my Lord, when we have it here, such as at this late hour.’
‘Whence cometh what you listen for?’
Angharad smiled, pointing downwards at the ground. ‘You built upon sacred ground, my Lord. The spirits lurk beneath your wooden dungeon and sometimes they vouchsafe what they would have their servants know’.
John the Marshal nodded. ‘And they do not resent the presence of priests or Christian men and women?’
‘They know they will have their hour; besides the absence of Nicholas de Sarum seems to have eased their torment.’
The Marshal chuckled. ‘Well, so what of the shadow?’
‘When first you asked me what would be your son’s fate if you sent him hostage to King Stephen I could divine no more than that his life would not be forfeit for your…’ she faltered again, not wishing to use the word and provoke her Master to rage.
The Marshal smiled. ‘My treachery? Is that what you mean?’
‘By what His Grace will see as treachery, my Lord.’
‘God’s bones, woman, thou shouldest be a man and a finagling priest for you would work wonders betwixt Courts in opposition!’ John the Marshal’s hideous face was split by a wide smile.
‘My Lord…’ Angharad responded noncommittally.
‘Go, get some rest. Her Ladyship will want you soon enough.’
Angharad paused at the door into the hall and turned to address the Marshal. ‘My Lord, the shadow comes from the silence. Your son is safe but he will not return home to your hearth for many months…perhaps years.’
The Marshal nodded. ‘ ’Twill be as God wills it, but I thank you.’
Two days later Geoffrey FitzJohn was led into Hamstead Marshal on an ass, a halter about his neck, his hands tied behind his back, his ankles fastened beneath the animal’s belly. He was sat facing the beast’s tail. It was clear to all who saw the pitiful sight that Newbury had fallen and most assumed – at that moment – that the Marshal’s second son had gone the way of all flesh.
*
‘During my sojourn as a prisoner of the Empress I was fettered,’ King Stephen remarked conversationally, sipping from his goblet before he moved the straw figure representing himself on the imaginary field of battle. ‘Now, Will, how shall though answer that, eh?’
Almost before the splayed ‘legs’ of the straw dolly had been settled on the crude chequerboard the boy had leapt to his feet to move his own figure. Stephen smote his thigh in mock exasperation. ‘By the Blood of Christ, Will, I know not how you do it but your winning streak, or your devilish cunning persuades me that I should not indulge you in such games, but fetter you, if only to teach you the proper manners towards your King.
William looked up smartly, his features apprehensive. ‘Sire, I…I only thought this a game…’
Stephen rubbed his chin, his hand rasping on his beard his face feigning a frown. ‘True in part, but it is a military game, is it not? Eh?’
‘Aye,’ responded the boy puzzled.
‘And you repeatedly beat your King. It would seem that all the terrors I have inflicted upon you have not cured you of your father’s conceit to defy me. What say you to that?’
It was the boy’s turn to frown and it was unfeigned, for the King presented him with a puzzle with which he felt he had been living for weeks now.
‘Well?’ the King persisted.
‘How can my losing to you, Sire, change my father’s mind?’
‘Would you do it, if you thought it might?’
William considered the proposition for a moment, then asked. ‘Would it end the enmity between my father and my Lord King?’
Stephen smiled. ‘Then there is no doubt in your mind who is your King?’
William sensed he had been led into a trap and bit his lip, torn between his filial duty to his father and his liking for the man who indulged him in games of ‘knights’ and whose wine goblet he kept topped-up most evenings on campaign. ‘You have been kind to me, Sire. I know no other King.’
‘Think you your father might be mistaken in his allegiance?’
‘Who am I to think for my father, Sire? In truth, I cannot tell…’
Stephen looked at the boy, again passing his fist across his lower face to conceal his smile. He had a nimble mind, to be sure. ‘Come let us play another game before you sleep…’
When it was over and William’s last straw horseman lay on its side he looked squarely at the King. ‘You beat me, Sire,’ he said.
‘Yes, Will, I beat you.’ The King paused, tossed off the contents of his goblet and let out a long sigh. ‘Now, to bed lad. Send in my man.’ Turning away the retreating boy heard him say, half to himself, ‘tomorrow or the next day Wallingford will fall to my arms too and then perhaps I can get some rest…’
After the fall and razing of Newbury and the despatch of Geoffrey FitzJohn on the back of an ass, King Stephen had moved his forces off to besiege the more substantial castle at Wallingford on the Thames. William had found himself in a curious position, both page and prisoner, a mock-squire who trailed aimlessly about the camp for the most part ignored, in the King’s army, yet not of it. He was treated kindly enough, but any attempt to wander off, even if as innocently intended as he might have done at Hamstead Marshal, was met with arrest, rebuke and chastisement, so that he soon learnt from his sore arse that nothing was expected of him so much that he must keep close to the camp of the King.
Indeed, he was not unwelcome in the squires’ tents. Outside them he found ready employment polishing harness and belts, sanding and sharpening swords, axes and war-hammers, and buffing their chasings and bright-work. Occasionally they would use him for exercise and by this means he grew in toughness and physique, acquiring considerable skill with sword and buckler. In this he earned a measure of respect and there w
ere those that said if he lived he might win some renown for his prowess. ‘If…’ they emphasised, retiring laughing and casting nary a look over their shoulder as the lad gathered-up their cast down weapons, the blunt swords and wooden shields they used in their martial exercises.
Being intelligent he quickly came to understand that by remaining obedient, no-one would maltreat him, for all knew he was the King’s toy, an amusement for their Royal master’s private moments. There were those who said more, but no-one ever found a shred of evidence for it and William never made any complaint, nor suggested otherwise. He had just become another camp-follower during weary months of campaigning and, even when the King’s army went into winter-quarters, William still found himself mostly ignored, like an old hound, fed and indulged by an occasional game of ‘knights,’ sleeping somewhere in whatever castle the King had chosen to lodge. Here he was subject to Stephen’s occasional half soliloquies.
‘You are my sounding-board,’ Stephen once remarked. ‘Like the body of a lute,’ he explained, seeing the boy’s stare. William began to perceive something enlightening in all of this, but of what, he was not yet at all certain.
*
The time that William spent in the train of King Stephen’s army turned into months and while the physical exercises and attending the squires tired his body, even in winter quarters, his mind had other occupations. As the former grew beyond its years in strength and stature, so his mind expanded with a stranger education than that inculcated by Nicholas de Sarum; he became a great observer and a quiet listener, so much an accepted part of Stephen’s retinue that few thought to curb their words in his hearing.
William Marshal Guardian of England- The Complete Series Page 5