Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank

by Whyte, Jack

  In any event, I decided that it made more sense for me to use my cavalry training and skills that night than to go trudging through the blackness of the caverns carrying a flickering torch and hoping eventually to grapple hand to hand with some faceless mercenary in the darkness of the castle. Brach suggested to Chulderic that he and Samson and I should all ride with the force designated to storm the castle once the bridge had been lowered. Chulderic agreed, and the three of us transferred ourselves to ride as ordinary troopers with the veteran cavalry commander Sigobert, whose normal rank was second in command to Samson himself. Thus my entry to the castle that night would be, God willing, by way of the hurriedly lowered drawbridge, at the head of a fast-moving column of riders charged with the task of penetrating the curtain wall defenses as quickly and savagely as we could and then making sure that Gunthar's people— three hundred of them were expected to remain in the castle, as opposed to our assault party's thirty—could not rally strongly enough to take back command of the main gates.

  It was hot and heavy work and we were outnumbered from the start, but the enemy had been demoralized on several counts, and so we were able to do greater damage than we might have expected to do otherwise. First and foremost, the garrison had been appalled by what must have seemed like the magical apparition of our warriors pouring out of the strongest building in their castle—the central tower with its massive defenses. Few of the defenders actually saw the arrival of our raiders, however. Our men were at their backs and moving stealthily and with determination. Familiar with the layout of the castle and the disposition of the guards, they attacked in silence, using their lethal daggers efficiently, and most of the guards died silently without ever knowing what had happened. Our raiding party slew them efficiently and without compunction because all of their targets were Outlanders—mercenaries whose deaths bore no personal significance for any of our men.

  Despite all our caution and efficiency and speed, however, a few men did manage to cry out before they died, and after that the alarm spread quickly, swelling with the clash of steel on steel until the off- guard watch spilled from their beds to see what all the clamor was about. By then, the first wave of attackers had overcome the guards at the main gates behind the curtain wall and flung open the gates, leaving a few men to hold them safe while the rest swept out along the curtain wall passage and around to attack the towers flanking the drawbridge. There they paused while the bowmen among them shot down the soldiers guarding the bridge works—all the defenses had been constructed to guard against attack from the far side, not from inside—and as soon as all the guards were dead they went to work immediately to lower the bridge.

  I was waiting with Sigobert and his attack group of horsemen, sixty strong, just behind the first fringe of trees across from the bridge, less than a hundred paces from the edge of the ditch. As the youngest there, I had better night vision than anyone else, and as soon as I saw the top of the bridge begin to move I warned Sigobert, who gave the signal to advance. Our whole group surged forward on a single broad front and was already reshaping itself into something resembling an arrowhead formation as we moved. By the time the bridge end came to rest on the ground we were less than thirty paces distant and advancing at full gallop in a column of horsemen three abreast. The thunder of our hooves on the timbers of the bridge would have awakened the entire garrison at that point, had they not already been fighting for their lives.

  We charged across the bridge and wheeled hard to the right, into the passageway behind the curtain wall that led to the main gates, and we were not a moment loo soon in getting there. Gunthar had evidently hired some exceptionally skilled people with his levies of mercenaries, and under their leadership the garrison troops had rallied strongly and mounted a concerted attack on the few of our men who had been left holding the gates against our arrival. Our fighters were heavily outnumbered and faring poorly when we reached them, but the sudden arrival of a charge of heavy horsemen was more than our enemies were prepared to stomach and they turned and fled back into the castle, leaving the gates in our possession. Mere moments later, it seemed, we heard the roar as our own infantry followed us through the gateway, under the leadership of Chulderic, and shortly after that the enemy surrendered and the castle was ours. My hand, I discovered, was sore from gripping the hilt of my sword too tightly, but I had not swung a single blow at anyone from start to finish of the fight.

  The total cost to us in storming the castle had been one man killed and twenty wounded, and none of the wounded men was expected to die. This would normally have been cause for celebration, but our situation was not one in which to rejoice. Samson, concerned about the Lady Vivienne and her companions, wanted to travel to her immediately to assure the Queen that all was well, that the castle was in our hands and that she and her company would be brought back in safety as soon as it was practicable. What that really meant was that the Queen and her ladies must resign themselves to remaining in the small valley behind its impassable mere for several more days until the tactical situation became less fluid and the dangers of their being abducted along the way had lessened to the point of being acceptable.

  But Brach had objected, claiming that duty for himself, and their clash of wills might have escalated had not Clodio announced bluntly that neither one of them should go on that mission unless they were prepared to be stranded outside the walls for a long time, in the event that Gunthar's forces returned to the attack. There were places in the caverns, he told them, that were simply too narrow for anyone as big as Samson to get through, even without armour, and Brach was half again as large as Samson.

  Their compromise was to send three of the smaller men to carry news to the Queen. Should Gunthar move against us in the meantime, the messengers were instructed to return to the red-wall caves to await Clodio, who would lead them back through the caverns.

  That task attended to, the princely brothers sought a place to sleep, while I, in acknowledgment of my lowly status as both a junior and a newcomer, took over the post of commander of the guard for the remainder of that night.

  Within the week that followed we had settled into a routine of boredom that was reinforced by the swift realization that our success in capturing the castle had effectively placed us under siege. Gunthar's forces had begun moving into position outside our wall by dawn on the morning following our attack, and a permanent detachment remained there afterwards, a large body of men whose primary purpose was to prevent us from lowering the drawbridge and leaving the castle. Most of them were bowmen, and by and large they remained out of our sight, safe behind the screen of trees that began about a hundred paces from the approach to the drawbridge . . . which raised the question of whether or not they were there, or whether they had merely convinced us that they were there, while in fact they were elsewhere and we had been tricked into imprisoning ourselves.

  We put that notion to the test twice, sending out mounted parties to test the enemy's responses, and on each occasion, Gunthar's bowmen simply moved out of the trees into the open as soon as they heard the bridge being lowered and then stood there, picking their targets and launching arrows, as quickly as they could pull and aim, reveling in their own lethal accuracy and in the knowledge that no living soul could reach them.

  The dilemma that next arose to perplex me was founded in the fact that I considered myself even then to be a horse-warrior ahead of everything else. The original attacking party had come in on foot through the caverns, arriving on the lowest levels of the central fortifications and making their way up by very dark and narrow stairways from floor to floor until they were able to emerge into the courtyard. That, in my mind, precluded any possibility of even considering the route as an exit for cavalry. An extraordinary horse may climb up stairs, blindfolded or blinkered and led by a trusted groom or rider, perhaps, if the conditions are right and the stairs are shallow enough, but no horse will descend a steep and narrow stairwell into darkness. I had to wonder, then, could we not enter the caverns with ou
r horses from the other side, through the red-wall caves?

  I went directly to find Clodio, never doubting that I could enlist his help.

  Later that night, after a long and sometimes impassioned discussion in which he and I came to know each other far better than we had before, Clodio took me into the caverns for the first time and showed me the route to the red-walled caves. I had not seen what he did to cause the door to open, but when it did, it opened silently, swinging backwards away from us and up with only the barest whisper of stone caressing stone as it rose. As soon as we stepped through into the space beyond, he grasped me by the arm and pulled me to one side, out of the way of the door, and told me to stand absolutely still. I stood motionless in the dark, listening to the silence and hearing the faint sound of the door closing again, and only then did I begin, very gradually, to grow aware that it was nowhere near as silent down there as I had first thought. I could hear water dripping, from many places, and the sounds the drops made as they landed varied from flat, dead-sounding slaps to musical, echoing and rotund plops where the drops were obviously falling into pools of standing water.

  There were other sounds, too, that I could hear but not identify, mainly because they were obscured by the noises my companion was making. Listening, I could tell that he was moving about, and it sounded as though he was rearranging his clothing. But then there came a glow, the merest hint of light that spread quickly, and then I saw the shape of Clodio's face as he bent low towards a clay fire box enclosed in a small cage of wood that he must have carried beneath his robe. He was kneeling on the ground close by my right side, and the glow had been revealed when he removed the lid of the box. He began to blow gently on the glowing embers and to feed them with small, teased bunches of line, dried grass. Within moments a small flame sprang into being and he fed it more fuel. In the growing light I saw a store of twigs and small kindling set against the wall, and beside them an iron brazier and what looked like a small barrel filled with heavy sticks.

  Clodio eventually lit the fire in the brazier with a twig from his fire box, and as he waited for the flames to catch and take hold he moved to the barrel, selected a stick and pulled it out, then thrust it under my nose for me to smell it. It stank—a rank, sulphurous stench that made me catch my breath. It was a kind of pitch, he told me, but thinner than the kind the shipwrights used to seal the seams of their vessels. This substance was called naphtha, he said. He thrust the end I had sniffed into the flames of the brazier and the thing exploded with a roar and instantly became a brightly flaming torch, burning hard and fiercely enough to sustain the roar of sound that had accompanied its birth. It was brighter than any other torch I had ever seen, illuminating the entire space within which we stood.

  Now I could easily see that this cavern, at least, had a roof, uneven and stained with moisture, arching over my head at about twice my own height. And against the wall, securely fastened into the rock, was a pair of angled brackets clearly designed to hold torches. There was one torch in place, and I looked at it curiously. The top end of it was encased in a cage of rusted wire, inside of which there appeared to be tightly wrapped rags of cloth, stiff and dry and brittle looking. Clodio reached up to it with the torch in his hand and it ignited with another ferocious whoosh of leaping flames.

  "The brackets were built possibly hundreds of years ago and probably at the same time as the doors. They're all made of lead, not iron, so they don't rust—it's very wet down here. There's a line of them all along the path to the other side. Most are on the walls, but there are a few in places where there are no walls. Those ones are mounted on poles. Two brackets to a station, post or wall, makes no difference. Look how far apart the holders are. That's so you can be sure that either one will burn without igniting the other. Going across, you light the one that's waiting for you and put a fresh one in the empty holder. See?" He kicked at the ground, where I saw the charred remnants of several old torches, burned right down to the butts.

  "Once these things are lit, you can't put them out, so you simply leave them to burn themselves out. But that's why you bring a bucket of ten or twelve fresh ones with you each time you cross. Burn the dry one, leave a wet one. The pitch comes from two places—two pools of the stuff that never dry up. You simply throw in a bucket and bring it out full, then lug it back here and pour it into the barrel there. No trouble finding the pools, even in the dark. You can smell them from half a mile away. Fall into one, though, you'll never come out again. Stuff kills you. King Ban knew someone who fell in, when he was a boy. They pulled him out, but he had already breathed in some of the stuff and he died right there.

  "So, those are the rules. The brackets are about sixty paces apart, and there's a fresh barrel of soaking torches every tenth station. There's three ten-station stretches from here to the other end, so it's just slightly under two miles."

  "Is it all flat?"

  "None of it's flat, lad. You'll see that as soon as we start to move. From here, it's all slightly downhill for about a mile, then it levels out for a very short distance and begins to climb again. Course, it's all irregular, and the path we'll be following isn't very wide in places, and there are some very nasty drops on either side from time to time. But that shouldn't bother you as long as you don't look down into any of them. Just keep your eyes fixed on the ground you can see ahead of you by the light of your torch.

  "There's a couple of tiny passages, too—wrigglers, I call them. Those are the places I warned Samson and Brach about. Narrow spots—tight places where you have to squeeze through, and it's best not to think too hard about where you are, but just remember to breathe out and keep moving until you're through and out on the other side. There's seventeen caverns down here. Some of them are tiny, others are enormous. This one here is smaller than some of the rooms in the castle upstairs, but it opens out into another that's ten times as big. Some of them are beautiful, too, even at night. There is daylight down here, in places—holes in the roof, high above your head, and the light falls down from them like beams of solid gold. Then there are places even more strange and filled with wonders that you'll have to see for yourself . . . you wouldn't believe me if I simply told you about them. Now, fill up that bucket over there with twelve of those torches and let's get started." He set out immediately, leaving me to scramble to obey him and then catch up, my hands and arms filled with the means of bringing light to the darkness.

  "How do you make the torches?"

  Clodio was lowering himself carefully down a sloping rock face and he took the time to regain a solid footing before he answered me.

  "I cut handles, good solid ones that offer a fair, firm grip. Willow and hazel sticks are best, I've found, because they grow more or less straight. I cut them to length and then jam the narrower end into the space made for them in the metal cages I have made specially for them. The cages are made from heavy iron wire and the same smith has been making them for me now for fifteen years, so he makes me a batch of them in a single day. Then I stuff the cages with old rags, anything I can scrounge. Old army blankets are best, though, if you roll them tightly enough they burn for hours and hours. Then all that's left to do is leave them to soak in the barrel of naphtha until you're ready to take them out and mount them in the brackets. Given enough time up there without being used, they'll dry out completely and you'd never know they'd ever been wet. But one spark's enough to set them off, even when they're bone dry." He made a choking sound, and it took me a moment to realize that he was laughing to himself.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Oh, I was just thinking. I make a batch of new torches two times each year, usually around the solstice because that's a good, solid time to remember to do certain things, and each year I might have to change three, perhaps more, of the wire cages." He giggled again. "Old Marcy the smith's been making them for me, as I said, for fifteen years and he still doesn't know what they're for. He's tried following me, asking people about them, he's tried everything to find out, but I never say a word
. It's driving him mad. Come on now, we'd best be moving."

  It took us nigh on an hour to traverse the caverns, lighting beacons as we went to guide us back, and only in two places did I have difficulty squeezing through the narrow wrigglers he had warned me about. The second time, I came so close to being unable to get through that I found myself on the verge of absolute panic at one point, beginning to believe that I would die there, wedged in an impossibly tiny hole in the center of the earth. When I regained sufficient presence of mind to remember what Clodio had said about breathing out, however, I forced myself to exhale each breath all the way and relax my body, and I was able to win through, but I had to stop and catch my breath then and there, to collect myself and master the fear that still leapt in my chest like a flickering fire.

  "If that's the only way through there," I said, struggling to keep my voice level, "then you were right. Brach will never see this place. He's far too big even to fit into the entrance there, let alone crawl through the wrigglers. We would lose him, and Samson, too, because neither of them would ever give in and they'd never back away. Brach would keep trying to squeeze through until it killed him."

  "Aye, and it would, without mercy. Almost got you, there, didn't it, until you remembered what I said about breathing out. Are you ready now to move on?"

  A short time after that he held up his hand and stopped. "Here we are. This is the end of the road, and I think it's also the place you were asking me about. Low ceiling, close to the outside, easy to supply and big enough to feed and shelter fifty horses. Mind you, it's going to be the end of the secret entrance as a secret."

  I nodded. "That is true—but if the secrecy was intended in the beginning as a means of saving the castle and its occupants from disaster and defeat someday in the distant future, then it has already served its purpose, for it can't ever be used and then continue to be a secret, can it? Now we will use it to excellent purpose, and we will maintain at least a semblance of secrecy for as long as we can. If we continue to enjoy good fortune, Gunthar and his people may never find out about it. I'll grant you, that may be wishful thinking, but any period of time we can grasp and maintain in this matter will serve us in good stead. Let me have a look at the place."