The Iron Castle
Page 18
‘And loose,’ said Aaron. The assistant tugged on a line, there was a sharp crack, the cord leaped forward and the bolt disappeared in a black blur. I saw it sail in a long arc and thump into the turf on the forward slope of the hill two hundred yards away, burying itself up to half its length about two dozen yards wide of a pair of workmen jogging towards the earthworks with spades on their shoulders. One of the men glanced round as the bolt landed but they didn’t break step and carried on to their place in the diggings.
‘Fifty, seventy yards,’ said Aaron. ‘Beyond that – pfft!’
‘He could shoot at them all day,’ said Vim, ‘use up maybe two score of iron bolts, probably all his stores, and kill one or two men, if he was lucky. It’s not accurate beyond fifty yards; beyond seventy you’d be fortunate to hit a barn door. You wait till they get a bit closer, Sir Alan – and they will come closer – then you’ll see what he can do.’
I left the tower feeling chastened and went to join Tilda at Mass.
The chapel was a wooden cube perched atop the stone privy block on the south side of the middle bailey. It was reached by a set of stairs beside the latrines. Vim once joked that it was a perfect arrangement as one could attend one’s bodily needs below and the needs of one’s soul above. It was lit at night by fine beeswax candles and during the day the large barred wooden window shutter was flung open, allowing the sunlight to stream in and illuminate the handsome golden cross on the altar. It was unusually quiet inside, a place of peace, as only knights and senior officers were permitted to worship therein: rain or shine, the common people were ministered to in the open air of the courtyard.
It was a sunny Sunday morning. I stood next to Tilda in that calm and holy place, very conscious of her warm presence and the faint smell of roses that came from the perfume she wore. I tried to concentrate on what the priest, Father Pierre de la Motte, was saying but found I was distracted merely by the girl’s presence. It was a saint’s day, though I forget which one, and the priest was speaking about the poor man’s particularly gruesome martyrdom long ago at the hands of a pagan Roman Emperor. Father de la Motte was a refined and aristocratic fellow from Rouen whose family’s extensive lands stretched from Boulogne to Burgundy. I had met him only a few times and he seemed a rather ferocious character, tall, lean with hooded bright blue eyes that seemed to pierce your soul.
As the good Father droned on about the ultimate sacrifice every Christian must be ready to make for his faith, I snatched a glance sideways and caught Tilda looking at me with smiling, mischievous eyes. I looked away quickly, then back again to find that she was still eyeing me, with a slightly amused uptilt in the corner of her mouth. She discreetly mimed a yawn, rolling her eyes towards the priest. I fought the urge to laugh, almost successfully.
‘And are you prepared, Sir Alan? Are you fully prepared?’
I tore my gaze from Tilda and looked towards the altar to find that Father de la Motte was addressing me. I had no idea what the priest’s question meant. My mouth was opening and closing soundlessly like a fish.
Tilda saved me. ‘Of course Sir Alan is prepared to die in battle for the sake of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Christian faith. Of course he is. He proved his valour many times in the Holy Land during the Great Pilgrimage.’
I smiled gratefully at her.
De la Motte ignored Tilda entirely. His blue eyes seemed to be boring into my head. ‘Are you truly ready to sacrifice yourself, my son?’ he said.
‘Oh yes, Father,’ I said. ‘Absolutely. Very keen.’ I thought for a moment about what I had just said. ‘Well, no, not actually keen; rather reluctant, if the truth be told. But, you know, if it were unavoidable, I suppose…’
The priest frowned at me. Tilda was now giggling uncontrollably, muffling her laughter with a lace kerchief.
The rest of the service was a blur of embarrassment. Tilda kept nudging me with her elbow and every time I looked at her we both broke into hysterical giggles. Mercifully it soon ended, and just as I was heading for the wooden staircase with Tilda, Father de la Motte called me back and asked to speak with me. I expected to be reprimanded for my unseemly behaviour, and I confess that I was more than a little nervous. He was more than a priest; his aristocratic background had earned him a place on the high council of the castle, the spiritual and temporal overlords of every soul inside its walls. Indeed he was third in the chain of command after Lord de Lacy and Sir Joscelyn Giffard.
In the event, Father de la Motte made no mention of our childish giggling and nudging. He asked about my family circumstances, my service in the Holy Land, and my duties in the outer bailey. When he found out that I had been charged by Robin with a thorough examination of the state of the defences there, he became deeply interested.
‘And what, in your opinion, Sir Alan, is the condition of the mortar in the walls of the outer bailey?’ de la Motte asked. ‘I have heard it is as wet as custard in some parts. Is that so?’
I understood why he asked. A section of the walls in the outer bailey had recently been strengthened and when the outer shell of stones were removed by the castle masons, the mortar that bound the rubble in-fill between had been found to be still slightly moist. Indeed, just as in Falaise, it had been Christophe Scarecrow who had brought this substandard work to my attention. He blamed the masons who built the fortifications, at King Richard’s orders, in such a tearing hurry. But he also told me the outer shells were perfectly solid. And he admitted it would probably stand up to a French assault, with a bit of luck.
I passed all this craft wisdom on to Father de la Motte.
‘So in your opinion, they will hold when Philip manages to set up all his heavy artillery and the bombardment begins?’ the priest enquired.
‘On the whole, the Lionheart built this castle well, sir,’ I told him. ‘It should hold against the castle-breakers, or so my man assures me.’
Father de la Motte grunted and moved on to question me about the morale of the Wolves, the watch system I had instituted, the state of our weapons and armour, and the number of sheaves of arrows at our disposal. He even asked about the effectiveness and range of Old Thunderbolt.
The French dug and they dug. High earthen walls appeared around the little hill, pierced in only a few places by wooden gatehouses flanked by strong wooden towers. They were, in effect, building a crude mud castle in the hill. We saw King Philip’s blue and gold banners entering the earthen camp a few days later, now that it was fully protected from our missiles, and construction began of more permanent shelters than the damp, sagging woollen tents of the men-at-arms: barracks made of nailed planks and thatch. Next, timber stables and storerooms popped up like mushrooms after autumn rain inside that walled expanse of mud.
I expected the digging to cease then, but it did not. Our enemies were not content with protecting themselves with their earthworks, they also sought to hem us in by digging a long ditch and accompanying wall from the western end of Philip’s Hill, as we now called it, all the way to the Seine; and another from the south face of the hill looping around to the south of Château Gaillard and joining the river there. These walls were manned day and night and high towers watched over us as well. We were cut off. Even if we had wanted to leave Château Gaillard, there was little chance of that now.
When the French earthworks were complete, around the first week of October, the heralds once again came to our gates with trumpets blaring and a flag of truce flapping in the chilly breeze. I did not hear the exchange, for I was on duty in the outer bailey, but Robin told me the sense of it was the same as before: Philip offering us one last opportunity to leave with honour and Roger de Lacy telling him he would not go from this place until dragged out by his heels.
I applauded the castellan’s stand, but in my heart a seed of doubt was growing. I did not doubt we could defeat our enemies when they next came charging at our walls – but I was concerned that there was an invisible enemy already inside our fortifications whom we could never defeat: hunger.
‘All rations have been halved, I am sorry to say,’ admitted the pimply fat-boy, wrapped in a warm cloak, sitting snug and dry in his hut by the store-cave. He did not sound in the least sorry and I was not sure if I should believe him or whether this was, in fact, another of his attempts to irk me.
I snarled wordlessly at him.
‘It is not of my doing, Dale. It is my Lord de Lacy’s express command. With all these extra mouths to feed we have depleted nearly one third of the castle stores in a single month. If we continue like this we’ll be starving by Christmastide.’
When I told Robin the news, he wasn’t in the least surprised. ‘Simple counting could have told you this already, Alan,’ he said.
He had a bad head cold that day and was in a foul mood. ‘We took in some two thousand people from the ville, and this castle was originally stocked with rations for a garrison of three or four hundred-odd for a twelve-month. I’m surprised Lord de Lacy did not consider this earlier.’
Quite apart from his cold, Robin had another reason to be out of sorts. Despite his status as an earl, he had been excluded from the private discussions of the castle’s high council: Roger de Lacy, Sir Joscelyn Giffard and Father Pierre de la Motte. While Robin was extended every courtesy due his rank – and had been given the outer bailey to defend on his own – he was not included in the major deliberations about the castle, Roger de Lacy told him, because he had no official status in the hierarchy. De Lacy, Giffard and de la Motte had been in the castle for some months before the siege began, and had formed an efficient triumvirate for its governance, while Robin, as well as being a despised mercenary captain (this went unsaid), was as much of a refugee as the townsfolk who flocked here a couple of days after we arrived.
I was mostly too busy to worry about Robin’s nose being out of joint. As well as organising the Petit Andely folk in their tasks, and the fighting men’s duty rota and overseeing the distribution of the rations, I was determined to keep the sentries up to the mark. My secret dread was a surprise night attack by the French. I had had a dream in which a horde of dark, demonic, many-legged creatures swarmed up the walls of the outer bailey in the dead of night before the alarm could be raised.
I made a tour of the sentries every night before retiring, reminding each of the dire consequences if they fell asleep. One night I came across Stefan, a blacksmith from Petit Andely who had volunteered to serve with the Wolves, and who was doing sentry duty in the small eastern tower. His four fellow members of the watch were in the chamber below huddled around a brazier, for the nights were chilly, and Stefan, a hairy man with forearms as thick as my thighs, was alone on the top of the tower. He was leaning out into the darkness, peering intently towards the French camp. When I came silently up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder he jerked in surprise and nearly fell over the parapet. When he had calmed himself, I asked if he had anything to report.
‘I can’t be certain, sir,’ he said.
‘What do you mean? Either you have something to report or you do not.’
‘I think there is somebody out there, sir, but I can’t be sure.’ He pointed to the saddle of land between our walls and the French encampment on Philip’s Hill. ‘There, sir.’
I peered into the darkness and could see … nothing.
‘What did you see?’ I asked Stefan.
‘I thought, sir, I saw something. A man, a hooded fellow, crawling towards us. Just a glimpse when the moon came out from behind a cloud and then it was gone.’
I strained my eyes and I was about to suggest Stefan took a turn beside the brazier, when I saw it. A long dark shape scuttling like a huge rat over a small rise and down into a hollow. And then it was gone.
I wondered if I had imagined it, and then knew for certain that I had not. It was a man, alone, as far as I could tell and he was heading stealthily towards us.
I shouted, ‘Who goes there!’ into the blackness, but received no response. I went to the far wall of the tower where a pine torch was burning, plucked it from its becket and, whirling it around my head, hurled it as far as I could. It sailed down and landed on the bare turf about twenty yards from the castle walls, creating a pool of orange light as it sizzled on the damp grass. As it landed I saw, once again, a shape moving swiftly at the very edge of the circle of light further into the shadows.
‘What is it, sir?’ asked Stefan. He looked extremely nervous.
‘It is a spy, I think, scouting our walls. But I think we have scared him away for the time being. There is nothing to fear. I will send someone up to watch with you, two pairs of eyes are better than one, and if you see more of them sound the alarm.’
I trotted down the stairs and went to seek Robin in his chamber and ask his advice. But, though I searched the whole of the outer bailey, room by room, then went across to the middle bailey to enquire for him there, I could not locate my lord. After two hours of fruitless search in every hall and chamber in the whole of Château Gaillard, every nook and cranny, I was certain of just one thing.
The Earl of Locksley was not inside the castle.
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning he was back. I discovered Robin in one of the storerooms of the outer bailey, deep in conversation with Vim about the construction of makeshift javelins from old kitchen knives and arrow-straight willow wands, of which the grey-blond mercenary captain had discovered a bundle in the stores.
When I told him about the spy and my search high and low for him in the castle, he was irritatingly vague.
‘I was here and there. I had some people I wanted to talk to. We must have missed each other in the darkness,’ he said.
‘But where exactly were you?’ I pressed.
‘I don’t answer to you for my whereabouts, Alan. You serve me, remember. And you can’t keep running to me whenever you see a ghost in the night. In my absence, you’re in charge of the bailey. You have to learn to make decisions for yourself.’
I was nettled by his words but I could see he had no intention of explaining himself, and so I was forced to let it drop. And, anyway, soon his mysterious absence was completely driven from my mind.
I was sitting on a bench with Tilda at the wine stand in the middle bailey on a pleasantly dry but cloudy afternoon, taking a cup of wine and, at her urging, telling her all about my exploits at Mirebeau, when the first French missile sailed over the eastern walls and shattered against the inner bailey.
The middle bailey had been quiet, for it was the height of the afternoon and many people were sleeping after dinner, but there were still some two hundred people aimlessly moving about as there always were in our crowded community. When the stone ball smashed itself to shards against the wall above our heads, the air was suddenly filled with falling debris and flying splinters of sharp rock, and my immediate, unthinking response was to throw myself at Tilda, to shield her. My fifteen-stone body smashed into her slighter frame, knocking the wind out of her, and the two of us were carried off the bench to thump to the sandy floor of the bailey. I tried to land on my knees and elbows, but I still ended up with my body pressed hard over hers and the two of us lying one on top of the other, face to face, in the dust. Once she had got over the shock and surprise, Tilda began to laugh.
I looked around, still lying atop Tilda, waiting to see if there would be another missile impact, and found myself staring at a pair of mailed feet with silver spurs attached. I looked up the mail legs, past the flowing surcoat, and into the furious face of Sir Joscelyn Giffard. His hand, I saw, was clenched on his hilt.
‘You, sir, will get off my daughter this very instant,’ he said.
I did so hurriedly. Tilda was laughing harder than ever, almost weeping with mirth, as the knight reached down and took her hand and pulled her to her feet.
‘Sir, I can explain,’
I said.
‘I will hear no excuses. I know what was in your mind! You filthy dog.’
‘No, sir, you misunderstand; I was merely—’ but I found I was talking to Sir Joscelyn’s retreating back. He marched across the courtyard towards the gate to the inner bailey, where he and his daughter had their chambers, pulling Tilda behind him, the girl still laughing helplessly.
That single missile, lobbed by Philip’s massive castle-breakers, was the only one to fall inside the middle bailey that day. I believe that something may have broken in the mechanism after that first loose, or the aim may have been changed, for we were not troubled inside the walls again for some days. But the outside walls began to receive a brutal pounding from that day onward.
From the north tower of the outer bailey, a little while later, I could look out at the tops of the three engines of the French over the earth walls on Philip’s Hill, and also two smaller machines set up due east of us behind the earthworks that surrounded the castle. They loosed at us with a ponderous regularity, but without haste, each machine discharging its burden perhaps one or two times per hour, which was a rather slow rate compared with that which these machines are capable of. The French were in no hurry. They had time on their side. Sometimes an hour or two would pass without a missile being fired, usually around the middle portion of the day, at the dinner hour. In the later part of the afternoon the bombardment ceased all together. It was a somewhat lackadaisical way of proceeding against us, and I was reminded in contrast of King Richard’s capture of the Castle of Loches in a single day, nine years before. But the Lionheart had twenty well-oiled war machines, huge numbers of missiles, and he urged on his engineers to loose as often as they could – and Loches was not nearly as strong as Château Gaillard.
Over the next few weeks some of the missiles fell short, a very few of the lighter stones sailed high over the ramparts and exploded against the walls of the inner bailey, but most crashed with dull regularity against the outer walls. Chips of stone would fly, a dent might be made in the limestone shell, but despite concerns about the mortar, the walls stood firm. Yet with each blow I could feel the castle become just the tiniest bit weaker, just a little more tired. People no longer strolled carelessly around the enclosures; they scurried, faces turned nervously towards the sky, hurrying across the open spaces. The most dangerous strikes – mercifully rare – were when the stone balls struck the wall-tops, splintering the galleries fixed there. When this happened there was a great danger of impalement by a shard of wood, some many feet long, not to mention being crushed by the missile itself. Whenever I walked along the top of a wall, I wore my shield on the outer side as an extra protection, although as Father de la Motte pointed out in a lesson one Sunday, it was all in God’s hands. We lived or died according to His will – and it was arrogance to assume that we knew better than the Creator of the world.