by Angus Donald
Then there were no more enemies to kill. The corpses of a score of men, diggers and men-at-arms lay scattered around that wide trench, and a dozen others were groaning, bleeding, crying and dying.
I heard the trumpets. Kit scrambled nimbly up the steep sides of the trench and on to the causeway. I could see his expression clearly, his mouth was a huge ‘O’, his eyes popping from his head.
He turned and shouted, ‘Knights! Knights!’
I yelled at the Wolves, ‘Back, back to the castle! Back to Château Gaillard if you value your lives.’ For I could already hear the thunder of hooves on packed earth and knew my doom was approaching.
A man on foot has little chance against a mounted knight. We fled the trench, but within five heartbeats the French knights were upon us. To my left, a rider dropped his lance and almost casually ran it through the back of a running Wolf, lifting him off the ground and hurling the skewered man and his lance away. I heard the pounding of hooves directly behind me and jinked to my left. I caught a glimpse of a mountain of horseflesh and mail rushing past my right, and something – the knight’s shield, I believe – caught me full in the back and hurled me to the ground.
The Wolves were being chased like hares across the turf, pierced with lances, hacked down by the knights’ swords.
And then Robin took a hand in the fight. I distinctly heard his bellowed commands from the battlements fifty yards away.
‘Nock!’
‘Draw!’
‘Loose!’
And the whisper of many shafts in the air.
As I got to my knees, I saw a knight take an arrow dead in the centre of his chest. His head snapped back, but he kept his seat. Then another yard of steel-tipped ash punched into his neck and he slid from the saddle.
The knights were retreating, galloping away up the causeway as swiftly as they had attacked.
I got to my feet, dazed and a little breathless, and looked around me. Kit was lying a dozen yards away, blood on his face, unmoving. I could see the three fleetest members of the Wolves hurrying towards the castle walls and one already crossing over the plank across the ditch to the postern gate. That was all that remained of the twenty men who had charged out of the castle with me so bravely less than half an hour before.
I went to Kit and, praise God, found he was still breathing. I loosed the straps on his helmet and eased it off his head and saw a gash high on his cheek and a livid bruise on the side of his skull. He had taken a nasty knock but I was fairly certain he’d live. I picked him up and slung him over my shoulder. But, although he weighed hardly anything after weeks of poor food, such was my own weakened state that I staggered as I carried him the twenty yards back to the walls.
I was summoned that evening to see Roger de Lacy. I expected to be roared at and roundly abused for my criminal recklessness – I would have deserved it. Instead, de Lacy seemed merely saddened by the whole affair.
‘I understand your feelings, Sir Alan,’ said the castellan gloomily. ‘I know it is very hard to sit idle while our enemies flaunt themselves within bowshot. I applaud your courage and initiative. But I cannot have any repetition of this sort of bloody business. I hear that you lost fourteen men-at-arms, more than two-thirds of your command in this little adventure. Is that true?’
I squirmed under his gaze.
‘And I hear that you slew a score of their men in the trenches, workers and peasants, mostly. Is that also correct?’
I nodded, looking at my boots.
‘This will not do, Sir Alan – we cannot afford to lose fourteen men-at-arms, we cannot afford to lose even one! Philip can summon up more peasants from his lands at will to dig mud and make his earthworks; I cannot make more men-at-arms.’
All this was perfectly clear to me. I longed for him to be silent and dismiss me. But he seemed to wish to make the point more forcefully, as if I were an idiot. And judging by the disastrous sortie that I had just led, perhaps he did think me one.
‘Do you see, Sir Alan? Every man we lose, weakens us. You must contain your zeal for battle until the moment is right. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So no more of these rash endeavours. We must stay behind our walls.’
‘Yes, sir; I mean, no, sir. I mean, no more rash endeavours, sir.’
‘Very good. You may go now.’
I was overjoyed to do so.
Chapter Twenty-one
The causeway came ever closer. Philip’s trebuchets pounded away in daylight hours and the crack-crack-crack of ball on stone numbed our ears. We ate up our meagre rations, drank our hot herb brew and dreamed of food as a young man dreams of love. I grieved for the good men whose lives I had thrown away with my rashness and stupidity. But, to my great relief, Kit recovered, and after a day or two in bed, he was back to his old cheerful self.
The French began acting strangely. Beyond the ramparts at the base of the long causeway, I could make out large groups of men moving about – many hundreds. There were banners and trumpet calls almost incessantly. The empty belfry was pushed forward to a position behind the gates and I could see men clambering all over it like spiders, hammering in last nails, hanging hides, fixing a rope here or there. And then, at a little before noon, without the slightest ceremony, the gates were flung open and I saw the completed belfry: a tall, thin, square wooden tower on wheels. It looked terrifying.
‘They are coming,’ said Robin. ‘This is it.’
‘They haven’t finished the causeway,’ I said, pointing to the twenty yards of open space, twice as deep as a standing man, that existed between the end of the tamped-down earth road and our ditch and walls.
‘They plan to fill that gap today,’ said Robin. ‘Sound the alarm, quickly, Alan, I want every man we have on the eastern walls right now. All the archers concentrated, half and half, in the north and south towers. Go, now!’
I went.
It took the most part of an hour for the belfry to advance the three hundred yards from Philip’s Hill across the causeway. It chafed our nerves raw, as we knew that when the belfry came up to our walls we would be fighting for our lives. It was painfully slow for them, too, for we made them pay for every yard in the blood of their men-at-arms. A score of men in the bottom of the tower pushed the machine along on its four solid wheels. But the belfry was an unwieldy beast, and monstrously heavy, and the men were soon exhausted and had to be relieved by others. Those pushing from inside its base were completely protected but the men waiting their turn behind the ungainly machine were much more vulnerable.
Although they were protected by shield men in the outer ranks, Robin’s archers killed them by the score. My lord led his bowmen by example: he plucked arrows from the full bag at his waist, nocked, drew back the powerful bow, the hempen string reaching his ear, and loosed. The shaft flashed out, curved in the air and, without fail, the bodkin point punched deep into living flesh. As the belfry trundled inexorably forward, the unfortunate men in its shadow paid the price for its advance. Squads of fresh men hurried out from Philip’s Hill to replace the dead and dying – and the belfry kept trundling along, closer, ever closer. The causeway was soon stained red with blood, slippery and littered with bodies; I saw sergeants kicking corpses into the ditches on either side so as not to block the passage of the troops in the wake of the belfry. But as fast as Robin and his men killed them, Philip replaced the stricken Frenchmen, and ever more foes, running in mail, shields high, sallied forth from the encampment to join in the great effort to heave the belfry towards our walls.
King Philip went so far as to dispatch a score of mounted knights, who patrolled up and down the causeway, as a deterrent to another sortie – and that was when I finally saw what Old Thunderbolt could do.
Aaron’s beloved springald was mounted on the north tower of the outer bailey. From there it could loose its bolts into the belfry or into the flanks of the squads of terrified men-at-arms hurrying along the causeway, shields held high, to join in the effort of pus
hing the mobile tower forward.
But Aaron chose to kill the knights.
I was watching a mounted man trotting casually along the north side of the causeway, about seventy yards out, exhorting a group of men in mail to hurry to the safety of the belfry’s shadow, when I heard a loud crack from my left, just made out the black blur of the bolt and saw the knight hurled from the saddle, his body sliced cleanly in half by the iron bolt. One moment he was riding merrily along, the next his upper body was spinning away from a rain of blood. The horse went mad with fright, leaped into the ditch on the far side of the causeway and was not seen again.
However, Old Thunderbolt was very slow to reload, and Aaron selected his targets with great care, so it was nearly a quarter hour before I next saw him make a kill. A pair of knights this time, riding side by side in the centre of the causeway, a hundred yards away. Either the bolt was faulty, or Aaron had doctored it somehow, for it spun in flight in a yard-wide circle of lethally spinning iron and cut raggedly through the chests of both knights and crushed one of the horse’s skulls.
I was deeply impressed – it was the last time knights ventured on to the causeway for some while.
Eventually, Robin’s withering barrage had to slacken – he had only a limited number of shafts to loose and I knew he was husbanding them for the assault itself. His six marksmen still stole the lives of the waiting men cowering behind the belfry; and from time to time Aaron, too, smashed a wicked bolt into the ranks there, murdering three or four and painting the belfry with their viscera.
But the machine was upon us. Trumpets sounded from Philip’s Hill and a horde disgorged from their encampment – perhaps six or seven hundred came running along the causeway. Some carried swords, spears, crossbows, axes – others bore huge wickerwork cages, others great stones and bags of what looked like wool or cloth, others ladders, blankets and big floppy leather bags. At least two hundred men came on behind this first eruption, with light carts and wheelbarrows filled with earth, and another hundred behind them carried spades.
Restraint forgotten, Robin’s archers drew and loosed, drew and loosed a dozen times; Aaron hurled his thunderbolts and cut bloody furrows through the enemy ranks. The men under my command – sixty of the Wolves and twenty men-at-arms from the castle garrison – showered heavy stones on the men’s heads below us. But they were too many. The French toiled like ants, throwing earth, wickerwork, cloth, even the bodies of their fallen comrades into the gap between us, desperate to fill the ditch any way they could. And it was filling. Soon it was filled to the height of the causeway, even higher. In the time it takes to say ten Our Fathers, the gap was bridged. We killed them, and we killed more, but they were just too many, and more men-at-arms, swords drawn, mail gleaming, were coming along the causeway from Philip’s Hill, hundreds more. They swarmed inside the tall machine, climbing the ladders inside to fill the galleries with fighting men, and soon the belfry was rolling forward again. It lurched as it hit the newly filled area, sagged to one side in the softer earth, but was hauled upright and steadied by hundreds of willing hands. And then it came on again.
I turned to my Wolves. ‘You all know what to do,’ I said. ‘They must not place a foot on the battlements. Follow my commands, do your duty, and fight like devils. If we can hold them here, then push them back, we will have won!’
It was not the greatest of speeches given to men facing death, but I was rewarded by an eldritch howl that lifted my heart as much as the hairs on my neck.
Suddenly the belfry was ten feet away.
The wide face of it fell forward, the wood bouncing slightly on the stone parapet and making a bridge. I shouted, ‘Shields up! Shields up!’ and knelt down behind the battlements with my helmeted head buried under the top of my shield, and with the sound of the cracking of a thousand whips, a hailstorm of crossbow bolts exploded from the inside of the top gallery of the belfry, spewing a blizzard of iron-tipped death against our walls.
We responded with a score of arrows loosed at a range of a couple of yards into the topmost gallery, which was packed with men – and I guarantee that every shaft found a mark – but most of our bowmen were in the towers on either side of the point of assault, and so unable to make the angle into the gallery. Men-at-arms, scores of them, a wall of grey mail and silver blades and red faces glaring under steel helmets, erupted from the box and charged, bellowing madly, across its dropped face.
And we stepped forward to meet them.
We crashed into them like vast boulders smashing together. Shields high, our swords stabbing over the top, we ploughed forward; myself in the centre, Vim to my left, Kit to my right, thirty Wolves crammed in hard all around me. We slammed into the wall of our foes as they charged across the wooden bridge. I felt as if I were trying to stop a maddened bull. One dark fellow whose shield was mashed against mine was cursing vilely at me in French, till a comrade’s spear slid over my shoulder, ripped his cheek apart and he fell away. Another yelling fellow immediately surged forward to take his place. But we held them – just – at the line of the battlements. The two sides were now one huge, heaving mass of struggling men, shoving, stabbing, screaming, dying and falling off the bouncing bridge that linked the top gallery of the belfry to the battlements.
We held them – by God’s grace. Yet the press was so tight it was almost impossible to move: we snarled and shoved and spat over our shield tops at the enemy; my helmet ringing with the blows of foes from behind their front line.
From the towers to either side, Robin’s archers slew men by the dozen. The arrows scythed in, skewering necks and sword-wielding arms, the punctured men falling thirty feet to the earth below. Old Thunderbolt loosed its deadly iron bolts from time to time, cutting a bloody channel two men deep through the press of humanity on the bridge. But despite the carnage, despite the constant rain of men, spitted with arrows, slashed with sword and spear, who fell screaming, the pressure against us never slackened. For the belfry’s greatest strength was its ability to feed men from the ground, up the stacked galleries, up the ladders, in a constant stream of charging, shouting humanity, to the top and on to the wooden bridge and into battle.
We fought like demons. We killed and killed, our blood-slick swords, when we could free them, reaching over our shields to stab into the faces of our enemies. The men jammed up behind us lanced over our heads with spears, or swung long-handled axes with terrible effect. We shoved back the enemy with all our might, but he was constantly replenished. How ever many we killed, his numbers never decreased, and we were gradually being pushed back, back.
Now the enemy was on the battlements – a bridgehead of a dozen men, but with more leaping to join them with every beat of my heart. My command had been forced into two, split by the pressure of the advance, and I saw Vim’s despairing face on the other side of the seething mass of our bloodied attackers, as he sliced and hewed at the foe like a hero of old. Yet we were being forced back, back and back – the enemy was inside the outer bailey, leaping from the bridge and landing freely on our walls.
I shouted, ‘Hold them, hold them!’ and summoned the last of my strength. I smashed my shield into a roaring face, battered Fidelity down on to a helmet, then punched my cross-guard into a man’s eyes. I managed to push forward a pace, ducked a swinging axe, and stabbed the man through his armpit. A crossbow bolt cracked into my helmet and I staggered back, dazed. Then felt Kit’s hand on my back steadying me. I charged forward once again, lunging, stabbing, screaming, ‘Westbury!’ and killing a terrified man with a brutal chop to the neck.
I heard the distinctive crack of the springald being loosed. I snatched a look at the belfry’s bridge, expecting to see that another bloody swath had been cleared through the crush of enemies charging over it, and my first thought was that Aaron had missed. The iron bolt of the springald was sunk up to half its length into the ox-hide-covered side of the machine and, curiously, a length of rope was extending from the end of the bolt back to the north tower.
Th
e rope snapped taut.
I dodged a sword swing, stepped forward and crashed the side of my shield into a man’s face. I stabbed once, twice, into the press of Frenchmen before me, but I was not truly giving the foe the whole of my attention.
I stole a glance behind to the north tower and saw Robin’s archers had laid down their bows and were all of them, some twenty men, hauling on the stout rope. Surely the bolt must come loose, I thought to myself – fending off a French knight who came at me like a tiger with sword and dagger – surely they will pull it free of the belfry like a cork from a bottle?
It was in that moment the battle’s fortunes were decided. Over the sea of screaming enemies before me, on the battlements on the other side, I could see Vim’s men were suddenly more numerous. There was no sign of the mercenary captain, but I could see Sir Joscelyn Giffard and thirty men-at-arms boiling out of the south tower and coming to join us. At the same time I felt a fresh surge of pressure from behind, as we too were reinforced by a flood of men from the middle bailey who even now were shoving their way eagerly into battle.
And the belfry began to lean. The iron bolt had not come loose. The archers, back and arm muscles strengthened by years of practice with powerful bows, hauled the rope towards them, foot by foot, yard by yard. I could hear Robin’s brazen voice clearly over the clash and screams of battle, ordering his men to ‘Heave, you weaklings! Heave like men!’
