by Angus Donald
The castellan strode from the room without a backward glance.
‘It is a bit thin, Alan,’ said Robin. ‘Come on, we’re all on edge. It is easy to let our imaginations get the better of us. Forget it for the moment and try to get a good night’s sleep. Here, have some more ale.’
‘Thank you, no,’ I said, irked that these men, both of whom I admired, had dismissed my idea. I, too, rose and left the chamber, my face beetroot red.
The next morning the French came at us again. They treated us with a good deal of respect after the disastrous belfry attack and the day began, as usual, with another battering from the castle-breakers. Perhaps I did suffer from an overabundance of imagination, as Robin had suggested the night before, because I distinctly heard the stone wall of the south tower moving under the pounding it received from Philip’s petraries that day. In the middle of the morning the barrage abruptly ceased and, in the unfamiliar quiet, I ran to the top to see what was amiss – and beheld a most extraordinary sight approaching along the causeway from Philip’s Hill.
It was a cat – not the household scourge of mice and rats, but the battlefield scourge of walls and masonry. Its use in battle is quite rare and not one man in a hundred has faced one, and so I must explain its functions. At its simplest the cat was nothing more than a very strongly built house on wheels; but it is the expertise of the men it contains that makes it so fearsome. Inside this cat – constructed of foot-thick timbers, roofed with overlapping inch-thick oak shingles and covered top, front and sides with wet ox-hide to prevent it being set alight – were a score of highly skilled men under a senior engineer armed with picks and iron bars, spikes, spades and hammers. Their task was to claw away at the foundations of the south tower, to undermine our walls, to pick at, and scrape into and lever out the masonry – until our defences came tumbling down. Watching a small house on wheels creeping towards you along the causeway might not appear a good reason for alarm – it sounds a little comical, perhaps – but I felt a tremor of fear at its approach, for I knew what an attack by this rolling monster truly portended.
The cat did not come on alone. Two battles of crossbowmen – each a hundred strong – came up the causeway on either side of it, and took up positions a hundred yards out. A conroi of knights formed up outside the gates of the encampment on Philip’s Hill, just out of range of our bows.
The cat crawled forward and, as it approached, a dozen of Robin’s archers in the north tower loosed shafts at its lumbering bulk. With no result whatsoever. The wet ox-hides on the sloping roof, and the shingles underneath, easily soaked up the power of the war bows. The roof became thickly feathered with our shafts – and that was all. We had no way of stopping the cat, except by sallying out of the outer bailey and killing the men inside who propelled it – and this is where the crossbowmen came in. These disciplined foot soldiers worked in pairs, each pair protected by a giant shield, called a pavise, which was the height of a man and nearly twice as wide. The pavise was fixed into the earth of the causeway by a spike on its bottom edge and the two crossbowmen – mercenaries from Genoa, I assumed, by the red cross on a white background on their pavises – worked in its shade, one loading his cumbersome crossbow, while the other sought out a suitable target on the walls and loosed. They were professionals, every man a marksman, and even at a hundred yards we had to keep our heads below the parapet if we wished to escape a bolt through the eye. Even if we had found the courage to sally out and charge the crossbowmen – and our casualties would have been appalling – there was the conroi of cavalry ready and waiting by the gates to the French camp to see that we did not return safely home again.
We could do nothing but watch as the cat rolled inexorably towards us.
Robin left his archers to continue a cautious duel with the crossbowmen – for once in a while a Genoese who foolishly stepped beyond the protection of his pavise could be satisfactorily skewered – and came to my side above the end of the causeway to the left of the south tower.
The cat was so close now that I could make out the heads of the long nails that held the ox-hides to the roof. As it reached the half-filled ditch before our walls, I heard the score of men inside the machine give a roar. They increased their speed and hurled the house-on-wheels down into the ditch to land with a thump against the base of our battlements.
As the dust settled, I looked down directly twenty feet below on to the brown-and-white hide-covered roof of the cat. It was angled downwards, the rear end high up on the causeway, the front down in the rubble of the ditch, and it was not quite snug against the walls; one side was hard up against the stone, the other was a good foot away. Through this gap, I saw the bearded face of a man peering up at me, but before I had time to react, he darted back under the roof.
We hurled rocks, stones and pieces of broken masonry down on the roof of the cat, but while they boomed satisfactorily, they seemed to have no destructive effect at all. Robin ordered several cauldrons of water to be heated to boiling point and poured on to the wet hides, which sizzled and steamed and gave off the tantalising smell of cooking beef, an insult to our siege-shrunken bellies. But while the hot water dripped off the indifferent eves, and the boulders crashed and bounced off the arrow-struck sides, one sound could clearly be heard coming from below.
The chink-chink-chink of steel chisels on stone.
‘I have to go out and stop them,’ I said to Robin. ‘However high the risk, we cannot let them pull the castle down from under us.’
I remember Robin’s expression very well: it was one of the few times I have seen him look uncertain.
‘Somebody must go,’ he said. ‘But that duty, I believe, falls to me. I leave you in command of the outer bailey. If anything happens to me, see that Marie-Anne and the boys are cared for. I leave them in your charge, Alan.’
‘My lord, I will go in your stead. We need you here to defend the castle.’
‘Do not argue with me, Alan. For once, just do as you are told.’
Chapter Twenty-four
Robin took twenty volunteers from the garrison – grim-faced men who had known him a long time and who would follow him to the very gates of Hell. An hour later they slipped out of the postern gate and into the half-filled ditch at the bottom of the walls. And there they began to die. Watchful eyes saw them leave the castle and almost immediately the quarrels of the Genoese began to strike them. Our archers returned the compliment valiantly, but Robin and his Wolves had stepped into a storm of death. They ran the thirty yards from the little door to the causeway through a blizzard of crossbow bolts, with a man falling every third step, and threw themselves at the cat. But the men inside were ready. After a short, fierce battle at the rear of the cat, in which I saw Robin, his blade flashing silver, cut down two giant axe-wielding men in three heartbeats, the thunder of hooves heralded the arrival of the conroi of French knights, which charged down the causeway to the rescue of the engineers.
Aaron’s aim proved true once again, and Old Thunderbolt utterly disintegrated one of the knights, smashing him out of the saddle in a tangle of severed arms and legs. But the rest of the conroi arrived more or less unscathed and Robin and his surviving men ran for their lives. They made it back inside the postern gate a yard or two ahead of the lances of the foremost horsemen. Panting, bloody, wild-eyed, eight of the Wolves who had sallied out with Robin returned safely home with him. A dozen bolts were stuck in Robin’s mail but the iron links had kept the missiles from penetrating, and my lord was no worse than bruised. However, while that knowledge gave me relief, the sortie achieved nothing, and twelve brave Wolves would never see the sun rise again.
Half an hour later eight big fellows were hurried out from the gates on Philip’s Hill in the centre of a mob of French men-at-arms and, under a covering of many shields, in an ancient formation known as a ‘tortoise’, they were swiftly escorted along the causeway to the cat – replacements for the men Robin and his Wolves had killed. We spattered them with arrows but they were well prote
cted, and moving fast, and the best we achieved was to kill one man-at-arms and wound another.
Below our walls the chink-chink-chinking began again.
We would not concede defeat easily. We harassed them as much as was humanly possible. We battered the cat with huge chunks of masonry ripped from the parapet on the south-western side of the outer bailey – which had been largely ignored by the French – and carried up to the walls above the cat by two of the biggest Wolves. But the machine was unbelievably strong and springy, and our missiles bounced or slowly rolled off without puncturing it or causing any damage save for the occasional tear in the ox-hide. Robin found a precious barrel of cooking oil which we heated until it smoked, then carefully poured down in a slick on one side of the cat and set alight with burning arrows. Again the smell of roasting beef tormented us, but the cat, while a little singed, remained largely unharmed.
The chinking noise continued by day and night – the causeway made bright with scores of torches after dusk, set there by the enemy to foil any attempt at a night sortie. Aaron smashed his iron bolts time and again into the side of that powerful wooden box, to no avail. We even tried to lift the cat away from the walls with ropes, lowering a loop and snagging a protruding end post – but while we hauled at the cat in vain, the French engineers divined our plans and sawed through the ropes from inside their mobile fortress – and we tumbled back comically like mountebanks.
A second cat came out from the encampment on Philip’s Hill, lighter and smaller than the first, but still robust. We christened it ‘the kitten’. It trundled smoothly along the causeway and came to rest nose-to-tail at the rear of the original machine, creating a long fortified tunnel. The kitten brought out more men and supplies with it and, through the little gap between the first cat and our walls, I glimpsed timbers and barrels being swiftly manhandled into the cavity that had been made beneath our feet.
I was gripped in that time with a burning sense of impotent rage. These men were eating away at our foundations like ants chewing through a door post – and there seemed nothing I or anybody else could do about it. I would spend hours with a pair of javelins kneeling behind the parapet above the cat, listening to them and hoping to hear when one of the men came out of the space they had dug under the wall, so that I could leap up and spit him with a thrown spear before he slipped across the tiny gap. But after one narrow miss, my javelin clattering off the stone walls, the man calling out to God in fear, they covered the gap with a roof of thick planks and thenceforth they travelled from cat to mine in perfect safety. I still spent some hours each day sitting above them, listening to their French chatter and trying to think of a way of combatting the steady erosion of our defences – and a few days after the mining began, I did hear something of great interest. Two men were coming out of the cavity beneath the south tower and speaking quite casually with one another. One was the senior engineer, the man in charge, and the other I thought was a new fellow, a junior man but of some rank; they hustled across the causeway under a roof of shields.
‘It’s just as the Sparrow told us,’ the older fellow said, quite distinctly. ‘The mortar is as wet as custard in some places.’
I sat up straight at these words. At the phrase ‘as wet as custard’. I had heard it from someone inside the castle. But who? I did not have to beat my brains for long. It was Father de la Motte. He had uttered it to describe the mortar inside the walls of the Iron Castle, and one of our enemies was using this exact same – and most unusual – phrase.
My first impulse was to tell Robin. Then I quashed it. The last time I had come to him with tales of a traitor inside our walls he had dismissed it as the workings of my overimaginative mind. And while I was certain that we had a turncoat among us, I had no more proof than the last time – just a muttered conversation and the coincidence of a phrase. Clearly the name the traitor went by among the French was the Sparrow – but who was he? Could it be de la Motte? If so, what motive could he have for working towards our destruction? In truth, I did not believe it truly was Father de la Motte. He was a good man, a man of God. He could not be so base as to betray his flock to the enemy. Could he? It was far more likely that he had heard someone – the true traitor – use the phrase, and merely repeated it to me. I had no answers to these questions – and no one I could usefully discuss them with. In the end I did nothing. For all thoughts of the Sparrow and his treachery were pushed from my head the next morning when the men in the cat finished their task.
I was on the north tower with Aaron and we were discussing the possibility of a very long shot of the springald against the conroi of horsemen on permanent guard outside the gates of the French encampment. My idea was to use a lighter bolt and scatter the cavalry, then send out a screen of shield men as cover against the crossbowmen for an attacking force, who would run out and slaughter the men inside the cat. It was a plan of last resort, an elaborate scheme – and I was fairly sure Robin would veto it after the debacle of his sally three days ago. Aaron was not even sure he could do much damage with Old Thunderbolt at that distance anyway.
As I looked dispiritedly at the evil cat, eating away at my walls, I was surprised to see a score of men burst out of the rear of the kitten, burdened down with tools, bundles and boxes. They raced as fast as they could along the causeway towards Philip’s Hill.
They were moving too fast for Aaron to have a chance of hitting them – and Old Thunderbolt was not ready to loose anyway. But the curious thing was that the cat the men had abandoned in such a hurry appeared to be burning. A thick column of grey smoke was pouring out of the rear end of the kitten, as if the enemy’s fortified tunnel had been magically transformed into a chimney, and dark vapour was seeping from the sides of both machines, too. At the same moment a trebuchet loosed from the French camp and a huge stone ball looped through the air and exploded in a storm of shards against the south tower.
I cupped my hands to my face and bellowed to Robin who was standing on the walls about twenty paces away.
‘They’ve fired the mine – get everyone off the south tower!’
Robin shouted back, ‘I’m not totally blind, Alan. Nor yet quite senile!’ He pointed to the thick bank of greasy smoke that was enveloping the whole of the base of the tower.
We pulled every man off the tower, and the connecting fortifications, with the missiles of the whole French battery crashing and smashing against our walls. We had already moved our wounded, our stores, our weapons and possessions out of that citadel and into the courtyard or the north and west towers. For we knew full well what was occurring beneath our feet. The French would have excavated a large space underneath the walls of the tower, a wide tunnel burrowing inward for several yards, supporting its roof with thick baulks and roof pieces nailed firmly in place. This was necessary because, above their heads, as they dug in, were a couple of thousand tons of rubble and stone. When the excavation was finished, the space they had hollowed out would have been filled with brushwood, kindling and many barrels of pig fat, and duly set alight – that accounted for the dark, oily smoke. The miners had run for their lives while the fire raged and burned its way through the wooden supports in the tunnel and then, if the French were lucky, and their excavations had been deep enough, well …
With a sound like a mountain tearing itself in two, the eastern half of the south tower and part of the curtain wall collapsed into a heap of broken masonry and tumbling, bouncing stone. The whole outer bailey was cloaked in grey dust and pig-fat smoke so thick it was almost impossible to breathe, but when the fog began to dissipate, I could see that a breach fully three or four yards wide had opened in our walls. Through the gap I could make out the earth ramparts on top of Philip’s Hill, packed with French spectators. The south tower gaped: I could see inside the chamber on the middle floor where for the past six months we had dined, the big table and the benches, the sideboard stripped of plates; and on the ground floor I could even make out the cot where I slept up against the far, intact wall of the tower
.
It felt deeply wrong, as though I were peeping at a woman halfway through dressing herself. To add insult to grave injury, the bombardment started up again as though nothing had happened. The balls smashed into the breach, widening it – one flew straight through the gap into a pair of archers standing in the courtyard. Both men disappeared in a splash of red, limbs wheeling through the air.
Robin was by my side, in the courtyard by the west wall. He took my arm and pointed through the hole in our defences to Philip’s Hill. I flinched as a ball crashed into the rubble below the breach, sending white dust and stone chips flying, then took command of myself and looked to where Robin was pointing. The gates had swung open and columns of marching spearmen were disgorging from the encampment. I could see the bright trappers of massed knights behind them.
‘They are coming,’ said Robin. ‘And they will surely be able to break through, if they try hard enough. We cannot hold this bailey for long – but we must hold it for a little while yet. We have to get our stores, our kit, all the wounded, then the rest of us over the bridge and into the middle bailey. And you, my friend, have to hold them while I accomplish this. I’ll give you twenty Wolves, ten of them archers – I’ll need the rest for carrying the wounded and all the gear. Can you do it?’
I swallowed. Of all the tasks Robin had asked of me over the years, this seemed the most difficult. I could see hundreds of men on the causeway – two hundred spearmen at least, a battle of crossbowmen, a conroi of horsemen.
