The Iron Castle

by Angus Donald

  I looked around at the men I had the honour to command. Good men, mostly Wolves. Familiar faces, confident grins, bright eyes: there was Claes, the one-eyed vintenar, waiting patiently for my orders; there were Jago and Denzell, the Cornish brothers to whom I owed my life, who both favoured long spears and round oak shields; there was Jacques, the big Norman mason, without the tools of his craft but carrying a long, old-fashioned bearded axe and looking grim. And somewhere below my feet was the crushed body of Christophe, the brave engineer entombed in an enemy mine, near the place that had nearly become my own tomb.

  Another good man dead – for nothing.

  ‘We hold this breach until we are relieved; those are the orders. And we will do exactly that. We do not take a single step backwards. We hold them here. I will rotate you, so that each man has a chance to rest at the rear of the shield wall. But know this: if we let them in, we are dead. So we hold them. Understood?’

  The response was a faint chorus of muttered assent.

  ‘What? You want to live for ever?’ I showed them my teeth. ‘This is where the war is today.’ I rapped a piece of broken masonry with my mail-covered knuckles. ‘This is where the war is and we are its warriors. So here is where we fight. Here is where we will show the kind of men we are. And if we fall, so be it, but we shall have made such a battle that we will be remembered for ever. For we are the Wolves!’

  I threw back my head and howled like a madman.

  And every man in that squad, whether they were Wolves or not, opened wide his jaws and howled with me.

  The French came up the hill and through the gates of the middle bailey – at least two hundred men – spearmen in the front ranks, dismounted knights and men-at-arms behind them, and crossbowmen on the flanks. They shouted ‘Saint Denis!’ invoking the headless holy man they venerated in Paris and ‘Vive le Roi!’

  The attack began with ordered ranks and files of men, but once through the gates of the middle bailey, they filled the air with their roars and charged forward as a mob. The French were brave men, fighting for their lord, and the first rank of men, those facing the greatest danger, were particularly valorous. But they died just the same. The first iron bolt of Old Thunderbolt ploughed into the mass of shouting men on the stone bridge when they were no more than twenty yards from the breach. It slashed through their ranks like a giant scythe, leaving a bloody furrow through the press of humanity; a dozen men were maimed or killed by that one strike. Then Robin’s archers and crossbowmen loosed their shafts – and showered the bridge with death. Like a swooping flock of deadly birds, the arrows hummed into the staggering men. Steel bodkin heads punched through padded gambesons, leather armour, even mail, and sank into tender flesh. Evil black quarrels punctured limbs and torsos, faces were gashed, bones were smashed, men were knocked flying. There were bodies falling, left and right, tumbling into the ditch below. The war cries turned to screams. The first volley from our bowmen was followed, moments later, by a second – only of arrows this time, war bows being faster to draw and loose than crossbows – then a third. Chaos screamed across that awful bridge, stealing souls, hurling men into destruction. One moment there were two score spearmen on the bridge, charging towards the breach, their long spears stretching out to us, the next it had almost been wiped clear, save for the bodies and the blood and the writhing wounded, men stuck here, there and everywhere with slim feathered shafts. I saw one with half a dozen shafts in his body, still moving feebly. Of forty who charged so valiantly, only three made it to the other side of the bridge – but they still bounded up the loose rubble slope, yelling their fury, stabbing with their spears – and were cut down with ease by the dozen eager Wolves who leaped forward to meet them at the top.

  I had not yet drawn my sword.

  The attack was far from over; more spearmen were coming forward from the gatehouse in the middle bailey, following in the bloody footsteps of the first, stepping cautiously on to the bridge, their shields held high, spears levelled, helmeted heads tucked in behind, shafts hammering down on them like hailstones. They came on still in their disciplined squads, many scores of them, some stepping through the carnage, slipping a little on the blood, some falling, some hesitating but most coming forward inexorably towards us; and yet more of the enemy, fifty men at least, were pouring down into the ditch on the right of the bridge, the southern side, nearest the breach, and that deep-dug defence was soon full of jostling, angry men shoving each other up the slippery chalk side, standing on shoulders and boosting each other, scrambling up and on to the tumbled stones of our broken walls.

  Robin’s men were no longer loosing volleys – the archers picked their targets and almost every arrow claimed a life. But they could not stem that flood of foes.

  Old Thunderbolt cracked again from high up behind me and a black bar of death hurtled through the air into the first men clambering out of the ditch and beginning their determined scrabble up the rubble slope to the breach. Two French men-at-arms were smashed apart, quite literally ripped limb from limb by the spinning yard-long steel bolt – and Robin’s bowmen were dropping quarrels and shafts on the heads of the milling horde in the ditch.

  Many died, but yet more of them came forward.

  A dozen men were now on the scree of loose masonry, and climbing towards us, shields held out before them, using spear and sword as staffs to speed them onwards and upwards. Into the mouth of battle. Into the cauldron of Hell. A volley of crossbow bolts lashed into them; two dropped, another staggered sideways, a quarrel in his belly. But on they came.

  I drew my sword.

  Despite Aaron’s devilish work with Old Thunderbolt, and the slaughter wrought by our bowmen, the enemy were upon us.

  I stepped up to the lip of the breach, the highest point in that stony hole in our walls, and waited a couple of heartbeats for the first French man-at-arms to puff and pant his way up towards me. Claes was at my right shoulder and Jacques the big mason at my left. Below us the enemy swarmed like angry ants. By now a dozen, a score, two score fighting men were boiling out of the ditch and scrambling their way towards us. It was time.

  I howled once, long and hard, and plunged into the mass of the enemy, my sword swinging like a butcher’s cleaver.

  The first man-at-arms died easily, Fidelity slicing into his waist almost of its own accord. There was another man, directly behind him, lunging at me with a sword. I swerved to avoid the blade and hacked into his arm, smashing Fidelity into his elbow joint. He screamed, dropped his shield and my back-swing chopped into his face, just below the ear. But, in the few heartbeats it took to free my blade from his gripping skull, a third man was on me, a knight in fine mail with a flower device on his shield. He hacked at my head, I ducked … and Jacques split his skull with one blow of his bearded axe.

  The enemy were all around us, and the Wolves either side of me were killing them with barely restrained fury. I chopped and sliced with Fidelity, I lunged and smashed my blade into the enemy. I shoved men back with my shield, and over our heads the deadly shafts whistled and buzzed, knocking down men just as they reached the top of the breach. The enemy seemed to pause, to reel back all at the same time, and I grabbed the two Wolves on either side and bawled at them to form a shield wall with me, here, and they sprang into the formation with admirable speed, those mindless hours on the Rouen training ground paying off; a dozen Wolves were at my back and both sides, shields high, plugging the left side of the breach with our armoured bodies. The French rallied and surged forward: a wave of men crashed against us, shouting stabbing, scrabbling with their feet to shove us back. I kept my shield up, though the downward pressure on it was enormous, and stabbed hard over the top, aiming under the rim of steel helmets at faces that seemed to be all red, screaming mouth – I thrust and jabbed with my sword, piercing cheeks and bursting eyes. The wounded enemy fell away but were instantly replaced by fresh yelling faces, and the weight on my shield never seemed to slacken. It was brutal work merely to keep your footing on the tumbled ma
sonry – and twice I felt the rubble lurch beneath my feet and twice I felt the crunch of steel blades against my mail-clad shins – but to stumble and fall meant death by trampling in the scrum of snarling, hacking, screaming, dying men and, by God’s grace, I kept my feet in that mêlée.

  I snatched a glance to my left and saw that de Lacy and his closest knights were fighting in the centre and beyond them I caught a glimpse of Sir Joscelyn killing foes with compact, well-trained strokes of his sword. The French were still boiling up over the lip of the ditch and sprinting across the bridge, scrambling to get at us, but by now they had to trample their own dying and dead to reach our shield line. Old Thunderbolt cracked again, smashing into five attackers who came at us in a group, swiping them all away and leaving only a bloody smear and a scatter of severed limbs. But still the enemy flung themselves at us, reckless of their own lives, inviting us to slaughter them. I dropped man after man, my sword red from hilt to tip, my face and mail dripping, my voice hoarse, my ears deafened by the roars and the screaming.

  Then a spear reached out from the second rank of the mass of enemies before me, driving towards my face. I ducked my head behind my shield and felt the jolt of the blow and the steel blade scrape harmlessly against my helmet. Something else crashed against the steel, making my head ring, but I felt the pressure against my shield ease momentarily and I bullocked forward blindly, forcing a wavering Frenchman backwards with brute strength, breaking our own wall but freeing my sword arm, to lunge and pierce his groin. He fell; another man appeared and I punched my hilt into his face, saw flying teeth, blood; I kicked another fellow in the belly; I sliced at an enemy, a vicious scything blow to the head, but a rock turned under my right foot and I missed – we were all surging forward by now and I could hear the Wolves behind me howling in victory and feel shields and hands shoving me down the slope. The French were melting away, falling back, crying, bleeding, streaming away across the bloody, corpse-strewn bridge, running for the gatehouse and safety. I called out for our men to halt and return to the breach, and they did, red-faced, joyous, panting, eyes bright as jewels, bodies wet with blood.

  We had held. We had kept the French out.

  For now.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I looked to my right, at de Lacy’s men and Sir Joscelyn’s fellows on the far right. They seemed intact, although the tidemark of dead and wounded before their position was thinner than before ours. Evidently, being closest to the stone bridge, we had borne the brunt of the battle. I sent the foremost Wolves back into the rear ranks to rest, with my praise ringing in their ears; the men who had been behind them in the shield wall now came forward. The rubble slope below us was thick with dead, forty or fifty men, many still moving, lay in their gore and in a litter of arrow shafts. Half a dozen of my men would never breathe again, and two would be cripples for life – if they survived their wounds.

  I sent five hale men down to gather unbroken arrows and told the rest of the Wolves to stand down and take shelter, lest the bombardment begin again.

  This battle was not over, far from it. Even as we strapped up the wounds of our comrades and gulped down bowls of cold nameless soup, I could see the enemy massing again in even larger numbers through the open gate of the middle bailey. Now there were scores of horsemen disgorging from Philip’s Hill and milling about on the slope below the gates, three conrois at least, perhaps a hundred mailed men in bright surcoats on large, high-spirited horses: the knights.

  I left Claes in charge of the men, telling him to keep them sheltered and distribute as much water as he could – our water supplies, thank God, had not diminished all through the siege. I took the arrows we had salvaged – a scant two dozen – and climbed to the top of the keep to deliver them personally to Robin.

  My lord was grim-faced when I approached. He was conferring with Aaron by Old Thunderbolt and directing two of Aaron’s engineers as they moved the springald into a new position with the utmost care. He thanked me for the arrows and admitted they were sorely needed.

  ‘We are down to fewer than three shafts a man,’ he said. I looked round at the twenty or so men on the keep and saw their despondency. Even with the arrows I had salvaged, these men had only enough shafts for a full-pitched battle lasting about thirty heartbeats. Then they were done.

  Robin said, ‘I’m worried about those horsemen.’ He nodded at the four score or so mounted men still moving about on the slope below the walls of the middle bailey. ‘We don’t have enough arrows to stop them on the bridge. If a dozen horsemen get across it, and if they can get their horses to mount the slope and climb it, we are all finished. They will punch through your men like a hammer through a horn window, and the foot soldiers will follow in their path. If they can get enough horsemen up to the top of the breach, it’s all over.’

  ‘Do you think horses could be made to climb that slope?’

  ‘If they are fairly well trained, and with ruthless use of the spur – yes.’

  ‘Then we are all dead.’

  ‘Well, not quite. I did have an idea that might just work, with a bit of luck. And if we have enough time. We will make a wall that no horse will ride through.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it in a moment. Come over here.’ He led me to the northern lip of the keep, and pointed down at the shimmering grey waters of the Seine.

  ‘What do you see there, Alan?’

  ‘The river.’

  ‘No, there, by the quay.’

  It was a large boat, moored on the east bank. I realised it was the place where, had God permitted it, we would have unloaded the convoy of food the Wolves had rowed down from Rouen all those months ago. Indeed, it looked exactly like one of the boats we had used to make our disastrous attack on the pontoon bridge.

  ‘We go tonight,’ said Robin. ‘I have ropes and ladders. We go – you, me and the surviving Wolves – when the world is asleep, we will leave this place, over the walls and down that cliffside. Quiet as mice. And we will seize that craft, cut it free and it will carry us away, downstream to Rouen and safety. What do you think?’

  ‘It could work,’ I admitted. ‘It could truly work. We could actually escape.’ I felt hope flame, a fire kindled to warm my heart.

  ‘You keep that thought in your head. And keep your head down for the rest of the day,’ said my lord. ‘Tonight we will shake the dust of this accursed place from our feet. Now about that wall…’

  He gathered two of his bowmen and we went down the stairs of the keep into the stables. The men collected two bales of straw apiece and then we scooped up a small barrel from the smithy where somebody had set it to warming on a ledge by the forge. Then, to the breach, and with plenty of willing help from the Wolves, we all got our hands extremely dirty.

  An hour later, standing high on a shard of broken masonry that jutted out from the remaining wall on the left side of the breach, I could clearly see, over the fortifications of the middle bailey, the French knights on the slope below. They had formed into two distinct groups, dismounted and standing by their chargers, on the left and, further away, on the right. The horses were clad in brightly coloured trappers that covered them from head-band to hock, the men standing beside them in matching surcoats over grey mail. Cheerful pennants fluttered from the ends of the lances, held upright in young squires’ hands and grounded in the mud. They all looked impossibly grand in the strong March sunlight; noble, brave, almost joyful. And between the groups of dismounted horsemen, a battle of men-at-arms sitting on the thin grass, perhaps two hundred, armed with spear and sword. There were black-clad priests moving among the men and horses, blessing them, offering words of comfort and fragments of the Host and sips from silver chalices. My belly grumbled merely at the thought of that holy feast, the body and blood of Christ. I thought about the bundle of food I had taken from Sir Joscelyn and Tilda, and pondered my decision to give it to Father de la Motte without even tasting the merest bite. What a fool I was, I thought. I could have gorged, I
could have filled my belly many times over. I could have felt the warm glow of the well-fed all over my thin, tired and battered body. And my body was battered: my shoulders, back and both legs were a sea of aches, every movement a jolt of fire. I wanted nothing more than to lie down; not true, I wanted more than anything to eat. And who would have known if I had gorged from the bundle? No one. And if I had wolfed it all, perhaps I would be stronger for the coming fight. Perhaps if I had swallowed down at least some of that forbidden food, just a leg of the capon, perhaps, or a slice of the game pie, I would be serving my fellow men in this castle well, by fortifying my body in readiness to face the foe …

  I blushed for shame at that silent sophistry. It was dirty meat, dishonoured bread, and no matter how much I drooled over its memory, I knew in my heart I had done the right thing. I would be no better than those three skulking thieves in the storeroom who robbed their comrades to stuff their fat faces, if I had partaken of the feast. I had stolen food myself once or twice when a lad, out of dire need, so I was not without that sin on my conscience, but never in time of siege, and never from men who would die hungry because of my thievery. I was a better man now, too, I hoped. I was a knight. I was a leader of men. I was hungry, yes, but I had my honour, by God, and I would not sell it for a bellyful of food stolen from starving comrades. But now this knight must prove his honour on an echoing belly, I reflected. For I could see the French knights in the left conroi stirring; the noblemen, now helmeted, fully armoured, were being heaved into the saddle by their squires.

  The knights swung up on to the backs of their big destriers, accepted their lances and, as a trumpet called out, formed up into a column of twos, a long snake of pairs of horseman stretching across the slope. Shields hefted, lances were tucked firmly under the right armpit, another trumpet rang out and the snake began to move towards us.