AHMM, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The ground on the river side of the castle was solid shale, Tom recalled. Digging a tunnel there would be arduous work, even with the river running at drought level and more ground than usual exposed. But on the moat side there was soft earth. Mining was possible there—and not just possible, but feared by the garrison. Several times during the siege, when the defenders’ suspicions were aroused by a knot of attackers staying out of sight for too long behind a makeshift barricade in the dry moat, pans of water were laid along the base of the wall. Guardsmen knelt over the pans, watching intently for ripples that would indicate digging underground. If a burgeoning tunnel should be found, they stood ready to sink their own shaft and take the fight to the men down below. But they never found one. Ironically, Tom now dared to hope they had simply missed it.

  But how to find it? He could think of no better method than to walk the full length of each wall, looking for any signs of weakness or, more realistically, trusting his weight to collapse any hidden trapdoor.

  So he went to the barbican, picked a spot at random, and started pacing. Slowly and methodically he made a full circuit around the base of the wall. The ground seemed solid with each step. Nowhere did he see any sign of digging.

  He moved on to the outer bailey. His task was harder here, this courtyard being larger and more crowded than the first. But he took just as much care walking the wall's perimeter, ignoring the grumblings and the odd looks of those he disturbed. Still he saw no sign of a tunnel.

  Noon came and went as he walked around the middle and inner baileys in turn. He remained deliberate and thorough. When the way was blocked by structures built along the wall, he did not go around them—he went inside, crawling in every chicken coop, turning over every pallet laid down in the lean-tos, pacing the stone floor of every outbuilding built against the south curtain wall.

  He found nothing.

  Late that afternoon, bone tired and aching in every joint, he returned to the barbican. He climbed up onto the ramparts and stared myopically at the distant village, trying to think. The day was proving to be a quiet one, the besiegers having assayed no attack. Perhaps they were still recovering from the wounds they suffered during yesterday's fighting. Or perhaps they knew that a different kind of turmoil gripped the castle today.

  Gazing miserably at the blurry village, he felt wholly unsuited for the task he'd undertaken. He needed help, someone who knew castles better, perhaps a soldier from the garrison. On impulse he looked around. Among the others with him atop the wall, a man in armor stood a short distance away. Like Tom, he was staring at the village in contemplative silence. He was young, bareheaded, with long blond hair and a matching mustache. The quality of his armor and the sword at his belt marked him as one of Baron Bradburn's knights.

  Without thinking, Tom walked up to the man. “I need your help,” he said bluntly. When the knight turned cool blue eyes upon him, he belatedly added, “Sir."

  The knight regarded him without emotion. When he spoke it was with a French accent. “What is it?"

  "My name is Tom Wainwright. I am Dunstan Wainwright's grandfather."

  Tom saw recognition in the knight's eyes. He looked for anger there, any sign the knight was annoyed to speak with a relative of the man blamed for the baron's death. But he saw none. The knight simply said, “I am Sir Geraint d'Auvergne."

  "I think someone—” Tom stopped to reorder his thoughts. “If the king's men have managed to dig a tunnel into the castle, where would it be?"

  "If they managed to dig a tunnel, one of the walls would have collapsed by now."

  Tom blinked, confused. “Why?"

  "The purpose of mining is to bring down walls. The miners dig a tunnel under a section of wall, and as they dig they shore up the tunnel roof with timbers. Then, when the tunnel is large enough, they fill it with brushwood and light the wood on fire. Often they'll put some pig carcasses in there too. The fat helps the fire burn. When the timbers burn, they collapse, and so does the tunnel roof and the section of wall above it. Then the attackers rush in."

  Tom thought about this. “So if someone wanted to sneak in here, undetected, how would they do it?"

  "They would probably try to bribe a guard into unlocking a sally port. But there's been no chance for that here. All the gates have been shut night and day since the siege began."

  "You say that as if they didn't need to be."

  "Here they do. But some sieges are different. Sometimes the besieging army stays to its camp, so the castle gates remain open, with people coming and going as they please and life almost normal for those inside. Other times the gates are left open just as a sign of defiance, until there is an attack. But here the gates have been closed. So King Henry's men haven't had the chance to buy off any guards."

  "So if they wanted to sneak in...?"

  Sir Geraint shrugged in his armor. “All they could hope for is to find a section of wall unguarded at night and have a few men scale it with ladders. No easy task, getting up and over a wall without being seen, even at night. And then they'd have to get to a sally port unseen and get it open.” He shook his head. “Not easy. But perhaps."

  Tom frowned. What Sir Geraint was saying seemed to support Father Rowan's idea, that those who snuck into besieged castles did so not to murder the castle's lord, but to open a gate and let in reinforcements. “So how are most castles won?” he asked.

  "Starvation. If you have the time, you starve them out. If you don't, you try to sneak in and open a gate. Or fight your way over the walls, like our friends outside tried to do yesterday. Although that is a costly tactic. You pay in lives.” Sir Geraint showed him a cold smile. “Apparently Lord Huxley feels he can afford it."

  Lord Ian Huxley was the noble in charge of the attacking forces. It was he who sent waves of men against the walls yesterday. Tom nodded quickly, discomfited by Sir Geraint's callousness. Sir Geraint smiled a bit broader, amused by his distaste.

  Tom's stomach twisted. This man, this knight ... he was nothing but a cold-blooded mercenary. His accent marked him as a foreigner, so he could only have been hired by the old baron, not knighted by him. In other words, his loyalty was to the baron's purse, not his cause. Maybe that loyalty followed the purse into young Edgar's hands. Maybe it didn't. By all rights, he and the others like him should be suspected of Baron Bradburn's death before homegrown boys like Dunstan.

  Tom hoped no sign of his thoughts showed on his face. Standing before this Frenchman, he was struck again by the old irony of this war—in a rebellion spurred by the English barons’ outrage over foreign influence in King Henry's court, the barons hired foreign knights to fight for them, and allowed themselves to be led by Simon de Montfort, a Frenchman by birth.

  Tom wondered if Sir Geraint had guessed—if he even cared—that he was trying to clear Dunstan's name. “Thank you for your help,” he said.

  Sir Geraint gave him a slight nod and turned back to his study of the distant village. Tom walked away.

  * * * *

  After a subdued supper with his family, Tom resumed his investigation. His conversation with Sir Geraint had at least given him one idea: He would inspect the sally ports.

  Designed as emergency exits for use during an escape or sortie, the sally ports served as portals of convenience in peacetime. There were three of them, one in each bailey. Each was a gate just large enough to admit a man on horseback, closed by a simple but strong wooden door. Tom discovered the one in the outer bailey was blocked by a boulder that was so large he judged it would take a team of half a dozen horses to shift it. The one in the middle bailey was simply locked but heavily guarded, as he learned from discreet inquiries among the villagers who camped nearby. The one in the inner bailey was blocked by a boulder even larger than the one in the outer bailey.

  Once again he was stymied. In the growing twilight, he stood and looked around the yard, searching for some sign of ... anything. Soldiers and villagers were about their business, carrying buckets, herding children, talking in two
s and threes. Across the way, a couple of chickens were scratching in the earth, parched dry again by another rainless day. The sentries atop the west wall stood motionless, black silhouettes against a blooded sky.

  He was out of ideas.

  A pair of soldiers was walking by. Tom intercepted them. “Where is Nathan Miller?” he asked.

  "On watch at the middle gate,” one said.

  Tom thanked the man and headed that way.

  The day's exertions had taken their toll. He was bone weary, his whole body aching as he walked to the middle gate. The climb up the steps to the wall-walk was so taxing he had to stand for a moment and collect his strength once he reached the top. Noticing him, a guard came over to inquire after his health. Tom asked him for Nathan.

  Nathan arrived a moment later. “I need your help,” Tom said without preamble. “I need to see where Dunstan died."

  "What? Why?"

  "Maybe there's something there, some sign of what really happened."

  Nathan shook his head. “Civilians aren't allowed in the keep, let alone in the baron's private chambers."

  "Please, Nathan.” Weakly, Tom grasped his arm. “There's nothing else. I can't let them blame him. I can't let them bury my grandson in a murderer's grave."

  Nathan frowned.

  "You don't believe he did it, do you?” Tom pressed.

  "No."

  He watched conflicting emotions flicker across Nathan's face. “Please."

  For another long moment, Nathan stood there considering. Finally, he turned to another guard standing a few paces away. “Godwin, cover for me. I'll be back."

  Tom almost wept with relief as Nathan led him down the steps and back up into the inner bailey. Just that quickly his aches and fatigue were gone; he kept up with Nathan's brisk stride without thinking. “Thank you, thank you,” he said.

  "The baron and his family are in the chapel,” Nathan said. “They're having the funeral service tonight. The knights and the counselors will be in there too. So now is about our only chance to get inside the baron's study."

  Tom followed him past the front of the keep. Residence of the baron and his family, last refuge for the defenders should the king's men break in, the keep loomed blocky and dour in the evening light. In passing, Tom glanced up the flimsy wooden staircase that led to the main door, where two soldiers stood on guard. The stairs really were as rickety as they looked. It was part of the keep's design: The stairs were made to be chopped away easily by defenders above. A few blows from an axe and attackers at ground level would be faced with a windowless stone wall sixteen feet thick. Beyond that wall lay only cellars and storerooms, all that occupied the ground floor. The living quarters were on the second and third floors. Tom looked up at the few thin windows there, aglow with yellow candlelight.

  Nathan led him across the yard and up a stone staircase to the wall-walk. The guards there didn't challenge them as they made their way to a wooden door in the keep's east side. Tom was surprised to discover no guard standing there. He was even more surprised when the door handle turned unlocked under Nathan's hand.

  "This deep in the castle, we figure we'll have plenty of warning to lock up,” Nathan said in response to Tom's stare. “The river runs so close on this side, there isn't even room down below to stand a siege ladder. Anyone coming in would have to come all the way across the yard."

  Inside the keep, Tom paused to consider the brackets on the door where a thick bar could be set. The bar itself stood on end beside the door. Judging by the cobwebs strung between it and the wall, it had been there for some time.

  He followed Nathan up a flight of steps to the third floor, then down a narrow corridor. They encountered two servants along the way but only one guard; the latter's pace, slow and purposeless, marked him as a man on patrol. The guard eyed them both deliberately—Tom guessed they were the most interesting thing he had seen in an hour—but he made no move to stop them.

  Moments later Nathan stopped at another plain wooden door. “This is it,” he said. “This was the baron's study. Dun was killed right here.” He pointed down at the floor.

  Tom looked down. A cold feeling seeped through him as he looked at the spot.

  Nathan opened the door. The room beyond was dark. He took a candle from a bracket on the wall and handed it to Tom. Cautiously Tom stepped inside.

  There was a broad wooden table in the center of the room with the dark abyss of an empty fireplace in the wall behind it. A couple of chairs and cabinets were the room's only other furnishings. There was one window, narrow and shuttered, in what Tom quickly reckoned to be the north wall. He headed there first.

  The window was just an arrow slit, too narrow to admit a man, even if one could somehow reach this height. With the river running directly below, Tom couldn't imagine how that could be accomplished. Still, he examined the windowsill and the shutters for any signs of tampering. Then he turned back to the room.

  A portrait frowned down at him from the wall beside the door, some stern patriarch with a noticeable Hawley family resemblance. A tapestry depicting a rural scene adorned another wall. The table in the center of the room was bare save for a quill and a pot of ink. Entirely bare were the tops of the cabinets and the mantelpiece. There were no ledgers or parchments or scrolls, the sorts of things Tom would have expected to find in a baron's study. Absent too were any personal articles. There were no slippers by the chairs, no wine cup, no castoff jewelry or keys lying about, nothing at all.

  "This room has been cleaned,” he said. His voice sounded loud in his ears.

  Nathan glanced away from the door, which he held open a crack. “Yes. Thoroughly. There was a lot of blood."

  Unhappily, Tom knelt down and examined the floor. He saw no sign of blood; the servants had done a good job. They must have scrubbed the stones clean before laying down fresh rushes. And they were certainly fresh, hardly wilted at all.

  He scanned the floor thoroughly, working his way around the table and back to the door. It was only on the doorjamb that he saw any sort of grime. At first he thought the smudge was a bit of dried mud, but closer examination revealed it to be dung. No great discovery, that. Anyone who walked in the baileys was likely to track dung about. Between spillage from chamber pots and droppings from livestock milling about the yard, every floor in the castle was prone to such leavings. No doubt this smudge was missed only because of its curious location, about waist high on the door frame.

  Tom straightened up again even as Nathan said, “We mustn't dawdle here."

  Tom nodded. He made another quick circuit of the room, examining all surfaces by the light of the candle, double-checking the windowsill for anything suspicious, even daring to open a few cabinet drawers, which proved to be empty. There was nothing. Worse than that, he still didn't know what he was looking for.

  "We have to go,” Nathan said. “Tom?"

  "All right."

  He returned to the door. Nathan led him out.

  "I didn't find anything,” he said to Nathan's back as they walked down the corridor.

  "I didn't think you would."

  They descended the stairs in silence.

  Once they were back out on the wall, Tom waited as Nathan closed the door behind them. Then he asked, “What do you think happened?"

  Nathan looked at him for a moment. Then he looked past him, to see if anyone else was in earshot. “In truth? I think one of the knights got tired of this war."

  Tom nodded grimly. He wasn't surprised Nathan shared his opinion of knights. Most commoners did. Just to see the knights earlier today, standing behind the young baron on top of the wall, they'd reminded him of nothing so much as a pack of wolves. “Anyone in particular?"

  "I'd trust any of them to do it. And Dun would have let any of them pass."

  Tom wondered if the knights would benefit from a surrender now that the man who hired them was dead. He couldn't imagine. He didn't know enough about politics.

  Tom turned and walked over to the outer
edge of the wall. Down below, the river lapped softly in the dusk. The effects of the drought were evident: The glint of moonlight on the water showed that the river had pulled away slightly from the base of the wall. There still wasn't room enough for someone to set up a ladder, but a man could walk on dry ground between the river and the wall now. Tom thought of the unlocked door behind them. Maybe there were enough potential killers inside the castle, but it would be so easy for an invader to get into the keep, if only he could get past the wall.

  Standing beside him, Nathan misread his thoughts. “God won't keep Dun out of heaven for someone else's crime,” he said.

  The statement made Tom remember his pain. “I hope you're right."

  * * * *

  Tom woke just a few hours after collapsing onto his pallet. He lay there for an interminable time, caught between sleep and waking, his limbs heavy with fatigue but his mind active and restless. He ran over the events of the day, searching for insight. Ironically, he felt as if he now knew even less than when he first started his investigation.

  With his thoughts running in circles, he began to feel as if he'd lain there for an eternity, with dawn another eternity away. The only way to break the spell was to get out of bed, so he did. He'd fallen asleep in his clothes, boots and all. Silently he slipped out of the dormitory he shared with his and a dozen other families.

  The warm night air was heavy and still. Stars glittered overhead and long luminescent clouds slid across the face of the gibbous moon. Without deliberately choosing a direction, he started to walk.