Stronghold

by Paul Finch

  Arrows sleeted into them via the murder holes, more stones were dropped, naptha grenades were flung - none of it to any consequence. At the far end of the passage they met the portcullis, behind which the fire-raiser waited. Gouts of white-hot flame billowed through them. Again, they melted like candles or flared like figures hacked from coal. When they threw themselves onto the grille, which soon glowed red with the heat of a furnace, they fried, their liquefied flesh running down its bars in sizzling rivulets. Only when crossbows were passed forward, and bolts discharged through the portcullis itself, one by one picking off the crew operating the fire-raiser, were they able to proceed. With groans of elemental agony, the overheated metal was bent and twisted out of the way and access was made.

  The dead streamed through, howling like the devil's Cwn Annwyn, the hounds which from time immemorial had haunted these drear Welsh moors. Only one man was left on the fire-raiser. He was an arbalester formerly of the royal contingent, though few of his companions remained in any part of the castle that he knew of, and even now he fancied some of those he'd lost might be coming against him - not that this was a prime concern. A crossbow bolt had already struck him in the chin, another in the shoulder. Though his blood splashed copiously on the flagstones, he was conscious enough to scream like a child as their skeletal paws grabbed hold of him. Shriek after shriek burst from his lips, his froth spattering their raddled, rotted faces as they carried him to the pot at the fire-raiser's mouth and immersed him head-first in the bubbling mixture that had cut through their ranks with its demonic breath.

  Next, they flowed up towards the galleries serving the murder holes. Defenders met them on the stairs with swords and axes. Slashing blows were exchanged. Struggling figures pitched down the stairwell, locked together. But the dead steadily prevailed. When their weapons broke, they latched onto the English with claws and teeth, ripping mail from flesh, flesh from bone. Others of their host, meanwhile, bypassed the battle on the stairs and herded along the main passage to the inner courtyard. Another portcullis awaited them there. Arrows whistled through it from a handful of defenders on the other side, but, unhindered now by fire, the dead fell upon the great iron trellis and began to lift it with ease.

  High overhead on the roof, the melee surged back and forth across a carpet of carnage. Blood ran in rivers. Corpse-fires still burned, spreading hellish, stinking smoke. More and more of the dead ascended from the ladders. Ranulf cut his way through half a dozen of them, only to be confronted by William d'Abbetot armed with a club-hammer. In truth, the aged engineer was so mutilated that he was only recognisable by his garb. His face had been smashed to pulp; his lower jaw hung from strands of sinew. Yet still he shrieked like a banshee as he rushed at Ranulf. Ranulf ducked the sweeping blow and ran d'Abbetot through from behind, but of course to no effect. Even with a severed nervous system, the engineer merely turned and sought to attack him again. Ranulf had to wrestle the club-hammer from him and batter him down with one massive blow after another, until he was nought but crumpled flesh and mangled bone.

  At which point, a shocking cry went up.

  "My lord!" someone cried. "My lord, Earl Corotocus - the dead are in the courtyard!"

  Every man still living pivoted round where he stood and stared back across the roof.

  "We're breached!" Gurt shouted, floundering towards Ranulf, blood streaming from a fresh gash across his forehead. "Ranulf, we're breached! We have to retreat!"

  "Where's the earl?" Ranulf demanded.

  Other survivors on the Constable's Tower were wondering the same. Over half the garrison had been here at the start of the battle; those who remained were clumped together at the south side, sheltering behind a wall of battered shields. But now there were only a couple of dozen of them, and even allowing for those killed or wounded, that was inexplicable. It was even more inexplicable that Earl Corotocus, Navarre and Hugh du Guesculin were absent, as were several other of the household knights and squires.

  "Has the earl fled?" someone asked, by his screechy tone of voice scarcely able to believe it.

  "Retreat to the Keep!" someone shouted hoarsely.

  "Wait!" Ranulf retorted. "There must be a hundred wounded in the rooms and passages below."

  Gurt shook his head. "Ranulf, if we could carry one each, that wouldn't be anything like enough."

  Ranulf knew this to be true, but before he could argue further there were muffled but ghastly wails from beneath their feet. They didn't know it, but the dead from the ground floor had now reached the levels where the wounded lay and were working their way among the helpless, bandaged bundles, pounding them with rocks, stabbing them over and over with every kind of blunted, broken blade.

  Gurt grabbed Ranulf's arm. "Ranulf, we have to get away!"

  "Mind your heads!" someone squealed.

  Everyone craned his neck to look up, and beheld the first of three colossal blocks of stone spinning down through the night towards them.

  "Gods!" Ranulf swore. "The mangonels!"

  The impacts were shattering. Huge sections of the paved roof imploded, an avalanche of masonry, rubble and splintered timber cascading onto the heaps of wounded and the packs of snarling dead currently ravaging them, burying them all together.

  "Now we go!" Ranulf nodded, coughing out lungfuls of foul dust. "Now we unquestionably go!"

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Keep was Grogen Castle's most impressive and indomitable feature.

  A great, square bastion, it stood in the northeast corner of the courtyard, where it towered over every other rampart and strongpoint. Though joined from the north and the east to the Inner Fort wall, it was girded on its west and south faces by a dry moat some ten yards across, about forty feet deep and filled with jumbled rocks. There were only three ways to actually enter the Keep. High up, there were two gantry drawbridges connecting with it, one from the North Hall, which, as the name suggested, was built against the Inner Fort wall on the north side of the courtyard, and one from the baronial State Rooms, a wattle and timber building raised against the Inner Fort wall on the east side of the courtyard. These two drawbridges, of course, could both be lifted at a moment's notice, presenting attackers from those directions with an impossible gap to cover and a terrifying ninety foot drop to the moat's rocky floor. The Keep's main entrance was the lower drawbridge. This larger platform crossed the moat on the Keep's west side, about thirty feet above the courtyard itself. Anyone seeking ingress by this route had first to ascend a freestanding stone stair, very steep, which terminated at a narrow lip, thus preventing any organised battering ram party from finding a level surface on which to wield their weapon against the drawbridge while it was raised.

  As with all defensive sections at Grogen, the Keep's upper tiers were strongly battlemented and cut with arrow-slits and vents for burning oil. This gave it a broad range of attack all across the courtyard. An ordinary army infiltrating this most central ward of the castle would in effect be corralled between high structures and subjected to hail after hail of missiles from defenders perched on unreachable parapets.

  But of course on this occasion it was no ordinary army, and the defenders would be few in number and wearied to the point of craziness. And down in the courtyard, craziness, in fact downright insanity, appeared to be the order of the day.

  Wounded men who had already shrieked so long and hard that their throats were raw and bleeding, shrieked again as Navarre and two of the earl's men-at-arms picked them up one by one and carried them by the feet and armpits back across the Keep's main drawbridge, hurling them down the steps. In some cases these victims struck the treads first with their backs or hips, while in others they plunged into the courtyard head first, either way landing with bone-crushing force. The last one, who was probably the heaviest, the earl's men gave up on half way, and tossed him over the side into the dry moat.

  "What in Christ's name do you think you are doing?" Zacharius howled, as he and Henri came staggering across the courtyard, having wrappe
d up their instruments and grabbed what few valuable medicines they could carry.

  On seeing and hearing the masses of the dead gathering on the far side of the courtyard, the doctor had been forced to abandon his infirmary. The weeping and imploring of those wounded he'd had to leave behind was a torture that he knew he would never forget. And yet now he had arrived at the foot of the Keep, only to discover the discarded bodies of those paltry few that, over the previous hour, he and Henri had managed to place in the safety of its interior; they'd been flung back out again like sacks of meal. He launched himself up the steps, at the top of which Navarre stood waiting, hands on hips.

  "I repeat!" Zacharius thundered. "What in the name of Christ do you think you are doing?"

  Navarre regarded him coolly. "There's a place for you and your boy inside here, doctor. But not for a bunch of wretches who, while unfit to wield a sword, are doubtless fit to eat our victuals and drink our drink."

  "Those men were my patients, you troll-faced dog!"

  Navarre smiled; with his misaligned features it was a chilling sight. "I have my orders."

  "We'll see about that!"

  Zacharius tried to push past, but Navarre stopped him with a heavy, mail-clad arm. "Alas, there's no time left."

  "There's time at least to have you punished, you murdering brigand!"

  "It's a pity that I couldn't find you," Navarre said and, without warning, he grabbed Zacharius by the throat.

  So tight was the grip that Zacharius could not even gag. He struggled wildly, but he was effete, a fop, and Navarre was the earl's champion. Helpless, the doctor found himself being frogmarched backward towards the edge of the drawbridge.

  "Alas," Navarre said again. "I searched high and low for you, but time ran out."

  Though he was now fighting for his life, there was no real way that Zacharius could resist this brutal foe. And he knew it. But even then he was unprepared to be pushed backward from the bridge and suspended in open space, his feet kicking ineffectually.

  Navarre's smile became a deranged grin. "Still glad your barren spell will end before mine, doctor?"

  And he opened his hands.

  Zacharius's scream broke from his constricted throat as he plummeted towards the rocks far below - it lingered horribly, before ending abruptly with the resounding impact of meat striking a slab.

  At the foot of the Keep steps, Henri stood aghast.

  Navarre peered down at him, before shaking his head glumly. "And without your master, what use are you?"

  He turned idly and strolled back across the drawbridge.

  Henri was so stunned that all he could do was stand there rigidly, oblivious to the dirge of demented cries drawing closer and closer from behind. Even when, with a rumble of timber and clanking of chains, the bridge was slowly raised, the surgeon's assistant was too frozen with shock to move. Thankfully, the first blow that fell on him was the last thing he knew, the single stroke of a falchion cleaving his skull asunder.

  Just before they vacated the Constable's Tower, Gurt and Ranulf looked down into the courtyard, but there was too much confusion there and around the foot of the Keep for them to focus on any particular detail. As such, neither of them saw the murder of Doctor Zacharius and his assistant. It was a mesmerising scene, all the same.

  The dead were now emerging in droves from the inner gate, which was directly below them, and streaming all over the inner ward, swarming between its rickety structures, including the infirmary, tearing them down, setting fire to their straw-thatched roofs. The few remaining domestics - the servants, grooms and pages - who'd deserted from the defences and been hiding, were hauled wailing into the open alongside the wounded, where they were all set about savagely; being beaten, torn, and dragged across the gore-smeared cobblestones. A party of the dead had ascended the Keep steps, but now stood howling in helpless rage for the main drawbridge had been lifted and stood upright against the facing wall.

  With the courtyard so occupied, the only way from the Constable's Tower to the Keep was along the top of the Inner Fort wall. Ranulf, Gurt and the sixteen men remaining dashed along it in single file, having to kick their way through yet more piles of ghastly Breton scarecrows, all the time aware that those dead who'd climbed to the Constable's Tower roof were close behind. At the same time they were struck with arrows from the curtain-wall, which accounted for a couple more of their number. The survivors finally scrambled through a nail-studded door into the upper level of the barrack house. It was lit by torches but rank with the smell of corrupted flesh - for the dead who had clambered through the arrow-slits here and slaughtered many of Davy Gou's small group of defenders were still present. They had now scattered the straw bedding and personal baggage of the earl's troops, searching for additional weapons - large numbers of which they had found.

  The two bands were not evenly matched - there were many more of the dead. But of course additional dead were now closing from behind. So the English had no option.

  "Butcher them!" Ranulf shouted, leading the charge. "It's the only way!"

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The chapel was almost completely dark when Father Benan's eyes flickered open. The tiny candle he'd placed on the altar step was little more than a blob of melted tallow. Slowly and painfully, he tried to rouse himself from the latest swoon that he'd fallen into.

  It had taken all the strength he had left to crawl here from the Constable's Tower. In addition, he hadn't eaten or drunk even a sip of water in as long as he could remember. Little wonder he'd been in and out of a dead faint since his return here. The welts that covered his plump body were stiff and aching. The cassock he'd wrapped himself with had adhered in strips to his clotted blood, and wouldn't be removed easily. Slowly, he sat upright on the step. His breathing was low and ragged. He hung his head. Despite the chill, sweat dripped from his brow. By the sounds of it, the attack on the castle was still raging. Thunderous impacts and wild shrieks sounded faintly through the chapel's thick walls.

  Benan struggled to think clearly. If nothing else, he knew that he had to get back to his feet. Zacharius would be working out there practically alone. The dying would need shrift. Regardless that he himself was maimed, regardless of this devil's brew that he was part of, the priest knew that he had a sacred duty here. But good Lord, it was icy cold and it was so dark. His sole candle lit only the immediate area around him - the stone step and a patch of rush-covered floor.

  He used the bare stone table to lever his shuddering bulk upright. Mumbling incoherent prayers, he bent down, picked up the stub of candle and, as carefully as he could, applied its glowing wick to two of the other three candles that were in reach. The light this created was dim, flickering, and cast eerie shadows over the rows of pews and the narrow aisles between them.

  Benan was still glad that he'd taken such a ferocious beating. Oh, he doubted God would be satisfied with a few strokes of the whip; Benan's role in the earl's many atrocities would incur a far greater penalty on Judgment Day, he was sure. But at least it was comforting that he was no longer part of the earl's inner sanctum; that in fact he had more in common with those countless, helpless wretches the earl had slain and brutalised in his quest for power.

  Then Benan thought he heard something close by - a rattling sound, as if someone had opened the chapel's outer door. He gazed down the nave. The inner door was half hidden in shadow, but it stood open. The passage beyond it was in inky darkness. Benan waited, but nobody announced themselves.

  Suddenly he felt a chill down his lacerated spine.

  He clutched at the crucifix hanging at his throat - as he had done throughout his chastisement. It was still sticky with blood, but he barely noticed. He listened intently, but there was no further sound - only the distant, muffled roar of the fighting, which, now that he thought about it, seemed to be penetrating the chapel from all sides - including above. Hastily, he lit the last candle, though it added precious little light to the chamber. He turned again to face the door and felt i
nto the pocket of his cassock. From it, he brought out a scapular dedicated to the Mother of Carmel, made of soft fabric and fastened to a cord. It bore images of the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Child.

  Benan regarded the celestial duo. As always, their expressions were serene, untroubled, full of love. Yet for a desolate second they seemed remote. Benan felt a terrible pang of regret for his misdeeds. How he suddenly yearned for that heavenly couple to be with him now - in spirit if not in body, just to bolster his resolve.

  He turned again to the empty chapel.

  If it was empty.

  Fleetingly, he imagined that somebody was down there in the farthest recess. Another chill crept up his spine. Determined to stay calm, he took the iron crucifix from his throat. That was when he noticed that a streak of reddish, fiery light had speared along the floor of the passage beyond the inner door. He'd been right after all - the outer door had been opened.