The Siege of Salwarpe

by Veronica Heley

‘Fool! Dolt! There is no-one in sight of the cages! See for yourself!’

  ‘I do not need to look,’ said Benedict. ‘I have no doubt I would see what you would see. The point is, would Peter Bowman see what I would see? Or would he see something different?’

  ‘I understand you,’ said Sir Henry. ‘You are right. We gave the matter insufficient thought. There may not be a trap, of course. In which case …’

  ‘I will gladly ride out with you. But not while the postern is left unguarded. I have had the alarm rung to deter anybody who thought to force the postern while our backs were conveniently turned …’

  Sir Henry’s jaw dropped. Then he said, ‘Sir Benedict, if I move a step without your advice in future, may I never see another sun rise!’ He dismounted and took Benedict’s arm to assist him in climbing off the mounting-block. ‘Pray God we are not too late. Men, dismount. Keep the horses walking about in readiness to leave, but bring the drawbridge up again. Send for Peter Bowman. Sir Reynold, we will take counsel together, if you please!’

  Within a few minutes the alarm bell had ceased to toll, and within half an hour the castle had resumed its normal appearance, save for where the horses were kept waiting. High above the road, on the ramparts of the gatehouse tower, Sir Henry stood with his lieutenants, waiting for Peter Bowman to finish his survey of the countryside below.

  Some hundred yards beneath, at a bend in the road, two wooden carts had been positioned. Crude woodwork had turned the carts into cages on wheels, and within them crouched the figures of a middle-aged woman in a wimple and torn but costly gown … and two children of perhaps twelve and fourteen years of age. All three clutched the bars of the cages and looked for help to the castle above. But still the portcullis remained down, and the drawbridge up.

  Below the cages the countryside seemed asleep. The tops of the trees were barely disturbed in a breeze and there was a general air of peace and quiet.

  ‘Nothing moves below,’ said Peter at last. ‘You said for me to take my time, and so I have. Nothing moves, anywhere. No men work in the fields below us, though they are moving around normally in the distance. No birds near here, though you can see they’re flying around as usual over towards the forest. No birds … I don’t like that, my lord. That’s not natural. The men might be working in the distant fields for some good reason, but there’s only one reason why the birds should have deserted us. If there’s no birds around, it means there’s something else there as shouldn’t be.’

  ‘What?’ said Reynold, striding up and down. ‘If there’s nothing to be seen, then there’s no-one there. We sit here like children fearing we know not what, and all the time those poor creatures …’

  ‘No birds?’ said Benedict. ‘What else?’

  ‘There’s something strange about the road there, just afore the turn. It’s not the same colour all over. D’ye see?’

  Benedict looked and said, ‘Earth of a different colour has been strewn across the road. I see it, now that you point it out. They must have brought earth from somewhere else, and spread it there to hide … what?’

  ‘Not a pit. It’s not deep enough. It’s not high enough for a barrier. But …’

  ‘A rope!’ Benedict slapped his thigh. ‘A rope or chain across the road, lying flat on the ground and covered with loose earth. When the horses come galloping down the slope with their riders’ eyes on the cages ahead, the rope is jerked up on either side … men could hide in that scrub to the side of the track, would they not? And the horses would be brought down, and the riders tumble off, and then …

  ‘It’s those bushes there that trouble me,’ said Peter, pointing to a thicket a little lower down the road. ‘I can’t remember a thicket being there, and yet it looks so natural. At least, it looks natural at first sight, and then I look at the colour of it, and say to myself that it isn’t natural for leaves to be turning, so early.’

  ‘A thicket?’ said Reynold, staring. ‘Those poor creatures are waiting to be rescued, and you talk about the leaves turning early?’

  But Benedict was consulting the maps he had caused to be made two days previously, and it did not seem that that thicket had been there before.

  ‘A thicket need not be a real thicket,’ he explained to Sir Henry. ‘It could be a lot of bushes cut down from somewhere else, and brought here to act as protection for men stationed there. Who looks at a thicket? Who would think it might hide a force of archers, say? And if there are archers there, waiting to pick off any who come running out of the castle …’

  ‘Hugo knows his business, it seems,’ said Sir Henry. ‘I wondered where he’d managed to mount guard on the road. I knew he must have done so, but since I could see nothing … yes, the man knows his business.’

  ‘Well, so do I,’ said Benedict, fingering his unshaven chin. ‘Now—what shall we do about it?’

  ‘Do we have a choice?’ demanded Reynold. ‘Can you watch those poor creatures suffer and die out there? Think of their lot in the heat of the day, without food or water!’

  ‘The art of siege warfare,’ said Benedict, ‘lies in not losing your temper. Hugo provokes us to action. He knows he has only four weeks to take Salwarpe. He knows you are a gallant knight, Reynold, skilled in combat. Be sure he will have questioned Aylmer’s messenger before the man died at Spereshot. So he knows who and what we are. He sets a trap to draw us out and then. … snip! He shears off our heads! Hmph!’

  ‘But now that we know he has set a trap, can we not avoid it and still rescue the poor creatures?’

  ‘Yes, there may be a way, but we will not take it yet awhile. Let us hear what Dickon has to say about the postern gate first.’

  Dickon was brought to them, and with him came Ursula, looking anxious.

  Dickon spoke in rapid bursts, appearing much excited. ‘There’s men there, Sir Henry. They’m ahiding in the willows down below at the water’s edge. But I seed them. I knows how to look. The guard-boat’s just come back from a trip to the harbour, and she’s a-bringing in another load of them fool soldiers. They’re no sort of good at hiding theirselves from sight. Slipping and splashing, and breaking branches. They’ve got climbing gear with them this time. Ropes in coils, and twinkling bits of metal on the ends. Hooks, belike, to throw over the walls once they’re up the cliff. And talk! How they jabber! If you listen hard enough, you can even hear them swearing!’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Maybe forty in all. Maybe a few less. That’s with the crew on the boat at present.’

  ‘You’ve not let on you’ve seen them?’

  ‘Nay, nay. For all they know we’re all peering out over the road. May I go back now? I want …’

  ‘To finish arming the catapult?’ Benedict smiled. He rubbed his hands together. ‘Forty men. A lot. How many fighting men can we muster? Not nearly enough. No, no. I know how many men you have, Simon. We do not have enough to repel an attack on two fronts at once. Hugo’s men are mercenaries, remember, trained to war. Your men are badly trained, badly armed … oh, I know it is not your fault, but we must not expect too much of them at first. To fight on two fronts; no. One at a time, then.’

  ‘First rescue the Lady of Spereshot, and her children,’ said Reynold. ‘We must ride out at once …’

  ‘Even avoiding the trap of the rope across the road, you will be sure to lose men from the archers in the thicket,’ said Benedict. ‘Why waste men and horses, when we can perhaps lure them into thinking. … a feint of some sort. … but what sort? And on which side?’

  ‘You mean,’ said Ursula, ‘that you want Hugo to think we are under attack and fully occupied on one side of the castle, in order to make him abandon his precautions …’

  ‘And come out of hiding, where we can deal with him better. Yes, yes. But we only have so many men; to create the sort of effect we want we need … ah, I have it. If we can only make Hugo believe that the attack on the postern had been successful, and that his men were within the castle, in hand-to-hand combat with the defenders. … would no
t his archers then rush out of the thicket and try to help their men, by trying to force the main entrance themselves? Eh? And the moment they come out of that scrub they would be fair targets for our own archers, and we could then send a group of men, preferably on foot, down the road to release the hostages.’

  ‘On foot!’ cried Reynold in disbelief.

  ‘Why waste horses?’ said Benedict. ‘We may need to eat them, later.’

  The sun rose higher, but still Benedict held his hand. An expectant hush lay over the castle. Benedict reflected that it was often thus at the start of the siege, when morale was high and there was yet plenty of food. The people of Salwarpe were looking on this as a sort of holiday. A mumming show, in which no-one was to be fatally injured. They were horrified and sorry for the woman and her children in the cages below, of course, but the Spereshot people were not Salwarpe folk. “They” had not had the good sense to choose to live in a castle on a hill. “They” did not have the old knight to look after them.

  “Long may they think like that”, thought Benedict, scurrying around the catapult and squinting along its beam.

  The catapult—or trebuchet, to give it the name by which soldiers knew it—was a frame with a cross-bar on which was pivoted a long arm. The long arm ended in a sling, and this was at present winched down to the ground and held there with ropes. The sling was being loaded with lumps of rock. The shorter arm was at present high in the air. A basket hung from the shorter arm, also weighted with rocks, to act as counterpoise. When the long end was released, it would fly into the air and send a scatter of missiles over the castle wall, out and down.

  ‘Are we not ready yet?’ said Sir Henry, stamping around.

  ‘One moment,’ said Benedict, testing ropes. For the eighth time he peered over the parapet. The men below had still not yet begun to climb the cliff, but the willows shook and creaked with their presence below. No doubt the men who were to attack the postern had instructions to await a signal from Hugo, and that signal would probably not be given till the defenders were issuing out of the main gate to rescue the people from Spereshot.

  A team of men adjusted the angle of the trebuchet once more, at Benedict’s command.

  ‘We’ve had to alter the angle,’ said Benedict, ‘because the target’s moved. We had been aiming to hit the boat when it was anchored in the channel, but now it’s right beneath us, tied up to one of the willows. We’ll have to aim for the scree, and that means shortening the range. Some stones may fall this side of the parapet, Simon. Best clear your men out of the way.’

  ‘The scree?’ cried Reynold. ‘Are we playing games? We are under attack by mercenaries, and you fight back … at the scree!’

  ‘Surely,’ said Benedict, in his usual even tone. ‘Once the scree is in motion, everything and everyone beneath it will perish.’

  He stepped back, felt something soft beneath his foot, apologised and had one arm taken in a firm grip while someone lifted a mailed hauberk over his head. As the garment cleared his neck, soft hands began to pull it down around him.

  ‘Lady, you should not!’ he said, in a low voice.

  ‘Really?’ said Ursula. ‘Then neither should you. If you put your head over that parapet once more without wearing a helmet, I will not be answerable for the consequences!’

  And there also was Parkyn, waiting with a chain-mail hood, which Benedict accepted with a grunt of thanks. But, ‘No sword,’ he said, thrusting that aside. ‘I don’t need one for this. Now, are your women ready to play their part?’

  ‘This hour past,’ said Ursula. ‘And Peter Bowman bids me tell you that he has done as you requested, though he would very much rather not be the one to cast the first stone.’

  ‘Aye, it is a risk,’ said Benedict. ‘I do not like using fire, either.’

  ‘Fire?’ said Reynold, staring.

  ‘Fire. Well, now!’ said the old knight, caressing his moustaches. ‘I think not, Benedict.’

  ‘One fire arrow, sped into those yellowing bushes where the archers hide?’ pleaded Benedict. ‘I fear we may not be able to draw them out of hiding otherwise.’

  ‘Fire!’ said Ursula. ‘There is no smoke without a fire, they say. Suppose we set fire to some oily rags and green branches within the castle, beside the gatehouse? Would not Hugo think the fires had been set by his men, who had successfully assailed us from the postern side?’

  ‘Why, Ursula …!’ said Benedict. Then he crimsoned, realising he had addressed her by her Christian name. But the slip was soon covered up.

  ‘What a ruse!’ cried the old knight. ‘It shall be. We will set alight to our false fires when you give us the word, Benedict!’

  ‘We cannot start till this thing be set …’

  But a quarter of an hour later he stood back and announced that he could do no better. Teams of men stood by to winch down the sling end of the trebuchet as soon as it had been fired, so as to reload it. Dickon Fowler knelt by a spyhole which had been cut in the masonry of the wall, looking over the cliff and giving them a report of everything that happened below.

  ‘They’re all on shore now, save for a pair of scoundrels left in the boat. They’ve found my punt, damn them. But they’re not moving up the cliff yet. What do you think the signal is for them? They can’t see round the cliff into the harbour …’

  ‘Signs of strife from above, I suppose,’ said Benedict. ‘So let’s give them nothing to worry them, till we’re ready. …’

  He left the postern to race over the sward to the gatehouse. A force of armed men, together with some carpenters, waited for him there. Here, as on the postern side, were a knot of women and children, with a multitude of pots and pans … and braziers filled with an assortment of rags and grass. Here Ursula stood, wearing a chain-mail tunic over her peach-coloured dress, and a round leather cap on her head.

  With a muttered word to Sir Henry, Benedict swung up into the gatehouse and peered down into the valley. Nothing stirred. Only, one of the children was crying. The sun beat down on the heavy quiet of noon.

  ‘So both sides wait,’ said Benedict. He hesitated. Had he read the situation aright? One got involved in the business of preparation and then one wondered whether in fact one wasn’t making a fuss about nothing. One might, easily, be making a complete and utter fool of oneself.

  “Well,” thought Benedict, “It wouldn’t be for the first time.”

  He gave the signal, and behind him Ursula thrust a burning pine knot into brazier after brazier, and the women began to beat on their pans with spoons and billets of wood, and to scream and shout. The noise was deafening.

  Benedict grinned. Beside him Peter Bowman tested his bowstring. Peter was also grinning.

  Sir Henry said, ‘Now!’

  The gatewarden gave the signal and the drawbridge began to fall.

  At one side of the drawbridge, set in the left-hand gate tower, was a small postern. No mounted men could go that way, but a small company of men on foot could slip in or out without making a stir about it. Now this door was set ajar … though no man issued forth.

  Benedict watched the yellowing thicket with eyes that stared till they ached.

  ‘Look!’ Peter Bowman was pointing not to the bushes, but to where the Lady of Spereshot and her children had turned their heads and were looking back down the slope. They could see what the men in the castle could not see. Hugo must have been arriving to oversee matters himself.

  ‘Did that earth on the road twitch?’ said Benedict.

  ‘And … now!’ said Sir Henry. ‘Men to the portcullis!’

  ‘If this doesn’t lure them out. …!’ said Benedict, running his hands through his hair and thereby pushing back his mailed hood till it came to rest around his neck.

  ‘Surely it will,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Do we not present a perfect picture of a garrison fighting with intruders in the very heart of the gatehouse?’

  The portcullis rose halfway, hovered and returned to earth. Sir Henry’s men filed into the area of the drawbridge
which lay between the two sets of gatehouses, and began to make a lot of noise, and mock-wrestle with each other.

  ‘There!’ cried Peter, and lifted his bow to the arrow-slit. From the bushes below, from those yellowing, tell-tale bushes, a man had stepped, clad in full armour. Another man was rising from his hiding-place beside the road, holding one end of a heavy chain in his hand … and the chain went looping down into the earth at his feet and across the road …

  And the woman and the children in the cages began to scream.

  Benedict wiped a dirty hand across his forehead. ‘I can never bear to hear women scream!’ Then he grabbed Peter’s arm. ‘Not yet, I tell you!’

  They were pantingly still … waiting … another man stepped out of the bushes. This man looked down the hill, presumably towards Hugo, for orders. The man with the chain threw down his end of it and shouted across the road to where another couple of men were emerging from hiding. They all looked up at the temptingly half open postern … and at the shouting, heaving mass of men inside the portcullis. And now the portcullis was slowly being winched up again, and then quickly lowered some feet. …

  ‘Not yet!’ said Benedict, in a strangled whisper.

  A stocky figure in a red and gold surcoat came into sight, loping up the road at the head of some more men, and together with the men from the thicket they all came charging up the hill with drawn swords, and levelled pikes. …

  ‘Now!’ said Benedict.

  A flight of arrows came speeding down from the gate-house and nearly every one seemed to find its mark. Hugo’s men screamed and spun round, clutching at feathered shafts … and out of the postern gate at the side of the gatehouse issued a stream of purposeful men who avoided the road, to run straight down the bank. They made for the cages, the two carpenters in their midst. They did not look to left or right. They did not even seem to see Hugo and his men. Their task was not to engage the enemy in battle but to free the hostages.

  Hugo’s voice bellowed out, trying to rally his men, but even as they reformed and tried to run up the hill again, there came another flight of arrows, as deadly as the first. Men fell, shrieking. Some began to limp back down the hill. Hugo’s attack turned into a rout.