Longsword

by David Pilling

  They left the injured horse behind. Hugh held his horse’s bridle as he jogged alongside. Esther kept her at an easy canter. After a mile or so, Hugh was distracted from the pain in his lungs by the gleam of spear-points on the road to the north.

  “Riders approaching,” said Esther, rising in her stirrups to see. “Ten… no, twelve of them. They look like soldiers, yet carry no banner.”

  There was a catch in her voice. Hugh stopped and fought for breath.

  “They won’t be outlaws,” he panted, “not on the King’s highway, so far from their haunts. Sheriff’s men, maybe, out on patrol.”

  They were not the local Sheriff’s men, unless he had taken to employing greasy, disreputable villains in rusting and tattered gear. Hugh’s heart sank at the sight of them. He and Esther stood quiet as the riders approached.

  Their captain, a burly ruffian in a tight-fitting pot helm, signalled his men to halt. “What’s this?” he said, squinting down at Hugh and Esther. “A couple of runaways, with just one horse between them.”

  Hugh kept his mouth shut and his head down. He heard the hiss of steel on leather, and the tip of a wide-bladed falchion placed under his chin.

  “I know you,” the captain said quietly as he forced Hugh’s head up, “indeed I do. From where, I wonder?”

  Hugh gazed up at the other man, who possessed a remarkably ugly face, flat and yellow-skinned and marked by the pox.

  Shock and dismay washed over Hugh like a sluice of ice-cold water. He had seen this face before, on the road north of Coventry. It belonged to the outlaw he had almost ridden down when he and Brother Stephen were ambushed.

  The captain’s dark little eyes flashed in recognition. His thick lips parted in a snarl. “I never forget a man who tries to gallop over my skull!” he cried. “I have often beseeched the Devil to lead me to you. The old man has seen fit to grant me that wish.”

  Hugh started to mouth a denial. He fell silent as the blade pricked his throat and drew blood.

  “Quit your noise!” the flat-faced man barked. “Else I’ll cut out your tongue. My name is Walter Devyas, and you are my prisoners.”

  20.

  Kenilworth

  The Bear was ready at last. Edward had fussed over his siege engine like a doting father on a favourite child. As a final touch, he dispatched soldiers to collect a great herd of oxen and baggage-mules. The beasts were slaughtered and flayed, their dripping hides draped over the front and sides of the monstrous tower to guard against fire.

  The tower had taken the best part of four months to construct. All that time the royal artillery had battered away at the walls of Kenilworth, while the king’s men worked feverishly on building wooden towers and portable bridges to span the lake. Reluctant to waste lives, King Henry stubbornly refused to countenance an all-out attempt at storming the walls until he was certain of success.

  After much wheedling, Edward had finally persuaded his father to order an assault. Peace terms discussed at Coventry had gained the approval of King and parliament, and were almost ready to be published. He was anxious to try the Bear against the castle before that happened. If the garrison accepted the terms and surrendered, the siege would come to a disappointing end, his great tower dismantled without ever going into action.

  Edward wasn’t having that. “Waste of money and men,” he growled to himself.

  As he did most mornings, Edward rode about Kenilworth to inspect the state of its defences. He liked to taunt the archers on the walls by staying just out of range. It was a risky game, as his bodyguards constantly reminded him, and to antagonise everyone further he often neglected to wear any armour. His ancestor, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, had tempted fate in the same way, and received a fatal arrow in the shoulder. There was a reckless streak in Edward, who secretly found it amusing to tempt the Devil.

  He currently faced the north side of the castle, where the water defences were at their weakest. Only a narrow water-filled ditch defended the northern walls. This weakness was compensated for by two massive square towers. In the days when Kenilworth was still a royal fortress, Edward’s grandfather, King John, had ordered the towers built to make the castle impregnable. Now, after four months of steady bombardment, they were severely damaged, roofs smashed in and great holes gouged out of the thick masonry.

  A long line of mantlets, large wooden shields mounted on timber frames, had been set up to face the north wall. Behind them the King’s Gascon crossbowmen and Welsh archers kept up a steady rain of missiles against the men on the battlements. The rebels had responded with interest, but in recent days their efforts had slackened. Casualties were taking their toll on the garrison, along with fatigue and starvation.

  Edward nodded in satisfaction. “We’ll try the Bear this afternoon,” he said to his younger brother, Prince Edmund.

  “Impossible,” replied Edmund, “the legate wants to try and speak to the garrison again.”

  Edward looked at him with affection. His brother was much like their father in appearance, short and stocky and inclining to plumpness, and had inherited his lack of aggression. Edward could not ask for a more loyal and dependable sibling, though he thanked God that he had been born the heir. England had suffered too many weak kings.

  “The legate has some guts,” remarked Edward. “Damned if I would risk another parley after last time.”

  He refered to Cardinal Ottobuono, who had recently graced Kenilworth with his presence. Immediately upon arrival, he declared his intention to persuade the garrison to surrender by approaching the walls and addressing them directly. The king, easily overawed by churchmen, agreed to the idea. Edward smiled at the memory of the Italian furiously haranguing the garrison, threatening to excommunicate the lot of them if they didn’t open their gates and submit humbly to the will of the Pope.

  His smile widened as he recalled the garrison’s response. One – Edward suspected it was Henry de Hastings himself – had appeared on the battlements in tattered robes and aped the Cardinal, waving his arms and shouting obscenities in Latin. Ottobuno almost had a seizure and had to be dragged away by his priests, sped on his way by a storm of insults and rubbish thrown from the walls.

  Edward had found it all highly entertaining, though his father was shocked beyond measure and took to his bed with a severe headache. It was thanks to his weakened condition that Edward had persuaded him to allow the assault to go ahead.

  “The Devil with the legate,” said Edward, banging his fist against his mailed thigh. “We go in this afternoon. Siege towers, pontoon bridges, scaling parties. Everything we have.”

  “You also risk offending de Clare,” Edmund reminded him.

  “The Devil with him, too!” Edward cried. “God’s Death, brother, there is no way of doing right in this matter. Whatever I do, someone must be offended. Let the whole world take offence, and to hell with them all.”

  He subsided, growling, while his brother went red and their bodyguards tactfully looked the other way. Edward knew Edmund was only trying to advise him, but the whole situation was infuriatingly complicated.

  Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, had arrived at Kenilworth shortly before the legate. Known as the red dog after his flaming red hair and vile temper, de Clare’s first act was to ignote a blazing row with Edward’s friend, Roger Mortimer. No doubt for his own crooked reasons, though Edward had yet to fathom them, de Clare had recast himself as a dove, and was all for peace with the Disinherited. Mortimer, on the other hand, was a ravenous hawk, eager to benefit from their confiscated property and wealth.

  Let them argue, Edward decided when his blood had cooled a little. Such petty disputes could wait.

  “This afternoon,” he repeated. “We storm the walls and put an end to this foolish siege.”

  Shortly after midday the criers went through the camp, to announce the assault and summon all available footmen to muster at the north wall. Picked volunteers from among the Gascon mercenaries were to propel the towers – there were three lesser towers s
tanding by the Bear, to act as support and draw defenders away from it – and the storming parties and teams of workmen ordered to assemble with ladders and bridges.

  Edward was nothing if not meticulous. He arranged for a meal of roast beef and unmixed wine for every knight and sergeant in the assault parties, to fill their bellies and stiffen their spines for the trial to come.

  The defenders knew what was coming, and the virtually abandoned north wall quickly filled with troops. Helms and spears twinkled in the sun. The defenders blew horns, clashed cymabls and pounded on drums to grate on the nerves of the enemy.

  A great cheer went up from the royalist lines as the towers started to rumble forward. The three smaller towers were monsters in their own right, each of them forty feet high. The Bear was the undoubted centrepiece, standing almost fifty feet high and stuffed with two hundred knights and crossbowmen. The towers were mounted on solid rollers – four for the lesser towers, six for the Bear – attached via iron brackets to their bottom floors, which meant they could only move in straight lines. Crossbowmen ran onto the flat roofs of the lesser towers to kneel and shoot at the defenders and drive them from the walls.

  The highest floor of the Bear was equipped with eleven light catapults and their crews. These began to lob their cargos of sharp stones as the enormous tower inched forward, pushed and manhandled by teams of sweating footmen. The crossbowmen packed into the lower floors aimed and shot through slits in the front of the machine.

  While the towers ground forward, the storming parties jogged towards the ditch, preceded by lighter-armed men carrying portable bridges and rafts. Arrows and stones from the walls fell among them, but those men that dropped were quickly replaced. They gained the lip of the ditch and started to heave their unwieldy burdens down the slope and into the water.

  Edward had never felt so excited, even on the eve of his first tournament, or when he first set eyes on Eleanor, his beloved Castilian wife. His father had strictly forbidden him to take part in the assault, on pain of being dismissed and packed off in disgrace back to London. For once the old man couldn’t be persuaded. Still, witnessing the assault was enough to make the blood thrill in Edward’s veins.

  “Attack!” he cried, shaking his fist at the battlements, “no mercy! Drive them from the rampart!”

  As soon as the towers had moved beyond the mantlets, and the men crowded at the foot of them in full view of the battlements, the defenders threw every missile they had. Arrows, crossbow bolts and javelins streaked among the men labouring to drag the machines closer. The enemy catapults and arbalasts hidden behind the wall started to hurl great stones and darts high into the sky. Some collided in mid-flight with those hurled from the royalist trebuchets. Others arced over the wall and smashed against the timbers of the upper floors of the towers.

  “Damn him!” Edward shouted. He meant the shade of de Montfort, who had taken care to restock Kenilworth with war-machines. Even now, a year after the man’s death, he haunted Edward still.

  The missiles of the defenders were doing terrible execution. Edward witnessed one of the footmen pushing the towers pierced by a foot-long dart that shot his intestines out of his mailed back. Others suffered crushed limbs and skulls from the shower of rocks, or were gaffed like salmon by arrows, crossbow bolts, and spears. The men trying to cross the ditch fared no better. One of the barges was sunk by a great stone that the defenders dropped on it from a murder-hole in the parapet above, smashing a great hole in the bottom and tipping its cargo of knights into the water.

  Nothing, however, could halt the progress of the Bear. Edward’s pulse quickened again as he watched the machine trundle to a halt on the edge of the ditch. Stones and missiles dashed against it no avail. He could see the knights and sergeants clustered on the ninth floor, more climbing the ladders at the rear of the tower. Edward could imagine the awful heat inside the packed staging, the stench of sweat, the feverish excitement clutching at each man’s guts.

  On the front of the tower, on the ninth floor, was a moveable gangway lashed in place by ropes. When released it would swing down and span the gap between the tower and the castle. The men inside would then have the unenviable task of charging across the causeway and storming the walls.

  Renewed cheers rippled through the royalist lines as the gangway was untied and crashed down onto the battlements. Of all four towers, only the Bear had made it so far. One had lost a roller, smashed from the bracket by a rock, and the crew had abandoned it. The crippled tower leaned drunkenly on its side and threatened to capsize into the ditch. The other two were still moving at a snail’s pace. Missiles continued to hammer the men pushing them, leaving trails of twitching, arrow-riddled bodies in their wake.

  “Why don’t they attack?” cried Edward, clawing at his brother’s arm. The men on the ninth floor of the Bear were still inside, crouched behind their shields. The defenders had massed at the point where the gangway met the wall, and a bristling hedge of spears and lances was gathered to meet anyone who tried to cross.

  “They’re afraid,” Edmund said quietly. “I don’t blame them.”

  “What?” Edward could feel the heat prickle on his skin as rage boiled inside him. “Afraid? Go on! Attack! Have at them!”

  His yells went unheard. The men inside the tower refused to move; not caring to set foot on the lofty, trembling causeway, or charge onto the wall of points that waited at the far end.

  *

  That evening Edward sat at dinner in his pavilion. His brother was present, picking glumly over a mess of powdered chicken. De Clare and Mortimer ignored the food and tore strips off each other instead.

  Edward had invited the Marchers in the half-hearted hope that he could reconcile them, but swiftly abandoned the attempt in the face of their mutual hostility.

  “Money,” growled Mortimer, leaning across the table to point at de Clare with his eating knife, “that’s the only reason you’re pretending to have sympathy for these traitors. You squeezed every bit of profit you could out of the rebels last year, and now you want the king to forgive them. Selfishness abounds in you, Gilbert, just as it did your father.”

  “I’ll let the jibe about my father pass, de Mortimer,” de Clare snarled, “but not the rest of it. Do you want the war to be last forever? You dare call me selfish! There must be peace, at any cost.”

  He hammered the palm of his hand on the table for emphasis. “I have made that point to you, over and over,” he shouted, his face flaming under the shock of red hair, “yet you cannot grasp it. As the Lord lives, you must have left your brains behind on the battlefield at Brecon, along with your baggage.”

  Mortimer’s chair tumbled backwards as he sprang to his feet. He was the lord of Wigmore, on the Welsh Marches, and de Clare had just made reference to a defeat Mortimer recently suffered at the hands of a Welsh war-band.

  “At least I have the courage to fight!” he riposted, his dark-skinned face almost black with anger. “Instead of running to safety every time Llewellyn shows his banner in the field!”

  De Clare leaned back and folded his arms. “I bow to your knowledge of Llewellyn’s movements. You have colluded with him often enough. You, a half-Welsh mongrel who has assisted this kingdom’s enemies to ravage its lands, have the sheer nerve to call other men traitors! This is bad comedy, milord.”

  Mortimer spun around to appeal to Edward. “You see how I am used?” he cried. “There is no talking to this red brute. Whip him to heel, lord prince, or by God I will!”

  Edward wasn’t listening. He had walked around the camp earlier, to try and raise the spirits of his men, and drunk rather too much of their sour, cloudy ale. Coupled with his crushing sense of failure and the wine he had for dinner, he was feeling distinctly sick and disinterested.

  He swayed slightly in his chair. The wine was blood-red. In its depths he once again saw his precious tower in flames. The rebels had succeeded in firing the Bear, despite its protective covering of flayed hides, by using flaming arrows wrapped in
oil-soaked bandages. Edward’s men had managed to escape before the tower burst into flames, but that was small consolation.

  Everywhere the assault had failed. The storming parties had been thrown back, the pontoon bridges broken and most of the rafts sunk. His knights carried the stain of cowardice for refusing to attack the walls. As their commander Edward shared in the dishonour. He couldn’t bring himself to face his father or Cardinal Ottobuono, and neither had asked to see him.

  Mortimer and de Clare were still bickering. He sighed, put down his cup, and rose unsteadily to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” asked Edmund.

  “To find Master John,” Edward slurred. “Kenilworth will not yield to the King, or the Pope, or military force. We must look to other methods.”

  He strode, somewhat unsteadily, into the night to look for his spymaster.

  21.

  Cambridgeshire

  The townsmen of Cambridge met the rebels at Impington, a village north of the town, and knelt before Sir John d'Eyvill. As he demanded in his letters, the twelve most important burghers and merchants of Cambridge had come out to meet him, unarmed and with halters round their necks.