The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (30 page)

Out of the corner of my eye, away to my left, from the French lines, there came an answering flash, a pause, a flash, a pause, and a final flash of light. The notion hit me like a kick to the belly. Somebody inside the castle was signalling to the French. Someone was conversing with the enemy in a code written in light. I had no idea what the message might mean, but I did know one thing.

We had a traitor within our walls.

Young Alan was defiant when he came to see me the next day. He was also badly hungover, with dark bruises under watery red eyes and a yellowish pallor to his skin. I had little sympathy – but his mother Marie fussed about him and brought him a posset with eggs beaten up in milk. He drank it down in one.

‘Have you made this girl Agnes pregnant?’ I asked him outright.

He stared at me, our eyes locked, but he said nothing.

I repeated the question, fighting the urge to crack my open palm against his cheek. My old eyes bored into his. Finally, he broke our contact, dropped his head.

‘You have nothing to say to me?’

More silence.

‘It was not my fault,’ he said eventually.

So, I asked, had he slipped then and fallen prick-first into her?

The boy glared at the rushes on the floor of the hall.

‘Did you force her?’

‘No, no.’ Alan’s head jerked up; he was quite shocked by the suggestion. ‘She said she loves me. I believe she does.’

More angry silence. Then: ‘I did not mean to get her with child, it was a mistake … We were kissing in the hay barn, a harmless kiss; and she was warm and soft and lovely; we lay down together…’

I tried for conciliation. ‘Surely you can see this from the point of view of the yeoman Godwin. All his hopes for a good marriage for his daughter are dashed. He raised her, he cherished her, he had plans for her. Now they are destroyed. Who will want her with another man’s child in her belly?’

Alan merely stared at the floor in sullen silence.

‘Listen to me, boy: she is ruined now and it is your fault. You have dishonoured her; you have taken her maidenhood from her, her most precious badge of honour – some might say that you have stolen it, if you will not replace her maiden status with that of wife. You must make things right with her and with her father, too. I take it that she would marry you, if you asked.’

‘I will not marry her!’ Alan was suddenly all fierceness. He looked me hard in the eye again, like an enemy, almost.

‘Why not? She seems a fine girl, beautiful, loving.’

‘Her father is a sheep farmer! She spends all day with her hands in a milk bucket. And I … I am the grandson of a knight, I am a gentleman, I am heir to these very Westbury lands.’

‘So? You think you should only marry some great lady?’

He said nothing for a while, then: ‘It is beneath my honour, Grandpa, surely even you can see that.’ He went quiet again, contemplating the floor-rushes once more. ‘I cannot be with her.’ He sounded almost wistful. ‘My friends would laugh at me; they would say she is a farm girl, far beneath my dignity.’

‘Your friends – ha! Those drunken popinjays.’

‘They are my best friends.’

I realised then what his problem was.

‘Those boys, those sons of great men whom you call your friends, have no idea who they really are,’ I said. ‘And they certainly cannot say who you are. They talk about their honour and their lineage and tell themselves they are noblemen, better than all others, but are they even men at all? Who knows? They have never been tested. They tell themselves they are better than others because they fear that they are not; they fear, deep in their hearts, that they might even be worse. You should not listen to such nonsense, not from them. Their mockery is no more than the honking of frightened geese. Find your own honour, prove it to yourself. You must show yourself to be a better man than others, it will not do merely to tell people that this is so.’

‘Do you truly think I should marry her, Grandpa?’

‘I cannot force you to wed, but I confess that I would think less of you if you did not. A man’s honour is not the same as his rank – remember that. And, if you marry her, you will gentle her condition – she will be Lady Westbury one day. I’d wager that she would make you a fine wife and a fine mistress for this old place. We know, at least, that she is fertile.’

I raced back to the postern gate, scrambling up and down the ditches either side of the causeway using my hands and feet. I bounced across the plank, blew through the courtyard of the outer bailey and into the south tower, my legs pumping, brain spinning like a windmill in a gale. If I were fast enough, I thought, I could catch whoever was signalling to the enemy in the very act – what the royal foresters who found poachers in Sherwood with their hands bloody used to call red-handed. In the map of my mind, I knew exactly which window had been used for this treachery. It was on the spiral staircase between middle floor, where Robin was entertaining his noble guests, and top, a few yards along from the alcove that was used as a latrine, just below where the men of the watch ought to be keeping a sharp lookout.

When I reached the middle floor – my hose covered in mud from the causeway ditches – the party was just breaking up. Indeed, several knights pushed past as I was coming up the spiral stairs, including a sneering Benedict. I could not think of a reason to halt him or any of the knights – and to demand outright if they had been communicating with the French from an arrow slit by candlelight seemed absurd. When I came in to the feasting chamber, I sketched a bow at Robin, who raised an eyebrow at my filthy attire, and ran straight up the stairs to the arrow slit but, of course, there was no one there. When I came back down, almost all the gathered knights – a dozen or so men – had left and Roger de Lacy was thanking Robin for his hospitality.

‘My lord, I must speak with you on a matter of urgency,’ I said to Robin, who was bidding the castellan farewell. ‘Perhaps my lord de Lacy should hear this too.’

‘Very well,’ said Robin. He called to one of the archers who had been serving the feast. ‘Simon, bring us another jug of that filthy ale, will you?’

Robin ushered us to the long table and pushed out the bench with his foot. De Lacy and I sat down while Robin took the jug from his archer-servant and poured out three goblets of a truly foul-tasting brew.

‘I believe there is a traitor inside the castle communicating with the French, perhaps telling them of our weaknesses,’ I said, and told them about the flashes of light from the arrow slit. Robin and de Lacy listened in silence until I had finished.

‘You took all that from seeing a gleam of candlelight at a window?’ said de Lacy, his disbelief obvious.

‘And the response from the French lines – an identical pattern of flashes.’

‘Could be a coincidence,’ said Robin.

‘It’s preposterous. It is out of the question that any of our men should be a traitor,’ said Roger de Lacy. He rose from his bench and put down his ale. His face was the colour of a freshly cut beetroot. ‘We have lived alongside each other in this castle for the best part of a year – for long before you two washed up here. I have patrolled and fought and starved and suffered alongside these men, these good men that you now accuse, for long enough to know the secrets of their hearts. I cannot believe any of them would be a traitor. I am disgusted by the very notion, Sir Alan, and I do not wish to hear another word on the matter. I bid you goodnight.’

The castellan strode from the room without a backward glance.

‘It is a bit thin, Alan,’ said Robin. ‘Come on, we’re all on edge. It is easy to let our imaginations get the better of us. Forget it for the moment and try to get a good night’s sleep. Here, have some more ale.’

‘Thank you, no,’ I said, irked that these men, both of whom I admired, had dismissed my idea. I, too, rose and left the chamber, my face beetroot red.

The next morning the French came at us again. They treated us with a good deal of respect after the disastrous belfry attack and the day began, as usual, with another battering from the castle-breakers. Perhaps I did suffer from an overabundance of imagination, as Robin had suggested the night before, because I distinctly heard the stone wall of the south tower moving under the pounding it received from Philip’s petraries that day. In the middle of the morning the barrage abruptly ceased and, in the unfamiliar quiet, I ran to the top to see what was amiss – and beheld a most extraordinary sight approaching along the causeway from Philip’s Hill.

It was a cat – not the household scourge of mice and rats, but the battlefield scourge of walls and masonry. Its use in battle is quite rare and not one man in a hundred has faced one, and so I must explain its functions. At its simplest the cat was nothing more than a very strongly built house on wheels; but it is the expertise of the men it contains that makes it so fearsome. Inside this cat – constructed of foot-thick timbers, roofed with overlapping inch-thick oak shingles and covered top, front and sides with wet ox-hide to prevent it being set alight – were a score of highly skilled men under a senior engineer armed with picks and iron bars, spikes, spades and hammers. Their task was to claw away at the foundations of the south tower, to undermine our walls, to pick at, and scrape into and lever out the masonry – until our defences came tumbling down. Watching a small house on wheels creeping towards you along the causeway might not appear a good reason for alarm – it sounds a little comical, perhaps – but I felt a tremor of fear at its approach, for I knew what an attack by this rolling monster truly portended.

The cat did not come on alone. Two battles of crossbowmen – each a hundred strong – came up the causeway on either side of it, and took up positions a hundred yards out. A
conroi
of knights formed up outside the gates of the encampment on Philip’s Hill, just out of range of our bows.

The cat crawled forward and, as it approached, a dozen of Robin’s archers in the north tower loosed shafts at its lumbering bulk. With no result whatsoever. The wet ox-hides on the sloping roof, and the shingles underneath, easily soaked up the power of the war bows. The roof became thickly feathered with our shafts – and that was all. We had no way of stopping the cat, except by sallying out of the outer bailey and killing the men inside who propelled it – and this is where the crossbowmen came in. These disciplined foot soldiers worked in pairs, each pair protected by a giant shield, called a pavise, which was the height of a man and nearly twice as wide. The pavise was fixed into the earth of the causeway by a spike on its bottom edge and the two crossbowmen – mercenaries from Genoa, I assumed, by the red cross on a white background on their pavises – worked in its shade, one loading his cumbersome crossbow, while the other sought out a suitable target on the walls and loosed. They were professionals, every man a marksman, and even at a hundred yards we had to keep our heads below the parapet if we wished to escape a bolt through the eye. Even if we had found the courage to sally out and charge the crossbowmen – and our casualties would have been appalling – there was the
conroi
of cavalry ready and waiting by the gates to the French camp to see that we did not return safely home again.

We could do nothing but watch as the cat rolled inexorably towards us.

Robin left his archers to continue a cautious duel with the crossbowmen – for once in a while a Genoese who foolishly stepped beyond the protection of his pavise could be satisfactorily skewered – and came to my side above the end of the causeway to the left of the south tower.

The cat was so close now that I could make out the heads of the long nails that held the ox-hides to the roof. As it reached the half-filled ditch before our walls, I heard the score of men inside the machine give a roar. They increased their speed and hurled the house-on-wheels down into the ditch to land with a thump against the base of our battlements.

As the dust settled, I looked down directly twenty feet below on to the brown-and-white hide-covered roof of the cat. It was angled downwards, the rear end high up on the causeway, the front down in the rubble of the ditch, and it was not quite snug against the walls; one side was hard up against the stone, the other was a good foot away. Through this gap, I saw the bearded face of a man peering up at me, but before I had time to react, he darted back under the roof.

We hurled rocks, stones and pieces of broken masonry down on the roof of the cat, but while they boomed satisfactorily, they seemed to have no destructive effect at all. Robin ordered several cauldrons of water to be heated to boiling point and poured on to the wet hides, which sizzled and steamed and gave off the tantalising smell of cooking beef, an insult to our siege-shrunken bellies. But while the hot water dripped off the indifferent eves, and the boulders crashed and bounced off the arrow-struck sides, one sound could clearly be heard coming from below.

The chink-chink-chink of steel chisels on stone.

‘I have to go out and stop them,’ I said to Robin. ‘However high the risk, we cannot let them pull the castle down from under us.’

I remember Robin’s expression very well: it was one of the few times I have seen him look uncertain.

‘Somebody must go,’ he said. ‘But that duty, I believe, falls to me. I leave you in command of the outer bailey. If anything happens to me, see that Marie-Anne and the boys are cared for. I leave them in your charge, Alan.’

‘My lord, I will go in your stead. We need you here to defend the castle.’

‘Do not argue with me, Alan. For once, just do as you are told.’

Robin took twenty volunteers from the garrison – grim-faced men who had known him a long time and who would follow him to the very gates of Hell. An hour later they slipped out of the postern gate and into the half-filled ditch at the bottom of the walls. And there they began to die. Watchful eyes saw them leave the castle and almost immediately the quarrels of the Genoese began to strike them. Our archers returned the compliment valiantly, but Robin and his Wolves had stepped into a storm of death. They ran the thirty yards from the little door to the causeway through a blizzard of crossbow bolts, with a man falling every third step, and threw themselves at the cat. But the men inside were ready. After a short, fierce battle at the rear of the cat, in which I saw Robin, his blade flashing silver, cut down two giant axe-wielding men in three heartbeats, the thunder of hooves heralded the arrival of the
conroi
of French knights, which charged down the causeway to the rescue of the engineers.