The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (31 page)

Aaron’s aim proved true once again, and Old Thunderbolt utterly disintegrated one of the knights, smashing him out of the saddle in a tangle of severed arms and legs. But the rest of the
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arrived more or less unscathed and Robin and his surviving men ran for their lives. They made it back inside the postern gate a yard or two ahead of the lances of the foremost horsemen. Panting, bloody, wild-eyed, eight of the Wolves who had sallied out with Robin returned safely home with him. A dozen bolts were stuck in Robin’s mail but the iron links had kept the missiles from penetrating, and my lord was no worse than bruised. However, while that knowledge gave me relief, the sortie achieved nothing, and twelve brave Wolves would never see the sun rise again.

Half an hour later eight big fellows were hurried out from the gates on Philip’s Hill in the centre of a mob of French men-at-arms and, under a covering of many shields, in an ancient formation known as a ‘tortoise’, they were swiftly escorted along the causeway to the cat – replacements for the men Robin and his Wolves had killed. We spattered them with arrows but they were well protected, and moving fast, and the best we achieved was to kill one man-at-arms and wound another.

Below our walls the chink-chink-chinking began again.

We would not concede defeat easily. We harassed them as much as was humanly possible. We battered the cat with huge chunks of masonry ripped from the parapet on the south-western side of the outer bailey – which had been largely ignored by the French – and carried up to the walls above the cat by two of the biggest Wolves. But the machine was unbelievably strong and springy, and our missiles bounced or slowly rolled off without puncturing it or causing any damage save for the occasional tear in the ox-hide. Robin found a precious barrel of cooking oil which we heated until it smoked, then carefully poured down in a slick on one side of the cat and set alight with burning arrows. Again the smell of roasting beef tormented us, but the cat, while a little singed, remained largely unharmed.

The chinking noise continued by day and night – the causeway made bright with scores of torches after dusk, set there by the enemy to foil any attempt at a night sortie. Aaron smashed his iron bolts time and again into the side of that powerful wooden box, to no avail. We even tried to lift the cat away from the walls with ropes, lowering a loop and snagging a protruding end post – but while we hauled at the cat in vain, the French engineers divined our plans and sawed through the ropes from inside their mobile fortress – and we tumbled back comically like mountebanks.

A second cat came out from the encampment on Philip’s Hill, lighter and smaller than the first, but still robust. We christened it ‘the kitten’. It trundled smoothly along the causeway and came to rest nose-to-tail at the rear of the original machine, creating a long fortified tunnel. The kitten brought out more men and supplies with it and, through the little gap between the first cat and our walls, I glimpsed timbers and barrels being swiftly manhandled into the cavity that had been made beneath our feet.

I was gripped in that time with a burning sense of impotent rage. These men were eating away at our foundations like ants chewing through a door post – and there seemed nothing I or anybody else could do about it. I would spend hours with a pair of javelins kneeling behind the parapet above the cat, listening to them and hoping to hear when one of the men came out of the space they had dug under the wall, so that I could leap up and spit him with a thrown spear before he slipped across the tiny gap. But after one narrow miss, my javelin clattering off the stone walls, the man calling out to God in fear, they covered the gap with a roof of thick planks and thenceforth they travelled from cat to mine in perfect safety. I still spent some hours each day sitting above them, listening to their French chatter and trying to think of a way of combatting the steady erosion of our defences – and a few days after the mining began, I did hear something of great interest. Two men were coming out of the cavity beneath the south tower and speaking quite casually with one another. One was the senior engineer, the man in charge, and the other I thought was a new fellow, a junior man but of some rank; they hustled across the causeway under a roof of shields.

‘It’s just as the Sparrow told us,’ the older fellow said, quite distinctly. ‘The mortar is as wet as custard in some places.’

I sat up straight at these words. At the phrase ‘as wet as custard’. I had heard it from someone inside the castle. But who? I did not have to beat my brains for long. It was Father de la Motte. He had uttered it to describe the mortar inside the walls of the Iron Castle, and one of our enemies was using this exact same – and most unusual – phrase.

My first impulse was to tell Robin. Then I quashed it. The last time I had come to him with tales of a traitor inside our walls he had dismissed it as the workings of my overimaginative mind. And while I was certain that we had a turncoat among us, I had no more proof than the last time – just a muttered conversation and the coincidence of a phrase. Clearly the name the traitor went by among the French was the Sparrow – but who was he? Could it be de la Motte? If so, what motive could he have for working towards our destruction? In truth, I did not believe it truly was Father de la Motte. He was a good man, a man of God. He could not be so base as to betray his flock to the enemy. Could he? It was far more likely that he had heard someone – the true traitor – use the phrase, and merely repeated it to me. I had no answers to these questions – and no one I could usefully discuss them with. In the end I did nothing. For all thoughts of the Sparrow and his treachery were pushed from my head the next morning when the men in the cat finished their task.

I was on the north tower with Aaron and we were discussing the possibility of a very long shot of the springald against the
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of horsemen on permanent guard outside the gates of the French encampment. My idea was to use a lighter bolt and scatter the cavalry, then send out a screen of shield men as cover against the crossbowmen for an attacking force, who would run out and slaughter the men inside the cat. It was a plan of last resort, an elaborate scheme – and I was fairly sure Robin would veto it after the debacle of his sally three days ago. Aaron was not even sure he could do much damage with Old Thunderbolt at that distance anyway.

As I looked dispiritedly at the evil cat, eating away at my walls, I was surprised to see a score of men burst out of the rear of the kitten, burdened down with tools, bundles and boxes. They raced as fast as they could along the causeway towards Philip’s Hill.

They were moving too fast for Aaron to have a chance of hitting them – and Old Thunderbolt was not ready to loose anyway. But the curious thing was that the cat the men had abandoned in such a hurry appeared to be burning. A thick column of grey smoke was pouring out of the rear end of the kitten, as if the enemy’s fortified tunnel had been magically transformed into a chimney, and dark vapour was seeping from the sides of both machines, too. At the same moment a trebuchet loosed from the French camp and a huge stone ball looped through the air and exploded in a storm of shards against the south tower.

I cupped my hands to my face and bellowed to Robin who was standing on the walls about twenty paces away.

‘They’ve fired the mine – get everyone off the south tower!’

Robin shouted back, ‘I’m not totally blind, Alan. Nor yet quite senile!’ He pointed to the thick bank of greasy smoke that was enveloping the whole of the base of the tower.

We pulled every man off the tower, and the connecting fortifications, with the missiles of the whole French battery crashing and smashing against our walls. We had already moved our wounded, our stores, our weapons and possessions out of that citadel and into the courtyard or the north and west towers. For we knew full well what was occurring beneath our feet. The French would have excavated a large space underneath the walls of the tower, a wide tunnel burrowing inward for several yards, supporting its roof with thick baulks and roof pieces nailed firmly in place. This was necessary because, above their heads, as they dug in, were a couple of thousand tons of rubble and stone. When the excavation was finished, the space they had hollowed out would have been filled with brushwood, kindling and many barrels of pig fat, and duly set alight – that accounted for the dark, oily smoke. The miners had run for their lives while the fire raged and burned its way through the wooden supports in the tunnel and then, if the French were lucky, and their excavations had been deep enough, well …

With a sound like a mountain tearing itself in two, the eastern half of the south tower and part of the curtain wall collapsed into a heap of broken masonry and tumbling, bouncing stone. The whole outer bailey was cloaked in grey dust and pig-fat smoke so thick it was almost impossible to breathe, but when the fog began to dissipate, I could see that a breach fully three or four yards wide had opened in our walls. Through the gap I could make out the earth ramparts on top of Philip’s Hill, packed with French spectators. The south tower gaped: I could see inside the chamber on the middle floor where for the past six months we had dined, the big table and the benches, the sideboard stripped of plates; and on the ground floor I could even make out the cot where I slept up against the far, intact wall of the tower.

It felt deeply wrong, as though I were peeping at a woman halfway through dressing herself. To add insult to grave injury, the bombardment started up again as though nothing had happened. The balls smashed into the breach, widening it – one flew straight through the gap into a pair of archers standing in the courtyard. Both men disappeared in a splash of red, limbs wheeling through the air.

Robin was by my side, in the courtyard by the west wall. He took my arm and pointed through the hole in our defences to Philip’s Hill. I flinched as a ball crashed into the rubble below the breach, sending white dust and stone chips flying, then took command of myself and looked to where Robin was pointing. The gates had swung open and columns of marching spearmen were disgorging from the encampment. I could see the bright trappers of massed knights behind them.

‘They are coming,’ said Robin. ‘And they will surely be able to break through, if they try hard enough. We cannot hold this bailey for long – but we must hold it for a little while yet. We have to get our stores, our kit, all the wounded, then the rest of us over the bridge and into the middle bailey. And you, my friend, have to hold them while I accomplish this. I’ll give you twenty Wolves, ten of them archers – I’ll need the rest for carrying the wounded and all the gear. Can you do it?’

I swallowed. Of all the tasks Robin had asked of me over the years, this seemed the most difficult. I could see hundreds of men on the causeway – two hundred spearmen at least, a battle of crossbowmen, a
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of horsemen.

I took a breath. A trebuchet ball smashed against the wall, making a high, loud noise, like the cry of a wounded bird. I opened my mouth, filled my lungs and bellowed, ‘North tower first watch and south tower third watch to me! This instant. I want you all right here, right now. North tower first watch and…’

Through the billowing dust and smoke I saw the obedient Wolves running towards me.

We burned the outer bailey just before we quit it. Robin’s men piled furniture in each of the towers and the extra bedding, straw, old candle ends, and anything they could find that was flammable, and set it ablaze. And they torched all the buildings in the courtyard, too. I lined the breach with a score of Wolves and while Robin and the rest of the men scurried about behind us, carrying boxes and barrels, and litters for the wounded, we kept the French at bay for more than an hour – but, thank God, we were called on to do little in the way of actual fighting. The bombardment had mercifully ceased as the French approached, and I believe they could have easily overwhelmed us in one determined rush. But they did not. Instead, the crossbowmen were pushed forward and planted their pavises fifty yards from the outer bailey and showered us with bolts. Our bowmen exchanged shafts with them, and killed a few, but we lost only one man – I had made sure that every Wolf was in good cover, behind rubble or a piece of remaining wall, and that they kept their shields up. The French knew we were there, waiting for them to attack, and they hesitated. I took that as a compliment to our prowess. But, at last, the French spearmen forming up on the causeway for the assault were ready to advance. It was at that moment that Robin released us from our duty – and we pulled back, scrambling down over the broken rock and stone – as the smoke from the fires set by his men began to boil out of the doorways of the towers and leak from the arrow slits set in the round walls.

By the time the horde of shouting Frenchmen was clambering out of the ditch and through the rubble of the breach, we were safe on the far side of the drawbridge that connected the outer and middle baileys, and were pulling it across behind us. The fire in the outer bailey had taken firm hold and all five towers were roaring. A few French spearmen climbed the walls and stared over at us in the middle bailey – but there was a vast ditch nine yards wide and a full thirty feet deep, between us and them, and the inferno we had left behind soon drove them out of the captured outer bastion.

Roger de Lacy was there to greet us in person as we came tumbling over the drawbridge, coughing from the smoke, and to his credit, he had a word of congratulation for almost every man. I was the last across and he beamed at me like a father and said, ‘Bravely done, Sir Alan, bravely done indeed. It was a defence worthy of the Lionheart himself. You made them pay dearly for that scorched pile of stones and rubble. I congratulate you. And it will do them no good now. The dogs.’

We might have been celebrating a victory, if one were to go by the castellan’s sternly happy expression, instead of watching our outer fortifications go up in flames. Perhaps it was a victory of sorts. We had held off the might of King Philip of France for nigh on six months, and only now had we been forced to give up a single outer bastion. The Iron Castle was still ours. Philip was, in some ways, no closer to having it than six months ago. The middle bailey, the inner bailey and the keep were formidable. We had not been defeated. It had, you might say, merely been a setback.