Winter Siege (29 page)

The Empress’s harsh voice rang out again. ‘You three men, do you hear what I say?’

The lads on the edge of the pond nodded.

‘Shall you remember it?’

Yes, yes, they would remember it.

‘Let us be sure. Tip them in.’

Grinning wickedly, Alan and Sir Christopher strode along the line of the three young men, pushing them into the pond as they went. There were gasps of cold and a crackle of ice. It was the traditional way to impress a matter of importance, should it ever be questioned in a court of law, on the memory of men who could neither read nor write. They wouldn’t forget this. If Gwil’s position were ever doubted, each of the trio could say that on such and such a day they had witnessed it being bestowed on him by the Empress, and given a ducking in the process. Granted, the custom was usually carried out in warmer weather, but each of the three was awarded a silver penny for his trouble before being taken home to dry by the fire.

At the rear gate Sir Christopher, now mounted, was patting his veil into place under a circlet. ‘You sure it suits me?’

‘You’d look better in yellow,’ Alan said. ‘Match your complexion.’ Around them, men and horses shifted in tension as they waited for the command.

Alan saluted. ‘Good luck and God go with you.’ And then added: ‘If you get through we’ll meet at Salisbury.’ Then he left to join the Empress in the secret postern. As he did so Sir Christopher turned to Penda:

‘Time for you to take your place as well, Master Penda,’ he said. ‘We shall be depending on your bow when we’re chased.’ He smiled at her. ‘It’s been a pleasure, young sir.’

‘Thank you,’ she said meekly; she would miss the courteous Sir Christopher and was anxious for his safety but still rather confused about what exactly was about to take place. However, clutching her bows and quarrels she set off to the ramparts to position herself among the other archers who would be sending arrows down on Stephen’s pursuing troops when they saw the pseudo-Empress ride out.

That was the plan. To tempt the enemy away from its encirclement with riders apparently attempting to escape with the Empress, actually Sir Christopher bewigged and veiled. To outride the pursuit if possible. To stand and fight if not. To give time and space for the real Empress and her chief mercenary to emerge from the secret postern, leaving only two sets of horse tracks in the ground to indicate where they had gone. Which would be due west.

Below the castle, in the prickly passage that smelled of bush and badgers, with grooms holding the two horses the Empress and Alan would ride, Maud was also feeling confused and anxious. Her castle had been invaded and put in danger by the autocratic woman who stood beside her, waiting to desert it. Poor Sir Rollo had been offended – he had his faults but his loyalty to Kenniford was unquestionable – and a mercenary of low degree put in his place. What’s more – and the thought struck her like a thunderbolt – if, as everybody expected, Sir John died soon, the Empress would most likely signal her gratitude to Gwil by bequeathing Maud and all her estates to him.

Perhaps Matilda was aware of the seething resentment emitting from her for she suddenly said: ‘You have asked for nothing.’

‘I want for nothing,’ Maud said and then added: ‘Except perhaps that, if I am widowed, I would ask that you don’t marry me off.’ It was a spontaneous reaction.

All at once they were creatures together: sleek, rich, breeding machines with leashes round their necks. Maud had been married off without consultation once, the Empress twice.

Maud looked at her. Was that sympathy she saw in Matilda’s face, sudden amusement, even comradeship? If it was, it changed quickly into calculation. If and when she became queen, the Empress might need to award the prize that was Maud of Kenniford to gain a useful alliance. And she would do it. Oh yes, she would do it. Her sudden smile was quite inscrutable.

‘But you are not yet a widow,’ was all she said. It meant nothing.

A rustle behind them announced the arrival of Alan of Ghent. He pushed past Maud and out of the tunnel, hiding in the rowan trees to peer beyond the castle walls to the lines of the enemy.

‘Not long now,’ he said after a time. ‘Up you get, my lady.’ He came back and formed his hands into a stirrup. The Empress put her left foot in it and swung her right leg across her horse’s saddle.

Alan went outside again and this time Maud joined him. All was calm and quiet, the distant men encircling the castle as silent as those inside it.

‘Why aren’t they moving? Why aren’t
we
?’ Maud said. ‘In the name of God, why doesn’t somebody
do something
?’ The wait was almost unbearable.

‘Nervous?’ The mercenary’s eyes were on the castle gates.

‘I’m not nervous … nerves aren’t something I suffer from. Will there be a signal?’ But her teeth were chattering and from something other than the cold.

‘Soon. Gwilherm – sorry,
Sir
Gwilherm knows what he’s about. But I warn you, it’s going to be noisy.’

The mounting suspense was terrible; unable to stand it, Maud went back into the tunnel to where the Empress was twisting in her saddle to arrange her cloak into decorous folds. She reached up to help her, deftly tying the scarf-strings of the Empress’s hood more tightly under her chin so that it should not be blown back to reveal either the gold circlet round her hair or the jewels in her ears and at her neck. In her outer clothes, she looked like any male winter rider; underneath she was fully equipped to bribe her way through enemy lines.

And how many of those would be encountered on the terrible ride ahead of her? ‘God go with you, Lady,’ Maud said and was surprised by how earnestly she meant it.

Whether the Empress replied she didn’t hear, because at that moment a great noise broke out at the castle gates. She rushed out of the postern to join Alan among the rowan trees and watch her contingent emerge from the rear gate making a racket of whistles, boos and shouts; there was even a trumpet blast. In the middle of them all a slight figure, its veil blowing in the wind, was screaming in a high falsetto.

‘What in God’s name are they
doing
?’

‘Attracting the enemy’s attention. They need that circle to break.

Leave a gap.’

Maud thought it unlikely that Stephen’s men would believe the Empress was being taken out with such furore. They’d suspect a trick. She said so.

‘Stephen might, but I don’t think he’s here yet. Come on, you bastards, come on. Break ranks. Come and pick that nice fat plum for your king.’

So far, the ring was holding, though some of its men were becoming restless at the jeers coming from the castle ramparts, and were having to be commanded back into line by their lieutenants. Gwilherm, followed by the castle contingent, had turned round and was circling the enemy so close that he was in arrow range. He was shouting, though what he yelled, Maud couldn’t hear. Sir Christopher’s taunts were like the screams of seagulls.

The temptation was too much for Stephen’s troops: they could take the Empress; they might even take the castle, with a reward for both. One by one the ring’s sections crumbled, its pieces surging forward in ragged attack.

Gwil wheeled away from them and headed for a gap that had opened in the south-east towards the hills. Christopher and his men galloped after him.

The delay had cost them dear; the enemy was at their heels. One man was outstripping the others, a morningstar with a wickedly flanged head flailing in his hand, ready to bring down Christopher’s horse.

‘Shoot him,’ Maud whispered. She was holding on to a tree trunk so that her knees wouldn’t give way. ‘Kill him.’

Whether anybody did or not, she suddenly couldn’t see because a troop of Stephen’s men who’d been holding the ring to the west came past to join the mêlée, their horses ploughing through the mud with a rocking action that scattered the earth over her.

‘Bless ’em,’ she heard Alan say. He went back into the tunnel to get mounted and fetch the Empress. ‘Our way’s open, Lady.’

When, both on horseback, they re-emerged, Alan reined in among the trees and looked down at Maud. He had looked at her like that once before on almost this very spot and was having the same effect now. Oh no! she thought. Not again! But this time she held his gaze and lifted her face to him.

‘A farewell kiss?’ he asked softly. ‘It is St Valentine’s Day, after all.’

Afterwards Maud tried to convince herself that she was about to protest but before she could say anything he had scooped her up and kissed her with an energy which sapped all hers and then lowered her gently to the ground again. Her heart pounding like a sack of frogs she could only watch as the Empress and her mercenary captain clamped their legs against their horses’ sides and galloped off, turning right away from the hubbub behind them.

‘Impudence,’ she whispered, raising her hand to her cheek when her head finally cleared. But because her knees were shaking, though this time from something other than fear, or cold, she found another tree to hang on to while she watched two figures disappear behind the fold of her fields that led to the west.

On the ramparts Penda’s eyes followed the soldier with the morningstar. He was chasing Christopher so closely that their horses were almost alongside. She could hear, or thought she could, the whistling displacement of air as the weapon flailed inches away from the labouring rump of Christopher’s horse. Another attempt like that and the animal would be brought down.

Penda sighted the arrow in her bow. It was going to be a long shot, a very long shot; the man was only just in her range. ‘Swerve, you fool,’ she told Christopher under her breath. He did, his pursuer swerving with him, the gleaming morningstar raised for another thwack.

It never came. The weapon dropped on to the field and the man fell forward on to his horse’s neck as Penda’s arrow went into his spine.

Sir Christopher looked round, saw her and raised an arm in salute before he made for the gap in the enemy ranks and disappeared.

‘
AND DID SHE
escape? Did the Empress get away?’ the scribe asks.

‘Oh yes,’ says the abbot. ‘After many adventures on the way, she arrived at her stronghold in the south-west, and was reunited with young Henry at Bristol, but much of the fight had gone out of her; she was, after all, over forty years old by then.’

‘So the war was over?’ the scribe asks, rather too casually for the abbot’s liking. He raises his eyebrows but the scribe is too busy writing to notice.

‘Not quite over,’ the abbot says with emphasis, too tired to berate him properly for his ignorance today. ‘Not yet … and anyway the Anarchy was just beginning. You see, in a strange way Stephen needed the Empress as his enemy; her very existence had given his barons a straight choice: Support me, the King, or you will be ruled by this domineering, unpleasant woman. Without her as a contrast, he was left naked as it were, his faults exposed, of which the greatest was weakness.’ The old man pauses and clears his throat to ensure he has the scribe’s full attention. ‘Now, I’m not saying Stephen wasn’t courageous or a fine general – he could move an army around England faster than anybody – and he was even kindly if they’d let him be, but he wasn’t a …’ He looks out at his oak tree to find the right word among its diminishing leaves. ‘… a nailer.’

‘A nailer, my lord?’

‘A nailer. Not effective. He seemed unable to administer the finishing touch. A job was never quite completed, a rebel never totally reduced. The Empress’s supporters, who were still fighting, could tempt him away from one siege by an attack somewhere else to which he would immediately respond. His word, though generously given, could not be trusted.

‘Under Henry the First, a much harsher man, there had been strong government, an efficient tax system, a rule of law. People knew where they were, even if they didn’t like it, but under Stephen these things disintegrated; he had no time to apply himself to them, though I doubt if he had the administrative ability to do so if he had. Wrongdoing went unpunished. Barons who were not concerned with putting the Empress on the throne, but with creating their own little kingdoms, saw that they could defy his authority. They became savages, invading their neighbours’ territory, torturing the landholders into revealing where they kept their money, taking men to build castles for them, stripping the fields of harvests so that peasants died in their thousands from starvation.’

It has been a long speech for a dying man. He lies back on his pillow, gasping. The scribe administers a spoonful of medicine and tells him to rest. ‘We can continue tomorrow.’ But there is one more question he has to ask: ‘My lord, what happened to Kenniford after the Empress had gone? Did it give in?’

‘Give in?’ All at once the abbot is reinvigorated. ‘Give in? There were great hearts in that castle, its chatelaine not the least of them. No, my son, only treachery could take Kenniford.’ The abbot’s eyes close again and his scribe sees tears creeping from under them. ‘The treachery of that grand dragon, that ancient serpent who leads the whole world astray, who was hurled to the earth and his angels with him …’

The scribe creeps out of the room, leaving his master to murmur from the Book of Revelation.

EVEN WITH THE
Empress gone the battle continued to rage. Stephen, thwarted by Matilda for a third time, was wreaking revenge on those responsible for his latest humiliation.

From Penda’s vantage point on the ramparts, there seemed an added ferocity to this morning’s attack, as if it were somehow personal this time.

Arrows rained down in great arcs to clatter on to the allure behind her, while the castle itself shuddered and shook as if, at any moment, it would crumble to dust under the relentless assault.

Gwil was no longer at her side, his duties as the newly appointed commander-in-chief had taken him elsewhere and she missed him. On the other hand, she was grateful too; the archer who had taken his place had received an arrow through the eye and was lying face up, dead, on the allure behind her. Such was the mercilessness of the enemy fire that nobody had been able to risk attending to the body.