Warlord(16)

Bows creaked and twanged as our archers poured their killing skill down upon the enemy surging below us. Our men flung down javelins, spears, cut-down lances, even lumps of jagged masonry to crush the seething mass of Frenchmen – but a dozen ladders were rising, swinging up and banging against the stone wall of the castle, and the bravest enemy knights were already swarming up the frail wooden rungs with terrifying speed.

Wherever we could, we hurled the ladders away from the walls, pushing them clear with wooden pitchforks or long poles cut and tied in the shape of a cross, tumbling the brave men who climbed them with oaths and shouts and the thump of flesh and crack of bone on to the earth below; but there were too many of them. Hanno and I had grabbed the end of a ladder, and were twisting the top of it with our combined strength, left and right, spilling the climbers, when I looked to my left and saw a Frenchman come screaming over the wall. He parried a sword thrust from one of Robin’s men-at-arms and struck the man’s head clean off with his riposte. Another knight crested the stone battlements two yards away and landed neat as a cat on to the wooden walkway behind it. I took two fast steps towards him and lunged for his throat, but he was swordsman of no little skill and he deflected by point and counter-attacked with a lightning stab at my heart, followed by a hard cut at my shoulder. I twisted to avoid his blade and went down on one knee; he swung at my head and I blocked his blow with my shield, but from the corner of my eye I could see another Frenchman rolling over the top of the wall into the gap the first man had created, and another. I had to plug this hole in our defences – and fast – or we were all dead men! I came up from my crouching position and lunged; a low, vicious blow that slid through the front slits of his mail coat and sliced up through his braies into the meat of his soft inner thigh. He screamed like a soul in torment and clutched at the fork of his legs, scarlet blood gushing from the wound, and he dropped. I left him to his fate and smashed my shield at the head of a man who was just appearing above the castle wall, cutting deep into his face with the edge; he fell straight backwards out of view. But there were enemies all around me now. I whirled and hacked with my long sword into the back of the neck of another Frenchman who was duelling with a green-cloaked man-at-arms; he fell away inside the castle walls, yelling in pain. I saw Hanno, wielding an axe, cave in the skull of a man in the act of climbing over the wall. I killed a man on the walkway to my right – my sword Fidelity spearing into his throat. I blocked a wild sword swing and cut deep into the thigh of a Frenchman to my left. Another head poked above the wall nearer to me and I darted forward, slicing into an eye and causing the head to disappear as if by some conjurer’s trick. A burly archer and I both grabbed the ladder top at the same time, and we heaved it away bodily, causing three climbing Frenchmen to spin off and crash to the hard ground in a cloud of flying dust and foul curses.

And suddenly there were no more ladder tops and the wall to the west of the gatehouse was clear of the enemy. I peered over the battlements, and jerked away just in time as a crossbow quarrel clattered against the stone inches to the right of my face. But I could see that the French were pulling back on our side, taking their wounded, but leaving a score of their dead in a bloody heap below our walls.

I shouted: ‘Archer, archers …’ But there was no need. Robin’s well-trained bowmen, under young Peter’s direction, were already harassing the retreating French with deadly accuracy, their shafts easily punching through the mail coats that covered the running men’s backs, and dropping their victims in their tracks. I looked across at Sir Aubrey’s command and he too seemed to have fought off the first onslaught, though he was leaning on his sword, holding his side with his left hand, and I saw with deep regret that there was a dark quarrel shaft sticking from his waist, and a wet stain was spreading beneath his hand. He was not the only man to have received a grievous wound from among our ranks: more than a dozen of our archers and men-at-arms had been wounded or killed during the attack on both sides of the gatehouse. But we had held them off.

Yet that day’s bloody work was only just beginning. The two enemy battles on the flanks had moved out of range of the deadly war bows of Robin’s men, but they had not dispersed into the camp. They waited, loosely formed, mauled but still menacing. And in the centre, trumpets rang out once again, and with dread I saw that the great ram was being hoisted on to its huge wooden cradle under the penthouse, surrounded by hundreds of men-at-arms bearing the five-foot-high, flat-topped, flat-bottomed, light wickerwork shields that were sometimes used to protect crossbowmen on the field of battle.