Warlord(17)

The trumpets blared, the drums sounded and the three foot-divisions began to advance. They were coming at us again. I looked to the west to the sun, which hung low in the blue vault of heaven. I judged that we had at most two hours of daylight left. I sent runners to the eastern and western walls and called the men I had posted there to me; I even sent a man down to the infirmary to summon any lightly wounded. I wanted every man who could stand on two feet and wield a sword on the castle’s front wall.

The battering ram under its sloping shingle roof crept forward at the pace of a crippled old man. But it came on steadily, pushed by men-at-arms inside the housing and by a line of steel-helmeted, mail-coated shield-men on the outside. Once within range of our bowmen, we began to take our toll of these outside men, though four arrows out of five thumped and lodged into the long wicker-work shields that they bore on their outer arms, or skittered harmlessly from the shingle roof of the penthouse.

At fifty yards, we had dropped only half a dozen shield-men and, at a shout of command from inside the penthouse, the pace was quickened and the entire contraption began to trundle towards the gate at increasing speed. At the same time, the two infantry battles on the left and right, howling like mad dogs, charged into the fray seeking revenge and I realized that we simply did not have enough archers even to slow their furious charge.

‘This is it, lads,’ I shouted. ‘This is it. If we hold them now, we’re safe. Hold them, and we’ve won the day.’

The foe was surging below us once more, the ladders were swinging up against the walls and banging against the crenellations. And we hurled the last of our javelins down upon the sea of taut white faces and red shouting mouths below us, following those missiles with rocks, earthenware jugs, even iron cooking pots. Anything and everything we had that could cause harm was hurled into the boiling sea of humanity below – but it seemed that nothing could stop the fear-spurred French from flying up the ladders and flooding over the wall in vast numbers.

Boom! The battering ram was at the gate and its first blow seemed to shake the very foundations of the earth.

A roaring bearded face appeared before me, framed by the rungs of a ladder, and I hacked with Fidelity, crunching deep through gristle and bone laterally across his broad nose; the man was hurled backwards in a spray of gore, but almost immediately another head appeared, and an arm waving a sword, too. I cut down hard, all but severing the arm at the elbow, and the man dropped away.

Boom! The ram struck again, accompanied by a hideous splintering sound, and I realized that the castle gate was not going to last long under this ferocious assault. I placed my mailed hand on the empty ladder rung and pushed with all the strength of my left arm; it lifted an inch or two from the face of the castle wall, skidded to the right and slipped away. But to my right, from another ladder – one of dozens now against the wall – a well-armed French knight, his face protected by a flat-topped tubular helmet, was leaping over the crenellations, then slicing down savagely into a man-at-arms a few yards from me. His blade bit deep, through the poor man’s green cloak and padded aketon, cutting into his chest cavity and the man dropped with a panting, gurgling moan.

I quickly turned my head and shouted: ‘Thomas, Thomas. Now’s your time! Come now.’

And was rewarded by a high, clear voice from the castle courtyard, shouting: ‘Yes, sir; coming, sir.’

The French knight, armed with sword and mace, stepped nonchalantly over the green-cloaked body of my dying comrade and came directly towards me, a challenge on his lips. His sword hissed at my head, and I parried. He swung the mace in his left hand hard at my body. I caught the blow on my shield, unbalancing myself, and momentarily blocking my line of sight, but recovered and swept low with my sword, smashing the blade into the back of the knight’s left knee. And while my blade did not penetrate the tough steel links of his leg mail, it swept him off his feet and, as he floundered on his back in front of me on the walkway, I leapt forward. My sword tip found the eye slit in his helmet and I put my weight above it and crunched the blade down hard. The whole walkway was a mass of struggling men by then, scores of Frenchmen hacking, clawing, biting and butting; locked in life-and-death combat with our surviving green-cloaked men. The air seemed to be misted with blood. The noise was appalling: screams and shrieks and the clang and clash of metal. And more Frenchmen were coming over the walls with every passing moment. Wrenching Fidelity free of the dead man’s helmet, I paused to take a fast breath and looked beyond him and espied Thomas, clutching two burning pinewood torches, incongruous on that golden afternoon, skipping up the steps that led from the courtyard to the right of the gatehouse. Behind him, lumbering with difficulty up the wooden steps, came the two burly men-at-arms I had allocated to him. In their hands, clasped between two long, pole-like wooden holders to protect them from the heat, was a huge cooking pot, a great cauldron of smoking walnut oil that had been heated to boiling on a fire in the courtyard below.