Warlord(39)

As I watched, with the sun only a finger’s width above the eastern horizon, even at that hour an impossibly bright yellow stain that promised a furnace-like day to come, the first trebuchet on the eastern side of the road prepared its missile. The twenty-five-foot-long solid oak arm was winched back by the muscle-power of a dozen men-at-arms, the massive D-shaped iron counterweight rising into the warming air. The arm was then firmly secured by stout ropes, and pegs driven deep into the ground. A boulder the size of a fully grown sheep was carefully rolled into the broad reinforced leather sling attached to the end of the long arm. A shout of command; the ropes were loosed; the lumpen counter-weight swung ponderously down; the arm flashed up, dragging the sling and its missile behind it; at the top of its arc, the throwing arm crashed into a padded wooden bar, stopping its path dead; the sling whistled over the top and the boulder was catapulted towards the outer wall. With a shattering crash, the quarter-ton missile struck the top of the target close to a small tower, exploding in a storm of flying masonry.

I winced, imagining the fate of the men on the wall in that deadly maelstrom of scything stone chips – the faces ripped and gashed, limbs crushed, bodies pulped by airborne lumps of razor-like rock. Agonized screams floated to us on the still morning air. And after only one strike I could see a dent in the smooth line of the top of the wall. And then a second trebuchet arm swung up, loosed its load, and a second missile crashed into the wall with a spectacular cracking boom and shower of shards. And a third. And a fourth.

And all the fury of Hell was unleashed on the defiant castle of Loches.

Even from our positions a good quarter of a mile away from the point of impact, the noise was deafening. The creak and thump as the arm pounded into the padded bar, the crash of stone against stone, the shouts of the trebuchet captains, the cheers of their men, the pain-soaked yells, cries and curses of men defending the walls, crushed, ripped and sliced by flying slivers of rock.

Then the second, the yet more powerful artillery company on the right of the road began its own deadly tattoo, looping their missiles at a higher trajectory over the walls to dash against the corner of the massive keep.

The engineers and their well-trained sergeants knew their work. I watched one team around a thirty-foot-tall trebuchet, known by its crew as the ‘Wall Eater’, and counted my heartbeats with a hand on my wrist – and I saw that they were able to loose a fresh boulder at the castle almost every fifteen beats. It was a staggering pace, and I wondered how long they could keep it up. But their diligent work meant that, with almost every one of my heartbeats, a missile from one of the sixteen engines on either side of the road crashed into the castle – crack, crack, crack, crack. It felt almost like sitting before a giant’s forge with a mad blacksmith hammering determinedly at a stone anvil without pause. The horses were a little frightened by the noise at first, but after a half-hour they became calmer, and accepted the hellish banging as a natural part of the sounds of the day.

The pounding went on and on. The artillery men on the left smashed boulder after boulder into the outer wall with surprising precision. A few missiles missed their mark and sailed over the wall or went wide, but eight stones out of ten crashed and splintered into the same twenty-foot stretch of outer wall. The more powerful company on the right were less accurate – theirs was a difficult, vertical target – but, by my count, at least six out of every ten of their missiles smashed into the corner of the tall keep.

After an hour’s solid battery from both sides of the main road, I heard a huge cheer from the artillery company on the left, and looked up to see a great crack appearing in the outer defences just to the left of the main gate. An hour after that, and whole chunks of masonry began to fall, almost slowly, from the crumbling outer wall.

The King was in high spirits; he smiled and joked with the men around him, the sunlight reflecting from his red-gold hair and the simple gold band he wore to keep it from his eyes. He leaned over to Robin and, punctuated by the crash of stone missiles on masonry, he shouted: ‘I think, Locksley, that we shall see this matter concluded today!’

‘Indeed, sire,’ replied Robin in his battle-voice. ‘That outer wall will be practicable by noon at the latest, I’d say.’

‘Aye,’ said the King. ‘I agree. Noon, if not earlier. Pass the word to Mercadier to be ready to attack by noon.’

Robin looked at me. ‘Would you be so kind, Alan?’ he said, with much more formality than I was used to from an old friend. Clearly he had still not forgiven me.

I guided Shaitan down the slight hill to a hollow on the left of the road where Mercadier and his men were encamped. As my destrier picked his way through a sea of low grubby tents, campfires and lounging routiers – an evil-visaged crew if ever I saw one, who stared at me with varying expressions of sullen contempt and indifference – I heard another cheer, this time coming from the far side of the road, and turned round in time to see a great eye-tooth-shaped chunk of stone slide from the north-western corner of the enormous keep.