arm, then knocking him back with a punch from my boar-shield.
‘This way! This way. Bring it here,’ a shrill voice was shouting. And I quickly turned to see Thomas’s cauldron-carrying men levering the smoking pot up to the edge of the battlement at the very centre of the gate — tipping the sizzling oil, perhaps half a dozen gallons of it, straight down on to the penthouse roof below.
Even above the dreadful clamour of battle, I could hear the agonized screams of a dozen shield-men below who were splashed by boiling oil: an unholy cacophony of white-hot pain. As I glanced over the edge of the wall, I saw the oil slicked across the wooden shingles of the penthouse below in a yellow, glistening, smoking sheet, and dripping through the cracks to scald the unfortunate men in the space below. Then Thomas hurled the two burning torches on to the sloping roof and with a huge, crackling roar the entire wooden structure of the penthouse burst into bright flame.
Almost immediately the men began to run from inside the burning ram-housing, discarding shields, ripping off burning surcoats, some shrieking wildly and beating at flames on their arms and chests where the dripping oil had ignited. These human torches ran, oil-soaked aketons doggedly ablaze, flesh scorching and blackening, hair exploding in a puff of flame to leave raw pink oozing scalps. Some fled heedlessly to their encampment as if trying to escape their own burning skin, while the wise ones dropped and rolled on the ground to extinguish the flames.
I had no time to watch the agonized antics of my enemies below — the battle for the walls was very nearly lost. ‘Throw them back, throw them back, kill them, kill them all,’ I shouted, and charged a few steps along the walkway to my left, sword whirling, hacking into the struggling mass of men there. Feeling the familiar black fury of combat rise from the pit of my stomach, I screamed a war cry that blasted from my lungs like a trumpet and plunged into the battle on a wave of soaring, joyful madness. I sliced and cleaved and battered. I was snarling, spitting, barging, shoving, hacking and stabbing like a man possessed. My sword swung in great glittering arcs, crunching into flesh and bone with every cut, and the enemy quailed before me. I thrust the living enemy off the walkway with my shield, or cut them down without mercy. I felt all-powerful, invincible, imbued with the power of God and the saints. I know that I received blows in turn — I saw the brutal patchwork of purple bruises later on my arms and legs — but my costly mail suit kept the blades from my flesh, and in my battle-rage I scarcely felt them. Then Hanno was beside me and we were tramping grimly forward, shoulder to shoulder, unstoppable, blocking the width of the walkway with our bodies and chopping down Frenchmen with axe and sword like a pair of country scythe-men reaping the corn. Some of the enemy ran back to their ladders, some leapt down to the courtyard floor and surrendered to our men down there; others hung from the outside of the wall and dropped the fifteen feet to the hard ground, stumbling away on jarred and twisted joints. But many of them died, chopped into meat beneath our swinging blades.
Suddenly I found myself face to face with Peter the vintenar, a battle snarl on his lips, a bloody sword in his fist — and the red fog in my mind slowly began to clear; I realized that the walkway was now clear of living enemies. Taking a huge gulp of air, I looked over the wall and saw that the whole attacking force was in full retreat. The surviving men beside me atop the gatehouse wall jeered them as they ran, our faces ruddy, and streaming with sweat from the heat of the conflagration below the front gate. My mail was thickly clotted with blood, my sword felt as heavy as a bar of lead, and my beloved boar-adorned shield had been battered and hacked out of shape and was now mangled almost beyond recognition.
But we had won.
With the sun low in the west, a mere two fingers above the horizon, I knew the enemy would not come again that day. But our victory had come at a heavy price. On my side of the gate, there were fewer than a score of our men still standing, and many of them were sorely gashed and bleeding. And below us, in the centre of the wall, the big wooden gate, our bulwark, our main defence, was beginning to char and blister and burn. Unless we acted swiftly, the fire that was consuming the ram and its penthouse would take the gate with it and leave our entrance open to attack the next day.
I organized the whole and only lightly wounded men — and there were not fifty of them among the entire castle’s garrison — into a bucket chain and we relayed water from the River Avre to men at the top of the gatehouse which they used to sluice down the outside of the front gate to keep it from burning all the way through. It was hot, dirty, sopping work, and I took my place in the chain, too. The men could only stand at the top of the gatehouse for a few moments before being driven back by the heat — but the water kept coming, bucketful by bucketful, and gradually the blaze was defeated. It was well after dark when the oily fire was finally doused, and the ram was left a charred, smouldering spine among the blackened ribs of its housing. Even then I did not let the men rest: we built a ramshackle inner gate behind the scorched outer portal, not much more than a breastwork of boxes, tables, chairs, empty barrels, bales of straw… anything that a man could stand behind and fight. Hanno bullied the men with urgent energy and no little cruelty to keep them at their tasks: but even he was haggard and drawn when at last we agreed that there was nothing more that could be accomplished that night. After organizing a skeleton sentry roster, we went in search of food and water and somewhere to curl up and sleep.
In the morning, we would fight again — and I was certain that we would not be able to keep them out this time.
In the morning, the French knights, hungry for their vengeance, would easily smash through the charred gate, leap their great destriers over the chest-high tangle of barrels and chairs and stable-yard detritus, and the final slaughter inside the castle would begin.
In the morning, we would all die.
Chapter Four
In the morning, when I awoke — stiff, my whole body bruised and aching, my blond hair and eyebrows singed — King Philip and the bulk of his army were gone.
It seemed a miracle, and I gave thanks on my knees to God and St Michael, the warrior archangel, whom I felt certain had preserved us. We were still besieged, of course, but the great royal tent with the fluttering fleur-de- lys was nowhere to be seen, and more than half the enemy’s strength had departed. The siege engines were still there, the trebuchets and the mangonel; companies of men-at-arms still marched about the camp; French breakfasts were still being cooked over hundreds of small fires; and scores of horses were still tethered in their neat lines — but, astoundingly, our doom had been lifted. I watched the enemy encampment with Sir Aubrey from the roof of the tower, and though I tried very hard, it was impossible not to believe that we were saved.
Sir Aubrey was pale — he had had the crossbow quarrel removed the night before and he was walking only with great difficulty — but he managed the climb to the top of the tower without a word of complaint. He was clearly a man with steel in his spine.
‘Where do you think they have gone?’ I asked him.
He shrugged — then tried to disguise a wince. ‘I think they must have overestimated our strength. They cannot know how weak we are or, as we speak, they would be tearing down the gate and bursting into the courtyard.’
‘We must not relax our vigilance,’ I said, trying to appear the stern warrior, quite unmoved by our unexpected reprieve from certain death.
‘Indeed,’ said Sir Aubrey. ‘They would still have more than enough men to take this castle if they had the strength of will to see it through.’
‘Indeed,’ I said, but I found that I was beaming at the older man, and I saw that a relieved smile had wreathed his leathery, pain-marked features as well.
The enemy, it seemed, were not of a mind to try conclusions with us again that day; and having seen that wakeful sentries were posted, and all the men had food and watered wine, and our horses were as comfortable as we could make them, I set off for the makeshift infirmary to check on the wounded and visit Father Jean.
I took Thomas with me, and found the priest cradling a dying man, giving him the comfort of absolution. The fellow was one of my men-at-arms, a former farmhand from the Locksley valley who had sought adventure in the ranks of Robin’s men and become a good, steady cavalryman. He had been eviscerated by an axe blow in the last attack against the right-hand side of the wall, Sir Aubrey’s section, the evening before. With that gaping wound, and the pink-white ropes of his guts plainly visible, I was surprised that he had lasted this long. He was in agony but
