preparation for the battle — apart from the Templars, of course, who as was their custom sported neatly trimmed beards. I felt my own lightly stubbled chin, and silently cursed myself for not thinking of having Thomas do the same for me. I felt untidy, and so a little angry with myself. As I had been so recently dubbed, I did not want to stand out from the other knights, or to look foolish or unkempt or peasant-like in any way. But my stubble was light and fair, and I persuaded myself that nobody would notice.
Richard had divided his heavy artillery in two unequal halves: the weaker company — six big siege engines, mangonels and trebuchets, and half a dozen smaller onagers and balistes, manned by engineers and experts in this type of weapon — was on the left of our position, east of the main road and near the banks of the River Indre. Their objective was to reduce the outer wall, to knock a gap at least twenty foot wide between the main gate and the first strong tower on the east of the castle wall. The second, stronger artillery company — consisting of ten thirty- foot-tall ‘castle-breakers’ — was placed on the right of the main road, to the west, and they had the more difficult task of pitching their missiles in a long arc over the outer wall to batter at the north-western corner of the massive keep.
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.
As I rode up to his tent, Mercadier was shaving himself, dipping a long dagger in a bucket of muddy water between strokes, glaring into a polished steel helm at his dark reflection, and carefully guiding the blade, which must have been extraordinarily keen, around his Adam’s apple.
My hand went unthinkingly to my own bristled chin. I did not wish to fall out with Mercadier on this day, a day when he would be facing mortal danger and I would very likely be safe from the fighting, and so I said in my most civil tone: ‘The King requests that you have your men ready to attack the outer wall at noon.’
‘Yes, fine, noon it is,’ he said, his Gascon accent particularly nasal.
I waited a moment for any further communication, and when he said nothing but merely continued to scrape away carefully at his jawline, I turned Shaitan and began to make my way towards the King.
While my back was turned, and I was a dozen yards away, I heard him speak: ‘Not with your precious priest today, Sir Knight?’
Scenting mockery, I turned in the saddle and saw that he was smiling crookedly at me, the bright sunlight making even more of a contrast between the long, puckered off-white scar and his half-shaven face. After weeks of campaigning, I noticed, his complexion was almost as dark as a Moor’s.
‘Not today,’ I said.
‘Well, you keep him safe, Sir Knight. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to such a saintly old man. That would be a terrible tragedy.’ And he laughed; a horrible dry sound.
I paused for a moment, groping for some rejoinder, but nothing came to me; and so I turned Shaitan’s head and rode on, a wave of grating laughter lapping in my wake.
Mercadier’s parting taunt turned my thoughts in the direction of Brother Dominic. We had been reunited at Tours and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal, his feet healing steadily thanks to Elise’s charms and unguents. I discovered that he belonged to the Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Vendome — the abbey in which the current abbot, who also had the dignity of the title cardinal, was… the erstwhile Bishop Heribert, author of my father’s expulsion from Notre-Dame.
‘Oh yes, the Cardinal is still in very good health for his years, praise God,’ quavered Dominic when I questioned him about his spiritual lord. This information lifted my heart — the Almighty had put this doddery old monk in my path, I was quite certain, for a reason, and I felt that the mystery surrounding my father’s death might not prove so impenetrable after all. It caused me to alter my plans for Dominic. When he was fit to travel, I hoped to send him back to Cardinal Heribert with a letter humbly requesting an audience. I had asked King Richard at Tours if I might be permitted to leave the army and pay a visit to the Cardinal myself, but I chose the wrong
