moment, it would seem. The King was in conference with a gaggle of his senior knights and barons, and was displeased to be interrupted with a petition such as mine. He had gruffly refused my request for leave and repeated what he had told me in Verneuil: that he could not spare me, he needed every sword, but that I might be permitted to pursue my quest at a later date.
As I headed back towards the ridge where Robin and the King were positioned, I saw that the outer wall of Loches Castle now had a gaping hole beside the main gate, which the defenders were making heroic efforts to plug with barrels and boxes and pieces of broken masonry. Before the wall, a loose and rocky ramp had been formed by tumbled stones and rubble from the defences. It was a rough and treacherous stair, but one that would make it possible for Mercadier’s nimble routiers to climb up and attack the breach. The enemy, however, had by no means given up: it was heart-breaking to watch those scurrying ant-like men hopelessly trying to patch the breach in their defences, for every few moments another huge stone missile would crash into the hastily repaired section, smashing the new wooden barricades to splinters and crushing the heroic men who were struggling to close the gap.
The massive keep, too, had been severely knocked about. The north-western corner had been gnawed away by Wall Eater and the other engines on the right-hand side of the road and a large section of the corner was missing, while the rest was pocked and scraped where the boulders had struck the masonry.
As I walked Shaitan up the slope towards the royal party, there was a flurry of activity in the eastern artillery company. Four of the big siege engines ceased their pounding, and four teams of oxen were led to the massive wooden frames and yoked up to them. The company was changing its point of attack. Whips cracked, sharp goads stabbed, the oxen leaned into their wooden yokes and the four machines rumbled fifty yards closer to the castle — though still well out of bow-shot. There was much shouting, and a scrum of men heaved at the engines as they were re-situated, but by the time I had rejoined the King and Robin, they had been secured in their new positions. And the pounding began anew — but this time joining their efforts to those of the big machines on the right of the road. Now fourteen ‘castle-breakers’ were concentrating their fury on the north-western corner of the keep.
In the diminished left-hand company, two smaller mangonels continued their ravaging of the open breach on the outer wall, pulverizing any man who dared to show his face for too long, and they were reinforced by a pair of onagers — simple spoon-like catapults that used the power of twisted leather to hurl rocks the size of a man’s head — and four balistes, gigantic crossbows mounted on a wooden frame that shot four-foot iron bolts at the enemy.
The sun was high above and it must have been noon, or nearly so. I saw that Mercadier had formed up his men, perhaps four hundred of them, and they were waiting patiently in three long lines, sweating in their leather and mail armour under Mercadier’s black banners, each dark as pitch but adorned with three bright golden coins. These waves of frail men would soon hurl themselves at the breach in the outer wall and try to force an entrance.
It must be time to go, I thought, it must be time. The breach could now easily be scaled by an able-bodied man, even one encumbered by shield and sword or spear. I wondered what the delay was — what was Richard waiting for? — and then I realized what it must be. The King was waiting for a similar breach to the one on the outer wall to be made in the great keep. He wanted to take the castle in a single bloody surging attack, his men sweeping through the outer walls, across the courtyard and into the keep in one long screaming rush.
Sensible, I realized. At the siege of Nottingham earlier in the year, Richard had taken the outer defences of the castle but failed to batter a hole in the stone core of the keep before the initial assault. As a result, his soldiers, once in the courtyard below the keep, had been easy victims to crossbowmen in the heart of the castle, defenders who were secured from the attackers’ anger by unbroken high stone walls.
Richard was not prepared to risk making the same mistake again. Crack… crack-crack… crack… the battering continued, missiles smashing relentlessly into the corner of the keep of Loches. My head was throbbing from the din of the bombardment and the heat of the day. I realized I was terribly, desperately thirsty, but before I could slake my desire, at that very moment, with a roaring, tearing, thunderous rumble, a noise that seemed to shake the foundations of the world, a whole section of the north-western corner of the keep crashed to earth. Through the clouds of stone dust I could actually glimpse the interior of the castle — a hall of some kind with flapping tapestries and a long trestle table and benches.
‘That will do,’ said Richard, nodding to William the Marshal. ‘Send word to Mercadier, and get your own men in position. You are to follow his lads in there only after they have cleared the breach in the outer wall. You will go in when the outer wall has been taken. Is that clear, William!’
‘As a mountain stream,’ said the Marshal, somewhat grumpily, and without another word he spurred his huge warhorse down the slope to the east.
To watch a battle is to take part in it only in spirit — and yet, when it was over, I felt almost as exhausted as if I had single-handedly fought the entire French garrison myself.
Mercadier’s lines of footmen moved forward almost casually, covering the three hundred or so yards to the wall at a brisk trot. As they reached the first loose stones before the breach they were met with a withering hail of crossbow fire, and I saw a score of men in the front ranks fall. The sole weakness of Richard’s plan was that the garrison knew full well where the attack would come, and when our punch would be delivered, and I could see hundreds of defenders gathered at the breach — nearly the whole garrison I guessed — crowding together, their arms glinting in the hot sun, light bouncing from polished helms as they prepared to defend to the death their walls. A last giant quarrel from a baliste on the eastern side of the road smashed into the jostling crowd of foemen in the breach, smashing two of them away — and yet more men eagerly filled the ranks, their steel points glittering as they awaited our assault. A shout of rage erupted from hundreds of throats as Mercadier’s men, now less than thirty yards away, began scrambling up the loose piles of rock and stone, shields on their backs, helmeted heads tucked low, clambering up the treacherous rubble using hands and feet like a swarming herd of human beetles — launching themselves into the maw of Hell.
They were rascals, bandits, priest-murderers and gutter-born thieves — but Mercadier’s men did not lack for raw courage. They swarmed up the loose rubble towards the breach in the outer wall of the castle — and were met with a devastating volley of crossbow bolts, spears, and loose rocks hurled down upon them. Many men fell under this onslaught, crushed by hurled boulders, spitted by quarrels, and those who reached the top of the stone stairway were swiftly cut down by the well-trained knights and men-at-arms at the top, their swinging swords spilling light and spraying blood as they hacked into the desperate, yelling horde of men surging towards them. Mercadier’s men boiled up the rocky slope — and died in their scores at the top, and yet more men came on behind them, trampling their dead and wounded comrades, mashing their bodies into the uneven stony incline as they forged upward, screaming taunts and lunging madly at their enemies.
The men of Loches were stalwart in defence; a score of knights in full iron mail, supported by crossbows and spearmen, held that breach, cutting down the leather-jacketed routiers who hurled themselves at them with swinging blows of sword and axe. The second wave of mercenaries attacked. And a hundred more of Mercadier’s men were fed into that cauldron of pain, rage and death, into the riot of scything steel and spurting blood.
Yet the breach held.
Now I could see that the mercenaries of the third wave were beginning to hang back a little on the rocky slope, and were milling around beneath the walls, rather than rushing to their deaths in that terrible blood-splashed bottle-neck. They were still dying in great numbers, plucked from this life by a hissing crossbow quarrel, an arrow or a hurled spear. Sergeants were screaming at the men, striking them, urging them onward — but the impetus of the initial attack had been lost. Here and there a brave man, or perhaps a pair of friends, even a small group, would rush up the slope, stumbling on the loose stones, which were now red and slippery, screaming their battle cries and waving weapons — and would die, chopped down by the long blood-slick swords and jabbing spears of the defenders.
Still the breach held.
I heard a trumpet, loud and strong from my left; two long blasts. Turning my head away from the appalling spectacle of bloody heroism and death at the breach, I saw a massive formation of unhorsed but fully armoured men start forward from our lines, thirty or so knights on foot, each clad from head to foot in protective iron links, and a couple of score men-at-arms and squires behind them. A standard fluttered above the foremost rank: it was William, Earl of Striguil, and his knightly followers; the Marshal blatantly disobeying the King’s orders and ramming his men into the battle, just at the moment when they were needed most.
‘The old fool! The disobedient glory-hunting fool,’ I heard the King mutter. And watched in awe as William
