drove the spiked butt-end of the standard into another man’s face, and urged Shaitan forward once more. I bellowed: ‘Come on, come on. A Locksley — to the gates! Follow me to the gates!’ And my men were coming towards me, pushing their horses through the struggling crowds of enemy. With the battle standard in my left hand and my sword in my right, I charged straight into a milling knot of enemy horsemen, guiding Shaitan with only my knees and killing with a desperate ferocity; dropping one man with a blow to the back of the neck, hacking deep into another’s face, ducking a sword stroke that whistled over my helmet, and cutting down another man-at-arms with a savage backhand across the spine as I passed him: but with Shaitan’s weight and a pack of yelling Locksley men pressing close behind me, we burst through the cloud of enemy cavalry and suddenly we were free and clear, with only two hundred yards to go before the castle gates, which were black and forbidding and closed tight ahead of us. The scurrilous chalk-drawn image of King Philip seemed to beckon us on with his phallic mace as we all barrelled forward at a frantic, pounding, heart-in-mouth gallop towards the castle gates.
An evil thought struck me: what if the defenders refused to open for us? Had they received our message: a note tied to an arrow and shot into the castle the night before by Owain? Did they know that we were friends and this was not some lunatic cavalry assault on their unbroken walls?
We were clear of the French horsemen now, with only a hundred yards to go, the rattling drumbeat of hundreds of hooves filling my ears, and looking behind I could see at least a good sixty or perhaps seventy so of our men, mostly archers but some lancers, too — including little Thomas, galloping on his brown mount, half-crouched in the saddle and still leading the packhorses, his mouth a grim line of determination. Hanno was on my left shoulder, urging his horse to greater speed with smacks from the flat of his sword. We thundered forward — and the gates remained firmly shut before us. The French were re-grouping; I could hear shrill trumpets sounding above the thunder of our pounding steeds. I called upon St Michael, the warrior archangel — ‘Oh holy one, let them open the gates! I beg you, let them open the gates!’ But I knew in my heart that the defenders had not received our message: we’d be pinned between the stout portal of the castle and the might of King Philip’s whole army and be crushed like a beetle under a workman’s boot.
Fifty paces to go: I opened my mouth to give the order for us to veer right to attempt to make some kind of escape to the west. And stopped just before I gave tongue. Was it true? Could it be? Oh praise be to God Almighty: for the great gate of Verneuil was opening, men were clustered around the two huge wooden doors that were slowly swinging inwards under their combined efforts.
My heart rocketed like a lark in summer; I lifted Robin’s wolf’s head banner high in the air and shouted: ‘Westbury!’ at the top of my aching lungs, and what seemed like only a dozen heartbeats later Shaitan and I were pounding through the open gates, and reining in puffing and panting before the bulk of the old stone keep, my wonderful black stallion rearing up and dancing momentarily on his hindquarters with the excitement of the day. My men poured in behind me and, in moments, the central courtyard of Verneuil was filled with red-faced, shouting, laughing, sweating folk on horseback. And as the tail end of my little company — those who had survived the desperate charge and the short but murderous melee — cantered into the open space, the defenders swung the great doors closed, just in time, and barred them tight against the enemy with a welcome crash of heavy timber.
We were safe.
We had lost twenty-three men in that mad gallop through the enemy ranks — nearly a quarter of my force. And while the survivors, many with light wounds, grinned at each other, swapped jests and slapped backs, I could not help feeling that I should have handled things better. So much for Alan the great warlord: I had lost one fourth of my men and my second in command in the first clash of arms, and we still had to hold this castle for several days until King Richard arrived with the relieving army. So, while I was surely happy to be alive and unwounded, I was not in the least proud of myself. And I was already missing Owain — his kindly face and reliable strength. I offered up a prayer for his soul and begged God’s forgiveness for not reaching him in time to save him.
This was not the moment for self-recrimination, however. The angry French horsemen had followed us down towards the gates and I speedily sent as many archers as I could to the battlements to take some revenge for their fallen comrades. After a dozen French knights and men-at-arms had been pierced with the bowmen’s pin-accurate shafts, the enemy withdrew out of bow-shot and contented themselves with shaking their fists at us and bawling inaudible threats.
The castellan, a tall spare leathery Norman knight, came over to greet me as I was checking Shaitan’s glossy black hide for injuries. He named himself as Sir Aubrey de Chambois and welcomed me to his command. I thanked him for his timely opening of the gates and he merely shrugged: ‘It is I who should thank you, Sir Alan. You have saved us; in another day we would have had to render ourselves to Philip. Our walls could not have borne much more battering and the next full-scale assault would have swamped us.’
And he gestured with his hand around the courtyard and walls of his stronghold. I saw then, clearly for the first time, what a desperate situation the defenders were in.
The castle of Verneuil, which had been built in King Richard’s grandfather’s day to protect the southern flank of his duchy of Normandy, was square in shape, covered roughly an acre and sat on the north bank of the River Avre. It was rather small by the standards of some of the castles I had known; in truth it was not much bigger than a fortified manor. On three sides, north, east and west, it was protected by a three-foot thick wall, made of the grey local stone, about fifteen foot high, with a walkway all the way round it on the inside that allowed a man to stand and fight with only his helmeted head exposed between the crenellations. At each of the four corners of the castle was a strong square tower. In the centre of the northern wall was the gatehouse and the gate we had just tumbled through in such scrambling haste — a stout wooden construction, I was pleased to see, reinforced with heavy oak cross-beams on the inside. To the south, the wide slow brown Avre and its boggy, reed-covered banks formed a formidable barrier against metal-clad attackers — and the stone exterior of a mill, a brewhouse and several store houses built of brick created the castle’s defensive wall on that side. I did not believe the enemy could come at us successfully from that quarter; the south, at least, was safe.
The northern wall on the eastern side of the gatehouse, however, had been severely pounded by the French siege engines — a gap the height of a man and wide enough for three men abreast had been smashed clear through the stonework at the top of the wall. It had been patched by Sir Aubrey’s men using the rubble from the breach itself and an assortment of old sheep hurdles, wine barrels and a dozen lengths of freshly cut wooden planking. The repairs looked a little rough and untidy, but I reckoned the patched section still presented a difficult obstacle for an attacking infantry force to overcome. However, it was a sign of what terrible destruction the boulders hurled by the trebuchets could wreak on the old masonry of the castle. Several of the wooden buildings in the courtyard had been reduced to loose piles of timber and kindling, smashed by barrel-sized stone missiles that had overshot the walls. While the small hall at the rear of the courtyard was still intact, in other buildings fires had plainly broken out, probably caused in the chaos of the trebuchet bombardment.
An old stable block against the eastern wall had been converted into an infirmary and I could see through its open doors that the straw-strewn floor was covered with wounded men. A priest was kneeling beside one and giving him the last rites. My eye lingered on the priest for a moment, then I continued to survey the interior of the castle. Over on the western side was an old chapel and in the graveyard outside it I could see row upon row of newly dug graves. The sour scent of charred wood, fear-sweat and human and animal waste hung in the air, overlaid with a strong whiff of pus and rotting flesh — it was a particular combination of foul odours that I had smelled before.
It was the smell of defeat.
I had been expecting a garrison of a hundred men, or maybe more but I could see only a score of local men- at-arms on their feet who were not wearing one of the dark green cloaks that marked out Robin’s fellows. As it turned out, the full, unwounded strength of Verneuil, including our newly arrived troops, now numbered little more than a hundred and twenty men in total. Given the vast numerical superiority of the French, any determined attack might overwhelm us. I looked around at the courtyard, my heart in my boots, and asked Sir Aubrey what he planned to do if Philip’s men got over the walls. He gave a grimace but no reply, merely inclining his head towards the biggest structure in the courtyard.
In the centre of the castle was a square stone tower — the keep, the dungeon, the final redoubt. It stood on a slight rise, though not much of one, and climbed about thirty feet into the air. I had very little confidence in the tower as a refuge of last resort. It was not high enough, for a start, and it had already been considerably battered by Philip’s artillery. Chunks of elderly, crumbling masonry seemed to have been ripped out of the north-eastern corner leaving semicircular indentations in the line of the walls — as if a stone-eating giant had taken a couple of
