‘Don’t worry, young Alan, I’m coming along too. I’ll see to it that he doesn’t a make a total hash of it.’
‘Still…’ I said doubtfully.
‘All will be well, Alan, trust me,’ said William. ‘It’s an insignificant castle, poorly defended, and we will snap it up like a trout rising to a mayfly.’
Insignificant Milly may have been, but poorly defended it was not. We had the walls surrounded by noon, with Prince John’s tent pitched to the north of the castle, and I took a bite of bread and ham with Thomas while we looked at the fortress from a copse a hundred or so paces from the western side. Thick walls, fifteen foot tall, a deep earth ditch before them, and scores of defenders, far from intimidated — indeed defiant — massed on the battlements. We had no siege engines, alas, for Richard’s ‘castle-breakers’ would have made short work of these walls — but to bring them up would have meant a delay of several days, and might have brought Philip’s main field army down on our heads in overwhelming force. Besides, Richard wanted a quick victory here, the castle captured, its constable made prisoner — and his brother John had promised it to him.
‘Locksley’s men will undertake the first assault,’ Prince John had croaked a half-hour earlier when the captains had met for a brief conference in his tent. He had barely looked at me while issuing these orders, but I could see a gleam of something unpleasant in his eyes as he spoke the words: was it a spark of revenge? I knew that he had not forgotten my supposed perfidy while Richard was imprisoned. The company that made the initial attack would face the heaviest casualties. It was a great honour to be the first men into the breach, but it was also the most dangerous task of the operation.
‘Perhaps, Your Highness, if my knights were to make a diversionary attack on the gatehouse, it might increase the chances of success for the Locksley assault,’ said William the Marshal. A veteran of a score of sieges, he knew full well how risky the assault would be. And while he may have been trying to spare my men, his suggestion was also sound from a military point of view. Two attacks going in simultaneously would divide the castle’s forces and consequently have a greater chance of success.
‘No, Marshal,’ John had said with a little smile. ‘My brother has told me of your perpetual eagerness for a fight, and I commend you for it, but I must insist the Locksley men go in alone: it will be a chance for them to prove their mettle. Unless there is some difficulty? Your men do have the stomach for it, do they not, Sir Alan?’
There was nothing I could do but nod gravely and agree, while cursing silently that our men would assault the castle — alone.
Now Thomas and I lay on our bellies, side by side, in this damp wood, with sixty odd men laid flat behind us. We were as yet undetected, we hoped, by the defenders and I was fairly sure that with a good deal of courage and determination we could take the castle. But my troops were unhappy at being asked to storm the walls alone — Prince John’s sneering words had spread like lightning among the ranks — and I could only hope that they would prove equal to the difficult task at hand. I had tried to appear confident as I crawled around the various groups of men, indicating where on the battlements they should make their individual ladder assaults, and trying to put heart into them. In a few moments we would go. And I did not want to. I would have happily spent the rest of the day, the rest of my life, in that sodden copse, and let pride, Robin, Prince John and the whole world go hang. Inside my head, a voice was asking why had I come to Normandy if I did not wish to fight? And I knew deep in my soul that I was frightened. It had been three years since I had felt this sensation: the cold, watery bowels, the sudden itch on leg or arm, the startling clarity of everything before my eyes. I was going into battle again; I was facing yet another dance with Death. And there was no way I could escape it and keep my honour. I touched my chest, and felt the ridge of scar tissue on the left-hand side even through my mail suit. I closed my eyes, dropped my forehead into the moist leaf litter in front of me, and uttered a prayer to St Michael.
When I looked up again, to my right, through the trees I saw a flutter of bright cloth: the Marshal, God bless him, was parading his knights in front of the main gate, just out of crossbow range. I recalled his gruff, half- whispered words after the meeting at Prince John’s tent. ‘He may forbid me to aid you in the assault, Alan, but he may not tell me where and when I can inspect my own men. We will make a bit of noise and a brave show in front of the gates, and that shall be your signal to attack. God go with you.’
Thirty knights were wheeling their horses, clumsily arranging them in a battle formation, and then appearing to change their minds at the last minute; the trappers on the horses, constantly in motion, were a bewildering range of colours: reds and blues, white, gold and black. The iron links of their mail shone silver in the sunlight, their steel helms, too, reflecting blindingly. The horsemen shouted to each other and brandished their lances, pennants fluttering. A few waved unsheathed swords and called to their friends. Some shouted insults at the garrison of Milly or bellowed their personal war cries.
It was time.
I took a deep breath and forced myself up on all fours. I looked behind me at the white, fearful-expectant faces in the gloom of the wood. ‘Well,’ I said in a low voice, just carrying to the furthest man, ‘we’ve done this before and been victorious. Let us show these Frenchmen how the Locksley men can fight. Archers to your posts. Ladder-men to the front! Quick and quiet, boys. Off we go.’
And off we went.
We sprinted out of the wood and made for the deep ditch in front of the western wall of the castle as quietly as we could — which is to say not very quietly at all. A man to my right appeared to twist his ankle and fell to the ground with a loud yell before we had got twenty yards. Another, seeing him, stopped to help the injured man. But we were off and running and, at first, it seemed as if we had managed to take the castle by surprise.
Then there were shouts from the battlements and a single crossbow fired. In answer, I heard the first fluting of the arrows as they flashed above our heads. I had left ten of Robin’s best archers behind in the tree line to pick off the defenders as we charged. And as I looked up at the looming castle walls that rushed towards us, I saw an arrow lance into the head of a shouting defender and jerk him backwards. Then we were in the ditch below the walls, and planting the feet of the ladders in the brown watery mud.
‘Up, up!’ I was shouting and climbing at the same time, my palms slippery on the rough wooden rungs of the ladder, my shield slung on my back, Fidelity gripped clumsily in my right hand. A head popped over the parapet in front of me and I lunged forward with my sword. I was too far away to badly injure the man but, as I had hoped, he pulled back and gave me a few precious moments to scramble up the remaining rungs. My enemy re-appeared: a screaming red mouth, a conical steel helmet, and a short swinging axe. I ducked, and felt a blow skittering across the top of my own helmet, and lunged again, slicing the spear-tip of Fidelity into his face. And I was over the wall. A quick glance to my left told me that the Marshal’s diversionary tactic had worked well, for the defenders had massed above the main gate and only now were they realizing the danger from our assault on the western wall. The man at my feet, a bloody flap of skin from his cheek swinging free, grabbed at my legs and I stamped hard on his throat with my mailed feet, crushing the larynx and leaving him choking. Beside me, left and right, the ladders were thumping against the stone walls, but enemies were coming at me along the walkway from both sides too. I went right, fumbling my shield from its straps across my back; the nearest man-at-arms swung his sword, I blocked and aimed a counter-thrust, spitting him in the belly. The enemy man-at-arms behind me shouted something and struck at me with a mace, but I managed to catch the heavy blow on my shield and, turning, I swept his legs from under him with my sword. The blood was singing in my veins, I felt the ancient glow of battle from my fingertips to my toes. Another man loosed a crossbow bolt at me, and I received it safely in the centre of my shield, took two steps towards him and sank the edge of my blade into the corner between his neck and his shoulder. And turned to look for my comrades, who should have been spilling over the walls behind me.
I was alone.
There were two dead men, in red Westbury surcoats, on the walkway behind the wall, and I could see the head of Alfred, Thomas’s mentor, poking cautiously above the twin rungs of a ladder. He was being assailed by two Milly men-at-arms at the same time — and as I watched the left-hand man split his head with a massive sword cut and he dropped away. I risked a quick glance over the wall. Two ladders remained propped against the walls, one was packed with men seemingly struggling upwards, the other only half-filled. I saw that one man was frozen halfway up. His face terrified, unable to climb the last few feet to his certain death, and behind him men were blocked from ascending by his fear. I saw a scattering of our dead and wounded in the ditch, and among them the body of Thomas, his steel helmet broken and bloodied.
A shout of pain and grief erupted from my lungs, but I had no time to mourn: my enemies were coming for me, dozens of them. And I was alone. I knew I would be united with Thomas very, very soon. The first man reached me and I dispatched him with a fast, hacking blow that opened his waist, I held off another with my shield and turned to smash the hilt of my sword into his face. I felled another with a slice to the back of the neck. There were
