“Then I give you to know,” said FitzGilbert forcefully, “that this castle of yours is surrounded, and strongly. No relief can get in to your aid, and no man of you can get out unless by agreement with her Grace. Make no mistake, you are in no case to withstand the assault we can make upon you, can and will, if you are obdurate.”
“Make your offer,” said Philip, unmoved. “I have work to do, if you have none.”
FitzGilbert was too old a hand at the manoeuvrings of civil war to be shaken or diverted by whatever tone was used to him. “Very well,” he said. “Your liege lady the empress summons you to surrender this castle forthwith, or she will take it by storm. Give it up intact, or fall with it.”
“And on what conditions?” said Philip shortly. “Name the terms.”
“Unconditional surrender! You must submit yourself and all you hold here to her Grace’s will.”
“I would not hand over a dog that had once barked at her to her Grace’s will,” said Philip. “On reasonable terms I might consider. But even then, John, I should require your warranty to back hers.”
“There’ll be no bargaining,” said the marshall flatly. “Surrender or pay the price.”
“Tell the empress,” said Philip, “that her own costs may come high. We are not to be bought cheaply.”
The marshall shrugged largely, and wheeled his horse to descend the slope. “Never say you were not warned!” he called back over his shoulder, and cantered towards the trees with his herald before him and his officers at his back.
After that they had not long to wait. The assault began with a volley of arrows from all the fringes of cover round the castle. For a good bowman the walls were within range, and whoever showed himself unwisely in an embrasure was a fair mark; but it seemed to Cadfael, himself up on the south-western tower, which came nearest to the village on the crest, that the attackers were being lavish of shafts partly to intimidate, having no fear of being left short of arrows. The defenders were more chary of waste, and shot only when they detected a possible target unwarily breaking cover. If they ran down their stock of shafts there was no way of replenishing it. They were reserving the espringales, and the darts and javelins they shot, to repel a massed attack. Against a company they could scarcely fail to find targets, but against one man on the move their bolts would be wasted, and waste was something they could not afford. The squat engines, like large crossbows, were braced in the embrasures, four of them on this south-westerly side, from which attack in numbers was most likely, two more disposed east and west.
Of mangonels they had only two, and no target for them, unless the marshall should be unwise enough to despatch a massed assault. They were the ones who had to fear the battering of siege engines, but at need heavy stones flung into a body of men making a dash to reach the walls could cut disastrous swathes in the ranks, and render the method too expensive to be persisted in.
The activity was almost desultory for the first hours, but one or two of the attacking archers had found a mark. Only minor grazes as yet, where some unwary youngster had shown himself for a moment between the merlons. No doubt some of these practised bowmen on the walls had also drawn blood among the fringes of the trees on the ridge. They were no more than feeling their way as yet.
Then the first stone crashed short against the curtain wall below the brattice, and rebounded without more damage than a few flying chips of masonry, and the siege engines were rolled out to the edge of cover, and began to batter insistently at the defences. They had found their range, stone after heavy stone howled through the air and thudded against the wall, low down, concentrating on this one tower, where Yves had detected signs of previous damage and repair. This, thought Cadfael, would continue through the day, and by night they might try to get a ram to the walls, and complete the work of battering a way through. In the meantime they had lost at any rate one of their engineers, who had ventured into view too clearly in his enthusiasm. Cadfael had seen him dragged back into the trees.
He looked out over the high ground that hid the village of Greenhamsted, probing for movement among the trees, or glimpses of the hidden machines. This was a battleground in which he should have had no part. Nothing bound him to either the besiegers or the besieged, except that both were humankind like himself, and could bleed. And he had better by far be making himself useful in the one way he could justify here. But even as he made his way along the guardwalk, sensibly from merlon to merlon like an experienced soldier with a proper regard for his own skin, he found himself approving Philip’s deployment of his bowmen and his espringales, and the practical way his garrison went about their defence.
Below in the hall the chaplain and an elderly steward were attending to such minor injuries as had so far been suffered, bruises and cuts from flying splinters of stone spattered high by the battering of the wall, and one or two gashes from arrows, where an arm or a shoulder had been exposed at the edge of the protecting merlons. No graver harm; not yet. Cadfael was all too well aware that before long there would be. He added himself to the relieving force here, and took comfort in the discovery that for some hours he had little enough to do. But before noon had passed it became clear that FitzGilbert had his orders to bring to bear upon La Musarderie every means of assault he had at his disposal, to assure a quick ending.
One frontal attack upon the gatehouse had been made early, under cover of the continued impact of stone upon stone under the tower to westward, but the espringales mounted above the gate cut a swathe with their javelins through the ranks of the attackers, and they were forced to draw off again and drag their wounded with them. But the alarm had distracted some degree of attention from the main onslaught, and diverted a number of the defenders to strengthen the gate-towers. The besiegers on the ridge took the opportunity to run their heaviest mangonel forward clear of the trees, and let loose all the heaviest stones and cases of iron rubble at the defences, raising their aim to pound incessantly at the timber brattice, more vulnerable by far than the solid masonry of the wall. From within, Cadfael felt the hall shaken at every impact, and the air vibrating like impending thunder. If the attackers raised their range yet again, and began lobbing missiles over among the buildings within the ward, they might soon have to transfer their activities and their few wounded into the rocklike solidity of the keep.
A young archer came down dangling a torn arm in a bloody sleeve, and sat sweating and heaving at breath while the cloth was cut away from his wound, and the gash cleaned and dressed.
“My drawing arm,” he said, and grimaced. “I can still loose the espringale, though, if another man winds it down. A great length of the brattice is in splinters, we nearly lost a mangonel over the edge when the parapet went, but we managed to haul it in over the embrasure. I leaned out too far, and got this. There’s nothing amiss with Bohun’s bowmen.”
The next thing, Cadfael thought, smoothing his bandage about the gashed arm, will be fire arrows into the splintered timbers of the gallery. The range, as this lad has proved to his cost, is well within their capabilities, there is hardly any deflecting wind, indeed by this stillness and the feel of the air there will be heavy frost, and all that wood will be dry as tinder.
“They have not tried to reach the wall under there?” he asked.
“Not yet.” The young man flexed his bandaged arm gingerly, winced, and shrugged off the twinge, rising to
