Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (58 page)

Nonetheless, we also had a huge logistical problem that offered us, paradoxically, a means of achieving what we wanted.

We had taken more than two hundred prisoners in our capture of the castle, and now we were faced with the double task of feeding them and guarding them. More than half of the prisoners had willingly thrown in their lot with us when they were captured, switching their allegiance from Gunthar as easily as a horse switches his tail at a fly, in return for their immediate freedom and an ongoing source of comfortable bedding and regular, well-prepared meals that were vastly preferable to what they could expect to receive as prisoners. The hundred or so that remained in our custody, however, were both a nuisance and a massive inconvenience.

I therefore proposed to Chulderic and the others that we set these people free again, but that we do so in a way that would work to our advantage. I explained my thinking and they listened, nodding occasionally in acknowledgment of the common sense involved in what I had to say. When I had finished, all eyes turned to Chulderic, who sat glowering at me from beneath heavy brows. His frown grew even darker as he began firing short, blunt questions at me, and I answered them as tersely and concisely as he phrased them. Finally, when I answered what had been the last of his questions, he surprised me by uttering a single sharp bark of laughter and slapping his hand on the arm of his chair.

"Do it, boy! If it works, it will be the making of you as a man. If it doesn't work, it will provide all of us older men with something to laugh over on a winter's night when we are too old to fight."

4

Just after the evening meal, when the smoke of the cooking fires still hung in the air and the men in both camps, Gunthar's and ours, were feeling well fed and lazy with an uneventful day behind them and their bellies full, the guards on duty herded all our prisoners from the enclosure in the inner defenses where they had been kept since their capture, tied their hands behind their backs and shackled their feet with pieces of rope that were long enough to allow them to walk comfortably but not to run. With longer ropes they tied the prisoners to each other in chains of a score of men each, making five chains in all. With those preparations completed, they then led the roped and hobbled prisoners out through the main gates and along the curtain wall passage and lined them up against the castle wall, facing out towards their former comrades on the far side of the broad ditch.

With a shrill squeak of windlasses and a rattling of chains, the bridge began to descend. That brought the enemy forward through their masking fringe of trees to see what we were about, but when they saw the prisoners all lined up and facing them, they hesitated. There was a period of confusion among their ranks, with people coming and going, and then there was a stirring at their rear as a small party of mounted men emerged from the trees and made their way towards the head of the drawbridge, obviously to discover for themselves what was happening. A trumpet blast from the battlements above us stopped them short, too, just beyond arrow range, as a line of our bowmen, in response to the signal, positioned themselves in the embrasures along the top of the wall above us, showing their weapons plainly. Moments later, at another blast of the trumpet, a trio of riders emerged from behind our curtain wall and rode out under the white banner that symbolized a call to meet to discuss terms.

Chulderic's spokesman, a junior cavalry officer whose name I did not yet know, rode forward to the enemy party and told them bluntly that we were releasing the prisoners because they were eating food that we needed ourselves. He demanded that the enemy commander withdraw his forces as a sign of good faith while the release was carried out, and pointed up to where our bowmen watched vigilantly, the height of their positioning giving them an enormous advantage over their opposite numbers.

As I had anticipated, the enemy commander could scarcely believe what he was hearing, because our message implied plainly that our concerns over our ability to feed ourselves were strong enough to make us release strong, healthy prisoners who would immediately rearm themselves to fight against us again. He complied without further discussion and ordered his men to withdraw. As the enemy fell back, vacating the field in front of the bridge, our soldiers began to shepherd their prisoners across in front of them.

As soon as they crossed the bridge, they spread the prisoners as far apart as the ropes joining them would permit and then held them in place, arranging the five extended rows of men so that they overlapped and formed a wide human screen between the bridge end and the enemy position. Only when they were satisfied with their positioning did the commander of the guard nod his permission and a single drummer began to rap out the cadence of a march that would take the prisoners forward in lockstep, without tripping in their hobbles and falling down. The first few steps were tentative and hesitant, but the rhythm caught quickly and the bound men began to march quite smartly towards their freedom.

At that precise moment, in response to a prearranged signal, the lead riders of a column of horsemen swung around the end of the curtain wall and spurred their mounts hard towards the drawbridge. Sixty riders, gathering speed and impetus with every stride, in a single column three abreast and twenty deep, were across the bridge and veering away to the right before the enemy could react. And when they did react, Gunthar's people were impeded by the strings of helpless, hobbled men spread out between them and the fleeing riders, for flee we did, as hard and as fast as we could, intent only upon riding out of arrow range as quickly as possible and making a clean escape thereafter. We knew they would follow us, but we knew, too, that where we were going they would never find us.

We reached the red-wall caves to find Clodio waiting for us and the secret entrance at the back of the caves already open, and we led our mounts inside, into the darkness of the first cavern. Once there, with the high, blazing fires burning brightly, the horses assumed it was night and settled down immediately, behaving normally as they were secured with the standard horse lines they submitted to every night.

Over the course of the next six days, with the horses safely quartered, we busied ourselves making a temporary home for men and animals in the King's Caverns, widening and digging out the few narrow wrigglers easily now that there was no need for secrecy and we could assign as many men as needed to the task of chipping and digging away the rock walls and widening the gaps in the worst places. There was no observable evidence of time passing down there in the depths of the caverns; it was permanent night, and so we set six consecutive watches of men to work at the mining task, each watch labouring for four hours a day so that the work went on without pause until it was completed. Even so, it took four solid days and nights of hard labour to achieve what we wanted.

That done, and the way open for easy access from one end of the caverns to the other, it was a simple task to bring down bales of straw and hay from the stables in the castle through the open door at the far end and to transport them to the red-wall caves at the other. It was deeply satisfying to know, too, that while we were consolidating our new resources in the caverns, Gunthar's people were turning the countryside upside down in their attempts to discover how sixty men and horses could simply vanish into nowhere.

By the time seven days had elapsed we were confident that the mystery of our escape would have faded from the forefront of the enemy's awareness. From their point of view, our disappearance had been complete and completely mystifying. They could only assume that we had ridden out and away, beyond our own borders, perhaps to gather help or buy the support of mercenaries. In all that time, we made no moves against them from the castle and they had made no attempt to attack us.

As soon as the widening of the wrigglers had been completed, an armed party was dispatched by night, leading a light wagon pulled by a two-horse team, to bring back the Queen, the women in her party and the physician Clement. They returned the following morning, arriving outside the red-walled caves just after sunrise, and the Queen's party was escorted on foot through the caverns and into the safety of the castle without incident. Seven days had passed since Vivienne had learned of King Ban's death.

I had ridden out earlier that morning with two companions, just before dawn, one of four three-man teams dispatched to explore the surrounding countryside and glean any information we could about the activities and disposition of Gunthar's forces within a radius of five miles. Our hunt was to the northeast, covering the ground on both sides of the northeast line, left to the line due north of the caves as far as the edge of Lake Genava, and then right to the line due east of them, so that we covered a full quarter of a circular area, riding back and forth in steadily increasing arcs as we moved farther out from our starting point on each sweep and leaving one scout behind in the cleared area of every third arc in case of any unforeseen developments at our back. It took us two full days to cover the entire area, and we knew that our other three teams were doing the same in the remaining three quadrants, which meant that by the time we returned to our starting point and assembled all the information that each of the four search teams had discovered, we would know everything we needed to know about what was happening within an area approaching ninety to a hundred square miles around the castle, and we would be able to draw up comprehensive plans for dealing with Gunthar's men—their holdings and their dispositions—throughout that area.

Two days after that, I rode out through the red-walled caves for the first time with Samson and our two cavalry squadrons—sixty mounted men. We swung far to the south this time, to where team number three had identified a heavy concentration of enemy forces they presumed to be Burgundians, billeted in the strongly made and recently fortified buildings of what had once been a prosperous farm. I counted upwards of a full hundred men in the place, and we spent a long time working our way down a hillside at their backs, through difficult and heavily overgrown terrain, to hit them from behind, from where they had least expected an attack—especially a mounted one—to materialize.

We hit hard and fast, giving them no time to rally themselves against us. Apart from our own mounts, there was not a horse in the entire place, and so we had no solid opposition. A few hardy souls formed isolated pockets of resistance, knowing that they were in desperate straits, but they went down quickly under the weight of our horseflesh, and we left few of them alive. In what was always known as "the butcher's accounting," we counted fifty-two enemy dead, and another thirty-eight wounded, all of whom we gathered together and left behind us under guard, having first relieved them of their weapons. A number of others managed to flee the slaughter nevertheless, and we let them go, content to have them carry the tale of the attack and its outcome back to whoever might have the responsibility for listening to them. We were happy to have Gunthar know that there was a potent and highly mobile cavalry force out there in his territories, raiding his raiders. However, by the time his exploratory force came seeking us, thirsting for revenge, we had disappeared back into the safety of our secret caverns.

Two days later, while Gunthar's cavalry guards were scouring the southern territories looking for us, we wiped out two similar but smaller posts in the northwest quadrant of our range, attacking both simultaneously with thirty riders. This time, too, we were fortunate enough to find a score of horses stabled in one of the farms, and when we left, having set fire to the buildings and piled the dead in the middle of the farmyard, we took the horses with us, a welcome addition to our own stables.

Those raids marked the formal start of our campaign, and for the next two months we remained neck deep in conflict with what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of fresh troops spilling out of Gunthar's territories, for territories—his and ours—had been established soon after the beginning of hostilities. Gunthar's forces had possession of a series of four minor but strongly fortified castles that were clustered near to each other in the south and eastern area of what had been Ban's kingdom, and the close linkage of those four strongholds, coupled with the hilly yet densely wooded terrain they occupied, enabled Gunthar to set up a solid and virtually self- sufficient province there that he could hold without great difficulty against any and all comers. There was little arable land within the region he controlled, so he had few convenient sources of supply of freshly grown foodstuffs, but since he and his followers were essentially brigands and Outlanders, they stole what they needed from wherever they could find it.

That brief time removed me forever from the status of boyhood, although because of it, I was never able to undergo the formal rites of passage into manhood. Informal rites there were aplenty to replace them, however, and I never heard anyone complain that my sword was being wielded by someone who lacked a man's credentials. I rode out of the red-walled caves on the morning of that first raid as a complete tyro—a green recruit who had absorbed many of the rudiments of basic training but had yet to distinguish himself in any way in the matter of combat or military conduct or manly prowess. It was true that I had killed more than one man, but none of the people who rode with me that day knew that. In their eyes, I was a mere boy, several years junior to the youngest of them.

Within the week, however, on a raid in which we had divided our force into two squadrons of thirty men each, the group I rode in was trapped by a detachment of Gunthar's mounted guards, who diverted us into a steep-sided valley that had no other way out. They outnumbered us by close on two to one and we had a sore time fighting our way clear, for before we realized what was happening they had herded us into a narrow chute at the extreme end of the valley, where we were so tightly jammed together that we had no room to fight. Caught on the outside of the crush at the rear of our squadron, far from the nearest of our attackers and angry at my own inability to move closer to the fighting, I unslung the bow that hung by my saddle and had been given me by King Ban. I threw the quiver of war arrows across my shoulders, jumped down from my horse and scrambled up the steep hillside that reared above me. It was hard going, for the ground was soft and sandy, and I found it difficult to gain a purchase on the slope with my feet, but eventually I came to a level spot where I could look down at the scene below me. It was chaotic, but I could see everything clearly, and so I began to aim and shoot.