Rhuddlan (18 page)

After dinner, he stood up and prepared to
leave the high table. The noise level in Dol’s somewhat small hall
was inevitably deafening with the crush of so many men and he had
discovered the peace of walking the walls on his own while everyone
else sat around and got progressively drunker. It would be even
worse today, because there was nowhere else for the men to go now
that they were confined to the fortress.

As he nodded to his host, de Fougères
suddenly grabbed his arm. It grated on Hugh that the man felt free
to touch him, but he gritted his teeth and said nothing. De
Fougères’ face was flushed from wine and the heavy meal. “Are you
on your way to the chapel to beg God for deliverance from the
Bastard?” he asked. “There’s no need; pray instead to keep the sun
high. The Bastard and his men will cook to death and save us the
bother of killing them!” He laughed uproariously at his joke and
those around him whistled and jeered. Hugh smiled thinly and
left.

It
was
hot outside. He shielded his eyes
and glanced upward at the cloudless sky and the blazing sun. The
air was still and eerily quiet, as if it were too hot for even
birds and crickets to stir themselves. He climbed the steps to the
top floor in the gatehouse and exchanged brief pleasantries with
the men on duty. The Bastard’s army, he was informed, hadn’t
changed position. One of the guards moved away so that he could
have a look through the arrow slit.

Longsword’s army was stretched out across the
field. Most of the men were sitting on the ground in little groups
and almost all of them had removed their heavy battle gear, which
lay in heaps here and there. The horses had similarly been divested
of their saddles and hardware, and had been hobbled and put out to
graze to the rear of the men. Hugh squinted hard.

“Which one is the Bastard?” he asked.

A guard stepped close to him and pointed out
Longsword. Hugh stared and chuckled. Of course that would be the
king’s son—one of the few still dressed neck to foot in gleaming
metal, his only concession to the heat the lack of helmet and
gloves. He was standing with two other men, distinguished by his
height, and was apparently doing all the talking, as it was his
head which bobbed and his hands which gestured.

As Hugh and the guards continued to watch the
lolling soldiers in the field before them, a hazy blur appeared on
the road from the direction of Pontorson. Longsword’s men saw it,
or heard it, too, because one by one they rose to their feet. The
Bastard himself was seen to clap his hands together as if with
great satisfaction and then turn in the direction of the road. Hugh
waited curiously. What could it be? More troops?

He was too far away to hear the pounding of
the oxen hooves or the rumbling of the heavy wheels, but after a
few moments, the cause of the royalists’ excitement became clear.
Half a dozen wagons turned slowly off the road and proceeded
towards Longsword’s encampment. Not more soldiers, Hugh realized,
but supplies: food, wine, water, tents, pots, bedding and the like.
He smiled to himself. If de Fougères believed the Bastard was just
going to walk away from this siege, he was in for his second shock
of the day.

“Send for Sir Ralph,” he said to one of the
guards when the men in the field started to unload the wagons.
Longsword was striding from one to the other, reaching in an arm
and poking around, obviously looking for something. He found it in
the last two carts. With a shout that carried all the way to Hugh,
he ordered these unloaded immediately.

It was difficult to see across the distance
precisely what was being extracted from the last two wagons. To
Hugh it looked like planks of wood of different sizes and that was
all. But evidently it was something marvelous to the Bastard, for
he had planted himself by the working men and was watching their
every move.

Hugh heard the clump of steps from behind but
didn’t bother to turn around. He wasn’t surprised when the arm
landed around his neck with a little squeeze or when he heard de
Fougères’ booming voice too close to his ear. He grimaced.

“Those must be your wagons, Chester!” the
older knight said cheerfully. His face was almost pressed against
Hugh’s cheek as he had a good look through the narrow opening. “And
your oxen as well!”

Hugh pulled away and allowed his ally the
full view. “I suppose so. But what is it the Bastard is so
interested in those last wagons?”

De Fougères squinted. After a moment he swung
his head around and, unsmiling now, demanded silence. The guard
tower was crowded with knights who had followed the Breton from the
hall and had been joking with each other about the possible
contents of the wagons, but they sobered immediately at his tone.
It was suddenly so quiet in the tower that they could all quite
clearly hear the sound of hammering and loudly shouted orders from
across the field. De Fougères stepped back, his face troubled.

“They mean business,” he said.

The knights who were closest to the arrow
slit pushed forward to fill the place vacated by de Fougères. Hugh
heard murmurs of agreement and felt at a loss. Obviously the planks
of wood were more than merely that but he hadn’t the practical
experience of the others in the tower and, from pride, was hesitant
to put his question to the Bretons a second time.

But de Fougères was explaining for those who
could not get to the window. “They’ve brought in a siege machine,”
he said. “A mangonel. There must have been one at Pontorson and the
Bastard’s carted it here in pieces. They’re putting it together
now.”

Hugh had seen a mangonel once, at the royal
castle at Gloucester. It was a device used to fling stones with
great force against the walls of a fortress in an effort to
collapse them. Power was derived from the torque of tightly twisted
rope, into which a stout pole was inserted so that it stuck
straight up into the air. A length of rope was fixed to the pole
about three-quarters of the way up and its free end was wound
around another pole which lay parallel to the torsion. This
horizontal pole was turned by means of a handle until the rope
pulled the torqued pole backwards to a fifteen degree, or smaller,
angle. When the handle was released, the torqued pole, at the far
end of which was a leather sling containing the stones, snapped
forward with stunning velocity until it was stopped by a padded
crossbar. But the missiles were unimpeded and flew loose of the
sling towards their target. It wasn’t a terribly accurate machine,
he knew, but destructive nevertheless.

“It isn’t much of a threat,” scoffed one man.
“To use it with any effectiveness, they have to bring it much
closer to the castle. And then we simply pick them off with our
bowmen.”

But de Fougères was shaking his head.
“This—boy,” he spat, “knows exactly what he’s doing. Look what he’s
got out there! Tents and cooking pots. Our oxen and our wagons for
transport. He’s got the earl’s gold and weapons and armor to use to
purchase enough mercenaries to swell his ranks to match ours.
Yesterday he killed over one hundred of my soldiers. All this and
now he’s gone through the trouble of dragging that mangonel twenty
miles and you think he hasn’t considered such a simple thing as
being within our arrow range when he uses it?” His voice had grown
so loud and angry that the unfortunate knight who’d so confidently
ventured his opinion, recoiled in shame.

“Well, then,” Hugh said mildly, “what do you
suggest we do?”

De Fougères stared hard at him. “We have no
choice. We have to wait. We have to see what the Bastard does
first, and then we can plan.”

The only thing de Fougères needed to plan,
Hugh thought as he watched the Breton stomp out of the tower, was
what words to use when he begged the king’s mercy.

“How are you going to get close enough to the
castle to use this thing?” Delamere asked, kicking a foot at the
mangonel. He wiped the sleeve of his tunic across his forehead.
“Without getting us killed, that is.”

“It’ll work out of their arrow range,”
Longsword said absently. He carefully examined the re-constructed
machine and pressed his thumb down upon the torqued rope with a
satisfied expression.

“Yes, but will it
hit
anything?” Delamere
persisted. The heat was making everyone impatient and
irritable.

Longsword glanced up, annoyed. “Of course! Do
you think I would have brought it all this way if I couldn’t use it
to some purpose?”

“I’m not exactly sure what you’re up to,
Will,” Delamere said with exasperation. “Since we started this
venture, you’ve been like another person.”

“What are you talking about? My father gave
me a job to do and I’m doing it! Perhaps I’m only taking it a bit
more seriously than you!”

Delamere’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a
criticism of my efforts?”

“No!”

“Hmph!” Delamere snorted and began to walk
away.

His friend’s approval meant everything to
Longsword. He hurried after Delamere. “Listen, Richard,” he said
earnestly, “the mangonel will work, not as effectively, but it will
still work at a greater distance. It’s a trick I heard of once. We
just load the sling with smaller missiles and fewer of them. So
it’s lighter. The force of the release is the same but the sling
will shoot farther because there isn’t much weight in it.”

Delamere thought about it and slowly nodded.
“All right, but what kind of damage can you hope to do with smaller
missiles?”

Longsword grinned. “With rocks and
stones—very little, unless we get lucky. But we won’t be using
rocks and stones, Richard. Not as such, that is. My plan is to tie
strips of cloth smeared with fat around them, light them and shoot
them over the walls. Fireballs!” he exclaimed. “We can’t break the
walls so we’ll fire the buildings inside. What do you think of
that?”

Delamere had to admit it was a good plan. He
glanced at the mangonel and then squinted up at the bright sky.
“There’s one good point to this infernal weather,” he added. “You
don’t have to waste any time lighting your missiles; just leave
them out in the sun and they’ll probably burst into flame on their
own.”

For the next three days, Longsword employed
the mangonel with an increasing measure of success. It took some
time to work out the most effective combination of distance and
weight and some more time to make up the strips of cloth slathered
in animal fat brought in from Pontorson which were tied around
rocks and set ablaze. The soldiers in the fortress appeared as
curious about the ability of the machine as did Longsword’s men.
They lined the walls and crowded into the guard towers to watch the
progress of the experiment directed against them. When the missiles
fell harmlessly short, they jeered and whistled…but when the
missiles began to soar past their heads, the catcalls abruptly
broke off as they scrambled to battle the flames.

Inside Dol, Hugh found the ordeal tedious. He
was enough of a knight to admire his foe’s ingenuity but not enough
to relish the tension of the stand-off. He considered de Fougères’
lack of reaction the rebels’ downfall. The Breton, he now believed,
was like a bully. While he was ransacking a defenseless countryside
he was bluff, confident and cruel but when face to face with an
army he lost his nerve. As far as Hugh could tell, what was spread
out before Dol was the extent of Longsword’s force, which could
probably easily be overcome. He couldn’t understand why de Fougères
continued to do nothing but he didn’t bother to ask.

The lack of response from the castle annoyed
Longsword as well. Here and there a crossbowman would take careful
aim and shoot at one of the soldiers manning the mangonel, always
with no result, but that was all. Delamere asked rhetorically why
the garrison should risk life and waste supplies with a sortie when
it could hold out for months but Longsword was impatient for a
resolution. The heat wave had not broken and his men complained
their tents were small protection against the merciless sun. The
horses were suffering even more and were periodically removed to
the shelter of the forest, although such a solution made
Longsword’s force extremely vulnerable. Despite the threat from the
mangonel, the siege seemed to be going in the rebels’ favor.
Longsword desperately wanted to finish them off before the king
recalled him. Alan d’Arques had been gone four days; he had surely
reached Rouen by now and given Henry the news of the attack on the
convoy and the blockade of the rebels in their castle. He could
well be on his way back with fresh instructions and Longsword
couldn’t be certain that these wouldn’t summon him to return to the
east. His frustration grew to the point where he barely slept at
night. Instead, he paced around the little camp, wracking his
brains for some way to entice the Bretons into leaving the security
of Dol.

The morning of the fourth day of the siege
dawned as relentlessly hot as the past few but with one difference:
a heavy, leaden sky overhead. Longsword’s mood turned even worse;
if it rained, he wouldn’t be able to shoot fireballs from the
mangonel and a whole day’s work would be lost. But he was the only
one of the men who viewed the coming storm with dismay. The others,
including even the genial and accommodating Sir Walter, were happy
to have relief from the heat.

“Perhaps nature will do the job for us,”
Delamere said, as the wind picked up and the first rumblings of
thunder were heard in the distance. “Lightning will strike the
wooden roof of the keep and set it ablaze.”

Longsword’s face was grim.
“It had better not,” he said. “This is
my
fight.”

Delamere was about to laugh but a glance at
his friend’s set expression forestalled him.