Warlord (Outlaw 4) (14 page)

To my mind, Loches was the very opposite of the castle of Verneuil, with its weak, stubby, crumbling keep and strong outer walls, which I had defended so successfully only ten days before. Loches had a huge, oblong, immensely strong stone keep about eighty foot long and forty foot wide, and soaring up more than a hundred feet into the air with a slight taper towards the top. It loomed over the rest of the castle, completely dwarfing it – the rest consisting of a twenty-foot-high stone curtain wall, only two-foot thick but studded with half a dozen round towers and surrounding the usual timber buildings: stables, a forge, bakeries, cook-shacks, barracks and so on. There was a large stone church in one corner of the castle bailey, and a chapter house – for this mighty fortress had been built around an ancient monastery. To the east of the castle flowed the slow River Indre, which through time immemorial had protected its flank from attacks coming out of the territory of the kings of France.

In many ways, Richard’s attack was a classic of its kind and amply demonstrated my King’s mastery of all the arts of war. After one very hard day’s travel, with all the men-at-arms and servants ordered to assist in pushing the great siege engines along the dusty road that ran for a goodly way beside the Indre directly from Tours to Loches, and knights galloping up and down the column urging on the sluggards, Richard had his entire force of more than a
thousand men encamped outside the walls, a little to the north of the castle, by dusk.

The French garrison continued to defy us, of course. And the next day, in the weak pink light of early morning, when the heralds had reported to the King the castle’s bold refusal to surrender, the bombardment by the massive ‘castle-breakers’ began.

Robin and I were with the King on a slight rise about a quarter of a mile to the north of the castle. Robin had not yet forgiven me for questioning his ruthless mulcting of the merchants of Tours, and he barely spoke to me as the sun climbed into the sky to herald a glorious June day. I sat astride Shaitan, stroking his glossy black neck, and a tiny, cowardly part of me was grateful that I would not, unless something went badly wrong, be engaging in the brutal, slogging fight that the day promised. On the far side of the King, on a huge white stallion, sat William the Marshal. That well-seasoned warrior had begged leave to storm the first breach in the curtain wall, claiming that it was his right – but the King had merely thanked him for his zeal and said calmly: ‘This is work for Mercadier’s men. They know their business well and today they shall demonstrate that they are worthy of their hire.’

‘I must insist, sire, that you give me and my men the honour of making the first assault,’ the Marshal had growled, glaring at the King like a hungry mastiff that had had a juicy bone stolen from between its jaws.

‘No, William, I said no.’ Richard seemed a little irritated that his orders were being questioned. ‘It will be very hot, hard, bloody work, and I want Mercadier’s ruffians to bear the brunt of it. Once they have taken the outer wall, your men can tackle the keep. Will that satisfy you, you old gore-guzzler?’

The Marshal had merely grunted his assent.

Beyond the bellicose Earl of Striguil sat the Navarrese captain in earnest discussion with Sir Aymeric de St Maur, a Templar knight, who with another of his Order, Sir Eustace de la Falaise,
commanded half a dozen black-clad Templar sergeants. Sir Aymeric was an old adversary of mine and Robin’s, with whom we were now publicly reconciled. He was a pious man and a renowned warrior, a serious, impressive fellow, and yet I could not respect him – this knight had tried to have Robin burnt as a heretic the year before, and had threatened me with dire torture. We had both evaded his malice and Robin had made an arrangement with the Templars – conceding his lucrative frankincense business to them to keep the peace. And so we were reconciled, although it could not be said that we were bosom friends. The Templars would not be taking part in any fighting during this campaign – it was contrary to their vows to fight their fellow Christians without a direct order from their Grand Master or the Pope himself. They were here as observers, to report the events back to the Master of their Order in London, and ostensibly to urge Richard to make peace with his fellow Christian monarch, Philip Augustus.

As I looked along the line of knights that flanked the King, I was struck by the noble profiles of the men as they gazed out over the castle, and I noticed a curious thing: every man had had himself shaved that morning in preparation for the battle – apart from the Templars, of course, who as was their custom sported neatly trimmed beards. I felt my own lightly stubbled chin, and silently cursed myself for not thinking of having Thomas do the same for me. I felt untidy, and so a little angry with myself. As I had been so recently dubbed, I did not want to stand out from the other knights, or to look foolish or unkempt or peasant-like in any way. But my stubble was light and fair, and I persuaded myself that nobody would notice.

Richard had divided his heavy artillery in two unequal halves: the weaker company – six big siege engines, mangonels and trebuchets, and half a dozen smaller onagers and balistes, manned by engineers and experts in this type of weapon – was on the left of our position, east of the main road and near the banks of the River
Indre. Their objective was to reduce the outer wall, to knock a gap at least twenty foot wide between the main gate and the first strong tower on the east of the castle wall. The second, stronger artillery company – consisting of ten thirty-foot-tall ‘castle-breakers’ – was placed on the right of the main road, to the west, and they had the more difficult task of pitching their missiles in a long arc over the outer wall to batter at the north-western corner of the massive keep.

As I watched, with the sun only a finger’s width above the eastern horizon, even at that hour an impossibly bright yellow stain that promised a furnace-like day to come, the first trebuchet on the eastern side of the road prepared its missile. The twenty-five-foot-long solid oak arm was winched back by the muscle-power of a dozen men-at-arms, the massive D-shaped iron counterweight rising into the warming air. The arm was then firmly secured by stout ropes, and pegs driven deep into the ground. A boulder the size of a fully grown sheep was carefully rolled into the broad reinforced leather sling attached to the end of the long arm. A shout of command; the ropes were loosed; the lumpen counter-weight swung ponderously down; the arm flashed up, dragging the sling and its missile behind it; at the top of its arc, the throwing arm crashed into a padded wooden bar, stopping its path dead; the sling whistled over the top and the boulder was catapulted towards the outer wall. With a shattering crash, the quarter-ton missile struck the top of the target close to a small tower, exploding in a storm of flying masonry.

I winced, imagining the fate of the men on the wall in that deadly maelstrom of scything stone chips – the faces ripped and gashed, limbs crushed, bodies pulped by airborne lumps of razor-like rock. Agonized screams floated to us on the still morning air. And after only one strike I could see a dent in the smooth line of the top of the wall. And then a second trebuchet arm swung up, loosed its load, and a second missile crashed into the wall with a
spectacular cracking boom and shower of shards. And a third. And a fourth.

And all the fury of Hell was unleashed on the defiant castle of Loches.

Even from our positions a good quarter of a mile away from the point of impact, the noise was deafening. The creak and thump as the arm pounded into the padded bar, the crash of stone against stone, the shouts of the trebuchet captains, the cheers of their men, the pain-soaked yells, cries and curses of men defending the walls, crushed, ripped and sliced by flying slivers of rock.

Then the second, the yet more powerful artillery company on the right of the road began its own deadly tattoo, looping their missiles at a higher trajectory over the walls to dash against the corner of the massive keep.

The engineers and their well-trained sergeants knew their work. I watched one team around a thirty-foot-tall trebuchet, known by its crew as the ‘Wall Eater’, and counted my heartbeats with a hand on my wrist – and I saw that they were able to loose a fresh boulder at the castle almost every fifteen beats. It was a staggering pace, and I wondered how long they could keep it up. But their diligent work meant that, with almost every one of my heartbeats, a missile from one of the sixteen engines on either side of the road crashed into the castle – crack, crack, crack, crack. It felt almost like sitting before a giant’s forge with a mad blacksmith hammering determinedly at a stone anvil without pause. The horses were a little frightened by the noise at first, but after a half-hour they became calmer, and accepted the hellish banging as a natural part of the sounds of the day.

The pounding went on and on. The artillery men on the left smashed boulder after boulder into the outer wall with surprising precision. A few missiles missed their mark and sailed over the wall or went wide, but eight stones out of ten crashed and splintered into the same twenty-foot stretch of outer wall. The more
powerful company on the right were less accurate – theirs was a difficult, vertical target – but, by my count, at least six out of every ten of their missiles smashed into the corner of the tall keep.

After an hour’s solid battery from both sides of the main road, I heard a huge cheer from the artillery company on the left, and looked up to see a great crack appearing in the outer defences just to the left of the main gate. An hour after that, and whole chunks of masonry began to fall, almost slowly, from the crumbling outer wall.

The King was in high spirits; he smiled and joked with the men around him, the sunlight reflecting from his red-gold hair and the simple gold band he wore to keep it from his eyes. He leaned over to Robin and, punctuated by the crash of stone missiles on masonry, he shouted: ‘I think, Locksley, that we shall see this matter concluded today!’

‘Indeed, sire,’ replied Robin in his battle-voice. ‘That outer wall will be practicable by noon at the latest, I’d say.’

‘Aye,’ said the King. ‘I agree. Noon, if not earlier. Pass the word to Mercadier to be ready to attack by noon.’

Robin looked at me. ‘Would you be so kind, Alan?’ he said, with much more formality than I was used to from an old friend. Clearly he had still not forgiven me.

I guided Shaitan down the slight hill to a hollow on the left of the road where Mercadier and his men were encamped. As my destrier picked his way through a sea of low grubby tents, campfires and lounging
routiers
– an evil-visaged crew if ever I saw one, who stared at me with varying expressions of sullen contempt and indifference – I heard another cheer, this time coming from the far side of the road, and turned round in time to see a great eye-tooth-shaped chunk of stone slide from the north-western corner of the enormous keep.

As I rode up to his tent, Mercadier was shaving himself, dipping a long dagger in a bucket of muddy water between strokes, glaring
into a polished steel helm at his dark reflection, and carefully guiding the blade, which must have been extraordinarily keen, around his Adam’s apple.

My hand went unthinkingly to my own bristled chin. I did not wish to fall out with Mercadier on this day, a day when he would be facing mortal danger and I would very likely be safe from the fighting, and so I said in my most civil tone: ‘The King requests that you have your men ready to attack the outer wall at noon.’

‘Yes, fine, noon it is,’ he said, his Gascon accent particularly nasal.

I waited a moment for any further communication, and when he said nothing but merely continued to scrape away carefully at his jawline, I turned Shaitan and began to make my way towards the King.

While my back was turned, and I was a dozen yards away, I heard him speak: ‘Not with your precious priest today, Sir Knight?’

Scenting mockery, I turned in the saddle and saw that he was smiling crookedly at me, the bright sunlight making even more of a contrast between the long, puckered off-white scar and his half-shaven face. After weeks of campaigning, I noticed, his complexion was almost as dark as a Moor’s.

‘Not today,’ I said.

‘Well, you keep him safe, Sir Knight. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to such a saintly old man. That would be a terrible tragedy.’ And he laughed; a horrible dry sound.

I paused for a moment, groping for some rejoinder, but nothing came to me; and so I turned Shaitan’s head and rode on, a wave of grating laughter lapping in my wake.

Mercadier’s parting taunt turned my thoughts in the direction of Brother Dominic. We had been reunited at Tours and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal, his feet healing steadily thanks to Elise’s charms and unguents. I discovered that he belonged to the
Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Vendôme – the abbey in which the current abbot, who also had the dignity of the title cardinal, was … the erstwhile Bishop Heribert, author of my father’s expulsion from Notre-Dame.

‘Oh yes, the Cardinal is still in very good health for his years, praise God,’ quavered Dominic when I questioned him about his spiritual lord. This information lifted my heart – the Almighty had put this doddery old monk in my path, I was quite certain, for a reason, and I felt that the mystery surrounding my father’s death might not prove so impenetrable after all. It caused me to alter my plans for Dominic. When he was fit to travel, I hoped to send him back to Cardinal Heribert with a letter humbly requesting an audience. I had asked King Richard at Tours if I might be permitted to leave the army and pay a visit to the Cardinal myself, but I chose the wrong moment, it would seem. The King was in conference with a gaggle of his senior knights and barons, and was displeased to be interrupted with a petition such as mine. He had gruffly refused my request for leave and repeated what he had told me in Verneuil: that he could not spare me, he needed every sword, but that I might be permitted to pursue my quest at a later date.

As I headed back towards the ridge where Robin and the King were positioned, I saw that the outer wall of Loches Castle now had a gaping hole beside the main gate, which the defenders were making heroic efforts to plug with barrels and boxes and pieces of broken masonry. Before the wall, a loose and rocky ramp had been formed by tumbled stones and rubble from the defences. It was a rough and treacherous stair, but one that would make it possible for Mercadier’s nimble
routiers
to climb up and attack the breach. The enemy, however, had by no means given up: it was heart-breaking to watch those scurrying ant-like men hopelessly trying to patch the breach in their defences, for every few moments another huge stone missile would crash into the hastily repaired
section, smashing the new wooden barricades to splinters and crushing the heroic men who were struggling to close the gap.