Warlord (Outlaw 4) (15 page)

The massive keep, too, had been severely knocked about. The north-western corner had been gnawed away by Wall Eater and the other engines on the right-hand side of the road and a large section of the corner was missing, while the rest was pocked and scraped where the boulders had struck the masonry.

As I walked Shaitan up the slope towards the royal party, there was a flurry of activity in the eastern artillery company. Four of the big siege engines ceased their pounding, and four teams of oxen were led to the massive wooden frames and yoked up to them. The company was changing its point of attack. Whips cracked, sharp goads stabbed, the oxen leaned into their wooden yokes and the four machines rumbled fifty yards closer to the castle – though still well out of bow-shot. There was much shouting, and a scrum of men heaved at the engines as they were re-situated, but by the time I had rejoined the King and Robin, they had been secured in their new positions. And the pounding began anew – but this time joining their efforts to those of the big machines on the right of the road. Now fourteen ‘castle-breakers’ were concentrating their fury on the north-western corner of the keep.

In the diminished left-hand company, two smaller mangonels continued their ravaging of the open breach on the outer wall, pulverizing any man who dared to show his face for too long, and they were reinforced by a pair of onagers – simple spoon-like catapults that used the power of twisted leather to hurl rocks the size of a man’s head – and four balistes, gigantic crossbows mounted on a wooden frame that shot four-foot iron bolts at the enemy.

The sun was high above and it must have been noon, or nearly so. I saw that Mercadier had formed up his men, perhaps four hundred of them, and they were waiting patiently in three long lines, sweating in their leather and mail armour under Mercadier’s black banners, each dark as pitch but adorned with three bright
golden coins. These waves of frail men would soon hurl themselves at the breach in the outer wall and try to force an entrance.

It must be time to go
, I thought,
it must be time
. The breach could now easily be scaled by an able-bodied man, even one encumbered by shield and sword or spear. I wondered what the delay was – what was Richard waiting for? – and then I realized what it must be. The King was waiting for a similar breach to the one on the outer wall to be made in the great keep. He wanted to take the castle in a single bloody surging attack, his men sweeping through the outer walls, across the courtyard and into the keep in one long screaming rush.

Sensible, I realized. At the siege of Nottingham earlier in the year, Richard had taken the outer defences of the castle but failed to batter a hole in the stone core of the keep before the initial assault. As a result, his soldiers, once in the courtyard below the keep, had been easy victims to crossbowmen in the heart of the castle, defenders who were secured from the attackers’ anger by unbroken high stone walls.

Richard was not prepared to risk making the same mistake again. Crack … crack-crack … crack … the battering continued, missiles smashing relentlessly into the corner of the keep of Loches. My head was throbbing from the din of the bombardment and the heat of the day. I realized I was terribly, desperately thirsty, but before I could slake my desire, at that very moment, with a roaring, tearing, thunderous rumble, a noise that seemed to shake the foundations of the world, a whole section of the north-western corner of the keep crashed to earth. Through the clouds of stone dust I could actually glimpse the interior of the castle – a hall of some kind with flapping tapestries and a long trestle table and benches.

‘That will do,’ said Richard, nodding to William the Marshal. ‘Send word to Mercadier, and get your own men in position. You are to follow his lads in there only
after
they have cleared the
breach in the outer wall. You will go in when the outer wall has been taken. Is that clear, William!’

‘As a mountain stream,’ said the Marshal, somewhat grumpily, and without another word he spurred his huge warhorse down the slope to the east.

To watch a battle is to take part in it only in spirit – and yet, when it was over, I felt almost as exhausted as if I had single-handedly fought the entire French garrison myself.

Mercadier’s lines of footmen moved forward almost casually, covering the three hundred or so yards to the wall at a brisk trot. As they reached the first loose stones before the breach they were met with a withering hail of crossbow fire, and I saw a score of men in the front ranks fall. The sole weakness of Richard’s plan was that the garrison knew full well where the attack would come, and when our punch would be delivered, and I could see hundreds of defenders gathered at the breach – nearly the whole garrison I guessed – crowding together, their arms glinting in the hot sun, light bouncing from polished helms as they prepared to defend to the death their walls. A last giant quarrel from a baliste on the eastern side of the road smashed into the jostling crowd of foemen in the breach, smashing two of them away – and yet more men eagerly filled the ranks, their steel points glittering as they awaited our assault. A shout of rage erupted from hundreds of throats as Mercadier’s men, now less than thirty yards away, began scrambling up the loose piles of rock and stone, shields on their backs, helmeted heads tucked low, clambering up the treacherous rubble using hands and feet like a swarming herd of human beetles – launching themselves into the maw of Hell.

They were rascals, bandits, priest-murderers and gutter-born thieves – but Mercadier’s men did not lack for raw courage. They swarmed up the loose rubble towards the breach in the outer wall of the castle – and were met with a devastating volley of crossbow bolts, spears,
and loose rocks hurled down upon them. Many men fell under this onslaught, crushed by hurled boulders, spitted by quarrels, and those who reached the top of the stone stairway were swiftly cut down by the well-trained knights and men-at-arms at the top, their swinging swords spilling light and spraying blood as they hacked into the desperate, yelling horde of men surging towards them. Mercadier’s men boiled up the rocky slope – and died in their scores at the top, and yet more men came on behind them, trampling their dead and wounded comrades, mashing their bodies into the uneven stony incline as they forged upward, screaming taunts and lunging madly at their enemies.

The men of Loches were stalwart in defence; a score of knights in full iron mail, supported by crossbows and spearmen, held that breach, cutting down the leather-jacketed
routiers
who hurled themselves at them with swinging blows of sword and axe. The second wave of mercenaries attacked. And a hundred more of Mercadier’s men were fed into that cauldron of pain, rage and death, into the riot of scything steel and spurting blood.

Yet the breach held.

Now I could see that the mercenaries of the third wave were beginning to hang back a little on the rocky slope, and were milling around beneath the walls, rather than rushing to their deaths in that terrible blood-splashed bottle-neck. They were still dying in great numbers, plucked from this life by a hissing crossbow quarrel, an arrow or a hurled spear. Sergeants were screaming at the men, striking them, urging them onward – but the impetus of the initial attack had been lost. Here and there a brave man, or perhaps a pair of friends, even a small group, would rush up the slope, stumbling on the loose stones, which were now red and slippery, screaming their battle cries and waving weapons – and would die, chopped down by the long blood-slick swords and jabbing spears of the defenders.

Still the breach held.

I heard a trumpet, loud and strong from my left; two long blasts. Turning my head away from the appalling spectacle of bloody heroism and death at the breach, I saw a massive formation of unhorsed but fully armoured men start forward from our lines, thirty or so knights on foot, each clad from head to foot in protective iron links, and a couple of score men-at-arms and squires behind them. A standard fluttered above the foremost rank: it was William, Earl of Striguil, and his knightly followers; the Marshal blatantly disobeying the King’s orders and ramming his men into the battle, just at the moment when they were needed most.

‘The old fool! The disobedient glory-hunting fool,’ I heard the King mutter. And watched in awe as William and his men broke into a heavy run and charged, heedless to all danger, across the open ground before the castle, sweeping Mercadier’s men out of their path, bounding up the gore-greased stairway and into the steel fence of the breach.

William and his knights smashed into the line of defenders and I could hear the crunch of wood, the squeal of metal and clash of blades as the two lines collided. The enemy line sagged, pushed back by the force of fresh men pressing against it; and I saw Mercadier, limping a little, shouting at his men from below the walls, urging them to add their weight to this fresh attack. Sword drawn, he joined his raggedy warriors scrambling up behind the Marshal’s fresh troops. I saw William himself, taller than other men, on the very lip of the breach, laying about him with a long sword, and dropping enemies with every stroke. And beside him his superbly trained household knights, their mail gleaming silver in the sunlight, hacked and carved their way forward, inch by bloody inch.

The resistance began to melt, the Marshal and his men were pushing forward, the defenders’ line was buckling backwards; there was a tremendous howl and a surge forward by Mercadier’s men as they pitched in behind the Marshal’s knights, adding their fury to
the mêlée, and suddenly they were all through the breach, like a great dam bursting, our men flooding forward, washing the enemy from my sight.

The slaughter after the taking of Loches was appalling. William the Marshal’s men and Mercadier’s rogues – those who had survived the horror in the breach – killed every living soul they could find inside the castle. The castellan and his wife and baby daughter, and a pair of priests, managed to surrender to the Marshal himself when he and his closest knights had fought their bloody way to the top of the tower – and they were the lucky ones. Everyone else inside the walls of Loches perished. Mercadier’s men, who had shown immense bravery in attacking that hellish gap, showed the other side of the
routiers
’ reputation when they had broken through the outer wall, and overcome the slight resistance of a few young squires in the smashed north-western corner of the keep. They sank to the level of beasts: a group of
routiers
discovered the cellars and they drank deeply of the rich yellow wine of the region, and this fuelled their depravity in the captured stronghold. Men, whether armed for war or not, servants, priests, monks – were all put to the sword. Women, old and young, were raped by long queues of
routiers
, who shouted jests and drained tankards of wine while they waited their turn to defile some unfortunate belledame, whose only crime was to have been married to a French garrison knight.

Loches was ours by mid-afternoon – it had only taken King Richard a matter of hours to reduce this formidable stronghold – but the looting, raping and murders continued until long after midnight.

At dawn the next day, King Richard set about restoring order. He had a gibbet set up in the bailey of the castle and hanged three of Mercadier’s men that his household knights caught in the act of raping an old woman. And the message to all the troops was clear:
that devilish playtime was over; the King’s army was being called to heel.

As ever, the sight of the hanged men put me in mind of my father’s death. And I gave thanks to God that Robin’s men had not been called upon to perform the executions. But an execution of a wholly different sort had taken place, which I only discovered when I returned to my tent later that evening accompanied by Thomas and Hanno.

Under a large blanket at the back of the tent, where he had been resting, and keeping the weight off his burnt feet, I found the skinny, blood-sodden corpse of Dominic.

His throat had been cut from ear to ear.

Chapter Eight

With Loches subdued, King Richard left a small garrison to repair the walls and drove south with the army into Aquitaine. After hearing of the bloody fate of Loches, castles now held by the foe in my lord’s vast southern dukedom opened their gates to us and threw themselves on Richard’s mercy: and, as ever, it delighted the King to be magnanimous in victory. The forces of Geoffrey of Rancon, Richard’s enemy in the south, and Philip’s ally, dissolved before us; some surrendered, were forgiven and renewed their allegiance to our King, others fled east into Burgundy. None could stand in the face of Richard’s righteous wrath – and the might of his castle-breakers.

We had buried Dominic in the monastery churchyard inside the walls of Loches before we left that sad citadel, and the old man lay next to some hundred or so of the French garrison who had died so bravely in its defence. As Hanno shovelled the earth over his shrouded body, and one of Richard’s priests mumbled prayers for his soul, I could feel a deep rage rising in my stomach. I felt almost certain that I knew who was responsible for the death of this good man – Mercadier. He could not have accomplished the
deed himself, of course; we had all seen him heroically storming the breach with his men, and then less than heroically sacking and looting the castle. But I was sure that one of his
routiers
, one of his cut-throats who had not taken part in the assault, had done the deed to strike back at me for killing his red-headed man-at-arms.

There was nothing I could do. Nobody could remember seeing one of Mercadier’s men entering my tent while we were watching the battle. But then, encamped shoulder to shoulder with at least two thousand other souls in a vast township of woollen tents and roughly built shelters, and living on top of each other as we were, there was a constant stream of people – soldiers, squires, farriers, whores, pedlars – walking past my tent day and night, and nobody would notice one murderous
routier
among that throng.