Yet that day’s bloody work was only just beginning. The two enemy battles on the flanks had moved out of range of the deadly war bows of Robin’s men, but they had not dispersed into the camp. They waited, loosely formed, mauled but still menacing. And in the centre, trumpets rang out once again, and with dread I saw that the great ram was being hoisted on to its huge wooden cradle under the penthouse, surrounded by hundreds of men-at-arms bearing the five-foot-high, flat-topped, flat-bottomed, light wickerwork shields that were sometimes used to protect crossbowmen on the field of battle.
The trumpets blared, the drums sounded and the three foot-divisions began to advance. They were coming at us again. I looked to the west to the sun, which hung low in the blue vault of heaven. I judged that we had at most two hours of daylight left. I sent runners to the eastern and western walls and called the men I had posted there to me; I even sent a man down to the infirmary to summon any lightly wounded. I wanted every man who could stand on two feet and wield a sword on the castle’s front wall.
The battering ram under its sloping shingle roof crept forward at the pace of a crippled old man. But it came on steadily, pushed by men-at-arms inside the housing and by a line of steel-helmeted, mail-coated shield-men on the outside. Once within range of our bowmen, we began to take our toll of these outside men, though four arrows out of five thumped and lodged into the long wicker-work shields that they bore on their outer arms, or skittered harmlessly from the shingle roof of the penthouse.
At fifty yards, we had dropped only half a dozen shield-men and, at a shout of command from inside the penthouse, the pace was quickened and the entire contraption began to trundle towards the gate at increasing speed. At the same time, the two infantry battles on the left and right, howling like mad dogs, charged into the fray seeking revenge and I realized that we simply did not have enough archers even to slow their furious charge.
‘This is it, lads,’ I shouted. ‘This is it. If we hold them now, we’re safe. Hold them, and we’ve won the day.’
The foe was surging below us once more, the ladders were swinging up against the walls and banging against the crenellations. And we hurled the last of our javelins down upon the sea of taut white faces and red shouting mouths below us, following those missiles with rocks, earthenware jugs, even iron cooking pots. Anything and everything we had that could cause harm was hurled into the boiling sea of humanity below — but it seemed that nothing could stop the fear-spurred French from flying up the ladders and flooding over the wall in vast numbers.
Boom! The battering ram was at the gate and its first blow seemed to shake the very foundations of the earth.
A roaring bearded face appeared before me, framed by the rungs of a ladder, and I hacked with Fidelity, crunching deep through gristle and bone laterally across his broad nose; the man was hurled backwards in a spray of gore, but almost immediately another head appeared, and an arm waving a sword, too. I cut down hard, all but severing the arm at the elbow, and the man dropped away.
Boom! The ram struck again, accompanied by a hideous splintering sound, and I realized that the castle gate was not going to last long under this ferocious assault. I placed my mailed hand on the empty ladder rung and pushed with all the strength of my left arm; it lifted an inch or two from the face of the castle wall, skidded to the right and slipped away. But to my right, from another ladder — one of dozens now against the wall — a well-armed French knight, his face protected by a flat-topped tubular helmet, was leaping over the crenellations, then slicing down savagely into a man-at-arms a few yards from me. His blade bit deep, through the poor man’s green cloak and padded aketon, cutting into his chest cavity and the man dropped with a panting, gurgling moan.
I quickly turned my head and shouted: ‘Thomas, Thomas. Now’s your time! Come now.’
And was rewarded by a high, clear voice from the castle courtyard, shouting: ‘Yes, sir; coming, sir.’
The French knight, armed with sword and mace, stepped nonchalantly over the green-cloaked body of my dying comrade and came directly towards me, a challenge on his lips. His sword hissed at my head, and I parried. He swung the mace in his left hand hard at my body. I caught the blow on my shield, unbalancing myself, and momentarily blocking my line of sight, but recovered and swept low with my sword, smashing the blade into the back of the knight’s left knee. And while my blade did not penetrate the tough steel links of his leg mail, it swept him off his feet and, as he floundered on his back in front of me on the walkway, I leapt forward. My sword tip found the eye slit in his helmet and I put my weight above it and crunched the blade down hard. The whole walkway was a mass of struggling men by then, scores of Frenchmen hacking, clawing, biting and butting; locked in life-and-death combat with our surviving green-cloaked men. The air seemed to be misted with blood. The noise was appalling: screams and shrieks and the clang and clash of metal. And more Frenchmen were coming over the walls with every passing moment. Wrenching Fidelity free of the dead man’s helmet, I paused to take a fast breath and looked beyond him and espied Thomas, clutching two burning pinewood torches, incongruous on that golden afternoon, skipping up the steps that led from the courtyard to the right of the gatehouse. Behind him, lumbering with difficulty up the wooden steps, came the two burly men-at-arms I had allocated to him. In their hands, clasped between two long, pole-like wooden holders to protect them from the heat, was a huge cooking pot, a great cauldron of smoking walnut oil that had been heated to boiling on a fire in the courtyard below.
Boom! The battering ram struck once more, and I felt the wooden walkway shiver beneath my feet. A squat French man-at-arms hopped over the wall right in front of me — an axe in one hand and a round shield in the other. He swung at me, and I ducked and counter-attacked purely by instinct, chopping my sword into his outstretched arm, then knocking him back with a punch from my boar-shield.
‘This way! This way. Bring it here,’ a shrill voice was shouting. And I quickly turned to see Thomas’s cauldron-carrying men levering the smoking pot up to the edge of the battlement at the very centre of the gate — tipping the sizzling oil, perhaps half a dozen gallons of it, straight down on to the penthouse roof below.
Even above the dreadful clamour of battle, I could hear the agonized screams of a dozen shield-men below who were splashed by boiling oiclass="underline" an unholy cacophony of white-hot pain. As I glanced over the edge of the wall, I saw the oil slicked across the wooden shingles of the penthouse below in a yellow, glistening, smoking sheet, and dripping through the cracks to scald the unfortunate men in the space below. Then Thomas hurled the two burning torches on to the sloping roof and with a huge, crackling roar the entire wooden structure of the penthouse burst into bright flame.
Almost immediately the men began to run from inside the burning ram-housing, discarding shields, ripping off burning surcoats, some shrieking wildly and beating at flames on their arms and chests where the dripping oil had ignited. These human torches ran, oil-soaked aketons doggedly ablaze, flesh scorching and blackening, hair exploding in a puff of flame to leave raw pink oozing scalps. Some fled heedlessly to their encampment as if trying to escape their own burning skin, while the wise ones dropped and rolled on the ground to extinguish the flames.
I had no time to watch the agonized antics of my enemies below — the battle for the walls was very nearly lost. ‘Throw them back, throw them back, kill them, kill them all,’ I shouted, and charged a few steps along the walkway to my left, sword whirling, hacking into the struggling mass of men there. Feeling the familiar black fury of combat rise from the pit of my stomach, I screamed a war cry that blasted from my lungs like a trumpet and plunged into the battle on a wave of soaring, joyful madness. I sliced and cleaved and battered. I was snarling, spitting, barging, shoving, hacking and stabbing like a man possessed. My sword swung in great glittering arcs, crunching into flesh and bone with every cut, and the enemy quailed before me. I thrust the living enemy off the walkway with my shield, or cut them down without mercy. I felt all-powerful, invincible, imbued with the power of God and the saints. I know that I received blows in turn — I saw the brutal patchwork of purple bruises later on my arms and legs — but my costly mail suit kept the blades from my flesh, and in my battle-rage I scarcely felt them. Then Hanno was beside me and we were tramping grimly forward, shoulder to shoulder, unstoppable, blocking the width of the walkway with our bodies and chopping down Frenchmen with axe and sword like a pair of country scythe-men reaping the corn. Some of the enemy ran back to their ladders, some leapt down to the courtyard floor and surrendered to our men down there; others hung from the outside of the wall and dropped the fifteen feet to the hard ground, stumbling away on jarred and twisted joints. But many of them died, chopped into meat beneath our swinging blades.