Paul Finch - Stronghold

"Since when did the king of England send devils to do his?" the priest said with another laugh.

The earl kicked at him, sending him sprawling.

"Do you all hear this treason? Is this a fitting comrade, who switches his allegiance the moment the enemy is close?"

"My lord," someone protested. "A holy man…"

"What's holy about him? You heard his weasel words. If the Welsh get in, he'll no doubt hasten to tell them that it wasn't him. That he advised against this mission, which, incidentally, we are carrying out on the orders of our lord, the king." He spat on Benan's cassock. "Do not be fooled by these priestly vestments. This turd has shown his true colours. He's a snake in the grass, who would deceive us all. Now do as I say. Get him out of here, scourge his worthless hide."

"You heard His Excellency!" Navarre shouted.

To see the household champion hurt, and yet still strong and fiercely loyal to his overlord galvanised the rest of them. Two household knights came forward and dragged the weeping priest away.

"Back to the business at hand," Corotocus said. "Shore those other hatches. Make sure they can't be broken again."

As the mesnie bustled, Ranulf wondered if the earl was at last losing his grasp of military realities. He'd wasted time punishing a malefactor, and yet a desperate battle was raging outside. He was content to close off the captured areas of the castle rather than try to recover them. There were exclamations about this from the more experienced knights. They pleaded with the earl that the Barbican, or at least the Gatehouse roof, needed to be cleared of the enemy, as the warriors catapulted up there would now be able to enter the bailey. But the earl replied that no more than a handful would manage it. The dead could have the Gatehouse roof, but so long as its interior was held from them, the bulk of the enemy would be kept outside.

"Does he fully realise what we're facing here?" Ranulf asked his father quietly. "These creatures can't just be cut down with a sword-stroke. I've seen that for myself. In that respect, each one of them is worth any ten of us."

"He can only do what he can do." Ulbert replied.

"What?"

Ulbert rarely showed emotion these days, let alone fear or panic. But even by his normal detached standards, he seemed strangely resigned to meeting whatever abhorrence was hammering on the hatchways above their heads.

"He can't just wave a wand to make this foe go away, Ranulf."

"Someone waved one to make them come here."

"Then perhaps, as soldiers, it is part of our duty to find this person and kill him." Ulbert moved away. "In the meantime we must look to our friends."

The earl was still issuing orders, fully in command again. When Ulbert and Ranulf confronted him, requesting permission to return to the south curtain-wall and organise a retreat for the troops still holding out there, he eyed them thoughtfully. Any anger he still felt at Ranulf was probably tempered by the sight of the young knight's facial wounds, which proved more than words ever could that he'd fought hard in his overlord's name. In addition, there were practical considerations. To withdraw from the curtain-wall now would be to grant the Welsh unfettered access to the berm and thus to the castle's main entrance. But to leave men on the curtain-wall would be certain death for them, not just from the mangonels to their front, but from the corpses in the bailey who could climb the scaffolding and attack them from behind.

"That would be sensible," he eventually said. "I don't want to do it with the southwest bridge intact, but it seems the bridge is beyond our reach. Very well. The curtain-wall is to be abandoned, but only temporarily. When the time is right, I intend to recapture it."

Corotocus gave the two knights leave and they descended quickly to the next level, crossing over a narrow gantry drawbridge, which spanned the castle's entrance passage and joined with the north curtain-wall. Thirty feet below them, the passage was deserted, but it was easy to imagine that soon it would be packed with struggling forms, their ghoulish groans echoing in the high, narrow space. The main entrance gate was recessed into the Gatehouse on the left-hand side of this passage rather than at its far end, which made assault by ram or catapult impossible. Theoretically, such a gate was unbreakable, but Ranulf could already envisage these indestructible monsters swarming all over it until they'd torn it down with their bare hands.

On the north battlements, he leaned against a crenel to get his breath. He pulled back his coif; his hair was sticky with clotting blood. Many of his gashes still wept red tears.

"Are you alright?" Ulbert asked.

"I think my nose is broken."

"No matter. It wasn't much to look at."

Ranulf half smiled. "A pity it couldn't have been your scrawny neck."

"Do you want to wait here and rest?"

"No. There are many hurt worse than me." They set off. As they walked, Ranulf said: "Father, have you ever heard of anything… anything like this before?"

Ulbert pondered; his face was graven in stone.

"I once heard about something," he admitted. "It was two centuries ago at least. A rumour brought back from the East. Bohemond's crusader army was in peril. They'd won the battle of Antioch, but the nobles squabbled and refused to cooperate with each other, so smaller parties of knights set out for Jerusalem without them. Soon they were starved and parched. They fought their way across an arid, desolate land, hunted all the way by Saracen horsemen. When they reached civilisation, they were more like animals than men. They destroyed the Moslem city of Ma'arrat, where the more demented among them prepared a cannibal feast. Even those who'd retained their sanity joined them, tortured by the smell of cooked meat. The Saracens were so outraged by this crime that they too broke God's laws. Their wizards summoned a dust storm to envelope the crusader army when it marched again. Many were lost in the confusion. Great numbers were taken prisoner. A year later, these prisoners reappeared at the battle of Ascalon. They were naked and skinless, having been flayed, but despite this they marched against their former allies. The story is that they marched under banners made from their own shredded hides."

"That's a fairy story," Ranulf said. "Surely?"

Ulbert laughed without humour. "In years to come people will refer to this as a fairy story. But that doesn't make it any less a nightmare for those of us living through it."

Countess Madalyn sat rigid on her horse. A long pole with a gleaming steel point was inserted through a pannier beside her saddle. From the top of it, Y Ddraig Goch, the dragon of Wales, billowed on a green weave.

It gave her a commanding aura, a queenly air, but those who knew her would say that her posture was just a little too stiff, her gloved hands knotted too tightly on her leather reins. Though her flame-red hair was a famed glory of the Powys valleys, her fleece hood was drawn up tightly. She wore a linen veil, drenched with perfume, across her nose and mouth. She looked neither left nor right, but focussed intently on the gaunt edifice of Grogen Castle.

From this position on the western bluff, it was difficult to see exactly what was happening over there. Palls of brackish smoke still cloaked the side of the fortress facing the river. The wall on that side had been blackened by fire, and massive projectiles were still being hurled across the water at it. With each monstrous impact, stones and bodies flew through the air, though no accurate tally could be made of the English dead. Likewise on the Barbican, which the great scooped throwing-machine located in the wood beyond the crest of the hill behind her had been pounding with showers of broken stone and metal. Consternation had been caused among its defenders, which intensified massively when, in scenes the countess had never thought she'd witness in a thousand lifetimes, human beings had also been flung up there, spinning through the air, turning over and over. In many cases they'd missed the Barbican altogether, falling short into the moat or striking the castle walls. Even those that reached it were surely landing with such force that they'd be broken to pieces. And yet fighting had followed on the Barbican battlements: figures struggling together, the flashing of blades, bodies and body parts dropping over the parapets, prolonged and hideous shrieks.