Paul Finch - Stronghold

Another boom, deep and hollow, sounded from overhead. Another followed. And another. Suddenly it was relentless, repeating itself over and over again.

Now that the cold had settled into his body and limbs, Ranulf was stiff all over. As he clambered to his feet, his joints ached and creaked. Other men began to stir. With each impact overhead, dust trickled down onto them.

"What is… what is that?" Gurt mumbled.

"Nothing good," Ranulf replied, heading for the stair.

On the third level, he met Hugh du Guesculin, who was carrying a candle and looked ashen-faced.

"They have a battering ram," du Guesculin said in a querulous tone.

Other men were now milling around them in the darkness, muttering and swearing.

Du Guesculin took Ranulf's arm. "Did you hear what I said, FitzOsbern? Those abominations on the north wall — they have a battering ram. They're using it on the gantry door."

"From the north wall?" Ranulf said. "It must be twenty feet across that gap."

"They've cut down a pine and trimmed its trunk. They can easily reach over. Not only that, they've tied ladders together. Improvised their own bridge."

Ranulf moved past him to the door in question. With each impact, it shook violently.

This drawbridge had never been constructed to withstand attack; it had never really been more than an access point between the Gatehouse and the curtain-wall. In due course, probably very soon, it would be smashed — and the dead would push their own bridge over and flow across it. Though many might be tossed to destruction en route, there would always, as they'd repeatedly proved in this siege of sieges, be more of them. At the same time, they would attack the portcullis again. The crew on the fire-raiser would be overwhelmed from within, and the Gatehouse would fall.

At that moment, sluggish with hunger, muddled by fatigue, Ranulf could not conceive of a single strategy to prevent this. And then, with an explosive report, three of the door's central planks fractured inwards.

"Get the earl," he said, jerking to life.

But the earl was already present, standing alongside du Guesculin. It was Earl Corotocus's manner, even in times of extreme crisis, to be grim but never despairing. Yet now, for the first time at Grogen Castle, his mouth twitched, his cheek had paled to a deathly hue.

"Sound the alarum," he said. "Retreat to the Constable's Tower."

When an army is prepared to lose thousands upon thousands of its men, or indeed, as in this case, is incapable of losing a single man, the word 'impregnable' no longer applies to any redoubt.

The English bore this in mind as they readied the Constable's Tower to receive the next onslaught. In normal times, the Constable's Tower would have felt far more secure than the Gatehouse. Its parapets were thirty feet higher, and in terms of structure it was altogether more massive, its walls infinitely thicker. It had more vents for oil and pitch and more loops from which missiles could be discharged. In addition, it could only really be attacked from one side. To the east and south it faced into the Inner Fort, the courtyard of which was a good eighty feet below. To the west, it faced into the bailey, which was a hundred feet below. Neither of these immense distances could be covered by ladder or climbing rope — at least, Earl Corotocus's men had never heard of such a thing. But from the north, it was a different matter.

The Constable's Tower's main door was on the north side, facing onto the causeway connecting from the Gatehouse. What was more, the door faced onto this directly, so that a ram could be brought to bear if it got close enough. It would not breach the tower easily: the gate was fashioned from English oak, some ten inches thick, and was ribbed with steel. Behind it there lay a passage beneath a murder hole, another portcullis, and beyond that the fire-raiser, which the English had refuelled. But given the nature of the enemy, nobody felt that these measures provided sufficient protection. What was more, the north wall of the Constable's Tower was only sixty feet high and was a far less daunting prospect than the walls to the south, east and west.

The English did what they could. They gathered new stocks of stones, spears, darts and arrows. They brought up new barrels of naptha. They crowded against the missile-portals and along the battlements, particularly on the north side, overlooking the causeway. Several companies had already been positioned in the Constable's Tower when the earl and what remained of the Gatehouse garrison arrived, but from that moment on there'd been no sleep for any of them. Blunted blades were re-sharpened, shields were patched, new fragments of armour donned. Every man — even if he wouldn't admit it — now looked to his own survival as much as to victory for his overlord.

By first light they were waiting, so tense that they no longer saw the weird Breton scarecrows, which littered the rooftops even of these inner ramparts.

The men had already passed the stage where sweat-inducing fear was an issue. Fear comes before battle rather than during it; it tends to dissipate after the first clash of steel, to be replaced by a duller but more practical state-of-mind in which warriors think purely about necessary actions. One such necessity was that everyone in the castle should now be present. The Constable's Tower was the key to the Inner Fort, and they could not afford to let it fall. Hence, the earl had redeployed every man into this one bastion, no longer concerned about a mingling of his companies or any confusion among his junior command.

Those wounded from the assaults on the Barbican and the south wall lay on its ground-level, wrapped in their bedrolls, gasping and shivering, with nothing to anaesthetise their pain as they awaited transportation to the infirmary, assuming such a luxury would ever come. Father Benan, one who would normally tend to them, was among their number, naked and slumped against a pillar. The only item he wore was a large iron crucifix, suspended by a cord at his neck. He was scarcely able to breathe, so weak was he from loss of blood. His entire body — his back, his buttocks, his shoulders, his arms, his legs — were crisscrossed with crimson stripes.

He was only vaguely aware, when a person came and crouched alongside him, that it was Doctor Zacharius, now with a gore-stained canvas apron over his fine clothes and his sleeves pinned back on forearms equally sullied.

As Zacharius looked the priest over, he mopped sweat from his haggard brow, smearing more blood there. With the few orderlies he'd been given now redeployed to defend the Constable's Tower roof, he'd had to cease working on his patients in order to help his assistant bring as many wounded as he could to the infirmary. Between them, they had improvised a bier by tying a cloak between two poll-arms, but it was still a laborious process, especially since neither of them had enjoyed much sleep since arriving here. But Zacharius, for all his faults, was not a doctor purely for the esteem it gave him. He believed in his vocation and would not shy from the dirt and drudgery of it.

"Benan!" he said into the priest's ear. "Benan, can you stand?"

Benan grunted in the negative, still too dazed by pain and exhaustion to form words.

"Benan, can you can stand and make your own way to the infirmary? I have salves that will help with these welts."

"There are… others," Benan muttered. "Others… worse than me…"

"Benan, some of these wounds of yours need sutures. You may bleed to death."

Bizarrely, Benan smiled, though it was still a picture of pain, his face gray and speckled with sweat.

"Our Lord," he stammered. "Our Lord was… scourged for our sins…"

"Benan, listen to me…"