Maggie Prince - Raider’s Tide

I had been afraid that no one would hear me or let me in, but the grille goes up fast, the door opens and Verity and Martinus pull me into the gatehouse. I stagger back against the wall, but something is wrong. The door will not shut behind me. Verity and Martinus throw their weight at it but the Scots are pushing from the other side, and slowly the door is opening again. I try to wind down the grille, but it will not move. I give up, realising they have jammed it, and instead add my strength to those trying to push the door shut. Laughter from outside mocks us. A cutlass pokes through the widening gap.

“They’re making it easy for us this time, laddies,” calls a voice next to the hinge, a hand’s breadth from my ear.

“Father! Send down more men!” Verity shouts through the inner door. Footsteps come running from above, but they are going to be too late. The door is opening now and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Those coming down the stairs behind us ought to bar the inner door against us, and safeguard the rest of the tower, but I know they will not. None of us here dares let go to seize weapons. Martinus gestures desperately to Verity and me to get behind the inner door and barricade ourselves in. Verity mutters, “And give you the pleasure of finishing off the bastards on your own?” except she does not describe them so genteelly.

The hairy hand and arm holding the cutlass pushes further through the gap. There is an explosion – our hagbut. Gunshots thud against the walls. In a brief, quiet moment I hear the hiss and whistle of arrows. Now James is here. He does not add his weight to pushing at the door, but instead seizes the horn from its niche and brings it up hard against the elbow that is pushing through the gap. The hand springs convulsively open and the cutlass clatters down, but the arm does not withdraw. Instead, with a jolt from outside, the door opens faster. Then a hand comes from behind me, a hand holding a sword. With a swift up and downward chop, it slashes at the arm. It is Kate. If her angle had been better she might have severed the limb. An inhuman scream spirals out of audible pitch. Blood spurts, and the arm is pulled back. I know I shall never again watch with equanimity while Kate carves the meat.

We all hurl ourselves at the door then, and at last it slams shut. Father is here now, and he crashes the six bolts and three heavy iron bars into their slots, fumbling with drunken haste. I steady his hand as he feeds metal into metal. Martinus drags at the handle which lowers the iron grille outside, and as he puts his full weight behind it there is a cracking noise, and it finally turns. Somebody outside yells as the descending grille hits them. James picks up the horn and restores it to its place.

The battle is long and terrible. It is the worst I remember. Father stands at the window of the living hall with his antiquated longbow, pumping arrows into the enemy. We don’t bother with crossbows here at Barrowbeck. At this height and range they have no particular virtue, and are too slow to reload, though the Scots put them to terrifying use from below. The extra power sends their arrows high over our battlements where our henchmen crouch, firing back. Behind them some of the young men and women from the valley kneel in the shelter of the beacon turret, binding arrow points in linen, dipping them in hot tar and setting them alight before passing them forward for firing. We all have short swords and knives at our belts, in case hand-to-hand combat should become necessary. Verity and James operate the catapult. James hefts the stones and Verity pulls back the lever. Occasionally James just throws a particularly heavy stone over the battlements. Downstairs Leo stands watch on the outer door, ready to bar the inner door if needs be. In the kitchen Kate boils lard for pouring on the enemy, and Germaine carries it up the stairs in wooden pails, cursing under her breath as homesteaders get in her way and the stairs grow greasy underfoot.

Many of the valley homesteaders who herded their animals into the tower are now huddled in the lower rooms with them. There are so many this time that in places it is difficult to move. We have put James’s black cattle in the kitchen with Kate. All the animals are going mad with terror. Their lowing and whinnying and squealing fill our ears, and the stink of them rises up the stairs in great waves.

My job is to go round checking that all possible entry points are defended. I have not forgotten the rope scaling ladders which I saw earlier. As I reach the gatehouse on one of my patrols, I find Leo looking very grim.

“They’re trying to fire the door, lady.”

I look down, and see a curl of smoke feathering out of a narrow crack at the base of the door.

“It will never burn, Leo. Thank the Lord we treated it in time.”

“Mebbe best get Mistress Kate to soak some leather for under it.”

“I’ll do that.” I move towards the kitchen, then stop. “Did you hear that?”

We both listen. Leo’s mouth tightens. “Grappling irons. They’re trying to get up the walls.”

“They must have hooked into one of the windows. Quick, Leo. If you start looking I’ll get some of the others to go round too.” As I speak, a homesteader comes rushing down from the battlements to tell us the Scots are scaling the walls. There is a flurry of commotion from above. Leo and I quickly bar the inner door and I hurry through the arch to the kitchen. Here people from the valley are tearing up linen for arrows and bandages, feeding and tending their animals, soothing their babies. At the far end of the kitchen James’s black cows are imprisoned by the long table, knee deep in straw and dung, lowing and stamping and rolling their eyes. Over the fire another cauldron of fat is heating, suspended from the greasy, dripping rackencrock. Shiny white gobs of lard slide from the sides of the cauldron, sink in the melted oil, then surface again, smaller. I ask some of the homesteaders to soak strips of leather for under the door, and others to spread out through the tower and check the windows for grappling irons. In the end, though, I am the one who finds the first ugly metal hook.

I go into the men’s common room and find Henry dead on the floor, our hagbut toppled from its stand, gunpowder drizzling out of its barrel. Henry has a great wound to his head where the grappling iron hit him, before it lodged tightly under the stone sill of the window. Now it rattles and shakes as someone climbs the rope ladder beneath.

There is no time. A face appears at the window. It all happens too fast. The bright hazel eyes are wide and wild, the beardless mouth young and reckless. He would have hauled himself in, but in the shock of seeing me, his defences are down, and he is too slow.

I take his face in my hands and push. With an arching cry he somersaults away backwards, out of sight.

I send his hook spinning after him, but I cannot watch him, or it, hit the ground. Instead, I race from room to room searching for more hooks. Between us the homesteaders and I find three more. We dislodge them with pokers and shovels, sending them and their human burdens hurtling to earth.

Whether it is the hurling down of these foolhardy climbers that finally makes the Scots lose heart, I do not know, but by the time I reach the battlements again, they are in retreat. Father’s henchmen send a score of flaming arrows after them for good measure, but the fleeing Scots are quickly out of range, heading down the valley towards the sea, carrying their wounded, and leaving behind them twelve or fifteen ghastly, staring corpses on the bloody, ashen, pig-greasy turf.

None of us emerges until the following day. Double watch is kept all night. By next morning the whole area smells like a slaughterhouse, and a thick crust of black flies has formed on the outside of the tower. They creep in through the window slits and buzz in our faces, grotesquely unable to differentiate between the living and the dead. Outside, they swarm on the bodies. On the grass they move in patterns, forming and re-forming like fishermen’s nets on the sea.