Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

I was waiting with Sigobert and his attack group of horsemen, sixty strong, just behind the first fringe of trees across from the bridge, less than a hundred paces from the edge of the ditch. As the youngest there, I had better night vision than anyone else, and as soon as I saw the top of the bridge begin to move I warned Sigobert, who gave the signal to advance. Our whole group surged forward on a single broad front and was already reshaping itself into something resembling an arrowhead formation as we moved. By the time the bridge end came to rest on the ground we were less than thirty paces distant and advancing at full gallop in a column of horsemen three abreast. The thunder of our hooves on the timbers of the bridge would have awakened the entire garrison at that point, had they not already been fighting for their lives.

We charged across the bridge and wheeled hard to the right, into the passageway behind the curtain wall that led to the main gates, and we were not a moment too soon in getting there. Gunthar had evidently hired some exceptionally skilled people with his levies of mercenaries, and under their leadership the garrison troops had rallied strongly and mounted a concerted attack on the few of our men who had been left holding the gates against our arrival. Our fighters were heavily outnumbered and faring poorly when we reached them, but the sudden arrival of a charge of heavy horsemen was more than our enemies were prepared to stomach and they turned and fled back into the castle, leaving the gates in our possession. Mere moments later, it seemed, we heard the roar as our own infantry followed us through the gateway, under the leadership of Chulderic, and shortly after that the enemy surrendered and the castle was ours. My hand, I discovered, was sore from gripping the hilt of my sword too tightly, but I had not swung a single blow at anyone from start to finish of the fight.

The total cost to us in storming the castle had been one man killed and twenty wounded, and none of the wounded men was expected to die. This would normally have been cause for celebration, but our situation was not one in which to rejoice. Samson, concerned about the Lady Vivienne and her companions, immediately dispatched a trio of messengers by different routes to assure his mother that all was well, that the castle was in our hands and that she and her company would be brought back in safety as soon as it was practicable. What that really meant was that the Queen and her ladies must resign themselves to remaining in the small valley behind its impassable mere for several more days until the tactical situation became less fluid and the dangers of their being abducted along the way had lessened to the point of being acceptable.

Samson, as a loving and dutiful son, originally wanted to take the tidings to his mother in person, but Brach had objected, claiming that duty for himself, and their clash of wills might have escalated had not Clodio announced bluntly that neither one of them should go on that mission unless they were prepared to be stranded outside the walls for a long time, in the event that Gunthar’s forces returned to the attack. Both of them were too big, he said, to reenter the castle through the caverns, and he reminded them of the small stature of the men he had picked earlier for the raid. There were places in the caverns, he said, that were simply too narrow for anyone as big as Samson to get through, even without armor, and Brach was half again as large as Samson.

Their compromise was to send three of the smaller men to carry news to the Queen, with a promise to return and rescue her later, along with her people. Should Gunthar move against us in the meantime, the messengers were instructed to return to the red-wall caves to await Clodio, who would lead them back through the caverns.

That task attended to, the princely brothers sought a place to sleep, while I, in acknowledgment of my lowly status as both a junior and a newcomer, took over the post of commander of the guard for the remainder of that night.

Within the week that followed we had settled into a routine of boredom that was reinforced by the swift realization that our success in capturing the castle had effectively placed us under siege. Gunthar’s forces had begun moving into position outside our wall by dawn on the morning following our attack, and a permanent detachment remained there afterward, a large body of men whose primary purpose was to prevent us from lowering the drawbridge and leaving the castle. Most of them were bowmen, and by and large they remained out of our sight, safe behind the screen of trees that began about a hundred paces from the approach to the drawbridge … which raised the question of whether or not they were there, or whether they had merely convinced us that they were there, while in fact they were elsewhere and we had been tricked into imprisoning ourselves.

We put that notion to the test twice, sending out mounted parties to test the enemy’s responses, and on each occasion, Gunthar’s bowmen simply moved out of the trees into the open as soon as they heard the bridge being lowered and then stood there, picking their targets and launching arrows, as quickly as they could pull and aim, reveling in their own lethal accuracy and in the knowledge that no living soul could reach them.

The dilemma that next arose to perplex me was founded in the fact that I considered myself even then to be a horse-warrior ahead of everything else. The original attacking party had come in on foot through the caverns, arriving on the lowest levels of the central fortifications and making their way up by very dark and narrow stairways from floor to floor until they were able to emerge into the courtyard. That, in my mind, precluded any possibility of even considering the route as an exit for cavalry. An extraordinary horse may climb up stairs, blindfolded or blinkered and led by a trusted groom or rider, perhaps, if the conditions are right and the stairs are shallow enough, but no horse will descend a steep and narrow stairwell into darkness. I had to wonder, then, could we not enter the caverns with our horses from the other side, through the red-wall caves?

I went directly to find Clodio, never doubting that I could enlist his help.

Later that night, after a long and sometimes impassioned discussion in which he and I came to know each other far better than we had before, Clodio took me into the caverns for the first time and showed me the route to the red-wall caves. I had not seen what he did to cause the door to open, but when it did, it opened silently, swinging backward away from us and up with only the barest whisper of stone caressing stone as it rose. As soon as we stepped through into the space beyond, he grasped me by the arm and pulled me to one side, out of the way of the door, and told me to stand absolutely still. I stood motionless in the dark, listening to the silence and hearing the faint sound of the door closing again, and only then did I begin, very gradually, to grow aware that it was nowhere near as silent down there as I had first thought. I could hear water dripping, from many places, and the sounds the drops made as they landed varied from flat, dead-sounding slaps to musical, echoing and rotund plops where the drops were obviously falling into pools of standing water.

There were other sounds, too, that I could hear but not identify, mainly because they were obscured by the noises my companions was making. Listening, I could tell that he was moving about, and it sounded as though he was rearranging his clothing. But then there came a glow, the merest hint of light that spread quickly, and then I saw the shape of Clodio’s face as he bent low toward a clay firebox enclosed in a small cage of wood that he must have carried beneath his robe. He was kneeling on the ground close by my right side, and the glow had been revealed when he removed the lid of the box. He began to blow gently on the glowing embers and to feed them with small, teased bunches of fine, dried grass. Within moments a small flame sprang into being and he fed it more fuel. In the growing light I saw a store of twigs and small kindling set against the wall, and beside them an iron brazier and what looked like a small barrel filled with heavy sticks.