Bernard Cornwell - The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond

'It's you, Dick!' Will Skeat exclaimed.

'Aye, it's me, Will,' Totesham said patiently. He saw that Skeat was dressed in mail and had a sword at his side, and he put a hand on his old friend's shoulder. 'Now, you're not going to be fighting tonight, Will, are you?'

'If there's going to be a scrap,' Skeat said, 'then I'd like to help.'

'Leave it to the young ones, Will,' Totesham urged, 'leave it to the young ones. You stay and guard the town for me. Will you do that?'

Skeat nodded and Totesham turned back to stare into the enemy's camp. It was impossible to tell which side was winning for the only troops he could see belonged to the enemy and they had their backs to him, though once in a while a flying arrow would flash a reflection of the firelight as proof that Sir Thomas's men still fought, but Totesham reckoned it was a bad sign that no troops were coming from the other fortresses to help Charles of Blois. It suggested the Duke did not need help, which in turn suggested that Sir Thomas Dagworth did and so Totesham leaned over the inner parapet. 'Open the gate!' he shouted.

It was still dark. Dawn was two hours or more away, yet the moon was bright and the fires in the enemy camp threw a garish light. Totesham hurried down the stairs from the ramparts while men pulled away the stone-filled barrels that had formed a barricade inside the gateway, then lifted the great locking bar that had not been disturbed in a month. The gates creaked open and the waiting men cheered. Totesham wished they had kept silent for he did not want to alert the enemy that the garrison was making a sortie, but it was too late now and so he found his own troop of men-at-arms and led them to join the stream of soldiers and towns-men who poured through the gate. Thomas went to the attack alongside Robbie and Sir Guillaume and his two men. Will Skeat, despite his promise to Totesham, had wanted to come with them, but Thomas had pushed him onto the ramparts and told him to watch the fight from there. 'You ain't fit enough, Will,' Thomas had insisted.

'If you say so, Tom,' Skeat had agreed meekly, then climbed the steps. Thomas, once he was through the gate, looked back and saw Skeat on the gate tower. He raised a hand, but Skeat did not see him or, if he did, could not recognize him. It felt strange to be outside the long-locked gates. The air was fresher, lacking the stench of the town's sewage. The attackers followed the road which ran straight for three hundred paces before vanishing beneath the palisade which protected the timber platforms on which Hellgiver and Widowmaker were mounted. That palisade was higher than a tall man and some of the archers were carrying ladders to get across the obstacle, but Thomas reckoned the palisades had been made in a hurry and would probably topple to a good heave. He ran, still clumsy on his twisted toes. He expected the crossbows to start at any moment, but no bolts came from Charles's earthworks; the enemy, Thomas sup-posed, were occupied with Dagworth's men.

Then the first of Totesham's archers reached the palisade and the ladders went up, but, just as Thomas had reckoned, a whole length of the heavy fence collapsed with a crash when men put their weight on the ladders. The banks and palisades had not been built to keep men out, but to shelter the crossbowmen, but those crossbowmen still did not know that a sortie had come from the town and so the bank was undefended. Four or five hundred men crossed the Callen palisade. Most were not trained soldiers, but townsmen who had been enraged by the enemy's missiles crashing into their houses. Their women and children had been maimed and killed by the trehuchets and the men of La Roche-Derrien wanted revenge, just as they wanted to keep the prosperity brought by the English occupation, and so they cheered as they swarmed into the enemy camp.

'Archers!' Totesham roared in a huge voice. 'Archers, to me! Archers!'

Sixty or seventy archers ran to obey him, making a line just to the south of the platforms where the two biggest trebuchets were set. The rest of the sortie were charging at the enemy who were no longer formed in their battle line, but had scattered into small groups who were so intent on completing their victory over Sir Thomas Dagworth that they had not been watching behind them. Now they turned, alarmed, as a feral roar announced the garrison's arrival. 'Kill the bastards!' a townsman shouted in Breton.

'Kill!' An English voice roared.

'No prisoners!' another man bellowed, and though Totesham, fearful for lost ransoms, called out that prisoners must be taken, no one heard him in the savage roar that the attackers made.

Charles's men-at-arms instinctively formed a line, but Totesham, ready for it, had gathered his archers and now he ordered them to shoot: the bows began their devil's music and the arrows hissed through the dark to bury themselves in mail and flesh and bone. The bowmen were few, but they shot at close range, they could not miss, and Charles's men cowered behind thei shields as the missiles whipped home, but the arrow easily pierced shields and the men-at-arms broke and scattered to find shelter among the tents. 'Hunt the down! Hunt them down!' Totesham released his archer to the kill. Less than a hundred of Sir Thomas Dagworth's me were still fighting and most of those were the archer who had gone to ground in the wagon park. Some of the others were prisoners, many were dead, while most were trying to escape across the earthworks and palisades, but those men, hearing the great roar behind them, turned back. Charles's men were scattered: many were still hunting down the remnants of the first attack and those who had tried to resist Totesham's sortie were either dead or fleeing into shadows. Totesham's men now struck the heart of the encampment with the savagery of a tempest. The townsmen were filled with rage. There was no subtlety in their assault, just a lust for vengeance as they swarmed past the two great trebuchets. The first huts they encountered were the shelters of the Bavarian engineers who, wanting no part of the hand-to-hand slaughter that was finishing off the survivors of Sir Thomas Dagworth's assault, had stayed by their billets and now died there. The townsmen had no idea who their victims were, only that they were the enemy, and so they were chopped down with axes, mattocks and hammers. The chief engineer tried to protect his eleven-year-old son, but they died together under a frenzy of blows, and meanwhile the English and Fleming men-atarms were streaming past. Thomas had shot his bow with the other archers, but now he sought Robbie whom he had last seen by the two big trebuchets. Widowmaker had been winched down ready to launch its first missile in the dawn and Thomas stumbled over a stout metal spike that protruded a yard from the beam and acted as an anchor for the sling. He cursed, because the metal had hurt his shins, then he climbed onto the trebuchet's frame and shot an arrow above the heads of the men slaughtering the Bavarians. He had been aiming at the enemy still clustered at the foot of the windmill and he saw a man fall there before the gaudy shields came up. He shot again, and realized that his wounded hands were doing what they had always done and were doing it well, and so he plucked a third arrow from the bag and drove it into a firelit shield painted with a white ermine, then the English men-at-arms and their allies were climbing the hill and obscuring his aim so he jumped down from the trebuchet and resumed his search for Robbie.

The enemy was defending the mill stoutly and most of Totesham's men had veered away into the tents where they had more hope of finding plunder. The townsmen, their Bavarian tormentors killed, were following with bloody axes. A man in plate armour stepped from behind a tent and cut at a man with a sword, folding him at the belly, and Thomas did not think, but put an arrow on the cord, drew and loosed. The arrow went through the slit in the enemy's visor as cleanly as if Thomas had been shooting on the butts at home and moon-glossed blood, glistening like a jewel, oozed from the visor slits as the man fell backwards onto the canvas.