Bernard Cornwell - The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond

Charles began to ask, then paused, frowning.

'The badge of Armorica, your grace,' the Lord of Roncelets answered. Today, as Duke Charles circled the town, he was accompanied by his great lords so that the defenders would see their banners and be awed. Most were lords of Brittany; the Viscount Rohan and the Viscount Morgat rode close behind the Duke, then came the lords of Chåteaubriant and of Roncelets, Laval, Guingamp, Rouge, Dinan, Redon and Malestroit, all of them mounted on high-stepping destriers, while from Normandy the Count of Coutances and the lords of Valognes and Carteret had brought their retainers to do battle for the nephew of their King.

'I thought Armorica was dead,' one of the Norman lords remarked.

'He has a son,' Roncelets answered.

'And a widow,' the Count of Guingamp said, 'and she's the traitorous bitch flying the banner.'

'A pretty traitorous bitch, though,' the Viscount Rohan said, and the lords laughed for they all knew how to treat unruly but pretty widows.

Charles grimaced at their unseemly laughter. When we take the town,' he ordered coldly, 'the dowager Countess of Armorica will not be hurt. She will be brought to me.'

He had raped Jeanette once and he would rape her again, and when that pleasure was done he would marry her off to one of his men-at-arms who would teach her to mind her manners and to curb her tongue. Now he reined in his horse to watch as more banners were hung from the ramparts, all of them insults to him and his house. 'It's a busy garrison,' he said drily.

'Busy townspeople,' the Viscount Rohan snarled. 'Busy goddamn traitors.'

'Townsfolk?' Charles seemed puzzled. 'Why would the townsfolk support the English?'

'Trade,' Roncelets answered curtly.

'Trade?'

'They're becoming rich,' Roncelets growled, 'and they like it.'

'They like it enough to fight against their lord?' Charles asked in disbelief.

'A disloyal rabble,' Roncelets said dismissively.

'A rabble,' Charles said, 'that we shall have to impoverish.' He spurred on, only checking his horse when he saw another nobleman's banner, this one showing a Yale flourishing a chalice. So far he had not seen a single banner that promised a great ransom if its lord was captured, but this badge was a mystery. 'Whose is that?' he asked. No one knew, but then a slim young man on a tall black horse answered from the rear of the Duke's entourage. 'The badge of Astarac, your grace, and it belongs to an imposter.' The man who had answered had come from France with a hundred grim horsemen liveried in plain black and he was accompanied by a Dominican with a frightening face. Charles of Blois was glad to have the black-liveried men in his army, for they were all hard and experienced soldiers, but he did feel somewhat nervous of them. They were somehow too hard, too experienced.

'An imposter?' he repeated and spurred on. 'Then we do not need to worry ourselves about him.'

There were three gates on the town's landward side and a fourth, opening onto the bridge, facing the river. Charles planned to besiege each of those gates so that the garrison would be trapped like foxes with their earths stopped. 'The army,' he decreed when the lords returned to the ducal tent, which had been raised close to the windmill that stood on the slight hill to the east of the town, 'will be divided into four parts, and one part will face each gate.' The lords listened and a priest copied down the pronouncement so that history would have a true record of the Duke's martial genius. Each of the four divisions of Charles's army would outnumber any relief force that Sir Thomas Dagworth could gather, but, to make himself even more secure, Charles ordered that the four encampments were to surround themselves with earthworks so that the English would be forced to attack across ditches, banks, palisades and thorn hedges. The obstacles would conceal Charles's men from the archers and give his Genoese crossbowmen cover while they rewound their weapons. The ground between the four encampments was to be cleared of hedges and other obstacles to leave a bare wilderness of grass and marsh.

'The English archer,' Charles told his lords, 'is not a man who will fight face to face. He kills from a distance and he hides behind hedges, thus frustrating our horses. We shall turn that tactic against him.' The tent was big, white and airy, and the smell inside was of trampled grass and men's sweat. From beyond the canvas walls came the sound of dull thudding as the engineers used wooden mallets to assemble the biggest of the great siege engines.

'Our men,' Charles further decreed, 'will stay within their own defences. We shall thus make four fortresses that will stand at the four gates of the town and if the English send a relief force then those men will have to attack our fortresses. Archers cannot kill men they can-not see.' He paused to make sure those simple words were understood.

'Archers,' he said again, 'cannot kill men they cannot see. Remember that! Our crossbows will be behind banks of earth, we will be screened by hedges and hidden by palisades, and the enemy will be out in the open where they can be cut down.'

There were growls of agreement for the Duke made sense. Archers could not kill invisible men. Even the fierce Dominican who had come with the soldiers in black looked impressed.

The midday bells rang from the town. One, the loudest, was cracked and gave a harsh note. 'La Roche-Derrien,' the Duke continued, 'does not matter. Whether it falls or not is of little consequence. What matters is that we draw our enemy's army out to attack us. Dagworth will probably come to protect La Roche-Derrien. When he arrives we shall crush him and once he is broken then only the English garrisons will be left and we shall take them one by one until, at summer's end, all Brittany is ours.' He spoke slowly and simply, knowing it was best to spell out the campaign for these men who, though they were tough as rams, were not renowned as thinkers. 'And when Brittany is ours,' he went on, 'there will be gifts of land, of manors and of strongholds.' A much louder growl of approbation sounded and the listening men grinned for there would be more than land, manors and castles as the rewards of victory. There would be gold, silver and women. Lots of women. The growl turned into laughter as the men realized they were all thinking the same thing.

'But it is here' – Charles's voice called his audience to order – 'that we make our victory possible, and we do it by denying the English archer his targets. An archer cannot kill men he cannot see!' He paused again, looking at his audience and he saw them nodding as the simple truth of that assertion at last penetrated their skulls. 'We shall all be in our own fortress, one of four fortresses, and when the English army comes to relieve the siege they will attack one of those fortresses. That English army will be small. Fewer than a thousand men!

Suppose, then, that it begins by attacking the fort I shall make here. What will the rest of you do?'

He waited for an answer and, after a while, the Lord of Roncelets, as uncertain as a schoolboy giving a response to his master, frowned and made a suggestion. 'Come to help your grace?'

The other lords nodded and smiled agreement.

'No!' Charles said angrily. 'No! No! No!' He waited, making sure they had understood the simple word. 'If you leave your fortress,' he explained, 'then you offer the English archer a target. It is what he wants! He will want to tempt us from behind our walls to cut us down with his arrows. So what do we do? We stav behind our walls. We stay behind our walls.' Did they understand that? It was the key to victory. Keep the men hidden and the English must lose. Sir Thomas Dagworth's army would be forced to assault earth walls and thorn hedges and the crossbowmen would spit them on quarrels and when the English were so thinned that only a couple of hundred remained on their feet the Duke would release his men-at-arms to slaughter the remnant. 'You do not leave your fortresses,' he insisted, and any man who does will forfeit my generosity.' That threat sobered the Duke's listeners. 'If even one of your men leaves the sanctuary of the walls,'

Charles continued, 'we shall make sure that you will not share in the distribution of land at the end of the campaign. Is that plain, gentle-men? Is that plain?'

It was plain. It was simple.

Charles of Blois would make four fortresses to oppose the four gates of the town and the English, when they came, would be forced to assault those newly made walls. And even the smallest of the Duke's four forts would have more defenders than the English had attackers, and those defenders would be sheltered, and their weapons would be lethal, and the English would die and so Brittany would pass to the House of Blois. Cleverness. It would win wars and make reputations. And once Charles had shown how to defeat the English here he would defeat them through all France. Because Charles dreamed of a crown heavier than Brittanv's ducal coronet. He dreamed of France, but it must begin here, in the flooded fields about La Roche-Derrien, where the English archer would be taught his place.

In hell.

The nine siege engines were all trebuchets, the largest of them capable of throwing a stone weighing twice the weight of a grown man for almost three hundred paces. All nine had been made at Regensburg in Bavaria and the senior engineers who accompanied the gaunt machines were all Bavarians who understood the intricacies of the weapons. The two biggest had throwing beams over fifty feet long and even the two smallest, which were placed on the far bank of the Jaudy to threaten the bridge and its barbican, had beams thirty-six feet long.

The biggest two, which were named Hellgiver and Widowmaker, were placed at the foot of the hill on which the windmill stood. In essence each was a simple machine, merely a long beam mounted on an axle like a giant's balance or a child's seesaw, only one end of the see-saw was three times longer than the other. The shorter end was weighted with a huge wooden box that was filled with lead weights, while the longer end, which actually threw the missile, was attached to a great windlass which drew it down to the ground and so raised the ten tons of lead counterweights. The stone missile was placed in a leather sling some fifteen feet long, which was attached to the longer arm. When the beam was released so that the counterweight slammed down, the longer end whipped up into the sky and the sling whipped even faster and the boulder was released from the sling's leather cradle to curve through the sky and crash down onto its target. That much was simple. What was hard was to keep the mechanism greased with tallow, to construct a winch strong enough to haul the long beam down to the ground, to make a container strong enough to thump down again and again and not spill the ten tons of lead weights and, trickiest of all, to fashion a device strong enough to hold the long beam down against the weight of the lead vet capable of releasing the beam safely. These were the matters on which the Bavarians were experts and for which they were paid so generously.

There were many who said that the Bavarians' expertise was redundant. Guns were much smaller and hurled their missiles with greater force, but Duke Charles had applied his intelligence to the comparison and decided on the older technology. Guns were slow and prone to explosions that killed their expensive gunners. They were also painfully slow because the gap between the missile and the gun's barrel had to be sealed to contain the powder's force and so it was necessary to pack the cannon ball about with wet loam, and that needed time to dry before the powder could be ignited, and even the most skilful gunners from Italy could not fire a weapon more than three or four times a day. And when a gun fired it spat a ball weighing only a few pounds. While it was true that the small ball flew with a velocity so great that it could not even be seen, nevertheless the older trebuchets could throw a missile of twenty or thirty times the weight three or four times in every hour. La Roche-Derrien, the Duke decided, would be hammered the oldfashioned way, and so the little town was surrounded by the nine trebuchets. As well as Hellgiver and Widowmaker, there was Stone-Hurler, Crusher, Gravedigger, Stonewhip, Spiteful, Destroyer and Hand of God.

Each trebuchet was constructed on a platform made of wooden beams and protected by a palisade that was tall and stout enough to stop any arrow. Some of the peasants who had joined the army were trained to stand close to the palisades and be ready to throw water over any fire arrows that the English might use to burn the fences down and so expose the trebuchets' engineers. Other peasants dug the ditches and threw up the earthen banks that formed the Duke's four fortresses. Where possible they used existing ditches or incorporated the thick blackthorn hedges into the defences. They made barriers of sharpened stakes and dug pits to break horses' legs. The four parts of the Duke's army ringed themselves with such defences and, day after day, as the walls grew and the trebuchets took shape from the pieces transported on the wagons, the Duke had his men practise forming their lines of battle. The Genoese crossbo«men manned the half-finished walls while behind them the knights and men-at-arms paraded on foot. Some men grumbled that such practices were a waste of time, but others saw how the Duke intended to fight and they approved. The English archers would be baffled by the walls, ditches and palisades and the crossbows would pick them off one by one, and finally the enemy would be forced to attack across the earth walls and the flooded ditches to be slaughtered by the waiting men-at-arms.

After a week of back-breaking work the trebuchets were assembled and their counterpoise boxes had been filled with great pigs of lead. Now the engineers had to demonstrate an even subtler skill, the art of dropping their great stones one after the other onto the exact same spot of the wall so that the ramparts would be battered away and a path opened into the town. Then, once the relieving army was defeated, the Duke's men could assault La Roche-Derrien and put its treasonous inhabitants to the sword. The Bavarian engineers selected their first stones carefully, then trimmed the length of the slings to affect the range of their machines. It was a fine spring morn-ing. Kestrels soared, buttercups dotted the fields, trout were rising to the mayflies, the wild garlic was blossom-ing white and pigeons flew through the new leaves of the green woods. It was the loveliest time of the year and Duke Charles, whose spies told him that Sir Thomas Dagworth's English army had yet to leave western Brittany, anticipated triumph. The Bavarians,' he told one of his attendant priests, may begin.'

The trebuchet named Hellgiver shot first. A lever was pulled that extracted a thick metal pin from a staple attached to the long arm of Hellgiver's beam. Ten tons of lead dropped with a crash that could be heard in Treguier, the long arm whipped up and the sling whirled at the arm's end with the sound of a sudden gale and a boulder arched into the sky. It seemed to hang for a moment, a great stone lump in the kestrel-haunted sky, and then, like a thunderbolt, it fell.

The killing had begun.

The first stone, thrown by Hellgiver, crashed through the roof of a dyer's house close to St Brieuc's church and took off the heads of an English man-at-arms and the dyer's wife. A joke went through the garrison that the two bodies were so crushed together by the boulder that they would go on coupling throughout eternity. The stone which killed them, a rock about the size of a barrel, had missed the eastern ramparts by no more than twenty feet and the Bavarian engineers made adjustments to the sling and the next stone thumped just short of the wall, spewing up filth and sewage from the ditch. The third boulder hit the wall plumb and then a monstrous thump announced that Widosvmaker had just shot its first missile and one after the other Stone-Hurler, Crusher, Gravedigger, Stonewhip, Spiteful, Destroyer and Hand of God added their contributions. Richard Totesham did his best to blunt the assault of the trebuchets. It was evident that Charles was attempting to make four breaches, one on each side of the town, and so Totesham ordered vast bags to be sewn and stuffed with straw and the bags were placed to cushion the walls, which were further protected by baulks of timber. Those precautions served to slow the process of making the breaches, but the Bavarians were sending some of their missiles deep into the town and nothing could be done to shield the houses from those plunging boulders. Some townsfolk argued that Tote-sham should construct a trebuchet of his own and try to break the enemy's machines, but he doubted there was time and instead a giant crossbow was fashioned from ships' spars that had been brought upstream from Treguier before the siege began. Treguier was now deserted for, lacking walls, its inhabitants had either come to La Roche-Derrien for shelter, fled to sea in their ships or gone over to Charles's camp.