The activity was almost desultory for the first hours, but one or two of the attacking archers had found a mark. Only minor grazes as yet, where some unwary youngster had shown himself for a moment between the merlons. No doubt some of these practised bowmen on the walls had also drawn blood among the fringes of the trees on the ridge. They were no more than feeling their way as yet.
Then the first stone crashed short against the curtain wall below the brattice, and rebounded without more damage than a few flying chips of masonry, and the siege engines were rolled out to the edge of cover, and began to batter insistently at the defences. They had found their range, stone after heavy stone howled through the air and thudded against the wall, low down, concentrating on this one tower, where Yves had detected signs of previous damage and repair. This, thought Cadfael, would continue through the day, and by night they might try to get a ram to the walls, and complete the work of battering a way through. In the meantime they had lost at any rate one of their engineers, who had ventured into view too clearly in his enthusiasm. Cadfael had seen him dragged back into the trees.
He looked out over the high ground that hid the village of Greenhamsted, probing for movement among the trees, or glimpses of the hidden machines. This was a battleground in which he should have had no part. Nothing bound him to either the besiegers or the besieged, except that both were humankind like himself, and could bleed. And he had better by far be making himself useful in the one way he could justify here. But even as he made his way along the guardwalk, sensibly from merlon to merlon like an experienced soldier with a proper regard for his own skin, he found himself approving Philip’s deployment of his bowmen and his espringales, and the practical way his garrison went about their defence.
Below in the hall the chaplain and an elderly steward were attending to such minor injuries as had so far been suffered, bruises and cuts from flying splinters of stone spattered high by the battering of the wall, and one or two gashes from arrows, where an arm or a shoulder had been exposed at the edge of the protecting merlons. No graver harm; not yet. Cadfael was all too well aware that before long there would be. He added himself to the relieving force here, and took comfort in the discovery that for some hours he had little enough to do. But before noon had passed it became clear that FitzGilbert had his orders to bring to bear upon La Musarderie every means of assault he had at his disposal, to assure a quick ending.
One frontal attack upon the gatehouse had been made early, under cover of the continued impact of stone upon stone under the tower to westward, but the espringales mounted above the gate cut a swathe with their javelins through the ranks of the attackers, and they were forced to draw off again and drag their wounded with them. But the alarm had distracted some degree of attention from the main onslaught, and diverted a number of the defenders to strengthen the gate-towers. The besiegers on the ridge took the opportunity to run their heaviest mangonel forward clear of the trees, and let loose all the heaviest stones and cases of iron rubble at the defences, raising their aim to pound incessantly at the timber brattice, more vulnerable by far than the solid masonry of the wall. From within, Cadfael felt the hall shaken at every impact, and the air vibrating like impending thunder. If the attackers raised their range yet again, and began lobbing missiles over among the buildings within the ward, they might soon have to transfer their activities and their few wounded into the rocklike solidity of the keep.
A young archer came down dangling a torn arm in a bloody sleeve, and sat sweating and heaving at breath while the cloth was cut away from his wound, and the gash cleaned and dressed.
“My drawing arm,” he said, and grimaced. “I can still loose the espringale, though, if another man winds it down. A great length of the brattice is in splinters, we nearly lost a mangonel over the edge when the parapet went, but we managed to haul it in over the embrasure. I leaned out too far, and got this. There’s nothing amiss with Bohun’s bowmen.”
The next thing, Cadfael thought, smoothing his bandage about the gashed arm, will be fire arrows into the splintered timbers of the gallery. The range, as this lad has proved to his cost, is well within their capabilities, there is hardly any deflecting wind, indeed by this stillness and the feel of the air there will be heavy frost, and all that wood will be dry as tinder.
“They have not tried to reach the wall under there?” he asked.
“Not yet.” The young man flexed his bandaged arm gingerly, winced, and shrugged off the twinge, rising to return to his duty. “They’re in haste, surely, but not such haste as all that. By night they may try it.”
In the dusk, under a moonless sky with heavy low cloud, Cadfael went out into the ward and climbed to the guardwalk on the wall, and peered out from cover at the splintered length of gallery that sagged outward drunkenly in the angle between tower and curtain wall. Within the encircling woodland above there were glimmerings of fires, and now and then as they flared they showed the outlines of monstrous black shapes that were the engines of assault. Distance diminished them into elusive toys, but did not diminish their menace. But for the moment there was a lull, almost a silence. Along the wall the defenders emerged cautiously from the shelter of the merlons to stare towards the ridge and the village beyond. The light was too far gone for archery, unless someone offered an irresistible target by stepping full into the light of a torch.
They had their first dead by then, laid in the stony cold of the chapel and the corridors of the keep. There could be no burying.
Cadfael walked the length of the wall between the towers, among the men braced and still in the twilight, and saw Philip there at the end of the walk, where the wreckage of the brattice swung loose from the angle of the tower. Dark against the dark, still in mail, he stood sweeping the rim of the trees for the gleams of fire and the location of the mangonels the empress had brought against him.
“You have not forgotten,” said Cadfael, close beside him, “what I told you? For I told you absolute truth.”
“No,” said Philip, without turning his head, “I have not forgotten.”
“Nor disbelieved it?”
“No,” he said, and smiled. “I never doubted it. I am bearing it in mind now. Should God forestall the empress, there will be provision to make for those who will be left.” And then he did turn his head, and looked full at Cadfael, still smiling. “You do not want me dead?”
“No,” said Cadfael, “I do not want you dead.”
One of the tiny fires in the distance, no bigger than a first spark from the flint, burned up suddenly into a bright red glow, and flung up around it shadows of violent movement, a little swirl of just perceptible chaos in the night and the woodland, where the branches flared in a tracery like fine lace, and again vanished. Something soared into the darkness hissing and blazing, a fearful comet trailing a tail of flames. One of the young archers, ten yards from where Cadfael stood, was staring up in helpless fascination, a mere boy, unused to siegecraft. Philip uttered a bellow of alarm and warning, and launched himself like a flung lance, to grasp the boy round the body and haul him back with him into the shelter of the tower. The three of them dropped together, as men were dropping under every merlon along the wall, pressed into the angle of wall and flagged walk. The comet, spitting sparks and flashes of flaming liquid, struck the centre of the length of damaged gallery, and burst, hurling burning tar from end to end of the sagging timbers, and splashing the guardwalk through every embrasure. And instantly the battered wood caught and blazed, the flames leaping from broken planks and splintered parapet all along the wall.
Philip was on his feet, hauling the winded boy up with him.
“Are you fit? Can you go? Down with you, never mind fighting it. Go get axes!”
There would be burns and worse to deal with afterwards, but this was more urgent now. The young man went scrambling down into the ward in frantic haste, and Philip, stooping under the shelter of the wall, went running the length of the blaze, hoisting his men up, despatching those worst damaged down to take refuge below and find help. Here the brattice would have to be hacked free, before it spread the fire within, flashed into the woodwork of the towers, spat molten tar over the ward. Cadfael went down the steps with a moaning youth in his arms, nursing him down stair by stair, his own scapular swathed round the boy’s body to quench the lingering smouldering of cloth and the smell of scorched flesh. There were others below waiting to receive him, and more like him, and hoist them away into cover. Cadfael hesitated, almost wishing to go back. On the guardwalk Philip was hacking away the blazing timbers among his remaining guards, wading through lingering puddles of flaming tar to reach the beams that still clung to their shattered hold upon the wall.