No, he was not of the garrison, he had no right to take a hand in this quarrel upon either side. Better go and see what could be done for the burned.
Perhaps half an hour later, from among the pallets in the hall, with the stench of burned woollens and flesh in his nostrils, he heard the timbers of the gallery break free and fall, creaking as the last fibres parted, flaring with a windy roar as they fell, fanned by their flight, to crash under the tower and settle, in a series of spitting collapses, against the stones.
Philip came down some time later, blackened to the brow and parched from breathing smoke, and stayed only to see how his wounded fared. He had burns of his own, but paid them little attention.
“They will try and breach the wall there before morning,” he said.
“It will still be too hot,” objected Cadfael, without pausing in anointing a badly burned arm.
“They’ll venture. Nothing but wood, a few hours of the night’s cold. And they want a quick ending. They’ll venture.”
“Without a sow?” They could hardly have hauled a whole stout wooden shelter, long enough to house and cover a team of men and a heavy ram, all the way from Gloucester, Cadfael surmised.
“They’ll have spent most of the day building one. They have plenty of wood. And with half the brattice on that side down, we’ll be vulnerable.” Philip settled his mail over a bruised and scorched shoulder, and went back to his guardwalk to watch out the night. And Cadfael, drawing breath at length among the injured, guessed at the approach of midnight, and made a brief but fervent office of Matins.
Before first light the assault came, without the precaution of the shelter a sow would have afforded, but with the added impetus of speed to balance that disadvantage. A large party issued from the woods and made a dash downhill for the wall, and though the mounted espringales cut some furrows in their ranks, they reached the foot of the tower, just aside from the glowing remnants of the fire. Cadfael heard from the hall the thudding of their ram against the stone, and felt the ground shake to the blows. And now, for the want of that length of gallery, the defenders were forced to expose themselves in order to hoist stones over the embrasures, and toss down oil and flares to renew the blaze. Cadfael had no knowledge of how that battle must be going; he had more than enough to do where he was. Towards morning Philip’s second in command, a border knight from near Berkeley named Guy Camville, touched him on the shoulder, rousing him out of a half-doze of exhaustion, and told him to get away into comparative quiet in the keep, and snatch a couple of hours of honest sleep, while it was possible.
“You’ve done enough, brother,” he said heartily, “in a quarrel that’s been none of your making.”
“None of us,” said Cadfael ruefully, clambering dazedly to his feet, “has ever done enough, or never in the right direction.”
The ram was withdrawn, and the assault party with it, before full light, but by then they had made a breach, not through the curtain wall, but into the base of the tower. A fresh approach by full daylight was too costly to contemplate without cover, but the besiegers were certainly hard at work by now building a sow to shelter the next onslaught, and if they contrived to get branches and brushwood inside they might be able to burn their way through into the ward. Not, however, without delaying their own entry in any numbers until the passage was cool enough to risk. Time was the only thing of which they lacked enough. Philip massed his own mangonels along the threatened south-western wall, and set them to a steady battering of the edge of the woodland, to hamper the building of the sow, and reduce the number of his enemies, or confine them strictly to cover until nightfall. Cadfael observed all, tended the injured along with every other man who could be spared for the duty, and foresaw an ending very soon. The odds were too great. Weapons spent here within, every javelin, every stone, could not be replaced. The empress had open roads and plenteous wagons to keep her supplied. No one knew it better than Philip. In the common run of this desultory war she would not have concentrated all this fury, costly in men and means, upon one solitary castle like La Musarderie. In just one particular she justified the expenditure, without regard to those she expended: her most hated enemy was here within. No cost was too great to provide her his death. That also he knew, none better. It had hardly needed telling; yet Cadfael was glad that Yves had risked his liberty, and possibly his own life, to bring the warning, and that it had been faithfully delivered.
While the attackers waited for night to complete the breach, and the defenders laboured to seal it, all the siege engines on the ridge resumed their monotonous assault, this time dividing their missiles between the foot of the tower and a new diversion, raising their trajectory to send stones and butts of iron fragments and tar casks over the wall into the ward. Twice roofs were fired within, but the fires were put out without great damage. The archers on the walls had begun selecting their quarries with care, to avoid profitless expense in shafts from a dwindling store. The engineers managing the siege machines were their main target, and now and again a good shot procured a moment’s respite, but there were so many practised men up there that every loss was soon supplied.
They set to work damping down all the roofs within the curtain wall, and moved their wounded into the greater safety of the keep. There were the horses to be thought of, as well as the men. If the stables caught they would have to house the beasts in the hall. The ward was full of purposeful activity, unavoidably in the open, though the missiles kept flying over the wall, and to be in the open there was one way of dying.
It was in the dark that Philip emerged from the breached tower, with all done there that could be done against the inevitable night assault; the breach again barricaded, the tower itself sealed, locked and barred. If the enemy broke in there, for hours at least they would be in possession of nothing beyond. Philip came forth last, with the armourer’s boy beside him, fetcher and carrier for the work of bolting iron across the gap in the wall. The armourer and one of his smiths had climbed to the guardwalk, to ensure there should be no easy way through at that level. The boy came out on Philip’s arm, and was restrained from bolting at once for the door of the keep. They waited close under the wall a moment, and then crossed at a brisk walk.
They were halfway across when Philip heard, as every man heard, the howling, whistling flight as perhaps the last missile of the day hurtled over the wall, black, clumsy and murderous, and crashed on the cobbles a few feet before them. Even before it had struck he had caught the boy in his arms, whirled about with no time to run, and flung them both down on the ground, the boy face-down beneath him.
The great, ramshackle wooden crate crashed at the same moment, and burst, flinging bolts and twisted lumps of iron, furnace cinder, torn lengths of chain-mail, for thirty yards around in all directions. The weary men of the garrison shrank into the walls on every side, hugging their cowering flesh until the last impact had passed in shuddering vibration round the shell of the ward, and died into silence.
Philip FitzRobert lay unmoving, spread along the cobbles, head and body distorted by two misshapen lumps of iron of the empress’s gift. Under him the terrified boy panted and hugged the ground, heaving at breath, undamaged.
They took him up, the trembling boy hovering in tears, and carried him into the keep and into his own austere chamber, and there laid him on his bed, and with difficulty eased him of his mail and stripped him naked to examine his injuries. Cadfael, who came late to the assembly, was let in to the bedside without question. They were accustomed to him now, and to the freedom with which their lord had accepted him, and they knew something of his skills, and had been glad of his willingness to use them on any of the household who came by injury. He stood with the garrison physician, looking down at the lean, muscular body, defaced now by a torn wound in the left side, and the incisive dark face just washed clean of blood. A lump of waste iron from a furnace had struck him in the side and surely broken at least two ribs, and a twisted, discarded lance-head had sliced deep through his dark hair and stuck fast in the left side of his head, its point at the temple. Easing it free without doing worse damage took them a grim while, and even when it was out, there was no knowing whether his skull was broken or not. They swathed his body closely but not too tightly, wincing at the short-drawn breaths that signalled the damage within. Throughout, he was deep beneath the pain. The head wound they cleansed carefully, and dressed. His closed eyelids never quivered, and not a muscle of his face twitched.