The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) by Angus Donald Read Free Book Online Page B

duties, staring into the empty darkness hour after hour. One night when making my rounds of the sentries, I came across Christophe crouching down behind the parapet. His face was pressed against the wall but he was easily recognisable by the clumps of hair jutting out from under his helmet. I thought at first that he was asleep, a grave crime for a sentry, and a surprising lapse for a soldier as experienced as he. But when I came closer I saw he was on one knee picking with a dirty finger at the mortar between the massive stones of the curtain wall.
    ‘What are you doing, Christophe?’
    ‘It’s too dry, sir – look!’ He held out a handful of grey powdery sludge. ‘It hasn’t been mixed right.’
    By the light of my pine torch, I peered at the crumbly melange of sand and lime in his big paw.
    ‘Look at it, sir! It’s a bloody disgrace, sir, and no two ways about it. Too much sand, not enough water. A rush job, I’d say. Done on the cheap by some bandit who is no more a mason than he is a merman. If the Bretons ever got serious about taking this place, we wouldn’t last a week.’
    Christophe’s words alarmed me somewhat.
    ‘Is the whole curtain wall like this?’
    ‘No, sir, if it were, not a stone would be standing on another. It looks like a repair job. A shoddily done repair job. Just this section here, I reckon.’
    ‘You think if the Bretons were to bombard us it would fall?’
    ‘If they knew where to strike, sir. But that’s not the problem. The problem would be the mines. If they knew this mortar here was so weak they’d dig their bloody great mines right under our feet, and then there’d be the Devil to pay.’
    I thought about his verdict for a few moments.
    ‘Well, Christophe, the Bretons aren’t here, are they? They are still in Brittany, as far as we know. And even if they did come and besiege us they wouldn’t be able to tell that this section of wall was weak just by looking at it, would they?’
    He looked doubtful. ‘No, sir. Not unless they got close and looked real careful like at the joins. Or if some rascal were to tell them about it.’
    ‘Well, we’d better hope the Bretons don’t have your sharp eyes. And I think you’d better keep those eyes of yours on the outside of the walls from now on.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    I dined infrequently with the lord of Falaise, about once every ten days, but he seldom troubled me with his conversation. I went to Mass in the castle church every day, if my duties allowed, and practised my sword and shield work in the courtyard with Little John – a master of all weapons – as often as I could. I tried to write a tune or two for my vielle and wrote some very poor poetry, which I soon abandoned as unworthy of my voice. I kept to myself, engaging with the other knights of the castle only when duty demanded it and, in my leisure hours, eating, drinking and playing dice with the Wolves, or throwing quoits with Little John.
    It might sound as if life was dull – and, in a way, it was. But there was a tension in the castle that made rest difficult. A weight pressing down on us. It was like the feeling before a thunderstorm, an itchy uncomfortable heaviness. Battle loomed, everyone could feel it. You could smell it on the wind.
    From time to time we had reports from the east, where King Philip was still knocking away ponderously at the thick screen of castles guarding the marches. The French army would occasionally besiege a small castle, the sort of isolated tower only defended by a couple of knights and two dozen men-at-arms, eventually either taking it or being forced to withdraw when one of King John’s mobile relief forces arrived. But they made little progress. Château Gaillard stood like an iron mountain at the centre of the defences of eastern Normandy, a mighty rock occasionally lapped by the tides of Philip’s armies but never submerged, and as long as King John held that puissant bastion, Philip and his barons could not get a firm grip on