Dragongate I

Eric crouched behind the breastwork they had thrown up in the night. ‘Any time now,’ he thought. His father was commanding the reserve sheltering behind the second ditch and dyke. Eric was in charge of the first. Something caught the corner of his eye. He looked down to his right; he realised that the sun had now crested the rim of the eastern hills; what he saw now was his shadow in the dust.

Incendiary missiles were hurled far over their heads into the deserted town behind them. That was a mere distraction, however, and of no purpose save to signal malice and burn wantonly. It was not what concerned Eric and his men. He coughed, and gratefully sipped some proffered water. It refreshed and soothed a dry throat and loosed a dry tongue from the roof of his mouth. He swallowed the water too quickly, with an involuntary gulp. Nerves, he reflected. He never had been much of one for the wait.

Then it came. A succession of crumps as stone smashed into distant stone to their front, sending up silent clouds of dust and fragments from behind the outer wall. Eric rose, loosening his limbs and walked up and down the line, exchanging greetings and encouraging remarks, checking that all was well. The noise of impacts continued, and Eric noted that they tended to concentrate on two or three places. Castle walls needed to be undermined or climbed, or their gates taken. Throwing rocks at them was a fool’s errand. These walls, however, were but a discouragement and, Eric knew, were not so stout that the great engines of the Enemy could beat them down. The Enemy brought overwhelming numbers, and, Eric had reasoned, whether by pounding out a breach with its trebuchets, mining, ramming the gate or escalade, the unsupported wall must soon fall and leave its defenders in a dangerous position. Yet doubt unbidden now assailed his conclusions. What if the wall did not fall? What if the Enemy instead pounded them on this exposed ground? Perhaps he had taken too much comfort from the earnest young woman in the mannish armour? He realised he was second-guessing his assessment of the previous day. He decided that doubts he could no longer act upon were unhelpful. He forced himself to concentrate on the wall. The first practicable breach would see an assault on that section, which the attackers would carry with surprised swiftness as they encountered the straw-stuffed sacking sentinels on the walls.

The minutes dragged slowly on and Eric began to see the ramparts of the outer wall crushed and brought low at places either side of the gate towers. The towers themselves still stood proud and inviolate in the early morning light. At one the red and green banner of the Vale still flew defiantly. From the other, the bold blue of Trenisslia. Proud, yet forlorn, thought Eric, and he regretted the need to leave them there. Their fate was to be torn down and trampled by their relentless foes, perhaps borne back in triumph to whatever dark captain led this sinister host.

***

In the still shadowy town, hidden, in the lee of the inner wall and its barbican, was the King with his lords and knights. They were arranged in three divisions, a centre and two wings, each several ranks deep. Lords and knights of both the Vale and of the Hidden Realm were clad boldly in the varied hues and symbols of their sigildry, save the King’s Household Knights, who, like him, wore the red of Dragongate. Behind them were the red-clad squires and Men-at-Arms also of Dragongate who had ridden with him to the Vale in the expectation of quite a different meeting. The Men-at-Arms of the Vale wore red and green, and those of the Hidden Realm, who had come also with the King, wore red and golden yellow. The shadows cast by the town still dulled their brilliance and cloaked their valorous glory. The drifts of smoke obscured them. Soon, though, they would stride forth upon the sunlit plain before them.

To the King’s right side, clad in the pale green of his House, Lord Warden Nerian. Behind them Sir Kendrick was stationed.

“It looks set to dawn a fine, bright, chill autumn day, my Lord Nerian,” remarked the King.

“Yes, my Liege,” the Warden replied, “though it will become hot enough by and by.”

“No doubt,” answered the King, “a day of hard choices and harder knocks, I deem.”

“My Liege,” ventured Nerian after a pause, “it is a great honour to be at your right hand, but I fear for the keeping of the castle, should anything befall us on the battlefield. The castle is the Vale’s, and your realm’s, last defence.”

“Not quite the last, Nerian,” replied the King, “and I believe that Lord Aldred has wit, strength and vigour enough to hold should we fail. Yet, I deem we are not doomed to fall this day.”

An incendiary missile passed over head and hit a building behind them. The King’s gloved hand brushed away the cooling fallen ash from his vambrace.

“Come!” said the King, turning to his Lords, “let us share a horn of mead ere we depart,” and he motioned to his cup bearer, who walked from one Lord’s stirrup to another, holding up the mead horn for each to drink gravely in turn.

“To Gryphonhold and the North!” cried the King.

“To Gryphonhold!” shouted the Lords in unison.

When they were done, the King turned to Earl Strang, “we will resume this formation once we are clear of the gate. My Lord Strang, take the right wing, if you would do me that honour. You will lead us through the gate.”

“Aye, Sire,” Strang replied. He bowed and spurred off to the right of the line and his retainers.

“My Lord Warian?” said the King, scanning for Warian’s white tower guarding its green field.

“My Lord,” said Warian, nudging his steed forward.

“You would honour me if you took charge of our left division and would follow me out of the gate.”

“My Lord,” bowed Warian, and departed.

“And, err,” coughed Nerian, “to what post does it please my Liege to send me?”

“Oh,” replied the King graciously, “I think you should stay right here by my side, where your actions will speak loudest.”

***

Eric was actually quite bored. He’d said that the outer wall would fall within an hour of dawn, and the precision and weight of stones that, bit by bit, pounded down the defenses, was work that could not be faulted. These were powerful engines, well manned and sited. The Enemy knew what it was doing. Yet, for all that, an hour spent watching the Enemy’s progress on the wall was a long hour, a slow hour, and a jarring hour. ‘Would they were done and coming for us at last,’ thought Eric. Then, in a pause between salvoes, he heard distant shouting beyond the gate. A drum struck up a rhythm and he next heard the first strike of a ram against the timbers of the gate. The sound was dulled and softened by distance, but he knew what it was. It was risky to attempt the gate while great rocks were striking the wall either side of it, but the rocks seldom went far astray, Eric noted, and the ram would have some shelter from splinters from the protruding gate towers. They had no shelter from the arrows and rocks they could expect from those manning the gate, yet no such defence would be encountered. Unexpectedly unmolested, the ram party would soon conclude that the walls were deserted.

***

Lord Aldred strode the battlements of the Gryphonhold. Age had not dimmed his sight, and the bright morning sunshine revealed all to him. He could well see the devastation to the outer wall. Lord Eric’s two thin lines of ditch and dyke looked puny in comparison to the masonry that was diminishing by the minute in clouds of silent dust. Lord Aldred could see what those crouched and wearied men in the plain could not see, and he was glad they could not see it. For Lord Aldred could see beyond the outer wall. The whole Vale, it seemed, was covered in rank upon rank of grey-clad warriors. No Lord, and few Kings, could muster so much, even for a short season. There were knights, and companies of men-at-arms, but most, it seemed, were a great quantity of ordinary soldiers. The harvest would be in throughout the Kingdoms, so that, while the granaries of Gryphonhold were full, anyone minded to assemble an army could now field all the men he could command. Equipping such a force was another matter. These were lightly, but well and uniformly, armed soldiers, not some peasant levy. Difficult, too, was provisioning them. He could see great cavalry reserves in the distance. Did they bring with them, across the Great Waste, the vast amounts of forage they would need, or had they stripped the lands behind them for fodder, lands from which no word had come? A man who could wield such a force could do whatever he wished before autumn rain came to bog him down, or winter snow to freeze him.

He heard a discrete cough beside him, his squire addressed him, “My lord, there is a Marcher Captain who would speak with you.”

“Bring him forward.”

“My Lord,” said the man, dressed modestly, yet with a very fine quality of clothing and gear in the pale green and dagger of the Warden, “may it please your Lordship, I am Forrada, Captain of the March Riders. My Lord Nerian bade me attend you and lend you what help I may.”

***

Eric now heard faraway war-horns blaring beyond the outer wall. His unseen foes were gathering. At various points he saw grey-clad men in steel helms struggling over the battlements. They had evidently thrown ladders up. He saw them now, like distracted rodents, scurrying back and forth along the rampart challenging his straw sentinels before contemptuously casting them down. Still the whump of flying boulders continued; one, crashing too close to the men on the wall, sent the nearest spinning off the parapet, their bodies limp as they hit the ground. Others screamed and writhed as stone splinters eviscerated them. The remaining men on the walls searched for a way down. More came clambering over the battlements. They fled further from the damaged sections of the wall, which were now dangerously low, like the savage bites of a great giant. Hurled stones crumped into the failing wall and great clouds of dust sprouted and drifted slowly off. All of a sudden there was a great cry of exultation from the Enemy and the ram pierced the doors and many shoulders heaved the shattered wood aside. One by one, in accelerating numbers, his enemies pushed through the splintered gates. They formed a phalanx between the towers and looked ready to move forward. Just then, Eric heard a whoosh of air behind him, and felt it briefly on the back of his neck, as a great rock sailed from the tall ramparts of Gryphonhold castle and smacked the enemy at the gates into pulp with a great plume of dust; grey, flecked with red. Eric felt a slight tremor in the earth reach him. Some seconds elapsed as the shock subsided. No more grey-clad enemies came through the gate. The enemy troops now dispersed along the battlements crouched in uncertainty, then the best bowmen the defenders had, who had lain in what shallow cover they could find or make in advance of Eric’s first dyke, stood slowly, nocked their arrows, and took deliberate aim at those Leopards on the exposed inner face of the battlements, and one by one, shot them down.

The check on the Enemy did not last long. More cheering followed from afar after more stone was knocked from the breaches either side of the gates. Men were seen clambering over first one, and then the other, in increasing numbers. More men emerged from the gate. More ladders brought more enemies over the battlements. Soon companies were forming inside the outer wall. More stones from the castle landed, to gouge great gaps in their ranks, yet many came forward, to escape that danger and to make way for the fresh arrivals who must form-up amid the failing stones. Eric’s bowmen loosed off a further flight of arrows – most finding a target – and then withdrew behind the dyke, helped up over the breastwork by their comrades. Rocks sent spinning overhead from the castle continued to distress and deplete the Enemy, but a large force was slowly and surely gathering in defiance of both rock fall and bow shot. Soon, they would be coming. A man a yard or so from Eric appeared to sit up and then lie back. ‘What foolishness?’ thought Eric, and was about to rebuke the man, when he realised that arrows and crossbow bolts were now falling amongst them and that the man had been shot in the chest and hurled upon his back.

“Down! Down!” cried Eric as each man sought to place himself behind the shelter of the turned earth rampart. Arrows seethed uselessly over their heads.

Eric needed to know what was happening, so, after a pause, he poked his head above the breastwork into the growing storm of arrows shot down from the outer wall’s rampart walk. He saw with satisfaction that the enemy archers did not have it all their own way and could not shoot with impunity; the castle relentlessly sent swift stones their way to smash or dislodge them. The dust obscured their aim. Eric saw, though, that many companies of grey soldiers, in their long, quilted coats, were established on the inside of the wall. Here and there, in mail, grey tabard and closed helm, were companies of knights and Men-at-Arms. Everywhere, from every man, insolent black-eyed yellow leopards stared at him, taunting it seemed. Then, with strident horn blasts, the grey horde came, tramping forward in grim unison. They were heralded by missiles cast at Eric’s dyke; word of the unexpected inner defences evidently having reached the enemy captain. Fire and stone landed around them, but few strikes were close. One fell short and took out some advancing Leopards. The hail of missiles soon abated as the Leopards closed the distance to the dyke. More stones fell from the castle, and behind the shelter of their earthen dyke, the bowmen of Trenisslia and the Vale began a new toll. Through the dust and out into the sharp autumn sunlight the Leopards came on regardless. Hundreds abreast and dozens deep, they marched relentlessly toward the dyke. Arrows ceased to whistle about Eric’s head, and he gave the order for his bowmen to have full rein, shooting in unison now, each volley thinning the Enemy’s ranks like an invisible scythe, yet each time the Enemy closed the gaps the arrows had made in its ranks and marched on.

At fifty yards from the dyke, the Leopards began to run. The thud of their feet became louder and faster, and the muffled but insistent jangle of belts, arms and equipment was heard. This was the point when a soldier’s fear gripped him; the full violence of the Enemy was imminent and the defenders, forced to remain impassive, knew they now had no escape from it. It had not rained for days, a boon for the harvest just gathered, for the North at least had had a good one, and dust was driven up from the earth at each heavy footfall. Still the defending bowmen took their toll. Still the ranks closed over the fallen and the Leopards came on. Bright now in the morning light their yellow leopard sigil, bright now glinted sword blades, spear tips and helms. The men themselves resolved into individuals; thick-set, with weathered faces, many bearded, now red with effort, wet with sweat, stained with dust and contorted in violence. Hellish they looked. Hellish they sounded. Their brazen horns called them on, their captains and knights shouted encouragement, goading them on. They growled and increased their pace.

Eric’s men had managed to dig a ditch some 3 to 4 feet deep and had thrown up an earthwork with the spoil to the same height. The bottom of the ditch was cut at an ankle-breaking angle, and it was sown with wooden staves, pared to wicked spikes, though nowhere as many as Eric would have wished. Into this ditch now came the Leopards. Some stumbled, or were pushed in by those behind, and landed to break their limbs or impale their bodies on the sharpened stakes. Others milled about, struggling against the sloping side of the ditch and rampart, which was just too high to let them pull themselves up. The defenders shot arrows at them, but soon there was too great a throng in the ditch to be eliminated by bow shot. As Leopards crawled or were pushed up to reach the earth rampart, the defenders reached over it and, with spears, spitted them. Blood began to pool at the base of the ditch, and the Leopards slipped and cursed in it. Yet, more Enemy came, and the struggle was relentless. The dead began to fill the ditch. In many places, the living, clambering over the corpses of their comrades, could now reach far enough to contest the rampart with its defenders. The defenders retained advantage, but the struggle to keep the Leopards from gaining the dyke was both terrible and ceaseless. Eric turned his attention to forming a reserve to cover his men when they could hold the rampart no longer. Thirty paces behind the line two men guarded a makeshift pole. It extended to some eighteen feet. A red bundle, attached to a halyard, lay at its foot. At a horn call, every third man withdraw from the rampart and ran to the rear, in line with the pole. There, thirty paces behind the line, the men withdrawn from the fight came together in groups. Eric oversaw the disposition of squads of men, which he and the captains now stationed at intervals along the length of the line. Satisfied, he returned to the rampart. Wherever he looked, he saw enemy soldiers clambering over the breast work, the earth of which was worn down in places by the repeated struggles over it. Each time a Leopard’s torso breasted the rampart, he was killed – speared or hacked – and pushed back into the ditch, but the numbers crowding the ramparts threatened to overwhelm the reduced garrison. Eric looked at the sun in the sky. By its position he judged that they had been fighting for no more than half an hour. His men looked exhausted already. They were struggling to hold their own. He must not leave a decision until it was too late, he warned himself. He turned north towards the Gryphonhold. He needed to know the King would come. He needed to know this King was ready.