It didn’t.
We had two siege towers of our own, full of the best archers in the army. Without them, the whole attempt would have been suicidal. Even so, with thirty ladders going up against thirty different points, and the flower of English archery sweeping the catwalk it was still horrible.
I was perhaps the fifteenth or twentieth man on my ladder. Other men carried it forward and put it up against the wall — it had massive supports, and was very difficult to overturn. We stood in a neat file behind the ladder, waiting for the word to go, while the crossbow bolts and rocks from the walls clanged off men’s helmets or killed them stone dead.
I didn’t know where to look. For the first time in my life, I thought of running away. One of the Earl’s hobilars died at my feet, having received an unlucky bolt down through the crown of his kettle helmet. Blood came out of every opening in his body, and he thrashed like a bug on a pin. I raised my eyes and stepped back so as not to see him, and instead I saw an archer fall right off the siege tower behind me, and his head hit a rock in the road and split open like a melon. Bits of him decorated my brigantine.
Just beyond the corpse, I saw Richard Beauchamp, whose elbow couldn’t yet be healed, Tom Amble and half a dozen of my former tormenters. Out here in the open at the base of the wall, we exchanged a glance that said it all.
Here, the only enemy was the wall.
Richard shrugged, dismissing me, and went back to watching the wall.
Back behind the siege towers stood the Earl, surrounded by his best men. They weren’t hanging back. Far from it. They were waiting for a lodgement — for one of the ladders to score a success.
Then we heard a shout. I turned and saw the first knight on our ladder. He was about twenty-five, in fine armour, a heavy brigantine over good mail, with plate legs and arms and a basinet with a pig’s snout, all shining steel from Italy, and over his red velvet brigantine he had a lady’s gown. Probably his fiancee’s. Such chivalric games were, and are, as much a part of war as raping French farm girls. He wore the gown to show his courage, to flaunt her beauty.
He ran to the ladder. I’d seen him before, but in that moment I realized that he was my de Vere cousin.
He ran to the foot of the ladder and past it.
He got under the ladder and began to climb the underside, hand over hand. In full armour. By God, he was strong, and noble. And fast.
It had never occurred to me until that moment to climb the underside of a ladder.
A man-at-arms a few men ahead of me ran to the underside and joined him, and before my head could take control, I was with them. He was, in that moment, my new hero. He was the man I wanted to be.
The first five rungs were easy.
The thing is that on the underside of a ladder, you cannot rest, you have to keep climbing, and in a brigantine and helmet, all your weight is in the wrong places. Everything hangs from your arms. Your legs don’t take as much of your weight as they do on top of the ladder.
The strangest thing happened to me about ten rungs up. I suddenly wondered how the hell I was going to get over the wall at the top, since I was under the ladder. It almost panicked me. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to do it, and I was now halfway up.
Down on the ground, men were starting up the front of the ladder.
A big stone came and plucked the first two men off, sending them crashing to the ground. That would have been me if I wasn’t on the underside. Even as it was, the stone made the ladder bounce.
Another rung.
Another.
How was I going to get around the ladder to go up the wall?
Above me, my cousin, the knight in the lady’s gown, and the other climber were faster than I. I watched the young knight.
God, he was good.
Just short of the base of the crenellations, he threw a leg out from behind the ladder, swarmed around it and vanished up it.
The hobilar followed him.
I was ten rungs behind. I didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. I don’t remember any sound, just the pure fear. The pain in the muscles of my arms. The way my smooth leather soles slipped on the rungs of the new ladder. The sheer distance to the ground.
I couldn’t breathe.
And when I looked down, there was no one else on the ladder.
The ladder was resting on wooden hoardings — a sort of wooden catwalk that stuck out from the wall and allowed the enemy to shoot straight down at our assault parties. Most castles had hoardings stored in the donjons, waiting for this day. I was now level with the base of the hoardings — massive timbers that ran from the lower crenellations to the new wooden walls.
In front of me — remember, I was climbing backwards — our archers were visible on the siege towers, loosing onto the French-held wall. It gradually penetrated my head that a man was shouting at me.
He pointed.
I was running out of courage, so I did what you do when you are desperate: I attacked my fear. Remember, it is my blessing and my curse that I go forwards when I am afraid.
I threw one leg around the ladder, the way I’d seen the knight do, got my smooth sole on the outer side of the rung and started to change my weight.
Suddenly I felt the ladder begin to move.
Good Christ.
There was a French sergeant just above me, trying to throw the ladder down. He’d hooked it with some kind of pike, and he was pushing.
I don’t remember how I got onto the wall, but I did. He was at my feet, dead, and I was standing on the wall. I must have climbed the last two rungs and jumped, and I still can’t muster any recollection of the deed.
He fell on top of the hobilar.
But my heroic, well-armoured cousin had a longsword, four feet long, and he had swept an eight-foot space on the wall and was holding it. His eyes flicked over to me — even through his visor I could see their fierce glitter — and the moment he saw me, he stepped toward me and cut twice, fast as an adder, giving me a clear space. Then I was down on the wall and got my sword in my right hand and my buckler in my left.
Somewhere in the next minute, I took my first real wound. My legs were unarmoured, and someone got in a cut to my right shin. I never felt it. I got one man and threw him off the wall, and I kept Sir Edward’s side safe for that minute. There was shouting — cheering — and suddenly the air around us was full of clothyard shafts.
In fact, Master Peter saw me go onto the catwalk, and only then saw that Sir Edward was alive. He shouted the news to one of the Earl’s men-at-arms.
This is what it is to be a knight.
The Earl ran, in armour, at the head of his household to the base of our ladder, which men steadied and reset. Then they ran up the ladder — in eighty pounds of plate and mail.
The archers kept us alive. They poured arrows into the wall on either side of us, wasting precious shafts that we would need later in the campaign, but the French didn’t fancy running that gauntlet just for a taste of Sir Thomas’s longsword. We were hard pressed, but never by more than two men at a time.
A minute is a long time under such conditions.
There are many forms of courage. We’d both taken wounds, and suddenly Sir Edward stumbled — a chance spear blow to the foot, it proved. He fell to one knee, and the French knight he was facing raised his sword to finish him — I was a heartbeat too far away — and the hobilar, already lying in a pool of his own blood, slammed his dagger hand into the French knight’s groin from out of the pile of dead and wounded. The French hacked him to death, but he’d saved my cousin, who got back to his feet.
They prepared a rush.
And the Earl leaped in through the hoarding, his standard bearer right behind him, and speared a sergeant with his poleaxe, roaring his war cry.