BOOK TWO
BROTHERS AND COUSINS
V
GUNTHAR AND THEUDERIC
GUNTHAR’S WAR. I have no idea why I still think of that squalid episode in those terms. It was Gunthar’s, certainly; he brought it about and he was the dominant participant, but it was not a war. It never came close to being a war.
Wars have at least an illusion of grandeur and respectability attached to them; there is always the notion involved that, in a just war, some of the participants are motivated by high ideals and honorable intentions and that they fight to defend and protect something of value. Gunthar’s War stirred no such thoughts. There was nothing noble or inspiring within its entire duration to stir the minds or imaginations of adventurous boys. The people ranged against Gunthar and his depravity, myself included, fought out of sheer terror and desperation, knowing that to do less, to refuse to fight, was to surrender their lives and their entire world to the dementia of a murderous degenerate. Gunthar’s War was a morass of filth and wretchedness from beginning to end. Nothing good came out of it. It was a bloodbath of mindless slaughter and godless atrocities too foul for the ordinary mind to accommodate, and merely being involved in it was a disgusting experience, easily the bleakest and blackest part of my early manhood.
Even so, I came of age in the course of it, and I learned much about the ways of men, because it presented me a study in treachery and an object lesson in how one evil man can spawn corruption and perdition and thrust it on to other, better men. Gunthar’s “War” was no more and no less than a vicious internecine squabble. It was born of greed, betrayal, duplicity, and the lust for power, and it demeaned and came nigh to destroying everyone caught up in it.
We rode into it, literally, the morning following our night in the shepherd’s hut.
I had been dreaming for years of the first view I would have of King Ban’s castle after my lengthy absence, and I had seen every detail of the place clearly outlined in my memory, so that even in the pouring rain, which had not abated in the slightest overnight, I found myself almost laughably anxious as Ursus and I approached the brow of the last rise in the road that concealed the castle from our view. And then we were level with the top and I was gazing hungrily at the sight that awaited me, only to find that it was vastly different from what I remembered leaving behind me six years earlier.
An enormous ditch had been dug around the entire castle, and the excavated earth had been used to build a steeply sloping rampart on the far side, in front of the castle walls, which thus became a secondary line of defense rather than the primary one. The work had been done very recently, too. I could see that by the rawness of the logs that had been used to stabilize the slope of the earthen wall. It was a classical Roman fortification of vallum et fossam: an unscalable, ramped wall of earth and clay excavated from, and used to back, a deep and dangerous protective ditch. The defenders were all but invulnerable, at the top of the sloping wall, where they could overlook and annihilate their attackers, who had to cross the exposed ditch and then fight their way up the steep clay face. In this instance, however, the effect of the fortification was doubly enhanced by the towering height of the castle walls that loomed behind the earthen one, for the stone battlements were more than twice as high again as the new ramparts at their foot, and the defenders up there could shoot down easily and without fear of counterattack into the mass of any attackers who might dare to attempt a crossing.
Ban’s castle, I saw at a glance, was now invulnerable behind its new defenses, accessible only by an imposing and weighty drawbridge, which for the time being lay open, bridging the chasm of the ditch. Perhaps the assembled might of the Empire would be able to bring Ban’s castle down now, but even that was questionable. The fortress beside the lake had its own deep wells, ensuring an ample and permanent supply of fresh water for the garrison, and any successful attack against it must entail a prolonged land siege and a simultaneous naval blockade to prevent reprovisioning of the garrison from the lake side of the defenses. Anyone with any awareness of the logistics involved in such a venture knew too that the Empire no longer had such naval power at its ready disposal.
I was aware of Ursus sitting tall beside me, taking everything in.
“All that looks new,” he said. “Must be for the Burgundians.”
“Alamanni. Chulderic said the Alamanni were on the march.”
“Aye, but didn’t he say at the same time that the Burgundians were causing him more trouble than the Alamanni ever had? Whichever’s right, he’s gone to a power of trouble to deter one or both of them. I wouldn’t like to be the attacking commander responsible for capturing that place now. Once that bridge goes up, there’s no way of getting it down again if the defenders don’t want you to.”
I had been staring at the bridge as he spoke, having recognized it as a masterpiece of defensive engineering from earlier times, one of the great Roman drawbridges. I had heard of such devices from my tutors at the Bishop’s School and had examined ancient drawings and plans for building them, but I had never seen a real one, and now I wondered who had designed and built this one.
Even from where we sat on the hill’s crest gazing at it, and even through the drifting curtains of heavy rain, I could see that it was solid and massive, the bridge deck itself roughly thirty paces in length and fashioned of long, straight logs carefully selected for their uniform size and thickness. They had then been hand sawn, lengthwise, and squared so their sides would fit together, after which they had been covered with a layer of thick, heavy planking set crosswise and secured in place with heavy metal spikes. But that was merely the smallest and least important part of the construction. A drawbridge, no matter how soundly built the bridge deck might be, was completely useless if it could not be raised and lowered, and therein lay the challenge of construction. The end of the bridge on our side of the great ditch overlapped the edge of the excavation by several paces and fitted into a deep channel that had been carefully dug to accommodate its thickness and to bring its surface level with the ground. The far end, however, on the castle side, was very different.