The dawn of the iron dra.., p.23
The Dawn of the Iron Dragon, page 23
part #2 of Saga of the Iron Dragon Series
One of the ladders being used as a bridge splintered, sending three men into the spikes and brambles. A few men managed to crawl all the way across, but most of these had an arrow or two sticking out of a limb by the time they got to the tower. Dead men piled up on the ladders, requiring the next wave of attackers to shove the corpses into the ditch or crawl over their comrades. Most pressed on, ignoring the dead men, but soon more ladders split under strain. Of the men who had ventured across the ditch floor, over half were impaled by arrows or fell victim to a wolf trap.
A few men did make it to the tower unscathed, but these then faced the task of retrieving the intact ladders from across the ditch while avoiding a hail of arrows from above. Most of them failed. Sigurd, who was not one of the better archers of the group, focused on the men at the base of the tower, and soon had hit three of them in the neck or shoulder. The men lived but were in no condition to hoist a ladder. A half-hour into the attack, not one ladder had been successfully placed against the tower.
Still the attackers came. Their supply of ladders—to say nothing of men—seemed infinite. Having learned from the first wave, the attackers began stacking ladders in pairs over the trench for added support and crossed the trench in a continuous line, one man’s helmet right against the rear of the man ahead of him. This forced the defenders to split their fire among more attackers as well as giving each man some additional cover.
Meanwhile, the barrage of stones from mangonels and bolts from ballistae continued. A man-at-arms named Frederick was the first defender to fall, pinned to the crenel behind him by a bolt. The ballistae were accurate enough to allow the Vikings to continue their attack while men crossed the ditch; the mangonels were so wildly inaccurate that the attackers didn’t even flinch at the telltale sound of a throwing arm thudding into a crossbar. For all the trouble they’d gone through to recruit Ibrahim, his engineering prowess seemed to have been greatly exaggerated. Stones continued to glance off the tower on occasion, but direct hits—causing the whole tower to shudder—were rare.
Nearly two hours after the assault began, Sigurd allowed himself to be relieved by a man-at-arms so that he could rest and get a sense for how the battle was going. From the tower, he could see a sizable portion of the Viking force, including most of their siege engines. While the attack on the tower went on, the Norsemen had dragged more siege engines into place on the north bank of the Seine. Rather than focus on the walls, the Vikings seemed to be firing randomly into the city. This was probably partly due to the inaccuracy of their weapons, but breaking down the city walls would provide minimal advantage in any case. The primary barrier to an assault on the city was the Seine. If they were unable to cross one of the bridges, the Norsemen would have to row across the river and climb up the steep banks to the city—all while under fire from archers lining the wall. This might be an effective strategy if the Vikings were willing to go all out, but so far their assault had been conservative. Sigurd suspected they didn’t plan to invade the city itself; their primary intention was to destroy the bridge that kept them from plundering freely up and down the Seine. Still, the mayhem and destruction the mangonels and ballistae were causing in the city would create panic and put pressure on the defenders to surrender.
After his respite, Sigurd rejoined the fray. The Vikings continued to refine their tactics, advancing closer and closer to the tower with their ladders before being cut down. At one point in the late afternoon, they had five ladders planted at the base of the tower at once. Even firing as rapidly as they were able, the archers in the tower couldn’t shoot down the men scurrying up the ladders quickly enough. The defenders were saved only by a stray boulder from a mangonel, which nicked the edge of one of the ladders, sending the attackers hurtling into the ditch.
After this close call, Gozlin called for pikemen to surround the tower to prevent the Norsemen from planting their ladders. This was a risky assignment, as the men were exposed to enemy arrows and ballistae, but as long as the Norsemen continued to stream over the ladders, they had some cover. Gozlin ordered the pikemen be replaced every hour by reinforcements from the city.
The assault went on until sunset, at which time the Vikings abruptly ceased their barrage and retired to their camps. The men near the ditch withdrew their ladders and retreated. Guarded cries of relief went up from the men in the tower, and the dead and wounded were carried across the bridge to the city. Three pikemen and three archers had been killed, and many more had been wounded. Despite this, spirits remained high. Gozlin worried, however, at how close some of the attackers had gotten to the top of the tower. If even half a dozen men reached the top, it would distract the defenders long enough for a hundred more to get across the ditches.
“We need that additional story on the tower,” he said to Sigurd, as they watched the Norsemen retreat in the twilight.
Sigurd nodded. “Summon the carpenters and enlist as many able-bodied men as you can to carry lumber. Assign pikemen to protect them. The Norsemen might try a sneak attack.”
“The tower will be undefended while the work goes on,” Gozlin said.
“Archers won’t be any good in the dark anyway.”
“You think we can finish the work by morning?”
“We had better. If that story isn’t finished by daybreak, the Vikings will take the bridge.”
Chapter Forty
Work on the tower continued through the night. While the carpenters sawed and hammered above, pikemen escorted laborers carrying lumber and other materials. Bishop Gozlin had torches set on tall poles just inside the trench, to allow the men to work. More torches, on shorter poles, were placed in several concentric rings outside the trench so that the workers would have some warning of the Norsemen attacked during the night.
The attack never came. Neither the hammering nor the glare of light from the torches seemed to interest the Vikings. Campfires glowed in the distance, and men could be heard singing and shouting boisterously for much of the night. If the Norsemen had been humbled by their inability to take the tower, they did not show it.
The additional story on the tower was finished just after dawn. Fortunately, the Vikings got a late start due to the previous night’s revelry, so they did not renew their attack until full daylight. Having evidently failed to grasp the significance of what had occurred during the night—and perhaps heartened by the fact that the defenders had withdrawn the pikemen at the base of the tower—the Norsemen continued with the same tactics they’d used the previous afternoon. Soon they had three ladders in place. It didn’t take them long to realize their mistake. Men reaching the top of the ladders found themselves facing crenels that had been divided by boards into vertical slits that were too narrow to climb through. Unable to swing their axes at their foes, they were impaled by spears or struck by arrows from above and fell to their death.
After a half-dozen men suffered this fate, the Norsemen gave up on climbing the ladders, opting for a different tactic: they sent men over the ditch with picks and shovels to dig underneath the tower. Some held shields over their heads while others dug. But the defenders were prepared for this as well. A small charcoal furnace burned in the tower, allowing them to heat a mixture of oil, wax and pitch in a cauldron, which was then dumped onto the attackers. Much of the scalding hot goo simply spilled off their shields, but enough spilled or splashed onto them to cause severe burns. A man might survive one assault, but by the second he was writhing on the ground in agony or clawing his way through the trench in an attempt to get to the river. After several hours and many more dead, the Norsemen gave up at this as well.
Their next tactic proved more effective. Men crawled over the ladders carrying a large canopy made from the skins of oxen. Arrows stuck in the leather but could not penetrate it, and soon a dozen men labored in front of the heavy wooden door of the tower. The canopy was assembled into a dome with a frame of pine logs. The Vikings spent the rest of the day crawling back and forth on the ladders under shields, ferrying bundles of green wood and buckets of pitch to the dome. Just before dusk, they set the mass of fuel alight.
Soon a dense plume of smoke enveloped the tower, burning the eyes and throats of the men inside. It grew so smoky and hot inside the tower that all the men were forced to the top level. The tower itself was in little danger, but several men were incapacitated by the smoke. The top of the tower was crowded with men on their knees, coughing and vomiting. Those who could still function stood at the perimeter of the tower with their bows ready and tears streaming down their cheeks. If the Vikings rushed the bridge en masse, the defenders were going to be hard-pressed to repel them.
Gozlin ordered two men to use some of their supply of water to douse the fire but called off the operation after a hundred gallons splashed ineffectually off the canopy. Meanwhile, the Norsemen continued to crawl back and forth on the ladders, bringing more fuel and stoking the flames higher. The archers did their best to slow them down, but they could barely see through the choking haze. Viking archers kept up their harassment, and a steady barrage of bolts slammed into the tower from distant ballista, gradually chipping away at the tower’s exterior. Occasionally the tower would shake as a stone struck it, but the structure showed no signs of weakening. Over the course of the day, three more defenders fell to arrows, including Count Odo’s brother, Robert. In desperation, the defenders threw the bodies of the dead men on top of the domed furnace in an attempt to break the wooden frame, to little effect.
“We need something heavier,” Sigurd gasped to Gozlin as the two leaned over the edge of the tower, hoping for a breeze to push some fresh air toward them.
“We could pull apart one of the merlons,” Gozlin said, patting the stone surface on which he was leaning. He was barely holding in a coughing fit.
Sigurd regarded the structure dubiously. If one fact had been proven over the course of the battle so far, the tower had been built to withstand just about anything. He was doubtful that a group of men sickened by smoke inhalation and barely able to breathe could break one of the merlons apart. There was a momentary break in the haze, and his eyes fell to the gate in front of the bridge. The gate was essentially a massive oak frame surrounding an iron portcullis some ten feet wide and ten feet high. A heavy iron chain ran from a pulley at the top of the portcullis to a slot in the side of the tower. On the lower level of the tower was a winch system that men could use to raise and lower the portcullis by turning a heavy wooden wheel.
“The wheel,” Sigurd coughed.
Gozlin’s brow furrowed, but then he nodded. He opened his mouth to speak but erupted in a fit of coughing.
“I’ll take care of it,” Sigurd said. Gozlin stopped coughing long enough to nod again.
Sigurd summoned Njáll and two other men who had not yet been overcome by the smoke and led them down the stairs to the lower level. It was like walking into an oven. The smoke was even thicker here; even with their shirts pulled over their faces, the air burned their lungs. His vision blurred by tears, Sigurd stumbled across the floor toward where he knew the winch system to be. One of the men had an axe, and they took turns hacking at the wheel’s housing. One of the men was overcome by the smoke and had to be helped back to the upper level by one of his comrades. Two more men came down the stairs to relieve them.
At last the wheel came free, and the four men lifted it, rolled it across the floor and then slowly carried it up the stairs. The wheel was nearly six feet in diameter and weighed as much as two men. By the time they reached the upper level, the men were on the verge of collapse. Oblivious to the others, Sigurd staggered to the edge of the tower, shoved an archer out of the way, and vomited over the edge.
Not much later, he became aware that a group of men to his right had lifted the wheel and were carrying it to the edge of the tower above the furnace. He watched through tear-filled eyes as the wheel fell, disappearing from view. A moment later, a huge crash sounded and several men on the ground cried out.
Soon the smoke began to thin, and Sigurd moved closer to the fire to see the results of their efforts. The dome had been demolished and he could see the limbs of at least three men who had been pinned under the wheel. But the fire still burned. Even as he watched, the flames were licking the edges of the wheel as expressing their gratitude for this new offering. “Should we try to douse it again?” Njáll asked Gozlin, who stood at the next crenel.
Gozlin shook his head. “We’ve already used most of our water, and the heart of the fire is under that wheel. We’ll just have to let it burn.”
Sigurd nodded. For now, the smoke had thinned enough to give the men some respite and allow them to accurately target the men coming over the ladders. The Vikings had grown careless, counting on the thick smoke to cover them. Many of them had left their shields behind so they could carry larger bundles of wood to the fire, and these were quickly impaled with arrows. The dead men and piles of wood effectively blocked the ladders, arresting the Vikings’ efforts to stoke the fire. Soon a breeze picked up, blowing the smoke away from the tower and directly toward the Norsemen. The attackers finally gave up in frustration.
For now, the tower had been saved.
Chapter Forty-one
Ibrahim ibn Muhammed sat on a stool in a small dark room with his wrists tied tightly behind his back. He had been here for three days.
His imprisonment was his own fault; he’d underestimated Hrólfr’s canniness. It had taken the Viking chief only a few hours to determine he’d been duped. Ibrahim had planned to slip away from the fortress that evening but never got a chance. Two of Hrólfr’s men had burst into his quarters while he was napping and dragged him to this tiny storeroom. He’d had nothing to eat and only half a cup of water since then.
Ibrahim had never even had a chance to see his machines in action, not that there’d been much to see. From what little information he’d been able to garner about the siege, the mangonels had been comically inaccurate. The first several fusillades were expected to miss their targets, but recalibrating the engines had only marginally improved their accuracy. Ibrahim had effected these handicaps through various forms of sabotage, from cutting gears with irregularly spaced teeth to dousing the torsion elements with lamp oil the night before the siege. The mangonels would have to be completely disassembled, inspected and repaired before they would be of much use in battle.
It was regrettable that the sabotage was necessary. Ibrahim had wanted nothing more than to see the towers and walls of the Christians laid low by his magnificent engines, but after this debacle he doubted he would ever work as an engineer again. The foreigners had promised him work at their stronghold, but they had all left and were unlikely to return, given the violence and chaos that had seized Normandy. If the foreigners had a secret stronghold somewhere far away from here, they would be fools if they had not already fled this land. In any case, it did not matter: Ibrahim would never leave this room alive.
His motivations for sabotage might have been considered petty by some, but Ibrahim had never cared about the judgments of others. Hrólfr’s men had mistreated Salim, and that was a sin for which he would not forgive them.
Lothar, Hrólfr’s previous siege engineer, had pretended to accept Ibrahim’s authority while secretly working to discredit him with Hrólfr. When these efforts failed, he made up a ridiculous story about Salim assaulting him. There had been no witnesses and Salim, being mute, was unable to speak in his own defense. Salim was already widely disliked by the Norsemen for his aloof manner, and rumors had been spreading since Ibrahim and Salim’s arrival about Ibrahim and Salim’s relationship. Hrólfr, in a fit of impatience, had ordered Salim exiled from the fort. Salim was a resourceful man—he’d had to be to survive as a deaf-mute in Kairouan—but casting him out of the fort in Frankia in the dead of winter was a death sentence.
Ibrahim, never a man to lash out in anger, had continued to work diligently on the siege engines, even magnanimously giving Lothar more responsibility, while secretly plotting to make certain the mangonels would never function properly. The ballistae would be more difficult to sabotage, and in any case they were not as vital to the assault as the mangonels: as long as the city’s towers stood, the city would not fall. Ibrahim had been willing to suffer the embarrassment of his siege engines’ failure—as well as the risk of his own capture—to ensure Hrólfr’s humiliation.
But now, having been tied to a stool in a dark room for three days with no food, he began to wonder if he’d made the right choice. Perhaps it would have been wiser to quietly slip away from the fort and look for Salim. But Ibrahim did not have the tools or skills to survive in this strange land. Even if he’d been able to locate Salim, they’d likely both have ended up dead.
The door opened, and Ibrahim squinted as light streamed into the tiny room. A hulking figure stood in the doorway, holding a torch: Hrólfr. He entered the room, closing the door behind him. He held the torch over his right shoulder so it cast a garish shadow on the wall behind him.
“Ivar says you still refuse to speak,” Hrólfr said.
Ibrahim did not reply.
“It is all I can do to keep my men fed,” Hrólfr said. “I will not waste food on a traitor.”
“Then you will learn nothing,” Ibrahim rasped.
“Ah, now you offer to talk?”
“My offer remains the same. I will tell you how to repair the mangonels… when you return Salim to me.”
