Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (15 page)

“But—”

Anna put her hands on Bronwen’s shoulders.
“You must know that my heart agrees with you, but my head says we
have to be practical. I hope Valence doesn’t breach the walls of
either the town or the castle, but it’s as likely as not that he
will do both, given time. Not everyone has an equal chance to live,
and right here, right now, is where we start to triage.”

Bronwen looked like she was going to argue
some more. In fact, Anna had rarely seen her so passionate about
anything.

“What would Ieuan tell you to do?” Anna
said.

Bronwen stuck her finger in Anna’s face.
“Don’t bring that
listen to your husband
crap down on me.”
She was speaking full American now; Anna wasn’t sure Lili could
keep up, which was probably a good thing. “I put up with it most of
the time, but just because we live in the Middle Ages doesn’t mean
we have to act like it. Lili is right about that, at least.”

“I wasn’t suggesting anything of the sort,”
Anna said. “I was merely pointing out that in this we
do
need to think like medieval people. The sick are in quarantine. We
didn’t house them inside the castle in the first place for that
reason—and it was a good reason. Do you want to expose Catrin to
scarlet fever? Or Arthur?”

Bronwen stabbed the toe of her boot into in
the dirt of the bailey. “But they’ll die.” She sounded sad now, and
tired. They all were tired and the battle hadn’t even started.

“We don’t know that,” Anna said.

Lili stepped between them and put her arm
around Bronwen’s waist. “Dafydd has done everything in his power to
protect this castle and Windsor town. He spent the last two months
strengthening the town walls. Perhaps he had a vision of the future
and knew that it might be the only thing standing between us and
death. Regardless, given the suddenness of the threat, we are as
prepared as we can be.” Between the twenty-foot-high town wall,
begun under Edward and finished very recently, and the moat created
by water diverted from the Thames, Valence wasn’t going to break
through their defenses quickly.

Bronwen closed her eyes, rubbing at her
temples with her fingers, finally calming down. Lili was right that
David had planned ahead, though Anna wasn’t going to admit that he
had the
sight
, Welsh blood or not. It was bad enough that
people routinely referred to him as the return of King Arthur.
David wasn’t King Arthur, and she wasn’t Morgane, even if she grew
more and more into the role with every year that passed. David had
named his son ‘Arthur’ because of that legacy, though few people
beyond Anna and her mother truly understood the cynicism behind
that act—and the extent to which it had been a blatant political
ploy.

It had been unlike David, and thus exactly
like him too.

“Even if we are forced to retreat to the
castle as a last resort,” Anna said, “and Valence’s men overrun the
town, they won’t want to get anywhere near our patients. They know
what scarlet fever looks like and how contagious it is.”

“They could set fire to the abbey and burn
everyone inside it,” Bronwen said.

Lili stepped in. “They will do the same to
the castle if they can. In fact, with the abbey in the center of
Windsor and the castle forming part of the defenses of the town, it
is the castle that is in the more vulnerable location.” She looked
at Anna. “We should think about moving the children to the
northwest tower of the lower bailey, where they can be protected by
the river and the walls. It’s the most defensible tower in the
whole castle.”

Their conversation had carried them into the
lower bailey Lili had mentioned. The gatehouse lay just in front of
them, and the stairs up to the southern battlements formed a line
to their left. Anna wasn’t sure if Bronwen had even heard Lili,
since she turned away and mounted the stairs without responding.
Lili and Anna followed. Many of the scholars had heard the news of
Valence’s approach; they’d had the same idea. Anna found herself
standing on the wall-walk with Lili on one side of her and Roger
Bacon on the other.

“War is the last recourse of the wise and
the first of fools,” he said by way of a greeting.

Anna glanced at him. “Who said that?” If it
wasn’t Shakespeare or the Bible, she wasn’t going to guess.

Bacon mumbled something under his breath
which Anna didn’t catch, and then said, “I did.”

Anna gave a low laugh. She was sure the
internet in the twenty-first century was full of pithy quotes by
Roger Bacon. She wouldn’t be the one to ask if this quote got
passed down through the ages, though it sounded familiar to her,
like maybe Plato had been the one to say it first. From where they
stood, she could see the dust churned up by Valence’s approaching
army. It hung in the air, the particles glinting in the light of
the setting sun. The soldiers marched up the King’s Road, which led
to the main gate of the town of Windsor.

The gate itself faced southeast, overlooking
the lands that fed the town. Anna was no farmer, but she recognized
the different grains by now—barley mostly, but also
wheat—interspersed with pasture where sheep and cattle grazed, and
patches of woods. The castle was located in the northeastern corner
of the town, accessible only from the town itself. Thus, its walls
formed a protective curtain around that quarter of Windsor, which
had only two entrances: the southeastern gate on the King’s road,
and a northern gate that guarded the bridge across the Thames River
and the road to London. The original castle, built at the time of
the Norman Conquest, occupied a natural chalk mound overlooking the
Thames River. The castle had been much expanded since then with the
addition of two more baileys and a dozen towers.

“They’ve already raised the sluice gates,”
Bacon said.

Anna stood on her tiptoes and peered between
the crenels, looking straight down into the frothy water below.
Since its completion, the moat had been filled only once, as a test
case.

Here at Windsor, the Thames flowed west to
east, heading towards London. The town had been built on the south
side of the river. After consulting a host of engineers, David had
built a dike and installed a sluice gate at the northwestern end of
the town. The gate could be opened at need to divert a portion of
the Thames into the moat that now surrounded the town and castle on
the west, south, and east sides. The water then flowed back into
the Thames at the northeastern side of the castle.

Though impressive, and even to Anna’s modern
eyes, sophisticated, this kind of project had been done before at
other castles. David had simply taken the best of what had been
tried to its logical conclusion.

“You could have run, my Queen,” Roger Bacon
said, leaning back to look past Anna to Lili. “You should not feel
that by fleeing Windsor, you would have abandoned us. Your duty to
your country and husband would be, first and foremost, to protect
your son.”

Anna didn’t tell him how strange it was to
think that the country to which Bacon was referring was England,
not Wales.

For her part, Lili calmly shook her head.
“Quite aside from the fact that I am one of the few people in this
castle who can shoot a bow, Math felt the risk of leaving
outweighed the risk of staying. Valence force-marched his men night
and day to get here. Our own riders were barely ahead of them.”

“Which is why, up until an hour ago, we
thought they hadn’t yet passed Winchester?” Bacon said.

“Exactly,” Lili said. “Math’s concern is
Valence’s penchant for constructing plans within plans. Who’s to
say that he didn’t send a contingent of men to block the road to
London in the hope that he could capture me as I fled the city with
Dafydd’s heir? If Valence does, in fact, believe Dafydd is here, he
might even be hoping that Dafydd himself would retreat to
Westminster.”

“Even Valence can’t imagine that King David
would abandon his people,” Bacon said.

“I didn’t say so, sir,” Lili said. “I merely
suggested that Dafydd might have left his men to defend the town
until he could marshal an army to come to their relief.”

“Ah, that is a good thought,” Bacon said.
“Did you know that I have made a particular study of battle tactics
employed by the Greeks and Romans and am writing a definitive work
on the strategy of war? Depending upon how this ends, Valence’s
maneuvers might be worthy of a mention.”

“Is that admiration I hear in your voice?”
Lili said, bemusement in hers.

“I would prefer that the only mention of
Valence is in defeat,” Anna said. “We all might be more interested
today in what the ancients said about defending a besieged
position.”

“They spoke of it often, of course.” Bacon
bent his head to look at Anna over the top of his glasses (a gift
from David). “It would have been better if we hadn’t found
ourselves on the defensive in the first place.”

“Obviously,” Bronwen said under her breath
from the far side of Lili.

Bacon didn’t seem to have heard her. “I may
have a few suggestions for our commander.” He tapped a finger
musingly to his lips, unaware that Bronwen was about to throttle
him.

“It may be that my husband would be happy to
hear them,” Anna said, with a grin at Bronwen, who rolled her eyes.
“I will take you to him.”

Anna gestured Bacon down the stairs to the
lower bailey, but while Lili followed, Bronwen caught Anna’s
sleeve. “You can’t be serious?”

“Maybe he can be of help,” Anna said. “Math
is overseeing the destruction of the bridge across the moat.
Perhaps he’ll find Bacon as amusing as I do.”

Below them, Bacon stood talking to Lili, her
quiver on her back and her bow in her hand. A half dozen other
archers clustered around them. Bacon appeared to be pontificating
yet again on military strategy.

Anna bit her lip, fighting back a smile, but
when she caught sight of Bronwen’s face, she sobered. Bronwen said,
“I’m sorry that I argued with you about moving the patients in the
infirmary. It was wrong of me.”

Anna put a hand to Bronwen’s cheek. “I
understand why you did. I know you are worried about them. And
about all of us. I am too.”

“It’s times like these I hate the Middle
Ages.”

“Ieuan will gather the necessary men and
return at the front of an army,” Anna said. “Valence will find that
he cannot maintain a siege when he faces opposition from the castle
and his flank.”

Bronwen took in a deep breath and let it
out. “I asked earlier why Valence had chosen to march on Windsor
instead of going directly to London. Now that I’ve had time to
think about it, either scenario—that he thinks David is here or
that he knows he isn’t—presents us with a problem. If Valence knows
David left for Ireland, then someone informed him of that fact and
made quite an effort to do so, given the distance between Windsor
and Ireland. As Lili pointed out, Valence would believe that we’re
less well-protected with the king gone, and since David wouldn’t
have taken the treasury with him, it is now exposed. Capture that,
and he goes a long way to putting the crown of England on his own
head.”

“And if he doesn’t know that David has left
for Ireland?” Anna said.

“Then he seeks to challenge David outright,”
Bronwen said. “I can’t decide which is worse.”

“How can he think to challenge David with
only two thousand men?” Anna said.

“Either he has more allies than we thought,
and thus more men, or he has something he believes will call into
question David’s right to the throne.”

Anna shook her head. “That, at least, is
unlikely. David rules because the people chose him and the barons
called for it, not because of his bloodline, whatever people think
that may be.”

One of the stranger twists of fate had been
the falsification of David’s family tree. Bishop Kirby had forged a
paper which ‘proved’ that Anna’s mother was the illegitimate
daughter of the old King Henry (and thus King Edward’s
half-sister). He’d done this in the hope that David would take the
throne under false pretenses, at which point Kirby could show proof
that the document had been forged. David, for his part, had
strenuously denied any such claim, burned the paper in front of
half the nobility of England, and been crowned king anyway. By now,
most of England believed him to be Henry’s grandson, and this,
along with the Arthurian mythologizing, had been ultimately
impossible for David to refute.

“Then it’s something else,” Bronwen said,
“and the traitors are among those barons who we believe to be
unswervingly loyal. Math needs to watch his back.”

“I will tell him,” Anna said.

“I will see to moving the children to the
northwest tower.”

Anna let Bronwen go, collected Lili and
Roger Bacon, and then made her way through the unusually empty
streets to the city gate. Normally at the close of the day, people
would be coming home from a day of work in craft hall or field.
Church bells tolled for vespers, but a glance down a side street
showed her that the only parishioners hurrying to evening devotions
were elderly. Tonight, the obligations of Windsor’s people would be
of a different sort entirely.

Anna found Math conferring with his captains
in a house adjacent to the city gate. The house belonged to one of
the aldermen and like most structures in Windsor had a thatched
roof. It would burn if Valence shot fire arrows over the walls.

At the same time, the house was more
substantial than the typical dwelling, with a complete second floor
and an interior stairway running up a side wall of the house.
Opposite the main door to the street was another doorway, which
opened onto a courtyard behind house, revealing the house’s kitchen
and washing areas. A woman in a faded dress, with two children
under five playing at her heels, unpinned laundry from a
clothesline near a well.