Chapter Twenty-Five #2
That satisfaction was short-lived. A stout gate and stone walls diminished Raghnall's advantage, but they did not erase it. Bram had seen stronger holds fall to fire or simple, brutal attrition. He could not afford a single mistake.
His gaze shifted briefly toward the keep behind him.
Anastasia was in there, along with his mother and Etta, the bairns he'd watched running through the gate and all those who had trusted these walls—and him—to keep them safe.
Raghnall had come because Bram lived and knew the truth of his treachery, and whatever he intended to do to silence that truth, Bram would not permit his family or his people to pay the price for it.
Raghnall would not come through those gates, he vowed.
Bram stepped nearer the parapet and made certain the man could see him. For a long moment neither moved, and then Raghnall wheeled the gray horse sharply and rode back toward his men.
Bram’s teeth showed briefly, more reflex than expression.
“He doesnae look a man greeting an old friend,” Harsain observed.
“Nae.”
“Poor bastard.”
This time Bram did smile, though there was nothing pleasant in it.
“Let’s disappoint him further.”
Raghnall did not keep them waiting long.
His archers moved first, spreading among the outer cottages and low walls of the abandoned village while the men carrying shields and ladders gathered behind them.
Bram watched the first bows rise and shouted for his men to take cover before the arrows came, a few snapping against the parapet stones and the rest sailing over to rattle down somewhere in the courtyard behind him.
One found a man farther along the wall, burying itself high in his arm, but most accomplished little beyond forcing the defenders beneath the protection of the parapet.
That, Bram knew, was largely their purpose.
Even before the first volley had spent itself, Raghnall's footmen began advancing from the village, shields raised while the ladders moved among them.
A second flight of arrows followed the first, and then a third, keeping the MacCailin archers down while the attacking force crossed the open ground.
“Hold!” Bram called when several of his men rose with bows already drawn. “Let them come nearer.”
The distance diminished quickly once Raghnall's men began to run.
Bram waited until they were well beyond the protection of the village and committed to the crossing before giving the order, and then MacCailin archers rose all along the landward wall and sent their first volley into them.
Men fell, one ladder dropping heavily when two of those carrying it went down, but others immediately seized their places and brought it forward again.
Bram had expected no less. Raghnall had not come with so many men because he feared losing them.
The first ladder struck the stone with a crack, then two more.
Raghnall had the numbers, but he could only send them up a few at a time.
Men scrambled up into a storm of spears and stones.
The first ladder toppled, a scream trailing its fall.
A helmeted head appeared over the parapet; Niall’s spear sent it down.
Another ladder slammed against the wall near the gatehouse.
Bram was there as the first man crested it.
No room to swing a sword. He caught the man’s arm, slammed his pommel into the attacker’s face, and shoved him back into the man below.
Another took his place, and the world shrank to the scrape of steel on stone, the grunt of impact, the press of a friendly shoulder at his back.
The first assault eventually broke, but the respite proved brief.
Raghnall gave Bram's men scarcely enough time to carry their wounded from the wall before sending another force forward, this one concentrating more heavily upon the gate while ladders went up on either side of it.
A dozen men came beneath overlapping shields carrying a heavy length of timber between them and began driving it against the gates, each blow reverberating through the gatehouse beneath Bram's feet.
The reinforced timbers held, and the men pushing at them did not fare nearly so well.
Stones dropped from directly overhead shattered the protection their shields afforded them, while arrows from the towers found those forced outward from beneath the shelter.
After several punishing attempts, the timber fell when too few men remained to carry it, and those still standing abandoned it and fled toward the village.
Still Raghnall sent them back.
One assault bled into another, the hour measured in thrown ladders and spent arrows.
Twice they fought to clear the wall, and once Bram had to haul Harsain up from his knees before driving an attacker back over the parapet.
They lost men. Young Ian from the village fell from the wall, and old Gilleasbuig died at Bram's feet with an arrow through his throat.
But for every man who fell, another MacCailin stepped forward to take his place.
And still Craig na Coille held.
By then Raghnall had paid dearly for every attempt.
The ground between the village and the wall was littered with bodies and abandoned shields, and two broken ladders lay where they had fallen.
Bram could not guess how many wounded had been carried back among the cottages, but he had seen enough men limp or stagger from the field to know the number was considerable.
The greater force remained Raghnall's, but the walls had done precisely what walls were intended to do, allowing Bram to meet superior numbers without ever having to face all of them at once.
“He canna keep doing this,” Harsain said beside him, breathing heavily as he leaned one shoulder against the stone.
Bram wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and looked toward the village. “He seems to believe he can.”
Raghnall remained beyond the useful range of their bows, sometimes mounted and sometimes upon the ground among the men who gathered around him between assaults, and nothing Bram had seen suggested he was reconsidering the attack.
If anything, each failure seemed only to make him more determined to send another group forward.
Bram watched another wave of men prepare to cross the killing ground. It was careless. Raghnall was spending lives as if they were coin, and Bram didn't like it. He was buying something, but Bram could not yet see what.
Bram was watching another group gathering among the cottages when a horn sounded.
He scarcely attended it at first, supposing it another signal from the gatehouse tower, until a second blast followed and Harsain turned sharply beside him.
This blast had come from behind them.
Bram wheeled toward the seaward wall, where men had begun shouting, running the length of the wall walk and taking the steps down and up again with Harsain close behind him.
He took the steps up to the rear battlement three at a time and stopped dead.
Below, four boats ground onto the beach, spilling armed men into the shallows.
A second followed, dangerously overloaded.
The cost. The carelessness. Cold realization washed over him.
It hadn’t been a miscalculation. It had been a distraction.
For the better part of an hour, the bastard had fed men to the landward wall, using their bodies to draw every eye while this second force snuck in from the sea.
“He’s desperate,” Harsain said grimly. “He’ll spend every man he brought to silence ye and keep his treachery buried.”
Bram came to the same conclusion. This wasn’t a siege; it was an assassination. Raghnall wasn’t here to take a castle, but to kill one man before the truth of his treachery could spread. If it cost him every man he’d brought, he plainly considered it a price worth paying.
“Archers!” Bram shouted. “I want a dozen archers back here!”
The men he'd left there had already begun to shoot, and the narrowness of the beach made their targets plentiful. Raghnall’s men could not spread out once they came ashore; those leaving the boats crowded behind the men already struggling over the wet stones, while others had begun making for the cliff.
One fell before he had gone ten paces, an arrow striking him in the chest and pitching him backward into the shallows, but several others reached the foot of the ascent and immediately began climbing.
“Bring ten men from the reserve,” Bram told Harsain. “Nae more. And tell Niall he holds the front with the men he has until I return.”
Harsain left at once while Bram leaned over the parapet and studied the attack below.
The sight was alarming for its unexpectedness and numbers, but the longer he looked, the more apparent the difficulty of Raghnall's undertaking became.
The cliff was not sheer, but it rose steeply enough from the narrow beach that the men climbing it needed both hands to make their way upward, leaving swords sheathed and shields behind or slung uselessly across their backs.
They could climb or they could defend themselves; they could not easily do both.
One man made it halfway up before an arrow struck stone by his head.
He flinched, nearly lost his footing, but kept climbing—only for the next shaft to take him under the shoulder.
He fell backward without a sound, tumbling down the rock face to the stones below.
It was a fool's climb. Bram watched another man try, and another fall, a brutal waste that served only one purpose: to divide his men.
Bram drew a long breath as the first of his reinforcements reached the wall behind him.
Raghnall had succeeded in surprising him. He had succeeded in dividing Bram’s small force, having to defend two locations.