Page 290 of The Pillars of the Earth

In the kitchen courtyard Aliena saw—to her astonishment—Jack’s mother, Ellen, as lean and brown as ever, but with gray in her long hair and wrinkles around her forty-four-year-old eyes. She was talking animatedly to Richard. Prior Philip was some distance away, directing children into the chapter house. He did not seem to have seen Ellen.

Standing nearby was Martha with Tommy and Sally. Aliena gasped with relief and hugged the two children.

Jack said: “Mother! Why are you here?”

“I came to warn you that a gang of outlaws is on the way. They’re going to raid the town.”

“We saw them in the forest,” Jack said.

Richard’s ears pricked up. “You saw them? How many men?”

“I can’t be sure, but it sounded like a lot, at least a hundred, maybe more.”

“What sort of weapons?”

“Clubs. Knives. A hatchet or two. Mostly clubs.”

“What direction?”

“North of here.”

“Thanks! I’m going to take a look from the walls.”

Aliena said: “Martha, take the children into the chapter house.” She followed Richard, as did Jack and Ellen.

As they hurried through the streets, people kept saying to Richard: “What is it?”

“Outlaws,” he would say succinctly, without breaking his stride.

Richard was at his best like this, Aliena thought. Ask him to go out and earn his daily bread and he was helpless; but in a military emergency he was cool, level-headed and competent.

They reached the north wall of the city and climbed the ladder to the parapet. There were heaps of stones, for throwing down on attackers, placed at regular intervals. Townsmen with bows and arrows were already taking up positions on the battlements. Some time ago, Richard had persuaded the town guild to hold emergency drills once a year. There had been a lot of resistance to the idea at first, but it had become a ritual, like the midsummer play, and everyone enjoyed it. Now its real benefits were showing as the townspeople reacted quickly and confidently to the sound of the alarm.

Aliena looked fearfully across the fields to the forest. She could see nothing.

Richard said: “You must have got here well ahead of them.”

Aliena said: “Why are they cominghere?”

Ellen said: “The priory storehouses. This is the only place for miles around where there’s any food.”

“Of course.” The outlaws were hungry people, dispossessed of their land by William, with no way to live but theft. In the undefended villages there was little or nothing to steal: the peasants were not much better off than the outlaws. Only in the barns of landowners was there food in quantity.

As she was thinking this, she saw them.

They emerged from the edge of the forest like rats from a burning hayrick. They swarmed across the field toward the town, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred of them, a small army. They had probably hoped to catch the town unawares and get in through the gates, but when they heard the bell ringing the alarm they realized they had been forestalled. Nevertheless they came on, with the desperation of the starving. One or two bowmen loosed off premature arrows, and Richard yelled: “Wait! Don’t waste your shafts!”

Last time Kingsbridge was attacked, Tommy had been eighteen months old and Aliena was pregnant with Sally. She had taken refuge in the priory then, with the elderly and the children. This time she would stay on the battlements and help to fight off the danger. Most of the other women felt the same way: there were almost as many women as men on the walls.

All the same, Aliena felt torn as the outlaws came closer. She was near the priory, but it was possible that the attackers could break through at some other point and reach the priory before she could get there. Or she might be injured in the fighting and unable to help the children. Jack was here, and so was Ellen: if they should be killed, only Martha would be left to take care of Tommy and Sally. Aliena hesitated, undecided.

The outlaws were almost at the walls. A shower of arrows fell on them, and this time Richard did not tell the archers to wait. The outlaws were decimated. They had no armor to protect them. There was also no organization. No one had planned the attack. They were like stampeding animals, rushing headlong at a blank wall. When they got there they did not know what to do. The townspeople bombarded them with stones from the battlements. Several outlaws attacked the north gate with clubs. Aliena knew the thickness of that ironbound oak door: it would take all night to break through. Meanwhile, Alf Butcher and Arthur Saddler were maneuvering a cauldron of boiling water from someone’s kitchen up onto the wall over the gate.

Directly below Aliena, a group of outlaws started to form a human pyramid. Jack and Richard immediately started to throw stones at them. Thinking of her children, Aliena did the same, and Ellen joined in too. The desperate outlaws withstood the hail of rocks for a while, then someone was hit on the head, the pyramid collapsed, and they gave up.

There were screams of pain from the north gate a moment later, as the boiling water poured on the heads of the men attacking the door.

Then some of the outlaws realized that their dead and wounded comrades were easy prey, and they started to strip the bodies. Fights broke out with those who were not so badly wounded, and rival looters quarreled over the possessions of the dead. It was a shambles, Aliena thought; a disgusting, degrading shambles. The townspeople stopped throwing stones as the attack petered out and the attackers fought among themselves like dogs over a bone.