Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) Read online

  ‘He just showed us forty crossbowmen,’ said Sir Nicholas, ‘and he may well have as many knights again, and as many men-at-arms again, too.’

  ‘That would seem about right,’ said Robin.

  ‘A hundred and twenty men?’ I said. ‘That is three times our number! We cannot possibly defeat such an army.’

  ‘Yes, we will have to find a way to reduce their numbers a little,’ said Robin. He was looking back up the slope at the castle, framed in blue above him, seemingly lost in thought. ‘But we have learned one very interesting thing…’ he said. ‘He is still putting his faith in all that mystical power-of-the-mind drivel. He really believed he could order me away like a naughty boy, and that I would meekly go. That is worth knowing, I think.’

  ‘From what you told me, his powers of persuasion seemed to work just fine on the Count of Foix,’ I said.

  ‘Him?’ said Robin. ‘A child could command Raymond-Roger to jump from his own battlements and he’d likely do it.’

  I said nothing, embarrassed. The Master’s strange power had indeed had an effect on me, if not on my lord. I would have obeyed his command. And that, I felt, was cause for shame.

  Once we had returned to the cave, Robin sent out Gavin and Little John with their war bows, to harass the walls a little and let the occupants of Montségur know that we were serious.

  ‘Don’t expose yourself,’ Robin told his giant friend, ‘but the more you kill at a distance, the fewer we will face in the assault.’

  But once those two had departed, there seemed little else that could be achieved. The men spent the afternoon sleeping in the cool of the cave or climbing about the foot of the mountain, staring up at the castle on the summit. Robin seemed totally unperturbed; even when Vim came and spoke seriously with him, voicing the mercenaries’ unease at tackling such a fortress, defended by so many men, he never showed anything but total confidence. ‘Do not trouble yourself, Vim, we will triumph against them. And rest assured that there will be treasure inside the castle beyond your wildest dreams – gold, silver, jewels – more wine than you could drink in a dozen lifetimes. And the fewer men we are, the bigger share of loot we shall each receive.’

  While Robin spoke to the mercenaries, I saw that both Roland and Sir Nicholas were listening intently. I was struck by their utterly different expressions. When Robin spoke of gold and silver and jewels, Roland’s eyes sparkled and a broad smile broke out on his lips. Sir Nicholas, in contrast, seemed almost physically sickened by such crude promises of vulgar worldly gain.

  However, I was fairly sure that Robin was lying through his teeth to the mercenary captain and his men. He dangled the prospect of wealth because he had to keep them on his side to have even the remotest chance of attacking the castle.

  I was unmoved by the talk of riches: I only wanted the Grail. It was so close – a few hundred yards away; and yet completely out of reach behind impregnable walls guarded by an army of enemies. My wounded right leg was paining me somewhat, and so I sat about the cave all afternoon, resting it, gnawing my fingernails and racking my brains for a way into Montségur. Nothing came.

  But, worse than a lack of ideas, was the knowledge that time was slipping away – by my reckoning, if I were to get the Grail home to Goody in time to save her life, I had to begin the journey home within the next ten days. And then there was Tuck – how much longer could he maintain his feeble grip on life? A day? Two days?

  At nightfall, Little John and Gavin returned in a state of mild elation: Gavin had killed one man and probably wounded another and after that the defenders had taken care not to show themselves on the walls for any length of time. But it was a paltry victory, and their strength was still overwhelming compared with ours.

  Thomas made us all some hot soup that evening, a thin pottage of wild garlic, hyssop, onions and barley, in a huge cauldron collectively owned by the mercenaries, and we all sat around the edges of the cave to eat. Before I had a chance to even taste a spoonful of my soup, Roland came over and said that Tuck was awake, and urgently wished to speak to me.

  The old priest was in a pitiable state: his eyes were open but fluttering madly, his skin was quite yellow and he was moaning almost constantly from the pain of his stomach wound. I thought at first that he was delirious, and after I had mopped his brow, and spooned a little water into his mouth, I was about to return to my cooling soup, when he grasped my hand with shocking force. His kind brown eyes opened and they stared at me with a feverish, almost demonic glitter that I had never seen in them before. Tuck was trying to speak through his agony, and I was dimly aware that Robin was standing quietly at my shoulder.

  ‘Too late,’ Tuck said, panting. ‘Too late … for me…’

  ‘Save your strength, my friend,’ I said, moistening his dry lips with a little more water. Sir Nicholas had told me that I must not let him eat or drink, not with a stomach wound, but his mouth was so cracked that it was beginning to split and bleed. ‘Rest yourself for a little while and save your strength to heal your wounds.’

  ‘The Grail…’ he said, the words jerking out through his gritted teeth. ‘I only … wanted … to see it … to hold it … just once … in my hands.’

  ‘You shall hold it yet, my friend,’ said Robin and when I turned to look at him, I saw a glint of moisture in his grey eyes, and all the muscles of his jaw were bunched and hard as iron. ‘And drink from it. And it shall heal you of all your hurts. I promise you, old friend, you shall yet hold the Grail.’

  ‘Too late,’ Tuck said in no more than a panting whisper. ‘But it has been … good this … journey … with … you … Robin. One … last … adventure…’

  He closed his eyes and became silent. For a moment I thought that his soul had gone from his body – and there were tears blurring my eyes, too. But, when I bent my ear down towards his open mouth, I felt the faintest stir of breath against the wet skin of my cheek.

  Robin was silent during supper; but when we had eaten and were making our preparations for bed, he gathered us all together in the centre of the cave and said, ‘Tomorrow, at noon, we will assault the castle. Rest now, every one of you – sleep well, and be ready for battle tomorrow. Tomorrow we take Montségur.’

  In the morning, I oversaw a squad of mercenaries as they gathered wood and chopped down a few scrubby trees and built themselves half a dozen ladders with which to assault the main entrance in the western wall of the Castle of Montségur. I did not feel at all happy in myself about the coming attack – and I have done this sort of thing many times and do not count myself a coward. It seemed to me a futile waste of lives to attack with the few people we had – thirty-five mercenaries, by my count, and seven Companions capable of swinging a sword. I did not believe it could be done. I could get nothing down for breakfast and all that morning my belly felt cold and hollow. But Robin was bright and breezily confident, coming around to each of the work parties of the mercenaries and encouraging them with words and a few crude jests, which were happily reciprocated – and I realized the men already had a liking and regard for the Earl of Locksley for all that he was about to plunge their lives into terrible danger.

  When Robin came up to my group of men, he led me aside, out of earshot and said something very strange indeed. ‘Alan,’ he said. ‘In the assault, I don’t want you to take any risks with your life. Play it safe, understand?’

  I stared at him. We were about to attack a formidable castle, well prepared and defended by three times our number. As a knight and a leader of men, it was my clear duty to set an example – in fact, to take risks. How could I play it safe? Before I could frame a question about Robin’s extraordinary words, my lord had moved on.

  We were watched closely from the ramparts all the while during our preparations by the Knights of Our Lady – while we gathered wood and shaped it with axes, and lashed it together with rawhide to make ladders – but, despite their overwhelming superiority, the defenders made no attempt to sally out and attack. Perhaps they were sensible: why
risk a sally when they could sit behind their safe walls and wait for us to come to them and be slaughtered? They would have ample time to prepare for our coming; we had utterly forfeited the element of surprise.

  Not all of us, however, were engaged in constructing the scaling ladders: Little John and Gavin spent the morning inside the cave setting up a rough-and-ready forge in the cooking hearth, using large quantities of scrap wood as fuel, a big leather bag as a bellows, and heating and hammering the discarded swords of the enemy that they had collected on a big round stone anvil. I was too engaged in my own works to discover what they were up to, but their efforts made the cave hellishly hot. However, that did not seem to disturb Nur, who was seated at the back of that big space muttering about mountain wombs over several large bowls of water, and fiddling with a mound of semi-rotten gobbets of human private parts that she had brought with her from the Jealous Castle. Occasionally, she would throw out her little bag of finger bones and indulge in a weird, high-pitched cackle. Throughout all this, Tuck lay quietly on his altar, in a deep, deep sleep that I knew was a only hair’s breadth away from death.

  A little before noon, we were ready. We massed our full strength, on foot, forty-odd hardened warriors, a hundred and fifty yards below the castle, just out of effective crossbow range. The men carrying the ladders were sent to the front, Robin took his position in the centre of the line, with Roland and Sir Nicholas at either side; Little John, with Gavin in his shadow, took the extreme left of the line, and Thomas and I took the extreme right. My stomach was a tight knot of fear. This day would be my last, I was utterly certain. There was no way we would be able to surmount those high walls and conquer the castle. But I kept my mouth shut, my back straight and tried my best to look confident.

  Robin stepped out in front of the line and said, very simply, ‘There is gold in that castle, and silver, and other treasures, enough to make all of you rich for the rest of your lives. Let’s go and fetch it. On my command the company will … advance!’

  We raced up that steep slope like hares.

  Have you ever tried to scramble a hundred and fifty yards up a slope that rises almost the height of a man in a single yard? And then, on reaching the summit, launch yourself into a full-pitched battle and attempt to overcome a twenty-foot-high wall bristling with scores of fanatical enemy soldiers? It cannot be done, I tell you. Well, it cannot be done by a company of thirty-odd mercenaries and a handful of dismounted knights. We climbed, we scrambled, we puffed and panted – and we arrived at the outer wall in a disorganized, milling mob, as fatigued as if we had just run several miles in full armour. Robin was shouting at the men, yelling, urging them to raise the ladders against the walls, and climb. But the confusion was too great for his will to be enforced. Ladders were abandoned; men cowered beneath their raised shields. The crossbow bolts cracked off the stones and whined about us. A man just in front of me was dropped in screaming agony by a flung spear; a boulder the size of a small pig thudded into the ground at my feet a moment later, narrowly avoiding crushing my toes. The mercenaries surged around below the walls like frightened peasants, picking up the ladders that had been dropped, taking hits from hurled missiles, dropping them again, being picked off one by one; some men were reduced to hacking impotently at the huge double door with their swords and axes or screaming insults at the defenders. One man was blinded, his face sloughing off like melting butter off a skillet when a cauldron of red-hot sand was dumped on him from above.

  In the end, only two ladders were raised against the wall, both on the right-hand side, the southern side. My side. The first was dislodged by the defenders with very little effort, pushed off the wall with a forked stick to crash to earth amid screams of agony from the scaling party; the second, I had the honour of commanding. My fear had swelled and grown almost to the point of panic. But I could not run, I could not prove a coward: I forced myself to move. The ladder crashed against the wall, held steady by two mercenaries, and I grabbed a rung at shoulder height and shouted for the men to follow me. A deep breath and I bounded upwards, eager to get this moment of extreme danger over as soon as possible. Fear gave wings to my feet. I could feel the ladder bouncing beneath me as other men came up behind. As I neared the top, a man-at-arms wielding a pole axe loomed over me; he swung the long axe at my head, but I managed to spear him in the throat with Fidelity in time and absorb the weakened blow with my shield. Then the axeman was gone, replaced by a mob of furious knights, slicing, hacking and lunging with their swords at my head, shoulders and upheld shield. Thank God for decent armour. I received half a dozen blows on my mail coat and helmet in as many heartbeats. I tried to bring my sword fully in to play, but with no free hand to grip the rungs of the ladder, a powerful glancing blow that skidded off my helm and on to my shoulder threw off my balance and a second strike, an axe, I believe, taken full on my shield, dislodged me completely. I had the sensation, for just a moment, of emptiness below me, almost of floating, and then I hit the earth. By God’s grace there was a stout bush beneath me to cushion my fall and, as I emerged scratched and slightly bleeding from its rough embrace, I heard Robin calling off the attack and urging us to get back, back out of range of their missiles. The men needed no urging. We were running down that hill before the echoes of Robin’s battle-voice died away.

  We regrouped near the foot of the mountain, and carried our wounded back to the cave. Six good men had been killed in that farcical, ill-conceived attack, and another ten had been wounded, some badly – and we had achieved precisely nothing.

  Back in the cave the mood was sour. The mercenaries sat about, tending to each other’s lesser wounds, binding their cuts and bruises, drinking wine with little moderation. We had lost that fight, and lost a handful of good comrades – we were weaker than before the assault and there was nothing for us to do but try once again to scale that damn mountain and conquer those killing walls.

  I felt the weight of despair settle around my shoulders. The fact that I had been right – that this was truly an impossible castle to capture – was no consolation. I would now never be able to place the Grail in Tuck’s sleeping hands and watch its holy magic restore him to full strength. He and Goody, and my unborn child, were now all as good as dead.

  In the late afternoon, Robin and I trudged up the mountain once more under the white flag of truce. It was hot; the southern sun beating down without mercy. We took eight of the mercenaries with us, all unarmed, and under instructions not to speak or communicate with the enemy under any circumstances. We paused a hundred yards from the main gate and watched as the white-clad men-at-arms on the battlements scurried about and eventually found an officer who would recognise our flag and beckon us forward.

  As we slogged up the last few yards, to stand a stone’s throw beyond the gate, I saw that the Master had climbed up once again to his place atop the battlements, and was smiling sadly down at us, once more with his hands nonchalantly on his hips.

  The bodies of half a dozen of our men were scattered below the walls of the Castle of Montségur, their corpses twisted in the inhuman attitudes of death, and Robin began his message with a gesture of his right hand towards the slain.

  ‘Under the time-honoured laws of combat, we seek a truce to recover the bodies of our fallen comrades, and to carry them away without fear of molestation,’ said Robin, in a flat, angry voice.

  The Master let out a long sigh of exasperation. ‘Such a waste, such a terrible waste of life,’ he said. His face was a picture of sorrow and concern. ‘Why are we clawing at each other like this, Robert? What is the purpose of all this bloodshed? Look at your men down there – did they have wives, children? They must have had mothers, at least. Will you tell their grieving mothers their sons are dead? I wonder. Or will you shirk that dolorous duty?’

  ‘May we have your leave to collect the bodies of our fallen comrades or not?’ said Robin stiffly.

  ‘Oh yes,’ sighed the Master, ‘you may gather up the grim harvest of the day; be my guest.’
His voice was tinged with sadness, but there was also an unmistakable hint of something else in his tone. Triumph.

  Robin gave the nod to the mercenaries who moved forward and gently began to lift the corpses of their comrades, fold them over their shoulders and carry them away down the hill. The Master, however, had not finished speaking.

  ‘Take the bodies, my friend, take them away with my blessing and the blessing of Holy Mary, the Mother of God, who weeps bitter tears at their deaths, but consider this – we did not slay these poor men, my knights and I – you did. It was your pride that killed them. You came against us in a spirit of violence and anger and your good men died uselessly as the price for that folly.’

  Robin lifted his head and looked right up at the Master; and with a flicker of spirit he said, ‘We will come again, Michel, mark my words, and make you pay for their sacrifice. You have not seen the last of us.’

  ‘Robin, Robin, why must you persist in this madness? You cannot take these walls. Look at our strength! You could not take them with ten thousand men. You know that; I know that; every man on this mountain knows that.’

  Robin said nothing. He looked down at his boots.

  ‘We are protected here by a power far, far greater than you can imagine. Not just by these high ramparts and the strong right arms of the brave men inside them. God protects us, and Holy Mary stands with us as well. You cannot prevail here. Robin, I beseech you, come to your senses. You cannot win. If you come again, your men will be slaughtered like these poor souls, they will be sacrificed on the altar of your stubbornness. Have pity on your own men and give up this foolish cause. It is futile.’

  I knew the Master was right – this was a futile cause. I had known it ever since I had first seen the Castle of Montségur. It was an impossible dream to attempt to take it. The Master seemed to be speaking inside my head, filling it with his words, and driving out any other considerations. Yet his simple message made perfect sense…