Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) Page 33

  ‘Do the right thing, the honourable thing – pack up your bags and your weapons, gather up your wounded men and simply ride away. I will not molest you as you depart – go from this place with my blessing, and you and your men shall live long and happy lives. Go now, I say to you, go now and live.’

  I looked at Robin and saw that he was nodding his head, ever so slightly. His eyes were still fixed on the ground but he seemed to be agreeing silently with every word the Master uttered. How could he not? The Master’s words were as true as the Gospels. We must go.

  ‘We have no quarrel, Robin, you and I – we are not enemies. As you said yesterday, we once divided the world between us, each in his proper place, each living in peace. As you said, we can have all that again. There is no need for you to kill your men, to kill your dear friends in this struggle – what can blood accomplish? Let us be sensible, let us behave like civilized men. You go your way, and I shall go mine, and we shall wish each other well. There is too much pain and sorrow in this world – let us not add to the sum of evil. Depart now, take your men and your weapons and ride away. And we shall both live in happiness and harmony.’

  There was a breathtaking beauty and purity in the Master’s words. I could see his vision of a happy, harmonious world in which men did not slaughter each other uselessly in the name of greed or religion or differences of opinion. Surely this beautiful world would be Heaven on Earth. And all we had to do now was to walk away from this sordid, impossible, foolish fight.

  ‘You will not attack us on the road, if we depart this place?’ asked Robin, very quietly; he was still staring at the ground by his feet. ‘I must have your solemn word on that, Michel. I will not allow my men to be put in danger on the march.’

  The mercenaries had finished gathering the bodies by then, and a couple of them were looking at Robin, awaiting his orders. Some appeared deeply puzzled by his words. My lord waved them off down the hill, bidding them to follow the line of men bearing corpses and step carefully down the slope.

  ‘Do I have your word?’ he said, finally looking up at the Master standing so high above us.

  ‘You have my word, old friend. Go in peace.’ The Master made the holy sign of the cross in the air above our heads.

  Robin put a hand on my arm and turned me so that I was facing down the hill, and we departed, saying nothing to each other, and stumbling a little on the loose rocks and uneven footing.

  At the base of the mountain, Robin paused and looked back up that steep slope. I looked too and saw that the Master had gone from his commanding position atop the battlements, although a pair of Knights of Our Lady had taken his place, and now were watching over us, shading their eyes against the bright sunlight.

  Robin turned to me. ‘That should do it,’ he murmured, and slapped me on the shoulder to urge me back along the path towards the cave.

  The Earl of Locksley clapped his hands to attract the attention of everyone in the crowded cave, and said loudly, in an oddly cheerful tone of voice, ‘We failed this afternoon to take the castle by frontal attack – which was to be expected. We are too weak, there are too few of us here to ram home a successful, conventional assault. We know that; the Master knows that; the whole mountain knows that, apparently. So we shall do what is expected of us, we shall do the only sensible thing. We shall run away, like whipped dogs with our tails between our legs!’ And he grinned at the assembled company, a group of thirty-odd bone-weary men, many wounded, all fatigued, bruised and downcast.

  Then something truly magical happened. A ripple of noise travelled around the room, like a murmur, and heads began to lift, backs to straighten, and mouths to smile. For suddenly it was clear that Robin had a deeper plan, a stratagem, a ruse – and all was not lost after all. Indeed, if you had looked at Robin’s grinning face, and the sly smiles of Little John and Gavin, you might easily have been led to believe that all was going according to plan.

  We mounted our horses in plain view of the ramparts and, with slumped shoulders and drooping heads, and with the occasional shouted insult wafting down to us from above, we formed up on the saddle of land to the west of the mountain and took the road north away from Montségur, slowly riding back the way we had come. A keen observer looking closely at the dirty faces of the tired mercenaries might have noticed a few secret smiles, and conspiratorial nudges, or whispered jests. But from the ramparts more than a thousand feet above, I am fairly sure it looked as Robin wished it to look, as if we were returning to Foix, or perhaps even further afield, to lick our wounds and think again.

  Once out of sight of the castle, shielded by a small, parched hill and finding ourselves in thick, almost virgin woodland, we jumped from our saddles and began to organize ourselves for the night march. Weapons, wool cloaks and water only, was the order from Robin – the horses and baggage being returned to their pasture under the care of three lightly wounded men.

  And an hour after nightfall, after we had eaten as much as we could, on foot, and all of us I believe filled with a boyish excitement, we took to a narrow, little-used track through the close-set trees heading due east, being led by Maury, the malodorous shepherd. I was ordered by Robin to take up a place at the rear of the line, which gave me an opportunity to count the men as they marched past through the trees in the last light of that day. With Vim at their head, I tallied twenty-six surviving mercenaries fit and ready for battle. We had left Tuck in the cave with one of the hurt younger men to care for him – but all the other Companions who had left England with me in March were more or less hale. However, nearly half of these tough routiers had fallen as a result of serving Robin for a few short days. Would they stay true, I wondered, in the coming fight? And if Robin’s plan were to work and we got inside Montségur, and they subsequently discovered that there was no hoard of gold and silver – how would they react then? Perhaps, I told myself, I was worrying over much. Perhaps I should put my faith in God – and Robin.

  As the last man in the marching column, I received an unpleasant shock only a few moments after we set off, when I heard a noise behind me, and a voice calling, ‘My lord? My lord? It is me, André, the scout. I have to make my report to the captain.’ It was one of the mercenaries we had sent to guard the horses. I sent him swiftly up the line to speak to Robin.

  Under the cover of full night and the thick forest of this remote region, we trudged in single file along ancient hunting tracks, stumbling a little in the dark and bumping into each other but led by Maury through secret ways and circling round Montségur to the north and then east. As the crow flies, we were never more than a mile or two from our enemies, but it felt as if we were in another county. My wounded calf throbbed awfully during that march. The forest closed in around us, and the night-black world was reduced to the stunted trees looming on either side, and the back of the man in front of you.

  After two hours, or perhaps three, we stopped and huddled around Robin in the darkness. Our leader told us that we were now directly to the east of the castle at the foot of the spur. Here we would rest for the remainder of the night, and a little before dawn, Maury would lead us up the spine where we would assault the castle, with any luck, achieving total surprise.

  ‘I have good news, my friends,’ said Robin. ‘It seems that after we left the cave the Master dispatched a strong force of knights to follow us, I believe to ambush us on the march – some forty men. Our friend André here watched them ride past on the road heading north. Even now, they are riding hard towards Foix, some fifteen miles away. The Master has weakened himself by a third, my friends, and we shall take full advantage of that fact when we attack. But there is more: we shall have powerful sorcery on our side in this coming struggle,’ announced my lord triumphantly. ‘Our wise friend Nur here has been in communion with the spirits of the sky and they have promised to come to our aid in the morning.’

  The reaction to this from the mercenaries was mixed – some of the men seemed cheered by the prospect of supernatural help; some muttered, looked fearf
ully out into the darkness and crossed themselves. Others just got on with making their beds.

  I sought out Roland before making up my own bed and asked him what Robin had meant about Nur.

  My cousin had the grace to look shamefaced at this open talk of demonic practices by a person under his protection. ‘She is making a magic mist that will hide us when we attack the castle again tomorrow morning,’ he said. Then, trying for a little levity: ‘She says that if she had the freshly severed head of a powerful man, she could be absolutely certain of her spell – but she lacks one. Ha-ha. So she had to make do with a pile of mouldy knights’ testicles! Ha! She even asked me today if I would cut off the Master’s head and give it to her as a gift. Oh, she is an odd one.’

  ‘Do you really believe all this disgusting magical nonsense?’ I said crossly. I did not appreciate Roland making light of these matters. It was a time for seriousness, I felt. I was also full of apprehensions about the attack. It seemed to me to have only a slightly greater chance of success than our botched assault on the main gate.

  ‘Do you believe that the Grail will save Tuck’s life? And Goody’s – if we can get it back to her in time? Do you have faith in its magical power?’ my cousin responded.

  I did not answer him – for his question had turned my head around. I hoped that the Grail would cure Tuck and Goody, I truly hoped with all my heart that it would. But did I truly believe that it would cure them? Did I have faith that the Grail could cure all wounds? Peering into my secret heart, I knew that I had my doubts.

  Before I could answer my cousin, I saw that Nur was now beside us and bit my tongue. She was laying out Roland’s cloak as a bed and had stuffed fresh green leaves and grass into an old chemise to make a little pillow for him; I saw, too, that he had already laid out a little mess of blankets for her a few feet from his. In an instant, a pure truth leaped unbidden into my mind, and I knew what I was seeing in this little tableau. It was an act of love, a quiet, ordinary, everyday act of love given freely by one human being to another. Whatever sordid, Devil-spawned magical fantasies this woman entertained, there was some good in Nur. And whatever type of bond this odd pair had forged – the tall French knight with the scarred face and the mutilated Syrian witch – it was a bond of love.

  And love, as Tuck had often told me, came only from God.

  I was awoken a little before dawn – from a nightmare in which I was being trampled by a herd of wild pigs – by shrieks of unholy glee. Something that felt like a pebble from a boy’s catapult crashed painfully into my forehead, and in the next instant a dozen more pummelled my prone body. I jumped up and reached for my shield which was on the ground just beside my head, and saw that the forest floor was littered with round white objects the size of dove’s eggs, and that more were hurtling down from the dark-grey sky. Hastily grabbing my weapons and mail, and holding the shield above my head, I scurried under the shelter of the nearest tree, and plumped down next to Thomas.

  The gleeful shrieking was coming from Nur, but the sound of her joy was now almost drowned out by the drumming rattle of the hailstones on the leather-faced wooden shield above my head. The strange Arab woman was capering about in a kind of ecstasy – heedless of the hail bouncing off her black headdress and robes – cackling madly and calling on all of us to admire her magical powers.

  In my sleep-fuddled state, it was several moments before I took in the scene but, in the half-light, I could make out little groups of mercenaries huddled, shields held aloft, around the base of almost every neighbouring tree, each looking in awe at the cavorting witch and occasionally glancing up through the leaves at the relentless falling hail. It was hard to believe after so many days of sunshine that we were now in a furious ice storm.

  Robin was running across the open space, the hail bouncing off the hard ground as high as his knees, with his cloak held over his head. He came crashing down beside me, shoving Thomas aside and putting his back to the wide trunk, and I was obliged to share my shield with him. My lord was breathless, hectic with excitement: ‘What did I tell you, Alan, what did I tell you? That Nur is a true miracle worker. She has brought the very weather to our aid, or the spirits of the air or whatever you want to call them. She’s bloody magnificent!’

  And I saw that as the barrage of hailstones lessened a fraction, a thick white mist was creeping through the trees, advancing in tendrils from the south like freezing smoke from a forest fire or the breath of a northern ice giant. I suddenly realized that I was very cold, shivering, in fact, and tugged Robin’s cloak from his unresisting fingers and wrapped it around my shoulders.

  My lord was oblivious to the cold, it seemed. ‘This is a God-send, Alan, an absolute God-send!’ His voice was alive with happiness. ‘We will be invisible, quite invisible until we are right on top of them. We can do it, Alan, I know it. I think we can honestly take that damned impossible castle in this wonderful fog!’

  The hailstorm lasted less than half an hour, but the mist that followed it swirled and thickened around us and became an almost-solid grey-white wall until we could barely see five paces away. Robin delayed the attack while the fog continued to thicken, keeping everyone together in a tight huddle, lest any man should wander off and become lost, and it was not until mid-morning that, fully armed and mailed, we began to climb the steep path that led westwards up the spur.

  Robin demanded absolute silence from the men, and we advanced in single file with each man taking a hold of the belt of the man in front. Once more Maury led the way, and thank the Good Lord that he did, for a couple of wrong steps to the left or right in that white blindness would have meant falling off the spine and crashing down the steep mountainside to our doom. But Maury led us true, and while it was a slightly more gentle climb than the path on the western side that we had sprinted up the day before, it was longer and still no easy stroll and my calf made a serious protest. But on we forged, the whiteness all around us, our hands sweaty on the belt of the man in front, stepping slowly and carefully, and trying not to let shield and spear clunk together as we moved, or sword hilt chink against mail coat. But we were fortunate – or Nur’s unholy spirits were truly with us – for that freezing fog cloaked sound as well as sight, and we marched on, ever upwards, into the heart of this earth-touching cloud. Our mood was buoyant, too. The men seemed to believe that Nur genuinely had conjured a mist to hide us from our enemies: and in my experience men fight far better when they think there are powers beyond nature on their side, be it God – or the Devil! It took two hours, by my reckoning, and when I finally blundered into the back of the mercenary in front of me, to a volley of whispered curses, I saw that we were all gathered together in a low hollow on the mountainside in a space that seemed like a round white room with nebulous, shifting, ghostly walls of mist. We were within a stone’s throw of the castle, undetected. And all of us, even the most hardened mercenaries, were eager for the assault, pink of cheek and filled with a soaring, breathless excitement.

  Robin addressed us in a low whisper: ‘There is a wall fifty paces over there’ – he held out an arm in a direction that I guessed was westwards – ‘that guards the castle from attack along this spur. It is twelve feet high with a little postern gate set into it. This is the first defence, manned by no more than a handful of men, but it needs to be taken speedily and in silence, or as quietly and quickly as we can possibly manage. Eight men will attack initially, scaling the wall using four of these. Little John is calling them his “war hooks” for want of a better name.’

  My lord reached into a rough fustian sack at his feet and pulled out a large, curious-looking metal object. It had been roughly fashioned by welding together three sword blades that had each been bent into a hook. The blades were bonded together at one end with strips of iron and attached to a length of knotted rope. At the top, the three sharp hooks branched out in three different directions. The device was heavy, and only crudely put together, but it seemed solid enough to take the weight of an armoured man – and I finally k
new what Little John and Gavin had been constructing at the forge in the hellishly hot cave while the mercenaries and I had been gathering wood on the mountain.

  ‘You hurl these war hooks over the top of the wall,’ said Robin in his quietest voice, ‘whereupon they will, with any luck, catch hold, and then you use the rope to ascend. Once at the top, leave the rope dangling for the next man. Behind the eight initial attackers will be the bowmen – myself, John and Gavin with war bows, and Jehan there with his crossbow’ – a burly mercenary ducked his head and grinned at us all – ‘and our task is to kill any enemy who puts his head above the parapet. This part should go easily enough – we think there are only five or six men manning this wall – the next bit is the tricky part. The first attackers must silence the defenders, open the gate for the rest of us, then immediately go on to assault the main wall of the castle. If God – or the spirits’ – a smile here for Nur – ‘are with us, we should be attacking an enemy that believes us to be long gone and, in any case, will not be prepared for an attack from this direction. I know that we can do this – but if you will forgive me for repeating myself, speed and silence are the essence. Now who will volunteer to be one of the attackers?’

  Robin looked at me, and I reluctantly nodded. I knew that this was the most dangerous role in the coming battle but, well, how could I say no to Robin? How could I refuse my lord? Thomas immediately volunteered to be second man on my war hook, and Roland stepped forward promptly too. In the end, the eight men were myself and Thomas, Vim and Olivier, and Roland and Sir Nicholas with two mercenaries whose names I did not know.

  ‘Remember,’ whispered Robin as a parting shot, ‘speed and silence, and the rest of us will be right there on your heels.’

  Maury took us the last few paces through the fog and, the heavy war hook in my hands, I found myself crouching behind a rock and looking out at the blank grey wall a mere ten paces away. I could not see anyone atop the battlements, and for one wild, craven moment, I dared to hope that the Knights of Our Lady had abandoned the castle and fled and that there would be no fight today. I pulled myself together, looked over to my right and left at Roland, Sir Nicholas and Vim, took a deep breath and began to run, as quietly as I could, towards the wall.