Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) Page 39

  It was Gilles de Mauchamps.

  He saw me, recognized me and ran at me snarling. Our blades arced out and clashed together once, and I counter-swung the mace at his head – and he pulled back just in time. There were more Templars bursting through, men-at-arms and knights, and my enemy was jostled away by the men coming in behind him. I killed a man-at-arms, and another. Roland was fighting like a Trojan beside me. I heard a roar from above and Little John jumped from the battlements to land with a thud in the sand. Then he was up, his great axe swinging. I ducked under a massive sword cut from a Templar knight, bobbed up and crushed his shoulder joint with a wind-milling mace blow. Roland had boldly engaged two men at once but was now struggling to fend them both off – I saw him take a blow to the head and stumble – and yet more Templars were crowding through, menacing shapes filling the bright light of the entrance.

  In that moment, with the main gate breached and a dozen Templars inside our walls, we were beaten; the castle was theirs, we were all as good as dead.

  Yet as I hacked Fidelity deep into the waist of a ferret-faced man-at-arms and ripped out his innards, I was dimly aware of a hideous noise coming from my right – a foul sound somewhere between a shriek and a drone – and into the mêlée in the courtyard charged a small, slight figure that looked as if it had been conjured from a wine-parched feverish nightmare. A pale emaciated body, naked but for a tattered black loincloth, rushed furiously out from the keep. Her body had been whitened with chalk and then painted with coal-black and blood in weird fantastical shapes and patterns. A pair of dry, empty, bone-white breasts, stippled with tiny black circles flapped on her skinny chest. The shortish grey hair had been stiffened with blood until it stood out straight from the scalp in a dark, spiky ball like an enormous gory hedgehog. But the terrible face under that macabre, prickled helmet was worse: a noseless, lipless, earless monstrosity, painted a ghoulish white and black to resemble a leering skull, the eyes burning with manic rage like those of a foul fiend from the uttermost depths of Hell.

  In her left hand, this creature carried a foreshortened spear with a grisly burden mounted on the sharp tip: a severed human head, similarly adorned with white chalk and bloody designs etched with a knife into the dead skin, the tonsured hair similarly spiked with dried blood, the mouth wedged open with a pair of short sticks and the tongue, painted deathly white, lolling freely as the head jiggled in the running witch’s hand. In her right hand was a small but wicked-looking hatchet.

  Nur howled and keened appallingly as she hurtled towards the knot of struggling men in the centre of the courtyard – and I swear, she caused every man in the battle, even those who knew her well, to pause for just an instant and stare at her shockingly hideous appearance. And in that tiny pause, Robin struck. I saw him standing on the parapet directly above the main gate, draw back his bow and aim almost vertically down into the courtyard. He loosed three shafts in as many heartbeats, one, two, three, plucking the arrows from the bag at his waist, nocking them, and shooting almost faster than the eye could see. Three times he loosed his shafts, and three enemies were transfixed. The first to fall was Gilles de Mauchamps – the one-armed knight crunched down to his knees, half a bow shaft protruding up from the hollow beside his collar bone. The next was a sergeant, who took an arrow straight down through his mail coif and into his brain, and the last was the axeman, a few paces into the courtyard, standing over the body of my cousin Roland, his weapon raised. Robin pierced his broad back with his final arrow, but it was Nur, screaming her weird war chant, who sent his soul to Hell.

  The witch leaped at him with hatchet in one hand and the Master’s head on a stick in the other and savaged him with both, butting his face with the bizarre severed-head-mace and hacking at his knees with the hatchet. When he was down, she finished him with a couple of scything hatchet blows to the back of the skull – then she drove on, into the astonished group of enemy men-at-arms standing flat-footed by the splintered gate, screaming at them and lunging madly with her awful weapons. Little John and I renewed our onslaught against the remaining Templars with a fresh wave of fury. We drove them towards the gate, killing, screaming, shoving them backwards with our steel. I found myself beside Nur by this point; we were shoulder to shoulder, cutting, slicing, lunging and – praise God – somehow corralling the pack of them, forcing them back, back to the shattered main gate.

  Then Little John was beside me, too, with a plank of wood from our dinner table in his hands, slamming the end mercilessly into the faces crowding in the entrance and, by main force, pushing the crowded enemy out with a foot-wide, six-foot length of roughly cut timber.

  Faced by the three of us – a blood-covered maniac swinging sword and mace, a giant wielding a long lump of wood and a naked battle-crazed fiend from Hell – our enemies wilted. They paused, they hesitated, they froze in their terror when they should have surged forward. One man-at-arms, blinded on the threshold, his face a mask of gore, was shrieking, ‘The Devil, the Devil, the Devil is against us!’ I killed him with a thrust to the throat from Fidelity – but I heard the cry taken up by more of the men outside. ‘The Devil is with them! The fiend is loose! God preserve us!’

  Miraculously, as we three shoved and struggled and hacked at them, the pressure began to slacken. And they finally began to pull back from the doorway and out of sight.

  When John had secured the door with another plank wedged into the frame and a stout locking bar dropped into its brackets, I limped up the stone stairs and looked out over the departing enemy, running down the hill in the manner of a flock of sheep panicked by a wolf. I could still hear faint cries of ‘Beware the Devil! The Devil is loose!’ from the running men.

  The Templars were in full retreat – I could hardly believe it. More than a hundred trained men had come against us that morning – and now more than a third of them lay crushed and broken outside and inside our walls. They had been frightened away from our broken gates by a skinny, naked, body-painted witch-woman who was not quite right in the head.

  Gilles de Mauchamps was still on his knees, a yard or two inside the courtyard. Five or six of his dead comrades lay about him but he still breathed, and he was tugging ineffectually at the arrow that jutted beside his neck, as the blood bubbled and spilled on to the white surcoat that sagged over his chest and belly. Beyond him, I saw Roland still lying on the floor, blood running down his temple, and Nur on her haunches beside my cousin, covered in battle-filth and dust, and seemingly trying to wake him. She leaned back and silently reached her skeletal white arms up to the sky as if imploring God or the spirits to come to her aid, and I saw that a black stick seemed to have sprouted from her emaciated, paint-spotted left breast – and then I realized with a cold, drenching shock that it was the latter half of a crossbow quarrel, I could even make out the leather fletchings. I was amazed that someone with such a frail-looking body had lasted as long as she had, for she must have taken her wound when we were pushing the enemy out of the gate. But even Nur’s powerful life force could not endure a pierced heart and she slumped down then and there, as I came down the stone steps towards her, falling gently sideways on to the courtyard floor, stretching out her bony white arm to touch Roland’s unconscious blond head.

  By the time I reached him, Gilles de Mauchamps had managed to undo the straps on his helmet one-handed and wrestle it from his head. He was clearly unable to rise and he remained on his knees like a penitent, swaying left and right. Blood covered the whole of his front, and was running freely from the corners of his slack mouth. He looked at me as I approached, his dark eyes questioning, seeming to ask the eternal query of the dying man – why me? – and he mumbled something that was too muffled by his own clotted gore to be comprehensible.

  I looked at him there, on his knees, dying. I paused for a heartbeat and stared into his face. Fidelity twitched in my hand, the blade seeming to have a soul of its own. I wanted to tell him that this death was the price of his cruel deeds at Westbury. That this was God’s judgm
ent. I thought about cutting his head from his shoulders, or spitting in his face, or taunting him with some clever remark. But, to be honest, I was just too tired. Instead, I looked into his eyes for a few moments, while he struggled to speak and the blood bubbled from his lips, then I shrugged and moved on.

  Nur was dead when I reached her but my cousin yet lived. Her white hand had found its way to his cheek, and in death the slight grubby fingers of the witch seemed to caress the shiny burn scar that marked the side of his face. Roland had a fresh wound to his sword arm, a gash that had ripped through his mail, probably a spear thrust, and a deep sword cut over his left ear, which I assumed came from the blow that had felled him. But he was breathing steadily and, God willing, I was fairly sure that he would live.

  The enemy did not come again that day. We stacked our dead by the walls, folded their arms and closed their eyes, and we hurled the enemy corpses – including that of Gilles de Mauchamps – over the steep cliff on the north-eastern side of the castle. We tended to our wounded, which was almost all of us – I had acquired a shallow sword cut across the back of my neck below the line of my helmet, which was irritatingly painful whenever I moved my head, and a deep cut in my right thigh, just above the knee – and all managed to have a drink from the Grail, which Robin said would not only heal our wounds but also put heart into us for the final battle.

  Roland remained unconscious – breathing shallowly but regularly, his wounds bathed in Grail water and bound up. He looked peaceful and, in my exhausted state, I had to struggle hard not to envy his seemingly delightful sleep.

  We ate a little, prayed, mourned the dead, set the sentries on the walls and all managed to take some measure of rest that night – I fell into a deep but disturbed slumber an hour or two after dusk in which I dreamed that I was trapped at the bottom of a deep well, while Nur and Goody looked down on me from above and mocked my impotent efforts to climb the slimy stone sides and escape my doom. I was awoken by Vim not long after midnight who told me gruffly that it was my turn to stand sentry duty and that all was quiet on the mountain – but when I tried to rise from my blankets, my whole body felt as if it had been beaten with cudgels for days or weeks on end.

  It was chilly on the ramparts, and what was worse was the knowledge that we could never manage to repulse another assault as ferocious as the one the day before. Only five mercenaries yet lived, including Vim – and with myself, Robin and Little John – who was a mass of minor cuts, bruises and punctures – we had only eight fighting men with which to repel any attack. I prayed that my death would be swift, when it came. And I wondered how Thomas was faring – had he managed to elude the Templars and make his way north? In a weak moment, just before the dawn, I even briefly considered taking my own life with the lance-dagger, as the Master had done, to ensure my everlasting reward in paradise. But I soon began to scold myself for such weakness – thank the Lord – and at the first pinky-grey light of dawn I felt entirely different about the matter of my life and death, and went over to the keep to wake Robin and report on an uneventful night.

  The Templar embassy came a little before noon. A lone knight walking up the path that lead to the main gate, unarmed except for a sword at his waist and carrying a beautiful, snowy white flag on a long ash pole over his shoulder. As he drew nearer, I saw that it was the handsome, red-haired knight I had seen that day with Gilles de Mauchamps at the Maison des Consuls in Toulouse.

  ‘God save you all,’ he sang out, as he came close to the walls, stopping about ten yards away and smiling cheerfully up at the ramparts – which had every defender who could drag himself upright lined up on them on Robin’s hurried orders.

  ‘What can we do for you, sir?’ The Earl of Locksley’s tone was perfectly polite, and I marvelled at his composure. He had taken a blow to the ankle the day before and while the joint was not broken it was swollen to twice its normal size and I knew that Robin, just by standing upright, was being battered by waves of pain.

  ‘Well, without wishing to disparage your magnificent defence yesterday – it was most impressive, my congratulations – I have come to discuss your surrender.’

  ‘What makes you think, sir, that we are ready to surrender?’ Robin’s words once again were mild as buttermilk, polite, utterly courteous.

  ‘My dear fellow – how many men have you left under arms? Twenty? Thirty, perhaps? I have more than a hundred men-at-arms down there and thirty knights. And I have just sent off a rider to Toulouse to fetch another hundred. With the greatest respect for your valour, you cannot keep us out for ever. I thought we might come to some accommodation to save unnecessary bloodshed.’

  ‘I have no problem with shedding your blood, none at all,’ said Robin, but he was smiling down at this charming Templar.

  ‘Quite, quite – but, you see, I’m afraid I rather do. I am Guy d’Épernay, by the way. The Seigneur de Mauchamps, our gallant captain, has tragically fallen, and that means that as Preceptor of the Templars of Toulouse, I am now the leader of our forces. I think you will find me far more open to reasonable discussion than poor old Gilles, may he rest with God. And I think I might be able to persuade my Order to overlook certain, erm, financial transgressions on your part in exchange for a certain rather special something, a unique holy relic, shall we say, that you currently have in your possession. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I think, sir, that you’d better come inside,’ Robin said.

  The gate had been barricaded with fresh wood and nailed shut at this point and so the Templar knight had to be hoisted up on a rope to the ramparts above the main gate. He passed along the line of wounded men with many a nod and a smile – and although he may have been surprised at how few we were and how knocked about our shrunken company was, he gave no sign of it and followed Robin amiably into the keep, where, once I had brought them a flagon of wine and two goblets, they remained alone for more than an hour.

  When they emerged, there was not a single man in Montségur who did not scan their faces for hopeful news. And the news was plain to see. Robin wore his usual serene expression, but with a little smile tugging at the corner of his lips; Guy d’Épernay looked openly delighted. Suddenly every bloody, bandaged, exhausted face in the castle was beaming. The Templar was courteously lowered back down the outside of the wall, after many a friendly slap on the back as he passed along the parapet, and the hard-bitten mercenaries actually waved to him and called out good wishes as he clambered down the mountain to the Templar camp.

  ‘Saved at the last minute, Alan – plucked out of the slavering jaws of Death!’ Robin was allowing himself to be openly jubilant.

  ‘Do you think we can trust him?’ I asked, for the sake of saying something. I knew we had no choice in this matter.

  ‘I believe so, God, I really hope so – it turns out that I know some of his people in Épernay; and his father was a great tournament rival with my father back in King Henry’s day. He’s a friend of the Viscount de Trencavel, as well. He seems to be a decent fellow; a man of his word, I’d say. He was also in a rare sweat to acquire the Grail for the Templars. He kept on asking me about it, all the way through our negotiations – he’s never seen it himself, of course, but he had heard all the extravagant tales. I think he would agree to almost anything to get his hands on it.’

  ‘So we must give it up?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the Grail or all our lives,’ Robin said. ‘We can march out of here, heads held high, with all our weapons and our wounded – we can even take the Master’s silver hoard with us. We will have enough to rebuild Westbury, if that is what is troubling you. But the truth is that we have no choice. Do you want to stay here and die for the Grail, when we can go free? Do you want all of them to die for it?’ He waved a hand across the courtyard at the mercenaries who were already happily engaged in tearing down the planks from the patched main gate.

  There was no need to reply to my lord’s question.

  Robin personally handed over the Grail to Guy d’Épernay in a bri
ef ceremony the next day that followed the burial of our dead at the foot of the mountain. One of our erstwhile enemy priests obliged by saying the prayers over the mass grave and then we all gathered in the Templar camp in the saddle below Montségur, with our wounded and our horses and our baggage, and my lord presented the square wooden box to a visibly ecstatic Guy d’Épernay.

  Guy opened the box slowly, reverently, and I caught a bright flash of gold, before he looked away, as if the very sight of the Grail were searing his eyes, and gently closed the lid. Laying the box down on a portable altar, he fell to his knees, followed in this example by all of his men, who were gathered eagerly around him. He lifted his face to the Heavens and began to utter a loud and lengthy prayer to God Almighty, thanking Him for delivering this blessed vessel into his unworthy care. When he had finished, he led his fellow Templars in a psalm, the singing pure, high and deeply wonderful in that lonely place, the music seeming to bounce off the peaks of the far Pyrenees. But while the Poor Fellow Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon raised their solemn voices to God and praised his holy name – Robin and the handful of survivors of the bloody struggle for Montségur climbed stiffly, painfully into their saddles and slipped away, pointing their horses’ heads north towards Toulouse.

  When we had travelled a couple of miles down the road and were well out of sight of the saddle of land, the singing having died away behind us, I dug my heels into my horse’s ribs and rode up to the head of the column until I was trotting along knee to knee with my lord.

  ‘I saw it,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Alan,’ said Robin. ‘You saw what?’

  ‘I saw the Grail.’

  ‘Well, congratulations, my lad. What a blessed day for you!’

  ‘Where is the real one?’

  ‘The real one? Whatever can you mean? The one and only Holy Grail – the cup of Christ, a transcendently beautiful, finely wrought vessel of solid gold, intricately carved and encrusted with priceless jewels – now rests with the noble Order of the Knights Templar. I have just given it to them in fair exchange for our lives. And don’t you ever say, or even dare to think, otherwise.’