Gate of the Dead

by David Gilman

  From what she could see, most of the men-at-arms, those hardened men who had rescued her, were already slain, their bodies stripped naked and smeared with blood and dirt as they were desecrated underfoot. Lady Marguerite’s clothes were being torn from her by peasant women; they grabbed her hair, their knives slashing away her fine clothes, uncaring that their blades cut through fabric and into skin. Christiana watched the woman’s humiliation and terror and felt the blood drain from her face. Sir Marcel, bloodied and wounded, was held bound by a stave behind his arms as he was forced to watch the sickening assault on his pregnant wife.

  In front of the parents was the battered and bloodied body of their fair-haired daughter, two years younger than Agnes. They had thrown the child from the window into the courtyard below. The mob leader spat into Sir Marcel’s face, and yelled for him to renounce his rank, and his privilege, and to turn his lands over to the people. Sir Marcel nodded, his body shuddering from the tears.

  Christiana saw half a dozen men-at-arms on horseback at the gate, and for a moment there was a flutter of hope. And then one of them raised himself in his stirrups. He was bareheaded, his sword still in its scabbard. Neither this knight, nor those with him, would raise a voice to protect them. He was young and she saw his fair hair and the shaved side of his head as he cried out to the mob’s leader.

  ‘Be done with it! He will say anything now. It means nothing. Be done with it!’

  The women had forced Marguerite to her knees and she had tried through her sobbing grief to reach forward to pull the battered body of her daughter to her. But a woman grabbed a handful of her hair, wrenching free a bloodied fistful. Sir Marcel was trying to say something to his wife when one of the men stepped forward and cut her throat. Her body convulsed as the women kept a firm grip on her, the pulsating blood soaking her bulging stomach. The horror was not yet over – men pulled his son through the crowd. He had obviously tried to protect his mother and Christiana could see he had been wounded: his left arm hung limp and he staggered, barely able to stay on his feet. He was little more than a child, still at home being taught, like all seven-year-olds, the joy of verse and the meaning of honour. He trembled, his fine clothes soiled with his own fear. A massive bruise covered half his face. No sooner had his eyes sought out his father than the mob’s leader slashed down viciously and slew the boy. A cheer went up as the child’s head was thrown into the crowd.

  Christiana’s strength deserted her and she slumped to the floor, her face pressed against the rough cold wall. It would be better to be torn apart by wolves, which would kill more quickly and with less cruelty than these peasants. Someone grabbed the front of her dress and shook her. It was Henry, slapping her face.

  ‘Get up!’ he hissed. ‘Get up now!’ She smelled the vomit he had spewed from his own terror before her own had cast her into darkness.

  Reaching for him she found her strength and then fear and instinct made her run for the stairwell. There were scant seconds for them to reach the cellar as the mob bayed for Sir Marcel’s death. As she went down the staircase, her back pressed against the wall, a firm grip on the knife, she saw the crowd part, exposing the heaped bundles of kindling. Two of the attackers struck flints and lit tallow torches and dragged the helpless de Lorris to where the fair-haired knight stood with a lance rammed into broken stonework. They bound the barely conscious man to the makeshift pyre and thrust the torches into the dry tinder. The flames quickly took hold and held the mob’s attention as Sir Marcel raised his face to the night sky and screamed in agony.

  Footsteps thumped back and forth above them, carpets and furniture dropped past the window – they were already looting. She dragged Agnes behind her as Henry watched their backs until they pushed into the cellar. She could smell the intruders before she saw them. A rancid stench of stale sweat and excrement that clung to clothes and skin. A candle flickered in the near-airless room as a man and woman gorged what food there was while shoving oatcakes, jars and cuts of meat into a sack. Their mouths were full, distorted gargoyles, when they saw Christiana. The man spluttered, reaching for a falchion he had laid on the table in his haste to seize supplies. As he lunged Christiana released Agnes’s hand and grappled with him, knowing in that instant that he would overpower her. Without thought she rained down knife blows on his neck and shoulder and saw blood spurt as she severed an artery. He fell back, legs kicking out across the blood-wet stone floor, choking on the food, hands to the wound that would kill him in minutes. The woman had thrown a clay pot at Henry, and then backed like a cornered feral cat as he and Christiana threatened her. The peasant slashed a short-bladed knife in front of her, sweeping back and forth, disgorging the food so she could cry for help.

  ‘Kill her!’ Christiana cried as she lunged, forcing the woman to face her attack. Henry hesitated, but only for a second, when the woman’s knife nearly caught his mother’s face, and then he drove down his sword into the woman’s back. She fell, taking his sword embedded in bone and muscle. He gazed, wide-eyed, at the first person he had slain.

  Christiana stepped on the woman’s shuddering body, her foot pressing her weight onto the neck, her voice a slap, breaking his hesitation. ‘Get it!’

  Henry yanked free the blade. The babble of voices from outside came closer as the mob came into the house. Christiana snatched the candle and led the way into the passage as Henry shouldered the door closed. They bumped along the rough-hewn wall, stumbling and grazing skin. Uneven rocks punched and bruised them; their breath rasped with exertion as terror drove them on to where the beam lay ready. She waited, trying to calm her breathing, listening in case any of the mob was already in the chapel. She pulled a bloodied sleeve across the sweat on her face. She could barely make out Agnes in the poor light, but she saw that Henry’s face was daubed with dirt and gore. He had taken responsibility for their safety – as his father had once done.

  ‘I’ll go up with Agnes. Block the door with the beam; can you do that on your own?’ she said.

  ‘I can do it. The rope’s up there. I’ll need the light.’

  Christiana handed him the candle. Her torn hem caught a cross bar; she ripped it free, then clambered up into the darkness. She eased herself into the sullen chapel. It was empty. Windowless, it had only one door. She turned around and lowered her hand to Agnes. Henry waited until his sister’s ankles kicked free of the beam and then he carefully placed the candle into a recess of an empty cresset lamp and manhandled the beam away from the hatch. As he dragged its weight towards the doorway he could hear no sound from the cellar. The mob must have been more interested in what lay in the house, but he could smell smoke. They were burning down the manor. Henry wedged the beam at a low angle, felt its foot bite into the rough stone floor and turned back towards the escape route.

  Complete darkness blanketed the chapel. The dull spluttering glow from the candle in the underground passageway barely offered enough light for her to see Agnes.

  ‘The rope!’ whispered Henry from below the hole.

  She lowered the rope whose one end was tied around a pillar. It was eight or nine feet to the floor below. Henry speared the point of his sword beneath the candle, reached up, twisted the rope around his left arm and hauled himself up far enough for his mother to wrap the torn strip from her dress around the palm of her hand and reach down to grasp the sharp-edged sword and its life-giving light.

  As Henry climbed up she reached down and grabbed his belt to haul him onto the chapel’s floor. For a moment he lay with his face pressed against cool stone. Christiana laid a hand on his head.

  ‘Your courage never failed you. And it saved our lives,’ she said.

  Henry got to his knees, his hands trembling after the blood-rush of the killing during their escape. ‘I was frightened, Mother – so scared of what they might do to you and Agnes. They’re burning the house. I smelled smoke when I blocked the door. What should we do now?’

  ‘Wait here a moment. Agnes, hold Henry’s hand.’

  The chap
el was barely big enough to hold twenty people. As she raised the candle she could see wooden benches that straddled the chapel’s width and a plank table that held the silver crucifix, a small casket and silver candlesticks. She made her way to the iron-studded door and prayed it had not been locked from the outside.

  ‘Mother! Don’t take the light away, please,’ whimpered Agnes.

  Henry eased her to him, and put his arms around her. ‘Hush now – be brave, little sister. Mother has to see if we can get away from here.’

  The child had known terror like this before, when a killer had held them on a castle’s battlements and threatened their lives. Since then there had been safety and the warmth of a home with her mother. There had been no menace, no frightening voices except those that came in her dreams. And when she woke kicking away the bedclothes and crying in fear, her mother’s soft arms cuddling her, and the warm smell of her mother’s body, comforted her and soothed away the memories. Her father had killed the man who had threatened them, but then he had left them, and she did not know why. She remembered a field of flowers and the snow-capped mountains that day when he held her in his strong arms and promised to return and fill her bedtime with stories. But he had not yet come back.

  ‘Is Father coming?’ she asked Henry as Christiana took the light further away.

  ‘I don’t think, so, sister. He does not know we are here, so how can he come? Mother and I will find a way. I promise. But we cannot do it without you.’

  ‘What must I do?’

  ‘Be brave, and say a prayer.’

  Agnes thought about it, and nodded, words failing her.

  Henry tried to see his sister’s features in the near darkness. She was nine years old, but she was like a child. Perhaps it was different for a girl. He had heard the men-at-arms and the squire say such things when they talked about women. Sir Marcel had been a kindly mentor and although his squire beat Henry at times for failing in his duty, the gentle knight had always explained that it was a man’s duty to protect women. Now Henry hoped he had done his best.

  Christiana turned the iron ring that lifted the latch. Before she pulled open the door she hesitated, worried that the dull glow from the candle might give away their hiding place to those in the manor house. Yet if she extinguished the flame the darkness would be complete and fear could strangle them. She placed the candle a few feet from the door so that when it opened there would be the barest glimmer of light showing. She eased back the door and breathed in the night air, sweeter than the dank chapel. She dared herself to step out further, and de Lorris family gravestones rose up from the ground, throwing cruciform shadows towards her as flames began to eat away at the manor house roof. She saw the dark forms of the mob as they began to filter away from their destruction, but two embers of light were bobbing their way up the path towards the chapel. She recognized one of the torchbearers as the knight who had called for the mob to kill Sir Marcel.

  There was no escape.

  She pushed her weight against the door and wished there had been a key in the lock. That at least would stop these rogue knights from coming into the chapel. Picking up the candle she moved back quickly through the benches to her children.

  ‘We have to go back down into the passage. Men are coming.’

  She saw the fear in her daughter’s face. Christiana smiled bravely, and glanced quickly at Henry, a look that told him not to contradict her. ‘They might be coming to help us,’ she said. ‘But we have to wait and make sure. Do you understand? We have to be quiet, and we will have to wait in the dark.’

  She felt the child stiffen.

  ‘Remember what I said,’ Henry told her.

  Her bottom lip trembled but she nodded, and reached out to grip his hand.

  ‘There might be smoke down there,’ said Henry. ‘We must tie cloth around our mouths and noses.’

  Christiana pushed the knife blade into the stitched seams of her dress and tore back the material, then fashioned it into a mask around Agnes’s face. Then she and Henry did the same. It was awkward trying to climb back down the hole. She took the weight on her forearms until she could grip the rope between her feet. Henry held on to her arm, took some of her weight and then watched as she went down the rope hand over hand.

  He lowered Agnes down after her as he heard men’s voices outside; their words had a guttural edge. Then the iron latch turned in the lock. Henry blew out the candle and grasped the side of the hole, felt the rope as his mother took up the slack and lowered himself down. As he did so the door of the chapel swung open with a heavy thud.

  They huddled together like creatures fearing for their lives when hunting dogs sniffed them out. The voices were indistinct, but the scrape of armour against stone grated on their nerves. Christiana tried to listen to the sounds beyond the hammering in her head from her heart’s pounding and to picture what the men were doing. Their laughter was a sharp echo from the vaulted roof. She heard the sound of objects clanking and realized they were taking the silverware. And then one man said something and the others fell silent.

  She tightened her embrace around her children, squeezing hard to contain their panic – and her own.

  *

  ‘You can’t smell that?’ said von Groitsch. ‘It’s candle wax.’

  ‘It’s smoke from the house,’ replied von Lienhard.

  ‘No, he’s right,’ said Martens. ‘Candle wax. Someone’s here.’

  Von Lienhard lifted the burning torch higher as the other man tied off the sack holding the chapel’s silver.

  ‘There’s nowhere to hide in here. They killed everyone in the house and there’d be no priest this far from any village.’ He sniffed the air, lifting the smell of the burning tallow away from his face, throwing the light further. He saw the edge of a raised stone slab just behind the pillar. He stepped towards it, knocking aside a bench.

  *

  Christiana heard the unmistakable sound of a sword being unsheathed from its scabbard. They cowered from the imminent threat, taking slow, shallow breaths as the smoke seeped around them from beneath the barred door of the cellar.

  Light spilled down the hole.

  They couldn’t be seen unless someone was foolhardy enough to clamber down into the passage.

  They held their breath.

  And then Agnes coughed.

  *

  Von Lienhard scraped the edge of the hole with his sword blade. ‘Come out, or I seal the passage and you can choke to death in the darkness.’

  He heard hurried whispers from below and then saw a woman, whose auburn hair caught the flickering torchlight. She looked to be no more than thirty years old, and although her dress was not of such fine quality as that worn by the nobility he could see she was no servant woman. She was petite, and her face was splattered with blood specks and dirt. Her dress was torn, and in her fist with scraped knuckles she gripped a knife. What he saw was a she-wolf protecting her cubs, as two children appeared at her side and gazed up at him. He glanced back at the other two knights, who made their way towards him; now all three gazed down at the survivors from the slaughter.

  Christiana had whispered her instructions quickly to the children. She had made Henry pull off his jupon that bore Sir Marcel’s badge. There was no choice but to seek mercy from these rogue knights. She pressed Agnes’s face close to her own. ‘Do not speak to these men. They must not know who your father is. Do as I say.’ She turned her head and whispered so that only Henry could hear her. ‘These men are with the Jacques. Say nothing.’

  Before Henry could question her Christiana looked up at the knights. ‘We are afraid,’ she said, gazing directly into the fair-haired knight’s face. ‘It might be better for me and my children to die down here.’

  One of the men spoke quietly to this knight, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  ‘Who are you?’ the other knight demanded.

  ‘I am the widow of Sir Guyon de Sainteny,’ she lied, giving her deceased father’s name. To have mentioned Bl
ackstone would either incite violence or elicit respect – she could not take that risk. No sooner had she brought up her father’s name than the memory of who had been responsible for his death stabbed at her. She quickly shook the image from her mind, determined not to let the truth that still haunted her expose her lie.

  The men looked at each other and turned their faces away for a moment.

  ‘You heard of him?’ von Lienhard asked.

  The other two men shook their head. There were thousands of knights across France.

  ‘We should leave them down there,’ said von Groitsch. ‘Let the rats have them. I’ve no taste for rape or using my sword on them.’

  ‘We can use them,’ said Martens. ‘How long do you think that mob will go on? There will be a reckoning. We’ve seen a dozen places burned down now and taken enough silver to see us through.’

  ‘She’s a nobody,’ said von Groitsch.

  ‘No, wait a minute, Siegfried is right,’ said von Lienhard. ‘We can use them to buy ourselves time. This silver is no great haul. We keep the rest hidden and use this as a token of our good intent to the Church.’

  ‘And if they know we’re involved?’ asked von Groitsch.

  Von Lienhard, sighed and shrugged. ‘Then we do what must be done.’ He looked down at Christiana. ‘We don’t know of your name.’

  ‘My... husband was a poor knight from Normandy. He died at Poitiers.’

  ‘We’re German knights,’ said von Lienhard. ‘We too fought with the King of France... Where were you when the mob swarmed?’

  ‘The cellar.’

  ‘And the blood?’ he said, pointing the sword tip at her.