At the far end of the chamber a man dressed only in off-white linen braies was trussed to a door-sized wooden board set vertically beside the altar; his chest was naked, well muscled and scarred like a galley-slave’s and he was gagged and held firmly in place by thick ropes. It was Sir Nicholas – and two paces from him, standing stock still behind the candle-bearing altar and gazing calmly, even arrogantly over the bloody mêlée that had broken out in the chapel, was a tall knight of middle years, flanked by two terrified-looking priests. The man, who had a vast black beard jutting from his jaw, a thin filet of gold holding back his springy black hair, and who wore the gold and black surcoat of Casteljaloux, seemed unnaturally composed, considering the chaos that had engulfed his initiation ceremony. It was not hard to guess that this was Amanieu d’Albret, the Seigneur of the Jealous Castle, the man who had tormented Nur.
All this I took in in two or three fast heartbeats – and then I took a deep breath, stepped forward and began to kill.
Chapter Fifteen
I took a firm double grip on the handle of Fidelity and waded into the battle like a man charging into the sea. My first blow struck the head clean off the knight who was grappling with Tuck, and I saw then that I had intervened just in time; blood was shining wetly at my old friend’s waist and there was a flapping rip in his robe. I killed a wounded man who blundered towards me with a bloody dagger in his fist – a straight-arm lunge to the throat – and stepped into the centre of the mêlée, trying to move towards the altar and the Seigneur d’Albret’s place behind it. I took out one of the knights in the jostling ring around Robin and Little John – a simple downward hack that split his skull. And then dropped another knight who had his back to me with a strike to the calf that nearly severed the lower part of his leg.
And then I was fighting for my life.
Two Knights of Our Lady peeled away from Robin and John and came for me at the same time, one either side. I attacked them both – swinging Fidelity back and forth above me, crashing down heavy blows at their heads like a frenetic overhead pendulum, giving them no time to do anything but block, before changing rhythm abruptly and smashing the steel crosspiece of my sword in the right-hand man’s mouth. He screamed and dropped, teeth scattering like spilled peas, and on the back swing I carved my blade deep into the other man’s chest.
I saw Robin eviscerate a knight with a perfectly elegant stroke, and as he came staggering towards me with his guts in his hands I ended him with a double-handed slice that took his head.
Then, as if I were in a strange dream or nightmare, I found that Nur was beside me, her veil gone and her mutilated, horrible, anguished face looking up at mine. She was shrieking and pointing: ‘Alan, Alan – there is d’Albret. There! Get him for me, go towards him, Alan. You must get him for me! I beg you!’
I saw that she was pointing at the far end of the chapel where the Seigneur d’Albret had deigned to join the battle. He was holding off both Roland and Gavin with a sword in one hand and a mace in the other. And, as I watched, he blocked a mighty cross blow from Roland and managed to kick my cousin in the chest and send him reeling away to crash into the wall of the chapel, and almost at the same time, his left hand licked out and caught Gavin a glancing blow on the crown of his head that dropped him boneless to the floor.
The man could fight.
I surged towards d’Albret, with Nur at my heels still shrieking encouragement. Out of nowhere, a Knight of Our Lady lunged at me with his sword and I ducked under the lancing blade, and shoulder-charged the man, knocking him to the floor, but just as I was about to finish him, I found Nur tugging at my sword arm, almost hanging on it.
‘Not him, Alan, not him. Don’t waste time. Get d’Albret!’
I left the fallen man alive and moved forward, stepping over the prone body of Gavin, and now I was within a sword’s length of the Seigneur d’Albret. He saluted me briefly, lifting his hilt to his lips, then attacked faster than a hunting weasel.
His sword arced in from the left at my head and, as I blocked the blow with Fidelity, fist up, blade below, my body turned side on to his, his mace thudded into my back, just over the middle of my spine. It hurt like a kick from a fear-crazed horse. But the double protection of my mail coat and the square leather plate beneath it was enough to save me from harm. The man had given me a serious shock. He was fast. And he was very, very good.
I stepped back, and circled to the right. Wary, now.
‘Kill him, Alan! Kill him, now!’ Nur was still dancing around behind me, yapping like a lapdog.
A snatched glance to my left, and I saw that the floor was a gory carpet of reeking corpses, and feebly stirring bodies. One man was screaming horribly, then was suddenly silenced. Little John was crouched over Gavin, and I saw that the lad had his eyes open.
And d’Albret launched another devastatingly swift attack at me. A swing of his mace made me duck; then his sword speared straight forward and I scrambled right out of its path, and only just got my sword up in time to block his second mace strike, which would have smashed my skull to shards, had it landed.
Then I went on to the attack.
Two hard diagonal slices from right and then left forced him to block hurriedly and back up. I made as if to chop down hard vertically on the fancy gold-filet that adorned his black head and, as he automatically raised his sword to block, I kicked him hard in the fork of his crotch with my right boot, almost lifting him off his feet. He said something like ‘Whuumph’ and folded immediately, huddled on the floor like a newborn and clutching his belly. A jet of brown spew erupted from his mouth, and he was panting like a woman in childbirth.
Nur pushed past me, stood over the cowering man and lifted her hatchet. She said something in Arabic that I didn’t catch, then smashed the axe down on to his back of his head. It was a relatively feeble blow, merely slicing off a flap of his scalp the size of my hand. Gore spurted from severed vessels and immediately covered Amanieu’s white face in a sheet of red. But Nur was nothing if not determined. She hacked down again and this time the wedge-shaped axe-blade stuck firmly into the Seigneur’s red, glistening head-bone. Nur wrestled the hatchet loose with some difficulty and lifted the weapon and smashed it down again with a loud cry. The skull was penetrated this time and the little axe buried deep in the brain. He was surely dead. But Nur was still not satisfied. She levered the slick steel out of the wound and struck down again.
And again. And again.
I turned away and looked out over the chapel, trying to ignore the wet, rhythmical crunching noises behind me, and the joyous, wordless shrieks of a witch’s bloody revenge.
There were no enemies still standing though I could see that a handful of our foes were alive, moaning and moving slowly on the floor. The place looked like an abattoir, blood spattered thickly on the whitewashed walls, the stink of fear and fresh shit heavy in the air. Robin was helping a dazed Roland to his feet and even Gavin seemed to able to sit up, with Little John’s arm around his back. I caught Thomas’s eye and he jerked a thumb silently at the door. I nodded, suddenly very weary. And Thomas slipped out of the crypt, pulling the door closed behind him.
‘Thomas has gone to check outside,’ I called over to Robin. ‘It can’t be long until the castle garrison comes for us.’
‘He’s not here. The bloody man is not here, and neither is the Grail!’ Robin’s face was a white mask. He rarely showed his anger, almost never. But raw fury was coming off him like smoke.
‘Little John, stop fussing over Gavin and start dealing with the wounded,’ said Robin. ‘No quarter, absolutely none at all.’
I saw John give Robin a black look, but he said nothing and helped Gavin to his feet and went off to begin quietly murdering the few Knights of Our Lady who had survived.
I crossed over to Sir Nicholas, gagged and trussed to the wooden board by the altar, and began to cut him loose. He was shaken but largely unharmed – his face bore the marks of a beating but apart from those cuts and bruises he was p
erfectly whole. I took off my red surcoat and offered it to my friend to cover his nakedness, and he took it with gratitude. Robin came over to us as he was pulling the garment over his head; he handed Sir Nicholas a scabbarded sword with a belt.
‘I thank you from the heart, my lord,’ said Nicholas. He seemed embarrassed. ‘I would have endured an unspeakable death but for your gallant rescue—’
Robin cut him off brusquely: ‘Where is the Master? Where is the Grail? Why are they not here? They must have let something slip. You must have heard something in your time among them. It cannot all have been wasted.’
Sir Nicholas looked bemused at Robin’s rudeness and then suddenly angry, but he answered civilly enough: ‘The Master left this morning, a short time before I was imprisoned. I saw him ride off with a dozen men, all Knights of Our Lady, but I do not know where he went.’
Thomas put his head through the door of the crypt. ‘They are coming, sir, a great crowd of them. Men-at-arms, knights, some militiamen from the town. Hundreds of them, sir.’
‘Get in here, Thomas, and barricade the door,’ I said. My weariness was gone, and in its place a cold terror. The words ‘hundreds of them’ were ringing in my ears.
‘Where could he have gone to? Where would the Master go?’ Robin was still speaking to Sir Nicholas.
‘I don’t know,’ said Sir Nicholas. ‘All I do know is that we need to get out of here right now. Or we will be caught and killed like rats in a trap. Did you not hear what young Thomas just said?’
I looked around that grim chapel, picturing it as I’d first seen it, and comparing it to now. There was something in the back of my mind that I was sure was important. What was it?
Thomas had bolted the door and was busy hauling the dead bodies of the Knights of Our Lady to pile against it. As a barricade, it would not hold long against a determined assault. They could burn the wooden door and burst through in less than half an hour, and then we would all be slaughtered.
‘Where would he go?’ Robin seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Not north or west. No. East or maybe south.’
‘Robin, we need to concentrate on this,’ I said. ‘The wrath of Casteljaloux, all of it, is about to fall on our heads.’
My lord looked at me and his eyes seemed to come into focus.
‘Yes, we had better leave,’ said Robin. ‘There is clearly nothing for us here.’
‘Robin,’ I said, speaking slowly. ‘We cannot get out of here, there are hundreds of armed men outside that door looking for vengeance. We are trapped. We’re stuck in here and most likely we’ll die in here.’ I was very far from calm.
‘Trapped?’ said Robin. ‘No, I don’t think so. Take a look behind the altar. Go on, Alan, look behind the altar. You’ll find something there to lift your spirits.’
And light dawned. The priests. When I had first seen the Seigneur d’Albret, he had been flanked by two priests. But when I looked again, they had disappeared.
I strode over to the altar and looked. There was nothing but empty space and a cheap, scruffy dun-coloured mat woven from bullrushes. I looked over at Robin, who was grinning at me like a demon, kicked angrily at the light mat … and it skidded away from its place to reveal a trapdoor set into the stone floor of the crypt.
‘Thomas, help me here!’ I shouted, and in moments my squire was standing beside me and we pulled open the flat, square door together and found ourselves peering into a black hole with a wooden ladder descending into darkness.
I grabbed a three-branched candelabrum from the altar and lowered it into the hole. The air smelled musty and stale, and very strongly of raw earth and damp. But I could see very little. However, it seemed likely that there were no enemies waiting down there in the deep shadows to ambush us. Equally, there was no sign of the priests who had so suddenly disappeared, for by the wildly dancing light of the candles, I could just make out a narrow tunnel, man-height and broad enough for three men to walk abreast, that seemed to be leading to the west, stretching away into the darkness.
We did not tarry long in the crypt. Tuck, it seemed, could walk after a fashion. He had taken a sword cut that had sliced through the rolls of fat around his large belly. It was painful, to be sure, but Roland, who had strapped a clean pad of cloth over it, did not think that any vital organs had been punctured. He and Robin helped the old man to the trapdoor, and eased him down the ladder. Little John and Gavin followed them down – Gavin looking dazed, his head bandaged.
We only induced Nur to leave the crypt with a good deal of difficulty. She was bustling about from corpse to corpse, her hands, bloody to the wrist and wielding a small knife, busily engaged in lifting their clothing and rummaging around in the dead men’s undergarments. I called to her urgently, told her that we must go but she ignored me and raised her hands with a yip of triumph and I saw she had a bloody lump of flesh in her fingers.
‘What in God’s name is she doing?’ I asked Roland, who was beside me, about to climb down through the trapdoor.
‘She says she is harvesting their manhood,’ he said in a quiet tone, his face pale.
‘What?’
‘She says there is power in a fighting man’s collops.’ I stared at him in horror but he avoided my eyes.
Finally, we persuaded her to enter the trapdoor and I noticed an unmistakable air of satisfaction as she pushed past me and stepped on to the wooden ladder. A sodden linen bag hung from her shoulder bulging with her disgusting booty.
Behind me, Sir Nicholas, dressed in my red surcoat, with a stolen sword at his hip, was the last man to leave, closing the trapdoor behind him. And, as the square of light was snuffed out, I could hear the sounds of angry shouting from the crypt door, as the fighting men of Casteljaloux tried to heave it open against the bolt and the weight of half a dozen corpses. We hurried down the long tunnel, Robin leading the way, with an altar candelabrum lighting our way. I was at the end of the line and could hardly see anything ahead of me except the distant glow of Robin’s candle some twenty yards ahead. At one point I tripped over the uneven earth floor and blundered into the back of Sir Nicholas, and he cursed mildly under his breath. But soon, I could see a grey circle of light beyond the bobbing candelabrum, and I knew with a huge sense of relief, like a vast burden being lifted from my shoulders, that we were very nearly free and clear.
The tunnel, we discovered, exited from the side of a high bank into a bramble thicket deep in the forest, far outside the walls of the town, and perhaps half a mile north of the place where we had left the horses. The forest was absolutely silent, the moon was still high and the sharp, pine-wood-perfumed air, which I sucked deep into my lungs, was as refreshing as a draught of mountain spring water. Looking back at the high walls of the town, some fifty yards behind us, it was difficult to imagine the scene of mutilation and carnage we had left in that small, underground House of God. There was no sight nor sound of pursuit – not yet – but our enemies were bound to know of the tunnel. It could not be long before a horde of men-at-arms came surging from that dark mouth in the bramble-covered bank.
Nur led us south, through the tall trees, to the place where we had left the horses, and we mounted immediately and moved off westwards, pushing deeper into the trackless wilderness of pine.
At dawn, we made camp in a small clearing, I would guess some six or seven miles from the town of Casteljaloux. I was exhausted – a night of combat and mortal fear had left me drained of all strength. I was ready to fall into my blankets and sleep for a year. Instead, we tended to the wounded as best we could and ate a few scraps of bread and dried meat, and drank watered wine from our flasks. And then we sat down in a circle to take counsel.
I was not the only one near the end of his strength. Gavin appeared to be in a deep stupor, with Little John trying from time to time to keep him awake by feeding him sips of wine; Tuck was huddled in his blankets with his eyes closed; Sir Nicholas’s face, marked with overlapping bruises of blue and red, and black crusts of dried blood, looked some ten years o
lder; while Roland and Thomas both had to stifle their yawns as Robin spoke. Nur sat apart, playing with her little bag of finger bones, casting them on to an old scrap of cloth and muttering over the patterns they made.
Only my lord of Locksley seemed unaffected by the rigours of the night before. Indeed, he looked indecently youthful and full of energy. ‘Well, my friends, we have missed the Master, and the Grail,’ he began. ‘But we must not despair. We have slain a goodly number of our enemies and we are all still living.’
‘We’re not all exactly in prime condition,’ growled John.
‘No, that is true,’ conceded Robin. ‘And that is why we shall rest here for a full day, to give us time to tend our various hurts. But we are not beaten. No, my friends, we are very far from beaten. We have, indeed, achieved a victory of sorts. We have boldly entered the enemy’s stronghold, rescued our comrade, slain his soldiers, and made our escape. We have won the first battle. In this war with the Master and his followers, we are winning!’
Winning? It did not feel like it. We were no closer to capturing the Grail, and time, I was conscious, was slipping away. In fact, we were worse off than we had been yesterday, for now, we did not know where the Master and the Grail were.
As he so often did, Robin seemed to be reading my thoughts: ‘We all need to rest and recuperate, before we put our minds to whence the Master and his men might have fled…’
The bruised knight lifted a hand, and Robin stopped speaking and turned to him. ‘Sir Nicholas?’
‘I believe the Master has gone east,’ he said.
‘Indeed?’ said Robin. ‘And how do you know this? When I asked you last night—’
‘Last night, last night I was not in my right mind…’ Sir Nicholas cut straight through Robin’s words. ‘But I know this because the Seigneur d’Albret came to me after I was taken. His men stripped me and took turns to beat me with their fists while he watched and laughed, and asked me questions. All of which I refused to answer…’ Sir Nicholas touched his battered face with a questing fingertip.
Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) Page 22