Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles)

by Donald, Angus

  Nevertheless, I saw him a few moments later in the courtyard ordering Vim to call in all the mercenaries engaged in tasks on the mountainside, and conferring with Little John about the placement of men on the walls. I stayed on the roof of the keep and watched the horsemen spill on to the bald saddle of land to the west below the castle. Despite what I had said to Robin, I don’t remember feeling fear or despair or any particular emotion when I saw these fresh enemies in their hundreds, dismount and begin to set up their encampment.

  I was tired and melancholic after the fight with Sir Nicholas and I looked on with a dull, almost uninterested eye as the drama unfolded far beneath us. It seemed to me to be as clear as sunshine that our pathetic handful of surviving men – perhaps some twenty effectives – could be overrun by the Templars whenever they chose to do so, and I and everybody else would die on these accursed walls. And when that had happened, Goody would die alone in England because I had failed to bring the Grail to her in time. But all I felt was a remote sadness, an empty feeling rather than a raging grief – the way you do when you discover that a far distant relative has been gathered unto God.

  All the rest of that day I watched from the keep as the Templars busied themselves below. They sent men around the mountain to the north and south, set up a ring of sentries around the whole eminence and established a small detachment at the base of the eastern ridge. We were trapped – surrounded, and outnumbered at least ten to one – yet the Templars made no move to attack, nor did they send an embassy to toil up the slope under a white flag to negotiate our surrender. I was puzzled until Thomas supplied the answer for me.

  ‘They do not wish to talk,’ said my squire. ‘They do not seek information from us, nor do they seek our surrender. They have come here to slay us, and I believe they will attack in the morning with all their strength. Can we hold them off the walls, do you think, Sir Alan?’

  I was about to tell him the truth, that we were doomed, then changed my mind. What would Robin say in these circumstances?

  ‘Of course we can hold them,’ I said, lifting my chin, squaring my shoulders and smiling confidently into his earnest brown face. ‘This castle is damn near impregnable – you’d need a train of mighty castle-breakers and thousands of men to take it, not that handful of Templar cavalry down there.’

  ‘We took it,’ said Thomas mildly.

  ‘Yes, but we had the help of a witch. I can’t see the Templars having much truck with witchcraft. Ha-ha! No, we can certainly keep them out. We just have to hold our nerve and do our duty as men-at-arms.’

  With such foolish words are men consigned to their deaths. Not that we had much choice in the matter. They had made no move to parley with us and our only choice was to go down there and abjectly surrender to them – which would mean an ignoble death for Robin and perhaps for all of us – or to fight.

  We would fight.

  We did not fight the next day. Nor the day after that. For three days, the Templars thoroughly scouted the lower slopes of the mountain, and presumably came to the same conclusions we had – that there were only two ways to assault the castle, from the west surging up to the front door, so to speak, and from the east along the spur of land that we had chosen. Those three days were torture. I tried to resign myself to death from the first moment I saw the long column of Templars riding up on to the saddle of land to the west, and to Goody’s death. But I could not. For me, it was not the despair that was so agonising: it was the hope. As each new day dawned, and the Templars declined to attack, I hoped against hope that they would miraculously withdraw and leave us in peace. Or that Robin would find us a way out of the trap. I dared to hope that I would be able, somehow, to get back to England in time to give Goody a life-saving drink from the Grail.

  On the second day after the Templars had besieged us, I was standing on the battlements looking out over their camp, easing my back after a bout of brutal labour and indulging in a mood of particular melancholy, when I turned to find Nur standing next to me. She was offering a cup of watered wine and a piece of honey cake. I wiped the sweat from my brow – I had been carrying dozens of huge rocks from the courtyard up to the parapet, missiles that we were planning to rain down on the enemy when he came at us – and smiled sadly at the witch.

  ‘Fear not, Alan, you will not perish here,’ she said. ‘I have consulted the bones. It is not your time. You will die a very old man. I have seen it.’

  I shuddered at her mention of the finger bones of our dead child. I had spent some time, during several sleepless nights, wondering what manner of boy – and man – he would have been, had he lived. A mingling of Nur and myself: would he be dark or blond, tall or short? Would he be able to ride and fight like a knight? Would he have turned to sorcery and evil spirits? That little bundle, which had never truly lived, haunted me with his death. Most of all, I hated to think of his little innocent hand, severed from his body and rotting down to bare bones as it was carried across the expanses of Europe by the witch who stood before me.

  ‘I am not concerned for my own life, Nur,’ I told her. ‘It is Goody that I fear for. I worry that I shall not be able to bring the Grail back to her in time to save her.’

  Nur cocked her head on one side for a few moments considering, then she said, ‘You do not need to take the Grail to her – all that is necessary is that she drink a liquor that has been cradled in the Grail’s embrace. Why do you not fill a flask with water from the Grail – I will give you the three drops of my blood which are required – and simply go to her, leave at this very hour, with the flask? Or, if you will not leave, send someone else.’

  I must admit that I was astounded. This elegant solution had never occurred to me. I hurried off the wall and down into the courtyard, shouting for Thomas and for my lord of Locksley almost in the same breath. I gathered these two men together by the kitchens and began to babble out my plan to them.

  After a few moments, Robin stopped the almost unintelligible flow of my words with a hand on my arm. ‘Let me see if I have this right, Alan,’ he said, ‘You want Thomas to slip out of the castle tonight with a quantity of Grail water, and journey all the way back to Bordeaux and then England alone and administer the water to Goody, so saving her life – is that it?’

  I nodded, having spent all my words.

  ‘Why do you not go yourself? I would give you leave, if you asked me.’

  I shook my head. ‘My leg is not fully healed, and a certain youthful nimbleness and speed will be required to slip past the Templar sentries on the mountainside. And I will not shirk this fight. I must stand with you, my lord, and face our enemies – and Thomas shall go in my stead.’

  ‘Would you do this?’ Robin was looking at Thomas.

  ‘With the greatest respect, my lord, my true place is here by Sir Alan’s side,’ my squire replied.

  ‘Well, yes, it would be rather dangerous,’ Robin said. ‘I can see why you might be frightened. You’d have to slip through the net here at Montségur and go hundreds of miles through war-torn country, then there would be a perilous sea voyage…’

  ‘It is not the danger!’ Thomas was looking hard at Robin. I do not think I have ever heard him interrupt anyone before, let alone our lord. ‘My place is here beside Sir Alan – the test of battle is looming; I cannot desert him in his hour of need.’

  ‘Goody is my life,’ I said. ‘If you wish to help me – go to her. If you can save her life, you would be rendering a far, far greater service to me than you would by dying beside me on these damned walls.’

  ‘Why do we not all go?’ said Thomas.

  ‘We have wounded men,’ said Robin, ‘and even if we were all able to slip away quietly, the Templars would see we were gone, or hear us blundering around in the darkness on the slopes, and we would be hunted and hounded through the countryside of Foix and cut down in the open. Our best chance of defence is here behind these walls. But one man, one quick, silent man would have a very good chance…’

  ‘If you will go, you
will earn my undying gratitude,’ I said.

  ‘And mine,’ said Robin. ‘Go!’

  Thomas slipped away that night, climbing down the almost sheer northern face of the mountain with the aid of one of Little John’s war hooks and a long rope. He took with him – slung over his shoulder on a stout cord – the sturdy leather bottle that I had purchased in Toulouse, containing a pint of water from the cistern that had been stirred together with a few drops of Nur’s blood in the Holy Grail. I said a prayer over the red-streaked water in the Grail and embraced Thomas, instructing him to kiss Goody from me. Then my squire departed, and I watched him climb hand over hand down the knotted rope and disappear into the scrubby brush of the mountain slope. I strained my ears for an hour or so afterwards – trying to make out the sounds of alarm or combat that would have indicated Thomas had been intercepted. But, to my enormous relief, I heard nothing.

  The attack finally came on the morning after Thomas’s departure. The Templars chose the front door, up the path, and it appeared to be almost leisurely, as if our enemies believed that they had already broken into our defences and it was only a matter of polishing off the survivors. But we had not been idle. Robin had ordered us to collect stones from the mountainside and to pile them in cairns every five yards around the walkway of the battlements; he had also distributed the castle’s stock of javelins – we had found about four score of them in the keep – in small heaps up behind the walls. Finally, he had arranged for a great fire to be set up, but not lit, in the middle of the courtyard, on which cauldrons of water could be boiled up and then dumped on our enemies’ heads.

  But we were so few. Vim now commanded only a dozen unhurt mercenaries and five men who we classed as walking wounded and who, thanks to the power of the Grail, were ready to fight; another three men, too badly injured to stand upright on the walls, were bedded down in the keep. Of the nine Companions of the Grail who had set out from Bordeaux just over a month before, only five remained in the castle: Robin, Little John, Roland and myself – and Nur, of course. We had twenty-one effective men-at-arms – and one skinny Arabian witch – with which to combat some two hundred Templar knights and their sergeants.

  When they came up the hill, it was on foot and at a gentle pace. It was a cool cloudy day and the snow-capped Pyrenees that had been visible for nearly a week by now were shrouded in grey. I was dreading another fog of the type that had allowed us to approach the summit of Montségur without being seen – and, indeed, perhaps that is what the Templars had also been waiting for. But it did not materialize and so they came slowly up the slope in great numbers. Robin placed one man on the eastern wall to watch over the spur, but the rest of us lined the parapet on either side of the main gate and we waited for them.

  I said a prayer to St Michael, the warrior archangel, my favourite of all the saints, as I watched our enemies approach, for the fear of death was upon me once again. I asked him to come to our aid with his fiery sword and sweep our enemies from the mountainside. I consoled myself with the thought that Thomas must have got away safely. But at the back of my mind was the suspicion that this was all a cruel joke: a feeling that God had arranged for Goody to live and for me to die. So be it. When I had last seen my beloved, I had asked God to spare her and take me in her stead – it was time, clearly, to pay that price.

  There were, I suppose, about a hundred men who came against us that morning: mostly tough, well-armed Templar sergeants with black surcoats over their mail, but with about a dozen or so knights among them, too. As they swarmed up that lung-crushing slope, I saw at the back of the first wave of men, perhaps two hundred yards away, a knight with a full helmet obscuring his face, urging on the sergeants to climb more swiftly. I noticed him because he had only one hand, his sword hand. On the other side his mail sleeve flapped emptily and he carried no shield. I had no doubt that it was Gilles de Mauchamps – the man who had burned Westbury and slaughtered my friends and servants. The first flush of anger warmed my blood.

  At fifty yards, our two mercenary crossbowmen loosed their quarrels at the scrambling men, and Robin, who had a position on the parapet directly above the main gate, took the first of their lives with his war bow. He had admitted to me that he had only a handful of arrows left and so he would be husbanding his shafts carefully, but we were well stocked with quarrels. Unfortunately, so were they – at least forty of the sergeants coming on towards us seemed to be armed with big, wicked-looking T-shaped bows and, once within range, we on the battlements found ourselves ducking behind the crenellations as their bolts whistled over our heads and cracked and sparked against the battlements.

  They had ladder-men too, a dozen of them, and I heard them roaring as they surged towards the gate and hurled themselves at the base of our walls. I stood straight then, ignoring the crossbow peril, with a javelin in each hand and a killing rage in my heart, and hurled the light spears down into the boiling mass of red-faced infantry below, skewering one man through the neck and missing completely with my second missile. I roared defiance at them, then I bent again and seized a jagged rock the size of a firkin of ale, hefted it over the battlements and hurled it on to the seething crowd of enemies below. On either side of me mercenaries and Companions were doing the same, bending, lifting and hurling, over and over again. The devastation we wreaked was appalling – men were crushed like weeds under a ploughman’s boot, limbs snapped, heads pulped. I saw Robin out of the corner of my eye, carefully choose a victim, draw and loose his bow, and smile with quiet satisfaction. But there were too many of them – a raging sea of humanity surged below our walls, a huge jostling, screaming herd of blood-crazed mankind – and while we crushed them with rock after rock, and pierced them with bolt and arrow and javelin, the ladders were swinging upwards. Five, six, seven ladders, swinging up and banging against the stonework, and I heard the thunking sound of sharp steel on wood and, as I leaned out to thrust a javelin down into a yelling face twenty feet below, I saw that they had two men with long woodsmen’s axes chopping methodically into the main gate, while a quartet of knights warded our missiles off with big shields held defensively over their heads.

  It could only be a matter of moments before we were overwhelmed.

  There were scores of men on the ladders now, brave men, bounding up the frail, bouncing wood. I grasped a rock the size of my head, ran to the nearest ladder and hurled the stone down into the body mass of a rapidly climbing knight. It crashed into his chest with an awful muted thud and swept him and the two fellows behind him down to the rocky floor below. I shoved the ladder away and it fell atop their broken bodies. But there were too many ladders, too many men surging up the walls, and the splintering crunches below of the axes on the door was relentless. Philip, the veteran mercenary who stood to my left, died then with a quarrel in his eye, and I saw that beyond him an enemy, a Templar knight, was in the very act of climbing over the parapet. I sprinted towards him, leaping over Philip’s body. I reached the Templar just in time, Fidelity’s naked blade in my right hand, and took his head off with one pounding chop, then booted his slack torso back over the wall, but another man-at-arms popped up in his place and he managed to deflect my next sword thrust with his own blade, and thrust me back with his shield, then he was over the wall and we were chest to chest, snarling in each other’s faces, butting and biting. I hurled him backwards and just managed to find the room to swing my sword and lop his right arm at the elbow; and he reeled away screaming, spurting, dying. But the walls had been breached in several places by now. I pulled out my mace from its place tucked into my belt at the small of my back and ran back north to batter and slice into a man with two feet on the walkway in the place I had been defending a dozen heartbeats before. He died with Fidelity in his guts but, when I had ripped out my blade and chanced to look behind me, south again, another two Templar sergeants had appeared from nowhere and were tumbling over the battlements in a panicked tangled of swords, scabbards and shields. I felt all the blood in my body change in some subtle w
ay, becoming lighter and seemingly as corrosive as acid, and I charged them, screaming, ‘Westbury!’ fit to burst my lungs, with my long sword swinging, my immortal soul soaring up to Heaven, my eyes misting red.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  We held that wall by the skin of our balls for what seemed like several hours but which, in reality, must have been less than a quarter of an hour. We struggled and killed, chopped and sliced, bit and swore, bled and died. We hurled back men and ladders; and crushed bone and skull by plummeting lethal rocks down upon the heads of those yet trying to scale the walls; we poured pots of boiling water on the men below and jeered at their scalded screams – at one point Little John, frothing white at the mouth like a moon-crazed idiot, cleared half a dozen enemies who had made it to the parapet in one unstoppable, howling charge, his great axe swinging around his head like a solid, circular sheet of steel. I was battling a Templar knight, a raging lion of a fighter, and had finally managed to drop him with a smashed jaw – feint from Fidelity and a sideways flick of my mace – when I heard Robin’s battle-voice shouting my name above the clamour of a dozen death cries, the awful shrieks of wounded men and the clatter of iron on stone, steel on wood.

  ‘Alan, Roland – the courtyard. Get down there both of you. The gate is falling. They’re breaking through. Get down now.’

  The pressure from the ladder-men on the wall seemed to have eased, and the parapet was a mass of stirring bodies, wounded and dead, ours and theirs, and I sprinted over the bloody backs of friend and foe for the stone steps that led down, with Roland at my shoulder.

  When I hit the flat, sanded courtyard, I could see daylight through the wood of the door and with every further blow, its giant frame shuddered and sagged a little more. As I skidded to a halt just before it, the door split open and two big men wielding axes burst through, shedding long splinters of wood, followed by a Templar sergeant and a shieldless knight in a white surcoat with a sword in his only hand.