I do not know how Robin came into the knowledge that the Master and the remaining Knights of Our Lady had taken refuge with Viscount Aimar, but Robin had many friends in Paris, and all over France, who had been searching for news of the Master for nearly five years now, and so perhaps a better question would have been why had we not uncovered his whereabouts sooner. From the little that Robin had gleaned, it seemed that the Master and his men had been in hiding on the far side of the Pyrenees, in lands that the original members of the Order would have campaigned over in their glory days fighting the Moors. Doubtless, the Master still had allies there. But recently, Robin’s informants had told him, he had grown in confidence and forsaken the wild lands beyond mountains and had taken up a more comfortable position with his cousin Viscount Aimar – exactly as Bishop de Sully had predicted. And one thing was certain: wherever the Master went, the treasure we sought, the Grail, would go, too.
Whenever Robin spoke of the Grail, which was not often, I noticed that he became strangely animated; and I confess I was puzzled by this. Robin, as I have often mentioned, was not a godly man. Or perhaps I should say he was not a man who respected the Church or subscribed to its teachings, and yet this Grail, this object that was said to have once contained Our Lord’s sacred blood, seemed to have seized his imagination. I think he pretended to himself that it was the vessel’s worldly value that drew him; for it surely would have fetched a mountain of gold if it were shown to be the genuine article. But I think there was more to it than his usual lust for money; in my private heart, I think that Robin was searching for an object that could demonstrate for him the truth – or otherwise – of the Christian faith. For him, the Grail was the embodiment of God – and I dreaded the likely discovery that this thing, which was claimed to have once held the holy blood of Jesus Christ and to possess miraculous powers of life and death, was merely an ancient, dusty bowl.
At this time, I was determined to be indifferent to the Grail – I could not afford to allow myself to believe in its wonders and then to have my hopes dashed. It must be, I told myself firmly, it must be no more than an old bowl, as Bishop de Sully had suggested, merely an object to be used in a bit of mummery to relieve credulous folk of their money. I was aided in this discipline of the mind, this denial of the possibility of the Grail’s authenticity, by the fact that it was, for me, irrevocably stained with death and surrounded by a dark aura of sadness: for the sake of this object my father had been hounded from Paris; in its name both he and Hanno had been murdered before my eyes.
But where the Grail was, there would the Master be. And I nursed my hatred of him to my bosom. If Robin wished to pursue this Grail, and to persuade King Richard to come south with his army, I was happy to follow him, for this path would lead me to the Master and my long-delayed revenge. And I felt in my bones then, in the last weeks of March, in the Year of the Incarnation eleven hundred and ninety-nine, that my vengeance was imminent: for we had Viscount Aimar and his few surviving men cornered, trapped at last in the tiny castle of Châlus-Chabrol, some fifteen miles south-west of Limoges.
While Richard’s men surrounded the castle – a simple affair at the top of a steep round hill, with a curtain wall and one round tower for a keep – we Locksley folk made our main camp to the west of the fortress on the flatter lands on the other side of the river. The castle foolishly defied us – for there cannot have been more than a handful of defenders, forty at most. But the defenders did include at least one man-at-arms in a white surcoat with a blue cross in a black-bordered shield on the chest. He was not a fellow I recognized, but my spirits rose when I saw him on the third day of the siege, leaning over the curtain wall to take a shot with a crossbow at a squad of Robin’s green-clad cavalry, which happened to be riding past. He missed the shot; it flew a dozen yards wide. But I was cheered by the glimpse of the device on his chest: if the Knights of Our Lady were here, that meant Robin’s information was true, and I grimly looked forward to renewing my acquaintance with the Master and Sir Eustace de la Falaise, when the castle inevitably fell.
Richard was at that time perhaps the most experienced man in Christendom in the art of siege warfare: he was not going to be troubled for long by an insignificant fortification such as Châlus. Indeed, his engineers had already been at work for three days, labouring under the cover of a stout canvas-and-wood shelter, digging in shifts, night and day, and burrowing under the very walls of the castle.
The miners would soon complete a broad tunnel right under the outer fortifications. The tunnel would be prevented from collapsing under the weight of the walls above by wooden pillars and planks, which formed the walls and roof of the excavation. When the engineers had determined that the tunnel was directly under the curtain wall, its dark cavity would be packed with faggots of brushwood, old logs and many barrels of pig fat, which would be set alight. The fierce blaze inside the tunnel would burn right through the wooden planks that supported its ceiling, and, once the inferno had consumed them, the tunnel would collapse under the weight from above – with God’s blessing, also bringing the stone wall of the castle tumbling down, and thus opening a breach in the defences.
Our knights would then charge up the steep slope and pour through the breach, and the merciless slaughter of the garrison would begin. They were fools to defy us; it was merely a matter of time before we would be inside Château Châlus-Chabrol, and under the accepted rules of warfare, because they had defied us, their lives were forfeit. Had they surrendered immediately, Richard might well have shown his customary mercy and pardoned them all.
While I was reasonably certain that the Master was inside the castle, my first glimpse of him was something of a shock. I was with Robin and a dozen of his archers, completing a discreet patrol at dusk on foot around the bottom of the hill on which the castle stood. For all its meagre number of defenders, the castle still managed to post half a dozen sentries, who could be glimpsed at all hours of the day or night – no more than a helmeted head showing briefly on the battlements, a black ball against the skyline. Our archers would occasionally take a pot-shot at these men, but Robin eventually ordered them to stop; we were short of arrows, and they must be husbanded for the assault. Besides, as the enemy rarely showed their heads for long, so far no sentry had been harmed. As we strolled along the track at the bottom of the hill, I looked up at the steep grassy slope and the wall at the top of it. I could make out the tall dark shape of the round tower on the far side of the castle, and to my right, outside the walls and halfway up the slope, I could see the broad squat structure that housed the entrance to the mine, and a line of Richard’s engineers burdened down with bundles of thick staves and barrels, hurrying in and out of the housing. My eye was caught by movement on the wall immediately above us: two figures, one a monk, the other a young man with bright red hair cradling a crossbow. The monk was pointing at the line of scurrying engineers, seemingly urging the crossbowman to shoot at them. The man-at-arms lifted his bow and loosed. The quarrel went wide, but I did not care where it struck: I was staring in shock at the monk. Without a doubt it was the Master; even from a hundred yards away, at dusk and looking up at such a great height, I could recognize his dark hair, cut in the tonsure, and his gaunt features. He looked strangely innocent; I could easily imagine him speaking in quiet, kindly tones to the crossbowman and urging him not to lose heart but to reload and try again.
‘Do you see him, Alan?’ said Robin.
‘I do,’ I said, gazing up at the slim, dark figure we had sought for so long.
The leader of the squad of archers, a steady man named Peter, who had fought bravely with me at Verneuil, said quietly: ‘My lord, I believe I can hit him; may I try one?’ But Robin was staring hard at the monk with a fixed, almost manic intensity. The light was poor for shooting, all the world made up only of layer upon layer of grey, and I expected Robin to refuse the archer’s request. ‘Give me your bow,’ he said, extending a hand behind him to Peter.
Robin rarely carried his own bow
these days; it was after all a yeoman’s weapon and he was an earl and a senior adviser to the King. But he took the proffered bow and nocked the arrow with all his old ease and skill.
At that moment the King himself came riding along the path with two of his younger knights. He reined in without a word when he saw Robin with the drawn bow in his hands. My lord pulled the cord easily back to his ear, and loosed the arrow in one smooth movement, and the shaft leapt from the string, up, up, straight and true, flashing towards the monk on the wall; and it would have spitted him, too, except that, at the last instant, the red-headed crossbowman gave a cry and swung a large round object up between the monk’s body and the hurtling shaft. The iron point of the arrow pinged off the make-shift shield and away – I could see now that it was a large iron frying pan that had saved the Master’s life – and behind me came a loud royal shout: ‘Bravo, well done that man!’
The King, clearly in a good humour, was applauding the swift reflexes of the crossbowman, or perhaps his ingenuity in improvising an efficient shield-substitute from a kitchen implement. ‘That’s the kind of spirit I like to see in a soldier!’ He was chuckling merrily to himself, the prospect of the coming battle as ever animating his spirits.
‘Beware, sire,’ said Robin, ‘that fellow is making ready to shoot again!’
Robin was right: the Master was pointing at the King, and the redhead was leaning over the parapet, his crossbow aimed in our direction. The distance was too great for accurate shooting, but every man in that group had his shield up, held with the top rim just below his eyeline – every man, that is, except King Richard. The King sat his horse, totally unconcerned, and I saw with a jolt of alarm that he was only wearing light armour, short-sleeved with very fine iron links, the kind that we used to wear in the heat of Outremer. His stout shield, with its golden lions on a blood-red field, was slung carelessly on his back.
‘Sire!’ said Robin urgently.
‘Be at peace, Locksley,’ said the King, ‘that bold fellow at the very least deserves a clear shot at me.’
The quarrel came on as an evil black streak and, with a cold splash of fear in my stomach, I saw it strike the King on his left shoulder, penetrating deeply despite the light armour; rocking his body in the saddle from the impact.
For three heartbeats nobody moved: we were as still as rocks. I heard a faint cheer from the battlements above, then we all surged forward at once, surrounding the King, some holding up their shields to protect him against any further missiles from the castle walls others helping him gently down from the saddle of his tall horse.
‘God’s legs, that was an unlucky blow,’ muttered the King, his face white, teeth gritted against the pain. ‘Get me to my tent, Locksley – quickly now, and quietly; cover my face with your cloak, it would not do to alarm the men.’
* * *
Three days later the engineers ignited the mine under the walls of Châlus-Chabrol. Thick black smoke boiled out of the tunnel that led into the hillside, in a huge dark plume, and an hour or so later, long jagged cracks appeared in the walls above. By mid-afternoon, with a great rippling crash, a wide section of wall collapsed, leaving a gap in the defences like a missing tooth in an old man’s mouth.
We were massed below the walls, out of crossbow range, the hundred or so Locksley men and my eight Westbury lads – we had lost one poor fellow on the field at Gisors, and another who died of wounds after the battle. Robin had begged for the honour of making the first assault on the castle, and Richard from his camp-bed had agreed. Behind us were the black flags of Mercadier’s men – some two hundred of the most foul-hearted, vicious, evil-looking scoundrels in France, and led by a scar-faced villain who topped them all for cruelty. They were there to support our attack, King Richard had ordered, but this was a war hammer to crack a hazelnut – there were only about forty defenders, and the Locksley men, even if they were to suffer heavy casualties in the assault, would still easily overwhelm them. More than likely Mercadier’s men, rather than genuinely wishing to support us, merely wanted to be in at the kill to have first pick of the loot. But then Robin’s motives in volunteering his men for the attack were not exactly pure either: by the private gleam in his grey eyes, I knew he was thinking of the Grail.
‘How does the King?’ I asked him as we stood side by side, looking up the slope at the gap in the wall, which was still shrouded with billowing clouds of rock dust.
‘Not well, Alan, not well, indeed.’ Robin was one of the few barons who had been allowed to visit him in his tent: the King wished to keep his injury a secret from the troops for fear of their losing heart. It had not worked; despite his seclusion, every man in the army knew that the King had been badly wounded, and the sense of raw, vindictive anger among the ranks against the defenders of the castle beat like a feverish pulse.
‘He tried to pull the quarrel out himself,’ Robin continued, speaking quietly in a toneless voice in the hope that he would not be overheard by the nearby men. ‘But he made a mess of it and the shaft snapped off in his hand. Then he called a surgeon, that fat little butcher Enguerrand, who hacked him about something awful – it was dark by then, and Enguerrand was, of course, drunk – but after digging about in his shoulder for most of an hour he managed to get the quarrel head out and bandage him up. But it’s not healing cleanly; the rot has begun and the smell of corruption in that tent is foul enough to make you gag.’
‘The King has been sorely wounded before,’ I said, ‘and has eventually recovered to full health.’
‘Several times, yes, he has, so let us all hope …’ Robin’s words were cut off by a trumpet blast. ‘Time to go, Alan; see you inside the castle – and be a good fellow and take the Master alive, if you can; beat him, maim him, cut him up as much as you like, but alive, if you please: I want to have a talk with him before we send him to Hell.’
Robin strode out in front of the troops. He turned to face them, raised his sword in the air: ‘In the name of God and our King – for Richard! For England! Forward!’ And the Locksley men cheered and, led by Robin’s nimble feet, with a deep, angry roaring, they charged up that slope.
It may sound absurd, but almost the hardest part of that assault for me was the run up that very steep, grassy hill, and the scramble up the rocky staircase to the breach. Although my wounded chest was long healed, my wind was still not as sound as I would have liked and I found myself breathless, red-faced and panting when I eventually reached the breach in the wall. The Westbury men and I were not in the vanguard, thank the Lord; and we ran hard, but my lungs felt as if they were on fire, and by the time we reached the gap in the fortifications, a flood of angry Locksley men had swept it clear of enemies. As I stepped over the broken rubble of the wall and down into the tiny courtyard, still breathing heavily, Thomas was at my side, carrying a crossbow he had acquired from somewhere, and a loose cloud of Westbury men were all around me. The first thing I saw was that almost all the fight had gone out of the garrison. Enemy men-at-arms were lying dead in bloody heaps, and others were attempting to surrender or being cut down by furious Locksley men; on the far side of the courtyard a lone knight, Viscount Aimar himself, I believe, battled against a mob of green-clad men. He killed one of our fellows with an elegant backhand, and then was himself overrun by a mass of stabbing, hacking, yelling fiends. To my right, at the foot of the round tower, a scrum of men were fighting outside a small door that led into the castle’s last redoubt. I saw flashing white surcoats adorned with a blue cross: and for the first time that day the battle-lust surged through my veins. I rushed forward, shouldered a Locksley man out of the way and engaged the nearest Knight of Our Lady. He snarled at me and cut; I blocked, feinted, ducked a blow and swept him off his feet with a sword strike to the ankles, and the Westbury men swarmed over him, stabbing down with awful efficiency. The other knight was very fast on his feet; he was already inside the tower and was desperately trying to swing the heavy wooden door shut in my face.
But I was faster.
I took a quick step towards him, punched the cross-guard of Fidelity into his face, crunching teeth and knocking him to the floor, then I stabbed down hard, plunging my blade through his heaving belly. And I was inside the door, in the tower, climbing and glaring upwards, the blood rushing hot in my veins. A stone, spiral staircase turning to the right, a dim form above me. I stepped back just in time as a spear clattered on the stone steps in front of me. Then I started to climb again. My sword arm, my right arm, was impeded by the central core of the spiral stairway, but this was not so for the knight above me; he smashed a blow down on me, aiming for my head, and I caught it on my shield, feeling the manic force of the strike right down through my spine. I was knocked back two steps, and looked upwards to see the mad, gleaming black eyes of Sir Eustace de la Falaise staring down at me through the gloom. He had a sword in his right hand, an axe in his left, and he smiled happily as he took a step down towards me, and unleashed a ravaging storm of blows from both hands.
Warlord (Outlaw 4) Page 41