Siege Perilous

by E. D. Debirmingham

  “They will be too distracted by the archers,” Peire-Roger retorted. “They probably will not even notice our approach, and they certainly won’t be prepared to respond.”

  “You are sending men to their deaths,” warned Raphael.

  Peire-Roger gave him a warning look. “You have already been told not to challenge my authority.” He turned his back on Raphael as if to push his way through his men toward the gate.

  “How will your archers avoid shooting you?” demanded Raphael. “In the dark?”

  The fortress commander stopped and turned sharply. He glared at the Levantine. “They’re good archers,” he said.

  Raphael began to retort, then caught himself and took a breath. “Would it not, perhaps, be wise to first see what the archers alone can do?” he counseled.

  “There are not many of them in the barbican. I have men in here who are very good on the ground,” said Peire-Roger. “If we start to shoot too soon—or if we only shoot, without engaging more directly—the French will back off, regroup, and think up some other plan we might not discover in time. At this moment, we have the element of surprise. That is our strongest weapon and I want to make use of it.”

  From Raphael’s expression he clearly disagreed with how best to make use of a “surprise,” but he grimly stopped debating.

  Hours later, it occurred to Ocyrhoe that she had been unofficially excused, and that she could probably have snuck into the donjon for warmth, if not sleep. But she felt safe next to Ferenc, and Ferenc was going out with the armed men. She had no fighting skills of any sort, much less any protective gear, but she could not bring herself to go inside while he was there in the courtyard. They remained by Raphael, who kept impatiently tapping the bottoms of his crutch onto the frozen ground. Ocyrhoe liked and trusted Raphael for reasons she could not have put into words, despite his ties to creepy Percival.

  “Percival and Vera never came back,” Ferenc said.

  “Mmm,” said Raphael, noncommittal and yet, Ocyrhoe thought, privately pleased. “Why don’t you find them?”

  Ferenc nodded, flashed Ocyrhoe a strange little smile, and darted into the crowd of soldiers. Then she understood: Percival and Vera were in the barbican. They had gone to join the archers already there. Ferenc—somehow—was joining them. And Peire-Roger was aware of none of this.

  “I suppose Vera’s not on kitchen duty,” she said to Raphael.

  His dark eyes, in the torchlight, slid slowly in her direction. “An accurate supposition,” he said quietly, approvingly.

  “But—” It felt presumptuous to question him. “There are already archers in the barbican,” she whispered. “Why do they need three more?”

  “Because,” replied Raphael, also in a whisper, “if the Lord of Montségur gives foolish orders, there will be three archers not obeying him. That man is no tactician. And no strategist. That this place still stands defiant is a testament to the site itself, not to the lord of it.”

  “I wish I were a fighter,” she said. “I feel so useless.”

  “Go into the donjon with the rest of the women and children,” he said, dismissively but not unkindly. “You will hear word soon enough how this has gone. There is no danger to you there, at least not tonight. The worst that will happen is that they take the barbican, but they would not also make a play for the fortress itself in one evening.”

  That possibility had not even entered Ocyrhoe’s head until he said it, and now she knew she would not be able to cease contemplating it. When Raphael turned his attention back toward the gate, she slipped away into the darkness, not toward the donjon but away from it.

  The men were all in maille, heavily armed, and waiting just inside the gate. Their collective breath in the frigid night air formed a wispy, pulsating cloud in the torchlight. Ocyrhoe wanted to climb up to the wall and look out with the archers. It was claustrophobic here, between the solid corps of soldiers and the awkward tangle of the skeletal trebuchet. It made her nervous to think of Ferenc in the barbican, with who knows how many French soldiers about to attack.

  Reaching the south side of the yard, she found a wooden ladder to the wall-walk. There was one stone stairway built into the wall near the gate, but elsewhere wooden ladders allowed easily mobility on and off the walls. She quickly climbed it and found herself between two archers, both standing motionless and breathing nervously, staring into the moonlight.

  At Peire-Roger’s orders, all the torches in the courtyard were completely doused, leaving Montségur in total darkness.

  CHAPTER 27:

  THE BATTLE FOR THE BARBICAN

  For what seemed forever, nothing happened. The French were clearly waiting for the cloud cover to roll in, so that they could move forward under cover of darkness. Peire-Roger wanted his men to hold until the French were close enough to engage them in hand-to-hand combat. To Ocyrhoe’s reckoning, as Raphael had said, this was inviting danger. It was surely foolish to lay an inviting trap for an enemy that outnumbered you by a factor of one hundred. Surely better just to keep the enemy away.

  After a very long time—so long the bells rang twice in the occupied village below—there was movement. The clouds had rolled in quickly and completely covered the moon, as Ferenc had said would happen; the darkness was not absolute but it was dark enough to be confusing. The archers in the barbican lit a candle in a westward-facing loop; archers on the walls passed the message on by tossing pebbles down to the men at the gate. The great gate swung open; the hinges had been greased, and it was silent.

  Ocyrhoe listened to the men of Montségur file quickly across the long, narrow spit of land that led to the barbican. They could jog only two abreast, and their armor and weapons clanked enough that the approaching French, who were still a ways down the slope, must have heard them. Before the French could respond—and also, conspicuously, before Peire-Roger signaled—there was a zinging sound above and then shrieks from down the slope. The Montségur archers had begun their deadly work.

  Ocyrhoe could see almost nothing, but knew there were about two dozen men from Montségur. However many French there were to start with, lights down the slope meant backup troops at the watchtower.

  A French commander suddenly shouted an order to charge. There was a horribly loud rasping sound as a mass of swords were unsheathed on both sides. The Montségur defenders circled the barbican, swords and axes drawn, and waited as the French began to rush them.

  Suddenly from the barbican fiery branches of collected scrub-timber seemed somehow to explode out of the arrow loops onto the frozen ground below. There was precious little for the fire to feed on besides the branches themselves, but the muddied snow was too frozen to damp the fire, and there was flame enough to light what would become the battleground. The tactic was clear: any Frenchman who tried to rush the barbican, or the Montségur soldiers on the ground near it, would either have to expose themselves in this firelit area or else detour so far around it as to risk walking off the edge of the mountaintop. The body of French attackers, collectively, paused. This was not what Peire-Roger had wanted, but it was safer for the fortress.

  Suddenly there was a much more intense eruption of arrows from the barbican, and the men on the walls of Montségur cheered and followed suit. Arrows in a lethal rain headed straight toward the French, and few of the crusaders even reached the level land by the tower. Now Peire-Roger cried out an order, arm raised with sword held high, and his score of followers rushed toward the barbican to engage with the French who had escaped his archers.

  All men on the battlements had hurried to the eastern wall and were crowded on it, shooting. Ocyrhoe crept up behind them, knelt down to watch between their greaves. Everyone she recognized—Peire-Roger, Artal, the Bonnet brothers—she saw in silhouette, with the burning branches scattered on the ground behind them.

  Peire-Roger was nearly at the door to the barbican, but a large Frenchman appeared from
around the curve of the building and intercepted him, sword out, with a vicious cut aimed at his neck. Unused to watching combat, Ocryhoe squealed despite herself. Peire-Roger seemed to sense the blow as it came at him, and raised his shield defensively, so that the attacker’s sword glanced off the center of it and the man staggered slightly back. But Peire-Roger staggered back himself, his chest unprotected, and another Frenchman behind the first came at him with an axe raised high. Ocyrhoe gasped and clenched her fists so hard she hurt her fingers.

  “Get out of here,” an archer towering above her hissed angrily over his shoulder as he reached for his quiver. “You’re a distraction, making noise like that.”

  Ocyrhoe could not move. She stared in horror while the second soldier’s axe sliced through the air toward the leader of Montségur.

  Suddenly the door of the barbican burst open and a ferocious form erupted from it, axe in right hand, knife in left, both blades moving in a frenzy, slashing so fast it was hard to believe the wielder saw what he was doing—no, what she was doing. This was Vera, Shield-Maiden, shield slung over her back now and doubly armed. In a heartbeat she had disarmed the man about to fell Peire-Roger, then sank the axe into his neck and pushed his corpse away from her with one booted foot.

  Ocyrhoe screamed in amazement. The archer snarled at her, without looking back, “Get the hell out of here, girl. You are a danger to us with that screaming! I’ll kick you off if you don’t go down now!”

  Breathing hard, Ocyrhoe retreated to the ladder and nearly fell down it in her haste. But she did not stop at the bottom. She ran toward the gate; all of the men had rushed out to the small field, but the gate stood open, with Ferrer and a few other men guarding it.

  “Let me out there,” she said, willing her voice and her arms not to tremble. “I have a message for his lordship from the bishop.” She sounded confident enough, and the supposed sender was portentous enough, that Ferrer did not challenge her.

  She ran halfway along the narrow strip of mountain-ridge, almost slipped off it on an icy patch, and stopped herself. If the French had broken through their ranks, she’d have been first in line for death. But it was clear the French would get nowhere close to her; already Peire-Roger’s men were in command of the field. In the few brief moments it had taken her to get outside the walls, Vera had dispatched two more crusaders, and was now fighting knife-to-knife with a burly third. Percival had exited the barbican, too; she could see his shape silhouetted by the dying fires of the branches, tall and broad-shouldered as he was; he fought with nothing but a sword against a corpulent but nimble enemy.

  A torch was lit in the barbican, and then another, and then another. She saw a few figures dash out, but then the door was bolted behind them. On the wall-walk of Montségur she heard another cheer: The barbican was securely bolted. The French had already failed in their plan; the only sensible course for them now was to retreat and regroup far down the slope of the mountaintop in soupy darkness. There would be no more bloodshed tonight.

  Or so Ocyrhoe thought. As she watched, she saw Percival attempt to slice his adversary across the middle, only to have his blow repelled by thick maille under the man’s tunic. “Hugue, you whoreson!” Peire-Roger’s voice cried out furiously over the din, and his figure, somehow darker than all the others, marched resolutely toward the two men. Ocyrhoe took a sharp breath: Percival was fighting with the enemy general, the man who had kept the siege going despite months of getting nowhere. With a wave of fury and loyalty, Ocyrhoe wanted to kill Hugue, too.

  Percival immediately dropped back from his engagement with Hugue, his sword held protectively in front of him, and then kicked Hugue hard in the hip to make him stagger toward Peire-Roger. Percival again moved his sword to a more offensive position but made no move to attack the man. To Ocyrhoe it looked as if he were offering to be a backup while Peire-Roger attacked his nemesis.

  She wanted to get closer to see. She knew this terrain well enough to navigate almost without vision, but it made her nervous to attempt it in the frozen dark.

  She considered her options. She could move forward beyond this narrow ridge, and stand directly on the field of battle. Or she could lower herself carefully down the slope and climb laterally, spiderlike, below the top of the ridge until she was just below the field. Then she could raise herself high enough to get a ground-level view. She would be unnoticed and safe. Unnoticed, that is, unless somebody threw their enemy off the side of the mountain where she was. But so far all the fallen were lying on the field.

  Peire-Roger saw Percival make way for him. His blood heated when he’d recognized Hugue de Arcis: that bloated, arrogant toady of the French king, the spiritual heir of the accursed Simon de Montfort, the most hated man in Occitania, the most hated man in Peire-Roger’s life. His presence at this moment showed how cocky the French had been of victory tonight: he would only be here if he genuinely believed he was about to receive Peire-Roger’s capitulation. With a surge of fury and gleeful disgust, Peire-Roger raised his sword and swung hard at Hugue’s broad shoulder. But the lord of Carcassonne saw this coming; he stepped in toward the blow and met it with his own heavy blade so intensely that both men were repelled away from each other. Peire-Roger recovered the quicker and swung around toward Hugue while he was still recovering. But Hugue unexpectedly crouched, and the shift in his hulking center of gravity spun him back around toward Peire-Roger more quickly than the lord of Montségur had expected. Hugue held his sword upward and slightly forward and began to rise, the tip of the sword headed straight for Peire-Roger’s throat.

  Out of the blackness, a broad axe fell hard between them, smashing Hugue’s sword out of the way. The heavy man fell sideways from the intensity of the blow. The axe-wielder disappeared into the darkness just as Peire-Roger registered, with amazement, that it was a woman.

  As Peire-Roger stepped in for an easy strike at the back of Hugue’s neck, Hugue thrust his blade over his left shoulder to protect himself and connected to Peire-Roger’s blade, shoving it aside. It gave Hugue the chance to heave himself up to stand, but as he faced Peire-Roger again the leader of Montségur was already striking, this time a low swing aimed at Hugue’s legs.

  Hugue took one firm step back, then suddenly stepped forward again and mirrored Peire-Roger’s attack. Peire-Roger, still striking out furiously, leapt back away from danger and stumbled as the ground beneath his heels crumbled away. He had lost his sense of place in his fury; he was about to tumble backward toward the precipice of the mountain ridge, and Hugue was about to push him over it.

  Two things happened then, swiftly, but to Peire-Roger they seemed to take forever. First, he felt his knife being pulled out of his belt, and a moment later saw it in the dim, as a child’s hand, holding the hilt, sliced at Hugue’s face. It made contact near the Frenchman’s chin—a superficial wound, but enough to distract; blood spurted and Hugue, shouting, staggered backward.

  A blink later, somebody else grabbed Peire-Roger by the front of the tunic and pulled him forward, down onto the frozen ground, before his own lost balance could propel him backwards off the mountain. Peire-Roger landed hard on top of whoever was pulling him to safety. Winded, he managed to sit up and saw in the flickering unsteady light that his two saviors were the strange young duo of Ferenc, who had pulled him forward, and Ocyrhoe, who held his knife and was staring at its bloody blade with wide, alarmed eyes at what she had just done.

  “It’s over, milord,” Ferenc said. Peire-Roger, stunned, got up and then offered his hand to Ferenc to help him stand. Fighting had warmed him, but now his wet hands stung with cold. “Look—they’re in retreat. We have the barbican, and we didn’t lose a single man.”

  Peire-Roger took a moment to register this. “You were in the tower,” he said, realizing. “You were the first archer. You minimized the number who attacked us.”

  “Percival and Vera shot with me,” Ferenc said. “Your men obeyed you and waited to shoo
t until it was folly not to. If you are angry that your initial plan was not implemented, the fault is ours, not theirs.”

  Peire-Roger ran his sleeve across his sweaty face to collect himself. “I think you may have saved us,” he said. “’Twas hubris on my part to think we could take on an endless stream of Frenchmen and win.” He looked around. His men—and only his men—remained standing on the bloody ground around the barbican tower. Inside, the tower was now well lit, and some of his soldiers were inside staring out toward him. He hailed them silently, and they gave a whooping cry of triumph in response.

  “Well done, lads,” he shouted out. “No more of this sneaky French nonsense.” He smiled briefly at Ferenc and Ocyrhoe and then walked toward the barbican door.

  Leaning against it was Vera, calmly wiping blood off her axe with a ragged piece of leather she had cut from the uniform of a dead French soldier. Percival stood beside her, looking levelly at Peire-Roger.

  “Vera saved your life twice tonight,” he informed the lord of Montségur.

  Peire-Roger looked at Vera. She continued to wipe the blade clean, with only the briefest glance in his direction.

  “You’re relieved of kitchen duty,” he said.

  CHAPTER 28:

  APRÈS-SIEGE

  An hour later they were all inside, where the defending heroes were saluted and cheered and given hot wine. The Good Ones, led by Bishop Marti, went upstairs to the donjon to give relieved prayers of thanks for their deliverance. But the Credents all stayed below to celebrate with Peire-Roger, who almost instantly got drunk.

  The community was too tired and wearied by anxiety for song or dance, but there was animated talking, storytelling, and children play-acting their innocent imaginings of what had happened outside the wall. The wives of those who’d been in combat wove themselves around their heroes, the unwed soldiers covertly eyed the unwed ladies, who covertly eyed them back, and Ferenc and Ocyrhoe sat flushed and delighted beside each other on a table near Peire-Roger. He had put them on display for their role in saving him. Vera was not given as prominent a spot, but her services had been pointed out and described by the lord of Montségur, and then repeated not infrequently about the room by Raphael, who perhaps slightly embellished what he’d heard from Percival.