by Dan Davis
“By this blood do I live. And by my blood my men gain a glimmer of my strength, my invulnerability. The Christ himself told us that unless you eat the flesh of the Christ and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my body and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Are his words unclear, Richard?”
William slashed a tiny blade across the inside of his wrist and blood flowed and William offered out the wound. Hugh of Havering bent over and sunk his mouth onto the wound and drank it down, suckling the blood. I could hear the fevered gulping. He stopped and smacked his lips, grinning.
A smile spread across William’s face. “And thus do we carry out God’s divine will. What is the life of some peasant compared to taking this Blessed Sacrament?” Roger of Tyre bent to William’s wrist and drank too.
“Sacrament?” I felt the rage returning. I glanced at the stockade beyond the fire where the prisoners were whimpering. “You are mad. And you have spread your madness to these other men.” Bodies still writhed and groaned all across the floor. Men I had slain in pursuit of my personal justice.
“Madness?” William laughed, echoing from the walls. “Was it madness that brought me back from the dead at Hattin? Was it madness that made me drink the blood from the bodies piled upon me? It was a sign from God, there can be no doubt. I died but I was reborn.”
I scoffed, even though I was almost convinced. “You were injured and you survived. The same has happened to me. Because of you, I died and they were going to bury me but I awoke and here I stand, ready to strike you down. I drank no blood to make it so. God gave you nothing. Your blood is not special.”
William’s smile faltered for a moment. He gestured to Hugh of Havering. “All men who take my Eucharist grow strong. If a man is injured a few drops heal his wounds. I take in the blood of women and children and within this holy vessel it is transformed into the blood of Christ. I do God’s work.”
“You killed my brother Henry because it was he who murdered your wife, I know that now. And if he truly did kill her? Then he deserved death.”
William stared, unmoving. His men glanced at him and back to me.
“But you killed Alice. And you killed Isabella. And you killed their children. And that was not God’s work. It is for those crimes and for all the other innocent blood you have shed that I take my revenge.”
“I killed them because they offended God,” William said. “Why should Henry have happiness when he took mine? No, what I did to him was justice. What I did to our father was justice. I killed him for you, Richard. For you and for your mother.”
I felt a terrible sinking feeling in my guts. “What is this madness that you speak now?”
William’s mouth gaped. “You cannot mean that you do not know? You cannot be so dim-witted if we are of the same blood? We are brothers, my dear Richard.”
I shook my head, denying his words. Resisting the dawning realisation of their truth.
He grimaced. “Our father forced himself upon your mother, one Christmas if I recall. You are sprung from Robert de Ferrer’s loins just as I am. Henry, that useless bastard you call brother, shared your mother but he despised you. You know that he hated you, surely? That hate was for what our father did to your mother. Did you know your mother slashed her wrists when you were a baby? Everyone pretended she had not but we all knew. Our father was the cause of it all.” William’s face twisted further into bitterness. “Perhaps it was that which drove Henry to kill my darling Katherine and my son Richard.”
I felt the world turning under me once more. As hard as it was to believe, many things that had once seemed strange began to make sense.
The men in Dartmouth believed it was I that murdered the local girl. They thought I looked like William. I rarely saw my own reflection but I was of a height with him. We had the same dark hair, same build. And, I supposed, a similar face.
King Richard had said something about me inheriting some of the de Ferrers lands. By rights it should be yours anyway. My father’s hatred for me. His attempts at making me a monk so that, even if Henry had died, I would never have inherited Ashbury. King Henry said that men were afraid I would be like William.
Such things only made sense if those kings had known or at least suspected the truth. How many men had known?
Had the Bishop of Coventry back in Derbyshire moved so quickly to take Duffield from fear that I would claim an inheritance and beat him to it? He gave me a full purse to encourage me to ride after William. But it was not to help me. I was delaying setting off and he must have wanted me to confront William. For even with a hired man or two I would have been killed had I found him.
I felt certain Alice had not known. Had not suspected. Had she?
But William was still speaking.
“Henry never would have done such a thing if our father had not caused such violence to his mother. A violence that put a bastard in her belly. A violence that shamed her into self-murder. But I put things right. I did justice to all. I poisoned our father when I returned home. Poisoned him so thoroughly he was dead and cold in a single night.” William laughed. It echoed from the walls. “But the old bastard woke up. Can you believe it? A day later, he lay on the table ready for burial and he sat up. He was very angry and I had to cut him down and bury him before the servants found out. It took rather a lot of work to kill him the second time. Practically had to cut his heart out. Tough old sod. We take after him, do we not? But know that he paid for his crime, though it was twenty years too late. I did it for you, Richard. Dearest Ricard, I take pride in telling you that your poor mother, God rest her soul, is avenged. As was my own mother, who died from the shame of her husband’s ways. As was my wife, when I killed that evil little shit Henry of Ashbury.”
I found I had little breath but William was looking at me. Waiting for me to speak.
“We are brothers,” I managed to say.
William’s eyes flashed sideways beyond me, changing focus for the briefest of moments. His smile twitched.
A tiny movement in the corner of my eye.
“Adelard,” I cried out, wheeling around.
But I was too late.
Antonius. The dark priest had crept after Adelard. He had freed himself from whatever bonds Adelard had left him in back in the tunnel. I watched as he rose up from behind us and sunk a dagger into Adelard’s throat. He sawed it back and forth, blood welling out as Adelard screamed.
I smashed the priest’s head so hard with my blade that his skull was almost cloven in two. Bone and pink brain sprayed out as I yanked back my sword.
William’s men were on me. They were fast. I fell back under their assault, deflecting blows with my battered sword.
But I had tired. I was more exhausted than I had ever felt. I was hurting all over and both Hugh and Roger were full of renewed strength and speed. Where I had to block with the blade, their attacks jarred my sword arm hard.
There were bodies everywhere underfoot and they were hard to avoid.
I never even saw the sword that ran me through. The pain, though, was like fire and ice tearing through me. It had happened again. I was stabbed, run through the ribs.
My face was slapped, hard. I woke, knowing that it had been mere moments. Hugh and Roger held me by the shoulders suspended before William. The fire on the brazier felt hot and the metal sizzled.
“Does this feel familiar?” William asked. He was close.
I had failed.
“I told you this was God’s will,” William said, his breath reeking of blood.
“Yes,” I said, a jolt of agony speared through me. “I see now.”
William’s face flowed before me. It was lit on one side by the fire that was finally dying now no one was there to feed it from the vast pile of desert brushwood. The wet blood on his face reflecting the flames like a thousand flecks of gold.
“So you see?” William asked. “You see I was given a gift by God?”
My head bobbed. “But I have it too,” I said.
“We were born this way,” I said. “Or perhaps we are born so and yet still we must die to become as we are. You killed me before but I was brought back. Just as you were at Hattin.”
I coughed blood and darkness at the edges of my vision closed in.
William’s face swam, a red and gold beacon in the darkness. “I have the Gift. I am the Angel of the Lord. I have the Christ’s holy blood in my veins. Not you. Me.”
“But Lord Robert, our father. You poisoned him and he died. But he, too, awoke.”
“No!” He screamed in my face. “No, I was chosen, not you. Not father. Do you understand? Will you drink my blood and become my man or shall I drink you dry, brother?”
The stench of his breath made me gag and the convulsion wracked through me.
“Please, Lord,” I mumbled. “Allow me to share your sacrament. Brother.”
“You will serve me?” William asked. “Swear with God as your witness.”
I was running out time and the world turned under me again. I saw then that oaths are worthless. Meaningless. Actions alone are important.
“I swear it,”
My eyes closed or I was losing consciousness. I heard but did not see William order his men to hold me steady. He warned them of my strength.
I felt skin pushed against my mouth. William intoned some twisted version of the ceremony as blood welled into my mouth.
My lips made a seal around his skin and I sucked in the hot blood that pumped and spurted into my mouth and swallowed it down. It was liquid gold. It was quicksilver. It was nectar and ambrosia.
In my travels I had felt the hunger of many days. I had felt the emptiness, weariness and weakness transformed after eating a piece of bread or meat. Felt the sustenance flow through my body and out into my limbs and into my mind, filling me up with strength once more.
Drinking William’s blood was like filling up with lightning. It was wildfire in my heart. The hurricane in my lungs. The wound in my belly knitted together. My bones became iron. My muscles ached to be free, to throw down mountains and lay waste to cities.
Someone was growling. A low, threatening, evil cry that grew and rose to an animal cry like a wolf or a bear.
“What is happening?” I heard William cry. “Hold him, God damn you. Hold him still.”
I stood. Neither man could resist my strength. I thrust my hands up and grabbed the throats of the two men beside me. Roger stabbed his dagger through my forearm up to the hilt but I felt nothing.
I crushed their throats to pulp, lifted them both from their feet by the neck and I tossed one after the other at William. He leapt aside from them both, their heads cracking on the floor and clattering against the piles of bodies in a loose-limbed jumble.
I stalked toward him. William snatched up a mace and swung it. It crunched into my arm and staggered me and he stepped in, sweeping it down on my head. I yanked it from him and swung it hard into his chest, ribs cracking like twigs. The force of the blow threw him back into the vast brazier. He thumped against it with his back and his head. It clanged and tossed up a shower of sparks.
“You are like me after all, brother,” he said from under the brazier, eyes wild. “God has chosen us both.” His voice pinched, his chest half crushed and struggling to breathe.
“No,” I said, stalking forward, an animal growl coming from my chest.
“Come with me,” William said, his eyes in shadow. “It is God’s will that we be together.”
“You will die by my hand,” I said, stalking forward to finish him off. The strength his blood had provided was already dying away. Fading with every moment. But I had enough rage left to slaughter him a hundred times over.
He scowled. “We shall see,” he said and he stood up, fast and heaved his back against the underside of the bowl of the brazier. He braced himself. William’s back hissed as it pushed against the metal underside. He screamed and pushed harder, lifting it. Tilting it.
The brazier fell backward, the tripod legs lifting until finally it tipped and fell with a metallic crash. It flung the contents of the bowl into the stockade and against the huge pile of brushwood. Half a hundredweight of glowing charcoal and flame tossed into a tinderbox.
Screams came from inside the stockade as the straw underfoot ignited and spread. I watched, mouth agape, at the speed with which the ancient timbers sparked into flame.
I turned back for William. To finish him. But already he was up and scuttling around behind me, back to the blood cistern in the centre of the room. His chest was smashed and he bent double. Yet he grinned and ducked his head into the cistern, gulping down more of the glistening, thick liquid.
The Saracens in the stockade screamed and rattled the wooden bars. They were shut in behind a sturdy door that was already on fire. The wooden beams that kept them in were too thick for them to break.
William backed away from me, snatching up a sword. “Fight me and they burn. All those women and children.” He stood straight again. His voice was strong and his breathing steady.
“I will kill you,” I said but made no move toward him.
“You forget I know you like a brother.” He laughed, pointing at the fire. At the stockade. “Your wife’s children are within.”
William turned and strode away toward the tunnel, his laughter echoing from the walls of the cavern as he disappeared into the darkness.
I ignored his escape, scooped up a huge axe and ran to the wall of flame. Between the bars, I could see the movement of the people screaming in terror. Flame leapt and crackled along the floor. The straw underfoot had caught and none of their frantic stamping helped to stem the blaze.
The huge axe was a whirlwind as I chopped through the beams farthest from the flames. Chips of wood flew. Flames crept closer until I was hacking into burning wood and the heat singed my hair and scolded my skin. I was sure I was too late, too weak, too slow but then the wood cracked and I kicked it through.
Hands and arms appeared and I pulled them through. I yanked out one after the other while the fire spread and the smoke choked us. Women and children, mostly. My eyes filled with smoke. The flames grew until the fire engulfed the hole and the people I dragged through were burned.
I used my body to shield them as best I could. I pushed my back against the flames until they were all through. The pain lashed me, spasms wracked my body. My helmet and armour were roasting me alive.
I had not seen Alice’s children. William had lied to me. Romantic fool that I was I had allowed myself to be tricked. William did know me. And yet for all that I was burning, I forced my head through the gap and squinted through the pain and the choking fumes.
Shapes moved in the corner against the back wall. I clambered through. Two children clasping each other.
Jocelyn and little Emma.
I was passing out from the smoke and burns on my skin so I grabbed the children, kicked out more of the burning wood and hurled them through the gap.
On the other side I carried them away to the other side of the cavern where it was lit by a tiny lamp.
My seared skin cracked and oozed as I set the children down beyond the blood. Black smoke billowed in a layer above our heads, getting thicker and lower. The other prisoners were panicking at the far end of the cavern, shrieking and wailing, trying to get out. It was dark and they could not find the entranceway.
Jocelyn clung to my arm, his strong fingers digging into my burned skin.
Emma was not moving.
My hands and eyes were shaking and I could not tell whether she was breathing. If only I had some of William’s blood.
William’s blood.
I seized my dagger, stabbed my wrist and held it over Emma’s mouth. Blood dripped onto her lips.
“No,” Jocelyn wailed. “Do not make her one of them.”
“She will not be,” I said, my voice a raw whisper from the smoke. “And if I do not, she may die.”
; He nodded once, giving me permission. His trust moved me deeply. It was not merely the smoke that made my eyes run with tears.
I worried about drowning Emma with my blood but still I held my wrist to her mouth. Her lips stirred and her throat bobbed. Her eyes sprang open. She gulped down life and her fingers dug into my arm like claws. When her eyes were alight with astonishment I gave her to her brother, who held her to his strong little body. She had recovered enough to walk and I knew she would live.
But I was dying. I could feel black poison from the burns seeping into my flesh. I knew what I needed.
The vat of blood had been warmed by the fire. I climbed up and in and submerged myself, the thick substance covering my head and I lapped it up, drinking down that filth, that life. Gulping down chunks of clotted blood, I came up for air, vomited black blood and drank more until my belly was bulging.
And the strength of it flowed through me. My burns were soothed and my skin became whole and soft again.
I climbed out, blood slewing off of my helm, my hauberk in sheets. The prisoners gathered, stood staring at me in fear, pleading for help. They were coughing, suffocating and terrified of the blood-drenched Frankish knight before them. Poor souls lost in the darkness and had come back to the light of the raging flame, looking to me to help them once again.
Carrying Jocelyn and Emma in my arms, I lead the peasants out through the tunnel. I groped my way through darkness and smoke until a prick of light appeared ahead. I staggered up from the black hole gasping for air and life.
Dawn was breaking over the hills. It was astonishing that I had been underground for so little time. A pale pink light growing and the promised warmth of the day already in the wind. Smoke drifted from holes all over the hill until the underground blaze burnt itself out. I looked from every vantage and not a soul moved anywhere down in the valleys or across the hills. From somewhere, a single goat bleated.
William was long gone.
The local Saracens helped each other away down into the valley. Those folk I had saved kept as far away from me as possible. Many glanced back at me, their faces masks of despair.