by Dan Davis
On we ran, through a bedchamber and into another, all the while the shouts of the men pursuing echoed through the rooms.
Our rescued knight John fell behind and with him the smaller squire. Both men were exhausted and close to collapse and it dawned on me that our rescue attempt had been doomed to failure right from the start for just that reason. Even had we remained undiscovered and attempted to flee through the tunnels, the weakened prisoners would have been unable to make it out before sunrise. We would have been seen making our way through the town to the river and someone would have raised the alarm. I had been swayed by Thomas’ endless words of duty and honour and I had allowed myself to be carried away by the potential gloriousness and bloody violence of the venture.
Watching John and Hugh clinging to each other a full chamber length behind us, both breathing hard and ashen-faced, I was angry at my foolishness and Thomas’ naivety.
“Leave them,” I said to Thomas.
My friend was appalled. “I shall not.”
“Yes, go,” John replied, hearing us as they came closer. “Take young Hugh with you and I will hold them off here while you make your escape.”
The squire looked at the knight, aghast at the notion.
“Oh, for the love of God,” I replied. “Not another honourable man. Go, you chivalrous fools. All three of you, go. I will hold them here.”
Thomas grasped my arm. “Go where?”
“You know the only other route.”
He gaped. “But we are only ever going up and up, Richard.”
The first of the pursuing soldiers burst through the doorway in a clattering of feet and hard breathing and there they froze, shocked to see us standing in conversation as if it were market day and we were debating the value of a ham.
I slapped my brother knight on the shoulder and pushed him away. “And what goes up, Thomas, must certainly come down. Go!”
While the three Templars, two young and one ancient, fled further, I turned to give the cluster of wary soldiers my full attention.
“My dear fellows,” I cried. “My name is Richard of Ashbury and I came to Château de Chinon to free Templars and to murder Frenchmen. How kind of you to deliver yourselves to my bloody sword.”
A huge sergeant at the back shoved his men forward and roared at them. “Have at him, you damned fools. He is one man. He is unarmoured. Take him, now!”
I laughed. Partly to unnerve them further, and so slow them down, but also because the battle madness had descended on me and I knew that in the next moments I would walk the knife edge between life and death. And there is no greater joy on this Earth.
The bravest ones came and at me and the bravest ones fell. The cunning among them circled to my flanks, attempting to get behind me, so I retreated as far as I could to the doorway behind to ensure I would not be cut off. The dead and the wounded littered the floor and the wails of the dying frightened the living, who could not understand what was happening. No one man should have been able to kill so many others. It was not possible. And yet they fell.
Without warning, the huge sergeant threw himself forward in a rage, determined to do the job himself.
I stamped my leg forward and thrust my sword toward him, knocking the blade of his polearm away. He was momentarily stunned by my strength and I smashed his nose with my pommel and cut his throat as he fell. I turned and fled as fast as my legs would carry me.
It was a good while before the surviving soldiers gathered their wits enough to take up their pursuit and I gained a lead on them. One chamber led to another, they became increasingly well appointed, until I raced by a very fine bedchamber where an old gentleman, his wife and their servants stood in the corner, the servants brandishing their knives.
“Good morning!” I shouted as I ducked into the already-open door that led straight onto another stairwell. Dragging their door closed behind me, I took a step or two down before I heard fighting echoing between the dark, curving stone walls. Blades clashing and men shouting.
The sound came from above me.
I turned and ran toward the fighting, up and up, round and round the steps.
Thomas, John, and Hugh were defending against almost a dozen soldiers who jabbed and thrust at them with their polearms while the three Templars backed across the room away from me.
This time, I was silent as I began killing those at the rear, cutting throats with my dagger and breaking skulls apart with my sword. When they noticed they were being attacked, they scattered and I shouted at my men to follow me. Thomas grabbed John and Hugh, who were both slumped and weakened beyond their bodily limits, and shoved them through the retreating, horrified soldiers and those writhing in agony on the floor.
As they reached me, I again made to flee down the stairs but the pursuing men were already coming. Instead, I ran up once more, going around the winding stairs passing by a slit window that fleetingly showed the sky beyond lightening with the dawn, and then I came to a dead end.
The single door at the top was locked.
“No!” I shouted and slammed my shoulder against it. The door shook but it was solid. “Help me, Thomas. We must break it down.”
“The key!” Thomas shouted, pointing at the wall. “The key!”
“Praise God,” I said, as I grabbed the door key, hanging by a ring, from an iron nail on the frame. I had overlooked it in the darkness and in my panic at the sound of pursuit so close behind. And Thomas, through some strange effect of my blood, had eyes that could see far better in the darkness than could mine.
I turned the lock and shoved the weakening John and Hugh through the door after Thomas, then jumped after them and slammed the door closed as the hands on the other side grasped at it. Someone screamed as his finger bones snapped when the door crushed them against the frame. I turned the key while the men on the other side hammered on the timber and shouted at us and each other.
“To where now?” Thomas asked, his head swivelling one way and another.
We were atop the curtain wall of the castle. Nothing was higher than we were, other than a handful of the towers that dotted the wall at intervals stretching away around the enormous perimeter.
The weather was clear and the air cool and dry. The sun had not yet risen but I could see the grey-purple roofs and walls of homes of the town down around the castle, with small trees and compact kitchen gardens in the shadows between them all. The curtain walls, towers and battlements of the fortifications all around led only from one to another, of course, as well as down into the dark interior of the great castle.
The soldiers behind the door fell silent for a moment before their banging took up a coordinated rhythm. It shook with each impact.
I looked over the edge of the wall. The River Vienne flowed along the base far below. Small, dark boats bobbed all over on the surface and barges and larger vessels were tied up along both banks. I could make out the bridge downstream.
“Perfect!” I said. “God does love us, after all, Thomas.”
He stared at me, aghast, his eyes white in the gloom.
“I cannot swim, sir,” Thomas reminded me, hissing the words. “And Sir John here would not even survive the fall.”
“It is a long drop for a mortal,” I allowed. “Why do you worry only for the knight and not the squire?”
John whimpered and I looked closer at the young man, slumped in shadow against the wall with his head lolling, clutching his guts. The bandages once covering his feet were gone and the blackened skin was cracked and bleeding freely. Only then did I notice that the front of his shirt was soaked with blood where he clutched at it. I had missed the wound he had received during combat and no doubt the mad flight had only opened him up further.
“Go,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “This wound is mortal.”
“No,” Hugh said, grasping him. “You must have faith, brother.”
“You pray for me, Hugh,” John said. “For all of us. After you get free.”
“Wheresoever yo
u go, sir,” the squire whispered, “there go I.”
The soldiers hammered on the door with steady, powerful blows. “Axes,” I said, recognising the sound. “They will be through soon enough.”
“More men are coming,” Thomas said, pointing into the gloomy courtyard below us.
“Do you swim, John?” I asked him.
He nodded but Hugh spoke for him. “We learned together to swim in the Cher, five summers past.”
“You may think me mad, sir,” I said to John, “but I can heal you, if you do exactly as I say. Heal you so that you will survive the fall, or perhaps bring you back to life if you die from it.”
In fact, I knew I would have to drag Thomas through the water to safety and would have little chance to save John if the fall did him in.
“Madness,” John muttered, confused and weak. “Yes, yes. What is this madness?”
Thomas strode to the young knight and seized him quite roughly. “It seems to be madness yet it is truth. There is a magic in Richard. In his blood. A magic you must imbibe now, or you shall die on this wall or in your goal.”
John’s eyes flicked around. “What magic?”
I sliced my wrist. “The magic is in my blood. Drink, and live.”
He was confused and disgusted and Hugh crossed himself.
“Who are you men?” Hugh asked. “Sorcerers? Heretics?”
“There is no time for reason,” I snapped, watching the soldiers coming through the shadows towards us. “Will you live on or will you die?”
“There can be no magic without faith,” Hugh said, though his eyes betrayed his concern for his brother Templar.
“I doubted once,” Thomas said. “When I was a Templar and had my guts ripped open. This blood healed me fully. I swear it by Jesus Christ and all His saints.”
John shook his head but did not resist when I held my bloody wrist to his mouth. Deciding all at once, he grasped my arm and sunk his lips onto my flesh and sucked the blood into his mouth like a hungry child on the breast.
The door behind us splintered and the soldiers within shouted like baying hounds as they threw it open. Below, the men from the courtyard clattered up the wooden stairs and reached the wall walk at the top, mere yards from us.
“Come now!” I shouted and jumped up onto the wall, dragging John up behind me.
Far below, the river was black like an abyss.
“The blood takes time to work,” Thomas shouted as he clambered up beside us with an arm around Hugh. “It is too soon!”
He was not wrong, of course, and I expected that John would die from his wound before the blood could do its magic. And I thought Hugh would be knocked senseless by the impact and drowned. But what choice did we have?
Soldiers were atop the wall, running from both sides with their spears up, shouting and cursing us.
“Keep your feet together!” I cried and then shoved John hard. He fell, tumbling slowly like a sack of turnips. As if he was already dead.
Muttering a prayer, Hugh leapt out into the emptiness after his brother Templar.
“Thomas, jump, you damned fool!” I shouted but he stood shaking as he looked down at the distant black surface.
A thrown dagger clattered off the battlements beside me and I ducked as a spear swished above my head and disappeared into the cold dawn air.
I whipped my sword at the nearest soldier to drive him back into his fellows before wrapping an arm around Thomas.
I jumped, dragging Thomas down with me.
The sun came up at that moment, peaking over the horizon and bathing us for an instant in glorious yellow light. Our fall into the shadows seemed to last forever and I was close to a kind of momentary ecstasy at the terrifying thrill of it before the violent impact of the hard, black, icy cold river slammed into my feet and body, knocking the wind from me.
I fought and clawed my way up, struggling to keep my breath in my body. I still had no idea if drowning would truly kill me but it certainly felt as though it would. For a moment, I was aghast with the certainty that I had been swimming down the entire time toward the riverbed, only for my head to break the surface. As I took a rasping gulp of cold air, I pulled Thomas up spluttering and clawing at me like a cat tossed into a water butt.
“Calm yourself, sir,” I managed to say. “All is well.”
The men atop the wall threw weapons and God only knows what else down on us but the current was already taking us away down river. I held Thomas with one hand and sculled away with the current.
“John?” Thomas asked, spluttering and gasping. “Hugh?”
“Cannot see them,” I replied. “I am sorry.”
I knew that our pursuers would not give up and that they would already be racing to get ahead of us. But we had already planned for such an eventuality and, tied up by the stone bridge downstream, we had a boat ready and waiting for us.
“Swim with me, Thomas. Kick your legs slowly. That is the way. By God, she is there, Thomas. She is bloody well there, and all.”
For it was true that Eva, our dear companion and fellow member of the Order of the White Dagger, was precisely where she was supposed to be.
“You said you would be coming by the road,” she said, after she dragged us into the boat. We lay there, gasping like landed fish. “No Templars?”
“We had a pair of the bastards,” I said, breathing hard. “They died.”
Thomas dragged himself to the stern and peered out into the darkness. “Hugh!” he shouted. “John!”
“Be silent, you fool!” I hissed. “We must away. They are lost.”
“No, no,” Thomas said. “They are there! Look, will you. There!”
“Good God Almighty,” I muttered. “They will dash their brains out. Get after them, Eva.”
Hugh and John’s heads went bobbing past us in the current and they were swept through the breakwaters of the bridge at a remarkable pace where the waters rushed, loud and white.
Without delay, Eva rowed us out into the current toward the bridge. Thomas and I took an oar each while Eva moved to the prow and we rowed so hard I feared the oars would snap.
“Slower, slower. Stop!” Eva cried. And then, “I have them.”
With her immortal strength, she pulled them in one after the other and dumped them, soaked and shivering and weak as new-born babes, into the bottom of our boat.
We rowed on with our immortal strength, away from our pursuers downstream toward the Loire in the north and from there downstream again toward the distant coast. We would be out of the water soon enough, just before Saumur where the Loire split around an island and where, on the eastern bank, Stephen would be waiting with a dozen fresh horses for our escape.
“You could find only two?” Eva asked, not hiding her disappointment.
“We freed a few commoners,” I replied. “But they were like as not recaptured before they could flee from the town, for we were betrayed. They were waiting for us. Even so, we managed to reach Grand Master Molay and some other senior men but they refused to flee with us.”
Eva scoffed. “No wonder the fools have been defeated. I mean no offence, Thomas. But honourable men are always the first to die.”
Because she was a woman, she did not fully appreciate the necessity for a man to sometimes choose honour over life and I wanted to argue with her. But I was tired and I suspected that I would lose that argument and so I held my tongue.
John lay on his back for a while, breathing deeply with his hands on his belly as the sun rose high and warm enough to dry him. His eyes closed and I watched closely as Hugh prayed over his Templar brother in a fervour. Before we reached the Loire, John opened his eyes and sat up, pulling his filthy, blood-stained shirt up and feeling where it had been pierced.
“My wound is healed,” he said to Hugh, a smile on his face. “That is, my wound is gone. It is gone, I tell you.”
Hugh ran his hands over John’s belly, shaking his head as he did so.
“It is a miracle,” Hugh said.
“Not a miracle,” I replied.
“It is magic,” Thomas said.
In fact, I had no idea what made my blood do what it did, and so I supposed that magic was as good a word as any to describe it.
“Examine your feet also,” I suggested as I pulled my oar.
“The magic is true,” John muttered, as Thomas nodded.
“Sir John. Squire Hugh,” Thomas said. “Your Order is almost extinguished. But you have heart and guts, sirs.”
“And balls,” I said. Eva laughed.
Thomas gave me a long look, full of meaning. In his eyes was a question.
I thought about it, watching the two men we had rescued. They had suffered for a long time and had fought to survive their tortures, they had fought the soldiers that tried to stop them fleeing, they had fought the cold dark of the river. They were fighters.
I nodded at Thomas.
“You men have honour and you both understand duty,” Thomas said to them. “I would like you to consider joining an Order that fights a great evil. A great evil worth dedicating your life to. Many lifetimes. Greater even than the evil of the Saracens.”
“What evil can be greater than that?” John asked, wide-eyed.
“Well sir,” I replied, watching the sun rise above the trees and hills and bathe the river in a million sparkles, “it all began one morning in the year eleven ninety, at the old manor house in Ashbury, in the finest land that God ever made, that is to say Derbyshire in England.”
Grand Master James of Molay was burnt at the stake in Paris on 18th March 1314. The poor old fool had confessed under torture that he had denied Christ and had spat on Christ’s image when he was inducted into the Order. Many of the Templars confessed to such a blasphemy but Thomas, John, and Hugh swore blind that it was all from the twisted minds of the Inquisitors. Other leading Templars had confessed that sodomy was rife amongst the brothers of the Order and, what was more, that the leadership had not only allowed but actively encouraged it.
When the Grand Master met with three cardinals sent by the Pope, he at once recanted his confession and ripped open his shirt to show the scars upon his body that he received in the torture chambers of the Inquisition. The Pope formally absolved all those men but it did no good against the power of King Philip, who turned all his legal and financial power against the Papacy and eventually won, for his power was earthly rather than divine and that is ultimately what counts upon the Earth.