Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (48 page)

His first strike, a double-handed overhand vertical blow at my head came unbelievably fast, and I was slow, but just speedy enough to sweep it away as it came down towards my skull, stumbling two steps to my right down the rocky slope and almost losing my footing altogether. My right calf muscle protested at the sudden jar, but that stumble saved me, too, for it made me duck my head to find my balance and in his next blow the steel came whistling no more than an inch above my blond locks. But then I forgot that Sir Nicholas was my friend and saw him, through a film of sweaty battle-fear, as the man who might very well end my life in the next two or three heartbeats.

I blocked his next slice with my cross-guard, and thrust Fidelity’s point at his eyes, making him take a fast step back up the slope. I saw that he was feeling his wound, favouring his left side. And I used that weakness without the slightest scruple – attacking that side relentlessly, hard blow after blow aimed at his ribs, all of which he parried, but which made him wince in pain with every blocked strike. I could see that the wound had opened and blood, black in the moonlight, was blooming on his surcoat. I could also see that our battle cries and the sharp ringing of steel had roused the castle and dark heads were appearing, and red torches too, at the battlements. He saw them as well and knew that he was lost – for now there could be no silent, secret escape for him with the Grail box slung over his back. But even though he knew that he must lose – Robin’s men would be out of the gates in a few moments – he still did his best to cut me down. He still tried to kill me.

But, in the finish, with his wounded side, he was no match for me, and I killed him before Robin’s men came within ten paces. He stumbled on the uneven slope, went down on one knee, tired, bleeding, and was a fraction of an instant slow to block my swinging strike at his unprotected head. Fidelity smashed into his blade and such was the power of my blow that it carried on, burying itself two inches into his skull, just above the ear.

And he was dead.

God have mercy on my soul, and his – for I killed one good friend in the service of another that night. Sir Nicholas de Scras was a fine warrior and a true knight, a good man, and I will remember him as such, not as the skulking thief who, driven mad by the lure of the Grail, tried to cheat Robin and do me to death. I can feel the tears rising as I write, and remember him as the man he truly was.

I have killed men, so many men, in war and out of it – for spite, for duty, by accident, and very occasionally for the pleasure of seeing the light go out in their eyes. Their shades know me and sometimes they form up in squadrons, dress their ranks, lower their lances and charge me in my dreams. I did not wish to kill Sir Nicholas de Scras – but I did so. I killed him for Robin, for a principle, but mainly, I swear, just to prevent him from killing me.

I must lay down my quill for a little while now.

The dawn, when it came, was warm and bright and Robin decreed that we would be leaving the very next day. I was glad – the death of Sir Nicholas lay heavily on my soul, and I still grieved sorely for Tuck as well. This quest, this strange adventure, may have been successful in that we now possessed the Grail and the Master was dead and his knights killed or scattered – but the toll had been a crushingly heavy one. I wanted to be home with Goody with no more delay. Thomas and I spent the morning packing our weapons and belongings into waterproof leather sacks in preparation for the long journey – and I spent a good deal of time praying in the chapel before the Grail, which had been restored to its place there and now was flanked by two armed guards on either side of the altar.

I was on my knees, trying to ignore the bored, much-scarred and slightly odiferous mercenaries, and focus on an image in my head of my beloved wife, when I heard the sentry calling for Robin from the roof of the keep. There was an urgency in his voice, almost a note of panic, that made me straighten up, abandon my prayers and run out into the sunny courtyard.

Robin and Little John and half a dozen mercenaries were already standing on the flat roof of the keep when I reached the top of the wooden ladder that was its only method of access. And looking west, I felt the water in my bladder chill. For coming along the track around the small hill to the north-west of our refuge was an army – more than a hundred, perhaps two hundred men, mostly in black surcoats over mail, but a score or so in white cloaks, well equipped for war, riding well-trained horses.

The Templars had come to Montségur.

I looked over at Robin, who was wearing the particularly serene expression I knew so well, and which meant he was deeply troubled, and said, ‘We’re not leaving tomorrow, are we?’

He looked over to me and smiled warmly. ‘Let’s just see what they want with us before we start despairing, shall we?’

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.