Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (35 page)

Once the Master was dead, Robin said, sounding as plausible as a courtroom cleric, we would ride north to Anjou and take up arms on the side of Arthur, Duke of Brittany, against the throne-stealing John of England, and when the usurper was dead or humbled, we would all be richly rewarded by the young, generous duke.

The mercenaries dutifully cheered once more. Then Robin gave his three rules of behaviour, the three unbreakable rules that I had heard him outline before on the Great Pilgrimage, as a measure to keep discipline in the ranks of his men. ‘No man under my command steals so much as a penny, desecrates a church, or beds any woman without her consent – unless I give them my permission. And I will hang from the nearest tree any man who breaks these rules. No trial, no excuses, just a quick final dance at the end of a rope. Is that clear to everyone?’

The men looked sober at this but not one ventured to protest at the promise of such rough justice. They were, after all, veteran soldiers, men used to warfare with harsh rules.

As I washed my face in the river before bed that night, I found myself kneeling next to Olivier, who was making his own ablutions beside me. He smiled nervously, and I greeted him with a curt but civil ‘God save you!’

An uncomfortable pause, then he said, ‘So you did for old Mercadier, eh?’

I didn’t know how to respond to that and so I said nothing.

‘I knew you and he was enemies, like,’ the man continued. ‘He hated your guts, truth be told. Hated you from the first moment he saw you in Normandy, all those years ago – told me so himself. But you fixed him good and proper, sir, in the end.’

I felt obliged to say something; the man was trying to be friendly, but I was still struggling with an appropriate answer.

‘It was not on my own account that we fought – it was for my cousin Roland, that blond man over there. Mercadier would have blinded him at Dangu – worse, my cousin was humiliated, and put in fear. In truth, we killed him for that humiliation.’

‘Yes, I remember that night, after the battle near Gisors – we took a score of Frenchies prisoner, if I remember rightly. Blinded most of ’em. Would have done your cousin, too, if the Earl hadn’t come in at the last minute with two dirty great chests of silver. I said to myself: that Earl, he’s an open-handed gent, he’s a lord who’d be generous to those who served him.’

‘You were there? You blinded all those men?’ I found that I had recoiled from the lean, grinning fellow. ‘That is monstrous. A crime against God – you should be ashamed of yourself…’

‘We don’t make the rules,’ said Olivier quickly. ‘We’re humble folk. We was just following orders. Mercadier’s orders – do that, he says, and we do it. And old King Richard knew about it, too. Oh yes, the Lionheart turned a blind eye to all of it. Blind eye – ha-ha. But war’s war, as old Mercadier often used to say to me; it’s not a child’s game. Our task is to win, and win any-which-way.’

I opened my mouth to rebuke him and then closed it. I did not want to debate the morality of the battlefield with a fellow who killed for pay and blinded his prisoners. I was about to tell him there would be none of that sort of disgusting and immoral behaviour under Robin’s command, when I thought of Malloch, the Jew, and the bloody stumps of his severed fingers, and found I had nothing to say after all. So I stiffly bade him good night and went to join the Companions.

Roland came to me as I was preparing to bed down. ‘I don’t like it, Alan,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t trust these … people. They could murder us all in our sleep.’

‘They could have killed us this afternoon, if they’d wished. But they did not. I think they will prove to be loyal – after all, a man must have a lord,’ I said. ‘Mustn’t he? Besides, Robin seems to trust them.’

Roland grunted something rude, seemingly unmollified, and went back to his bedroll.

In spite of my words, I slept fitfully – the misericorde gripped in my hand.

We left just after dawn – riding south, through Pamiers and other villages, beside the rushing waters of the Ariège, and coming into the green hill country at the base of the mighty Pyrenees. Around mid-afternoon we rounded the shoulder of a mountain and saw the castle of the Counts of Foix standing proud on an isolated hilltop before us. Its sight drew a gasp from me.

It was a noble fortification: two square stone towers with a long, low stone hall joining them to each other, surrounded by a high curtain wall and all of it atop an almost sheer outcrop of grey rock that lunged upwards hundreds of feet above the surrounding river valley. At the foot of the mass of the castle rock, between that stark citadel and the place where the Arget river joined the Ariège, nestled the ancient Abbey of St Volusianus. The town, a stinking warren of craftsman’s and tradesman’s houses, was slightly to the south and squeezed between the abbey and the steep sides of the ancestral fortress of the Count of Foix.

We made our camp about five hundred yards to the south-east of the castle, in the water meadows by the Ariège, and we were not unobserved. Indeed, our passage along the banks of the river was punctuated by the brisk sound of slamming wooden shutters as the townsfolk began to barricade themselves into their dwellings. I could make out the figures of a dozen men-at-arms or knights in bright red-and-gold-striped surcoats on the battlements of the castle, and a stream of townsfolk making their way up the winding path to it, burdened with cloth-wrapped bundles. And no wonder, with the addition of the mercenaries, we were now a sizeable force – and when more than fifty dirty, raggedy, unshaven yet heavily armed men arrive unexpectedly in your town, you lock up your house, bury your coin and get your wife and children up to the castle as quick as your legs will carry you, if you are a wise man.

As the mercenaries set up camp in the water meadow, under the watchful gaze of the crowd on the battlements, I hunted out my best clothes and, with Thomas’s help, managed to find a cleanish pair of grey hose and a blue tunic trimmed with silk that was only lightly stained. With my hair combed, my face more or less clean, my sword belted around my waist but without armour or shield, I accompanied Robin and Vim through the narrow streets of the town, past the locked gate of the abbey and up the steep, serpentine road to the castle and its main entrance, a barred double door set in a stone arch.

We were challenged fifty feet from the gate, and when Robin announced himself, the portal swung open and we were escorted by a dozen men-at-arms in their gaudy gold-and-red-striped attire, to the hall of the castle, and ushered into the august presence of Raymond-Roger, the fifth Count of Foix of that name.

We bowed and Robin handed over a letter from another Raymond-Roger, our friend Tronc, which briefly introduced us as peaceful travellers and commended us to his care. The Count – a fat, angry-looking man nearing fifty, with a weak, petulant mouth – read the letter quickly, standing by his hearth, and then scowled at us. He took a long pull from a jewelled goblet, wiped a trickle of wine from his lips with his embroidered sleeve and said, ‘So you are the Earl of Locksley – the outlawed Earl of Locksley, if I’m not mistaken, also known as Robin Hood.’

‘I am,’ said Robin, smiling genially, though I saw a glint of steel in his gaze.

It was clear that the Count had his own sources of information.

‘And you were chased out of Toulouse and have decided to come south to visit my lands – with a small army at your back; an army that I see is now encamped outside my peaceful little town.’

The Count gestured violently at a small barred window set high in the stone wall of his low-ceilinged hall. ‘What am I to make of you? The infamous Robin Hood – here in my castle. How would you respond if I were to come to your lands in England – Yorkshire, isn’t it? – under similar circumstances? Would you welcome me with open arms? Feast me, fall on my neck and rejoice to the heavens at my coming? I very much doubt it.’

‘We mean no harm to you, my lord,’ said Robin with a frank and winning smile. ‘We seek a powerful man, a former monk, who goes by the name of the Master and who has an extra thumb on his left hand. We were told that you had had some dealings with him and we would be grateful for a little information. That is all.’

‘And what would you do if you were to encounter this man, this Master?’ asked the Count, tilting his head on one side and squeezing one eye shut. I realized then that the man was extremely drunk.

For a moment, Robin did not answer. He seemed to be weighing his words carefully. Then he said coldly, formally, like a man pronouncing a sentence in law, ‘I would kill him; I would slit his belly, pull out his steaming entrails, roast them and feed them to him. I would cut off his head, but slowly, sawing through his neck with an old and rusty blade, and bear his ugly, severed poll, dripping, all the way back to Yorkshire on my spear-point. I would slaughter him, dismember him, turn him into fox-food – and I would destroy any man,
any man,
who seeks to protect him.’

The Count seemed rather taken aback by Robin’s answer, and the naked threat that it contained. He was silent for several long moments. I wondered if he would order his men-at-arms to fall on us, and I readied myself. But he remained still and silent, and a range of expressions flickered across his wine-sodden face: outrage, anger, fear, calculation, wonderment – and was that last expression a look of relief? Then he gave Robin a sly smile, which broadened into a wide grin.

‘That is a bold, warlike answer, my lord, one that I find gladdens my heart – perhaps you and your knights would be gracious enough to spend a few days here in the castle as my guests – although I would prefer your common men-at-arms to remain in the water meadow for the time being. I believe that we may have things of mutual benefit to discuss.’

The mercenaries stayed in the meadow, and ate and drank and slept, and more or less kept their discipline – Little John, Thomas, Nur and Gavin remained with them and Robin had repeated his three rules and even gone so far as to set up a semi-permanent makeshift gallows, a noose hung over the branch of an apple tree, as a reminder of the penalty for unruly behaviour. But Sir Nicholas, Roland, Robin, Tuck and myself – and Vim – were offered a floor to ourselves in the old, northernmost tower of the Castle of Foix, and the Count beamed and nodded at us and showed us the most lavish hospitality.

The square room we shared was three storeys up, at the top of three steep sets of ladders – and with six big men sleeping in there, it was not spacious – but I was very grateful to be indoors and not sleeping in the open or under canvas in the meadow. We discovered that the weather in late April and early May so near the high mountains was very swift to change – one moment bright sunshine, the next a deluge of stinging rain or a fog as thick as a fleece.

I was not present at the discussions of ‘mutual benefit’ that Robin had with the Count of Foix, but my lord related the gist of them to me, on the afternoon of the second day after our arrival, when we were standing on the flat roof of the tower, taking a little weak sunshine on our faces and admiring the view: to the south the snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees, to the north the long valley of the Ariège, dotted with round green hills and crumbling rocky eminences. The Castle of Foix was a magnificent site for a fortification, one of the best I have seen, soaring high above the countryside and from which you could see a day’s ride in all directions.

‘The Master is now at a place called Montségur,’ said Robin quietly. ‘It is about twenty miles south-east of here, an old ruined castle on a mountaintop, which the previous count of Foix abandoned as too remote to bother with. Nine months ago, the Master came to Foix. He had only two retainers with him, a priest and a poor knight, and he begged the Count for permission to set up a retreat from the world at Montségur. He made it sound as if it would be a sort of hermitage – a place of contemplation for a handful of devout men who wished to venerate the Holy Mother of Our Lord, in their own quiet and humble way.

‘Somehow – and the Count is not quite sure exactly what happened – he found himself setting his seal to a formal charter that granted Montségur to the Master. The Count cannot clearly remember why he was persuaded to sign over Montségur – it may be a surfeit of drink, or his own feeble will, but he believes that his mind was clouded by a kind of enchantment. I know what I think.’

Robin looked at me, but I looked away – I was embarrassed. I too had been susceptible to the Master’s strange charisma when he had been our prisoner in the Limousin at Château Chalus-Chabrol around the time King Richard had died.

‘But the Count was not too perturbed, at this point. He had deeded away a tiny tract of land to a religious institution – but his father had done something similar on a much grander scale, granting land for several abbeys to be built in Foix, where Masses for his soul are still being said. Montségur was little better than a ruin, and Raymond-Roger had given his word and set his seal on the document. What harm could a few devotees of the Virgin do down there on a remote mountaintop?

‘For some months, the Count ignored his new neighbours, and carried on with his affairs here in Foix. He is a man, I think, who desires a quiet life. But he began to hear strange tales about the place. The Master was swiftly rebuilding the walls of the old castle, the Count was told, using forced peasant labour. And the Master was recruiting fighting men – knights and men-at-arms from all over Europe – in significant numbers. In the space of six months, the ruined castle had been repaired and turned into a fortress – and the Count began to be alarmed. But even more troubling were the stories coming out of Montségur, tales of Satanic ceremonies involving a magical relic, a relic so holy that its merest touch could cure all disease, even hold back Death itself. More warriors were recruited to serve at Montségur – and the castle soon became powerful, manned by scores of knights in white mantels with a blue cross on their chests.

‘Our poor friend Raymond-Roger felt betrayed, he felt that he had been harbouring a cuckoo in his nest. A mighty castle had sprung up, almost overnight, in his own backyard, one that could even rival the Castle of Foix. Then it grew worse. Armed men rode out from Montségur and took what they wished from the local peasants; taxes, even tithes destined for the Church, all in the name of the Mother of God and this mysterious relic. They were acting more like bandits than men of the cloth. At this affront to his authority, and that of the Church, the Count of Foix was forced to act. About three weeks ago, he gathered his handful of knights and rode to Montségur to demand answers – indeed, he intended to rescind the charter and take back possession of the castle for himself.