Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (39 page)

My calf was throbbing like a Saracen war-drum as I sat under that tree in the darkness. Better to rest, I told myself, and take another look in the morning. With that, I hauled myself to my feet and limped back to the cave. I rolled myself up in my blankets near the banked fire and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

I awoke in the middle of the night to find the cave suffused with a strange greenish light. It seemed to be coming from the walls themselves, and I was seized with an unearthly terror. Had I in-advertently stepped into some fairy realm, some eldritch half-place where, as Nur had said, the spirits of the wild had dominion? I could see no sign of my companions. I was alone, alone except for a tall figure dressed in shining white at the far end of the cave by the stone altar. I tried to speak, to call out to the figure, but my mouth was sealed with some sticky, glue-like substance and I was rendered mute. The figure turned and I saw that it was a woman – and that the face above the plain, long white dress, framed by a pure white headdress, was Goody’s. Her beautiful countenance was deathly pale, as it had been when I last saw her in Sherwood, but her violet-blue eyes sparkled with love and understanding. She walked towards me, gliding on unseen feet beneath her white garb, and stopped and looked down at me in my blankets. I tried to raise a hand to her, to touch her, but my outstretched limb was far too heavy to lift. Goody said nothing, but she pointed to the altar where I now saw a shining cup of gold, bigger and brighter than any vessel I had ever seen before and seeming to shoot out rays of power. The vast cup was so bright that it hurt my eyes and I took my gaze back to Goody. And saw to my horror that she was weeping.

‘Goodbye, my dearest, goodbye,’ she said in a whispering voice quite unlike her own true tones, and the image began to fade, her features becoming paler, becoming ghostly and wraith-like, as if she were dissolving into the air.

With a huge effort, I ripped open my lips and screamed, ‘No, Goody, no, come back to me. Don’t go!’

But the wraith merely whispered, ‘Goodbye, my love’, and vanished into the blackness of the cave.

I opened my eyes, and all was pitch dark, except for the merest glow of the few remaining coals of our campfire. Someone was beside me, and a light, cool soothing hand was resting on my naked shoulder. But it was not until Thomas had thrown a few sticks of kindling on the fire and poked it back into life that I realized Nur was kneeling beside my bedroll, and she was talking to me in a quiet and reassuring voice. ‘You were dreaming, Alan. The spirits came to you, as they often do in these places. Tell me, what did you see? Did you see the Grail?’

It took me a few moments to recover myself, and then I answered her: ‘Yes, yes, it was the Grail. And Goody came to me too. Is she dead? Tell me, Nur, is Goody dead?’

I had struggled out of my bedclothes and was standing over the woman dressed only in my braies with my fists clenched. Nur rose and prudently took a step backwards.

‘Go to sleep, Alan. All is well, let us all go back to sleep.’

I dropped to my knees and fumbled around on the ground next to my blankets until I found my sword and, gripping its handle in one hand and the sheath in the other, I stood and said again, through gritted teeth, ‘Tell me now, witch, does Goody yet live?’

My threat was quite explicit. I would have chopped Nur down in that moment had she not said to me, ‘Alan, I swear to you, by the spirits, by the love that I once bore for you, that Goody yet lives. Have faith. My curse cannot be unmade – much as I wish it might be. And killing me would only make it stronger, as my soul is sworn to it. But now, on this night, Goody lives! I swear it. She is alive, and she will remain so until one year and one day have passed from the day of your wedding.’

I was comforted, just a little, by Nur’s words. But not for long. As we all settled back down in our sleeping places, I began to reckon the days. Goody and I had wed on the first day of July the year before; it was now early May, perhaps the third day of the month – I was not certain. That meant that I had perhaps eight weeks until Goody was fated to die. The journey back to Westbury would take five weeks, indeed it might be six or even seven weeks if the weather was inclement or there were no ships bound for England at Bordeaux on my arrival in that city. I had two weeks, I calculated, or perhaps less, in which to capture the impregnable Castle of Montségur, slaughter the Master and all his knights, take possession of the Grail, save Tuck and begin the journey back to Goody. Two weeks.

I did not sleep again that night.

We spent the first part of the next day, another glorious one, making a circuit of Montségur, heading in a sunwise direction and being led by Maury who had the eagerness of a young goat over the steep rocks, despite his grizzled hair and the burden of his years. My calf pained me somewhat during that rough scramble, but I would not let an old man best me, and I kept pace as well as I could. Mercifully, it was not difficult to remain unobserved from the castle walls, for the lower slopes of the mountain were well covered by greenery – but I believe that the Master, knowing that Robin and his men were surely coming, and doubtless discouraged by his defeat the day before, was keeping his men locked up safe in the castle. Certainly we met no enemies that day as we made a complete slow, very painful circumnavigation of his fortress.

The reconnaissance, however, was less than fruitful. From the north face of the mountain, we looked up at the square keep of the castle, its highest point. There was no way to attack from this side: the mountainside was sheer, almost bare rock, and an army of battle-hardened Welsh mountaineers would have had trouble scaling it, let alone fighting a fierce battle once they reached the top. From the north-east the same, and perhaps even more difficult, for to attack from that direction would mean starting in a deep ravine filled with thorny scrub, which lay at the bottom. The eastern side, however, was more promising. A narrow spur of land extended down from the southernmost point of the castle directly towards the rising sun, a steep-sided but gently sloping spine of rock that wended down over half a mile to the treeline. An attack might have been possible from the east along this spur – except for two things. First, a twelve-foot-high stone rampart had been constructed at the top of the spur some thirty yards beyond the castle proper, as an extra defence on this weakest of sides, and I could see that it was manned by half a dozen alert men. Second, in broad daylight, an enemy could be seen coming for miles as they slogged up. Any half-awake garrison, seeing this attack coming, would have an hour or more to prepare their defences – which were already truly formidable. An army struggling up that way could be bombarded with a trebuchet set up inside the castle walls, and knocked off the single-file path like skittles, or if the defenders lacked stone-throwing machines, the attacking force could be simply mown down with a blizzard of crossbow bolts as they approached, forced by the landscape to advance slowly on such a narrow front. We could not attack from that direction, I concluded.

The south too was impossible: a sheer rock face leading up to a blank twenty-foot stone wall. Which left the west. This side housed the main gate and a steep winding path, no more than a goat track, that led up from the saddle of land where the road ran past Montségur to the north. This was the ordinary way that a peaceable traveller might approach, and the track the peasants who rebuilt the fortifications must have used, and I could clearly see that the stony path worn by many feet, and even with some crude steps cut into the rock, ended at a round arched double door in the thick castle walls. Once again, on a beautiful cloudless May day such as that one, an enemy could be clearly seen slogging up to the front door and there would be plenty of time to roll rocks down on to his head, skewer him with an avalanche of crossbow bolts, or fry him alive with boiling oil.

We returned to the cave a little after noon, tired from the long unsuccessful scramble around that stark mountain and, I must admit, a little despondent that we had not found even a remotely suitable avenue of attack.

I reported back to Robin by mid-afternoon, having rewarded Maury with a silver penny from Mercadier’s black leather purse and repeated my warning not to let anyone in our camp know that he had been ordered to take a particular road to Montségur by the treacherous Count of Foix.

Robin had brought discipline back to our thinned company, I saw, and a mound of freshly dug earth concealed the bodies of our fallen comrades. Sir Nicholas de Scras, I later learned, had said the holy words over the grave and led the mercenaries in prayer for the fallen.

Tuck still lived, praise God, and I found him lying in the small copse of trees where we had defeated the ambushing crossbowmen the day before. Someone had crudely stitched the flap of scalp back into position and washed the worst of the blood from his face, but he was still and quiet, in a profound state of slumber and his face was unnaturally waxy and pale. His stomach wound had been strapped and bandaged and his chest had been covered with a flap of blood-soaked cloth that trembled with every escaping breath of air from his punctured lungs.

I kissed the old man on his blood-streaked pate and went to report to Robin. My lord was conferring with Sir Nicholas by our horses – those we had brought to the field and those we had acquired by right of battle. I noticed, too, that Little John and Gavin were wandering over the battlefield and collecting up the discarded swords of our enemies.

‘Well, Alan, you seem to be in a calmer humour: tell me all about Montségur,’ my lord said, after we had exchanged our greetings.

I described for my lord the various aspects of the castle, and of the landscape around it, and the advantages and disadvantages of an attack from each of the cardinal points. When I had finished, I looked down at the green turf, unsure of how to conclude my report. ‘I cannot … I cannot see a way in. That is the truth. I cannot see a way in which with the few troops we have we can conquer a castle that is this well fortified by man and nature. Maybe with a mighty army and a year-long siege … But,
we
cannot do it. It bruises my heart to say this but it is impossible.’

I felt I was condemning both Tuck and Goody with my words. Yet I could only tell the truth, as I saw it, to my lord.

‘Impossible?’ said Robin, cocking an eyebrow. ‘I very much doubt that. What you mean is that it is going to be rather difficult.’

Although this was no more than a well-worn platitude, I was encouraged by my lord’s cheerfulness. A few well-chosen words and the world seemed a brighter place. He possessed this skill, Robin, one of his main talents, I believe, that enabled him to put fresh heart into a man when he was feeling at his lowest.

‘Well, no point sitting around here,’ said Robin, ‘I think we’d better get the men off their fat behinds and go and look at this “impossible” castle of yours. Go and get them all saddled up, will you, Alan.’

I led the Companions and the surviving mercenaries to the cave under the mountain. We carried Tuck there in a litter made of spears and roughly stitched cloaks and placed him on the altar rocks at the back, where he would be out of the way of any careless boots. Robin took one look at the castle, high above us, and detached two of the lightly wounded mercenaries to take the horses back down the road to a stretch of pasture that we’d passed on the way.

‘This is no task for cavalry,’ my lord said, gripping my shoulder. ‘We must see this business through on our own two feet.’

Despite his apparent confidence, I sensed that Robin was a little surprised at just how difficult it would be to take the Castle of Montségur. I saw him eyeing the battlements and looking for paths up the sheer rock face – in vain. Over the next few days, while the men idled in the cave, Robin scouted around the mountain with only Maury for company, spending hours each day staring up at the walls. But there were no attack points that were practicable – of that I was quite certain. And I noticed that we, in turn, were being observed by several score of tiny figures in blue-and-white surcoats on the ramparts, as we went about our business at the foot of the mountain.

Up there, I thought to myself, up there somewhere was the Master. Up there was the man who had killed my father, who was responsible for the murder of my friend Hanno. The man who had nearly killed me once in Paris and who had ordered Westbury burned to the ground. Up there was the man who stood between me and the Grail. His miserable life, I said to myself, was all that prevented me saving the lives of Goody and Tuck. The fury began to flow in my belly, like a river of fire.

On the third day after our arrival at Montségur, Robin came to me, fresh from one of his unsuccessful rambles on the slopes. ‘We’d better go up and speak to him,’ he said, with no preamble.

‘The Master?’

‘We need to find out what is in his mind,’ my lord said. ‘And I want to gauge his strength of will to resist us.’

I merely nodded.

Robin constructed himself an
ad hoc
white flag with a clean linen chemise from his saddlebag and one of the Count of Foix’s long spear shafts, and accompanied by myself, Roland and Sir Nicholas de Scras, set off up the steep, well-worn track under its dubious protection. The climb, even taken slowly, was a taxing one, especially with my half-healed calf, and in the bright May sunshine. And in my armour and carrying a heavy shield, I was sweating rivers and panting like a broken bellows as we neared the top of the mountain. The closer we got, the more difficult the task of capturing the castle seemed.

We halted about thirty yards from the main gate: a vast double door of thick, dark-brown wood that looked as if it could withstand a dragon’s fiery wrath. We stood stock still under the flapping white banner. Me, Robin, Roland and Sir Nicholas. Four knights, armed and armoured, standing in a line. Waiting.

I could see the helmeted heads of a dozen Knights of Our Lady as they passed between the crenellations, presumably moving along a walkway behind the walls. Occasionally, a man would pause and stare out at us, before disappearing again. But we were offered no hostility, although we were well within crossbow range. The flag of truce, it seemed, was being dutifully observed.