Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (41 page)

‘The Grail…’ he said, the words jerking out through his gritted teeth. ‘I only … wanted … to see it … to hold it … just once … in my hands.’

‘You shall hold it yet, my friend,’ said Robin and when I turned to look at him, I saw a glint of moisture in his grey eyes, and all the muscles of his jaw were bunched and hard as iron. ‘And drink from it. And it shall heal you of all your hurts. I promise you, old friend, you shall yet hold the Grail.’

‘Too late,’ Tuck said in no more than a panting whisper. ‘But it has been … good this … journey … with … you … Robin. One … last … adventure…’

He closed his eyes and became silent. For a moment I thought that his soul had gone from his body – and there were tears blurring my eyes, too. But, when I bent my ear down towards his open mouth, I felt the faintest stir of breath against the wet skin of my cheek.

Robin was silent during supper; but when we had eaten and were making our preparations for bed, he gathered us all together in the centre of the cave and said, ‘Tomorrow, at noon, we will assault the castle. Rest now, every one of you – sleep well, and be ready for battle tomorrow. Tomorrow we take Montségur.’

In the morning, I oversaw a squad of mercenaries as they gathered wood and chopped down a few scrubby trees and built themselves half a dozen ladders with which to assault the main entrance in the western wall of the Castle of Montségur. I did not feel at all happy in myself about the coming attack – and I have done this sort of thing many times and do not count myself a coward. It seemed to me a futile waste of lives to attack with the few people we had – thirty-five mercenaries, by my count, and seven Companions capable of swinging a sword. I did not believe it could be done. I could get nothing down for breakfast and all that morning my belly felt cold and hollow. But Robin was bright and breezily confident, coming around to each of the work parties of the mercenaries and encouraging them with words and a few crude jests, which were happily reciprocated – and I realized the men already had a liking and regard for the Earl of Locksley for all that he was about to plunge their lives into terrible danger.

When Robin came up to my group of men, he led me aside, out of earshot and said something very strange indeed. ‘Alan,’ he said. ‘In the assault, I don’t want you to take any risks with your life. Play it safe, understand?’

I stared at him. We were about to attack a formidable castle, well prepared and defended by three times our number. As a knight and a leader of men, it was my clear duty to set an example – in fact, to take risks. How could I play it safe? Before I could frame a question about Robin’s extraordinary words, my lord had moved on.

We were watched closely from the ramparts all the while during our preparations by the Knights of Our Lady – while we gathered wood and shaped it with axes, and lashed it together with rawhide to make ladders – but, despite their overwhelming superiority, the defenders made no attempt to sally out and attack. Perhaps they were sensible: why risk a sally when they could sit behind their safe walls and wait for us to come to them and be slaughtered? They would have ample time to prepare for our coming; we had utterly forfeited the element of surprise.

Not all of us, however, were engaged in constructing the scaling ladders: Little John and Gavin spent the morning inside the cave setting up a rough-and-ready forge in the cooking hearth, using large quantities of scrap wood as fuel, a big leather bag as a bellows, and heating and hammering the discarded swords of the enemy that they had collected on a big round stone anvil. I was too engaged in my own works to discover what they were up to, but their efforts made the cave hellishly hot. However, that did not seem to disturb Nur, who was seated at the back of that big space muttering about mountain wombs over several large bowls of water, and fiddling with a mound of semi-rotten gobbets of human private parts that she had brought with her from the Jealous Castle. Occasionally, she would throw out her little bag of finger bones and indulge in a weird, high-pitched cackle. Throughout all this, Tuck lay quietly on his altar, in a deep, deep sleep that I knew was a only hair’s breadth away from death.

A little before noon, we were ready. We massed our full strength, on foot, forty-odd hardened warriors, a hundred and fifty yards below the castle, just out of effective crossbow range. The men carrying the ladders were sent to the front, Robin took his position in the centre of the line, with Roland and Sir Nicholas at either side; Little John, with Gavin in his shadow, took the extreme left of the line, and Thomas and I took the extreme right. My stomach was a tight knot of fear. This day would be my last, I was utterly certain. There was no way we would be able to surmount those high walls and conquer the castle. But I kept my mouth shut, my back straight and tried my best to look confident.

Robin stepped out in front of the line and said, very simply, ‘There is gold in that castle, and silver, and other treasures, enough to make all of you rich for the rest of your lives. Let’s go and fetch it. On my command the company will … advance!’

We raced up that steep slope like hares.

Have you ever tried to scramble a hundred and fifty yards up a slope that rises almost the height of a man in a single yard? And then, on reaching the summit, launch yourself into a full-pitched battle and attempt to overcome a twenty-foot-high wall bristling with scores of fanatical enemy soldiers? It cannot be done, I tell you. Well, it cannot be done by a company of thirty-odd mercenaries and a handful of dismounted knights. We climbed, we scrambled, we puffed and panted – and we arrived at the outer wall in a disorganized, milling mob, as fatigued as if we had just run several miles in full armour. Robin was shouting at the men, yelling, urging them to raise the ladders against the walls, and climb. But the confusion was too great for his will to be enforced. Ladders were abandoned; men cowered beneath their raised shields. The crossbow bolts cracked off the stones and whined about us. A man just in front of me was dropped in screaming agony by a flung spear; a boulder the size of a small pig thudded into the ground at my feet a moment later, narrowly avoiding crushing my toes. The mercenaries surged around below the walls like frightened peasants, picking up the ladders that had been dropped, taking hits from hurled missiles, dropping them again, being picked off one by one; some men were reduced to hacking impotently at the huge double door with their swords and axes or screaming insults at the defenders. One man was blinded, his face sloughing off like melting butter off a skillet when a cauldron of red-hot sand was dumped on him from above.

In the end, only two ladders were raised against the wall, both on the right-hand side, the southern side. My side. The first was dislodged by the defenders with very little effort, pushed off the wall with a forked stick to crash to earth amid screams of agony from the scaling party; the second, I had the honour of commanding. My fear had swelled and grown almost to the point of panic. But I could not run, I could not prove a coward: I forced myself to move. The ladder crashed against the wall, held steady by two mercenaries, and I grabbed a rung at shoulder height and shouted for the men to follow me. A deep breath and I bounded upwards, eager to get this moment of extreme danger over as soon as possible. Fear gave wings to my feet. I could feel the ladder bouncing beneath me as other men came up behind. As I neared the top, a man-at-arms wielding a pole axe loomed over me; he swung the long axe at my head, but I managed to spear him in the throat with Fidelity in time and absorb the weakened blow with my shield. Then the axeman was gone, replaced by a mob of furious knights, slicing, hacking and lunging with their swords at my head, shoulders and upheld shield. Thank God for decent armour. I received half a dozen blows on my mail coat and helmet in as many heartbeats. I tried to bring my sword fully in to play, but with no free hand to grip the rungs of the ladder, a powerful glancing blow that skidded off my helm and on to my shoulder threw off my balance and a second strike, an axe, I believe, taken full on my shield, dislodged me completely. I had the sensation, for just a moment, of emptiness below me, almost of floating, and then I hit the earth. By God’s grace there was a stout bush beneath me to cushion my fall and, as I emerged scratched and slightly bleeding from its rough embrace, I heard Robin calling off the attack and urging us to get back, back out of range of their missiles. The men needed no urging. We were running down that hill before the echoes of Robin’s battle-voice died away.

We regrouped near the foot of the mountain, and carried our wounded back to the cave. Six good men had been killed in that farcical, ill-conceived attack, and another ten had been wounded, some badly – and we had achieved precisely nothing.

Back in the cave the mood was sour. The mercenaries sat about, tending to each other’s lesser wounds, binding their cuts and bruises, drinking wine with little moderation. We had lost that fight, and lost a handful of good comrades – we were weaker than before the assault and there was nothing for us to do but try once again to scale that damn mountain and conquer those killing walls.

I felt the weight of despair settle around my shoulders. The fact that I had been right – that this was truly an impossible castle to capture – was no consolation. I would now never be able to place the Grail in Tuck’s sleeping hands and watch its holy magic restore him to full strength. He and Goody, and my unborn child, were now all as good as dead.

In the late afternoon, Robin and I trudged up the mountain once more under the white flag of truce. It was hot; the southern sun beating down without mercy. We took eight of the mercenaries with us, all unarmed, and under instructions not to speak or communicate with the enemy under any circumstances. We paused a hundred yards from the main gate and watched as the white-clad men-at-arms on the battlements scurried about and eventually found an officer who would recognise our flag and beckon us forward.

As we slogged up the last few yards, to stand a stone’s throw beyond the gate, I saw that the Master had climbed up once again to his place atop the battlements, and was smiling sadly down at us, once more with his hands nonchalantly on his hips.

The bodies of half a dozen of our men were scattered below the walls of the Castle of Montségur, their corpses twisted in the inhuman attitudes of death, and Robin began his message with a gesture of his right hand towards the slain.

‘Under the time-honoured laws of combat, we seek a truce to recover the bodies of our fallen comrades, and to carry them away without fear of molestation,’ said Robin, in a flat, angry voice.

The Master let out a long sigh of exasperation. ‘Such a waste, such a terrible waste of life,’ he said. His face was a picture of sorrow and concern. ‘Why are we clawing at each other like this, Robert? What is the purpose of all this bloodshed? Look at your men down there – did they have wives, children? They must have had mothers, at least. Will you tell their grieving mothers their sons are dead? I wonder. Or will you shirk that dolorous duty?’

‘May we have your leave to collect the bodies of our fallen comrades or not?’ said Robin stiffly.

‘Oh yes,’ sighed the Master, ‘you may gather up the grim harvest of the day; be my guest.’ His voice was tinged with sadness, but there was also an unmistakable hint of something else in his tone. Triumph.

Robin gave the nod to the mercenaries who moved forward and gently began to lift the corpses of their comrades, fold them over their shoulders and carry them away down the hill. The Master, however, had not finished speaking.

‘Take the bodies, my friend, take them away with my blessing and the blessing of Holy Mary, the Mother of God, who weeps bitter tears at their deaths, but consider this – we did not slay these poor men, my knights and I – you did. It was your pride that killed them. You came against us in a spirit of violence and anger and your good men died uselessly as the price for that folly.’

Robin lifted his head and looked right up at the Master; and with a flicker of spirit he said, ‘We will come again, Michel, mark my words, and make you pay for their sacrifice. You have not seen the last of us.’

‘Robin, Robin, why must you persist in this madness? You cannot take these walls. Look at our strength! You could not take them with ten thousand men. You know that; I know that; every man on this mountain knows that.’

Robin said nothing. He looked down at his boots.

‘We are protected here by a power far, far greater than you can imagine. Not just by these high ramparts and the strong right arms of the brave men inside them. God protects us, and Holy Mary stands with us as well. You cannot prevail here. Robin, I beseech you, come to your senses. You cannot win. If you come again, your men will be slaughtered like these poor souls, they will be sacrificed on the altar of your stubbornness. Have pity on your own men and give up this foolish cause. It is futile.’

I knew the Master was right – this
was
a futile cause. I had known it ever since I had first seen the Castle of Montségur. It was an impossible dream to attempt to take it. The Master seemed to be speaking inside my head, filling it with his words, and driving out any other considerations. Yet his simple message made perfect sense…

‘Do the right thing, the honourable thing – pack up your bags and your weapons, gather up your wounded men and simply ride away. I will not molest you as you depart – go from this place with my blessing, and you and your men shall live long and happy lives. Go now, I say to you, go now and live.’

I looked at Robin and saw that he was nodding his head, ever so slightly. His eyes were still fixed on the ground but he seemed to be agreeing silently with every word the Master uttered. How could he not? The Master’s words were as true as the Gospels. We must go.

‘We have no quarrel, Robin, you and I – we are not enemies. As you said yesterday, we once divided the world between us, each in his proper place, each living in peace. As you said, we can have all that again. There is no need for you to kill your men, to kill your dear friends in this struggle – what can blood accomplish? Let us be sensible, let us behave like civilized men. You go your way, and I shall go mine, and we shall wish each other well. There is too much pain and sorrow in this world – let us not add to the sum of evil. Depart now, take your men and your weapons and ride away. And we shall both live in happiness and harmony.’