Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (42 page)

There was a breathtaking beauty and purity in the Master’s words. I could see his vision of a happy, harmonious world in which men did not slaughter each other uselessly in the name of greed or religion or differences of opinion. Surely this beautiful world would be Heaven on Earth. And all we had to do now was to walk away from this sordid, impossible, foolish fight.

‘You will not attack us on the road, if we depart this place?’ asked Robin, very quietly; he was still staring at the ground by his feet. ‘I must have your solemn word on that, Michel. I will not allow my men to be put in danger on the march.’

The mercenaries had finished gathering the bodies by then, and a couple of them were looking at Robin, awaiting his orders. Some appeared deeply puzzled by his words. My lord waved them off down the hill, bidding them to follow the line of men bearing corpses and step carefully down the slope.

‘Do I have your word?’ he said, finally looking up at the Master standing so high above us.

‘You have my word, old friend. Go in peace.’ The Master made the holy sign of the cross in the air above our heads.

Robin put a hand on my arm and turned me so that I was facing down the hill, and we departed, saying nothing to each other, and stumbling a little on the loose rocks and uneven footing.

At the base of the mountain, Robin paused and looked back up that steep slope. I looked too and saw that the Master had gone from his commanding position atop the battlements, although a pair of Knights of Our Lady had taken his place, and now were watching over us, shading their eyes against the bright sunlight.

Robin turned to me. ‘That should do it,’ he murmured, and slapped me on the shoulder to urge me back along the path towards the cave.

The Earl of Locksley clapped his hands to attract the attention of everyone in the crowded cave, and said loudly, in an oddly cheerful tone of voice, ‘We failed this afternoon to take the castle by frontal attack – which was to be expected. We are too weak, there are too few of us here to ram home a successful, conventional assault. We know that; the Master knows that; the whole mountain knows that, apparently. So we shall do what is expected of us, we shall do the only sensible thing. We shall run away, like whipped dogs with our tails between our legs!’ And he grinned at the assembled company, a group of thirty-odd bone-weary men, many wounded, all fatigued, bruised and downcast.

Then something truly magical happened. A ripple of noise travelled around the room, like a murmur, and heads began to lift, backs to straighten, and mouths to smile. For suddenly it was clear that Robin had a deeper plan, a stratagem, a ruse – and all was not lost after all. Indeed, if you had looked at Robin’s grinning face, and the sly smiles of Little John and Gavin, you might easily have been led to believe that all was going according to plan.

We mounted our horses in plain view of the ramparts and, with slumped shoulders and drooping heads, and with the occasional shouted insult wafting down to us from above, we formed up on the saddle of land to the west of the mountain and took the road north away from Montségur, slowly riding back the way we had come. A keen observer looking closely at the dirty faces of the tired mercenaries might have noticed a few secret smiles, and conspiratorial nudges, or whispered jests. But from the ramparts more than a thousand feet above, I am fairly sure it looked as Robin wished it to look, as if we were returning to Foix, or perhaps even further afield, to lick our wounds and think again.

Once out of sight of the castle, shielded by a small, parched hill and finding ourselves in thick, almost virgin woodland, we jumped from our saddles and began to organize ourselves for the night march. Weapons, wool cloaks and water only, was the order from Robin – the horses and baggage being returned to their pasture under the care of three lightly wounded men.

And an hour after nightfall, after we had eaten as much as we could, on foot, and all of us I believe filled with a boyish excitement, we took to a narrow, little-used track through the close-set trees heading due east, being led by Maury, the malodorous shepherd. I was ordered by Robin to take up a place at the rear of the line, which gave me an opportunity to count the men as they marched past through the trees in the last light of that day. With Vim at their head, I tallied twenty-six surviving mercenaries fit and ready for battle. We had left Tuck in the cave with one of the hurt younger men to care for him – but all the other Companions who had left England with me in March were more or less hale. However, nearly half of these tough
routiers
had fallen as a result of serving Robin for a few short days. Would they stay true, I wondered, in the coming fight? And if Robin’s plan were to work and we got inside Montségur, and they subsequently discovered that there was no hoard of gold and silver – how would they react then? Perhaps, I told myself, I was worrying over much. Perhaps I should put my faith in God – and Robin.

As the last man in the marching column, I received an unpleasant shock only a few moments after we set off, when I heard a noise behind me, and a voice calling, ‘My lord? My lord? It is me, André, the scout. I have to make my report to the captain.’ It was one of the mercenaries we had sent to guard the horses. I sent him swiftly up the line to speak to Robin.

Under the cover of full night and the thick forest of this remote region, we trudged in single file along ancient hunting tracks, stumbling a little in the dark and bumping into each other but led by Maury through secret ways and circling round Montségur to the north and then east. As the crow flies, we were never more than a mile or two from our enemies, but it felt as if we were in another county. My wounded calf throbbed awfully during that march. The forest closed in around us, and the night-black world was reduced to the stunted trees looming on either side, and the back of the man in front of you.

After two hours, or perhaps three, we stopped and huddled around Robin in the darkness. Our leader told us that we were now directly to the east of the castle at the foot of the spur. Here we would rest for the remainder of the night, and a little before dawn, Maury would lead us up the spine where we would assault the castle, with any luck, achieving total surprise.

‘I have good news, my friends,’ said Robin. ‘It seems that after we left the cave the Master dispatched a strong force of knights to follow us, I believe to ambush us on the march – some forty men. Our friend André here watched them ride past on the road heading north. Even now, they are riding hard towards Foix, some fifteen miles away. The Master has weakened himself by a third, my friends, and we shall take full advantage of that fact when we attack. But there is more: we shall have powerful sorcery on our side in this coming struggle,’ announced my lord triumphantly. ‘Our wise friend Nur here has been in communion with the spirits of the sky and they have promised to come to our aid in the morning.’

The reaction to this from the mercenaries was mixed – some of the men seemed cheered by the prospect of supernatural help; some muttered, looked fearfully out into the darkness and crossed themselves. Others just got on with making their beds.

I sought out Roland before making up my own bed and asked him what Robin had meant about Nur.

My cousin had the grace to look shamefaced at this open talk of demonic practices by a person under his protection. ‘She is making a magic mist that will hide us when we attack the castle again tomorrow morning,’ he said. Then, trying for a little levity: ‘She says that if she had the freshly severed head of a powerful man, she could be absolutely certain of her spell – but she lacks one. Ha-ha. So she had to make do with a pile of mouldy knights’ testicles! Ha! She even asked me today if I would cut off the Master’s head and give it to her as a gift. Oh, she is an odd one.’

‘Do you really believe all this disgusting magical nonsense?’ I said crossly. I did not appreciate Roland making light of these matters. It was a time for seriousness, I felt. I was also full of apprehensions about the attack. It seemed to me to have only a slightly greater chance of success than our botched assault on the main gate.

‘Do
you
believe that the Grail will save Tuck’s life? And Goody’s – if we can get it back to her in time? Do you have faith in its magical power?’ my cousin responded.

I did not answer him – for his question had turned my head around. I
hoped
that the Grail would cure Tuck and Goody, I truly hoped with all my heart that it would. But did I truly
believe
that it would cure them? Did I have faith that the Grail could cure all wounds? Peering into my secret heart, I knew that I had my doubts.

Before I could answer my cousin, I saw that Nur was now beside us and bit my tongue. She was laying out Roland’s cloak as a bed and had stuffed fresh green leaves and grass into an old chemise to make a little pillow for him; I saw, too, that he had already laid out a little mess of blankets for her a few feet from his. In an instant, a pure truth leaped unbidden into my mind, and I knew what I was seeing in this little tableau. It was an act of love, a quiet, ordinary, everyday act of love given freely by one human being to another. Whatever sordid, Devil-spawned magical fantasies this woman entertained, there was some good in Nur. And whatever type of bond this odd pair had forged – the tall French knight with the scarred face and the mutilated Syrian witch – it was a bond of love.

And love, as Tuck had often told me, came only from God.

I was awoken a little before dawn – from a nightmare in which I was being trampled by a herd of wild pigs – by shrieks of unholy glee. Something that felt like a pebble from a boy’s catapult crashed painfully into my forehead, and in the next instant a dozen more pummelled my prone body. I jumped up and reached for my shield which was on the ground just beside my head, and saw that the forest floor was littered with round white objects the size of dove’s eggs, and that more were hurtling down from the dark-grey sky. Hastily grabbing my weapons and mail, and holding the shield above my head, I scurried under the shelter of the nearest tree, and plumped down next to Thomas.

The gleeful shrieking was coming from Nur, but the sound of her joy was now almost drowned out by the drumming rattle of the hailstones on the leather-faced wooden shield above my head. The strange Arab woman was capering about in a kind of ecstasy – heedless of the hail bouncing off her black headdress and robes – cackling madly and calling on all of us to admire her magical powers.

In my sleep-fuddled state, it was several moments before I took in the scene but, in the half-light, I could make out little groups of mercenaries huddled, shields held aloft, around the base of almost every neighbouring tree, each looking in awe at the cavorting witch and occasionally glancing up through the leaves at the relentless falling hail. It was hard to believe after so many days of sunshine that we were now in a furious ice storm.

Robin was running across the open space, the hail bouncing off the hard ground as high as his knees, with his cloak held over his head. He came crashing down beside me, shoving Thomas aside and putting his back to the wide trunk, and I was obliged to share my shield with him. My lord was breathless, hectic with excitement: ‘What did I tell you, Alan, what did I tell you? That Nur is a true miracle worker. She has brought the very weather to our aid, or the spirits of the air or whatever you want to call them. She’s bloody magnificent!’

And I saw that as the barrage of hailstones lessened a fraction, a thick white mist was creeping through the trees, advancing in tendrils from the south like freezing smoke from a forest fire or the breath of a northern ice giant. I suddenly realized that I was very cold, shivering, in fact, and tugged Robin’s cloak from his unresisting fingers and wrapped it around my shoulders.

My lord was oblivious to the cold, it seemed. ‘This is a God-send, Alan, an absolute God-send!’ His voice was alive with happiness. ‘We will be invisible, quite invisible until we are right on top of them. We can do it, Alan, I know it. I think we can honestly take that damned impossible castle in this wonderful fog!’

The hailstorm lasted less than half an hour, but the mist that followed it swirled and thickened around us and became an almost-solid grey-white wall until we could barely see five paces away. Robin delayed the attack while the fog continued to thicken, keeping everyone together in a tight huddle, lest any man should wander off and become lost, and it was not until mid-morning that, fully armed and mailed, we began to climb the steep path that led westwards up the spur.

Robin demanded absolute silence from the men, and we advanced in single file with each man taking a hold of the belt of the man in front. Once more Maury led the way, and thank the Good Lord that he did, for a couple of wrong steps to the left or right in that white blindness would have meant falling off the spine and crashing down the steep mountainside to our doom. But Maury led us true, and while it was a slightly more gentle climb than the path on the western side that we had sprinted up the day before, it was longer and still no easy stroll and my calf made a serious protest. But on we forged, the whiteness all around us, our hands sweaty on the belt of the man in front, stepping slowly and carefully, and trying not to let shield and spear clunk together as we moved, or sword hilt chink against mail coat. But we were fortunate – or Nur’s unholy spirits were truly with us – for that freezing fog cloaked sound as well as sight, and we marched on, ever upwards, into the heart of this earth-touching cloud. Our mood was buoyant, too. The men seemed to believe that Nur genuinely had conjured a mist to hide us from our enemies: and in my experience men fight far better when they think there are powers beyond nature on their side, be it God – or the Devil! It took two hours, by my reckoning, and when I finally blundered into the back of the mercenary in front of me, to a volley of whispered curses, I saw that we were all gathered together in a low hollow on the mountainside in a space that seemed like a round white room with nebulous, shifting, ghostly walls of mist. We were within a stone’s throw of the castle, undetected. And all of us, even the most hardened mercenaries, were eager for the assault, pink of cheek and filled with a soaring, breathless excitement.