Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (49 page)

But we were so few. Vim now commanded only a dozen unhurt mercenaries and five men who we classed as walking wounded and who, thanks to the power of the Grail, were ready to fight; another three men, too badly injured to stand upright on the walls, were bedded down in the keep. Of the nine Companions of the Grail who had set out from Bordeaux just over a month before, only five remained in the castle: Robin, Little John, Roland and myself – and Nur, of course. We had twenty-one effective men-at-arms – and one skinny Arabian witch – with which to combat some two hundred Templar knights and their sergeants.

When they came up the hill, it was on foot and at a gentle pace. It was a cool cloudy day and the snow-capped Pyrenees that had been visible for nearly a week by now were shrouded in grey. I was dreading another fog of the type that had allowed us to approach the summit of Montségur without being seen – and, indeed, perhaps that is what the Templars had also been waiting for. But it did not materialize and so they came slowly up the slope in great numbers. Robin placed one man on the eastern wall to watch over the spur, but the rest of us lined the parapet on either side of the main gate and we waited for them.

I said a prayer to St Michael, the warrior archangel, my favourite of all the saints, as I watched our enemies approach, for the fear of death was upon me once again. I asked him to come to our aid with his fiery sword and sweep our enemies from the mountainside. I consoled myself with the thought that Thomas must have got away safely. But at the back of my mind was the suspicion that this was all a cruel joke: a feeling that God had arranged for Goody to live and for me to die. So be it. When I had last seen my beloved, I had asked God to spare her and take me in her stead – it was time, clearly, to pay that price.

There were, I suppose, about a hundred men who came against us that morning: mostly tough, well-armed Templar sergeants with black surcoats over their mail, but with about a dozen or so knights among them, too. As they swarmed up that lung-crushing slope, I saw at the back of the first wave of men, perhaps two hundred yards away, a knight with a full helmet obscuring his face, urging on the sergeants to climb more swiftly. I noticed him because he had only one hand, his sword hand. On the other side his mail sleeve flapped emptily and he carried no shield. I had no doubt that it was Gilles de Mauchamps – the man who had burned Westbury and slaughtered my friends and servants. The first flush of anger warmed my blood.

At fifty yards, our two mercenary crossbowmen loosed their quarrels at the scrambling men, and Robin, who had a position on the parapet directly above the main gate, took the first of their lives with his war bow. He had admitted to me that he had only a handful of arrows left and so he would be husbanding his shafts carefully, but we were well stocked with quarrels. Unfortunately, so were they – at least forty of the sergeants coming on towards us seemed to be armed with big, wicked-looking T-shaped bows and, once within range, we on the battlements found ourselves ducking behind the crenellations as their bolts whistled over our heads and cracked and sparked against the battlements.

They had ladder-men too, a dozen of them, and I heard them roaring as they surged towards the gate and hurled themselves at the base of our walls. I stood straight then, ignoring the crossbow peril, with a javelin in each hand and a killing rage in my heart, and hurled the light spears down into the boiling mass of red-faced infantry below, skewering one man through the neck and missing completely with my second missile. I roared defiance at them, then I bent again and seized a jagged rock the size of a firkin of ale, hefted it over the battlements and hurled it on to the seething crowd of enemies below. On either side of me mercenaries and Companions were doing the same, bending, lifting and hurling, over and over again. The devastation we wreaked was appalling – men were crushed like weeds under a ploughman’s boot, limbs snapped, heads pulped. I saw Robin out of the corner of my eye, carefully choose a victim, draw and loose his bow, and smile with quiet satisfaction. But there were too many of them – a raging sea of humanity surged below our walls, a huge jostling, screaming herd of blood-crazed mankind – and while we crushed them with rock after rock, and pierced them with bolt and arrow and javelin, the ladders were swinging upwards. Five, six, seven ladders, swinging up and banging against the stonework, and I heard the thunking sound of sharp steel on wood and, as I leaned out to thrust a javelin down into a yelling face twenty feet below, I saw that they had two men with long woodsmen’s axes chopping methodically into the main gate, while a quartet of knights warded our missiles off with big shields held defensively over their heads.

It could only be a matter of moments before we were overwhelmed.

There were scores of men on the ladders now, brave men, bounding up the frail, bouncing wood. I grasped a rock the size of my head, ran to the nearest ladder and hurled the stone down into the body mass of a rapidly climbing knight. It crashed into his chest with an awful muted thud and swept him and the two fellows behind him down to the rocky floor below. I shoved the ladder away and it fell atop their broken bodies. But there were too many ladders, too many men surging up the walls, and the splintering crunches below of the axes on the door was relentless. Philip, the veteran mercenary who stood to my left, died then with a quarrel in his eye, and I saw that beyond him an enemy, a Templar knight, was in the very act of climbing over the parapet. I sprinted towards him, leaping over Philip’s body. I reached the Templar just in time, Fidelity’s naked blade in my right hand, and took his head off with one pounding chop, then booted his slack torso back over the wall, but another man-at-arms popped up in his place and he managed to deflect my next sword thrust with his own blade, and thrust me back with his shield, then he was over the wall and we were chest to chest, snarling in each other’s faces, butting and biting. I hurled him backwards and just managed to find the room to swing my sword and lop his right arm at the elbow; and he reeled away screaming, spurting, dying. But the walls had been breached in several places by now. I pulled out my mace from its place tucked into my belt at the small of my back and ran back north to batter and slice into a man with two feet on the walkway in the place I had been defending a dozen heartbeats before. He died with Fidelity in his guts but, when I had ripped out my blade and chanced to look behind me, south again, another two Templar sergeants had appeared from nowhere and were tumbling over the battlements in a panicked tangled of swords, scabbards and shields. I felt all the blood in my body change in some subtle way, becoming lighter and seemingly as corrosive as acid, and I charged them, screaming, ‘Westbury!’ fit to burst my lungs, with my long sword swinging, my immortal soul soaring up to Heaven, my eyes misting red.

We held that wall by the skin of our balls for what seemed like several hours but which, in reality, must have been less than a quarter of an hour. We struggled and killed, chopped and sliced, bit and swore, bled and died. We hurled back men and ladders; and crushed bone and skull by plummeting lethal rocks down upon the heads of those yet trying to scale the walls; we poured pots of boiling water on the men below and jeered at their scalded screams – at one point Little John, frothing white at the mouth like a moon-crazed idiot, cleared half a dozen enemies who had made it to the parapet in one unstoppable, howling charge, his great axe swinging around his head like a solid, circular sheet of steel. I was battling a Templar knight, a raging lion of a fighter, and had finally managed to drop him with a smashed jaw – feint from Fidelity and a sideways flick of my mace – when I heard Robin’s battle-voice shouting my name above the clamour of a dozen death cries, the awful shrieks of wounded men and the clatter of iron on stone, steel on wood.

‘Alan, Roland – the courtyard. Get down there both of you. The gate is falling. They’re breaking through. Get down now.’

The pressure from the ladder-men on the wall seemed to have eased, and the parapet was a mass of stirring bodies, wounded and dead, ours and theirs, and I sprinted over the bloody backs of friend and foe for the stone steps that led down, with Roland at my shoulder.

When I hit the flat, sanded courtyard, I could see daylight through the wood of the door and with every further blow, its giant frame shuddered and sagged a little more. As I skidded to a halt just before it, the door split open and two big men wielding axes burst through, shedding long splinters of wood, followed by a Templar sergeant and a shieldless knight in a white surcoat with a sword in his only hand.

It was Gilles de Mauchamps.

He saw me, recognized me and ran at me snarling. Our blades arced out and clashed together once, and I counter-swung the mace at his head – and he pulled back just in time. There were more Templars bursting through, men-at-arms and knights, and my enemy was jostled away by the men coming in behind him. I killed a man-at-arms, and another. Roland was fighting like a Trojan beside me. I heard a roar from above and Little John jumped from the battlements to land with a thud in the sand. Then he was up, his great axe swinging. I ducked under a massive sword cut from a Templar knight, bobbed up and crushed his shoulder joint with a wind-milling mace blow. Roland had boldly engaged two men at once but was now struggling to fend them both off – I saw him take a blow to the head and stumble – and yet more Templars were crowding through, menacing shapes filling the bright light of the entrance.

In that moment, with the main gate breached and a dozen Templars inside our walls, we were beaten; the castle was theirs, we were all as good as dead.

Yet as I hacked Fidelity deep into the waist of a ferret-faced man-at-arms and ripped out his innards, I was dimly aware of a hideous noise coming from my right – a foul sound somewhere between a shriek and a drone – and into the mêlée in the courtyard charged a small, slight figure that looked as if it had been conjured from a wine-parched feverish nightmare. A pale emaciated body, naked but for a tattered black loincloth, rushed furiously out from the keep. Her body had been whitened with chalk and then painted with coal-black and blood in weird fantastical shapes and patterns. A pair of dry, empty, bone-white breasts, stippled with tiny black circles flapped on her skinny chest. The shortish grey hair had been stiffened with blood until it stood out straight from the scalp in a dark, spiky ball like an enormous gory hedgehog. But the terrible face under that macabre, prickled helmet was worse: a noseless, lipless, earless monstrosity, painted a ghoulish white and black to resemble a leering skull, the eyes burning with manic rage like those of a foul fiend from the uttermost depths of Hell.

In her left hand, this creature carried a foreshortened spear with a grisly burden mounted on the sharp tip: a severed human head, similarly adorned with white chalk and bloody designs etched with a knife into the dead skin, the tonsured hair similarly spiked with dried blood, the mouth wedged open with a pair of short sticks and the tongue, painted deathly white, lolling freely as the head jiggled in the running witch’s hand. In her right hand was a small but wicked-looking hatchet.

Nur howled and keened appallingly as she hurtled towards the knot of struggling men in the centre of the courtyard – and I swear, she caused every man in the battle, even those who knew her well, to pause for just an instant and stare at her shockingly hideous appearance. And in that tiny pause, Robin struck. I saw him standing on the parapet directly above the main gate, draw back his bow and aim almost vertically down into the courtyard. He loosed three shafts in as many heartbeats, one, two, three, plucking the arrows from the bag at his waist, nocking them, and shooting almost faster than the eye could see. Three times he loosed his shafts, and three enemies were transfixed. The first to fall was Gilles de Mauchamps – the one-armed knight crunched down to his knees, half a bow shaft protruding up from the hollow beside his collar bone. The next was a sergeant, who took an arrow straight down through his mail coif and into his brain, and the last was the axeman, a few paces into the courtyard, standing over the body of my cousin Roland, his weapon raised. Robin pierced his broad back with his final arrow, but it was Nur, screaming her weird war chant, who sent his soul to Hell.

The witch leaped at him with hatchet in one hand and the Master’s head on a stick in the other and savaged him with both, butting his face with the bizarre severed-head-mace and hacking at his knees with the hatchet. When he was down, she finished him with a couple of scything hatchet blows to the back of the skull – then she drove on, into the astonished group of enemy men-at-arms standing flat-footed by the splintered gate, screaming at them and lunging madly with her awful weapons. Little John and I renewed our onslaught against the remaining Templars with a fresh wave of fury. We drove them towards the gate, killing, screaming, shoving them backwards with our steel. I found myself beside Nur by this point; we were shoulder to shoulder, cutting, slicing, lunging and – praise God – somehow corralling the pack of them, forcing them back, back to the shattered main gate.

Then Little John was beside me, too, with a plank of wood from our dinner table in his hands, slamming the end mercilessly into the faces crowding in the entrance and, by main force, pushing the crowded enemy out with a foot-wide, six-foot length of roughly cut timber.

Faced by the three of us – a blood-covered maniac swinging sword and mace, a giant wielding a long lump of wood and a naked battle-crazed fiend from Hell – our enemies wilted. They paused, they hesitated, they froze in their terror when they should have surged forward. One man-at-arms, blinded on the threshold, his face a mask of gore, was shrieking, ‘The Devil, the Devil, the Devil is against us!’ I killed him with a thrust to the throat from Fidelity – but I heard the cry taken up by more of the men outside. ‘The Devil is with them! The fiend is loose! God preserve us!’

Miraculously, as we three shoved and struggled and hacked at them, the pressure began to slacken. And they finally began to pull back from the doorway and out of sight.