The Last Crusade

by S. J. A. Turney

  As the sun began to dip behind the buildings, signalling the beginning of day’s end, they stowed all that which they would not immediately require in their room and prepared. Thus it was with the very first clang of the bell signalling vespers that they rose from their table and emerged once more into the shady, late afternoon streets. Arnau took the lead, familiar enough with the city after a lifetime in the region and a decade of semi-regular visits, and he took Tristán via a slightly roundabout route.

  To leave the inn and make for the castle directly would have taken them across the route the archbishop would almost certainly take between the two buildings. Thus, they moved into a wider street and headed west, downhill some way, winding through alleys and thoroughfares with which even Arnau had only a passing familiarity, all the time circling around the heart of the city and the grand form of the cathedral. He could see the towers of the castle occasionally between high buildings as they approached, but it was only when the bells had ended and they had come far past the cathedral itself, turning a corner to face east once more, when they finally laid eyes fully upon their destination.

  Tristán whistled through his teeth and may have said something under his breath that a master would punish him for. The massive patriarch’s castle rose to fully three times the height of the buildings around it, two of its corners protected by even higher octagonal turrets, enormous stout buttresses supporting a balcony some way up, the whole thing displaying windows only at a high level. A huge, studded double door faced into the street and, while it remained open, men in the vertical red and gold stripes of Archbishop Rocaberti’s own family livery stood to either side with shields and pikes, watching the street intently.

  ‘We have every right to be here,’ Arnau reminded the squire. ‘They have no reason to suspect us, so we must be careful not to give them one. Let us approach this with confidence, and I am content that we will succeed. The good Lord will protect and guide us. We must be strong in our faith in Him, and he will reward us – “The hand of strong men shall have lordship, but the hand that is slow shall serve only slaves.” Proverbs, twelve.’

  Tristán looked less convinced, yet he nodded his agreement as they approached the doors. As Arnau prepared himself and made for one of the two guards, he suddenly became aware of a third figure awaiting them, a man in a black habit standing in the shadows of the doorway, almost invisible. He was an odd sight, for he was clearly a monk, and yet the sumptuous quality of his habit and the gold chain around his neck were strangely at odds with his simple mode of dress. His face was pinched and squinting, and his tonsure had clearly seen better days, now having taken over much of his head, such that only clumps of white hair clung on in a rough ring in defiance of approaching baldness.

  The man stepped forth from the shadows at their approach, uncoiling like some weird, tufted serpent. Arnau could almost feel the squire tensing beside him and willed Tristán not to touch his sword hilt reflexively.

  ‘Can I help you, Brother?’ the man asked in a sinuous voice.

  Arnau smiled as warmly as he could manage, trying not to shudder at the weird fellow. ‘Good afternoon, Brother. We have come from the House of Barber, and are seeking the paborda of Tarragona with a view to examining some of the records in his care. I presume those records are kept here.’

  The man smiled back, revealing an almost complete absence of teeth.

  ‘You are indeed fortunate, sir knight. The paborda is moving his place of work out of the city to his own estate and will be taking the records with him. Fortunately, he has not yet done so, and they remain in our care. Clearly, those records are largely confidential and the property of the cathedral and its paborda. I cannot allow you to view them without his permission.’

  Arnau bowed his head. ‘Of course. Is the paborda currently here?’

  ‘He is, and he is in a meeting, although it will undoubtedly be concluded presently. Perhaps I can show you to his offices and you would be good enough to wait there until I return with the paborda?’

  Again Arnau nodded and smiled. ‘That would be very good of you. Thank you.’

  The strange man turned and swept away into the dim interior of the fortress, gesturing for the two Templars to follow. Inside, he led them along a wide and well-lit vaulted corridor decorated with the arms of various noble incumbents of the more important roles in the cathedral. Up a wide flight of stairs they went, and along several other corridors. Arnau only realised as they turned another corner that he had been picking out landmarks along the route and filing them away as directions, thanks to some natural instinct rather than conscious choice. Thus it was that he believed he could comfortably retrace their route had he the need. Lord, but his life had been troubled that he had developed such devious natural habits.

  At the end of the corridor that they turned into stood a wide oriel window with a seat below, while further passages led off to both sides. At the corner, the strange monk gestured to the right. ‘At the end here are the paborda’s chambers and offices. They are, naturally, locked. If you would kindly wait here, I shall find milord de Sant Llorenç and see if his meeting is complete.’

  As the man turned to leave, Arnau looked this way and that at the doors to each end. There was nothing there openly of interest. As Tristán sank onto the seat below the oriel window, Arnau leaned and looked out of it. The view was wonderful, across half a dozen tiled roofs and to the square beyond and the grand, ornate façade of the cathedral that rose above it. The sun was now on the horizon, and the world had taken on an indigo hue; lamps were being lit throughout the streets.

  ‘I am a bundle of nerves,’ the squire muttered.

  Arnau tried to play down his own tension, but something was prickling at him now. Though everything seemed fine and nothing had apparently gone wrong, there was something about this that felt like a flaw, like a fracture in the plan, and though every passing moment brought no revelation as to the reason, the sense that something was horribly wrong grew almost exponentially now they were alone once more.

  Finally, he stepped back, nervous eyes darting to the doors at each end, then back along the now empty corridor.

  ‘What is it?’ Tristán asked, clearly sensing something himself.

  ‘Something is wrong.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. I missed something. Something we saw or heard or smelled. Something is wrong.’

  ‘Maybe we should give this up?’

  Arnau fumed. ‘But we’re so close, and this is our last hope. If we cannot do this, the preceptrix falls, and Rourell with her. We can’t afford to simply give up.’

  ‘But even I can feel that something is wrong.’

  Arnau nodded. He was wavering now. As his face folded into a frown, a thought struck him, he turned to the squire. ‘Who was it the monk said he was going to see?’

  Tristán shrugged. ‘The paborda.’

  ‘Yes, but he used the man’s name. I was busy thinking about our task, and it completely slipped past me. I heard it, but it didn’t register directly. What was it?’

  ‘Something like Laurentius,’ the squire mused, scratching his head.

  Arnau’s eyes widened. ‘That was it. He was the lord de Sant Llorenç.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  ‘Ramon de Sant Llorenç is the paborda.’

  ‘I fear you are beginning to repeat yourself, Brother,’ Tristán snorted.

  Arnau turned and grabbed the squire by the shoulders, his panicked gaze rising above him and to the corridor along which they’d come and from which now echoed the sound of footsteps. He lowered his voice to a hiss. ‘Ramon de Sant Llorenç might be the paborda, but he is also the lord of Albiol and La Selva!’

  The squire jerked upright from his seat. ‘What?’

  ‘The very man we’ve come to for help is at the heart of our enemy. Lord, but this was a mistake.’

  ‘This way,’ Tristán hissed, grabbing Arnau by the upper arm and spinning him round as he padded off along the cor
ridor that lay opposite the paborda’s door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he hissed.

  ‘Can you fly?’ grunted the squire as they scurried into the dark corridor.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then the window’s out. The paborda’s door is locked, and the only other way is right into his arms. So it’s this way. Come on.’

  As the squire reached the end of the corridor, he tried the door there and Arnau was immensely relieved when it swung easily open without a creak. Hurrying inside, they closed it behind them and Tristán turned the key in the lock. Arnau stood at the door, crouching, ear by the keyhole as the squire moved about the dark room as quietly as he could, exploring their accidental prison.

  ‘…gone,’ he heard the monk’s voice.

  ‘Could they have left the castle?’

  ‘It is possible. Unfortunately they will be very hard to locate. The cambrer has been in a meeting with a deputation from the city’s Templar House, and there have been at least half a dozen brothers in white and black in the castle.’

  ‘Curse this place,’ the quieter voice snapped. ‘The sooner this all moves to La Selva the better. I cannot believe that de Comminges is so disorganised that he has to send riders on my tail, so whoever these knights were, I doubt they were from Barbera as they claimed. Should anyone else want to see me or the records, have the foresight to deliver them into the hands of the guard to wait rather than leaving them alone by a window…’

  The footsteps began once more, clattering off and echoing along the corridor. Arnau allowed himself to heave in a deep breath once he could no longer hear them, and then almost jumped and shrieked as something touched his shoulder, turning wide-eyed in the dark to see Tristán beside him.

  ‘Saints above, please don’t do that.’

  ‘I don’t know whose rooms these are, but there’s a small spiral staircase that looks like a servants’ access in the corner. If it is, then it will lead to the lower levels without going near the main halls.’

  ‘So?’

  The squire gave him a long-suffering look. ‘Unless you intend to stay here until the occupant comes back and explain yourself to him, we need to go. They’ve got to wonder where we went, so they’ll be watching the main gate.’

  Arnau chewed his cheek. ‘It sounds to me as though they think we’ve already left, mixed up with a bunch of brothers from the city who were here at the same time. With luck they have no intention of searching for us. That said, we still cannot simply march out of the front. Lead on.’

  As Tristán led him across to the doorway and the passage for a narrow descent, Arnau hauled off his white knight’s mantle. He’d foregone the chain hauberk, given that he was presenting himself to a churchman in an office, and now he was rather grateful for that. Without it, he was wearing a simple off-white tunic that could pass for ordinary attire. Bundling up his mantle, he stuffed it beneath his arm. At the top of the stairs he waited for Tristán to do the same and, dressed in simple tunics of black and white with no red cross on show, they began to descend.

  Arnau had been in the working areas of both his own modest castle a few times and that of the more grand pile at Santa Coloma once or twice, not to mention the shudder-inducing fortress of Renfrizhausen, and the one thing it seemed that such places always had in common was easy access. While knights and lords might want privacy with heavy doors and places they could fortify against any enemy, servants needed the run of the place and with as few impediments as possible, and once within their world movement was rapid. It took only a quarter of an hour, after finding a few dead ends and raising eyebrows from the various workers along the way, to locate a lesser exit from the castle. The place may look powerful, but even from the beginning it had functioned far more as a sumptuous residence than a fortress, and the exits led directly into the streets of the city. They found a small servant’s door standing open, a tired-looking portly man emptying dregs from barrels into the gutter outside, and slipped past him with relief into the city. Two dozen heartbeats later they were streets away and moving fast, returning to their accommodation.

  They managed to cross the city without incident, and reached their inn with explosive breaths of relief. Rather than risk a table in the open now, the two men purchased a jug of wine and retreated to their room, where they both collapsed upon the beds, chests rising and falling with all the exertion, mantles discarded, forgotten, on the floor.

  ‘That,’ Arnau said finally, ‘was about as close as I would like to come to failure.’

  ‘I don’t want to further irritate you, Brother, but we have failed.’

  Arnau sighed. ‘Without those records there is no other way to exonerate the preceptrix. We failed to get them today, but we cannot give up.’

  Tristán pulled himself up from the bed with effort, brow folded and eyes scrunched up. ‘You cannot possibly be considering trying again?’

  Another sigh. ‘If we don’t, we lose Rourell and the preceptrix might even die for it. Can we afford not to? It is our duty to the preceptrix and to the Order. It is our whole purpose to defy the wicked and to save the innocent. In this case the preceptrix is the innocent and we are beginning to identify the wicked in droves. If we walk away, everything ends. We must acquire those records.’

  ‘We’re not going to manage by walking in and asking any more. Not after last time.’

  ‘No. So we must ask forgiveness of God, of Christ and of the Holy Mother, for any lies, dissembling, theft and other underhand methods we need to employ. They are all in a righteous cause. We must now find another way into that office and take the records we need.’

  Tristán sagged. ‘We need to get in there when the archbishop, the paborda and that weird monk are all absent. That’s our only real chance.’

  ‘And before La Selva decides that it is time to move it all to his castle. We are running out of time in every respect with all of this. However, I think I am beginning to form a plan.’

  ‘Good,’ the squire huffed. ‘Now open the wine.’

  Chapter Seven

  Larceny

  2nd October 1212

  Tristán was not enormously proud of his past. Not the manufactured past he’d slowly revealed to Arnau, of course, but that which he’d detailed for the preceptrix when she had accepted him into the Order. Oh, the parts about helping his papa on the fishing boat in their village near San Sebastián were all quite true, but it was the sin of omission that counted there, for Arnau had not known of how his father had succumbed to a slow decline, coughing himself into the grave. He’d not heard how Tristán’s mother had pined away to nothing in the following months, and of how the boy had taken to thievery in the village to feed himself and his failing ma. He’d not learned of how Tristán had narrowly escaped the village when he’d been caught, and how he had run to the city of San Sebastián and never looked back. But most of all, he’d not heard of the years the lad had spent in that metropolis.

  He’d only known two things when he arrived there, still at a tender age, broke and hungry: how to pilot a boat and how to swipe things from stalls without being seen… mostly. He’d tried the former, but all the sailors in the city who were willing to put to sea with a boy so young were already doing so with their own kin, and so he’d ended up living in a ruinous abandoned house, living on what he could steal. He’d almost been caught twice already when the Garduña found him. They’d watched him lift a side of ham and followed him back to his hovel. There they’d beaten him within an inch of his life for pulling something so brazen on their turf.

  That had started his apprenticeship with the criminal gang in the city. He’d learned a few tricks, though nothing of any real importance. The sad fact was that he was simply a little too large, slow and loud to truly succeed as a criminal, which was why they had ended up employing him as an enforcer. That had been the end of it. He could justify in the eyes of the Lord swiping a couple of apples from a table to stave off starvation, but breaking the leg of a man he didn’t know just
to please some shadowy superior had been too much. He’d made the decision to leave San Sebastián and its dangerous criminal brotherhood.

  He knew the Garduña had links all along the coast, and so he’d hitched a ride inland on a farm cart. His goal, once he’d properly formed one, was to make it to the great port city of Barcelona, where perhaps he could return to the straight path and sail for a living. After all, he was older and wiser now, and could be taken on as a full-time sailor. It had been on that journey when he had managed to thieve a few coins in a local market and afford a room in an inn, when his plan had changed. The village had been Rourell, and with the discovery that some local lad had managed to have all his sins washed away on crusade by joining the Templars at the nearby preceptory: he had finally known what to do.

  The rest was history.

  But the Lord had a plan, and while none could predict the path of God’s will – ‘my thoughts be not your thoughts, and my ways be not your ways, saith the Lord’ – perhaps this moment was why Tristán had been put through such trials before being brought to the grace of the Lord. Perhaps his shady past had been needed for the grand plan.

  He looked down at the wall.

  The mark was indistinct, which was just right. On the corner of a street, on a stone block at knee level, it might have looked like a well-weathered mason’s mark to the uninitiated, but would certainly have passed as graffiti or vandalism or the remnants of some unexplained ancient carving at worst. It consisted of three vertical lines, accentuated at the top, with one below on the horizontal, accentuated on the left. Steeling himself, Tristán looked back at the way he’d come, following the initial pointers down Tarragona’s streets. It was no surprise that he’d long since left the city proper, passing through some ancient ruinous area filled with long stepped seating stands and tumbledown houses, out of the walls and into the lower city.