Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles)

by Donald, Angus

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I swung the heavy war hook once, twice and then hurled it with all my might up the face of the wall. It hit the top with a deafening clatter and thumped back down to earth – but I gathered it in by its rope and swung harder, hurled it once more and this time, God be praised, two of the bent sword-hooks fixed themselves over the top and I pulled the knotted rope taut. Thomas was by my side, crouching down with his shield up, ready to secure the rope’s end as I climbed. To my left, I could see that Roland had his war hook attached and was beginning to climb, but to my right, neither Sir Nicholas nor Vim had managed to affix their hooks to the top, and were swinging the ungainly metal shapes again and again. Just then, a helmeted head peered over the wall, the man looked down at us and opened his mouth. Thunk! An arrow smashed into his open mouth, jolting his head back, and away from the parapet – but I feared that the element of surprise was lost. I put my boots on the wall and began to walk upwards as speedily as I could, my shield on its carrying strap banging painfully against my spine, my wounded calf protesting madly. Another head appeared, and a crossbow bolt clanged off his helmet, but the man stayed in position, shouted a curse and I narrowly ducked a sword swipe that would had stunned me had it landed. By God’s mercy, he was swept away in the next instant by an arrow that socked into his eye. Then I was at the lip of the wall. My left hand twisted itself securely into the rope, my right snaked over my shoulder and seized the T-shaped handle of the lance-dagger, and as a third man-at-arms loomed above me, looking down over the wall, I plunged the blade up, hard, into his neck. He shrieked and jerked back, blood jetting from between the fingers of his left hand which was clapped over the gaping rip in his throat. But I was over the wall by then, and I silenced his noise with a thrust of the lance-dagger into his open mouth and out the back of his neck. I could see Roland too was on the walkway on the other side, and I could hear the grunting breath of Thomas behind me. The mist was still thick around us – you could see nothing beyond ten yards away. I sheathed the bloody lance-dagger, shoved the dying man out of my way, and leaped down seven feet to the soft earth behind the wall, landing heavily, and immediately hauling out Fidelity. A man came out of a crude lean-to shelter beside the postern gate holding nothing more threatening than a wooden bowl of pottage and a horn spoon – but I killed him nonetheless, snapping my sword down two-handed into his bare head. Another man ran out of the fog on the far side of the wall – an untrained man, I believe, certainly un-armoured, perhaps a servant. He shouted something and jabbed at me clumsily with a spear, but I parried with Fidelity and dropped him with a counter stroke that ripped across his belly like a razor. Eviscerated, gasping, shocked beyond words, he goggled at me, gushing blood, and sank to his knees.

  Miraculously, it seemed that the alarm had not yet been raised. I killed the servant before me with a merciful sword thrust under the chin, and he died with a quiet sigh. I watched Roland drop a man on the walkway with a single sword thrust to the chest, and the man gave a gargled cry before he fell, muffled by the fog. Thomas was visible by now on the wall, looking grim with a sword in his fist, but no foeman before him. Sir Nicholas and Vim had also emerged from over the top. No more enemies came, so I jumped towards the postern gate, hauling back the locking bar and admitting Robin, who tumbled through the entrance as if he had been leaning on the outside of the door with all his weight. Little John was with him, axe in hand, and Gavin, and beyond them a score of madly grinning mercenaries emerging like joyful demons from the mist and running full pelt towards the open postern.

  ‘On, on to the ramparts,’ Robin said, trying to keep his voice pitched low, but failing in the excitement of battle. I saw that Thomas had collected the war hook from the top of the wall on his way down and was already pelting towards the castle a mere forty paces away. I sprinted after him, part of a swarm of thirty mercenaries and Companions, and as I reached the foot of the sheer stone wall I heard the cry above us: ‘Alarm – they’re coming, the Devils are coming. To arms, brothers. To the eastern wall!’

  We no longer had surprise. But Vim was there swinging his war hook, and another man too beyond him, and Thomas had already secured his to the top of the wall and was climbing the rope like a monkey, a dagger clenched between his teeth. Twenty yards to my right, Sir Nicholas, too, had fixed his hook to the ramparts and was hauling himself upwards. Thomas had disappeared over the top of the wall and I heard him shout ‘Westbury!’ and another voice screaming in pain. I sheathed Fidelity, grasped the rope and pulled myself up, hand over hand, arm-muscles creaking with the strain, heart banging, the fire of combat coursing through my body like scalding spiced wine. I plunged up, unchallenged, got a hand on the stone crenellation, and a boot, and leaped over the rampart.

  I was inside the impossible Castle of Montségur.

  Next I knew, I was dodging a mace blow aimed at my head from a blue and white knight. I grabbed his swinging arm, pulled him towards me, off balance, and smashed my helmeted forehead into his face. He flew backwards, yelling, and plunged down into the courtyard. I did not stop to watch him fall – there were men running at me from both sides. I ripped Fidelity from the scabbard and took its edge to the enemy on my left. A flurry of blows and he was clutching the stump of his arm, bleeding, screaming. I fended off the man on my right, drove him back with a series of fast lunges and, as he retreated along the walkway, he met Little John rolling over the wall, who straightened, swung and hacked off his head with one blow from his axe. A crossbow bolt clattered on the stone of the walls by my shoulder. I got my shield off its carrying strap on my back and on to my free arm, just in time to stop a strike from a man-at-arms who ran in from the left – and felled him with my riposte, Fidelity ripping an extra, bloody mouth under his chin. There were enemies all around, now, and more coming my way. But more of my friends were on the walkway, too.

  We boiled over that wall – all of us – in a less than a hundred heartbeats. I saw Vim stepping over the ramparts and immediately begin slaying men with great sweeps of his sword, snarling like a bear. There was André the scout cutting down a cowering crossbowman who had spent his bolt.

  I saw Thomas ten paces further along the walkway, facing down a mob of charging enemy knights. I raced to his side, stopped a sword strike at his head, and threw off his attacker with a shield-punch – and we held them, and blocked them and forced them back. Thomas killed the foremost man and I took the next. Then we fought our way forward, heading towards the keep, holding off a swarm of enemies with sword and shield, cutting, killing and maiming. Keeping their vicious blades out of our bodies. And behind us, in a space cleared of enemies, good man after good man came tumbling over that wall behind and screamed into the fight. Then Robin was behind me. He shouted in my ear just as Thomas was finishing off a big fellow with a twisted lip. My lord clapped me on the shoulder and pulled me away from my squire.

  ‘I need you now, Alan,’ he bellowed – for the din was terrific: the clash and scrape of steel on steel, the screams of pain, the yells of fury, a trumpet calling over and over for the Knights of Our Lady to come to arms. And they did – score upon score of them, erupting out of the barracks in the courtyard like ants from a kicked nest, and charging up onto the walkway via the stone stairs at the southern end. A crossbow quarrel slashed past my face, but I paid it no heed. Robin and I drove south, sprinting along the walkway, chopping down anything in our path, with Thomas following in our wake. Robin’s blade was like a deadly serpent’s tongue flicking to take the life of any man who foolishly stood before him. We slipped in gory puddles but somehow managed to keep our footing; we stumbled over corpses and the writhing bodies of the wounded, and Thomas, who was a pace behind me, killed any that he found alive beneath his feet. A group of four knights tried to form a loose shield wall in front of us, but Robin and I charged straight into it, shields up, swords pounding down, battering relentlessly. Thomas pressed in close behind, I could feel his breath on my neck, his sword arching over the top of my shoulder to
stab at enemy faces – and we soon swept them backwards with our momentum, tumbling two of them off the walkway to thump down on the sandy floor twenty feet below. I remember thinking that these Knights of Our Lady would never have made the ranks of the Templars – they were soft, and slow, and unused to fighting in close concert with their brother knights.

  We killed them.

  I heard a great roar behind me, and stole a half-glance, as Little John, war hook in his right hand, double-headed axe in his left, jumped straight down on to the red-tiled roof of a stables below the parapet, smashing terracotta, and then kicking free of the broken shards to jump down a further ten feet to the courtyard. Gavin followed in his wake, sword and shield in his hands, a reckless grin on his handsome face.

  At a set of stone stairs in the south-eastern corner, a fresh surge of enemies, led by two Knights of Our Lady and with half a dozen men-at-arms behind them, rushed up to confront us, and Robin and I met our first serious resistance. I took a pace forward and my right leg failed me – I felt the wound tear open and a lightning bolt of pain in my calf and, at the same time, the knight on the right, on my side, sliced forward with a long sword, driving for my face. I took the blow on the cross-guard of Fidelity, shook it aside, and, trying to keep the weight on my left leg, cut at his neck with my counter stroke, which he blocked easily with his shield. Robin was duelling with the knight on my left, a flurry of clashing steel and the dull cracks of metal on leather-covered wood. A crossbow bolt, loosed from the courtyard smashed into my shield, rocking me back. My opponent lunged again, this time for my belly, and I twisted out of the blade’s path at the last instant, my calf screaming, and chopped down on his extended right arm with my shield, and dislocated the elbow.

  Then he was mine.

  I dispatched him with a feinted lunge to unbalance him, and a powerful strike at his throat. My blade smashed into the mail of his coif that protected his neck. The blade did not pierce the iron links but he stumbled and fell to his knees, and I cracked Fidelity down on his helmeted head, stunning him. His place on the stair was immediately taken by a wildly yelling man-at-arms, who stepped over the prone knight and began hacking at me with a sword in one hand and an axe in the other. I hobbled back out of range and something big and glinting blurred through the air between our bodies, and I saw with shock, and not a little horror, that it was a war hook, hurled up by Little John from the courtyard floor. The sword blades snatched deep into the man-at-arms’ chest and, like a fisherman hooking a salmon, John yanked the rope taut and hauled the soldier and two comrades standing behind him backwards to crash down the steps on to the courtyard floor.

  Our forward passage cleared, both Robin and I charged down the stone steps, smashing a couple of men-at-arms aside with our shields, and surging down to join up with Little John in the centre of the courtyard. Thomas was on my heels and behind him were a dozen mercenaries. Suddenly our men were all over the castle: the iron-studded door of the keep, at the northern end, was wide open, and I saw a wolfish mercenary jump down from the walkway on the north-eastern wall and cut down a half-dressed man who emerged bemused from its darkness; I saw a pair of knights in blue and white, cowards for sure, slipping over the western wall to make their escape. Another poltroon, a balding man-at-arms, hurled away his sword and began scrabbling in terror at the barred main gate, trying to claw it open so that he could flee to safety.

  For a moment I stood still, panting with exhaustion, dripping sword in hand, my weight on my left leg, trying to master the waves of white agony flowing from my wounded calf.

  Olivier, the skinny mercenary, had also battled his way down to the courtyard nearer the keep. I saw him, twenty yards away, take on two leather-jacketed enemy men-at-arms armed with pole axes, and drop one. But the second dodged Olivier’s strike, slashed with his own weapon, and gashed Olivier’s sword arm, rendering it useless, and finished him with an axe blow to the stomach that folded him in half. Two mercenaries nearby pounced on the axeman and took a swift revenge. But, as I watched, the skinny ruffian who would have happily burned out Roland’s eyes died like a soldier on the castle’s sanded floor, his bloody white and blue entrails bulging through his fingers.

  I looked over towards a small chapel by the main gate and saw the Master for the first time that day. His expression was one of deep and terrifying fury. He had a naked sword in his hand – incongruous with his gaunt, ascetic features, his tonsure and the immaculate black robe that he wore. He glared at me briefly, his mouth a white line, then fixed his eyes on Robin in the south of the courtyard.

  And he stalked directly towards him.

  A howling mercenary, tossed on the winds of madness, and wielding a bloody sword, hurled himself at the Master – but the former monk barely glanced at the battle-crazed man as he dispatched him with two swift, precise strikes of his own blade, leaving him bleeding and crying in the sand. The Master’s eyes seemed to bore into Robin and he glided across towards him oblivious to the scramble of battle all about him, occasionally swatting men out of his path as if they were no more troublesome than late-summer flies. As he came on, surviving Knights of Our Lady seemed to coalesce around him, flocking to him as if he represented the only light in a world of darkness. Three, five, ten knights – and a gaggle of their men-at-arms gathered behind the Master’s dark robe. Robin stepped in to meet his enemy, and at the same time both their swords licked out like bolts of lightning and cracked together with what seemed to my battle-heightened mind to be a shower of brilliant sparks.

  The Master was fast, almost faster than any man I have ever seen – his sword was a flicker of light, a gleaming blur that probed and struck and sliced the air around Robin, and I remembered that he had been a Templar himself in his youth and had fought against the Moors of Spain and won much honour on those battlefields.

  But my lord of Locksley was no stranger to the roar of battle either – as a youth he had been trained by the best sword-masters in England and had been fighting with a long blade ever since. So Robin blocked and parried, and counter-attacked with skill, smothering the Master’s initial attack, and managing to keep his enemy’s quick-silver blade from his flesh.

  A bareheaded knight in blue and white charged at me and I could no longer observe the crash and wheel of the fight between the two lords of men. The knight’s sword hacked down towards my head, but I got my shield up, just in time, taking the heavy blow on its already much battered frame and sweeping low with my own sword to thump the long blade into his mail-covered thigh just above the knee. He went down, but I found to my surprise that I was too weary to finish him – I watched Gavin leap forward and lance his sword-point into the man’s white face. And, with that action – killing my opponent for me – the young bowman sealed his fate.

  As Gavin bent to put his shoulder into the lunge, a Knight of Our Lady behind the fallen man jumped in and hacked his sword down into the back of the youngster’s curly head, splitting his skull and burying the blade deep into his brains.

  A great, deep animal-like cry of rage and despair came from behind us, and I was hurled off my feet as a force like a mighty whirlwind, an unstoppable, elemental impetus, barrelled past me, with a noise like the bellowing of a herd of fear-maddened bulls. I crashed painfully to the floor on my right shoulder, the helmet strap snapped and my steel cap fell forward to partially cover my eyes. And my impressions of the next few moments were of a huge shining axe blade swinging in a fine cloud of blood and a howling storm of terrifying noise as Little John, crazed with grief, barged straight into the crowd of enemy fighting men behind the Master – his last remaining knights – and began to hew and hack in a mindless, whirling, blood-spattering rage. At one point, I swear on my soul, I saw a severed arm fly through the air followed immediately by the upper half of a human head, still partially helmeted. And by the time I had painfully regained my feet, there was not a living enemy to be seen in the courtyard, save for a few gore-spattered men-at-arms, scrambling like cats over the walls to try and save t
heir miserable skins.

  And the Master.

  The elemental fury of John’s lone, whirlwind assault stopped the battle dead in its tracks. His rage seemed to have ended the carnage like a snuffed candle. The Master and Robin, both with their mouths agape in awe, were frozen a couple of yards apart with their swords raised, transfixed. They gawped as the big man laid down his axe and knelt among a ring of piled, mangled, knightly corpses, scooping up the limp body of his young friend in his arms, his blond, gore-speckled head pressed to Gavin’s dark, broken poll, the giant’s vast frame heaving with wild, lung-tearing sobs.

  Robin recovered first. He reached out his sword and tapped the Master’s blade, almost as if seeking to attract his opponent’s attention, and purely by instinct, the Master delivered a lightning riposte, a low lunge that Robin had to scramble to avoid.

  Robin took a long step backwards. ‘Do you surrender?’ he said to the Master. The monk was friendless in that courtyard, a circle of Robin’s men was forming around him, yet he replied, ‘And let you hang me? Or crop my fingers at your leisure? Oh, yes, that barbarous tale reached my ears. I think not!’ And he lunged again, quick as thought, at Robin’s chest, forcing my lord to parry and step away.

  And again the Master attacked. A dancing step forward and huge vertical downward chop that seemed to contain all the fury and hatred in the world. The blade arced down – and was met by Robin’s shield. But such was the power of the blow that the steel sliced halfway through the wood and leather of Robin’s protector. My lord took a step backwards, his sword extended before him, warding the Master off, while he shook his left arm free of the flapping tatters of the shattered shield. The Master launched another manic offensive. Scything, double-handed diagonal cross-strikes from left and right, left and right. If any of these had landed, my lord, now shieldless, would be breathing his last. But Robin somehow, miraculously, each time got his sword between the Master’s malice and his own skin. Their blades rang like bells, again and again, and Robin with every blow was being forced relentlessly backwards towards the wall.