Warlord (Outlaw 4)

by Donald, Angus

  Sword and axe, sword and axe, right and left – the strikes battered my helmet and shield and my hunched mailed shoulders with a terrible ferocity. I could barely use my sword either to defend or attack; the design of the stairwell, with the rising steps rotating sunwise, making it impossible for me to swing my blade. I took as much of the punishment as I could on my shield, but that article was soon battered into a shapeless mass of splintering wood and flapping leather. I fended off Sir Eustace with jabs of my sword point, giving ground, step by step, being forced back down, down and around to the ground floor. Sir Eustace shouted: ‘Die, die, you peasant scum,’ and hammered down his left hand, his axe hand. I felt the blade crunch into the muscle of my shoulder, splitting the iron mail links and just penetrating the flesh. I staggered back another step, but managed to catch my enemy’s next sword strike on the remains of my shield.

  Somebody was under my stumbling feet, and I glanced down swiftly to see Thomas coming up and forward under my shield arm, his knees on the steps; from the level of my thighs, he poked the crossbow upwards, aimed, loosed, and the quarrel shot forward and punched deep into the side of the ranting, spitting knight above me, just as he was raising his sword to strike again. He gave a shout of outrage and looked down at the quarrel sticking from his waist. Another crossbow twanged from below me, from the jostling mass of Westbury men who had followed me into the tower. The bolt clattered harmlessly off the round wall behind Sir Eustace’s snarling, bestial face, but it caused the knight to scream in frustrated rage and to hurl his axe at my head, end over end, with shocking force. I ducked in the nick of time, the axe blade crashing on to the round top of my helm and bouncing away. And he ran. Sir Eustace bounded up the stone stairs away from me like a mountain goat; disappearing instantly from view, his slapping steps diminishing and finally ending with the clear sound, high above, of a slammed wooden door.

  Even so, we climbed the stairs cautiously. Myself in the lead, with a fresh red Westbury shield furnished by Thomas on my left arm, and my squire advancing behind my left shoulder, his crossbow spanned and ready once again.

  At the top of the stairs we paused in front of the door. I looked at Thomas. ‘If it is possible, I want to kill him myself, do you understand?’ I said, nodding down at the deadly loaded crossbow in his steady hands.

  ‘For Hanno?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Yes, for Hanno – and all the others.’

  The door yielded to one hard stamp of my right foot, and I was in a large round dim chamber; the only light coming from arrow slits in the stone walls. And there was the Master, on the far side of the room, his hands calmly folded inside the opposite sleeves of his robe, in the position in which I had first seen him. Hiding his thumbs.

  A flicker of movement to my left – but hardly unexpected. I relaxed my knees and bobbed down and a sword blade flashed over my lowered head and struck sparks against the stone wall behind me, but I was already moving away, circling the room. I saw that Sir Eustace de la Falaise had the sword in his right hand; he had drawn the lance-dagger, the strange weapon that had ended Hanno and so many other good men, and was holding it in his left.

  The crossbow quarrel was deeply embedded above his right hip, and his white surcoat on that side bore a large and growing red stain. I smiled at him: and I swear at that moment I felt no fear at all. God had placed him in my path so that I might have my vengeance. He smiled back at me with his amiable idiot’s grin, and mad little black eyes, swung the sword again, hard, and I took the blow full on my new red shield. Almost at the same time, less than a heartbeat later, he lunged forward with the lance-dagger, lightning fast, aiming for the centre of my chest. But I had anticipated the move and twisted my torso side-on in time to allow the strange blade to strike nothing more precious than air. Then I struck: a full, sweeping downward blow with my sword that would have split his skull if it had landed. But the man had been a Templar, a true Templar with all the martial skill of that famous Order, and wounded or not, he was still formidable. His sword whipped up and deflected my strike harmlessly away and to his left, and we both stepped back at the same time and began warily to circle each other again.

  The room was filling with my men, but Thomas kept them against the walls, leaving Sir Eustace and I room to fight our duel. The Master had not moved from his stance by the arrow-slit window on the far side of the round chamber. One glance at his serene, handsome face, his blue eyes watching us, seemingly filled with compassion for all mankind, and I felt a wave of nauseous disgust. He looked like a bishop, a grave man of God, someone who should be revered. I knew better: he was filth, murdering filth, hiding behind a godly robe and a pious manner.

  I wanted to hear him scream for mercy.

  Sir Eustace attacked again, using exactly the same manoeuvre: a swing of the sword and a snake-quick thrust with the lance-dagger. And once again I blocked the sword with my shield, and dodged the dagger thrust. Then I came at him – hard, fast and with all the bottled anger in my grieving soul. I swept Fidelity laterally at his neck, from the left and then the right, punched at the quarrel shaft protruding from his waist with my shield, driving it deeper into him, causing him to shout in pain and leap away – and then I took two quick steps in and smashed Fidelity hard and down into the outside of his mailed left knee. My blade did not penetrate but he howled, dropped to a kneeling position on the floor, I smashed the outer rim of my shield down on to his right wrist, and his sword clattered away. Immediately, he came surging up at me in a stumbling lunge, trying to grapple my shoulder with his empty right hand and plunge the lance-dagger into my belly with his left. I dodged to my right, out of his path, swung Fidelity and sliced down with all my might as he passed me, hacking through the mail and deep into his shoulder. He shouted once more, a short hard cry of shocked rage. His arm hung limp, useless, a deep purple gash of flesh exposed for an instant, a flash of round white bone. And then the blood fountained up; the lance-dagger dropped from his unfeeling fingers and skittered across the stone floor to land against my mailed foot. He turned to face me, and stood silent, massive-eyed, swaying, weaponless, his whole body drenched with his own spurting gore. I tucked Fidelity under my shield arm, bent down quickly and scooped up the lance-dagger in my right hand, hefted it, looked deeply into his black eyes, then stepped in and punched the blade into his chest, aiming for a spot an inch or so to the left of his sternum. He died there on his feet, staring back at me in disbelief for a single moment, before crashing to the floor.

  I turned to the Master and saw that he was now on his knees. I grasped Fidelity once more. The man’s eyes were tightly shut, his head bowed in prayer, his hands still tucked together in the sleeves of his gown.

  I was aware of a sigh, a gust of breath from half a dozen throats, followed by an admiring murmur from the assembled Westbury men, and sensed that others too were entering the room. There was a crush of bodies by the door, and I heard Thomas saying in a quiet steady voice: ‘Leave them be, this is Sir Alan’s task and his alone; stay back, boys, if you please, stand back.’

  But my eyes were fixed upon the Master, and over the low hum of the watching folk behind me, I heard him repeat the familiar Latin words: ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus. Sancta Maria mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae …’

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.

  I looked down at him, Fidelity slack in my right hand. I must tell you, my friends, for all that I knew he was truly evil, it is no easy thing to kill a monk who is on his knees praying, no easy thing at all. I conjured up an image of Hanno in my mind, his laughing face, the shaven head and terrible teeth; I thought of the adventures we’d had together in far-off lands, his stories, his love of fat women and good ale, and still I hesitated to strike my enemy down.
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br />   I thought of my father – and finally lifted Fidelity, high above my head, my wrists cocked, ready to strike the final blow. Brother Michel opened his bright blue eyes and looked up at my face – and deep into my soul. His left hand emerged from the sleeve of his robe: it bore a small silver crucifix; plain, brilliant, the miniature figure of our Lord exquisitely rendered. He held it out towards me. He held it so that his ugly split thumb divided either side of the lower part of the cross, twin perfect digits, with well-trimmed white nails poking out to the left and right of Our Lord’s tiny, silver feet, as if supporting Him, as if easing His suffering in the hour of His death.

  ‘You cannot kill me, Alan,’ he said in a soft, calm, infinitely reasonable voice, raising the crucifix towards me. ‘You do know that, don’t you? I serve the Mother of God and her only son Our Lord Jesus Christ. I am a man of God. You could no more kill me than you could take your own life. To kill me is to deny God! I command you, by the power of the Almighty, by the power of Our Lady Mary, to lay down your sword.’

  The world shook itself, and blurred sickeningly before my eyes. The muscles of my arms and back, the meaty fibres that supported Fidelity in its attack position above my head were frozen; I could never have moved, even if my life had depended on it. Suddenly I was transported to Nottingham Castle five years earlier – and Sir Ralph Murdac, my hated enemy, saying: ‘If you kill me, you will never know the secret of your father’s death.’

  I knew that secret now; I knew that it was this man, the ‘man you cannot refuse’, presently unarmed and, in turn, on his knees before me, holding out that sliver of precious silver in his left hand – I knew it was he who had ordered my father’s shameful death. Yet through some strange alchemy, or because of an invisible strength in his words or emanating from his soul, I could not strike him down.

  The Master rose to his feet. He jerked the tiny silver crucifix at me, and I took an involuntary step backwards. Fidelity was still poised above my head, forgotten. The Master looked deep inside me, his clear blue eyes filled with all the sadness and pity of the world. ‘I shall pray for your soul, my son,’ he said. And he began to walk lightly, easily towards the door of that high, round room.

  I could not move: I was locked tight, with Fidelity held impotently, absurdly, above my head as the Master – the man I hated more than the Devil, the monster who had killed my friend and my father – walked serenely towards the door. Not a man moved to stop him. The Westbury men, even my steady, reliable Thomas, moved out of his path, parting before him like a red curtain as if moved by an unseen force: this truly was magic, this was a powerful enchantment of a magnitude that put all of poor, crazed Nur’s shabby countryside tricks to shame.

  The Master walked unmolested to the door. Under its lintel, however, he stopped dead. I could see nothing but the back of his tonsured head. He was motionless, as frozen as I, or any other mortal man in that room.

  ‘Back in there, I think,’ said a calm, familiar voice.

  And the Master took a step backwards, into the round room. His thin face had paled, I could see even from my poor angle of view, and a shining steel blade extended horizontally from under his chin into the darkness of the stairwell.

  ‘Keep going, Brother – if you want to live,’ said the voice. The Master took two more steps back into the room. And Robin emerged from the darkness of the stairwell, his unwavering sword held to the Master’s throat.

  ‘Well done, Sir Alan,’ said my lord. ‘I thought you’d kill him out of hand. It is so gratifying to see self-restraint practised by the young men of today. Well done, indeed.’ Then louder: ‘Sam, Gerry, bind this slippery bastard securely and take him down to the camp; he’s our prisoner.’

  And two burly Locksley men bustled through the doorway, and brushed roughly past the dazed, spell-bound Westbury men to carry out Robin’s orders. I looked at my lord, his silver eyes sparkling with unholy merriment, then I lowered Fidelity with more than a little effort, shook my head to clear it, and managed a feeble smile of welcome.

  ‘Where is it? Where is it, you maggoty little turd?’ Robin’s face was a mask of cold fury, and only inches from the Master’s. We were in Robin’s large green campaign tent, on the flat land below the castle. It was two days after we had stormed Château Châlus-Chabrol, and while the men had celebrated the victory in the usual raucous, bibulous manner, there was an air of bleached grey gloom over the whole camp like a dank mist. The King was sinking fast: his shoulder was swollen, greeny-black and stinking, and the poison was spreading down his arm, Robin had reported. Richard had summoned his priests to hear his last confession, and written to his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, and we heard that she was hurrying south to see her beloved son one last time on this Earth.

  I felt as if my heart was breaking, breathless, sick and dim of sight as if the sun was guttering and fading: my King, one of the finest men I had ever known, was slipping away, killed by a silly, insignificant wound – one that on another day he might have been shrugged off with a golden laugh and a flash of his strong teeth. It had been no more than a lucky shot with a crossbow, a shot that should have missed at that distance, which might easily have been stopped with a small movement of his shield. It was a useless death, a paltry, ignoble, meaningless end for such a man, for such a king – how could the greatest hero of Christendom be laid low by an unknown peasant’s chance shot? And yet he had been: and Richard was as forthright when facing death as he was in life. I finally managed to see him, face to face, on the sixth day after he had taken his wound. For all that he had wanted to keep the hurt a secret, he had failed, and hundreds of men from the lowest beggars to the haughtiest barons wished to speak to him one last time before he went to the Great Beyond. He had time for them all.

  To me, when I was finally admitted to his tent, he said in a low scratchy voice: ‘We had some rare times together, Blondel, my friend – some laughter, some song, some joy and a little shared glory …’ I could not prevent my eyes from blurring with tears. He was clad only in a dirty chemise, propped up on sweat-stained silk pillows in a low pallet in his pavilion, his face waxy-white, eyes brilliant against the pallor, his once-bright hair now lank and flat. ‘And I thank you for all you have done for me these many years; I hope you will remember me fondly when I am gone.’

  I choked back a sob, and said: ‘You must not say such things, sire. You will survive, you will surely find the strength to overcome this illness and …’

  ‘I am dying, Alan. Let there be truth between us at the last. We have both seen much of death and of dying men, have we not? Let us not deceive ourselves.’

  I was weeping openly by this time. The King took my hand in his unnaturally hot, bony grasp, and his glittering blue eyes fell upon a velvet bundle at my feet. ‘You are to practise your music a little more often, Blondel,’ he said mock-sternly. ‘I command it. I have noticed of late that you have been neglecting the vielle; it can be as powerful as the sword in the right hands, you know. You do too much soldiering and not enough singing, in my opinion.’

  I smiled at him, through the mist of tears, and offered to play for him for a while. He agreed, but after a verse or two I saw that his eyes had closed and he was asleep, and his household knights behind him were frowning at me and gesturing frantically and silently that I should leave him in peace. And so I tiptoed away. I never saw my King alive again, and even now, many years later, the memory of his well-loved, fine-drawn sleeping face squeezes my throat and makes it hard for me to take a breath.

  While the King was dying, Robin occupied himself interrogating the Master: we had rifled his baggage, and gone through the piles of loot, and searched the whole of the castle from the top of the tower to the deepest latrine, and found nothing. Either the Grail was indeed a magical object that could make itself invisible, or it was not in the castle. At first the Master had refused to speak of it at all; then after he had been roughly handled by Little John, who had threatened to roast his balls like chestnuts over a campfire, the Master ha
d admitted that he had once had possession of the Grail, but insisted that he no longer knew where it was.

  I dreaded what would come next; I knew Robin would not shrink from the vilest torture to get what he desired. But I did not want to see any man, even one as deserving as the Master, undergo the sort of torments that I knew Robin and Little John could inflict.

  Robin strode out of his tent, calling a little too loudly for a brazier, firewood and irons, and I took my chance to speak with the prisoner. He was still bound, with his arms behind him, but his legs had been freed. As he sat there on the ground, his back against a bulky clothes chest, with his skinny white legs protruding from his drab monk’s robe and extended in front of him, it was difficult to remember that this was a man who casually ordered killings, a master of gangs of ruthless French woodland thieves, the head of a secret organization of would-be Templar knights, and someone who called himself the ‘man you cannot refuse’.

  I knelt down beside him and looked into his pale, pockmarked face. Slowly, he raised his innocent blue eyes until he was staring into mine. ‘They are even now fetching the instruments,’ I said. He nodded sadly but said nothing.

  ‘You must die, of course,’ I said, ‘for what you have done to my family and my friends’ – he nodded again, an acknowledgement of his doom – ‘but I can make it quick. And, if you wish, I could use this.’

  From the leather sheath at my waist, I plucked the lance-dagger, now cleaned and oiled, that I had recovered from Sir Eustace de la Falaise’s corpse. His eyes fixed upon it and I thought I detected a glow of veneration. He truly believed, I thought, that this was the blade that had pierced Christ’s body. ‘All you have to do is tell me where the Grail is, and swear on your immortal soul that you do not lie, and I will use this on you, swiftly, and you will feel no pain and go to your reward without the red-hot horrors that my lord of Locksley and his men would inflict upon you. Tell me, Brother Michel, where is the Grail? Tell me quickly before they return.’