Stigmata

by Colin Falconer

  ‘They made it my fight.’

  Raimon wished him God speed. Philip nodded and led the palfrey they had given him out of the cave, looking for the path. It fought the bridle, the flaming torch making it skittish. He kept a firm grip.

  It was a clear night; the moon like a new-minted silver coin was reflected in the river far below. The horse slid on a loose stone and scrambled for its footing. He did not even hear the rock hit the bottom. They must be on an overhang, he thought, and despite what Raimon had said to him he chanced one quick look down and could see nothing.

  Eventually he reached flatter ground and looked up, saw a sentry on the high barbican, his pikestaff silhouetted against the night sky.

  He waited for the rest of his squadron to reach him. No one had fallen into the chasm; so far so good. They mounted their horses and started at a walk towards the crusader camp.

  He could see the trebuchet in the moonlight; he could have found it blindfolded anyway, had watched it for days now pounding them with missile after missile while he stood with his fists clenched on the parapets. He knew its size and position as well as he knew his own hand.

  But he could have found it anyway; the bastards who worked it laboured by night as well as day and so their post was well lit with torches; they even had a cosy log fire to keep them warm on these first cold nights of autumn. They like making war on others well enough, he thought, because they think themselves safe from all retribution. Let us see now how much they like a war that is brought to them.

  He wanted to let his horse have its head, but the ground was broken and dangerous and he planned only to come at the gallop for the last hundred paces. Holding back, knowing the right moment, this was the hardest thing.

  He hoped their luck would hold.

  But it didn’t.

  *

  There were no sentries, not on this side of the camp. But one of the crosatz had stumbled out of his blanket to relieve himself and as they crested a small rise they came across him standing right in front of them, swaying sleepily as he directed his stream against a small bush. Philip spurred forward to silence him before he could shout an alarm but he was too late. The man had time to let out one piercing scream before he cut him down.

  There was nothing for it but to start their charge. But they were too far away and by the time they reached the trebuchet the engineers had already scattered. They cut a few of them down, but not enough; the rest they lost in the dark.

  Some of his men attacked the trebuchet with axes, while those carrying baskets had already dismounted and were stuffing the straw under the machine. Another doused the straw with oil and lit it with one of the crosatz’ own torches.

  ‘Burn!’ one of the chevaliers shouted. ‘Burn, burn, burn!’

  The alarm had been raised through the camp with trumpets and shouts and drums. Philip knew the fire would make them easy targets so he ordered his men to withdraw and wait for the counterattack from the shadows. They could not make their escape yet. They had to stop the crusaders from dousing the flames before they had properly taken hold.

  The first crusaders rushed in, still struggling into their armour, and Philip and his chevaliers wheeled in from the dark and cut them down. But there were too many of them streaming out of the camp now. They were everywhere, in and around and behind them, trying to drag them from their horses.

  Philip slashed wildly with his sword. Why did it take dry timber so long to burn at the end of such a long summer?

  Someone grabbed his horse’s bridle and he slashed down with his sword and the man disappeared screaming under the hooves. But close by he saw another of his chevaliers pulled from the saddle, and then another.

  A shower of sparks rose from the trebuchet. Suddenly she was fully ablaze. Just as well, he thought, for we have to get out of here now. He wheeled his horse around and signalled for his men to follow him. Another wave of crosatz streamed towards them. There was just one last card to play.

  He raised his sword. ‘The gates are open!’ he screamed at them. ‘Follow me! For God and de Montfort!’ And the crusaders cheered him and followed as he galloped right through the middle of them towards Montaillet.

  *

  He spurred his palfrey as hard as he dared across the broken ground and only stopped when he was in the shadow of the fortress walls. He turned in the saddle. Only a pitiful number of riders were still with him. They could not wait. The crusaders were streaming after them, thinking it was an attack on the gates.

  He led the surviving cavalry towards the cliffs, losing their pursuers in the dark. Then he ordered them to dismount and they walked their horses the rest of the way down the crumbling path back to the cave. Raimon and his men were waiting for them. ‘Did you do it?’ Raimon shouted when he saw him.

  ‘We did. With any luck it’s still burning.’

  ‘And you? Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Philip said. He handed over his reins and and sat down on a rock. In the light of Raimon’s torch he discovered an ugly sword slash between his greaves and shin. He had not even felt it, but it hurt him now, though, well enough.

  ‘How many men did we lose?’ he said.

  Raimon counted the heads. ‘A dozen and one by my count. It might be worth it, if the trebuchet is destroyed.’

  ‘It’s well alight. In the morning we will see if we did damage enough to justify the lives of thirteen good men.’

  *

  But they did not lose thirteen men; only six. Seven of Philip’s men were sent back the next day, without noses, lips and eyes. One they only half-blinded, so he could lead the others.

  Raimon cut himself with his sword and swore vengeance with his own blood when he saw them. The rest of the day he spent in silent rage. The trebuchet was at least charred ashes, and was still smoking at first light. Was it worth what was done to those men? Philip wondered. They had saved the fortress, so he supposed it could be counted as success. He hoped they would think so too.

  ‘Thank God we are fighting God’s own army,’ Raimon said when finally he was calm enough to speak. ‘For I should hate to fight the Devil’s!’

  *

  Saints; no saints. Hell; no hell. God loves us; God will destroy us. Jesus was meek and mild so I will murder you if you do not eat his body in this bread. Jesus died on the cross; Jesus did not die on the cross.

  He had grown tired of men arguing over it; he had especially grown tired of men dying over it.

  Did you not once have a castle? Why was it not enough?

  What would be enough, then, if not a castle and a horse and servants and a beautiful wife? This: a narrow bed in a shuttered room with no servants but some bread and cheese on the table and a woman he loved in his bed and a plump and healthy baby in the trundle. Not much but enough. Oh, and to be left in peace. To not have friends butchered because of him, not to be haunted by the ghosts of the men he himself had killed.

  Enough: to tease from the unsmiling gods some glimmer of grace, some transigence in their unflinching retribution.

  The softness of a woman’s breast. The cooing of an infant. The rising of the sun.

  Enough.

  *

  Fabricia used two thin strips of linen to bind the lips of the wound together, then brought a poultice of herbs and bound it to his leg. ‘I thought that we had run out of medicines for the wounded,’ he said, ‘that you had used them all.’

  ‘I had one saved, in case you were hurt.’

  ‘That is unjust to these other men. They bleed as I do.’

  ‘Why did you not tell me what you were going to do? I might not have seen you again.’

  ‘I would rather do my duty and leave the rest to my fate than go through long farewells. It unnerves me. As it is, you slept through my moments of danger and now it is done and I am here safe.’

  ‘How many men did you kill?’

  ‘I do not know. It was a bloody fight in the darkness and when all is done, I try not to think too much about it.’
/>   ‘Do they never disturb your sleep, the heads and the limbs you have hacked off?’

  ‘If I did not kill them, they would kill me.’

  ‘I just know I could never do it, seigneur. I could never kill a man. I would always see his blood on my hands.’

  ‘In times of peace we hunt meat in the forest, or we die. And in times of war we defend ourselves from those who would kill us. It is the way of things.’ He stood up, testing his weight on the injured leg. ‘The bons òmes would disagree with me. They are good and holy men, I allow. But they are not me. That night when the wolves were circling us, would you have rather it was Père Vital with you in the dark?’

  She did not answer.

  ‘Because I cannot be like you, it does not mean I do not treasure you. Whatever it was that you did when you laid your hands on people, it gave them hope. I saw it in their faces. Whether you have the gift or not, it makes them think that God has not abandoned them. The possibility of a miracle is a precious thing, for everyone. It is a glimpse of the divine amidst all the suffering. You matter a great deal, and not just to me.’ He stood up. ‘Thank you again for your kindness,’ he said, and limped away.

  LXXXI

  RAIMON ORDERED HIS men to knock down the stables and a grainhouse to get stones for the mangonels; Anselm supervised repairs to the walls damaged by the trebuchet; they dug ditches and built barricades behind the iron-bound oak doors of the main gate, knowing that this was where the crosatz would concentrate their next attack.

  The burghers raised blisters on their soft merchants’ hands, serving as apprentice masons or carpenters; their wives and daughters ran soup kitchens or repaired chain mail or tended the injured or sick, as Fabricia did, their skirts knotted up above their knees. Everyone had been pressed into service, even the children, carrying armfuls of planks or broken beams up shaky ladders for fuel for the cauldrons.

  By now the crosatz were desperate. They had lost their main weapon and though they still bombarded them night and day with their smaller catapults, they could no longer hurl stones large enough to weaken the walls.

  Philip did not believe a frontal assault on the walls could succeed. But time was running out; Montaillet had only one cistern for the whole citadel and it was almost dry. If the rains did not come soon, they would be forced to parlay on whatever terms they could get. Philip did not hold out much hope of mercy from the butchers camped below.

  The other problem would not be remedied by the weather, and that was the legacy left them by Guilhemeta.

  *

  The great hall was packed with bodies. The stench would fell a horse, Philip thought. Soldiers, children and women lay sprawled together on the flagstones, groaning, retching, dying. Half the garrison must be down here.

  Fabricia was moving among the sick, rationing the scarce medicine they had. She saw him standing on the steps and picked her way through the chaos towards him.

  ‘Pray God they do not attack us now,’ she said. ‘We have not even room for all the sick, there would be nowhere to put any wounded.’

  ‘There would be scarce be any left to defend us,’ he said. ‘This is twice as many as yesterday.’

  ‘My mother found some angelica root in the storehouse. We powdered it and mixed it with wine, for there is hardly any water to give them. It will help them if they can keep it down, but most retch it right up again.’

  ‘It was the woman, Guilhemeta.’

  ‘But Loup never got sick. Nor I, and I laid hands on her.’

  He looked at her hands. She still wore her gloves but they no longer had those familiar brown bloodstains. ‘A pity you cannot still perform your miracles, Fabricia.’

  There was a blast of trumpets from the main gate, followed by the urgent clamour of the bells from the church. ‘They are going to storm the walls,’ she said.

  ‘It may be a false alarm.’

  ‘I think they can smell the sickness. Somehow they know.’

  ‘Or they are as desperate as we are,’ he said and ran back up the steps to join the muster.

  *

  The crosatz waited until the setting sun blinded the garrison on the western wall. Raimon’s soldiers could barely make them out, with the sun in their faces, but they could hear them well enough, beating the earth with their pikes. The rabble of pilgrims that followed them were singing the Veni Sancte Spiritus.

  Something smashed into the court below. It was the blackened head of one of the soldiers they had killed during the sally against the trebuchet.

  ‘Only half my soldiers are still standing,’ Raimon said.

  ‘Then we will have to fight twice as fiercely,’ Philip said.

  Martín Navarese stood next to him, legs akimbo, his sword tip resting on the stones. He spat over the wall. ‘French bastards.’

  Loup stood at Raimon’s other shoulder holding a slingshot, a pile of stones at his feet. There were three women at one of the mangonels; Anselm the stonemason waited beside them, bare-chested in the sun, loading boulders into the slings. So it’s come to this, Philip thought. Women and children to do the killing now.

  The sun hovered just two fingers above the horizon when they attacked, their wooden cats swaying and bumping across the plateau. A wagon, covered with a tough canopy of cowhide, slammed against the wall. The crosatz sappers would be under there, Philip knew, trying to dig under the wall. Anselm hurled heavy rocks down on them, single-handed, while the women dropped flaming brands. The canopy soon bristled with wasted arrows and bolts.

  A cauldron of blazing oil went over the side and the leather fizzed with pitch and caught fire, sending a plume of black smoke into the air. Men ran shrieking with their clothes alight back to the crusader lines. The archers picked them off as they ran.

  Now the rest of the army came on, throwing ladders against the walls for the mercenaries and the foot soldiers. If we can throw them back this one last time, he thought, I think we will be safe.

  *

  ‘Don’t be angry at me,’ Elionor said. She had joined all the other bons òmes helping tend the sick in the great hall. She no longer looked like Mama; she had shorn her long salt-and-pepper hair so that it was short like a man’s. The black hooded robe they had given her was too large and her thin frame was lost inside it.

  ‘I’m not angry, Mama,’ Fabricia lied. I am furious. You abandoned me and you abandoned Papa when we needed you most. We all risk dying unshriven, why couldn’t you? For us?

  ‘I am following my heart in this. We must all follow our hearts.’

  Elionor trailed her around, trying to engage her in private debate, perhaps seeking an absolution. Fabricia stopped and listened to the noise from outside. The battle had been joined; soon the wounded would start arriving. Where would they put them?

  The worst of it was not knowing what was happening up there. Any moment she might see those brutes with scarlet crosses on their surcoats advancing down the steps, their swords drawn.

  ‘Please, my Fabricia, my little one. We don’t know how much time we have left. Let us not part this way.’

  Two men staggered down the steps into the cellar carrying a wounded archer. They slipped on a slick of blood and tumbled. ‘Someone help us,’ one of them said. ‘There’s too many for us to bring on our own!’

  Fabricia started up the stairs after them, but Elionor caught her wrist. ‘Stay here! Don’t put yourself in harm’s way!’

  Fabricia shook herself free. She followed the men up the steps and ran after them to the gatehouse. They clambered up the wooden ladder to the lower floor and urged her to follow. When she got there, she stopped, stunned by the heat and the noise. The framework of planks and beams shook under her feet, and then a man dropped from a hatchway above, an arrow through his neck. He lay at her feet, writhing and gurgling and kicking for a few moments, and then he died.

  ‘Help me,’ someone said.

  She turned around. A man – she realized she knew him, it was the tinker from Saint-Ybars! – was trying to drag a sled of
stones up the wooden ladder. He reached out his hand towards her, then gave a shout of surprise and reached behind him. He twisted around, but could not see the arrow that had lodged in his back. He glared at Fabricia as if she were the one who had fired it, then he let go of the ladder and dropped out of sight.

  Philip ran towards her along the parapet with a dozen armed men behind him. He ordered them up the steps. ‘Get out of here!’ he shouted at her. ‘We are overrun! You have to get out!’

  Three crosatz jumped down the wooden ladder from the upper floor. Philip charged them and they fell back. One on one they were no match for him, she could see, for they were poorly armoured and did not have his imposing height and physique. But after they recovered from the surprise of his rushed assault, their numbers told and they forced him to retreat.

  He still had time to grab her and almost bodily hurl her down the ladder.

  She started to clamber back down. And what then? she thought. Leave him to face the three of them on his own?

  She climbed back up again.

  The floor of the gatehouse was slippery with blood. Two of them were down, but Philip had lost his sword in the mêlée, and the other crosat was standing over him, beating him repeatedly with his sword. Philip was keeping him at bay with just his shield.

  Philip’s blade lay on the boards in front of her. She picked it up, testing the weight of it. She knew she could not lift it above her head, as the crosat was doing, but if she could swing it into the man’s back it should stop him right enough. He had only a thick leather jerkin as armour; the steel blade would go straight through it and slice him open.

  The man raised his sword again. Philip watched her, pleading with his eyes.

  Do it. Do it!

  But she couldn’t. She dropped the sword and instead jumped on the man’s back, one arm around his neck, the other clawing at his sword arm. It might have given Philip time to recover if she had been able to hold on, but the crusader was too strong for her and shrugged her off easily, hurling her against the wall.