Assassin's Creed: Heresy

by Christie Golden

  THURSDAY, 5 MAY, 1429

  ORLÉANS

  ASCENSION DAY

  “You, Englishmen, who have no right to this kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Jeanne the Maid, to leave your fortresses and return to your country. I write to you for the third and last time. I will write no further. Thus signed, Jhesus-Maria, Jeanne the Maid.”

  A subdued Gabriel dutifully wrote down everything as Joan spoke it. She had changed since yesterday. They both had. Gabriel had a newfound respect for those who had repeatedly, willingly, gone forward into such scenes of chaos and kept their heads even as they faced death and dealt it. Joan’s radiance was still there, but it was different: tempered by a true awareness of the terrible duty she had been charged with.

  As she took the pen and shakily, carefully wrote her name, Louis appeared at the door. As ever, the boy looked worried and perplexed.

  “My lady,” he said, “Madame Boucher has sent the red thread you asked for.”

  “Thank you, Louis!” she said, smiling warmly at him, and the boy relaxed.

  When the ink had dried, Joan rolled up the parchment in a tight scroll. “Come with me. You too, Fleur.”

  Joan had hoped to have some new clothes made for Fleur, but there had been little time for such things, so Fleur simply wore some of Joan’s masculine clothing. They were of a height, and though Fleur’s slenderness was a contrast to Joan’s healthy, muscular build, that only meant that the blonde girl needed to tighten her belts.

  Now Fleur, who had been sitting patiently, hopped up eagerly, her eyes filled with adoration. Gabriel wondered if he, too, looked at Joan in such a manner, and was forced to admit that he probably did. It was no matter. There was no shame in adoring a messenger of God.

  After their taste of battle, Pierre and Jean had opted to stay with their fellow soldiers instead of lodging with their sister. Thus it was only Gabriel and Fleur who followed Joan out from the gate, where the throng had, as always, gathered to catch a glimpse of the Maid. After the victory at the Saint-Loup boulevard, their fervor had only increased.

  Again, they headed toward the Bridge of Orléans. Gabriel glanced back at Fleur. She was completely new to riding, but he was impressed to see that that she gamely kept up with them, although she clutched the reins so tightly her knuckles were white.

  “Come to insult Glasdale again?” one of the soldiers grinned.

  “Not today,” Joan replied. She held up the parchment and thread. “Will one of your archers give me an arrow?”

  Gabriel started laughing as he watched Joan roll the parchment tightly around the arrow shaft, and held it securely for her while she tied it on with the red thread.

  She handed it back to the archer, climbed up the fortification to where she could see and yelled, “Glasdale! Read, this is news!”

  The archer stepped up and, careful to aim it true and not injure anyone—he certainly did not want to be the one to accidentally start a fight when the Maid simply wanted to deliver a note—let the arrow fly.

  “News from the Armagnac whore!” one of the English soldiers called back.

  Gabriel heard a swift intake of breath beside him, and turned to see that Fleur had gone scarlet. She looked down, blinking back tears. Joan, too, looked upset for a moment, then she turned away.

  “Many of those who say such things will be dead within days,” Joan said. “Their breaths have numbers. Let them waste them on ugly words if they choose.”

  FRIDAY, 6 MAY, 1429

  Joan, Gabriel, and Fleur left the church together after morning mass. Gabriel was used to the routine by now; confession, then mass, then whatever Joan’s Voices called her to do. But Fleur was still awkward when entering a holy house. Even so, Gabriel thought her aptly named, for she was blossoming beneath Joan’s kindness.

  As they walked back to the Boucher’s home, Gabriel noticed the governor of Orléans, the elderly, dignified old soldier Raoul de Gaucourt, arguing with La Hire. The two stepped back at Joan’s approach, behaving almost like guilty children.

  “Is the Bastard finally willing to attack the English today?” Joan asked them.

  The mountain frowned and stayed silent. De Gaucourt said, “As it happens, Maid, I have been specifically asked by the Bastard to guard this gate from those who might be too eager to leap into battle. There will be no fighting today.”

  La Hire and Joan exchanged a long look. Then Joan turned back to de Gaucourt. “I am weary of not being included in decisions that affect the very city that God has sent me to help,” she said coldly. “You, La Hire, and your generals were in your council, and I in mine, and you ought to believe that the counsel of my Lord will be done and will endure, and any other counsel will perish.”

  “But—this is the order of the man who is in charge of the army,” began de Gaucourt.

  “You are the governor of Orléans! Do you not wish to see her free? I think the soldiers should depart, along with any of those in town who wish to fight alongside them. They should make a charge against the Augustins boulevard, south of Les Tourelles, and you are an evil man to want to stop it!”

  Something was happening to La Hire’s scarred face. It took Gabriel a moment to realize the big man was trying not to laugh. “Like it or not,” Joan warned the governor, “the soldiers will come, and they will obtain what they have obtained elsewhere.”

  She spun, addressing the crowd that always seemed to be gathered near her. Drawing her sword, she cried out to them, “My soldiers! You know what we should be doing! People of Orléans—will you join us!”

  The now familiar swell of a response drowned out the governor’s voice as he tried to plead for reason. Gabriel knew that the Assassins believed that Joan’s appeal, her power to inspire others, was not sent from God, but was rather something that was in her blood.

  He didn’t know who was right, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that she believed in her mission, and she would succeed in it.

  The scene dissolved into the mists of the Memory Corridor. Simon was relieved when they did not next solidify into screaming soldiers, thundering hooves, and blood and mud, but into a painting of a dark night, the silhouettes of soldiers weary but alive, and the little flowers of campfires.

  “You should return to Orléans to rest,” Gabriel said to Joan as they sat by their own campfire. They were out of their armor, and Joan’s squires were hard at work cleaning off the blood and mud with vinegar, sand from the riverbank, and vigor. “You have done so much.”

  Joan smiled at him and touched his cheek gently. Fire and calmness made a strange union in his body and his heart. “I will be here, with the men who have fought so bravely. We are so close, my Shadow; so close to victory.”

  “Because of you,” Gabriel said.

  “Because of God,” she corrected, and he nodded, smiling. God, and you, and your Precursor blood, and the beautiful Sword of Eden. How can anyone hope to stand against you?

  She sobered slightly, and said, “I need you to wake me early tomorrow, and keep close to me. Tomorrow, I will have much to do, more than I have ever done before.” She paused, one hand creeping up to touch the pouch that hung over her heart for a moment, then trail along the skin of her neck, chest, and shoulder. “Tomorrow, blood will leave my body… here, perhaps; above my breast.”

  Cold fear seized him. “Did your Voices—”

  “Jeanne?” The voice was sweet, feminine, and familiar. They both looked up to see Fleur smiling down at them. She carried an enormous basket weighed down with bottles of wine, loaves of bread, and what appeared to be cheese wrapped in cloth. An abruptly-silenced squawk from a nearby campfire informed them that there would be chicken shortly as well.

  “Fleur!” Joan exclaimed, smiling. “What are you doing here?”

  Fleur gestured to the other Orléanais who were bringing gifts to other campfires. “They are so grateful! They know you all fought so hard, all day, and you must be hungry and tired.” She waved someone else over,
who was bearing thick blankets. “We all came over in small boats, very quietly. Of course I had to come.”

  She sat down between them. Her eyes were bright, and she couldn’t seem to stop smiling, even here, so close to a battleground. Glad as he was that Fleur had made the trip to help reprovision them safely, Gabriel was still reeling from Joan’s words. Blood will leave my body. A bullet? A sword? An arrow? What weapon is evil enough to harm my Jeanne? he thought.

  And… will she live?

  As the mists closed in, Simon knew what Gabriel did not: that the boy would have wished that Joan had died in the forthcoming battle, rather than meet the end she would little over two years from now.

  Les Tourelles? Victoria asked.

  Simon took a breath. “Les Tourelles,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  SATURDAY, 7 MAY, 1429

  LES TOURELLES

  Simon was grateful for the Memory Corridor’s slow, methodical rendering of the world. It helped him to remember that while what he was bearing witness to was real—had happened, exactly as he saw it—it also was not his reality, his present.

  Les Tourelles.

  He had seen it from the back, across the gap of water where once parts of the Bridge of Orléans had connected it to the city. Now, the drawbridge in the front linking it to the southern shore of the Loire was all that kept it from being its own island tower.

  And before it, at the other end of that drawbridge, loomed its massive boulevard. Dunois had called it one of the most imposing fortifications ever built, and he should know: he had ordered it constructed to augment the initial masonry fortifications, in order to protect Les Tourelles from being taken by the besieging English. That plan had failed abysmally, and the English had fortified the boulevard even beyond its original construction. Dunois estimated that the boulevard and Les Tourelles contained between them almost a thousand English soldiers—and the majority of the English guns.

  A palisade of sharpened tree trunks was the first line of defense, angled outward toward the enemy. On the other side of this wall of wood was a soft earthen ditch, ten feet wide and twenty feet deep. The softness of the ground was in itself a defense—anyone who fell in would struggle even harder to escape. The wall of the boulevard itself was sixty-five feet long and eighty-five feet wide and surrounded a sort of courtyard, where the English could, at their will, fire guns, arrows, small cannon balls, spears, and axes. The boulevard was connected to Les Tourelles by a drawbridge; beneath it was a moat, through which flowed Loire river water.

  Simon knew that, despite their “council,” all of the French generals had shown up to camp with Joan the previous night. Starting at eight that morning, the French had been firing artillery at the barriers, beginning with the palisades. The very earth now seemed to tremble from the sounds of the bombards disgorging their round metal contents at the wooden wall. Arrows set aflame hummed like furious hornets, and small, quick, orange tongues of fire licked hungrily as archers took aim into the boulevard courtyard. No horses, not here, not this time, only the brutal simplicity of armored soldiers on foot.

  “Cease firing!” came the order from Dunois, barely audible over the thunder. “Cease firing!” The French artillery went silent.

  “Forward, my brave soldiers!” came Joan’s voice, clear and strong. Like the rest of them, she was on foot, her standard in her hand. “Fill the ditch so we may cross the boulevard!”

  There was a great roar as the men surged forward now. Some of them shoved blasted pieces of wood down into the ten-foot ditch. What had once been a barrier to them would now be a bridge. Others, including Gabriel, raced forward clutching bundles of twigs prepared the night before for just this purpose. He tossed his pile into the gulf, and headed back for more.

  Gabriel knew he was an exposed target. The only way into the courtyard area was over the boulevard wall, and the only way over the wall was to scale it with ladders. Wooden tree trunks and bundles of twigs were not the only things filling the ditch. Bodies lay where they had fallen, sprawled at unnatural angles, and Gabriel’s gut twisted as he saw them. But there was no thought of hauling them out to a respectful place far from battle. They had fallen here, and the ditch needed to be filled, and they would serve the French cause in death as they had in life. Even as he turned back from another run, he heard one of the soldiers screaming in agony, begging for help. An archer took pity on the wounded man, and his screams stopped.

  The ditch was almost filled now, with wood and men dead or dying, and a cry went up: “Scale! Scale!”

  Cheering soldiers now clutched scaling ladders, planting them in the filled ditch and placing them against the sides of the boulevard. As Gabriel turned to help bring one to the wall, he realized that Joan had beaten them all it. She had been the first to place her scaling ladder against the boulevard, and was now almost halfway up. A cheer tore from his throat as she nimbly ascended.

  It turned into a scream.

  The world slowed to a crawl, growing deathly silent to him as Joan arched backward and then let go of the ladder, her arms spread out like wings, falling in full armor into the sea of men below her as if she had taken her Leap of Faith and failed.

  “No!” cried Gabriel. “Jeanne! Jeanne!”

  He dropped the ladder, careless of the arrows and gunfire, focused only on Joan as he fought through his own people to get to her side. He clutched her arm as he and two others rushed her to the rear of the battlefield. The arrow was embedded at an angle, a good six inches into her upper chest on the right hand side, halfway between her collarbone and her shoulder.

  Tomorrow, blood will leave my body… here, perhaps; above my breast….

  They carried her as carefully as possible, but even so the jouncing caused her face to contort in pain and she shrieked. The sound almost tore out Gabriel’s heart.

  “My Voices,” she said, “they… they did not say how much it would hurt….” She sobbed, tears making trails through the dirt and sweat on her beautiful face. There was no light shining from her, not now, and a terrible fear seized Gabriel.

  They laid her down in the grass. “Stay still, Jeanne,” Gabriel urged.

  “This is not good,” murmured La Hire. God alone knew where he had come from; he had been directing the flank on the left.

  “I have a charm,” one of the soldiers said. “Here—press it against the wound, it will—”

  “No!” Joan’s voice was surprisingly strong. “I would rather die than use something against the will of God!”

  “Jeanne,” Gabriel said, and her bloodshot eyes moved slowly to meet his gaze, “Jeanne… you’re not going to die. God won’t let you. You haven’t lifted the siege.”

  “But you will,” she said, smiling softly.

  No, no… “But what about the king? You have to take him to Reims!” Gabriel looked up to see La Hire looking at him, almost pleading with him, to convince Joan to stay with them.

  Joan closed her eyes for an awful moment. Then they snapped open. She clenched her teeth and growled, low and deep, then reached up her left hand, grasped the arrow, and began to pull it out herself. Her face suddenly grew luminous, even as she screamed in startlement at the depth of the agony as the point ripped more muscle and skin on its way out and Joan’s blood started pumping freely.

  God would not take her. She wouldn’t die. Not today.

  The scene began to swirl and fade, enveloped by the churning grayness of the Memory Corridor.

  You all right?

  He nodded and licked his lips. “I know she didn’t die,” he said.

  But Gabriel hadn’t known. Do you need a break?

  “No,” he said. “Let’s push on.” He had traveled so far with Joan, he had to witness this legendary military victory, the triumph the city of Orléans celebrated to this day with a ten-day festival in her honor.

  The mists again solidified. They again revealed Les Tourelles, but this time, there was no battle taking place. “I am sorry, Jeanne,”
the Bastard was saying. “The men are so tired and hungry.”

  Joan was again in her armor, which covered her bandaged chest. She was pale and drawn, but otherwise, one would never have known she was wounded. “I understand,” she said, surprising the generals, who exchanged glances. “I will return shortly.”

  She rose and went off into the gathering dusk, toward what remained of a neglected vineyard. Gabriel got to his feet to accompany her, but she lifted a hand and passed him her standard. “Not this time,” she said, and walked away into the lengthening shadows.

  He watched her, then went to join the generals. The mood was somber, and they ate and drank in silence. Fighting had been going on since early morning. Cannons had done damage to some parts of the boulevard, but the English had fought with heart as well. Ladder upon ladder had been laid against the walls, but the English had shoved them and the soldiers climbing them off. Or else, they waited until the intruders were nearly at the top, and attacked with lances and polearms, axes and hammers.

  Morale flagged during the hours Joan had spent away from the battle due to her injury. The men were now exhausted, Gabriel among them, and dusk was approaching.

  The Bastard looked at La Hire, de Rais, and Gabriel, then said quietly, “It will soon be dark. We have to retreat. I’ll send a signal to the Orléanais that they should halt as well.”

  “Orléanais?” Gabriel asked.

  De Rais shot him one of his manic grins. “We don’t fight alone, Laxart,” he said. “We have other plans afoot. There are attacks being prepared from other sides of Les Tourelles.”

  Still confused, Gabriel repeated, “Other sides?” From the bridge, he understood, but from where else?

  “You’ll see,” de Rais said. “It will be beautiful!”

  “We will lose all the ground we have gained today!” La Hire argued.

  “Some, but not all,” Dunois insisted. “But without Jeanne, the men—”

  “The men will not need to be without Jeanne.” They turned to see her approach. Although there were hollows around her eyes from the pain she endured, her face was alight and her lips curved in a soft smile. “She is here, and she is with them, and God is with all of us.”