Knight of Shadows

by Toby Venables

  What he saw, as Tancred’s footsteps approached, raised as many baffling questions as it answered. He had primed himself to be sensitive to the subtlest signs – unusual movements, things out of place, glints of metal or muffled sounds of command from amongst the trees. In the event, no such sensitivity was required. In full view, on the flat slab of the great stone, stood a single figure – tall, hooded, as dark as Tancred was pale, a bag across one shoulder, a bow held flat across his thigh, arrow nocked upon it, ready to be drawn. Aldric cursed his stupidity – his doubt. Had he trusted his first instinct, Bertrans and Engenulf might now be alive.

  “Tancred!” boomed out a voice from the rock.

  Tancred stepped forward to the parapet no more than a yard from Aldric. His lip curled, and Aldric heard him utter a single word: “Gisburne...” Without hesitation and in one swift movement, the stranger raised and drew the bow and loosed the arrow.

  It whistled past Tancred’s ear. The master of Castel Mercheval did not flinch, nor did he make any attempt to conceal himself. If the bowman wished to kill him with a second shot, there was little anyone could now do to prevent it. But Tancred showed no hint of fear. There were those who said that if he were face to face with the Devil himself, he would walk straight up to him, sword drawn and ready to fight. Now Aldric knew that was true.

  Tancred’s fearlessness, irrational though it may have been, shamed him. He rose to his feet, crossbow raised, and saw that several yards along the battlements Gaston – a serjeant, similarly armed – had done the same. Their adversary was well within range – close enough that mail would not save him – and the second arrow that Aldric had expected to see already upon his bow was not there. The bow itself was lowered, his other fist now raised as if it contained something of great import. Some time in the past few moments, Aldric now noticed, the stranger’s shoulder bag had also begun to drip blood.

  “He was supposed to be dead,” hissed Tancred.

  Fulke, still a yard behind him, flushed red. “I thought...” His voice died away.

  Tancred’s mouth twisted into a snarl of cold contempt. “You thought...”

  Aldric caught Gaston’s eye, and without a word both levelled their weapons at the stranger. If he attempted to reload – even if he tried to run – they could pin him. Yet this man, whose gaze was now locked with Tancred’s, seemed equally oblivious to the possibility of death. If man he was.

  For a time they stood in charged silence, face to face across that expanse of stone, moat and mud, one seeming the demonic twin of the other – black angel versus White Devil. Aldric swore he could see Tancred’s already stony eyes harden as he regarded this shadowy reflection. But what had passed between these two, and what type of being this dark shade – this Gisburne – really was, he could not guess.

  A thousand thoughts rushed through his mind in those moments. He had believed the miss with the arrow an accident. Now, considering the bowman’s precision in taking out Bertrans and Engenulf, he was convinced it had been deliberate. But if he was Tancred’s enemy – and knew he would receive no mercy in return – why spare him? What did he now hope to achieve against Tancred’s knights, and these impregnable walls? And if he had come to the rescue of their recent prisoners, why announce himself in broad daylight, rather than sneaking in at night?

  “You wait for your enginer in vain,” the voice from the rock rang out again. He took a step forward. Aldric and Gaston tensed. Reaching into the bag, he threw before him what appeared to be part of a mutilated limb. It bounced on the rock, leaving behind a splatter of red that slowly dissipated with the rain. The stranger then extended his arm. Hanging from it, Aldric could see a string or fine chain, and at its end, spinning and glinting in the dim grey light, what appeared to be a key. “Only this will open the box,” came the grim cry. “If you want it, come and take it.”

  Tancred stared down at the dark figure, eyes narrowing, jaw clenching. Aldric did not want to know what was going through that head. The master of Castel Mercheval looked up at the grey, empty sky as if seeking something in it, then back to Gisburne.

  “Kill him,” he said flatly.

  Aldric squeezed the trigger. The heavy crossbow leapt in his hands. At the edge of his vision, he was aware of Gaston doing the same. The two bolts – fired almost simultaneously – drove into Gisburne’s chest, knocking him off his feet. He slammed onto the wet rock and lay motionless, the patter of the rain the only sound, the stain of red running off the angled surface.

  “Get the key,” Tancred said, and turned and walked away.

  LIII

  “GALFRID?” IT WAS too dark to see, but Mélisande knew it had to be the squire. She was certain there were no other prisoners in here but the two of them, but already exhaustion and disorientation were causing her senses to play tricks. There were rats – that much she knew. She could smell them, had heard the scrabbling and scratching, had even felt them move against the soles of her naked, cold-numbed feet. But then, some time during the previous night, twisting and writhing out of the gloom, she had seen translucent snakes with human eyes. She had understood later, when clarity returned, that she was beginning to lose her grip. How much further Galfrid was down that path – and what horrors he was seeing around him in the dark – she could not imagine.

  Water dripped. The dank, clammy walls of this unseen chamber stank of waste, of decay, of the dying breaths of past inhabitants. Somewhere high above, through the meagre slit of some unseen window, the wind resonated weirdly. Its reedy rise and fall was like the howl of a starving wolf, but incessant, neverending – the plaintive exhalation of some unearthly creature doomed never to draw breath.

  She had fatally misjudged her adversary. She had felt a wild confidence in her plan when she’d left Gisburne – fully justified in dismissing his words of warning. Her father was the Count of Boulogne, after all, connected to some of the most powerful people in Europe. And few families had such strong links with the Templars as the house of Boulogne. The dynasty had supported the Templar cause from the very beginning – with money, with land, with knights. It had even provided two Kings of Jerusalem. What she had not appreciated was just how far Tancred had drifted from the powers that supposedly ruled him – his Grand Master, his Pope, his sanity.

  When she was led through the gate of this strange castle, the life she found inside seemed to bear little relation to the knightly order she knew. That, in itself, had unnerved her. Then, when she had stood before her captor, hands bound behind her, and voiced her outrage – invoking her family name, her loyalty to the French King, and had finally thrown at Tancred the fact that she knew personally the Grand Master and Lord of Cyprus, Robert de Sablé – he had simply stared, devoid of all emotion, and told her that God no longer recognised de Sablé as Grand Master, and that the King of France had no right to receive his gift.

  Only then did the truth become clear. Tancred really did mean to keep the skull for himself.

  Her blood ran cold. There was nothing with which to bargain. She had threatened him then, saying her father would send an army if she was harmed. Tancred had remained unmoved. She was a heretic, he said. An enemy of God, most likely tainted by exposure to Saracen ways. Her father could send a thousand men to crush him if he liked. A million. He would see her punished, nonetheless. God willed it.

  But first, a simple question. He said he would ask it only once. After that, should her answer prove unsatisfactory, another would take over. He would not ask anything of her – would not even speak. He would simply cause her pain. But Tancred’s question would remain, and she could answer it at any time, should she so wish.

  It all sounded so reasonable, so ordered. She almost laughed.

  Then Tancred fixed her with his dead eyes, and asked her the question.

  “How does one open the box?” he said.

  Her mind reeled. He did not have the key, but might yet get it. And he had an enginer coming. He could undoubtedly get the box open. But still something about the operat
ion unnerved him. There was more he felt he needed to know – something about it that he feared. He feared failing God.

  That realisation felt like triumph.

  So, she smiled that sweet smile, and leaned forward as if to whisper in his ear. He leaned towards her, his mask of a face passing horribly close to hers.

  “Very carefully,” she said.

  Without another word, she had been dragged to this dark place. And then the other that Tancred had spoken of appeared. Until then, she had thought Tancred the vilest creature she was ever likely to meet. But she was wrong.

  She could hear him now, in the dark. His shuffling feet. His rasping breath.

  She strained to listen for other signs of movement – from Galfrid – but could hear nothing. She didn’t know how long it had been since he had spoken. Only when he groaned, now, could she be sure he was there. And even that had stopped.

  There were no manacles here. No chains. That had been the first surprise. The restraints upon her arms – presumably attached to rope, and from which she was suspended in mock crucifixion, arms outstretched, toes barely touching the floor – were broad and made of soft, padded leather. They did not cut, or chafe. It was almost as if they were made for comfort. This fact – this collision of opposites – alarmed and disturbed her for reasons she could not place.

  Her restraints also removed from her any ability to make sound other than by speech. Speaking was what they wanted her to do. So she would not do it. Eventually, when the need to assert her presence – to confirm her existence – became too much to bear, she began to talk to herself, to break the silence of the void. She had done this only when she thought they weren’t there. Then she had heard him – her gaoler – shambling in the darkness, and knew she was not alone – perhaps had never been. She had cursed her stupidity, then, reviewing all the words that had spewed out of her mouth.

  How he was able to move about in this pitch black – to do whatever it was he was doing, with the scrape and clank of metal – she could not guess. She told herself that all these things had been contrived to dishearten her, to break her spirit. Telling herself that did not lessen their effect, of course. But she knew nothing about the box, and resolved to offer them nothing else. She would remain silent, no matter what. Tancred could not be allowed to know her mission – her real mission.

  The reliquary box, meanwhile, had been placed in the centre of the chamber before them. She knew this because sometimes it was illuminated by a single, shaded candle that lit the box itself and nothing else. That was Tancred’s idea – to confront them with the source of their suffering, the symbol of their guilt. At first she had fixed her eyes upon it. It was the only visible point of reference in the entire chamber, an anchor for her drifting perspective. But it was not itself anchored to anything. Its dim image seemed to float in the formless black, to advance and recede, to tip and sway. She could not even tell if it was placed on the ground, or upon a table, or hanging on the end of a rope. Sometimes she seemed to see other shapes within it – once, a grinning skull-like face of such leering intensity that she had to close her eyes.

  Then there was the time when their host – not Tancred, but the other, whose domain this was – moved closer to the candle than he had meant, and his face had been revealed. It was partly in shadow. But for a fleeting moment, in the candle’s sickly yellow light, she saw it clear.

  Out of all the terrible things that now surrounded her, this – the face of their silent captor – was the most disturbing of all.

  He was out there now. He had taken Galfrid down once today – if it was indeed day. She had heard the sounds as he had worked upon him, then the grunts as he heaved him back up. Galfrid himself had not even cried out this time. It would be her turn next.

  TANCRED DID NOT believe in torture. He believed in punishment. An eye for an eye – or for an offence against a pilgrim. A head struck off, a tongue torn out. Evil had to be destroyed without hesitation. Rooted out. If there was a limb that was infected – literally or morally – Tancred would not balk at personally hacking away the offending part. Was it not Matthew who said: “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into Hell”?

  Like Reynald de Châtillon, Tancred would also not hesitate in having someone thrown from the battlements in order to make a point. Unlike Reynald, however – whose example he regarded as the worst form of moral depravity – he did not do it because he enjoyed it. The idea was abhorrent to him. Contrary to what many believed, inflicting pain gave him no pleasure. Nor did it repel him. It was neither here nor there. And that was how it should be. Those who did gain pleasure from it, he regarded as weak. He felt the same, in fact, about those who gained pleasure from anything.

  Tancred did what he did because it was right. It was necessary. Others spoke of doing things for their beliefs, but to Tancred the whole notion of “belief” was something that belonged to the morally and spiritually inferior. Tancred did not act as he did because he believed. He did so because he knew. Because God told him so – and God was infallible. These certainties were more real and immediate to him than any matter of mere flesh. Of course, God could be merciful, but mercy was not Tancred’s calling. He knew better than most that mercy was the enemy of moral clarity. It was the thing that stayed the hand when there was greatest need to strike. Evil did not respect or listen to mercy, and was not worthy of it. It exploited it, depended on it. And God had need to be wrathful from time to time: to smite, to punish. It was then that Tancred served as His right hand. His agent on earth.

  Despite his contempt for the corporeal world, Tancred also abhorred deformation of the flesh. Those who were born imperfect were corrupt – their bodies warped by their spiritual deficiencies. But those who deliberately mutilated the flesh for their own ends were something worse: defilers of God’s work – men who inflicted their own corruption upon the bodies of others. Like those who had crucified Christ. Wounds inflicted as direct punishment for a misdeed, injuries as a result of misadventure, scars of battle – all served a useful purpose. They were reminders, warnings. But he would play no part in torture that left its mark upon the flesh.

  Fortunately, he had occasionally encountered men who were more creative in their approach – and he was pragmatic enough, when instructed to do so, to have employed them to achieve necessary ends.

  One such man was Fell the Maker.

  It was Fell who shambled out there in the darkness like some blind cave creature. Fell who administered methods of persuasion which gave even Tancred de Mercheval pause.

  He knew exactly how far a bone could bend without breaking. How much a joint could be twisted and stretched without lasting damage. How long a body could hang suspended by its limbs – to the point of unbearable exhaustion, and no further. How much extreme heat or cold a body could take, how long it could be denied air without dying. None of these methods left marks upon the victim – not visible ones, at least. That was Fell’s great skill, his contribution to human wisdom. Fell the Gentle, some called him. By the end, his guests would tell their interrogators everything. Anything.

  Yet he himself asked nothing of them. He did not engage directly with them at all, except through his various devices. He never spoke. There were sounds, but to Mélisande, they seemed more the snuffling of some animal. The snort of a cow. The grunt of a pig.

  Mélisande had seen and withstood many physical hardships – more than most men could stand. But what terrified her now was not the threat to her body. It was not the anticipation of pain, or the fear of death. It was the slow realisation that, to Fell, she was dead already. An object without significance or meaning. A piece of meat. To suffer and die – that was a known quantity to her. It might even be just, and heroic. It was the Christian way. But to cease to have meaning, to no longer have any connection to this world, to be nothing... That was true terror.

  There w
ere shouts from outside. Among them, a distant voice, echoing strangely, which she felt sure was familiar. It was him. It had to be him. She heard Fell grunt in the darkness – the first time she had been aware of him responding to anything outside of this dismal, lightless world. She could not tell if it was an expression of alarm, or a kind of laugh. But her heart leapt. The breaking of the spell – the sudden piercing of this weird, hermetic domain – had spurred her. A momentary thrill of reconnection. She was not yet lost. Not yet abandoned.

  No sooner had it begun than it ceased. Cold silence. Mélisande heaved on her bindings, trying to raise herself up, bracing herself for the things she knew Fell would have in store. But also stirring her spirit, her muscles, trying to remember – to prepare.

  The shouts outside... She was sure now that it was him. It had to be.

  “He’s coming, Galfrid, I know it,” she said, not caring if their gaoler heard her. “Just a little longer... A little longer...”

  But Galfrid – if Galfrid it was – said nothing.

  LIV

  TANCRED DE MERCHEVAL had reached the third step of the wooden stair when Aldric’s voice stopped him.

  “My lord...” Tancred turned.

  He was not used to being stopped or summoned. It did not please him. There had been a time when he had been a dutiful servant, what he would now call a “lackey”. He had jumped to all commands, had respected all in authority. His superiors had been many – his knight, his Baron, his Count, his Duke, his King. Then his Temple Master, the Grand Master, his Holiness the Pope. For years he had done their bidding without question – even with good cheer – safe in the knowledge that he was promoting the cause of order – of good – in his small corner of the universe. He had been an optimist, but not a blind one. He was well-read in philosophy, and had arrived at his point of view based on both his own experience and the accumulated wisdom of the ages. He fervently believed that if each performed their duties well, in however small a way, then all their small efforts could come together to create something wonderful. A better world, in which each contributed his carefully-shaped stone to the construction of the great cathedral. In this way, the honest peasant toiling in the field was as worthy of respect – and as important to the harmony of the cosmos – as any prince or bishop.