Borrowed Time (19 page)

Her own voice strong, Joan called back an answer. “In the name of God, leave France, go back to your home, and you will have no need to fear me.” No answer came from the English. Joan spoke again, much more quietly, so only those on the wall could hear. “There is no chance of victory here. They want me, but I will not willingly be imprisoned by them again for they seek only my death. I ask no more than that you grant me time to fortify myself inside the keep and then you are free to go where you may and say what you will to ensure your safety.”

Kate swallowed nervously, looking sidelong down the ranks of the mercenary knights.

But every one of the knights just gazed forward, their faces as hard and uncompromising as the stone of the wall. None of them replied to the herald.

In a little while an English knight in fine armor rode up to the herald and spoke to him, then the herald raised his voice once more. “If you surrender the witch, you shall be granted your lives, your freedom, and one hundred gold crowns apiece, this sworn to on the word of Sir Costain of Kent.”

“You may accept the offer as long as you grant me time to get into the keep,” Joan murmured to the knights. “This alone I ask of you.”

After a long moment, Andre shook his head, looking disgusted. “We can’t, Maid.”

“I thought all you believed in now was money,” Kate said.

“That’s the problem with the Maid, you see.” Andre smiled toward Joan, then turned a grim face back to the English. “She makes you believe in things again. She makes you believe in her, she makes you believe in yourself, and she makes you believe in dying for France.” Andre raised his own voice to a shout. “You won’t have the Maid from us while we live, you English pig! You can take your filthy gold to hell!”

The herald and the English knight rode back to their lines. There was another pause, messengers riding down the English line calling out orders, then a line of archers stood out. “Beware the longbows,” Joan warned Kate.

The archers bent their bows, then as the trumpets sounded again they launched their arrows as the men-at-arms and knights charged the keep.

It’s not real. It’s a game. It’s not real. It’s a game.
Kate kept repeating that in her mind to keep from running and hiding as the English reached the keep. Most of the French knights had gone down to hold the gate, but five stood with Joan and Kate along the wall as the English soldiers reached it and began trying to boost their comrades up onto it.

Kate’s sword was out and she was actually using it in a real fight, trying not to think about the fact that she was really trying to hurt and kill. Men-at-arms fell back, but one of the French knights on the wall took two arrows and fell, then another was stabbed in the throat by an English soldier who had made it up. That soldier died at the hands of the remaining three French knights with Joan and Kate, then in a momentary lull they heard a cry from below. “The gate is going!”

“To me!” Joan cried, and Kate and the other three knights followed as Joan hurtled down the stairs to the courtyard, where the improvised barricade was coming apart under the pressure of the attackers and several French knights already lay dead or dying. Men-at-arms were coming over the abandoned wall. “We cannot hold here! To the keep!” Joan ordered.

The remaining knights at the gate fell back, joined by those with Joan, and the small group backed their way toward the entrance to the keep, fighting the mass of English soldiers boiling through the gate and over the wall. One more French knight fell, then another, then as Joan, Kate and two other surviving knights reached the keep only Andre stood between them and the English. “Close the entry!” Andre shouted.

“I’ll not leave you outside the door!” Joan cried in return. “I was so abandoned at Compiegne and I will not do the same to a brave and loyal knight!”

But as Andre raised his sword for another blow at the onrushing English, longbow archers who had entered the courtyard released their arrows, three of their shafts slamming into him, piercing the armor and leaving Andre swaying for a moment. “I am done,” he said in a slightly puzzled voice, then fell forward into his attackers, his final collapse holding back the enemy a little longer.

The surviving two knights joined Joan and Kate in levering closed the broken door to the keep, wedging wreckage around it to help hold as the door began splintering under blows from outside.

Joan looked upwards. “Kate, go up and see the state of the tower above. There is too much light there. There may be an opening the English can use to enter above us.”

Kate took the rickety, decayed stairs at the best speed she could manage in armor, the wildlife nesting in the tower taking flight. The part of Kate’s mind not filled with fear noted the many nests and the dried out old wood and realized the tower’s interior was a tinder box waiting for a spark.

The first level up was choked with more debris and broken wood, the remains of furniture and chests. Kate staggered up the next set of stairs, which creaked ominously under her weight, and onto the second level, bright with light streaming in through a breach in the tower wall close to two meters wide and just as tall. Reaching the opening, Kate gazed downward to where the English were readying tree trunks with the branches lopped off short to form improvised ladders. She went back to the stairs, yelling down to be heard over the clash of fighting below. “Joan, there’s a gap in the tower wall two levels up. They’re getting ready to try to come through here.”

No answer. Despite her tiredness Kate went back down the sagging stairs to the first level and shouted her message to the figures she could now see below.

Joan looked upwards, then to the door. “Lady Kate and I will hold the tower above.”

One of the French knights nodded. “We shall hold here as long as breath is in us, Maid. Bless us before you leave us, please, that we may die in God’s grace.”

“I am but a servant of God, not one of His angels,” Joan protested.

“Please, Maid!”

Tears spilling from her eyes, Joan fumbled through a blessing of the two knights as they leaned against the crumbling door. “I come, Kate. Hold the breach until I reach you.”

Kate had to pause to rest before lurching up the stairs one more time, one of the steps cracking into fragments and nearly tossing her down. But she made it up again, then to the side of the gap in the tower, where the end of a tree trunk could now be seen just above the bottom of the breach.

She had seen enough movies to know what to do. Kate planted her foot against the tree trunk and shoved as hard as she could. The trunk shifted, to the sounds of yells below. A loud report of metal on stone sounded nearby as an arrow struck the tower. More archers were bending their longbows, aiming at her, but Kate thought of Joan and the knights holding the door below and somehow nerved herself to stay in the opening long enough to shove the trunk again, so that it toppled to one side.

Then Kate whirled back into cover, leaning against the inside of the tower, breathing heavily as arrows rattled through the opening and struck the far wall.

Joan came up the stairs and to the other side of the breach, smiling at Kate through tears. “There is little time left. If you would leave, leave now.”

Kate stared, her mouth hanging open, then she shook her head, aware that she was crying as freely as Joan. “I won’t leave you.” The words she had never managed to say burst out. “I love you.”

“I love you as well, Kate.” But then Joan’s eyes locked on Kate’s, and Joan somehow read the meaning there. Kate waited for the look of anger, of denial, but Joan’s smile just saddened. “That is the way of it? Alas, my good Lady Kate, your love is not the kind I could ever return. Even were you a man, my only Lord can be my God.”

“You don’t hate me?”

“Hate you? I have been judged by others, Kate. I know how little such judgments say of the truth. How could I hate a woman such as you? My Lord bid us love all, and though I have great bitterness toward the English even they would I willingly grant leave to depart France in peace if they would do so. But there is no evil in your heart, Kate. Your love is not such as I could ever feel, but it is pure nonetheless. My voices told me this of you, and now you see again how true they are.”

More arrows flew through the breach in the wall, but this time they trailed smoke and heat. Joan took a quick look out, then leaned back, shaking her head, for the first time showing a trace of fear. “They seek to force us out of the tower by setting fire to it.”

Kate had thought she couldn’t be more frightened, but now realized there was always another intensity worse than the last. “This thing will burn like a torch.” A realization broke through her fear. “I can’t hear the fighting at the door.”

Joan nodded. “You are closer. Check the stairs while I guard here.”

Scuttling to the stairs, Kate looked downward. The thud of weapons against wood or their clang against armor no longer came up from below, but she could hear the sounds of movement among the wreckage as well as something else, a crackling sound which she couldn’t place for a moment.

Then Kate heard the crackling sound growing louder amid alarmed shouts of “Outside! Outside!” in archaic English, and smoke began curling upwards from the ground level in rapidly growing billows as the shouts faded.

Now was definitely the time to panic, but instead as Kate looked toward Joan she felt an odd resolve settle over her.

Kate rejoined Joan at the breach in the tower. “The English won’t be coming up the stairs,” Kate gasped.

Joan looked back, seeing the smoke now streaming upwards through the stair opening. “The fire has caught below.”

“Yes. The English were down there, but I think they ran from the fire. The other two knights must be dead.”

Joan leaned back against one side of the breach while Kate rested against the other side. The fire venting up the tower was sucking in air through the breach, keeping this spot clear of smoke and relatively cool despite the growing heat. But the edges of the stairwell up here were smoldering, ready themselves to catch fire, and then the floor beneath them would burn as well. “It seems, my good Lady Kate, that you have saved me from one pyre only to land both of us inside another. I confess to you a secret I tried to hide from my captors. I fear death by fire. There is little I fear, but I fear that so very much.”

“We can still escape,” Kate urged.

“I told you to go, dearest Kate.”

“No. Both of us. We can both get away from here.”

Joan’s eyes locked on hers. “And afterwards to continue my mission?”

Kate longed to say ‘yes,’ to lie to Joan, anything to get her out of this trap, but her traitor lips shaped the truth. “No. We’d be gone from France, from this time, forever.”

Her eyes momentarily went distant, then Joan smiled at Kate even though her eyes still revealed her dread of the fire. “You must go. You need not die here. But my voices say that here is where I stand, here is where I stay.”

“Don’t listen to them!” Kate screamed. “They don’t care about you!”

“They do care,” Joan corrected, her eyes lit with an inner fire now as well. “But they only carry messages to me from my Lord. I always knew it would end. I wish it were not so soon, and I wish it were not to end in fire. But this is my mission, and I will not falter now. Others have died at my command, others have died for France. How can I flee and deny their sacrifice?”

“You have to die so you can keep inspiring people?” Kate yelled. “That’s awful. It’s not fair!”

Joan turned those intense eyes on Kate. “It is as God wills.”

“Then I won’t leave you.” Part of Kate was screaming in terror inside her, but she couldn’t go now. “You won’t face the fire alone.”

Joan’s answering smile held more gratitude than fear this time. She nodded to Kate and raised her sword in a salute. “Thank you, sister.”

Another tree trunk thudded against the breach in the wall. Joan and Kate both tried to shove it aside, but it was heavier than the first and soldiers below were holding it in place as men-at-arms climbed clumsily upward. The archers were firing again, trying to hit Joan and Kate as they struggled to move the tree trunk, but then the first of the men-at-arms reached the top.

Kate swung her sword and fought, side by side with Joan, trading blows with the attackers as one man-at-arms after another came up swinging. One, two, three attackers fell back and down, then in a moment’s gap before the next man-at-arms could reach them the two women shoved at the trunk again and this time it shifted, then slid away.

Flames erupted through the floor behind them as the tower turned into a massive chimney feeding the blaze. The floor sagged suddenly as a beam gave way, and Kate staggered back on a still-intact portion of the floor, holding up her arms to protect her face against the heat, trying to keep terror from overwhelming her.

“Kate.” The voice was weak yet somehow penetrated the noise of the fire.

Looking down, Kate’s fright turned to horror as she saw Joan half-sitting, half-lying near the breach. The shaft of an arrow which had punched through Joan’s breast plate protruded a good foot from her chest. She must have been hit in the instant the tree trunk had been cast down. “Oh, God, no.” Kate fell to her knees beside Joan, momentarily unaware of the fire, the threat of the English forgotten. She reached toward the arrow shaft, then hesitated.

Joan, her face very pale, managed to turn her head to look at Kate. “Don’t. It is over . . . my sister.”

“It – It can’t be.” Kate shook her head, renewed tears running down her face and splashing onto Joan’s breastplate. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to live. To come back with me. You’re supposed to.”

“My mission,” Joan reminded Kate, her voice growing weaker. “My voices told me . . . it must end in fire . . . This is my Lord’s will . . . but, by His grace . . . you have given me a gift . . . that I die fighting . . . and never feel the flames.”

“No,” Kate moaned. “In my time you could be happy. You’d belong there. You deserve a better fate than this.”