Warlord (Outlaw 4) (35 page)

My heart banged at the sight of so many friends; and their battle skill was a joy to watch. Roland ran a man-at-arms through the belly, pulled his sword clear, whirled and blocked a scything blow from a yelling Knight of Our Lady. The Seigneur, though past his prime, was clearly still a fine warrior: he engaged a pair of knights simultaneously, swiftly dropped one with a slash to the ankles and stunned the other with a smashing pommel blow to the head. Little John killed another knight, and another, and within a couple of heartbeats a full-pitched battle was in progress. Reuben hurled a knife that smacked into the chest of a crossbowman who was aiming his weapon at Little John’s back – and by now there were half a dozen dead and dying soldiers of Our Lady sprawled across the floor.

The Master shouted: ‘Eustace! Eustace!’ and the black-eyed fiend burst through the main door at the western end of the chapel, leading a crowd of men-at-arms. The soldiers rushed at my friends, engaging them in a mad, hacking mêlée – a whirl of sharp cries, clashing metal, glittering sword sweeps, and bright sprays of blood. My friends advanced in a line, Little John in the centre, his great axe swinging with a terrible rhythm; Roland on his left moved with a sinuous grace, his sword flickering out like a reptile’s tongue
to steal men’s lives. The Seigneur d’Alle’s style was old-fashioned, but he killed with a relentless ferocity and surprising energy. And all about the enemy knights were staggering, falling, bleeding, dying. I remember thinking:
These men, these Knights of Our Lady, could never have been true Templars, never
.

The Master shouted once more: ‘Eustace, the Grail!’ and rushed towards the altar at the east, shoving the slight form of Thomas out of his path. And without a moment’s hesitation, Sir Eustace left his men to their fate, coming fast on the Master’s heels. He gave my reeling squire a kick in the belly as he came level with my chair; Thomas, winded, sat down abruptly on the stone floor and dropped his knife, his plan to cut me free thwarted. I saw the Master reach the altar, grasp the square wooden box on its purple cushion and without the merest backward glance to see his men dying under the swords of their enemies, he headed towards the door in the northeastern corner of the chapel and disappeared through it.

Sir Eustace took three paces after him, then stopped. He turned towards me – bound, gagged and helpless in my chair – and swiftly pulled the lance-dagger from its broad leather sheath at his right side. He advanced on dancer’s feet and the killing blow, when it came, hurt no more than a heavy punch to the breast, a feeling of hard pressure rather than pain. I looked down in surprise to see Sir Eustace’s mailed sleeve, and his fist on the wooden handle, and the Holy Lance embedded deep in my chest, perhaps an inch or two to the left of my sternum.

He pulled it out with a wet tearing noise, a gust of stale lung air, and a gush of bright blood. And with the blood, the pain came roaring through me.

I looked up at his face, and he smiled at me, his amiable idiot’s grin. He saluted me by lifting the blood-smeared lance-dagger to his brow, and then he ran to the north-eastern corner of the chapel, and disappeared through the same door that had swallowed his Master.

Part Three

Chapter Nineteen

Young Alan is back with us again at Westbury a mere month after his last visit. He has been sent home in disgrace after savagely beating a fellow squire with his fists after some petty boys’ disagreement in Kirkton. The other lad’s father, Lord Stafford, is said to be extremely angry. And Marie, Alan’s mother, blames me.

‘It is your silly stories that have made him behave in this barbaric way, you old fool! You should know better at your age. I told you that you shouldn’t be wallowing in your violent past again, dredging up your blood-hungry tales; I told you that no good would come of it. And wasn’t I proved right?’

Although I dearly love her, she can be something of a shrew, my daughter-in-law.

‘Boys fight,’ I told her. ‘It is quite natural, but, if you wish, I will speak to young Alan about the matter.’

My grandson was unrepentant about his victory over the other boy: ‘He insulted the honour of our family, and so I was obliged to punish him,’ he said, and when I enquired further, he told me that the boy had been spreading the word among the other noblemen’s sons at
Kirkton that Alan’s great-grandfather, my own father Henry, had been a villein, who had been hanged as a thief by the Sheriff.

‘I told him all about the tale you are setting down, Grandpa, and the search for the “man you cannot refuse” who ordered your father’s death, and he went off and told everyone else. They all started to call me “plough boy” and “dirty serf”. And so I took my vengeance on him. I paid him back for his insolence. Tell me honestly, Grandpa, would you not have done the same thing yourself?’

I found it difficult to answer him: I might very well have done exactly the same in those circumstances; I well remembered a bully who called himself Guy who had tormented me when I was Alan’s age, and how I had been revenged upon him, but I knew that Marie would make my life a living hell if I did not try to teach the boy to behave himself in a civilized manner among his peers.

I scowled at him: ‘You are supposed to be learning how to be a knight, up there in Kirkton,’ I said sternly. ‘And a knight is a gentleman; he does not brawl like a tavern drunk with his fellows. Furthermore, Our Lord Jesus Christ has taught us that it is better to turn the other cheek when we are wronged. A true Christian knight would have forgiven his enemy for the wrong that had been done to him – he would have meekly turned away and given up his wrath for the sake of peace.’

At my age, after all that I have been through in this long life, I had thought myself beyond shame. But I felt the burn of shame then – it seemed as if my prating hypocrisy to my grandson were choking me – and young Alan could sense my falseness as keenly as a pig smells buried acorns.

‘Would you truly have forgiven a man who blackened your name like that; who insulted you and mocked you behind your back?’ asked Alan, his face blazing with innocence. He was honestly seeking the truth, desperately wanting to know how to be. I couldn’t look him in the eye: ‘The fruits of vengeance are almost always death and sorrow – for all concerned,’ I said, and I picked up a bundle of parchments. ‘Read this and you will see what happened to my good
friend Hanno, and to me, as a direct result of my seeking vengeance on the “man you cannot refuse”. And perhaps this will persuade you that revenge is a futile path, and that there is a greater wisdom for Mankind in Christ’s teachings.’ And I shoved the second part of this tale at him; partly for his education, partly to get him to stop looking at me that way.

I did not pass out, at least, not then. I watched, gagged, bound and bleeding, as the Master and Sir Eustace de la Falaise made their escape from the side door in the Bishop’s chapel in the Abbey of St Victor. The skirmish was over; the surviving Knights of Our Lady, only three or four of them, seeing their Master flee, made a fighting retreat to the main door and ran for it themselves, and Little John let them go. Presumably they went to summon reinforcements or raise the hue and cry within the Abbey – we did not tarry long enough to find out.

My bruised and weeping squire Thomas cut my bonds and, under Reuben’s direction, he made a rough pad from the altar cloth and strapped it tightly over the wound in my chest. The gag had been removed and I was free to speak, but, convinced that I had only moments left to live, I kept repeating to Reuben the same phrase over and over: ‘You must get word to Goody – you must tell her how I love her. Tell her I am sorry …’ But my breath was short and I could feel puffs of wet air seeping through the bloody bandage on my chest every time I tried to utter a word.

‘Shush, shush, now, Alan! Be quiet and save your strength,’ Reuben said to me, as he felt for the pulse in my neck. I could feel his cool hand on my skin, and the throbbing of my vein under his fingers. Reuben was frowning, looking at me oddly, almost with a kind of awe.

When the last wounded Knight of Our Lady had been dispatched, Little John came across to me. His blue eyes in that ruddy face stared into mine, and for once he didn’t make a crude jest. ‘We
must go now, Alan,’ he said. ‘You grip on tight to my neck. I shall carry you.’

‘What about Hanno?’ My breath hissed in my throat. Little John looked at my friend, sprawled in the chair next to mine, and he said: ‘The canons will give him a decent burial.’ And then he leaned forward and scooped me up in his arms, as if I was no heavier than a child’s doll.

We left the same way that Little John, Thomas and the d’Alles had entered: through the ruin of the window, the glittering shards crunching under their boots.

I was laid in the bed of a straw-filled wagon, and I saw Little John and my friends donning the robes of monks once more, five anonymous clerics and their wagon among the hundreds that streamed about the Abbey in the last few hours before Vespers and the closing of the gates.

And
then
I passed into oblivion.

I awoke to Robin’s long, handsome face, and a look of infinite concern in his grey eyes. I was in a narrow bed, in a small white-washed room, a cell of some kind. It was night-time and cold, and the room was lit by a single candle. But I knew somehow that it was not the same night as the fight in the chapel; I knew that I had been there for many days. I had a raging thirst, and a crushing ache along the whole of the left-hand side of my chest; a full bladder too.

‘I’m not dead,’ I said wonderingly. And then I said it again. ‘I’m not dead – am I?’

‘No,’ said Robin with a half-laugh. ‘You are not dead; and I sometimes think that you must be indestructible.’

‘Why am I not dead?’

‘Somebody stands a very good guard over you: God, the Devil, one of your myriad saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary …’

‘Not her.’

‘No, not her,’ Robin agreed.

‘You do. You stand guard over me.’

‘Well, I try to,’ he said, the candlelight turning his eyes to silver. ‘I cannot for the life of me say why: you are seldom grateful, you are far too wilful; you will not obey even the simplest of orders from your lord – I told you to leave these people alone, but would you ever listen—’

‘They told you to tell me to leave them alone.’

He said nothing.

‘How long have you known that it was Brother Michel who ordered my father’s death?’ I asked. ‘How long have you known that he was the Master, the “man you cannot refuse”?’

Silence.

‘And why did you never tell me?’

Another pause.

‘We will talk about it in the morning,’ said Robin finally. ‘You are not going anywhere for a while; and neither am I. Here,’ he lifted a clay cup from the table beside the bed, ‘Reuben says I am to make sure that you drink all of this.’

And he cupped my neck and helped me to drink. Then he gave me water and, without a shred of embarrassment, he helped me to relieve myself into a chamber pot below the bed. These simple actions exhausted me, and I fell back into the cot, barely able to keep my eyes open. My chest was a jagged cage of fire, but I could feel whatever it was that Reuben had prepared for me to drink beginning to soothe and ease my pains, spreading its soft, supple fingers, kneading the pain away around my whole body.

‘Where am I?’ I asked Robin as he picked up the candle and prepared to leave.

‘In the Hotel-Dieu, on the Île de la Cité,’ Robin replied with more than a suggestion of a twinkle in his eye. ‘We are guests of the venerable Bishop Maurice de Sully.’

‘
Situs inversus viscerum
,’ said Reuben, relishing the three Latin words. ‘Your insides are the wrong way around, Alan. And for that
reason you are breathing today, and no other. You have perfectly normal heart, lungs, liver and lights, they are just on the opposite side of the body from most other people. You heart is on the right-hand side of the body, not the left as usual. I should have known in Cyprus three years ago when I removed that crossbow bolt from your right side, and couldn’t find your liver. This is the second time your life has been saved by your condition.’

‘That’s it? He stabbed me in the heart but my heart wasn’t where it was supposed to be – so he missed?’ I said. It sounded wonderfully absurd.

‘Well, he also missed the major veins and arteries, but yes, that’s it. It’s not even all that uncommon – I remember reading a treatise in Montpellier recently by a much-fêted Arab physician who claimed that one person in ten thousand had been made by God this way. Think of it as being left-handed, but inside your body. No more sinister than that. Ha-ha!’

I acknowledged his feeble joke with a smile. But then Reuben’s face turned grave: ‘I’m not saying it was easy for me: your left lung collapsed and filled with fluid, and I had to drain it with a hollow reed, through a water valve – you will have noticed that beautifully stitched cut under your left armpit – but I won’t confuse your simple brain with the details of my extraordinary skill as a surgeon, nor of my miraculous healing powers as a physician …’

‘Or your world-renowned modesty …’ I murmured.

‘… but in short, you are alive because of the way your organs are arranged – that is it!’ Reuben’s dark face was lit by a grin. And I could not but be warmed by his smile and comforted by his presence at my bedside.

‘I thank you,’ I said, smiling wanly back at him, ‘and I give thanks to God for your miraculous healing powers.’

And I meant it, but while I was grateful to Reuben and his skill, I knew in my heart that I had been saved by God, and that St
Michael, the warrior archangel to whom I often prayed, must also have had a hand in my deliverance.

It was then three weeks since the fight in the chapel, and I had spent all that time recovering from my wound in the small cell in the Hotel-Dieu. A rib had been smashed by Eustace’s strike, my lung had been punctured, and I had lost a lot of blood – but, by the grace of God, the assistance of St Michael and, of course, my undeniably skilled physician friend, I was still alive.