Warlord (Outlaw 4) (52 page)

We celebrated yet another cessation of hostilities with a lavish dinner in the big round audience room in the keep of Château-Gaillard – a great number of the King’s senior knights and barons were there – and, naturally, when we had eaten and drunk to repletion, the talk turned to the war. ‘How should we pass our time during this irksome truce?’ That was the question on every man’s lips.

My master Robert, Earl of Locksley, had the answer. He stood up from his place at the high table, a place of honour that only Richard’s closest barons enjoyed, and raised a silver goblet: ‘Sire, if I may say a few words,’ he said in his battle-voice, and his tone caused a hush to fall around the room. ‘We have done mighty deeds this past year,’ Robin said, ‘and we have lost many dear companions …’ There was a murmur of assent around the circular
room. ‘But now we have a truce, for however long it lasts, and our righteous war has been suspended for a time. We have sworn before Almighty God that we shall not trouble King Philip – even though his liegemen still hold many lands and castles that belong by right to our noble King Richard.’

‘Hear, hear,’ roared a royal voice from not very far away.

‘So what is to be done? Shall we sit in idleness, wrapped in costly furs, supping good wine by our hearth-fires and toasting our toes?’

‘Sounds like an excellent idea to me!’ said William the Marshal, with a tipsy grin. There was a burst of laughter.

‘You would not be able to sit idle by your warm hearth for long, Marshal, even if I had you chained there,’ called out the King, to more laughter.

‘My friends, we are men of the sword, we are knights sworn to King Richard’s service, not sleepy, muddle-brained, old drunkards – well, most of us are,’ said Robin, inclining his head towards the Marshal. More laughter, and the Marshal scowled grotesquely like a mystery-player and shook his fist in mock anger at the Earl of Locksley.

‘My friends,’ Robin continued, his voice deepening and his face becoming serious. ‘We are knights sworn to Richard’s service, and yet there is one unruly baron who yet defies his rightful King; there is one who has rebelled against his lawful lord and with whom we have made no treaty, one who is not protected by this truce. Can we call ourselves the King’s loyal men and not punish those who insult him? I say that we must hunt down this rebellious dog and destroy him!’ Muttering rumbled about the tables like wine barrels on cobblestones; the company had become uneasy – a good many men at the feast had at one time or another rebelled against Richard.

‘I speak, of course, of the traitor Viscount Aimar of Limoges,’ said Robin, to a general sigh of relief. ‘He is a wealthy man, with
a hoard of silver and jewels, and his sun-lit southern lands are wide and rich.’ More appreciative murmurs. ‘And I say that, come the spring, we must go south and teach this proud rascal that our King will not be mocked! In the spring, let us go down to the Limousin, punish this haughty Viscount Aimar, and take our swords to this plump nest of rebels!’

A few cheers, but most knights confined themselves with nodding in benevolent agreement, and beginning to discuss with their fellows the delightful prospect of looting the rich territory of the Limousin.

The next day, in the mid-afternoon twilight of the short winter day, the King called me to his private chamber: he wanted me to play a little music for him, he said, to cheer a dreary season. But the real reason he summoned me, I soon discovered, was that he wanted me to play the informer.

‘What was all that nonsense about Viscount Aimar?’ he asked me. ‘Why does Locksley so urgently want me to go down and have at him?’

‘He has rebelled against you, sire,’ I said.

‘I know that,’ the King said impatiently. ‘He’s a fool and Philip has sent him silver and knights and turned his head with extravagant promises. But other men in Aquitaine have rebelled too. Adémar of Angoulême, for example: he’s made an alliance with Philip, too, and he’s a much bigger fish than Aimar. Why does Robin want me to go after the Viscount of Limoges?’

I stood there flat-footed, not knowing what to say to my King. I knew, of course, exactly why Robin wished the army to go south and attack Aimar. And, while he had not actually sworn me to secrecy, it was understood that one did not discuss Robin’s private affairs with anyone, king or commoner. I mumbled something about my lord being a loyal man, who hated all of Richard’s enemies equally.

The King looked hurt; his bright blue eyes clouded with sorrow:
‘My good Blondel,’ he said, ‘we have fought together, side by side, on many a bloody field, over many long years; we made the Great Pilgrimage together to Outremer and battled the Saracen hordes; you came to Germany when I was in despair and languishing in darkness, and you found me and brought me back into the light. Do not speak falsehoods to me now. Why does the Earl of Locksley wish me to humble Aimar of Limoges?’

I could not bear it; I felt that I was being pulled in two, my loyalty to my lord and to my King tugging my soul in different directions. And so I answered him.

‘There is a treasure,’ I said. ‘There is a great and wonderful treasure that Aimar of Limoges, or rather that one of his relatives has in his possession. And my lord the Earl of Locksley burns to possess it.’

‘Not that same treasure that he went off on a goose chase in Burgundy to discover last year?’ said the King.

‘The same.’

‘What do you know of this treasure?’ he said, looking at me keenly. ‘Have you ever seen it? Is it truly valuable?’

‘I have not seen it,’ I said, ignoring the first part of his question. ‘But I believe that it is truly valuable – perhaps the most valuable object in Christendom and certainly something that many men: counts, kings, even the Pope himself, would give a fortune to have in their possession.’

‘I think I should like to see this treasure,’ said the King.

Chapter Twenty-eight

That spring Richard’s knights and Mercadier’s
routiers
ravaged the Limousin without mercy: and Robin and I played our parts, too. We burned farmsteads, stole livestock and destroyed crops, although I would not allow my men to despoil churches – it was Lent, the season in which all Christian warriors are expected to observe the Truce of God and lay down their arms, but we served King Richard, and he was not a man to allow the strictures of the Church to stand in his way. So, may God forgive us, we fought all through that March even though it was Lent, harrying Viscount Aimar and his knights from manor to manor. We ate meat and eggs, too, when we could get them, but we left places of worship unmolested. It was a sop, a gesture, but my men were not unhappy at that curb: in battle we all need God’s protection, and it would not do to anger Him by stealing from His house. However, I felt the dark shadow of guilt on my soul during that southern spring of blood and fire: I believed Richard and his barons’ enthusiasm for the harrying of the Limousin, and the relentless pursuit of Count Aimar and his men, might have had a good deal to do with my talk of the fabulous ‘treasure’ in his possession. These rich lands were
ruined, and many poor peasants were put out of their hovels, their meagre wealth snatched, their children brought to starvation, because Robin and I had moved the King to make it so. Such is war; but I felt the burden of it as a heavy weight on my conscience.

I do not know how Robin came into the knowledge that the Master and the remaining Knights of Our Lady had taken refuge with Viscount Aimar, but Robin had many friends in Paris, and all over France, who had been searching for news of the Master for nearly five years now, and so perhaps a better question would have been why had we not uncovered his whereabouts sooner. From the little that Robin had gleaned, it seemed that the Master and his men had been in hiding on the far side of the Pyrenees, in lands that the original members of the Order would have campaigned over in their glory days fighting the Moors. Doubtless, the Master still had allies there. But recently, Robin’s informants had told him, he had grown in confidence and forsaken the wild lands beyond mountains and had taken up a more comfortable position with his cousin Viscount Aimar – exactly as Bishop de Sully had predicted. And one thing was certain: wherever the Master went, the treasure we sought, the Grail, would go, too.

Whenever Robin spoke of the Grail, which was not often, I noticed that he became strangely animated; and I confess I was puzzled by this. Robin, as I have often mentioned, was not a godly man. Or perhaps I should say he was not a man who respected the Church or subscribed to its teachings, and yet this Grail, this object that was said to have once contained Our Lord’s sacred blood, seemed to have seized his imagination. I think he pretended to himself that it was the vessel’s worldly value that drew him; for it surely would have fetched a mountain of gold if it were shown to be the genuine article. But I think there was more to it than his usual lust for money; in my private heart, I think that Robin was searching for an object that could demonstrate for him the truth – or otherwise – of the Christian faith. For him, the Grail was the
embodiment of God – and I dreaded the likely discovery that this thing, which was claimed to have once held the holy blood of Jesus Christ and to possess miraculous powers of life and death, was merely an ancient, dusty bowl.

At this time, I was determined to be indifferent to the Grail – I could not afford to allow myself to believe in its wonders and then to have my hopes dashed. It must be, I told myself firmly, it must be no more than an old bowl, as Bishop de Sully had suggested, merely an object to be used in a bit of mummery to relieve credulous folk of their money. I was aided in this discipline of the mind, this denial of the possibility of the Grail’s authenticity, by the fact that it was, for me, irrevocably stained with death and surrounded by a dark aura of sadness: for the sake of this object my father had been hounded from Paris; in its name both he and Hanno had been murdered before my eyes.

But where the Grail was, there would the Master be. And I nursed my hatred of him to my bosom. If Robin wished to pursue this Grail, and to persuade King Richard to come south with his army, I was happy to follow him, for this path would lead me to the Master and my long-delayed revenge. And I felt in my bones then, in the last weeks of March, in the Year of the Incarnation eleven hundred and ninety-nine, that my vengeance was imminent: for we had Viscount Aimar and his few surviving men cornered, trapped at last in the tiny castle of Châlus-Chabrol, some fifteen miles south-west of Limoges.

While Richard’s men surrounded the castle – a simple affair at the top of a steep round hill, with a curtain wall and one round tower for a keep – we Locksley folk made our main camp to the west of the fortress on the flatter lands on the other side of the river. The castle foolishly defied us – for there cannot have been more than a handful of defenders, forty at most. But the defenders did include at least one man-at-arms in a white surcoat with a blue cross in a black-bordered shield on the chest. He was not a
fellow I recognized, but my spirits rose when I saw him on the third day of the siege, leaning over the curtain wall to take a shot with a crossbow at a squad of Robin’s green-clad cavalry, which happened to be riding past. He missed the shot; it flew a dozen yards wide. But I was cheered by the glimpse of the device on his chest: if the Knights of Our Lady were here, that meant Robin’s information was true, and I grimly looked forward to renewing my acquaintance with the Master and Sir Eustace de la Falaise, when the castle inevitably fell.

Richard was at that time perhaps the most experienced man in Christendom in the art of siege warfare: he was not going to be troubled for long by an insignificant fortification such as Châlus. Indeed, his engineers had already been at work for three days, labouring under the cover of a stout canvas-and-wood shelter, digging in shifts, night and day, and burrowing under the very walls of the castle.

The miners would soon complete a broad tunnel right under the outer fortifications. The tunnel would be prevented from collapsing under the weight of the walls above by wooden pillars and planks, which formed the walls and roof of the excavation. When the engineers had determined that the tunnel was directly under the curtain wall, its dark cavity would be packed with faggots of brushwood, old logs and many barrels of pig fat, which would be set alight. The fierce blaze inside the tunnel would burn right through the wooden planks that supported its ceiling, and, once the inferno had consumed them, the tunnel would collapse under the weight from above – with God’s blessing, also bringing the stone wall of the castle tumbling down, and thus opening a breach in the defences.

Our knights would then charge up the steep slope and pour through the breach, and the merciless slaughter of the garrison would begin. They were fools to defy us; it was merely a matter of time before we would be inside Château Châlus-Chabrol, and
under the accepted rules of warfare, because they had defied us, their lives were forfeit. Had they surrendered immediately, Richard might well have shown his customary mercy and pardoned them all.

While I was reasonably certain that the Master was inside the castle, my first glimpse of him was something of a shock. I was with Robin and a dozen of his archers, completing a discreet patrol at dusk on foot around the bottom of the hill on which the castle stood. For all its meagre number of defenders, the castle still managed to post half a dozen sentries, who could be glimpsed at all hours of the day or night – no more than a helmeted head showing briefly on the battlements, a black ball against the skyline. Our archers would occasionally take a pot-shot at these men, but Robin eventually ordered them to stop; we were short of arrows, and they must be husbanded for the assault. Besides, as the enemy rarely showed their heads for long, so far no sentry had been harmed. As we strolled along the track at the bottom of the hill, I looked up at the steep grassy slope and the wall at the top of it. I could make out the tall dark shape of the round tower on the far side of the castle, and to my right, outside the walls and halfway up the slope, I could see the broad squat structure that housed the entrance to the mine, and a line of Richard’s engineers burdened down with bundles of thick staves and barrels, hurrying in and out of the housing. My eye was caught by movement on the wall immediately above us: two figures, one a monk, the other a young man with bright red hair cradling a crossbow. The monk was pointing at the line of scurrying engineers, seemingly urging the crossbowman to shoot at them. The man-at-arms lifted his bow and loosed. The quarrel went wide, but I did not care where it struck: I was staring in shock at the monk. Without a doubt it was the Master; even from a hundred yards away, at dusk and looking up at such a great height, I could recognize his dark hair, cut in the tonsure, and his gaunt features. He looked strangely innocent;
I could easily imagine him speaking in quiet, kindly tones to the crossbowman and urging him not to lose heart but to reload and try again.