Warlord(150)

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.