Warlord(88)

I had my legs underneath me by that point but I stopped myself from diving at him – he would have gutted me like a fish. Instead, I half-stood and took a step towards him – and swayed to the right just in time as his blade plunged towards my belly. His right arm passed through the space between my ribs and my left arm, and I clamped his forearm with my elbow against my waist, and curled my left hand around to grasp his upper arm – so trapping his right arm and knife immobile against my body. My right hand had been moving at the same time, and I plunged a hard index finger into his left eye, and felt a popping squelch that caused him to scream with rage and pain. He wrestled his knife arm free, and roaring, his left hand cupping his damaged eye, he slashed at me again with the blade, and I pulled back to avoid its slice. Then he stabbed again, lunging forward with his right leg, like a swordsman, and I moved with him, forward and left, dodging the strike, my weight on my right leg. I lifted my left leg chest high and stamped down as hard as I could on the inside of his forward right knee, pushing the joint outwards, dislocating it with a brisk pop, and causing him to splash screaming to the cell floor, half-turned away from me. I punched down hard, using all the weight of my shoulders, and smashed my fist into the back of his neck. There was a muted crack and a bolt of agony shot up my wrist: but he flopped down face-first into the filth, and I was on him as fast as a hunting weasel. Both my knees crashed into his back, with my full weight behind them, pinning him to the cell floor. I punched him again, hard in the back of the neck – and then leaned my left forearm on the base of his skull, grabbed a handful of greasy hair with my right hand, and kept his face firmly pressed into the slurry on the floor. His knife was lost, but his arms flailed wildly about him as I bore down with my full strength, mashing his head into the six inches of liquid sewage that covered the stone floor. He wriggled and kicked, but I held him there. He gave one last desperate heave that nearly unseated me, but I kept my place, my fifteen stones of weight between his shoulder blades – and his mouth and nose below the stinking surface.

Finally, he moved no more.

When I was certain he was dead, I scrabbled around in the slurry and found the knife. Tucking it in belt, my chest still heaving, my right hand a blur of agony, I retook my place against the wall and offered up a long-overdue prayer to Almighty God, St Michael and all the other saints who, between them, once again had preserved me from the wrath of my enemies.

The door crashed open; again light flooded the cell and two of the Provost’s men-at-arms stood in the doorway.

‘Which of you is Sir Alan Dale?’ said one of the guards.

I lifted my aching right hand.

‘You have been called,’ he said, looking at me doubtfully. ‘Will you come with us peacefully, or must we come down there and bind you?’





Chapter Seventeen



When I stumbled out of that cell, dripping, stinking, half-blinded by the daylight, I was astonished to find that the first person I saw was Roland d’Alle.

‘Good day to you, cousin,’ he said.

I squinted at him, and then I saw that beyond this knight, who had just publicly acknowledged our kinship, were the familiar figures of Thomas and Hanno. The Bavarian was grinning like a gargoyle, and Thomas was frowning and holding out a large blue cloak for me to wear. I waved my young squire and his voluminous cloak away. And ignoring the insincere offer of a supporting arm from Roland, I walked, head high, out of the arched gates of the Grand Chastelet and a dozen yards to the right by the river bank.

‘Wait here,’ I said, and fumbling at the linen belt that secured my braies, and the ties that kept up my hose, I walked down the earthen bank and plunged into the river.

If I had spent a week in the Seine, scrubbing my body raw with soap and a stiff brush, I don’t think I would have felt truly clean, but after I had removed shoes, hose, braies and chemise – and let them float away downstream, and splashed and washed as best I could in the cold, brownish water, I did feel a little better. And, wrapped in Thomas’s large cloak and naked as a baby underneath, I walked barefoot up the Rue St-Denis, and explained to Roland and my men what I thought had happened in the gaol.

It all came out in a gabbling, barely intelligible rush, for I was feeling the mind-spinning effects now of my dance with Death. ‘It was another attempt to murder me – obviously. The “man you cannot refuse”, the Master, or whatever you want to call him – my enemy – that bastard – he sent a bandit called Guillaume in there with orders to kill me. That fucking bastard. He had Fulk murdered to stop him helping me, then had me arrested, and while I was in that hellish hole, he sent in a man to kill me, with a fucking knife. Of course he did. The cunning bastard. And if he killed Fulk, it means that Fulk’s theory about the Grail is correct. It must be right. Don’t you see, it must be!’