The fury on Sir Eustace’s face was now obvious: he pulled out the strange weapon from its sheath and brandished it in front of our faces. ‘You see this, you sacrilegious scum! You see this,’ he was shouting, and I felt a speck of his hot spittle graze my cheek. I stared at his weapon; truly I had never seen its like before. It was the head of a broad-headed lance, an elongated diamond shape about two inches across at its widest point and tapering to a wicked needle tip. The iron of the lance head looked ancient, pitted here and there, but had clearly been well cared for and burnished brightly. In the socket where the long shaft would once have been fitted was a stubby wooden T-shaped handle, approximately four inches long, fitting the lance-head socket snugly. Sir Eustace gripped the wooden crossbar in his palm, and made a fist, so that the lance head protruded from between his second and third fingers.
‘You see this!’ Sir Eustace bellowed, his words again accompanied by a storm of spittle. ‘This is the instrument of your deaths. And while you are not worthy to even look at it, by the mercy of the Blessed Virgin, and her son Our Lord, you shall receive death from it; and solely because of its sacred power, you shall be received into Heaven. This is the Holy Lance that pierced Our Saviour’s body on the Cross, this blade has been anointed with the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ! Christ’s holy blood …’
Eustace had a light froth around his mouth now; his black eyes gleamed with madness. And while I stared mutely in hopeless fascination at the extraordinary object in my enemy’s hands, Hanno spoke.
‘Talk, talk, talk …’ he said. ‘That is all you can do, you talky fool …’
Sir Eustace took two steps towards Hanno, his right fist lashed out like a bolt of lightning, and he punched the lance-dagger deep into Hanno’s chest. It was a single thrust, snake-fast and perfectly accurate, an inch to the left of the sternum, directly into my friend’s living heart.
I heard the door opening to my left, and a voice from the east end of the chapel shouting: ‘Eustace, no! I told you to leave them be!’
Sir Eustace stepped back, ripping the bloody lance-dagger free of Hanno’s punctured chest. Thick dark blood was bubbling from the wound. And I twisted my head to stare into my old friend’s eyes as he died. There was a slight smile on his lips, and he managed to utter one word, just a whisper, before his eyes rolled and he slumped unstrung against his bonds.
The word was: ‘Perfect!’
* * *
Something of myself died with Hanno that day. And the memory of his ugly, battered face and his proud final word, still makes my eyes prick and burn four decades later. But I console myself by thinking that Hanno died happy: no sane man wishes to die, but many a warrior I have known has spoken to me of the manner in which he would prefer to depart this earth. Usually, these men say ‘in battle, with a ring of enemy slain around me, like the heroes of old’ or something similar; but I think Hanno – who always strived for perfection in everything, and especially in the arts of war – would not have been dissatisfied by the manner of his passing. He was killed by a skilled enemy; by a man who must have made a considerable study of the perfect way to kill. I think that perhaps Hanno was content to die at his hand, and may even have provoked him for that very purpose. But I pray that Sir Eustace was right, and that the Holy Lance did indeed have the power to confer entry into Heaven with its lethal punch. I also silently vowed that I would split Eustace’s cowardly heart one day, if God gave me the opportunity, and look in his eye while he died.
Those were not my uppermost thoughts at the time, however. I was more concerned with my own demise. Sir Eustace stood before me as I sat there bound and helpless, the dripping lance-dagger in his hand and a killing gleam in his mad black eyes. He was breathing heavily, like a man who had just run a race. And I was certain that nothing would restrain him from plunging that blade into my breast.
The voice spoke again, nearer this time. ‘Eustace, command yourself! You will step away from Sir Alan.’
I wrenched my gaze away from the madman in front of me and glanced left towards the chapel door. Brother Michel was approaching fast, his sandals slapping the stone floor of the chapel like brisk applause. But it was the man walking beside him, a tall dark man in a long black robe, who made me gape in surprise. It was the man whom I had glimpsed in the garden, and the same man I had seen lurking round and about me in the streets of Paris.
It was my old friend and comrade Reuben of York.
I was dimly aware that a dozen men wearing the white linen surcoats of the Knights of Our Lady had filed into the chapel behind these two men, but my eyes were locked on Reuben’s dark face. Was he friend or foe? What was he – a Jew – doing in this Christian abbey? And why had he been following me so relentlessly through the Paris streets?