Stigmata (38 page)

‘It may be a false alarm.’

‘I think they can smell the sickness. Somehow they
know
.’

‘Or they are as desperate as we are,’ he said and ran back up the steps to join the muster.

The
crosatz
waited until the setting sun blinded the garrison on the western wall. Raimon’s soldiers could barely make them out, with the sun in their faces, but
they could hear them well enough, beating the earth with their pikes. The rabble of pilgrims that followed them were singing the
Veni Sancte Spiritus.

Something smashed into the court below. It was the blackened head of one of the soldiers they had killed during the sally against the trebuchet.

‘Only half my soldiers are still standing,’ Raimon said.

‘Then we will have to fight twice as fiercely,’ Philip said.

Martín Navarese stood next to him, legs akimbo, his sword tip resting on the stones. He spat over the wall. ‘French bastards.’

Loup stood at Raimon’s other shoulder holding a slingshot, a pile of stones at his feet. There were three women at one of the mangonels; Anselm the stonemason waited beside them,
bare-chested in the sun, loading boulders into the slings. So it’s come to this, Philip thought. Women and children to do the killing now.

The sun hovered just two fingers above the horizon when they attacked, their wooden cats swaying and bumping across the plateau. A wagon, covered with a tough canopy of cowhide, slammed against
the wall. The
crosatz
sappers would be under there, Philip knew, trying to dig under the wall. Anselm hurled heavy rocks down on them, single-handed, while the women dropped flaming brands.
The canopy soon bristled with wasted arrows and bolts.

A cauldron of blazing oil went over the side and the leather fizzed with pitch and caught fire, sending a plume of black smoke into the air. Men ran shrieking with their clothes alight back to
the crusader lines. The archers picked them off as they ran.

Now the rest of the army came on, throwing ladders against the walls for the mercenaries and the foot soldiers. If we can throw them back this one last time, he thought, I think we will be
safe.

‘Don’t be angry at me,’ Elionor said. She had joined all the other
bons òmes
helping tend the sick in the great hall. She no longer looked like
Mama; she had shorn her long salt-and-pepper hair so that it was short like a man’s. The black hooded robe they had given her was too large and her thin frame was lost inside it.

‘I’m not angry, Mama,’ Fabricia lied.
I am furious.
You abandoned me and you abandoned Papa when we needed you most. We all risk dying unshriven, why couldn’t you?
For us?

‘I am following my heart in this. We must all follow our hearts.’

Elionor trailed her around, trying to engage her in private debate, perhaps seeking an absolution. Fabricia stopped and listened to the noise from outside. The battle had been joined; soon the
wounded would start arriving. Where would they put them?

The worst of it was not knowing what was happening up there. Any moment she might see those brutes with scarlet crosses on their surcoats advancing down the steps, their swords drawn.

‘Please, my Fabricia, my little one. We don’t know how much time we have left. Let us not part this way.’

Two men staggered down the steps into the cellar carrying a wounded archer. They slipped on a slick of blood and tumbled. ‘Someone help us,’ one of them said. ‘There’s
too many for us to bring on our own!’

Fabricia started up the stairs after them, but Elionor caught her wrist. ‘Stay here! Don’t put yourself in harm’s way!’

Fabricia shook herself free. She followed the men up the steps and ran after them to the gatehouse. They clambered up the wooden ladder to the lower floor and urged her to follow. When she got
there, she stopped, stunned by the heat and the noise. The framework of planks and beams shook under her feet, and then a man dropped from a hatchway above, an arrow through his neck. He lay at her
feet, writhing and gurgling and kicking for a few moments, and then he died.

‘Help me,’ someone said.

She turned around. A man – she realized she knew him, it was the tinker from Saint-Ybars! – was trying to drag a sled of stones up the wooden ladder. He reached out his hand towards
her, then gave a shout of surprise and reached behind him. He twisted around, but could not see the arrow that had lodged in his back. He glared at Fabricia as if she were the one who had fired it,
then he let go of the ladder and dropped out of sight.

Philip ran towards her along the parapet with a dozen armed men behind him. He ordered them up the steps. ‘Get out of here!’ he shouted at her. ‘We are overrun! You have to get
out!’

Three
crosatz
jumped down the wooden ladder from the upper floor. Philip charged them and they fell back. One on one they were no match for him, she could see, for they were poorly
armoured and did not have his imposing height and physique. But after they recovered from the surprise of his rushed assault, their numbers told and they forced him to retreat.

He still had time to grab her and almost bodily hurl her down the ladder.

She started to clamber back down. And what then? she thought. Leave him to face the three of them on his own?

She climbed back up again.

The floor of the gatehouse was slippery with blood. Two of them were down, but Philip had lost his sword in the mêlée, and the other
crosat
was standing over him, beating him
repeatedly with his sword. Philip was keeping him at bay with just his shield.

Philip’s blade lay on the boards in front of her. She picked it up, testing the weight of it. She knew she could not lift it above her head, as the
crosat
was doing, but if she
could swing it into the man’s back it should stop him right enough. He had only a thick leather jerkin as armour; the steel blade would go straight through it and slice him open.

The man raised his sword again. Philip watched her, pleading with his eyes.

Do it.
Do it!

But she couldn’t. She dropped the sword and instead jumped on the man’s back, one arm around his neck, the other clawing at his sword arm. It might have given Philip time to recover
if she had been able to hold on, but the crusader was too strong for her and shrugged her off easily, hurling her against the wall.

Philip threw himself at the soldier to protect her, lost his shield in the struggle and fell. Now he was defenceless as the
crosat
came at him a third time.

Something hit the man in the face, and he howled in pain and staggered back. It gave Philip enough time to grab his sword and make the killing stroke, two-handed, bringing the blade up in a
practised arc just below the man’s midriff and burying it almost to the hilt in his chest.

Fabricia looked around for their unlikely saviour. Loup stood framed in the doorway of the gatehouse, his slingshot in his right hand. He grinned at Philip. ‘I just saved your life,’
he said. ‘Now you owe me.’

T
HE CHURCH BELLS
pealed across the citadel, announcing the victory. The
crosatz
had retreated; even with only half
the garrison standing they had somehow beaten them back. Philip slumped to his haunches and took off his helm. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall.

Trencavel’s soldiers were already dragging the bodies of the dead crusaders across the courtyard, tossing them over the northern wall into the gorge.
Get them out before they bloat and
stink. And damn them all.

At one point they had had their ladders on the gatehouse and the battering ram at the main gate. He had thought it was over. It was the women and the old men that saved them, pouring pitch and
boiling water from the barbican, tipping back the ladders, making up in numbers and enthusiasm what they lacked in archers and crossbows and men-at-arms.

He stumbled as he made his way back to the
donjon
. He had never been so tired.

He saw Navarese’s routiers below the south-east wall, a score of them, jeering and kicking. Trencavel’s own soldiers watched them, but stood off, wary of them. He suspected he knew
what this was about and he unsheathed his sword and went over to stop it.

Their crusader prisoner had been stripped and his hands were tied with hemp behind his back. He was writhing on the cobblestones like an animal, blood and saliva in his beard. The mercenaries
were prodding him with their lances, but enough only to make him bleed, and scream.

He pushed them aside. The stink of them! They were like a pack of wild animals.

‘What is happening here?’ he shouted.

‘Stay out of this,’ Navarese said. ‘He is our prisoner. It is none of your business what we do with him.’

‘Where is your honour, man?’

‘Honour? What has honour to do with anything here? You pay us to fight for you; we will fight. Don’t talk to me about honour, you hypocrite.’

‘Just kill him and be done with it.’

‘You saw what they did to our prisoners. They gouged out their eyes and cut off their faces. Why should this pig expect any different?’

Philip did not answer. He stared at the desperate, bloody thing on the ground at his feet and wondered what this man would do if the tables were turned. ‘Who is your lord?’ he said
to him. He was still crying, so Philip put his boot on his throat to get his attention. ‘Who is your lord?’ he repeated.

‘Gilles de Soissons of Normandy,’ he panted. ‘Please, Lord, help me. I –’

‘What is his device?’

‘We have three blue eagles . . .’

Navarese kicked him into silence. ‘What is this? What does it matter?’

So, he
was
one of them, Philip thought, one of the men who had stood around, laughing, just like these routiers, when they had blinded Renaut. And now the tables were turned. Let him know
then what it is like to have someone do it to him, let him taste the piercing agony and humiliation to the dregs. It is a kind of justice.

And then you’ll become just like them,
he heard Renaut say.
Is that what you want? Is that what you think I want?

Philip took off the man’s head with one quick blow and stepped back.

There was a shocked silence. Then Navarese stepped close up, eyes red, every muscle twitching. He stabbed a forefinger into his chest. ‘You Devil-fucker! You whoreson piece of God-fucking
goat-shit. You Frenchman. You whore!’ He stood there, prodding him with his finger as if it were a red-hot fork. But the chain mail and the baron’s chest were implacable. The words and
the threats bounced off.

‘Now you can do what you want to him,’ Philip said.

‘You have made an enemy here today!’

‘You will have to wait your turn, I have too many to count.’ Philip said and walked away, daring him to strike at his back. But for all his foul mouth, he did not dare.

Fabricia sat on the steps of the church, her head between her knees. Everywhere the smell of death. He sat down beside her.

‘I knew your trade before this, seigneur, I have seen other men like you fighting and killing each other. But this is the first time I ever saw
you
do it, with my own eyes. The way
you killed that man! Not a moment’s hesitation. And so expertly done, like you were slaughtering some barnyard animal.’

‘It is what a warrior does. I was trained for it since I was a child. I am a knight, Fabricia, not a baker. Or a stonemason. I kill or I am killed, it is the law I live by, the law that
has kept you and all these other women and children from their deaths here today.’

‘I am not accusing you, seigneur, it is just I never expected to be so shocked when I finally saw it.’

‘Why didn’t you use that sword yourself? You had the opportunity. He might have killed us both.’

‘I told you, I cannot kill. I cannot have another man’s death on my conscience, no matter who he is.’

‘You do understand that we are only talking like this, here, now, because you have the luxury of being virtuous while I take it upon myself to sin.’

‘Perhaps then we have both seen the worst of each other today.’

‘We come from different worlds, Fabricia. I suppose it was inevitable that one day we would.’

R
AIMON WAS A
young man grown suddenly old. There were lines on his face where there had been none before. His eyes were
sunken into plum-coloured bruises in his head from the strain of command and from lack of sleep.

He stood on the barbican with his eyes closed, letting the rain run down his face. ‘Fine weather at last,’ he said.

‘At last,’ Philip said.

Such a storm; it had half filled the cistern in a single night. The weather had turned so quickly; Philip had gone to sleep sunburned and woken up shivering with cold.

Now a chill mist hung above the trees behind the crusader encampment. Below them a vulture stood atop one of the bodies below the walls, occasionally lowering its beak to take a leisurely
breakfast.

‘Perhaps they will give up and go home now,’ Raimon said.

But they did not give up and go home. Later that day a sentry at the south barbican shouted the alarm. Raimon and Philip ran up the steps to the parapet and stared down the
ridge towards the crusader camp. A column of men was riding up the road from the Toulousain and by the standards and pennants they carried he realized it must be Simon de Montfort himself come from
Carcassonne to join the assault on Montaillet. He had twenty knights with him. He had also brought another one of his trebuchets
.

‘One in five of my fighting men is dead,’ Raimon said. ‘Another one in five has succumbed to, or is yet weak from, the fever that woman brought with her. We
have enough water, thanks be to God for last night’s storm, but we do not have soldiers to drink it all. If they attack again, this time they will overrun us.’ He pointed to the crude
map, drawn in chalk on the oak table in the centre of the room. ‘They will position the trebuchet once more against the west wall.’ He looked at Anselm, who had been invited to
participate in the conference. ‘How long?’ he said.