Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

1194, Nottingham

Liam and the soldiers standing alongside him ducked again at the warning shout from the gatehouse. Half a dozen rounded boulders the size of mead barrels came hurtling over the top of the city wall and with a clearly audible whistle arced downwards into the market square.

One landed with a heavy thud that he felt vibrate through the ground. It sent up a mushroom cloud of dust and airborne soil and chicken droppings. The others found market stalls and the wooden shacks that surrounded the thoroughfare, shattering them like eggshell.

‘Jay-zus-’n’-Mother-Mary!’

Bob stood beside him, calmly evaluating the paths the boulders had taken. ‘Information: they are adjusting their angles of trajectory.’ He pointed towards a section of wall twenty yards to the right of the city’s main gatehouse. ‘They are aiming for that. The wall there is weak.’

Liam could see a faint discoloration to the section of wall, as if different stone had been used there to patch up an age-old breach.

The first few volleys had overshot the wall and disappeared among the jumble of slate and wood rooftops in the middle of Nottingham, sending up plumes of dust and smoke into the cloudless blue sky. A fire had been started in among that somewhere; and the darker column of smoke, growing thicker, suggested it was beginning to take hold and spread.

Liam could feel the nervous darting eyes of hundreds of the town’s people on him; looking to their young sheriff to issue his orders.

Oh just great. Fantastic. I’ve never commanded the defence of a siege before.

‘Suggestion.’

Liam leaned closer to Bob. ‘Yes please … I’ve got no idea what to do, so help me.’

‘The wall will fail there,’ he said, pointing towards the discoloured section. ‘We will need to concentrate the garrison where the breach will be.’

‘Right.’

Bob pointed up to the top of the city wall and the gatehouse. Nottingham’s meagre garrison of troops were mostly dotted along the front wall, firing sporadic, unaimed arrows towards the metallic, shimmering and glinting mass of Richard’s assembled army. ‘These soldiers, also the ones held in reserve to defend the keep, are not efficiently deployed,’ rumbled Bob.

Liam watched them, cowering behind the crenellations as arrows flickered over the wall, occasionally sticking their heads out to return the odd shot. Bob was right. It appeared Richard had not bothered with taking more time to build siege towers. He’d efficiently evaluated the city’s wall and decided the obvious weak section was his way in. Half a dozen trebuchets working over that part of the wall was all that was needed. The fight wasn’t going to focus around the gatehouse, nor be for control of the wall tops. The fight was going to be concentrated around the breach, just as soon as the masonry had finished tumbling down and the dust settled.

Liam looked at the wall section at the same moment that voices from the gatehouse called out another warning. Several boulders arced languidly over the top, their shadows racing across the cobbles and dirt of the market square as they came to earth much closer, and thudded with impacts that shook the ground again beneath Liam’s feet.

But one shot landed on target. He heard the deep crash and boom of the projectile rock against masonry, and saw a spider’s web of cracks suddenly appear on their side of the wall. Dirt, dust and shards of dislodged flint and rock cascaded down in a clattering shower on to the market stalls standing near the base of the wall.

Liam turned to Bob. ‘We’re going to need everyone right here, aren’t we?’

Bob nodded. ‘Correct.’

Liam nodded, spat grit from his mouth. He really could have done with John being out here; for him to be seen by his people standing shoulder to shoulder with them, with his appointed sheriff. Instead of cowering in the keep.

Time to lead, Liam. Come on, Mr O’Connor … we’ve been here before.

True, but it was just a class of kids last time. Not a whole bloody city.

Come on, they’re all looking at you! Waiting for you. Do something!

He cupped his mouth and waited for a lull in the noise: the distant sound of Richard’s men chanting taunts, the frightened mewling of womenfolk and children; the braying of donkeys, the squeal of a pig nearby, dragging itself in panicked circles, both back legs and rear end crushed to a bloody, bone-splintered pulp by the fallen masonry of the wall.

‘ALL MEN-AT-ARMS TO ASSEMBLE HERE!’ he bellowed at the soldiers standing nearby, and those men up on the wall achieving nothing useful. He then turned to the townsfolk. He guessed there had to be over a thousand of them huddled in the open ground of the market square and clogging the narrow streets that led on to it.

‘EVERY MAN WHO CAN FIGHT … TO ASSEMBLE HERE!’ He gestured at the already cracked wall, through a slowly clearing pall of dust. ‘THIS IS WHERE THEY WILL COME THROUGH! WE WILL HOLD THEM HERE!’

For a moment he wondered if they’d heard him. For an absurd moment he thought everyone was going to laugh at him — Look at the boy playing at being a general .

But voices carried his command onwards across the market square and through the crowd, along the wall, one soldier to the next. He saw a flurry of movement, the backs of men, young and old, turning for their shanty homes to retrieve old weapons and farming tools.

Liam let out a gasp of relief, hiding it behind one gauntlet-covered hand. He hoped that to anyone watching him it looked like a casual yawn.

‘That sound all right?’ he uttered out of the side of his mouth.

Bob nodded, a dark brow lifted and the corner of his horse-lips stretched with a hint of pride. ‘Affirmative.’

2001, New York

They studied the rectangle of yellow parchment cut out from the Treyarch Confession. Adam held it up carefully by two corners and looked at them through the patchwork of little square windows he’d cut out of it.

‘It’s so very fragile,’ he said, ‘I’m scared of tearing the thing.’

‘Let’s get the Grail out,’ said Maddy. She reached for the Treyarch, now missing a rectangle four feet long by eighteen inches wide, and hurriedly wound it round its wooden spindle. Rolled up, she casually tossed it on to one of the armchairs and reached for the wooden box.

Cabot rested a hand on its lid. His eyes locked on Maddy’s. ‘Ye understand what lies within?’

She nodded impatiently.

He glanced at the Treyarch tossed on the chair, already forgotten. ‘I trust ye will treat what lies within this box with more respect than ye did the Confession.’ His hand remained firmly on the lid. ‘In here are precious words many men have died for … and killed for.’

‘The Holy Grail, right.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Ye say that, young girl, like a … like ’tis just a flavour of preserve.’ He looked down at the box. ‘If ’tis what King Richard believes it to be, if it be what the Templars believe it to be, then this contains the hidden words of God. Ye understand this?’

Maddy pursed her lips and sighed. ‘Yes … yes, of course, I’ll be very careful with it. OK?’

Cabot shook his head with frustration. ‘’Tis not the scroll — the parchment and ink — I am talking about. That is merely the work of a man with a quill.’ He glanced at the parchment grille Adam was holding up carefully. ‘If that really be the key … By laying that atop the Grail and looking through the holes, we are looking upon the true Word of God. Is it truly for us to see?’

Maddy’s first instinct was to brush the old fool aside. She didn’t have the patience for this kind of superstitious nonsense. She didn’t believe in some fluffy-haired Father Christmas-like guy sitting up on some heavenly throne and handing down sound-bites of wisdom once every few millennia. She was about to dismiss his medieval superstition with a sarcastic comment, but then a solitary word pushed itself to the forefront of her mind and silenced her.