Bernard Cornwell - Heretic

Robbie slipped past Thomas and crept up the side of the hall beneath the slit windows, which let in slanting bars of silvered moonlight. Thomas put an arrow on the black bow, then drew the cord and felt the immense power of the yew stave as he took the string back to his right ear. Robbie glanced at him, saw he was ready, and reached out with his sword to pull back the threadbare tapestry.

But before the blade even touched the tapestry it was swept aside as a big man charged Robbie. He came roaring and sudden, astonishing the Scot who tried to bring his sword back to meet the attack, but Robbie was too slow and the big man leaped on him, fists flailing. Just then the big black bow sang. The arrow, which could strike down an armoured knight at two hundred paces, slid through the man’s rib cage and span him around so that he flailed bloodily across the floor. Robbie was still half under him, his fallen sword clattering on the thick wooden floorboards. A woman was screaming. Thomas guessed the wounded man was the castellan, the garrison’s commander, and he wondered if the man would live long enough to answer some questions, but Robbie had drawn his dagger and, not knowing that his assailant was already pierced by an arrow, was flailing the short blade at the man’s fat neck so that a sheet of blood spilled dark and shining across the boards and even after the man had died Robbie still gouged at him. The woman screamed on. ‘Stop her noise,’ Thomas said to Jake and went to pull the heavy corpse off the Scot. The man’s long white nightshirt was red now. Jake slapped the woman and then, blessedly, there was silence.

There were no more soldiers in the castle. A dozen servants were sleeping in the kitchens and storerooms, but they made no trouble. The men were all taken down to the dungeons, then Thomas climbed to the keep’s topmost rampart from where he could look down on the unsuspecting roofs of Castillon d’Arbizon, and there he waved a flaming torch. He waved it back and forth three times, threw it far down into the bushes at the foot of the steep slope on which the castle and town were built, then went to the western side of the rampart where he laid a dozen arrows on the parapet. Jake joined him there. ‘Sam’s with Sir Robbie at the gate,’ Jake said. Robbie Douglas had never been knighted, but he was well born and a man-at-arms, and Thomas’s men had given him the rank. They liked the Scotsman, just as Thomas did, which was why Thomas had disobeyed his lord and let Robbie come with him. Jake laid more arrows on the parapet. ‘That were easy.’

‘They weren’t expecting trouble,’ Thomas said. That was not entirely true. The town had been aware of English raiders, Thomas’s raiders, but had somehow convinced themselves that they would not come to Castillon d’Arbizon. The town had been at peace for so long that the townsfolk were persuaded the quiet times would go on. The walls and the watchmen were not there to guard against the English, but against the big companies of bandits that infested the countryside. A dozy watchman and a high wall might deter those bandits, but it had failed against real soldiers. ‘How did you cross the river?’ he asked Jake.

‘At the weir,’ Jake said. They had scouted the town in the dusk and Thomas had seen the mill weir as the easiest place to cross the deep and fast-flowing river.

‘The miller?’

‘Scared,’ Jake said, ‘and quiet.’

Thomas heard the crackling of breaking twigs, the scrape of feet and a thump as a ladder was placed against the angle between the castle and the town wall. He leaned over the inner parapet. ‘You can open the gate, Robbie,’ he called down. He put an arrow on his string and stared down the long length of moonlit wall.

Beneath him men were climbing the ladder, hoisting weapons and bags that they tossed over the parapet and then followed after. A wash of flamelight glowed from the open wicket gate where Robbie and Sam stood guard, and after a moment a file of men, their mail clinking in the night, went from the wall’s steps to the castle gate. Castillon d’Arbizon’s new garrison was arriving.

A watchman appeared at the wall’s far end. He strolled towards the castle, then suddenly became aware of the sound of swords, bows and baggage thumping on stone as men clambered over the wall. He hesitated, torn between a desire to get closer and see what was really happening and a wish to find reinforcements, and while he hesitated both Thomas and Jake loosed their arrows.

The watchman wore a padded leather jerkin, protection enough against a drunkard’s stave, but the arrows slashed through the leather, the padding and his chest until the two points protruded from his back. He was hurled back, his staff fell with a clatter, and then he jerked in the moonlight, gasped a few times and was still.

‘What do we do now?’ Jake asked.

‘Collect the taxes,’ Thomas said, ‘and make a nuisance of ourselves.’

‘Until what?’

‘Until someone comes to kill us,’ Thomas said, thinking of his cousin.

‘And we kill him?’ Jake might be cross-eyed, but he held a very straightforward view of life.

‘With God’s good help,’ Thomas said and made the sign of the cross on his friar’s robe.

The last of Thomas’s men climbed the wall and dragged the ladder up behind them. There were still half a dozen men a mile away, across the river and hidden in the forest where they were guarding the horses, but the bulk of Thomas’s force was now inside the castle and its gate was again locked. The dead watchman lay on the wall with two goose-feathered shafts sticking from his chest. No one else had detected the invaders. Castillon d’Arbizon either slept or drank.

And then the screams began.

It had not occurred to Thomas that the beghard girl who was to die in the morning would be imprisoned in the castle. He had thought the town would have its own jail, but she had evidently been given into the garrison’s keeping and now she was screaming insults at the newly imprisoned men in the other cells and her noise was unsettling the archers and men-at-arms who had climbed Castillon d’Arbizon’s wall and taken the castle. The jailer’s plump wife, who spoke a little French, had shouted for the English to kill the girl. ‘She’s a beghard,’ the woman claimed, ‘in league with the devil!’

Sir Guillaume d’Evecque had agreed with the woman. ‘Bring her up to the courtyard,’ he told Thomas, ‘and I’ll hack off her damn head.’

‘She must burn,’ Thomas said. ‘That’s what the Church has decreed.’

‘So who burns her?’

Thomas shrugged. ‘The town sergeants? Maybe us, I don’t know.’

‘Then if you won’t let me kill her now,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘at least shut her goddamned mouth.’ He drew his knife and offered it to Thomas. ‘Cut her tongue out.’

Thomas ignored the blade. He had still not found time to change out of his friar’s robe, so he lifted its skirts and went down to the dungeons where the girl was shouting in French to tell the captives in the other cells that they would all die and that the devil would dance on their bones to a tune played by demons. Thomas lit a rush lantern from the flickering remnants of a torch, then went to the beghard’s cell and pulled back the two bolts.

She quietened at the sound of the bolts and then, as he pushed the heavy door open, she scuffled back to the cell’s far wall. Jake had followed Thomas down the steps and, seeing the girl in the lantern’s dim light, he sniggered. ‘I can keep her quiet for you,’ he offered.

‘Go and get some sleep, Jake,’ Thomas said.

‘No, I don’t mind,’ Jake persisted.

‘Sleep!’ Thomas snapped, suddenly angry because the girl looked so vulnerable.

She was vulnerable because she was naked. Naked as a new-laid egg, arrow-thin, deathly pale, flea-bitten, greasy-haired, wide-eyed and feral. She sat in the filthy straw, her arms wrapped about her drawn-up knees to hide her nakedness, then took a deep breath is if summoning her last dregs of courage. ‘You’re English,’ she said in French. Her voice was hoarse from her screaming.