Heretic (Extract)

Castillon d’Arbizon had been at peace for too long. The garrison was small and careless, its duties little more than to levy tariffs on goods coming to the town and despatching the taxes to Berat where their lord lived. The men had become lazy, but Thomas of Hookton, who had pretended to be a friar, had been fighting for months and his instincts were those of a man who knew that death could be waiting at every corner. Robbie, though he was three years younger than Thomas, was almost as experienced in war as his friend, while cross-eyed Jake had been a killer all his life.

They began with the castle’s undercroft where six dungeons lay in foetid darkness, but a flickering rushlight showed in the jailer’s room where they found a monstrously fat man and his equally fat wife. Both were sleeping. Thomas pricked the man’s neck with the sword’s point to let him smell blood, then marched the couple to a dungeon where they were locked away. A girl called from another of the cells, but Thomas hissed at her to be quiet. She cursed him in return, then went silent.

One down, four to go.

They climbed back to the courtyard. Three servants, two of them boys, were sleeping in the stables and Robbie and Jake took them down to the cells, then rejoined Thomas to climb the dozen broad steps to the keep’s door, then up the tower’s winding stair. The servants, Thomas guessed, would not be numbered among the garrison, and there would doubtless be other servants, cooks and grooms and clerks, but for now he worried only about the soldiers. He found two of them fast asleep in the barracks room, both with women under their blankets, and Thomas woke them by tossing in a torch he took from a becket on the stairway. The four sat up, startled, to see a friar with an arrow nocked on his drawn bow. One woman took breath to scream, but the bow twitched and the arrow was pointing straight at her right eye and she had the sense to stifle her alarm.

Tie them up, Thomas said.

Quicker to slit their gizzards, Jake suggested.

Tie them up, Thomas said again, and stuff their mouths.

It did not take long. Robbie ripped a blanket into strips with his sword and Jake trussed the four. One of the women was naked and Jake grinned as he tied her wrists and then hoisted her up to a hook on the wall so that her arms were stretched. Nice, he said.

Later, Thomas said. He was at the door, listening. There could be two more soldiers in the castle, but he heard nothing. The four prisoners were all being half suspended from the big metal hooks that normally held swords and mail shirts and, when the four were silenced and immobilised, Thomas went up the next winding stair to where a great door blocked his path, Jake and Robbie followed him, their boots making a slight noise on the worn stone steps. Thomas motioned them to silence, then pushed on the door. For a moment he thought it must be locked and so he pushed harder and the door jerked open with a terrible shriek of rusted metal hinges. The sound was fit to wake the dead and Thomas stood, appalled, to stare into a great high room hung with tapestries. The squeal of the hinges died away, leaving silence. The remnants of a fire burned in a big hearth and gave enough light to show that the hall was empty. At its far end was a dais where the Count of Berat, the lord of Castillon d’Arbizon, would sit when he visited the town and where his table would be placed for any feasts. style=”mso-spacerun: yes”> The dais was empty now, except that at its rear, hidden by a tapestry, there was an arched space where another flicker of light showed through the moth-eaten weave.

Robbie slipped past Thomas and crept up the side of the hall beneath the slit windows that let in slanting bars of silvered moonlight. style=”mso-spacerun: yes”> 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 so 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, and just then the big black bow sang. The arrow, that 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. style=”mso-spacerun: yes”> 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 store rooms, 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 the raiders 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 flame light 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. style=”mso-spacerun: yes”> 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.