The Lion Rampant

CHAPTER FIVE

Westminster

Feast of St George, April 1314

The Pope was dead and the shiver of it added to the cold ache in the bones. Drip and ache, that was Easter, thought Edward, every miserable cunny-rotted day of it, when the damp crept up your back and no amount of stoked fire could keep the wind from looping in and up your bowels until you coughed and shat hedgepigs.

Like Father. He threw that thought from him, as he always did when it crept in like a mangy dog seeking shelter. Shitting his life down his leg; for all his strength and longevity brought low by a foul humour up the arse, king or no.

Death did not care for rank. The Pope had found that, just as Jacques de Molay had promised from his pyre. Edward, even as the delicious chill of it goosed his flesh, could not help the hug of glee that he was not his father-in-law, the King of France, who had also been cursed in the same breath.

Still, there was room enough for Edward to wonder if his own treatment of the Order of Poor Knights had inherited a waft of that smoke-black shriek from de Molay. He had been light on the Templars, but followed the Pope’s edict and handed their forfeited holdings — well, most of them — to the Hospitallers. Much good may it do them, he thought, though it does me very little for I cannot see the Order of St John coming to my army. The Templars made that mistake by joining my father’s army and the lesson in it is plain enough for a blind man to see.

He wished someone would come to his army, all the same.

‘Who has not responded?’ he demanded and de Valence made a show of consulting the roll, squinting at it in the bright glow of wax candle which haloed the small group in the dim room. No one was fooled; everyone there, the King included, knew he could recite it from memory.

Lancaster, Arundel, Warwick, Oxford, Surrey: the greatest earls of his realm. Plus Sir Henry Percy, bastion of the north.

‘We issued summons to all earls and some eighty magnates of the realm to prepare for war with the Scots,’ de Valence pointed out, as if to say that these six were nothing at all. Edward shifted in his seat, scowling and aching.

Summons to eighty magnates and every earl — even his 13-year-old half-brother, Thomas, Earl of Norfolk — not to mention Ulster and personal, royal-sealed letters to twenty-five rag-arsed Irish chieftains. But the realm’s five most powerful and the north’s shining star, Percy, had all refused and the gall of it scourged him almost out of his seat.

‘When we defeat Bruce, my liege, all matters will be resolved,’ de Valence went on, hastily, as if he sensed the withering hope of the King. ‘We will have twenty thousand men, including three thousand Welsh, at Berwick by this time next month, even without these foresworn lords.’

With smiths and carpenters, miners and ingéniateurs, ships to transport five siege engines and the means to construct an entire windmill sufficient to grind corn for the army. Plus horses — a great mass of horses.

Edward thought sourly of the man who had just left, elegantly dressed, with a plump face that had yet to settle into anything resembling features. But Antonio di Pessagno, the Genoese mercantiler who was as seeming bland as a fresh-laid egg, held the realm of England in his fat, ringed hand, for it was his negotiated loans which were paying for the Invasion.

Edward did not like Pessagno, but the Ordainers — Lancaster, Warwick and the other barons who tried to force him into their way — had banished his old favourites, the Frescobaldi, so he had no choice but to turn to the Genoese. The same earls who ignored him now, Edward brooded, feeling the long, slow burn of anger at that. The same who had contrived in the death of my Gaveston …

‘They claim’, he rasped suddenly, ‘what reasons for refusing my summons to defend the realm?’

‘That they did not sanction the campaign.’

The answer was a smooth knife-edge that cut de Valence off before he could speak. Hugh Despenser, Earl of Winchester, leaned a little into the honeyed light.

‘They say you are in breach of the Ordinances,’ he added with a feral smile.

No one spoke, or had to. They all knew the King had deliberately manipulated the affair so that he breached the imposed Ordinances by declaring a campaign against the Scots without the approval of the opposing barons. Honour dictated they should defend the realm, no matter what — but if they agreed, then they supported the King’s right to make war on his own, undermining everything they had worked for. Their refusal, however, implied that they were prepared to let the Scots mauraud unchecked over the realm and that did no good to their Ordinance cause.

They were damned if they did and condemned if they didn’t, so the King won either way, though he would have preferred to have them give in and send their levies. Still, it was a win all the same and, since Despenser had suggested the idea, he basked in the approval of the tall, droop-eyed Edward while the likes of de Valence and others could only scowl at the favour.

Yet Edward was no fool; Despenser was not a war leader and de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, most assuredly was. Better yet, the Earl hated Lancaster for having seized Gaveston from his custody and executing him out of hand and Edward trusted the loyalty of revenge.

Edward leaned back, well satisfied. All he had to do was march north, to where this upstart Bruce had finally bound himself to a siege at Stirling and could not refuse battle without losing face with his own barons.

‘Bring the usurper to battle, defeat him and we win all — roll the main, nobiles. Roll the main.’

Roll the main, de Valence thought as the approving murmurs wavered the candle flame in a soft patting like mouse paws massaging the royal ego. But the other side of that dice game was to throw out and lose.

That is why they call it Hazard, he thought.

Crunia, Kingdom of Castile

Feast of St James the Less, May 1314

The port was white and pink and grey, hugged by brown land studded with dusty green pines and cypress — and everywhere the sea, deep green and leaden grey, scarred with thin white crests and forested with swaying masts. Light flitted over it like a bird.

Crunia was the port of pilgrims, those who had wearily travelled from Canterbury down through France and English Gascony into Aragon and Castile and could not face the journey back the same way. The rich, or fortunate beggars, would take ship back to Gascony, or even all the way to England — the same ships which brought the lazy or infirm to walk the last little way to the shrine at Compostella and still claim a shell badge.

Hal stared with bewilderment at them, the halt and twisted, the fat and self-important, shrill beldames and sailors, those who thought they could fool God and those footsore and shining with the fervour of true penitents. He had never seen a foreign land and it made his head swim with a strange fear that Kirkpatrick noted with his sardonic twist of smile.

‘Can suck the air from you, can it not,’ he said gently and laid a steady hand on the tremble of one shoulder. Hal looked at him, remembering what he had learned of Kirkpatrick’s past in the land of Oc, fighting Cathars in a holy crusade. Oc was not so far from here, he thought, though he had trouble with the map of it in his head — trouble, too, with the realization that Kirkpatrick was the closest to a friend he had left other than Sim, who came rolling up the quayside as if summoned.

‘No’ very holy,’ Sim growled, staring at the huddled houses before kneeling and laying a hand flat on the cobbles. ‘Mark you, any land is fine after yon ship. Bigod, I can hardly walk straight on the dry.’

No one walked straight on the dry, but Hal tried not to turn and gawp as they helped unload the heavy, precious cargo into the carts they had hired, making it seem as anonymous as dust.

Everyone, pilgrim and prostitute, seemed moulded from another clay entirely, while the stalls were a Merlin’s cave of jeweller’s work and carpets, tableware worked in silver, glass and crystal, ironwork made like lace.

There were Moors, too, swarthy and robed, turbanned and flashing with teeth and earrings; Hal would not have been surprised to meet a dog-headed man, or a winged gryphon on a leash.

‘Are we stayin’ the night?’ demanded Sim. ‘I had a fancy to some comfort and a meat pie.’

‘Little comfort in this unholy town,’ Kirkpatrick answered grimly, ‘and you would boak at the content of such a pie, so it is best we shake this place off our shoes. We will be escorted by the Knights of Alcántara, no less, to a safe wee commanderie some way on the road to Villasirga.’

Hal had seen the Knights arrive, a score of finely mounted men sporting a strange, embellished green cross on their white robes — argent, a cross fleury vert, he translated, smiling, as he always did, at the memory of his father who had dinned heraldry into him.

The new Knights were all in maille from head to foot, with little round iron caps and sun-smacked faces that made them almost as dark as the trading Moors, at whom they scowled in an insult that would have had them skewered in Scotland.

‘They frown at everyone,’ Kirkpatrick answered, when Hal pointed this out, ‘save Doña Beatriz.’

It was true enough — the leader of the Knights bowed and fawned on the elegant, cool and sparkling lady, and then was presented to everyone who mattered as ‘el caballero Don Saluador’, followed by a long string of meaningless sounds which Kirkpatrick said was the man’s lineage. Don Saluador looked at everyone as if he had had Sim’s old hose shoved under his nose.

‘But they hate those ones even more than they hate the Moors,’ Kirkpatrick added, nodding towards a group of men shouldering arrogantly through the crowds. Dressed richly, they had faces as blank and haughty as the statues of saints and wore billowing white blazoned with a red cross which looked like a downward pointing dagger.

‘Fitchy,’ Hal said, still dizzy with the sights and smells of it all.

‘Just so,’ Kirkpatrick confirmed. ‘The cross fitchy of the Order of Santiago — the wee saint’s very own warriors. The Order of Alcántara is so new it squeaks and yon knights never let them forget it.’

‘You have it wrangwise,’ Sim answered, wiping the sweat from his face, and Kirkpatrick, scowling, turned to him.

‘There are others they hate even harder,’ Sim went on and nodded to where the black-robed former Templars walked, stiff-legged and ruffed as dogs, refusing to be anonymous or duck under the scorch of stares from all sides. For all that they sported no device, everyone knew them by their very look, though none dared call them out as heretics.

Christ betimes, Hal thought, the world is stuffed with God’s warrior monks, and it seems the only fighting they do is against each other.

By the time the carts were loaded and ready, the sun was brassed and high, the road crowded with pilgrims fresh from Mass and still in the mood to sing psalms along the dusty road, as if their piety increased with the level of noise they made.

The locals knew better and sneered, both at the singing of these lazy penitents and their foreigner stupidity at walking out in the midday heat. They did not sneer at the Knights of Alcántara, Hal noted, who were riding out in the midday heat with four carts and a motley of strange foreigners.

Rossal and the others took their leave of de Grafton, who had volunteered to stay with the Bon Accord, as if only he was capable of defending it; they needed the ship victualled and ready if they were to succeed, so it seemed sensible — but Hal saw Kirkpatrick frowning thoughtfully over it and wondered at that.

Beyond the port, the air was so clear that it seemed you could see every tree on the foothills that led to the dust-blue horizon etched against the gilding sky. The pilgrims rapidly ran out of enthusiasm for psalms and the column began to shed them like old skin, each one tottering into some panting shade and groaning.

‘Fine idea,’ Sim declared, mopping his streaming face. ‘If I was not perched on a cart, I would be seeking that same shade.’

‘You would not,’ Kirkpatrick answered grimly and jerked his chin to one side, where distant figures squatted, patient as stones.

‘Trailbaston and cut-throats,’ he said with a lopsided grin. ‘Waiting for dark and the passing of the fighting men to come down and snap up the tired and weary, like owls on mice.’

‘Christ betimes, they are robbing pilgrims,’ Sim said, outraged.

‘So they are — almost. The wee saint’s warriors are busy protecting the proper pilgrim route, the Way of St James. Since there are two roads to Santiago, it takes them all their time — though the northern route is used less these days, now that the Moors have been expelled from the road from Aragon to Castile.’

‘This is what happens when you try and cheat God,’ Hal added with a grin.

He had lost the humour in it by the time the day died in a blood and gold splendour, wiped from his lips by too much heat and dust, the ten different languages that made the psalms a babble, the quarrels that broke out on every halt, the stink that hung with them in the dust.

Hal was sharply aware that this was but a lick of what Crusaders had experienced here and that it was worse by far further south and east, in the Holy Land itself; his estimation of his father went up when he thought of him enduring this in the name of God. By the time they turned off the road and into a tree-shaded avenue, Hal was heartily sick of the Kingdom of Castile and the commanderie of St Felix was a blessed limewashed relief.

Stiff-legged, he climbed off the palfrey he had been given and had it removed by a silent figure, blank and shadowed as the dark which closed on them. Led by flickering torches, Hal and the others were escorted into a large room with a stout door to the right and a curtained archway to the left; there were tables and benches, fresh herbs and straw.

‘It is not much,’ said a smooth voice, the French accented heavily, ‘but it is what we use as bed and board.’

They turned to see a tall man with the Alcántara cross on a white camilis that accentuated the dark of his face and the neatly trimmed black beard; his smile was as dazzling as his robe and Doña Beatriz hung off his arm with a familiarity intended to raise the hackles of the black-robed Templars, even if it was only his sister.

‘I am Don Guillermo,’ he announced, raking them with his grin. ‘I assure you, this is really how we live — you see, we can be as austere as Benedictines. Up to a point.’

Rossal, unsmiling, bowed from the neck; the others followed and Hal saw the scowl scarring the face of the German.

‘Our thanks for your hospitality and escort. I will see to my charge before prayers.’

‘Of course,’ Guillermo answered smoothly. ‘Be assured, our best men guard those carts.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ Rossal answered. He turned to look briefly at Kirkpatrick and then went out, trailed by de Villers. Sim stretched noisily and farted.

‘Not a bad lodging, mark you,’ he declared, glancing at the wall whose bare, rough whiteness was broken by a trellis of poles supporting a short walkway reached by an arched doorway. It was the height of two tall men from the floor.

‘A gallery for minstrels,’ he said and grinned. ‘Some entertainment later, eh, lads?’

In a commanderie of a religious Order? Hal looked at Kirkpatrick, who held the gaze for a moment, and then moved to the nearest door, which was beneath the gallery. It was clearly locked. The curtained archway on the other side of the room led to some steps and Kirkpatrick was sure they reached up to a belltower he had seen on the way in.

‘As neat a prison as any you will see,’ he offered to the returned Rossal, who nodded grimly, and then turned to the door he had been escorted through; the rattle of the locking bar was clear to everyone and he frowned.

‘Where is Brother Widikind?’

The Lothians

At the same time

They roared through the March, looting and burning and with no care now that they had rid themselves of the Welsh. Using fire, using blade, using lies and deceit, they harried the wee rickle of fields and cruck houses in Byres, Heriot, Ratho and Ladyset. They felled ramparts and broke wooden walls, ravaged the Pinkney stronghold at Ballencrieff and showed their faces to the frightened burghers of Haddington.

Fell and bloody were the riders of Black James Douglas, who gorged on fire and sword and pain and never seemed to have enough of it to drive out the hatred he felt for all that had been taken from him.

Then they came down on the weekly market at Seton, because that lord was firmly in the English camp and Black Jamie wanted him scorched for it. They rampaged through the screamers, scattering them with half-mocking snarls and a waved blade. There was little of fodder anywhere, Dog Boy noted, and Jamie nodded, pointing to the church.

‘You can rely on God to make sure of his tithe,’ he said, and bellowed at the others to be quick and to take only the peas and barley, the live chooks and the dead coneys.

They were good, too, careful when loading the stolen eggs and ignoring trinkets — well, in the main. Everyone took a little something, as a keepsake or a token for a woman somewhere, while a bolt of new cloth was blanket and cloak both on a bad night.

Jamie and Dog Boy rode up to the stout-walled tithe barn and Dog Boy skipped off the garron and kicked open the double doors; it was an echoing hall, bare even of mice, and Jamie’s eyebrows went up at that. At the nearby church, the door of it clearly barred from the inside, the priest stood outside, defiant chin raised.

‘The silver is buried,’ he said bitterly, ‘and you are ower late to this feast — others have beaten you.’

Jamie, leaning forward on the pommel, calm as you please, offered the man a smile and a lisping greeting in good Latin.

‘Father Peter,’ the priest replied, clearly unable to speak the tongue, which Dog Boy knew was common enough among parish priests, who understood only the rote of services and would not know Barabbas from Barnabas.

‘Your wealth is safe enough — silver-gilt chalice, is it?’ Jamie replied easily. ‘A pyx, of course — silver or ivory? A silver-gilt chrismatory, a thurible, three cruets and an osculatorium.’

Dog Boy turned to stare in wonder at Jamie, but the priest was unimpressed.

‘One cruet, for we are not rich here. And a pewter ciborium, which you forgot — but since this is the minimum furnishing for a house of God, as any learned man knows, I do not consider you to have the power of Seeing.’

‘God forbid,’ Dog Boy offered and everyone crossed themselves.

‘These others who came’, Jamie went on lightly, ‘were equally restrained, it appears, and only took fodder — unless you have also hidden the contents of your tithe barn.’

‘I wish it were so. They sought food only, as you do,’ the priest replied coldly. ‘Came out of Berwick, but were no skilled raiders, only poor folk starving in that place.’

‘Berwick …’

Dog Boy knew why Jamie was so thoughtful. Berwick was a long way off and if the residents were scourging the country from that distance, then they were starving right enough. Which was news enough for Black Sir James to smile, wish the priest well — and his women and weans, too, which brought a scowl, but no denial.

It was all friendly enough, but Dog Boy threw the first torch that fired every house in the vill, so that they rode away from it leaving flames and weeping and sullen stares in the smoke. I am filled to the brim with shrieks and embers, Dog Boy thought, and wondered if there would ever be an end.

Commanderie of St Felix in the Kingdom of Castile

Feast of the Invention of the Cross, May 1314

He was called Brother Amicus, though there was nothing friendly about him.

‘You should repent and confess your sins, Brother,’ he spat. ‘If you go unshriven, you go to Hell, to be broken on the wheel by foul demons, smashed over and over for the sin of pride. You will be thrown into freezing water until you scream for your arrogance. You will be dismembered alive by gibbering imps armed with dull knives for your impiety, thrown into a boiling pit of molten gold for your pride, forced to eat rats, toads and snakes in remembrance of your greed.’

He paused, breathing heavily and frothing at the corners of his mouth.

Widikind laughed through his burst lips, the words coming slowly because his arms were twisted up behind him and fastened by chains, which suspended his whole weight and constricted his breathing. He was naked and streaked with his own and other people’s foulness.

His voice came in spurts for he found it hard to get air into his flattened lungs — but he had breath enough for this.

‘You may dream of it, torturer. I have suffered all that and more in the service of God and the Temple, even to the eating of toads and snakes. However, I am sure you can verify your visions — I will be seeing you in Hell, certes.’

The Inquisitor scowled and turned away, leaving Widikind in his pain. The start of it had been the blow, sharp and sudden, which had whirled stars into him as he went to check the carts. Even as he went down, he knew what it was, even if he did not quite know who.

He learned that soon enough, knew it even when he could not raise his head to look — her perfume, spiced and insidious as a snake’s coils, left him in no doubt as he hung in the shadow-flickering room.

‘You would do well to speak, Templar,’ Doña Beatriz said softly. ‘My brother needs what you know and he will not be kind.’

Widikind was more ashamed of his nakedness than concerned for future agonies, but he knew now that his soul was safe and he only laughed; he knew, by the stiffness in her body, that she was irritated, felt the grip in his beard as his head was raised. The Moor, her servant, held Widikind’s stained beard in one fist so that he could see both their faces; his was unsmiling as a stone, but hers was a blaze of fury.

‘You will speak,’ she said, her voice a razor, and smiled like a sweet sin as she waved another man into Widikind’s eyeline. This one was lean, grizzled and seemed nothing — until you looked in his eyes. There was nothing in them at all, save a bland, studied interest and Widikind knew what he was at once.

‘This is Rafiq,’ Doña Beatriz said. ‘Buscador de demonios.’

She turned away and left. For a moment, Piculph hesitated, flicking his eyes sideways to the blank-eyed Rafiq, and then he relinquished his grip, so that Widikind’s head fell forward and he lost sight of them all.

But he was aware of Piculph’s going, more aware still of the one they called ‘seeker of devils’ stepping close; Widikind heard him crooning, soft and melodious as a monk at plainchant, wondered if it was a psalm against evil, or a spell.

He would have been surprised to discover that it was a lullaby. He was not surprised to discover that Rafiq was an expert and that his skill was in pain. He hoped that he had been missed, though he expected no rescue, for the others would now have their fears confirmed.

He would have been gratified to hear them discuss his absence.

‘It seems your fears may be justified,’ Rossal admitted grudgingly to Kirkpatrick. ‘In which case, we should take some precautions.’

‘What is happening?’ demanded Sim, an eyeblink before Hal did. Rossal issued crisp orders and the other two began turning tables up on their ends.

‘I was of the opinion’, Kirkpatrick answered slowly, ‘that this Guillermo and his lady sister would make some move against us.’

‘The gold …’

‘Aye, just so.’

There was no urgency in the man, nor in Rossal now that the tables had been upended like a siege pavise, and Hal could not understand why this Guillermo and his sister should wish to attack them — and why everyone seemed acceptingly calm about it. He said so and Rossal clapped him on the shoulder.

‘In a moment, we will know whether this Guillermo is to be trusted.’

‘Look to your weapons, mark you, in case he cannot,’ Kirkpatrick added, ‘but keep behind our defences — I am sure he has used that wee minstrel gallery before this.’

Minstrel gallery, Hal thought. And pigs have wings.

‘If they mean to red-murder us and steal the gold,’ Sim blustered, confused and angry at the feeling of it, ‘then we should not be sittin’ here like a set mill.’

‘Doucelike, Sim Craw,’ Kirkpatrick said, laying a hand on the man’s big shoulder and smiling into the bristle of his beard. ‘I may have it wrangwise. We might be locked in for our own safety.’

‘Pigs have wings,’ Hal muttered.

The Seeker of Demons was Satan’s own creation, Widikind was sure of it. He caressed with blades, peeling back skin until the pain was so burning intense that the German felt the rawness like ice. He worked through the long hours, while Widikind hung and dripped sweat, blood and vomit.

At some point — Widikind did not know day from night — the Seeker of Demons broke off to eat bread and cheese and refresh himself with wine, and began on the hot irons.

The smell of his own flesh roasting nauseated Widikind, but he swallowed it rather than give the torturer the satisfaction of knowing it. But this time the pain was enough to make him call to God, to the Virgin, and he found himself babbling in German. But he knew what he said and it was nothing they wanted or could use.

He slipped into a grey veiled world, was aware of figures moving in it and recognized the perfume of the lady. The man with her, his voice clearly used to command, snapped at another, his voice sharp and grating with annoyance, and the man’s soothing assurances confirmed him as Brother Amicus, who called the one he spoke to ‘Don Guillermo’.

He heard Guillermo speak again, softer this time and in French, rather than the elegant Castilian of the court.

‘This de Grafton — is he to be trusted?’

‘No, darling brother, but he can be relied on to serve our interests as long as he is serving his own.’

Doña Beatriz’s voice was a sneer and Widikind heard her brother laugh.

‘Go to Crunia. Search the ship — the treasure must be there. Send word in a hurry.’

‘What of the crew?’

There was silence, which was answer enough.

Afterwards — it might have been a minute, an hour or a week — the Seeker of Demons took Widikind’s eye with a white-hot iron, a lancing shriek of agony that had him bucking and twisting as he dangled in chains, feeling his flesh bubble and dissolve in the heat, pouring down his cheek, sizzling like meat on a skewer.

He surfaced from the cool dark of oblivion into the agony of life.

‘Where is the Templar treasure?’

It was the first thing the Seeker of Demons had asked, the first time he had spoken and the only sound he had made other than the crooning gentleness of song.

Widikind, who wondered what he had babbled while his mind cowered elsewhere, grinned a bloody grin, for he knew by the question that he had said nothing of value. He remembered the feeling of his own flesh melting on his cheek like gold and what Brother Amicus had promised. For his pride. He was proud of resisting, yet aware that such arrogance was unfit for a Templar, proscribed or no.

Yet he could not resist it.

‘Found any demons?’ he mushed and laughed his way back to the coverlet of dark.

The sluice of cold water slashed him into the light again, into the world of pain the torturer had made with vicious beatings. He could feel his arms and realized he had been lowered a little and refastened so that his hands were now bound with rope rather than chain and the suspension on his dangling arms could be alleviated if he raised himself on the balls of his feet.

Whose toes had been broken, so that doing so seared agony through him like a knife.

He raised his wobbling head and stared with his one good eye into the face of the torturer and saw no pleasure in the other’s witnessing of his realization. Which was, he thought, worse than a leering grin; Widikind let his head loll, though he could see the man’s face through the spider-legs of his remaining lashes.

The Seeker of Demons, his face still blank, touched the white-hot iron to Widikind’s abdomen and, for the first time, showed emotion: surprise at the lack of response.

He wonders if he has gone too far, Widikind thought.

‘Where is the Templar treasure?’

Widikind heard the querulous note in his voice and knew it was time. He wanted him near, wanted him close with his hot iron. He felt fingers at his neck, checking pulse, felt the length of forearm on his chest, so he knew where the Seeker of Demons stood. He was a Knight of the Temple and had the power of God still with him …

He swept his legs up and locked them round the man’s waist, crossing his ankles until his broken feet flared howls from him; he welcomed the pain, for there was more triumph and anger in it now and the agony fuelled his strength like fire in his veins. God give me strength …

The man was strong but Widikind had trained every day for years in every facet of horsemanship; his feet were broken, but the thighs and calves on him were crippling and the Seeker of Demons arched and shrieked, unable to break free. He tried to beat Widikind with his one free hand, the one with the hot iron in it, but each time he began, Widikind crushed him further until something snapped. The man twisted and screamed.

‘That was a rib breaking,’ Widikind told him, so close that the blood from his cracking lips spotted the Seeker of Demons’s cheek. ‘There will be more if you do not do as I say. If you resist me further, I will break your back and you will never stand unaided again.’

‘Let … me…’

‘No.’

They strained, panting like dogs.

‘Raise the iron,’ Widikind hoarsed at him, panting close to the man’s ear, feeling the rank fear-sweat of him cinched tight and obscene as a lover. ‘Raise it slowly and touch it to the ropes on my wrist. If you do anything else, I will crack all feeling from your back, so that you will drag yourself around with padded rags on your hands the rest of your short and miserable life.’

The torturer was hovering at the edge of fainting, so the cooling red tip of the iron wavered back and forth, searing Widikind’s flesh as it charred through the rope. The parting brought them crashing down, but Widikind was ready for it, sprang free, grabbed the iron and smashed it on the Seeker of Demons’s head.

He did it twice more before the pain in his feet seemed to drive up into the core of him and he fell over into emptiness. When he woke, he stared up into a sweat-gleamed familiar face, whose wild eyes looked at the splintered gourd that was the head of the torturer, then into Widkind’s melted ruin of a face.

Piculph, the German thought and almost sobbed with how close he had come to escape. The Moor licked his lips, stuck out a hand and hauled Widikind to his agony of broken feet.

‘Move,’ he said in good French, ‘if you want to live.’

There was a thump and a crash which brought heads up. Then came the unmistakable sound of the bar being lifted from the far side of the door and, even as they crouched and lifted their weapons, the door flung open and a body fell in.

For a moment, no one moved — and then everyone did. De Bissot and Kirkpatrick sprang to the body, Hal and de Villers moved to the open door, beyond which lay the guard, his head cracked and leaking over the flagstones; Sim covered the gallery, just in case. But the hissed, broken, bubbling voice stopped them all.

‘Stay,’ Widikind managed. ‘Piculph says there is no way we can escape this way, so he brought me here. Listen closely — I have much to tell and no time left to tell it.’

He spoke, hoarse and swift and laid out what he knew. When his voice trailed off, de Bissot straightened and looked at Kirkpatrick.

‘You were right.’

‘Bar the door,’ Hal advised and they fell to it, moving the heavy trestles. Then they shifted the lolling Widikind, his naked, streaked body trailing fluids like a bad winesack; Kirkpatrick did not say it, but he thought the man was not long for this world. Unless they could find a way out of this place, at once prison and fortress, none of them were.

‘This Guillermo will come to talk soon,’ Kirkpatrick informed everyone with certainty. ‘He will threaten and cajole. After that will come the hard part.’

Hal was on the point of demanding to know the whole of it, annoyed at being kept so in the dark, but Kirkpatrick’s prophecy was proved true with the innocuous twitch of the hanging over the gallery entrance. Sim, watching carefully, called the warning.

‘Cover,’ he snapped and Hal, glancing backwards as he scurried behind a table, saw the figures move smoothly out on to the gallery, latchbows ready. Behind them came the tall, saturnine figure of Guillermo, a scowl on his handsome face.

‘Ach,’ Sim declared with disgust, cranking the arbalest like a madman. ‘There are times when I wish you were no’ as sharp in your thinkin’, Kirkpatrick, but I prig the blissin’ o’ the blue heaven on you for it.’

‘God be praised,’ Kirkpatrick answered piously.

‘For ever and ever.’

Guillermo stared down at them and silence fell, broken only by the harsh of breathing and the clank of Sim resting his arbalest on a steadying edge. That slight sound seemed to break the moment.

‘You would be wise not to trigger that monster,’ Guillermo warned. ‘Those tables will not stand against the quarrels from my own bows at this range.’

‘You dare not kill us,’ Rossal said quietly and stepped from behind cover. Hal moved as if to drag him back and felt Kirkpatrick’s hand on his forearm; when he looked, he was given a quiet smile and a shake of the head, which only left him more bewildered than ever.

‘You do not know which of us holds the secret of the treasure you seek,’ Rossal went on, ‘now that you have discovered the truth.’

Hal’s gaze was wide-eyed, matched only by Sim, but Kirkpatrick merely flashed them a smile and put his fingers to his lips.

‘Sand,’ Guillermo declared with disgust. ‘Boxes of sand. And some lead for the weight. Clever. Now you will tell us where you have hidden the treasure. You will do this or suffer.’

‘You should not’, Rossal flung back, ‘have left the likes of us our arms, for you cannot inflict suffering without a fight and we will neither step back nor surrender, so you will have to kill us. You cannot do that, my lord, if you want the secret you seek. So your threats are an empty mistake. And not nearly as bad as the one which led you to this betrayal. You are a serpent in Eden, my lord, whose own bite will be fatal for you.’

‘Three Poor Knights,’ Guillermo sneered, ‘one half-dead already. And three old men. A jester with a bladder on a stick could overpower you.’

‘Bigod!’ Sim bellowed. ‘I will send a bolt to rip away his liver and lights.’ He was held back only by the combined efforts of Kirkpatrick and Hal and eventually forced silent.

‘You have one hour to consider matters,’ Guillermo declared, unfolding his arms and sweeping back through the archway, the two archers filtering warily after him.

The breath came out of them sudden and together, so that it sounded like a small wind; Kirkpatrick and Hal let go of Sim, who shook himself angrily, like a bristling dog.

‘You had better explain this,’ Hal said wearily to Kirkpatrick, ‘for it seems to me everyone kens the meat of it save myself and Sim. I am sick of your close mouth, Kirkpatrick, particularly when you drag me and those I care for by your side.’

‘Guillermo is an ambitious wee scrauchle,’ Kirkpatrick answered blandly, ignoring Hal’s scowls, ‘winsome, but with a wanthrifty soul, whose sister is as black-avowed as he is. Guillermo wants to be Grand Master of his Order and the one who occupies that space is no capering fool — his name is Ruy Vaz and he had his suspicions.’

‘He might well be behind it,’ Hal pointed out and Rossal shook his head, a quiet, sad smile lifting the black beard.

‘Ruy Vaz is the one who sent warning to us and a solution. The warning came by one of his agents, one close to the sister.’

‘Piculph,’ Sim declared, remembering the hissed revelations of Widikind; all heads turned to where the German, bundled in a cloak, lay trembling and rolling-eyed. Dying, Hal thought dully.

‘So it appears, though we were not told of it,’ Kirkpatrick went on. ‘But we devised this cheatry about the gold. Even sent out decoy ships as if it was real.’

‘It is fake?’ Sim demanded truculently. ‘We came all this way — I boaked up my guts for a ruse?’

‘The fish send their thanks,’ de Villers declared, grinning as he arranged the trestles round the door leading to the belltower.

‘The treasure is here,’ Rossal answered before Sim bubbled up, ‘and we must get it to Ruy Vaz to exchange for the weapons we have promised King Robert.’

‘It is not in the carts,’ Kirkpatrick explained, seeing Hal’s bewilderment, ‘nor is it on the ship, which Guillermo suspects and will have confirmed. Widikind-’

‘Brother Widikind has said nothing,’ Rossal interrupted sharply. ‘Else Guillermo would know the truth of matters. He is no fool, all the same, and will work to the meat of it in the end. Even without Brother Widikind.’

Hal heard the bitter sadness in his voice and realized that de Bissot already considered Widikind as dead. Worse occurred to him as he recalled the German’s halting last words.

‘The others have been taken,’ he said. ‘We have no ship, then, and if we have a treasure as you say I cannot see how it is to be got to this Ruy Vaz, nor the weapons all the way back to King Robert.’

He stopped, seeing Rossal and de Villers scramble out of their black priests’s robes, so that they stood in white undershirts, each with a small red cross on the breast. Rossal hauled out a leather pouch and handed it to Kirkpatrick.

‘The treasure,’ he declared solemnly, and leaned closer, so that his next words were low and hissed.

‘Ordo ex chao,’ he said and Kirkpatrick took the pouch, nodded and stuffed it inside his own tunic.

‘It is my task to get to Ruy Vaz,’ he said lightly, grinning at Hal and Sim. ‘It is yours to get back to the coast and find out what has happened to the Bon Accord. De Grafton is the traitor who nearly did for Somhairl.’

He broke off and shook his head in genuine sorrow.

‘He has fallen a long way from grace. He may well now have thrown in his lot with Guillermo and his sister. Whether de Grafton has shackled himself to her or not, he is an agent of the English, I am sure of it.’

‘Christ betimes, how are we to achieve any of this?’ roared Sim, scrubbing his head with confusion. ‘You have contrived to fasten us up in a prison, Kirkpatrick.’

‘Mind yer station, ye moudiewart,’ Kirkpatrick replied, his wry smile balming the sting of it. ‘I hope you are as clever at getting down a long drop as you are at scaling one, Sim Craw. I will need your belts and those black robes, for we do not have one of your cunning ladders.’

De Villers returned, grim and spade-bearded, to tell them he had muffled the bell with his own small clothes, cut the long bell rope and refastened it securely.

‘It is short,’ he replied tersely and Hal knew what they were about to do, for he had seen the commanderie, perched on the edge of a ravine: the belltower rope would lead to the base of the rock it was built on and then there would be another drop, a good ten ells, to the bottom of the brush-choked ravine. A man could break every limb in such a fall. A man could break his head.

‘The belts and cloth strips should make the difference,’ Kirkpatrick said cheerily and Hal looked at him; they were three men past their prime for hand-over-hand descents down makeshift ropes and his look said it all.

Almost all. Sim, as ever, had his own thoughts on the drop and the dark.

‘God be praised,’ he declared piously and crossed himself.

‘For ever and ever.’

Rossal came to Hal, looming sudden as a wraith.

‘Brother de Grafton’, he said, his French soft and sibilant, ‘was released into the care of Sir Henry Percy after the Order was proscribed in England and all Templars arrested. It is possible that he has renounced his vows to God in favour of King Edward, but probably works only for Percy. De Grafton was the only one of us who did not know the truth of the Templar treasure. Like this Guillermo and his sister, he believed that the wealth was boxed and in our carts.’

Hal nodded, frowning and trying hard to keep pace with it all. Guillermo, if he had any sense at all, would wonder where the boxed treasure had vanished. If not here, or on the ship, it could only have been spirited away on a rest halt and that under the eyes of the escorting knights.

Rossal nodded at this, his smile a sardonic twist in the dim.

‘De Grafton will know by now, for he is of the Order. He may even tell Guillermo the truth of it, though I am sure he will look for his own advantage first. If he does not tell, Guillermo will be left wondering. We are the Templars, after all, who worship Baphomet and have strange powers. Who is to say what spells such magi could cast on the eyes and minds of men? Or even on gold.’

‘If you have one to make us fly, now is the time to conjure it up,’ Sim Craw growled. ‘Better still, turn us invisible.’

‘God be praised,’ Rossal answered, cross-signing Sim’s blasphemy away.

‘For ever and ever,’ Hal intoned frostily, glaring at the unrepentant Sim. Then he looked at Rossal. ‘Mark you, he has a point — Guillermo is not so much of a fool that he will have forgot to have the tower surrounded.’

‘Not down in that ravine,’ Kirkpatrick answered, bustling up. ‘Mak’ haste — we have little time.’

‘They will expect us to try an escape,’ Hal persisted and Rossal laid a hand on his arm.

‘With the greatest of respect,’ he said, ‘they consider you three old men of little worth. It is the Templars they want and myself in particular. As long as they see us here, that is what they will fix on.’

The sick lurch of it reeled Hal sideways; he had not considered what the Order knights would do and realized it now, all in a rush.

‘We are the last Templars,’ Rossal declared simply. Nearby, faint as a moth’s breath, came the sound of de Villers praying. Non nobis, non nobis, Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam … not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to Your Name give glory.

Rossal rolled his shoulders a little.

‘We will fight them in the narrow door and up the steps to the tower. It will take them a long time to overcome us and they must try and take at least one of us alive, in order to question.’

He nodded to each of them.

‘You will have the night, perhaps more if God is with us. Then they will come after you.’

Stunned, they watched him move away to kneel with the others. Kirkpatrick cleared his throat and exchanged glances with Hal.

‘Defending the treasure and the honour of his Order to the end,’ he growled. ‘No better way to end it.’

Hal heard the gruffness tremble all the same and remembered that Kirkpatrick owed his life twice to the intervention of Rossal de Bissot. He followed the man up the steps, with Sim grunting behind him. At the top, panting, Sim rounded on Kirkpatrick.

‘Whaur’s the treasure?’

Sim’s truculent demand was a blot in the mirror of the moment.

‘Seems to me,’ he went on sullenly, ‘you are placing a deal of trust in this Ruy Vaz.’

‘The Grand Master of Alcántara has flushed out his traitor,’ Kirkpatrick declared, ‘who thinks Templar treasure can be lifted and weighed in boxes. Ruy Vaz kens the truth of matters.’

‘I wish I did,’ Sim muttered. ‘Are you payin’ for good King Robert’s armoury with the blessings of God?’

‘No,’ Hal said, remembering the pouch and the whisper: Ordo ex chao. Order out of chaos. A fitting password to go with the Templar jetton. He explained it to Sim, who also remembered it from the time they had ransomed Isabel using one — more years ago now than either of them cared to recall.

A tally note for sums deposited elsewhere, it could be presented, together with the secret word known only to the deliverer and the recipient, in exchange for all or part of the sum. There was no gold in boxes or anywhere else, only a slip of scribbled parchment and a few spoken words.

‘There is a fearsome sum on this wee jetton tally note, stamped by the Templar seal and the Schiarizzi mercantilers of the Italies,’ Kirkpatrick declared, patting his tunic where the pouch was hidden. ‘One of those merchants waits in Villasirga with Ruy Vaz and when he gets this wee scrap o’ paper and the secret word, he will nod and Ruy Vaz will know his money is assured.’

Sim worried it in his head, licked his lips and nodded uncertainly. Once he would have crossed himself and spat over his shoulder at this, as clear an indication of unholy magic as there could be — how else could the Templars transfer a man’s coin from one place to another, unseen and unheard?

‘You must get to the port and see to the crew and the ship,’ Kirkpatrick went on, grim as old rock. ‘When I bring this to Ruy Vaz, he will scourge Guillermo and his supporters and we are assured of weapons and armour — but we still need to bring them safe to King Robert.’

Kirkpatrick’s eyes and sweat-sheened face seemed to gleam in the dark and the snake-hiss slither of the rope going over the side was loud. For a moment, Hal saw de Bissot and Kirkpatrick lock eyes with one another, saw the jaw muscles work Kirkpatrick’s beard. Then Kirkpatrick nodded once and turned away; he and Hal clasped wrist to wrist, brief and wordless, and Kirkpatrick, grunting with effort, levered himself over the belltower lip, hung for a moment and was gone.

Blinking sweat from his eyes and rubbing his palms, Hal remembered when he, Isabel and Sim had watched Dog Boy perform the same feat out of the window of a besieged Herdmanston. The three of them had had to lie together on the great box bed to stop it being dragged across the floor by the makeshift rope Dog Boy hung from; Isabel, smiling bright, had sworn them all to secrecy about her lying abed with the pair of them, easing the strain on the moment if not the rope.

Hal blinked back to the present, helped Sim grunt and pech his way over the lip and was not sure the big man had the strength of arm and leg to get him all the way down. Still, he heard no wild cry and thump so thought it went fine enough.

He wondered if he had that strength himself and was taking up the rope when a soft voice stopped him; he turned to see Rossal de Bissot, a shadow at the top of the belltower stairs.

‘Take this,’ the Templar said, holding out his sword, ‘and give me your own. I would not see this fall into the hands of Guillermo and can think of no one better to wield it with honour. You are a Sientcler, after all.’

Numbed and dumb, Hal took the sword and handed over his own; the new one felt heavier, though it slid into his sheath easily enough — all but a fingerwidth of blade below the hilt.

‘Hubris,’ Rossal declared with a smile like a sickle moon in the dark. ‘That sword is longer, heavier and has more decoration on it than was ever proper for a Poor Knight.’

‘I am honoured to wield it — though you put a deal of faith in the Sientcler name,’ Hal growled, dry-mouthed with the moment and aware, yet again, of that peculiar Sientcler connection with the Order, so that every member of that family seemed to have drunk from the Grail itself. And all because a female ancestor had once been married to Hugues de Payens, the founder.

‘You will not disgrace the blade,’ Rossal answered and Hal was not sure whether it was a statement or a command. Below, he heard de Villers chanting: Vade retro Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana — begone Satan, never suggest to me thy vanities.

He knew the Knight was facing his own fear and desire for life, rejecting any possibility of salvation. Preparing to die.

Hal glanced at de Bissot and saw nothing of fear or regret, only a slight sadness when the man revealed that Widikind had already died. The Templar raised his hand in a final salute and was gone like a wraith.

Hal stood for a moment, and then crossed to the stone lip, wriggled his hips to the balance point and, with a final fervent prayer for his own salvation, slithered over the edge.

Vade retro Satana, he heard as he scrabbled in a blind sweat for footholds. Ipse venena bibas. Begone Satan. Drink thou thine own poison.

Hal, his hands straining, the sweat in his eyes, wondered how in the name of all Hell had Dog Boy ever managed this.

ISABEL

Now am I ripe in the understanding of what the love of God means. You sent me the little nun, the one called Constance, who whispered to me briefly, so briefly I hardly believed I had heard it all. He is free, she said to me. Roxburgh is taken and Hal is free. Blessed is the Lord.