barrel where he was trying to staunch the bleeding from a wound in his belly. The young monk had been an assistant in his monastery’s infirmary, and so he approached the wounded soldier. ‘I can bind that up,’ he said, kneeling, but the wounded man snarled at him and lashed out with a knife, which Brother Michael only avoided by toppling sideways. He scrambled to his feet and backed away.
‘Take off your robe,’ the wounded man said, trying to follow the monk, but Brother Michael ran uphill. The man collapsed again, spitting curses.‘Come back,’ he shouted, ‘come back!’ Over his leather jerkin he wore a jupon that showed a golden merlin against a red field and Brother Michael, dazedly trying to make sense of the chaos about him, realised that the golden bird was the symbol of the town’s defenders, and that the wounded man had wanted to escape by stealing his monk’s robe and using it as a disguise, but instead the man was trapped by two soldiers in green and white colours who cut his throat.
Some men wore a badge showing a yellow bishop’s staff surrounded by four black cross-crosslets, and Brother Michael decided they had to be the bishop’s soldiers, while the troops who wore the green horse on the white field must serve the Count of Labrouillade. Most of the dead displayed the golden merlin, and the monk noted how many of those corpses were spitted by long English arrows that had blood-speckled white feathers. The fighting had passed through this part of the town, leaving it burning. Fire leaped from thatched roof to thatched roof, while in the places where the fire had not reached a horde of drunken, undisciplined soldiers plundered and raped amidst the smoke. A baby cried, a woman shrieked, then a blinded man, his eyes nothing but blood-weeping pits, staggered from an alley to collide with the monk. The man shrank away, whimpering, holding up his hands to ward off the expected blow.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Brother Michael said in French, a language he had learned as a novice so he would be fitted to finish his education at Montpellier, but the blinded man ignored him and stumbled down the street. Somewhere, incongruous in the blood and smoke and shouting, a choir sang, and the monk wondered if he was dreaming, yet the voices were real, as real as the screaming women and sobbing children and barking dogs.
He went cautiously now, for the alleys were dark and the soldiers wild. He passed a tanner’s shop where a fire burned and he saw a man had been drowned in a vat of the urine used to cure the hides. He came into a small square, decorated with a stone cross, and there he was attacked from behind by a bearded brute wearing the bishop’s livery. The monk was pushed to the ground and the man bent to cut away the pouch hanging from his rope belt. ‘Get away! Get away!’ Brother Michael, panicking, forgot where he was and shouted in English. The man grinned and moved the knife to threaten the monk’s eyes, then he opened his own eyes wide, looked horrified and the flame-lit night went dark with a spray of blood as the man slowly toppled over. Brother Michael was spattered with the blood and saw that his assailant had an arrow through his neck. The man was choking, clawing at the arrow, then began to shudder as blood pulsed from his open mouth.
‘You’re English, brother?’ an English voice asked, and Michael looked up to see a man wearing a black livery on which a white badge was slashed with the diagonal bar of bastardy. ‘You’re English?’ the man asked again.
‘I’m English,’ Brother Michael managed to speak.
‘You should have clouted him,’ the man said, picking up Brother Michael’s staff, then hauling the monk to his feet. ‘Clouted him hard and he’d have toppled over. Bastards are all drunk.’
‘I’m English,’ Brother Michael said again. He was shaking. The fresh blood felt warm on his skin. He shivered.
‘And you’re a long bloody way from home, brother,’ the man said. He had a great war bow strung across his muscled shoulders. He stooped to the monk’s assailant, drew a knife and cut the arrow out of the man’s throat, killing him in the process. ‘Arrows are hard to come by,’ he explained, ‘so we try to rescue them. If you see any, pick them up.’
Michael brushed down his white robe, then looked at the brutal badge on his rescuer’s jupon. It showed a strange animal holding a cup in its claws. ‘You serve …’ he began.
‘The Bastard,’ the man interrupted. ‘We’re the Hellequin, brother.’
‘The Hellequin?’
‘The devil’s souls,’ the man said with a grin, ‘and what the hell are you doing here?’
‘I’ve a message for your master,
‘Then let’s find him. My name’s Sam.’
The name suited the archer, who had a boyish, cheerful face and a quick grin. He led the monk past a church that he and two other Hellequin had been guarding because it was a refuge for some of the townsfolk. ‘The Bastard doesn’t approve of rape,’ he explained.
‘Nor should he,’ Michael responded dutifully.
‘He might as well disapprove of rain,’ Sam said cheerfully, leading the way into a larger square where a half- dozen horsemen waited with drawn swords. They were in mail and helmets, and all wore the bishop’s livery, and behind them was the choir, a score of boys chanting a psalm. ‘
‘He’d know what that meant,’ Sam said, tapping his badge and evidently meaning
‘It means God has brought our souls out of hell,’ Brother Michael said, ‘and given us life and will keep us from the pit.’
‘That’s very nice of God,’ Sam said. He gave a perfunctory bow to the horsemen and touched his hand to his helmet. ‘That’s the bishop,’ he explained, and Brother Michael saw a tall man, his dark face framed by a steel helmet, sitting on his horse beneath a banner showing the crozier and the crosses. ‘He’s waiting,’ Sam explained, ‘for us to do the fighting. They all do that. Come and fight with us, they say, then they all get pissing drunk while we do all the killing. Still, it’s what we’re paid for. Careful here, brother, it gets dangerous.’ He took the bow from his shoulder, led the monk down an alley, then checked at the corner. He peered around. ‘Bloody dangerous,’ he added.
Brother Michael, fascinated and repelled by the carnage all about him, leaned past Sam and discovered they had reached the top of the town and were at the edge of a big open space, a marketplace perhaps, and on its far side was a road cut through black rock to the castle gate. The gatehouse, lit by the flames in the lower town, was hung with great banners. Some enjoined the help of the saints, while others showed the badge of the golden merlin. A crossbow bolt struck the wall near the priest then skittered down the cobbled alley. ‘If we capture the castle by sundown tomorrow,’ Sam said, putting an arrow on his string, ‘our money is doubled.’
‘Doubled? Why?’
‘Because tomorrow is Saint Bertille’s day,’ Sam said, ‘and our employer’s wife is called Bertille, so the fall of the castle will prove that God is on our side and not on hers.’
Brother Michael thought that was dubious theology, but he did not argue the point. ‘She’s the wife who ran away?’
‘Can’t blame her. He’s a pig, the count, a bloody pig, but marriage is marriage, ain’t it? And it’ll be a chill day in hell that a woman can choose a husband. Still, I do feel sorry for her, married to that pig.’ He half drew the bow, stepped around the corner, looked for a target, saw none and stepped back. ‘So the poor girl’s in there,’ he went on, ‘and the pig is paying us to fetch her out double fast.’
Brother Michael peered around the corner, then twitched back as a pair of crossbow bolts caught the firelight. The bolts banged into the wall close to him, then ricocheted on down the alley. ‘Lucky, aren’t you?’ Sam said cheerfully. ‘Bastards saw me, took aim, then you showed yourself. You could be in heaven by now if the bastards could shoot straight.’
‘You’ll never get the lady out of that place,’ Brother Michael opined.
‘We won’t?’
‘It’s too strong!’
‘We’re the Hellequin,’ Sam said, ‘which means the poor lass has got about an hour left with her lover boy. I hope he’s giving her a good one to remember him by.’
Michael, unseen, blushed. He was troubled by women. For most of his life that temptation had not mattered because, closed away in the Cistercian house, he rarely saw any women, but the journey from Carlisle had strewn a thousand devil’s snares across his path. In Toulouse a whore had grabbed him from behind, fondled him, and he had torn himself free, shaking with embarrassment, and fallen to his knees. The memory of her laughter was like a whip on his soul, as were the memories of all the girls he had seen, stared at, and wondered about, and he remembered the white naked skin of the girl at the town gate and he knew the devil was tempting him again, and he was about
