‘What ails you?’ Josse asked.
De Loup opened his eyes and glared up at him. ‘As I said last night, the boy has a heavy hand with a bolt of wood,’ he said. He put up a hand and touched the back of his head. ‘I believe he cracked my skull.’
Josse slipped off Horace’s back. ‘Let me look,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we can assist, or help you to where you can receive treatment.’
De Loup began to laugh. ‘I said you were a fool,’ he observed, ‘and I was right. Do you not recognize an enemy when he stares you in the face?’ Before Josse could reply, he added, ‘Besides, it is too late.’ He took a breath and squared the slumped shoulders. ‘I can no longer feel the left side of my body.’
Josse thought rapidly. He had seen men take a blow to the head, get up and appear to be all right and then some time later, just like de Loup, take sick and die. It was as if the brain refused at first to admit it was fatally damaged.
Ninian had also dismounted. ‘I will take her,’ he announced, advancing on de Loup.
Something was wrong; it was only the swiftest of impressions but it registered in Josse’s mind. Even as he yelled to Ninian, ‘Watch out!’ de Loup uncurled himself, his short, lethal knife an extension of his right hand, and with the full impulsive power of his push off the ground, hurled himself on Ninian.
Terror turning him icy-cold, Josse thought it was all over in that first savage attack, but Ninian fought like a street urchin and by some trick he wriggled free of the stabbing knife, twisting round so that he kept his slim body out of reach. But de Loup, despite his injury, was stronger; soon he had Ninian’s arm up behind his back, the knife to the boy’s throat.
‘Now I finish what I tried to do at World’s End,’ he panted. ‘We needed two victims that night and we only offered up one, and the boy squealed like a girl while we dispatched him. He was not worthy of us or our great ceremony.’
Ninian struggled, his face contorted with rage. ‘You had no right to take his life!’ he cried. ‘You tortured and shamed him, and his last moments on earth were polluted by your foul desires!’
De Loup wrenched up the boy’s captive hands and Ninian bit down a scream of pain. ‘As would yours have been, my pretty lad, but for the interruption! Make no mistake — what you heard us do to the first boy was in store for you too.’
Josse made a move forward but instantly the knifepoint dug into Ninian’s neck. ‘Stay where you are,’ de Loup warned.
Josse watched Ninian. The boy’s eyes were closed and he was moving his lips; oh, God, Josse thought, he is praying — he believes his life is about to end and he prays for forgiveness of his sins! But then the blue eyes shot open and looked straight at Josse. Amazingly, Ninian smiled. Then he went limp.
De Loup, feeling the sudden weight of the body sagging in his arms, was taken off guard and bent with the load. Ninian slipped to the ground, de Loup crouching over him. Then, as de Loup put out both hands to support himself, Ninian shot up and kneeled on the older man’s chest, his hands pinning down the arms.
De Loup stared up at him, his face suddenly impassive. ‘So,’ he sighed, ‘again you evade me.’
His deadly pale face was beaded with sweat and his breath came unevenly. He is dying, Josse thought. Ninian must have seen it too, but he did not relax his hold.
‘You are fortunate in your allies,’ de Loup said with a sigh, ‘for you attract better fighters than I do.’ The white face twisted into a smile. ‘Two against so many, back at my tower on Oleron, but then one of those was rather special.’
Josse was puzzled; the two must have been Piers and Ninian himself, and he had had no idea that Piers had been a great fighter. On the face of it, it seemed unlikely, but then a man did not always display his full prowess until he had to. ‘Piers of Essendon was a surprising man, then,’ he said.
Both Ninian and de Loup turned to stare at him. Ninian looked guilty; de Loup was laughing softly.
‘Shall I tell him or will you?’ he asked Ninian. The boy did not reply, save only to tighten his grip on de Loup’s arms. ‘Very well,’ de Loup said, smiling, ‘I shall.’
He turned his head so that he could meet Josse’s eyes more comfortably. ‘Piers protested the moment we took the first boy and tied him to the altar,’ he said, his voice pleasant and conversational, as if he were speaking about what he had eaten for supper. ‘The Knights of Arcturus are not what they were. As you have seen for yourself, many of us are old and feeble. Nevertheless, restraining Piers was well within our capabilities and we made him witness what we did. We dispatched the first boy and were in the middle of our preparations for the second when we were interrupted.’ He sighed heavily. ‘The intruder burst into the upper chamber and took us by surprise,’ he went on. ‘He released Piers, pushed him on down the stairs and kept us at bay with that great sword of his. That’s the problem with a narrow stair,’ he added, frowning. ‘Such things are built, naturally, for those within to defend themselves, for of course only one attacker at a time can advance. By the same token, however, they also help those who retreat. He kept us there while Piers released his boy and fetched a couple of horses. He wounded three of us and that had the effect of discouraging the others. By the time we got down the stairs, the three of them had escaped.’
‘And they raced across the island to the waiting boat,’ Josse said. He stared at Ninian. ‘It was you — you were the slighter, shorter man, and Piers was the fair one!’ Piers’s hair had been light brown turning to grey; under the moonlight, he would have appeared fair.
That made two, and the third one had been the king.
Everything Josse had so painstakingly worked out suddenly fell apart. ‘I thought… I believed the king was one of the Knights of Arcturus,’ he said. ‘I thought Piers and Ninian escaped, and you — ’ he glared at de Loup — ‘set off in pursuit with the king and another knight.’
De Loup calmly returned the stare. ‘You were wrong.’
He shifted his position slightly and Ninian renewed the pressure of his knees on the older man’s chest. ‘King Richard did not care for our activities in the tower at the end of his mother’s island,’ de Loup said. ‘He was always very fussy about what could and could not be allowed to go on in Aquitaine; Queen Eleanor brought him up in the firm belief that the whole country would be his one day and he acted as if that day had already come.’ A sly smile creased his face. ‘Still, you know what they used to say about him. He might have appreciated the particular nature of our ceremonies on any other night and it was sheer bad luck that- Aaagh!’
Ninian had shifted his right hand from de Loup’s upper arm to his throat and he cut off the flow of words. He does not believe the filthy rumours muttered about the king any more than I do, Josse thought warmly. Good for him, he De Loup’s freed left arm had slid like a snake across the grass and now he had his knife in his hand. He swept it up towards Ninian’s belly and in the same instant Josse threw himself forward, pushing Ninian off de Loup’s chest and landing with his full and considerable weight in the boy’s place. The knife was between him and de Loup; he had time only for a very swift prayer.
De Loup groaned and coughed. Blood ran out of his mouth and he tried to draw air into his crushed chest. Josse moved off him; the knife lay flat against de Loup’s stomach. Rapidly Josse inspected himself and de Loup, but neither of them had been wounded by the blade.
De Loup was struggling for breath, the white flesh around his mouth turning grey. His eyelids fluttered closed and he mouthed some silent words; with no breath, he could make no sound. After a few agonizing moments, the convulsive movements in his chest slowed and then ceased. Josse leaned down over him. Then, standing up again, he said, ‘He’s dead.’
Ninian found the black statue, carefully wrapped in one of de Loup’s saddlebags. He was in favour of setting out for the coast, and a ship to take them back to England, immediately, but Josse knew they could not be so hasty. There were two more things he must do, and the first of them was right there.
With Ninian’s grudging help, they dug a grave for Philippe de Loup. It was not as deep as Josse would have liked, but the ground was quite soft and they managed to cover the corpse with sufficient depth of earth for it not to attract predators. Josse was troubled by the lack of a priest to speak the necessary words; he mentioned this to Ninian, who said scornfully that de Loup would not have had any time for the priest or his prayers. ‘He walked a very different path, Josse,’ the boy added gravely. ‘He must meet whatever awaits him in the same unorthodox way that he lived his life.’
There was nothing that Josse could think of to reply to that. When they had finished, Ninian stowed the figure in his pack and, leading de Loup’s horse — for they could not leave the animal running loose — they set off back along the Eure. They did not follow the road all the way back to Chartres; as the city’s walls appeared in front of them, the low, early sun making them appear to glow orange, Josse turned off to the north-west so as to avoid the
