Bernard Cornwell - The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond

De Taillebourg was standing at the altar with its white Easter frontal. A crucifix stood on the altar between two flickering candles. The camp outside was an uproar of screams and pain and arrows, of horses whimpering and men shouting, but it was oddly calm in the make-shift chapel.

'You bastard,' Thomas said, drawing his sword and advancing on the Dominican, 'you goddamn stinking turd-faced piece of priestly shit.'

Bernard de Taillebourg had one hand on the altar. He raised the other to make the sign of the cross. 'Dominus t'ohiscum,' he said in his deep voice. An arrow scraped over the tent's roof with a high-pitched scratching sound and another whipped through a side wall and span down behind the altar.

'Is Vexille with you?' Thomas demanded.

'God's blessings on you, Thomas,' de Taillebourg said. He was fierce-faced, stern, eyes hard, and he made the sign of the cross towards Thomas, then stepped back as Thomas raised the sword.

'Is Vexille with you?' Thomas demanded again.

'Can you see him?' the Dominican asked, peering about the chapel, then smiled. No, Thomas, he's not here. He's gone into the dark. He rode to fetch help and you cannot kill me.'

'Give me a reason,' Robbie said, 'because you killed my brother, you bastard.'

De Taillebourg looked at the Scotsman. He did not recognize Robbie, but he saw the anger and offered him the same blessing he had given Thomas. 'You cannot kill me,' he said after he had made the sign of the cross, 'because I am a priest, my son, I am God's anointed, and your soul will be damned through all time if you so much as touch me.'

Thomas's response was to lunge his sword at de Taillebourg's belly, forcing the priest hard back against the altar. A man screamed outside, the sound faltering and fading, ending in a sob. A child wept inconsolably, her breath coming in great gasps, and a dog barked frantic-ally. The light of the burning tents was lurid on the chapel's canvas walls.

'You are a bastard,' Thomas said, 'and I don't mind killing you for what you did to me.'

'What I did!' De Taillebourg's anger flared like the fires outside. 'I did nothing!' He spoke in French now. 'Your cousin begged me to spare you the worst and so I did. One day, he said, you would be on his side! One day you would join the side of the Grail! One day you would be on God's side and so I spared you, Thomas. I left you your eyes! I did not burn your eves!'

'I'll enjoy killing you,' Thomas said, though in truth he was nervous of attacking a priest. Heaven would be watching and the recording angel's pen would be writing letters of fire in a great book.

'And God loves you, my son,' de Taillebourg said gently, 'God loves you. And God chastises whom he loves.'

'What's he saying?' Robbie interrupted.

'He's saying that if we kill him,' Thomas said, 'our souls are damned.'

'Till another priest undamns them,' Robbie said. 'There ain't a sin done on earth that some priest won't absolve if the price is right. So stop talking to the bastard and just kill him.' He advanced on de Taillebourg, sword raised, but Thomas held him back.

'Where's my father's book?' Thomas asked the priest. 'Your cousin has it,' de Taillebourg replied. 'I promise you, your cousin has it.'

'Then where is my cousin?'

'I told you, he rode away to fetch help,' de Taillebourg said, 'and now you must go too, Thomas. You must leave me here to pray.'

Thomas almost obeyed, but then he remembered his pathetic gratitude to this man when he had ceased the torture, and the memory of that gratitude was so sham-ing, so painful, that he suddenly shuddered and, almost without thinking, swung the sword at the priest.

'No!' de Taillebourg shouted, his left arm cut to the bone where he had tried to defend himself from Thomas's sword.

'Yes.' Thomas said, and the rage was consuming him, filling him, and he cut again and Robbie was beside him, stabbing with his sword, and Thomas swung a third time, but so lavishly that his blade got tangled with the tent roof.

De Taillebourg was swaying now. 'You can't kill me!' he shouted. 'I'm a priest!' He screamed that last word and was still screaming as Robbie chopped Sir William Douglas's sword into his neck. Thomas disentangled his own blade. De Taillebourg, the front of his robes soaked with blood, was staring at him with astonishment, then the priest tried to speak and could not, and the blood was spreading through the weave of his robes with an extraordinary swiftness. He fell to his knees, still trying to speak, and Thomas's sword blow took him on the other side of his neck, and more blood spurted out to slash drops across the white altar frontal. De Taillebourg looked up, this time with puzzlement on his face, then Robbie's last blow killed the Dominican, tearing his windpipe out of his neck. Robbie had to leap back to avoid the spray of blood. The priest twitched and in his death throes his left hand pulled the blood-drenched frontal off the altar, spilling candles and cross. He made a rattling noise, twitched and was still.

'That did feel good,' Robbie said in the sudden dark as the candles went out. 'I hate priests. I've always wanted to kill one.'

'I had a friend who was a priest,' Thomas said, making the sign of the cross, 'but he was murdered, either by my cousin or by this bastard.' He stirred de Taillebourg's body with his foot, then stooped and wiped his sword blade clean on the hem of the priest's robes.

Robbie went to the tent door. 'My father reckons that hell is full of priests,' he said.

'Then there's one more on his wav down there now,' Thomas said. He picked up his bow and he and Robbie went back into the dark where the screams and arrows laced the night. So many tents and huts were now aflame that it might as well have been daylight and in the lurid glare Thomas saw a crossbowman kneeling between two picketed and terrified horses. The cross-bow was aimed up the hill to where so many English were fighting. Thomas put an arrow on his cord, drew, and at the very last second, just as he was about to put the arrow through the crossbowman's spine, he recognized the blue and white wavy pattern on the jupon and he jerked his aim aside so that his arrow hit the crossbow instead and knocked it out of Jeanette's hands. 'You'll get killed!' he shouted at her angrily.

'That's Charles!' She pointed up the hill, equally angry with him.

'The only crossbows are with the enemy,' he said to her. 'You want to be shot by an archer?' He picked up her bow by its crank and tossed it into the shadows. 'And what are you goddamn doing here?'

'I came to kill him!' she said, pointing again at Charles of Blois who, with his retainers, was warding off a desperate assault. He had eight surviving knights with him and they were all fighting savagely even though they were hugely outnumbered and every one of them was wounded. Thomas led Jeanette up the slope just in time to see a tall English man-at-arms hack at Charles who caught the blow on his shield and slid his own sword under its rim to stab the Englishman in the thigh. Another man attacked and was slashed down by an axe, a third pulled one of Charles's retainers away from the mill and hacked at his helmet. There seemed to be a score of Englishmen trying to reach Charles, smashing their shields into his retainer's weapons, thrusting swords and chopping with big war axes.

'Give him room!' an authoritative voice shouted.

'Give him room! Back away! Back away! Let him yield!'

The attackers reluctantly moved back. Charles had his visor up and there was blood on his pale face and more blood on his sword. A priest was on his knees beside him.

'Yield!' a man shouted at the Duke, who seemed to understand because he impulsively shook his head in refusal, but then Thomas put an arrow on his cord, drew and pointed it at Charles's face. Charles saw the threat and hesitated.

'Yield!' another man shouted.

'Only to a man of rank!' Charles called in French.

'Who has rank here?' Thomas called in English, then again in French. One of Charles's remaining men-at-arms slowly collapsed, first to his knees, then onto his belly with a crash of plate armour.

A knight stepped out of the English ranks. He was a Breton, one of Totesham's deputies, and he announced his name to prove to Charles that he was a man of noble birth and then he held out his hand and Charles of Blois, nephew to the King of France and claimant of the Duchy of Brittany, stepped awkwardly forward and held out his sword. A huge cheer went up, then the men on the hill divided to let the Duke and his captor walk away. Charles expected to be given his sword back and looked surprised when the Breton did not make the offer, then the defeated Duke walked stiffly down the hill, ignoring the triumphant English, but suddenly checked for a black-haired figure had stepped into his path.

It was Jeanette. 'Remember me?' she asked.

Charles looked her up and down and flinched as though he had been struck when he recognized the badge on her jupon. Then he flinched again when he saw the anger in her eyes. He said nothing.

Jeanette smiled. 'Rapist,' she said, then spat through his open visor. The Duke jerked his head away, but too late, and Jeanette spat into his face again. He shivered with anger. She was daring him to strike her, but he restrained himself and Jeanette, unable to do the same, spat a third time. 'leer,' she said scornfully and walked away to an ironic cheer.

'What's ver?' Robbie asked.

'Worm,' Thomas said, then smiled at Jeanette. 'Well done, my lady.'

'I was going to kick his goddamn balls,' she said, 'but I remembered he was wearing armour.'

Thomas laughed, then stepped aside as Richard Tote-sham ordered a half-dozen menat-arms to escort Charles back into La Roche-Derrien. Short of capturing the King of France, he was as valuable a captive as any to be had in the war. Thomas watched him walk away. Charles of Blois would now be joining the King of Scot-land as England's prisoner and both men would have to raise a fortune if they wished to be ransomed.

'It isn't finished!' Totesham shouted. He had seen the crowd of jeering men following the captured Duke and hurried to pull them away. 'It isn't done! Finish the job!'

'Horses!' Sir Thomas Dagworth called. 'Take their horses!'

The fight in Charles's encampment was won, but not ended. The assault from the town had hit like a storm and driven clean through the centre of Duke Charles's carefully prepared battle line and what was left of his force was now split into small groups. Scores were already dead, and others were fleeing into the darkness. 'Archers!' a shout 'vent up.

'Archers to me!' Dozens of archers ran to the back of the encampment, where the escaping French and Bretons were trying to reach the other fortresses, and the bows cut the fugitives down mercilessly.

'Clean them out!' Totesham shouted. 'Clean them out!' A rough kind of organization had emerged in the shambles as the garrison and the townsmen, augmented by the survivors of Sir Thomas Dagworth's force, hunted through the burning encampment to drive any survivors back to where the archers waited. It was slow work, not because the enemy was making any real resistance, but because men were constantly stopping to pillage tents and shelters. Women and children were pulled out into the moonlight and their men were killed. Prisoners worth a huge ransom were slaughtered in the confusion and darkness. The Viscount Rohan was chopped down, as were the lords of Laval and of Chåteaubriant, of Dinah and of Redon. A grey light glimmered in the east, the first hint of dawn. Whimpering sounded in the burned camp.

'Finish them off?' Richard Totesham had at last found Sir Thomas Dagworth. The two men were on the encampment's ramparts from where they_ stared at the southern enemy fortress.