Stigmata (35 page)

‘Will you become a priest, like him, then?’

‘Should we somehow survive this – yes, I shall be a priest and preach, as Father Vital does.’

Fabricia hung her head.

‘I do not understand why you and your father persist with the Roman Church, the ridiculous nonsense they believe. Babies born to virgins and the dead coming back to life! Does anyone
really believe these old bones will creak back into living once they are buried in the earth?’

‘I don’t know, perhaps you’re right. But leaving Papa on his own after all these years doesn’t seem like such a good and holy thing either, Mama.’

Elionor squeezed her hand. ‘Please, Fabricia. Let me go. My soul yearns for heaven.’

Fabricia winced and withdrew her hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ Elionor said. ‘I forgot myself. How are your wounds?’

‘They are a little better.’ She took off her mittens. She was surprised to find the bandages clean for the first time in months. The blood had stopped seeping.

‘Will you tell me something? The truth?’ Elionor asked her.

Fabricia nodded. She knew what she was going to ask her.

‘These wounds. Did you . . . did you make them . . . did you do it yourself?’

Fabricia stripped the linen bandage off her right hand. She held it to the light so that her mother could see. ‘Look, Mama. The puncture goes straight through. Do you think I could stand
the pain of making even one such wound? I have them on both hands and both feet. Why would I do it? How could I?’

‘The crucifixion is a lie,’ Elionor said. ‘Every right-thinking person knows it.’

‘Because you do not understand something does not mean it cannot be. Even in the convent they said I was lying, and to them the cross is everything. “Why would Christ’s wounds
appear on a woman?” they said. As if I would know the answer!’

Elionor touched her daughter’s cheek with her fingers. ‘I am sorry for everything. I love you.’ And she put her head on Fabricia’s shoulder and wept.

But there was no time for consolation. Fabricia felt a familiar tugging at her sleeve, a woman kneeling there, with her child. ‘Please,’ she said, holding out her infant.
‘Touch her. Make her well again . . .’

T
HEY SENT IN
the bandits and
hoi polloi
first. Philip stood next to Raimon on the barbican and watched them stream
up the narrow isthmus towards the
bourg
. ‘The walls are not strong enough,’ he said. ‘You cannot hold your position there.’

‘I do not intend to. I have told them merely to hold on for as long as they can, let the archers go about their work, and then to withdraw when things get too hot. If we can frustrate them
for a few hours they may lose their stomach for it.’

They were singing a Latin hymn in the crusader camp. They must be going at it with gusto to be able to hear them this far off. Down in the
bourg
Raimon’s plan had gone awry. He
could see fighting on the walls already.

‘God’s holy balls,’ Raimon muttered and turned to his trumpeter to give the signal for his men to fall back.

‘You may not need to do that,’ Philip said. ‘It seems they have made up their own minds.’

The inhabitants were already streaming through the streets, a panicked wave of men, women and children, the old and the slow falling under the crush. Raimon’s soldiers were not far behind
them.

Raimon went down the ladder to the gatehouse. Philip heard him bawling at the watchmen to open the gates.

He readied himself for a fight. The old seneschal’s armour was a tight fit, but it was well made and would serve well enough; good Toledo steel laced with copper studs, steel gauntlets and
thigh pieces, a shield polished smooth as glass. He would not go down easily.

The archers that Raimon had kept in reserve came crowding up the ladders from the court and took their positions along the gatehouse battlements. Philip took his new helm from under his arm and
put it on.

As the iron-barred doors creaked open a wave of refugees streamed through, their panicked screams echoing from the walls of the gatehouse. Raimon waited as long as he dared to close them again.
This was not the orderly retreat he had planned and not all were on the right side of the gates when the drawbridge was raised.

Those left behind were butchered right there beneath the walls, some killed by their own archers.

Raimon reappeared on the barbican, his helm still under his arm. His face was the colour of chalk. ‘What is wrong with them? My archers are cutting them into windrows and still they keep
coming.’

‘They think they have God on their side,’ Philip said.

When those most urgently seeking heaven had died, their comrades finally left off the attack on the south-east wall and retreated, setting fire to the
bourg
as they went. The town burned
slowly at first but by the middle of the afternoon it was well alight. Choking black smoke, driven by the wind, blocked out the sun. Not a good start.

T
HE CHURCH BELLS
were ringing; horns at the south-east gate joined the alarm. Raimon screamed at his archers to follow him
and ran along the battlements through the smoke. Philip followed.

They were already fighting hand to hand on the barbican. Men with scarlet crosses emblazoned on their tunics were clambering up ladders they had set against the walls.

A cat – a siege tower – loomed through the smoke, ablaze from the flaming arrows that Raimon’s archers had fired into it. Phillp felt a grudging admiration for whoever
commanded the crusader army. He had judged the wind, and deliberately sent the bulk of his force against the
bourg
so he could burn it and use the smoke as cover for an attack on the other
wall.

The Spanish mercenaries were in the thick of it. He saw their captain, Navarese, heft back a ladder single-handed, sending the men on it screaming into the moat, then urge his men against the
handful of crusaders who had gained foothold on one of the towers. Raimon ordered more fire arrows into the cat.

Hard to breathe or even see their enemy through the red smoke. How many of them were already inside the citadel? There was no time to help Raimon reorganize the defences now, it was just strike
and parry and run, get to the south-east barbican and the looming threat of the cat as soon as he could.

Philip saw a man-at-arms with the three Norman eagles on his shield and went straight for him. The man fell back, trying to parry his blows, but as he reached the wall Philip put all his weight
behind his shield and hit him front on. He had advantage of height and bulk and better armour. The man toppled back and fell.

But in his eagerness to claim a Norman he had left his back exposed. As he turned he saw two others come at him, one with an axe, the other with a broadsword. He took the blow from the axe on
his shield; the sword gave him a glancing blow to his helm. His opponents were not knights but, though poorly armoured, they were brave enough. He cut one down with his sword but the man with the
axe was determined and a second blow this time glanced off his shield and would have taken off his head if it were not for the good Toledo steel of the helmet Raimon had furnished him. Stunned, he
went down.

The soldier raised the axe above his head a third time. Philip could not roll to the right, for there was another man fallen beside him. To his left was the wall. Neither could he bring up his
shield to deflect the blow in time.

Suddenly the man gasped and dropped the axe. Martín Navarese used the heel of his boot to prise the man free of his sword, and then kicked him over the edge. He gave Philip his hand and
pulled him to his feet. ‘You owe me,’ he said.

The barbican had been cleared. The cat was fully alight now; men were jumping from the upper works with clothing alight. Horses, their bellies ripped open, were writhing in the ditch. Ladders
tilted back all along the wall, crashing into the chaos of struggling and bleeding bodies below.

Through the smoke Philip saw a knight with a gold helm spur his horse close to the walls to snatch one of his men from under a mass of tangled bodies. His coat of mail bristled with arrows.

As if he wished to remove any doubt of his identity, the knight removed his helm and stood in the stirrups of his destrier, pointing up at the battlements. It was an unspeakably reckless thing
to do and for a moment Philip almost admired him for it. ‘Every one of you shall burn. I will have your filthy castle within the week!’

For a moment their eyes met. They were close enough that Philip saw his face clearly and remembered him from that day in the forest when Leyla had broken her foreleg. They had seen each other
then, and he knew that the knight had seen him now. There was a moment of surprise, then recognition. Philip turned to the archer beside him and grabbed his bow. This is my chance to square our
ledger
,
he thought. But when he turned back the knight was gone, lost in the drifting pall of smoke.

T
HE GREAT HALL
had been made into a hospital for the injured. The wounded and dying were carried in and dumped on the
floors, to lie there groaning and bleeding. A monk who knew something of herbs had been pressed into service, and the
bons òmes
, who had some reputation for medicine, did what they
could. Fabricia and a handful of other women had rolled up their sleeves and joined them, unable to stand the pitiful screams that came from the
donjon
.

Every time she knelt to help some shockingly injured young man she prayed it would not be Philip.

Smoke from the burning siege towers drifted in all through the afternoon, so that the great arches and high windows of the hall seemed to be shrouded in mist. The heat was oppressive, the air
putrid and choked with smoke, and there were flies everywhere. A priest wandered between the rows of injured men, stopping to offer the final unction to any who asked for it. She wondered why he
had not left. Perhaps, like her, he was more southerner than Catholic.

Tapers were lit. Father Vital mumbled the
consolamentum
over some dying routier and sent him direct to heaven even after a lifetime of rape and murder.

She bent over a longbow-man; he fought for every breath, the arrow that had pierced his leather jerkin still in him. She took a vial of valerian from her tunic and put a drop on his lips to help
with his pain.

She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. She looked up; it was Philip.

‘I thank God you are unharmed,’ she said. She barely recognized him; his face was blackened from smoke, his hair plastered to his skull with sweat. His eyes had a faraway look, as if
he were focused on something in the distance. There was blood all over his hands.

‘What is happening out there?’ she said.

‘They burned the
bourg
and attacked the south-east wall. We have beaten them back, for now.’

‘Now what will happen?’

‘They have lost a lot of men. I doubt they will try another assault very soon. If they cannot scale the walls they will try and bring them down instead.’

Suddenly the ground shook under their feet. It sounded as if the
donjon
had crashed into the square. She gasped and put out a hand to steady herself against one of the pillars.
‘What was that?’

‘They waste no time. It has started already.’

‘It sounded as if the whole castle just came down.’

‘It is the trebuchet.’

‘What is that?’

‘Remember when we were in the caves, you thought you heard thunder? It is a siege engine, it looks like an immense sling; they hauled it up here with a team of oxen. It is the first time I
have seen one, though I had lately heard of them. It seems one of the King’s engineers thought to use counterweights and pivots on his siege machines instead of the old way of twisted ropes.
I am told it is so complex, they employ specialist carpenters to work it. It hurls boulders the size of Paris. So for now we are done with honour and courage, our survival is down to men in aprons
and pulley systems.’

‘What chance do we have, seigneur?’

‘Summer is nearly over,’ he said, wiping a lather of sweat from his face and smearing the soot across his cheeks. ‘They have only an army of volunteers. As soon as the weather
turns they will want to go home. We do not need to win this battle, we just have to hold on for a few weeks.’

T
HE CRUSADERS HAULED
the trebuchet as close as they dared to the fortress, just out of range of Raimon’s
crossbow-men. They could see them from the ramparts, forty or fifty men beetling over the infernal machine, finally hurling a massive boulder over the walls. At first the missiles shattered in the
courtyard or into the stables or the church, killing or injuring a handful of townspeople or refugees each time. It took them long enough to gauge the height and range, Philip thought, but once
they did, the rocks smashed consistently into the upper works of the south-west wall. The bombardment continued day and night.

The archers in the barbican towers wasted many of their bolts trying to pick off the engineers but finally Raimon ordered them to stop and save their ammunition.

Clouds of dust rose at each strike on the walls. But they held, for now.

The
crosat
commander put the rest of his engineers to work building petraries, small wooden catapults built on a trestle frame. They cut down all the holm oaks that grew in the hollows,
and used gangs of pilgrims to pull them over the rocks and up the tongues of the spurs to the high ground. They even sent their children scurrying through the
garrigue
to fetch small
limestone and granite rocks to hurl down at them.

The long summer dragged on. The stink of the crowded citadel was unbearable. The flies drove them mad and the levels in the water cistern dropped alarmingly.

Anselm found employment once more, trying to repair the damage done to the wall by the trebuchet. He hardly slept. Suddenly he had fire in him again; he stood taller and had a purpose about him.
When he was not building stone barricades or reinforcing walls he carried rocks for the mangonels, large slingshots that had been built on the towers under Raimon’s orders so that they might
give the
crosatz
a taste of what it was like to have their own dinners interrupted by falling masonry.