Taking the Cross, page 14
Pietro did not answer her directly at first. “I made pilgrimage to the village of Magdala when I was in the Holy Land. I wanted to see where our Lord drove the seven devils from the Magdalen. I was indeed shown a dusty patch of street where, it is believed, blessed Iesu did battle and Maria Magdalen emerged cleansed of the enemy’s hold.
“Amongst the Saracens in the village, even on that street, I saw some young Hebrew women in their tallits, their prayer shawls, with hair black as raven’s feathers and dark eyes to match. I imagined anyone of them could have been the Magdalen. I do not believe she possessed hair of red nor was she a harlot. Her great name has been besmirched.”
Eva lowered her axe. “What of this feast day? Will her name be further besmirched?”
CHAPTER 17
22 JULY 1209
THE FEAST DAY OF
SAN MARIA MAGDALEN
Andreas wiped the blood and sweat from his eyes.
He raised his shield as a club crashed down upon it and he thrust upward with his sword, pierced threadbare fabric, skin, muscle, and vital organ. The club fell into a puddle of blood, joined a second later by its wielder as Andreas kicked the chest of the next rotier, felling him and three others as they skittered on the crimson slick that was the street of the jewelers. Bertran came alongside and slit belly and throat before the blood soaked wretches could rise.
The knights held fast the streets that emptied into the plaza of the Church of the Magdalen. The bodies of the rotiers mounded ever higher. Their free flow joined the life that spilled from house and courtyard of the slain Bitterois. The wretches slipped, fell, and slid in the crimson stream of their own creation. Covered with a glossy purplish patina that baked quickly in the sun, left the rotiers smelling like a warm, meaty scab.
Andreas’s weaponry was slathered, clotted from the gravy-like flow. There was no time for cleansing.
The sun, unrelenting in its intensity, heated the bodies of rotier and Bitterois alike, cooked the viscous liquid that flowed from the hewn corpses, generated a sweet sick smell that made the gorge rise to his throat.
Yet the stench was not only on the ground and splattered against the stone and timber merchant houses lining the street, it was soaked into the surcoats and boots of the knights themselves, garments smeared with blood, flecked with pieces of fat, and muscle, and bowel.
Vultures and kites were spiraling the city, seeming closer to the ground with each pass, their increasing ranks blotting out more of the sun. Andreas looked the opposite direction to the square as one of the archers aimed for the sky, loosed a cry of rage, and somehow felled one of the birds. The bowman likely would never release such a quarrel again, and never may he earn the chance.
As the scavengers flew overhead, the shadows they left seemed to change shape before his eyes into those of owls on the prey, but no owls soared in the skies above Beziers. He was reminded of hearing the screeching of owls four days past in the wood. The shadow of an owl swooped over him once more and he shivered.
What started as a dark impression in his soul, expanded like sodden grain to fill the whole of his very being, a mortal dread that caused him to believe that not only may thousands of Bitterois perish this day, but none of them who were of the Languedoc may make egress from the city among the living.
Would the French cavaliers have mercy?
Andreas ran through a rotier at the belly and collapsed the skull of yet another. Where were the knights from the North? Andreas believed Beziers may become his own stone sarcophagus.
Aimer rushed up to Andreas. “The rest of our archers have abandoned the wall and are encircling the church. They are piercing the rotiers as fast as they can loose arrows. The French knights scale the walls with ladders.”
A brigade of archers, in leather armor covered by chain mail, reached them and took up positions around the church of San Maria Magdalen and at the head of each of the streets that emptied into the church plaza.
Andreas issued the order to retreat toward the safekeeping of the Magdalen and moved toward the church. “Encircle the sanctuary!” The knights of the Languedoc moved to do so.
From his point at the main doors of the church, Andreas held a clear view down the approaching streets. The rotiers halted their advance and melted away into blood and stone. His mind proclaimed it good news because the Northern knights were likely chasing the demonic savages away, but something in his bowels countered the hope. It was a fear he could not put words to, that these cavaliers of the Parisian King may not be inclined to show mercy.
But what else could he do? At his leading, the Languedoc knights had packed the Magdalen church with perhaps as many as three thousand Bitterois. There was no other place to seek safe haven.
The last peeling away of the vagabonds gave way to the glinting of chain mail and swords.
A fair fight at last, thought Andreas.
He was forming a plan in his mind, looking to summon Bertran and Aimer, when they were attacked on all sides by foot soldiers who poured out of houses nearby, swiftly made charge into the plaza, caught Andreas’s thinning troop unaware, tore into their ranks, killed the Languedoc knights and archers one by one, stabbed and slashed their way toward Trencavel’s knights at the church doors.
They were overwhelmed on all sides.
Andreas prepared to face mortality.
“To me! To me!” Andreas roared above the din. The remainder of their company rallied to his side. They formed a human barrier in front of the doors of the church.
Their numbers had dwindled to twenty. They raised shields and stood shoulder to shoulder, like a Roman phalanx. A company of soldiers charged head on from across the plaza, swords and axes raised high. “Absorb their blows then thrust upward and gut these barbarians! Slay them!” Andreas took a blow from a tall, blonde soldier with an axe. Once the weapon was embedded in his shield, the châtelain thrust longsword between his and Bertran’s shields and the Northerner died with eyes and mouth open wide.
Bertran blocked a cut from a sword and stabbed his foeman under the ribs. All the soldiers were cut down. They repelled at least five more charges of the like until the French archers took positions in the upper floors of houses around the plaza. They smashed windows and nocked arrows. The broken glass made no sound at all when it landed, flowed away with the life blood of Beziers. Upon the order to “loose,” the quarrels started to find their flanks and the phalanx crumbled one cavalier at a time.
At least two score of knights charged them and Andreas’s troop could no longer hold formation. Their foemen were able to surround the church in total. Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer were pushed as if by a wave to the east, away from the doors of the church.
Andreas saw the Northern soldiers surrounding the church open their line, providing a way for the rotiers to violate the sacredness of Saint Maria Magdalen.
That was the point was it not?
The wretches, screeching like owls, streamed into the gap after helpless prey.
For a moment, all seemed to slow as silence erupted around the plaza. It eclipsed, overwhelmed all sound of battle. Andreas raised his sword to charge the French. A window of stained glass fragmented to shards that burst from the building as if belched from the mouth of a beast. There was no sound. He battled the beast. He battled the beast he had seen on the road to Montpellier, the beast that had violated his very bedchamber, his very slumber. A second window exploded noiselessly in the selfsame way. It was the cries, both low pitch and high, of those that waged a precarious battle for life that restored Andreas’s hearing. Like ants streaming from an anthill, they emerged from broken windows.
Blood pooled on the front steps of the church, flowing into the plaza.
The movement of swords, knives, and clubs flashed across broken windowpanes, slashing and beating those with hands raised toward heaven.
Andreas’s rage returned, for he had seen enough rivers of blood this feast day to satiate any appetite for killing.
Only vulture and kite would consume a rich banquet. Is this how Maria Magdalen was to be honored? What saint would have such a taste for blood?
Andreas slay one knight, then another, and another, inched back toward the Church of the Magdalen.
Save even one.
A line of soldiers moved between Bertran and a young mother round with child and her little girl who had abandoned the church through a panic-smashed window.
As the Occitan cavalier slay one of the Northern soldiers and wounded another, two more French infantry grabbed the woman who was with child and slashed open her belly and slit the throats of mother and daughter in such a violent fashion they were nearly decapitated.
“No!” screamed Bertran in a wail of soulish agony. “Kyrie eleison!”
“The only mercy God can give now is if we all die here,” said Andreas quietly. But in his spirit surrender was not found.
Raising his sword high, he brought full force crashing against the shield of a French soldier, who nearly tumbled over from the blow. In the instant the soldier lifted his arms to catch his balance while stumbling backward, Andreas pursued him and slashed him across the chest and kicked him to the ground.
He ran toward Aimer, who was attempting to fend off two more. Gripping the pommel of his sword and putting all his weight behind the thrust, Andreas forced it through the thin chain mail of one, while Aimer took advantage to slash the other across the face and bury a dagger in his side.
As the second soldier crumpled over, Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer took stock and saw they had been isolated from the other Languedoc cavaliers. More French knights stormed the plaza.
As they parried blows with the Northern knights who now surrounded them, Andreas saw that the three of them were being driven from the church and toward the city walls.
He saw the last of their comrades run through with French swords.
The only hands now raised in the church of Saint Maria Magdalen were French rotiers and cavaliers. The blood flow from the sanctuary was ankle-deep at the least, coating the plaza in an ever-growing purplish-brown sheen. Men were sliding and falling.
All that moved of the Bitterois was their still warm blood.
All Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer had to fight for was each other.
The street they were battling on led to a tor that anchored the curtain walls of the northwest quarter of the city.
For each French knight they felled, a replacement appeared. Andreas glanced toward the tower and knew an ambush awaited. “Fight through the trap.”
“Beziers is lost.” The words of Bertran lacked emotion.
The interior of the tor had an open staircase that circled around the circumference of the rounded structure, leading to the top of the walls. The tor was devoid of French when first they made entrance. “To the allure,” urged Andreas.
As they climbed, they heard voices above and below yell but a single word in the tongue of the French, in du Langued’oil. “Assault!” French knights stormed the tower from both street and wall, advancing toward Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer.
“Keep climbing,” said Andreas. The stairs had breadth enough for them to charge side by side. “False attack,” said Andreas, the knights’ code for starting with a low guard then striking from on high.
Keeping their broadswords in a defensive posture, they raised them as one when only steps from the descending French cavaliers. The simultaneous strike wounded two knights and knocked over a third and Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer shoved those knights off the stair, leaving them to plunge to the floor. They continued fighting their way up the stairs, determined to reach the allure before they had to engage the ascending knights behind them.
When they were within five yards of where the tower opened onto the wall, more French cavaliers flooded through the upper opening, halted the advance of the Languedoc knights enough for the pursuing French to reach their position. They were now battling on two very compact fronts. It was clear their opponents were trying to force them from the stair. All took blows from swords but their armor held.
A soldier wielding a pike swung the butt end hard into the legs of Aimer, robbed him of footing. As the strong cavalier stumbled backwards losing helmet and shield, the knights de Fransa behind him moved aside until one with a clear strike slashed Aimer across the face, and another pierced his skull.
Aimer remained sprawled on the staircase as French reinforcements stepped over him, continued the upward charge.
Andreas and Bertran saw their comrade at arms, their friend, struck down and loosed a cry as one, raised their intensity. They were battling back to back now, Bertran facing down the stair and Andreas facing up. More than slashing and stabbing them, the Trencavel knights were seeking to push their adversaries from the stair.
Knock them off-balance and send them plunging below.
Bertran pierced a knight in the thigh with a downward sword thrust and brought his boot into the face of the knight, sending him reeling backwards, taking another six with him.
Bertran turned and fought side by side with Andreas as they pushed the remaining French cavaliers up the stair. They were nearing the exit from the tower onto the wall.
“What of the allure?” exhaled Bertran in rapid cadence as he clipped the legs of a Northern knight with his mace.
“The ladders Frances,” replied Andreas as he pushed that same knight off the stair to the ground below. “Flee the city. Warn Carcassonne.”
“If we survive,” replied Bertran abruptly as he slashed another cavalier in the belly and struck him across the face, sending him plunging to the stone floor below. “You yourself need warning, Andreas”
“What warning?”
They had reached the top of the tower but found the allure, the ledge behind the crenellations, to be quiet and vacant, at least as far as sight could tell. All were down in the city.
Andreas heard a couplet of short wind bursts as Bertran slammed into his shoulder knocking him aside as his ears registered a fleshy thud. Hearing a gurgling sound, he turned to Bertran and looked in disbelief at the feathered shaft protruding from the neck of his friend.
Bertran grew wobbly as Andreas reached to halt his fall, as pain spiked in his torso and movement was constricted.
Two small bolts from a crossbow extruded from his chest.
The châtelain made sure they were both down out of sighting of the French archers. Bertran had absorbed the worst of it. He sought to bolster his sergeant at arms. “I will take you down a ladder.” Each breath seemed to breed pain anew for Bertran, but the eyes of his friend were steadfast, calm.
“Andreas… hearken to me.” His breathing was measured, but labored. “Take heed… of l’ orde.”
“What are you saying?” Andreas wondered if Bertran was babbling, though his sound was coherent.
“You are… under their watching… an…oppressive watching.” Bertran coughed and a red mist filled the air. “Everywhere L’orde is present. We are bested with the sword this day Andreas. Concede not… the battle of the spirit.” Bertran swallowed and grimaced. “They would purloin your soul… unrelenting.”
Bertran was wheezing now, fighting for every breath, the blood oozing from his throat in increased flow like a wine skin with a crack that did not cease to split.
“These things… are such a burden to know. The twelve of l’orde have laid claim upon your very spirit. You are seven jewels to them… twelve pearls of great price… three sevens. I vowed to Guilhabert to protect you from their wiles.” More coughed up blood and gasps for air. “I have died defending you.” Bertran clenched both hands into fists and shook them with feeble strength.
“You will yet live, Bertran. Who are they? How know you this?” asked Andreas tersely, but in a whisper, mindful of the charging French cavaliers several yards away who had just emerged into view.
Bertran struggled mightily to release the words of his response, gurgling and hacking up blood. “I heard them… speak of their plans for you. Guilhabert rescued me. Take heed… the coils of the serpent… be not struck but strike in the spirit…memento mori…”
Bertran’s eyes remained open as his life drained away, as his soul quit his body and the look of his face was one of peace.
Andreas gently closed the eyes of Bertran. “Of what serpent do you speak? Why do you leave? Curse you Bertran! Why did you not tell me sooner, while you still drew unfaltering breath?”
The French were upon him once more.
Andreas raised his sword to parry a blow from a tall, powerful Northern Knight, as a well-placed kick in the belly sent another off the wall and into the city below.
When he turned to resume battle with the tall knight, that cavalier had disappeared. Seeing movement behind the diminutive mangonel that sat only yards away, Andreas raised sword to charge the elusive foe.
The châtelain felt pressure on his belly and found he was sliding toward the wall, unable to change course. He was looking at the crossbowmen in the city below as they recocked their weapons, then spun around, yet knew not how, and he was looking over the crenellations, across the river, into the forest.
He felt force applied to his backside and the forest inverted.
He was looking at the sky, then the exterior of the city walls, then the slope to the river, then the river, then the plains, then the forest another time, and then the cloudless heavens again, until his backside felt pressure once more and his vision was consumed by blackness.
When his eyes again received light, he was facing still an empty canvas of blue, marred only by the lazy circling of vultures and kites, whose numbers had seen increase.
Slowly he turned his head to take in his surroundings.
He was lying in a broad mound of hay, likely deep if its sponginess told anything. The pungent odors of pitch and oil permeated his nostrils. To his left towered the city walls so close he could almost touch the ochre stone with the reach of his arm. To his right, down a short slope and a sandy plain was the River Orb, perhaps two-hundred yards away.
But he dared not move his limbs yet. He knew not yet what was broken or who was keeping vigilance from above. The sun radiated its scorching heat and he could feel it exuding from his armor. The odor from his surcoat grew rancid, like fatty red meat left to rot.
“Amongst the Saracens in the village, even on that street, I saw some young Hebrew women in their tallits, their prayer shawls, with hair black as raven’s feathers and dark eyes to match. I imagined anyone of them could have been the Magdalen. I do not believe she possessed hair of red nor was she a harlot. Her great name has been besmirched.”
Eva lowered her axe. “What of this feast day? Will her name be further besmirched?”
CHAPTER 17
22 JULY 1209
THE FEAST DAY OF
SAN MARIA MAGDALEN
Andreas wiped the blood and sweat from his eyes.
He raised his shield as a club crashed down upon it and he thrust upward with his sword, pierced threadbare fabric, skin, muscle, and vital organ. The club fell into a puddle of blood, joined a second later by its wielder as Andreas kicked the chest of the next rotier, felling him and three others as they skittered on the crimson slick that was the street of the jewelers. Bertran came alongside and slit belly and throat before the blood soaked wretches could rise.
The knights held fast the streets that emptied into the plaza of the Church of the Magdalen. The bodies of the rotiers mounded ever higher. Their free flow joined the life that spilled from house and courtyard of the slain Bitterois. The wretches slipped, fell, and slid in the crimson stream of their own creation. Covered with a glossy purplish patina that baked quickly in the sun, left the rotiers smelling like a warm, meaty scab.
Andreas’s weaponry was slathered, clotted from the gravy-like flow. There was no time for cleansing.
The sun, unrelenting in its intensity, heated the bodies of rotier and Bitterois alike, cooked the viscous liquid that flowed from the hewn corpses, generated a sweet sick smell that made the gorge rise to his throat.
Yet the stench was not only on the ground and splattered against the stone and timber merchant houses lining the street, it was soaked into the surcoats and boots of the knights themselves, garments smeared with blood, flecked with pieces of fat, and muscle, and bowel.
Vultures and kites were spiraling the city, seeming closer to the ground with each pass, their increasing ranks blotting out more of the sun. Andreas looked the opposite direction to the square as one of the archers aimed for the sky, loosed a cry of rage, and somehow felled one of the birds. The bowman likely would never release such a quarrel again, and never may he earn the chance.
As the scavengers flew overhead, the shadows they left seemed to change shape before his eyes into those of owls on the prey, but no owls soared in the skies above Beziers. He was reminded of hearing the screeching of owls four days past in the wood. The shadow of an owl swooped over him once more and he shivered.
What started as a dark impression in his soul, expanded like sodden grain to fill the whole of his very being, a mortal dread that caused him to believe that not only may thousands of Bitterois perish this day, but none of them who were of the Languedoc may make egress from the city among the living.
Would the French cavaliers have mercy?
Andreas ran through a rotier at the belly and collapsed the skull of yet another. Where were the knights from the North? Andreas believed Beziers may become his own stone sarcophagus.
Aimer rushed up to Andreas. “The rest of our archers have abandoned the wall and are encircling the church. They are piercing the rotiers as fast as they can loose arrows. The French knights scale the walls with ladders.”
A brigade of archers, in leather armor covered by chain mail, reached them and took up positions around the church of San Maria Magdalen and at the head of each of the streets that emptied into the church plaza.
Andreas issued the order to retreat toward the safekeeping of the Magdalen and moved toward the church. “Encircle the sanctuary!” The knights of the Languedoc moved to do so.
From his point at the main doors of the church, Andreas held a clear view down the approaching streets. The rotiers halted their advance and melted away into blood and stone. His mind proclaimed it good news because the Northern knights were likely chasing the demonic savages away, but something in his bowels countered the hope. It was a fear he could not put words to, that these cavaliers of the Parisian King may not be inclined to show mercy.
But what else could he do? At his leading, the Languedoc knights had packed the Magdalen church with perhaps as many as three thousand Bitterois. There was no other place to seek safe haven.
The last peeling away of the vagabonds gave way to the glinting of chain mail and swords.
A fair fight at last, thought Andreas.
He was forming a plan in his mind, looking to summon Bertran and Aimer, when they were attacked on all sides by foot soldiers who poured out of houses nearby, swiftly made charge into the plaza, caught Andreas’s thinning troop unaware, tore into their ranks, killed the Languedoc knights and archers one by one, stabbed and slashed their way toward Trencavel’s knights at the church doors.
They were overwhelmed on all sides.
Andreas prepared to face mortality.
“To me! To me!” Andreas roared above the din. The remainder of their company rallied to his side. They formed a human barrier in front of the doors of the church.
Their numbers had dwindled to twenty. They raised shields and stood shoulder to shoulder, like a Roman phalanx. A company of soldiers charged head on from across the plaza, swords and axes raised high. “Absorb their blows then thrust upward and gut these barbarians! Slay them!” Andreas took a blow from a tall, blonde soldier with an axe. Once the weapon was embedded in his shield, the châtelain thrust longsword between his and Bertran’s shields and the Northerner died with eyes and mouth open wide.
Bertran blocked a cut from a sword and stabbed his foeman under the ribs. All the soldiers were cut down. They repelled at least five more charges of the like until the French archers took positions in the upper floors of houses around the plaza. They smashed windows and nocked arrows. The broken glass made no sound at all when it landed, flowed away with the life blood of Beziers. Upon the order to “loose,” the quarrels started to find their flanks and the phalanx crumbled one cavalier at a time.
At least two score of knights charged them and Andreas’s troop could no longer hold formation. Their foemen were able to surround the church in total. Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer were pushed as if by a wave to the east, away from the doors of the church.
Andreas saw the Northern soldiers surrounding the church open their line, providing a way for the rotiers to violate the sacredness of Saint Maria Magdalen.
That was the point was it not?
The wretches, screeching like owls, streamed into the gap after helpless prey.
For a moment, all seemed to slow as silence erupted around the plaza. It eclipsed, overwhelmed all sound of battle. Andreas raised his sword to charge the French. A window of stained glass fragmented to shards that burst from the building as if belched from the mouth of a beast. There was no sound. He battled the beast. He battled the beast he had seen on the road to Montpellier, the beast that had violated his very bedchamber, his very slumber. A second window exploded noiselessly in the selfsame way. It was the cries, both low pitch and high, of those that waged a precarious battle for life that restored Andreas’s hearing. Like ants streaming from an anthill, they emerged from broken windows.
Blood pooled on the front steps of the church, flowing into the plaza.
The movement of swords, knives, and clubs flashed across broken windowpanes, slashing and beating those with hands raised toward heaven.
Andreas’s rage returned, for he had seen enough rivers of blood this feast day to satiate any appetite for killing.
Only vulture and kite would consume a rich banquet. Is this how Maria Magdalen was to be honored? What saint would have such a taste for blood?
Andreas slay one knight, then another, and another, inched back toward the Church of the Magdalen.
Save even one.
A line of soldiers moved between Bertran and a young mother round with child and her little girl who had abandoned the church through a panic-smashed window.
As the Occitan cavalier slay one of the Northern soldiers and wounded another, two more French infantry grabbed the woman who was with child and slashed open her belly and slit the throats of mother and daughter in such a violent fashion they were nearly decapitated.
“No!” screamed Bertran in a wail of soulish agony. “Kyrie eleison!”
“The only mercy God can give now is if we all die here,” said Andreas quietly. But in his spirit surrender was not found.
Raising his sword high, he brought full force crashing against the shield of a French soldier, who nearly tumbled over from the blow. In the instant the soldier lifted his arms to catch his balance while stumbling backward, Andreas pursued him and slashed him across the chest and kicked him to the ground.
He ran toward Aimer, who was attempting to fend off two more. Gripping the pommel of his sword and putting all his weight behind the thrust, Andreas forced it through the thin chain mail of one, while Aimer took advantage to slash the other across the face and bury a dagger in his side.
As the second soldier crumpled over, Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer took stock and saw they had been isolated from the other Languedoc cavaliers. More French knights stormed the plaza.
As they parried blows with the Northern knights who now surrounded them, Andreas saw that the three of them were being driven from the church and toward the city walls.
He saw the last of their comrades run through with French swords.
The only hands now raised in the church of Saint Maria Magdalen were French rotiers and cavaliers. The blood flow from the sanctuary was ankle-deep at the least, coating the plaza in an ever-growing purplish-brown sheen. Men were sliding and falling.
All that moved of the Bitterois was their still warm blood.
All Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer had to fight for was each other.
The street they were battling on led to a tor that anchored the curtain walls of the northwest quarter of the city.
For each French knight they felled, a replacement appeared. Andreas glanced toward the tower and knew an ambush awaited. “Fight through the trap.”
“Beziers is lost.” The words of Bertran lacked emotion.
The interior of the tor had an open staircase that circled around the circumference of the rounded structure, leading to the top of the walls. The tor was devoid of French when first they made entrance. “To the allure,” urged Andreas.
As they climbed, they heard voices above and below yell but a single word in the tongue of the French, in du Langued’oil. “Assault!” French knights stormed the tower from both street and wall, advancing toward Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer.
“Keep climbing,” said Andreas. The stairs had breadth enough for them to charge side by side. “False attack,” said Andreas, the knights’ code for starting with a low guard then striking from on high.
Keeping their broadswords in a defensive posture, they raised them as one when only steps from the descending French cavaliers. The simultaneous strike wounded two knights and knocked over a third and Andreas, Bertran, and Aimer shoved those knights off the stair, leaving them to plunge to the floor. They continued fighting their way up the stairs, determined to reach the allure before they had to engage the ascending knights behind them.
When they were within five yards of where the tower opened onto the wall, more French cavaliers flooded through the upper opening, halted the advance of the Languedoc knights enough for the pursuing French to reach their position. They were now battling on two very compact fronts. It was clear their opponents were trying to force them from the stair. All took blows from swords but their armor held.
A soldier wielding a pike swung the butt end hard into the legs of Aimer, robbed him of footing. As the strong cavalier stumbled backwards losing helmet and shield, the knights de Fransa behind him moved aside until one with a clear strike slashed Aimer across the face, and another pierced his skull.
Aimer remained sprawled on the staircase as French reinforcements stepped over him, continued the upward charge.
Andreas and Bertran saw their comrade at arms, their friend, struck down and loosed a cry as one, raised their intensity. They were battling back to back now, Bertran facing down the stair and Andreas facing up. More than slashing and stabbing them, the Trencavel knights were seeking to push their adversaries from the stair.
Knock them off-balance and send them plunging below.
Bertran pierced a knight in the thigh with a downward sword thrust and brought his boot into the face of the knight, sending him reeling backwards, taking another six with him.
Bertran turned and fought side by side with Andreas as they pushed the remaining French cavaliers up the stair. They were nearing the exit from the tower onto the wall.
“What of the allure?” exhaled Bertran in rapid cadence as he clipped the legs of a Northern knight with his mace.
“The ladders Frances,” replied Andreas as he pushed that same knight off the stair to the ground below. “Flee the city. Warn Carcassonne.”
“If we survive,” replied Bertran abruptly as he slashed another cavalier in the belly and struck him across the face, sending him plunging to the stone floor below. “You yourself need warning, Andreas”
“What warning?”
They had reached the top of the tower but found the allure, the ledge behind the crenellations, to be quiet and vacant, at least as far as sight could tell. All were down in the city.
Andreas heard a couplet of short wind bursts as Bertran slammed into his shoulder knocking him aside as his ears registered a fleshy thud. Hearing a gurgling sound, he turned to Bertran and looked in disbelief at the feathered shaft protruding from the neck of his friend.
Bertran grew wobbly as Andreas reached to halt his fall, as pain spiked in his torso and movement was constricted.
Two small bolts from a crossbow extruded from his chest.
The châtelain made sure they were both down out of sighting of the French archers. Bertran had absorbed the worst of it. He sought to bolster his sergeant at arms. “I will take you down a ladder.” Each breath seemed to breed pain anew for Bertran, but the eyes of his friend were steadfast, calm.
“Andreas… hearken to me.” His breathing was measured, but labored. “Take heed… of l’ orde.”
“What are you saying?” Andreas wondered if Bertran was babbling, though his sound was coherent.
“You are… under their watching… an…oppressive watching.” Bertran coughed and a red mist filled the air. “Everywhere L’orde is present. We are bested with the sword this day Andreas. Concede not… the battle of the spirit.” Bertran swallowed and grimaced. “They would purloin your soul… unrelenting.”
Bertran was wheezing now, fighting for every breath, the blood oozing from his throat in increased flow like a wine skin with a crack that did not cease to split.
“These things… are such a burden to know. The twelve of l’orde have laid claim upon your very spirit. You are seven jewels to them… twelve pearls of great price… three sevens. I vowed to Guilhabert to protect you from their wiles.” More coughed up blood and gasps for air. “I have died defending you.” Bertran clenched both hands into fists and shook them with feeble strength.
“You will yet live, Bertran. Who are they? How know you this?” asked Andreas tersely, but in a whisper, mindful of the charging French cavaliers several yards away who had just emerged into view.
Bertran struggled mightily to release the words of his response, gurgling and hacking up blood. “I heard them… speak of their plans for you. Guilhabert rescued me. Take heed… the coils of the serpent… be not struck but strike in the spirit…memento mori…”
Bertran’s eyes remained open as his life drained away, as his soul quit his body and the look of his face was one of peace.
Andreas gently closed the eyes of Bertran. “Of what serpent do you speak? Why do you leave? Curse you Bertran! Why did you not tell me sooner, while you still drew unfaltering breath?”
The French were upon him once more.
Andreas raised his sword to parry a blow from a tall, powerful Northern Knight, as a well-placed kick in the belly sent another off the wall and into the city below.
When he turned to resume battle with the tall knight, that cavalier had disappeared. Seeing movement behind the diminutive mangonel that sat only yards away, Andreas raised sword to charge the elusive foe.
The châtelain felt pressure on his belly and found he was sliding toward the wall, unable to change course. He was looking at the crossbowmen in the city below as they recocked their weapons, then spun around, yet knew not how, and he was looking over the crenellations, across the river, into the forest.
He felt force applied to his backside and the forest inverted.
He was looking at the sky, then the exterior of the city walls, then the slope to the river, then the river, then the plains, then the forest another time, and then the cloudless heavens again, until his backside felt pressure once more and his vision was consumed by blackness.
When his eyes again received light, he was facing still an empty canvas of blue, marred only by the lazy circling of vultures and kites, whose numbers had seen increase.
Slowly he turned his head to take in his surroundings.
He was lying in a broad mound of hay, likely deep if its sponginess told anything. The pungent odors of pitch and oil permeated his nostrils. To his left towered the city walls so close he could almost touch the ochre stone with the reach of his arm. To his right, down a short slope and a sandy plain was the River Orb, perhaps two-hundred yards away.
But he dared not move his limbs yet. He knew not yet what was broken or who was keeping vigilance from above. The sun radiated its scorching heat and he could feel it exuding from his armor. The odor from his surcoat grew rancid, like fatty red meat left to rot.
