Siege Perilous Read online

  Dietrich shrugged. “It is not for me to say. They wish to question you about a matter unrelated to the heresy.”

  “So why do the heretics benefit from it?” Peire-Roger demanded.

  Again, Dietrich shrugged. “Someone in authority must have assessed that a knight would unstintingly use his own situation for the betterment of others, when possible.”

  Peire-Roger gave Raphael a skeptical look. Raphael smiled in response, an expression sporting a sort of noble sheepishness. “That’s true,” he said. “I’d rather not entrust myself to a Livonian, but I’ll certainly meet with Hugue de Arcis if that will spare everyone here from the trebuchet awhile.”

  “And how do we know you are not just taking him to murder him?” demanded Peire-Roger.

  “I offer myself in his stead,” said Dietrich. “I will stay here as your hostage, and my companions will lead Raphael down the mountain. When they have finished their negotiations, he and I will swap places again. Perhaps something will come of it that may end hostilities altogether.” He smiled graciously. “Myself, I do not know the details of these matters. I am merely the messenger.”

  “Let me do it, milord,” said Raphael. “Even if there is treachery afoot I can protect myself.”

  “There will be no need of it, I assure you.”

  “Strange that Hugue did not send his own men up to fetch you,” said Peire-Roger.

  “These are Hugue’s men,” Dietrich lied cheerfully, referring to his own sword-brothers. Unlike him they were not in ceremonial attire; their surcoats were a neutral white, showing no allegiance. “I cannot account for why they sent me in particular, but I am sure they will explain that if you accept the offer. They might be unaware of our history, and perhaps chose me because of my distinguished service record.”

  Raphael and Peire-Roger exchanged looks. “I’ll do it,” Raphael insisted.

  Peire-Roger looked between the two knights, his face gradually darkening, the sneer that was a permanent element of his expression deepening with disgust. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I will not compromise with these villains. For decades they have destroyed our land and our families. If they are trying to parley now, it’s because they are on the verge of giving up and so are desperate.”

  “We are hardly desperate, milord,” Dietrich countered with a syrupy arrogance. “As you must be aware, we are within days of taking the barbican.”

  “You are also within days of running out of food. I have sources; I know what conditions are like in your camp. Your bravado does not fool me. Go back down to your lord, you vermin, and tell him we have nothing to discuss. We are in our own home; we have easy, constant access to food and weapons, by channels your general cannot find or replicate. All of the men working your trebuchet out there resemble undernourished peasants.” Raphael was impressed by how fluidly Peire-Roger lied. Save for what Ocyrhoe could carry on her back, they no longer had access to outside supplies at all. “We are in far better shape than you, and I am not interested in listening to parleys.”

  “Milord, it’s not a parley,” insisted Raphael quietly, his eyes still examining Dietrich’s face; Dietrich sensed this but kept his focus on Peire-Roger. “They want to interrogate me for some reason. I believe him that it is not related to the siege. And yet it might yield collateral benefit.”

  “While you are in this fortress, you are my knight, and I won’t spare you,” said Peire-Roger irritably. To Dietrich he said, “Tell your lord if he wants to come up here to interview Raphael in person, I’ll allow a day of truce for that, but I will determine when. Do you understand? Take that back to your lord Hugue the Arsehole of Arcis.”

  Dietrich’s face darkened. “That language is uncalled for, milord.”

  “This siege is uncalled for,” Peire-Roger shot back. “The entire Albigensian Crusade was uncalled for, and even when it was called off, it continued—to this day. You are no longer welcome here. Depart.”

  “I should have said I was from the archbishop,” mused Dietrich a few hours later. “The very mention of Hugue’s name was a mistake. There is such ferocious hatred within the secular ranks between the local men and the French occupiers. I regret how badly I erred in that.”

  “But neither could you have said you were from me,” said the archbishop. “They would never have allowed a religious leader to interrogate somebody during a religious persecution. Hugue does not even know we used his name.”

  A long pause.

  “Perhaps we tell him,” Father Sinibaldo said at last.

  The crusaders’ trebuchet was now so close that there was sporadic fighting on the mountaintop between the two sides daily. Mostly it was archers, and mostly this was a waste of arrows, so Peire-Roger discouraged the soldiers on watch in the barbican from indulging in it. “The French have set up such a well-constructed shield, and we are so outnumbered, we are like flies trying to puncture the hide of a bull,” he grumbled.

  The trebuchet was now actually too close to fling anything at the barbican, but the French had shortened the sling length and were bombarding the walls of the donjon with increasingly enormous stones, the weight of a man, that came with greater rapidity, day and night, shuddering the entire building and terrifying everyone within. The garrison had to kneel on the battlements and shoot between the crenellations at the French archers on the ground—who in turn shot at them whenever they caught a glimpse of movement on the battlements.

  Worse, the French archers were close enough now that they could shoot over the walls of Montségur and rain down arrows randomly within the courtyard all the time. Peire-Roger announced it was no longer safe for anyone to go outside without an urgent reason. The door was kept open to allow air in and out of the keep, but it was dark and increasingly fetid inside. The population of the fortress grew more solemn and more silent. Ocyrhoe, for all her grieving, at least had the benefit of keeping busy. She spent most of her waking hours up and down the small southern tunnel. With the dwindling help of soldiers and farmers from the countryside, she continued bringing up a very limited supply of food, fuel, and the makings of good arrows. They were still awaiting sulphur to make fire-arrows; it might be weeks before that arrived. Given the tunnel’s narrowness and occasional sliding inclines, she could never carry more than what would fit into a small backpack. It was the starving time of year anyhow, a fact the priests cleverly masked as spiritually nourishing, making a virtue of necessity. The falling-off of food worried all but surprised none.

  Ocyrhoe found farmers, peasants, and deserters from the French army who could help her bring things partway up the tunnels to the narrow, claustrophobic, final measure. Then she herself, painstakingly and slowly, over hours, would move whatever material was incoming—hardtack, arrowheads, fletchings. These would be collected at the courtyard tunnel mouth and carried to wherever it was needed. Ocyrhoe’s face and clothes grew brown from grime and the detritus of the supplies she carried. The glow of the love-drunk maiden was utterly extinguished. She lived for nothing but to do her work. She worked herself ragged, almost never sleeping and rarely eating.

  The French trebuchet had moved so close to the barbican that the fortress’s own hurled boulders were now useless, flying harmlessly over the heads of the enemy and landing halfway down the ridge, where the French no longer were. French scouts endlessly patrolled the rest of the mountaintop, seeking the secret to the tunnel entrances in the snow, but the trebuchet was too static to hit any moving target. It became a large, useless piece of furniture, fast splintering with arrows.

  There had been a thaw and then another cold snap, so the snow had turned to ice and, with a second thawing, almost everything turned to mud. The day came, the last week of February, when the French archers took control of the ground near the barbican, and the guard could not safely move in or out of the tower. The same dozen men remained trapped inside for days, exhausted, hungry, and running out of arrows. Under cover of night,
the fastest of the young Montségur soldiers sprinted across the narrow, limestone ridge, carrying food and arrows on their backs. A few archers joined them, but truthfully the archers already in the barbican were the best in Montségur; strategically, it did not make sense to move them. The barbican was no fouler, colder, or more crowded than the keep, so Peire-Roger determined that most archers should remain in the barbican.

  While Rixenda was crossing the courtyard after bringing the guards a basket of warmed hardtack, a blunted arrow was shot into the fortress from the barbican with a piece of vellum rolled around the shaft. It wobbled crazily in the air, and when it landed near Rixenda she could see why: it had no feathers to stabilize it. She brought it into the keep, where Peire-Roger glumly held court on a stool near the fire.

  Written on the vellum was a distress message: Something had gone wrong with the glue holding the fletching to the shafts of the arrows; the barbican fletcher had adjusted the formula, and the glue should work now, but thousands of feathers had been rendered useless in the process, and they needed new ones immediately.

  Ocyrhoe, who had become ubiquitous, hovering always in the background wherever Peire-Roger was, immediately offered to take more feathers over.

  “We’ll wait until nightfall,” said Peire-Roger.

  “I don’t think they have until nightfall,” said Ocyrhoe. “I’ll take them now.”

  “You’ll be peppered with arrows before you get halfway across the ridge,” argued his lordship.

  Ocyrhoe shook her head. Her grief and weariness gave her the gravity of a much older woman, although her unkempt state made her look like the Roman street urchin of old. “There’s a tunnel entrance I can take that will get me outside onto the mountaintop. It will be a bit of a hustle to the barbican entrance, but the French won’t be looking for me. I can get there safely. If I draw too much attention getting in, I’ll simply stay in the tower until nightfall. Then the mud will freeze, so it will be easier to run back.”

  Rixenda muttered with worried disapproval. But an hour later another featherless arrow wobbled through the air into the courtyard, with a message that now implored immediate assistance. Peire-Roger accepted Ocyrhoe’s offer, and she scuttled out of the gate, a pack of goose feathers (all from the left side of the geese) on her back.

  She was right: None of the French noticed her skittering across the mountaintop. Her presence was not marked until she was safely inside the tower.

  But peering out through the arrow-loops the barbican soldiers saw the French archers muttering together and then rearranging their formation. At least a dozen put arrow to string and aimed at the barbican door, waiting for it to open again. Ocyrhoe announced she would stay there until dark, when she should be able to cross back safely; the waning moon was full enough but there was heavy cloud cover, and the only French archers who remained out here after sunset were those guarding the trebuchet. She curled up in a corner of the barbican and fell asleep.

  At nightfall she awoke on instinct, barely rested. The captain of the barbican listened to a report of the French action, then gave her leave to race back to the fortress.

  Ocyrhoe stepped outside and shivered in the endless breeze that brushed the mountaintop. As if she were appreciating somebody else’s capabilities, not her own, she noticed how acute her hearing was, how quick to respond to noises her body was, how attuned to all possible dangers she was. She took no pleasure in these abilities.

  She did not want to be the person crossing the chasm back to the fortress; she wanted to be the person who fell off the ridge, to remove herself from the miserable life she was caught in. With no Ferenc. And soon, nothing at all. She could not keep the cup; clinging to it was humiliating. If her life’s purpose was to hold on to one object whose existence was troublesome to her…no. She would tell Rixenda—who still held it—to give it to the knight, and that would be the end of it. That would remove the only bond that kept her tethered to this earth.

  She could not share her thoughts, for the others would be appalled and call her sick and keep her under watch; being under watch was the last thing in the world she wanted now. She wanted to be left alone. That was the attraction of the work in the tunnels. It was hours and hours every day that nobody could try to penetrate her focus.

  Unfreighted by cargo, she sprinted along the ridge and her top speed got her across the limestone span in less than the time it took her heart to beat a dozen times. As she approached the fortress, she cried out to Ferrer on the other side of the gate; her cry caught the attention of a French archer, and a moment later an arrow whizzed by her arm; then another by the other arm, then one very close to her ear. As she reached the gate and felt it push open toward her, she heard the swish of another arrow and suddenly her left arm grew very hot and heavy, and she knew she had received a superficial hit.

  “Damn you!” she screamed, and burst out sobbing. Not because she had been wounded—but because she had been merely wounded. She decided she would stop running right now, and turn to face the archers, and let them have her. Let it be over. I am done, she thought, and felt a great weight lift from her.

  But her body, to her rage, disregarded her decision. It continued to rush toward the gate, and as she watched, her good arm raised itself—even as she furiously forbade it to—and her hand prepared to beat down on the gate in case the porter had not heard her. No risk of that—the gate on its oiled hinges began to open outward just enough for her to slip in.

  I am not going inside, she silently instructed her body. I am staying here and letting them take me. She shouted this silently as her legs carried her in through the opening, and she heard the gate lumber closed behind her. Suddenly she found her voice, heard it swearing fiercely in the cold night air.

  Softer than her anger, other people appeared, reacting to her bleeding arm; voices called out Raphael and Rixenda’s names, and a few moments later, she stopped cursing, and crumpled over in pain.

  Ocyrhoe was returning from the southern tunnel in search of news—and tallow to burn for warmth and light. The Good Ones were disgusted with the idea, but with the chandlery dismantled to make room for the now-useless trebuchet, they were down to the crisis-reserve of beeswax candles and were nearly out of oils.

  Vera, Percival, and Raphael approached her at the door. She stared at them from hurt, dark eyes, her lips pursed, and brushed past them to the corner of the hall. The Bonnet brothers’ surrogate was waiting with an open codex, to receive her news. They watched her return the covered lantern and shrug the thick woolen cloak from off her narrow shoulders. Beneath it, the back-pack bulged with something. She glanced almost disdainfully back over her shoulder at Raphael and Percival as they approached.

  There was, they heard her tell the scribe, no further word of any troops arriving—not from Corbario the Aragonese mercenary, not from the Count of Toulouse, not from Emperor Frederick.

  She paused. Without excusing herself form the scribe, she turned to face them as if waiting for something.

  “Frederick is not really sending men,” Raphael muttered. The trio preferred to speak privately on the steps of the doorway, the only spot in the keep that was not overrun with Credents. The air there was chilly but much fresher than anywhere else indoor, and they could immediately see developments outside. But he wanted Ocyrhoe to be a part of this discussion and he understood from her defiant stance she would not leave the warmth of the keep. “He only sent word so that we would hear and think it was safe to leave. He wants us back as soon as possible.”

  “If our young friend here would give me the grail, then I’d be willing to leave,” said Percival.

  “Would you really?” snapped Vera, who had stood in her usual taciturn silence until now. “Hypocrites, both of you. You would leave these people before help arrives? What part of your precious prophecy does that fulfill, oh sacred vision-master? And you,” turning sharply to Raphael, “A renegade witch-spy is puppetee
ring a man to whom you owe no fealty. That takes precedence for you over besieged innocents whom you are in the midst of? Beside whom you have fought? Is this the code of the Shield-Brethren?” She looked furious and disgusted. She stood up. “I do not think our young friend will give you the grail anyway, but if she tries to, I will intercept it and keep it out of your reach. Shame upon you both.”

  Ocyrhoe gave her a teary smile. “Thank you, sister,” she said. “You will be glad to know I have one more piece of news.” Turning back to the scribe, she shrugged off the backpack and offered it to him very carefully. “Please add to the inventory that we now have sulphur. To make fire-arrows.”

  CHAPTER 33:

  INFORMING HUGUE

  Hugue de Arcis, his cheek still bandaged from the urchin’s knife-strike, scowled from the doorway, his broad frame filling it almost entirely. “I am not accustomed to being summoned,” he said sharply. The Archbishop of Narbonne gave him a bland look.

  “Not even by the king?” he asked.

  “His Majesty is not here,” Hugue retorted.

  “Not even by the Pope?”

  “His Holiness is not here, either. And I am beginning to consider you a very inadequate proxy for him.”

  “That’s a coincidence,” said the archbishop tersely. “I am beginning to consider you an inadequate proxy for His Majesty. But at least I have had the decency to yield my position to my superior.”

  Hugue frowned. “You’ve summoned the Pope?” he said mockingly.

  “He did not summon me,” said Father Sinibaldo severely. “I came by my own judgment. Your king is a fool not to have done the same by now. Clearly his investment in this project lags behind mine.”

  Hugue stared in confusion at the stranger. He was dressed like a regular priest but held himself with an air of importance that made him almost shine compared to the rest of the gathering in this small, airless room. “Are you…you are not…”