LX

 

 

GISBURNE’S STRATEGY HAD been a gamble. A precarious balancing act, in which he had attempted to read the mind of his opponent – his deluded, insane, barely human opponent – and judge exactly which pieces in the game could be given up or put at risk. Each piece had its purpose, its place – and its moment when it became redundant.

His thinking had gone like this: Tancred would not kill Galfrid and Mélisande – at least, not until he had used them to draw him out, and acquired the key to the box. And then, he gambled that Tancred would not kill him until he had the relic in his hand. In fact, he was depending on it. This was the most unpredictable part of the plan, depending on the notion that he, Gisburne, was the only one who understood the box, and that Tancred might feel the need to extract further knoweldge from him in order to open it safely.

At the moment, sadly, it was looking very much like Tancred wanted to kill him.

Gisburne parried the first blow with his shortsword. There was a spark as the blades hit; a splinter of metal flew and struck Gisburne on the cheek. He stepped over the body of one of his victims and leapt back, the surrounding men falling back around him. They were an audience now – the horror of the slaughter now turning to a kind of baying bloodlust. A lust for his blood, the usurper’s blood.

Tancred fought with speed and grace – went at him with a series of astonishing moves, his body spinning, the blade flashing at him almost faster than Gisburne’s eye could follow. He sidestepped and parried, deflecting the blade, trying to protect his own. No one wanted to use their precious sword to parry another. But it was better than dying.

Tancred’s technique was unlike any other, except for that of a sandy-haired boy all those years ago, at Fontaine-La-Verte. This much he already knew to his cost. It broke all the rules. Tancred had the wrong grip. He used both short edge and long edge of the blade – the “back” and the “front” – with almost equal vigour, in spite of everything Gisburne had ever been taught. He even had the audacity to turn his back on his opponent as he whirled his blade about him.

Before, Gisburne had found he simply did not know how to fight this man; there was nothing familiar with which to engage. This time, he simply fell back. Gisburne would not be tricked into playing by another’s rules. Tancred flailed and slashed at him, growing furious with frustration as he stumbled and backed away, the baying crowd jeering around them. They cheered as Gisburne fell against the wooden stairway. Tancred’s sword flashed close to his head, and embedded itself at an angle in the newel post – almost splitting it. Tancred hissed like some nocturnal creature, and heaved it free – but Gisburne had already leapt to his feet and was half way up the stair. Tancred pursued him – and Gisburne smiled. Try your little dance on the stairs, you prancing bastard, he thought.

Tancred could not. Forced to fight frontally, his technique stripped away, he suddenly became a conventional opponent. Vulnerable, mortal. Gisburne pushed his advantage. He bore down on his foe, using his extra height, slashing at Tancred’s head while his own was beyond his opponent’s reach. The White Devil – for the first time on the defensive – flung himself to one side, stumbling on the wet wood of the steps, one foot almost slipping between the treads. Gisburne pressed on, landing a kick on the side of Tancred’s head. He fell sideways against his own sword hand, the blade clattering against the stone wall. Gisburne swung his foot again and caught the Templar across the mouth. Blood splattered on the stones.

Tancred roared in anger, grabbed at the foot and missed it, then swung his blade full force at Gisburne’s legs. Gisburne flung himself back and fell hard against the treads, losing his shortsword. He was scrambling up the steps as Tancred swung again, his blade biting. Had he worn the full hauberk of a knight, the mail about his legs might have turned the sword point. But he did not. Tancred’s sword cut through Gisburne’s long leather boots and snicked the front edge of his shinbone. He cried out between gritted teeth, and the leering faces cheered their approval. Tancred immediately changed tactic, targeting Gisburne’s feet and legs. They were his weak point – impossible to defend at this angle. And now Tancred had realised it, and meant to cripple him.

Gisburne clawed faster, backwards up the stairway, his blade connecting awkwardly with Tancred’s. The gathered men cheered at the turnabout – more, it seemed to Gisburne, in a kind of poisonous anger than with any fervour. That was what Tancred bred here. There was no passion – only hatred.

Suddenly, he felt cold stone beneath him. He was on the parapet.

He stood, knowing he had only moments to decide his course. Behind him was the southwest tower. Ahead, advancing now, the grim, glaring visage of Tancred de Mercheval. Once at the top of the steps he could resume his lethal assault. Gisburne turned and ran for the tower, smashing his sword pommel into the face of an astonished guard and sending him sprawling off the walkway. A second guard literally leapt off, out of Gisburne’s path, rather than get in his way.

Gisburne raced up the internal ladder to the fighting platform at the top of the tower, where the larger of the mangonels was positioned. As he emerged, a man-at-arms flew at him with a mace, and Gisburne ducked, felt the man nearly tumble over the top of him, then heaved him over the battlements. In another moment, Tancred would be up the ladder’s steps, his sword whirling at him in unstoppable arcs. The confined arena would favour Tancred; there would now be nowhere for him to hide from Tancred’s spinning blade. Doubtless, Tancred would now be considering the folly of Gisburne’s move and relishing his demise, knowing he had the advantage of the battlefield.

But Gisburne meant to make it his own. Looking about him, Tancred’s feet already audible upon the rungs below him, Gisburne saw what he was after. He’d known they would be here: a row of large demijohns by the side wall, beyond the mangonel, and at the front, three large copper vats on wooden pivots, positioned over chutes in the stonework. Gisburne threw down his sword and set his shoulder against the first of them.

As Tancred loomed up the stair, Gisburne had already dislocated the first vat off its pivot. Ignoring the stab in his side, the sickening ache in his shoulder, he heaved it over onto its side, its gallons of oil flooding the floor of the tower battlement. Then over went another, and the third. The thick, viscous liquid gushed past Tancred’s feet and cascaded in a black waterfall down the trap door. It fell past the connecting ladders, and on down the spiralling stone steps – coated the interior of the tower, and glugged and oozed out of the tower doorway as it went, creeping out along the battlement walkway. Tancred stared in perplexed rage at the glossy slick, then back at his opponent. He placed one foot forward, and it slithered sideways.

Gisburne shot him a look of vicious glee. “Spin on that,” he said.

And, as Tancred swiped at him in fury, lost his traction and grasped at the strut of the still-cocked, creaking mangonel, Gisburne lunged forward and booted him in the balls. Tancred doubled up and went down like a Parisian whore, his blade skittering away from him. Gisburne fell on top of him in the black morass, grabbed him by the surcoat and wrestled him onto his back. He slithered, recovered his sword, and – still holding Tancred by a handful of stained silk surcoat and oily mail about the scruff of his neck – struggled to his feet, his blade poised high above his head, ready to strike.

This had not been part of the plan. But killing Tancred now did not seem such a bad idea.

The reptilian, expressionless eyes in that oily, bloody half-and-half face flicked sideways. Then Tancred gave a kind of hoarse cackle. For a moment, Gisburne did not know what it was. But as it grew, he realised. It was laughter. So unexpected, so horrid and so utterly alien was the sound issuing from that scar-like slit of a mouth, that at first Gisburne could only gawp in dumbfounded revulsion. Then his eyes followed Tancred’s line of sight. Upon the gatehouse tower, he saw the scorpion turned upon him, its operator’s eyes wide, its huge, spiked bolt pointed at his heart.

Tancred, still chuckling, narrowed his eyes as if to say: Let’s see if you can survive this one...

Gisburne hesitated, for a moment looking like he might accept Tancred’s unspoken challenge – might put the marksman’s mettle to the test – and to Hell with the consequences. His eyes dropped to the demijohns, only yards distant. If he could just grab one of those...

Then a bellowed cry made him turn.

“Gisburne!”

It came from the bailey. There, down below, a man-at-arms gripped a bloody, near-lifeless Galfrid. Next to him, bare-footed and bound, stood Mélisande, and behind her, the grinning Ulrich held a blade across her white, exposed throat.

He will exploit your weakness. That was what Aldric Fitz Rolf had said.

Gisburne’s sword faltered and fell, the castle echoing to this wholly new sound – a sound its denizens had never before heard: the dry, hollow sound of its master’s jubilant laughter.