| |
Day Two
Christopher
––––––––
“I don’t like the look of that.” Huw had arrived in Paris that morning on the boats, which lay moored outside the city, waiting to be filled by the refugees from Paris. Or by now maybe a better word would be émigrés. The timing of his arrival had been a little tight, though he thought he’d been a day early.
Christopher almost laughed. “How many times have we done this? And how many times have you said that exact same thing?”
“Too many, by my count,” William said sourly from Christopher’s other side.
“Ireland, England, and now France.” Christopher ticked the countries off on his fingers, trying to lighten the dark moment.
Once again, he and his friends had been given a genuine scouting mission, and once again they were in the right place at the right time. He’d realized by now that some of that was lucky, but a lot of it was less arbitrary than it looked at first. Spies had to make their own luck, which meant, in this case, sending people out on what could be a useless task, but sending them anyway. It was why he’d been on the top floor of the palace yesterday to hear George betray them. In fact, it was the basis of most of the work he’d done for DG. Lots of times, all they did was stand around and watch, but if a person did that enough, eventually he was going to discover something useful.
Christopher checked the sky. They had about two hours until sunset. They wanted to be back at the Paris Temple well before then, ready for the next stage of the plan.
What lay before them, however, might put a bit of a spanner in the works, as Callum had been known to say—whatever a spanner was, which Christopher had no idea himself. He made a note to ask Callum the next time they saw each other—if they ever saw each other again. He ruthlessly put down the thought.
“How many men are down there do you think?” Robbie said. “Five hundred?”
“It’s a lot.” Christopher rolled onto his back and stared up at the trees above his head.
They’d found a vantage point to the west of the village of Bobigny. Nogaret’s plan, as related by Norris, was for the Templars to escort the community of Jews five miles northeast of the city, to this village. Not so ironically in Avalon, it was in Bobigny that Jews of the twentieth century had been put on trains and sent to die during World War II.
Because of what Isabelle had overheard, they knew about the rest of Nogaret’s plan, which the army below them looked prepared to fulfil. That army was precisely what Christopher and his friends had been sent this afternoon to find. And truly, five hundred men were a little hard to hide if you knew what to look for: horse tracks, smoke from cooking fires, and local people who could point a finger as to which way they went.
“None of you are going to say it, so I will,” William said, as they retreated off the rise they’d been spying from, back down to where they’d left their horses. “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me!”
The freaking was a new addition, encouraged by Bronwen (and others) because they loved hearing William say the phrase with such a posh accent.
Robbie rested his head on his horse’s neck. “They’re wearing David’s colors and fly dragon banners.” He looked up. “Do you realize what that means?
“It means Nogaret is more devious than we hoped, and he is working to stay one step ahead of us, even as we are trying to stay one step ahead of him,” Huw said.
“It means,” Christopher said, “that we have to get the hell back to the Temple, because this changes everything.”
William frowned. “How so? The Templars already know not to come here. This army is going to sit in this village all night waiting, and by the time they figure out that nobody is coming, we’ll have everyone on the river.”
“Yes,” Christopher said, trying to keep his temper, since it wasn’t William’s fault that everything had just gone bananas, “but what else does what we see here tell us?”
Robbie had already figured it out. “Nogaret intends for England to take the blame for the death of the Jews.”
“Kind of ironic, since he blamed them for David’s escape in the first place,” Christopher said.
“Those five hundred men would cut through them like a hot knife through butter,” William said. “Even if a Templar is worth four regular troopers, they still wouldn’t have enough.”
“Especially if they were taken by surprise,” Robbie said.
William was looking pensive. “I’m confused. Nogaret has an army here, waiting, dressed like English soldiers. That wasn’t something he came up with in the last few hours. He had to have been planning something with them for weeks. Was he always intending to expel Jews from Paris today?”
Christopher waved a hand for them to mount. The last thing they wanted was to get caught here. “We know that Nogaret always planned for Philippe to keep Aquitaine. He’s also been planning for weeks to trade Arthur for weapons from George. David wasn’t to know about George at all, but to think that Philippe was holding Arthur as hostage to his good behavior—and as leverage against Callum down in Aquitaine. I don’t see where Jews or these soldiers fit into this at all.”
“If David hadn’t escaped, what could Jews have been blamed for?” Robbie said.
Christopher’s stomach sank into his boots. “His death?”
William waggled his head back and forth. “What if those soldiers weren’t originally supposed to be massacring Jewish citizens at all but marauding through the countryside, so the people of Paris would demand David’s head.”
Robbie frowned. “Nogaret would kill his own people?”
William, the child of a Marcher lord, knew better. “It would be nothing to him.”
Christopher looked back towards the encampment, though he couldn’t see it from where he sat in the saddle. He felt pressure building behind his eyes. He’d thought working for DG had taught him to think like a spy, but Nogaret’s mind was proving to be above his pay grade.
Huw shook his head. “It might not matter anymore what he was thinking. Nogaret’s plan isn’t just to murder Jews, it’s to eliminate a bunch of Templars too—and maybe all of them eventually—just as David told Molay he would.”
“Three for one,” Christopher said, “because Nogaret would get to blame England for it all.”
