Heretic - Bernard Cornwell

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had seen the mill weir as the easiest place to cross the deep and fast-flowing river.

      ‘The miller?’

      ‘Scared,’ Jake said, ‘and quiet.’

      Thomas heard the crackling of breaking twigs, the scrape of feet and a thump as a ladder was placed against the angle between the castle and the town wall. He leaned over the inner parapet. ‘You can open the gate, Robbie,’ he called down. He put an arrow on his string and stared down the long length of moonlit wall.

      Beneath him men were climbing the ladder, hoisting weapons and bags that they tossed over the parapet and then followed after. A wash of flamelight glowed from the open wicket gate where Robbie and Sam stood guard, and after a moment a file of men, their mail clinking in the night, went from the wall’s steps to the castle gate. Castillon d’Arbizon’s new garrison was arriving.

      A watchman appeared at the wall’s far end. He strolled towards the castle, then suddenly became aware of the sound of swords, bows and baggage thumping on stone as men clambered over the wall. He hesitated, torn between a desire to get closer and see what was really happening and a wish to find reinforcements, and while he hesitated both Thomas and Jake loosed their arrows.

      The watchman wore a padded leather jerkin, protection enough against a drunkard’s stave, but the arrows slashed through the leather, the padding and his chest until the two points protruded from his back. He was hurled back, his staff fell with a clatter, and then he jerked in the moonlight, gasped a few times and was still.

      ‘What do we do now?’ Jake asked.

      ‘Collect the taxes,’ Thomas said, ‘and make a nuisance of ourselves.’

      ‘Until what?’

      ‘Until someone comes to kill us,’ Thomas said, thinking of his cousin.

      ‘And we kill him?’ Jake might be cross-eyed, but he held a very straightforward view of life.

      ‘With God’s good help,’ Thomas said and made the sign of the cross on his friar’s robe.

      The last of Thomas’s men climbed the wall and dragged the ladder up behind them. There were still half a dozen men a mile away, across the river and hidden in the forest where they were guarding the horses, but the bulk of Thomas’s force was now inside the castle and its gate was again locked. The dead watchman lay on the wall with two goose-feathered shafts sticking from his chest. No one else had detected the invaders. Castillon d’Arbizon either slept or drank.

      And then the screams began.

      It had not occurred to Thomas that the beghard girl who was to die in the morning would be imprisoned in the castle. He had thought the town would have its own jail, but she had evidently been given into the garrison’s keeping and now she was screaming insults at the newly imprisoned men in the other cells and her noise was unsettling the archers and men-at-arms who had climbed Castillon d’Arbizon’s wall and taken the castle. The jailer’s plump wife, who spoke a little French, had shouted for the English to kill the girl. ‘She’s a beghard,’ the woman claimed, ‘in league with the devil!’

      Sir Guillaume d’Evecque had agreed with the woman. ‘Bring her up to the courtyard,’ he told Thomas, ‘and I’ll hack off her damn head.’

      ‘She must burn,’ Thomas said. ‘That’s what the Church has decreed.’

      ‘So who burns her?’

      Thomas shrugged. ‘The town sergeants? Maybe us, I don’t know.’

      ‘Then if you won’t let me kill her now,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘at least shut her goddamned mouth.’ He drew his knife and offered it to Thomas. ‘Cut her tongue out.’

      Thomas ignored the blade. He had still not found time to change out of his friar’s robe, so he lifted its skirts and went down to the dungeons where the girl was shouting in French to tell the captives in the other cells that they would all die and that the devil would dance on their bones to a tune played by demons. Thomas lit a rush lantern from the flickering remnants of a torch, then went to the beghard’s cell and pulled back the two bolts.

      She quietened at the sound of the bolts and then, as he pushed the heavy door open, she scuffled back to the cell’s far wall. Jake had followed Thomas down the steps and, seeing the girl in the lantern’s dim light, he sniggered. ‘I can keep her quiet for you,’ he offered.

      ‘Go and get some sleep, Jake,’ Thomas said.

      ‘No, I don’t mind,’ Jake persisted.

      ‘Sleep!’ Thomas snapped, suddenly angry because the girl looked so vulnerable.

      She was vulnerable because she was naked. Naked as a new-laid egg, arrow-thin, deathly pale, flea-bitten, greasy-haired, wide-eyed and feral. She sat in the filthy straw, her arms wrapped about her drawn-up knees to hide her nakedness, then took a deep breath is if summoning her last dregs of courage. ‘You’re English,’ she said in French. Her voice was hoarse from her screaming.

      ‘I’m English,’ Thomas agreed.

      ‘But an English priest is as bad as any other,’ she accused him.

      ‘Probably,’ Thomas agreed. He put the lantern on the floor and sat beside the open door because the stench in the cell was so overwhelming. ‘I want you to stop your screaming,’ he went on, ‘because it upsets people.’

      She rolled her eyes at those words. ‘Tomorrow they are going to burn me,’ she said, ‘so you think I care if fools are upset tonight?’

      ‘You should care for your soul,’ Thomas said, but his fervent words brought no response from the beghard. The rush wick burned badly and its horn shade turned the dim light a leprous, flickering yellow. ‘Why did they leave you naked?’ he asked.

      ‘Because I tore a strip from my dress and tried to strangle the jailer.’ She said it calmly, but with a defiant look as though daring Thomas to disapprove.

      Thomas almost smiled at the thought of so slight a girl attacking the stout jailer, but he resisted his amusement. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked instead.

      She was still defiant. ‘I have no name,’ she said. ‘They made me a heretic and took my name away. I’m cast out of Christendom. I’m already halfway to the next world.’ She looked away from him with an expression of indignation and Thomas saw that Robbie Douglas was standing in the half-open door. The Scot was gazing at the beghard with a look of wonderment, even awe, and Thomas looked at the girl again and saw that under the scraps of straw and embedded filth she was beautiful. Her hair was like pale gold, her skin was unscarred from pox and her face was strong. She had a high forehead, a full mouth and sunken cheeks. A striking face, and the Scotsman just stared at her and the girl, embarrassed by his frank gaze, hugged her knees closer to her breasts.

      ‘Go,’ Thomas told Robbie. The young Scotsman fell in love, it seemed to Thomas, like other men became hungry, and it was plain from Robbie’s face that he had been struck by the girl’s looks with the force of a lance hammering into a shield.

      Robbie frowned as though he did not quite understand Thomas’s instruction. ‘I meant to ask you,’ he said, then paused.

      ‘Ask me what?’

      ‘Back in Calais,’ Robbie said, ‘did the Earl tell you to leave me behind?’

      It seemed an odd question in the circumstances, but Thomas decided it deserved a response. ‘How do you know?’

      ‘That priest told me. Buckingham.’

      Thomas wondered why Robbie had even talked to the priest, then realized that his friend was simply making conversation so he could stay near to the latest girl he had fallen so hopelessly in love with. ‘Robbie,’ he said, ‘she’s going to burn in the morning.’

      Robbie shifted uneasily. ‘She doesn’t have to.’

      ‘For

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