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courtyard, some horribly mutilated, others hardly touched. All, however, had had
their throats cut.
The crusaders passed into the courtyard with only a passing glance at the
bodies. They were looking for the Turks, not the sign of their passing. Death was
their stock in trade, and the death of the villagers elicited only casual professional
interest.
The chapel of the shrine of Chalice Well lay across the square, and de Beq
and two of the men from his skirmishing party trotted out in front of the rest of the
crusaders and made their way across to it. The door was closed and barred from
within, but inside they could hear the wailing moans of someone pleading for
mercy, punctuated by screams, and the laughter and coarse chatter of the Turks.
Quietly, de Beq beckoned for one of the burlier serjeants to come and boost
him up so he could look through a tiny window above the door. With a leg up from
a man-at-arms, he climbed shakily onto the serjeant's shoulders and stood up,
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hooking his fingertips over the windowsill. By stretching, he was just able to peer
through the lower part of the little window.
Inside, to blasphemies and hoots of derision, seven or eight Turks had
singled out the guardian of the shrine for their special attention. The old priest had
been stripped naked and nailed to the top of his altar, a spike driven through each of
his outstretched hands and another pounded through his feet in sacrilegious parody
of the crucifix looking down from the wall above him no work of any Christian
or even of Moslems, who at least honored Jesus of Nazareth as God's prophet, even
if they did not accept him as God's son.
Not satisfied with this profanation, the Turks were flaying the priest alive,
one of them peeling long, bloody strips from his tightly-stretched chest with a
wicked, curved dagger while his fellows crowded round and took delight in each
new contortion. Blood streamed from the priest's wounds, befouling the altar with
gore and the sweat of his terror and anguish, but the raw agony of his screams was
weakening with every breath he managed to draw.
The man with the dagger somehow de Beq knew it could only be Ibn-al-
Hassad himself gave a maniacal laugh and flayed another strip of flesh, then bent
languorously to lick the raw wound with an obscene, bloodstained tongue. The old
man's scream shifted into a long, despairing wail of anguish at this new outrage,
caught just at the edge of madness, but the sound, coupled with his writhing, only
served to goad his torturers on.
De Beq had seen enough. He knew their number, their unredeemable
depravity, and he also knew that there was no other way out of the place besides the
door below him. Letting himself down from the sill, still balanced on the sergeant's
shoulders, he turned and took the up-stretched hands of two of his knights and
vaulted lightly to the ground, beckoning them silently aside.
"He's in there with about half a dozen of his men," de Beq said. "They're
torturing the priest. There's nothing we can do for him, but I don't intend that
Hassad should leave this place alive. If they don't simply tire of their sport and kill
him, the priest should last long enough for us to make our preparations. Michel," he
called to one of the serjeants, "take two of the men, go back to the horses, and
bring up the archers."
Without waiting, the serjeant tapped two men on the chest, and the three of
them trotted off in the direction of the horses. Satisfied, de Beq turned back to his
knights.
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"Now, we're going to need something to use as a battering ram. Armand,
take three men and see what you can find, and be quick about it. You others, keep
looking for more of the Turks. They all may be broucolaques. Father Georgilas said
they fall into a kind of stupor when they're sated with blood, and they're hard to
rouse. But don't waste time stabbing and cutting just cut off their heads or burn
them in the huts where you find them, if you have to. This whole place goes, when
we're done. And William as soon as the archers get here, I want you to position
them opposite the chapel door. Put a double row of men with spears at either side
of the door. If any of those bastards come out, I want them facing a gauntlet of steel
and a shower of arrows. The minute they're down, behead them."
He kept two knights and half a dozen men-at-arms with him, in case he had
overestimated the priest's endurance, and set them in readiness outside the chapel
door. Because the fighting would be close when they eventually went in, he took
off his helmet and spurs and directed his men to do the same. Some of them put
aside their swords in favor of maces or axes. De Beq decided to keep his sword, but
did take off his scabbard.
The rest of his men finished their sweep of the village in the quarter hour it
took the archers to return, and came back bloodstained and satisfied-looking.
Francois Mansard reported that they had accounted for a good score of the Turks,
all drowsing in a blood-induced stupor in one of the sheds, surrounded by the
bodies of slain villagers.
Listening grimly, de Beq watched William deploy the returning archers,
integrating them with the returned serjeants and men-at-arms exactly as he had
ordered. On either side of the chapel door, eleven men were drawn up in a double
line of six men backed up by five more. They were crouching on the ground, facing
diagonally towards the door with their spears at the ready. Beyond them by some
fifty feet were the archers, protected by a German knight named Hano von Linka
and the limping Myles Brabazon, easing his wounded leg with a boar spear for a
crutch. If the Turks broke out of the chapel, they immediately would face a hail of
arrows that either would drive them onto the broad points of the boar spears or
force them back inside. The deathtrap was well set.
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