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sword through a skein of ropes tethering three horses to a ring set in the wall. He pricked one of the horses with his sword’s point, and the animal bolted, causing chaos among the waking men. He slapped the other two, and all through the yard horses were whinnying and rearing.
    ‘Drawbridge!’ Roland shouted. Two men were facing him, both with swords, but he was suddenly calm. This was his trade. So far he had only fought in tournaments, but his victories in the lists were the result of hours of practice, hour upon hour of obsessive sword practice, and he flicked one enemy’s blade wide, feinted back, stepped forward and his sword slid between the ribs of the left-hand man, and he stepped into the other man, inside his wild swing, and brought his sword arm back so his elbow smashed into the man’s belly.
    ‘I have him,’ Robbie called, just as if they were in a tournament’s melee.
    Roland stepped to his left and gave a short downswing, and the first man was out of the fight and he had hardly drawn breath. Now two sentinels had come from the gatehouse, and he went for them fast. One carried a spear, which he jabbed, but Roland could see the nervousness on the man’s face and he hardly even had to think to parry the thrust and then flick the sword up so that its tip raked a horrid wound across the man’s face. He cut lips, nose and an eyebrow, and the man, one eye filling with blood, reeled back into the second guard, who panicked, backing into the guardhouse. ‘Bring Lady Genevieve,’ Roland called to Michel, ‘into the arch!’
    Roland vanished into the guardroom, while Robbie and Sculley barred the entrance to the deep arched tunnel that was blocked at its further end by the closed drawbridge. ‘It’s got bloody bolts,’ Sculley said.
    Michel spoke no English, but he had seen the bolts and dragged the right-hand one free of its stone socket. Genevieve reached up and tried to free the other, but it would not budge and the cloak fell off her shoulders. Men in the courtyard saw her naked back and shouted to see more. Michel came to help her and the vast iron bolt squealed back.
    ‘Hold them, Sculley!’ Robbie shouted.
    ‘Douglas!’ Sculley bellowed his war shout at the men in the courtyard.
    One guard was left inside the guardroom, but he shrank away from Roland who ignored him. Instead, Roland climbed the winding stairs that led to the big chamber above the gate arch. There was no one there, but it was dark, the only light was the moon’s dim glow leaking through the arrow slits, but Roland could see the vast windlass on which the drawbridge’s chains were spooled. The windlass’s drum was as wide as the arch and stood four feet high. There were huge handles at either end, but Roland could not budge the nearer one. He heard shouts below and the clash of blades. He heard a scream. A horse whinnied. For a few seconds he stood helpless, wondering how to release the mechanism, then as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw a vast wooden lever by the far handle. He ran to it, took hold and pulled. For an instant it resisted his strength, then it suddenly gave way and there was an appallingly loud click and the vast drum spun fast and the chains whipped off the spools, jerking and shaking, and one snapped and the broken links whipped back to slash the side of Roland’s face just as an almighty crash announced that the drawbridge was down.
    He staggered, half stunned by the whiplashing chain, then recovered to pick up his sword that he had dropped to pull the lever, and started down the stairs.
    The gate was open.
     
    ‘Sir?’ Sam touched Thomas’s shoulder.
    ‘Jesus.’ Thomas breathed the name. He had been half asleep, or rather his mind was drifting vaguely like the tenuous mist that was sifting off the moon-touched moat of Labrouillade’s castle. He had been thinking of the Grail, of the common clay bowl he had hurled into the sea, and been wondering, as he often did, whether it truly was the Holy Grail. Sometimes he doubted it, and sometimes he shivered for the audacity of concealing it beneath the eternal roll and thunder of the waves. And before that, he thought, he had sought the lance of Saint George, and that too was gone, and he had been thinking that if he did find
la Malice
then perhaps that also should be hidden for ever, and while his mind was wandering he had seen the sudden dull glimmer of firelight appear in the castle’s arch and then came the great crash