The House of the Red Slayer

crescents on the standards dazzling in the scorching sunlight. The city had been besieged for months but at last a breach had been forced in one of the walls. He and Sir Brian had gone in first to stand shoulder to shoulder, their comrades around them, a fighting circle of steel slowly edging into the city. Behind them the massed troops of the Caliph, their battle cries rising and falling like a demoniac chorus. The knights had forced their way through the gap and along the wall to the steps leading to the parapet above the main gate.
    Sir Gerard’s mind slipped eagerly back into the past. He remembered the intense heat, the sunlight dancing off sword and dagger points, the roar of battle, the blood which pumped like a thousand fountains as men fell screaming from horrible wounds in head, body or thigh. Slowly he and his companions had edged up the steps, hacking their way through flesh until they reached a point above the main gate. Now who had it been? Of course! As always, Bartholomew. He’d jumped down, engaging in combat with a huge Mameluke. Bartholomew had moved with the grace of a dancer, his sword a silver hissing snake. One false feint to the groin, then up and round in a semi-arc to slice the enemy between helmet and hauberk. Ralph had followed. He had been an honourable knight then.
    The great bar to the gate was lifted and the Caliph’s men had poured into the city. What a bloodletting! No quarter was asked and none was given. The narrow, hot streets dinned with the silver bray of trumpets and the shrieks of dying men and women. At least the knights had not been party to the massacre; they had achieved their task and now looked for suitable reward. They eventually found themselves in a huge square where a white marble fountain played in the centre. Nearby stood the banker’s empty house. Oh, the treasure they had found there! Adam had run knee-deep in silver ducats and jewelled goblets full of pearls!
    Mowbray suddenly shook himself free from his memories. He thought he’d heard a sound, there towards the end of the parapet at the top of the steps. No, he concluded, it was only the wind. He went back to his memories. Strange, Mowbray pondered, that Adam had not come to see them this Christmas. Perhaps he was too frightened. Had the dead Sir Ralph and the now wealthy burgess Adam known something he did not? What had happened three years ago to frighten the Constable so much?
    ‘We are all frightened,’ Mowbray whispered to himself. This fear had changed them all. That’s what evil did to you, he thought, it corroded the will, rotted the soul, and fouled the chambers and passageways of the mind. What had been done in Outremer so many years ago had been evil! Bartholomew had been their leader. Half the treasure was rightfully his, and he had trusted them — a terrible mistake. Betrayal! Treachery! The words shrieked like tormented ghosts in the dark recesses of Mowbray’s soul. Ralph had planned it but they had all been party to his evil. Mowbray stirred against the cold. Oh, he had confessed his sins, walked barefoot to the shrine of St James at Compostela and both he and Fitzormonde had become hospitallers to make reparation. He stared out into the darkness.
    ‘Oh, sweet Christ!‘ he murmured. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’ The hospitaller felt the black demons of Hell closing in around him. What terrors did the pit hold for traitors? To be basted with pitch in a dark pen full of brimstone where adders would suck at his eyes and snakes curl round his lying tongue! What could he do to break free of such phantasms? Tell Cranston? No! Perhaps Brother Athelstan? Mowbray remembered the dark eyes and closed face of the Dominican monk. Mowbray had met such men before; some of his commanders in the knights hospitaller had the same gift as Athelstan of sensing every thought. The friar knew there was something wrong, something evil and rotten, behind Sir Ralph’s death.
    Mowbray jumped as a night bird shrieked beyond the Tower walls. A dog howled in protest. Was it a dog? he wondered. Or one of Satan’s scouts calling up the legions of the damned from the abyss of Hell? A bell clanged. Mowbray moaned in fear, caught now in his own fancies. The bell boomed as though it came from the bowels of the earth. He cursed and calmed himself.
    The bell was the tocsin in the Tower! Mowbray’s hand fell to his sword hilt as he realised that great brass tongue only tolled when the Tower was under attack. He gripped