Part Three: DEPOSITION
Fidèle had assumed that the shacks and workshops would run all the way up to the city walls, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, a strip of bare ground about twenty paces across ran the entire length of the wall. About halfway across the space, the defenders had piled up dirt into a rampart the height of a man. Several boys from the camp had already climbed to the top and were pointing at something below on the other side.
“Come on,” Jean-Claude urged, and he and Luc ran across the open ground and started climbing the mound of earth themselves.
Fidèle paused to peer up at the wall. But the battlements were so high up and he was standing so close to the base that he couldn’t even see the crenelations at the top anymore. Openings projected from the wall at regular intervals, through which the defenders could rain arrows or stones or boiling oil on their attackers, but as far as Fidèle could see no one was manning them. Reassured, Fidèle followed his friends to the top of the rampart.
On the other side, the defenders had dug a ditch, running the full circumference of the wall. The sharpened points of hundreds of wooden posts peeked up over the edge.
“I’m starting to think they don’t want us here,” Jean-Claude said.
Now that he was face to face with the city itself, Fidèle shot nervous glances up and down the wall, every nerve on alert as he searched for signs that he was looking at a city of the damned – of a world gone wrong. But this wall, as well-made as it obviously was, just looked so ordinary. No fire. No demon guardians. No mystic symbols. Just weathered stone.
“How are we going to tell who the heretics are?” he asked.
He hadn’t addressed the question to anyone in particular, but Luc responded. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, not everyone in Béziers can be a heretic, can they?”
“When the Crusaders breach the gates, anyone who stands against them is a heretic,” Jean-Claude answered, with an air of authority.
That makes sense, I guess, Fidel thought to himself.
Suddenly, Jean-Claude was clambering down the other side of the rampart.
“Where are you going?”
“Crossing the ditch,” Jean-Claude answered.
“What – are you crazy?”
“Last one to lay his hand on the wall is a whoreson,” Jean-Claude called back over his shoulder. He was already at the lip of the ditch, joining a dozen other boys from the Crusader army who had gathered there. Luc quickly followed. Fidèle glumly made his own way down the far side of the rampart.
He stopped when he was still half a pace away from the ditch, standing on tiptoe and craning his neck, trying to peer all the way down to the bottom. The ditch was deeper than a horse could stand, with sharply sloping walls on either side. The floor of the trench bristled with sharpened poles arranged in a tight crisscross pattern. The ditch didn’t have to stop invaders, Fidèle realized. It just had to slow them down long enough to make them easy targets from above.
Luc was staring up at the top of the wall himself now. “Is anyone even up there?” He turned to the others. “Do we know for sure that there are people in the city?”
Almost as if in answer to his question, there came the sharp sound of metal on metal to their right. At a point further up the wall, right where it curved out of sight, was one of the city’s gates, and it was swinging open.
Half a dozen men poured out, brandishing sticks and wooden swords and shouting something in their southern dialect that Fidèle couldn’t understand. But the message was clear enough. They rushed towards Fidèle’s group and Fidèle’s group rushed towards them. They ended up on opposite sides of the trench, hurling insults and stones at one another. A pebble clipped Fidèle’s knee.
Then a tall Crusader with bulging arms – an apprentice to one of the army’s blacksmiths, Fidèle guessed – stepped forward carrying a rock the size of a melon. He hurled it across the gap, but the defenders side-stepped it easily. One blew a raspberry and then they all turned tail and ran, vanishing back inside the gate.
“Come on!” Jean-Claude urged. They all rushed to the point of the trench opposite the gate. They yelled insults and challenges, while some of them disappeared back among the shacks, returning with all sorts of random objects that were heavy enough to throw.
They were still making these preparations when the eastern gate opened up again. There were twice as many defenders now, and some had brought steel with them this time. Now that Fidèle was close enough to get a good look at them, he realized they were all of an age with the him, Jean-Claude, Luc, and the rest – in their early teens.
We’re all just boys, playing at being soldiers, Fidèle thought. That didn’t lessen the ferocity of the defenders’ challenges, however, and the Crusader boys were responding in kind.
A small stone shot out from among the defenders, hitting the blacksmith’s apprentice square on the nose. One of the defenders had brought a sling – and was a pretty good shot at it too.
All of the Crusader boys were throwing objects now: rocks and shoes and chairs and fence posts. Jean-Claude started pulling potatoes out of his sack and flinging them across the gap. He was a pretty good shot himself, and soon a group of defenders had gathered across from him, hurling missiles of their own. A rotting cabbage splashed against Fidèle’s chest and dropped into the trench, impaling itself on one of the sharpened posts.
Fidèle was the only one on his side of the trench not yelling or throwing anything. He stood there in a daze, peering into the faces of the men across the way from him, looking for any sign of Satan’s influence. But all he saw was boys at play. They were jeering and postering like spectators at a ball game. Like the smooth stones of the wall behind them, the defenders all seemed so normal, and Fidèle found himself wondering just what he had been expecting. Glowing eyes? Snarling fangs? Tears of blood?
At just that moment, the blacksmith’s apprentice appeared out from among the shacks carrying a log almost as large as he was. Without a pause, he rushed to the edge of the trench and flung it across.
It hit three of the defenders across the chest, clipping one but knocking the other two to the ground. One struggled, pinned underneath. The other wasn’t moving at all.
In that instant, the whole scene shifted, the air humming with new tension. Several of the defenders glared up at them in shock and then rushed back inside the gate. Others hefted the log off of their two friends. One was screaming in pain now. The other still hadn’t moved.
All around Fidèle on his side of the trench, the others were still jeering and throwing things, pelting the injured boys and their rescuers with missiles. Forced back, the defenders finally retreated back through the gate, dragging one friend behind them and leaving the other where he lay.
At different points along their lines, boys were struggling down into the trench. Kicking and pulling and shoving, they started knocking the sharpened posts aside, clearing a path across. “Come on!” Jean-Claude yelled, joining one of these groups. Luc and Fidèle exchanged glances.
“What does he think he’s doing?” Fidèle asked.
“My guess is he’s sick of throwing things. They want a real fight.”
It wasn’t until that moment that Fidèle realized: he didn’t want a real fight. He wasn’t a soldier. He’d come to Languedoc to tend Lord Chretien’s horse and drive the cart. The thought that he might end up in battle himself had never once occurred to him.
Not that he didn’t see the righteousness of their cause. The heretics were a corrupting influence, a threat to everyone around them. A threat to the Church itself. A threat to the entire world. He wanted to see them stopped as much as any other man in the Crusader army. He just didn’t feel he had the skills necessary to be the one to do it.
Luc had joined Jean-Claude at the bottom of the trench, where a group of Crusader boys were making quick work of the wooden poles. Soon, they had cleared a path and started climbing up the other side.
Jean-Claude was the first to the top. He turned and his eyes fixed on Fidèle, still standing there across the gap.
“Are you coming, whoreson?” he asked with a smirk.
“We’re going to get into trouble,” Fidèle shouted back.
“Trouble?” Jean-Claude threw back at him. “How could we get into trouble? This is what we all came here to do.”
As these words were leaving his mouth, behind him the gate flew open and defenders came pouring out in force.
Hearing their shouts, Jean-Claude began to turn, but he never got the chance. One of the first defenders through the gate barreled into him, shoving him over the lip of the trench.
Jean-Claude fell into a section of the trench their comrades hadn’t cleared yet. The points of sharpened wood slid into him easily, like he didn’t have any bones. He ended up suspended midair, skewered between three of the poles. He screamed. He wouldn’t stop screaming.
Anyone who stands against us is a heretic, Jean-Claude had said.
This is what we all came here to do, Jean-Claude had said.
Fidèle glanced up to where Jean-Claude’s murderer had been, but he was gone.
In a rage, in a panic, Fidèle half-slid, half-fell down to the floor the trench. By the time he reached his friend, the screaming had stopped. Jean-Claude would never scream again.