Timeline

27:27:22

For the last forty minutes, they had been scrambling up through the forest northeast of Castelgard. At last, they came to the top of the hill, the highest point in the area, and they could pause to catch their breath and look down.

"Oh my God," Kate said, staring.

They looked down on the river, and the monastery on the opposite side. But their attention was drawn to the forbidding castle high above the monastery: the fortress of La Roque. It was enormous! In the deepening blue of evening, the castle glowed with light from a hundred windows and from torches along the battlements. But despite the glowing lights, the fortress was ominous. The outer walls were black above the still waters of the moat. Inside was another complete set of walls, with many round towers, and at the center of the complex, the actual castle, with its own great hall, and a dark rectangular tower, rising more than a hundred feet into the air.

Marek said to Kate, "Does it look like modern La Roque?"

"Not at all," she said, shaking her head. "This thing is gigantic. The modern castle has only one outer wall. This one has two: an additional ring wall that is no longer there."

"So far as I know," Marek said, "nobody ever captured it by force."

"You can see why," Chris said. "Look how it's sited."

On the east and south side, the fortress was built atop a limestone cliff, a sheer drop of five hundred feet to the Dordogne below. On the west, where the cliff was less vertical, the stone houses of the town climbed up toward the castle, but anyone following the road through the town would end up facing a broad moat and several drawbridges. On the north, the land sloped more gently away, but all the trees on the north had been cut down, leaving an exposed plain without cover - a suicidal approach for any army.

Marek pointed. "Look there," he said. :

In the twilight, a party of soldiers approached the castle on a dirt road from the west. Two knights in the lead held torches, and by that light they could just barely discern Sir Oliver, Sir Guy, the Professor, and the rest of Oliver's knights bringing up the rear, in two columns. The figures were so far away that they really recognized them by body shape and posture. But Chris, at least, had no doubt what he was seeing.

He sighed as he watched the riders cross a drawbridge over a moat and pass through a large gatehouse with half-round twin towers - a so-called double-D gate, because the towers looked like twin D's when seen from above. Soldiers atop the towers watched the riders as they passed through.

Beyond the gatehouse, the riders entered another enclosed courtyard. Here, many long wooden buildings had been erected. "That's where the troops are garrisoned," Kate said.

The party rode across this inner courtyard, crossed a second moat over a second drawbridge, passing through a second gatehouse with even larger twin towers: thirty feet high, and glowing with light from dozens of arrow slits.

Only then did they dismount, in the innermost court of the castle. The Professor was led by Oliver toward the great hall; they disappeared inside.

Kate said, "The Professor said that if we were separated, we should go to the monastery and find Brother Marcel, who has the key. I assume he meant the key to the secret passage."

Marek nodded. "And that's what we're going to do. It'll be dark soon. Then we can go."

Chris looked down the hill. In the gloom, he could see small bands of soldiers in the fields, all the way down to the river's edge. They would have to make their way past all those soldiers. "You want to go to the monastery tonight?"

Marek nodded. "However dangerous it looks now," he said, "tomorrow morning, it will be worse."