‘We seven men,’ I said loudly, ‘we seven Companions of the Grail shall make a mighty vow this night. We shall…’
But I had lost the attention of my audience. Robin had risen from his throne-like chair at the head of the table and was walking towards the door. For it had opened and a short figure dressed in a long black robe had entered the room. Her hair was covered by a black headdress, her face by a heavy veil. The only visible features were a pair of liquid brown eyes that seemed to glow with a strange inner fire.
Robin said, ‘I beg your pardon, Alan’ – he had taken the woman’s white hand on his arm and was leading her towards the far end of the table to the empty place between Sir Nicholas and Roland – ‘but you are mistaken. We shall not be seven men embarking on this quest. We shall not be seven Companions undertaking this perilous journey. We shall be eight.’
Robin seated the black-clad figure on the stool at the end of the table.
I looked into the blazing eyes above the veil, and with a volcanic upwelling of rage and fear and hatred and plain dumbfounded disbelief, I recognized the new arrival.
It was Nur.
Part Two
Chapter Nine
Father Anselm must believe that I am a particularly wealthy man – or a particularly gullible one: he has asked me to purchase a golden casket with a clear glass top to house the Flask of St Luke the Evangelist, so that the faithful may flock to see this holy relic, and pray before it, but will not be tempted to sully its saintly leather with the touch of their hands.
I told him no, and had some difficulty in keeping my temper. I am not a pauper, it is true, and Westbury has been bountiful in the past few years, but I will not throw good money away on this ridiculous form of ostentation – and for a fake as well.
By God’s mercy, I managed to restrain myself from telling him the true base nature of his absurd ‘relic’ – but I sent him away from my hall with a few choice expressions of my wrath ringing in his ears.
However, yesterday, on All Saints’ Day, that bouncing tonsured puppy preached a long homily in church all about the flask and the blessed St Luke and the power of prayer. He exhorted the villagers to pray before it and ask for whatever they wished and, he said, if they had sufficient faith in miracles, St Luke would help them.
Then he had the God-damned effrontery to lead the congregation in a prayer for a casket to house the flask. He said that God would surely grant us this gaudy trinket – which would cost no more than twelve pounds – if we prayed hard enough and believed with all our hearts that the miracle would occur. I was standing there right in front of him, blushing in my best clothes, and thankfully unarmed, while he begged St Luke to intercede with the Almighty and persuade Him to send us a suitable container for the flask. If I’d had a sword with me, I might have run him through. If he had made some slighting mention of my refusal to pay for this golden extravagance, I might well have slaughtered him. No, I tell a lie, I would not have done that – my killing days are undoubtedly over – but I was tempted to duck his head in his own font, and I could certainly do that, I warrant, even at my advanced age.
Worse, the villagers have taken his words to heart. When I returned to the church this very evening to pray for the soul of my wife Godifa – as the day after All Saints, it is, of course, All Souls’ Day, and I come each year to light a candle for her and sit quietly alone and remember the happiness we once shared – I was greeted by a piteous sight. Two of my tenants from the village, a devoted couple called Martha and Geoffrey, were praying before the altar where the flask is displayed. These two had found each other late in life – she is a plain, hard-working woman who will never see forty again and he is almost as old as I am – and yet they seem to be as enamoured of each other as a pair of giggling twenty-year-olds. Martha and Geoffrey had been there since the service the day before, on their knees at the altar, taking neither food nor drink, never moving, and praying continuously for St Luke to grant them a child. At their age! That would indeed be a miracle.
I lit a candle for Goody, and said a prayer, but I did not linger.
I leaped on to the wine merchant’s table in a single bound and took three fast steps down its full length, heedlessly crushing costly glasses, and scattering dirty plates, fish bones, scraps of bread and jugs of good red wine. I hurled myself at Nur, my fifteen stones of muscle and bone smashing her slight form from the stool and on to the reed-strewn floor. I had no weapon – all my war gear was in the sleeping chamber on the first storey of the house – and I had not paused for a moment. I saw her; I flung myself at her. We crashed to the floor and I reached for her throat, gripped, locked my hands and began to squeeze…
I think that if there had been lesser men seated at the table that evening, the witch would have died there and then. I could feel her tiny neck like a twig beneath my palms, and the swordsman’s muscles in my heavy arms writhed – a few more moments and I would have snapped her spine as easily as a farmer dispatches a dove. But Nicholas and Thomas were on me almost as soon as I had Nur in my grasp and with their considerable combined strength pulling my wrists away from the woman, and with Robin on my back, choking my neck with his left forearm and shouting in my ear that I must release her immediately or I would suffer the consequences, I soon found myself separated from the woman in black, my vision blurring and helplessly pinned by three friends against the solid edge of the table. Roland swam into my field of view; he was saying, ‘Alan, give the Earl your word that you will not attack this lady and you will be released. Alan, you must give your word.’
I mumbled something through a clogged and swollen throat, and Robin released his grip a fraction. ‘Do you swear on your soul that if I release you, you will not attack the lady Nur again? Do you swear on Goody’s life?’
I struggled futilely for a moment or two, growling like a mastiff in my half-crushed throat.
‘Do you swear that you will not harm her?’
I managed to cough out the word: ‘Swear.’
‘I am serious, Alan – do not attack Nur again tonight.’ Robin removed his forearm from my neck, allowing me to take a ragged breath, but Nicholas and Thomas still had my arms in their grip.
I stared at my victim. My sudden assault had ripped the veil from her face and I looked into a gaunt visage that would have terrified the Devil himself. The lip-less mouth seemed to be permanently grinning, mocking me, the nose was a truncated snout, no more than two gaping red-rimmed holes in the centre of her face. I caught a glimpse of the mass of scarring where her right ear had been and a frill of remaining earlobe – and her eyes burned with an unquenchable demonic hatred as she hastily rearranged her headdress to cover her ugliness from the world.
‘I swear that I will not kill that Hell-spawned hag this night – but I make no promises about the morrow and there had better be a God-damned good reason why you sprung her on me like that, Robin, and why you seem to be inviting her to join our sacred quest. And I want to know that reason right now – or you will suffer the fucking consequences.’
It hurt me a good deal to speak but I do not remember when I have been so angry. The sight of Nur, that vile agent of Goody’s illness, seemed to have ignited something powerful inside me. I was fully prepared in that instant to make an enemy of Robin – and my lord must have sensed this.
‘First of all let us sit down and compose ourselves, and take a deep breath,’ Robin said. ‘Gavin, would you kindly run through to the servant’s quarters and ask them to bring us some more wine.’
I found myself sitting back at my place, staring at my twitching hands, my blood still simmering, my bruised windpipe on fire, while Thomas fussed about mopping up spilled wine and gathering the shards of broken glass. After a very short time, order had been regained and I looked up. For some reason I could hardly bring myself to look directly at the small dark figure, now fully veiled again and sitting as still as a statue at the far end of the table.
Robin spoke: ‘I must apologize to you all, and to my friend Al
an here most of all, for the events of this evening. I had anticipated having a chance to explain why I asked the lady Nur to join us before you were all presented with the fact of it. Alan – I am truly sorry.’
I said nothing. I looked down at my big hands again.
Robin continued. ‘There are certain things that you should know, Alan; certain things that the lady has sworn to me, and which I have accepted as the truth. Firstly, while Nur admits that she did place a curse on yourself and Goody, she swears that she would now lift it if she could; but she tells me that this kind of magic cannot be undone, and that this curse would continue in its malevolence even in the event of her death. Is this not true?’ He directed the question down the table to the witch.
Nur spoke. ‘It is true, lord,’ she said, her voice, though now a little hoarse and scratchy, had the same weird, sing-song quality that had long haunted my nightmares. ‘I made this curse from a male mandrake root boiled in dew from a dead man’s grave in a virgin’s pelvis bone. I buried it in the earth and drowned it in a waterfall, and burned it on a fire made from a murdered woman’s dry bones, before scattering it to the four winds. It is the most powerful curse of all. It cannot be unmade, not by my art – not even if I wished it so. I have pledged my soul to this curse: my death would merely make it stronger.’
She paused then, and I sensed that she was looking directly at me. ‘If I were to die at your hands, my beloved, your pale Godifa, your milky whore-wife, would live not one hour longer. As it is: she will live until the curse claims her. One year and one day after you wed, she will pay.’
I lifted my head and stared at Nur just then, hating her from the depths of my soul, and remembered that she had often called me her beloved when we had been lovers, in a faraway land, long, long ago. Goody and I had married on the first day of July the year before. It was now mid-March. If the curse were to prove true, my beloved would be gone in a few short months. I thought of Goody as I’d last seen her, cold, still; my eyes filled with tears and I could make no sound more than a sob.
‘Well, yes, be that as it may,’ said Robin. Even his customary assurance seemed to have deserted him. ‘But, you see, Alan, killing Nur can have no good effect on Goody’s well-being – and perhaps, if you believe in this business of curses, it may have the opposite effect. But tell him, Nur, tell him why you are here.’
‘I alone know where the cup of Christ may be found,’ said the witch calmly. ‘I alone know its resting place. Its magic calls to my magic. Its power calls to mine.’
Every face at the table was watching her keenly; not a man fidgeted, not a cough or a sniff was to be heard.
‘Your sour-cream bitch can be saved only by the strongest magic in the world, Alan – by the power of the Christ God,’ said Nur. ‘And none other. If she were to drink a draught of ordinary water from the vessel that is called the Grail, into which had been mingled three drops of my own blood, the curse would be shattered and she would surely regain her strength. This is her only chance to escape her doom.’
When Nur finished, the silence continued among the assembled company for a dozen heartbeats. It was broken by Robin. ‘Nur knows where the Grail is, Alan,’ said my lord, a little too loudly, as if I were either stone deaf or very stupid, ‘and she has agreed to take us there. So if you want your Goody to live, I am afraid you must suffer Nur’s presence with us on our journey.’
We boarded The Goose the next day, on a sour, pewter-coloured morning, a little before noon. The ship, moored at Queen’s Hythe dock, a mere bowshot to the west of Ivo the merchant’s house, was an ugly, fat-bellied craft, sixty feet long and twenty-four feet across at the beam. I hated The Goose from the moment I saw her – although it must be acknowledged that I was in a mood to hate the whole world that day.
The night before, Robin had dismissed everybody to bed, including the witch, but had kept me back for a few words when the hall had emptied. I was angry and hurt that he had arranged all this behind my back and I ranted a good deal and behaved more than a little childishly towards my lord. His response was blunt: ‘Do you want to save Goody’s life or not?’
I had no reply to that, and no move to make except to take myself off to bed in an angry, sulky silence.
At the top of the stairs, I saw that Sir Nicholas was waiting for me. He put two hands on my shoulders and looked intently into my face. ‘Know that I stand with you on this, Alan,’ he said. ‘It seems that we must endure the company of this vile sorceress for a little while, for the sake of the Grail. But I shall watch her every move, I promise you, and if she tries any devilment, any of her foul Satanic practices, I shall take her life in a single heartbeat. I will gladly slay her for you, Alan, whenever you give me the word, and we shall put our trust in the Lord God for Goody’s recovery.’
I knew that the former Hospitaller meant this kindly but I shook my head. ‘We have no choice but to suffer the witch to live, Nicholas,’ I said. ‘But I thank you from the depths of my soul for your generous intent.’
While The Goose was not spacious, we seven warriors, the seven Companions of the Grail, as I thought of us, managed to find shelter from the spitting rain under the aft-castle, a crenellated walkway that ran around the ship’s square rear as a fighting platform. The Goose had a similar defensive position at the bow called the fore-castle, square and crenellated as well, and it was underneath this smaller platform that Nur made her nest. Our spirits were subdued that afternoon as the six sailors who manned the ship slipped the moorings, hoisted the square sail on the single mast and under the gentlest of breezes and a fine drizzle, we wafted downstream. We tacked around the end of the great stone bridge of London – which was then nearly two-thirds built, and which ran from St Botolph’s in Billingsgate almost all the way across the water to the stews of Southwark – and once past that obstacle we took the centre of the greasy brownish stream and glided along the Thames, at about the speed of a walking horse, towards the sea.
The river traffic was light, and the passage was calm, but the vision of that small black-clad figure sitting alone in the bows made my stomach churn with frustrated rage and despair. We sat glumly on our baggage – mainly weapons and armour, some sacks holding a little food, bundles of spare clothes, and Robin’s strong box, which contained silver coin and a few valuables – and munched dry bread and onions as the falling damp soaked into our clothing; I contemplated weeks of this experience with a shudder.
Before long, the captain of the ship came aft to bid us a formal welcome. He was a short, sturdy, muscular man named Samuel, with a wide, square face and cropped pitch-black hair and, in contrast to his master, Ivo the merchant, he was apparently a fearless soul.
‘Welcome aboard my ship, gentlemen,’ he said looking at Robin. ‘As you know, Ivo of Shoreham owns her, and he tells me what is to be carried in her holds,’ he said jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the main deck which was packed with hundreds of coarse lumpy grey sacks holding Staffordshire coal for the busy forges of Aquitaine. ‘But once The Goose leaves the dock, she is entirely my bird, and I have dominion over her and anyone she carries. We will make you as comfortable as we can, but this is a working ship and, Earl or churl, you are merely passengers on it. Keep out of the way of the sailors, and obey any command you are given by myself and we shall get along fine. We’ll be landing before dusk each day, wherever we can, and setting off again at dawn – in between times, under here is as good a place as any to roost. If we encounter pirates, you’ll be expected to fight – but by the looks of you that should not be too outlandish an experience.’ And he was rewarded with seven grins from the Companions. Then he frowned, and glanced at the huddled figure under the fore-castle: ‘The lady, well, she makes the crew a little nervous, so just keep her out of the way, agreed?’
Robin stood. ‘Captain Samuel—’ he began.
But the man cut him short: ‘You call me Governor or Samuel, one or the other, nothing else.’
‘Very well, ah, Samuel, I would just like to thank you for
allowing us on board your fine vessel and to assure you that we accept your authority and while under your care we shall be as meek and obedient as a troop of novice nuns.’
‘That’s good,’ said Samuel. ‘See that you are. We sleep tonight at Gravesend and, wave and weather permitting, we should make the mouth of the Gironde by the middle of Holy Week or thereabouts – in about twenty days, give or take.’ He nodded at Robin, turned and strode away towards the bow.
For the next few weeks we submitted to the queasy tedium of travelling by sea. As the Governor had promised, we stopped at Gravesend that evening, and we passed the night in a stinking tavern that overcharged for its lodgings and for a vile eel stew and a few crusts of stale bread. The next day we took to the open sea and after a rough crossing, with a good deal of grey-faced vomiting from even the seasoned voyagers, we arrived in Calais, and dragged our drenched and aching bones off the ship in search of warm wine and a place that did not heave and creak and shift and splash quite as much as the deck of The Goose.
And so we proceeded down the coast of northern France – surging past the wide beaches of Picardy and Normandy and along beside the rock-bound coast of Brittany. The days merged into one another, each dull, damp and long; aboard we ate bread and vegetables boiled with pungent dried fish, and drank watered ale or the rough, sour cider of the region; we told stories to pass the time, taking it in turns to recount the adventures we had had in far flung corners of the world. I sang for the company my entire repertoire of cansos, sirventes and tensos and as many bawdy fabliaux as I could remember – unaccompanied by any musical instrument, for my well-loved applewood vielle had been consumed in the fire at Westbury and I had no money to replace it.
Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) Page 13