Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles)

by Donald, Angus

  I remember little of the next few days and weeks. I was drowning in a grief so deep as to block out almost all memory. But for some strange reason I could not shed a single tear. Robin and Thomas, Roland and Little John took turns to sit with me but I scarcely moved or spoke and only ate and drank tiny amounts and sat dry-eyed with an empty expression and a cold, echoing numbness in my heart.

  The weeks passed, and the business of Westbury continued around me. Baldwin was a competent steward of the manor, and the harvest was brought in without the slightest participation from me. I swam silently in my grief, alone inside my head, quietly torturing myself with thoughts of how I might have saved her. Should I not have brought Shaitan out of the stables? Should I have had him hobbled? Why on earth had I thought that he would make a suitable gift for Sir Thomas Blood? But the truth was, and I was finally forced to accept this, that there was nothing I could have done to save her or to prevent her death. Yet I still had not shed a single tear.

  One thing stuck in my mind, and kept going around and around in my head like a spinning cartwheel: Goody died on the second day of July in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred. It was exactly one year and one day after Goody and I had been wed. Nur’s curse had come to pass.

  Grief fades with time, of course, although to the griever himself, this can seem an impossibility. But one morning in September, I found myself sitting in the sunshine outside the hall, staring dry-eyed into space, as had been my habit for many long weeks, when I heard a sound. It was a baby crying inconsolably. And I thought swiftly, angrily, Where is that wet nurse? Where is the servant who is supposed to be caring for my son? How dare they allow him to disturb my grief? I looked around for Robin or Thomas to send them to fetch somebody for the infant, but there was nobody within sight and the crying continued, on and on, grating on my soul.

  At last, I struggled to my feet and went to comfort the child myself, and, as I plucked that bawling, neglected baby from its basket and took him into my arms, I looked into his violet-blue, tear-stained eyes and saw Goody looking back at me, a small, perfect, madly sobbing, pink-faced version of my one true love.

  I squeezed my only living son to my breast, feeling his warm, wriggling body against mine. Feeling his frailty, his strength, his wildly beating little heart. And, as I rocked him back and forth, with my big, clumsy arms wrapped tight around his tiny, fragile frame, his tears at last subsided and finally ceased.

  And mine began to flow.

  Epilogue

  At my daughter-in-law’s urging, I paid a visit last night to the village of Westbury and to the humble cott of two of my tenants. The woman of the household, Martha, had recently been delivered of a baby. She and her aged husband, you will remember, were the beneficiaries of the first miracle of the Flask of St Luke – and there have been two more since then; that is, two more that I know about. I admired their baby for a little while, a sturdy sleeping boy, and gave his father Geoffrey a silver penny with which to celebrate the birth at the alehouse.

  The weight of my own baby son in my arms had rescued me from despair in the weeks after Goody died, a deep melancholy in which I might well have ended my own existence. My son Robert truly saved my life, I believe, but for some reason other men’s sons do not have the same joyous effect on me. I am happy to admire a child, briefly, and it pleases me to see them grow, but these days I find I am feigning interest much of the time in visits of this sort.

  But, as Marie and I walked back to the manor that long August evening after our little call in the village, I pondered the riddle of the false flask and the ‘miracles’ it has apparently engendered.

  A rock-like belief, it seemed to me, was the key to many of the wonders that the world contains. In a word, faith. Martha and Geoffrey believe absolutely that their child was a miraculous gift from God – they asked for His mercy and received it. In one way of seeing it, it was their faith in God that granted them a child. Another way of looking at it is that the flask, having once contained water from the Grail – and a few drops of Nur’s blood – may have had some supernatural power that allowed Martha to conceive. I do not believe that. I prefer to believe that the couple’s deep, unshakeable faith allowed them to create new life.

  Was Nur’s curse truly responsible for the death of Goody? I do not know – it may have been no more than a sad accident. But I do not choose to put my faith in curses and foul magic – and so I say no, it was not the witch’s malediction that killed my beloved. I am deciding to believe, I do believe, that it was a cruel coincidence.

  Was the Holy Grail truly able to heal all hurts and hold back death? Certainly Vim’s men fought better at Montségur knowing that the Grail was with them – they had faith in it, I did too – and none of the wounded died after drinking from the Grail. That blessed bowl certainly had a potency of some kind. I know it.

  Faith and belief might sometimes be misplaced, I concluded silently, but they have a vast power to affect our lives. And, as in the case of Martha and Geoffrey, affect our lives for the better.

  ‘Marie,’ I said, as we approached the manor, ‘can you arrange for Father Anselm to come to see me tomorrow.’

  ‘Of course, Alan,’ said my daughter-in-law. ‘But I thought you didn’t care for him. What shall I say you want him for?’

  I took a step or two before I answered her, then I said, ‘You may tell him that, after careful deliberation, I have decided to purchase a fine golden relic-casket for our little church.’

  Historical Note

  Barcelona instantly became my favourite city in the world after a weekend there with my wife last summer. The authorities screen movies in the public squares, bar-hopping’s a genuine art form, there’s cool architecture everywhere and nobody eats dinner till ten at night. And, as if that wasn’t enough, I was also privileged enough during my visit to see some of the earliest images ever made of the Holy Grail.

  In the heart of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), the interior of a small twelfth-century church has been partially reconstructed. The original church of St Clement still stands in the remote village of Taüll in the Valley of Boí high in the Pyrenees, but when the stunning Romanesque frescos the church contained were discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, and foreign ‘entrepreneurs’ began chipping off bits of the masonry and carrying them away, the Spanish authorities acted swiftly. Using a near-miraculous chemical process, in which strips of treated cloth are pressed on to the church walls and then peeled off, these ancient paintings were painstakingly removed from the walls of the church of St Clement and taken to Barcelona, where they have been lovingly restored and housed in MNAC.

  When I saw them there in June 2012, I was astonished by their remarkable beauty and power. The main apse of the reconstructed church is the setting for the superb painting of Christ in Majesty, which shows the Saviour enthroned in Heaven and looking down on mortal sinners with a stern yet compassionate expression. The curve of the apse gives the fresco a strangely three-dimensional effect, and the colours – royal blue, warm ochre, creamy white and blood red – appear to be as vibrant as the day they were painted, probably in 1123. Christ is surrounded by various saints and apostles and below his bare right foot and slightly to the left is a panel containing an image of the Virgin Mary.

  Her expression is serene, she holds up her right hand, palm out in a gesture of blessing, or perhaps of warning, and in her left hand, covered by her rich blue mantle, she is holding a shallow bowl, painted white, which seems to be filled with fire and has rays of reddish-orange light shooting out of it.

  This is one of the very earliest representations of the Holy Grail, an object that shortly afterwards began to appear regularly in religious art all over the Pyrenees. Of course, the object in her hand was not regarded then as the Holy Grail, as we think of it today – it was a graal, the word in the medieval language of the region for a common, broad, shallow dish of the kind that might be used to hold a cooked fish when it was served at the table. And it was
‘holy’ because Mary the Mother of God was holding it, not in her bare palm, but in a hand covered by her blue mantle.

  Opinion is divided on what the graal is supposed to symbolize – other Christian dignitaries have their symbols, useful icons for identifying them in medieval art today, as then: St Luke, for example, is often pictured with an ox; St Peter holds a set of keys; on the picture of Christ in Majesty, in the panel to the right of Mary’s, St John is seen supporting a book in his right hand, the hand also covered in a mantle, like the Virgin’s, to indicate the book’s holiness. Some scholars suggest the graal pictured in this magnificent painting might be a container of Christ’s blood, reminiscent of the Saviour’s words repeated in the Eucharist – ‘This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many…’ – others suggest the graal might hold sacred oil – chrism – a holy unguent used in consecration and other important Christian rituals. Personally, I think Mary’s graal is a symbol of her womb, in which she conceived Christ by the Holy Spirit and carried him for nine months. What more powerful symbol could a holy mother display than the space inside her body in which she nurtured her child and from which issued the future Saviour of Mankind?

  But whatever the graal was originally intended to mean – and nobody can be absolutely certain – the symbol was to have a profound effect on Christendom. By the middle of the twelfth century, grail-like objects were appearing regularly in the hands of the Virgin in religious art, particularly in the southern lands of western Europe – in the Languedoc in France, northern Spain and northern Italy. Sometimes they were bowls, sometimes cups or chalices, sometimes they appear to be oil lamps.

  However, it was not until the end of the twelfth century that the Holy Grail made its literary debut. Perceval, Le Conte du Graal (Percival, The Story of the Grail) was written by the French poet Chretien de Troyes sometime between 1180 and 1190 – perhaps sixty years or more after the graal was pictured in the Virgin’s hands in the Pyrenees – and the work was an almost instant hit in European aristocratic circles. The Grail appears as a golden bowl encrusted with precious jewels, paraded about by mysterious denizens of a mysterious castle in the company of a shining lance, a pair of candlesticks and a silver carving platter. (See my previous novel Warlord.)

  In Chretien’s story the graal is a receptacle for the host of the Eucharist, and such is its power that one wafer of holy bread a day is enough to sustain the lord of the mysterious castle. Beyond that, Chretien does not say much about the Grail, and indeed his poem Le Conte du Graal was never finished. But the Grail was now loose in the literary domain and it had begun to exert its strange fascination over writers, which has continued ever since. Around 1200, a Bavarian poet called Wolfram von Eschenbach produced an operatic retelling of Chretien de Troyes’s story called Parzival, embellishing it considerably, and conceiving of the grail as a precious stone that had fallen from the sky. But the version of the Grail story that I have chosen to adopt comes from Robert de Boron, a Burgundian knight, who wrote Joseph d’Arimathie or Le grant estoire dou graal (Joseph of Arimathea or the Great History of the Grail), sometime in the 1190s. His take on the legend is the one that would be most recognizable to readers today, in that his Grail is both the cup used at the Last Supper and the vessel used to catch the blood of Christ as he died on the Cross.

  I would recommend that anyone interested in the story of the Grail read Professor Joseph Goering’s excellent book The Virgin and the Grail: Origins of a Legend (Yale University Press, 2005) for more details on the medieval Grail poets. Indeed, I must acknowledge him as the inspiration behind my own take on the Holy Grail in this novel and my source on its origins and, perhaps, its physical reality. Because I think that there might really have been a physical object which people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries considered to be the Holy Grail.

  And it might even still exist.

  Let’s return to the beginning of the twentieth century and the Valley of Boí in the high Pyrenees. At the same time that the marvellous painting of Christ in Majesty was discovered in St Clement of Taüll, a set of wooden sculptures was found in another church dedicated to St Mary a few hundred yards away. These figures were part of a tableau, dated to about the same time as the fresco in St Clement’s church, which is most likely to depict the Descent from the Cross – statues of Mary and Joseph of Arimathea, and perhaps Nicodemus, helping to bring down Christ’s dead body after the Crucifixion. In other contemporary examples of this sort of tableau, Christ’s hand is seen as dangling over a wooden bowl held by his mother, in a manner such that a few drops of his blood might fall into the bowl. The wooden statue of Mary bears a striking resemblance to the image of the Virgin in the painting in St Clement’s. Both have the same clothing, the same posture, the same expression – indeed the resemblance is so striking that scholars believe that one must have been a copy of the other, although it is impossible to say whether the painting inspired the wooden statue or vice versa.

  But, for me, the most interesting thing about the statue of the Virgin, which is now housed in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University is that the left hand, the hand that would have been holding the bowl that caught the Saviour’s precious blood, is missing. It has been cut off at some point and neither the hand nor the wooden bowl it once undoubtedly held have ever been found.

  I like to think that this missing twelfth-century wooden bowl, from a group of statues in a remote church in the Pyrenees, might have been the origin of the physical, the actual Holy Grail. Perhaps this was the sacred objective of real quests, by real medieval knights. And, perhaps, somewhere in a Swiss vault in a wealthy man’s private collection, or in some secret dusty annex of the Vatican, it sits to this day.

  Cathars and castles in the air

  Montségur, of course, is a real castle twenty miles south-east of Foix in the shadow of the Pyrenees, and was the site, in 1244, of the heroic last stand of the Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade. But forty-four years earlier, when my fictional heroes and villains occupied the place, it was in reality a ruined fortress that had been abandoned by the Counts of Foix as too remote to bother with. Ruined or not, it still would have been a formidable bastion and, I think, very nearly impregnable after only minor repairs to the walls. A man standing on the battlements can see for miles in all directions, and the sides of the mountain are incredibly steep, and fairly exhausting to climb in a T-shirt and shorts on a sunny May day – let alone in heavy armour and under fire from all manner of lethal medieval missiles. It took ten thousand crusaders nine months to subdue the castle in 1243–1244, and this presented me, as a twenty-first-century novelist, with a bit of a problem.

  When I had puffed and panted my way up the tourist path to the main entrance on the western side in hot sunshine, and clambered all over the existing walls of the castle, I was left with a magnificent view and absolutely no idea how a handful of men – even superb warrior-heroes such as the Companions of the Grail – could possibly capture it in the year 1200. I knew that the crusaders forty years later had attacked up the narrow spur of land to the east of the castle (as my heroes eventually do) but, like Alan Dale, I could still not see how the Companions could successfully attack on such a narrow front under sustained fire from the castle. A couple of well-aimed mangonel or trebuchet strikes and a volley or two of crossbow bolts would have destroyed such a small number of assailants.

  I went back down the mountain in a state of mild despair, had supper and went to bed early. The next morning I was awoken at dawn by a terrible noise that sounded like something between machine-gun fire and a seventies drum solo. A powerful hail storm was battering the terracotta roof of my auberge and hailstones the size of golf balls were bouncing waist-high off the stone floor of the courtyard below. After the bright sunshine of the day before this came as something of a shock, and when the hail ceased a thick fog descended on the village of Montségur, weather so dense that you could barely see ten yards. I stayed in the hotel most of that day – except for a very pleasant vi
sit to the excellent Montségur museum – but I was quite happy to be inactive, indeed, I was elated. I had found a plausible plot device that would allow me to get my heroes close to the castle walls without being seen: Nur’s sudden magical mist. The weather there, so close to the Pyrenees, is very changeable, and if I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would never have dared to include something quite so preposterous in the story.

  As well as outlandish weather, Montségur is also well supplied with a satisfying quantity of strange myths. There are many legends of the Cathars hiding their lost treasure in secret caves, and of travellers well into the twentieth century having visions of a lady dressed all in white appearing to them on the steep slopes. My kind hosts at the auberge told me that there was a large hidden cave burrowed into the rock directly under the castle itself, but the official French gatekeeper of the castle grumpily denied it and despite a long, hot exhausting search I could not find it. Nevertheless, there may well be large caves in the rock of Montségur, as yet undiscovered or just forgotten, and in my imagination, in one of them, at a stone altar far at the back lies an ancient skeleton with an even older plain wooden bowl in his bony grasp.

  Angus Donald

  Tonbridge, Kent, December 2012

  Acknowledgements

  A book is always a collaborative process – I get to have my name in big letters on the front, of course, but it wouldn’t exist without a great deal of help from a great many people. I would firstly like to thank my agent Ian Drury, of Sheil Land Associates, for his unfailing support and encouragement of the Outlaw Chronicles over the years and also his colleague in the foreign rights department Gaia Banks. My talented editors at Sphere, Ed Wood and Iain Hunt, deserve high praise for wrestling this book into its current shape, and Anne O’Brien did her usual excellent proofreading job.