The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic

by Bernard Cornwell

  'No.' Robbie still had his head back as he stared at the magnificence of the transept's ceiling. 'I'll find him and then I'll gralloch the bastard.'

  Thomas did not know what gralloch meant, but decided the word was bad news for de Taillebourg. 'So why the hell are you here?'

  Robbie frowned. He had a shock of curling brown hair and a snub face that, at first glance, made him look boyish, though a second look would detect the strength in his jawline and the hardness of his eyes. He at last turned those eyes on Thomas. 'What I can't stand,' he said, 'are those damned laddies! Those bastards!'

  It took a couple of heartbeats before Thomas realized he meant the men-at-arms who had been their companions on the ride from Durham to York, the men who were now two hours south on the road to London. 'What was wrong with them?'

  'Did you hear them last night? Did you?' Robbie's indignation flared, attracting the attention of two men who were on a high trestle where they were painting the feeding of the five thousand on the nave's wall. 'And the night before?' Robbie went on.

  'They got drunk,' Thomas said, 'but so did we.' 'Telling how they fought the battle!' Robbie said. 'And to hear the bastards you'd think we ran away!' 'You did,' Thomas said.

  Robbie had not heard him. 'You'd think we didn't fight at all! Boasting, they were, and we nearly won. You hear that?' He poked an aggressive finger into Thomas's chest. 'We damn nearly won, and those bastards made us sound like cowards!'

  'You lost,' Thomas said.

  Robbie stared at Thomas as though he could not believe his ears. 'We drove you back halfway to bloody London! Had you running, we did! Pissing in your breeks! We damn nearly won, we did, and those bastards are gloating. Just gloating! I wanted to murder the pack of them!' A score of folk were listening. Two pilgrims, making their way on their knees to the shrine behind the high altar, were staring open-mouthed at Robbie. A priest was frowning nervously, while a child sucked its thumb and gazed aghast at the shockheaded man who was shouting so loudly. 'You hear me?' Robbie yelled. 'We damn nearly won!'

  Thomas walked away.

  'Where are you off to?' Robbie demanded.

  'South,' Thomas said. He understood Robbie's embarrassment. The messengers, carrying news of the battle, could not resist embellishing the story of the fight when they_ were entertained in castle or monastery and so a hard-fought, savage piece of carnage had become an easy victory. No wonder Robbie was offended, but Thomas had small sympathy. He turned and pointed at the Scotsman. 'You should have stayed at home.'

  Robbie spat in disgust, then became aware of his audience. 'Had you running,' he said hotly, then leaped over to catch up with Thomas. He grinned and there was a sudden and appealing charm in his face. 'I didn't mean to shout at you,' he said, 'I was just angry.'

  'Me too,' Thomas said, but his anger was at himself and it was mingled with guilt and grief that did not lessen as the two rode south. They took to the road in mornings heavy with dew, rode through autumn mists, hunched under the lash of rain, and for almost every step of the journey Thomas thought of Eleanor. Lord Outhwaite had promised to bury her and have Masses said for her soul and Thomas sometimes wished he was sharing her grave.

  'So why is de Taillebourg chasing you?' Robbie asked on the day they rode away from York. They spoke in English for, though Robbie was from the noble house of Douglas, he spoke no French.

  For a time Thomas said nothing, and just when Robbie thought he would not answer at all he gave a snort of derision. 'Because,' he said, 'the bastard believes that my father possessed the Grail.'

  'The Grail!' Robbie crossed himself. 'I heard it was in Scotland.'

  'In Scotland?' Thomas asked, astonished. 'I know Genoa claims to have it, but Scotland?'

  'And why not?' Robbie bristled. 'Mind you,' he relented, 'I've heard there's one in Spain, too.' 'Spain?'

  'And if the Spanish have one,' Robbie said, 'then the French will have to have one as well, and for all I know the Portuguese too.' He shrugged, then looked back to Thomas. 'So did your father have another?'

  Thomas did not know what to answer. His father had been wayward, mad, brilliant, difficult and tortured. He had been a great sinner and, for all that, he might well have been a saint as well. Father Ralph had laughed at the wider reaches of superstition, he had mocked the pig bones sold by pardoners as relics of the saints, yet he had hung an old, blackened and bent spear in his church's rafters and claimed it was the lance of St George. He had never mentioned the Grail to Thomas, but since his death Thomas had learned that the history of his family was entwined with the Grail.

  In the end he elected to tell Robbie the truth. 'I don't know,' he said, 'I simply don't know.'

  Robbie ducked under a branch that grew low across the road. 'Are you telling me this is the real Grail?'

  'If it exists,' Thomas said and he wondered again if it did. He supposed it was possible, but wished it was not. Yet he had been charged with the duty of finding out and so he would seek his father's one friend and he would ask that man about the Grail and when he received the expected answer he would go back to France and join Skeat's archers. Will Skeat himself, his one-time commander and friend, was stranded in Caen, and Thomas had no knowledge whether Will still lived or, if he did, whether he could speak or understand or even walk. He could find out by sending a letter to Sir Guillaume d'Evecque, Eleanor's father, and Will could be given safe passage in return for the release of some minor French nobleman. Thomas would repay Lord Outhwaite with money plundered from the enemy and then, he told himself, he would find his consolation in the practice of his skill, in archery, in the killing of the King's enemies. Perhaps de Taillebourg would come and find him and Thomas would kill him like he would put down a rat. As for Robbie? Thomas had decided he liked the Scotsman, but he did not care whether he stayed or went.

  Robbie only understood that de Taillebourg would seek Thomas and so he would stay at the archer's side until he could kill the Dominican. He had no other ambition, just to avenge his brother: that was a family duty. 'You touch a Douglas,' he told Thomas, 'and we'll fillet you. We'll skin you alive. It's a blood feud, see?'

  'Even if the killer is the priest?'

  'It's either him or his servant,' Robbie said, 'and the servant obeys the master: either way the priest's responsible, so he dies. I'll slit his bloody throat.' He rode for a while in silence, then grinned. 'And then I'll go to hell, but at least there'll be plenty of Douglases keeping the devil company.' He laughed.

  It took ten days to reach London and, once there, Robbie pretended to be unimpressed, as though Scot-land had cities of this size in every other valley, but after a while he dropped the pretence and just stared in awe at the great buildings, crowded streets and serried market stalls. Thomas used Lord Outhwaite's coins so they could lodge in a tavern just outside the city walls beside the horse pond in Smithfield and close to the green where more than three hundred traders had their stalls. 'And it's not even market day?' Robbie exclaimed, then snatched at Thomas's sleeve. 'Look!' A juggler was spinning half a dozen balls in the air – that was nothing unusual for any county fair would show the same – but this man was standing on two swords, using them as stilts, with his bare feet poised on the swords' points. 'How does he do it?' Robbie asked. 'And look!' A dancing bear was shuffling to the tune of a flute just beneath the gibbet where two bodies hung. This was the place where London's felons were brought to be sent on their swift way to hell. Both corpses were encased in chains to hold the rotting flesh to their bones and the stench of the decaying corpses mingled with the smell of smoke and the reek of the frightened cattle who were bought and sold on the green, which stretched between London's wall and the Priory of St Bartholomew where Thomas paid a priest to say Masses for the souls of Eleanor and Father Hobbe.

  Thomas, pretending to Robbie that he was far more familiar with London than was the truth, had chosen the tavern in Smithfield for no other reason than its sign was two crossed arrows. This was only his second visit to the city and he was a
s impressed, confused, dazzled and surprised as Robbie. They wandered the streets, gaping at churches and noblemen's houses, and Thomas used Lord Outhwaite's money to buy himself some new boots, calfskin leggings, an oxhide coat and a fine woollen cloak. He was tempted by a sleek French razor in an ivory case, but, not knowing the razor's value, feared he was being cheated; he reckoned he could steal himself a razor from a Frenchman's corpse when he reached Calais. Instead he paid a barber to shave him and then, dressed in his new finery, spent the cost of the unbought razor on one of the tavern's women and afterwards lay with tears in his eyes because he was thinking of Eleanor.

  'Is there a reason we're in London?' Robbie asked him that night.

  Thomas drained his ale and beckoned the girl to bring more. 'It's on our way to Dorset.'

  'That's as good a reason as any.'

  London was not really on the way from Durham to Dorchester, but the roads to the capital were so much better than those that wandered across the country and so it was quicker to travel through the great city. How-ever, after three davs, Thomas knew they must move on and so he and Robbie rode westwards. They skirted Westminster and Thomas thought for an idle heartbeat of visiting John Prvke, the royal chaplain sent to accompany him to Durham who had fallen ill in London and now either lived or died in the abbey's hospital, but

  Thomas had no stomach to talk of the Grail and so he rode on.

  The air became cleaner as they went deeper into the country. It was not reckoned safe to travel these roads, but Thomas's face was so grim that other travellers reckoned he was the danger rather than the prey. He was unshaven and he dressed, as he always had, in black, and the misery of the last days had put deep lines on his thin face. With Robbie's mass of unkempt hair, the two of them looked like any other vagabonds who wandered the roads, except these two were fearsomely armed. Thomas carried his sword, bow and arrow bag, while Robbie had his uncle's sword with the scrap of St Andrew's hair encased in its hilt. Sir William had reckoned he would have small use for the sword in the next few years while his family attempted to find the vast ransom, and so he had lent it to Robbie with the encouragement to use it well.

  'You think de Taillebourg will be in Dorset?' Robbie asked Thomas as they rode through a stinging rain shower.

  'I doubt it.'

  'So why are we going?'

  'Because he may go there eventually,' Thomas said, 'him and his damn servant.' He knew nothing about the servant except what Robbie had told him: that the man was fastidious, elegant, dark in looks and mysterious, but Robbie had never heard his name. Thomas, finding it hard to believe that a priest would have killed Eleanor, had persuaded himself that the servant was the killer and so planned to make the man suffer in agony.

  It was late afternoon when they ducked under the arch of Dorchester's east gate. A guard there, alarmed by their weapons, challenged them, but backed down when Thomas answered in French. It suggested he was an aristocrat and the guard sullenly let the two horse-men pass, then watched as they climbed East Street past All Saints' church and the county jail. The houses grew more prosperous as they neared the town's centre and, close to St Peter's church, the wool-merchants' homes might not have been out of place in London. Thomas could smell the shambles behind the houses where the butchers worked their trade, then he led Robbie into Cornhill, past the shop of the pewterer who had a stammer and a wall eye, then past the blacksmith where he had once bought some arrow heads. He knew most of these folk. The Dogman, a legless beggar who had come by his nickname because he lapped water from the River Cerne like a dog, was heaving down South Street on the wooden bricks strapped to his hands. Dick Adyn, brother of the town's jailer, was driving three sheep up the hill and paused to deliver a genial insult to Willie Palmer who was closing up his hosiery shop. A young priest hurried into an alley with a book wrapped in his arms and averted his eyes from a woman squatting in the gutter. A gust of wind blew woodsmoke low into the street. Dorcas Galton, brown hair drawn up into a bun, shook a rug out of an upstairs window and laughed aloud at something Dick Adyn said. They all spoke in the local accent, soft and broad and buzzing like Thomas's own, and he almost curbed the horse to speak with them, but Dick Advn glanced at him and then looked swiftly away and Dorcas slammed the window shut. Robbie looked formidable, but Thomas's gaunt looks were even more frightening and none of the townsfolk recognized him as the bastard son of Hook-ton's last priest. They would know him if he introduced himself, but war had changed Thomas. It had given him a hardness that repelled strangers. He had left Dorset a boy, but come back as one of Edward of England's prized killers and when he left the town by the south gate a constable gave both him and Robbie good riddance and told them to stay away. 'Be lucky the pair of you ain't in jail!' the man called, emboldened by his municipal coat of mail and ancient spear. Thomas stopped his horse, turned in the saddle and just stared at the man who suddenly found reason to duck back into the alley beside the gate. Thomas spat and rode on.

  'Your home town?' Robbie asked caustically.

  'Not now,' Thomas said and he wondered where home was these days, and for some odd reason La Roche-Derrien came unbidden to his thoughts and he found himself remembering Jeanette Chenier in her great house beside the River Jaudy, and that recollection of an old love made him feel guilty yet again for Eleanor. 'Where's your home town?' he asked Robbie rather than dwell on memories.

  'I grew up close to Langholm.'

  'Where's that?'

  'On the River Esk,' Robbie said, 'not far north of the border. It's a hard country, so it is. Not like this.'

  'This is a good countryside,' Thomas said mildly. He looked up at the high green walls of Maiden Castle where the devil played on All Hallow's Eve and where the corncrakes now made their harsh song. There were ripe blackberries in the hedgerows and, as the shadows lengthened, fox cubs skittering at the edge of the fields. A few miles on and the evening had almost shaded to night, but he could smell the sea now and he imagined that he could hear it, sucking and surging on the Dorset shingle. This was the ghost time of day when the souls of the dead flickered at the edges of men's sight and when good folk hurried home to their fire and to their thatch and to their bolted doors. A dog howled in one of the villages.

  Thomas had thought to ride to Down Mapperley where Sir Giles Marriott, the squire of Hookton among other villages, had his hall, but it was late and he did not think it wise to arrive at the hall after dark. Besides, Thomas wanted to see Hookton before he spoke with Sir Giles and so he turned his tired horse towards the sea and led Robbie under the high dark loom of Lipp Hill. 'I killed my first men up on that hill,' he boasted.

  'With the bow?'

  'Four of them,' Thomas said, 'with four arrows.' That was not entirely true for he must have shot seven or eight arrows, maybe more, but he had still killed four of the raiders who had come across the Channel to pillage Hookton. And now he was deep in the twilight shadow of Hookton's sea valley and he could see the fret of breaking waves flashing white in the late dusk as he rode down beside the stream to the place where his father had preached and died.

  No one lived there now. The raiders had left the village dead. The houses had been burned, the church roof had fallen and the villagers were buried in a grave-yard choked by nettles, thorn and thistles. It was four and a half years since that raiding party had landed at Hookton led by Thomas's cousin, Guy Vexille, the Count of Astarac, and by Eleanor's father, Sir Guillaume d'Evecque. Thomas had killed four of the crossbowmen and that had been the beginning of his life as an archer. He had abandoned his studies at Oxford and, until this moment, had never returned to Hookton. 'This was home,' he told Robbie.

  'What happened?'

  'The French happened,' Thomas said and gestured at the darkling sea. 'They sailed from Normandy.'

  'Jesus.' Robbie, for some reason, was surprised. He knew that the borderlands of England and Scotland were places where buildings were burned, cattle stolen, women raped and men killed, but he had never thought it happened thi
s far south. He slid down from his horse and walked to a heap of nettles that had been a cottage. 'There was a village here?'

  'A fishing village,' Thomas said and he strode down what was once the street to where the nets had been mended and the women had smoked fish. His father's house was a heap of burned-out timbers, choked with bindweed now. The other cottages were the same, their thatch and wattle reduced to ash and soil. Only the church to the west of the stream was recognizable, its gaunt walls open to the sky. Thomas and Robbie tied their horses to hazel saplings in the graveyard, then took their baggage into the ruined church. It was already too dark to explore, yet Thomas could not sleep and so he went down to the beach and he remembered that Easter morning when the Norman ships had grounded on the shingle and the men had come shrieking in the dawn with swords and crossbows, axes and fire. They had come for the Grail. Guy Vexille believed it to be in his uncle's possession and so the Harlequin had put the village of Hookton to the sword. He had burned it, destroyed it and gone from it without the Grail.

  The stream made its little noise as it twisted inside the shingle Hook on its way to meet the great sound of the sea. Thomas sat down on the Hook, swathed in his new cloak, with the great black bow beside him. The chaplain, John Prvke, had talked of the Grail in the same awed tones that Father Hobbe had used when he spoke of the relic. The Grail, Father Pryke said, was not just the cup from which Christ had drunk wine at the Last Supper, but the vessel into which Christ's dying blood had poured from the cross. 'Longinus,' Father Prvke had said in his excitable manner, 'was the centurion beneath the cross and, when the spear struck the dolorous blow, he raised the dish to catch the blood!'

  How, Thomas wondered, did the cup go from the upper room where Christ had eaten his last meal into the possession of a Roman centurion? And, stranger still, how had it reached Ralph Vexille? He closed his eyes, swaying back and forwards, ashamed of his dis-belief. Father Hobbe had always called him Doubting Thomas. 'You mustn't seek explanations,' Father Hobbe had said again and again, 'because the Grail is a miracle. It transcends explanations.'