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

by Bernard Cornwell

  'What happens' — Robbie interrupted his thoughts — 'if they find out you're not Scottish?'

  Thomas held up the two fingers of his right hand that drew the bowcord. 'They cut those off.'

  'Is that all?'

  'Those are the first things they cut off.'

  They walked on south through a country of small steep hills, tight fields, thick woods and deep lanes. Thomas had never been to Evecque and, though it was not far from Caen, some of the peasants they asked had never heard of it, but when Thomas asked which way the soldiers had been going during the winter they pointed on southwards. They spent their first night in a roofless hovel, a place that had evidently been abandoned when the English came in the summer and swept through Normandy.

  They woke at dawn and Thomas put two arrows into a tree, just to keep in practice. He was cutting the steel heads out of the trunk when Robbie picked up the bow. 'Can you teach me to use it?' he asked.

  'What I can teach you,' Thomas said, 'will take ten minutes. But the rest will need a lifetime. I began shoot-ing arrows when I was seven and after ten years I was beginning to get good at it.'

  'It can't be that difficult,' Robbie protested, 'I've killed a stag with a bow.'

  'That was a hunting bow,' Thomas said. He gave Robbie one of the arrows and pointed to a willow that had stubbornly kept its leaves. 'Hit the trunk.'

  Robbie laughed. 'I can't miss!' The willow was scarcely thirty paces away.

  'Go on, then.'

  Robbie drew the bow, glancing once at Thomas as he realized just how much strength was needed to bend the great yew stave. It was twice as stiff as the shorter hunting bows he had used in Scotland. 'Jesus,' he said softly as he hauled the string back to his nose and realized his left arm was trembling slightly with the tension of the weapon. but he peered down the arrow to check his aim and was about to loose when Thomas held up a hand. 'You're not ready yet.'

  'I damn well am,' Robbie said, though the words came out as grunts for the bow needed immense force to hold in the drawn position.

  'You're not ready.' Thomas said, 'because there's four inches of the arrow sticking out in front of the bow. You have to pull it back until the arrow head touches your left hand.'

  'Oh, sweet Jesus,' Robbie said and took a breath, nerved himself and pulled until the string was past his nose, past his eye and close by his right ear. The steel arrow head touched his left hand, but now he could no longer aim by looking down the arrow's shaft. He frowned as he realized the difficulty that implied, then compensated by edging the bow to the right. His left arm was shaking with the tension and, unable to keep the arrow drawn, he released, then twitched as the hemp string whipped along his inner left forearm. The arrow's feathers flashed white as they passed a foot from the willow's trunk. Robbie swore in amazement, then handed the bow to Thomas. 'So the trick of it,' he said, 'is learning how to aim it?'

  'The trick,' Thomas said, 'is not aiming at all. It's something that just happens. You look at the target and you let the arrow fly.' Some archers, the lazy ones, only drew to the eye and that made them accurate, but their arrows lacked force. The good archers, the archers who drove down armies or brought down kings in shining armour, pulled the string all the way back. 'I taught a woman to shoot last summer,' Thomas said. taking back the bow, 'and she became good. Really good. She hit a hare at seventy paces.'

  'A woman!'

  'I let her use a longer string,' Thomas said, 'so the bow didn't need as much strength, but she was still good.' He remembered Jeanette's delight when the hare tumbled in the grass, squealing, the arrow pinned through its haunches. Jeanette. Why was he thinking of her so much?

  They walked on through a world edged white with frost. The puddles had frozen and the leafless hedgerows were outlined with a sharp white rime that faded as the sun climbed. They crossed two streams, then climbed through beechwoods towards a plateau which, when they reached it, proved to be a wild place of thin turf that had never been cut with a plough. A few gorse bushes broke the grass, but otherwise the road ran across a featureless plain beneath an empty sky. Thomas had thought that the heathland would be nothing but a narrow belt of high country and that they must soon drop into the wooded valleys again, but the road stretched on and he felt ever more like a hare on a chalk upland under the gaze of a buzzard. Robbie felt the same and the two of them left the road to walk where the gorse provided some intermittent cover.

  Thomas kept looking ahead and behind. This was horse country, a firm-turfed upland where riders could go full gallop and where there were no woods or gullies in which two men on foot could hide. And the high ground seemed to extend for ever.

  At midday they reached a circle of standing stones, each about the height of a man and heavily encrusted with lichen. The circle was twenty yards across and one of the stones had fallen and they rested their backs against it while they took a meal of bread and cheese. 'The devil's wedding party, eh?' Robbie said.

  'The stones. you mean?'

  'We have them in Scotland.' Robbie twisted round and brushed fragments of snail shell from the fallen stone. 'They 're people who were turned into rocks by the devil.'

  'In Dorset,' Thomas said, 'folk say that God turned them into stone.'

  Robbie wrinkled his face at that idea. 'Why would God do that?'

  'For dancing on the sabbath.'

  'They'd just go to hell for that,' Robbie said, then idly scratched at the turf with his heel. 'We dig the stones up when we have the time. Look for gold, see?'

  'You ever find any?'

  'We do in the mounds sometimes. Pots anyway, and beads. Rubbish really. We throw it away as often as not. And we find elf stones, of course.' He meant the mysterious stone arrow heads that were supposedly shot from elfin bowstrings. He stretched out, enjoying the feeble warmth of the sun that was now as high as it would climb in the midwinter sky. 'I miss Scotland.'

  'I've never been.'

  'God's own country,' Robbie said forcefully, and he was still talking about Scotland's wonders when Thomas fell gently asleep. He dozed, then was woken because Robbie had kicked him.

  The Scot was standing on the fallen stone. 'What is it?' Thomas asked.

  'Company.'

  Thomas stood beside him and saw four horsemen a mile or more to the north. He dropped back to the turf, pulled upon his bundle and took out a single sheaf of arrows, then hooked the bowstring over the nocked tips of the stave. 'Maybe they haven't seen us,' he said optimistically.

  'They have,' Robbie commented, and Thomas climbed onto the stone again to see that the horsemen had left the road; they had stopped now and one of them stood in his stirrups to get a better look at the two strangers at the stone circle. Thomas could see they were wearing mail coats under their cloaks. 'I can take three of them,' he said, patting the bow, 'if you manage the fourth.'

  'Ah, be kind to a poor Scotsman,' Robbie said, draw-ing his uncle's sword, 'leave me two. I have to make money, remember.' He might have been facing a fight with four horsemen in Normandy, but he was still a prisoner of Lord Outhwaite and so bound to pay his ransom that had been set at a mere two hundred pounds. His uncle's was ten thousand and in Scotland the Douglas clan would be worrying how to raise it.

  The horsemen still watched Thomas and Robbie, doubtless wondering who and what they were. The riders would not be fearful; after all they were mailed and armed and the two strangers were on foot and men on foot were almost certainly peasants and peasants were no threat to horsemen in armour. 'A patrol from Evecque?' Robbie wondered aloud.

  'Probably.' The Count of Coutances would have men roaming the country looking for food. Or perhaps the horsemen were reinforcements riding to the Count's aid, but whoever they were they would regard any stranger in this countryside as prey for their weapons.

  'They're coming,' Robbie said as the four men spread into a line. The riders must have assumed the two strangers would try to escape and so were making the line to snare them. 'The four horsemen, eh?' Robbie said. 'I can never r
emember what the fourth one is.'

  'Death, var, pestilence and famine,' Thomas said, putting the first arrow on the string.

  'It's famine I always forget,' Robbie said. The four riders were a half-mile away, swords drawn, cantering on the fine solid turf. Thomas was holding the bow low so they would not be ready for the arrows. He could hear the hoofbeats now and he thought of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the dreadful quartet of riders whose appearance would presage the end of time and the last great struggle between heaven and hell.

  War would appear on a horse the colour of blood, famine would be on a black stallion, pestilence would ravage the world on a white mount while death would ride the pale horse. Thomas had a sudden memory of his father sitting bolt upright, head back, intoning the Latin: 'et ecce equus pallidus'. Father Ralph used to say the words to annoy his housekeeper and lover, Thomas's mother, who, though she knew no Latin, understood that the words were about death and hell and she thought, rightly as it turned out, that her priest lover was inviting hell and death to Hookton.

  'Behold a pale horse,' Thomas said. Robbie gave him a puzzled look. "'I saw a pale horse,"' Thomas quoted, '''and the name of its rider was Death, and Hell followed him."'

  'Is hell another of the riders?' Robbie asked.

  'Hell is what these bastards are about to get,' Thomas said and he brought up the bow and dragged back the cord and felt a sudden anger and hate in his heart for the four men, and then the bow sounded, the cord's note hard and deep, and before the sound had died he was already plucking a second arrow from where he had stuck a dozen point-down in the turf. He hauled the cord back and the four horsemen were still riding straight for them as Thomas aimed at the left-hand rider. He loosed, took a third arrow, and now the sound of the hooves on the frost-hardened turf was as loud as the Scottish drums at Durham and the second man from the right was thrashing left and right, falling back, an arrow jutting from his chest and the rider on the left was lying back on his saddle's cantle, and the other two, at last understanding their danger, were swerving to throw off Thomas's aim. Gobbets of earth and grass were thrown up from the horses' hooves as they slewed away. If the two unwounded riders had any sense, Thomas thought, they would ride away as though Hell and Death were on their heels, ride back the way they had come in a desperate bid to escape the arrows, but instead, with the rage of men who had been challenged by what they believed to be an inferior enemy, they curved back towards their prey and Thomas let the third arrow fly. The first two men were both out of it, one fallen from his saddle and the other lolling on his horse that just cropped the winter-pale turf; and the third arrow flew hard and straight at its victim, but his galloping horse tossed up its head and the arrow slid down the side of its skull, blood bright on the black hide: the horse twisted away from the pain and the rider, unready for the turn, was flailing for balance, but Thomas had no time to watch him for the fourth rider was inside the stone circle and closing on him. The man had a vast black cloak that billowed behind as he turned the pale grey horse and he shouted his defiance as he stretched out the sword to whip the point like a lance head into Thomas's chest, but Thomas had his fourth arrow on the cord and the man suddenly understood that he was a split second too late. 'Non!' he shouted, and Thomas did not even draw the bow fully back, but let it fly off the half-string and the arrow still had enough force to bury itself in the man's head, splitting the bridge of his nose and driving deep into his skull. He twitched, his sword arm dropped, Thomas felt the wind as the man's horse thundered past him and then the rider fell back over the stallion's rump.

  The third man, the one unseated from the black horse, had fallen in the stone circle's centre and now approached Robbie. Thomas plucked an arrow from the turf. 'No!' Robbie called. 'He's mine.'

  Thomas relaxed the string.

  'Chien batard,' the man said to Robbie. He was much older than the Scotsman and must have taken Robbie for a mere boy for he half smiled as he came fast forward to lunge his sword and Robbie stepped back, parried, and the blades rang like bells in the clear air. 'Batard!' the man spat and attacked again.

  Robbie stepped back once more, yielding ground until he had almost reached the stone ring, and his retreat worried Thomas who had stretched his string again, but then Robbie parried so fast and riposted so quickly that the Frenchman was going backwards in a sudden and desperate hurry. 'You English bastard,' Robbie said. He swung his blade low and the man dropped his own blade to parry and Robbie just kicked it aside and lunged so that his uncle's blade sank into the man's neck. 'Bastard English bastard,' Robbie snarled, ripping the blade free in a spray of bright blood. 'Bloody English pig!' He freed the sword and swung it back to bury its edge in what was left of the man's neck.

  Thomas watched the man fall. Blood was bright on the grass. 'He wasn't English,' Thomas said.

  'It's just a habit when I fight,' Robbie said. 'It's the way my uncle trained me.' He stepped towards his victim. 'Is he dead?'

  'You half cut off his head,' Thomas said, 'what do you think?'

  'I think I'll take his money,' Robbie said and knelt beside the dead man.

  One of the first two men to be struck by Thomas's arrows was still alive. The breath bubbled in his throat and showed pink and frothy at his lips. He was the man lolling in his saddle and he moaned as Thomas spilled him down to the ground.

  'Is he going to live?' Robbie had crossed to see what Thomas was doing.

  'Christ, no,' Thomas said and took out his knife.

  'Jesus!' Robbie stepped back as the man's throat was cut. 'Did you have to?'

  'I don't want the Count of Coutances to know there are only two of us,' Thomas said. 'I want the Count of Coutances to be as scared as hell of us. I want him to think the devil's own horsemen are hunting his men.'

  They searched the four corpses and, after a lumbering chase, managed to collect the four horses. From the bodies and the saddlebags they took close to eighteen pounds of had French silver coinage, two rings, three good daggers, four swords, a fine mail coat that Robbie claimed to replace his own, and a gold chain that they hacked in half with one of the captured swords. Then Thomas used the two worst swords to picket a pair of the horses beside the road and on the horses' backs he tied two of the corpses so that they hung in the saddle, bending sideways with vacant eyes and white skin laced with blood. The other two corpses, stripped of their mail, were placed on the road and in each of their dead mouths Thomas put sprigs of gorse. That gesture meant nothing, but to whoever found the bodies it would suggest something strange, even Satanic. 'It'll worry the bastards,' Thomas explained.

  'Four dead men should give them a twitch,' Robbie said.

  'They'll be scared to hell if they think the devil's loose,' Thomas said. The Count of Coutances would scoff if he knew there were only two young men come as reinforcements for Sir Guillaume d'Eyecque, but he could not ignore four corpses and hints of weird ritual. And he could not ignore death.

  To which end, when the corpses were arranged, Thomas took the big black cloak, the money and the weapons, the best of the stallions and the pale horse.

  For the pale horse belonged to Death.

  And with it Thomas could make nightmares.

  A single short burst of thunder sounded as Thomas and Robbie neared Evecque. They did not know how close they were, but they were riding through country where all the farms and cottages had been destroyed which told Thomas that they must be within the manor's boundaries. Robbie, on hearing the rumble, looked puzzled for the sky immediately above them was clear, although there were dark clouds to the south. 'It's too cold for thunder,' he said.

  'Maybe it's different in France?'

  They left the road and followed a farm track that twisted through woods and petered out beside a burned building that still smoked gently. It made little sense to burn such steadings and Thomas doubted that the Count of Coutances had initially ordered the destruction, but Sir Guillaume's long defiance and the bloody-mindedness of most soldiers would ensure tha
t the pillage and burning would happen anyway. Thomas had done the same in Brittany. He had listened to the screams and protests of families who had to watch their home being burned and then he had touched the fire to the thatch. It was war. The Scots did it to the English, the English to the Scots, and here the Count of Coutances was doing it to his own tenant.

  A second clap of thunder sounded and just after its echo had died Thomas saw a great veil of smoke in the eastern sky. He pointed to it and Robbie, recognizing the smear of campfires and realizing the need for silence, just nodded. They left their horses in a thicket of hazel saplings and then climbed a long wooded hill. The setting sun was behind them, throwing their shadows long on the dead leaves. A woodpecker, redheaded and wings barred white, whirred loud and low above their heads as they crossed the ridge line to see the village and manor of Evecque beneath them.

  Thomas had never seen Sir Guillaume's manor before. He had imagined it would be like Sir Giles Marriott's hall with one great barn-like room and a few thatched outbuildings, but Evecque was much more like a small castle. At the corner closest to Thomas it even had a tower: a square and not very tall tower, but properly crenellated and flying its banner of three stooping hawks to show that Sir Guillaume was not yet beaten. The manor's saving feature, though, was its moat, which was wide and thickly covered with a vivid green scum. The manor's high walls rose sheer from the water and had few windows, and those were nothing but arrow slits. The roof was thatched and sloped inwards to a small courtyard. The besiegers, whose tents and shelters lay in the village to the north of the manor, had succeeded in setting fire to the roof at some point, but Sir Guillaume's few defenders must have managed to extinguish the flames for only one small portion of the thatch was missing or blackened. None of those defenders was visible now, though some of them must have been peering though the arrow slits that showed as small black specks against the grey stone. The only visible damage to the manor was some broken stones at one corner of the tower where it looked as though a giant beast had nibbled at the masonry, and that was probably the work of the springald that Father Pascal had mentioned, but the oversized crossbow had obviously broken again and irremediably for Thomas could see it lying in two gigantic pieces in the field beside the tiny stone village church. It had done very little damage before its main beam broke and Thomas wondered if the eastern, hidden, side of the building had been hurt more. The manor's entrance must be on that far side and Thomas suspected the main siege works would also be there.