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

by Bernard Cornwell

  'But it is here' – Charles's voice called his audience to order – 'that we make our victory possible, and we do it by denying the English archer his targets. An archer cannot kill men he cannot see!' He paused again, looking at his audience and he saw them nodding as the simple truth of that assertion at last penetrated their skulls. 'We shall all be in our own fortress, one of four fortresses, and when the English army comes to relieve the siege they will attack one of those fortresses. That English army will be small. Fewer than a thousand men!

  Suppose, then, that it begins by attacking the fort I shall make here. What will the rest of you do?'

  He waited for an answer and, after a while, the Lord of Roncelets, as uncertain as a schoolboy giving a response to his master, frowned and made a suggestion. 'Come to help your grace?'

  The other lords nodded and smiled agreement.

  'No!' Charles said angrily. 'No! No! No!' He waited, making sure they had understood the simple word. 'If you leave your fortress,' he explained, 'then you offer the English archer a target. It is what he wants! He will want to tempt us from behind our walls to cut us down with his arrows. So what do we do? We stav behind our walls. We stay behind our walls.' Did they understand that? It was the key to victory. Keep the men hidden and the English must lose. Sir Thomas Dagworth's army would be forced to assault earth walls and thorn hedges and the crossbowmen would spit them on quarrels and when the English were so thinned that only a couple of hundred remained on their feet the Duke would release his men-at-arms to slaughter the remnant. 'You do not leave your fortresses,' he insisted, and any man who does will forfeit my generosity.' That threat sobered the Duke's listeners. 'If even one of your men leaves the sanctuary of the walls,' Charles continued, 'we shall make sure that you will not share in the distribution of land at the end of the campaign. Is that plain, gentle-men? Is that plain?'

  It was plain. It was simple.

  Charles of Blois would make four fortresses to oppose the four gates of the town and the English, when they came, would be forced to assault those newly made walls. And even the smallest of the Duke's four forts would have more defenders than the English had attackers, and those defenders would be sheltered, and their weapons would be lethal, and the English would die and so Brittany would pass to the House of Blois.

  Cleverness. It would win wars and make reputations. And once Charles had shown how to defeat the English here he would defeat them through all France.

  Because Charles dreamed of a crown heavier than Brittanv's ducal coronet. He dreamed of France, but it must begin here, in the flooded fields about La Roche-Derrien, where the English archer would be taught his place.

  In hell.

  The nine siege engines were all trebuchets, the largest of them capable of throwing a stone weighing twice the weight of a grown man for almost three hundred paces. All nine had been made at Regensburg in Bavaria and the senior engineers who accompanied the gaunt machines were all Bavarians who understood the intricacies of the weapons. The two biggest had throwing beams over fifty feet long and even the two smallest, which were placed on the far bank of the Jaudy to threaten the bridge and its barbican, had beams thirty-six feet long.

  The biggest two, which were named Hellgiver and Widowmaker, were placed at the foot of the hill on which the windmill stood. In essence each was a simple machine, merely a long beam mounted on an axle like a giant's balance or a child's seesaw, only one end of the see-saw was three times longer than the other. The shorter end was weighted with a huge wooden box that was filled with lead weights, while the longer end, which actually threw the missile, was attached to a great windlass which drew it down to the ground and so raised the ten tons of lead counterweights. The stone missile was placed in a leather sling some fifteen feet long, which was attached to the longer arm. When the beam was released so that the counterweight slammed down, the longer end whipped up into the sky and the sling whipped even faster and the boulder was released from the sling's leather cradle to curve through the sky and crash down onto its target. That much was simple. What was hard was to keep the mechanism greased with tallow, to construct a winch strong enough to haul the long beam down to the ground, to make a container strong enough to thump down again and again and not spill the ten tons of lead weights and, trickiest of all, to fashion a device strong enough to hold the long beam down against the weight of the lead vet capable of releasing the beam safely. These were the matters on which the Bavarians were experts and for which they were paid so generously.

  There were many who said that the Bavarians' expertise was redundant. Guns were much smaller and hurled their missiles with greater force, but Duke Charles had applied his intelligence to the comparison and decided on the older technology. Guns were slow and prone to explosions that killed their expensive gunners. They were also painfully slow because the gap between the missile and the gun's barrel had to be sealed to contain the powder's force and so it was necessary to pack the cannon ball about with wet loam, and that needed time to dry before the powder could be ignited, and even the most skilful gunners from Italy could not fire a weapon more than three or four times a day. And when a gun fired it spat a ball weighing only a few pounds. While it was true that the small ball flew with a velocity so great that it could not even be seen, nevertheless the older trebuchets could throw a missile of twenty or thirty times the weight three or four times in every hour. La Roche-Derrien, the Duke decided, would be hammered the old-fashioned way, and so the little town was surrounded by the nine trebuchets. As well as Hellgiver and Widowmaker, there was Stone-Hurler, Crusher, Gravedigger, Stonewhip, Spiteful, Destroyer and Hand of God.

  Each trebuchet was constructed on a platform made of wooden beams and protected by a palisade that was tall and stout enough to stop any arrow. Some of the peasants who had joined the army were trained to stand close to the palisades and be ready to throw water over any fire arrows that the English might use to burn the fences down and so expose the trebuchets' engineers. Other peasants dug the ditches and threw up the earthen banks that formed the Duke's four fortresses. Where possible they used existing ditches or incorporated the thick blackthorn hedges into the defences. They made barriers of sharpened stakes and dug pits to break horses' legs. The four parts of the Duke's army ringed themselves with such defences and, day after day, as the walls grew and the trebuchets took shape from the pieces transported on the wagons, the Duke had his men practise forming their lines of battle. The Genoese crossbo«men manned the half-finished walls while behind them the knights and men-at-arms paraded on foot. Some men grumbled that such practices were a waste of time, but others saw how the Duke intended to fight and they approved. The English archers would be baffled by the walls, ditches and palisades and the crossbows would pick them off one by one, and finally the enemy would be forced to attack across the earth walls and the flooded ditches to be slaughtered by the waiting men-at-arms.

  After a week of back-breaking work the trebuchets were assembled and their counterpoise boxes had been filled with great pigs of lead. Now the engineers had to demonstrate an even subtler skill, the art of dropping their great stones one after the other onto the exact same spot of the wall so that the ramparts would be battered away and a path opened into the town. Then, once the relieving army was defeated, the Duke's men could assault La Roche-Derrien and put its treasonous inhabitants to the sword.

  The Bavarian engineers selected their first stones carefully, then trimmed the length of the slings to affect the range of their machines. It was a fine spring morn-ing. Kestrels soared, buttercups dotted the fields, trout were rising to the mayflies, the wild garlic was blossom-ing white and pigeons flew through the new leaves of the green woods. It was the loveliest time of the year and Duke Charles, whose spies told him that Sir Thomas Dagworth's English army had yet to leave western Brittany, anticipated triumph. The Bavarians,' he told one of his attendant priests, may begin.'

  The trebuchet named Hellgiver shot first. A lever was pulled that extracted a thic
k metal pin from a staple attached to the long arm of Hellgiver's beam. Ten tons of lead dropped with a crash that could be heard in Treguier, the long arm whipped up and the sling whirled at the arm's end with the sound of a sudden gale and a boulder arched into the sky. It seemed to hang for a moment, a great stone lump in the kestrel-haunted sky, and then, like a thunderbolt, it fell.

  The killing had begun.

  The first stone, thrown by Hellgiver, crashed through the roof of a dyer's house close to St Brieuc's church and took off the heads of an English man-at-arms and the dyer's wife. A joke went through the garrison that the two bodies were so crushed together by the boulder that they would go on coupling throughout eternity. The stone which killed them, a rock about the size of a barrel, had missed the eastern ramparts by no more than twenty feet and the Bavarian engineers made adjustments to the sling and the next stone thumped just short of the wall, spewing up filth and sewage from the ditch. The third boulder hit the wall plumb and then a monstrous thump announced that Widosvmaker had just shot its first missile and one after the other Stone-Hurler, Crusher, Gravedigger, Stonewhip, Spiteful, Destroyer and Hand of God added their contributions.

  Richard Totesham did his best to blunt the assault of the trebuchets. It was evident that Charles was attempting to make four breaches, one on each side of the town, and so Totesham ordered vast bags to be sewn and stuffed with straw and the bags were placed to cushion the walls, which were further protected by baulks of timber. Those precautions served to slow the process of making the breaches, but the Bavarians were sending some of their missiles deep into the town and nothing could be done to shield the houses from those plunging boulders. Some townsfolk argued that Tote-sham should construct a trebuchet of his own and try to break the enemy's machines, but he doubted there was time and instead a giant crossbow was fashioned from ships' spars that had been brought upstream from Treguier before the siege began. Treguier was now deserted for, lacking walls, its inhabitants had either come to La Roche-Derrien for shelter, fled to sea in their ships or gone over to Charles's camp.

  Totesham's springald was thirty feet in width and shot a bolt eight feet long propelled by a cord made from braided leather. It was cocked by means of a ship's windlass. It took four davs to make the weapon and the very first time they tried to use it the spar-arm broke. It was a had omen, and there was an even worse one next morning when a horse drawing a cart of night soil broke free from its harness and kicked a child in the head. The child died. Later that day a stone from one of the smaller trebuchets across the river plunged into Richard Totesham's house and brought down half the upper floor and very nearly killed his baby. Over a score of mercenaries tried to desert the garrison that night and some must have got clean away, others joined Charles's army and one, who had been carrying a message for Sir Thomas Dagworth concealed in a boot, was caught and beheaded. Next morning his severed head, with the letter fixed between his teeth, was hurled into the town by the trebuchet called the Hand of God and the spirits of the garrison plummeted even further.

  'I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, `whether omens can be trusted.'

  'Of course they can.'

  'I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.'

  'You said I was cured,' Thomas protested.

  'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.'

  Thomas obeyed, Mordecai held the liquid up to the sun, then dipped a finger in it and dabbed it onto his tongue. 'Splendid!' he said. 'Clear, pure and not too saline. That is a good omen, is it not?'

  'That's a symptom,' Thomas said, 'not an omen.'

  'Ah.' Mordecai smiled at the correction. They were in the small back yard behind Jeanette's kitchen where the doctor watched the house-martins bringing mud to their new nests beneath the eaves. 'Enlighten me, Thomas,' he said with another smile, 'on the matter of omens.'

  'When our Lord was crucified,' Thomas said, 'there was darkness in daytime and a curtain in the temple was torn in two.'

  'You are saying that omens are secreted at the very heart of your faith?'

  'And yours too, surely?' Thomas asked.

  Mordecai flinched as a boulder crunched down some-where in the town. The sound reverberated, then there was another splintering crash as a weakened roof or floor gave way. Dogs howled and a woman screamed. 'They're doing it deliberately,' Mordecai said.

  'Of course,' Thomas said. Not only was the enemy sending boulders to fall on the tight small houses of the town, but they sometimes used the trebuchets to lob the rotting corpses of cattle or pigs or goats to splatter their filth and stench through the streets.

  Mordecai waited till the woman had stopped scream-ing. 'I don't think I believe in omens,' he said. 'We suffer some bad luck in the town and everyone assumes we are doomed, but how do we know there is not some ill fortune afflicting the enemy?'

  Thomas said nothing. Birds squabbled in the thatch, oblivious that a cat was stalking just below the roof ridge.

  'What do you want, Thomas?' Mordecai asked. 'Want?'

  'What do you want?'

  Thomas grimaced and held out his right hand with its crooked fingers. 'For these to be straight.'

  'And I want to be young again,' Mordecai said impatiently. 'Your fingers are mended. They are misshapen, but mended. Now tell me what you want.'

  'What I want,' Thomas said, 'is to kill the men who killed Eleanor. To bring Jeanette's son back. Then to be an archer. Just that. An archer.' He wanted the Grail too. but he did not like to talk of that with Mordecai.

  Mordecai tugged at his beard. 'To kill the men who killed Eleanor?' he mused aloud. 'I think you'll do that. Jeanette's son? Maybe you will do that too, though I don't understand why you wish to please her. You don't want to marry Jeanette, do you?'

  'Marry her!' Thomas laughed. 'No.'

  'Good.'

  'Good?' Thomas was offended now.

  'I have always enjoyed talking with alchemists,' Mordecai said, 'and I have often seen them mix sulphur and quicksilver. There is a theory that all metals are composed of those two substances, did you know? The proportions vary, of course, but my point, dear Thomas, is that if you put quicksilver and sulphur into a vessel, then heat it, the result is very often calamitous.' He mimed an explosion with his hands. 'That, I think, is you and Jeanette. Besides, I cannot see her married to an archer. To a king? Yes. To a duke? Maybe. To a count or an earl? Certainly. But to an archer?' He shook his head. 'There is nothing wrong with being an archer, Thomas. It's a useful skill in this wicked world.' He sat silent for a few heartbeats. 'My son is training to be a doctor.'

  Thomas smiled. 'I sense a reproof.'

  'A reproof?'

  'Your son will be a healer and I'm a killer.'

  Mordecai shook his head. 'Benjamin is training to be a physician, but he would rather be a soldier. He wants to be a killer.'

  'Then why—' Thomas stopped because the answer was obvious.

  'Jews cannot carry weapons,' Mordecai said, 'that is why. No, I meant no reproof. I think, as soldiers go, Thomas, that you are a good man.' He paused and frowned because another stone from one of the bigger trebuchets had slammed into a building not far away and, as the echoing crash subsided, he waited for the screams. None came. 'Your friend Will is a good man, too,' Mordecai went on, 'but I fear he's no longer an archer.'

  Thomas nodded. Will Skeat was cured, but not restored. 'It would have been better, I sometimes think—' Thomas began.

  'If he had died?' Mordecai finished the thought. 'Wish death on no man, Thomas, it comes soon enough with-out a wish. Sir William will go home to England, no doubt, and your Earl will look after him.'

  The fate of all old soldiers, Thomas thought. To go home and die on the charity of the family they served. 'Then I'll go to the siege of Calais when all this is over,' Thomas said, 'and see if Will's archers need a new leader.'

  Mordecai smiled. 'You won't look for the Grail?' 'I don't know where it is,' Thomas said.

  'And your f
ather's book?' Mordecai asked. 'It didn't help?'

  Thomas had been poring over the copy Jeanette had made. He thought his father must have used some kind of code, though try as he might he could not pierce the code's workings. Or else, in its ramblings, the book was merely a symptom of Father Ralph's troubled mind. Yet Thomas was sure of one thing. His father had believed he possessed the Grail. 'I will look for the Grail,' Thomas said, 'but I sometimes think the only way to seek it is not to search for it.' He looked up, startled, as there was a sudden scrabbling sound on the roof. The cat had made a rush and almost lost its footing as birds scattered upwards.

  'Another omen?' Mordecai suggested, looking up at the escaping birds. 'Surely a good one?'

  'Besides,' Thomas said, 'what do you know of the Grail?'

  'I am a Jew. What do I know of anything?' Mordecai asked innocently. 'What would happen, Thomas, if you found the Grail?' He did not wait for an answer. 'Do you think,' he went on instead, 'that the world will become a better place? Is it just lacking the Grail?

  Is that all?' There was still no answer. 'It's a thing like Abracadabra, is that it?' Mordecai said sadly.