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

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Go,’ Thomas told Robbie. The young Scotsman fell in love, it seemed to Thomas, like other men became hungry, and it was plain from Robbie’s face that he had been struck by the girl’s looks with the force of a lance hammering into a shield.

  Robbie frowned as though he did not quite understand Thomas’s instruction. ‘I meant to ask you,’ he said, then paused.

  ‘Ask me what?’

  ‘Back in Calais,’ Robbie said, ‘did the Earl tell you to leave me behind?’

  It seemed an odd question in the circumstances, but Thomas decided it deserved a response. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘That priest told me. Buckingham.’

  Thomas wondered why Robbie had even talked to the priest, then realized that his friend was simply making conversation so he could stay near to the latest girl he had fallen so hopelessly in love with. ‘Robbie,’ he said, ‘she’s going to burn in the morning.’

  Robbie shifted uneasily. ‘She doesn’t have to.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Thomas protested, ‘the Church has condemned her!’

  ‘Then why are you here?’ Robbie asked.

  ‘Because I command here. Because someone has to keep her quiet.’

  ‘I can do that,’ Robbie said with a smile, and when Thomas did not respond the smile turned into a scowl. ‘So why did you let me come to Gascony?’

  ‘Because you’re a friend.’

  ‘Buckingham said I’d steal the Grail,’ Robbie said. ‘He said I’d take it to Scotland.’

  ‘We have to find it first,’ Thomas said, but Robbie was not listening. He was just looking hungrily at the girl who huddled in the corner. ‘Robbie,’ Thomas said firmly, ‘she’s going to burn.’

  ‘Then it doesn’t matter what happens to her tonight,’ the Scotsman said defiantly.

  Thomas fought to suppress his anger. ‘Just leave us alone, Robbie,’ he said.

  ‘Is it her soul you’re after?’ Robbie asked. ‘Or her flesh?’

  ‘Just go!’ Thomas snarled with more force than he meant and Robbie looked startled, even belligerent, but then he blinked a couple of times and walked away.

  The girl had not understood the English conversation, but she had recognized the lust on Robbie’s face and now turned it on Thomas. ‘You want me for yourself, priest?’ she asked in French.

  Thomas ignored the sneering question. ‘Where are you from?’

  She paused, as if deciding whether or not to answer, then shrugged. ‘From Picardy,’ she said.

  ‘A long way north,’ Thomas said. ‘How does a girl from Picardy come to Gascony?’

  She hesitated again. She was, Thomas thought, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, which made her overripe for marriage. Her eyes, he noticed, had a curious piercing quality, which gave him the uncomfortable sensation that she could see right through to the dark root of his soul. ‘My father,’ she said. ‘He was a juggler and flame-eater.’

  ‘I’ve seen such men,’ Thomas said.

  ‘We went wherever we wished,’ she said, ‘and made money at fairs. My father made folk laugh and I collected the coins.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Dead.’ She said it carelessly as if to suggest she could not even remember her mother. ‘Then my father died here. Six months ago. So I stayed.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’

  She gave him a sneering look as if to suggest the answer to his question was so obvious that it did not need stating, but then, presuming him to be a priest who did not understood how real people lived, she gave him the answer. ‘Do you know how dangerous the roads are?’ she asked. There are coredors.’

  ‘Condors?’

  ‘Bandits,’ she explained. ‘The local people call them coredors. Then there are the routiers who are just as bad.’ Routiers were companies of disbanded soldiers who wandered the highways in search of a lord to employ them and when they were hungry, which was most of the time, they took what they wanted by force. Some even captured towns and held them for ransom. But, like the coredors, they would regard a girl travelling alone as a gift sent by the devil for their enjoyment. ‘How long do you think I would have lasted?’ she asked.

  ‘You could have travelled in company?’ Thomas suggested.

  ‘We always did, my father and I, but he was there to protect me. But on my own?’ She shrugged. ‘So I stayed. I worked in a kitchen.’

  ‘And cooked up heresy?’

  ‘You priests do so love heresy,’ she said bitterly. ‘It gives you something to burn.’

  ‘Before you were condemned,’ Thomas said, ‘what was your name?’

  ‘Genevieve.’

  ‘You were named for the saint?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said.

  ‘And whenever Genevieve prayed,’ Thomas said, ‘the devil blew out her candles.’

  ‘You priests are full of stories,’ Genevieve mocked.

  ‘Do you believe that? You believe the devil came into the church and blew out her candles?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just kill her if he’s the devil? What a pathetic trick, just to blow out candles! He can’t be much of a devil if that’s all he does.’

  Thomas ignored her scorn. ‘They tell me you are a beghard?’

  ‘I’ve met beghards,’ she said, ‘and I liked them.’

  ‘They are the devil’s spawn,’ Thomas said.

  ‘You’ve met one?’ she asked. Thomas had not. He had only heard of them and the girl sensed his discomfort. ‘If to believe that God gave all to everyone and wants everyone to share in everything, then I am as bad as a beghard,’ she admitted, ‘but I never joined them.’

  ‘You must have done something to deserve the flames.’

  She stared at him. Perhaps it was something in his tone that made her trust him, but the defiance seemed to drain out of her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall and Thomas suspected she wanted to cry. Watching her delicate face, he wondered why he had not seen her beauty instantly as Robbie had done. Then she opened her eyes and gazed at him. ‘What happened here tonight?’ she asked, ignoring his accusation.

  ‘We captured the castle,’ Thomas said.

  ‘We?’

  ‘The English.’

  She looked at him, trying to read his face. ‘So now the English are the civil power?’

  He supposed she had learned the phrase at her trial.

  The Church did not burn heretics, they merely condemned them, and then the sinners were handed to the civil power for their deaths. That way the Church kept clean hands, God was assured that his Church was undefiled and the devil gained a soul. ‘We are the civil power now,’ Thomas agreed.

  ‘So the English will burn me instead of the Gascons?’

  ‘Someone must burn you,’ Thomas said, ‘if you are a heretic’

  ‘If?’ Genevieve asked, but when Thomas did not answer she closed her eyes and rested her head on the damp stones again. ‘They said I insulted God.’ She spoke tiredly. ‘That I claimed the priests of God’s Church were corrupt, that I danced naked beneath the lightning, that I used the devil’s power to discover water, that I used magic to cure people’s ills, that I prophesied the future and that I put a curse on Galat Lorret’s wife and on his cattle.’

  Thomas frowned. ‘They did not convict you of being a beghard?’ he asked.

  ‘That too,’ she added drily.

  He was silent for a few heartbeats. Water dripped somewhere in the dark beyond the door and the rushlight flickered, almost died and then recovered. ‘Whose wife did you curse?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Galat Lorret’s wife. He’s a cloth merchant here and very rich. He’s the chief consul and a man who would like younger flesh than his wife.’

  ‘And did you curse her?’

  ‘Not just her,’ Genevieve said fervently, ‘but him too. Have you never cursed anyone?’

  ‘You prophesied the future?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘I said they would all die, and that is an evident tr
uth.’

  ‘Not if Christ comes back to earth, as he promised,’ Thomas said.

  She gave him a long, considering look and a small smile half showed on her face before she shrugged. ‘So I was wrong,’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘And the devil showed you how to discover water?’

  ‘Even you can do that,’ she said. ‘Take a forked twig and walk slowly across a field and when it twitches, dig.’

  ‘And magical cures?’

  ‘Old remedies,’ she said tiredly. ‘The things we learn from aunts and grandmothers and old ladies. Take iron from a room where a woman is giving birth. Everyone does it. Even you, priest, touch wood to avert evil. Is that piece of magic sufficient to send you to the fire?’

  Again Thomas ignored her answer. ‘You insulted God?’ he asked her.

  ‘God loves me, and I do not insult those who love me. But I did say his priests were corrupt, which you are, and so they charged me with insulting God. Are you corrupt, priest?’

  ‘And you danced naked under the lightning,’ Thomas concluded the indictment.

  ‘To that,’ she said, ‘I plead guilty.’

  ‘Why did you dance?’

  ‘Because my father always said that God would give us guidance if we did that.’

  ‘God would do that?’ Thomas asked, surprised.

  ‘So we believed. We were wrong. God told me to stay in Castillon d’Arbizon and it only led to torture and tomorrow’s fire.’

  ‘Torture?’ Thomas asked.

  Something in his voice, a horror, made her look at him, and then she slowly stretched out her left leg so that he could see her inner thigh and the raw, red, twisted mark that disfigured the white skin. ‘They burned me,’ she said, ‘again and again. That was why I confessed to being what I was not, a beghard, because they burned me.’ She was crying suddenly, remembering the pain. ‘They used red-hot metal,’ she said, ‘and when I screamed they said it was the devil trying to leave my soul.’ She drew up her leg and showed him her right arm, which had the same scars. ‘But they left these,’ she said angrily, suddenly revealing her small breasts, ‘because Father Roubert said the devil would want to suck them and the pain of his jaws would be worse than anything the Church could inflict.’ She drew her knees up again and was silent for a while as the tears ran down her face. ‘The Church likes to hurt people,’ she continued after a while. ‘You should know that.’

  ‘I do,’ Thomas said, and he very nearly lifted the skirts of his Dominican’s robe to show her the same scars on his body, the scars of the hot iron that had been pressed on his legs to make him reveal the secrets of the Grail. It was a torture that drew no blood for the Church was forbidden to draw blood, but a skilled man could make a soul scream in torment without ever breaking the skin. ‘I do,’ Thomas said again.

  ‘Then damn you,’ Genevieve said, recovering her defiance, ‘damn you and damn all the damned priests.’

  Thomas stood and lifted the lantern. ‘I shall fetch you something to wear.’

  ‘Frightened of me, priest?’ she mocked.

  ‘Frightened?’ Thomas was puzzled.

  ‘By this, priest!’ she said and showed him her nakedness and Thomas turned away and closed the door on her laughter. Then, when the bolts were shot, he leaned on the wall and stared at nothing. He was remembering Genevieve’s eyes, so full of fire and mystery. She was dirty, naked, unkempt, pale, half starved and a heretic and he had found her beautiful, but he had a duty in the morning and he had not expected it. A God-given duty.

  He climbed back to the yard to find everything quiet. Castillon d’Arbizon slept.

  And Thomas, bastard son of a priest, prayed.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  The tower stood in woodland a day’s ride east of Paris, on a low ridge not far from Soissons. It was a lonely place. The tower had once been home to a lord whose serfs farmed the valleys on either flank of the ridge, but the lord had died without children and his distant relatives had squabbled over ownership which meant the lawyers had become rich and the tower had decayed and the fields had been overgrown by hazel, and then by oak, and owls had nested in the high stone chambers where the winds blew and the seasons passed. Even the lawyers who had argued over the tower were now dead and the small castle was the property of a Duke who had never seen it and would never dream of living there, and the serfs, those that remained, worked fields closer to the village of Melun where the Duke’s tenant had a farm.

  The tower, the villagers said, was haunted. White spirits wreathed it on winter nights. Strange beasts were said to prowl the trees. Children were told to stay away, though inevitably the braver ones went to the woods and some even climbed the tower to find it empty.

  But then the strangers came.

  They came with the faraway Duke’s permission. They were tenants, but they did not come to farm or to thin the ridge of its valuable timber. They were soldiers. Fifteen hard men, scarred from the wars against England, with mail coats and crossbows and swords. They brought their women who made trouble in the village and no one dared to complain because the women were as hard as the soldiers, but not as hard as the man who led them. He was tall, thin, ugly, scarred and vengeful. His name was Charles and he had not been a soldier and he never wore mail, but no one liked to ask him what he was or what he had been for his very glance was terrifying.

  Stonemasons came from Soissons. The owls were ejected and the tower repaired. A new yard was made at the tower’s foot, a yard with a high wall and a brick furnace, and soon after that work was finished a wagon, its contents hidden by a linen canopy, arrived at the tower and the new gate in the yard’s wall slammed shut behind it. Some of the braver children, curious about the strange happenings at the tower, sneaked into the woods, but they were seen by one of the guards and they fled, terrified, as he pursued them, shouting, and his crossbow bolt narrowly missed a boy. No child went back. No one went there. The soldiers bought food and wine in the market, but even when they drank in Melun’s tavern they did not say what happened at the tower. ‘You must ask Monsieur Charles,’ they said, meaning the ugly, scarred man, and no one in the village would dare approach Monsieur Charles.

  Smoke sometimes rose from the yard. It could be seen from the village, and it was the priest who deduced that the tower was now the home of an alchemist. Strange supplies were taken up the ridge and one day a wagon loaded with a barrel of sulphur and ingots of lead paused in the village while the carter drank wine. The priest smelt the sulphur. They are making gold,’ he told his housekeeper, knowing she would tell the rest of the village.

  ‘Gold?’ she asked.

  ‘It is what the alchemists do.’ The priest was a learned man who might have risen high in the Church except that he had a taste for wine and was always drunk by the time the angelus bell sounded, but he remembered his student days in Paris and how he had once thought that he might join the search for the philosopher’s stone, that elusive substance which would meld with any metal to make it gold. ‘Noah possessed it,’ he said.

  ‘Possessed what?’

  ‘The philosopher’s stone, but he lost it.’

  ‘Because he was drunk and naked?’ the housekeeper asked. She had a dim memory of the story of Noah. ‘Like you?’

  The priest lay on his bed, half drunk and fully naked, and he remembered the smoky workrooms of Paris where silver and mercury, lead and sulphur, bronze and iron were melted and twisted and melted again. ‘Calcination,’ he recited, ‘and dissolution, and separation, and conjunction, and putrefaction, and congelation, and cibation, and sublimation, and fermentation, and exaltation, and multiplication, and projection.’

  The housekeeper had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Marie Condrot lost her child today,’ she told him. ‘Born the size of a kitten, it was. All bloody and dead. It had hair though. Red hair. She wants you to christen it.’

  ‘Cupellation,’ he said, ignoring her news, ‘and cementation, and reverberation, and distillation. Always distillation.
Per ascendum is the preferred method.’ He hiccupped. ‘Jesus,’ he sighed, then thought again. ‘Phlogiston. If we could just find phlogiston we could all make gold.’

  ‘And how would we make gold?’

  ‘I just told you.’ He turned on the bed and stared at her breasts that were white and heavy in the moonlight. ‘You have to be very clever,’ he said, reaching for her, ‘and you discover phlogiston which is a substance that burns hotter than hell’s fires, and with it you make the philosopher’s stone that Noah lost and you place it in the furnace with any metal and after three days and three nights you will have gold. Didn’t Corday say they built a furnace up there?’

  ‘He said they made the tower into a prison,’ she said.

  ‘A furnace,’ he insisted, ‘to find the philosopher’s stone.’

  The priest’s guess was closer than he knew, and soon the whole neighbourhood was convinced that a great philosopher was locked in the tower where he struggled to make gold. If he was successful, men said, then no one would need to work again for all would be rich. Peasants would eat from gold plate and ride horses caparisoned in silver, but some people noted that it was a strange kind of alchemy for two of the soldiers came to the village one morning and took away three old ox-horns and a pail of cow dung. ‘We’re bound to be rich now,’ the housekeeper said sarcastically, ‘rich in shit,’ but the priest was snoring.

  Then, in the autumn which followed the fall of Calais, the Cardinal arrived from Paris. He lodged in Soissons, at the Abbey of St-Jean-de-Vignes which, though wealthier than most monastic houses, could still not cope with all the Cardinal’s entourage and so a dozen of his men took rooms in a tavern where they airily commanded the landlord to send the bill to Paris. ‘The Cardinal will pay,’ they promised, and then they laughed for they knew that Louis Bessières, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno and Papal Legate to the Court of France, would ignore any trivial demands for money.

  Though of late His Eminence had been spending it lavishly. It had been the Cardinal who restored the tower, built the new wall and hired the guards, and on the morning after he arrived at Soissons he rode to the tower with an escort of sixty armed men and fourteen priests. Halfway to the tower they were met by Monsieur Charles who was dressed all in black and had a long, narrow-bladed knife at his side. He did not greet the Cardinal respectfully as other men would, but nodded a curt acknowledgement and then turned his horse to ride beside the prelate. The priests and men-at-arms, at a signal from the Cardinal, kept their distance so they could not overhear the conversation.