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

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘You look well, Charles,’ the Cardinal said in a mocking voice.

  I’m bored.’ The ugly Charles had a voice like iron dragging through gravel.

  ‘God’s service can be hard,’ the Cardinal said.

  Charles ignored the sarcasm. The scar went from his lip to his cheekbone, his eyes were pouchy, his nose broken. His black clothes hung from him like a scarecrow’s rags and his gaze constantly flicked from side to side of the road as though he feared an ambush. Any travellers, meeting the procession, had they dared raise their eyes to see the Cardinal and his ragged companion, would have taken Charles to be a soldier, for the scar and the sword suggested he had served in the wars, but Charles Bessières had never followed a war banner. He had cut throats and purses instead, he had robbed and murdered, and he had been spared the gallows because he was the Cardinal’s eldest brother.

  Charles and Louis Bessières had been born in the Limousin, the eldest sons of a tallow merchant who had given the younger son an education while the elder ran wild. Louis had risen in the church as Charles had roamed dark alleys, but different though they were, there was a trust between them. A secret was safe between the tallow merchant’s only surviving sons and that was why the priests and the men-at-arms had been ordered to keep their distance.

  ‘How is our prisoner?’ the Cardinal asked.

  ‘He grumbles. Whines like a woman.’

  ‘But he works?’

  ‘Oh, he works,’ Charles said grimly. ‘Too scared to be idle.’

  ‘He eats? He is in good health?’

  ‘He eats, he sleeps and he nails his woman,’ Charles said.

  ‘He has a woman?’ The Cardinal sounded shocked.

  ‘He wanted one. Said he couldn’t work properly withouLxme so I fetched him one.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘One from the stews of Paris.’

  ‘An old companion of yours, perhaps?’ the Cardinal asked, amused. ‘But not one, I trust, of whom you are too fond?’

  ‘When it’s all done,’ Charles said, ‘she’ll have her throat cut just like him. Simply tell me when.’

  ‘When he has worked his miracle, of course,’ the Cardinal said.

  They followed a narrow track up the ridge and, once at the tower, the priests and the armed men stayed in the yard while the brothers dismounted and went down a brief winding stair that led to a heavy door barred with three thick bolts. The Cardinal watched his brother draw the bolts back. ‘The guards do not come down here?’ he asked.

  ‘Only the two who bring food and take away the buckets,’ Charles said, ‘the rest know they’ll get their throats cut if they poke their noses where they’re not wanted.’

  ‘Do they believe that?’

  Charles Bessières looked sourly at his brother. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ he asked, then drew his knife before he shot the last bolt. He stepped back as he opened the door, evidently wary in case someone beyond the door attacked him, but the man inside showed no hostility, instead he looked pathetically pleased to see the Cardinal and dropped to his knees in reverence.

  The tower’s cellar was large, its ceiling supported by great brick arches from which a score of lanterns hung. Their smoky light was augmented by daylight that came through three high, small, thickly barred windows. The prisoner who lived in the cellar was a young man with long fair hair, a quick face and clever eyes. His cheeks and high forehead were smeared with dirt, which also marked his long, agile fingers. He stayed on his knees as the Cardinal approached.

  ‘Young Gaspard,’ the Cardinal said genially and held out his hand so the prisoner could kiss the heavy ring that contained a thorn from Christ’s crown of death. ‘I trust you are well, young Gaspard? You eat heartily, do you? Sleep like a babe? Work like a good Christian? Rut like a hog?’ The Cardinal glanced at the girl as he said the last words, then he took his hand away from Gaspard and walked further into the room towards three tables, on which were barrels of clay, blocks of beeswax, piles of ingots, and arrays of chisels, files, augurs and hammers.

  The girl, sullen, red-haired and dressed in a dirty shift that hung loose from one shoulder, sat on a low trestle bed in a corner of the cellar. ‘I don’t like it here,’ she complained to the Cardinal.

  The Cardinal stared at her in silence for a good long time, then he turned to his brother, ‘If she speaks to me again, Charles, without my permission,’ he said, ‘whip her.’

  ‘She means no harm, your eminence,’ Gaspard said, still on his knees.

  ‘But I do,’ the Cardinal said, then smiled at the prisoner. ‘Get up, dear boy, get up.’

  ‘I need Yvette,’ Gaspard said, ‘she helps me.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ the Cardinal said, then stooped to a clay bowl in which a brownish paste had been mixed. He recoiled from its stench, then turned as Gaspard came to him, dropped to his knees again, and held up a gift.

  ‘For you, your eminence,’ Gaspard said eagerly, ‘I made it for you.’

  The Cardinal took the gift. It was crucifix of gold, not a hand’s breadth high, yet every detail of the suffering Christ was delicately modelled. There were strands of hair showing beneath the crown of thorns, the thorns themselves could prick, the rent in his side was jagged edged and the spill of golden blood ran past his loincloth to his long thigh. The nail heads stood proud and the Cardinal counted them. Four. He had seen three true nails in his life. ‘It’s beautiful, Gaspard,’ the Cardinal said.

  ‘I would work better,’ Gaspard said, ‘if there was more light.’

  ‘We would all work better if there were more light,’ the Cardinal said, ‘the light of truth, the light of God, the light of the Holy Spirit.’ He walked beside the tables, touching the tools of Gaspard’s trade. ‘Yet the devil sends darkness to befuddle us and we must do our best to endure it.’

  ‘Upstairs?’ Gaspard said. ‘There must be rooms with more light upstairs?’

  ‘There are,’ the Cardinal said, ‘there are, but how do I know you will not escape, Gaspard? You are an ingenious man. Give you a large window and I might give you the world. No, dear boy, if you can produce work like this’ - he held up the crucifix - ‘then you need no more light.’ He smiled. ‘You are so very clever.’

  Gaspard was indeed clever. He had been a goldsmith’s apprentice in one of the small shops on the Quai des Orfevres on the lie de la Cite in Paris where the Cardinal had his mansion. The Cardinal had always appreciated the goldsmiths: he haunted their shops, patronized them and purchased their best pieces, and many of those pieces had been made by this thin nervous apprentice who had then knifed a fellow-apprentice to death in a sordid tavern brawl and been condemned to the gallows. The Cardinal had rescued him, brought him to the tower and promised him life.

  But first Gaspard must work the miracle. Only then could he be released. That was the promise, though the Cardinal was quite sure that Gaspard would never leave this cellar unless it was to use the big furnace in the yard. Gaspard, though he did not know it, was already at the gates of hell. The Cardinal made the sign of the cross, then put the crucifix on a table. ‘So show me,’ he ordered Gaspard.

  Gaspard went to his big work table where an object was shrouded in a cloth of bleached linen. ‘It is only wax now, your eminence,’ he explained, lifting the linen away, ‘and I don’t know if it’s even possible to turn it into gold.’

  ‘It can be touched?’ the Cardinal asked.

  ‘Carefully,’ Gaspard warned. ‘It’s purified beeswax and quite delicate.’

  The Cardinal lifted the grey-white wax, which felt oily to his touch, and he carried it to one of the three small windows that let in the shadowed daylight and there he stood in awe.

  Gaspard had made a cup of wax. It had taken him weeks of work. The cup itself was just big enough to hold an apple, while the stem was only six inches long. That stem was modelled as the trunk of a tree and the cup’s foot was made from the tree’s three roots that spread from the bole. The tree’s branches divided into filigree work th
at formed the lacy bowl of the cup, and the filigree was astonishingly detailed with tiny leaves and small apples and, at the rim, three delicate nails. It is beautiful,’ the Cardinal said.

  ‘The three roots, your eminence, are the Trinity,’ Gaspard explained.

  ‘I had surmised as much.’

  ‘And the tree is the tree of life.’

  ‘Which is why it has apples,’ the Cardinal said.

  ‘And the nails reveal that it will be the tree from which our Lord’s cross was made,’ Gaspard finished his explanation.

  ‘That had not escaped me,’ the Cardinal observed. He carried the beautiful wax cup back to the table and set it down carefully. ‘Where is the glass?’

  ‘Here, your Eminence.’ Gaspard opened a box and took out a cup that he offered to the Cardinal. The cup was made of thick, greenish glass that looked very ancient, for in parts the cup was smoky and elsewhere there were tiny bubbles trapped in the pale translucent material. The Cardinal suspected it was Roman. He was not sure of that, but it looked very old and just a little crude, and that was surely right. The cup from which Christ had drunk his last wine would probably be more fit for a peasant’s table than for a noble’s feast. The Cardinal had discovered the cup in a Paris shop and had purchased it for a few copper coins and he had instructed Gaspard to take off the ill-shapen foot of the glass which the prisoner had done so skilfully that the Cardinal could not even see that there had once been a stem. Now, very gingerly, he put the glass cup into the filigree wax bowl. Gaspard held his breath, fearing that the Cardinal would break one of the delicate leaves, but the cup settled gently and fitted perfectly.

  The Grail. The Cardinal gazed at the glass cup, imagining it cradled in a delicate lacework of fine gold and standing on an altar lit by tall white candles. There would be a choir of boys singing and scented incense burning. There would be kings and emperors, princes and dukes, earls and knights kneeling to it.

  Louis Bessières, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno, wanted the Grail and, some months before, he had heard a rumour from southern France, from the land of burned heretics, that the Grail existed. Two sons of the Vexille family, one a Frenchman and the other an English archer, sought that Grail as the Cardinal did, but no one, the Cardinal thought, wanted the Grail as much as he did. Or deserved it as he did. If he found the relic then he would command such awesome power that kings and pope would come to him for blessing and when Clement, the present Pope, died, then Louis Bessières would take his throne and keys - if only he possessed the Grail. Louis Bessières wanted the Grail, but one day, staring unseeing at the stained glass in his private chapel, he had experienced a revelation. The Grail itself was not necessary. Perhaps it existed, probably it did not, but all that mattered was that Christendom believed that it existed. They wanted a Grail. Any Grail, so long as they were convinced it was the true and holy, one and only Grail, and that was why Gaspard was in this cellar, and why Gaspard would die, for no one but the Cardinal and his brother must ever know what was being made in the lonely tower among the windswept trees above Melun. ‘And now,’ the Cardinal said, carefully lifting the green glass from its wax bed, ‘you must make the common wax into heavenly gold.’

  ‘It will be hard, your eminence.’

  ‘Of course it will be hard,’ the Cardinal said, ‘but I shall pray for you. And your freedom depends on your success.’ The Cardinal saw the doubt on Gaspard’s face. ‘You made the crucifix,’ he said, picking up the beautiful gold object, ‘so why can you not make the cup?’

  ‘It is so delicate,’ Gaspard said, ‘and if I pour the gold and it does not melt the wax then all the work will be wasted.’

  ‘Then you will start again,’ the Cardinal said, ‘and by experience and with the help of God you will discover the way of truth.’

  ‘It has never been done,’ Gaspard said, ‘not with anything so delicate.’

  ‘Show me how,’ the Cardinal ordered and Gaspard explained how he would paint the wax cup with the noxious brown paste that had repelled the Cardinal. That paste was made from water, burned ox-horn that had been pounded to powder and cow dung, and the dried layers of the paste would encase the wax and the whole would then be entombed in soft clay, which had to be gently pressed into place to cradle the wax, but not distort it. Narrow tunnels would run through the clay from the outside to the entombed wax, and then Gaspard would take the shapeless clay lump to the furnace in the yard where he would bake the clay and the beeswax inside would melt and run out through the tunnels and, if he did it well, he would be left with a hard clay mass within which was concealed a delicate cavity in the shape of the tree of life.

  ‘And the cow dung?’ the Cardinal asked. He was genuinely fascinated. All beautiful things intrigued him, perhaps because in his youth he had been denied them.

  ‘The dung bakes hard,’ Gaspard said. ‘It makes a hard shell around the cavity.’ He smiled at the sullen girl. ‘Yvette mixes it for me,’ he explained. ‘The layer closest to the wax is very fine, the outer layers are coarser.’

  ‘So the dung mixture forms the hard surface of the mould?’ the Cardinal asked.

  ‘Exactly.’ Gaspard was pleased that his patron and saviour understood.

  Then, when the clay was cold, Gaspard would pour molten gold into the cavity and he must hope that the liquid fire would fill every last cranny, every tiny leaf and apple and nail, and every delicately modelled ridge of bark. And when the gold had cooled and become firm the clay would be broken away to reveal either a grail-holder that would dazzle Christendom or else a mess of mis-shapen gold squiggles. ‘It will probably have to be done in separate pieces,’ Gaspard said nervously.

  ‘You will try with this one,’ the Cardinal ordered, draping the linen cloth back over the wax cup, ‘and if it fails you will make another and try again, and then again, and when it works, Gaspard, I shall release you to the fields and to the sky. You and your little friend.’ He smiled vaguely at the woman, made the sign of a blessing over Gaspard’s head, then walked from the cellar. He waited as his brother bolted the door. ‘Don’t be unkind to him, Charles.’

  ‘Unkind? I’m his jailer, not his nurse.’

  ‘And he is a genius. He thinks he is making me a Mass cup, so he has no idea how important his work is. He fears nothing, except you. So keep him happy.’

  Charles moved away from the door. ‘Suppose they find the real Grail?’

  ‘Who will find it?’ the Cardinal asked. ‘The English archer has vanished and that fool of a monk won’t find it in Berat. He’ll just stir up the dust.’

  ‘So why send him?’

  ‘Because our Grail must have a past. Brother Jerome will discover some stories of the Grail in Gascony and that will be our proof, and once he has announced that the records of the Grail exist then we shall take the cup to Berat and announce its discovery.’

  Charles was still thinking of the real Grail. ‘I thought the Englishman’s father left a book?’

  ‘He did, but we can make nothing of it. They are the scribblings of a madman.’

  ‘So find the archer and burn the truth from him,’ Charles said.

  ‘He will be found,’ the Cardinal promised grimly, ‘and next time I’ll loose you on him, Charles. He’ll talk then. But in the meantime we must go on looking, but above all we must go on making. So keep Gaspard safe.’

  ‘Safe now,’ Charles said, ‘and dead later.’ Because Gaspard would provide the means for the brothers to go to Avignon’s papal palace and the Cardinal, climbing to the yard, could taste the power already. He would be Pope.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  At dawn that day, far to the south of the lonely tower near Soissons, the shadow of Castillon d’Arbizon’s castle had fallen across the heap of timbers ready for the heretic’s burning. The firewood had been well constructed, according to Brother Roubert’s careful instructions, so that above the kindling and around the thick stake to which a chain had been stapled there were four layers of upright faggots that would bur
n bright, but not too hot and without too much smoke, so that the watching townsfolk would see Genevieve writhe within the bright flame and know that the heretic was going to Satan’s dominion.

  The castle’s shadow reached down the main street almost to the west gate where the town sergeants, already bemused by the discovery of the dead watchman on the walls, stared up at the bulk of the castle’s keep outlined by the rising sun. A new flag flew there. Instead of showing the orange leopard on the white field of Berat it flaunted a blue field, slashed with a diagonal white band that was dotted with three white stars. Three yellow lions inhabited the blue field and those fierce beasts appeared and disappeared as the big flag lifted to an indifferent wind. Then there was something new to gape at for, as the town’s four consuls hurried to join the sergeants, men appeared at the top of one of the bastions that protected the castle gate and they dropped a pair of heavy objects from the rampart. The two things dropped, then jerked to a stop at the end of ropes. At first the watching men thought that the garrison was airing its bedding, then they saw that the lumps were the corpses of two men. They were the castellan and the guard, and they hung by the gate to reinforce the message of the Earl of Northampton’s banner. Castillon d’ Arbizon was under new ownership.

  Galat Lorret, the oldest and richest of the consuls, the same man who had questioned the friar in the church the previous night, was the first to gather his wits. ‘A message must go to Berat,’ he ordered, and he instructed the town’s clerk to write to Castillon d’Arbizon’s proper lord. Tell the Count that English troops are flying the banner of the Earl of Northampton.’