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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Brother Ramon, a Spaniard who was the monastery’s physician, brought a report to the abbot. ‘The Count has a fever,’ he said, ‘and a surplus of bile.’

  ‘Will he die?’ Planchard asked.

  ‘Only if God wills it,’ Brother Ramon said, which is what he always said when asked that question. ‘We shall leech him and then attempt to sweat the fever away.’

  ‘And you will pray for him,’ Planchard reminded Ramon, then he went back to Michel and learned that the Count’s men-at-arms had ridden to attack the English in the valley of the River Gers. ‘You will meet them on their return,’ the abbot ordered Michel, ‘and tell them their lord is struck down. Remind the Lord Joscelyn that a message must be sent to Berat.’

  ‘Yes, lord.’ Michel looked worried by this responsibility.

  ‘What was the Count doing when he fainted?’ Planchard asked, and so heard about the strange wall beneath the castle chapel.

  ‘Perhaps I should go back,’ Michel suggested nervously, ‘and find out what’s behind the wall?’

  ‘You will leave that to me, Michel,’ Planchard said sternly. ‘Your only duty is to your master and his nephew. Now go and find Lord Joscelyn.’

  Michel rode to intercept Joscelyn’s return and Planchard went in search of the serfs who had brought the Count to the monastery. They were waiting by the gate, expecting some reward, and they fell to their knees as Planchard approached. The abbot spoke first to the oldest man. ‘Veric, how is your wife?’

  ‘She suffers, sir, she suffers.’

  ‘Tell her she is in my prayers,’ Planchard said truthfully. ‘Listen, all of you, and listen well.’ He waited until they were all looking at him. ‘What you will do now,’ he told them sternly, ‘is return to the castle and cover up the wall. Put the earth back. Seal it! Do not dig further. Veric, you know what an encantada is?’

  ‘Of course, lord,’ Veric said, crossing himself.

  The abbot bent close to the serf. ‘If you do not cover the wall, Veric, then a plague of encantadas will come from the castle bowels and they will take your children, all of your children,’ he looked along the line of kneeling men, ‘they will rise up from the earth, snatch your children and dance them down to hell. So cover the wall. And when it is done, come back to me and I shall reward you.’ The monastery’s poor box contained a few coins and Planchard would give them to the serfs. ‘I trust you, Veric!’ he finished. ‘Dig no further, just cover up the wall.’

  The serfs hurried to obey. Planchard watched them go and said a small prayer asking God to forgive him for telling an untruth. Planchard did not believe that enchanted demons lived under Astarac’s old chapel, but he did know that whatever the Count had discovered should be hidden and the threat of the encantadas should suffice to make certain the work was properly done.

  Then, that small crisis resolved, Planchard went back to his room. When the Count had come to the monastery and caused a sudden excitement, the abbot had been reading a letter brought by a messenger just an hour before. The letter had come from a Cistercian house in Lombardy and now Planchard read it again and wondered whether he should tell the brethren about its dreadful contents. He decided not, then he dropped to his knees in prayer.

  He lived, he thought, in an evil world.

  And God’s scourge had come to bring punishment. That was the message of the letter and Planchard could do little except pray. “‘Fiat voluntas tua”‘,’ he said over and over again. ‘Thy will be done.’ And the terrible thing, Planchard thought, was that God’s will was being done.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  The first thing was to recover as many arrows as possible. Arrows were scarce as hens’ teeth in Gascony. In England, or in England’s territory in France, there were always spare arrows. They were made in the shires, bundled into sheaves of twenty-four, and sent wherever archers fought, but here, far from any other English garrison, Thomas’s men needed to hoard their missiles and so they went from corpse to corpse collecting the precious arrows. Most of the broad-heads were sunk deep in horseflesh and those heads were mostly lost, but the arrow shafts pulled out cleanly enough and all archers carried spare heads in their pouches. Some men cut into the corpses to retrieve the broad-heads. Other arrows had missed and just lay on the turf and the archers laughed about those. ‘One of your points here, Sam!’ Jake called. ‘Missed by a bloody mile!’

  That’s not mine. Must be Genny’s.’

  ‘Tom!’ Jake had seen the two pigs across the river. ‘Can I get supper?’

  ‘Arrows first, Jake,’ Thomas said, ‘supper afterwards.’ He bent to a dead horse and cut into the flesh in an attempt to retrieve a broad-head. Sir Guillaume was scavenging pieces of armour, unbuckling greaves and espaliers and chausses from dead men. Another man-at-arms hauled a mail coat from a corpse. Archers were carrying armfuls of swords. Ten enemy horses were either unwounded or so lightly injured as to be worth keeping. The others were dead or else in such pain that Sam despatched them with a battle-axe blow to the forehead.

  It was as complete a victory as Thomas could have wished and, better still, Robbie had captured the man Thomas took to be the enemy leader. He was a tall man with a round, angry face that was shining with sweat. ‘He’s the heir to Berat,’ Robbie called as Thomas approached, ‘and his uncle wasn’t here.’

  Joscelyn glanced at Thomas and, seeing his bloody hands and the bow and arrow bag, reckoned him a man of no worth and so looked at Sir Guillaume instead. ‘Do you lead here?’ he demanded.

  Sir Guillaume gestured at Thomas. ‘He does.’

  Joscelyn seemed bereft of words. He watched, appalled, as his wounded men-at-arms were plundered. At least his own two men, Villesisle and his companion, were both alive, but neither had been able to fight with their accustomed ferocity for the arrows had killed their horses. One of Joscelyn’s uncle’s men had lost his right hand, another was dying from an arrow in his belly. Joscelyn tried to count the living and dead and reckoned that only six or seven of his men had managed to escape across the ford.

  The beghard was plundering with the rest. Joscelyn spat when he realized who she was, then made the sign of the cross, but he went on staring at Genevieve in her silver mail. She was, he thought, as beautiful a creature as he had ever seen.

  ‘She’s spoken for,’ Sir Guillaume said drily, seeing where Joscelyn was looking.

  ‘So what are you worth?’ Thomas asked Joscelyn.

  ‘My uncle will pay a great deal,’ Joscelyn answered stiffly, still not sure that Thomas really was the enemy commander. He was even less sure that his uncle would pay a ransom, but he did not want to suggest that to his captors, nor tell them that his lordship of Béziers would be fortunate to scrape up more than a handful of ecus. Béziers was a dirt-poor collection of shacks in Picardy and would be lucky to ransom a captured goat. He looked back at Genevieve, marvelling at her long legs and bright hair. ‘You had the devil’s help in beating us,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘In battle,’ Thomas said, ‘it’s good to have powerful friends.’ He turned to where the ground was horrid with bodies. ‘Hurry up!’ he called to his men. ‘We want to be home before midnight!’

  The men were in a fine mood. They would all have a share of Joscelyn’s ransom, even though Robbie would take the greater part, and some of the lesser prisoners would yield a few coins. In addition they had taken helmets, weapons, shields, swords and horses, and only two men-at-arms had received so much as a scratch. It was a good afternoon’s work, and they laughed as they retrieved their horses, loaded the captured beasts with plunder, and readied to leave.

  And just then a single horseman came across the ford.

  Sir Guillaume saw him first and called to Thomas who turned and saw it was a priest who approached. The man had black and white robes, suggesting he was a Dominican. ‘Don’t shoot!’ Thomas called to his men. ‘Bows down! Down!’ He walked towards the priest who was mounted on a small mare. Genevieve was already in her saddle, but now she jumped down and hurri
ed to catch up with Thomas.

  ‘His name,’ Genevieve said softly, ‘is Father Roubert.’ Her face was white and her tone bitter.

  ‘The man who tortured you?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘The bastard,’ she said, and Thomas suspected she was fighting back tears; he knew how she was feeling for he had known the same humiliation at the hands of a torturer. He remembered pleading with his torturer and the shame of being so utterly abased to another person. He remembered the gratitude when the pain stopped.

  Father Roubert curbed his horse some twenty paces from Thomas and looked at the scattered dead. ‘Have they been shriven?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Thomas said, ‘but if you want to shrive them, priest, then do it. And afterwards go back to Berat and tell the Count we have his nephew and will negotiate a ransom.’ He had nothing else to say to the Dominican so he took Genevieve’s elbow and turned away.

  ‘Are you Thomas of Hookton?’ Father Roubert asked.

  Thomas turned back. ‘What is it to you?’

  ‘You have cheated hell of a soul,’ the priest said, ‘and if you do not yield it then I shall demand yours as well.’

  Genevieve took the bow from her shoulder. ‘You’ll be in hell before me,’ she called to Roubert.

  The friar ignored her, speaking to Thomas instead. ‘She is the devil’s creature, Englishman, and she has bewitched you.’ His mare twitched and he slapped her neck irritably. ‘The Church has made its decision and you must submit.’

  ‘I’ve made my decision,’ Thomas said.

  Father Roubert raised his voice so that the men behind Thomas could hear him. ‘She is a beghard!’ he called. ‘She is a heretic! She has been excommunicated, cast out of God’s holy precincts, and as such she is a doomed soul! There can be no salvation for her and none for any man who helps her! You hear me? It is God’s Church on earth that talks to you, and your immortal souls, all your immortal souls, are in dire peril because of her.’ He looked back to Genevieve and could not resist a bitter smile. ‘You will die, bitch,’ he said, ‘in earthly flames that will usher you to the eternal fires of hell’

  Genevieve raised her small bow which had a broad-head on the string. ‘Don’t,’ Thomas said to her.

  ‘He is my torturer,’ Genevieve said, tears on her cheeks.

  Father Roubert sneered at her bow. ‘You are the devil’s whore,’ he told her, ‘and worms will inhabit your womb and your breasts will give forth pus and the demons will play with you.’

  Genevieve loosed the arrow.

  She snatched at the shot. She did not aim. Anger made her pluck the cord far back and then she loosed and her eyes were so filled with tears that she could hardly see Father Roubert. In practice her arrows had usually flown madly wide, but at the very last moment, just as she loosed, Thomas tried to knock her arm away; he barely touched her, just tapped her bow hand, and the arrow twitched as it leaped from the string. Father Roubert had been about to insult her toy bow, but instead the arrow flew true and struck him. The broad, tanged head slashed into the priest’s throat and the arrow stayed there, its white feathers turning red as blood poured down the shaft. For a heartbeat the priest sat in the saddle, a look of utter astonishment on his face, then a second great gout of blood spurted out over his horse’s ears, he made a choking sound and fell hard to the ground.

  By the time Thomas reached him the priest was dead.

  ‘I told you he’d go to hell first,’ Genevieve said, then spat on the corpse.

  Thomas made the sign of the cross.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  There should have been jubilation after the easy victory, but the old mood, the sullen mood, returned to haunt the garrison at Castillon d’Arbizon. They had done well in the fight, but the death of the priest had horrified Thomas’s men. Most of them were unrepentant sinners, some had even killed priests themselves, but they were all superstitious and the friar’s death was regarded as an evil omen. Father Roubert had ridden forward unarmed, he came to parley, and he had been shot down like a dog. A few men applauded Genevieve. She was a proper woman, they said, a soldier’s woman, and the Church could be damned for all they cared, but those men were a small minority. Most of the garrison recalled the priest’s last words that had damned their own souls for the sin of harbouring a heretic, and those harsh threats brought back the fears that had haunted them when Genevieve’s life was first spared. Robbie propounded that view relentlessly and, when Thomas challenged him by asking when the Scot planned to ride to Bologna, Robbie brushed the question off. ‘I’m staying here,’ he said, ‘till I know what ransom I’m getting. I’m not riding away from his money.’ He jerked a thumb at Joscelyn who had learned of the antagonism inside the garrison and did his best to encourage it by forecasting dire things if the beghard was not burned. He refused to eat at the same table as Genevieve. As a nobleman he was entitled to the best treatment the castle could offer and he slept in a room of his own at the top of the tower, but rather than eat in the hall he preferred to take his meals with Robbie and the men-at-arms and he beguiled them with tales of his tournaments and scared them with dire warnings of what happened to men who protected the enemies of the Church.

  Thomas offered Robbie almost all the money in his keeping as his share of Joscelyn’s ransom, the final amount to be adjusted when that ransom was negotiated, but Robbie refused it. ‘You might end up owing me far more,’ he claimed, ‘and how do I know you’ll pay it? And how will you know where I am?’

  ‘I’ll send it to your family,’ Thomas promised. ‘You trust me, don’t you?’

  ‘The Church doesn’t,’ was Robbie’s bitter answer, ‘so why should I?’

  Sir Guillaume tried to ease the tension, but he knew the garrison was falling apart. A fight broke out in the lower hall one night between Robbie’s supporters and the men who defended Genevieve, and at the end of it one Englishman was dead and a Gascon had lost an eye to a dagger. Sir Guillaume thumped heads hard, but he knew there would be other fights.

  ‘What do you propose to do about it?’ he asked Thomas a week after the skirmish by the River Gers. The air was cold from a north wind, the wind that men believed made them dull and irritable. Sir Guillaume and Thomas were on the keep’s battlements, beneath the Earl of Northampton’s fading banner. And beneath that red and green flag hung the orange leopard of Berat, but upside down to show the world that the standard had been captured in battle. Genevieve was there too, but sensing that she did not want to hear what Sir Guillaume had come to say she had gone to the farthest corner of the ramparts.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Because your cousin will come?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Thomas said.

  ‘And suppose you have no men left?’ Sir Guillaume asked.

  Thomas said nothing for a while. Eventually he broke the silence. ‘You too?’

  ‘I’m with you,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘fool that you are. But if your cousin comes, Thomas, he won’t come alone.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And he won’t be as foolish as Joscelyn was. He won’t give you a victory.’

  ‘I know.’ Thomas’s voice was bleak.

  ‘You need more men,’ Sir Guillaume said. ‘We have a garrison; we need a small army.’

  ‘It would help,’ Thomas agreed.

  ‘But no one will come while she’s here,’ Sir Guillaume warned, glancing at Genevieve. ‘And three of the Gascons left yesterday.’ The three men-at-arms had not even waited for their share of Joscelyn’s ransom, but had simply ridden away westwards in search of other employment.

  ‘I don’t want cowards here,’ Thomas retorted.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a damned fool!’ Sir Guillaume snapped. ‘Your men will fight other men, Thomas, but they won’t fight the Church. They won’t fight God.’ He paused, evidently reluctant to say whatever was on his mind, but then took the plunge. ‘You have to send her away, Thomas. She has to go.’

  Thomas stared at the southern
hills. He said nothing.

  ‘She has to go,’ Sir Guillaume repeated. ‘Send her to Pau. Bordeaux. Anywhere.’

  ‘If I do that,’ Thomas said, ‘then she dies. The Church will find her and burn her.’

  Sir Guillaume stared at him. ‘You’re in love, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Jesus goddamned Christ,’ Sir Guillaume said in exasperation. ‘Love! It always leads to trouble.’

  ‘Man is born to it,’ Thomas said, ‘as the sparks fly upwards.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sir Guillaume said grimly, ‘but it’s women who provide the bloody kindling.’

  And just then Genevieve called to them. ‘Horsemen!’ she warned, and Thomas ran across the ramparts and stared down the eastern road and saw that sixty or seventy horsemen were emerging from the woods. They were men-at-arms wearing the orange and white jupons of Berat and at first Thomas assumed they were coming to offer a ransom for Joscelyn, then he saw that they flew a strange banner, not the leopard of Berat, but a Church banner like those carried in processions on holy days. It hung from a cross-staff and showed the blue gown of the Virgin Mary and behind it, on smaller horses, were a score of churchmen.

  Sir Guillaume made the sign of the cross. ‘Trouble,’ he said curtly, then turned on Genevieve. ‘No arrows! You hear me, girl? No damn arrows!’

  Sir Guillaume ran down the steps and Genevieve looked at Thomas. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘For killing the priest? Damn the bastard.’

  ‘I rather think they’ve come to damn us,’ Genevieve said, and she went with Thomas to the side of the battlements that overlooked Castillon d’Arbizon’s main street, the west gate and the bridge across the river beyond. The armed horsemen waited outside the town while the clergy dismounted and, preceded by their banner, trooped up the main street towards the castle. Most of the churchmen were in black, but one was in a white cope, had a mitre and carried a white staff topped with a golden crook. A bishop, no less. He was a plump man with long white hair that escaped from beneath the golden hem of his mitre. He ignored the townsfolk who knelt to him as he called up to the castle. ‘Thomas!’ he shouted. ‘Thomas!’