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

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘I asked him to join us,’ Philin repeated stubbornly. His son, his leg in a splint and with crude crutches cut from oak boughs beneath his shoulders, swung across to stand beside his father.

  ‘Will you fight for him?’ Destral asked. He was not as tall as Philin, but he was broad across the shoulders and had a squat brute strength. His face was flat with a broken nose and he had eyes like a mastiff; eyes that almost glowed with the thought of violence. His beard was matted, strung with dried spittle and scraps of food. He swung the axe so its head glittered in the dying light. ‘Fight me,’ he said to Philin, his voice hungry.

  ‘I just want him to live,’ Philin said, unwilling to draw a sword on his mad-eyed leader, but the other coredors had smelt blood, plenty of it, and they were making a rough circle and egging Destral on. They grinned and shouted, wanting the fight, and Philin backed away until he could go no farther.

  ‘Fight!’ the men shouted. ‘Fight!’ Their women were screaming as well, shouting at Philin to be a man and face the axe. Those closest to Philin shoved him hard forward so that he had to jump aside to stop himself colliding with Destral who, scornful, slapped him in the face and then tugged his beard in insult.

  ‘Fight me,’ Destral said, ‘or else slice off the Englishman’s fingers yourself.’

  Thomas still did not know what was being said, but the unhappy look on Philin’s face told him it was nothing good. ‘Go on!’ Destral said. ‘Cut off his fingers! Either that, Philin, or I’ll cut off your fingers.’

  Galdric, Philin’s son, drew his own knife and pushed it towards his father. ‘Do it,’ the boy said, and when his father would not take the knife he looked at Destral. ‘I’ll do it!’ the boy offered.

  ‘Your father will do it,’ Destral said, amused, ‘and he’ll do it with this.’ He unlooped the wrist strap and offered the axe to Philin.

  And Philin, too terrified to disobey, took the weapon and walked towards Thomas. ‘I’m sorry,’ he spoke in French.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Because I have no choice.’ Philin looked miserable, a humiliated man, and he knew the other coredors were enjoying his shame. Tut your hands on the tree,’ he said, then repeated the order in his own language and the men holding Thomas forced his arms up until both his crooked hands were flat against the bark. They held Thomas by the forearms as Philin came close. ‘I’m sorry,’ Philin said again. ‘You must lose your fingers.’

  Thomas watched him. Saw how nervous he was. Understood that the axe blow, when it came, was as likely to chop him at the wrist instead of the fingers. ‘Do it quickly,’ he said.

  ‘No!’ Genevieve shouted and the couple holding her laughed.

  ‘Quickly,’ Thomas said, and Philin drew the axe back. He paused, licked his lips, took one last anguished look into Thomas’s eyes, then swung.

  Thomas had let the men force him against the tree-he didn’t try to pull away from them until the axe came. Only then did he use his huge strength to tear himself from their grasp. The two men, astonished by the power of an archer trained to use the long yew bow, flailed as Thomas snatched the axe out of the air and with a bellow of rage turned it on the man holding Genevieve. His first swing split that man’s skull, the woman instinctively let go of Genevieve’s other arm and Thomas wheeled back to beat down the men who had been holding his arms against the tree. He was screaming his war cry, the battle shout of England: ‘St George! St George!’ and he lashed the heavy blade at the nearest man just as the horsemen came from the trees.

  For a heartbeat the coredors were caught between the need to overwhelm Thomas and the danger of the horsemen, then they realized the riders were by far the more dangerous enemy and they did what all men instinctively did when faced by galloping men-at-arms. They ran for the trees and Guy Vexille’s black-robed riders spurred among them, swinging swords and killing with brutal ease. Destral, oblivious of their threat, had run straight at Thomas and Thomas thrust the axehead into the squat man’s face, shattering the bridge of his nose and hurling him backwards, then Thomas let go of the clumsy weapon, seized his bow and arrow bag and snatched Genevieve’s wrist.

  They ran.

  There was safety in the trees. The trunks and low branches stopped the horsemen running free in the wood, and the darkness was coming fast to obscure their view, but in the clearing the horsemen were wheeling, cutting, wheeling again, and the coredors who had failed to escape into the trees were dying like sheep savaged by wolves.

  Philin was beside Thomas now, but his son, on his awkward crutches, was still in the clearing and a horseman saw the boy, turned and lined his sword. ‘Galdric!’ Philin shouted, and he started to run to save the boy, but Thomas tripped him, then put an arrow on the string.

  The rider was holding the sword low, intending to jab the point into the small of Galdric’s back. He touched his horse with his spurs and it accelerated just as the arrow whipped from the shadows to slice his throat open. The horse wheeled away, its rider spilling from the saddle in a stream of blood. Thomas shot a second arrow that flashed past the boy to spit Destral through one eye, then he looked for his cousin among the horsemen, but it was so dim now that he could not make out any faces.

  ‘Come!’ Genevieve urged him. ‘Come!’

  But Thomas, instead of running with her, dashed back into the clearing. He scooped up the empty grail box, looked for his bag of money, plucked up a sheaf of his arrows, then heard Genevieve’s cry of warning as hooves came towards him and he swerved to one side, doubled back, then ran into the trees. The pursuing rider, confused by Thomas’s quick evasions, spurred forward again, then veered away as Thomas ducked under a low branch. Other coredors were fleeing to the caves, but Thomas ignored that refuge and struck south beside the crag. He led Genevieve by the hand while Philin carried Galdric on his shoulders. A handful of the braver horsemen made a brief effort to follow, but some of the surviving coredors had their crossbows and the bolts thumping out of the dark persuaded the riders to be content with their small victory. They had killed a score of bandits, captured as many more and, what was better, taken a dozen of their women. And in doing it they had lost only one man. They took the arrow from his throat, draped his body on his horse and, with their captives tied by strips of cloth, went back northwards.

  While Thomas ran. He still had his mail coat, his bow, a bag of arrows and an empty box, but everything else was lost. And he was running in the dark.

  To nowhere.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  Failure was hard, and Guy Vexille knew he had failed. He had sent riders into the woods to beat any fugitives out to the open ground and instead they had become tangled in a bloody, one-sided brawl with coredors that had left one of his men dead. The body was taken down to Astarac where, early next morning, Guy Vexille buried the man. It was raining. The rain had begun at midnight, a steady downpour that flooded the grave, which had been scraped between the olive trees. The bodies of the captured coredors, all of them beheaded the previous night, were lying abandoned at the edge of the olive grove, but Vexille was determined his own man should have a grave. The body had been stripped of everything except his shirt and now the man was rolled into the shallow hole where his head flopped back into the rainwater to expose the wound in his neck. ‘Why wasn’t he wearing his gorget?’ Vexille asked one of the men who had attacked the coredors. A gorget was a piece of plate covering the throat and Vexille remembered that the dead man had been proud of the piece of armour that he had scavenged from some forgotten battlefield.

  ‘He was.’

  ‘A lucky sword thrust then?’ Vexille asked. He was curious. All knowledge was useful, and few scraps of knowledge so useful as those that helped a man live in the chaos of battle.

  ‘It wasn’t a sword,’ the man said, ‘he got an arrow.’

  ‘Crossbow?’

  ‘Long arrow,’ the man said, ‘went straight through the gorget. Must have hit plumb.’ The man made the sign of the cross, praying that he would not suffer a sim
ilar fate. ‘The archer got away,’ he went on. ‘Ran into the woods.’

  And that was when Vexille realized Thomas must have been among the coredors. It was possible that one of the bandits had been using a hunting bow, but not likely. He demanded to know where the arrow was, but it had been thrown away, no one knew where, so in the morning mist Vexille led his men up to the ridge and then south to the clearing where the bodies still lay. Rain pelted down, dripping from the horses’ trappers and finding its way beneath men’s armour so that the metal and leather chafed chilled skins. Vexille’s men grumbled, but Vexille himself seemed oblivious of the weather. Once at the clearing he looked at the scatter of corpses, then saw what he was looking for. A squat, bearded man had an arrow in his eye and Vexille dismounted to look at the shaft, which proved to be a long ash arrow fledged with goose feathers. Vexille pulled it free, tugging it from the dead man’s brains. It had a long, needle-like head, and that suggested it was English, then he looked at the fledging. ‘Did you know,’ he said to his men, ‘that the English only use feathers from one wing of a goose?’ He stroked the damp feathers, which were held in place by twine and by glue that had a greenish tinge. ‘Either the right wing,’ he said, ‘or the left, doesn’t matter, but you don’t mix feathers from both wings on one arrow.’ He suddenly snapped the arrow in a surge of frustration. Goddamn it! It was an English arrow and that meant Thomas had been here, so damned close, and now was gone. But where?

  One of his men proposed riding westwards to rake the valley of the Gers, but Vexille snarled at the suggestion. ‘He’s no fool. He’ll be miles away by now. Miles.’ Or perhaps he was just yards away, watching from among the trees or from the rocky heights of the crag, and Vexille stared into the woods and tried to put himself into Thomas’s place. Would he run back to England? But why would he ever have come here in the first place? Thomas had been excommunicated, thrown out from his companions, sent into the wilderness, but instead of fleeing home to England he had come east to Astarac. But there was nothing in Astarac now. It had been harrowed, so where would Thomas go? Guy Vexille looked into the caves, but they were empty. Thomas was gone.

  Vexille returned to the monastery. It was time to leave and he went there to gather the rest of his men. Charles Bessières had also assembled his few soldiers who were mounted on horses heavy with plunder. ‘And where are you going?’ Vexille asked him.

  ‘Wherever you go, my lord,’ Bessières said with sarcastic courtesy, ‘to help you find the Englishman. So where do we look?’ He asked the question caustically, knowing that Guy Vexille had no ready answer.

  Vexille said nothing. The rain still fell steadily, turning the roads into quagmires. On the northern road, that led eventually to Toulouse, a group of travellers had appeared. They were all on foot, thirty or forty of them, and it was apparent that they were coming to seek shelter and help from the monastery. They looked like fugitives for they were pushing four handcarts loaded with chests and bundles. Three old people, too weak to struggle through the cloying mud, were riding on the carts. Some of Bessières’s men, hoping for more easy plunder, were spurring towards them and Guy Vexille headed them off. The folk, seeing Vexille’s lacquered armour and the prancing yale on his shield, knelt in the mud. ‘Where are you going?’ Vexille demanded.

  ‘To the monastery, lord,’ one of the men said, hauling off his hat and bowing his head.

  ‘And where are you from?’

  The man said they were from the valley of the Garonne, two days’ journey to the east, and further questioning elicited that they were four craftsmen and their families: a carpenter, a saddler, a wheelwright and a mason, all from the same town.

  ‘Is there trouble there?’ Vexille wanted to know. He doubted it would concern him, for Thomas would surely not have travelled eastwards, but anything strange was of interest to him.

  ‘There is a plague, lord,’ the man said. ‘People are dying.’

  There’s always plague,’ Vexille said dismissively.

  ‘Not like this, lord,’ the man said humbly. He claimed that hundreds, maybe thousands, were dying and these families, at the very first onslaught of the contagion, had decided to flee. Others were doing the same, the man said, but most had gone north to Toulouse while these four families, all friends, had decided to look to the southern hills for their safety.

  ‘You should have stayed,’ Vexille said, ‘and taken refuge in a church.’

  ‘The church is filled with the dead, lord,’ the man said, and Vexille turned away in impatience. Some disease in the Garonne was not his business, and if common folk panicked, that was nothing unusual. He snarled at Charles Bessières’s men to leave the fugitives alone, and Bessières snapped back, saying that they were wasting their time. ‘Your Englishman’s gone,’ he sneered.

  Vexille heard the sneer, but ignored it. Instead, he paused a moment, then gave Charles Bessières the courtesy of taking him seriously. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘but gone where?’

  Bessières was taken aback by the mild tone. He leaned on his saddle pommel and stared at the monastery as he thought about the question. ‘He was here,’ he said eventually, ‘he went, so presumably he found what he wanted?’

  Vexille shook his head. ‘He ran from us, that’s why he went.’

  ‘So why didn’t we see him?’ Bessières asked belligerently. The rain dripped from the broad metal brim of his sallet, a piece of armour he had adopted to keep his head dry. ‘But he’s gone, and taken whatever he found with him. And where would you go if you were him?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Long way,’ Bessières said. ‘And his woman’s wounded. If I was him I’d find friends and find them fast.’

  Vexille stared at the grim Charles Bessières and wondered why he was being so unusually helpful. ‘Friends,’ Vexille repeated.

  ‘Castillon d’Arbizon,’ Charles Bessières spelled it out.

  ‘They threw him out!’ Vexille protested.

  ‘That was then,’ Bessières said, ‘but what choices does he have now?’ In truth Charles Bessières had no idea whether Thomas would go to Castillon d’Arbizon, but it was the most obvious solution, and Charles had decided he needed to find the Englishman fast. Only then, when he was certain that no true Grail had been discovered, could he reveal the fake chalice. ‘But if he hasn’t gone to his friends,’ he added, ‘he’s certainly going west towards the other English garrisons.’

  ‘Then we’ll cut him off,’ Vexille said. He was not convinced that Thomas would go to Castillon d’Arbizon, but his cousin would surely go west, and now Vexille had a new worry, one put there by Bessières, that Thomas had found what he sought.

  The Grail could be lost and the scent was cold, but the hunt must go on.

  They all rode west.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  In the dark the rain came like vengeance from heaven. A downpour that thrashed on the trees and dripped to the floor of the wood and soaked the fugitives and lowered their already low spirits. In one brief passage of unexpected violence the coredors had been broken apart, their leader killed and their winter encampment ruined. Now, in the utter blackness of the autumn night, they were lost, unprotected and frightened.

  Thomas and Genevieve were among them. Genevieve spent much of the night doubled over, trying to contain the pain of her left shoulder that had been exacerbated when the coredors tried and failed to strip her of the mail shirt, but when the first thin, damp light showed a path through the trees she stood and followed Thomas as he went westwards. At least a score of the coredors followed, including Philin, who was still carrying his son on his shoulders. ‘Where are you going?’ Philin asked Thomas.

  ‘Castillon d’Arbizon,’ Thomas said. ‘And where are you going?’

  Philin ignored the question, walking in silence for a few paces, then he frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I was going to cut your fingers off.’

  ‘Didn’t have much choice, did you?
’

  ‘I could have fought Destral.’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘You can’t fight men like that. They love fighting, feed on it. He’d have slaughtered you and I’d still have lost my fingers.’

  ‘I’m sorry, though.’

  They had worked their way across the highest part of the ridge and now could see the grey rain slashing all across the valley ahead, and across the next ridge and further valley. Thomas wanted to look at the landscape ahead before they descended the slope and so he ordered them all to rest, and Philin put his son down. Thomas turned to the tall man. ‘What did your boy say to you when he offered you the knife?’

  Philin frowned as if he did not want to answer, then shrugged. ‘He told me to cut off your fingers.’

  Thomas hit Galdric hard across the head, making the boy’s head ring and prompting a cry of pain. Thomas slapped him a second time, hard enough to hurt his own hand. Tell him,’ Thomas said, ‘to pick fights with people his own size.’

  Galdric began crying, Philin said nothing and Thomas looked back to the valley ahead. He could see no horsemen there, no riders on the roads or mailed soldiers patrolling the wet pastures, and so he led the group on downwards. ‘I heard’ - Philin spoke nervously, his son back on his shoulders - ‘that the Count of Berat’s men are besieging Castillon d’Arbizon?’

  ‘I heard the same,’ Thomas said curtly.

  ‘You think it’s safe to go there?’