Half the castle’s gateway was already down and Signor Gioberti had now realigned his bulbous gun so that its missiles would strike the right-hand side of the arch. The Italian reckoned it would take a week to bring the whole gate down, and he had advised Joscelyn that it would be best to spend still more time on widening the breach by bringing down those sections of the curtain wall either side of the ruined arch so that the attackers were not channelled into a narrow space which the archers could fill with feathered death.
Tavises,’ Joscelyn said, and he had ordered the town’s two carpenters to make more of the big willow shields that would protect the crossbowmen as they ran to the breach. Those crossbowmen could then shoot up at the archers while the men-at-arms streamed past them. ‘One week,’ Joscelyn told the Italian, ‘you’ve got one week to bring down the gate, then we attack.’ He wanted it over fast for the siege was proving more expensive and more complicated than he had ever imagined. It was not just the fighting that was difficult, but he had to pay carters to bring hay and oats for all the men-at-arms’ horses, and he had to send men to scavenge for scarce food in a district that had already been plundered by the enemy, and each day brought new unforeseen problems that gnawed at Joscelyn’s confidence. He just wanted to attack and get the wretched business over.
But the defenders attacked first. At dawn, on the day after Thomas reached Castillon d’Arbizon, when there was a chill north-easterly wind blowing under a leaden sky, fire arrows seared from the tower ramparts to plunge into the town’s thatch. Arrow after arrow trailed smoke, and the besiegers woke to the danger as the townfolk screamed for hooks and water. Men used the long-handled hooks to pull the thatch from the roofs, but more arrows came and within minutes three houses were ablaze and the wind was pushing the flames towards the gate where the gun was already loaded and the loam was setting.
‘The powder! The powder!’ Signor Gioberti shouted, and his men began carrying the precious barrels out of the house near the gun, and smoke billowed across them and frightened folk got in their way so that one man slipped and spilt a whole barrel of unmixed powder across the roadway. Joscelyn came from his commandeered house and shouted at his men to fetch water, while Guy Vexille was ordering that buildings should be pulled down to make a firebreak, but the townspeople held the soldiers up and now the fires were roaring, a dozen more houses were ablaze and their thatch had become furnaces that spread from roof to roof. Panicked birds fluttered inside the smoke and rats, in their scores, fled out of thatch and cellar doors. Many of the besieging crossbowmen had made themselves eyries inside the roofs from where they could shoot through holes piercing the thatch, and they now stumbled down from the attics. Pigs squealed as they were roasted alive and then, just when it seemed the whole town would burn and when the first flying sparks were settling on the roofs near the cannon, the heavens opened.
A crash of thunder tore across the sky and then the rain slashed down. It fell so hard that it blotted out the view of the castle from the town gate. It turned the street into a watercourse, it soaked the powder barrels and it extinguished the fires. Smoke still poured upwards, but the rain hissed on glowing embers. The gutters ran with black water and the fires died.
Galat Lorret, the senior consul, came to Joscelyn and wanted to know where the townsfolk should shelter. Over a third of the houses had lost their roofs and the others were crowded with billeted soldiers. ‘Your lordship must find us food,’ he told Joscelyn, ‘and we need tents.’ Lorret was shivering, perhaps with fear or else from the onset of a fever, but Joscelyn had no pity for the man. Indeed he was so enraged at being given advice by a commoner that he struck Lorret, then struck him again, driving him back into the street with a flurry of blows and kicks.
‘You can starve!’ Joscelyn screamed at the consul. ‘Starve and shiver. Bastard!’ He punched the old man so hard that Lorret’s jaw was broken. The consul lay in the wet gutter, his official robes soaking with the ash-blackened water. A young woman came from the undamaged house behind him; she had glazed eyes and a flushed face. She vomited suddenly, pouring the contents of her stomach into the gutter beside Lorret.
‘Get out!’ Joscelyn screamed at her. ‘Put your filth somewhere else!’
Then Joscelyn saw that Guy Vexille, Robbie Douglas and a dozen men-at-arms were staring open-mouthed at the castle. Just staring. The rain was lessening and the smoke was clearing and the castle’s shattered frontage could be seen again, and Joscelyn turned to see what they gazed at. He could see the armour hanging from the keep’s battlements, the mail coats stripped from his dead men and hung there as an insult, and he could see the captured shields, including Robbie’s red heart of Douglas, hanging upside down among the hauberks, but Guy Vexille was not staring at those trophies. Instead he was looking at the lower rampart, at the half-broken parapet above the castle gate, and there, in the rain, was gold.
Robbie Douglas risked the archers in the castle by walking up the street to see the golden object more clearly. No arrows came at him. The castle appeared deserted, silent. He walked almost to the square until he could see the thing clearly and he peered in disbelief and then, with tears in his eyes, he fell to his knees. ‘The Grail,’ he said, and suddenly other men had joined him and were kneeling on the cobbles.
‘The what?’ Joscelyn asked.
Guy Vexille pulled off his hat and knelt. He stared upwards and it seemed to him that the precious cup glowed.
For in the smoke and destruction, shining like the truth, was the Grail.
—«»—«»—«»—
The cannon did not fire again that day. Joscelyn was not happy about that. The new Count of Berat did not care that the defenders had a cup, they could have had the whole true cross, the tail of Jonah’s whale, the baby Jesus’s swaddling clothes, the crown of thorns and the pearly gates themselves and he would happily have buried the whole lot under the castle’s shattered masonry, but the priests with the besiegers went on their knees to him, and Guy Vexille did the same, and that obeisance from a man he feared gave Joscelyn pause.
‘We have to talk with them,’ Vexille said.
‘They are heretics,’ the priests said, ‘and the Grail must be saved from them.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Joscelyn demanded. ‘Just ask for it?’
‘You must bargain for it,’ Guy Vexille said.
‘Bargain!’ Joscelyn bridled at the thought, then an idea came. The Grail? If the thing existed, and everyone about him believed it did, and if it really was here, in his domain, then there was money to be made from it. The cup would need to go to Berat, of course, where fools like his dead uncle would pay mightily to see it. Big jars at the castle gate, he thought, and lines of pilgrims throwing in money to be allowed to see the Grail. There was, he thought, profit in that gold, and plainly the garrison wanted to talk for, after displaying the cup, they had shot no more arrows.
‘I will go and talk with them,’ Vexille said.
‘Why you?’ Joscelyn demanded.
‘Then you go, my lord,’ Vexille said deferentially.
But Joscelyn did not want to face the men who had held him prisoner. The next time he saw them he wanted them to be dead, and so he waved Vexille on his way. ‘But you’ll offer them nothing!’ he warned. ‘Not unless I agree to it.’
‘I will make no agreement,’ Vexille said, ‘without your permission.’
Orders were given that the crossbowmen were not to shoot and then Guy Vexille, bare-headed and without any weapons, walked up the main street past the smoking wreckage of the houses. A man was sitting in an alley and Vexille noticed that his face was sweating and blotched with dark lumps and his clothes were stained with vomit. Guy hated such sights. He was a fastidious man, scrupulously clean, and the stench and diseases of mankind repelled him: they were evidences of a sinful world, one that had forgotten God. Then he saw his cousin come onto the broken rampart and take the Grail away.
A moment later Thomas crossed the rubble that filled the gateway. Lik
e Guy he wore no sword, nor had he brought the Grail. He wore his mail, which was rusting now, frayed at the hem and crusted with dirt. He had a short beard for he had long lost his razor and it gave him, Guy thought, a grim and desperate look. ‘Thomas,’ Guy greeted him, then gave a small bow, ‘cousin.’
Thomas looked past Vexille to see three priests watching from halfway down the street. ‘The last priests who came here excommunicated me,’ he said.
‘What the Church does,’ Guy said, ‘it can undo. Where did you find it?’
For a moment it looked as if Thomas would not answer, then he shrugged. ‘Under the thunder,’ he said, ‘at the lightning’s heart.’
Guy Vexille smiled at the evasion. ‘I do not even know,’ he said, ‘whether you have the Grail. Perhaps it is a trick? You put a golden cup on the wall and we just make an assumption. Suppose we are wrong? Prove it to me, Thomas.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Then show it to me,’ Guy begged. He spoke humbly.
‘Why should I?’
‘Because the Kingdom of Heaven depends on it.’
Thomas seemed to sneer at that answer, then he looked curiously at his cousin. ‘Tell me something first,’ he said.
‘If I can.’
‘Who was the tall, scarred man I killed at the mill?’
Guy Vexille frowned for it seemed a very strange question, but he could see no trap in it and he wanted to humour Thomas so he answered. ‘His name was Charles Bessières,’ he said cautiously, ‘and he was the brother of Cardinal Bessières. Why do you ask?’
‘Because he fought well,’ Thomas lied.
‘Is that all?’
‘He fought well, and he very nearly took the Grail from me,’ Thomas embroidered the untruth. ‘I just wondered who he was.’ He shrugged and tried to work out why a brother of Cardinal Bessières should have been carrying the Grail.
‘He was not a man worthy of having the Grail,’ Guy Vexille said.
‘Am I?’ Thomas demanded.
Guy ignored the hostile question. ‘Show it to me,’ he pleaded. ‘For the love of God, Thomas, show it to me.’
Thomas hesitated, then he turned and raised a hand and Sir Guillaume, armoured in captured plate from head to foot and with a drawn sword, came from the castle with Genevieve. She carried the Grail and had a wine skin tied to her belt. ‘Not too close to him,’ Thomas warned her, then looked back to Guy. ‘You remember Sir Guillaume d’Evecque? Another man sworn to kill you?’
‘We are meeting under a truce,’ Guy reminded him, then he nodded at Sir Guillaume whose only response was to spit on the cobbles. Guy ignored the gesture, gazing instead at the cup in the girl’s hands.
It was a thing of ethereal, magical beauty. A thing of lace-like delicacy. A thing so far removed from this smoke-stinking town with its rat-chewed corpses that Guy had no doubts that this was the Grail. It was the most sought-after object in Christendom, the key to heaven itself, and Guy almost dropped to his knees in reverence.
Genevieve took off the pearl-hung lid and tipped the stemmed gold goblet over Thomas’s hands. A thick green glass cup fell out of the golden filigree and Thomas held it reverently. ‘This is the Grail, Guy,’ he said. ‘That golden confection was just made to hold it, but this is it.’
Guy watched it hungrily, but dared make no move towards it. Sir Guillaume wanted only the smallest excuse to lift his sword and ram it forward and Guy had no doubt that archers were watching him from behind the slits in the high tower. He said nothing as Thomas took the skin from Genevieve’s belt and poured some wine into the cup. ‘See?’ Thomas said, and Guy saw that the green had darkened with the wine, but that it also now possessed a golden sheen that had not been there before. Thomas let the wine skin drop to the ground and then, with his eyes on his cousin’s eyes, he lifted the cup and drained it. ‘“Hie est enim sanguis rneus,”’ Thomas said angrily. They were the words of Christ. ‘This is my blood.’ Then he gave the cup to Genevieve and she walked away with it, followed by Sir Guillaume. ‘A heretic drinks from the Grail,’ Thomas said, ‘and there’s worse to come.’
‘Worse?’ Guy asked gently.
‘We shall put it under the gate arch,’ Thomas said. ‘And when your cannon brings down the rest of the bastions then the Grail will be crushed. What you’ll get is a twisted piece of gold and some broken glass.’
Guy Vexille smiled. The Grail cannot be broken, Thomas.’
‘Then you risk that belief,’ Thomas said angrily and turned away.
‘Thomas! Thomas, I beg you,’ Guy called. ‘Listen to me.’
Thomas wanted to keep walking, but he reluctantly turned back for his cousin’s tone had been pleading. It had been the voice of a broken man, and what did it hurt Thomas if he heard more? He had made the threat. If the attack continued then the Grail would be broken. Now, he supposed, he must let his cousin make whatever offer he wanted, though he did not intend to make that easy. ‘Why should I listen,’ he asked, ‘to the man who killed my father? Who killed my woman?’
‘Listen to a child of God,’ Guy said.
Thomas almost laughed, but he stayed.
Guy took a breath, framing what he wanted to say. He stared up at the sky where low clouds threatened more rain. ‘The world is beset by evil,’ he said, ‘and the Church is corrupt, and the devil does his work unhindered. If we have the Grail we can change that. The Church can be cleansed, a new crusade can scour the world of sin. It will bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.’ He had been staring skywards as he spoke, but now looked at Thomas. ‘That is all I want, Thomas.’
‘So my father had to die for that?’
Guy nodded. ‘I wish it had not been necessary, but he was hiding the Grail. He was an enemy of God.’
Thomas hated Guy then, hated him more than ever, hated him even though his cousin was speaking low and reasonably, his voice filled with emotion. ‘Tell me,’ Thomas said, ‘what you want now.’
‘Your friendship,’ Guy said.
‘Friendship!’
‘The Count of Berat is evil,’ Guy said. ‘He’s a bully, a fool, a man who ignores God. If you lead your men out of the castle I will turn on him. By nightfall, Thomas, you and I will be lords of this place, and tomorrow we shall go to Berat and reveal the Grail and invite all men of God to come to us.’ Guy paused, watching Thomas’s hard face for any reaction to the words. ‘March north with me,’ he went on, ‘Paris will be next. We shall rid ourselves of that foolish Valois King. We shall take the world, Thomas, and open it to the love of God. Think of it, Thomas! All the grace and beauty of God poured onto the world. No more sadness, no more sin, just the harmony of God in a world of peace.’
Thomas pretended to think about it, then frowned. ‘I’ll attack Joscelyn with you,’ he said, ‘but I would want to talk with Abbot Planchard before I marched north.’
‘With Abbot Planchard?’ Guy could not hide his surprise. ‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a good man,’ Thomas said, ‘and I trust his advice.’
Guy nodded. ‘Then I shall send for him. I can have him here by tomorrow.’
Thomas felt such anger then that he could have attacked Guy with his bare fists, but he held the rage in check. ‘You can have him here by tomorrow?’ he asked instead.
‘If he’ll come.’
‘Doesn’t have much choice, does he?’ Thomas said, the fury in his voice now. ‘He’s dead, cousin, and you killed him. I was there, in the ossuary, hiding. I heard you!’
Guy looked astonished, then incensed, but he had nothing to say.
‘You lie like a child,’ Thomas said scornfully. ‘You lie about one good man’s death? Then you lie about everything.’ He turned and walked away.
‘Thomas!’ Guy called after him.
Thomas turned back. ‘You want the Grail, cousin? Then you fight for it. Maybe just you and me? You and your sword against me and my weapon.’
‘Your weapon?’ Guy asked.
‘The Grail,’ Thomas said curtly and, ignorin
g his cousin’s pleas, walked back to the castle.
—«»—«»—«»—
‘So what did he offer?’ Sir Guillaume asked.
‘All the kingdoms of the earth,’ Thomas said.
Sir Guillaume sniffed suspiciously. ‘I smell something holy in that answer.’
Thomas smiled. ‘The devil took Christ into the wilderness and offered him all the kingdoms of the earth if he would give up his mission.’
‘He should have accepted,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘and saved us a pile of trouble. So we can’t leave?’
‘Not unless we fight our way out.’
‘The ransom money?’ Sir Guillaume asked hopefully.
‘I forgot to ask about it.’
‘Much bloody use you are,’ Sir Guillaume retorted in English, then he switched back to French and sounded more cheerful. ‘But at least we have the Grail, eh? That’s something!’
‘Do we?’ Genevieve asked.
The two men turned to her. They were in the upper hall, bare of furniture now because the table and stools had been taken down to reinforce the barricade in the courtyard. All that was left was the big iron-bound chest that had the garrison’s money inside and there was plenty of that after a season of raiding. Genevieve sat on the chest; she had the beautiful golden Grail with its green cup, but she also had the box that Thomas had brought from St Sever’s monastery, and now she took the cup from its golden nest and placed it in the box. The lid would not close because the glass cup was too big. The box, whatever it might have been made for, had not been made for this Grail. ‘Do we have the Grail?’ she asked, and Thomas and Sir Guillaume stared at her as she showed how the cup would not fit in the box.
The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic Page 113