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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Vexille’s men at the foot of the stairs should have stopped the charge, but they were taken aback by the sight of Guy staggering down, by Fulk’s screaming and by the stench of fire and burning flesh and they backed out of the door as the enemy came howling out of the smoke. Thomas only led five men, but they were enough to panic Guy’s small band who seized their master and fled back into the courtyard’s fresh air. Thomas followed, thrusting the lance forward, and he caught Guy plumb on the breastplate so that he was thrown back down the outer steps to sprawl on the courtyard’s stones. Then the arrows came from the battlements, plunging through mail and plate. The attackers could not go back up the steps, because Thomas was there and the doorway was filled with armed men and smoke, and so they fled. They ran for the town and the arrows followed them through the archway and hurled two of them onto the rubble. Then Thomas shouted for the archers to stop shooting. ‘Rest strings!’ he yelled. ‘You hear me, Sam? Rest strings! Rest strings!’

  He let the shortened lance fall and held out his hand. Genevieve gave him his bow and Thomas took a broad-head from his arrow bag and looked down the steps to where his cousin, abandoned by his men, struggled to stand in his heavy black armour. ‘You and me,’ Thomas said, ‘your weapon against mine.’

  Guy looked left and right and saw no help. The courtyard was stinking of vomit, dung and blood. It was thick with bodies. He backed away, going to the gap at the edge of the barricade and Thomas followed, coming down the steps and staying within a dozen paces of his enemy. ‘Lost your appetite for battle?’ Thomas asked him.

  Guy rushed him then, hoping to get within the range of his long sword’s blade, but the broad-head hit him smack on the breastplate and he was brutally checked by it, stopped dead by the sheer force of the big bow, and Thomas already had another arrow on the string. ‘Try again,’ Thomas said.

  Guy backed away. Back through the barricade, past Sir Guillaume and his two men who did nothing to interfere with him. Thomas’s archers had come down from the battlements and were on the steps, watching. ‘Is your armour good?’ Thomas asked Guy. ‘It needs to be. Mind you, I’m shooting broad-heads. They won’t pierce your armour.’ He loosed again and the arrow hammered into the plates at Guy’s groin and bent him over and threw him back onto the rubble. Thomas had another arrow ready.

  ‘So what will you do now?’ Thomas asked. ‘I’m not defenceless like Planchard. Like Eleanor. Like my father. So come and kill me.’

  Guy got to his feet and backed over the rubble. He knew he had men in the town and if he could just reach them then he would be safe, but he dared not turn his back. He knew he would fetch an arrow if he did and a man’s pride did not allow a wound in the back. You died facing the enemy. He was outside the castle now, backing slowly across the open space and he prayed one of his men would have the wit to fetch a crossbow and finish Thomas off, but Thomas was still coming towards him, smiling, and the smile was of a man come to his sweet revenge.

  ‘This one’s a bodkin,’ Thomas said, ‘and it’s going to hit you in the chest. You want to raise the shield?’

  ‘Thomas,’ Guy said, then raised the small shield before he could say anything more because he had seen Thomas draw the big bow, and the string was released and the arrow, headed with heavy oak behind the needle-sharp blade, slammed through the shield, through the breastplate, mail and leather to lodge against one of Guy’s ribs. The impact jarred him back three paces, but he managed to keep his feet, though the shield was now pinned to his chest and Thomas had another arrow nocked.

  ‘In the belly this time,’ Thomas said.

  ‘I’m your cousin,’ Guy said, and he wrenched the shield free, tearing the arrow head from his chest, but he was too late and the arrow punched his stomach, driving through plate steel and iron mail and greased leather, and this arrow sank deep. ‘The first was for my father,’ Thomas said, ‘that one was for my woman, and this one’s for Planchard.’ He shot again and the arrow pierced Guy’s gorget and hurled him back onto the cobbles. He still had the sword and he tried to lift it as Thomas came close. He also tried to speak, but his throat was filled with blood. He shook his head, wondering why his sight was going misty, and he felt Thomas kneel on his sword arm and he felt the punctured gorget being prised up and he tried to protest, but only spewed blood, then Thomas put the dagger under the gorget and rammed it deep into Guy’s gullet. ‘And that one’s for me,’ Thomas said.

  Sam and a half-dozen archers joined him by the body. ‘Jake’s dead,’ Sam said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Half the bloody world’s dead,’ Sam said.

  Maybe the world was ending, Thomas thought. Perhaps the terrible prophecies of the Book of Revelation were coming true. The four dread horsemen were riding. The rider on the white horse was God’s revenge on an evil world, the red horse carried war, the black horse was saddled by famine while the pale horse, the worst, brought plague and death. And perhaps the only thing that could turn the riders away was the Grail, but he did not have the Grail. So the horsemen would run free. Thomas stood, picked up his bow and started down the street.

  Guy’s surviving men were not staying to fight the archers. They fled like Joscelyn’s men, going to find a place where no plague filled the streets, and Thomas stalked a town of the dying and the dead, a town of smoke and filth, a place of weeping. He carried an arrow on the string, but no one challenged him. A woman called for help, a child cried in a doorway, and then Thomas saw a man-at-arms, still in mail, and he half drew the bow, then saw the man had no weapons, only a pail of water. He was an older man, grey-haired. ‘You must be Thomas?’ the man said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Sir Henri Courtois.’ He pointed at a nearby house. ‘Your friend is in there. He’s sick.’

  Robbie lay on a fouled bed. He was shaking with a fever and his face was dark and swollen. He did not recognize Thomas. ‘You poor bastard,’ Thomas said. He gave his bow to Sam. ‘And take that too, Sam,’ he said, pointing to the parchment that lay on a low stool beside the bed, and then he lifted Robbie in his arms and carried him back up the hill. ‘You should die among friends,’ he told the unconscious man. The siege, at last, was over.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  Sir Guillaume died. Many died. Too many to bury, so Thomas had the corpses carried to a ditch in the fields across the river and he covered them with brushwood and set the heap on fire, though there was not enough fuel to burn the bodies, which were left half roasted. Wolves came and ravens darkened the sky above the ditch that was death’s rich feast.

  Folk came back to the town. They had sought refuge in places that were struck as badly as Castillon d’Arbizon. The plague was everywhere, they said. Berat was a town of the dead, though whether Joscelyn lived no one knew and Thomas did not care. Winter brought frost and at Christmas a friar brought news that the pestilence was now in the north. ‘It is everywhere,’ the friar said, ‘everyone is dying.’ Yet not everyone died. Philin’s son, Galdric, recovered, but just after Christmas his father caught the disease and was dead in three agonizing days.

  Robbie lived. It had seemed he must die for there had been nights when he appeared not to breathe, yet he lived and slowly he recovered. Genevieve looked after him, feeding him when he was weak and washing him when he was filthy, and when he tried to apologize to her she hushed him. ‘Speak to Thomas,’ she said.

  Robbie, still weak, went to Thomas and he thought the archer looked older and fiercer. Robbie did not know what to say, but Thomas did. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘When you did what you did, you thought you were doing the right thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ Robbie said.

  ‘Then you did no wrong,’ Thomas said flatly, ‘and that’s an end of it.’

  ‘I should not have taken that,’ Robbie said, pointing to the parchment on Thomas’s lap, the Grail writings left by Thomas’s father.

  ‘I got it back,’ Thomas said, ‘and now I’m using it to teach Genevieve to read. It isn’t any use for anything el
se.’

  Robbie stared into the fire. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Thomas ignored the apology. ‘And what we do now is wait until everyone is well, then we go home.’

  They were ready to leave by St Benedict’s Day. Eleven men would go home to England, and Galdric, who had no parents now, would travel as Thomas’s servant. They would go home rich, for most of the money from their plunders was still intact, but what they would find in England Thomas did not know.

  He spent the last night in Castillon d’Arbizon listening as Genevieve stumbled over the words of his father’s parchment. He had decided to burn it after this night, for it had led him nowhere. He was making Genevieve read the Latin, for there was little English or French in the document, and though she did not understand the words it did give her practice in deciphering the letters. ‘“Virga tua et bacillus tuus ipsa consolobuntur me,”‘ she read slowly, and Thomas nodded and knew the words Calix Meus Inebrians were not far ahead, and he thought that the cup had got him drunk, drunk and wild and all to no purpose. Planchard had been right. The search made men mad.

  ‘“Pono coram me mensam,’” Genevieve read, ‘“ex adverso hostium meorum.’”

  ‘It’s not pono,’ Thomas said, ‘but pones. “Pones coram me mensam ex adverso hostium meorum.’” He knew it by heart and now translated for her. ‘“Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies.”‘

  She frowned, a long pale finger on the writing. ‘No,’ she insisted, ‘it does say “pono”.’ She held out the manuscript to prove it.

  The firelight flickered on the words that did indeed say ‘pono coram me mensam ex adverso hostium meorum.’ His father had written it and Thomas must have looked at the line a score of times, yet he had never noticed the mistake. His familiarity with the Latin had led him to skip across the words, seeing them in his head rather than on the parchment. Pono. ‘I prepare a table.’ Not thou preparest, but I prepare, and Thomas stared at the word and knew it was not a mistake.

  And knew he had found the Grail.

  EPILOGUE

  The Grail

  The breaking waves drove up the shingle, hissed white and scraped back. On and on, ever and ever, the grey-green sea beating at England’s coast.

  A small rain fell, soaking the new grass where lambs played and buck hares danced beside the hedgerows where anemones and stitchwort grew.

  The pestilence had come to England. Thomas and his three companions had ridden through empty villages and heard cows bellowing in agony for there was no one to take the milk from their swollen udders. At some villages archers waited at barricaded streets to turn all strangers away and Thomas had dutifully ridden around such places. They had seen pits dug for the dead; pits half filled with corpses that had received no last rites. The pits were edged with flowers for it was springtime.

  In Dorchester there was a dead man in the street and no one to bury him. Some houses had been nailed shut and painted with a red cross to show that the folk inside were sick and must be left there to die or recover. Outside the town the fields went unploughed, seed stayed in the barns of dead farmers, and yet there were larks above the grass and the kingfishers darting along the streams and plovers tumbling beneath the clouds.

  Sir Giles Marriott, the old lord of the manor, had died before the plague struck, and his grave was in the village church, but if any of the surviving villagers saw Thomas ride by, they did not greet him. They sheltered from God’s wrath and Thomas, Genevieve, Robbie and Galdric rode on down the lane until they were beneath Lipp Hill and ahead was the sea, and the shingle, and the valley where Hookton had once stood. It had been burned by Sir Guillaume and Guy Vexille back when they were allies, and now there was nothing but thorns looping over the lumpy remains of the cottages, and hazels and thistles and nettles growing in the scorched black, roofless walls of the church.

  Thomas had been in England for a fortnight. He had ridden to the Earl of Northampton, and he had knelt to his lord who had first had servants examine Thomas to make sure he did not carry the dark marks of the pestilence, and Thomas had paid his lord one-third of the money they had brought from Castillon d’Arbizon, and then he had given him the golden cup. ‘It was made for the Grail, my lord,’ he said, ‘but the Grail is gone.’

  The Earl admired the cup, turning it and holding it up so that it caught the light, and he was amazed at its beauty. ‘Gone?’ he asked.

  ‘The monks at St Sever’s,’ Thomas lied, ‘believe it was taken to heaven by an angel whose wing had been mended there. It is gone, lord.’

  And the Earl had been satisfied, for he was the possessor of a great treasure even if it was not the Grail, and Thomas, promising to return, had gone away with his companions. Now he had come to the village of his childhood, the place he had learned to master the bow, and to the church where his father, the mad Father Ralph, had preached to the gulls and hidden his great secret.

  It was still there. Hidden in the grass and nettles that grew between the flagstones of the old church, a thing discarded as being of no value. It was a clay bowl which Father Ralph had used to hold the mass wafers. He would put the bowl on the altar, cover it with a linen cloth and carry it home when mass was done. ‘I prepare a table’, he had written, and the altar was the table and the bowl was the thing he set it with and Thomas had handled it a hundred times and thought nothing of it, and when he had last been in Hookton he had picked it up from the ruins and then, disdaining it, he had thrown it back among the weeds.

  Now he found it again among the nettles and he took it to Genevieve who placed it in the wooden box and closed the lid, and the fit of the thing was so perfect that the box did not even rattle when it was shaken. The base of the bowl matched the slight discoloured circle in the old paint of the box’s interior. The one had been made for the other. ‘What do we do?’ Genevieve asked. Robbie and Galdric were outside the church, exploring the ridges and lumps that betrayed where the old cottages had been. Neither knew why Thomas had come back to Hookton. Galdric did not care, and Robbie, quieter now, was content to stay with Thomas until they all rode north to pay Lord Outhwaite the ransom that would release Robbie back to Scotland. If Outhwaite lived.

  ‘What do we do?’ Genevieve asked again, her voice a whisper.

  ‘What Planchard advised me,’ Thomas said, but first he took a wine skin from his bag, poured a little wine into the bowl and made Genevieve drink from it, then he took the bowl and drank himself. He smiled at her. That rids us of excommunication,’ he said, for they had drunk from the bowl that caught Christ’s blood from the cross.

  ‘Is it really the Grail?’ Genevieve asked.

  Thomas took it outside. He held Genevieve’s hand as they walked towards the sea and, when they reached the shingle inside the hook where the Lipp Stream curved across the beach by the place where the fishing boats had been hauled up when Hookton still had villagers, he smiled at her, then hurled the bowl as hard as he could. He threw it across the stream to the hook of shingle on the far side and the bowl crunched down into the stones, bounced, ran a few feet and was still.

  They waded the stream, climbed the bank and found the bowl undamaged.

  ‘What do we do?’ Genevieve asked again.

  It would cause nothing but madness, Thomas thought. Men would fight for it, lie for it, cheat for it, betray for it and die for it. The Church would make money from it. It would cause nothing but evil, he thought, for it stirred horror from men’s hearts, so he would do what Planchard had said he would do. ‘“Hurl it into the deepest sea,” he quoted the old abbot, ‘“down among the monsters, and tell no one.”‘

  Genevieve touched the bowl a last time, then kissed it and gave it back to Thomas who cradled it for a moment. It was just a bowl of peasant’s clay, red-brown in colour, thickly made and rough to the touch, not perfectly round, with a small indentation on one side where the potter had damaged the unfired clay. It was worth pennies, perhaps nothing, yet it was the greatest treasure of Christendom and he kisse
d it once and then he drew back his strong archer’s right arm, ran down to the sucking sea’s edge and threw it as far and as hard as he could. He hurled it away and it span for an instant above the grey waves, seemed to fly a heartbeat longer as though it were reluctant to let go of mankind, and then the bowl was gone.

  Just a white splash, instantly healed, and Thomas took Genevieve’s hand and turned away.

  He was an archer, and the madness was over. He was free.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  I have allowed a surfeit of rats to appear here and there in Heretic, though I am persuaded they were probably innocent of spreading the plague. There is argument among the medical historians as to whether the Black Death (named for the colour of the buboes, or swellings, which disfigured the sick) was bubonic plague, which would have been spread by fleas from rats, or some form of anthrax, which would have come from cattle. Fortunately for me Thomas and his companions did not need to make that diagnosis. The medieval explanation for the pestilence was mankind’s sin added to an unfortunate astrological conjunction of the planet Saturn, always a baleful influence. It caused panic and puzzlement for it was an unknown disease that had no cure. It spread north from Italy, killing its victims within three or four days and mysteriously sparing others. This was the first appearance of the plague in Europe. There had been other pandemics, of course, but nothing on this scale, and it would continue its ravages, at intervals, for another four hundred years. The victims did not call it the Black Death, that name was not to be used till the 1800s, they just knew it as the ‘pestilence’.

  It killed at least one-third of the European population.

  Some communities suffered a mortality bill of more than fifty per cent, but the overall figure of one-third seems to be accurate. It struck as hard in rural areas as in towns and whole villages vanished. Some of them can still be detected as ridges and ditches in farmland, while in other places there are lone churches, standing in fields with no apparent purpose. They are the plague churches, all that remain of the old villages.