by Alex Scarrow
To his left, one of his men, one of his recruited garrison, a man perhaps only five years older, grinned at him, showing no more than a handful of yellowing teeth framed by a blond beard. He swung his sword down on to the man in front of him, its edge biting the curve between shoulder and neck. Dark blood arced into the air as he yanked his sword free.
Liam felt his shield suddenly lurch downwards. He saw the fingers of a hand clad in a thick leather glove on the rim, yanking it roughly down and outward. Caught unawares, Liam found his left hand losing its grip on the shield’s handle.
Jay-zus, no!
His shield clattered on to the rubble at his feet and he had only the briefest moment to register the florid, hot face of the man in front of him. A face he was never going to forget. He was sure, as long as he lived … this man was destined to live on in his nightmares.
Liam’s response was ungainly and entirely reflexive, a lunge of desperate panic now that his shield had been ripped away and he felt naked and exposed, despite his thick leather quilted underlay and the heavy mail on top of it.
In the terrible slow-motion of heightened awareness, he saw the heavy blade of his sword swing down and bite deep into the side of the man’s neck.
Time seemed to slow down to almost a complete stop, as their eyes met. The mercenary’s cornflower blue, wide with surprise — slowly realizing that the blade lodged in his neck signalled the moment his life had come to an end.
The noise of battle going on around them seemed to be a hundred miles away. All Liam could hear was the roaring of blood through his veins, the hammer thump of his heart, the sound of his panting breath in his ears … and this man before him, now spitting dark gouts of crimson from his mouth and gurgling something — a defiant curse, a last prayer?
Liam found himself mouthing I’msosorry to him, as if the dying man would actually understand, might even forgive him.
Then the moment was gone: slow-motion back to normal speed, Liam’s ears once again filled with the sound of grunts and cries, scraping and battering clang of metal on metal. The man with cornflower-blue eyes grabbed a firm hold of the blade with both hands, as if he was attempting to pull it out of him. But his strength was fast bleeding out, and Liam watched …
the man I just killed
… slowly collapse to his knees in front of him, then fall backwards, disappearing amid the churning quagmire of struggling bodies, taking Liam’s sword with him.
Liam found himself empty-handed as another thickset and red-faced man, sweating under forty pounds of mail armour, took his place. Liam cursed as the man grinned at his good fortune and pulled back to skewer him on the tip of his halberd.
Liam’s face screwed up with anticipation, his arms held out in front of him in a vain attempt to fend off the point. But then, all of sudden he felt himself being lifted off the ground by the scruff of his mail vest and tossed backwards down the clattering pile of rubble towards the marketplace.
He cracked the side of his head on the sharp rim of a jagged piece of masonry.
It left him stunned, his ears ringing. He watched dark shapes stepping over him, clambering up the slope to join the press of men in the breach; further above, the darting flicker of arrows heading into and out of the city; and high up in the rich blue sky a pair of swallows chasing each other in slow playful circles, oblivious to the carnage beneath them.
A face full of bristles and a mouth containing a solitary tooth leaned over him. ‘Ye alroight down there, sire?’ Liam vaguely recognized the face as one of Nottingham’s blacksmiths.
He nodded. A rough hand grasped his and pulled him up on to legs that wobbled uncertainly.
‘I–I lost my weapon and my shield …’ he said.
‘Not to worry,’ the man grinned. ‘There’ll be plenty more to pick up soon enough, sire,’ he said, then turned away, scrambling up the gravel to join the thick ruck of men fighting to hold the breach.
At the top, Liam thought he caught sight of Bob: the back of his head, his broad shoulders; one arm swinging a long-handled axe to and fro like a scythe.
His head was swimming with pain, a sharp stabbing agony that almost made it impossible to gather together a single coherent thought.
But he just about managed one.
When the hell’s Becks coming back?
John watched the distant struggle from the balcony of the keep’s Great Hall. From this far away the squirming press of men looked like insects fighting over a dung hill.
Every last man of the garrison was over there, and a good proportion of the town’s menfolk, all fighting for their town.
And fighting for me.
He felt sick of his weakness, his cowardice. The sight of blood had always left him in a cold dread.
You have not the heart of a king — that’s why you shall never be one; something Richard had once said to him back when their father had been alive.
‘Perhaps you are right,’ John whispered miserably. And yet … he thought he’d caught a glimpse of something inside himself. Perhaps ‘courage’ was too grand a word for it, but it was a firmness of resolve, perhaps even a hint of defiance as he’d parlayed with Richard earlier.
I was strong then, was I not?
Strong?
He stroked his beard absently with a hand that trembled like an autumn leaf ready to take flight on a fresh breeze. ‘No … you are just a weak fool,’ he answered himself.
‘Sire?’
John looked over his shoulder to see one of the keep’s squires standing beside the drapes. A pale-faced, effeminate man in expensive linens. ‘Sire? Should we — should we not close the castle’s gates? Should they break through, we would be safe in the castle a while longer!’
John felt something deep inside him turn away in disgust.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Have you a sword and mail?’
The squire’s eyes rounded. ‘Sire?’
‘You heard.’
‘I–I — I suppose I have … somewhere …’
‘Then fetch it.’
‘F-fetch it, S-sire?’
‘Yes.’ John took a deep breath to steady the timbre of his voice. ‘We shall be joining them.’
CHAPTER 78
2001, New York
Maddy leaned against the crumbling brick wall of their transplanted archway, watching the others standing over on the grass-tufted hummocks of silt along the East River.
‘Madelaine?’
She turned round to see Becks standing in the opening beneath the fully raised shutter.
‘You all done?’
Becks nodded an affirmative.
‘If I lock your hard-drive partition again, what you know — what you’ve just read, it’s all gonna be safe in there, right?’
‘That is correct.’
Maddy nodded thoughtfully. No one else would know what secret message was hidden in the Grail, not even Becks herself.
She’d already made her mind up on the matter: she was going to unlock Becks’s partition with Foster present; they’d both hear what she had to say. And then together figure out what it meant, what they’d have to do about it, if anything.
‘Ready to lock that information away?’
‘Affirmative.’
She uttered the three words quietly. Becks blinked several times then cocked her head. Her voice immediately returned to its softer, more feminine tone. ‘I register thirty-seven minutes of absent data …’
Maddy raised her hand. ‘It’s OK, I’ve been talking with your alter ego.’
Becks consulted something inside her mind. ‘My code-word-locked partition?’
‘Yup.’ Maddy looked at the others. ‘You decoded the Holy Grail successfully. It’s now safely locked away in your head.’ Maddy laughed. ‘Not even you can get in there.’
Becks nodded approvingly. ‘A sensible precaution, Maddy.’
She was about to say a thank-you when she heard Sal’s voice calling out. She could just make out her small outline in the twilight, tur
ning away from the river towards her.
‘What’s up?’ she called out.
She replied something but a sudden freshening breeze carried it away; ripples of cats’ paws danced across the mirror-smooth water towards them as a fresh breeze stirred the millpond calm.
Something’s coming our way.
Maddy looked at the sky and saw it: what looked like a rolling stormfront rushing towards them from out of the Atlantic Ocean.
‘Hurry!’ she shouted at Sal. Sal in turn beckoned the other two men to hasten after her up the shingle towards their jagged brick bunker perched among the sandy dunes.
Their feet clattered off soft sand on to the broken fragments of pavement and alleyway that had transported to this reality along with the archway, just as the black stormcloud rolled over Manhattan Island.
‘Tis the Lord’s coming,’ gasped Cabot sombrely.
‘No,’ said Sal. ‘Just a time wave.’
Among the churning black clouds crossing the river towards them, Maddy thought she saw a dozen different city skylines flicker over Manhattan: one moment, towering pointed church steeples topped with cruciforms that reached for the sky, then the next they formed into the rounded bulge of mosques and onion-shaped minarets topped with crescents.
‘My God … Do you see that?’ said Adam, his voice competing with a growing thundering boom.
Wind danced around them, stinging their cheeks with whipped-up sand as they stood in the opening to the archway watching the world in flux. And then, the wall of undulating reality was upon them.
A moment of pitch-black as the tidal wave swept over. And then it was gone.
The archway was entirely dark and lifeless, then a moment later a light winked on inside and they heard the soft chug of the generator starting up in the back room.
Outside, it was a calm evening once more; the gentle lapping of low tide punctuated by the lonely plaintive call of a solitary seagull.
Either side of her, Maddy heard both Adam and Cabot gasping. Cabot the worst of the two. ‘God help me,’ he gasped, ‘did I just witness the Devil’s work?’
‘A reality shift,’ said Becks. ‘Events in the past have changed the present.’
Maddy looked at the island of Manhattan. The lights of the fishing boats had gone. The lights of the town beyond, gone. Instead she could only make out a thick dark treeline descending down to the water’s edge. ‘There’s nothing there now!’
‘Just woods,’ said Sal.
Maddy bit her lip. ‘Becks?’
‘Yes?’
‘What on earth was going on when you left the twelfth century?’
‘King Richard was preparing to take the town of Nottingham from his brother.’
‘Oh great!’ snapped Maddy. ‘Is that, like, ourfault?’
‘No,’ said Adam, ‘that actually happened.’
‘Well, something’s still wrong back then!’
‘The holy scroll thing?’ Sal pointed towards the table. ‘Maybe we hung on to it too long?’
‘Yes,’ Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re probably right. We should get it back, ASAP.’
‘But … is that right?’ said Adam. ‘Does Richard get his hands on the Holy Grail, you know, in correct history?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t know! But it sure shouldn’t be here in the twenty-first century.’
‘It goes missing. It gets lost!’ Adam stepped back towards the table. ‘That’s how this becomes the stuff of myth and legends. That’s why people ended up thinking it was the cup of Christ! It gets lost, right?’
‘Maybe we should just, you know, rip it up?’ offered Sal.
They all stared in a prolonged silence at the unrolled parchment beneath the glare of the light above it.
‘King Richard would kill his brother,’ said Cabot finally. ‘If he does not get what he’s come for.’ The old man shook his head. ‘His anger … he would kill everyone in Nottingham.’
‘That doesn’t happen,’ said Adam. ‘Not in proper history. The siege of Nottingham lasts just a few days, John surrenders and Richard forgives him.’
Cabot looked at him. ‘Ye are certain?’
‘Oh yeah. John’s forgiven. In fact he gets to be king when Richard dies several years later.’
‘Then Richard must get what he wanted,’ said Maddy. ‘The Grail. Right? He gets it, he’s a happy boy. John is forgiven.’
‘But …’ Sal glanced at the table. ‘But isn’t there some big secret in there? Some secret that makes him go and do another one of them crusades which — ’
‘Which results in England’s complete financial ruin,’ cut in Adam, ‘and the invasion of the French king, Philip II.’
Maddy bit her lip with frustration. What do we do? Give it to him? Or not?
Another long silence, all eyes on her, waiting for her to make the call.
‘No.’ It was Becks who spoke finally. ‘No,’ she said again.
‘No — what?’ said Maddy impatiently.
‘King Richard will find nothing in the Grail.’
Adam suddenly grinned. ‘She’s right! Maybe it’s a — maybe it turns out to be a … a complete disappointment for him. Maybe what he ends up with is a useless scroll that he can’t decode because …’
‘Because the real grille was always the Treyarch Confession?’ said Maddy.
Adam nodded. ‘And perhaps what he has, that grille guarded by the knights in Acre, that was just a red herring. A fake.’
Maddy gave it a moment’s thought. ‘Yes! Why would there be another key? The one Richard has is no good!’
‘We should return it immediately,’ said Becks. ‘Reality is fluctuating.’
Sal nodded. ‘That last wave was really weird … like it couldn’t decide which way it wanted to go.’
‘Perchance the battle for Nottingham has begun?’ said Cabot. ‘And ’tis that the outcome of this battle hangs in the balance?’
Maddy wasn’t sure if this last time wave actually meant that. In fact she wasn’t sure what it meant, other than history was still somehow derailed. But then again … maybe the old monk was right. After all, the correct-history version of the siege of Nottingham hadn’t featured a lethal killing machine like Bob back there fighting on the side of John.
‘OK. My mind’s made up,’ she said. ‘Becks and you too, Mr Cabot — you’re taking the Grail back and you’ve got to get it to John to give to King Richard, somehow. Make him a happy boy — happy enough to let his brother live.’
She bit her lip.
Oh crud, is this the right call?
CHAPTER 79
1194, Nottingham
Liam had managed to work his way up beside Bob again, armed with another shield and this time an axe; both home-made by some artisan blacksmith. In between ferocious swings, he’d managed to tap Bob on the shoulder and let him know he was right there and watching his flank.
In front of Bob the descending slope of rubble of the collapsed section of wall was covered in a thick carpet of mangled bodies, bludgeoned and cleaved by his swooping axe blade. Either side of them stood the defenders, now mostly the citizens of Nottingham, dotted with one or two dozen remaining men of the garrison, in their burgundy and amber tunics.
The attackers’ momentum seemed to have been stalled for the moment; the front rank of men decorated with the colours of a dozen different coats of arms began to slowly recede down the ever more cumbersome and slippery mound that led up to the breach.
Liam allowed himself a hope that the attack had faltered, that the men of Richard’s gathered army had lost heart already. But it was soon obvious that the men had been summoned by the distant call of a horn. They were retreating to take a water break.
He found himself laughing, almost hysterically.
Bob glanced at him over his shoulder. ‘What is funny?’
‘It’s like half-time at a peil Ghaelach match,’ snorted Liam. The flitting of arrows overhead ceased as if archers on both sides had agreed to a temporary truce.
> He could see women and children with buckets slung on yokes over their shoulders moved swiftly among the ranks of Richard’s men as they dipped their helmets and grubby hands in and scooped and sloshed much-needed water into their mouths and on to their faces.
From behind Liam women also emerged from the market square with buckets and hides full of water, which the fighting men eagerly sipped and poured over their heads.
Of course it made sense to him. He realized how desperately hot he was under the leather and mail and, of course, he’d only fought briefly. Water, and an agreed break in the hostilities during which it could be distributed, was as much a part of the twelfth-century battlefield as anything else.
‘Bob,’ he said, rapping his knuckles on his back, ‘there’s water, you should get some while you can.’
Bob turned round. For the first time Liam saw the front of the shield strapped to the stump of his left arm. ‘Jay-zus, Bob — you seen that?’ The shield bristled arrows like a hairbrush. The enemy archers had been deliberately targeting him.
Several other arrows protruded from the front of his chest.
‘Oh boy … you need to get some of this seen to.’
‘The damage at this stage is acceptable, Liam,’ grunted Bob. ‘I am still at fifty-five per cent functioning capacity.’ His fat lips spread. ‘But you are correct … I could do with some water.’
Along with the other men, they took their turn scooping cooling handfuls of water out of the buckets being passed up to them, and it was as Bob was glugging water like a thirsty dog after a long walk that Liam heard a muted cheer rippling through the crowd gathered in the market square.
He saw bodies part respectfully and then finally, stepping on to the bottom of the mound of broken masonry, he recognized John, in heavy mail, holding a shield bearing the royal crest.
‘Sire!’ he called out.
John slowly picked his way up towards him. ‘Sheriff,’ he finally replied, winded from the exertion. He gathered his breath before speaking again. ‘’Tis hard enough walking in this, let alone climbing.’
The men of the garrison standing nearby, respectfully dropped to their knees.
