The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond tgq-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  'You think de Taillebourg will be in Dorset?' Robbie asked Thomas as they rode through a stinging rain shower.

  'I doubt it.'

  'So why are we going?'

  'Because he may go there eventually,' Thomas said, 'him and his damn servant.' He knew nothing about the servant except what Robbie had told him: that the man was fastidious, elegant, dark in looks and mysterious, but Robbie had never heard his name. Thomas, finding it hard to believe that a priest would have killed Eleanor, had persuaded himself that the servant was the killer and so planned to make the man suffer in agony. It was late afternoon when they ducked under the arch of Dorchester's east gate. A guard there, alarmed by their weapons, challenged them, but backed down when Thomas answered in French. It suggested he was an aristocrat and the guard sullenly let the two horse-men pass, then watched as they climbed East Street past All Saints' church and the county jail. The houses grew more prosperous as they neared the town's centre and, close to St Peter's church, the wool-merchants' homes might not have been out of place in London. Thomas could smell the shambles behind the houses where the butchers worked their trade, then he led Robbie into Cornhill, past the shop of the pewterer who had a stammer and a wall eye, then past the blacksmith where he had once bought some arrow heads. He knew most of these folk. The Dogman, a legless beggar who had come by his nickname because he lapped water from the River Cerne like a dog, was heaving down South Street on the wooden bricks strapped to his hands. Dick Adyn, brother of the town's jailer, was driving three sheep up the hill and paused to deliver a genial insult to Willie Palmer who was closing up his hosiery shop. A young priest hurried into an alley with a book wrapped in his arms and averted his eyes from a woman squatting in the gutter. A gust of wind blew woodsmoke low into the street. Dorcas Galton, brown hair drawn up into a bun, shook a rug out of an upstairs window and laughed aloud at something Dick Adyn said. They all spoke in the local accent, soft and broad and buzzing like Thomas's own, and he almost curbed the horse to speak with them, but Dick Advn glanced at him and then looked swiftly away and Dorcas slammed the window shut. Robbie looked formidable, but Thomas's gaunt looks were even more frightening and none of the townsfolk recognized him as the bastard son of Hook-ton's last priest. They would know him if he introduced himself, but war had changed Thomas. It had given him a hardness that repelled strangers. He had left Dorset a boy, but come back as one of Edward of England's prized killers and when he left the town by the south gate a constable gave both him and Robbie good riddance and told them to stay away. 'Be lucky the pair of you ain't in jail!' the man called, emboldened by his municipal coat of mail and ancient spear. Thomas stopped his horse, turned in the saddle and just stared at the man who suddenly found reason to duck back into the alley beside the gate. Thomas spat and rode on.

  'Your home town?' Robbie asked caustically.

  'Not now,' Thomas said and he wondered where home was these days, and for some odd reason La Roche-Derrien came unbidden to his thoughts and he found himself remembering Jeanette Chenier in her great house beside the River Jaudy, and that recollection of an old love made him feel guilty yet again for Eleanor. 'Where's your home town?' he asked Robbie rather than dwell on memories.

  'I grew up close to Langholm.'

  'Where's that?'

  'On the River Esk,' Robbie said, 'not far north of the border. It's a hard country, so it is. Not like this.'

  'This is a good countryside,' Thomas said mildly. He looked up at the high green walls of Maiden Castle where the devil played on All Hallow's Eve and where the corncrakes now made their harsh song. There were ripe blackberries in the hedgerows and, as the shadows lengthened, fox cubs skittering at the edge of the fields. A few miles on and the evening had almost shaded to night, but he could smell the sea now and he imagined that he could hear it, sucking and surging on the Dorset shingle. This was the ghost time of day when the souls of the dead flickered at the edges of men's sight and when good folk hurried home to their fire and to their thatch and to their bolted doors. A dog howled in one of the villages.

  Thomas had thought to ride to Down Mapperley where Sir Giles Marriott, the squire of Hookton among other villages, had his hall, but it was late and he did not think it wise to arrive at the hall after dark. Besides, Thomas wanted to see Hookton before he spoke with Sir Giles and so he turned his tired horse towards the sea and led Robbie under the high dark loom of Lipp Hill. 'I killed my first men up on that hill,' he boasted.

  'With the bow?'

  'Four of them,' Thomas said, 'with four arrows.' That was not entirely true for he must have shot seven or eight arrows, maybe more, but he had still killed four of the raiders who had come across the Channel to pillage Hookton. And now he was deep in the twilight shadow of Hookton's sea valley and he could see the fret of breaking waves flashing white in the late dusk as he rode down beside the stream to the place where his father had preached and died.

  No one lived there now. The raiders had left the village dead. The houses had been burned, the church roof had fallen and the villagers were buried in a grave-yard choked by nettles, thorn and thistles. It was four and a half years since that raiding party had landed at Hookton led by Thomas's cousin, Guy Vexille, the Count of Astarac, and by Eleanor's father, Sir Guillaume d'Evecque. Thomas had killed four of the crossbowmen and that had been the beginning of his life as an archer. He had abandoned his studies at Oxford and, until this moment, had never returned to Hookton. 'This was home,' he told Robbie.

  'What happened?'

  'The French happened,' Thomas said and gestured at the darkling sea. 'They sailed from Normandy.'

  'Jesus.' Robbie, for some reason, was surprised. He knew that the borderlands of England and Scotland were places where buildings were burned, cattle stolen, women raped and men killed, but he had never thought it happened this far south. He slid down from his horse and walked to a heap of nettles that had been a cottage. 'There was a village here?'

  'A fishing village,' Thomas said and he strode down what was once the street to where the nets had been mended and the women had smoked fish. His father's house was a heap of burned-out timbers, choked with bindweed now. The other cottages were the same, their thatch and wattle reduced to ash and soil. Only the church to the west of the stream was recognizable, its gaunt walls open to the sky. Thomas and Robbie tied their horses to hazel saplings in the graveyard, then took their baggage into the ruined church. It was already too dark to explore, yet Thomas could not sleep and so he went down to the beach and he remembered that Easter morning when the Norman ships had grounded on the shingle and the men had come shrieking in the dawn with swords and crossbows, axes and fire. They had come for the Grail. Guy Vexille believed it to be in his uncle's possession and so the Harlequin had put the village of Hookton to the sword. He had burned it, destroyed it and gone from it without the Grail.

  The stream made its little noise as it twisted inside the shingle Hook on its way to meet the great sound of the sea. Thomas sat down on the Hook, swathed in his new cloak, with the great black bow beside him. The chaplain, John Prvke, had talked of the Grail in the same awed tones that Father Hobbe had used when he spoke of the relic. The Grail, Father Pryke said, was not just the cup from which Christ had drunk wine at the Last Supper, but the vessel into which Christ's dying blood had poured from the cross.

  'Longinus,' Father Prvke had said in his excitable manner, 'was the centurion beneath the cross and, when the spear struck the dolorous blow, he raised the dish to catch the blood!'

  How, Thomas wondered, did the cup go from the upper room where Christ had eaten his last meal into the possession of a Roman centurion? And, stranger still, how had it reached Ralph Vexille? He closed his eyes, swaying back and forwards, ashamed of his dis-belief. Father Hobbe had always called him Doubting Thomas. 'You mustn't seek explanations,' Father Hobbe had said again and again, 'because the Grail is a miracle. It transcends explanations.'

  C'est une tasse magique,' Eleanor had added, implicitly addin
g her reproof to Father Hobbe's.

  Thomas so wanted to believe it was a magic cup. He wanted to believe that the Grail existed just beyond human sight, behind a veil of disbelief, a thing half visible, shimmering, wonderful, poised in light and glowing like pale fire. He wanted to believe that one day it would take on substance and that from its bowl, which had held the wine and the blood of Christ, would flow peace and healing. Yet if God wanted the world to be at peace and if He wanted sickness defeated, why did He hide the Grail? Father Hobbe's answer had been that mankind was not worthy to hold the cup, and Thomas wondered if that was true. Was anyone worthy? And perhaps, Thomas thought, if the Grail had any magic then it was to exaggerate the faults and vir-tues of those who sought it. Father Hobbe had become more saintlike in his pursuit and the strange priest and his dark servant more malevolent. It was like one of those crystal lenses that jewellers used to magnify their work, only the Grail was a crystal that magnified character. What, Thomas wondered, did it reveal of his own? He remembered his unease at the thought of marrying Eleanor, and suddenly he began to weep, to heave with sobs, to cry more than he had already cried since her murder. He rocked to and fro, his grief as deep as the sea that beat on the shingle, and it was made worse by the knowledge that he was a sinner, unshriven, his soul doomed to hell.

  He missed his woman, he hated himself, he felt empty, alone and doomed, and so, in his father's dead village, he wept.

  It began to rain later, a steady rain that soaked through the new cloak and chilled Thomas and Robbie to the bone. They had lit a fire that flickered feebly in the old church, hissing under the rain and giving them a small illusion of warmth. 'Are there wolves here?' Robbie asked.

  'Supposed to be,' Thomas said, 'though I never saw one.'

  'We have wolves in Eskdale,' Robbie said, 'and at night their eyes glow red. Like fire.'

  'There are monsters in the sea here,' Thomas said. 'Their bodies wash ashore sometimes and you can find their bones in the cliffs. Sometimes, even on calm days, men wouldn't come back from fishing and you'd know the monsters had taken them.' He shivered and crossed himself.

  'When my grandfather died,' Robbie said, 'the wolves circled the house and howled.'

  'Is it a big house?'

  Robbie seemed surprised by the question. He con-sidered it for a moment, then nodded. 'Aye,' he said. 'My father's a laird.'

  'A lord?'

  'Like a lord,' Robbie said.

  'He wasn't at the battle?'

  'He lost a leg and an arm at Berwick. So we boys have to fight for him.' He said he was the youngest of four sons. 'Three now,' he said, crossing himself and thinking of Jamie.

  They half slept, woke, shivered, and in the dawn Thomas walked back to the Hook to watch the new day seep grey along the sea's ragged edge. The rain had stopped, though a cold wind shredded the wave-tops. The grey turned a leprous white, then silvery as the gulls called over the long shingle where, at the top of the Hook's bank, he found the weathered remnants of four posts. They had not been there when he left, but beneath one of them, half buried in stones, was a yellowish scrap of skull and he guessed this was one of the crossbowmen he had killed with his tall black bow on that Easter day. Four posts, four dead men and Thomas supposed that the four heads had been placed on the poles to gaze out to sea till the gulls pecked out their eyes and flensed the flesh back to the bare skulls.

  He stared into the ruined village, but could see no one. Robbie was still inside the church from which a tiny wisp of smoke drifted, but otherwise Thomas was alone with the gulls. There were not even sheep, cattle or goats on Lipp Hill. He walked back inland, his feet crunching on the shingle, then realized he still held the broken curve of skull and he hurled it into the stream where the fishing boats had been flooded to rid them of rats and then, feeling hungry, he went and took the piece of hard cheese and dark bread from the saddlebag that he had dumped beside the church door. The walls of the church, now he could see them properly in the daylight, appeared lower than he remembered, probably because local folk had come with carts and taken the stones away for barns or sties or house walls. Inside the church there was only a tangle of thorns, nettles and a few gnarled lengths of charred timber that had long been overgrown by grass. 'I was almost killed in here,' he told Robbie, and he described how the raiders had beaten on the church door as he had kicked out the horn panes of the east window and jumped down into the graveyard. He remembered how his foot had crushed the silver Mass cup as he scrambled over the altar.

  Had that silver cup been the Grail? He laughed aloud at the thought. The Mass cup had been a silver goblet on which was incised the badge of the Vexilles, and that badge, cut from the crushed cup, was now pinned to Thomas's bow. It was all that was left of the old goblet, but it had not been the Grail. The Grail was much older, much more mysterious and much more frightening. The altar was long gone, but there was a shallow clay bowl in the nettles where it had stood. Thomas kicked the plants aside and picked up the bowl, remembering how his father would fill it with wafers before the Mass and cover it with a piece of linen cloth and then hurry it to the church, getting angry if any of the villagers did not take off their hats and bow to the sacrament as he passed. Thomas had kicked the bowl as he climbed onto the altar to escape the Frenchmen, and here it still was. He smiled ruefully, thought about keeping the bowl, but tossed it back into the nettles. Archers should travel light.

  'Someone's coming,' Robbie warned him, running to fetch his uncle's sword. Thomas picked up the bow and took an arrow from his bag, and just then he heard the thump of hooves and the baying of hounds. He went to the ruins of the door and saw a dozen great deerhounds splashing through the stream with tongues lolling between their fangs; he had no time to run from them, only to flatten himself against the wall as the hounds streaked for him.

  'Argos! Maera! Back off now! Mind your goddamn manners!' the horseman bellowed at his hounds, reinforcing his commands with the crack of a whip over their heads, but the beasts surrounded Thomas and leaped up at him. Yet it was not in threat: they were licking his face and wagging their tails. 'Orthos!' the huntsman snapped at one dog, then he stared hard at Thomas. He did not recognize him, but the hounds obviously knew him and that gave the huntsman pause.

  'Jake,' Thomas said.

  'Sweet Jesus Christ!' Jake said. 'Sweet Jesus! Look what the tide brought in. Orthos!

  Argos! Off and away, you bastards, off and away!' The whip cracked loud and the hounds, still excited, backed away. Jake shook his head. 'It's Thomas, isn't it?'

  'How are you, Jake?'

  'Older,' Jake Churchill said gruffly, then climbed down from the saddle, pushed through the hounds and greeted Thomas with an embrace. 'It was your damned father who named these dogs. He thought it was a joke. It's good to see you, boy.' Jake was grey-bearded, his face dark as a nut from the weather and his skin scarred from countless brushes with thorns. He was Sir Giles Marriott's chief huntsman and he had taught Thomas how to shoot a bow and how to stalk a deer and how to go hidden and silent through country. 'Good Christ Almighty, boy,' he said, 'but you've fair grown up. Look at the size of you!'

  'Boys do grow up, Jake,' Thomas said, then gestured at Robbie. 'He's a friend.'

  Jake nodded at the Scotsman, then hauled two of the hounds away from Thomas. The dogs, named for hounds from Greek and Latin myth, whined excitedly. 'And what the hell are you two doing down here?' Jake wanted to know. 'You should have come up to the hall like Christians!'

  'We got here late,' Thomas explained, 'and I wanted to see the place.'

  'Nothing to see here,' Jake said scornfully. 'Nothing but hares here now.'

  'You're hunting hare now?'

  'I don't bring ten brace of hounds to snaffle hares, boy. No, Lally Gooden's boy saw the pair of you sneak-ing in here last night and so Sir Giles sent me down to see what evil was brewing. We had a pair of vagabonds trying to set up home here in the spring and they had to be whipped on their way. And last week there was a pair of foreigner
s creeping about.'

  'Foreigners?' Thomas asked, knowing that Jake could well mean nothing more than that the strangers had come from the next parish.

  'A priest and his man,' Jake said, 'and if he hadn't been a priest I'd have loosed the dogs on him. I don't like foreigners, don't see no point to them. Those horses of yours looks hungry. So do the two of you. You want breakfast? Or are you going to stand there and spoil those damned hounds by patting them half to death?'

  They rode back to Down Mapperley, following the hounds through the tiny village. Thomas remembered the place as big, twice the size of Hookton, and as a child he had thought it almost a town, but now he saw how small it was. Small and low, so that on horse-back he towered above the thatched cottages that had seemed so palatial when he was a child. The dung-heaps beside each cottage were as high as the thatch. Sir Giles Marriott's hall, just beyond the village, was also thatched, the moss-thick roof sweeping almost to the ground. 'He'll be pleased to see you,' Jake promised. And so Sir Giles was. He was an old man now, a widower who had once been wary of Thomas's wildness, but now greeted him like a lost son. 'You're thin, boy, too thin. Ain't good for a man to be thin. You'll have breakfast, the two of you? Pease pudding and small ale is what we've got. There was bread yesterday, but not today. When do we bake more bread, Gooden?' This was demanded of a servant.

  'Today's Wednesday, sir,' the servant said reprovingly.