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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Thomas crossed to Sir William Skeat, but his old friend was dead. He had been wounded in the neck and he had bled to death on the stone pile. He looked strangely peaceful. A first shaft of the new day's sun cut across the world's edge to light the bright blood at the top of Stonewhip's beam as Thomas closed his mentor's eyes. 'Who killed Will Skeat?' Thomas demanded of Sir Geoffrey's men and Dickon, the young one, pointed at the wreckage of mail, flesh, entrails and bone that had been the Scarecrow.

  Thomas inspected the dents in his sword. He must learn to use one, he thought, or else he would die by the sword, then he looked up at Sir Geoffrey's men. 'Go and help the attack on the next fort,' he told them. They stared at him. 'Go!' he snapped and, startled, they ran westwards.

  Thomas pointed his sword at the Lord of Roncelets. 'Take him back to town,' he told Robbie, 'and guard him well.'

  'What about you?' Robbie asked.

  'I'm going to bury Will,' Thomas said. 'He was a friend.' He thought he must shed some tears for Will Skeat, but there were none. Not now, anyway. He sheathed the sword, then smiled at Robbie. 'You can go home, Robbie.'

  'I can?' Robbie seemed puzzled.

  'De Taillebourg's dead. Roncelets will pay your ran-som to Lord Outhwaite. You can go to Eskdale, go home, go back to killing Englishmen.'

  Robbie shook his head. 'Guy Vexille lives.'

  'He's mine to kill.'

  'And mine,' Robbie said. 'You forget he killed my brother. I'm staying till he's dead.'

  'If you can ever find him,' Jeanette said softly.

  The sun was lighting the smoke of the burning encampments and casting long shadows across the ground where the last of Charles's army abandoned their earthworks and fled towards Rennes. They had come in their great splendour and now they scuttled away in abject defeat.

  Thomas went to the engineers' tents and found a pickaxe, a mattock and a shovel. He dug a grave beside Stonewhip and tipped Skeat into the damp soil and tried to say a prayer, but he could not think of one, and then he remembered the coin for the ferryman and so he went to the Lord of Roncelets's tent and pulled the charred canvas away from the chest and took a piece of gold and went back to the grave. He jumped down beside his friend and put the coin under Skeat's tongue. The ferryman would find it and know from the gold that Sir William Skeat was a special man. 'God bless you, Will,' Thomas said, then he scrambled out of the grave and he filled it in, though he kept pausing in hope that Will's eyes would open, but of course they did not and Thomas at last wept as he shovelled earth onto his friend's pale face. The sun was up by the time he finished and women and children were coming from the town to look for plunder. A kestrel flew high and Thomas sat on the chest of coins and waited for Robbie to return from the town.

  He would go south, he thought. Go to Astarac. Go and find his father's notebook and solve its mystery. The bells of La Roche-Derrien were ringing for the victory, a huge victory, and Thomas sat among the dead and knew he would have no peace until he had found his father's burden. Calix mens inebrians. Transfer calicem istem a me. Ego enim Bram pincerna regis.

  Whether he wanted the job or not he was the King's cupbearer, and he would go south.

  Historical Notes

  The novel begins with the battle of Neville's Cross. The name of the battle is derived from the stone cross that Lord Neville erected to mark the victory, though it is possible there was another cross already on the site which Lord Neville's memorial replaced. The battle, fought by a large Scottish army against a small scratch force hastily assembled by the Archbishop of York and the northern lords, was a disaster for the Scots. Their King, David II, was captured as described in Vagabond, trapped under a bridge. He managed to knock out some of his captor's teeth, but then was subdued. He spent a long time at Bamburgh Castle recovering from his facial wound, then was taken to London and put into the Tower with most of the other Scottish aristocracy cap-tured that day, including Sir William Douglas, the Knight of Liddesdale. The two Scottish Earls who had previously sworn fealty to Edward were decapitated, then quartered. and the parts of their body displayed around the realm as a warning against treachery. Later that year Charles of Blois, nephew to the King of France and would-be Duke of Brittany, joined David II in the Tower of London. It was a remarkable double by the English who will, in another decade, add the King of France himself to the haul.

  The Scots invaded England at the request of the French to whom they were allied, and it is probable that David II truly believed England's army was all in northern France. But England had foreseen just this kind of trouble and certain northern lords were charged with staying at home and being ready to raise forces if the Scots ever marched. The backbone of those forces was, of course, the archer, and this is the great age of English (and, to a lesser extent, Welsh) archery. The weapon used was the longbow (a name that was coined much later) which was a yew bow at least six feet in length with a draw weight of over a hundred pounds (more than double the weight of modern competition bows). It is a mystery why England alone could field armies of lethal archers who did, indeed, become kings of the European battlefield, but the likeliest answer is that mastery of the longbow was an English enthusiasm, practised as a sport in hundreds of villages. Eventually laws were passed making archery practice obligatory, presumably because the enthusiasm was fading. It was, certainly, an extraordinarily difficult weapon to use, requiring immense strength, and the French, though they tried to introduce the weapon into their ranks, never mastered the longbow. The Scots were accustomed to these archers and had learned never to attack them on horseback, but in truth there was no answer to the longbow until firearms were deployed on the battlefield.

  Prisoners were important. A great man like Sir William Douglas would only be released on payment of a vast ransom, though Sir William was given early parole to help negotiate the ransom of the King of Scotland and when he failed he dutifully returned to his imprisonment in the Tower of London. The ransoms for men like Charles of Blois and King David II were massive and might take years to negotiate and raise. In David's case the ransom was £66,000, a sum that has to be multiplied at least a hundred times to get even a rough approximation of its modern value. The Scots were allowed to pay it in ten instalments and twenty noble-men had to be surrendered as hostages for the payment before David was released in 1357 by which time, ironically, his sympathies had become entirely pro-English. Sir Thomas Dagworth was officially the captor of Charles of Blois and he sold him to Edward III for the much smaller sum of £3,500, but doubtless it was better to have that money in hand than wait while a larger ransom was collected in France and Brittany. King David's captor had been an Englishman called John Coupland who also sold his prisoner to Edward, in Coupland's case for a knighthood and land.

  Charles's defeat at La Roche-Derrien is one of the great unsung English triumphs of the period. Charles had faced archers before and had worked out, rightly as it happened, that the way to defeat them was to make them attack well-protected positions. What the archer could not see he could not kill. The tactic worked against Sir Thomas Dagworth's assault, but then came Richard Totesham's frenetic sortie from the town and, because Charles had insisted that the four parts of his army stay behind their protective earthworks, he was overwhelmed and the other parts of his army were then defeated in turn. His defeat and capture were an immense shock to his allies, the French, who were failing to relieve the siege of Calais. I must record my debt to Jonathan Sumption whose book, Trial by Battle, the first volume of his superb history of the Hundred Years War, was of particular use to me. The errors in the novel are entirely mine, of course, though in the interests of lightening my post bag may I gently point out that Durham Cathedral only possessed two towers in 1347 and that I placed the Hachaliah reference in the book of Esdras, instead of in Nehemiah, because I was using the Vulgate and not the King James Bible.

  Heretic

  HERETIC

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  Heretic

  is for Dorothy Carroll,
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br />   who knows why

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Calais 1347

  Part One: The Devil’s Plaything

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: Fugitive

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Three: The Darkness

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue: The Grail

  Historical Note

  PROLOGUE

  Calais, 1347

  The road came from the southern hills and crossed the marshes by the sea. It was a bad road. A summer’s persistent rain had left it a strip of glutinous mud that baked hard when the sun came out, but it was the only road that led from the heights of Sangatte to the harbours of Calais and Gravelines. At Nieulay, a hamlet of no distinction whatever, it crossed the River Ham on a stone bridge. The Ham was scarcely worth the title of river. It was a slow stream that oozed through fever-ridden marshlands until it vanished among the coastal mudflats. It was so short that a man could wade from its source to the sea in little more than an hour, and it was so shallow that a man could cross it at low tide without getting his waist wet. It drained the swamps where reeds grew thick and herons hunted frogs among the marsh grass, and it was fed by a maze of smaller streams where the villagers from Nieulay and Hammes and Guimes set their wicker eel traps.

  Nieulay and its stone bridge might have expected to slumber through history, except that the town of Calais lay just two miles to the north and, in the summer of 1347, an army of thirty thousand Englishmen was laying siege to the port and their encampment lay thick between the town’s formidable walls and the marshes.

  The road which came from the heights and crossed the Ham at Nieulay was the only route a French relief force might use and in the height of the summer, when the inhabitants of Calais were close to starvation, Philip of Valois, King of France, brought his army to Sangatte. Twenty thousand Frenchmen lined the heights, their banners thick in the wind blowing from the sea. The oriflamme was there, the sacred war pennant of France. It was a long flag with three pointed tails, a blood-red ripple of precious silk, and if the flag looked bright that was because it was new. The old oriflamme was in England, a trophy taken on the wide green hill between Wadicourt and Crecy the previous summer. But the new flag was as sacred as the old, and about it flew the standards of France’s great lords: the banners of Bourbon, of Montmorency and of the Count of Armagnac. Lesser flags were visible among the noble standards, but all proclaimed that the greatest warriors of Philip’s kingdom were come to give battle to the English. Yet between them and the enemy were the River Ham and the bridge at Nieulay that was defended by a stone tower around which the English had dug trenches. These they had filled with archers and men-at-arms. Beyond that force was the river, then the marshes, and on the higher ground close to Calais’s high wall and its double moat was a makeshift town of houses and tents where the English army lived. And such an army as had never been seen in France. The besiegers’ encampment was bigger than Calais itself. As far as the eye could see were streets lined with canvas, with timber houses, with paddocks for horses, and between them were men-at-arms and archers. The oriflamme might as well have stayed unfurled.

  ‘We can take the tower, sire.’ Sir Geoffrey de Charny, as hard a soldier as any in Philip’s army, gestured down the hill to where the English garrison of Nieulay was isolated on the French side of the river.

  ‘To what end?’ Philip asked. He was a weak man, hesitant in battle, but his question was pertinent. If the tower did fall and the bridge of Nieulay was thus delivered into his hands, what would it serve? The bridge merely led to an even greater English army, which was already arraying itself on the firm ground at the edge of its encampment.

  The citizens of Calais, starved and despairing, had seen the French banners on the southern crest and they had responded by hanging their own flags from their ramparts. They displayed images of the Virgin, pictures of St Denis of France and, high on the citadel, the blue and yellow royal standard to tell Philip that his subjects still lived, still fought. Yet the brave display could not hide that they had been besieged for eleven months. They needed help.

  ‘Take the tower, sire,’ Sir Geoffrey urged, ‘and then attack across the bridge! Good Christ, if the Goddamns see us win one victory they might lose heart!’ A growl of agreement came from the assembled lords.

  The King was less optimistic. It was true that Calais’s garrison still held out, and that the English had hardly damaged its walls, let alone found a way to cross the twin moats, but nor had the French been able to carry any supplies to the beleaguered town. The people there did not need encouragement, they needed food. A puff of smoke showed beyond the encampment and a few heartbeats later the sound of a cannon rolled across the marshes. The missile must have struck the wall, but Philip was too far away to see its effect.

  ‘A victory here will encourage the garrison,’ the Lord of Montmorency urged, ‘and put despair in the English hearts.’

  But why should the English lose heart if the tower of Nieulay fell? Philip thought it would merely fill them with a resolve to defend the road on the far side of the bridge, but he also understood that he could not keep his rough hounds leashed when a hated enemy was in sight and so he gave his permission. ‘Take the tower,’ he instructed, ‘and God give you victory.’

  The King stayed where he was as the lords gathered men and armed themselves. The wind from the sea brought the smell of salt, but also a scent of decay which probably came from rotting weed on the long tidal flats. It made Philip melancholy. His new astrologer had refused to attend the King for weeks, pleading that he had a fever, but Philip had learned that the man was in fine health, which meant that he must have seen some great disaster in the stars and simply feared to tell the King. Gulls cried beneath the clouds. Far out to sea a grubby sail bellied towards England, while another ship was anchoring off the English-held beaches and ferrying men ashore in small boats to swell the enemy ranks. Philip looked back to the road and saw a group of around forty or fifty English knights riding towards the bridge. He made the sign of the cross, praying that the knights would be trapped by his attack. He hated the English. Hated them.

  The Duke of Bourbon had delegated the organization of the assault to Sir Geoffrey de Charny and Edouard de Beaujeu, and that was good. The King trusted both men to be sensible. He did not doubt they could carry the tower, though he still did not know what good it would do; but he supposed it was better than letting his wilder noblemen carry their lances in a wild charge across the bridge to utter defeat in the marshlands. He knew they would love nothing better than to make such an attack. They thought war was a game and every defeat only made them more eager to play. Fools, he thought, and he made the sign of the cross again, wondering what dire prophecy the astrologer was hiding from him. What we need, he thought, is a miracle. Some great sign from God. Then he twitched in alarm because a nakerer had just beaten his great kettledrum. A trumpet sounded.

  The music did not presage the advance. Rather the musicians were warming their instruments, ready for the attack. Edouard de Beaujeu was on the right where he had assembled over a thousand crossbowmen and as many men-at-arms, and he plainly intended to assault the English from one flank while Sir Geoffrey de Charny and at least five hundred men-at-arms charged straight down the hill at the English entrenchments. Sir Geoffrey was striding along the line shouting at the knights and men-at-arms to dismount. They did so reluctantly. They believed that the essence of war was the cavalry charge, but Sir Geoffrey knew that horses were no use against a stone tower protected by entrenchments and so he was insisting they fought on foot. ‘Shields and swords,’ he told them, ‘no lances! On foot! On foot!’ Sir Geoffrey had learned the hard way that horses were pitiably vulnerable to English arrows, w
hile men on foot could advance at the crouch behind stout shields. Some of the higher-born men were refusing to dismount, but he ignored them. Even more French men-at-arms were hurrying to join the charge.

  The small band of English knights had crossed the bridge now and looked as if they intended to ride straight up the road to challenge the whole French battle line, but instead they checked their horses and gazed up at the horde on the ridge. The King, watching them, saw that they were led by a great lord. He could tell that by the size of the man’s banner, while at least a dozen of the other knights carried the square flags of bannerets on their lances. A rich group, he thought, worth a small fortune in ransoms. He hoped they would ride to the tower and so trap themselves.

  The Duke of Bourbon trotted his horse back to Philip. The Duke was in plate armour that had been scoured with sand, vinegar and wire until it shone white. His helmet, still hanging from his saddle’s pommel, was crested with feathers dyed blue. He had refused to dismount from his destrier, which had a steel chanfron to protect its face and a trapper of gleaming mail to shield its body from the English archers who were no doubt stringing their bows in the entrenchments. ‘The oriflamme, sire,’ the Duke said. It was supposed to be a request, but somehow sounded like an order.