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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Genevieve somehow stayed in the saddle as her horse bolted northwards, spraying blood as it went. Two more quarrels flew past Thomas, then he twisted in his saddle to see four horsemen and at least a dozen men on foot coming from the wood. ‘Go for the rocks!’ he shouted at Genevieve. ‘The rocks!’ He doubted their horses could outrun the coredors, not with Genevieve’s mare pumping out blood with every stride.

  He could hear the pursuing horses. He could hear their hooves drumming on the thin turf, but then Genevieve was among the rocks and she swung herself out of the saddle and scrambled up the boulders. Thomas dismounted beside her horse, but instead of following her he strung his bow and snatched an arrow from his bag. He shot once, shot again, the arrows whipping low, and one rider was falling back from his horse and the second man was dead with an arrow in his eye and the other two swerved away so violently that one horse lost its footing and spilled its rider. Thomas flicked an arrow at the surviving horseman, missed, and sent his fourth at the unsaddled man, sticking the bodkin high on the man’s back.

  The men on foot were following as fast as they could, but they were still some way off and that gave Thomas time to pull all his spare arrows and his purse of money from his horse’s saddle. He rescued Genevieve’s bag from her mare, tied the two horses’ reins together and looped the knot over a boulder in the hope it would hold them, then climbed up the steep jumble of rocks. Two crossbow bolts banged on stone near him, but he was scrambling fast and knew only too well how hard it was to hit a moving man. He found Genevieve in a gully near the top. ‘You killed three!’ she said in wonderment.

  ‘Two,’ he said. The others are just wounded.’ He could see the man he had hit in the back crawling towards the distant woods. He looked around and reckoned Genevieve had found the best refuge possible. Two vast boulders formed the sides of the gully, their massive flanks touching at the back, while in front was a third boulder that served as a parapet. It was time, Thomas thought, to teach these bastards the power of the yew bow and he stood up behind the makeshift parapet and hauled back the cord.

  He drove his arrows with a cold fury and a terrible skill. The men had been coming in a bunch and Thomas’s first half-dozen arrows could not miss, but slashed into the ragged coredors one after the other, and then they had the sense to scatter, most turning and running away to get out of range. They left three men on the ground and another two limping. Thomas sent a final arrow at a fugitive, missing the man by an inch.

  Then the crossbows were released and Thomas ducked down beside Genevieve as the iron quarrels clanged and cracked on the gully’s boulders. He reckoned there were four or five crossbows and they were shooting at a range just outside the reach of his bow; he could do nothing except peer round the boulder and watch through a crack that was little more than a hand’s breadth wide. After a few moments he saw three men running towards the rocks and he loosed an arrow through the crack, then stood and shot two more shafts before ducking fast as the quarrels hammered on the high boulders and tumbled to fall beside Genevieve. His arrows had driven the three men away, though none had been hit. They’ll all go away soon,’ Thomas said. He had seen no more than twenty men pursuing and he had killed or wounded nearly half of them, and while that would doubtless make them angry, it would also make them cautious. ‘They’re just bandits,’ Thomas said, ‘and they want the reward for capturing an archer.’ Joscelyn had confirmed to him that the Count had indeed offered such a reward, and Thomas was sure that bounty was on the minds of the coredors, but they were discovering just how difficult it would be to earn it.

  ‘They’ll send for help,’ Genevieve said bitterly.

  ‘Maybe there aren’t any more of them,’ Thomas suggested optimistically, then he heard one of the horses whinny and he guessed that a coredor, one he had not seen, had reached the two animals and was untying their reins. ‘God damn them,’ he said, and jumped over the boulder and began leaping from stone to stone down the front of the hill. A crossbow bolt slammed just behind him while another drove a spark from a boulder in front, then he saw a man leading both horses away from the rocks and he paused and drew. The man was half hidden by Genevieve’s mare, but Thomas loosed anyway and the arrow flashed beneath the mare’s neck to strike the man’s thigh. The coredor fell, still holding the reins, and Thomas turned and saw one of the four crossbowmen was aiming up at Genevieve. The man shot and Thomas loosed in return. He was at the limit of his big bow’s range, but his arrow went perilously close to the enemy and that near escape persuaded all the crossbowmen to back away. Thomas, his arrow bag banging awkwardly against his right thigh, knew they were terrified of his bow’s power and so, instead of returning to his eyrie in the high rocks, he ran towards them. He shot two more arrows, feeling the strain in his back muscles as he hauled the string far back, and the white-feathered shafts arched through the sky to plummet down around the crossbowmen. Neither shaft hit, but the men backed off still farther and Thomas, when he was sure they were at a safe range, turned back to rescue the horses.

  It had not been a man he wounded, but a boy. A snub-nosed child, maybe ten or eleven, who was lying on the turf with tears in his eyes and a scowl on his face. He gripped Thomas’s reins as though his life depended on it, and in his left hand there was a knife that he waved in feeble threat. The arrow was through the boy’s right thigh, high up, and the pain on his victim’s face made Thomas think that the bodkin point had probably broken the bone.

  Thomas kicked the knife out of the boy’s hand. ‘Do you speak French?’ he asked the lad, and received a gob of spittle in reply. Thomas grinned, took the reins back then hauled the boy to his feet. The child cried out with pain as the arrow tore at his wound, and Thomas looked at the surviving coredors and saw that all the fight had gone from them. They were staring at the boy.

  Thomas guessed the boy had come with the three men who had run to the rocks while he was crouched behind the boulder. They had doubtless been hoping to steal the two horses for that, at least, would give them some small profit on what had turned out to be a disastrous foray. Thomas’s arrows had turned the men back, but the boy, smaller, nimbler and faster, had reached the rocks and tried to be a hero. Now, it seemed, he was a hostage, for one of the coredors, a tall man in a leather coat and with a cracked sallet crammed onto his wildly tangled hair, held out both hands to show he carried no weapons and walked slowly forwards.

  Thomas kicked the boy down to the ground when the man was thirty paces away, then he half drew the bow. Tar enough,’ he told the man.

  ‘My name is Philin,’ the man said. He was broad in the chest, long-legged, with a sad, thin face that had a knife or sword scar running across his forehead. He had a knife sheathed at his belt, but no other weapons. He looked like a bandit, Thomas thought, yet there was something about Philin’s eyes which spoke of better times, even of respectability. ‘He is my son,’ Philin added, nodding at the boy.

  Thomas shrugged as if he did not care.

  Philin took off his cracked helmet and stared briefly at the dead men on the pale grass. There were four of them, all killed by the long arrows, while two more were wounded and groaning. He looked back to Thomas. ‘You are English?’

  ‘What do you think this is?’ Thomas asked, hefting the bow. Only the English carried the long war bow.

  ‘I have heard of the bows.’ Philin admitted. He spoke a badly accented French and sometimes hesitated as he searched for a word. ‘I have heard of them,’ he went on, ‘but I had not seen one until today.’

  ‘You’ve seen one now,’ Thomas said vengefully.

  ‘I think your woman is wounded,’ Philin said, nodding up to Genevieve’s hiding place.

  ‘And you think I’m a fool,’ Thomas said. Philin wanted him to turn his back so that the crossbows could creep near again.

  ‘No,’ Philin said. ‘What I think is that I want my boy to live.’

  ‘What do you offer for him?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Your life,’ Philin said. ‘If you keep
my son then we shall bring other men here, many men, and we shall surround you and wait for you. You will both die. If my son dies then you will die in such agony, Englishman, that all the torments of hell will seem a relief afterwards. But let Galdric live and you both live. You and the heretic’

  ‘You know who she is?’ Thomas was surprised.

  ‘We know everything that happens between Berat and the mountains,’ Philin said.

  Thomas glanced back up the mound of rocks, but Genevieve was hidden. He had planned to beckon her down, but instead he stepped away from the boy. ‘You want me to take out the arrow?’ he asked Philin.

  ‘The monks at St Sever’s will do that,’ Philin said.

  ‘You can go there?’

  ‘Abbot Planchard will always take a wounded man.’

  ‘Even a coredor?’

  Philin looked scornful. ‘We are just landless men. Evicted. Accused of crimes we did not do. Well,’ he smiled suddenly and Thomas almost smiled back, ‘some we did not do. What do you think we should have done? Gone to the galleys? Been hanged?’

  Thomas knelt beside the boy, put his bow down and drew his knife. The boy glared at him, Philin called out in alarm, but then went silent as he saw that Thomas meant the child no harm. Instead Thomas cut the arrow head from the shaft and put the precious scrap of metal into his haversack. Then he stood. ‘Swear on your boy’s life,’ he ordered Philin, ‘that you will keep your word.’

  ‘I swear it,’ Philin said.

  Thomas gestured towards the high rocks where Genevieve sheltered. ‘She is a draga,’ he said. ‘Break your oath, Philin, and she will make your soul shriek.’

  ‘I will not harm you.’ Philin said gravely, ‘and they,’ he looked at the other coredors, ‘will not harm you either.’

  Thomas reckoned he had little choice. It was either trust Philin or resign himself to a siege in a high place where there was no water and so he stepped away from the boy. ‘He’s yours.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Philin said gravely. ‘But tell me . . .’ These last three words checked Thomas who had turned to lead the horses back to the rocks. ‘Tell me, Englishman, why you are here? Alone?’

  ‘I thought you knew everything that happened between Berat and the mountains?’

  ‘I know by asking questions,’ Philin said, stooping to his son.

  ‘I’m a landless man, Philin, a fugitive. Accused of a crime I did commit.’

  ‘What crime?’

  ‘Giving refuge to a heretic’

  Philin shrugged as if to suggest that crime ranked very low in the hierarchy of evils that had driven the coredors to outlawry. ‘If you are truly a fugitive,’ he said, ‘you should think of joining us. But look after your woman. I did not lie. She is wounded.’

  He was right. Thomas took the horses back to the rocks and he called Genevieve’s name and when she did not answer he climbed up to the gully and found her with a crossbow bolt in her left shoulder. It had pierced the silver mail and shattered a rib just above her left breast, close to the armpit, and she was lying there, surrounded by the ugly black quarrels, breathing shallowly. her face paler than ever and she cried out when Thomas lifted her. ‘I’m dying,’ she said, but there was no blood in her mouth and Thomas had seen many others live after such wounds. He had seen them die too.

  He gave her a lot of pain as he carried her down the rocks, but once at the foot she found some small strength to help herself as Thomas lifted her into the saddle. Blood ran down her mail, trickling between the rings. She slouched there, eyes dull, and the coredors came close to stare at her in wonderment. They stared at Thomas too, and made the sign of the cross as they looked at the big bow. They were all thin men, victims of the region’s poor harvests and of the difficulty of finding food when they were fugitives, but now that Philin had ordered them to put up their weapons, they were not threatening. They were, instead, pathetic. Philin spoke to them in the local language and then, with his son mounted on one of the scrawny horses with which the coredors had pursued Thomas and Genevieve, he started down the hill towards Astarac.

  Thomas went with him, leading Genevieve’s horse. The blood had clotted on the mare’s haunch and, though she walked stiffly, she did not seem badly injured and Thomas had left the bolt in her flesh. He would deal with it later. ‘Are you their leader?’ he asked Philin.

  ‘Only of the men you saw,’ the big man said, ‘and maybe no longer.’

  ‘No longer?’

  ‘The coredors like success,’ Philin said, ‘and they don’t like burying their dead. No doubt there are others who think they can do better than me.’

  ‘What about those other injured men?’ Thomas asked, jerking his head back up the hill. ‘Why aren’t they going to the abbey?’

  ‘One didn’t want to, he’d rather go back to his woman, and the others? They’ll probably die.’ Philin looked at Thomas’s bow. ‘And some of them refuse to go down to the abbey; they think they’ll be betrayed and captured. But Planchard will not betray me.’

  Genevieve was swaying in her saddle so that Thomas had to ride close alongside to give her support. She said nothing. Her eyes were still dull, her skin pale and her breathing almost undetectable, but she gripped the pommel firmly enough and Thomas knew there was still some life in her. ‘The monks may not treat her,’ he said to Philin.

  ‘Planchard takes everyone,’ Philin said, ‘even heretics.’

  ‘Planchard is the abbot here, yes?’

  ‘He is,’ Philin confirmed, ‘and also a good man. I was one of his monks once.’

  ‘You?’ Thomas could not hide his surprise.

  ‘I was a novice, but I met a girl. We were staking out a new vineyard and she brought the willow slips to tie the vines and . . .’ Philin shrugged as if the rest of the tale was too familiar to bear repetition. ‘I was young,’ he finished instead, ‘and so was she.’

  ‘Galdric’s mother?’ Thomas guessed.

  Philin nodded. ‘She’s dead now. The abbot was kind enough. He told me I had no vocation and let me go. We became the abbey’s tenants, just a small farm, but the other villagers didn’t like me. Her family had wanted her to marry someone else, they said I was no good for anything and after she died they came to burn me out. I killed one of them with a hoe and they said I had started the fight and branded me a murderer, so here I am. It was either this or be hanged in Berat.’ He led his son’s horse across a small stream that tumbled from the hill. ‘It’s the wheel of fortune, isn’t it? Round and round, up and down, but I seem to be down more than up. And Destral will blame me.’

  ‘Destral?’

  ‘Our leader. His name means “axe”, and that’s what he kills with.’

  ‘He’s not here?’

  ‘He sent me to see what was happening in Astarac,’ Philin said. ‘There were men in the old castle, digging. Destral thinks there’s treasure there.’

  The Grail, Thomas thought, the Grail, and he wondered if it had already been found, then dismissed the thought for surely that news would have gone through the countryside like lightning.

  ‘But we never reached Astarac,’ Philin went on. ‘We camped in the woods and were just about to leave when we saw you instead.’

  ‘And thought you’d become rich?’

  ‘We would have got forty coins for you,’ Philin said, ‘all of them gold.’

  ‘Ten more than Judas got,’ Thomas said lightly, ‘and his were only silver.’ Philin had the grace to smile.

  They reached the monastery just after midday. The wind was cold, gusting from the north and blowing the kitchen smoke above the gateway where two monks accosted them. They nodded to Philin, allowing him to take his son to the infirmary, but then barred Thomas’s path. ‘She needs help,’ Thomas insisted angrily.

  ‘She is a woman,’ one of the monks said, ‘she cannot enter here.’

  ‘There is a place in the back,’ the other monk said and, pulling his white hood over his head, he led Thomas around the side of the buildings and through some o
live trees to where a cluster of wooden huts was surrounded by a high fence of palings. ‘Brother Clement will receive you,’ the monk said, then hurried away.

  Thomas tied the two horses to an olive tree, then carried Genevieve to the gate in the fence. He kicked it with his boot, waited and kicked again, and after the second kick the gate creaked open and a small, white-robed monk with a wrinkled face and a straggling beard smiled up at him.

  ‘Brother Clement?’

  The monk nodded.

  ‘She needs help,’ Thomas said.

  Clement just gestured inside and Thomas carried Genevieve into what he at first took to be a farmyard. It smelt like one, though he could see no dungheap, but the thatched buildings looked like small barns and stables, then he noticed the grey-robed people sitting in doorways. They stared at him hungrily, and others came to the small windows when the news of his arrival spread. His immediate impression was that they were monks, then he saw there were women among the robed figures and he looked back to the gate where a small table was piled with wooden clappers. They were pieces of wood attached to a handle by a strip of leather and, if the handle was shaken, the wooden flaps would make a loud noise. He had noticed them when Brother Clement beckoned him inside, but now the strange objects made sense. The clappers were carried by lepers to warn folk of their approach and the table was set so that anyone from this compound going into the wider world could take one. Thomas checked, frightened. ‘Is this a lazar house?’ he asked Brother Clement.

  The monk nodded cheerfully, then plucked at Thomas’s elbow. Thomas resisted, fearing the dreadful contagion of the grey-robed lepers, but Brother Clement insisted and pulled him to a small hut to one side of the yard. The hut was empty except for a straw mattress in one corner and a table on which jars, pestles and an iron balance stood. Brother Clement gestured at the mattress.

  Thomas laid Genevieve down. A dozen of the lepers crowded at the doorway and gaped at the newcomers until Brother Clement shooed them away. Genevieve, oblivious of the stir her arrival had caused, sighed, then blinked at Thomas. ‘It hurts,’ she whispered. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but you must be brave.’ Brother Clement had rolled up his sleeves and now he gestured that Genevieve’s mail coat must be taken off. That would be hard for the crossbow quarrel was still in her flesh and was jutting through the polished mail. But the monk seemed to know what to do for he pushed Thomas aside and first moved Genevieve’s arms so they were reaching above her head, then he took hold of the quarrel’s leather vanes. Genevieve moaned, then Brother Clement, with extraordinary delicacy, eased the bloody and broken mail and the leather jerkin that supported it clear up over the bolt. Then he reached down with his left hand and put it under the jerkin’s skirt, right up until he was holding the bolt and his left arm was supporting the armour to keep it from touching the quarrel and he nodded at Thomas, looked expectant, then jerked his head as if to suggest that Thomas should simply pull Genevieve out of the mail coat. The monk nodded approvingly as Thomas took hold of her ankles, then nodded encouragement.