‘Because I looked at your bow this morning, Thomas,’ Planchard said, ‘out of nothing but idle curiosity. I have heard so much about the English war bow, but I have not seen one for many years. But yours, I noticed, had something which I suspect most bows do not. A silver plate. And on the plate, young man, was the badge of the Vexilles.’
‘My father was a Vexille,’ Thomas said.
‘So you’re nobly born?’
‘Bastard born,’ Thomas said. ‘He was a priest.’
‘Your father was a priest?’ Planchard sounded surprised.
‘A priest,’ Thomas confirmed, ‘in England.’
‘I heard some of the Vexilles had fled there,’ Planchard said, ‘but that was many years ago. Before my memories begin. So why does a Vexille return to Astarac?’
Thomas said nothing. Monks were going to work, carrying hoes and stakes out of the gate. ‘Where were they taking the dead Count?’ he asked, trying to evade the abbot’s question.
‘He must go to Berat, of course, to be buried with his ancestors,’ Planchard said, ‘and his body will be stinking by the time it gets to the cathedral. I remember when his father was buried: the smell was so bad that most of the mourners fled into the open air. Now, what was my question? Ah yes, why does a Vexille return to Astarac?’
‘Why not?’ Thomas answered.
Planchard stood and beckoned him. ‘Let me show you something, Thomas.’ He led Thomas to the abbey church where, as he entered, the abbot dipped his finger into the stoup of holy water and made the sign of the cross as he genuflected towards the high altar. Thomas, almost for the first time in his life, did not make the same obeisance. He was excommunicated. The old things had no power for him now because he had been cut off from them. He followed the abbot across the wide empty nave to an alcove behind a side altar and there Planchard unlocked a small door with a big key. ‘It will be dark downstairs,’ the old man warned, ‘and I have no lantern, so step carefully.’
A dim light found its way down the stairs and when Thomas reached the bottom Planchard held up a hand. ‘Wait here,’ he said, ‘and I will bring you something. It is too dark to see in the treasury.’
Thomas waited. His eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he saw there were eight arched openings in the undercroft and then he saw that it was not just a vault, but an ossuary and the realization made him take a step back in sudden horror. The arches were stacked with bones. Skulls gazed at him. At the eastern end there was an arch only half filled, the rest of its space waiting for the brethren who prayed each day in the church above. This was the cellar of the dead; heaven’s antechamber.
He heard the click of a lock turning, then the abbot’s footsteps returned and Planchard held out a wooden box. ‘Take it to the light,’ he said, ‘and look at it. The Count tried to steal it from me, but when he returned here with the fever I took it back from him. Can you see it properly?’
Thomas held the box up to the small light that came down the stairwell. He could see that the box was old, that its wood had dried out, and that it had once been painted inside and out, but then, on the front, he saw the remnants of the words he knew so well, the words that had haunted him ever since his father had died: Calix Meus Inebrians.
‘It is said,’ the Abbot took the box back from Thomas, ‘that it was found in a precious reliquary on the altar of the chapel in the Vexille castle. But it was empty when it was found, Thomas. Do you understand that?’
‘It was empty,’ Thomas repeated.
‘I think I know,’ Planchard said, ‘what brings a Vexille to Astarac, but there is nothing here for you, Thomas, nothing at all. The box was empty.’ He put the box back, locked the heavy chest and led Thomas back up to the church. He secured the treasury door, then beckoned Thomas to sit with him on a stone ledge that ran all around the otherwise bare nave. ‘The box was empty,’ the abbot insisted, ‘though no doubt you are thinking it was filled once. And I think you came here to find the thing that filled it.’
Thomas nodded. He was watching two novices sweep the church, their birch bristles making small scratching noises on the wide flagstones. ‘I also came,’ he said, ‘to find the man who killed, who murdered my father.’
‘You know who did that?’
‘My cousin. Guy Vexille. I’m told he calls himself the Count of Astarac.’
‘And you think he is here?’ Planchard sounded surprised. ‘I have never heard of such a man.’
‘I think that if he knows I am here,’ Thomas said, ‘then he’ll come.’
‘And you will kill him?’
‘Question him,’ Thomas said. ‘I want to know why he thought my father possessed the Grail.’
‘And did your father possess it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas said truthfully. ‘I think he may have believed he did. But he was also mad at times.’
‘Mad?’ The question was asked very gently.
‘He didn’t worship God,’ Thomas said, ‘but fought him. He pleaded, shouted, screamed and wept at God. He saw most things very clearly, but God confused him.’
‘And you?’ Planchard asked.
‘I’m an archer,’ Thomas said, ‘I have to see things very clearly.’
‘Your father,’ Planchard said, ‘opened the door to God and was dazzled, while you keep the door shut?’
‘Maybe,’ Thomas said defensively.
‘So what is it, Thomas, that you hope to achieve if you find the Grail?’
‘Peace,’ Thomas said. ‘And justice.’ It was not an answer he had thought about, but almost a dismissal of Planchard’s question.
‘A soldier who seeks peace,’ Planchard said, amused. ‘You are full of contradictions. You have burned and killed and stolen to make peace.’ He held up a hand to still Thomas’s protest. ‘I have to tell you, Thomas, that I think it would be best if the Grail were not found. If I were to discover it I would hurl it into the deepest sea, down among the monsters, and tell no one. But if another person finds it, then it will merely be another trophy in the wars of ambitious men. Kings will fight for it, men like you will die because of it, churches will grow rich on it, and there will be no peace. But I don’t know that. Maybe you’re right? Maybe the Grail will usher in an age of plenty and peacefulness, and I pray it does. Yet the discovery of the crown of thorns brought no such splendours, and why should the Grail be more powerful than our dear Lord’s thorns? We have vials of his blood in Flanders and England, yet they do not bring peace. Is the Grail more precious than his blood?’
‘Some men think so,’ Thomas said uncomfortably.
‘And those men will kill like beasts to possess it,’ Planchard said. ‘They will kill with all the pity of a wolf savaging a lamb, and you tell me it will bring peace?’ He sighed. ‘Yet perhaps you’re right. Perhaps this is the time for the Grail to be found. We need a miracle.’
‘To bring peace?’
Planchard shook his head. He said nothing for a while, just stared at the two sweepers and looked very solemn and immensely sad. ‘I have not told this to anyone, Thomas,’ he broke his long silence, ‘and you would be wise to tell no one either. In time we shall all know and by then it will be too late. But not long ago I received a letter from a brother house in Lombardy and our world is about to change utterly.’
‘Because of the Grail?’
‘I wish it were so. No, because there is a contagion in the east. A dreadful contagion, a pestilence that spreads like smoke, that kills whoever it touches and spares no one. It is a plague, Thomas, that has been sent to harrow us.’ Planchard gazed ahead, watching the dust dance in a shaft of slanting sunlight that came down from one of the high, clear windows. ‘Such a contagion must be the devil’s work,’ the abbot went on, making the sign of the cross, ‘and it is horrid work. My brother abbot reports that in some towns of Umbria as many as half the folk have died and he advises me to bar my gates and allow no travellers inside, but how can I do that? We are here to help people, not to shut them away from God.’ H
e looked higher, as if seeking divine aid among the great beams of the roof. ‘A darkness is coming, Thomas,’ he said, ‘and it is a darkness as great as any mankind has ever seen. Perhaps, if you find the Grail, it will give light to that darkness.’
Thomas thought of Genevieve’s vision beneath the lightning, of a great darkness in which there was a point of brilliance.
‘I have always thought,’ Planchard went on, ‘that the search for the Grail was a madness, a hunt for a chimera that would bring no good, only evil, but now I learn that everything is going to change. Everything. Perhaps we shall require a wondrous symbol of God’s love.’ He sighed. ‘I have even been tempted to wonder whether this coming pestilence is sent by God. Perhaps he burns us out, purges us, so that those who are spared will do His will. I don’t know.’ He shook his head sadly. “What will you do when your Genevieve is well?’
‘I came here,’ Thomas said, ‘to find out all I could about Astarac’
‘Of the beginning and end of man’s labours,’ Planchard said with a smile, ‘there is no end. Would you resent advice?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then go far away, Thomas,’ the abbot said firmly, ‘go far away. I do not know who killed the Count of Berat, but it is not hard to guess. He had a nephew, a stupid but strong man, whom you took prisoner. I doubt the Count would have ransomed him, but now the nephew is himself the Count and can arrange his own ransom. And if he seeks what his uncle sought then he will kill any rival, and that means you, Thomas. So take care. And you must go soon.’
‘I am unwelcome here?’
‘You are most welcome,’ Planchard insisted, ‘both of you. But this morning the Count’s squire went to report his master’s death and the boy will know you are here. You and the girl. He may not know your names, but the two of you are . . . what shall I say? Noticeable? So if anyone wants to kill you, Thomas, they will know where to look for you. Which is why I tell you to go far away. This house has seen enough murder and I want no more.’ He stood and placed a gentle hand on Thomas’s head. ‘Bless you, my son,’ he said, then walked out of the church.
And Thomas felt the darkness closing.
—«»—«»—«»—
Joscelyn was the Count of Berat.
He kept remembering that, and each remembrance gave him a surge of pure joy. Count of Berat! Lord of money.
Villesisle and his companion had returned from Astarac with news that the old man had died in his sleep. ‘Before we even reached the monastery,’ Villesisle told Joscelyn in front of Robbie and Sir Guillaume, though later, in private, he confessed that things had not gone quite so well and that blood had been shed.
‘You’re a fool,’ Joscelyn snarled. ‘What did I tell you?’
‘To stifle him.’
‘So you drench the damn room with his blood instead?’
‘We didn’t have a choice,’ Villesisle claimed sullenly. ‘One of his men-at-arms was there and tried to fight. But what does it matter? The old man’s dead, isn’t he?’
He was dead. Dead and rotting, and that was what really mattered. The fourteenth Count of Berat was on his way to heaven or to hell and so the county of Berat with its castles, fiefs, towns, serfs, farmlands and hoarded coin all belonged to Joscelyn.
Joscelyn possessed a new authority when he met with Robbie and Sir Guillaume. Before, when he had been wondering whether or not his uncle would ransom him, he had done his best to be courteous for his future depended on the goodwill of his captors, but now, though he was not rude to them, he was aloof and that was fitting for they were mere adventurers and he was one of the richest nobles of southern France. ‘My ransom,’ he declared flatly, ‘is twenty thousand florins.’
‘Forty,’ Sir Guillaume insisted immediately.
‘He’s my prisoner!’ Robbie turned on Sir Guillaume.
‘So?’ Sir Guillaume bridled. ‘You’ll settle for twenty when he’s worth forty?’
‘I’ll settle for twenty,’ Robbie said and it was, in truth, a fortune, a ransom worthy of a royal duke. In English money it would be close to three thousand pounds, sufficient to set a man up in luxury for life.
‘And three thousand florins more,’ Joscelyn offered, ‘for the captured horses and my men-at-arms.’
‘Agreed,’ Robbie said before Sir Guillaume could object.
Sir Guillaume was disgusted at Robbie’s ready acceptance. The Norman knew the twenty thousand florins was a fine ransom, more than he had ever dared hope for as he had watched the few horsemen approach the ford and the waiting ambush, but even so he believed that Robbie had acquiesced far too quickly. It usually took months to negotiate a ransom, months of haggling, of messengers carrying offer and counter-offer and rejection and threat, yet Joscelyn and Robbie had settled the whole thing in moments. ‘So now,’ Sir Guillaume said, watching Joscelyn, ‘you stay here until the money arrives.’
‘Then I shall stay here for ever,’ Joscelyn said calmly. ‘I have to enter into my inheritance,’ he explained, ‘before the money will be released.’
‘So I just let you go?’ Sir Guillaume asked scornfully.
‘I’ll go with him,’ Robbie said.
Sir Guillaume looked at the Scotsman, then back to Joscelyn, and he saw allies. It must have been Robbie, Sir Guillaume thought, who had taken down Joscelyn’s reversed shield, a gesture the Norman had noticed, but decided to ignore. ‘You’ll go with him,’ he said flatly, ‘and he’s your prisoner, eh?’
‘He’s my prisoner,’ Robbie said.
‘But I command here,’ Sir Guillaume insisted, ‘and a share of the ransom is mine. Ours.’ He waved a hand to indicate the rest of the garrison.
‘It will be paid,’ Robbie said.
Sir Guillaume looked into Robbie’s eyes and saw a young man who would not meet his gaze, a young man whose allegiances were uncertain, who proposed riding to Berat with Joscelyn. Sir Guillaume suspected Robbie would not come back and so the Norman went to the niche where the crucifix hung, the same crucifix that Thomas had held in front of Genevieve’s eyes. He took it from the wall and laid it on the table in front of Robbie. ‘Swear on that,’ he demanded, ‘that our share will be paid.’
‘I do so swear it,’ Robbie said solemnly and laid his hand on the cross. ‘By God and my mother’s own life, I swear it.’ Joscelyn, watching, seemed amused.
Sir Guillaume gave in. He knew he could have kept Joscelyn and the other prisoners, and that in the end a means of conveying all the ransom money would be found if he did keep them, but he also knew that he would face weeks of unrest. Robbie’s supporters, and there were many of them, especially among the routiers who had joined the garrison, would claim that by waiting he risked losing all the money, or else they would suggest that he was planning to take the cash and cheat them, and Robbie would encourage that unrest and in the end the garrison would fall apart. It was probably going to fall apart anyway for, without Thomas, there was no compelling reason to stay. The men had never known that the Grail was their quest, but they had sensed Thomas’s urgency, sensed that he had a cause, and that what they did had a meaning; now, Sir Guillaume knew, they were just another band of routiers who were lucky enough to hold a castle. None of them would stay long, Sir Guillaume thought. Even if Robbie did not pay his share Sir Guillaume could still ride away much richer than he had arrived, but if Robbie kept faith then Sir Guillaume would have enough money to raise the men he needed to gain his revenge on those who had stolen his lands in Normandy.
‘I expect the money to be here within a week,’ Sir Guillaume said.
‘Two,’ Joscelyn said.
‘One week!’
‘I shall try,’ Joscelyn said off-handedly.
Sir Guillaume pushed the crucifix across the table. ‘One week!’
Joscelyn looked at Sir Guillaume for a long time, then placed a finger on the broken body of Christ. ‘If you insist,’ he said. ‘One week.’
Joscelyn left next morning. He rode in full armour, his banner, horses and men-a
t-arms restored to him, and with him rode Robbie Douglas and sixteen other men-at-arms, all of them Gascons who had served Thomas, but who now preferred to take gold from the Count of Berat. Sir Guillaume was left with the men who had come to Castillon d’Arbizon, but at least that meant he had the archers. He stood on the castle’s topmost rampart and watched Joscelyn ride away. John Faircloth, the English man-at-arms, joined him there. ‘Is he leaving us?’ he asked, meaning Robbie.
Sir Guillaume nodded. ‘He’s leaving us. We’ll not see him again.’
‘So what do we do?’ Faircloth asked, in French this time.
‘Wait for the money, then go.’
‘Just go?’
‘What else in God’s name can we do? The Earl of Northampton doesn’t want this town, John. He’ll never send anyone to help us. If we stay here, we die.’
‘And we go or die without the Grail,’ Faircloth said. ‘Is that why the Earl sent us here? He knew about the Grail?’
Sir Guillaume nodded. ‘The knights of the round table,’ he said, amused, ‘that’s us.’
‘And we abandon the search?’
‘It’s a madness,’ Sir Guillaume said forcefully, ‘a goddamned madness. It doesn’t exist, but Thomas thought it might and the Earl thought it worth an effort. But it’s pure moonstruck idiocy. And Robbie’s caught up in it now, but he won’t find it because it isn’t there to be found. There’s just us and too many enemies, so we’ll take our money and go home.’
‘What if they don’t send the money?’ Faircloth asked.
‘There’s honour, isn’t there?’ Sir Guillaume said. ‘I mean we plunder, thieve, rape and kill, but we never cheat each other over ransoms. Sweet Jesus! No one could ever trust anyone else if that happened.’ He paused, staring at Joscelyn and his entourage who had stopped at the valley’s end. ‘Look at the bastards,’ he said, ‘just watching us. Wondering how to get us out of here.’
The horsemen were indeed taking a last look at Castillon d’Arbizon’s tower. Joscelyn saw the impudent standard of the Earl of Northampton lift and fall in the small breeze, then he spat onto the road. ‘Are you really going to send them money?’ he asked Robbie.
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