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

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Planchard believed it was the box that held the Grail,’ he told her, ‘or maybe the box that was supposed to make men think it had held the Grail.’ He stared at the fading inscription. Now that he could see the box properly, in the sunlight, he saw that the lettering had been in red and that where the paint had been rubbed away there was still a faint impression on the wood. There was another faint impression inside the box, a circle of dust that had been forced into the wood as if something had rested there a long time. The two iron hinges were rusted and fragile, and the wood so dry that it weighed almost nothing.

  ‘Is it real?’ Genevieve asked.

  ‘It’s real,’ Thomas said, ‘but whether it ever held the Grail, I don’t know.’ And he thought how often he had said those last three words whenever he talked about the Grail.

  Yet he knew more now. He knew that seven men had fled Astarac in the previous century, back when the forces of France, wearing the crusaders’ cross, had come to burn a heresy from the southland. The men had fled, claiming to take a treasure, and they had pledged to defend it, and now, so many years later, only Guy Vexille had kept the twisted faith. And had Thomas’s father really possessed the Grail? That was why Guy Vexille had gone to Hookton and murdered his way through the village, just as he had now murdered Planchard. The descendants of the dark lords were being purged for betraying the trust, and Thomas knew exactly what would happen to him if his cousin caught him.

  ‘It’s a strange shape for a Grail,’ Genevieve said. The box was shallow and square, not tall as though a stemmed cup had once been stored in it.

  ‘Who knows what the Grail looks like?’ Thomas asked, and then he put the box into his haversack and they walked on southwards. Thomas constantly glanced behind and around mid-afternoon he saw dark-cloaked men riding up to the ridge from the monastery. There were a dozen of them and he guessed they would use the ridge as a lookout. Guy Vexille must have searched the monastery again and found nothing so now he was spreading his net wider.

  They hurried. As evening approached they were in sight of the jumbled rocks where Genevieve had been wounded; the woodlands were not far ahead now, but Thomas kept looking behind, expecting the dozen riders to appear at any moment. Instead, more men appeared to the east, another twelve climbing the track which led across the ridge, and Thomas and Genevieve ran across the grass and vanished into the trees just moments before the new horsemen appeared on the crest.

  The two lay in the undergrowth, catching their breath. The twelve new riders sat in the open, waiting, and after a while the first horsemen appeared like a line of beaters. They had been searching the open part of the ridge, hoping to flush Thomas and Genevieve out of cover, and Thomas understood that his cousin had foreseen exactly what he would do, had foreseen that he would try to reach Castillon d’Arbizon, or at least journey west towards the other English garrisons, and now his men were combing all the landscape west of Astarac. And even as Thomas watched, his cousin came into sight, leading another score of men who joined the others on the grassy crest. There were now over forty men-at-arms on the high ground, all in mail or plate, all cloaked in black, all with long swords.

  ‘What do we do?’ Genevieve breathed the question.

  ‘Hide,’ Thomas said.

  They wriggled backwards, trying to make no sound, and when they were deep in the trees Thomas led her eastwards. He was going back towards Astarac because he doubted Guy would expect that, and when they reached the edge of the high ground and could see the valley spread out in front of them, Thomas sidled north again to see what his pursuers were doing.

  Half of them had gone on westwards to block the tracks crossing the neighbouring valley, but the rest, led by Vexille, were riding towards the trees. They would be the beaters again, hoping to drive Thomas and Genevieve out towards the other men-at-arms and, now that the horsemen were closer, Thomas could see that some of them were carrying crossbows.

  ‘We’re safe for the moment,’ Thomas told Genevieve when he rejoined her in the rocky gully where she sheltered. He reckoned he had slipped inside his cousin’s cordon that was driving outwards, and the farther it went the wider that cordon would become and the easier it would be to slip between its gaps. But that must wait till morning because the sun was already sinking towards the western clouds, touching them pink. Thomas listened to the sound of the woods, but heard nothing alarming, only the scrabble of claws on bark, the wing beats of a pigeon and the sigh of the wind. The black-cloaked riders had gone westwards, but to the east, down in the valley, their work was visible. There were still soldiers down there and those men had fired the lazar house so that its smoke smeared all the sky above the monastery, and they had also burned what remained of the village, reckoning the flames would drive anyone concealed in the cottages into the open. More men were in the ruins of the castle, and Thomas wondered what they did there, but he was much too far away to see.

  ‘We have to eat,’ he told Genevieve.

  ‘We have nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Then we’ll look for mushrooms,’ Thomas said, ‘and nuts. And we need water.’

  They found a tiny streamlet to the south and they both slaked their thirst by thrusting their faces against a rock down which the water trickled, then Thomas made a bed of bracken in the streamlet’s gully and, when he was satisfied that they would be well hidden there, he left Genevieve and went in search of food. He carried his bow and had a half-dozen arrows in his belt, not just for defence, but in hope of seeing a deer or pig. He found some mushrooms in the leaf mould, but they were small and black-vaned and he was not sure whether they were poisonous. He went farther, looking for chestnuts or game, always creeping, always listening, and always keeping the edge of the ridge in sight. He heard a noise and turned fast and thought he saw a deer, but the shadows were lengthening and he could not be certain; he put an arrow on the string anyway and crept to where he had seen the flickering movement. This was the rutting season and the stags should be in the woods, looking for others to fight. He knew he dared not light a fire to cook the meat, but he had eaten raw liver before and it would be a feast this night. Then he saw the antlers and he moved to one side, half crouching, trying to bring the stag’s body into view and just then the crossbow shot and the bolt hissed past him to thump into a tree and the stag took off in great bounds as Thomas twisted round, hauling back the bowcord, and saw the men drawing their swords.

  He had walked into a trap.

  And he was caught.

  PART THREE

  The Darkness

  Chapter 9

  The search of the monastery had yielded nothing except the body of Abbot Planchard and Guy Vexille, on being told of the old man’s death, loudly blamed his missing cousin. He had then ordered a search of all the buildings, commanded that the village and Iazar house be fired to make certain no fugitives were hiding in either, and then, reluctantly convinced that his prey had fled, he sent horsemen to search all the nearby woods. The discovery of a pair of discarded lepers’ robes and two wooden clappers in the western woods suggested what had happened and Vexille confronted the horsemen who had been guarding that side of the monastery. Both men swore they had seen nothing. He did not believe them, but there was little to be gained by challenging their assertions and so, instead, he sent horsemen to rake every path which led towards the English possessions in Gascony. When he ordered Charles Bessières to add his men to the search, however, Bessières refused. He claimed his horses were lame and his men tired. ‘I don’t take your orders,’ Bessières snarled. ‘I’m here for my brother.’

  ‘And your brother wants the Englishman found,’ Vexille insisted.

  ‘Then you find him, my lord,’ Bessières said, making the last two words sound like an insult.

  Vexille rode west with all his men, knowing that Bessières probably wanted to stay behind to plunder the village and monastery, and that was precisely what Charles Bessières did, though he found little enough. He sent six of his men to rake through the path
etic belongings that the villagers had saved from the new flames, and they discovered some pots and pans that might sell for a few sous, but what they really wanted were the coins that the villagers would have hidden when they saw armed men coming. Everyone knew that peasants hoarded small amounts of cash, and buried it when mailed raiders appeared, and so Bessières’s men tortured the serfs to make them reveal the hiding places and, in so doing, discovered something far more intriguing. One of Charles’s men spoke the language of southern France and he had been sawing at a prisoner’s fingers when the man blurted out that the old Count had been digging in the castle ruins and had uncovered an ancient wall beneath the chapel but then had died before he was able to delve farther. That interested Bessières, because the man suggested there was something behind the wall, something that had excited the old Count and which the abbot, God save his soul, had wanted hidden and so, once Vexille had vanished westwards, Bessières led his men up to the old fortress.

  It took less than an hour to prise up the flagstones and reveal the vault, and in another hour Bessières had pulled out the old coffins and seen that they had already been plundered. The man from the village was fetched and he showed where the Count had been digging and Bessières ordered his men to uncover the wall. He made them work fast, wanting to finish the job before Guy Vexille returned and accused him of desecrating his family’s graves, but the wall was stoutly made and well mortared, and it was not until one of his men fetched the blacksmith’s heaviest hammer from the plunder taken from the burned village that he made real progress. The hammer crashed on the stones, chipping and dislodging them, until at last they were able to get an iron spike between the lower blocks and the wall came tumbling down.

  And inside, on a stone pillar, was a box.

  It was a wooden box, perhaps big enough to hold a man’s head, and even Charles Bessières felt a surge of excitement as he saw it. The Grail, he thought, the Grail, and he imagined riding north with the prize that would give his brother the papacy. ‘Out of the way,’ he snarled at a man reaching for the treasure, then he stooped into the low space and took the wooden box from its pedestal.

  The chest was cunningly made, for it seemed to have no lid. On one side - Bessières assumed it was the top - was inset a silver cross that had become tarnished over the years, but there was no writing on the box and no clue as to what might be inside. Bessières shook it and heard something rattle. He paused then. He was thinking that perhaps the real Grail was in his hands, but if the box proved to hold something else then this might be a good time to take the fake Grail from the quiver at his belt and pretend he had discovered it beneath Astarac’s ruined altar.

  ‘Open it,’ one of his men said.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ Bessières said, wanting to think some more. The Englishman was still at large, but he would probably be caught, and suppose he had the Grail and the one at his hip was thus revealed as a fake? Bessières faced the same dilemma that had puzzled him in the ossuary when he’d had a simple chance to kill Vexille. Produce the Grail at the wrong time and there would be no easy life in the papal palace at Avignon. So it was best, he thought, to wait for the Englishman’s capture and thus make sure there was only one Grail to be carried to Paris. Yet perhaps this box contained the treasure?

  He carried it up to the daylight and there he drew his knife and hacked at the box’s well-made joints. One of his men offered to use the blacksmith’s hammer to splinter the wood apart, but Bessières cursed him for a fool. ‘You want to break what’s inside?’ he asked. He cuffed the man aside and went on working with the knife until he finally succeeded in splitting one side away.

  The contents were wrapped in white woollen cloth. Bessières eased them out, daring to hope that this was the great prize. His men crowded around expectantly as Bessières unwound the old, threadbare cloth.

  To find bones.

  A skull, some foot bones, a shoulder-blade and three ribs. Bessières stared at them, then cursed. His men began to laugh and Bessières, in his anger, kicked the skull so that it flew down into the vault, rolled for a few paces, and then was still.

  He had blunted his good knife to find the few remaining bones of the famous healer of angels, St Sever.

  And the Grail was still hidden.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  The coredors had been intrigued by the activity around Astarac. Whenever armed men pillaged a town or village there would be fugitives who made easy pickings for desperate and hungry outlaws, and Destral, who led close to a hundred coredors, had watched the harrowing of Astarac and noted the folk fleeing the soldiers and watched where they went.

  Most of the coredors were fugitives themselves, though not all. Some were just men down on their luck, others had been discharged from the wars and a handful had refused to accept their given place as serfs belonging to a master. In summer they preyed on the flocks taken to the high pastures and ambushed careless travellers in the mountain passes, but in winter they were forced to lower ground to find victims and shelter. Men came and went from the band, bringing and taking their women with them. Some of the men died of disease, others took their plunder and left to make a more honest living, while a few were killed in fights over women or wagers, though very few died in fights with outsiders. The old Count of Berat had tolerated Destral’s band so long as they did no great damage, reckoning it a waste of money to hire men-at-arms to scour mountains riven with gullies and thick with caves. Instead he put garrisons wherever there was wealth to attract coredors and made sure the wagons carrying his tax tribute from the towns were well guarded. Merchants, travelling away from the main roads, took care to move in convoy with their own hired soldiers, and what was left was the coredors’ pickings, which sometimes they had to fight for because routiers encroached on their territory.

  A routier was almost a coredor, except that routiers were better organized. They were soldiers without employment, armed and experienced, and routiers would sometimes take a town and ransack it, garrison it, keep it till it was wrung dry and then travel again. Few lords were willing to fight them for the routiers were trained soldiers and formed small vicious armies that fought with the fanaticism of men who had nothing to lose. Their predations stopped whenever a war started and the lords offered money for soldiers. Then the routiers would take a new oath, go to war and fight until a truce was called, and then, knowing no trade except killing, they would go back to the lonelier stretches of countryside and find a town to savage.

  Destral hated routiers. He hated all soldiers for they were the natural enemies of coredors, and though, as a rule, he avoided them, he would allow his men to attack them if he had a great advantage in numbers. Soldiers were a good source for weapons, armour and horses, and so, on the evening when the smoke from the burning village and lazar house was smearing the sky above Astarac, he allowed one of his deputies to lead an attack on a half-dozen black-cloaked men-at-arms who had strayed a short way into the trees. The attack was a mistake. The riders were not alone, there were others just beyond the woods, and suddenly the gloom beneath the trees was loud with horses’ hooves and the scrape of swords leaving scabbards.

  Destral did not know what was happening at the wood’s edge. He was deeper among the trees in a place where a limestone crag reared up from the oaks and a small stream fell from the heights. Two caves offered shelter, and this was where Destral planned to spend his winter, high enough in the hills to offer protection, but close enough to the valleys so his men could raid the villages and farms, and it was here that the two fugitives from Astarac had been brought. The pair had been captured at the edge of the ridge and escorted back to the clearing in front of the caves where Destral had prepared fires, though he would not light the wood until he was sure the soldiers were dealt with. Now, in the evening’s twilight, he saw his men had brought him a greater prize than he had dared dream of because one of the two captives was an English archer and the other was a woman, and women were always scarce among the coredors. She would have
her uses, but the Englishman would have a greater value. He could be sold. He also possessed a bag of money, a sword and a mail coat, which meant his capture, for Destral, was a triumph made even sweeter because this was the same man who had killed half a dozen of his men with his arrows. The coredors searched Thomas’s haversack and stole his flint and steel, the spare bowcords and the few coins Thomas had stored there, but they threw away the spare arrow heads and the empty box which they considered a thing of no value. They stripped him of his arrows and gave his bow to Destral who tried to draw it and became enraged when, despite his strength, he could not haul the string back more than a few inches. ‘Just chop off his fingers,’ he snarled, throwing down the bow, ‘and strip her naked.’ Philin intervened then. A man and a woman had seized Genevieve and were hauling the mail shirt over her head, ignoring her shrieks of pain, and Thomas was trying to break away from the two men holding his arms, when Philin shouted that they were all to stop.

  ‘Stop?’ Destral turned on Philin in disbelief at the challenge. ‘You’ve gone soft?’ he accused Philin. ‘You want us to spare him?’

  ‘I asked him to join us,’ Philin said nervously. ‘Because he let my son live.’

  Thomas did not understand any of the conversation, which was being held in the local tongue, but it was plain that Philin was pleading for his life, and it was equally plain that Destral, whose nickname came from the great axe that was slung on his shoulder, was in no mood to grant the request. ‘You want him to join us?’ Destral roared. ‘Why? Because he spared your son? Jesus Christ, but you’re a weak bastard. You’re a lily-livered piece of snot-nosed shit.’ He unslung the axe, looped the cord tied to its handle about his wrist, and advanced on the tall Philin. ‘I let you lead men and you have half of them killed! That man and his woman did that, and you’d have him join us? If it wasn’t for the reward I’d kill him now. I’d slit his belly and hang him by his own rotten guts, but instead he’ll lose a finger for every man of mine he killed.’ He spat towards Thomas then pointed the axe at Genevieve. ‘Then he can watch her warm my bed.’