Harlequin

by Bernard Cornwell

  'A bastard English archer put an arrow in my leg,' Sir Guillaume said, 'and I pray nightly that his soul will roast in hell.'

  'You should, instead, give thanks that he was inaccurate. Why do you bring me an English war bow decorated with a yale?'

  'Because I thought it would interest you,' Sir Guillaume said, 'and because my young friend here,' he touched Thomas's shoulder, 'wants to know about the Vexilles.'

  'He would do much better to forget them,' Brother Germain grumbled.

  He was perched on a tall chair and now peered about the room where a dozen young monks tidied the mess left by the monastery's English occupiers. Some of them chattered as they worked, provoking a frown from Brother Germain.

  'This is not Caen marketplace!' he snapped. 'If you want to gossip, go to the lavatories. I wish I could. Ask Mordecai if he has an unguent for the bowels, would you?' He glowered about the room for an instant, then struggled to pick up the bow that he had propped against the desk. He looked intently at the yale for an instant, then put the bow down. 'There was always a rumour that a branch of the Vexille family went to England. This seems to confirm it.'

  'Who are they?' Thomas asked.

  Brother Germain seemed irritated by the direct question, or perhaps the whole subject of the Vexilles made him uncomfortable. 'They were the rulers of Astarac,' he said, 'a county on the borders of Languedoc and the Agenais. That, of course, should tell you all you need to know of them.'

  It tells me nothing,' Thomas confessed.

  Then you probably have a doctorate from Paris!' The old man chuckled at this jest. 'The Counts of Astarac, young man, were Cathars. Southern France was infested by that damned heresy, and Astarac was at the centre of the evil.' He made the sign of the cross with fingers deep-stained by pigments. 'Habere non potest,' he said solemnly, 'Deum patrem qui ecclesiam non habet matrem.'

  St Cyprian,' Thomas said. '"He cannot have God as his father who does not have the Church as his mother."'

  'I see you are not from Paris after all,' Brother Germain said. 'The Cathars rejected the Church, looking for salvation within their own dark souls. What would become of the Church if we all did that? If we all pursued our own whims? If God is within us then we need no Church and no Holy Father to lead us to His mercy, and that notion is the most pernicious of heresies, and where did it lead the Cathars? To a life of dissipation, of fleshly lust, of pride and of perversion. They denied the divinity of Christ!' Brother Germain made the sign of the cross again.

  'And the Vexilles were Cathars?' Sir Guillaume prompted the old man.

  'I suspect they were devil worshippers,' Brother Germain retorted, 'but certainly the Counts of Astarac protected the Cathars, they and a dozen other lords. They were called the dark lords and very few of them were Perfects. The Perfects were the sect leaders, the heresiarchs, and they abstained from wine, intercourse and meat, and no Vexille would willingly abandon those three joys. But the Cathars allowed such sinners to be among their ranks and promised them the joys of heaven if they recanted before their deaths. The dark lords liked such a promise and, when the heresy was assailed by the Church, they fought bitterly.' He shook his head. 'This was a hundred years ago! The Holy Father and the King of France destroyed the Cathars, and Astarac was one of the last fortresses to fall. The fight was dreadful, the dead innumerable, but the heresiarchs and the dark lords were finally scotched.'

  'Yet some escaped?' Sir Guillaume suggested gently.

  Brother Germain was silent for a while, gazing at the drying vermilion ink. 'There was a story,' he said, 'that some of the Cathar lords did survive, and that they took their riches to countries all across Europe. There is even a rumour that the heresy yet survives, hidden in the lands where Burgundy and the Italian states meet.' He made the sign of the cross. 'I think a part of the Vexille family went to England, to hide there, for it was in England, Sir Guillaume, that you found the lance of St George. Vexille…' He said the name thoughtfully. 'It derives, of course, from vexillaire, a standard-bearer, and it is said that an early Vexille discovered the lance while on the crusades and thereafter carried it as a standard. It was certainly a symbol of power in those old days. Myself? I am sceptical of these relics. The abbot assures me he has seen three foreskins of the infant Jesus and even I, who hold Him blessed above all things, doubt He was so richly endowed, but I have asked some questions about this lance. There is a legend attached to it. It is said that the man who carries the lance into battle cannot be defeated. Mere legend, of course, but belief in such nonsense inspires the ignorant, and there are few more ignorant than soldiers. What troubles me most, though, is their purpose.'

  'Whose purpose?' Thomas asked.

  'There is a story,' Brother Germain said, ignoring the question, 'that before the fall of the last heretic fortresses, the surviving dark lords made an oath. They knew the war was lost, they knew their strongholds must fall and that the Inquisition and the forces of God would destroy their people, and so they made an oath to visit vengeance on their enemies. One day, they swore, they would bring down the Throne of France and the Holy Mother Church, and to do it they would use the power of their holiest relics.'

  'The lance of St George?' Thomas asked.

  'That too,' Brother Germain said.

  'That too?' Sir Guillaume repeated the words in a puzzled tone.

  Brother Germain dipped his quill and put another glistening drop of ink on the parchment. Then, deftly, he finished his copy of the badge on Thomas's bow. 'The yale,' he said, 'I have seen before, but the badge you showed me is different. The beast is holding a chalice. But not any chalice, Sir Guillaume. You are right, the bow interests me, and frightens me, for the yale is holding the Grail. The holy, blessed and most precious Grail. It was always rumoured that the Cathars possessed the Grail. There is a tawdry lump of green glass in Genoa Cathedral that is said to be the Grail, but I doubt our dear Lord drank from such a bauble. No, the real Grail exists, and whoever holds it possesses power above all men on earth.' He put down the quill. 'I fear, Sir Guillaume, that the dark lords want their revenge. They gather their strength. But they hide still and the Church has not yet taken notice. Nor will it until the danger is obvious, and by then it will be too late.' Brother Germain lowered his head so that Thomas could only see the bald pink patch among the white hair. 'It is all prophesied,' the monk said; 'it is all in the books.'

  'What books?' Sir Guillaume asked.

  'Et confortabitur rex austri et de principibus eius praevalebit super eum,' Brother Germain said softly.

  Sir Guillaume looked quizzically at Thomas. 'And the King from the south will be mighty,' Thomas reluctantly translated, 'but one of his princes will be stronger than him.'

  'The Cathars are of the south,' Brother Germain said, 'and the prophet Daniel foresaw it all.' He raised his pigment-stained hands. 'The fight will be terrible, for the soul of the world is at stake, and they will use any weapon, even a woman. Filiaque regis austri veniet ad regem aquilonis facere amicitiam.'

  'The daughter of the King of the south,' Thomas said, 'shall come to the King of the north and make a treaty.'

  Brother Germain heard the distaste in Thomas's voice. 'You don't believe it?' he hissed. 'Why do you think we keep the scriptures from the ignorant? They contain all sorts of prophecies, young man, and each of them given direct to us by God, but such knowledge is confusing to the unlearned. Men go mad when they know too much.' He made the sign of the cross. 'I thank God I shall be dead soon and taken to the bliss above while you must struggle with this darkness.'

  Thomas walked to the window and watched two wagons of grain being unloaded by novices. Sir Guillaume's men-at-arms were playing dice in the cloister. That was real, he thought, not some babbling prophet. His father had ever warned him against prophecy. It drives men's minds awry, he had said, and was that why his own mind had gone astray?

  'The lance,' Thomas said, trying to cling to fact instead of fancy, 'was taken to England by the Vexille family. My father was one
of them, but he fell out with the family and he stole the lance and hid it in his church. He was killed there, and at his death he told me it was his brother's son who did it. I think it is that man, my cousin, who called himself the Harlequin.' He turned to look at Brother Germain. 'My father was a Vexille, but he was no heretic. He was a sinner, yes, but he struggled against his sin, he hated his own father, and he was a loyal son of the Church.'

  'He was a priest,' Sir Guillaume explained to the monk.

  'And you are his son?' Brother Germain asked in a disapproving tone. The other monks had abandoned their tidying and were listening avidly.

  'I am a priest's son,' Thomas said, 'and a good Christian.'

  'So the family discovered where the lance was hidden,' Sir Guillaume took up the story, 'and hired me to retrieve it. But forgot to pay me.'

  Brother Germain appeared not to have heard. He was staring at Thomas. 'You are English?'

  'The bow is mine,' Thomas acknowledged.

  'So you are a Vexille?'

  Thomas shrugged. 'It would seem so.'

  'Then you are one of the dark lords,' Brother Germain said.

  Thomas shook his head. 'I am a Christian,' he said firmly.

  'Then you have a God-given duty,' the small man said with surprising force, 'which is to finish the work that was left undone a hundred years ago. Kill them all! Kill them! And kill the woman. You hear me, boy? Kill the daughter of the King of the south before she seduces France to heresy and wickedness.'

  'If we can even find the Vexilles,' Sir Guillaume said dubiously, and Thomas noted the word 'we'. 'They don't display their badge. I doubt they use the name Vexille. They hide.'

  'But they have the lance now,' Brother Germain said, 'and they will use it for the first of their vengeances. They will destroy France, and in the chaos that ensues, they will attack the Church.' He moaned, as if he was in physical pain. 'You must take away their power, and their power is the Grail.'

  So it was not just the lance that Thomas must save. To Father Hobbe's charge had been added all of Christendom. He wanted to laugh. Catharism had died a hundred years before, scourged and burned and dug out of the land like couch grass grubbed from a field! Dark lords, daughters of kings and princes of darkness were figments of the troubadours, not the business of archers. Except that when he looked at Sir Guillaume he saw that the Frenchman was not mocking the task. He was staring at a crucifix hanging on the scriptorium wall and mouthing a silent prayer. God help me, Thomas thought, God help me, but I am being asked to do what all the great knights of Arthur's round table failed to do: to find the Grail.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  Philip of Valois, King of France, ordered every Frenchman of military age to gather at Rouen. Demands went to his vassals and appeals were carried to his allies. He had expected the walls of Caen to hold the English for weeks, but the city had fallen in a day and the panicked survivors were spreading across northern France with terrible stories of devils unleashed.

  Rouen, nestled in a great loop of the Seine, filled with warriors. Thousands of Genoese crossbowmen came by galley, beaching their ships on the river's bank and thronging the city's taverns, while knights and men-at-arms arrived from Anjou and Picardy, from Alençon and Champagne, from Maine, Touraine and Berry. Every blacksmith's shop became an armoury, every house a barracks and every tavern a brothel. More men arrived, until the city could scarce contain them, and tents had to be set up in the fields south of the city. Wagons crossed the bridge, loaded with hay and newly harvested grain from the rich farmlands north of the river, while from the Seine's southern bank came rumours. The English had taken Evreux, or perhaps it was Bernay? Smoke had been seen at Lisieux, and archers were swarming through the forest of Brotonne. A nun in Louviers had a dream in which the dragon killed St George. King Philip ordered the woman brought to Rouen, but she had a harelip, a hunchback and a stammer, and when she was presented to the King she proved unable to recount the dream, let alone confide God's strategy to His Majesty. She just shuddered and wept and the King dismissed her angrily, but took consolation from the bishop's astrologer who said Mars was in the ascendant and that meant victory was certain.

  Rumour said the English were marching on Paris, then another rumour claimed they were going south to protect their territories in Gascony. It was said that every person in Caen had died, that the castle was rubble; then a story went about that the English themselves were dying of a sickness. King Philip, ever a nervous man, became petulant, demanding news, but his advisers persuaded their irritable master that wherever the English were they must eventually starve if they were kept south of the great River Seine that twisted like a snake from Paris to the sea. Edward's men were wasting the land, so needed to keep moving if they were to find food, and if the Seine was blocked then they could not go north towards the harbours on the Channel coast where they might expect supplies from England.

  'They use arrows like a woman uses money,' Charles, the Count of Alençon and the King's younger brother, advised Philip, 'but they cannot fetch their arrows from France. They are brought to them by sea, and the further they go from the sea, the greater their problems.' So if the English were kept south of the Seine then they must eventually fight or make an ignominious retreat to Normandy.

  'What of Paris? Paris? What of Paris?' the King demanded.

  'Paris will not fall,' the Count assured his brother. The city lay north of the Seine, so the English would need to cross the river and assault the largest ramparts in Christendom, and all the while the garrison would be showering them with crossbow bolts and the missiles from the hundreds of small iron guns that had been mounted on the city walls.

  'Maybe they will go south?' Philip worried. 'To Gascony?'

  'If they march to Gascony,' the Count said, 'then they will have no boots by the time they arrive, and their arrow store will be gone. Let us pray they do go to Gascony, but above all things pray they do not reach the Seine's northern bank.' For if the English crossed the Seine they would go to the nearest Channel port to receive reinforcements and supplies and, by now, the Count knew, the English would be needing supplies. A marching army tired itself, its men became sick and its horses lame. An army that marched too long would eventually wear out like a tired crossbow.

  So the French reinforced the great fortresses that guarded the Seine's crossings and where a bridge could not be guarded, such as the sixteen-arched bridge at Poissy, it was demolished. A hundred men with sledgehammers broke down the parapets and hammered the stonework of the arches into the river to leave the fifteen stumps of the broken piers studding the Seine like the stepping stones of a giant, while Poissy itself, which lay south of the Seine and was reckoned indefensible, was abandoned and its people evacuated to Paris. The wide river was being turned into an impassable barrier to trap the English in an area where their food must eventually run short. Then, when the devils were weakened, the French would punish them for the terrible damage they had wrought on France. The English were still burning towns and destroying farms so that, in those long summer days, the western and southern horizons were so smeared by smoke plumes that it seemed as if there were permanent clouds on the skylines. At night the world's edge glowed and folk fleeing the fires came to Rouen where, because so many could not be housed or fed, they were ordered across the river and away to wherever they might find shelter.

  Sir Simon Jekyll, and Henry Colley, his man-at-arms, were among the fugitives, and they were not refused admittance, for they both rode destriers and were in mail. Colley wore his own mail and rode his own horse, but Sir Simon's mount and gear had been stolen from one of his other men-at-arms before he fled from Caen. Both men carried shields, but they had stripped the leather covers from the willow boards so that the shields bore no device, thus declaring themselves to be masterless men for hire. Scores like them came to the city, seeking a lord who could offer food and pay, but none arrived with the anger that filled Sir Simon.

  It was the injustice that galled him. I
t burned his soul, giving him a lust for revenge. He had come so close to paying all his debts — indeed, when the money from the sale of Jeanette's ships was paid from England he had expected to be free of all encumbrances — but now he was a fugitive. He knew he could have slunk back to England, but any man out of favour with the King or the King's eldest son could expect to be treated as a rebel, and he would be fortunate if he kept an acre of land, let alone his freedom. So he had preferred flight, trusting that his sword would win back the privileges he had lost to the Breton bitch and her puppy lover, and Henry Colley had ridden with him in the belief that any man as skilled in arms as Sir Simon could not fail.

  No one questioned their presence in Rouen. Sir Simon's French was tinged with the accent of England's gentry, but so was the French of a score of other men from Normandy. What Sir Simon needed now was a patron, a man who would feed him and give him the chance to fight back against his persecutors, and there were plenty of great men looking for followers. In the fields south of Rouen, where the looping river narrowed the land, a pasture had been set aside as a tourney ground where, in front of a knowing crowd of men-at-arms, anyone could enter the lists to show their prowess. This was not a serious tournament — the swords were blunt and lances were tipped with wooden blocks — but rather it was a chance for masterless men to show their prowess with weapons, and a score of knights, the champions of dukes, counts, viscounts and mere lords, were the judges. Dozens of hopeful men were entering the lists, and any horseman who could last more than a few minutes against the well-mounted and superbly armed champions was sure to find a place in the entourage of a great nobleman.

  Sir Simon, on his stolen horse and with his ancient battered sword, was one of the least impressive men to ride into the pasture. He had no lance, so one of the champions drew a sword and rode to finish him off. At first no one took particular notice of the two men for other combats were taking place, but when the champion was sprawling on the grass and Sir Simon, untouched, rode on, the crowd took notice.