Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (15 page)

I felt a vast swell of affection for the man. He was truly a generous lord, whatever other sins he was guilty of – and they were legion. He was a true friend. ‘Thank you, Robin, for that offer – for taking us in last night, for seeing to Goody, for everything. I don’t know how I will ever be able to repay you…’

‘Well, I’m glad you mentioned that,’ said Robin with a mischievous grin that I knew well and did not relish. ‘I’ve something to discuss with you when you return.’

I frowned and took the bridle of the grey horse from the groom’s hand. As I stepped up into the saddle, a most unpleasant thought struck me. ‘What did you do with the poor goldsmith? He had surely told you everything. What became of him?’

Robin said nothing. He merely stared at me, his face blank, as I sat on his grey horse, my belly full of his food and drink, my sick wife and unborn baby under his care. ‘Have a safe journey,’ he said. ‘We have much to talk about when you return.’

‘What did you do with him, Robin?’ I insisted foolishly. ‘What became of Malloch Baruch, the Jew of Lincoln?’

Robin looked at me levelly for a few moments. ‘I gave him to Brigid – I gave him to Brigid for the ritual,’ he said with nothing in his voice. ‘He is the price of Goody’s care.’

The journey was safe – and very nearly uneventful. The deer paths and woodland tracks were narrow but clear to follow. I could not understand how I had lost my way so easily the night before: and yet I knew that darkness can make even the simplest task a dozen times more difficult.

As I approached Westbury and rode towards the high knoll with the little copse, a thin figure burst out of the stand of trees and came running towards me calling my name. I released my sword hilt and stepped down from my horse to embrace Baldwin: dirty, his robe damp and torn, his face grey with fatigue and fear, but it was truly my steward, more or less whole and hale. My joy at discovering him alive leavened the deep sadness I felt at the sight of Westbury in the daylight. As we stood by the copse and looked down at the charred ruin a little over a mile away, Baldwin told me his story in short, excited bursts.

My steward had ridden out of the stable behind Ox-head with the rest of us, but the surprise of our eruption from the building on horseback had lessened by the time he and his riding companion emerged. While we had ridden to safety out of the gates, they had been surrounded by a crowd of enemy men-at-arms and pulled from the horse near the gate. While Ox-head had battled manfully for his life, killing at least two of his enemies before he succumbed, Baldwin, perhaps less gloriously though more prudently, had wriggled free of the press and run as fast as his legs would carry him to the well in the middle of the courtyard and had jumped inside. He had remained there somehow undetected for several hours and towards dawn, when the soldiers had all departed, he climbed out with the aid of the rope that was attached to the bucket. Fearing that Gilles de Mauchamps’ men might return, he had left Westbury and hidden himself in the undergrowth in the copse on the knoll until he had seen me approaching.

I congratulated him on his survival and told him that he had done exactly the right thing in the circumstances.

I was very glad that he yet lived, but I was drowning in a sense of shame and failure. The primary duty of a lord is to protect his people. Yet a great many of those who had looked to me for their protection were now dead. As we walked slowly together down the slope towards my now blackened and smoke-stinking property, I pictured the faces of the fallen, so many fallen. My servants, my soldiers, my friends … For of the thirty-two people who had once called the manor home, only seven now remained on this earth.

As a place of human habitation, Westbury was no more. The hall, the stables, Roland’s guest hall, the store rooms – every structure had been deliberately torched and was no more than a collection of half-burned blackened timbers that had collapsed in on themselves. Our dead lay where they had fallen: men-at-arms, the women of Westbury, even a couple of innocent children lay in the pathetic attitudes of death, their bodies blackened with soot and sprawled like discarded dolls on the hoof-churned, blood-soaked earth. Baldwin wept openly as we bent together to the task of gathering the corpses of our friends and companions, many cruelly burned or mutilated, and carried them out of the reeking compound and on to the green turf of the sheep-pasture to line them up in rows for a Christian burial.

We were joined after an hour or so by Father Arnold, who popped up, a little soot-blackened but apparently otherwise unharmed, and told me blinking his owlish eyes a little more madly than usual that the village too had been ravaged by the marauders. However, only two or three houses had been destroyed, and, while several folk had suffered slight injuries at the hands of the enemy, only one man had been killed. Many of the village folk had seen Westbury burning and overrun by enemy soldiers, and had escaped by hiding in the woods nearby.

I passed on Robin’s offer of help to the little priest and gave instructions for a Mass for the dead as soon as it was possible. I also charged Baldwin with beginning the rebuilding of the manor, as Robin had so accurately put it, from the ground up. Father Arnold assured me that the village men would be only too glad to help with the reconstruction of my home under Baldwin’s supervision, and I promised that suitable payment would be forthcoming for their efforts.

It was a desperately sad day, but a busy one. There was so much to do that I felt that I was drowning in decisions. But, even while giving dozens of detailed instructions to Baldwin and Arnold, and greeting villagers who emerged from a wide variety of hiding places to offer their condolences and help with the clearing up, I was distracted by grief and worry. I found it hard to focus on my labours, many and onerous as they were, for one most urgent question hammered away in my heart: did Goody yet live?

It was late in the evening when I returned to Robin’s Caves, more tired than I had been for months, and I discovered that my beloved’s condition had not changed. She appeared still to be in a deep unnatural sleep, her breathing only the faintest whiff of air, her pulse feeble and uneven. She had been moved from her bearskin by the fire into a small cave all of her own and Ada was tending to her, feeding an iron brazier with billets of wood and sitting beside her lest she wake.

Ada told me in a hushed voice that the notorious witch Brigid of the Wood had been to visit and had examined her closely all over and declared that the malaise that Goody was suffering from was magical in its nature – and furthermore that it was a powerful spell that could not easily be countered. Brigid feared for Goody’s life, Ada told me, and even more for the life of the baby inside her. However, the witch had agreed that she would use all her skill to cure my girl, and that she had returned to her home in the forest to brew up the most powerful medicines at her disposal.

‘It will be tongue of toad, and a hanged man’s member, all boiled together in a cauldron of fresh baby’s blood, I expect,’ said Ada, with a good deal of relish. She was a devoted servant to Goody, and had nursed her tenderly, but I could not help but feel that she seemed to be enjoying the drama of her mistress’s illness a little too much. I did not like to dwell on what witchy charms and cures Brigid might be concocting. An image of the finger-cropped goldsmith Malloch leaped into my mind; and I shuddered at the knowledge that he was in Brigid’s blood-stained hands. But I was too worn out for true outrage at Robin’s hellish exchange. Would I have killed Malloch to save Goody’s life? Would I allow an enemy, a man who had tried to have me killed, a treacherous fellow who had asked for my help, and been generously offered it, and then had tried to trap me – would I allow this man to be murdered by a pagan priestess to save my beloved and my unborn baby? I could make that decision in a single heartbeat. There was no question about it at all.

I sat beside Goody in her cave for an hour or so, holding her hand and staring at her still white face in the flickering light of the brazier while Ada bustled about making a broth. I prayed silently once again: offering myself to God if he would allow her to live. But I took little comfort from my attempt to commune with the Almighty. My thoughts turned to Nur – the foul bitch who, I was truly beginning to believe, had somehow caused this vile sickness to come down on my beloved. If I could kill her, I thought, surely that would lift the curse on Goody. And if, God forbid, Goody should die, I would kill her anyway, slowly, for what she had done. Finally, I put away these dark thoughts and rose to my feet. I kissed Goody’s cold brow, tucked the blankets tight around her unresponsive body and went in search of Robin.

My lord of Locksley took one look at me and sat me down at a stool by the table and poured me a large cup of wine, and moments later Thomas appeared with a hot bowl of venison stew and some bread. As I ate and drank, Robin looked hard at me. Then he spoke. ‘If you will permit me, Alan,’ he began, ‘I would like to outline your position. May I do so in full honesty as an old and trusted friend?’

I was too tired to comment so merely nodded and spooned some more of the venison into my mouth; it had been a while since I had had anything so good to eat.

‘Your wife is dying, and with her your unborn baby.’

I flinched but said nothing. It was the cold truth.

‘Your home has been burned to the ground by an agent of the Master, our old enemy. And we can be certain that the Master, or minions such as Gilles de Mauchamps, will continue to attack you – and me – without warning whenever he can until he has destroyed us. Or until we have destroyed him.’

It was clear to me what Robin was aiming at; in fact I had known what he wanted from me since I rose that morning and I had already decided my answer – but, for reasons that I cannot fully express, I remained silent.

‘We know also that the Master possesses a holy vessel, a sacred relic that many have claimed can cure all hurts, wipe away all disease, even hold back death itself.’

I nodded but I seemed to have lost the power of speech. I had washed down the stew with plenty of wine yet my tongue seemed glued to the roof of my mouth.

‘Is your path not clear to you? You must come with me to the south. We will track the Master together, we will hunt him down and kill him and prise the Grail from his dead hands, and we will use it to cure Goody of her malaise, and save her and your baby. Will you not come with me, my friend, and help me to accomplish this task? To help me and to save Goody’s life.’

My tongue unstuck itself at last. ‘Yes, my lord,’ I said. ‘I will come with you.’

A week later, I found myself once again seated at a table with friends and drinking wine. It was long past nightfall, and I was in the hall of a wine merchant’s house – a grand place of black timber, white plaster and red tiles owned by one Ivo of Shoreham – a hundred yards to the east of the royal dockyard of Queen’s Hythe in the City of London. The hall was large for a townhouse in a crowded port, even a little larger than my burned-out country hall at Westbury, and sumptuously decorated with brightly patterned wall hangings and tapestries. The long table at which we sat was two-inch-thick English oak polished to a high shine with beeswax; the wine was the clear ruby-coloured juice of ancient Aquitainian vines, fermented, casked and blended by masters in the art from the area around the city of Bordeaux, and shipped to England by Master Ivo. We had dined simply, for it was Lent, on fish and boiled vegetables with bread, and a fruit pudding to follow – but the wine, served in egg shell-thin, beautifully-engraved and gilded glasses, had been of the finest quality, a rich, smooth, crimson nectar. Beneath my feet I could feel the rumble of huge iron-hooped wooden barrels, each heavier than three men, being rolled around the stone floor of the undercroft. A delivery of fresh wine had arrived from Queen Eleanor’s homeland that afternoon and it was being trundled only now into its storage position in the cellars by gangs of porters, servants of the wine merchant, our host.

Master Ivo had been presented to me the day before as an old friend of Robin’s. But I did not believe he had much love for the Earl of Locksley – indeed, wealthy and powerful as he must be, he seemed to stand in fear of my lord, almost to go out of his way, without offending, to shun Robin’s company. I did not ask what dealings Robin and Ivo of Shoreham had had in the past – but I could well imagine some sordid tale of black murder or brutal persuasion, of a crucial favour done and repayment subsequently demanded by Robin. Whatever had passed between them, Ivo clearly stood in Robin’s debt – and urgently wished to redeem himself. The merchant – although he had excused himself gracefully shortly after our arrival – had indeed been more than generous with his wine and food. And, on this second day of our sojourn in his house, I had recovered some of my spirits.

Were it not for my stomach-grinding concern for Goody and the baby – I had left her still unconscious at Robin’s Caves in the care of Ada and under the protection of Baldwin and Kit – I might have felt the embers of excitement. We were about to embark on a grand adventure, a quest to find the most fabulous object in Christendom.

The cup of Christ, the Holy Grail.

One voice in my head argued stridently, even a little shrilly, that this quest was futile; the Grail could not possibly be what some claimed it to be – it could not be the vessel that had been used at the Last Supper and that had held Our Saviour’s holy blood at the Crucifixion – it just could not. How could an earthly object encapsulate the sacred life fluid of God Himself? Was it not far more likely that this object was merely some gaudy trinket, the focus of a collection of lies, half-truths and fables designed to enrich an unscrupulous seller of such sacred oddments? Was it not far more likely, the grating voice whined, that I was wasting precious time that could be spent with Goody, perhaps her last days on this earth? That this so-called Grail was no more than a tool for gulling the credulous?

But another voice, a calm, clear, soothing voice told me a different tale. Have faith, it said. Have faith in a loving and merciful God whose designs you cannot possibly fathom. This miraculous cup of Christ will be given to you – and Goody will be cured by its holy power, if only you have sufficient faith. Seek out this Grail, said the voice; overcome the evil men who pollute it with their touch and use its power for good; use its power to save Goody and the baby.