The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic (147 page)

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Sir Henri Courtois.’ He pointed at a nearby house. ‘Your friend is in there. He’s sick.’

Robbie lay on a fouled bed. He was shaking with a fever and his face was dark and swollen. He did not recognize Thomas. ‘You poor bastard,’ Thomas said. He gave his bow to Sam. ‘And take that too, Sam,’ he said, pointing to the parchment that lay on a low stool beside the bed, and then he lifted Robbie in his arms and carried him back up the hill. ‘You should die among friends,’ he told the unconscious man. The siege, at last, was over.

—«»—«»—«»—

Sir Guillaume died. Many died. Too many to bury, so Thomas had the corpses carried to a ditch in the fields across the river and he covered them with brushwood and set the heap on fire, though there was not enough fuel to burn the bodies, which were left half roasted. Wolves came and ravens darkened the sky above the ditch that was death’s rich feast.

Folk came back to the town. They had sought refuge in places that were struck as badly as Castillon d’Arbizon. The plague was everywhere, they said. Berat was a town of the dead, though whether Joscelyn lived no one knew and Thomas did not care. Winter brought frost and at Christmas a friar brought news that the pestilence was now in the north. ‘It is everywhere,’ the friar said, ‘everyone is dying.’ Yet not everyone died. Philin’s son, Galdric, recovered, but just after Christmas his father caught the disease and was dead in three agonizing days.

Robbie lived. It had seemed he must die for there had been nights when he appeared not to breathe, yet he lived and slowly he recovered. Genevieve looked after him, feeding him when he was weak and washing him when he was filthy, and when he tried to apologize to her she hushed him. ‘Speak to Thomas,’ she said.

Robbie, still weak, went to Thomas and he thought the archer looked older and fiercer. Robbie did not know what to say, but Thomas did. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘When you did what you did, you thought you were doing the right thing?’

‘Yes,’ Robbie said.

‘Then you did no wrong,’ Thomas said flatly, ‘and that’s an end of it.’

‘I should not have taken that,’ Robbie said, pointing to the parchment on Thomas’s lap, the Grail writings left by Thomas’s father.

‘I got it back,’ Thomas said, ‘and now I’m using it to teach Genevieve to read. It isn’t any use for anything else.’

Robbie stared into the fire. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Thomas ignored the apology. ‘And what we do now is wait until everyone is well, then we go home.’

They were ready to leave by St Benedict’s Day. Eleven men would go home to England, and Galdric, who had no parents now, would travel as Thomas’s servant. They would go home rich, for most of the money from their plunders was still intact, but what they would find in England Thomas did not know.

He spent the last night in Castillon d’Arbizon listening as Genevieve stumbled over the words of his father’s parchment. He had decided to burn it after this night, for it had led him nowhere. He was making Genevieve read the Latin, for there was little English or French in the document, and though she did not understand the words it did give her practice in deciphering the letters.
‘“Virga tua et bacillus tuus ipsa consolobuntur me
,”‘ she read slowly, and Thomas nodded and knew the words
Calix Meus Inebrians
were not far ahead, and he thought that the cup had got him drunk, drunk and wild and all to no purpose. Planchard had been right. The search made men mad.

‘“Pono coram me mensam,’” Genevieve read, ‘“ex adverso hostium meorum.’”

‘It’s not
pono,’
Thomas said, ‘but
pones. “Pones coram me mensam ex adverso hostium meorum.’”
He knew it by heart and now translated for her. ‘“Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies.”‘

She frowned, a long pale finger on the writing. ‘No,’ she insisted, ‘it does say
“pono”.’
She held out the manuscript to prove it.

The firelight flickered on the words that did indeed say
‘pono coram me mensam ex adverso hostium meorum.’
His father had written it and Thomas must have looked at the line a score of times, yet he had never noticed the mistake. His familiarity with the Latin had led him to skip across the words, seeing them in his head rather than on the parchment.
Pono.
‘I prepare a table.’ Not thou preparest, but I prepare, and Thomas stared at the word and knew it was not a mistake.

And knew he had found the Grail.

The breaking waves drove up the
shingle,
hissed white and scraped back. On and on, ever and ever, the grey-green sea beating at England’s coast.

A small rain fell, soaking the new grass where lambs played and buck hares danced beside the hedgerows where anemones and stitchwort grew.

The pestilence had come to England. Thomas and his three companions had ridden through empty villages and heard cows bellowing in agony for there was no one to take the milk from their swollen udders. At some
villages
archers waited at barricaded streets to turn all strangers away and Thomas had dutifully ridden around such places. They had seen pits dug for the dead; pits half filled with corpses that had received no last rites. The pits were edged with flowers for it was springtime.

In Dorchester there was a dead man in the street and no one to bury him. Some houses had been nailed shut and painted with a red cross to show that the folk inside were sick and must be left there to die or recover. Outside the town the fields went unploughed, seed stayed in the barns of dead farmers, and yet there were larks above the grass and the kingfishers darting along the streams and plovers tumbling beneath the clouds.

Sir Giles Marriott, the old lord of the manor, had died before the plague struck, and his grave was in the village church, but if any of the surviving villagers saw Thomas ride by, they did not greet him. They sheltered from God’s wrath and Thomas, Genevieve, Robbie and Galdric rode on down the lane until they were beneath Lipp Hill and ahead was the sea, and the shingle, and the valley where Hookton had once stood. It had been burned by Sir Guillaume and Guy Vexille back when they were allies, and now there was nothing but thorns looping over the lumpy remains of the cottages, and hazels and thistles and nettles growing in the scorched black, roofless walls of the church.

Thomas had been in England for a fortnight. He had ridden to the Earl of Northampton, and he had knelt to his lord who had first had servants examine Thomas to make sure he did not carry the dark marks of the pestilence, and Thomas had paid his lord one-third of the money they had brought from Castillon d’Arbizon, and then he had given him the golden cup. ‘It was made for the Grail, my lord,’ he said, ‘but the Grail is gone.’

The Earl admired the cup, turning it and holding it up so that it caught the light, and he was amazed at its beauty. ‘Gone?’ he asked.

‘The monks at St Sever’s,’ Thomas lied, ‘believe it was taken to heaven by an angel whose wing had been mended there. It is gone, lord.’

And the Earl had been satisfied, for he was the possessor of a great treasure even if it was not the Grail, and Thomas, promising to return, had gone away with his companions. Now he had come to the village of his childhood, the place he had learned to master the bow, and to the church where his father, the mad Father Ralph, had preached to the gulls and hidden his great secret.

It was still there. Hidden in the grass and nettles that grew between the flagstones of the old church, a thing discarded as being of no value. It was a clay bowl which Father Ralph had used to hold the mass wafers. He would put the bowl on the altar, cover it with a linen cloth and carry it home when mass was done. ‘I prepare a table’, he had written, and the altar was the table and the bowl was the thing he set it with and Thomas had handled it a hundred times and thought nothing of it, and when he had last been in Hookton he had picked it up from the ruins and then, disdaining it, he had thrown it back among the weeds.

Now he found it again among the nettles and he took it to Genevieve who placed it in the wooden box and closed the lid, and the fit of the thing was so perfect that the box did not even rattle when it was shaken. The base of the bowl matched the slight discoloured circle in the old paint of the box’s interior. The one had been made for the other. ‘What do we do?’ Genevieve asked. Robbie and Galdric were outside the church, exploring the ridges and lumps that betrayed where the old cottages had been. Neither knew why Thomas had come back to Hookton. Galdric did not care, and Robbie, quieter now, was content to stay with Thomas until they all rode north to pay Lord Outhwaite the ransom that would release Robbie back to Scotland.
If Outhwaite lived.

‘What do we do?’ Genevieve asked again, her voice a whisper.

‘What Planchard advised me,’ Thomas said, but first he took a wine skin from his bag, poured a little wine into the bowl and made Genevieve drink from it, then he took the bowl and drank himself. He smiled at her. That rids us of excommunication,’ he said, for they had drunk from the bowl that caught Christ’s blood from the cross.

‘Is it really the Grail?’ Genevieve asked.

Thomas took it outside. He held Genevieve’s hand as they walked towards the sea and, when they reached the shingle inside the hook where the Lipp Stream curved across the beach by the place where the fishing boats had been hauled up when Hookton still had villagers, he smiled at her,
then
hurled the bowl as hard as he could. He threw it across the stream to the hook of shingle on the far side and the bowl crunched down into the stones, bounced, ran a few feet and was still.

They
waded
the stream, climbed the bank and found the bowl undamaged.

‘What do we do?’ Genevieve asked again.

It would cause nothing but madness, Thomas thought. Men would fight for it, lie for it, cheat for it, betray for it and die for it. The Church would make money from it. It would cause nothing but evil, he thought, for it stirred horror from men’s hearts, so he would do what Planchard had said he would do. ‘“Hurl it into the deepest sea,” he quoted the old abbot, ‘“down among the monsters, and tell no one.”‘

Genevieve touched the bowl a last time, then kissed it and gave it back to Thomas who cradled it for a moment. It was just a bowl of peasant’s clay, red-brown in colour, thickly made and rough to the touch, not perfectly round, with a small indentation on one side where the potter had damaged the unfired clay. It was worth pennies, perhaps nothing, yet it was the greatest treasure of Christendom and he kissed it once and then he drew back his strong archer’s right arm, ran down to the sucking sea’s edge and threw it as far and as hard as he could. He hurled it away and it span for an instant above the grey waves, seemed to fly a heartbeat longer as though it were reluctant to let go of mankind, and then the bowl was gone.

Just a white splash, instantly healed, and Thomas took Genevieve’s hand and turned away.

He was an archer, and the madness was over. He was free.

I have allowed a surfeit of rats to appear here and there in
Heretic,
though I am persuaded they were probably innocent of spreading the plague. There is argument among the medical historians as to whether the Black Death (named for the colour of the buboes, or swellings, which disfigured the sick) was bubonic plague, which would have been spread by fleas from rats, or some form of anthrax, which would have come from cattle. Fortunately for me Thomas and his companions did not need to make that diagnosis. The medieval explanation for the pestilence was mankind’s sin added to an unfortunate astrological conjunction of the planet Saturn, always a baleful influence. It caused panic and puzzlement for it was an unknown disease that had no cure. It spread north from Italy, killing its victims within three or four days and mysteriously sparing others. This was the first appearance of the plague in Europe. There had been other pandemics, of course, but nothing on this scale, and it would continue its ravages, at intervals, for another four hundred years. The victims did not call it the Black Death, that name was not to be used till the
1800s,
they just knew it as the ‘pestilence’.

It killed at least one-third of the European population.

Some communities suffered a mortality bill of more than fifty per cent, but the overall figure of one-third seems to be accurate. It struck as hard in rural areas as in towns and whole villages vanished. Some of them can still be detected as ridges and ditches in farmland, while in other places there are lone churches, standing in fields with no apparent purpose. They are the plague
churches, all that
remain of the old villages.

Only the opening and closing passages of
Heretic
are based on real history. The plague happened, as did the siege and capture of Calais, but everything in between is fictional. There is no town of Berat, nor a bastide called Castillon d’Arbizon. There is an Astarac, but whatever was built there now lies under the waters of a great reservoir. The fight which begins the book, the capture of Nieulay and its tower, did happen, but the victory gained the French no advantage for they were unable to cross the River Ham and engage the main English army.
So the French withdrew, Calais fell and the port remained in English hands for another three centuries.
The story of the six burghers of Calais being condemned to death,
then
reprieved, is well known and Rodin’s statue of the six, in front of the town’s hall, commemorates the event.

Thomas’s language difficulties in Gascony were real enough. The aristocracy there, as in England, used French, but the common folk had a variety of local languages, chiefly Occitan, from which the modern Languedoc comes. Languedoc simply means ‘the language of oc’, because
oc
was the word for yes, and it is closely related to Catalan, the language spoken just across the Pyrenees in northern Spain. The French, conquering the territory to their south, tried to suppress the language, but it is still spoken and is now enjoying something of a revival.

As for the Grail?
Long gone, I suspect. Some say it was the cup Christ used at the Last Supper, and otheis that it was the bowl used to catch his blood from the ‘dolorous blow’, the lance wound given to His side during the crucifixion. Whatever it was, it has never been found, though rumours persist and some say it is hidden in Scotland. It was, nevertheless, the most prized relic of medieval Christendom, perhaps because it was so mysterious, or else because, when the Arthurian tales received their final form, all the old Celtic tales of magic cauldrons became confused with the Grail. It has also been a golden thread through centuries of stories, and will go on being that, which is why it is probably best if it remains undiscovered.