Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (34 page)

‘It would do us no good, John,’ said Robin, wheeling his horse, ‘we have four bowmen and four swordsmen, and they…’ My lord made a gesture with his hand and we could all clearly see, a mass of horsemen, more than forty, perhaps even fifty strong, cantering down a gentle slope towards us no more than three-quarters of a mile away. It was clear by then that they were not disciplined Templars – it was worse than that. They were Mercadier’s mercenaries,
routiers
now unchecked in their savagery by any lord. And they were plainly looking for us.

‘I don’t give an angel’s pink, puckered hole how many they are,’ growled John, ‘fifty, a hundred, five hundred. This is just as good a place as any to die.’

‘Let us go down by the river,’ Sir Nicholas said. ‘The water will make it harder for them to come at us and it never hurts to have something cool to drink in a hard fight.’

We guided our tired mounts down the steep slope to the river and found a shallow fordable place where we carefully led them over. Gavin and Thomas tethered them to a line of scrubby trees that fringed a large pool and Robin set us in a double line, with the river in front and facing the slope beyond it that led to the road: four swordsmen with shields to the front – myself, with Thomas at one shoulder and Roland at the other and beyond him Sir Nicholas de Scras, who was shaking his arms to loosen the muscles and whistling to himself happily as if he had not a care in the world.

The ground was marshy and littered with boulders, some the size of a prize Nottinghamshire bull. This would be good for men on foot fighting against mounted foes; the horses would have to negotiate the river – which could not be done at speed, and then fight us among the big, impeding stones with treacherous boggy ground beneath their hooves. But there were just too many of the enemy to make the outcome uncertain. This is where I would die, I reflected, here by this cold river, with my boots sunk up to the ankles in black mud, far away from Goody and Westbury. I felt a wave of frustrated fury flood my veins. It seemed such an absurd place in which to meet my end; such a silly death. I’d not even set eyes on the Master, nor glimpsed the Grail. I prayed that Goody and I would be reunited in Heaven.

Robin, who was lining up the four bowmen behind me – himself, John, Tuck and Gavin – saw my glum face and actually laughed.

‘We are not quite dead yet, Alan,’ he said. ‘And with a band of fighting men such as ours – who can defeat us? Little John here has personally killed more men than the red plague; Sir Nicholas, once the pride of the Hospitallers, will not allow himself to fall to a pack of gutter-born, greasy mercenaries. Will you, sir? And Sir Roland – the flower of French chivalry; one of the finest knights that noble land has ever produced – he is not afraid of anything. Look at us – we eight, we eight men of war. We are such warriors that legends are made of – we cannot be killed. Not by a hundred enemies, not by a thousand. Indeed, I worry that we shall live for ever.’

I looked at my cousin and saw that Robin’s absurd speech seemed to have cheered him and, to be honest, I felt better myself. Bring on the battle, I thought. Bring on the fight, you bastards, and I will show you how an Englishman fights and dies. I felt a warm glow at the top of my spine and down the length of my arms. And, I swear, the heavy shield and sword felt lighter in my hands.

‘Where is Nur?’ I asked Roland, who was fiddling with a strap at the top of his left chausse, his mail legging, that attached it to the belt under his mail shirt. I had lost my chausses at Westbury, and fought only in knee-length hauberk, helmet and thick leather riding boots – although I did have the reinforced breast-and-back plate under my mail, holding the lance-dagger between my shoulder blades.

‘She’s behind us in that little spinney, over there,’ my cousin told me, ‘brewing up a spell to bring a thick mist. Like a huge cloud coming down to earth, she says, that will shield us from the sight of our enemies and allow us to escape unseen.’

I looked up at the sky: it was a bowl of palest blue, with a few delicate wisps in the far south.
A magic mist?
I thought.
My chilly arse
.

‘At least she’ll be hidden,’ I said, ‘when the horsemen come.’

And at that moment, a lone rider, a thin raggedy man armed with spear and shield appeared on the lip of the slope above us. He was some fifty yards away, on the far side of the rushing river, but I recognized him. He had been the one who ran away from the fight with Mercadier outside Bordeaux. By some freak of the wind, I heard him shout in rough French as clearly as if he were standing next to me, ‘Here they are, Vim! They are here! Down there by the river.’

I heard the wooden creaking sound of a war bow being drawn, and Robin’s voice saying, ‘Hold fast, Gavin; hold a little longer. Let’s just see if these scum have anything worth saying before we start wasting our good arrows on them.’

A few moments later the eastern skyline was filled with the shapes of the massed horsemen – a long line of mounted men arrayed for war on the slope above, menacing as a storm, malevolent, dark and as bleakly immobile as statues. It felt as if we Companions were no more than a huddle of children standing under a vast black cliff, which at any moment would crumble, slide and crash down on our heads.

Mercadier’s mercenaries had finally caught us.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways, as my old friend Tuck never tired of telling me. Westbury has had its first miracle – and, of course, Father Anselm has given the credit for it solely to the power of the Flask of St Luke. Incredibly, the pious old couple of Westbury village that I mentioned before, Martha and Geoffrey, have found themselves with child. Happy Martha has all the signs of being pregnant. Three months ago, at the Feast of All Saints she and her husband prayed before the flask for three days and three nights without food, drink or rest, begging the Lord that they might be blessed with a baby despite their advanced age – and God Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, has heeded them.

A month after Christmas, my daughter-in-law Marie told me in wondering tones that Martha was expecting, and that she was planning to wrap up some of her old baby clothes and a few carved wooden toys as a gift for the newborn when it arrives.

I do not know what to think of this – I know for certain that the flask is the same one I purchased in the cathedral of St-Sernin, a perfectly ordinary piece of pilgrim’s kit, and yet God has seen fit to grant a miracle in its name. Why? Does an old leather bottle hold the same power as a true relic? Is God indifferent to the authenticity of sacred objects blessed by the Church? I cannot understand it.

Alas, the fame of the Flask of St Luke is spreading; and people are coming from as far away as Sheffield to pray in front of it in our little church. For my part, I pray that the enthusiasm for this false relic will quickly die out – but I fear otherwise. I have encountered a dozen pilgrims on the paths around Westbury in the past few weeks, even in this inclement winter season. And when I stopped each of them and asked their business on my desmesne, I discovered that they were foreigners from other counties, women from Yorkshire and Derbyshire mostly, who had walked here to pray at our church for a child. Is the whole world planning to make a pilgrimage to my door? What if more miracles are announced? We would have no peace at all.

But I must confess there is another fear that lurks just beyond my thoughts. Was it truly God who sanctioned this miracle – or could it perhaps have been some other power? For the flask is not quite as ordinary an object as I often like to tell myself. In my most secret heart, I know that it once held a liquor that might well be a source of great power, but could also be a conduit for evil.

For that flask once held the blood of a witch.

There were forty-seven men and horses lined up above us – I know that because I had time to count each of them. Forty-seven iron-hard mercenaries – the scum of Christendom, men whose names were a byword for rapacity, cruelty and reckless slaughter. Our little group of eight Companions, standing straddle-foot in the rock-strewn valley of the River Ariège, grimly determined, gripping our weapons in sweat-damp hands, did not move: we waited for their attack.

Which did not come.

A lone man, gently waving a big, pale grubby rag – the closest they had to a white flag, I presumed – walked his horse slowly down the slope. He was a big-shouldered, brawny
routier
, square-faced and grey-blond, scarred and immensely tough-looking. His horse, a raw-boned bay with a black mane, seemed almost as exhausted as our own nags. The beast picked its way carefully, tiredly, through the boulders down to the opposite side of the river, some twenty paces from us, and there the rider halted it.

‘I seek the Earl of Locksley,’ said the man, in rough Norman French with, I swear, a touch of a Germanic accent.

Robin pushed his way past my shoulder and took a pace out in front of our little formation. He had a strung bow in his hands, an arrow bag at his hip, but his sword remained sheathed.

‘I am Locksley,’ he said, cool as morning dew, ‘who are you and how may I serve you?’

‘It is I – or rather we – who wish to serve you,’ said the man, with a faint smile. ‘I am Wilhelmus of Mechlin, though my men call me Vim, and we are a company of free lances, soldiers of the road, good men all and doughty fighters. But we have no lord, we are masterless men. We had a bold captain – and he was strong and wise in the ways of battle – but he is dead now. So we would take service with you, my lord, for a season and for a generous fee, and we will swear to accept all your commands faithfully and do your bidding in all things.’

‘You are Mercadier’s men?’

‘We were. Now we are nobody’s men.’

‘What do you know of Mercadier’s death?’

The blond mercenary laughed. ‘We know how he died. Like a warrior, in battle, as we would all wish to die. And we know who killed him.’ He inclined his head towards me. ‘Olivier up there saw the fight; barely escaped with his own life.’

The familiar-looking man on the slope above lifted his left hand to me in a wary greeting. ‘We do not seek vengeance, if that is what concerns you,’ Vim said. ‘There is no gain in it for us – as God above is my witness – we merely seek a lord, a captain under whose banner we can fight for pay and profit. Your name is known to us, as is your reputation – as a generous lord and man who knows the value of a bag of silver and how to get hold of one. We would serve you – Robin Hood. Would you have us?’

The mercenaries came down from the slope and one by one they each crossed the Ariège, bared their heads, put aside their many and varied weapons in a great, clanking pile by the river bank, and swore an oath of fealty to Robin, kneeling before him and placing their right hands on a tattered Bible that Tuck hastily produced from his baggage. They swore that they would never harm their lord and would faithfully serve him for a period of one year and one day from the day of the oath. Robin, in turn, gave each man a single silver penny as a token that he would, in due course, reward them richly for their service – although I knew that Robin must be running short of funds by then and wondered where the hoard of silver required to pay the mercenaries was to come from. Then, right there by the river side, not ten yards from the spot where I had believed a few hours earlier that I would be slaughtered, we sat down to break bread with these men.

We ate and drank from the stores that Tronc had furnished us with, cracking open a barrel of wine, and unwrapping whole hams and cold roast ducks and many cheeses, and I believe this impressed the hungry mercenaries. But I mused privately that their attitude might well change when the silver ran out and we were forced to eat rotten cabbage soup and drink rainwater.

As we ate, the Companions kept their distance from the
routiers
– Roland in particular seemed to be particularly suspicious of them, and he eyed them keenly as he ate. Nur crouched beside him, watching my cousin with a proprietorial air and, I noted to myself, perhaps rather meanly, that the weather remained glorious, the sun was shining, there was barely a cloud in the sky – no sign at all of the promised life-saving magic mist. But I was able – just – to restrain myself from asking her why this miraculous change in the weather had not occurred.

Robin had been making a round of the mercenaries, greeting them, making the odd jest and getting to know them by name, but he finally grabbed a piece of bread and a duck leg and came over to sit beside me.

We ate in contented silence for a while and then my lord said quietly, in a tone that would carry no further, ‘Well, Alan, what do you make of them?’

I shrugged. ‘They are a hard crew but I think we can trust them. They had us at their mercy and instead of slaughtering us they swore an oath of fealty to you. I think they genuinely do seek a lord. A mercenary must have a paymaster. The only thing that concerns me is the money. They
will
have to be paid handsomely. These kind of men do not fight for nothing. Can you afford it?’

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘I can’t. I have almost no silver left, and I must have coin for these men. No matter, a little money trouble is a good deal better than being dead.’

‘What about Baruch’s gold?’ I asked.

‘I pawned a good deal of it in London and Bordeaux to pay our expenses. I do have a couple of trinkets left but I cannot divide up, say, a tiny golden censer, with delicate silver filigree work, and share it out among fifty horny-handed men-at-arms. No, I must have silver coin, and plenty of it, before long.’

We camped by the river, mercenaries and Companions still keeping their distance, and at dusk Robin gathered all of us together and gave a speech. He told the
routiers
that we sought a three-thumbed monk who called himself the Master, who was our enemy, and who was somewhere in the County of Foix, and then told them that we aimed to take revenge on him. Robin did not mention the Grail at all; instead he implied that the Master had great riches in his possession and that, once he was dead, we’d all share in the loot. At that, the mercenaries gave a rousing cheer.