Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (52 page)

The groom held Shaitan’s head while I began a long speech about Thomas’s virtues – I had spent the previous day preparing it and I felt I owed the young man a proper recitation of his courage and steadfastness as my squire. While I spoke, Goody, her maid Ada and the servants cleared the tables and brought out more dainties to be enjoyed. The day was uncomfortably hot and we had all consumed a good deal of wine, as well as having partaken of a hearty meal, and while I talked on I noticed some of my guests nodding in the strong sunshine, their eyes closing momentarily. I had got no further than listing Thomas’s valorous service with me in Normandy against King Philip’s men, when I noticed this somnolence and I remember clearly thinking to myself that I really must bring my speech to a speedy close as I had even sent poor Shaitan off to sleep, for I saw that his dark, liquid eyes were closed and his long black head was drooping.

At that moment Goody came out of the hall carrying a large tray filled with a dozen flagons of watered ale and a tower of stacked earthenware cups, for some of the guests had been complaining of thirst, asking for something with less body than our good red wine. She was walking towards the feasting tables, and was halfway across the courtyard when she tripped on her long skirts and sent the tray and the flagons and the cups crashing to earth with a deafening clatter. It was a simple accident, something that might happen any day, to any one – but I have relived that moment in my mind a thousand times since then.

Shaitan woke with a start at the loud noise behind him and reacted in a way that any highly strung destrier might. Being jerked so suddenly from his slumbers, he conceived himself under attack from the rear by some predator and lashed out behind him with his massively powerful hooves. His two black limbs surged out and his off hind hoof cracked directly into the top of Goody’s skull.

My sweet wife had not even been looking at the horse, she was bending down to gather up the broken fragments of cheap earthenware when Shaitan’s hoof thudded into her skull. Goody was immediately flung several paces across the courtyard and she landed in a heap of skirts and limbs and, to my horror, I saw a bright trickle of scarlet running out from beneath them.

I thrust the table out of my path scattering plates and cups and one unlucky guest and charged over to her fallen body. I was beside her in two heartbeats, cradling her blonde, broken head in my hands, feeling the blood trickle through my splayed fingers. She looked up at me, opening her beautiful violet-blue eyes and gazing up into mine one last time. I could feel the bones of her head moving ever so slightly in my palms, and through the matted golden hair I could see a dent the size of my fist above her right eyebrow filled with jelly and blood. She smiled once and tried to speak, but then her gaze shifted, just fractionally, to beyond my shoulder and fixed on something that no living eye could see. Quite slowly, with a little tired sigh, the soul went out of her body.

I remember little of the next few days and weeks. I was drowning in a grief so deep as to block out almost all memory. But for some strange reason I could not shed a single tear. Robin and Thomas, Roland and Little John took turns to sit with me but I scarcely moved or spoke and only ate and drank tiny amounts and sat dry-eyed with an empty expression and a cold, echoing numbness in my heart.

The weeks passed, and the business of Westbury continued around me. Baldwin was a competent steward of the manor, and the harvest was brought in without the slightest participation from me. I swam silently in my grief, alone inside my head, quietly torturing myself with thoughts of how I might have saved her. Should I not have brought Shaitan out of the stables? Should I have had him hobbled? Why on earth had I thought that he would make a suitable gift for Sir Thomas Blood? But the truth was, and I was finally forced to accept this, that there was nothing I could have done to save her or to prevent her death. Yet I still had not shed a single tear.

One thing stuck in my mind, and kept going around and around in my head like a spinning cartwheel: Goody died on the second day of July in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred. It was exactly one year and one day after Goody and I had been wed. Nur’s curse had come to pass.

Grief fades with time, of course, although to the griever himself, this can seem an impossibility. But one morning in September, I found myself sitting in the sunshine outside the hall, staring dry-eyed into space, as had been my habit for many long weeks, when I heard a sound. It was a baby crying inconsolably. And I thought swiftly, angrily,
Where is that wet nurse? Where is the servant who is supposed to be caring for my son? How dare they allow him to disturb my grief?
I looked around for Robin or Thomas to send them to fetch somebody for the infant, but there was nobody within sight and the crying continued, on and on, grating on my soul.

At last, I struggled to my feet and went to comfort the child myself, and, as I plucked that bawling, neglected baby from its basket and took him into my arms, I looked into his violet-blue, tear-stained eyes and saw Goody looking back at me, a small, perfect, madly sobbing, pink-faced version of my one true love.

I squeezed my only living son to my breast, feeling his warm, wriggling body against mine. Feeling his frailty, his strength, his wildly beating little heart. And, as I rocked him back and forth, with my big, clumsy arms wrapped tight around his tiny, fragile frame, his tears at last subsided and finally ceased.

And mine began to flow.

At my daughter-in-law’s urging, I paid a visit last night to the village of Westbury and to the humble cott of two of my tenants. The woman of the household, Martha, had recently been delivered of a baby. She and her aged husband, you will remember, were the beneficiaries of the first miracle of the Flask of St Luke – and there have been two more since then; that is, two more that I know about. I admired their baby for a little while, a sturdy sleeping boy, and gave his father Geoffrey a silver penny with which to celebrate the birth at the alehouse.

The weight of my own baby son in my arms had rescued me from despair in the weeks after Goody died, a deep melancholy in which I might well have ended my own existence. My son Robert truly saved my life, I believe, but for some reason other men’s sons do not have the same joyous effect on me. I am happy to admire a child, briefly, and it pleases me to see them grow, but these days I find I am feigning interest much of the time in visits of this sort.

But, as Marie and I walked back to the manor that long August evening after our little call in the village, I pondered the riddle of the false flask and the ‘miracles’ it has apparently engendered.

A rock-like belief, it seemed to me, was the key to many of the wonders that the world contains. In a word, faith. Martha and Geoffrey believe absolutely that their child was a miraculous gift from God – they asked for His mercy and received it. In one way of seeing it, it was their faith in God that granted them a child. Another way of looking at it is that the flask, having once contained water from the Grail – and a few drops of Nur’s blood – may have had some supernatural power that allowed Martha to conceive. I do not believe that. I prefer to believe that the couple’s deep, unshakeable faith allowed them to create new life.

Was Nur’s curse truly responsible for the death of Goody? I do not know – it may have been no more than a sad accident. But I do not choose to put my faith in curses and foul magic – and so I say no, it was not the witch’s malediction that killed my beloved. I am deciding to believe, I do believe, that it was a cruel coincidence.

Was the Holy Grail truly able to heal all hurts and hold back death? Certainly Vim’s men fought better at Montségur knowing that the Grail was with them – they had faith in it, I did too – and none of the wounded died after drinking from the Grail. That blessed bowl certainly had a potency of some kind. I know it.

Faith and belief might sometimes be misplaced, I concluded silently, but they have a vast power to affect our lives. And, as in the case of Martha and Geoffrey, affect our lives for the better.

‘Marie,’ I said, as we approached the manor, ‘can you arrange for Father Anselm to come to see me tomorrow.’

‘Of course, Alan,’ said my daughter-in-law. ‘But I thought you didn’t care for him. What shall I say you want him for?’

I took a step or two before I answered her, then I said, ‘You may tell him that, after careful deliberation, I have decided to purchase a fine golden relic-casket for our little church.’

Barcelona instantly became my favourite city in the world after a weekend there with my wife last summer. The authorities screen movies in the public squares, bar-hopping’s a genuine art form, there’s cool architecture everywhere and nobody eats dinner till ten at night. And, as if that wasn’t enough, I was also privileged enough during my visit to see some of the earliest images ever made of the Holy Grail.

In the heart of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), the interior of a small twelfth-century church has been partially reconstructed. The original church of St Clement still stands in the remote village of Taüll in the Valley of Boí high in the Pyrenees, but when the stunning Romanesque frescos the church contained were discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, and foreign ‘entrepreneurs’ began chipping off bits of the masonry and carrying them away, the Spanish authorities acted swiftly. Using a near-miraculous chemical process, in which strips of treated cloth are pressed on to the church walls and then peeled off, these ancient paintings were painstakingly removed from the walls of the church of St Clement and taken to Barcelona, where they have been lovingly restored and housed in MNAC.

When I saw them there in June 2012, I was astonished by their remarkable beauty and power. The main apse of the reconstructed church is the setting for the superb painting of
Christ in Majesty
, which shows the Saviour enthroned in Heaven and looking down on mortal sinners with a stern yet compassionate expression. The curve of the apse gives the fresco a strangely three-dimensional effect, and the colours – royal blue, warm ochre, creamy white and blood red – appear to be as vibrant as the day they were painted, probably in 1123. Christ is surrounded by various saints and apostles and below his bare right foot and slightly to the left is a panel containing an image of the Virgin Mary.

Her expression is serene, she holds up her right hand, palm out in a gesture of blessing, or perhaps of warning, and in her left hand, covered by her rich blue mantle, she is holding a shallow bowl, painted white, which seems to be filled with fire and has rays of reddish-orange light shooting out of it.

This is one of the very earliest representations of the Holy Grail, an object that shortly afterwards began to appear regularly in religious art all over the Pyrenees. Of course, the object in her hand was not regarded then as the Holy Grail, as we think of it today – it was a
graal
, the word in the medieval language of the region for a common, broad, shallow dish of the kind that might be used to hold a cooked fish when it was served at the table. And it was ‘holy’ because Mary the Mother of God was holding it, not in her bare palm, but in a hand covered by her blue mantle.

Opinion is divided on what the graal is supposed to symbolize – other Christian dignitaries have their symbols, useful icons for identifying them in medieval art today, as then: St Luke, for example, is often pictured with an ox; St Peter holds a set of keys; on the picture of
Christ in Majesty
, in the panel to the right of Mary’s, St John is seen supporting a book in his right hand, the hand also covered in a mantle, like the Virgin’s, to indicate the book’s holiness. Some scholars suggest the graal pictured in this magnificent painting might be a container of Christ’s blood, reminiscent of the Saviour’s words repeated in the Eucharist – ‘This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many…’ – others suggest the graal might hold sacred oil – chrism – a holy unguent used in consecration and other important Christian rituals. Personally, I think Mary’s graal is a symbol of her womb, in which she conceived Christ by the Holy Spirit and carried him for nine months. What more powerful symbol could a holy mother display than the space inside her body in which she nurtured her child and from which issued the future Saviour of Mankind?

But whatever the graal was originally intended to mean – and nobody can be absolutely certain – the symbol was to have a profound effect on Christendom. By the middle of the twelfth century, grail-like objects were appearing regularly in the hands of the Virgin in religious art, particularly in the southern lands of western Europe – in the Languedoc in France, northern Spain and northern Italy. Sometimes they were bowls, sometimes cups or chalices, sometimes they appear to be oil lamps.

However, it was not until the end of the twelfth century that the Holy Grail made its literary debut.
Perceval, Le Conte du Graal
(
Percival, The Story of the Grail
) was written by the French poet Chretien de Troyes sometime between 1180 and 1190 – perhaps sixty years or more after the graal was pictured in the Virgin’s hands in the Pyrenees – and the work was an almost instant hit in European aristocratic circles. The Grail appears as a golden bowl encrusted with precious jewels, paraded about by mysterious denizens of a mysterious castle in the company of a shining lance, a pair of candlesticks and a silver carving platter. (See my previous novel
Warlord
.)

In Chretien’s story the graal is a receptacle for the host of the Eucharist, and such is its power that one wafer of holy bread a day is enough to sustain the lord of the mysterious castle. Beyond that, Chretien does not say much about the Grail, and indeed his poem
Le Conte du Graal
was never finished. But the Grail was now loose in the literary domain and it had begun to exert its strange fascination over writers, which has continued ever since. Around 1200, a Bavarian poet called Wolfram von Eschenbach produced an operatic retelling of Chretien de Troyes’s story called
Parzival
, embellishing it considerably, and conceiving of the grail as a precious stone that had fallen from the sky. But the version of the Grail story that I have chosen to adopt comes from Robert de Boron, a Burgundian knight, who wrote
Joseph d’Arimathie or Le grant estoire dou graal
(
Joseph of Arimathea or the Great History of the Grail
), sometime in the 1190s. His take on the legend is the one that would be most recognizable to readers today, in that his Grail is both the cup used at the Last Supper and the vessel used to catch the blood of Christ as he died on the Cross.