Heretic (25 page)

Robbie savored the thought. He imagined the money sitting in the dark, the two barrels filled with the marvellous coins of Genoa, coins made of pure gold, each tiny genoin sufficient to keep a man fed and clothed and armed for a year. Two barrels!

“But my uncle,” Joscelyn went on, “is also a mean man. He won’t spend money except on the Church. If he had a choice then he would rather that I was dead, that one of my brothers was his heir and that his coins were un-diminished. At night, sometimes, he takes a lantern down to the castle cellars and stares at his money. Just stares at it.”

“You’re telling me,” Robbie said bitterly, “that you won’t be ransomed?”

“I’m telling you,” Joscelyn said, “that so long as my uncle is the Count, then so long will I be your prisoner. But if I was the Count?”

“You?” Robbie was not sure where the conversation was going and sounded puzzled.

“My uncle is sick,” Joscelyn said, “and perhaps dying.”

Robbie thought about that and saw what Joscelyn was suggesting. “And if you were the Count,” he said slowly, “then you could negotiate your own ransom?”

“If I was Count,” Joscelyn said, “I would ransom myself and my men. All of them. And I’d do it quickly.”

Again Robbie thought. “How big are the barrels?” he asked after a while.

Joscelyn held a hand a couple of feet above the floor. “It is the biggest hoard of gold in Gascony,” he said. “There are ducats and ecus, florins and agnos, deniers and genoins, pounds and moutons.”

“Moutons?”

“Gold ones,” Joscelyn said, “thick and heavy. More than enough for a ransom.”

“But your uncle may live,” Robbie said.

“One prays so,” Joscelyn said piously, “but if you would let me send two men to Astarac they could discover his state of health for us? And they could, perhaps, persuade him to offer a ransom?”

“But you said he would never pay.” Robbie was pre tending not to understand, or perhaps he did not want to acknowledge what Joscelyn was suggesting.

“He might be persuaded,” Joscelyn said, “out of his lingering affection for me. But only if I send men to him.”

“Two men?”

“And if they fail,” Joscelyn said innocently, “then of course they will return to their captivity here, so what can you lose? But you cannot let them travel unarmed. Not in a country beset by
coredors.”

Robbie stared at Joscelyn, trying to read his face in the firelight, then a question occurred to him. “What was your uncle doing at Astarac?”

Joscelyn laughed. “The stupid old fool was looking for the Holy Grail. He thought I didn’t know, but one of the monks told me. The Holy goddamned Grail! He’s mad. But he thinks God will give him a son if he finds it.”

“The Grail?”

“God knows where he got the idea. He’s mad! Mad with piety.”

The Grail, Robbie thought, the Grail. At times he had doubted Thomas’s search, thinking it a lunacy, but now it seemed that other men shared the madness, which confirmed that the Grail might truly exist. And the Grail, Robbie thought, should not go to England. Anywhere but England.

Joscelyn seemed unaware of how his words had affected Robbie. “You and I,” he said, “shouldn’t be on different sides. We’re both enemies of England. They’re the ones who caused the trouble. It was the English who came here,” he tapped the table to emphasize his point, “and they started the killing, and for what?”

For the Grail, Robbie thought, and he imagined taking the holy relic back to Scotland. He imagined the armed might of Scotland, given power by the Grail, sweeping in bloody triumph through England.

“You and I should be friends,” Joscelyn said, “and you can show me a gesture of friendship now.” He looked up at his shield, which hung on the wall, but it had been hung upside down so that the red fist pointed downwards. Thomas had put it there as the symbol that the shield’s owner had been taken prisoner. “Take that down,” Joscelyn said bitterly.

Robbie glanced at Joscelyn, then walked to the wall and used his sword to dislodge the shield which fell with a clatter. He propped it, right way up, against the stones.

“Thank you,” Joscelyn said, “and remember, Robbie, that when I’m Count of Berat I’m going to need good men. You’re not sworn to anyone, are you?”

“No.”

“The Earl of Northampton?”

“No!” Robbie protested, remembering the Earl’s unfriendliness.

“So think of serving me,” Joscelyn said. “I can be generous, Robbie. Hell, I’ll start by sending a priest to England.”

Robbie blinked, confused by Joscelyn’s words. “You’d send a priest to England? Why?”

“To carry your ransom, of course,” Joscelyn said with a smile. “You’ll be a free man, Robbie Douglas.” He paused, watching Robbie closely. “If I’m Count of Berat,” he added, “I can do that.”

“If you’re Count of Berat,” Robbie said cautiously.

“I can ransom every prisoner here,” Joscelyn said expansively, “ransom you and hire as many of your men as want employment. Just let me send my two men to Astarac.”

Robbie talked with Sir Guillaume in the morning and the Norman saw no reason why two men-at-arms should not talk with the Count at Astarac so long as they swore to return to their captivity when their errand was done. “I just hope he’s well enough to listen to them,” Sir Guillaume said.

So Joscelyn sent Villesisle and his companion, his own sworn men. They rode in armor, with swords and with careful instructions.

And Robbie waited to become rich.

T
HE WEATHER CLEARED.
The grey clouds dissipated into long streaks that were a beautiful pink in the evenings and next night they faded to a clear sky in which the wind went to the south and became warm.

Thomas and Genevieve stayed in the broken cottage for two days. They dried their clothes and let the horses eat the last of the year’s grass. They rested. Thomas felt no urge to reach Astarac quickly, for he did not expect to find anything there, but Genevieve was certain that the local folk would have tales to tell and, at the very least, they should listen. But for Thomas it was enough that he and Genevieve were alone for the first time. They had never really been alone even in the castle, for when they went behind the tapestry there was always the knowledge that others were sleeping in the hall just beyond. And Thomas had not realized until now how burdened he had been by decisions. Whom to send out on raids, whom to leave behind, whom to watch, whom to trust, whom to keep apart, who needed the reward of a few coins if they were to stay loyal, and always, ever present, the worry that he had forgotten something, that his enemy might be planning some surprise that he had not foreseen. And all the time the real enemy had been close by: Robbie, seething with righteous indignation and tortured desire.

Now Thomas could forget it all, but not for long, for the nights were cold and the winter was coming, and on the second day in their refuge he saw horsemen on the southern heights. There were half a dozen of them, ragged-looking men, two with crossbows slung on their shoulders. They did not look down into the valley where Thomas and Genevieve sheltered, but he knew that eventually someone would come here. It was the time of year when wolves and
coredors
came down from the high mountains to seek easier plunder in the foothills. It was time to go.

Genevieve had questioned Thomas about the Grail, hearing how his father, the clever, half-mad priest, had perhaps stolen it from his own father who was the exiled Count of Astarac, but how Father Ralph had never once admitted the theft or the ownership, instead he had merely left a tangle of strange writings that only added to the mystery. “But your father,” Genevieve said on the morning they were readying to leave, “wouldn’t have taken it back to Astarac, would he?”

“No.”

“So it isn’t there?”

“I don’t know if it even exists,” Thomas said. They were sitting beside the stream. The horses were saddled and the arrow sheaves tied to the cantles. “I think the Holy Grail is a dream that men have, a dream that the world can be made perfect. And if it existed,” he went on, “then we’d all know the dream can’t come true.” He shrugged, then began scraping at a patch of rust on his mail.

“You don’t think it exists, yet you look for it?” Genevieve asked.

Thomas shook his head. “I look for my cousin. I want to learn what he knows.”

“Because you do believe in it, don’t you?”

He paused in his work. “I want to believe. But if my father had it then it ought to be in England, and I’ve searched everywhere he might have hidden it. But I’d like to believe.” He thought for a moment. “And if I found it,” he went on, “then the Church must take us back.”

Genevieve laughed. “You are like a wolf, Thomas, who dreams of nothing but joining the flock of sheep.”

Thomas ignored that. He gazed up at the eastern skyline. “It’s all that’s left. The Grail. I’ve failed as a soldier.”

Genevieve was scornful. “You will get your men back. You will win, Thomas, because you are a wolf. But I think you will find the Grail too.”

He smiled at her. “Did you see that under the lightning?”

“I saw darkness,” she said vehemently, “a real darkness. Like a shadow that is going to cover the world. But you lived in it, Thomas, and you shone.” She was gazing into the stream, an expression of solemnity on her long face. “Why should there not be a Grail? Perhaps that is what the world waits for, and it will sweep all the rottenness away. All the priests.” She spat. “I don’t think your Grail will be at Astarac, but perhaps there will be answers to questions.”

“Or more questions.”

“Then let’s find out!”

They rode eastwards again, climbing through trees to the high, bare uplands and always going cautiously, avoiding settlements, but late in the morning, to cross the valley of the Gers, they rode through the village where they had fought Joscelyn and his men. The villagers must have recognized Genevieve, but they made no trouble for no one ever interfered with armed riders, not unless they were soldiers themselves. Thomas saw a newly dug patch of earth next to one of the pear orchards and reckoned that was where the skirmish’s dead had been buried. Neither of them said anything as they passed the place where Father Roubert had died, though Thomas made the sign of the cross. If Genevieve saw the gesture she ignored it.

They forded the river and climbed through the trees to the wide flat crest that overlooked Astarac. There were woods to their right and a jumbled summit of rocks on higher ground to the left and Thomas instinctively went towards the woods, seeking their cover, but Genevieve checked him. “Someone’s lit a fire,” she said, and pointed to a tiny wisp of smoke coming from deep among the trees.

“Charcoal-burners?” Thomas suggested.

“Or
coredors,”
she countered, turning her horse away. Thomas followed, giving one reluctant glance at the wood. Just as he did, he saw a movement there, something furtive, the kind of motion he had learned to look for in Brittany, and he instinctively pulled his bow from the sheath that held it to his saddle.

Then the arrow came.

It was a crossbow bolt. Short, squat and black, and its ragged leather vane made a whirring noise as it flew and Thomas kicked his heels back and shouted a warning to Genevieve just as the bolt seared in front of his horse to thump her mare in the haunch. The mare bolted, blood red on its white hide and with the quarrel’s stub sticking from the wound.

Genevieve somehow stayed in the saddle as her horse bolted northwards, spraying blood as it went. Two more quarrels flew past Thomas, then he twisted in his saddle to see four horsemen and at least a dozen men on foot coming from the wood. “Go for the rocks!” he shouted at Genevieve. “The rocks!” He doubted their horses could outrun the
coredors,
not with Genevieve’s mare pumping out blood with every stride.

He could hear the pursuing horses. He could hear their hooves drumming on the thin turf, but then Genevieve was among the rocks and she swung herself out of the saddle and scrambled up the boulders. Thomas dismounted beside her horse, but instead of following her he strung his bow and snatched an arrow from his bag. He shot once, shot again, the arrows whipping low, and one rider was falling back from his horse and the second man was dead with an arrow in his eye and the other two swerved away so violently that one horse lost its footing and spilled its rider. Thomas flicked an arrow at the surviving horseman, missed, and sent his fourth at the unsaddled man, sticking the bodkin high on the man’s back.

The men on foot were following as fast as they could, but they were still some way off and that gave Thomas time to pull all his spare arrows and his purse of money from his horse’s saddle. He rescued Genevieve’s bag from her mare, tied the two horses’ reins together and looped the knot over a boulder in the hope it would hold them, then climbed up the steep jumble of rocks. Two crossbow bolts banged on stone near him, but he was scrambling fast and knew only too well how hard it was to hit a moving man. He found Genevieve in a gully near the top. “You killed three!” she said in wonderment.

“Two,” he said. “The others are just wounded.” He could see the man he had hit in the back crawling towards the distant woods. He looked around and reckoned Genevieve had found the best refuge possible. Two vast boulders formed the sides of the gully, their massive flanks touching at the back, while in front was a third boulder that served as a parapet. It was time, Thomas thought, to teach these bastards the power of the yew bow and he stood up behind the makeshift parapet and hauled back the cord.

He drove his arrows with a cold fury and a terrible skill. The men had been coming in a bunch and Thomas’s first half-dozen arrows could not miss, but slashed into the ragged
coredors
one after the other, and then they had the sense to scatter, most turning and running away to get out of range. They left three men on the ground and another two limping. Thomas sent a final arrow at a fugitive, missing the man by an inch.

Then the crossbows were released and Thomas ducked down beside Genevieve as the iron quarrels clanged and cracked on the gully’s boulders. He reckoned there were four or five crossbows and they were shooting at a range just outside the reach of his bow; he could do nothing except peer round the boulder and watch through a crack that was little more than a hand’s breadth wide. After a few moments he saw three men running towards the rocks and he loosed an arrow through the crack, then stood and shot two more shafts before ducking fast as the quarrels hammered on the high boulders and tumbled to fall beside Genevieve. His arrows had driven the three men away, though none had been hit. “They’ll all go away soon,” Thomas said. He had seen no more than twenty men pursuing and he had killed or wounded nearly half of them, and while that would doubtless make them angry, it would also make them cautious. “They’re just bandits,” Thomas said, “and they want the reward for capturing an archer.” Joscelyn had confirmed to him that the Count had indeed offered such a reward, and Thomas was sure that bounty was on the minds of the
coredors,
but they were discovering just how difficult it would be to earn it.