The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic (113 page)

‘Later,’ Thomas said. He was at the door, listening. There could be two more soldiers in the castle, but he heard nothing. The four prisoners were all being half suspended from the big metal hooks that normally held swords and mail shirts and, when the four were silenced and immobilized, Thomas went up the next winding stair to where a great door blocked his path. Jake and Robbie followed him, their boots making a slight noise on the worn stone steps. Thomas motioned them to silence, then pushed on the door. For a moment he thought it must be locked, but he pushed again, harder, and the door jerked open with a terrible shriek of rusted metal hinges. The sound was fit to wake the dead and Thomas, appalled, found himself staring into a great high room hung with tapestries. The squeal of the hinges died away, leaving silence. The remnants of a fire burned in a big hearth and gave enough light to show that the hall was empty. At its far end was a dais where the Count of Berat, the Lord of Castillon d’Arbizon, would sit when he visited the town and where his table would be placed for any feasts. The dais was empty now, except that at its rear, hidden by a tapestry, there was an arched space where another flicker of light showed through the moth-eaten weave.

Robbie slipped past Thomas and crept up the side of the hall beneath the slit windows, which let in slanting bars of silvered moonlight. Thomas put an arrow on the black bow, then drew the cord and felt the immense power of the yew stave as he took the string back to his right ear. Robbie glanced at him, saw he was ready, and reached out with his sword to pull back the threadbare tapestry.

But before the blade even touched the tapestry it was swept aside as a big man charged Robbie. He came roaring and sudden, astonishing the Scot who tried to bring his sword back to meet the attack, but Robbie was too slow and the big man leaped on him, fists flailing. Just then the big black bow sang. The arrow, which could strike down an armoured knight at two hundred paces, slid through the man’s rib cage and
span
him around so that he flailed bloodily across the floor. Robbie was still half under him, his fallen sword clattering on the thick wooden floorboards. A woman was screaming. Thomas guessed the wounded man was the castellan, the garrison’s commander, and he wondered if the man would live long enough to answer some questions, but Robbie had drawn his dagger and, not knowing that his assailant was already pierced by an arrow, was flailing the short blade at the man’s fat neck so that a sheet of blood spilled dark and shining across the boards and even after the man had died Robbie still gouged at him. The woman screamed on. ‘Stop her noise,’ Thomas said to Jake and went to pull the heavy corpse off the Scot. The man’s long white nightshirt was red now. Jake slapped the woman and then, blessedly, there was silence.

There were no more soldiers in the castle. A dozen servants were sleeping in the kitchens and storerooms, but they made no trouble. The men were all taken down to the dungeons, then Thomas climbed to the keep’s topmost rampart from where he could look down on the unsuspecting roofs of Castillon d’Arbizon, and there he waved a flaming torch. He waved it back and forth three times, threw it far down into the bushes at the foot of the steep slope on which the castle and town were built, then went to the western side of the rampart where he laid a dozen arrows on the parapet. Jake joined him there. ‘Sam’s with Sir Robbie at the gate,’ Jake said. Robbie Douglas had never been knighted, but he was well born and a
man-at-arms,
and Thomas’s men had given him the rank. They liked the Scotsman, just as Thomas did, which was why Thomas had disobeyed his lord and let Robbie come with him. Jake laid more arrows on the parapet. ‘
That were
easy.’

‘They weren’t expecting trouble,’ Thomas said. That was not entirely true. The town had been aware of English raiders, Thomas’s raiders, but had somehow convinced themselves that they would not come to Castillon d’Arbizon. The town had been at peace for so long that the townsfolk were persuaded the quiet times would go on. The walls and the watchmen were not there to guard against the English, but against the big companies of bandits that infested the countryside. A dozy watchman and a high wall might deter those bandits, but it had failed against real soldiers. ‘How did you cross the river?’ he asked Jake.

‘At the weir,’ Jake said. They had scouted the town in the dusk and Thomas had seen the mill weir as the easiest place to cross the deep and fast-flowing river.

‘The miller?’

‘Scared,’ Jake said, ‘and quiet.’

Thomas heard the crackling of breaking twigs, the scrape of feet and a thump as a ladder was placed against the angle between the castle and the town wall. He leaned over the inner parapet. ‘You can open the gate, Robbie,’ he called down. He put an arrow on his string and stared down the long length of moonlit wall.

Beneath him men were climbing the ladder, hoisting weapons and bags that they tossed over the parapet and then followed after. A wash of flamelight glowed from the open wicket gate where Robbie and Sam stood guard, and after a moment a file of men, their mail clinking in the night, went from the wall’s steps to the castle gate. Castillon d’Arbizon’s new garrison was arriving.

A watchman appeared at the wall’s far end. He strolled towards the castle, then suddenly became aware of the sound of swords, bows and baggage thumping on stone as men clambered over the wall. He hesitated, torn between a desire to get closer and see what was really happening and a wish to find reinforcements, and while he
hesitated
both Thomas and Jake loosed their arrows.

The watchman wore a padded leather jerkin, protection enough against a drunkard’s stave, but the arrows slashed through the leather, the padding and his chest until the two points protruded from his back. He was hurled back, his staff fell with a clatter, and then he jerked in the moonlight, gasped a few times and was still.

‘What do we do now?’ Jake asked.

‘Collect the taxes,’ Thomas said, ‘and make a nuisance of ourselves.’

‘Until what?’

‘Until someone comes to kill us,’ Thomas said, thinking of his cousin.

‘And we kill him?’ Jake might be cross-eyed, but he held a very straightforward view of life.

‘With God’s good help,’ Thomas said and made the sign of the cross on his friar’s robe.

The last of Thomas’s men climbed the wall and dragged the ladder up behind them. There were still half a dozen men a mile away, across the river and hidden in the forest where they were guarding the horses, but the bulk of Thomas’s force was now inside the castle and its gate was again locked. The dead watchman lay on the wall with two goose-feathered shafts sticking from his chest. No one else had detected the invaders. Castillon d’Arbizon either slept or drank.

And then the screams began.

It had not occurred to Thomas that the beghard girl who was to die in the morning would be imprisoned in the castle. He had thought the town would have its own jail, but she had evidently been given into the garrison’s keeping and now she was screaming insults at the newly imprisoned men in the other cells and her noise was unsettling the archers and men-at-arms who had climbed Castillon d’Arbizon’s wall and taken the castle. The jailer’s plump wife, who spoke a little French, had shouted for the English to kill the girl. ‘She’s a beghard,’ the woman claimed, ‘in league with the devil!’

Sir Guillaume d’Evecque had agreed with the woman. ‘Bring her up to the courtyard,’ he told Thomas, ‘and I’ll hack off her damn head.’

‘She must burn,’ Thomas said. ‘That’s what the Church has decreed.’

‘So who burns her?’

Thomas shrugged.
‘The town sergeants?
Maybe us, I don’t know.’

‘Then if you won’t let me kill her now,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘at least shut her goddamned mouth.’ He drew his knife and offered it to Thomas. ‘Cut her tongue out.’

Thomas ignored the blade. He had still not found time to change out of his friar’s robe, so he lifted its skirts and went down to the dungeons where the girl was shouting in French to tell the captives in the other cells that they would all die and that the devil would dance on their bones to a tune played by demons. Thomas lit-a rush lantern from the flickering remnants of a torch, then went to the beghard’s cell and pulled back the two bolts.

She quietened at the sound of the bolts and then, as he pushed the heavy door open, she scuffled back to the cell’s far wall. Jake had followed Thomas down the steps and, seeing the girl in the lantern’s dim light, he sniggered. ‘I can keep her quiet for you,’ he offered.

‘Go and get some sleep, Jake,’ Thomas said.

‘No, I don’t mind,’ Jake persisted.

‘Sleep!’
Thomas snapped, suddenly angry because the girl looked so vulnerable.

She was vulnerable because she was naked.
Naked as a new-laid egg, arrow-thin, deathly pale, flea-bitten, greasy-haired, wide-eyed and feral.
She sat in the filthy straw, her arms wrapped about her drawn-up knees to hide her nakedness, then took a deep breath is if summoning her last dregs of courage. ‘You’re English,’ she said in French. Her voice was hoarse from her screaming.

‘I’m English,’ Thomas agreed.

‘But an English priest is as bad as any other,’ she accused him.

‘Probably,’ Thomas agreed. He put the lantern on the floor and sat beside the open door because the stench in the cell was so overwhelming. ‘I want you to stop your screaming,’ he went on, ‘because it upsets people.’

She rolled her eyes at those words. ‘Tomorrow they are going to burn me,’ she said, ‘so you think I care if fools are upset tonight?’

‘You should care for your soul,’ Thomas said, but his fervent words brought no response from the beghard. The rush wick burned badly and its horn shade turned the dim light a leprous, flickering yellow. ‘Why did they leave you naked?’ he asked.

‘Because I tore a strip from my dress and tried to strangle the jailer.’ She said it calmly, but with a defiant look as though daring Thomas to disapprove.

Thomas almost smiled at the thought of so slight a girl attacking the stout jailer, but he resisted his amusement. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked instead.

She was still defiant. ‘I have no name,’ she said. ‘They made me a heretic and took my name away. I’m cast out of Christendom. I’m already halfway to the next world.’ She looked away from him with an expression of indignation and Thomas saw that Robbie Douglas was standing in the half-open door. The Scot was gazing at the beghard with a look of wonderment, even awe, and Thomas looked at the girl again and saw that under the scraps of straw and embedded filth she was beautiful. Her hair was like pale gold, her skin was unscarred from pox and her face was strong. She had a high forehead, a full mouth and sunken cheeks. A striking face, and the Scotsman just stared at her and the girl, embarrassed by his frank gaze, hugged her knees closer to her breasts.

‘Go,’ Thomas told Robbie. The young Scotsman fell in love, it seemed to Thomas, like other men became hungry, and it was plain from Robbie’s face that he had been struck by the girl’s looks with the force of a lance hammering into a shield.

Robbie frowned as though he did not quite understand Thomas’s instruction. ‘I meant to ask you,’ he said, then paused.

‘Ask me what?’

‘Back in Calais,’ Robbie said, ‘did the Earl tell you to leave me behind?’

It seemed an odd question in the circumstances, but Thomas decided it deserved a response. ‘How do you know?’

‘That priest told me. Buckingham.’

Thomas wondered why Robbie had even talked to the priest, then realized that his friend was simply making conversation so he could stay near to the latest girl he had fallen so hopelessly in love with. ‘Robbie,’ he said, ‘she’s going to burn in the morning.’

Robbie shifted uneasily. ‘She doesn’t have to.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Thomas protested, ‘the Church has condemned her!’

‘Then why are you here?’ Robbie asked.

‘Because I command here.
Because someone has to keep her quiet.’

‘I can do that,’ Robbie said with a smile, and when Thomas did not respond the smile turned into a scowl. ‘So why did you let me come to Gascony?’

‘Because you’re a friend.’

‘Buckingham said I’d steal the Grail,’ Robbie said. ‘He said I’d take it to Scotland.’

‘We have to find it first,’ Thomas said, but Robbie was not listening. He was just looking hungrily at the girl who huddled in the corner. ‘Robbie,’ Thomas said firmly, ‘she’s going to burn.’

‘Then it doesn’t matter what happens to her tonight,’ the Scotsman said defiantly.

Thomas fought to suppress his anger. ‘Just leave us alone, Robbie,’ he said.

‘Is it her soul you’re after?’ Robbie asked.
‘Or her flesh?’

‘Just go!’ Thomas snarled with more force than he meant and Robbie looked startled, even belligerent, but then he blinked a couple of times and walked away.

The girl had not understood the English conversation, but she had recognized the lust on Robbie’s face and now turned it on Thomas. ‘You want me for yourself, priest?’ she asked in French.

Thomas ignored the sneering question. ‘Where are you from?’

She paused, as if deciding whether or not to answer,
then
shrugged. ‘From Picardy,’ she said.

‘A long way north,’ Thomas said. ‘How does a girl from Picardy come to Gascony?’

She hesitated again. She was, Thomas thought, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, which made her overripe for marriage. Her eyes, he noticed, had a curious piercing quality, which gave him the uncomfortable sensation that she could see right through to the dark root of his soul. ‘My father,’ she said. ‘He was a juggler and flame-eater.’

‘I’ve seen such men,’ Thomas said.

‘We went wherever we wished,’ she said, ‘and made money at fairs. My father made folk laugh and I collected the coins.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Dead.’
She said it carelessly as if to suggest she could not even remember her mother. ‘Then my father died here. Six months ago. So I stayed.’

‘Why did you stay?’

She gave him a sneering look as if to suggest the answer to his question was so obvious that it did not need stating, but then, presuming him to be a priest who did not understood how real people lived, she gave him the answer. ‘Do you know how dangerous the roads are?’ she asked. There are
coredors.’

‘Condors?’

‘Bandits,’ she explained. ‘The local people call them
coredors.
Then there are the routiers who are just as bad.’ Routiers were companies of disbanded soldiers who wandered the highways in search of a lord to employ them and when they were hungry, which was most of the time, they took what they wanted by force. Some even captured towns and held them for ransom. But, like the
coredors,
they would regard a girl travelling alone as a gift sent by the devil for their enjoyment. ‘How long do you think I would have lasted?’ she asked.

‘You could have travelled in company?’ Thomas suggested.

‘We always did, my father and I, but he was there to protect me. But on my own?’ She shrugged. ‘So I stayed. I worked in a kitchen.’

‘And cooked up heresy?’

‘You priests do so love heresy,’ she said bitterly. ‘It gives you something to burn.’

‘Before you were condemned,’ Thomas said, ‘what was your name?’

‘Genevieve.’

‘You were named for the saint?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said.

‘And whenever Genevieve prayed,’ Thomas said, ‘the devil blew out her candles.’

‘You priests are full of stories,’ Genevieve mocked.

‘Do you believe that? You believe the devil came into the church and blew out her candles?’

‘Probably.’

‘Why didn’t he just kill her if he’s the devil? What a pathetic trick, just to blow out candles! He can’t be much of a devil if that’s all he does.’

Thomas ignored her scorn. ‘They tell me you are a beghard?’

‘I’ve met beghards,’ she said, ‘and I liked them.’

‘They are the devil’s spawn,’ Thomas said.

‘You’ve met one?’ she asked. Thomas had not. He had only heard of them and the girl sensed his discomfort. ‘If to believe that God gave all to everyone and wants everyone to share in everything,
then
I am as bad as a beghard,’ she admitted, ‘but I never joined them.’

‘You must have done something to deserve the flames.’

She stared at him. Perhaps it was something in his tone that made her trust him, but the defiance seemed to drain out of her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall and Thomas suspected she wanted to cry. Watching her delicate face, he wondered why he had not seen her beauty instantly as Robbie had done. Then she opened her eyes and gazed at him. ‘What happened here tonight?’ she asked, ignoring his accusation.

‘We captured the castle,’ Thomas said.

‘We?’

‘The English.’

She looked at him, trying to read his face. ‘So now the English are the civil power?’

He supposed she had learned the phrase at her trial.

The Church did not burn heretics, they merely condemned them, and then the sinners were handed to the civil power for their deaths. That way the Church kept clean hands, God was assured that his Church was undefiled and the devil gained a soul. ‘We are the civil power now,’ Thomas agreed.

‘So the English will burn me instead of the Gascons?’

‘Someone must burn you,’ Thomas said, ‘if you are a heretic’

‘If?’
Genevieve asked, but when Thomas did not answer she closed her eyes and rested her head on the damp stones again. ‘They said I insulted God.’ She spoke tiredly. ‘That I claimed the priests of God’s Church were corrupt, that I danced naked beneath the lightning, that I used the devil’s power to discover water, that I used magic to cure people’s ills, that I prophesied the future and that I put a curse on Galat Lorret’s wife and on his cattle.’

Thomas frowned. ‘They did not convict you of being a beghard?’ he asked.

‘That too,’ she added drily.

He was silent for a few heartbeats. Water dripped somewhere in the dark beyond the door and the rushlight flickered, almost died and then recovered. ‘Whose wife did you curse?’ Thomas asked.

‘Galat Lorret’s wife.
He’s a cloth merchant here and very rich. He’s the chief consul and a man who would like younger flesh than his wife.’

‘And did you curse her?’

‘Not just her,’ Genevieve said fervently, ‘but him too.
Have you never cursed anyone?’

‘You prophesied the future?’ Thomas asked.

‘I said they would all die, and that is an evident truth.’

‘Not if Christ comes back to earth, as he promised,’ Thomas said.

She gave him a long, considering look and a small smile half showed on her face before she shrugged. ‘So I was wrong,’ she said sarcastically.

‘And the devil showed you how to discover water?’

‘Even you can do that,’ she said. ‘Take a forked twig and walk slowly across a field and when it twitches, dig.’

‘And magical cures?’

‘Old remedies,’ she said tiredly. ‘The things we learn from aunts and grandmothers and old ladies. Take iron from a room where a woman is giving birth. Everyone does it. Even you, priest, touch wood to avert evil. Is that piece of magic sufficient to send you to the fire?’

Again Thomas ignored her answer. ‘You insulted God?’ he asked her.

‘God loves me, and I do not insult those who love me. But I did say his priests were corrupt, which you are, and so they charged me with insulting God. Are you corrupt, priest?’