The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic (118 page)

‘You’re a soldier, they’re not,’ Thomas said and some of the men grinned.

Sir Guillaume nodded, glanced warily at Genevieve,
then
gestured two of his men-at-arms to accompany him. They went unwillingly, not wanting to miss whatever Thomas was about to say, but Sir Guillaume growled at them and they followed him through the gate.

Thomas held the crucifix high. ‘If this girl is the devil’s creature,’ he said, ‘then she cannot look at this and she cannot bear its touch. If I hold it in front of her eyes she will go blind! If I touch her skin it will bleed. You know that! Your mothers told you that! Your priests told you that!’

Some of the men nodded and all stared open-mouthed as Thomas held the crucifix in front of Genevieve’s open eyes, and then touched it to her forehead. Some men held their breath and most looked puzzled when her eyes remained whole and her clear, pale skin unblemished.

‘She has the devil’s help,’ a man growled.

‘What kind of a fool are you?’ Thomas spat. ‘You claim she can escape by using the devil’s trickery? Then why was she here? Why was she in the cells? Why didn’t she unfold great wings and fly away?’

‘God prevented it.’

‘Then God would have made her skin bleed when the crucifix touched her,’ Thomas said, ‘wouldn’t He? And if she’s the devil’s creature she’ll have cat’s feet. You all know that!’ Many of the men muttered agreement for it was well known that those whom the devil favoured were given cats’ paws so they could creep about in the dark to work their evil. ‘Take your shoes off,’ Thomas ordered Genevieve, and when her feet were bare he pointed at them. ‘Some cat, eh? She won’t catch many mice with paws like that!’

Two or three other men offered argument, but Thomas put them to scorn, and then Sir Guillaume came back and Father Medous accompanied him with a small silver casket that he kept ready to take the sacraments to a dying person. ‘It isn’t seemly,’ Father Medous began, but stopped when Thomas glared at him.

‘Come here, priest,’ Thomas said and Father Medous obeyed. Thomas took the silver casket from him. ‘She has passed one test,’ he said, ‘but all of you
know,
all
of you, even in Scotland they know this,’ he paused and pointed at Robbie, ‘that the devil himself cannot save his creatures from the touch of Christ’s body. She will die! She will writhe in agony. Her flesh will fall away and the worms will wriggle where she stood. Her screams will be heard in heaven. You all know that!’

They did know it and they nodded, and they watched as Thomas took a small piece of dry bread from the box and held it towards Genevieve. She hesitated, looking worriedly into Thomas’s eyes, but he smiled at her and she obediently opened her mouth and let him put the thick wafer on her tongue.

‘Kill her, God!’ Father Medous called. ‘Kill her! Oh Jesus, Jesus, kill her!’

His voice echoed from the castle’s yard,
then
the echo died away as every man in the yard stared at the tall Genevieve as she swallowed.

Thomas let the silence stretch,
then
he looked pointedly at Genevieve who still lived. ‘She came here,’ he told his men in English, ‘with her father. He was a juggler who collected pennies at fairs and she carried the hat. We’ve all seen folk like that.
Stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, bear-handlers, jugglers.
Genevieve collected the coins. But her father died and she was left here, a stranger, among folk who spoke a different language. She was like us! No one liked her because she came from far away. She didn’t even speak their language! They hated her because she was different, and so they called her a heretic. And this priest says she’s a heretic! But on the night I came here I was in his house and he has a woman who lives in his house and cooks for him and cleans for him, but he only has one bed.’ That got a laugh as Thomas had known it would. For all he knew Father Medous had a dozen beds, but the priest did not know what was being
said.
‘She is no beghard,’ Thomas said, ‘you have just seen that for yourself. She is only a lost soul, like us, and folk took against her because she was not like them. So, if any of you still fear her and still think she will bring us bad luck, kill her now.’ He stepped back, arms folded, and Genevieve, who had not understood anything he said, looked at him with worry on her face. ‘Go on,’ Thomas said to his men. ‘You have bows, swords, knives. I have nothing. Just kill her! It won’t be murder. The Church says she must die, so if you want to do God’s work, do it.’ Robbie took a half-pace forward, then sensed the mood in the yard and stayed still.

Then someone laughed, and suddenly they were all laughing and cheering and Genevieve still looked puzzled, but Thomas was smiling. He quietened them by raising his hands. ‘She stays,’ he said, ‘she lives, and you have work to do. So go and bloody do it.’

Robbie spat in disgust as Thomas took Genevieve back to the hall. Thomas hung the crucifix in its niche and closed his eyes. He was praying
,
thanking God she had passed the test of the wafer. And, better still, that she was staying.

Thomas spent his first fortnight readying for a siege. Castillon d’Arbizon’s castle possessed a well, which brought up
a discoloured
and brackish water but meant his men would never die of thirst; the old garrison’s storerooms, however, had contained only a few sacks of damp flour, a barrel of sprouting beans, a jar of rancid olive oil and some mouldering cheeses. So, day after day, Thomas sent his men to search the town and the nearby villages and now food was piling into the undercroft. Once those sources had been exhausted, he began raiding. This was war as he knew it, the kind of war that had ravaged Brittany from end to end and reached almost to the gates of Paris. Thomas would leave ten men as a castle guard and the rest would follow him on horseback to some village or farm that owed allegiance to the Count of Berat and they would take the livestock, empty the barns and leave the place burning. After two such raids Thomas was met by a delegation from a village
who
brought money so that his men would spare them from pillage, and next day two more embassies arrived with bags of coin. Men also came offering their services. Routiers heard there was money and plunder to be gained in Castillon d’Arbizon and before he had been in the town ten days Thomas commanded over sixty men. He had two mounted raiding parties leave each day, and almost every day he sold excess plunder in the marketplace. He divided the money into three parts, one for the Earl of Northampton, one for himself which he shared with Sir Guillaume and Robbie, and the third part for the men. Genevieve rode with him. Thomas had not wanted that. Taking women on raids was a distraction and he forbade any of the other men to bring their women, but Genevieve still feared Robbie and the handful of men who seemed to share his hatred of her, and so she insisted on riding alongside Thomas. She had discovered a small haubergeon in the castle stores and polished it with sand and vinegar until her hands were red and sore and the mail glowed like silver. It hung loose on her thin frame, but she belted it with a strip of yellow cloth and hung another strip of the same colour from the crown of her polished helmet, which was a simple iron cap padded with a leather liner. The people of Castillon d’Arbizon, when Genevieve of the silver mail rode into town at the head of a line of mounted men leading packhorses heaped with plunder and driving stolen cattle, called her a
draga.
Everyone knew about
dragas,
they were devil’s girls, capricious and deadly, and they dressed in glowing white. Genevieve was the devil’s woman, they said, and she brought the Englishmen the devil’s own luck. Strangely, that rumour made the majority of Thomas’s men proud of her. The archers among them had become accustomed to being called the
hellequin
in Brittany and they were perversely proud of that association with the devil. It made other men fearful, and so Genevieve became their symbol of good luck.

Thomas had a new bow. Most archers, when their old bows wore out, simply purchased a new one from the supplies that were shipped from England, but there were no such supplies in Castillon d’Arbizon and, besides, Thomas knew how to make the weapon and loved doing it. He had found a good yew branch in Galat Lorret’s garden and he had sawn and slashed away the bark and outer wood until he had a straight staff that was dark as blood on one half and pale as honey on the other. The dark side was the yew’s heart-wood that resisted compression, while the golden half was the springy sapwood; when the bow was finished the heartwood would fight against the
cord’s
pull and the sapwood would help snap the bow straight so the arrow would fly like a winged demon.

The new weapon was even bigger than his old bow and sometimes he wondered if he was making it too big, but he persisted, shaping the wood with a knife until it had a thick belly and gently tapering ends. He smoothed, polished and then painted the bow, for the wood’s moisture had to be trapped in the timber if the bow was not to break, and then he took the horn nocks from his old bow and put them on the new. He also took the silver plate from the old bow, the piece of Mass cup that bore his father’s badge of a yale holding a grail, and he pinned it to the outer belly of the new bow that he had rubbed with beeswax and soot to darken the wood. The first time he strung it, bending the new staff to take the cord, he marvelled at the strength he needed, and the first time he shot it he watched astonished as the arrow soared out from the castle battlements.

He had made a second bow from a smaller bough, this one a child’s bow that needed hardly any strength to draw, and he gave it to Genevieve who practised with blunt arrows and amused the men as she sprayed her missiles wildly about the castle’s yard. Yet she persevered, and there came a day when arrow after arrow struck the inner side of the gate.

That same night Thomas sent his old bow to hell. An archer never threw a bow away, not even if it broke on him; instead, in a ceremony that was an excuse for drinking and laughter, the old bow was committed to the flames. It was being sent to hell, the archers said, going ahead to wait for its owner. Thomas watched the yew burn, saw the bow bend for the last time, then snap in a shower of sparks, and he thought of the arrows it had sent. His archers stood respectfully around the great hall’s hearth, and behind them the men-at-arms were silent, and only when the bow was a broken strip of ash did Thomas raise his wine. ‘To hell,’ he said in the old invocation.

‘To hell,’ the archers agreed and the men-at-arms, privileged to be admitted to this archers’ ritual, echoed the words.
All but Robbie, who stood apart.
He had taken to wearing a silver crucifix about his neck, hanging it above his mail coat to make it obvious that it was there to ward off evil.

‘That was a good bow,’ Thomas said, watching the embers, but the new one was just as good, maybe better, and two days later Thomas carried it when he led his biggest raid yet.

He took all his men except the handful needed to guard the castle. He had been planning this raid for days and he knew it would be a long ride and so he left long before dawn. The sound of the hooves echoed from the house fronts as they clattered down to the western arch where the watchman, now carrying a staff decorated with the Earl of Northampton’s badge, hurriedly pulled apart the gates,
then
the horsemen trotted across the bridge and vanished into the southern trees. The English were riding, no one knew where.

They were riding east, to Astarac. Riding to the place where Thomas’s ancestors had lived, to the place where perhaps the Grail had once been hidden. ‘Is that what you expect to find?’ Sir Guillaume asked him. ‘You think we’ll trip over it?’

‘I don’t know what we’ll find,’ Thomas admitted.

‘There’s a castle there, yes?’

‘There was,’ Thomas said, ‘but my father said it had been slighted.’ A slighted castle was one that had been demolished and Thomas expected to find nothing but ruins.

‘So why go?’ Sir Guillaume asked.

‘The Grail,’ Thomas answered curtly. In truth he was going because he was curious, but his men, who did not know what he sought, had detected there was something unusual in this raid. Thomas had merely said they were going to a distant place because they had plundered everything that was close, but the more thoughtful of the men had noticed Thomas’s nervousness.

Sir Guillaume knew the significance of Astarac, as did Robbie, who now led the advance guard of six archers and three men-at-arms who rode a quarter-mile ahead to guard against ambush. They were guided by a man from Castillon d’Arbizon who claimed to know the road and who led them up into the hills where the trees were low and scanty and the views unrestricted. Every few minutes Robbie would wave to signify that the way ahead was clear. Sir Guillaume, riding bare-headed, nodded at the distant figure. ‘So that friendship’s over?’ he asked.

‘I hope not,’ Thomas said.

‘You can hope what you bloody like,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘but she came along.’ Sir Guillaume’s face had been disfigured by Thomas’s cousin, leaving the Norman with only his right eye, a scarred left cheek and a streak of white where the sword had cut into his beard. He looked fearsome, and so he was in battle, but he was also a generous man. He looked now at Genevieve who rode her grey mare a few yards to the side of the path. She was in her silver armour, her long legs in pale grey cloth and brown boots. ‘You should have burned her,’ he said cheerfully.

‘You still think that?’ Thomas asked.

‘No,’ Sir Guillaume admitted. ‘I like her. If Genny’s a beghard then let’s have more of them. But you know what you should do with Robbie?’

‘Fight him?’

‘Christ’s bones, no!’ Sir Guillaume was shocked that Thomas should even suggest such a thing. ‘Send him home. What’s his ransom?’

‘Three thousand florins.’

‘Christ in his bucket, that’s cheap enough! You must have that much coin in the chests, so give it to him and send him packing. He can buy his freedom and go and rot in Scotland.’

‘I like him,’ Thomas said, and that was true. Robbie was a friend and Thomas hoped that their old closeness could be restored.

‘You might like him,’ Sir Guillaume retorted tartly, ‘but you don’t sleep with him, and when it comes to a choice, Thomas, men always choose the one who warms their bed. It may not give you a longer life, but it will certainly be a happier one.’ He laughed, then turned to search the lower ground for any enemy. There was none. It appeared that the Count of Berat was ignoring the English garrison that had so suddenly taken a part of his territory, but Sir Guillaume, who was older in war than Thomas, suspected that was only because the Count was marshalling his forces. ‘He’ll attack when he’s ready,’ the Norman said. ‘And have you noticed that the
coredors
are taking an interest in us?’

‘I have,’ Thomas said. On every raid he had been aware of the ragged bandits watching his men. They did not come close, certainly not within bowshot, but they were there and he expected to see them in these hills very soon.

‘Not like bandits to challenge soldiers,’ Sir Guillaume said.

‘They haven’t challenged us yet.’

‘They’re not watching us for amusement,’ Sir Guillaume added drily.

‘I suspect,’ Thomas replied, ‘that there’s a price on our heads. They want money. And they’ll get brave one day. I hope so.’ He patted the new bow, which was holstered in a long leather tube sewn to his saddle.

By midmorning the raiders were crossing a succession of wide fertile valleys separated by high rocky hills that ran north and south. From the summit of the hills Thomas could see dozens of villages, but once they descended and were among the trees again, he could see none. They saw two castles from the heights, both
small,
both with flags flying from their towers, but both were too far away to distinguish the badge on the flags, which Thomas assumed would be that of the Count of Berat. The valleys all had rivers running north, but they had no trouble crossing them for the bridges or fords were not guarded. The roads, like the hills and valleys, went north and south and so the lords of these rich lands did not guard against folk travelling east or west. Their castles stood sentinel over the valley entrances where the garrisons could skim taxes from the merchants on the roads.

‘Is that Astraac?’ Sir Guillaume asked when they crossed yet another ridge. He was staring down at a village with a small castle.

‘Astarac’s castle is ruined,’ Genevieve answered. ‘It’s a tower and some walls on a crag, nothing like that.’

‘You’ve been there?’ Thomas asked.

‘My father and I always went for the olive fair.’

‘Olive fair?’

‘On the feast of St Jude,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of folk came. We made good money.’

‘And they sold olives?’

‘Jars and jars of the first pressing,’ she said, ‘and in the evening they soaked young pigs with the oil and people tried to catch them. There was bull-fighting and dancing.’ She laughed at the memory,
then
spurred on. She rode well, straight-backed and with her heels down, while Thomas, like most of his archers, rode a horse with all the grace of a sack of wheat.

It was just past midday when they rode down into Astarac’s valley. The
coredors
had seen them by now and a score of the ragged bandits were dogging their footsteps, but not daring to come close. Thomas ignored them, staring instead at the black outline of the broken castle that stood on its rocky knoll a half-mile south of a small village. Farther north, in the distance, he could see a
monastery,
probably Cistercian for its church had no tower. He looked back at the castle and knew his family had once held it, that his ancestors had ruled these lands, that his badge had flown from that broken tower, and he thought he ought to feel some strong emotion, but instead there was only a vague disappointment. The land meant nothing to him, and how could something as precious as the Grail belong to that pathetic pile of shattered stone?

Robbie rode back. Genevieve moved aside and he ignored her. ‘Doesn’t look like much,’ Robbie said, his silver crucifix shining in the autumn sun.

‘It doesn’t,’ Thomas agreed.

Robbie twisted in his saddle, making the leather creak. ‘Let me take a dozen men-at-arms to the monastery,’ he suggested. ‘They might have full storerooms.’

‘Take
a half
-dozen archers with you as well,’ Thomas suggested, ‘and the rest of us will ransack the village.’

Robbie nodded,
then
looked back at the distant
coredors.
‘Those bastards won’t dare attack.’