The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic (130 page)

‘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.

‘They’ll send for help,’ Genevieve said bitterly.

‘Maybe there aren’t any more of them,’ Thomas suggested optimistically, then he heard one of the horses whinny and he guessed that a
coredor,
one he had not seen, had reached the two animals and was untying their reins. ‘God damn them,’ he said, and jumped over the boulder and began leaping from stone to stone down the front of the hill. A crossbow bolt slammed just behind him while another drove a spark from a boulder in front, then he saw a man leading both horses away from the rocks and he paused and drew. The man was half hidden by Genevieve’s mare, but Thomas loosed anyway and the arrow flashed beneath the mare’s neck to strike the man’s thigh. The
coredor
fell, still holding the reins, and Thomas turned and saw one of the four crossbowmen was aiming up at Genevieve. The man shot and Thomas loosed in return. He was at the limit of his big bow’s range, but his arrow went perilously close to the enemy and that near escape persuaded all the crossbowmen to back away. Thomas, his arrow bag banging awkwardly against his right thigh, knew they were terrified of his bow’s power and so, instead of returning to his eyrie in the high rocks, he ran towards them. He shot two more arrows, feeling the strain in his back muscles as he hauled the string far back, and the white-feathered shafts arched through the sky to plummet down around the crossbowmen. Neither shaft hit, but the men backed off still farther and Thomas, when he was sure they were at a safe range, turned back to rescue the horses.

It had not been a man he wounded, but a boy.
A snub-nosed child, maybe ten or eleven, who was lying on the turf with tears in his eyes and a scowl on his face.
He gripped Thomas’s reins as though his life depended on it, and in his left hand there was a knife that he waved in feeble threat. The arrow was through the boy’s right thigh, high up, and the
pain on his victim’s face made Thomas think
that the bodkin point had probably broken the bone.

Thomas kicked the knife out of the boy’s hand. ‘Do you speak French?’ he asked the lad, and received a gob of spittle in reply. Thomas grinned, took the reins back then hauled the boy to his feet. The child cried out with pain as the arrow tore at his wound, and Thomas looked at the surviving
coredors
and saw that all the fight had gone from them. They were staring at the boy.

Thomas guessed the boy had come with the three men who had run to the rocks while he was crouched behind the boulder. They had doubtless been hoping to steal the two horses for that, at least, would give them some small profit on what had turned out to be a disastrous foray. Thomas’s arrows had turned the men back, but the boy, smaller, nimbler and faster, had reached the rocks and tried to be a hero. Now, it seemed, he was a hostage, for one of the
coredors,
a tall man in a leather coat and with a cracked sallet crammed onto his wildly tangled hair, held out both hands to show he carried no weapons and walked slowly forwards.

Thomas kicked the boy down to the ground when the man was thirty paces away, then he half drew the bow. Tar enough,’ he told the man.

‘My name is Philin,’ the man said. He was broad in the chest, long-legged, with a sad, thin face that had a knife or sword scar running across his forehead. He had a knife sheathed at his belt, but no other weapons. He looked like a bandit, Thomas thought, yet there was something about Philin’s eyes which spoke of better times, even of respectability. ‘He is my son,’ Philin added, nodding at the boy.

Thomas shrugged as if he did not care.

Philin took off his cracked helmet and stared briefly at the dead men on the pale grass. There were four of them, all killed by the long arrows, while two more were wounded and groaning. He looked back to Thomas. ‘You are English?’

‘What do you think this is?’ Thomas asked, hefting the bow. Only the English carried the long war bow.

‘I have heard of the bows.’ Philin admitted. He spoke
a badly
accented French and sometimes hesitated as he searched for a word. ‘I have heard of them,’ he went on, ‘but I had not seen one until today.’

‘You’ve seen one now,’ Thomas said vengefully.

‘I think your woman is wounded,’ Philin said, nodding up to Genevieve’s hiding place.

‘And you think I’m a fool,’ Thomas said. Philin wanted him to turn his back so that the crossbows could creep near again.

‘No,’ Philin said. ‘What I think is that I want my boy to live.’

‘What do you offer for him?’ Thomas asked.

‘Your life,’ Philin said. ‘If you keep my son then we shall bring other men here, many men, and we shall surround you and wait for you. You will both die. If my son dies then you will die in such agony,
Englishman, that
all the torments of hell will seem a relief afterwards. But let Galdric live and you both live. You and the heretic’

‘You know who she is?’ Thomas was surprised.

‘We know everything that happens between Berat and the mountains,’ Philin said.

Thomas glanced back up the mound of rocks, but Genevieve was hidden. He had planned to beckon her down, but instead he stepped away from the boy. ‘You want me to take out the arrow?’ he asked Philin.

‘The monks at St Sever’s will do that,’ Philin said.

‘You can go there?’

‘Abbot Planchard will always take a wounded man.’

‘Even a coredor?’

Philin looked scornful. ‘We are just landless men.
Evicted.
Accused of crimes we did not do. Well,’ he smiled suddenly and Thomas almost smiled back, ‘some we did not do. What do you think we should have done? Gone to the galleys? Been hanged?’

Thomas knelt beside the boy, put his bow down and drew his knife. The boy glared at him, Philin called out in alarm, but then went silent as he saw that Thomas meant the child no harm. Instead Thomas cut the arrow head from the shaft and put the precious scrap of metal into his haversack. Then he stood. ‘Swear on your boy’s life,’ he ordered Philin, ‘that you will keep your word.’

‘I swear it,’ Philin said.

Thomas gestured towards the high rocks where Genevieve sheltered. ‘She is a
draga,’
he said. ‘Break your oath, Philin, and she will make your soul shriek.’

‘I will not harm you.’ Philin said gravely, ‘and they,’ he looked at the other
coredors,
‘will not harm you either.’

Thomas reckoned he had little choice. It was either trust Philin or
resign
himself to a siege in a high place where there was no water and so he stepped away from the boy. ‘He’s yours.’

‘Thank you,’ Philin said gravely. ‘But tell me . . .’
These
last three words checked Thomas who had turned to lead the horses back to the rocks. ‘Tell me, Englishman, why you are here? Alone?’

‘I thought you knew everything that happened between Berat and the mountains?’

‘I know by asking questions,’ Philin said, stooping to his son.

‘I’m a landless man, Philin, a fugitive. Accused of a crime I did commit.’

‘What crime?’

‘Giving refuge to a heretic’

Philin shrugged as if to suggest that crime ranked very low in the hierarchy of evils that had driven the
coredors
to outlawry. ‘If you are truly a fugitive,’ he said, ‘you should think of joining us. But look after your woman. I did not lie. She is wounded.’

He was right. Thomas took the horses back to the rocks and he called Genevieve’s name and when she did not answer he climbed up to the gully and found her with a crossbow bolt in her left shoulder. It had pierced the silver mail and shattered a rib just above her left breast, close to the armpit, and she was lying there, surrounded by the ugly black quarrels, breathing shallowly.
her
face paler than ever and she cried out when Thomas lifted her. ‘I’m dying,’ she said, but there was no blood in her mouth and Thomas had seen many others live after such wounds. He had seen them die too.