Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) Read online

  By the same author

  Outlaw

  Holy Warrior

  King’s Man

  Warlord

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  ISBN: 9780748120536

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 Angus Donald

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Sphere

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Also by Angus Donald

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  For Mary, Emma and Robin,

  with all my love

  Part One

  Chapter One

  My immortal soul is in grave peril, I have been informed, for the sin of blasphemy. And, as I am now in my seventh decade, a weary old man approaching my end, I suppose I must try to treat this sort of thing with a degree of seriousness – even if this extraordinary knowledge was imparted to me by a bouncy stripling barely out of childhood with a wispy upper lip and a brutally fresh tonsure … But I must strive to be fair in these writings; I must not indulge my envy of his youth: Father Anselm, our village priest, is no callow stripling, he is fully twenty-three years of age. It is only that he looks to me like an untried lad of twelve summers. Perhaps, when the ripe pimples that stud his small, eager face have cleared up, I will be able to show him the proper respect due a man of God.

  But somehow I doubt it.

  How did I blaspheme? I laughed in church today during Mass, long and very loud, joyously and uncontrollably; indeed, such was my mirth that I was forced to excuse myself and leave in the midst of the lesson. I was reproved for my levity afterwards, and I may, Father Anselm warned me, even be guilty of blasphemy as well – a mortal sin. I showed a gross lack of reverence for a holy object and I must do a penance. When he told me this after the service this morning, it was only with a deal of difficulty that I did not begin to roar like a donkey once again.

  It happened like this: Father Anselm was delivering his usual Sunday homily to the villagers and using the Flask of St Luke the Evangelist, as it is known, our village’s only relic, as the basis for his theme, and the words from the Gospel of Matthew about the power of Faith as his text. I’m sure you will know it. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain: “Remove hence to yonder place”, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.’

  Father Anselm claims that he had a vision in which St Luke himself came to his bedside and gave him the flask – which is an ancient leather bottle, sealed on the inside with pitch and at the neck with a wooden stopper. It has a rather indistinct image stamped into the leather of a prone man and a bovine animal of some kind. Father Anselm claims that it is an image of St Luke himself and his symbol of an ox, and that the saint told him to use it for God’s work in the manor of Westbury in the county of Nottinghamshire. My manor, where I am lord over all, except perhaps over my sharp-tongued daughter-in-law Marie, mother of my grandson and namesake Alan. It is my church, in fact, that Father Anselm preaches in. It stands on my land, the living is within my gift, and it was my silver, not five years ago, that paid for the new roof. If I choose to laugh there about his ridiculous stories of visions and holy flasks, surely that is my right.

  I know that Father Anselm is lying about the vision; that water flask used to belong to me, and I gave it to the old village priest of Westbury – not Anselm’s predecessor Father Gilbert, but the incumbent even before him, a little owlish man named Father Arnold – long ago when I had returned from my travels in the south. Nobody but me remembers him now – they are all in their graves. I do not know exactly where Arnold hid the bottle away in his little cott behind the church but, evidently, Father Anselm has newly discovered it and he is now pretending that because, like me, it is very old, it must be a sacred relic. It is not – the ox is, in fact, a bull and the man depicted on the leather is St Sernin, a holy man who lived and died in the far south, and whose image can be found, I would imagine, on hundreds or even thousands of similar water bottles that are sold to pilgrims in the beautiful, rose-coloured city of Toulouse. I know because that is where I bought this particular bottle, merely as a container for refreshment during my journeying, when I was in that city some forty years ago.

  I will refrain from exposing the priest as a liar, although I would enjoy that a good deal. That would no doubt also gravely imperil my soul, I suspect, but I choose not to expose him for another, better reason. Father Anselm is a distant kinsman of the Earl of Locksley, a landowner in the counties of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, and I have given the priest the living here at Westbury as a boon to the Earl. This magnate is not my old friend Robert Odo, the hero of all those lively ale-house rhymes, and the man who was my liege lord and companion on many a bloody adventure – no, alas, my old friend Robin has long been in his grave – this is his son, a bird of a very different feather. Yet I would not wish to offend him by embarrassing his priestly kinsman. So I will remain silent about the true provenance of the Flask of St Luke, and I will try to control my mirth when he prates about the power of faith to move mountains and how the flask will perform miracles if only the villagers will believe in it. I am too old to make fresh enemies, and fight yet more futile battles over something as slight as a boy priest’s foolish lies.

  I have seen enough of battle in my long life. Quite enough.

  I must husband my strength, too. I do not know how long I have left in this sinful world – it cannot be long – and before I depart I have a tale to set down upon this parchment by my own blotched and shaking hand. By strange coincidence, it too is a tale of faith, and of a mountain. A tale of that journey to the rosy city of Toulouse when I was not much older than Father Anselm – a young knight of five and twenty years. It is a tale of that old leather flask, and a tale about my friend, the thief, the warrior, the cruel and generous lord – the current Earl of Locksley’s father, whom all the people knew then as the outlaw Robin Hood…

  The sound o
f a screaming horse ripped through the warm, dusty summer air in the hall at Westbury: a raw blast of scalding pain and rage, barely recognizable as coming from a living thing and not some monstrous creature from a sweat-drenched nightmare. I was leaning over the long table at the north end of the hall, with my steward Baldwin, and Father Arnold, the old village priest, frowning over a scatter of parchments and rolls at the tally of rents and dues from the previous year, and building myself a mild headache after several hours of close study.

  At the first equine squeal, I jerked upright, turned from the table and sprinted towards the door of the hall, vaulting the central hearth that lay directly in my path and bursting out through the portal into the bright July light of the courtyard. I knew the animal that was making that terrible sound: a gigantic, noble beast, dark as sin, strong as a mountain and worth two years’ revenues from Westbury. It was my destrier, my trusted friend and mount in many a desperate mêlée: it was Shaitan. And when Shaitan was angry, hurt or frightened, he was as lethal as a maddened bull – just as powerful and twice as vicious. As I burst out of the hall doorway, I saw that my warhorse, saddled, bridled and accoutred for a morning gallop, had already taken a toll on the human population of Westbury. A young groom called Matthew lay on the dried mud of the courtyard, whey-faced and clutching an obviously broken arm, his eyes wide with agony. Shaitan was pawing the ground, skittering, capering and snapping his teeth at the centre of a loose ring of my people, men-at-arms, grooms, farm servants and maids. The Westbury folk, all of whom seemed to be shouting advice over each other, were wisely keeping their distance from the vast prancing, kicking, bucking bulk of the horse. All except one: my squire Thomas, a young man of seventeen or so summers, with peat-brown hair and dark Welsh eyes, and an air of oak-hard sturdiness, who had followed me to the wars in France. Thomas had the horse’s leather reins wrapped around both of his fists, pulled taut, his weight leaning back in an attempt to keep the animal at least partly anchored. Shaitan suddenly stopped his weird capering and raised his massive head in one quick jerk, hauling Thomas forward willy-nilly; the horse then let out a massive squeal of displeasure and shook his heavy head, causing Thomas to scuttle to one side, then the other. The animal’s wide shoulders bunched, the head dipped and, like twin black battering rams, his hind legs pounded out, iron-shod hooves slicing the air inches from the face of an incautiously close man-at-arms behind him. It was a manoeuvre that Shaitan had been patiently taught, long before I had owned him – and his ability to do this was part of his enormous value: the backwards double-kick was a deadly strike in the fierce press of battle that could crush an enemy’s skull or stave in his chest, and it was only by the grace of God that no one had been killed so far on this day. Thomas had been dragged to his knees in the courtyard dust by then, and had lost one of the reins. He grimly held the other in both hands; but Shaitan, his chestnut eyes rolling in fury, grunting neighs exploding from his nostrils, clearly resented this slight check on his liberty; the huge black head swooped down, lips peeled back to expose pink gums and big, square yellow teeth, and, fast as a pouncing cat, my warhorse lunged forward and bit down hard on Thomas’s shoulder, eliciting a scream from the young man and a satisfied snort from the beast.

  Into this maelstrom of angry horse and anguished squire, shouting folk and weeping, terrified servants, stepped my beloved, my utterly beautiful wife Godifa. She came out of the dairy, a white apron tied around her slim middle, the sleeves of her gown rolled up beyond her elbows, hands slightly reddened with hard work: blonde hair tucked under a neat white cap, pale cream face, sparkling violet-blue eyes – and an air of calm, quiet womanly authority, more remarkable for the fact that she had only recently passed her twentieth birthday. She seemed to glide smoothly towards Shaitan like a swan, her feet invisible beneath the hem of her long blue gown, her arms were held wide, outstretched to make the shape of the cross, and I saw then that she had a short cheese knife in her right hand. She was making a low meaningless noise in her throat as she advanced relentlessly on the destrier, who was now scuttling and prancing crabwise, shaking his back and hindquarters as if trying to wriggle his huge barrel of a body out of his tight riding saddle.

  Stepping forward myself, I shouted, ‘Goody, get back. For God’s sake, keep away from him!’ But my determined wife appeared not to hear me; she continued her calm, graceful walk towards Shaitan, crooning soft nonsensical phrases, arms out; and the crowd split before her, the folk moving aside to clear her passage like a swept-back pair of bed curtains. Shaitan saw my lady coming; he twisted his head and fixed her with his dark, malevolent eye. Then he nodded once, as if making his mind up about something, brayed deafeningly with furious outrage, and reared high on his hind legs, his broad forefeet wind-milling above Goody’s head; heavy, iron-rimmed hooves the size of roof shingles pawing the air above her fragile skull.

  My heart stopped. The moment was frozen: the massive, furious, tar-black animal rearing up high against a pale sky, and before it, the slender figure of Goody, arms spread abroad like Our Saviour in his Passion on the Cross.

  I screamed, ‘No, no!’ And took a fast step closer, reaching out blindly for a trailing rein. And then Shaitan came down. He laid his hooves down softly, one after the other, with a delicate precision, on the ground in front of Goody, scarcely creating a puff of dust. His long dark head bowed before my wife, nostrils warmly puffing, forehead knocking playfully against her breasts and belly; and Goody stroked his muzzle and satin neck with her left hand, still crooning, and her right arm moved smoothly along his flank. The cheese knife slipped between his belly and the twin girths holding the saddle in place, slicing through the tough binding leather in a couple of jerky thrusts. It was only then that I noticed the blood, dark fluid on his dark hide, seeping down Shaitan’s flank from beneath the high saddle, showing up scarlet on Goody’s white hand.

  ‘Help me, Thomas, quickly now,’ said Goody to my squire, who had got to his feet and was brushing the dust of the courtyard from his hose. And between them they carefully lifted the heavy wood-framed saddle from Shaitan’s back, and the blood-and-sweat-stained blanket beneath it, and Thomas bore them away and into the gloom of the stable.

  I found myself at Shaitan’s head, his bridle in my shaking hand and I stroked his broad nose, and silky-hard jaw bones for a hundred heartbeats, blowing softly into his nostrils and murmuring apologies to him. I looked between his ears over the muscular arch of his neck and down into the broad hollow of his back, and I could see the wound clearly, a gash a couple of inches long running laterally to the left of his spine, just above the glossy black bulge of his haunch.

  ‘This is the culprit, sir,’ said Thomas returning from the stable with a small grey-brown object in his right hand. It was a bent three-inch nail, a little rusty and oddly small in his strong brown hand but still sharp, and now smirched with horse blood and hair. ‘This must have become wedged under the saddle somehow, then worked its way through the blanket when Matthew rode him across the courtyard.’

  ‘How is Matthew?’ Goody’s voice broke in.

  ‘He’ll live, my lady,’ Thomas replied, his natural grave cheerfulness already reasserting itself. He smiled in admiration at Goody. ‘That arm is certainly broken – but it will be a good lesson for him. It will teach him that grooms should always check their gear carefully before saddling expensive destriers – and that they should not try to ride their master’s mounts without permission!’

  I put my arms around Goody then, and crushed her to me, that awful moment – when Shaitan had towered above her like a solid black mountain, ready to fall on her head – still echoing shrilly in my soul. ‘Promise me, promise me, my love, that you will never do something as foolish as that again,’ I said, my words muffled by the white linen cap atop her head. I could smell the scent of her hair through it; and a perfume made of crushed summer roses that she sometimes wore. ‘You must be careful, my darling; I do not think I could bear it if…’

  Goody broke our embrace. S
he pushed back her body in the loose circle of my arms and smiled up at me. ‘Oh do shut up, you silly man,’ said my beloved, her violet-blue eyes glinting. ‘I knew Shaitan would never really hurt me. What a fuss you do make!’

  I had planned, with Thomas as an escort, to take Shaitan out for a good long gallop that morning – nowhere wild and dangerous, he was too valuable a beast to risk a carelessly broken leg by some mishap over rough ground – but the destrier was badly in need of some exercise. And while I did not fear that his wound was serious – it was a deep cut, no more nor less, and the head groom had already doctored it with a poultice of old bread and goose fat – I could certainly not ride him for some weeks. I was, however, reluctant to relinquish my own urge for fresh air – I had not left the compound of Westbury for some days, and I itched for the sensation of speed and freedom. I was more than ready that day to leave the mysteries of tallying the manor’s revenues to Baldwin and Father Arnold, and enjoy some sunshine on my face and feel the wind in my hair. So I ordered a feisty bay mare from the stables to be saddled instead, strapped on my sword and found an old riding cloak. While I was waiting for my mount, I took a look at Thomas’s shoulder.

  My squire told me it was nothing but I made him strip off his chemise and inspected the two matching bright-red curves of swelling flesh on his chest and back that were the result of Shaitan’s savage bite. He was right: no bone was damaged, the skin was barely broken, but I knew that the bruising would be spectacular and so, while my squire bore his wound stoically, I left Goody to apply a herb-laced salve of her own devising and cantered out of the main gate, leaving all my cares behind me.

  And so it was that I found myself alone, on a fresh horse, riding out into the Nottinghamshire countryside that fine July morning. The fright that I had taken over Goody and Shaitan had made me a little reckless, and I put my spurs to the bay’s sides and we galloped for a mile or so, taking the road towards Nottingham and heading due south. The sun was warm on my face, the horse moved smoothly under me and we ate up the ground together. On a whim, I took a path off the main road down a long tunnel of trees and, pounding along at a canter, my breath coming easily, I felt my anxiety over Goody recede. I was conscious of a deep sense of well-being: I was healthy and strong, not yet twenty-five years old; married to a wonderful woman and lord of a small but bountiful manor. On that morning, it seemed, all was well. I had proved myself as a man in war, many times, but I had no urge to seek out battle again. I had silver in my coffers and strength in my limbs. I was content to husband my lands and raise fine sons and daughters with Goody for the rest of my days.