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

  ‘The years passed and the old Lord of Erill died at a greatly advanced age, his life artificially prolonged, some dared to whisper, by the power of the Grail of Taüll. His lands were inherited by a new lord of Erill, Ramon’s father. And, of course, as word of the Grail continued to spread, it came to the ears of the new Bishop of Roda, an ambitious young man from a wealthy family, who was fond of music and whose name was Heribert.’

  I gave an involuntary start to hear that name – to be honest, I nearly fell off my stool – for suddenly this tale of generations past, of grandfathers and ancestors, had taken a giant stride towards the here and now. I had met Heribert briefly six years ago, when he was a fat, old Cardinal living in the city of Vendôme – and he had been murdered by the Master’s men to prevent him from speaking to me about the Grail. Roland saw my agitation and gave me a curious glance but I merely held out my wine cup for him to fill with the jug by his boot. As a consequence, I missed Tuck’s next few words.

  ‘… when his demands were refused, Heribert and his men came in force, in the dead of winter, the cruel season of snow and ice, and they fell upon the village of Taüll like a wolf upon the flock. Ramon told me that he and his family are still very bitter about what happened next. Only a handful of Erill men-at-arms were in the village when Heribert struck with a large force of Spanish mercenaries, scores of them. Taüll was burned – and many peasants perished afterwards in the snows, driven from their homes by the marauders – and the Church of St Clement was broken into and ransacked for its hoard of silver. The Spanish captain of the mercenaries, a sacrilegious beast, may God curse him, took his sword to the wooden tableau of the Descent from the Cross. The figures were hacked and broken, and some thrown in the fires of the ravaged village, but this captain still feared to touch the Holy Grail with his bare hands, so he cut off the whole arm of the statue of the Virgin with one blow of his sword and carried away the Grail wrapped in his cloak. He took the Holy Lance as well in its golden box, only the magnificent painting of Christ in Majesty, with its superb little panel depicting the Virgin and the Grail was spared – for how can you possibly carry away an image painted on a wall?’

  Tuck paused at this point to refresh himself from his wine cup, and Robin threw a pair of dry logs on the fire.

  ‘I think that is enough for tonight,’ said the priest with a sigh. ‘My old bones ache and I long to be snug in my bed.’

  ‘May I take the story onwards from here, Tuck?’ Robin asked. ‘I will finish it swiftly, I swear.’ And the fat priest nodded over the rim of his cup. ‘Unless you would rather relate it, Alan?’ Robin looked over at me. I shook my head. I knew the course of the tale from this point – it was to a certain extent my story, but I, too, was tired after a long day in the saddle; my head ached somewhat and I had little desire to recount it for the Companions.

  ‘Very well,’ said Robin. ‘I will be brisk, for we must soon get to our beds; we have another hard ride tomorrow. So, this is what we know: Heribert, Bishop of Roda, now had in his possession the Holy Grail and the Holy Lance, and it sparked in him a lifelong obsession with relics of all kinds. About twenty-five years ago, Heribert paid a visit to Paris. He had heard that rare and precious relics were to be had for sale in that great city, if you knew the right people to ask. But he could not bear to be parted from the Grail and the Lance even for a few weeks and so, when the noble bishop travelled north, he took them with him. He had been blessed with good fortune all his life, wealthy parents, a fine bishopric, and now possession of that wonder of wonders, the Holy Grail – but in Paris his luck ran out. There, the Grail and the Lance and several other trinkets were stolen from him by a young chorister of the cathedral – a monk named Michel, who later became known as the Master, or the “man you cannot refuse”, and who is our enemy.

  ‘We believe that the Master is now at the Jealous Castle under the protection of its seigneur, Amanieu d’Albret, who so abused good Nur here, and that in his possession is the Grail. Tuck and I have made enquiries in Bordeaux – your musical friend Bernard was a mine of information, Alan. It seems that the Master was there a week ago and, as far as we know, is still there.’

  ‘He is there,’ Nur interrupted. ‘The Grail is there, too. I have seen it in the bones.’

  There was a short uncomfortable silence – nobody, it seemed, was inclined to question the witch’s knowledge.

  Robin spoke: ‘We must assume that for now – we know that it is his recruiting base. For Bernard also told me that he has been summoning knights and men-at-arms to join him there from across Christendom.’

  There was another heavy silence after Robin’s words.

  ‘How many men does he now have?’ asked Roland.

  ‘We can’t know for sure,’ said Robin, ‘but it may be that he has already recruited as many as fifty or sixty to his banner.’

  ‘Sixty men?’ said Gavin. ‘Against the nine of us?’

  ‘It may not be as many as that. They may not all be there, all the time. The other snippet that I picked up from Bernard, is that the Master is building his own fortress on a mountaintop, a mighty keep, and the new knights he is inducting into his Order are to form a garrison of pious, dedicated men to protect the Grail from those who are unworthy of its sanctity.’

  ‘Where is this mighty castle?’ I asked. This was the first I’d heard of this. I’d thought of the Master as a fugitive, a hunted man, cowering from his enemies, under the protection of others. But the closer I came to him, the more puissant he seemed to become. Indeed, he now loomed in my mind as a potent, even daunting foe.

  ‘Again, we don’t exactly know,’ said Robin. ‘But right now he is most likely at the Jealous Castle – not two days’ ride from here. And it is there that we shall trap him, we shall kill him and we shall take possession of the Grail.’

  Some of the Companions actually applauded. But, as we made up our straw pallets on the floor of the tavern, I thought about Robin’s breezy assurance. Sixty men against us, and they tucked up inside a mighty castle – that did not seem an easy proposition to me. I slept badly and dreamed of Goody’s death. She was carried away by angels, all singing in beautiful verse that this was the result of my failure in this quest. And, most painfully, as her face moved upwards, away from me, borne aloft by celestial wings, she said that she loved me and that she forgave my weakness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next day we rode a little north of east, following the looping course of the river, which was never more than a thousand yards from the road, and sometimes flowed within spitting distance of our horses’ hooves. At a little before noon, Nur, who had been lagging perhaps a hundred yards behind at the rear of our column, raced forward to pull up, her farmer’s hack snorting with effort, beside Robin, who was in the lead position. They conferred briefly – Robin scanned our back trail and then said crisply, ‘Everyone off the road, right now.’ And he urged his horse up a narrow path that headed northwards, away from the river, towards a small ruined church about half a mile distant. He took off at a full gallop and his turn of speed rather surprised me. But we all managed to scramble after him and a short while later we were sheltering behind tumbled-down walls, out of sight and trying to keep our horses from whickering.

  And just in time.

  We heard them before we saw them. A tight group of some fifty horsemen thundering along the road we had just forsaken. I do not know how Nur had detected them, whether it was her magic baby bones or just her keen mortal eyesight, but I was very glad that she had. For they were an evil-looking crew – tough, ragged, hungry men, well armed with lance and sword and armoured in leather and iron. They came past our hiding place at a fast canter, not bothering to spare their horses – and they seemed to travel in their own dark bubble of menace. For these were not regular troops, disciplined men-at-arms serving under a knight or a nobleman, these were routiers. These were mercenaries, the lowest scum of any army, willing to fight for pay and plunder against anyone, anywhere. These men, or men just l
ike them, had burned their way across half of northern France in the long wars between King Richard and Philip Augustus, slaughtering everything in their path, desecrating churches, raping and ravaging the land with a near-lunatic fury, destroying what they could not carry away. They had no banners, and it was too far to see their faces, but I knew, without a doubt, that these were Mercadier’s men.

  They passed our hiding place in no more than a dozen heartbeats, riding as if driven on by the lash of whips or in pursuit of something or someone valuable.

  I caught Robin’s steely eye a moment after the horsemen had passed, leaving nothing but a billow of yellow dust and a faint smell of horse sweat.

  ‘You let one of his men escape alive,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I truly was.

  His hard face relaxed a little and he half-smiled. ‘Well, it is done now,’ my lord said, swinging up into the saddle. ‘Maybe we can manage to stay out of their path.’

  ‘We can’t know for sure that they were seeking us,’ Roland said – though I could see that he did not believe it himself. Robin gave him a withering look, but said nothing.

  ‘They were in an awful hurry to find somebody,’ said Little John. ‘And, by Christ’s fetid foot-rags, it will not be good news for the folk they are seeking.’

  That day we rode slowly and with great caution, each of us, except Tuck and Nur, taking it in turns to ride scout a mile ahead of the rest of our column. We camped outside Marmande, sleeping rough in a small dank wood not far from the river, and Robin forbade us to light fires on which to cook our supper, and ordered us to make as little noise as possible. But nobody complained – the Companions were all hardy campaigners used to cold, uncomfortable nights – and we chewed on leathery sticks of dried beef and dipped twice-baked bread in twice-watered wine to make it soft enough to squeeze down our throats. Then we scooped out a shallow hip-hole apiece, wrapped ourselves in our cloaks, and went swiftly to sleep on the hard ground.

  The next day we rode along the western side of the newly built high stone walls of the town of Marmande, eyed warily by the sentries above us, but not challenged as we did not try to enter the place. We crossed the wide Garonne by a crumbling bridge of brick and stone that Tuck said must have been built by the Romans many hundreds of years before. The road on the other side of the water was as straight as an arrow, and ran due south, with a vast pine forest glowering on our right and more cheerful open fields to our left. Once we were on that arrow of a highway, Robin urged us to greater speed and we alternately galloped and trotted our horses as the sun rose high, bright and heavy before us.

  By noon, Nur told us that we were nearing the Jealous Castle and we left the road and forced our way into the thick pine woods to the west. While the rest of us built a camp between the dense boughs, interweaving branches cut from the trees to make a large rain-proof roof, and piling other freshly cut feathery limbs to make comfortable beds, Little John and Gavin slipped away together into the gloom of the woods with their war bows. I watched them go and before they disappeared completely among the trees, I saw John take Gavin’s smaller hand in his own. My jaw fell open.

  I saw that Robin was watching me watching them, and he must have noticed my shocked expression for he came over and drew me away from the other Companions.

  ‘Did you not know about them?’ he asked quietly.

  I goggled at him. ‘Are they … Is Little John really … How long have they been…’ I belatedly pulled myself together and tried to sound worldly and matter-of-fact. ‘They are lovers, yes? Ah, indeed, I had not realized that,’ I said.

  ‘It has been so almost since the first day they met three or four months ago.’

  ‘You don’t find this a bit, well, odd, or comical or just a little bit disgusting? Which one plays the part of the … oh, never mind.’

  ‘John Nailor has been my most loyal follower for more than twenty years,’ said Robin. ‘He is still my most loyal man – along with you, of course, Alan. He has fought beside me on countless occasions, he has killed for me, and worse; and he has shed his own blood for me. For my part, he could bugger a whole den full of pigs, he could rape the Virgin Mary and every single one of the saints – all the women and all the men – and I would still love him.’

  I considered this appalling, blasphemous statement in silence.

  ‘He is still the same big, ugly, crude, bloodthirsty bastard he always was,’ said Robin. ‘He’s still John.’

  I thought about John then: he had been very kind to me over the years, and also, it must be said, unkind on a few occasions, but he’d always treated me with a rough brotherly camaraderie. He was my comrade, my friend.

  ‘He’s still John,’ I said, nodding. And Robin smiled at me.

  ‘I think it might be best if you didn’t tell the others, Alan, particularly Sir Nicholas. He would say, I believe, that the Church considers it a mortal sin. And I don’t want to foster any disharmony in our ranks.’

  I nodded again, and Robin slapped me on the shoulder and walked away.

  At dusk John and Gavin returned, quietly happy and with five good-sized hares strung on a broken arrow, which we skinned, gutted and roasted on the fire. I watched the pair of them covertly while we cooked and ate and saw clearly for the first time the tenderness between them. I could not believe that I had not noticed their love before, for it seemed to burn as brightly as the pine-wood fire. The Church might call it a mortal sin, Sir Nicholas might not approve, but I could see no wrongdoing.

  When we had eaten and drank, and all the Companions were sitting around the crackling blaze, eight tough men and a half-mad witch, a light rain began to patter impotently on the branch roof above us and Robin outlined his plans for the Jealous Castle.

  ‘Many of us here are known to the Master – and perhaps also to some of these Knights of Our Lady he commands,’ Robin began. ‘We dare not risk riding into the town in daylight. But three of us are unknown, at least by sight, to our enemies, and so they must undertake the reconnaissance.

  ‘Tuck, Nur and Sir Nicholas will each enter Casteljaloux separately. These three will be our spearhead. Tuck, you will seek lodgings in the cloisters of the Benedictines – a small daughter-house of the Abbey of La Sauve-Majeure, which is in the east of the town near the river. You will claim to be a wandering preacher from Bordeaux who has been fired by a vision of the Virgin to save souls in these heretical southern lands, and you will search for news of the Grail. Sir Nicholas, under the name of Peter of Horsham, you will apply to join the ranks of the Knights of Our Lady – admitting to having been a Knight Hospitaller, which should make you an attractive recruit. Your task will be to get to the Master and his inner circle. And Nur – Nur, you have the most important task of all; you will gather information from both Tuck and Sir Nicholas and relay it back to us. By day, you will sit in the market square begging for alms, waiting for either Tuck or Sir Nicholas to pass on their news. At night, you will leave the town before curfew and, when you know what is needed for a successful attack, you will return here to pass on messages from Tuck and Sir Nicholas to us.

  ‘It could take several days, I believe, until we have enough knowledge to make our assault – and when we do make it, I want everybody to be clear of our objectives. We are here to take the Grail from the Master. That is our goal. If we can kill the Master as well, that is excellent, and I know that some of us believe this would be a pleasure’ – there was a bear-like growl of assent from Little John, but I remained silent – ‘yet without the Grail, the Master is finished anyway. His power to recruit knights and men-at-arms and whatever other scum choose to serve him, is founded on his possession of the Grail. We take away the Grail; the Master is a broken reed. He can no longer hurt us.’ Robin was looking hard at me. ‘We are not here for revenge. We are here to take possession of the Grail. Is that clear?’

  I nodded – for Robin’s labouring of this simple point seemed to be entirely for my benefit. He didn’t want another Mercadier.
r />   ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ asked Robin.

  Thomas, who was normally silent during these conferences, raised a hand. ‘Yes,’ said Robin.

  ‘Forgive me for asking a foolish question, sir,’ said Thomas, ‘but why is it called the Jealous Castle?’

  It was Nur who answered him. ‘These lands are the territories of the d’Albrets,’ she said, waving a skinny arm in a wide circle above her head. ‘The accursed son of that brood told me this long ago. From here all the way west to the great, grey sea, is d’Albret land. And they have many castles in them. But the Jealous Castle is right on the edge of their domain, away from the prying eyes of friends and family, and Amanieu told me that the d’Albret men had long used it as a place to conduct lustful liaisons with other men’s wives. That is why it is called the Jealous Castle – from the feelings it arouses in all the cuckolded husbands.’

  Tuck gave a discreet cough. ‘That is a fascinating story, my dear Nur,’ he began, ‘and it may well be true in some ways, but I have heard a less romantic version of the naming of Casteljaloux. A learned friend of mine in Bordeaux, an elderly monk who has a particular interest in nomenclature, told me that the name came from the Latin “Castrum Gelo” – “Frozen Castle” – so named because the River Avance that runs by the castle is unusually cold.’

  I saw a flicker of annoyance pass across Nur’s brow, but before she could speak, Roland said, ‘I think Nur’s tale is more likely to be true. Frozen Castle: what an absurd name. Who would call their home that? No, I’m sure that Nur has it right.’

  I was watching Nur’s brown eyes above the veil as Roland said his piece, and I swear they glowed a little with gratitude.

  The next morning at dawn Sir Nicholas left us, fully armed and mailed, and riding the best of the nags that Robin had bought in Bordeaux. Before he climbed on to his mount, he clasped my hand and said quietly to me, ‘Never fear, Alan, we shall have our revenge on the Master, whatever Locksley says. From what I hear, he is a piece of heretical filth whose works are a foul stain on Christendom. We shall send the Master to face the judgment of God, soon enough, you have my word on it.’