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

  ‘So you still have the real one?’

  Robin did not answer for a few moments, then he said, ‘Have you ever thought about how many people that we know have died for that damned bowl? Your father, Hanno, Sir Nicholas, the Master, Tuck, Gavin – even poor Nur. And many, many more have perished in its name – think of all the Master’s victims, for a start. All those men and women are dead because of a piece of ancient wood that some people are convinced, for some reason, once held a few drops of Christ’s blood. Oh, and it was also used as a wine container at a rather dull farewell party that your precious Lord and Saviour once threw in Jerusalem.’

  It was my turn to be silent – I hated this irreverent, blatantly blasphemous side of Robin, but I could not deny that a vast lake of blood had been spilled in the name of the Holy Grail.

  Robin continued: ‘I went to see the Master in that little store room, when he was our prisoner, did you know that?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I had something that I wanted to ask him urgently before I handed him over to the Count of Foix. Can you guess what I wanted to know?’

  ‘Did you want to know if the Grail was genuine?’

  ‘No – nobody can say that for sure after all these years. You either believe it is genuine or you don’t. You either have faith in the Grail and its power or you don’t. I went to see the Master because I could not understand why I had been unable to find the Grail after we took Château Chalus-Chabrol and I wanted him to explain it to me. Do you remember?’

  I did. It was around the time that King Richard had died. We had captured the Master and searched the tiny Castle of Chalus-Chabrol high and low and found not a trace of the Grail. Then the Master had escaped, and somehow he had regained possession of the sacred vessel a few months later.

  ‘Did he tell you what he did with the Grail?’

  ‘He did,’ said Robin. ‘He told me that, when it became clear that the castle would fall, he threw it over the walls and into the midden.’

  I was shocked. The idea of the Master, who so venerated the Grail, tossing it into the stinking mound of garbage, vegetable peelings, animal bones, broken crockery and human waste that polluted one area outside every large habitation, filled me with a deep disgust. And I had drunk from this Grail – twice!

  Robin could see my face and, as he often did, he seemed to be reading my mind – he laughed.

  ‘Don’t worry, Alan, I am sure that after he retrieved it, he gave it a thorough wash. But my point is this: we did not find it because the Holy Grail was hidden in a mound of refuse. I even had some of our men poke about in the midden, if I remember correctly, but they didn’t find the Grail because they didn’t know that they were actually looking for a cracked old wooden bowl, the kind of item that might well be thrown away by a house-proud goodwife and find its way into the midden.’

  ‘A clever hiding place,’ I muttered. Somehow I could faintly taste something stinking and rotten on my tongue.

  ‘No – you don’t understand, Alan. The Grail was not out of place in the filth and rubbish of the midden because, from one perspective, it is just that – rubbish – a dirty, cracked old bowl. The thing that makes it a wondrous relic, an object that can cure wounds and hold back Death, is belief. If you have faith in the Grail, a cracked old bowl becomes a priceless treasure.’

  ‘So do you still have it? I know that the thing you gave the Templars was the golden cup we stole from Welbeck.’

  Robin said nothing for a while, and I did not press him. We had many miles to travel that day.

  Finally he said, ‘You must keep all of this under your hat, agreed? Seriously, Alan, no loose tongues on this matter? The Templars have Malloch’s golden cup, yes, but they will believe it is the real Grail unless somebody tells them otherwise. It looks exactly as people imagine the Grail to be. And when I saw an opportunity to deceive them, I could not resist…

  ‘But I do not have the real Grail – if it is indeed that – either. After I had spoken to the Master, I began to think about that old bowl and the many pointless deaths it has caused. It may be nothing more than a piece of rubbish, but I think it is an unlucky piece of rubbish. I think that, through their honestly held beliefs a good many people would be prepared to kill for that ancient piece of rubbish – and they might certainly seek to kill the person who possessed it, in order to take it from them. I decided that I did not want to burden myself, or my family, with that perpetual risk. So, to answer your question, no, I do not have the real Grail.’

  I held my breath, and counted to five in my head.

  ‘What did you do with it?’ I asked.

  ‘I gave it to someone who now has no fear of death. I kept my word to my old friend Tuck, the promise that I made on his deathbed. Right now, the Grail is clutched in his cold dead hands in that hidden cave under the mountain. I hope it will remain there, out of the world, in his safekeeping, until the end of time.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  We travelled slowly because of our wounded and were delayed in Bordeaux for a week before we could find a ship willing to take us to England, but I was not unduly dismayed that we did not set sail until the first of June because I had heard from friends of Robin at the docks that a young Welsh man-at-arms by the name of Thomas had boarded a ship to England on the eighteenth day of May.

  My squire had apparently made it thus far unscathed and, God willing, he should be with Goody almost two weeks before I arrived there myself, perhaps by the middle of June. We parted company with Vim and his surviving mercenaries at Bordeaux. Some of the more seriously wounded were lodged in the Abbey of St Andrew under the care of the monks, but the rest of the men – five hard-bitten fighters – found themselves to be pleasantly wealthy by their standards and no longer required by Robin.

  Although they had lost so many of their number in battle, the proportion of the silver hoard of Montségur that each man received was correspondingly greater, and so they parted with the Earl of Locksley amicably, with jingling pouches and many a jest. A couple of the men were planning to return to their homes in Brabant province and buy small holdings and take up the placid life on the land; others – disappointed by the news that King John of England and King Philip of France had recently signed a treaty at Le Goulet in Normandy and were now formally at peace – seemed determined to spend every penny on drink and women in the less salubrious parts of Bordeaux. Vim, who had naturally appropriated a larger share than his men, was planning to put a goodly amount of his silver into the wine trade with England – he had dreams of hanging up his sword and becoming a rich merchant.

  I know that Robin had hoped to see his countess Marie-Anne and his two sons in Bordeaux, but as part of Eleanor’s ménage they were obliged to follow the old Queen and were now in Chinon, in the county of Anjou. So he sent messages to them by courier, told them of his plans to return to Westbury with me, and we embarked for England on a small ship called The Holy Trinity.

  The sea voyage was a melancholy one, long and dull, and the four of us – Robin, Little John, Roland and I – were constantly reminded of our comrades who had died in this fruitless quest: Tuck’s happy red face haunted me, as did Sir Nicholas’s stern mien. Little John still grieved deeply for Gavin. I even found myself thinking not unkindly of Nur when the Trinity found itself becalmed and enveloped in a thick fog off the Norman coast. The notion of our dead son and his tiny severed hand was often in my thoughts as well. And I prayed every morning and night that Thomas had met with no mishap on the journey home and that Goody had been cured by the power of the Grail.

  I had plenty of time at sea to think about Robin’s disposal of the Grail. Although I did yearn to see it once more, and to drink its cool healing waters again, I could see the reasoning behind his actions, and while they seemed to make the quest into a bloody and painful waste of time, I found to my surprise that I agreed with what he had done. If he possessed the Grail, word would get out sooner or later, and he and his family would be in constant mortal danger.
If the Templars discovered his trick, their wrath would know no bounds, and possession of the true Grail is not something that could be kept a secret indefinitely.

  There was also something else that I had discovered about the Grail that I did not esteem. It seemed to make men act against their true nature; indeed, it seemed to have the power to turn them into madmen. I thought about Sir Nicholas still trying to kill me even when he had no further hope of escape. I thought about the Master – a good man, once, but turned towards evil. No, I decided, it was better that Tuck’s spirit should guard it through the ages. I had drunk from it – twice. The vessel that had contained Christ’s sacred blood had nourished me and touched my soul. And that is a share of holiness that is given to few mortals.

  It did my heart good to see Westbury – not only for the familiar joy of a homecoming as we galloped up the Great Northern Road on hired nags in the last days of June – but because it was un-familiar. The place was the same yet different. I had last seen it as a blackened ruin, but in the months I had been away my steward Baldwin had rebuilt the manor from the ground up – and added a few improvements. The wooden palisade that marked the perimeter of the courtyard had been extended by perhaps a third. The hall was bigger and shaped like the letter L, the guest hall had been enlarged, there were half a dozen more outbuildings than I remembered and the whole compound smelled cheerfully of cut wood.

  But my greatest joy was not the construction of a finer residence, but the sight when we came trotting through the wide-open gates of Westbury of a slim figure with bright blonde hair clad in a dark-blue dress sitting on a stool by the door of the new hall. And in her arms was a little bundle of white cloth with a tiny pink face poking out from the folds.

  Is there any greater joy for a man than the sight of his first-born son? I can honestly tell you that there is – it is the sight of his beloved wife, well and strong and fully returned to health, and holding that baby son in her arms outside the door of his newly made hall, waiting to greet him with a loving kiss.

  I was too overcome to speak as I took my family in my embrace, squeezing Goody and my month-old son Robert in my arms as if I would hold them for ever and praising God with all my heart for preserving them for me.

  I heard the full story of Goody’s recovery from Thomas who was waiting to greet me with a basin of hot water and a towel with which to wash away the dust of the road. I was scrubbing my damp face with the towel and babbling my thanks to him for reaching my beloved in time with the Grail water when he stopped me with a gentle outstretched hand.

  ‘It was not my doing, Sir Alan,’ said this honest fellow. ‘She was in blooming health when I returned two weeks ago, and had been safely delivered of Robert, too. I did nothing – indeed I still have the Grail water in its leather bottle, untouched.’

  I was astounded. It took Goody a long while to explain to me what had occurred. In short it was not the Grail that had cured her, but the wise-woman Brigid’s care. After Robin and I had left England, Goody had remained in her pitiful state of sickness for some weeks, but Brigid had used her wisdom and all of her powers of healing to bring my beloved back to the land of the living – and she had even managed to keep the baby alive in her womb as well, and that, it seemed, had been Goody’s chief preoccupation while she was suffering from her illness.

  ‘I am not sure that it really was a curse,’ Goody told me the next day. ‘Brigid believed that the malaise was magical but she claims that every misfortune is caused by unearthly powers – rain at harvest time, an old grandfather who dies suddenly in his sleep, a chicken that won’t lay, everything. It could just as well have been a sickness of some kind. I’m not sure that I wholly believe in curses, it often seems like a lot of silly nonsense to me.’

  I had forgotten how refreshingly forthright my lovely wife could be.

  Just then little Robert began to cry and Goody – although like most gentlewomen in her position, she had hired a wet nurse – rushed over to his cot to see that he was being cared for. I wandered over to the guest house to speak to Robin and Little John, who had taken up residence there with Roland.

  Robin spoke vaguely about moving back to the caves in Sherwood, but I could see that he was quite comfortable in the guest hall at Westbury and I did not really mind if he made the place his permanent home. Likewise Roland had made some noises about returning to Paris and his father’s house, but he did not seem in any hurry to leave Westbury either. I think the truth was that none of us wanted the quest to end – it had been an extraordinary journey, and we had seen wonders and miracles and performed feats of valour and, despite the pain of so many lost comrades, deep down not one of us wished the camaraderie of the adventure to end. Besides, we had a solemn ceremony to perform the next day and I wanted as many of the Companions of the Grail to be there as possible.

  The next day, I took Thomas to the Westbury bath house before dawn for a thorough cleansing in hot and cold water, and then, with my squire dressed in a simple white shift with a good quality dark-green cloak over the top, he and I and Robin and Roland – along with Goody and Baldwin and the entire household – trooped down to the little stone church in the village of Westbury and participated in a Mass for the souls of our dead friends conducted by Father Arnold, the village priest. When the service was over, in the presence of the whole community of village and manor, Thomas shrugged off the cloak and knelt humbly before the Earl of Locksley.

  Robin drew his sword and lightly tapped Thomas on the shoulders with it and, with a straight face, he invoked God Almighty and St George, and bade him take on the onerous duties of a knight.

  ‘I dub thee Sir Thomas Blood,’ my lord of Locksley said, before lifting my erstwhile squire to his feet, embracing him and presenting him with a pair of fine silver spurs. While Robin was taking Sir Thomas’s homage – for from that moment onward he would be Robin’s man and no longer mine – I leaned over to Roland and asked him quietly about the change of name.

  ‘Oh, Sir Thomas feels that Blood is a less confusing surname for a knight serving an English lord than “ap Lloyd”. You know that he has no family in Wales left and he has not set foot there since he was a lad, so he let it be known to Robin that he would be Sir Thomas Blood henceforth – and it is a good warlike name for a knight, I would say.’

  We feasted Sir Thomas in the courtyard at Westbury on a fine July afternoon, and many of us made him gifts suitable for his new rank. Robin gave him a fine sword, and Roland a new hauberk of iron links, and Little John presented him with a beautifully painted shield. While we were enjoying nuts and sweetmeats with the last of the wine, seated at a three-sided square of trestle tables, one of the grooms, a nervous fellow who had been hired while I was in the southern lands, led out my special gift to Sir Thomas.

  It was Shaitan, my destrier, glossy, mettlesome and black as pitch, but well mended from the cut on his back and as big and strong as a plough ox. I was a little sad to part with the warhorse for we had been together for some years now and I had fought many times from his broad back, but I wanted to make the lad a magnificent gift on the occasion of his knighting that matched the gratitude I felt towards him for his many years of loyal service.

  The groom held Shaitan’s head while I began a long speech about Thomas’s virtues – I had spent the previous day preparing it and I felt I owed the young man a proper recitation of his courage and steadfastness as my squire. While I spoke, Goody, her maid Ada and the servants cleared the tables and brought out more dainties to be enjoyed. The day was uncomfortably hot and we had all consumed a good deal of wine, as well as having partaken of a hearty meal, and while I talked on I noticed some of my guests nodding in the strong sunshine, their eyes closing momentarily. I had got no further than listing Thomas’s valorous service with me in Normandy against King Philip’s men, when I noticed this somnolence and I remember clearly thinking to myself that I really must bring my speech to a speedy close as I had even sent poor Shaitan off to sleep, for I saw that his dark, liquid eye
s were closed and his long black head was drooping.

  At that moment Goody came out of the hall carrying a large tray filled with a dozen flagons of watered ale and a tower of stacked earthenware cups, for some of the guests had been complaining of thirst, asking for something with less body than our good red wine. She was walking towards the feasting tables, and was halfway across the courtyard when she tripped on her long skirts and sent the tray and the flagons and the cups crashing to earth with a deafening clatter. It was a simple accident, something that might happen any day, to any one – but I have relived that moment in my mind a thousand times since then.

  Shaitan woke with a start at the loud noise behind him and reacted in a way that any highly strung destrier might. Being jerked so suddenly from his slumbers, he conceived himself under attack from the rear by some predator and lashed out behind him with his massively powerful hooves. His two black limbs surged out and his off hind hoof cracked directly into the top of Goody’s skull.

  My sweet wife had not even been looking at the horse, she was bending down to gather up the broken fragments of cheap earthenware when Shaitan’s hoof thudded into her skull. Goody was immediately flung several paces across the courtyard and she landed in a heap of skirts and limbs and, to my horror, I saw a bright trickle of scarlet running out from beneath them.

  I thrust the table out of my path scattering plates and cups and one unlucky guest and charged over to her fallen body. I was beside her in two heartbeats, cradling her blonde, broken head in my hands, feeling the blood trickle through my splayed fingers. She looked up at me, opening her beautiful violet-blue eyes and gazing up into mine one last time. I could feel the bones of her head moving ever so slightly in my palms, and through the matted golden hair I could see a dent the size of my fist above her right eyebrow filled with jelly and blood. She smiled once and tried to speak, but then her gaze shifted, just fractionally, to beyond my shoulder and fixed on something that no living eye could see. Quite slowly, with a little tired sigh, the soul went out of her body.