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

  ‘I have had my fill of war and the bloody squabbling of greedy princes,’ I said. ‘My heart’s desire is only to remain here at Westbury with Goody, left in peace to compose my music, and grow fat and happy raising my children.’

  ‘I understand what you say,’ said Roland. ‘And I honour you for your pursuit of a peaceful life, but I have not yet lost my love for adventure. Things are different for you: you have Goody, and the baby to come, and lands of your own, while I must live my life perpetually in the shadow of my father. He is the Seigneur, he is the master of our House and always will be – and I will be nobody until he is dead. And, although God forbid that his death should come soon, I cannot but think that I will remain only half a man until he is called to Heaven. No, I must seek my own path, Alan, away from the loving stranglehold of family. I cannot be happy until I have carved my own place in this world with gold and glory in equal measure won by my sword.’

  ‘Talking of treasure,’ I said, ‘when would you like to deliver your silver hoard to the Earl of Locksley?’

  ‘As soon as possible,’ said my cousin, with a strange writhe of his damaged features. ‘I have been in mortal fear of thieves ever since I left Paris. I could not bear to return to my father and say that I had been robbed on the way to paying my debt, and humbly ask for him to hand over another fortune. I did think of going to the Templars and exchanging the coin for a promissory note, but the fees that they demand for their services are extortionate. And in the end, I decided to risk it, but vowed that I would die rather than allow the silver to be stolen by bandits on the journey.’

  I kept my face deliberately straight, but inside I was laughing like a lunatic at full moon. It would have been a sublime pleasure for me to see Robin receiving his payment in the form of a letter of credit drawn on the Templars.

  ‘We may go to his winter camp tomorrow, if you wish,’ I said. ‘But I must warn you that I will have to bind your eyes with a cloth as we approach the place. It is a secret, and its location must not be revealed, even to a friend such as you. I swore a mighty oath to this effect many years ago, and I will not break it.’

  ‘That seems oddly fitting,’ said Roland. ‘I must be blinded temporarily in order to pay the price for the salvation of my sight.’

  Sherwood shivered under a thick blanket of snow as Roland and I walked our horses down the narrow deer tracks that took us towards Robin’s winter den – a well-hidden complex of caves that he had used years ago when he first became an outlaw. Roland had been accompanied by his protective men-at-arms a good part of the way, and then at my command he had dismissed them and submitted to the blindfold, and alone, I had led him and the two heavily laden pack mules through the secret paths towards the hidden caves of my lord.

  The wood was bright with reflected light from the snow banks, and silent, the trees appearing as huddled, frosted skeletons under ragged white mantles, and we walked our horses through a cloud of our own frozen breath. Robin greeted us by the entrance to the main cave, wearing a bearskin cloak and standing beside a roaring campfire with a broad grin lighting his face and his hands resting comfortably on his hips. His beard had continued to grow since our escapade at Welbeck Abbey, and his hair was long and unkempt. He looked the very picture of an outlaw: shabby, wild and decked in animal skins. And while Little John and Gavin unloaded the silver from the mules, he poured cups of hot spiced wine and led us to the big table at the back of the largest cave.

  It was delightfully warm in that wide space, kept so by the roaring fire, and the cave had an air of comfortable male clutter: swords, spears and shields were piled around the walls, and riding gear, saddles and bridles heaped in confusion; half a deer carcass hung from a hook by the entrance next to a box of apples and a large round of cheese. Half a dozen dirty, hairy men lounged about the cave, largely ignoring our intrusion, some sleeping, some drinking, some merely doing very little in a lazily, contented way. This was clearly a place of ease and comfort for men on the run from the law, with plentiful food and few rules and obligations. And yet, I could not help noticing how different it was from the early days of Robin’s outlawry. There was an aimlessness about the place that I had not seen ten years ago, and a lack of order: then, Robin had had a plan – he had been raising an army of outcasts, training them, disciplining them, forging them into a company that could take on his enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham’s forces in pitched battle. Then Robin had a goal – to be reinstated as a member of lawful society. Now, it seemed, he did not.

  Little John and Gavin joined us at the table, helping themselves to cups of hot wine and pulling up wooden stools. I noticed that they sat unnaturally close to each other, their thighs almost touching. ‘Well, it’s all there,’ said Little John, nodding in appreciation at Roland. Gavin beamed at the whole table.

  ‘And I must thank you for such a speedy repayment,’ said Robin, smiling at my cousin. ‘Please pay my respects to your father the Seigneur when you see him.’

  ‘It is I who must thank you, my lord,’ said Roland. ‘I owe the fact that I can see you today to your kindness.’

  Though Roland’s words were most courteous and polished, I could sense that he was uncomfortable in this fire-lit den of thieves and outlaws in the depths of the wilderness. He was more used to the cobbled streets of Paris and the grand halls of powerful nobles, and so when Robin invited us to stay and feast with him on fresh venison that night, I refused and said we had to return to Westbury before dark to keep an eye on Goody who had been particularly queasy that morning.

  ‘There is just one little thing I would like to show you before you leave,’ said Robin. I looked out at the winter gloom of early afternoon, saw that the snow was softly falling again, and I nodded absently, expecting some bauble, a golden or silver trinket to be produced for me to marvel over. Instead, Robin turned to Little John and said in a soft voice as cool as a breeze on the back of the neck, ‘Bring him in here, and bring the shears with you too.’ And Little John and Gavin got up from the table and went out into the grey, swirling snow.

  A few moments later they returned dragging a wretched figure by the arms between them. The man was about forty years old, pale, filthy and dressed in the rags of what looked as if they had once been rich town clothes but which were now stained with sweat and dirt and a good deal of pus and blood, old and new. His skin was waxy, and a yellow-grey colour, and he was weeping freely from large brown bloodshot eyes. He had matted, curly brown hair in a fringe around his bald pate, like a monk’s tonsure. But this man was no Christian monk: he was a Jew.

  ‘This is Malloch Baruch, once a goldsmith of Lincoln,’ said Robin in an empty voice. ‘He accepted money from a mysterious knight to spin me a tale about the cruel Abbot of Welbeck refusing to pay for his golden altar ornaments. He came to me pretending to ask for my help but secretly helping those who plotted to have me trapped and murdered. It took some while, and no little trouble to coax the full, the true story from him but we managed it in the end … Show them, John.’

  The pathetic man was slumped on his knees by the table, his hands together in front of him. John reached down with a meaty fist and pulled Malloch’s wrists up on to the table – and my mind reeled in horror.

  The prisoner’s arms were tightly bound at the wrists from the heel of the palm to the elbow, but it was his crossed hands that drew the eye. He had but three digits remaining, two on the right hand, the thumb and middle finger, and a single finger on the left, the little one. Where the other six fingers and his left thumb had been there were now merely bloody stumps, some less than half an inch long, crusted and scabbed over, some festering and some half-healed, and some with a glimpse of bone poking through the dried cap of black blood. The digits had clearly been severed individually, and over a considerable length of time.

  ‘No, no, not again, please God, please God. I’ve already told you everything … No, please, noooooooooo!’ The man’s voice rose to a howling scream as John pulled a large pair of sheep shears from his belt. T
hese were ordinary farm implements; two long triangles of steel linked by a U-shaped springy metal rod, the inner edges of the blades as sharp as a barber’s razor. With this tool, a farm hand could cut the fleece from a struggling ewe in a hundred heartbeats. Gavin stepped behind Malloch and grasped him firmly by the shoulders. John held the poor man’s arms fast on the table and placed the cutting edges of the shears over the man’s remaining thumb – and looked at Robin.

  Malloch’s screaming was at a near-deafening volume by now, a wailing assault on our ears, and he was writhing and thrashing, trying to break from Gavin’s grip.

  ‘Be quiet now and stay still or you will lose the thumb,’ said Robin quietly and the man stopped his awful noise immediately.

  Robin looked at me, his eyes like chips of mountain ice. ‘When I heard you were coming, Alan, I kept this fellow to hand. I want you to hear this from his own lips so that you will know that it is true. So, are you listening?’

  I nodded, my eyes fastened to the prisoner’s poor mutilated hands.

  ‘You will remember how this works, Baruch, I’m sure,’ said Robin, looking down at the wretch trembling with fear, his eyes round and dark as ale cups.

  ‘You answer my questions quickly; do not lie, do not prevaricate, do not try to mislead – otherwise…’ Robin clicked his own fingers and thumb together, making a dry, cracking noise.

  The man was nodding jerkily, pathetically trying to please, holding Robin’s grey eyes with his huge brown ones, pleading silently for a little mercy. I felt an almost overpowering urge to vomit; my cousin Roland’s face was as pale as the snow in the deep drifts outside the cave; his mouth was clamped shut.

  ‘Who was it who paid you to set the trap for me?’ said Robin.

  Malloch answered in a high, fast, gabbling voice. ‘It was a French knight who goes by the name of Mauchamps; he paid me ten pounds in silver to set the snare for you.’ He took a huge breath. ‘Good sir, I beg you, I beg you … please forgive me; you must know that I am truly sorry…’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Robin in a low voice. ‘Just answer the questions slowly and clearly, nothing more. Now, which Order does this false knight serve?’

  ‘He is a Templar, sir; he wore their white surcoat with the red cross on the breast when first he came to me.’

  ‘And what else?’ said Robin.

  ‘And he belongs to another Order as well, but I do not know its name. Their device is … their shields bear a blue cross on a white field inside a black border.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘The boy, my only living son, he followed the knight at my orders after he made me the offer of the money. I wanted to see where he went, with whom he spoke after me. Shimon followed him to a mean lodging in the poorest part of Lincoln and when he went out that night, the boy searched his room. He found a shield with a blue cross, and a white surcoat also with this same device on it … but, sir, you already know this, I’ve told you many times, please sir—’

  ‘Silence!’

  Robin looked at me. ‘So, Alan, what do you think?’ he said.

  ‘I think you are the cruellest man I have ever met. How can you do this?’

  Robin frowned. ‘It’s not about this treacherous piece of slime; he doesn’t signify. I mean about the knights of the blue cross, or as we know them, the Knights of Our Lady … and their Master.’

  He looked at me, eyebrows raised expectantly.

  I said nothing, collecting my horror-bruised thoughts.

  Robin waved a hand at the kneeling prisoner, who was now silently weeping. ‘John, take this foul thing away, would you. I think we’re done with it … for now.’

  ‘So,’ said my lord again, when Malloch had been dragged, still whimpering, from the cave. ‘What do you think?’

  The Knights of Our Lady. I had not thought about them for many months. Nor had I thought about their leader – a man who called himself simply the Master. I had believed that I had managed to block them from my mind – but now, here they were, their spectral image conjured up before me in this smoky, fire-lit cave in the wilds of Sherwood by a mutilated, sobbing wreck of a Jewish goldsmith.

  The Master was a Templar turned monk who had led this secret organization of knights sworn to serve the Virgin Mary. He was a man who appeared to exude holiness and yet was truly one of the most evil men I had ever encountered. Some even said that he had the mark of the Devil upon him – for he had a curious deformity, an extra thumb on his left hand, or rather two tiny twin digits growing from the same root. Robin and I had fought the Master and his Knights of Our Lady in France during Richard the Lionheart’s long wars against Philip. The Master had been responsible for the death of my father, and the murder of a loyal friend of mine called Hanno. I’d tracked him down in Paris, and Robin had ousted him from his privileged and powerful life there as the Bishop’s amanuensis by exposing his wickedness to the world. I had assumed that the Master was a fugitive somewhere in France, in hiding, powerless.

  This was clearly not the case.

  ‘If Gilles de Mauchamps is a Knight of Our Lady,’ I said slowly, ‘and that much is clear from that poor fellow’s confession, then we must assume that the Master was behind the attempt to trap you at Welbeck.’

  ‘What happened at Welbeck?’ asked Roland.

  ‘That’s not important,’ I said, catching Robin’s slight shake of the head. ‘What is important is that now we know the Master is coming after Robin, presumably seeking revenge. I thought he was finished but he clearly still has the desire – and the power – to strike out at us.’

  ‘That was my conclusion as well,’ said Robin. ‘Do you think he still has the Grail with him?’

  Robin had hunted the Master halfway across France trying to take possession of that legendary relic.

  ‘I suspect that while he has one trickle of breath in his lungs he would try to keep possession of the Grail.’

  ‘Good,’ said Robin. ‘I think so, too. So let us go and get him, Alan. Together. Let us find him, kill him and steal that last trickle of breath from his body – and the Grail, too, of course. Come on, Alan; for Hanno, for your father – and if they mean nothing to you, for your own safety and the safety of your family. Let us track down the Master and end this threat to ourselves. What do you say, old friend?’

  Robin’s eyes were shining like polished silver; he was using the whole force of his personality on me, willing me to take up this challenge. I realized now why he had subjected me to the sight of the poor Jew. He had wanted to be sure that I truly believed the Master was back in our lives.

  He wanted me to join him in this mad quest.

  ‘Tell me about the Holy Grail,’ said Roland.

  ‘It’s a mysterious vessel from a long romantic poem by a trouvère from Troyes in Champagne – have you never heard of it?’ I said.

  ‘I have heard its name but I have never heard it spoken of in a serious manner. Is it real? Does it truly exist? What is it like?’

  ‘It is the most costly, most fabulous object in the world, my friend,’ said Robin in a reverent tone. ‘A golden treasure of surpassing beauty, set with the finest gem stones, and worth a dukedom at the very least, a kingdom, perhaps. And, for men of faith, it is much more than that – and that makes it even more valuable. The Grail, they say, can cure any hurt, any wound; it is said to be able to hold back Death itself. Some say it is the vessel that was used by Jesus Christ himself at the Last Supper, and it was used again by Joseph of Arimathea to collect his blood as it spilled from the wound in his side on the Cross…’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ I said grumpily. I was irked by Robin’s attempts to manipulate me into joining his mad treasure hunt. ‘These could be merely the extravagant claims of a few drunken poets trying to make a name for themselves—’

  This time Robin interrupted me. ‘The Master believes it to be the most sacred, the most valuable object in the world – and he is prepared to kill again and again, to slaughter churchman or churl, anyone, absolu
tely anyone, in the name of the Grail.’

  Both Roland and Robin had a slight pink flush on their cheeks.

  ‘I should like to see this Holy Grail one day,’ said Roland. ‘I believe that would be a noble quest worthy of my mettle.’

  ‘Well, good luck to you,’ I said crossly. ‘But on this day I am going home to Westbury to care for Goody; while my wife is unwell nothing on earth will induce me to leave Nottinghamshire and to head off on some silly chase after something that may be no more than a myth.’

  And with those intemperate words, I made a farewell to my lord and, with some difficulty, steered Roland outside. Leaving the warm, masculine fug of Robin’s Caves behind us, we both rode into the cleansing, snowy wastes of Sherwood.

  Christmas should have been a time of joy – we decked the hall with evergreen boughs and sprigs of holly bright with berries; we set a giant yule log to smoulder in the hearth for the full twelve days; we drank and danced and feasted; I sang and made music on my vielle to amuse my cousin and the household. And yet I could find no joy. The blight on the season was Goody’s health. She was by then a little past twelve weeks of the pregnancy but she still continued to vomit up her breakfast most mornings and added to that she developed a low, hacking cough that would not yield to the infusions of honey and herbs that my wife drank several times a day in an attempt to tame it. At night, she would lie beside me, both of us sleepless, and bark quietly long into the early hours, her chest convulsing painfully. Sometimes I knew that she had been unable to catch a wink of sleep until dawn. And I was sick myself – with worry for her and the baby. At the back of my mind loomed Nur’s curse.

  By early January, Goody’s cough had not improved and she developed a fever as well, her body alternately raging hot and icy cold. She took to her bed and despite being plied with all the delicacies that Westbury could muster – honey cakes, fatty salt pork, preserved berries from autumn – she began to lose weight. She soon found that she could not lie flat without feeling suffocated and could only breathe shallowly and with some difficulty propped up in a nest of pillows. I was badly scared by this point, and summoned the apothecary once again from Nottingham. The man spoke at length about evil humours and noxious airs, balancing the black bile and yellow bile in her body; he felt her brow, took her pulse and demanded a sample of her urine. To my disgust, he examined it closely in the light from the shutter in our bedchamber, sniffed it deeply like a lover of fine wine and then took a sip. He prescribed a greyish powder that cost me three shillings for a pound – he claimed it was ground unicorn’s horn – and Goody took it with a little warm milk that Ada brought her morning and night. But she did not recover. Indeed, she told me that it merely made her feel more nauseated.