The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic (128 page)

‘What do you propose to do about it?’ he asked Thomas a week after the skirmish by the River Gers. The air was cold from a north
wind,
the wind that men believed made them dull and irritable. Sir Guillaume and Thomas were on the keep’s battlements, beneath the Earl of Northampton’s fading banner. And beneath that red and green flag hung the orange leopard of Berat, but upside down to show the world that the standard had been captured in battle. Genevieve was there too, but sensing that she did not want to hear what Sir Guillaume had come to say she had gone to the farthest corner of the ramparts.

‘I’ll wait here,’ Thomas said.

‘Because your cousin will come?’

‘That’s why I’m here,’ Thomas said.

‘And suppose you have no men left?’ Sir Guillaume asked.

Thomas said nothing for a while. Eventually he broke the silence.
‘You too?’

‘I’m with you,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘fool that you are. But if your cousin comes, Thomas, he won’t come alone.’

‘I know.’

‘And he won’t be as foolish as Joscelyn was. He won’t give you a victory.’

‘I know.’ Thomas’s voice was bleak.

‘You need more men,’ Sir Guillaume said. ‘We have a garrison; we need a small army.’

‘It would help,’ Thomas agreed.

‘But no one will come while she’s here,’ Sir Guillaume warned, glancing at Genevieve. ‘And three of the Gascons left yesterday.’ The three men-at-arms had not even waited for their share of Joscelyn’s ransom, but had simply ridden away westwards in search of other employment.

‘I don’t want cowards here,’ Thomas retorted.

‘Oh, don’t be such a damned fool!’ Sir Guillaume snapped. ‘Your men will fight other men, Thomas, but they won’t fight the Church. They won’t fight God.’ He paused, evidently reluctant to say whatever was on his mind, but then took the plunge. ‘You have to send her away, Thomas. She has to go.’

Thomas stared at the southern hills. He said nothing.

‘She has to go,’ Sir Guillaume repeated. ‘Send her to Pau. Bordeaux.
Anywhere.’

‘If I do that,’ Thomas said, ‘then she dies. The Church will find her and burn her.’

Sir Guillaume stared at him. ‘You’re in love, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas said.

‘Jesus goddamned Christ,’ Sir Guillaume said in exasperation.
‘Love!
It always leads to trouble.’

‘Man is born to it,’ Thomas said, ‘as the sparks fly upwards.’

‘Maybe,’ Sir Guillaume said grimly, ‘but
it’s
women who provide the bloody kindling.’

And just then Genevieve called to them. ‘Horsemen!’ she warned, and Thomas ran across the ramparts and stared down the eastern road and saw that sixty or seventy horsemen were emerging from the woods. They were men-at-arms wearing the orange and white jupons of Berat and at first Thomas assumed they were coming to offer a ransom for Joscelyn,
then
he saw that they flew a strange banner, not the leopard of Berat, but a Church banner like those carried in processions on holy days. It hung from a cross-staff and showed the blue gown of the Virgin Mary and behind it, on smaller horses,
were
a score of churchmen.

Sir Guillaume made the sign of the cross. ‘Trouble,’ he said curtly, then turned on Genevieve. ‘No arrows! You hear me, girl? No damn arrows!’

Sir Guillaume ran down the steps and Genevieve looked at Thomas. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘For killing the priest?
Damn the bastard.’

‘I rather think they’ve come to damn us,’ Genevieve said, and she went with Thomas to the side of the battlements that overlooked Castillon d’Arbizon’s main street, the west gate and the bridge across the river beyond. The armed horsemen waited outside the town while the clergy dismounted and,
preceded
by their banner, trooped up the main street towards the castle. Most of the churchmen were in black, but one was in a white cope, had a mitre and carried a white staff topped with a golden crook.
A bishop, no less.
He was a plump man with long white hair that escaped from beneath the golden hem of his mitre. He ignored the townsfolk who knelt to him as he called up to the castle. ‘Thomas!’ he shouted. ‘Thomas!’

‘What will you do?’ Genevieve asked.

‘Listen to him,’ Thomas said.

He led her down to the smaller bastion above the gate that was already crowded with archers and men-at-arms. Robbie was there and, as Thomas appeared, the Scotsman pointed at him and called down to the bishop, ‘This is Thomas!’

The bishop struck his staff on the ground. ‘In the name of God,’ he called out, ‘the all-powerful Father, and in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost, and in the name of all the saints, and in the name of our Holy Father, Clement, and by virtue of the power which has been granted us to loose and to bind in heaven as it is loosed and bound upon earth, I summon you, Thomas! I summon you!’

The bishop had a fine voice. It carried clearly, and the only other sound, except for the wind, was the murmur as a handful of Thomas’s men translated the French into English for the benefit of the archers. Thomas had assumed that the bishop would speak in Latin and that he alone would know what was being said, but the bishop wanted everyone to understand his words.

‘It is known that you, Thomas,’ the bishop resumed, ‘sometime baptised in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, have fallen from the society of Christ’s body by committing the sin of giving comfort and shelter to a condemned heretic and murderer. So now, with grief in our heart, we deprive you, Thomas, as we will deprive all your accomplices and supporters, of the communion of the body and the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He banged his staff on the ground again and one of the priests rang a small handbell. ‘We separate you,’ the bishop went on, his voice echoing from the castle’s high keep, ‘from the society of all Christians and we exclude you from all holy precincts.’ Again the staff struck the cobbles and the bell rang. ‘We banish you from the bosom of our holy mother the Church in heaven and upon earth.’ The bell’s clear tone echoed back from the keep’s stones. ‘We declare you, Thomas, to be excommunicated and we judge you to be condemned to eternal fire with Satan and all his angels and all the reprobates. We pronounce you accursed in this wicked fact and we charge all those who favour and love our Lord Jesus Christ to hold you for punishment.’ He thumped his staff a last time, glared defiantly at Thomas and then turned away, followed by the priests and their banner.

And Thomas felt numb.
Cold and numb.
Empty. It was as though the foundations of the earth had vanished to leave an aching void above the blazing gates of hell. All the certainties of life, of God, of salvation, of eternity, were gone, had been blown away like the fallen leaves rustling in the town’s gutters. He had been changed into a true hellequin, excommunicated, cut off from the mercy, the love and the company of God.

‘You heard the bishop!’ Robbie broke the silence on the rampart. ‘We’re charged to arrest Thomas or else share his damnation.’ And he put his hand on his sword and would have drawn it if Sir Guillaume had not intervened.

‘Enough!’ the Norman shouted. ‘Enough! I am second-in-command here. Does anyone dispute that?’ The archers and men-at-arms had drawn away from Thomas and Genevieve, but no one intervened on Robbie’s behalf. Sir Guillaume’s scarred face was grim as death. ‘The sentries will stay on duty,’ he ordered, ‘the rest of you to your quarters.
Now!’

‘We have a duty . . .’ Robbie began and then involuntarily stepped back as Sir Guillaume turned on him in fury. Robbie was no coward, but no one could have withstood Sir Guillaume’s anger at that moment.

The men went reluctantly, but they went, and Sir Guillaume slammed home his half-drawn sword. ‘He’s right, of course,’ he said gloomily as Robbie went down the steps.

‘He was my friend!’ Thomas protested
,
trying to hold on to one piece of certainty in a world turned inside out.

‘And he wants Genevieve,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘and because he can’t have her he’s persuaded himself his soul is doomed. Why do you think the bishop didn’t excommunicate all of us? Because then we’d all be in the same hell with nothing to lose. He divided us, the blessed and the damned, and Robbie wants his soul to be safe. Can you blame him?’

‘What about you?’ Genevieve asked the Norman.

‘My soul withered years ago,’ Sir Guillaume said grimly,
then
he turned and gazed down the main street. ‘They’ll be leaving men-at-arms outside the town to take you when you leave. But you can go out by the small gate behind Father Medous’s house. They won’t be guarding that, and you can cross the river at the mill. You’ll be safe enough in the woods.’

For a moment Thomas did not comprehend what Sir Guillaume was saying, then it struck him with awful force that he was being told to go.
To run.
To hide.
To leave his first command, to abandon his new wealth, his men, everything.
He stared at Sir Guillaume, who shrugged. ‘You can’t stay, Thomas,’ the older man said gently. ‘Robbie or one of his friends will kill you. My guess is that a score of us would support you, but if you stay it will be a fight between us and them and they’ll win.’

‘You’ll stay here?’

Sir Guillaume looked uncomfortable, then nodded. ‘I know why you came here,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe the damn thing exists nor, if it does, do I think we have a cat’s chance of finding it. But we can make money here, and I need money so, yes, I’m staying. But you’re going, Thomas. Go west. Find an English garrison. Go home.’ He saw the reluctance on Thomas’s face. ‘What in Christ’s name else can you do?’ he demanded. Thomas said nothing and Sir Guillaume glanced at the soldiers waiting beyond the town gate. ‘You can take the heretic to them, Thomas, and give her over to the burning. They’ll lift your excommunication then.’

‘I won’t do that,’ Thomas said fiercely.

‘Take her down to the soldiers,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘and
kneel
to the bishop.’

‘No!’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why not.’

‘Because you love her?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas said, and Genevieve took his arm. She knew he was suffering, just as she had suffered when the Church withdrew the love of God from her, but she had come to terms with the horror. Thomas had not and she knew it would take him time.

‘We shall survive,’ she said to Sir Guillaume.

‘But you must leave,’ the Norman insisted.

‘I know,’ Thomas could not keep the heartbreak from his voice.

‘I’ll bring you supplies tomorrow,’ Sir Guillaume promised.
‘Horses, food, cloaks.
What else do you need?’

‘Arrows,’ Genevieve said promptly, then she looked at Thomas as if expecting him to add something, but he was still too shocked to think properly. ‘You’ll want your father’s writings, won’t you?’ she suggested gently.

Thomas nodded. ‘Wrap them up for me?’ he asked Sir Guillaume. ‘Wrap them in leather.’

‘Tomorrow morning, then,’ Sir Guillaume said. ‘Wait by the hollow chestnut on the hill.’

Sir Guillaume escorted them out of the castle, through the back alleys behind the priest’s house to where a small door had been let through the town wall to give access to a path which led to the water-mill on the river. Sir Guillaume shot the bolts and opened the gate warily, but no soldiers waited outside and so he led them down to the mill and there he watched as Thomas and Genevieve crossed the stone sill of the mill pond. From there they climbed into the woods.

Thomas had failed. And he was damned.

It rained all night. It was a pelting rain driven by a cold wind that snatched the leaves from the oaks and chestnuts and swirled spitefully into the ancient tree that had been broken by lightning and hollowed by time. Thomas and Genevieve tried to shelter in the trunk, flinching once when a burst of thunder sounded in the sky. No lightning showed, but the rain slashed down even more forcefully. ‘It’s my fault,’ Genevieve said.

‘No,’ Thomas said.

‘I hated that priest,’ she said. ‘I knew I shouldn’t shoot, but I remembered all he did to me.’ She buried her face on his shoulder so her voice became muffled and Thomas could hardly hear her. ‘He would stroke me when he wasn’t burning me. Stroke me like a child.’

‘Like a child?’

‘No,’ she said bitterly, ‘like a lover. And when he’d hurt me he’d say prayers for me and tell me I was precious to him. I hated him.’

‘I hated him too,’ Thomas said, ‘for what he did to you.’ He had his arms about her. ‘And I’m glad he’s dead,’ he added, and then reflected that he himself was as good as dead. He had been sent to hell, cut off from salvation.

‘So what will you do?’ Genevieve asked in the shivering dark.

‘I won’t go home.’

‘So where will you go?’

‘Stay with you.
If you want.’
Thomas thought of saying that she was free to go wherever she wished, but he knew she had entwined her fate in his so he did not try to persuade her to leave him, nor did he want her to leave him. ‘We’ll go back to Astarac,’ he suggested instead. He did not know what good that would do, but he knew he could not just crawl home defeated. Besides, he was damned now. He had nothing to lose and all eternity to gain. And perhaps the Grail would redeem him. Perhaps now that he was doomed, he would find the treasure and it would restore his soul to grace.

Sir Guillaume arrived soon after
dawn,
escorted by a dozen men who Sir Guillaume knew would not betray Thomas. Jake and Sam were among them and both wanted to accompany Thomas, but he refused. ‘Stay with the garrison,’ he told them, ‘or go back west and find another English fort.’ It was not that he did not want company, but he knew it would be difficult enough to feed
himself
and Genevieve without having two other mouths to worry about. Nor did he have any prospect to offer them except danger, hunger and the certainty of being hunted across southern Gascony.

Sir Guillaume had brought two horses, food, cloaks, Genevieve’s bow, four sheaves of arrows and a fat purse of coins. ‘But I couldn’t get your father’s manuscript,’ he confessed, ‘Robbie took it.’

‘He stole it?’ Thomas asked indignantly.

Sir Guillaume
shrugged as if the fate of the manuscript was unimportant. ‘Berat’s men-at-arms have gone,’ he said, ‘so the road west is safe, and I sent Robbie east this morning to look for livestock. So ride west, Thomas. Ride west and go home.’

‘You think Robbie wants to kill me?’ Thomas asked, alarmed.

‘Arrest you, probably,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘and
give
you to the Church. What he really wants, of course, is to have God on his side and he believes if he finds the Grail then all his problems will be over.’ Sir Guillaume’s men looked surprised at the mention of the Grail and one, John Faircloth, began a question, but Sir Guillaume cut him off. ‘And Robbie’s persuaded himself that you’re a sinner,’ he said to Thomas. ‘Sweet Christ,’ he added, ‘but there’s nothing worse than a young man who’s just found God. Except a young woman who finds God. They’re insufferable.’

‘The Grail?’
John Faircloth insisted. There had been plenty of wild rumours about why the Earl of Northampton had sent Thomas and his men to Castillon d’Arbizon, but Sir Guillaume’s careless admission had been the first confirmation.

‘It’s a madness Robbie’s got in his skull,’ Sir Guillaume explained firmly, ‘so take no damned notice.’

‘We should stay with Thomas,’ Jake put in. ‘All of us. Begin again.’

Sir Guillaume knew enough English to understand what Jake had said and he shook his head. ‘If we stay with Thomas,’ he said, ‘then we have to fight Robbie. That’s what our enemy wants. He wants us divided.’

Thomas translated for Jake. ‘And he’s right,’ he added forcibly.

‘So what do we do?’ Jake wanted to know.

‘Thomas goes home,’ Sir Guillaume pronounced doggedly, ‘and we stay long enough to get rich and then we go home too.’ He tossed Thomas the reins of the two horses. ‘I’d like to stay with you,’ he said.

‘Then we all die.’

‘Or we’ll all be damned. But go home, Thomas,’ he urged, throwing down a fat leather bag. ‘There’s enough money in that purse to pay your passage, and probably enough to persuade a bishop to lift the curse. The Church will do anything for money. You’ll do fine, and in a year or two come and find me in Normandy.’

‘And Robbie?’
Thomas asked. ‘What will he do?’

Sir Guillaume shrugged. ‘He’ll go home in the end. He’ll not find what he’s looking for, Thomas, and you know that.’

‘I don’t know that.’

‘Then you’re as mad as he is.’ Sir Guillaume pulled off his gauntlet and held out his hand. ‘You don’t blame me for staying?’

‘You should stay,’ Thomas said.
‘Get rich, my friend.
You’re in command now?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then Robbie will have to pay you a third share of Joscelyn’s ransom.’

‘I’ll keep some for you,’ Sir Guillaume promised,
then
he clasped Thomas’s hand, turned his horse and led his men away. Jake and Sam, as farewell gifts, threw down two more sheaves of arrows, and then the horsemen were gone.

Thomas felt his anger simmer as he and Genevieve rode eastwards in a soft drizzle that soon soaked through their new cloaks. He was angry at himself for having failed, though the only way he could have succeeded was by putting Genevieve on a pile of firewood and torching her, and he could never do that. He was bitter at Robbie for having turned against him, though he understood the Scotsman’s reasons and even considered that they were good ones. It was not Robbie’s fault that he was attracted to Genevieve, and it was no bad thing for a man to have a care for his soul. So most of all Thomas was furious at life, and that rage helped to take his mind off their discomfort as the rain grew heavy again. They tended southwards as they went east, sticking to the woods where they were forced to duck beneath low branches. Where there were no trees they used the higher ground and kept a lookout for mailed horsemen. They saw none. If Robbie’s men were in the east then they were keeping to the low ground and so Thomas and Genevieve were alone.

They avoided farms and villages. That was not difficult for the country was sparsely populated and the higher ground was given to pasture rather than cultivation. They saw a shepherd in the afternoon
who
sprang up, surprised, from behind a rock and fished a leather sling and a stone from his pocket before he saw the sword at Thomas’s side and swiftly hid the sling and knuckled his forehead as he bowed. Thomas paused to ask the man if he had seen any soldiers and Genevieve translated for him, reporting the man had seen nothing. A mile beyond the frightened shepherd Thomas put an arrow into a goat. He retrieved the arrow from the carcass, which he skinned, gutted and jointed. That night, in the roofless shelter of an old cottage built at the head of a wooded valley, they lit a fire with flint and steel,
then
roasted goat ribs in the flames. Thomas used his sword to cut branches from a larch, which he fashioned into a crude lean-to against one wall. It would keep the rain off for a night, and he made a bed of bracken beneath the makeshift shelter.

Thomas remembered his journey from Brittany to Normandy with Jeanette. Where was the Blackbird now, he wondered? They had travelled in the summer, living off his bow, avoiding every other living person, and it had been a happy time. Now he did the same with Genevieve, but the winter was coming. He did not know how hard that winter would be, but Genevieve said she had never known snow in these foothills. ‘It falls to the south,’ she said, ‘in the mountains, but here it is just cold.
Cold and wet.’

The rain was intermittent now. Their horses were picketed on a patch of thin grass beside the stream that trickled past the ruins. A crescent moon sometimes showed through the clouds to silver the high wooded ridges on either side of the valley. Thomas walked a half-mile downstream to listen and watch, but he saw no other lights and heard nothing untoward. They were safe, he reckoned, from men if not from God, and so he went back to where Genevieve was trying to dry their heavy cloaks in the small heat of the fire. Thomas helped her, draping the woollen cloth over a frame of larch sticks. Then he crouched by the flames, watching the red embers glow, and he thought of his doom. He remembered all the pictures he had seen daubed on church walls: pictures showing souls tumbling towards hell with its grinning demons and roaring fires.

‘You are thinking of hell,’ Genevieve said flatly.

He grimaced. ‘I was,’ he said and he wondered how she had known.

‘You really think the Church has the power to send you there?’ she asked and, when he did not reply, she shook her head. ‘Excommunication means nothing.’

‘It means everything,’ Thomas said sullenly. ‘It means no heaven and no God, no salvation and no hope, everything.’

‘God is here,’ Genevieve said fiercely. ‘He is in the fire, in the sky, in the air. A bishop cannot take God away from you. A bishop cannot suck the air from the sky!’

Thomas said nothing. He was remembering the bishop’s staff striking the cobbles and the sound of the small handbell echoing from the castle walls.

‘He just said words,’ Genevieve said, ‘and words are cheap. They said the same words to me, and that night, in the cell, God came to me.’ She put a piece of wood onto the fire. ‘I never thought I would die. Even as it came close I never thought it would happen. There was something inside me, a
sliver, that
said it would not. That was God, Thomas. God is everywhere. He is not a dog on the Church’s leash.’

‘We only know God through His Church,’ Thomas said. The clouds had thickened, obscuring the moon and the last few stars, and in the dark the rain became harder and there was a grumble of thunder from the valley’s high head. ‘And God’s Church,’ he went on, ‘has condemned me.’

Genevieve took the two cloaks from their sticks and bundled them up to keep the worst of the rain from their weave. ‘Most people don’t know God through the Church,’ she said. ‘They go and they listen to a language they don’t understand, and they say their confession and they bow to the sacraments and they want the priest to come to them when they are dying, but when they are really in trouble they go to the shrines the Church doesn’t know about. They worship at springs, at holy wells, in deep places among the trees. They go to wise women or to fortune-tellers. They wear amulets. They pray to their own God and the Church never knows about it. But God knows because God is everywhere. Why would the people need a priest when God is everywhere?’

‘To keep us from error,’ Thomas said.

‘And who defines the error?’ Genevieve persisted.
‘The priests!
Do you think you are a bad man, Thomas?’

Thomas thought about the question. The quick answer was yes because the Church had just expelled him and given his soul to the demons, but in truth he did not think he was bad and so he shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Yet the Church condemns you! A bishop says words. And who knows what sins that bishop does?’

Thomas half smiled. ‘You are a heretic,’ he said softly.

‘I am,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m not a beghard, though I could be one, but I am a heretic, and what choice do I have? The Church expelled me, so if I am to love God I must do it without the Church. You must do the same now, and you will find that God still loves you however much the Church might hate you.’ She grimaced as the rain beat the last small flames out of their fire, then they retreated to the larch shelter where they did their best to sleep under layers of cloaks and mail coats.

Thomas’s sleep was fitful. He dreamed of a battle in which he was being attacked by a giant who roared at him,
then
he woke with a start to find that Genevieve was gone and that the roaring was the bellow of thunder overhead. Rain seethed on the larch and dripped through to the bracken. A slither of lightning pierced the sky, showing the gaps in the branches that half sheltered
Thomas,
and he wriggled out from beneath the larch and stumbled in the dark to find the broken hovel’s doorway. He was about to shout Genevieve’s name when another crack of thunder tore the sky and echoed from the hills, so near and so loud that Thomas reeled sideways as if he had been struck by a war-hammer. He was bare-footed and wearing nothing but a long linen shirt that was sopping wet. Three lightning whips stuttered to the east and in their light Thomas saw the horses were white-eyed and trembling and so he crossed to them, patted their noses and made sure their tethers were still firm. ‘Genevieve!’ he shouted. ‘Genevieve!’

Then he saw her.

Or rather, in the instant glare of a splintering streak of lightning, he saw.
a
vision. He saw a woman, tall and silver and naked, standing with her arms
raised
to the sky’s white fire. The lightning went, yet the image of the woman stayed in Thomas’s head, glowing, and then the lightning struck again, slamming into the eastern hills, and Genevieve had her head back, her hair was unbound, and the water streamed from it like drops of liquid silver.