He had been raised near Paris by the Count’s younger brother who had died of the flux seventeen years before. There had been little money in Joscelyn’s house and the Count, notoriously mean, had sent the widow hardly an ecu to save her distress, yet Joscelyn had made money with his lance and sword, and that, the Count reckoned, was to his credit. And he had brought two men-at-arms with him, both of them hardened warriors, whom Joscelyn paid from his own money and that, the Count thought, showed that he was able to lead men. “But you really should learn to read,” he finished his thought aloud. “The mastery of letters civilizes a man, Joscelyn.”
“Shit on civilization,” Joscelyn said, “there are English bandits in Castillon d’Arbizon and we’re doing nothing! Nothing!”
“We’re hardly doing nothing,” the Count demurred, scratching again under his woolen cap. He had an itch there, and he wondered if it presaged some worse ailment. He made a mental note to consult his copies of Galen, Pliny and Hippocrates. “We’ve sent word to Toulouse and to Paris,” he explained to Joscelyn, “and I shall protest to the seneschal in Bordeaux. I shall protest very firmly!” The seneschal was the English King’s regent in Gascony and the Count was not sure he would send the man a message, for such a protest might well provoke more English adventures to seek land in Berat.
“Damn protests,” Joscelyn said, “just kill the bastards. They’re breaking the truce!”
“They’re English,” the Count said, “they always break truces. Trust the devil before an Englishman.”
“So kill them,” Joscelyn persisted.
“I’ve no doubt we shall,” the Count replied. He was deciphering the terrible handwriting of a long-dead clerk who had written a contract with a man called Sestier to line As-tarac’s castle’s drains with elmwood. “In time,” he added absently.
“Give me thirty men, uncle, and I’ll scour them out in a week!”
The Count discarded the document and picked up another. The ink had turned brown and was badly faded, but he could just make out that it was a contract with a stonemason. “Joscelyn,” he asked, still peering at the contract, “how will you scour them out in a week?”
Joscelyn stared at his uncle as though the old man was mad. “Go to Castillon d’Arbizon, of course,” he said, “and kill them.”
“I see, I see,” the Count said, as though grateful for the explanation. “But the last time I was in Castillon d’Arbizon, and that was many years ago, just after the English left, but when I was there, Joscelyn, the castle was made of stone. How will you defeat that with sword and lance?” He smiled up at his nephew.
“For God’s sake! They’ll fight.”
“Oh, I am sure they will. The English like their pleasures, as do you. But these Englishmen have archers, Joscelyn, archers. Have you ever encountered an English archer on the tournament field?”
Joscelyn ignored the question. “Only twenty archers,” he complained instead.
“The garrison tell us twenty-four,” the Count said pedantically. The survivors of Castillon d’Arbizon’s garrison had been released by the English and had fled to Berat where the Count had hanged two as an example and then questioned the others. Those others were now all imprisoned, waiting to be taken south and sold as galley slaves. The Count anticipated that source of income with a smile, then was about to put the stonemason’s contract in the basket when a word caught his eye and some instinct made him hold on to the document as he turned back to his nephew. “Let me tell you about the English war bow, Joscelyn,” he said patiently. “It is a simple thing, made of yew, a peasant’s tool, really. My huntsman can use one, but he is the only man in Berat who has ever mastered the weapon. Why do you think that is?” He waited, but his nephew made no answer. “I’ll tell you anyway,” the Count went on. “It takes years, Joscelyn, many years to master the yew bow. Ten years? Probably that long, and after ten years a man can send an arrow clean through armor at two hundred paces.” He smiled. “Splat! A thousand ecus of man, armor and weaponry fallen to a peasant’s bow. And it isn’t luck, Joscelyn. My huntsman can put an arrow through a bracelet at a hundred paces. He can pierce mail coat at two hundred. I’ve seen him put an arrow through an oak door at a hundred and fifty, and the door was three inches thick!”
“I have plate armor,” Joscelyn said sullenly.
“So you do. And at fifty paces the English will pick out the eye slits in your visor and send arrows into your brain. You, of course, might survive that.”
Joscelyn did not recognize the insult. “Crossbows,” he said.
“We have thirty crossbowmen,” the Count said, “and none are as young as they were, and some are ill, and I wouldn’t really think they can survive against this young man, what is his name?”
“Thomas of Hookton,” Father Roubert interjected.
“Strange name,” the Count said, “but he seems to know his business. A man to be treated with care, I’d say.”
“Guns!” Joscelyn suggested.
“Ah! Guns,” the Count exclaimed as though he had not thought of that himself. “We could certainly take cannon to Castillon d’Arbizon, and I daresay the machines will tear down the castle gate and generally make a regrettable mess, but where are we to find the things? There is one in Toulouse, I’m told, but it needs eighteen horses to move it. We could send to Italy, of course, but they are very expensive things to hire and their expert mechanics are even more expensive, and I very much doubt that they will fetch the things here before the spring. God preserve us till then.”
“We can’t do nothing!” Joscelyn protested again.
“True, Joscelyn, true,” the Count agreed genially. Rain hammered at the horn panels that covered the windows. It was falling in grey swathes all across the town. It cascaded down the gutters, flooded the latrine pits, dripped through thatch and swept like a shallow stream through the town’s lower gates. No weather for fighting, the Count thought, but if he did not allow his nephew some freedom then he suspected the young fool would ride off and get himself killed in an ill-considered skirmish. “We could bribe them, of course,” he suggested.
“Bribe them?” Joscelyn was outraged by the suggestion.
“It’s quite normal, Joscelyn. They’re nothing but bandits and they only want money, so I offer them coins to yield the castle. It works often enough.”
Joscelyn spat. “They’ll take the money then stay where they are and demand more.”
“That’s very good!” The Count of Berat smiled approvingly at his nephew. “That’s precisely what I had concluded. Well done, Joscelyn! So I won’t try to bribe them. I have written to Toulouse, though, and requested the service of their gun. No doubt it will be disgustingly expensive, but if it’s necessary, we shall unleash it on the English. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Have you spoken with Sir Henri?” he asked.
Sir Henri Courtois was the Count’s garrison commander and a soldier of experience. Joscelyn had indeed talked with him and been given the same answer that his uncle had just delivered: beware of English archers. “Sir Henri’s an old woman,” Joscelyn complained.
“With that beard? I doubt it,” the Count said, “though I did once see a bearded woman. It was in Tarbes, at the Easter fair. I was very young then, but I distinctly remember her. A great long beard, she had. We paid a couple of coins to see her, of course, and if you paid more you were allowed to tug the beard, which I did, and it was the true thing, and if you paid more still they revealed her breasts which destroyed any suspicion that she was really a man. They were very nice breasts, as I recall.” He looked at the stonemason’s contract again and at the Latin word that had caught his eye. Calix. A memory from his childhood stirred, but would not come.
“Thirty men!” Joscelyn pleaded.
The Count let the document rest. “What we will do, Joscelyn, is what Sir Henri suggests. We shall hope to catch the Englishmen when they are away from their lair. We shall negotiate for the gun at Toulouse. We are already offering a bounty for every English archer captur
ed alive. A generous bounty, so I have no doubt every routier and coredor in Gascony will join the hunt and the English will find themselves surrounded by enemies. It won’t be a pleasant life for them.”
“Why alive?” Joscelyn wanted to know. “Why not dead English archers?”
The Count sighed. “Because then, my dear Joscelyn, the coredors will bring in a dozen corpses a day and claim they are Englishmen. We need to talk to the archer before we kill him to make sure he is the real thing. We must, so to speak, inspect the breasts to ensure the beard is real.” He stared at the word, calix, willing the memory to surface. “I doubt we’ll capture many archers,” he went on, “they hunt in packs and are dangerous, so we shall also do what we always do when the coredors become too impudent. Wait patiently and ambush them when they make a mistake. And they will, but they think we shall make the mistake first. They want you to attack them, Joscelyn, so they can riddle you with arrows, but we have to fight them when they are not expecting a fight. So ride with Sir Henri’s men and make sure the beacons are laid and, when the time comes, I will release you. That is a promise.”
The beacons were being laid in every village and town of the county. They were great heaps of wood which, when fired, would send a signal of smoke to say that the English raiders were in the vicinity. The beacons warned other nearby communities and also told the watchmen on the tower of Berat’s castle where the English were riding. One day, the Count believed, they would come too close to Berat, or be in a place where his men could ambush them, and so he was content to wait until they made that mistake. And they would make it, coredors always did, and these English, though they flew the badge of Northampton’s Earl, were no better than common bandits. “So go and practice your weapons, Joscelyn,” he told his nephew, “because you will use them soon enough. And take that breastplate with you.”
Joscelyn left. The Count watched as Father Roubert fed the fire with new logs, then he looked again at the document. The Count of Astarac had hired a stonemason to carve “Calix Meus Inebrians” above the gate of Astarac’s castle and specified that the date on the contract was to be added to the legend. Why? Why would any man want the words “My Cup Makes Me Drunk” decorating his castle? “Father?” he said.
“Your nephew will get himself killed,” the Dominican grumbled.
“I have other nephews,” the Count said.
“But Joscelyn is right,” Father Roubert said. “They have to be fought, and fought soon. There is a beghard to be burned.” Father Roubert’s anger kept him awake at night. How dare they spare a heretic? He lay in his narrow bed, imagining the girl’s screams as the flames consumed her dress. She would be naked when the cloth had burned and Father Roubert remembered her pale body tied to his table. He had understood temptation then, understood it and hated it and there had been such pleasure in drawing the hot iron up the tender skin of her thighs.
“Father! You’re half-asleep,” the Count remonstrated. “Look at this.” He pushed the stonemason’s contract across the table.
The Dominican frowned as he tried to make out the faded handwriting, then nodded as he recognized the phrase. “From the psalms of David,” he said.
“Of course! How stupid of me. But why would a man carve ’ Calix Meus Inebrians’ over his gateway?”
“The Church Fathers,” the priest said, “doubt that the psalmist means drunk, not as we mean it. Suffused with joy, perhaps? ‘My cup delights me’?”
“But what cup?” the Count asked pointedly. There was silence except for the sound of rain and the crackle of logs, then the friar looked again at the contract, pushed back his chair and went to the Count’s shelves. He took down a great chained book that he placed carefully on the lectern, unclasped the cover and opened the huge, stiff pages. “What book is that?” the Count inquired.
“The annals of St. Joseph’s monastery,” Father Roubert said. He turned the pages, seeking an entry. “We know,” he went on, “that the last Count of Astarac was infected with the Cathar heresy. It’s said that his father sent him to be a squire to a knight in Carcassonne and thus he became a sinner. He eventually inherited Astarac and lent his support to the heretics, and we know he was among the last of the Cathar lords.” He paused to turn another page. “Ah! Here it is. Montségur fell on St. Joevin’s day in the twenty-second year of the reign of Raymond VII.” Raymond had been the last great Count of Toulouse, dead now almost a hundred years. Father Roubert thought for a second. “That would mean Montségur fell in 1244.”
The Count leaned over the table and picked up the contract. He peered at it and found what he wanted. “And this is dated the eve of St. Nazarius of the same year. Saint Nazarius’s feast is at the end of July, yes?”
“It is,” Father Roubert confirmed.
“And St. Joevin’s day is in March,” the Count said, “which proves that the Count of Astarac didn’t die in Montségur.”
“Someone ordered the Latin carved,” the Dominican allowed. “Maybe it was his son?” He turned the big pages of the annals, flinching at the crudely illuminated capitals, until he found the entry he wanted. “‘And in the year of our Count’s death, when there was a great plague of toads and vipers,’” he read aloud, “‘the Count of Berat took Astarac and slew all that were inside.’”
“But the annals do not say that Astarac himself died?”
“No.”
“So what if he lived?” The Count was excited now and had left his chair to start pacing up and down. “And why would he desert his comrades in Montségur?”
“If he did,” Father Roubert sounded dubious.
“Someone did. Someone with authority to hire a mason. Someone who wanted to leave a message in stone. Someone who…” The Count suddenly stopped. “Why would they describe the date as the eve of St. Nazarius’s feast?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“Because that is St. Pantaleon’s day. Why not call it that?”
“Because,” Father Roubert was about to explain that St. Nazarius was a good deal better known than St. Pantaleon, but the Count interrupted him.
“Because it is the Seven Sleepers’ Day! There were seven of them, Roubert! Seven survivors! And they wanted the date inscribed to make that obvious!”
The friar thought the Count was stretching the evidence exceedingly thin, but he said nothing. “And think of the story!” The Count urged him. “Seven young men under threat of persecution, yes? They flee the city, which was it? Ephesus, of course, and hide in a cave! The Emperor, Decius wasn’t it? I’m sure it was, and he ordered every cave sealed and years later, over a hundred years later if I remember rightly, the seven young men are found there, and not one of them has aged a day. So seven men, Roubert, fled Montségur!”
Father Roubert replaced the annals. “But a year later,” he pointed out, “your ancestor defeated them.”
“They could have survived,” the Count insisted, “and everyone knows that members of the Vexille family fled. Of course they survived! But think, Roubert,” he was unconsciously calling the Dominican by his childhood name, “why would a Cathar lord leave the last stronghold if it not to take the heretics’ treasures to safety? Everyone knows the Cathars possessed great treasures!”
Father Roubert tried not to get caught up in the Count’s excitement. “The family,” he said, “would have taken the treasures with them.”
“Would they?” the Count demanded. “There are seven of them. They go their different ways. Some to Spain, others to northern France, one at least to England. Suppose you are hunted, wanted by the Church and by every great lord. Would you take a great treasure with you? Would you risk that it falls into your enemies’ hands? Why not hide it and hope that one day whoever of the seven survives can return to recover it?”
The evidence was now stretched impossibly thin and Father Roubert shook his head. “If there was treasure in Astarac,” he said, “it would have been found long ago.”
“But the Cardinal Archbishop is looking for it,” the Count
said. “Why else does he want to read our archives?” He picked up the stonemason’s contract and held it over a candle so that the three Latin words and the demand to cut the date in the stone were scorched out of existence. He stamped his fist on the charred, glowing edge to extinguish the fire, then put the damaged parchment into the basket of documents that would be given to the monk. “What I should do,” he said, “is go to Astarac.”
Father Roubert looked alarmed at such hot-headedness. “It is wild country, my lord,” he warned, “infested with coredors. And not that many miles from the English in Castillon d’Arbizon.”
“Then I shall take some men-at-arms.” The Count was excited now. If the Grail was in his domain then it made sense that God had placed the curse of barrenness on his wives as a punishment for failing to search for the treasure. So he would put it right. “You can come with me,” he told Father Roubert, “and I’ll leave Sir Henri, the crossbowmen and most of the men-at-arms to defend the town.”
“And your nephew?”
“Oh, I’ll take him with me! He can command my escort. It will give him the illusion that he’s useful.” The Count frowned. “Isn’t St. Sever’s near Astarac?”
“Very close.”
“I’m sure Abbot Planchard will give us accommodation,” the Count said, “and he’s a man who might very well help us!”
Father Roubert thought Abbot Planchard was more likely to tell the Count he was an old fool, but he could see that the Count was caught up in the enthusiasm. Doubtless he believed that if he found the Grail then God would reward him with a son, and perhaps he was right. And perhaps the Grail needed to be found to put the whole world right, and so the friar fell to his knees in the great hall and prayed that God would bless the Count, kill the heretic and reveal the Grail.