Six men, hollow-cheeked and dressed in the robes of penitents, with hanging nooses draped about their necks, were brought from the town. They were all leading citizens, merchants or knights, men of wealth and standing, the kind of men who had defied Edward of England for eleven months. They carried the keys of the town’s gates on cushions that they laid before the King, then prostrated themselves in front of the wooden platform where the King and Queen of England and the great magnates of their realm were seated. The six men pleaded for their lives, but Edward was angry. They had defied him, and so the executioner was summoned, but again his great lords argued that he invited reprisals, and the Queen herself knelt to her husband and begged that the six men be spared. Edward growled, paused while the six lay motionless beneath the dais, then let them live.
Food was taken to the starving citizens, but no other mercy was shown. They were evicted, allowed to take nothing except the clothes they wore and even those were searched to ensure that no coins or jewels were being smuggled past the English lines. An empty town, with houses for eight thousand people, with warehouses and shops and taverns and docks and a citadel and moats, belonged to England. “A doorway into France,” the Earl of Northampton enthused. He had taken a house that had belonged to one of the six, a man who now wandered Picardy like a beggar with his family. It was a lavish stone house beneath the citadel with a view of the town quay that was now crowded with English ships. “We’ll fill the town with good English folk,” the Earl said. “You want to live here, Thomas?”
“No, sire,” Thomas said.
“Nor me,” the Earl admitted. “A pig sty in a swamp, that’s what it is. Still, it’s ours. So what do you want, young Thomas?”
It was morning, three days after the town’s surrender, and already the confiscated wealth of Calais was being distributed to the victors. The Earl had found himself even richer than he expected, for the great chest Thomas had brought from Brittany was filled with gold and silver coins captured in Charles of Blois’s camp after the battle outside La Roche-Derrien. One-third of that belonged to Thomas’s lord and the Earl’s men had counted the coins, setting aside a third of the Earl’s share for the King.
Thomas had told his story. How, on the Earl’s instructions, he had gone to England to search his dead father’s past for a clue to the Grail. He had found nothing except a book in which his father, a priest, had written about the Grail, but Father Ralph had wits that wandered and dreams that seemed real and Thomas had learned nothing from the writings, which had been taken from him by the Dominican who had tortured him. But the book had been copied before the Dominican took it and now, in the Earl’s new sunlit chamber above the quay, a young English priest tried to make sense of the copy.
“What I want,” Thomas told the Earl, “is to lead archers.”
“God knows if there’ll be anywhere to lead them,” the Earl responded gloomily. “Edward talks of attacking Paris, but it won’t happen. There’s going to be a truce, Thomas. We’ll plead eternal friendship, then go home and sharpen our swords.” There was the crackle of parchment as the priest took up a new page. Father Ralph had written in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French, and evidently the priest understood them all. He made an occasional note on a scrap of parchment as he read. Barrels of beer were being unloaded on the quay, the rumble of the great tuns sounding like thunder. The flag of England’s King, leopards and fleur de lys, flew from the captured citadel above the French standard, which was hung upside down as a mark of derision. Two men, Thomas’s companions, stood at the edge of the room, waiting for the Earl to include them. “God knows what employment there’ll be for archers,” the Earl went on, “unless it’s guarding fortress walls. Is that what you want?”
“It’s all I’m good for, my lord. Shooting a bow.” Thomas spoke in Norman French, the language of England’s aristocracy and the language his father had taught him. “And I have money, my lord.” He meant that he could now recruit archers, equip them with horses and take them on the Earl’s service, which would cost the Earl nothing, but the Earl could then take one-third of everything they plundered.
That was how Will Skeat, common-born, had made his name. The Earl liked such men, profited from them, and he nodded approvingly. “But lead them where?” he asked. “I hate truces.”
The young priest intervened from his table by the window. “The King would prefer it if the Grail were found.”
“His name’s John Buckingham,” the Earl said of the priest, “and he’s Chamberlain of the Receipt of the Exchequer, which may not sound much to you, young Thomas, but it means he serves the King and he’ll probably be Archbishop of Canterbury before he’s thirty.”
“Hardly, my lord,” the priest said.
“And of course the King wants the Grail found,” the Earl said, “we all want that. I want to see the damn thing in Westminster Abbey! I want the King of damned France crawling on his bloody knees to say prayers to it. I want pilgrims from all Christendom bringing us their gold. For God’s sake, Thomas, does the bloody thing exist? Did your father have it?”
“I don’t know, my lord,” Thomas said.
“Much bloody use you are,” the Earl grumbled.
John Buckingham looked at his notes. “You have a cousin, Guy Vexille?”
“Yes,” Thomas said.
“And he seeks the Grail?”
“By seeking me,” Thomas said. “And I don’t know where it is.”
“But he was searching for the Grail before he knew you existed,” the young priest pointed out, “which suggests to me that he possesses some knowledge denied to us. I would advise, my Lord, that we seek this Guy Vexille.”
“We’d be two dogs chasing each other’s tails,” Thomas put in sourly.
The Earl waved Thomas to silence. The priest looked back at his notes. “And, opaque though these writings are,” he said disapprovingly, “there is one thread of light. They seem to confirm that the Grail was at Astarac. That it was hidden there.”
“And taken away again!” Thomas protested.
“If you lose something valuable,” Buckingham said patiently, “where do you begin your search? At the place where it was last seen. Where is Astarac?”
“Gascony,” Thomas said, “in the fief of Berat.”
“Ah!” the Earl said, but then was silent.
“And have you been to Astarac?” Buckingham asked. He might have been young, but he had an authority that came from more than his job with the King’s Exchequer.
“No.”
“Then I suggest you go,” the priest said, “and see what you can learn. And if you make enough noise in your searching then your cousin may well come looking for you, and you can find him and discover what he knows.” He smiled, as if to suggest that he had solved the problem.
There was silence except that one of the Earl’s hunting dogs scratched itself in a corner of the room and on the quays a sailor let loose a stream of profanities that might have brought a blush to the devil’s face. “I can’t capture Guy by myself,” Thomas protested, “and Berat offers no allegiance to our King.”
“Officially,” Buckingham said, “Berat offers allegiance to the Count of Toulouse, which today means the King of France. The Count of Berat is definitely an enemy.”
“No truce is signed yet,” the Earl offered hesitantly.
“And won’t be for days, I suspect,” Buckingham agreed.
The Earl looked at Thomas. “And you want archers?”
“I’d like Will Skeat’s men, sire.”
“And no doubt they’d serve you,” the Earl said, “but you can’t lead men-at-arms, Thomas.” He meant that Thomas, not nobly born and still young, might have the authority to command archers, but men-at-arms, who considered themselves of higher rank, would resent his leadership. Will Skeat, worse born than Thomas, had managed it, but Will had been much older and far more experienced.
“I can lead men-at-arms,” one of the two men by the wall announced.
Thomas introduced th
e two. The one who had spoken was an older man, scarred, one eye missing, hard as mail. His name was Sir Guillaume d’Evecque, Lord of Evecque, and he had once held a fief in Normandy until his own King turned against him and now he was a landless warrior and Thomas’s friend. The other, younger man was also a friend. He was a Scot, Robbie Douglas, taken prisoner at Durham the year before. “Christ’s bones,” the Earl said when he knew Robbie’s circumstances, “but you must have raised your ransom by now?”
“I raised it, my lord,” Robbie admitted, “and lost it.”
“Lost it!”
Robbie stared at the floor, so Thomas explained in one curt word. “Dice.”
The Earl looked disgusted, then turned again to Sir Guillaume. “I have heard of you,” he said, and it was a compliment, “and know you can lead men-at-arms, but whom do you serve?”
“No man, my lord.”
“Then you cannot lead my men-at-arms,” the Earl said pointedly, and waited.
Sir Guillaume hesitated. He was a proud man, thirty-five years old, experienced in war, with a reputation that had first been made by fighting against the English. But now he possessed no land, no master, and as such he was little more than a vagabond and so, after a pause, he walked to the Earl and knelt before him and held up his hands as though in prayer. The Earl put his own hands round Sir Guillaume’s. “You promise to do me service,” he asked, “to be my liege man, to serve no other?”
“I do so promise,” Sir Guillaume said earnestly and the Earl raised him and the two men kissed on the lips.
“I’m honored,” the Earl said, thumping Sir Guillaume’s shoulder, then turned to Thomas again. “So you can raise a decent force. You’ll need, what? Fifty men? Half archers.”
“Fifty men in a distant fief?” Thomas said. “They won’t last a month, my lord.”
“But they will,” the Earl said, and explained his previous, surprised reaction to the news that Astarac lay in the county of Berat. “Years ago, young Thomas, before you were off your mother’s tit, we owned property in Gascony. We lost it, but we never formally surrendered it, so there are three or four strongholds in Berat over which I have a legitimate claim.” John Buckingham, reading Father Ralph’s notes again, raised an eyebrow to suggest that the claim was tenuous at best, but he said nothing. “Go and take one of those castles,” the Earl said, “make raids, make money, and men will join you.”
“And men will come against us,” Thomas observed quietly.
“And Guy Vexille will be one,” the Earl said, “so that’s your opportunity. Take it, Thomas, and get out of here before the truce is made.”
Thomas hesitated for a heartbeat or two. What the Earl suggested sounded close to insanity. He was to take a force into the deep south of French territory, capture a fortress, defend it, hope to capture his cousin, find Astarac, explore it, follow the Grail. Only a fool would accept such a charge, but the alternative was to rot away with every other unemployed archer. “I shall do it, my lord,” he said.
“Good. Be off with you, all of you!” The Earl led Thomas to the door, but once Robbie and Sir Guillaume were on the stairs, he pulled Thomas back for a private word. “Don’t take the Scotsman with you,” the Earl said.
“No, my lord? He’s a friend.”
“He’s a damned Scot and I don’t trust them. They’re all goddamned thieves and liars. Worse than the bloody French. Who holds him prisoner?”
“Lord Outhwaite.”
“And Outhwaite let him travel with you? I’m surprised. Never mind, send your Scottish friend back to Outhwaite and let him molder away until his family raises the ransom. But I don’t want a bloody Scotsman taking the Grail away from England. You understand?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Good man,” the Earl said and clapped Thomas’s back. “Now go and prosper.”
Go and die, more like. Go on a fool’s errand, for Thomas did not believe the Grail existed. He wanted it to exist, he wanted to believe his father’s words, but his father had been mad at times and mischievous at others, and Thomas had his own ambition, to be a leader as good as Will Skeat. To be an archer. Yet the fool’s errand gave him a chance to raise men, lead them and follow his dream. So he would pursue the Grail and see what came.
He went to the English encampment and beat a drum. Peace was coming, but Thomas of Hookton was raising men and going to war.
PART ONE
The Devil’s Plaything
THE COUNT OF BERAT was old, pious and learned. He had lived sixty-five years and liked to boast that he had not left his fiefdom for the last forty of them. His stronghold was the great castle of Berat. It stood on a limestone hill above the town of Berat, which was almost surrounded by the River Berat that made the county of Berat so fertile. There were olives, grapes, pears, plums, barley and women. The Count liked them all. He had married five times, each new wife younger than the last, but none had provided him with a child. He had not even spawned a bastard on a milkmaid though, God knew, it was not for lack of trying.
That absence of children had persuaded the Count that God had cursed him and so in his old age he had surrounded himself with priests. The town had a cathedral and eighteen churches, with a bishop, canons and priests to fill them, and there was a house of Dominican friars by the east gate. The Count blessed the town with two new churches and built a convent high on the western hill across the river and beyond the vineyards. He employed a chaplain and, at great expense, he purchased a handful of the straw that had lined the manger in which the baby Jesus had been laid at his birth. The Count encased the straw in crystal, gold and gems, and placed the reliquary on the altar of the castle’s chapel and prayed to it each day, but even that sacred talisman did not help. His fifth wife was seventeen and plump and healthy and, like the others, barren.
At first the Count suspected that he had been cheated in his purchase of the holy straw, but his chaplain assured him that the relic had come from the papal palace at Avignon and produced a letter signed by the Holy Father himself guaranteeing that the straw was indeed the Christ-child’s bedding. Then the Count had his new wife examined by four eminent doctors and those worthies decreed that her urine was clear, her parts whole and her appetites healthy, and so the Count employed his own learning in search of an heir. Hippocrates had written of the effect of pictures on conception and so the Count ordered a painter to decorate the walls of his wife’s bedchamber with pictures of the Virgin and child; he ate red beans and kept his rooms warm. Nothing worked. It was not the Count’s fault, he knew that. He had planted barley seeds in two pots and watered one with his new wife’s urine and one with his own, and both pots had sprouted seedlings and that, the doctors said, proved that both the Count and Countess were fertile.
Which meant, the Count had decided, that he was cursed. So he turned more avidly to religion because he knew he did not have much time left. Aristotle had written that the age of seventy was the limit of a man’s ability, and so the Count had just five years to work his miracle. Then, one autumn morning, though he did not realize it at the time, his prayers were answered.
Churchmen came from Paris. Three priests and a monk arrived at Berat and they brought a letter from Louis Bessières, Cardinal and Archbishop of Livorno, Papal Legate to the Court of France, and the letter was humble, respectful and threatening. It requested that Brother Jerome, a young monk of formidable learning, be allowed to examine the records of Berat. “It is well known to us,” the Cardinal Archbishop had written in elegant Latin, “that you possess a great love of all manuscripts, both pagan and Christian, and so entreat you, for the love of Christ and for the furtherance of His kingdom, to allow our Brother Jerome to examine your muniments.” Which was fine, so far as it went, for the Count of Berat did indeed possess a library and a manuscript collection that was probably the most extensive in all Gas-cony, if not in all southern Christendom, but what the letter did not make clear was why the Cardinal Archbishop was so interested in the castle’s muniments. As for the ref
erence to pagan works, that was a threat. Refuse this request, the Cardinal Archbishop was saying, and I shall set the holy dogs of the Dominicans and the Inquisitors onto your county and they will find that the pagan works encourage heresy. Then the trials and the burnings would begin, neither of which would affect the Count directly, but there would be indulgences to buy if his soul was not to be damned. The Church had a glutton’s appetite for money and everyone knew the Count of Berat was rich. So the Count did not want to offend the Cardinal Archbishop, but he did want to know why His Eminence had suddenly become interested in Berat.
Which was why the Count had summoned Father Roubert, the chief Dominican in the town of Berat, to the great hall of the castle, which had long ceased to be a place of feasting, but instead was lined with shelves on which old documents moldered and precious handwritten books were wrapped in oiled leather.
Father Roubert was just thirty-two years old. He was the son of a tanner in the town and had risen in the Church thanks to the Count’s patronage. He was very tall, very stern, with black hair cut so short that it reminded the Count of the stiff-bristled brushes the armorers used to burnish the coats of mail. Father Roubert was also, this fine morning, angry. “I have business in Castillon d’Arbizon tomorrow,” he said, “and will need to leave within the hour if I am to reach the town in daylight.”
The Count ignored the rudeness in Father Roubert’s tone. The Dominican liked to treat the Count as an equal, an impudence the Count tolerated because it amused him. “You have business in Castillon d’Arbizon?” he asked, then remembered. “Of course you do. You are burning the beghard, are you not?”