The path was steep and wet. Thomas kept glancing to his left, looking for enemy, but none showed on the slope. He hurried, lost his footing, saw the wall so close ahead and climbed on. Genevieve was in the gate now, looking back for him, and Thomas scrambled the last few feet and ran through the splintered gate, following Genevieve down the dark alley and out into the square. A crossbow bolt spat into the cobbles, bounced up, and someone was shouting and he saw men-at-arms in the main street, was aware of an arrow sizzling past him just as he saw that half the gate arch had been destroyed, that a pile of rubble half obscured the castle’s entrance, that a pile of naked corpses was lying in the square under the castle’s curtain wall and that crossbow quarrels were skidding across the stones. Then he jumped the rubble, bounced off the remaining part of the arch and was safe inside the yard where his feet flew from beneath him because the stones were slippery. He slid a few feet, then banged against a timber barricade stretching across the yard.
And Sir Guillaume, one eyed, evil-looking, was grinning at him. “Took your time coming, didn’t you?” the Frenchman said.
“Bloody hell,” Thomas said. The coredors were all there except for the woman who had fallen from the weir. Genevieve was safe. “I thought you’d need help,” he said.
“You think you can help us?” Sir Guillaume said. He lifted Thomas to his feet and enfolded his friend in an embrace. “I thought you were dead,” he said, and then, embarrassed at this display of feeling, he jerked his head at the coredors and their children. “Who are they?”
“Bandits,” Thomas said, “hungry bandits.”
“There’s food in the upper hall,” Sir Guillaume said, and then Jake and Sam were there, grinning, and they escorted Thomas and Genevieve up the stairs where the coredors stared at the cheese and salt meat. “Eat,” Sir Guillaume said.
Thomas remembered the naked corpses in the town square. Were they his men? Sir Guillaume shook his head. “Bastards attacked us,” he said, “and the bastards died. So we stripped them and threw them over the wall. Rats are eating them now. Big bastards, they are.”
“The rats?”
“Big as cats. So what happened to you?”
Thomas told him as he ate. Told of going to the monastery, of Planchard’s death, of the fight in the wood, and of the slow journey back to Castillon d’Arbizon. “I knew Robbie wasn’t here,” he explained, “so I reckoned only my friends would be left.”
“Nice to die among friends,” Sir Guillaume said. He glanced up at the hall’s high narrow windows, judging the progress of the day by the angle of the light. “Gun won’t fire for another couple of hours.”
“They’re knocking down the gate arch?”
“That’s what they seem to be doing,” Sir Guillaume said, “and maybe they want to bring down the whole curtain wall? That would make it easier for them to get into the courtyard. It’ll take them a month, though.” He looked at the coredors. “And you bring me extra mouths to feed.”
Thomas shook his head. “They’ll all fight, even the women. And the children can pick up the crossbow bolts.” There were plenty of those strewn about the castle and, once the vanes had been straightened, they would serve the coredors’ crossbows well enough. “First thing, though,” Thomas went on, “is to get rid of that bloody gun.”
Sir Guillaume grinned. “You think I haven’t thought about doing that? You reckon we’ve just been sitting on our backsides playing dice? But how do you do it? A sally? If I take a dozen men down the street half of them will be spitted by quarrels by the time we reach the tavern. Can’t be done, Thomas.”
“Kindling,” Thomas said.
“Kindling,” Sir Guillaume repeated flatly.
“Kindling and twine,” Thomas said. “Make fire arrows. They’re not storing their damned gunpowder in the open air, are they? It’s in a house. And houses burn. So we burn the bloody town down. All of it. I doubt our arrows can reach the houses by the gun, but if we get an east wind the fire will spread fast enough. It’ll slow them anyway.”
Sir Guillaume stared at him. “You’re not as daft as you look, are you?”
Then a gasp made both men turn round. Genevieve, sitting close by, had been toying with the quarrel-case that Thomas had snatched up at the mill. The lid, which fitted neatly over the circular leather case, had been sealed with wax and that had intrigued her so she had scraped the wax away, lifted the lid, and found something inside, something which had been carefully wrapped in linen and padded with sawdust. She had shaken the sawdust off, then unwrapped the linen.
And everyone in the room now gazed at her in awe.
For she had found the Grail.
JOSCELYN DECIDED he hated Guy Vexille. Hated the man’s air of competence, the slight sneer that always seemed to be on his face and which, without words being said, seemed to condemn whatever Joscelyn did. He also hated the man’s piety and self-control. Joscelyn would have liked nothing better than to order Vexille away, but his men were a valuable addition to the besieging force. When the assault came, when there was a charge across the rubble of the castle gateway, Vexille’s black-cloaked men-at-arms could well mean the difference between defeat and victory. So Joscelyn endured Vexille’s presence.
Robbie also endured it. Vexille had killed his brother and Robbie had sworn to take vengeance for that, but by now Robbie was so confused that he did not know what his oaths meant any more. He had sworn to go on pilgrimage, yet here he was, still in Castillon d’Arbizon; he had sworn to kill Guy Vexille, yet the man lived; he had sworn allegiance to Joscelyn, and now he recognized that Joscelyn was a brainless fool, brave as a pig, but with no trace of religion or honor. The one man he had never sworn an oath to was Thomas, yet that was the man he wished well in the unfolding tragedy.
And at least Thomas lived. He had managed to cross the weir, despite the guard Guy Vexille had placed on the mill. Vexille had come to Castillon d’Arbizon, discovered the river crossing was unguarded, and put the sour, dour Charles Bessières in command at the mill. Bessières had accepted the order because it kept him away from both Vexille and Joscelyn, but then he had failed, and Robbie had been astonished at the delight he had felt when he realized that Thomas had again outwitted them, and that Thomas lived and was back in the castle. He had seen Thomas run across the square, the air humming with crossbow bolts, and he had almost cheered when he saw his friend make the safety of the castle.
Robbie had seen Genevieve too and he did not know what to think about that. In Genevieve he saw something he wanted so badly that it was like an ache. Yet he dared not admit it, for Joscelyn would just laugh at him. If Robbie had a choice, and his oaths meant he had none, he would have gone to the castle and begged Thomas’s forgiveness, and doubtless he would have died there.
For Thomas, though he lived, was trapped. Guy Vexille, cursing that Charles Bessières had failed at such a simple task, had put men in the woods across the river so that there was now no escape across the weir. The only way out of the castle was down the main street and out the town’s west gate or north to the smaller gate by St. Cal-lic’s church, which opened onto the water meadows where the townsfolk grazed their cattle, and Joscelyn and Vexille, between them, had well over a hundred men-at-arms waiting for just such an attempt. Crossbowmen were placed in every vantage point in the town, and meanwhile the gun would gnaw and hammer and undermine the castle-gate bastions until, in time, there would be a rough path across the ruins and into the castle’s heart. Then the slaughter could begin and Robbie must watch his friends die.
Half the castle’s gateway was already down and Signor Gioberti had now realigned his bulbous gun so that its missiles would strike the right-hand side of the arch. The Italian reckoned it would take a week to bring the whole gate down, and he had advised Joscelyn that it would be best to spend still more time on widening the breach by bringing down those sections of the curtain wall either side of the ruined arch so that the attackers were not channeled into a narrow space which the archers could fill wit
h feathered death.
“Pavises,” Joscelyn said, and he had ordered the town’s two carpenters to make more of the big willow shields that would protect the crossbowmen as they ran to the breach. Those crossbowmen could then shoot up at the archers while the men-at-arms streamed past them. “One week,” Joscelyn told the Italian, “you’ve got one week to bring down the gate, then we attack.” He wanted it over fast for the siege was proving more expensive and more complicated than he had ever imagined. It was not just the fighting that was difficult, but he had to pay carters to bring hay and oats for all the men-at-arms’ horses, and he had to send men to scavenge for scarce food in a district that had already been plundered by the enemy, and each day brought new unforeseen problems that gnawed at Joscelyn’s confidence. He just wanted to attack and get the wretched business over.
But the defenders attacked first. At dawn, on the day after Thomas reached Castillon d’Arbizon, when there was a chill northeasterly wind blowing under a leaden sky, fire arrows seared from the tower ramparts to plunge into the town’s thatch. Arrow after arrow trailed smoke, and the besiegers woke to the danger as the townfolk screamed for hooks and water. Men used the long-handled hooks to pull the thatch from the roofs, but more arrows came and within minutes three houses were ablaze and the wind was pushing the flames towards the gate where the gun was already loaded and the loam was setting.
“The powder! The powder!” Signor Gioberti shouted, and his men began carrying the precious barrels out of the house near the gun, and smoke billowed across them and frightened folk got in their way so that one man slipped and spilt a whole barrel of unmixed powder across the roadway. Joscelyn came from his commandeered house and shouted at his men to fetch water, while Guy Vexille was ordering that buildings should be pulled down to make a firebreak, but the townspeople held the soldiers up and now the fires were roaring, a dozen more houses were ablaze and their thatch had become furnaces that spread from roof to roof. Panicked birds fluttered inside the smoke and rats, in their scores, fled out of thatch and cellar doors. Many of the besieging crossbowmen had made themselves eyries inside the roofs from where they could shoot through holes piercing the thatch, and they now stumbled down from the attics. Pigs squealed as they were roasted alive and then, just when it seemed the whole town would burn and when the first flying sparks were settling on the roofs near the cannon, the heavens opened.
A crash of thunder tore across the sky and then the rain slashed down. It fell so hard that it blotted out the view of the castle from the town gate. It turned the street into a watercourse, it soaked the powder barrels and it extinguished the fires. Smoke still poured upwards, but the rain hissed on glowing embers. The gutters ran with black water and the fires died.
Galat Lorret, the senior consul, came to Joscelyn and wanted to know where the townsfolk should shelter. Over a third of the houses had lost their roofs and the others were crowded with billeted soldiers. “Your lordship must find us food,” he told Joscelyn, “and we need tents.” Lorret was shivering, perhaps with fear or else from the onset of a fever, but Joscelyn had no pity for the man. Indeed he was so enraged at being given advice by a commoner that he struck Lorret, then struck him again, driving him back into the street with a flurry of blows and kicks.
“You can starve!” Joscelyn screamed at the consul. “Starve and shiver. Bastard!” He punched the old man so hard that Lorret’s jaw was broken. The consul lay in the wet gutter, his official robes soaking with the ash-blackened water. A young woman came from the undamaged house behind him; she had glazed eyes and a flushed face. She vomited suddenly, pouring the contents of her stomach into the gutter beside Lorret. “Get out!” Joscelyn screamed at her. “Put your filth somewhere else!”
Then Joscelyn saw that Guy Vexille, Robbie Douglas and a dozen men-at-arms were staring open-mouthed at the castle. Just staring. The rain was lessening and the smoke was clearing and the castle’s shattered frontage could be seen again, and Joscelyn turned to see what they gazed at. He could see the armor hanging from the keep’s battlements, the mail coats stripped from his dead men and hung there as an insult, and he could see the captured shields, including Robbie’s red heart of Douglas, hanging upside down among the hauberks, but Guy Vexille was not staring at those trophies. Instead he was looking at the lower rampart, at the half-broken parapet above the castle gate, and there, in the rain, was gold.
Robbie Douglas risked the archers in the castle by walking up the street to see the golden object more clearly. No arrows came at him. The castle appeared deserted, silent. He walked almost to the square until he could see the thing clearly and he peered in disbelief and then, with tears in his eyes, he fell to his knees. “The Grail,” he said, and suddenly other men had joined him and were kneeling on the cobbles.
“The what?” Joscelyn asked.
Guy Vexille pulled off his hat and knelt. He stared upwards and it seemed to him that the precious cup glowed.
For in the smoke and destruction, shining like the truth, was the Grail.
THE CANNON DID NOT FIRE again that day. Joscelyn was not happy about that. The new Count of Berat did not care that the defenders had a cup, they could have had the whole true cross, the tail of Jonah’s whale, the baby Jesus’ swaddling clothes, the crown of thorns and the pearly gates themselves and he would happily have buried the whole lot under the castle’s shattered masonry, but the priests with the besiegers went on their knees to him, and Guy Vexille did the same, and that obeisance from a man he feared gave Joscelyn pause.
“We have to talk with them,” Vexille said.
“They are heretics,” the priests said, “and the Grail must be saved from them.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Joscelyn demanded. “Just ask for it?”
“You must bargain for it,” Guy Vexille said.
“Bargain!” Joscelyn bridled at the thought, then an idea came. The Grail? If the thing existed, and everyone about him believed it did, and if it really was here, in his domain, then there was money to be made from it. The cup would need to go to Berat, of course, where fools like his dead uncle would pay mightily to see it. Big jars at the castle gate, he thought, and lines of pilgrims throwing in money to be allowed to see the Grail. There was, he thought, profit in that gold, and plainly the garrison wanted to talk for, after displaying the cup, they had shot no more arrows.
“I will go and talk with them,” Vexille said.
“Why you?” Joscelyn demanded.
“Then you go, my lord,” Vexille said deferentially.
But Joscelyn did not want to face the men who had held him prisoner. The next time he saw them he wanted them to be dead, and so he waved Vexille on his way. “But you’ll offer them nothing!” he warned. “Not unless I agree to it.”
“I will make no agreement,” Vexille said, “without your permission.”
Orders were given that the crossbowmen were not to shoot and then Guy Vexille, bare-headed and without any weapons, walked up the main street past the smoking wreckage of the houses. A man was sitting in an alley and Vexille noticed that his face was sweating and blotched with dark lumps and his clothes were stained with vomit.
Guy hated such sights. He was a fastidious man, scrupulously clean, and the stench and diseases of mankind repelled him: they were evidences of a sinful world, one that had forgotten God. Then he saw his cousin come onto the broken rampart and take the Grail away.
A moment later Thomas crossed the rubble that filled the gateway. Like Guy he wore no sword, nor had he brought the Grail. He wore his mail, which was rusting now, frayed at the hem and crusted with dirt. He had a short beard for he had long lost his razor and it gave him, Guy thought, a grim and desperate look. “Thomas,” Guy greeted him, then gave a small bow, “cousin.”
Thomas looked past Vexille to see three priests watching from halfway down the street. “The last priests who came here excommunicated me,” he said.
“What the Church does,” Guy said, “it can undo. Where did you find i
t?”
For a moment it looked as if Thomas would not answer, then he shrugged. “Under the thunder,” he said, “at the lightning’s heart.”
Guy Vexille smiled at the evasion. “I do not even know,” he said, “whether you have the Grail. Perhaps it is a trick? You put a golden cup on the wall and we just make an assumption. Suppose we are wrong? Prove it to me, Thomas.”
“I can’t.”
“Then show it to me,” Guy begged. He spoke humbly.
“Why should I?”
“Because the Kingdom of Heaven depends on it.”
Thomas seemed to sneer at that answer, then he looked curiously at his cousin. “Tell me something first,” he said.
“If I can.”
“Who was the tall, scarred man I killed at the mill?”
Guy Vexille frowned for it seemed a very strange question, but he could see no trap in it and he wanted to humour Thomas so he answered. “His name was Charles Bessières,” he said cautiously, “and he was the brother of Cardinal Bessières. Why do you ask?”
“Because he fought well,” Thomas lied.
“Is that all?”
“He fought well, and he very nearly took the Grail from me,” Thomas embroidered the untruth. “I just wondered who he was.” He shrugged and tried to work out why a brother of Cardinal Bessières should have been carrying the Grail.
“He was not a man worthy of having the Grail,” Guy Vexille said.
“Am I?” Thomas demanded.
Guy ignored the hostile question. “Show it to me,” he pleaded. “For the love of God, Thomas, show it to me.”
Thomas hesitated, then he turned and raised a hand and Sir Guillaume, armored in captured plate from head to foot and with a drawn sword, came from the castle with Genevieve. She carried the Grail and had a wine skin tied to her belt. “Not too close to him,” Thomas warned her, then looked back to Guy. “You remember Sir Guillaume d’Evecque? Another man sworn to kill you?”