Sir Giles Marriott, the old lord of the manor, had died before the plague struck, and his grave was in the village church, but if any of the surviving villagers saw Thomas ride by, they did not greet him. They sheltered from God’s wrath and Thomas, Genevieve, Robbie and Galdric rode on down the lane until they were beneath Lipp Hill and ahead was the sea, and the shingle, and the valley where Hookton had once stood. It had been burned by Sir Guillaume and Guy Vexille back when they were allies, and now there was nothing but thorns looping over the lumpy remains of the cottages, and hazels and thistles and nettles growing in the scorched black, roofless walls of the church.
Thomas had been in England for a fortnight. He had ridden to the Earl of Northampton, and he had knelt to his lord, who had first had servants examine Thomas to make sure he did not carry the dark marks of the pestilence, and Thomas had paid his lord one-third of the money they had brought from Castillon d’Arbizon, and then he had given him the golden cup. “It was made for the Grail, my lord,” he said, “but the Grail is gone.”
The Earl admired the cup, turning it and holding it up so that it caught the light, and he was amazed at its beauty. “Gone?” he asked.
“The monks at Saint Sever’s,” Thomas lied, “believe it was taken to heaven by an angel whose wing had been mended there. It is gone, lord.”
And the Earl had been satisfied, for he was the possessor of a great treasure even if it was not the Grail, and Thomas, promising to return, had gone away with his companions. Now he had come to the village of his childhood, the place he had learned to master the bow, and to the church where his father, the mad Father Ralph, had preached to the gulls and hidden his great secret.
It was still there. Hidden in the grass and nettles that grew between the flagstones of the old church, a thing discarded as being of no value. It was a clay bowl which Father Ralph had used to hold the mass wafers. He would put the bowl on the altar, cover it with a linen cloth and carry it home when mass was done. “I prepare a table,” he had written, and the altar was the table and the bowl was the thing he set it with and Thomas had handled it a hundred times and thought nothing of it, and when he had last been in Hookton he had picked it up from the ruins and then, disdaining it, he had thrown it back among the weeds.
Now he found it again among the nettles and he took it to Genevieve who placed it in the wooden box and closed the lid, and the fit of the thing was so perfect that the box did not even rattle when it was shaken. The base of the bowl matched the slight discolored circle in the old paint of the box’s interior. The one had been made for the other. “What do we do?” Genevieve asked. Robbie and Galdric were outside the church, exploring the ridges and lumps that betrayed where the old cottages had been. Neither knew why Thomas had come back to Hookton. Galdric did not care, and Robbie, quieter now, was content to stay with Thomas until they all rode north to pay Lord Outhwaite the ransom that would release Robbie back to Scotland. If Outhwaite lived.
“What do we do?” Genevieve asked again, her voice a whisper.
“What Planchard advised me,” Thomas said, but first he took a wine skin from his bag, poured a little wine into the bowl and made Genevieve drink from it, then he took the bowl and drank himself. He smiled at her. “That rids us of excommunication,” he said, for they had drunk from the bowl that caught Christ’s blood from the cross.
“Is it really the Grail?” Genevieve asked.
Thomas took it outside. He held Genevieve’s hand as they walked towards the sea and, when they reached the shingle inside the hook where the Lipp Stream curved across the beach by the place where the fishing boats had been hauled up when Hookton still had villagers, he smiled at her, then hurled the bowl as hard as he could. He threw it across the stream to the hook of shingle on the far side and the bowl crunched down into the stones, bounced, ran a few feet and was still.
They waded the stream, climbed the bank and found the bowl undamaged.
“What do we do?” Genevieve asked again.
It would cause nothing but madness, Thomas thought. Men would fight for it, lie for it, cheat for it, betray for it and die for it. The Church would make money from it. It would cause nothing but evil, he thought, for it stirred horror from men’s hearts, so he would do what Planchard had said he would do. “‘Hurl it into the deepest sea,’” he quoted the old abbot, “‘down among the monsters, and tell no one.’”
Genevieve touched the bowl a last time, then kissed it and gave it back to Thomas who cradled it for a moment. It was just a bowl of peasant’s clay, red-brown in color, thickly made and rough to the touch, not perfectly round, with a small indentation on one side where the potter had damaged the unfired clay. It was worth pennies, perhaps nothing, yet it was the greatest treasure of Christendom and he kissed it once and then he drew back his strong archer’s right arm, ran down to the sucking sea’s edge and threw it as far and as hard as he could. He hurled it away and it span for an instant above the gray waves, seemed to fly a heartbeat longer as though it were reluctant to let go of mankind, and then the bowl was gone.
Just a white splash, instantly healed, and Thomas took Genevieve’s hand and turned away.
He was an archer, and the madness was over. He was free.
Historical Note
I have allowed a surfeit of rats to appear here and there in Heretic, though I am persuaded they were probably innocent of spreading the plague. There is argument among the medical historians as to whether the Black Death (named for the color of the buboes, or swellings, which disfigured the sick) was bubonic plague, which would have been spread by fleas from rats, or some form of anthrax, which would have come from cattle. Fortunately for me, Thomas and his companions did not need to make that diagnosis. The medieval explanation for the pestilence was mankind’s sin added to an unfortunate astrological conjunction of the planet Saturn, always a baleful influence. It caused panic and puzzlement for it was an unknown disease that had no cure. It spread north from Italy, killing its victims within three or four days and mysteriously sparing others. This was the first appearance of the plague in Europe. There had been other pandemics, of course, but nothing on this scale, and it would continue its ravages, at intervals, for another four hundred years. The victims did not call it the Black Death; that name was not to be used till the 1800s. They just knew it as the “pestilence.”
It killed at least one-third of the European population.
Some communities suffered a mortality bill of more than 50 percent, but the overall figure of one-third seems to be accurate. It struck as hard in rural areas as in towns, and whole villages vanished. Some of them can still be detected as ridges and ditches in farmland, while in other places there are lone churches, standing in fields with no apparent purpose. They are the plague churches, all that remain of the old villages.
Only the opening and closing passages of Heretic are based on real history. The plague happened, as did the siege and capture of Calais, but everything in between is fictional. There is no town of Berat, nor a bastide called Castillon d’Arbizon. There is an Astarac, but whatever was built there now lies under the waters of a great reservoir. The fight which begins the book, the capture of Nieulay and its tower, did happen, but the victory gained the French no advantage for they were unable to cross the River Ham and engage the main English army. So the French withdrew, Calais fell and the port remained in English hands for another three centuries. The story of the six burghers of Calais being condemned to death, then reprieved, is well known and Rodin’s statue of the six, in front of the town’s hall, commemorates the event.
Thomas’s language difficulties in Gascony were real enough. The aristocracy there, as in England, used French, but the common folk had a variety of local languages, chiefly Occitan, from which the modern Languedoc comes. Languedoc simply means “the language of oc,” because oc was the word for yes, and it is closely related to Catalan, the language spoken just across the Pyrenees in northern Spain. The French, conquering the territory to their south,
tried to suppress the language, but it is still spoken and is now enjoying something of a revival.
As for the Grail? Long gone, I suspect. Some say it was the cup Christ used at the Last Supper, and others that it was the bowl used to catch his blood from the “dolorous blow,” the lance wound given to his side during the crucifixion. Whatever it was, it has never been found, though rumors persist and some say it is hidden in Scotland. It was, nevertheless, the most prized relic of medieval Christendom, perhaps because it was so mysterious, or else because, when the Arthurian tales received their final form, all the old Celtic tales of magic cauldrons became confused with the Grail. It has also been a golden thread through centuries of stories, and will go on being that, which is why it is probably best if it remains undiscovered.
About the Author
BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Richard Sharpe series; the Thomas of Hookton series; the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles; the Warload Trilogy; and the novels Redcoat, Stone-henge 2000 B.C., and Gallows Thief. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod. You can visit his website at www.bernardcornwell.net.
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Books by Bernard Cornwell
The Sharpe Novels (in chronological order)
• SHARPE’S TIGER1 • SHARPE’S TRIUMPH*
SHARPE’S FORTRESS* • SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR*
SHARPE’S PREY*• SHARPE’S RIFLES • SHARPE’S HAVOC*
SHARPE’S EAGLE • SHARPE’S GOLD • SHARPE’S ESCAPE*
SHARPE’S BATTLE*• SHARPE’S COMPANY
SHARPE’S SWORD • SHARPE’S ENEMY
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REBEL*• COPPERHEAD*• BATTLE FLAG*
THE BLOODY GROUND*
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THE ARCHER’S TALE* • VAGABOND*
HERETIC*
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GALLOWS THIEF*
STONEHENGE, 2000 B.C.: A NOVEL*
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HERETIC. COPYRIGHT © 2006 BY BERNARD CORNWELL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED UNDER INTERNATIONAL AND PAN-AMERICAN COPYRIGHT CONVENTIONS. BY PAYMENT OF THE REQUIRED FEES, YOU HAVE BEEN GRANTED THE NON-EXCLUSIVE, NON-TRANSFERABLE RIGHT TO ACCESS AND READ THE TEXT OF THIS E-BOOK ON-SCREEN. NO PART OF THIS TEXT MAY BE REPRODUCED, TRANSMITTED, DOWN-LOADED, DECOMPILED, REVERSE ENGINEERED, OR STORED IN OR INTRODUCED INTO ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, WHETHER ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, NOW KNOWN OR HEREINAFTER INVENTED, WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF HARPERCOLLINS E-BOOKS.
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader December 2006 ISBN 978-0-06-121403-5
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
Epilogue
Historical Note
About the Author
More resounding praise
Books by Bernard Cornwell
Copyright
About the Publisher
Bernard Cornwell, Heretic
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