Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (12 page)

‘You will remember how this works, Baruch, I’m sure,’ said Robin, looking down at the wretch trembling with fear, his eyes round and dark as ale cups.

‘You answer my questions quickly; do not lie, do not prevaricate, do not try to mislead – otherwise…’ Robin clicked his own fingers and thumb together, making a dry, cracking noise.

The man was nodding jerkily, pathetically trying to please, holding Robin’s grey eyes with his huge brown ones, pleading silently for a little mercy. I felt an almost overpowering urge to vomit; my cousin Roland’s face was as pale as the snow in the deep drifts outside the cave; his mouth was clamped shut.

‘Who was it who paid you to set the trap for me?’ said Robin.

Malloch answered in a high, fast, gabbling voice. ‘It was a French knight who goes by the name of Mauchamps; he paid me ten pounds in silver to set the snare for you.’ He took a huge breath. ‘Good sir, I beg you, I beg you … please forgive me; you must know that I am truly sorry…’

‘Be quiet,’ said Robin in a low voice. ‘Just answer the questions slowly and clearly, nothing more. Now, which Order does this false knight serve?’

‘He is a Templar, sir; he wore their white surcoat with the red cross on the breast when first he came to me.’

‘And what else?’ said Robin.

‘And he belongs to another Order as well, but I do not know its name. Their device is … their shields bear a blue cross on a white field inside a black border.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘The boy, my only living son, he followed the knight at my orders after he made me the offer of the money. I wanted to see where he went, with whom he spoke after me. Shimon followed him to a mean lodging in the poorest part of Lincoln and when he went out that night, the boy searched his room. He found a shield with a blue cross, and a white surcoat also with this same device on it … but, sir, you already know this, I’ve told you many times, please sir—’

‘Silence!’

Robin looked at me. ‘So, Alan, what do you think?’ he said.

‘I think you are the cruellest man I have ever met. How can you do this?’

Robin frowned. ‘It’s not about this treacherous piece of slime; he doesn’t signify. I mean about the knights of the blue cross, or as we know them, the Knights of Our Lady … and their Master.’

He looked at me, eyebrows raised expectantly.

I said nothing, collecting my horror-bruised thoughts.

Robin waved a hand at the kneeling prisoner, who was now silently weeping. ‘John, take this foul thing away, would you. I think we’re done with it … for now.’

‘So,’ said my lord again, when Malloch had been dragged, still whimpering, from the cave. ‘What do you think?’

The Knights of Our Lady. I had not thought about them for many months. Nor had I thought about their leader – a man who called himself simply the Master. I had believed that I had managed to block them from my mind – but now, here they were, their spectral image conjured up before me in this smoky, fire-lit cave in the wilds of Sherwood by a mutilated, sobbing wreck of a Jewish goldsmith.

The Master was a Templar turned monk who had led this secret organization of knights sworn to serve the Virgin Mary. He was a man who appeared to exude holiness and yet was truly one of the most evil men I had ever encountered. Some even said that he had the mark of the Devil upon him – for he had a curious deformity, an extra thumb on his left hand, or rather two tiny twin digits growing from the same root. Robin and I had fought the Master and his Knights of Our Lady in France during Richard the Lionheart’s long wars against Philip. The Master had been responsible for the death of my father, and the murder of a loyal friend of mine called Hanno. I’d tracked him down in Paris, and Robin had ousted him from his privileged and powerful life there as the Bishop’s amanuensis by exposing his wickedness to the world. I had assumed that the Master was a fugitive somewhere in France, in hiding, powerless.

This was clearly not the case.

‘If Gilles de Mauchamps is a Knight of Our Lady,’ I said slowly, ‘and that much is clear from that poor fellow’s confession, then we must assume that the Master was behind the attempt to trap you at Welbeck.’

‘What happened at Welbeck?’ asked Roland.

‘That’s not important,’ I said, catching Robin’s slight shake of the head. ‘What is important is that now we know the Master is coming after Robin, presumably seeking revenge. I thought he was finished but he clearly still has the desire – and the power – to strike out at us.’

‘That was my conclusion as well,’ said Robin. ‘Do you think he still has the Grail with him?’

Robin had hunted the Master halfway across France trying to take possession of that legendary relic.

‘I suspect that while he has one trickle of breath in his lungs he would try to keep possession of the Grail.’

‘Good,’ said Robin. ‘I think so, too. So let us go and get him, Alan. Together. Let us find him, kill him and steal that last trickle of breath from his body – and the Grail, too, of course. Come on, Alan; for Hanno, for your father – and if they mean nothing to you, for your own safety and the safety of your family. Let us track down the Master and end this threat to ourselves. What do you say, old friend?’

Robin’s eyes were shining like polished silver; he was using the whole force of his personality on me, willing me to take up this challenge. I realized now why he had subjected me to the sight of the poor Jew. He had wanted to be sure that I truly believed the Master was back in our lives.

He wanted me to join him in this mad quest.

‘Tell me about the Holy Grail,’ said Roland.

‘It’s a mysterious vessel from a long romantic poem by a
trouvère
from Troyes in Champagne – have you never heard of it?’ I said.

‘I have heard its name but I have never heard it spoken of in a serious manner. Is it real? Does it truly exist? What is it like?’

‘It is the most costly, most fabulous object in the world, my friend,’ said Robin in a reverent tone. ‘A golden treasure of surpassing beauty, set with the finest gem stones, and worth a dukedom at the very least, a kingdom, perhaps. And, for men of faith, it is much more than that – and that makes it even more valuable. The Grail, they say, can cure any hurt, any wound; it is said to be able to hold back Death itself. Some say it is the vessel that was used by Jesus Christ himself at the Last Supper, and it was used again by Joseph of Arimathea to collect his blood as it spilled from the wound in his side on the Cross…’

‘We don’t know that,’ I said grumpily. I was irked by Robin’s attempts to manipulate me into joining his mad treasure hunt. ‘These could be merely the extravagant claims of a few drunken poets trying to make a name for themselves—’

This time Robin interrupted me. ‘The Master believes it to be the most sacred, the most valuable object in the world – and he is prepared to kill again and again, to slaughter churchman or churl, anyone, absolutely anyone, in the name of the Grail.’

Both Roland and Robin had a slight pink flush on their cheeks.

‘I should like to see this Holy Grail one day,’ said Roland. ‘I believe that would be a noble quest worthy of my mettle.’

‘Well, good luck to you,’ I said crossly. ‘But on this day I am going home to Westbury to care for Goody; while my wife is unwell nothing on earth will induce me to leave Nottinghamshire and to head off on some silly chase after something that may be no more than a myth.’

And with those intemperate words, I made a farewell to my lord and, with some difficulty, steered Roland outside. Leaving the warm, masculine fug of Robin’s Caves behind us, we both rode into the cleansing, snowy wastes of Sherwood.

Christmas should have been a time of joy – we decked the hall with evergreen boughs and sprigs of holly bright with berries; we set a giant yule log to smoulder in the hearth for the full twelve days; we drank and danced and feasted; I sang and made music on my vielle to amuse my cousin and the household. And yet I could find no joy. The blight on the season was Goody’s health. She was by then a little past twelve weeks of the pregnancy but she still continued to vomit up her breakfast most mornings and added to that she developed a low, hacking cough that would not yield to the infusions of honey and herbs that my wife drank several times a day in an attempt to tame it. At night, she would lie beside me, both of us sleepless, and bark quietly long into the early hours, her chest convulsing painfully. Sometimes I knew that she had been unable to catch a wink of sleep until dawn. And I was sick myself – with worry for her and the baby. At the back of my mind loomed Nur’s curse.

By early January, Goody’s cough had not improved and she developed a fever as well, her body alternately raging hot and icy cold. She took to her bed and despite being plied with all the delicacies that Westbury could muster – honey cakes, fatty salt pork, preserved berries from autumn – she began to lose weight. She soon found that she could not lie flat without feeling suffocated and could only breathe shallowly and with some difficulty propped up in a nest of pillows. I was badly scared by this point, and summoned the apothecary once again from Nottingham. The man spoke at length about evil humours and noxious airs, balancing the black bile and yellow bile in her body; he felt her brow, took her pulse and demanded a sample of her urine. To my disgust, he examined it closely in the light from the shutter in our bedchamber, sniffed it deeply like a lover of fine wine and then took a sip. He prescribed a greyish powder that cost me three shillings for a pound – he claimed it was ground unicorn’s horn – and Goody took it with a little warm milk that Ada brought her morning and night. But she did not recover. Indeed, she told me that it merely made her feel more nauseated.

The wise woman from the village came to see her almost daily and she clucked and bustled around the bedside but although she managed to calm the fever with her steaming, foul-smelling herbal infusions, the wrenching cough and the nausea persisted. And one day the old biddy came to me and told me with much sadness in her rheumy eyes that she feared the baby might be lost if Goody did not recover soon. This had also occurred to me – indeed I prayed to God most earnestly that if He must take a life, it should be mine – but if it came to a choice between Goody and the baby, He should take the baby, so long as He let my beloved live. We were young, we would be able to have other children.

If Goody lived.

In a black fog of desperation, I had Father Arnold come to the bedchamber and try to counter the curse, if curse it was, with holy water and prayer. He came and dutifully mumbled away in bad Latin and splashed my beloved with a few freezing drops – but once again it had no effect. Goody coughed and hacked, day after day, and vomited up all that we gave her to eat. She did not complain, but she sometimes wept a little from the frustration of her constant ill-health. Yet she did not curse God nor the Devil nor even Nur for her condition, and she always wore a thin, brave smile on her wan face when I came to sit with her.

The nights were the worst. By day, Goody would sometimes force herself to rise and go about the hall, and even occasionally into the courtyard if the weather was mild, and she would sit by the hearth for an hour or so, if she felt strong enough, and talk to Ada a little about the doings of the village or chat with Roland about his family. But at night – lying in our big sweat-soaked bed, cough-cough-coughing her life away with myself beside her, sitting on a stool, holding her pale hand and feeding her spoonfuls of honeyed water – I think she must have had a taste of what Hell might be like.

But God moves in mysterious ways, as my old friend Father Tuck always used to tell me – for it was Goody’s illness that saved my life and hers. Indeed, it saved a good few souls at Westbury. For one dark night in mid-February, I was fully dressed and wide awake, even though it was long past midnight, and reading a poem about King Arthur and Queen Guinevere aloud to her, when the Knight of Our Lady, Gilles de Mauchamps, returned to Westbury.

The first I heard of the attack was a scream and a thump. The sentry who patrolled the palisade of Westbury had been shot from the darkness below by a crossbowman, I was told later. The man, whose name was Rinc, God rest his soul, must have been gathering wool in his mind as he paced up and down the windswept walkway – either that or the attackers were particularly skilled at making a silent, unseen approach – for he apparently saw nothing and gave no warning of the assault.

However, Rinc did his duty with his death cry. Swept off the walkway and back into the courtyard by a bolt to the chest, he had enough time to give a wild howl of pain before he smashed to the floor ten feet below and never made another sound in this world. And that was enough to give me warning. By God’s grace, I was fully dressed in tunic and hose, and well shod in a pair of stout riding boots, and when I heard Rinc’s scream, I jumped up from the stool beside Goody’s bed and snatched up my sword from the corner of the room. I ran out of the bedchamber at the eastern end of the hall, through the main living space, leaping over the now stirring bodies of sleeping servants, and burst out of the main hall door into the courtyard. It was a freezing night with a clear, starry sky and there was enough light from a sliver of moon to make out the humped black shapes of men coming over the top of the palisade, and to see a knot of indistinct figures by the main gate lifting the massive locking bar from its brackets. A cold hand gripped my heart and I thought:
God save us, they are already inside the walls. We are lost!
But I had no time for fearful thoughts or useless recriminations.

‘Westbury! To arms, to arms!’ I bellowed and rushed forward across the courtyard. But I was far, far too late, the big double gates, our doughty defences, were swinging slowly open and I could see the red light of torches and a press of armed, mounted men outside. As the gates swung open, the enemy outside it gave a roar and surged forward. I felt a bloody glow of unthinking, bestial rage bloom behind my eyes, as if I was seeing the world through red-tinted glass – these filthy creatures were invading my home; these invaders were threatening Goody, they were threatening my
family
. They must be destroyed – all of them – right now. And I charged towards the gates alone, all caution abandoned, my long sword whirling around my head, a scream of furious wordless defiance on my lips. But before I could throw myself, undoubtedly to my doom, on the incoming tide of foemen, a man-at-arms already inside the courtyard rushed to intercept me and we met in a bone-jarring crash of steel on steel. He knew his business, my enemy, and he skilfully parried my furious blows as I tried to cut him down and reach the gate in time to stem the flow of attackers. But he blocked my blizzard of sword blows with a rare skill and even made me duck under a lightning lunge to my face. But that was his downfall. It unbalanced him and, even as I ducked, I took out his knee with a simple low sweep and left him crouched, shouting in pain as I pushed past and hurtled towards the gate.