Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (17 page)

I found myself sitting back at my place, staring at my twitching hands, my blood still simmering, my bruised windpipe on fire, while Thomas fussed about mopping up spilled wine and gathering the shards of broken glass. After a very short time, order had been regained and I looked up. For some reason I could hardly bring myself to look directly at the small dark figure, now fully veiled again and sitting as still as a statue at the far end of the table.

Robin spoke: ‘I must apologize to you all, and to my friend Alan here most of all, for the events of this evening. I had anticipated having a chance to explain why I asked the lady Nur to join us before you were all presented with the fact of it. Alan – I am truly sorry.’

I said nothing. I looked down at my big hands again.

Robin continued. ‘There are certain things that you should know, Alan; certain things that the lady has sworn to me, and which I have accepted as the truth. Firstly, while Nur admits that she did place a curse on yourself and Goody, she swears that she would now lift it if she could; but she tells me that this kind of magic cannot be undone, and that this curse would continue in its malevolence even in the event of her death. Is this not true?’ He directed the question down the table to the witch.

Nur spoke. ‘It is true, lord,’ she said, her voice, though now a little hoarse and scratchy, had the same weird, sing-song quality that had long haunted my nightmares. ‘I made this curse from a male mandrake root boiled in dew from a dead man’s grave in a virgin’s pelvis bone. I buried it in the earth and drowned it in a waterfall, and burned it on a fire made from a murdered woman’s dry bones, before scattering it to the four winds. It is the most powerful curse of all. It cannot be unmade, not by my art – not even if I wished it so. I have pledged my soul to this curse: my death would merely make it stronger.’

She paused then, and I sensed that she was looking directly at me. ‘If I were to die at your hands, my beloved, your pale Godifa, your milky whore-wife, would live not one hour longer. As it is: she will live until the curse claims her. One year and one day after you wed, she will pay.’

I lifted my head and stared at Nur just then, hating her from the depths of my soul, and remembered that she had often called me her beloved when we had been lovers, in a faraway land, long, long ago. Goody and I had married on the first day of July the year before. It was now mid-March. If the curse were to prove true, my beloved would be gone in a few short months. I thought of Goody as I’d last seen her, cold, still; my eyes filled with tears and I could make no sound more than a sob.

‘Well, yes, be that as it may,’ said Robin. Even his customary assurance seemed to have deserted him. ‘But, you see, Alan, killing Nur can have no good effect on Goody’s well-being – and perhaps, if you believe in this business of curses, it may have the opposite effect. But tell him, Nur, tell him why you are here.’

‘I alone know where the cup of Christ may be found,’ said the witch calmly. ‘I alone know its resting place. Its magic calls to my magic. Its power calls to mine.’

Every face at the table was watching her keenly; not a man fidgeted, not a cough or a sniff was to be heard.

‘Your sour-cream bitch can be saved only by the strongest magic in the world, Alan – by the power of the Christ God,’ said Nur. ‘And none other. If she were to drink a draught of ordinary water from the vessel that is called the Grail, into which had been mingled three drops of my own blood, the curse would be shattered and she would surely regain her strength. This is her only chance to escape her doom.’

When Nur finished, the silence continued among the assembled company for a dozen heartbeats. It was broken by Robin. ‘Nur knows where the Grail is, Alan,’ said my lord, a little too loudly, as if I were either stone deaf or very stupid, ‘and she has agreed to take us there. So if you want your Goody to live, I am afraid you must suffer Nur’s presence with us on our journey.’

We boarded
The Goose
the next day, on a sour, pewter-coloured morning, a little before noon. The ship, moored at Queen’s Hythe dock, a mere bowshot to the west of Ivo the merchant’s house, was an ugly, fat-bellied craft, sixty feet long and twenty-four feet across at the beam. I hated
The Goose
from the moment I saw her – although it must be acknowledged that I was in a mood to hate the whole world that day.

The night before, Robin had dismissed everybody to bed, including the witch, but had kept me back for a few words when the hall had emptied. I was angry and hurt that he had arranged all this behind my back and I ranted a good deal and behaved more than a little childishly towards my lord. His response was blunt: ‘Do you want to save Goody’s life or not?’

I had no reply to that, and no move to make except to take myself off to bed in an angry, sulky silence.

At the top of the stairs, I saw that Sir Nicholas was waiting for me. He put two hands on my shoulders and looked intently into my face. ‘Know that I stand with you on this, Alan,’ he said. ‘It seems that we must endure the company of this vile sorceress for a little while, for the sake of the Grail. But I shall watch her every move, I promise you, and if she tries any devilment, any of her foul Satanic practices, I shall take her life in a single heartbeat. I will gladly slay her for you, Alan, whenever you give me the word, and we shall put our trust in the Lord God for Goody’s recovery.’

I knew that the former Hospitaller meant this kindly but I shook my head. ‘We have no choice but to suffer the witch to live, Nicholas,’ I said. ‘But I thank you from the depths of my soul for your generous intent.’

While
The Goose
was not spacious, we seven warriors, the seven Companions of the Grail, as I thought of us, managed to find shelter from the spitting rain under the aft-castle, a crenellated walkway that ran around the ship’s square rear as a fighting platform.
The Goose
had a similar defensive position at the bow called the fore-castle, square and crenellated as well, and it was underneath this smaller platform that Nur made her nest. Our spirits were subdued that afternoon as the six sailors who manned the ship slipped the moorings, hoisted the square sail on the single mast and under the gentlest of breezes and a fine drizzle, we wafted downstream. We tacked around the end of the great stone bridge of London – which was then nearly two-thirds built, and which ran from St Botolph’s in Billingsgate almost all the way across the water to the stews of Southwark – and once past that obstacle we took the centre of the greasy brownish stream and glided along the Thames, at about the speed of a walking horse, towards the sea.

The river traffic was light, and the passage was calm, but the vision of that small black-clad figure sitting alone in the bows made my stomach churn with frustrated rage and despair. We sat glumly on our baggage – mainly weapons and armour, some sacks holding a little food, bundles of spare clothes, and Robin’s strong box, which contained silver coin and a few valuables – and munched dry bread and onions as the falling damp soaked into our clothing; I contemplated weeks of this experience with a shudder.

Before long, the captain of the ship came aft to bid us a formal welcome. He was a short, sturdy, muscular man named Samuel, with a wide, square face and cropped pitch-black hair and, in contrast to his master, Ivo the merchant, he was apparently a fearless soul.

‘Welcome aboard my ship, gentlemen,’ he said looking at Robin. ‘As you know, Ivo of Shoreham owns her, and he tells me what is to be carried in her holds,’ he said jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the main deck which was packed with hundreds of coarse lumpy grey sacks holding Staffordshire coal for the busy forges of Aquitaine. ‘But once
The Goose
leaves the dock, she is entirely my bird, and I have dominion over her and anyone she carries. We will make you as comfortable as we can, but this is a working ship and, Earl or churl, you are merely passengers on it. Keep out of the way of the sailors, and obey any command you are given by myself and we shall get along fine. We’ll be landing before dusk each day, wherever we can, and setting off again at dawn – in between times, under here is as good a place as any to roost. If we encounter pirates, you’ll be expected to fight – but by the looks of you that should not be too outlandish an experience.’ And he was rewarded with seven grins from the Companions. Then he frowned, and glanced at the huddled figure under the fore-castle: ‘The lady, well, she makes the crew a little nervous, so just keep her out of the way, agreed?’

Robin stood. ‘Captain Samuel—’ he began.

But the man cut him short: ‘You call me Governor or Samuel, one or the other, nothing else.’

‘Very well, ah, Samuel, I would just like to thank you for allowing us on board your fine vessel and to assure you that we accept your authority and while under your care we shall be as meek and obedient as a troop of novice nuns.’

‘That’s good,’ said Samuel. ‘See that you are. We sleep tonight at Gravesend and, wave and weather permitting, we should make the mouth of the Gironde by the middle of Holy Week or thereabouts – in about twenty days, give or take.’ He nodded at Robin, turned and strode away towards the bow.

For the next few weeks we submitted to the queasy tedium of travelling by sea. As the Governor had promised, we stopped at Gravesend that evening, and we passed the night in a stinking tavern that overcharged for its lodgings and for a vile eel stew and a few crusts of stale bread. The next day we took to the open sea and after a rough crossing, with a good deal of grey-faced vomiting from even the seasoned voyagers, we arrived in Calais, and dragged our drenched and aching bones off the ship in search of warm wine and a place that did not heave and creak and shift and splash quite as much as the deck of
The Goose
.

And so we proceeded down the coast of northern France – surging past the wide beaches of Picardy and Normandy and along beside the rock-bound coast of Brittany. The days merged into one another, each dull, damp and long; aboard we ate bread and vegetables boiled with pungent dried fish, and drank watered ale or the rough, sour cider of the region; we told stories to pass the time, taking it in turns to recount the adventures we had had in far flung corners of the world. I sang for the company my entire repertoire of
cansos
,
sirventes
and
tensos
and as many bawdy fabliaux as I could remember – unaccompanied by any musical instrument, for my well-loved applewood vielle had been consumed in the fire at Westbury and I had no money to replace it.

Robin sang with me, from time to time, and recounted comic, and occasionally hair-raising, incidents from his days as a young outlaw in Sherwood. On two occasions Samuel warned us that he suspected another ship in the vicinity of being a pirate, and we donned our mail coats and helmets and slung our swords and shields, and with any of the sailors who could be spared from driving the ship forward, we lined the wooden aft-castle and watched as the suspected ship came closer up behind to inspect us. By that point I was so bored that I would genuinely have welcomed a good, bloody sea-fight and, off the coast of the Ile d’Ouessant, at the furthest western tip of the Brittany peninsula, Little John went so far as to roar a foul-mouthed challenge at the approaching vessel, a red-and-white-sailed sinuous snake-boat from the northern lands, by the look of it, packed with a dozen fair-haired warriors. But the sight of so many fighting men in hauberk and helm lined up at the rail and all eager for battle, seemed to discourage any would-be pirates and, to Little John’s chagrin, they put over their helm and headed north, and we were left unmolested as we began the long journey south towards the warm lands of Aquitaine.

From the first day of the voyage Nur seemed determined to stay apart. And I believe that none of us, except perhaps Robin, were entirely comfortable with having an avowed witch in our company – I saw the hostile glances that Sir Nicholas de Scras gave her as she perched up at the bow, an unmoving black bundle seemingly impervious to the discomforts of the journey.

She remained as still as a statue for hours at a time, but, very occasionally, she would withdraw a small dark-grey leather bag from within her robe, where it was attached by a thong around her neck. She would shake the contents of the bag, a collection of what looked like little grey-white splinters of wood, on to the deck and peer closely at the pile, poking at it with one skinny finger. Then she would gather the pieces up carefully and pour them back into the bag, which she would return to its place deep within her clothing.

Her behaviour was puzzling, and I feared it was some demonic ritual and crossed myself whenever I saw her perform it. But most of the time she sat, still and silent, and I, and most of the rest of the Companions, ignored her. By the second day, I had mastered my white-hot rage at her presence among us. But I still had every intention of cutting her scrawny throat, as soon as possible after we had accomplished our quest and taken possession of the Grail – I vowed to myself silently that I would take a good deal more than three drops of her blood once Goody had been cured.

From the first day on board, it became apparent that the witch had brought nothing with her in the way of nourishment. Each night, when we stopped and made our way gratefully on to dry land, we most often went without food. It was Lent, and while Robin cared little for this season of self-denial, Sir Nicholas insisted that we observe its strictures. How could we even hope to be worthy of finding the Grail, he pointed out, if we ignored God’s will and flouted His holy laws? So, reluctantly, we restricted ourselves to one meal a day, consumed at noon aboard ship. As
The Goose
shouldered her way through the tall grey waves, and we chewed our dull Lenten fare beneath the aft-castle, Nur remained in the bow and apparently neither ate nor drank. She did not attempt to join us, nor did she ask for anything, she merely sat hour after hour, twenty yards away with the heap of dirty coal sacks between us. And while we chatted idly, told stories and swapped jests, and consumed our meagre daily meal, she stared out at the passing coast as if deep in a trance, or as if she were the only soul in the world.