Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (29 page)

The tunnel, we discovered, exited from the side of a high bank into a bramble thicket deep in the forest, far outside the walls of the town, and perhaps half a mile north of the place where we had left the horses. The forest was absolutely silent, the moon was still high and the sharp, pine-wood-perfumed air, which I sucked deep into my lungs, was as refreshing as a draught of mountain spring water. Looking back at the high walls of the town, some fifty yards behind us, it was difficult to imagine the scene of mutilation and carnage we had left in that small, underground House of God. There was no sight nor sound of pursuit – not yet – but our enemies were bound to know of the tunnel. It could not be long before a horde of men-at-arms came surging from that dark mouth in the bramble-covered bank.

Nur led us south, through the tall trees, to the place where we had left the horses, and we mounted immediately and moved off westwards, pushing deeper into the trackless wilderness of pine.

At dawn, we made camp in a small clearing, I would guess some six or seven miles from the town of Casteljaloux. I was exhausted – a night of combat and mortal fear had left me drained of all strength. I was ready to fall into my blankets and sleep for a year. Instead, we tended to the wounded as best we could and ate a few scraps of bread and dried meat, and drank watered wine from our flasks. And then we sat down in a circle to take counsel.

I was not the only one near the end of his strength. Gavin appeared to be in a deep stupor, with Little John trying from time to time to keep him awake by feeding him sips of wine; Tuck was huddled in his blankets with his eyes closed; Sir Nicholas’s face, marked with overlapping bruises of blue and red, and black crusts of dried blood, looked some ten years older; while Roland and Thomas both had to stifle their yawns as Robin spoke. Nur sat apart, playing with her little bag of finger bones, casting them on to an old scrap of cloth and muttering over the patterns they made.

Only my lord of Locksley seemed unaffected by the rigours of the night before. Indeed, he looked indecently youthful and full of energy. ‘Well, my friends, we have missed the Master, and the Grail,’ he began. ‘But we must not despair. We have slain a goodly number of our enemies and we are all still living.’

‘We’re not all exactly in prime condition,’ growled John.

‘No, that is true,’ conceded Robin. ‘And that is why we shall rest here for a full day, to give us time to tend our various hurts. But we are not beaten. No, my friends, we are very far from beaten. We have, indeed, achieved a victory of sorts. We have boldly entered the enemy’s stronghold, rescued our comrade, slain his soldiers, and made our escape. We have won the first battle. In this war with the Master and his followers, we are winning!’

Winning? It did not feel like it. We were no closer to capturing the Grail, and time, I was conscious, was slipping away. In fact, we were worse off than we had been yesterday, for now, we did not know where the Master and the Grail were.

As he so often did, Robin seemed to be reading my thoughts: ‘We all need to rest and recuperate, before we put our minds to whence the Master and his men might have fled…’

The bruised knight lifted a hand, and Robin stopped speaking and turned to him. ‘Sir Nicholas?’

‘I believe the Master has gone east,’ he said.

‘Indeed?’ said Robin. ‘And how do you know this? When I asked you last night—’

‘Last night, last night I was not in my right mind…’ Sir Nicholas cut straight through Robin’s words. ‘But I know this because the Seigneur d’Albret came to me after I was taken. His men stripped me and took turns to beat me with their fists while he watched and laughed, and asked me questions. All of which I refused to answer…’ Sir Nicholas touched his battered face with a questing fingertip.

‘They did not have the time for a more lengthy and sophisticated inquisition, praise God – and for your speedy rescue, my lord, I am eternally grateful – but, as he left me in that cell below the tower, d’Albret promised that in a few hours his newly initiated knights would dismember me as part of the ceremony – a blooding, he called it – and that my head would be cut off and set on a spike on the walls of the town,
facing east
, to greet the Master when he returned.’

‘East,’ said Robin. ‘Thank you, Sir Nicholas.’

To my surprise, Tuck spoke then. His voice was stronger than I had expected, though I could tell he was in pain.

‘East means Toulouse. The Master has gone there. Where else would he recruit knights to fight for his banner? The largest town to the east is Toulouse.’

‘He could have gone further afield,’ Roland said. ‘Carcassonne or even Montpellier…’

‘If he has gone further,’ said Tuck, ‘he would surely be obliged to pass through Toulouse and we might well get wind of him there.’

It was Nur who spoke next: ‘The bones say eastwards. The Grail is to the east of here,’ she said with extraordinary authority. ‘The Grail is in Toulouse.’

Two days later, at midday, we found ourselves on the south bank of the Garonne, opposite a town that Tuck told us was called Tonneins. We were about to enter lands that for generations had been controlled by the Counts of Toulouse.

We had rested for a day at our temporary camp deep in the pine woods then packed up and headed east, looping far north around Casteljaloux and cutting through forest and farmland, avoiding all established roads, even drovers’ tracks, which we were sure would be patrolled by armed men from the town, and eschewing all forms of human contact. Our mood was subdued, a little discouraged, by the time we reached the river, even though we now considered ourselves beyond the limit of the fury of the Jealous Castle.

Roland and Tuck were in considerable pain, even with their wounds tightly bound and travelling on horseback at a walking pace. Gavin was pale and ill but determined not to allow the crack to his pate to slow our pace, while John hovered around him like a vast, red-faced, mother hen. Only Nur was in a buoyant mood – after her revenge on d’Albret, she now carried his manhood, with a dozen or so others, in the sticky bag that banged against her hip as she rode along beside my cousin. As we paced the southern bank of the Garonne, she warbled a weird lilting Arabic song whose words I did not understand but which I assumed was some sort of bloodthirsty victory chant.

And Robin, as always, was determinedly cheerful.

‘We have won a decisive battle, Alan,’ insisted my lord of Locksley as we walked our horses beside the wide, slow-flowing expanse of brown water. ‘The Master has been materially weakened. He has lost many men – maybe as much as third of his total strength. And, after such a bloody defeat, his grip on his remaining followers must be loosened, perhaps fatally.’

‘He also knows that we are coming for him. From now on, he will be on his guard,’ I said gloomily. ‘And he can still use the power and mystery of the Holy Grail to recruit more fighting men.’

‘Maybe, maybe … but I feel it in my bones: we shall have him the next time, and the Grail, too. I am sure of it.’

The mighty trading city of Toulouse, set on a gentle bend of the Garonne, had high, well-defended walls and for the most part happy, healthy, wealthy inhabitants. But the first thing that struck us about that southern citadel was its colour. It was built, almost entirely it seemed, not from honest granite or limestone, but from slim, delicate orange-red bricks – and I swear to you that Toulouse glowed like a vast pink jewel on the horizon as we urged our tired horses towards it.

We approached from almost due west, having parted from the river near Agen. When we asked for news outside that little town, a frightened local villein tending a herd of pigs had told us that a party of
routiers
fifty strong had been raiding along the north bank of the Garonne and burning and looting like a pack of fiends from Hell – Mercadier’s masterless men, I had no doubt. Out of the Casteljaloux frying pan and into a mercenary fire, I thought to myself. Robin, with a flinty glance at Roland, had decreed that to avoid the risk of encountering them, we should make our progress towards Toulouse by riding due south across forty miles of rich corn-growing land to Auch, then another forty miles due east through neat vineyards to enter the rose-bright city through its drab western suburb of Saint Cyprien.

And so we did.

As we crossed the river by the thoroughfare over the Pont Neuf, a little before noon on a bright Sunday, we heard all the church bells of the city ring prettily out in celebration – it was St George’s Day, Tuck informed us – but although we knew it was in truth merely the jubilation customarily shown on a feast day, the place appeared to be happily welcoming us. The smooth pink walls of Toulouse stretched out before us like the widespread bare arms of a sun-kissed giantess, and when we had stated our business at the gatehouse to a jolly sergeant-at-arms and his men – we were pilgrims heading for Montpellier wishing to consult the learned doctors there – we were admitted to the narrow streets of the Cité. We asked the jovial warden if a party of knights, friends of ours, in white surcoats with a blue cross on the front, and commanded by a monk who called himself the Master, had passed through his gate. But the man merely shook his head and denied all knowledge of such a group. We pressed him to ask among his men-at-arms, and after a short delay, he returned from the guardhouse with a rueful shake of his head and some advice: ‘If you seek tidings of your friends, go to the St George’s Haberdashers’ Fair in the big square by the Maison des Consuls in the heart of the Cité, and ask around. They sell more than fancy clothes and frilly folderols. They sell good wine and honest food – and information. Ask at the taverns. You might even be able to buy yourself a little love as well. Ha-ha. If you ask the right demoiselles!’ And he roared with laughter as if his words were the drollest ever spoken.

Brick houses two or even three storeys high loomed over us on either side as we entered the Cité, glowing in the strong southern sunlight. Like the sergeant at the gate, even the lowliest denizens of Toulouse seemed to have a happy, ruddy light to their faces as they flowed with us in huge numbers towards the centre of the town, play-fighting, singing and calling jests loudly to their fellows in the Langue d’Oc, the musical tongue of that land. We decided that we would first seek information at the Haberdashers’ Fair and then head for the northern area known as the Bourg, which housed the town’s richer merchants, and also the cathedral of St-Sernin, where the gatekeeper had told us that we might conceivably find lodgings in the dormitory.

We scarcely needed to touch spur to horse for the crowd was enough to carry us along like a great jostling tide. And, by good fortune, having shouted out a few questions to the throng, we knew we were being carried in the right direction. After a while, we found ourselves entering an enormous space in the centre of Toulouse that seemed to contain half the population of Christendom. Here, clearly, was the great St George’s Day Haberdashers’ Fair. Hundreds of carts filled the middle of the square, piled with thick woollen cloth dyed a homely rusty red or bolts of snowy linen, or mounds of fine lace, ribbons fluttering from poles like miniature pennants, and even a few rolls of bold silks in sky blue and grass-green. All the haberdashery carts were arranged in two rows. Around the outside, squeezed between bustling taverns, were the shopfronts of the permanent haberdashers’, their counters displaying parti-coloured hose, and long robes of velvet, magnificent hats adorned with the long feathers of exotic birds, worked-leather jerkins – more than the eye could take in at once. The noise was enormous and continuous, bewildering after the peace of the countryside – a babbling, rainbow sea of humanity; the merchants crying their wares, the Toulousain men and women strolling about in their own saint’s day finery, buying goods, fingering the fine cloth, arguing and laughing and shouting greetings to their friends. Long ago I had acquainted myself with the language of these southern lands, and, in truth, it was not so far removed from French as to seem utterly outlandish. Indeed, most of the Companions could make sense of it, but even so, the strange, twangy Toulousain accent occasionally defeated my ears – although that may have been partly the assault of the colour and noise and the sheer numbers of people. The heavenly smell of onions frying in pork fat broke in upon my senses just then, causing my stomach to give a start of joy. It had been many hours since we’d broken our fast.

We tethered our horses at a tavern on the northern side of the square and, while the rest of the Companions took their ease in the shade at a long communal table under the overhang of the upper storeys of the house and ordered up cool jugs of wine, Robin quietly asked Thomas and I to make a circuit of the square and ask at the taverns for news of the Master and his Knights of Our Lady.

I was not best pleased – I was hungry and, to be honest, the smell of well-spiced sausages cooking on the tavern’s hot griddle was tormenting me. But I obeyed, and Thomas and I dutifully pushed our way through the crowds, stopping at each tavern and, trying to avoid drooling openly at the varied and delicious smells that we encountered, we asked each proprietor or serving man in turn if they had seen any men in the surcoats of the Knights of Our Lady or had had any word of someone who called himself the Master and had an extra thumb on his left hand. After half an hour, I returned to Robin, having nothing of any significance to tell him. In truth, I am surprised that my lord could hear me make my report over the growling of my stomach.

But the wondrous thing about being afflicted with hunger is that its cure, while never permanent, is so delightful. I munched on a vast pile of sausages laced with pepper, marjoram and sage, and eggs stirred in butter in a frying pan, and chewed good white bread and sank a cup or two of sweet red wine in the company of my friends and companions, and very soon my good humour was restored.

I sat back, replete, poured another cup of wine and began to take a proper, measured look at the bustle of the fair. To our left, perhaps twenty yards away, I noticed a well-dressed lad of no more than fourteen or fifteen in the act of climbing on to a brick mounting block. He was a jongleur, I assumed, by the old vielle he carried, and apprenticed to a rich music master judging by the quality of his clothes. I sat back and listened happily while he began to play and sing for the passers-by. I could not clearly make out what he was playing, but it sounded like a simple
canso
– a love song of the kind that these southern lands were famous for. Even at that distance, and over the bubbling noise of the market, I could tell that he was a musician with no vast store of talent, and worse, his old vielle was slightly out of tune.