Grail Knight: Number 5 in series (Outlaw Chronicles) (53 page)

I would recommend that anyone interested in the story of the Grail read Professor Joseph Goering’s excellent book
The Virgin and the Grail: Origins of a Legend
(Yale University Press, 2005) for more details on the medieval Grail poets. Indeed, I must acknowledge him as the inspiration behind my own take on the Holy Grail in this novel and my source on its origins and, perhaps, its physical reality. Because I think that there might really have been a physical object which people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries considered to be the Holy Grail.

And it might even still exist.

Let’s return to the beginning of the twentieth century and the Valley of Boí in the high Pyrenees. At the same time that the marvellous painting of
Christ in Majesty
was discovered in St Clement of Taüll, a set of wooden sculptures was found in another church dedicated to St Mary a few hundred yards away. These figures were part of a tableau, dated to about the same time as the fresco in St Clement’s church, which is most likely to depict the Descent from the Cross – statues of Mary and Joseph of Arimathea, and perhaps Nicodemus, helping to bring down Christ’s dead body after the Crucifixion. In other contemporary examples of this sort of tableau, Christ’s hand is seen as dangling over a wooden bowl held by his mother, in a manner such that a few drops of his blood might fall into the bowl. The wooden statue of Mary bears a striking resemblance to the image of the Virgin in the painting in St Clement’s. Both have the same clothing, the same posture, the same expression – indeed the resemblance is so striking that scholars believe that one must have been a copy of the other, although it is impossible to say whether the painting inspired the wooden statue or vice versa.

But, for me, the most interesting thing about the statue of the Virgin, which is now housed in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University is that the left hand, the hand that would have been holding the bowl that caught the Saviour’s precious blood, is missing. It has been cut off at some point and neither the hand nor the wooden bowl it once undoubtedly held have ever been found.

I like to think that this missing twelfth-century wooden bowl, from a group of statues in a remote church in the Pyrenees, might have been the origin of the physical, the actual Holy Grail. Perhaps this was the sacred objective of real quests, by real medieval knights. And, perhaps, somewhere in a Swiss vault in a wealthy man’s private collection, or in some secret dusty annex of the Vatican, it sits to this day.

Cathars and castles in the air

Montségur, of course, is a real castle twenty miles south-east of Foix in the shadow of the Pyrenees, and was the site, in 1244, of the heroic last stand of the Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade. But forty-four years earlier, when my fictional heroes and villains occupied the place, it was in reality a ruined fortress that had been abandoned by the Counts of Foix as too remote to bother with. Ruined or not, it still would have been a formidable bastion and, I think, very nearly impregnable after only minor repairs to the walls. A man standing on the battlements can see for miles in all directions, and the sides of the mountain are incredibly steep, and fairly exhausting to climb in a T-shirt and shorts on a sunny May day – let alone in heavy armour and under fire from all manner of lethal medieval missiles. It took ten thousand crusaders nine months to subdue the castle in 1243–1244, and this presented me, as a twenty-first-century novelist, with a bit of a problem.

When I had puffed and panted my way up the tourist path to the main entrance on the western side in hot sunshine, and clambered all over the existing walls of the castle, I was left with a magnificent view and absolutely no idea how a handful of men – even superb warrior-heroes such as the Companions of the Grail – could possibly capture it in the year 1200. I knew that the crusaders forty years later had attacked up the narrow spur of land to the east of the castle (as my heroes eventually do) but, like Alan Dale, I could still not see how the Companions could successfully attack on such a narrow front under sustained fire from the castle. A couple of well-aimed mangonel or trebuchet strikes and a volley or two of crossbow bolts would have destroyed such a small number of assailants.

I went back down the mountain in a state of mild despair, had supper and went to bed early. The next morning I was awoken at dawn by a terrible noise that sounded like something between machine-gun fire and a seventies drum solo. A powerful hail storm was battering the terracotta roof of my auberge and hailstones the size of golf balls were bouncing waist-high off the stone floor of the courtyard below. After the bright sunshine of the day before this came as something of a shock, and when the hail ceased a thick fog descended on the village of Montségur, weather so dense that you could barely see ten yards. I stayed in the hotel most of that day – except for a very pleasant visit to the excellent Montségur museum – but I was quite happy to be inactive, indeed, I was elated. I had found a plausible plot device that would allow me to get my heroes close to the castle walls without being seen: Nur’s sudden magical mist. The weather there, so close to the Pyrenees, is very changeable, and if I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would never have dared to include something quite so preposterous in the story.

As well as outlandish weather, Montségur is also well supplied with a satisfying quantity of strange myths. There are many legends of the Cathars hiding their lost treasure in secret caves, and of travellers well into the twentieth century having visions of a lady dressed all in white appearing to them on the steep slopes. My kind hosts at the auberge told me that there was a large hidden cave burrowed into the rock directly under the castle itself, but the official French gatekeeper of the castle grumpily denied it and despite a long, hot exhausting search I could not find it. Nevertheless, there may well be large caves in the rock of Montségur, as yet undiscovered or just forgotten, and in my imagination, in one of them, at a stone altar far at the back lies an ancient skeleton with an even older plain wooden bowl in his bony grasp.

Angus Donald

Tonbridge, Kent, December 2012

A book is always a collaborative process – I get to have my name in big letters on the front, of course, but it wouldn’t exist without a great deal of help from a great many people. I would firstly like to thank my agent Ian Drury, of Sheil Land Associates, for his unfailing support and encouragement of the Outlaw Chronicles over the years and also his colleague in the foreign rights department Gaia Banks. My talented editors at Sphere, Ed Wood and Iain Hunt, deserve high praise for wrestling this book into its current shape, and Anne O’Brien did her usual excellent proofreading job.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Joseph Goering of the University of Toronto for his marvellous book
The Virgin and The Grail
, which inspired me to put my Robin Hood and his Holy Grail in the same novel. On my trip to Barcelona last summer to look at some extraordinary twelfth-century images of the Grail, I was looked after very well by Anna Portabella, and lavishly wined and dined by Daniel Fernandez, my Spanish publishers. And I must also thank the kind staff at the Museu Nacional D’Art de Catalunya, who showed me around the reconstructed Pyrenean church of St Clement of Taüll in the basement of their fine museum and other jewels of their collection and patiently answered all my questions. Finally, I would like to thank Philip and Camilla Drinkall, who lent me their iPad charging lead at the auberge in Montségur and allowed me to join them for a wonderful evening, and without whom my research trip would have been far less enjoyable.