The Lazarus Vault (44 page)

Arthur. Arthur. Arthur.

At last I understand the tapestries, the crown and the throne. Morgan’s an opportunist, a usurper papering over his theft with a grandiose title that’s fallen out of use. But the title he’s claiming is more ancient and profound than the dilapidated kingdom of Morgannwg.

Morgan raises his hand and the hall goes quiet. Hugh’s about to say something, but before he can speak I step forward, feeling for where the different torches overlap to make the brightest place. It’s a trick I learned as a troubadour – no one listens to a man in shadow.

‘I can tell you a tale.’

The King’s gaze switches on to me. ‘Iwant answers. The truth. I have the best minstrels and harpers in Wales to tell me stories.’

‘Not like mine. I have the greatest story that was ever told in a royal court.’

Another troubador’s conceit. No one pays to hear about the moderately interesting.

‘My story is the story of Perceval the Welshman. A story no one has ever heard before. A story of secrets.’

Our eyes meet; he’s intrigued. He nods.

‘Tell me your tale, and I’ll see how I like it.’

I lift my shoulders, tugging against the rope. ‘It’s easier to tell with my hands unbound.’

A guard cuts the rope. I rub my wrists, then walk over to the table and take a cup of wine to wet my throat.

‘Long ago, when Arthur was king …’

I make it up as I go along. Sometimes I catch myself digressing, or repeating too much, but each time some instinct draws me back to the story, like a blind man feeling the edge of the path with his stick. I watch the King’s face the same way I watched Ada’s when we sat by the river at Hautfort, catching the things that please him, amplifying them where I can. Some of it comes from the stories my mother told me; other pieces from scraps I’ve heard in other halls, or half-remember from the books I studied as a child. For the rest, I take the coarse threads of my life, dye them vivid colours and weave my own tapestry to hang in the hall.

I tell the king how Perceval was born in the waste forest of Wales. How his father and his brothers were Arthur’s knights, all killed on the same day. How his mother raised him with no knowledge of knights or chivalry, to protect him from the same fate – but how the moment he saw a company of knights riding through the forest, he knew it was his destiny.

I tell how Perceval went to Caerleon where Arthur kept his court. I make great play of looking around the hall.

‘It wasn’t a particularly great or magnificent court …’

Morgan flushes, sensitive to any insult.

‘
…
only three thousand knights or so.’

They all laugh. Morgan thumps the arm of his chair and nods his approval. The energy in the room lifts and channels into me.

I tell them more. How Arthur dubbed Perceval a knight, and how Perceval set out to find adventures. How he met the Lady Blancheflor, saved her castle from the wicked Clamadeu and made her his sweetheart, though not his wife. In my story, there’s no husband to get in the way.

The hall’s growing dim – the servants have forgotten to replace the candles. I shift position; I crouch to keep my face in the light. I tell how Perceval set out again and came to a broad river and met a fisherman. How the fisherman directed him to a castle in a hidden valley, and how that night at supper he witnessed marvels he did not understand.

*

Afterwards, I couldn’t tell you how it came to me that way. All I know is that at that moment there isn’t a man in the hall who would not stay there until dawn to find out what the grail and spear mean.

I tell them how Perceval woke the next morning and found the castle deserted. How as he was riding over the drawbridge it closed behind him. How he never found the castle again – how the quest drove him mad. How he lost his memory so totally that he no longer even remembered God. He wandered for five years, forgetting everything, until on Good Friday a hermit took him in and restored him to sanity. How he vowed he would not spend two consecutive nights under the same roof as long as he lived, until he had found out why the spear bled, and what the grail contained.

How –

I break off suddenly. Morgan thinks it’s a dramatic effect; he waits a moment for me to continue. When he realises I’m not going to, he rises forward like a man woken from a dream.

‘And?’

I shrug my shoulders. ‘I don’t know the ending. The story hasn’t finished yet.’

London

Blanchard sat in his office and stared at the chessboard on his desk. It was late in the game: the only surviving pieces were two kings and a white knight. He toyed with the knight, testing possible moves.

Which way now?

He was a good chess player – not formally brilliant, no automaton, but hard to beat. He knew that you had to read play not just from your perspective, or even as a textbook might judge it, but as your opponent understood it.
Where does he see his strengths? His vulnerabilities? What will he do next?
On the rare occasions he played against computers, he did badly: he needed a man sitting across the table to dissect, to worm into and ultimately to defeat.

Take Ellie. The moment she’d walked into his office, even in her frumpy clothes and wide-eyed innocence, he’d known she’d be a formidable adversary. Saint-Lazare had called her a pawn: Blanchard saw she was a pawn who could become a queen. For all he respected her, he’d still underestimated her.
He’d failed to block her path. Now she was almost home.

He had one chance left, a single shot. The engineers at Mirabeau said that the chapel was beyond repair: whatever secrets had once adorned it had been blown to pieces by the helicopter. Ellie might resurface, but after their run-in at Annelise Stirt’s she’d be careful about showing herself.

Which way would she go? Which way should he go?

He pushed the chessboard aside, toppling over the king with the sudden motion. He took out his computer. His white finger hovered over a button, then stabbed down.

In twenty-four hours, he’d know.

Caerleon, Wales

Thirty-five knights crammed in a stockade makes for an uncomfortable night. There’s not even space to relieve ourselves, except by pissing through the palings. At least we stay warm.

Around midnight the King’s seneschal unlocks the door and brings us back to the hall. The fire’s smouldering, the guards have gone. The King sits alone, wreathed in smoke, as if the dragons on his throne have started to stir.

‘You can have your horses, your arms, and safe conduct out of my kingdom.’

Hugh starts to speak, but Morgan cuts him off.

‘I’ll also give you some news. The men you want left Morgannwg this afternoon, heading north-west. They stopped at an inn to feed their horses – the stable boy heard them talking about a place called Cwm Bychan. It’s in Gwynedd, near the sea. Three days’ hard riding through the mountains.

Hugh gives a slight bow. ‘Thank you, your majesty.’

A terse smile. ‘Make sure you keep your storyteller safe. I want him to tell me how it ends.’

*

For three days and nights we ride, snatching sleep and food where we can, never more than half an hour, then back in the saddle and on again. The pace is brutal, the terrain unforgiving. I understand why the Normans never really conquered Wales – why Morgan ap Owain could overthrow them the moment the King’s attention was elsewhere. It’s a wild land of sheer valleys, icy swamps and dark forests that stretch to the horizon. It punishes the horses. One by one, they go lame or collapse with exhaustion. We leave the riders behind, though it’s a long, dangerous journey home.

It feels as if the land is swallowing us. Each day the valleys grow deeper, while the peaks reach further towards the clouds. Snow blankets the upper reaches, vast heights where only God and eagles roam.

On the second afternoon we pause at the top of yet another ridge. Hugh reins in next to me and turns round in his saddle, looking for something.

He points back. ‘Can you see them?’

I strain my eyes, but don’t see anything. ‘Who?’

‘The riders. They’ve been following us all the way from Caerleon.’

‘Malegant’s men?’ I look again; I still can’t see them.

‘Morgan’s.’

‘Has he changed his mind? Are they chasing us?’

‘Stalking us.’ He gives a grim laugh. ‘Did you really think your story was so powerful it moved Morgan to mercy? He understood what you were saying, for all you disguised it. He knows we’re after something powerful – a weapon. He wants it for himself.’

I scan the long valley behind us, the ranks of trees like furrows in a field. Browns fade to greys as they fall in the mountain shadows. It feels like the end of the world.

*

At dusk on the third day we come to a long lake nestled in a valley. High summits loom all around it like sleeping giants. On one of them, at the eastern end of the lake, a fire glows against the sky.

Hugh slips off his horse. ‘That’s them. Please God we’re not too late.’

We dismount and leave the horses drinking from the lake. We don’t need to tether them – they don’t have the strength to wander far. We’re not much better off, but we don’t have a choice. We jog along the dusky lakeshore, hoping the men on the hill don’t hear the sound of our arms.

Even on foot, the hill looks too steep to climb. But at the far end of the lake, we find steps cut in to the mountain face, climbing towards the pass between two summits. It doesn’t surprise me. I remember what my mother said, how Wales is a wild realm on the rim of the world, how every rock and tree might hide the door to an enchanted land. Stones stand upright like trees; sometimes when the tide goes out, whole forests appear on the seabed. I think these steps must be the same, a hidden road that’s opened by a beam of moonlight, or the song of a wren.

Scrambling up the stairs in the dark is agonising work. There isn’t a muscle in my body that doesn’t ache from so many long days in the saddle. The moon’s behind a cloud: we scuttle like crabs, ungainly in our armour, testing every rock to make sure it won’t make a noise. Distant thunder rumbles across the valley – a storm’s coming. Above us, the flames on the mountain sway into the night.

The last few yards are the hardest: an almost vertical climb up a damp rock face. There must be another way, but Hugh doesn’t want to run into any sentries. We strap our swords to
our backs and cling on with numb fingers, praying the fire masks the noise we make.

At last I haul myself over the lip of the cliff, and flop belly-down in a patch of heather. I tilt back my head and stare at the open hilltop.

France

The Land Rover had a satnav, but Ellie turned it off. She didn’t think you could track a car through its GPS, but the idea of a chip sending a signal into space, broadcasting her position, made her too anxious. Instead, she studied the map book and made a list of waypoints, then set out following the road signs. She stuck to secondary roads as much as she could. She wished Annelise had owned something less conspicuous – a Renault or a Citroën.

She’d never realised how big France was. She drove for hours, but when she checked her progress on the map she still had dauntingly far to go. Around 3 a.m. she almost dozed off – her eyes had closed without her realising it. The shock took her another few miles, but when she felt her eyes starting to droop again she had no choice but to pull over on a farm track and curl up in the back seat. A tractor rumbling past woke her at dawn.

Now she had a new worry. The fuel gauge on the car was edging inexorably down. She stopped at a small petrol station and spent the last of her euros on a few more litres. The needle barely budged.

She crossed into Britanny and kept driving. The main roads followed the coast, but she found one that cut straight through the middle of the peninsula, a winding valley overshadowed by a spine of hills. Even in France, she knew it was considered a wild region – a place with its own language, its own customs, its own ghosts and magic. The needle touched red.

She almost made it. On a road so minor she’d almost missed it, five kilometres short of where Doug had indicated on the map, the engine cut out. She coasted down the hill and nosed the Land Rover on to the grassy verge. After so many hours being carried along by its sound, the silence was eerie. She sat in the car for a few minutes, drawing up her courage. Then she got out and walked into the trees.

The forest was an otherworldly place. Whereas the Mirabeau forest had been dead and brown, this one burst with life. Green ivy hung from the trees and crept over their bark; moss carpeted the floor in a spongy mass that soaked up her footsteps. At first Ellie found it comforting, a glimpse of spring in the depths of winter, but the further she went the more oppressive it seemed. The colour became alien, not vibrant but poisonous, stifling everything.

Black clouds began massing in the sky. The forest darkened. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Soon the rain began to beat down, and the leafless trees were no protection. It drizzled down her neck and soaked her clothes. The pack on her back felt twice as heavy. She began to wonder if she’d ever get out, or if she’d die of exposure in this lonely forest. Sheets of rain washed over her face, blinding her.

The sky seemed lighter up ahead. She plunged on, slipping on the moss and the slick rock underfoot. She came out of the trees on the edge of a ridge and stared. Below her, a narrow valley plunged away like a scar in the forest. Few trees grew there. The entire valley was choked with boulders, a jumble of vast lumps of granite, each taller than she was, piled up like giant golf balls. A stream flowed around the rocks, sometimes dammed into pools, sometimes spilling over them and falling in cascades, sometimes disappearing into hidden channels
below. Moss covered everything.