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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2004

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007310326

Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007338801

Version: 2018-04-20

‘The battle scenes, as always, are masterful; and the vignettes of everyday living, in times of extreme hardship, have the ring of simple truth’

Sunday Telegraph

HERETIC

is for Dorothy Carroll,

who knows why

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Prologue: CALAIS, 1347

Part One: THE DEVIL’S PLAYTHING

The Count of …

It had not …

Thomas spent his …

Thomas and his …

In the name …

Part Two: FUGITIVE

It rained all …

Thomas woke with …

Sir Henri Courtois …

Part Three: THE DARKNESS

The search of …

Sir Guillaume, the …

It was on …

Epilogue: THE GRAIL

Historical Note

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
Calais, 1347

The road came from the southern hills and crossed the marshes by the sea. It was a bad road. A summer’s persistent rain had left it a strip of glutinous mud that baked hard when the sun came out, but it was the only road that led from the heights of Sangatte to the harbours of Calais and Gravelines. At Nieulay, a hamlet of no distinction whatever, it crossed the River Ham on a stone bridge. The Ham was scarcely worth the title of river. It was a slow stream that oozed through fever-ridden marshlands until it vanished among the coastal mudflats. It was so short that a man could wade from its source to the sea in little more than an hour, and it was so shallow that a man could cross it at low tide without getting his waist wet. It drained the swamps where reeds grew thick and herons hunted frogs among the marsh grass, and it was fed by a maze of smaller streams where the villagers from Nieulay and Hammes and Guîmes set their wicker eel traps.

Nieulay and its stone bridge might have expected to slumber through history, except that the town of Calais lay just two miles to the north and, in the summer of 1347, an army of thirty thousand Englishmen was laying siege to the port and their encampment lay thick between the town’s formidable walls and the marshes. The road which came from the heights and crossed the Ham at Nieulay was the only route a French relief force might use and in the height of the summer, when the inhabitants of Calais were close to starvation, Philip of Valois, King of France, brought his army to Sangatte.

Twenty thousand Frenchmen lined the heights, their banners thick in the wind blowing from the sea. The oriflamme was there, the sacred war pennant of France. It was a long flag with three pointed tails, a blood-red ripple of precious silk, and if the flag looked bright that was because it was new. The old oriflamme was in England, a trophy taken on the wide green hill between Wadicourt and Crécy the previous summer. But the new flag was as sacred as the old, and about it flew the standards of France’s great lords: the banners of Bourbon, of Montmorency and of the Count of Armagnac. Lesser flags were visible among the noble standards, but all proclaimed that the greatest warriors of Philip’s kingdom were come to give battle to the English. Yet between them and the enemy were the River Ham and the bridge at Nieulay that was defended by a stone tower around which the English had dug trenches. These they had filled with archers and men-at-arms. Beyond that force was the river, then the marshes, and on the higher ground close to Calais’s high wall and its double moat was a makeshift town of houses and tents where the English army lived. And such an army as had never been seen in France. The besiegers’ encampment was bigger than Calais itself. As far as the eye could see were streets lined with canvas, with timber houses, with paddocks for horses, and between them were men-at-arms and archers. The oriflamme might as well have stayed unfurled.

‘We can take the tower, sire.’ Sir Geoffrey de Charny, as hard a soldier as any in Philip’s army, gestured down the hill to where the English garrison of Nieulay was isolated on the French side of the river.

‘To what end?’ Philip asked. He was a weak man, hesitant in battle, but his question was pertinent. If the tower did fall and the bridge of Nieulay was thus delivered into his hands, what would it serve? The bridge merely led to an even greater English army, which was already arraying itself on the firm ground at the edge of its encampment.

The citizens of Calais, starved and despairing, had seen the French banners on the southern crest and they had responded by hanging their own flags from their ramparts. They displayed images of the Virgin, pictures of St Denis of France and, high on the citadel, the blue and yellow royal standard to tell Philip that his subjects still lived, still fought. Yet the brave display could not hide that they had been besieged for eleven months. They needed help.

‘Take the tower, sire,’ Sir Geoffrey urged, ‘and then attack across the bridge! Good Christ, if the Goddamns see us win one victory they might lose heart!’ A growl of agreement came from the assembled lords.

The King was less optimistic. It was true that Calais’s garrison still held out, and that the English had hardly damaged its walls, let alone found a way to cross the twin moats, but nor had the French been able to carry any supplies to the beleaguered town. The people there did not need encouragement, they needed food. A puff of smoke showed beyond the encampment and a few heartbeats later the sound of a cannon rolled across the marshes. The missile must have struck the wall, but Philip was too far away to see its effect.

‘A victory here will encourage the garrison,’ the Lord of Montmorency urged, ‘and put despair in the English hearts.’

But why should the English lose heart if the tower of Nieulay fell? Philip thought it would merely fill them with a resolve to defend the road on the far side of the bridge, but he also understood that he could not keep his rough hounds leashed when a hated enemy was in sight and so he gave his permission. ‘Take the tower,’ he instructed, ‘and God give you victory.’

The King stayed where he was as the lords gathered men and armed themselves. The wind from the sea brought the smell of salt, but also a scent of decay which probably came from rotting weed on the long tidal flats. It made Philip melancholy. His new astrologer had refused to attend the King for weeks, pleading that he had a fever, but Philip had learned that the man was in fine health, which meant that he must have seen some great disaster in the stars and simply feared to tell the King. Gulls cried beneath the clouds. Far out to sea a grubby sail bellied towards England, while another ship was anchoring off the English-held beaches and ferrying men ashore in small boats to swell the enemy ranks. Philip looked back to the road and saw a group of around forty or fifty English knights riding towards the bridge. He made the sign of the cross, praying that the knights would be trapped by his attack. He hated the English. Hated them.

The Duke of Bourbon had delegated the organization of the assault to Sir Geoffrey de Charny and Edouard de Beaujeu, and that was good. The King trusted both men to be sensible. He did not doubt they could carry the tower, though he still did not know what good it would do; but he supposed it was better than letting his wilder noblemen carry their lances in a wild charge across the bridge to utter defeat in the marshlands. He knew they would love nothing better than to make such an attack. They thought war was a game and every defeat only made them more eager to play. Fools, he thought, and he made the sign of the cross again, wondering what dire prophecy the astrologer was hiding from him. What we need, he thought, is a miracle. Some great sign from God. Then he twitched in alarm because a nakerer had just beaten his great kettledrum. A trumpet sounded.

The music did not presage the advance. Rather the musicians were warming their instruments, ready for the attack. Edouard de Beaujeu was on the right where he had assembled over a thousand crossbowmen and as many men-at-arms, and he plainly intended to assault the English from one flank while Sir Geoffrey de Charny and at least five hundred men-at-arms charged straight down the hill at the English entrenchments. Sir Geoffrey was striding along the line shouting at the knights and men-at-arms to dismount. They did so reluctantly. They believed that the essence of war was the cavalry charge, but Sir Geoffrey knew that horses were no use against a stone tower protected by entrenchments and so he was insisting they fought on foot. ‘Shields and swords,’ he told them, ‘no lances! On foot! On foot!’ Sir Geoffrey had learned the hard way that horses were pitiably vulnerable to English arrows, while men on foot could advance at the crouch behind stout shields. Some of the higher-born men were refusing to dismount, but he ignored them. Even more French men-at-arms were hurrying to join the charge.

The small band of English knights had crossed the bridge now and looked as if they intended to ride straight up the road to challenge the whole French battleline, but instead they checked their horses and gazed up at the horde on the ridge. The King, watching them, saw that they were led by a great lord. He could tell that by the size of the man’s banner, while at least a dozen of the other knights carried the square flags of bannerets on their lances. A rich group, he thought, worth a small fortune in ransoms. He hoped they would ride to the tower and so trap themselves.

The Duke of Bourbon trotted his horse back to Philip. The Duke was in plate armour that had been scoured with sand, vinegar and wire until it shone white. His helmet, still hanging from his saddle’s pommel, was crested with feathers dyed blue. He had refused to dismount from his destrier, which had a steel chanfron to protect its face and a trapper of gleaming mail to shield its body from the English archers who were no doubt stringing their bows in the entrenchments. ‘The oriflamme, sire,’ the Duke said. It was supposed to be a request, but somehow sounded like an order.

‘The oriflamme?’ The King pretended not to understand.

‘May I have the honour, sire, of carrying it to battle?’

The King sighed. ‘You outnumber the enemy ten to one,’ he said, ‘you hardly need the oriflamme. Let it stay here. The enemy will have seen it.’ And the enemy would know what the unfurled oriflamme meant. It instructed the French to take no prisoners, to kill everyone, though doubtless any wealthy English knight would still be captured rather than killed, for a corpse yielded no ransom. Still, the unfurled triple-tongued flag should put terror into English hearts. ‘It will remain here,’ the King insisted.

The Duke began to protest, but just then a trumpet sounded and the crossbowmen started down the hill. They were in green and red tunics with the grail badge of Genoa on their left arms, and each was accompanied by a foot soldier holding a pavise, a huge shield that would protect the crossbowman while he reloaded his clumsy weapon. A half-mile away, beside the river, Englishmen were running from the tower to the earth entrenchments that had been dug so many months before that they were now thickly covered with grass and weeds. ‘You will miss your battle,’ the King said to the Duke who, forgetting the scarlet banner, wheeled his great armoured warhorse towards Sir Geoffrey’s men.

‘Montjoie St Denis!’ The Duke shouted France’s war cry and the nakerers thumped their big drums and a dozen trumpeters blared their challenge at the sky. There were clicks as helmet visors were lowered.

The crossbowmen were already at the foot of the slope, spreading right to envelop the English flank. Then the first arrows flew: English arrows, white-feathered, fluttering across the green land, and the King, leaning forward in his saddle, saw that there were too few archers on the enemy side. Usually, whenever the damned English gave battle, their archers outnumbered their knights and men-at-arms by at least three to one, but the outpost of Nieulay seemed mostly to be garrisoned by men-at-arms. ‘God speed you!’ the King called to his soldiers. He was suddenly enthused because he could scent victory.

The trumpets sounded again and now the grey metallic tide of men-at-arms swept down the slope. They roared their war cry and the sound was rivalled by the drummers who were hammering their taut goatskins and the trumpeters who were playing as if they could defeat the English with sound alone. ‘God and St Denis!’ the King shouted.

The crossbow quarrels were flying now. Each short iron bolt was fitted with leather vanes and they made a hiss as they streaked towards the earthworks. Hundreds of bolts flew, then the Genoese stepped behind the huge shields to work the ratchets that bent back their steel-reinforced bows. Some English arrows thumped into the pavises, but then the archers turned towards Sir Geoffrey’s attack. They put bodkin-headed arrows on their strings, arrows that were tipped with three or four inches of narrow-shafted steel that could pierce mail as if it were linen. They drew and shot, drew and shot, and the arrows thumped into shields and the French closed ranks. One man was pierced in the thigh and stumbled and the men-at-arms flowed around him and closed up again. An English archer, standing to loose his bow, was hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt and his arrow flew crazily into the air.

‘Montjoie St Denis!’ The men-at-arms bellowed their challenge as the charge reached the flat ground at the foot of the slope. The arrows hammered into shields with sickening force, but the French held their tight formation, shield overlapping shield, and the crossbowmen edged closer to aim at the English archers who were forced to stand high in their trenches to loose their weapons. A bolt went clean through an iron sallet to pierce an English skull. The man toppled sideways, blood spilling down his face. A volley of arrows whipped from the tower’s top and the answering crossbow bolts rattled on the stones as the English men-at-arms, seeing that their arrows had not checked the enemy, stood with unsheathed swords to meet the charge.

‘St George!’ they shouted, then the French attackers were at the first entrenchment and stabbing down at the English beneath them. Some Frenchmen found narrow causeways piercing the trench and they streamed through to attack the defenders from the rear. Archers in the two rearmost trenches had easy targets, but so did the Genoese crossbowmen who stepped from behind their pavises to rain iron on the enemy. Some of the English, sensing the slaughter to come, were leaving their entrenchments to run towards the Ham. Edward de Beaujeu, leading the crossbowmen, saw the fugitives and shouted at the Genoese to drop their crossbows and join the attack. They drew swords or axes and swarmed at the enemy. ‘Kill!’ Edward de Beaujeu shouted. He was mounted on a destrier and, his sword drawn, he spurred the big stallion forward. ‘Kill!’

The Englishmen in the forward trench were doomed. They struggled to protect themselves from the mass of French men-at-arms, but the swords, axes and spears slashed down. Some men tried to yield, but the oriflamme was flying and that meant no prisoners so the French swamped the slick mud at the trench’s bottom with English blood. The defenders from the rearward trenches were all running now, but the handful of French horsemen, those too proud to fight on foot, spurred across the narrow causeways, shoved through their own men-at-arms and screamed the war cry as they drove their big horses into the fugitives beside the river. Stallions wheeled as swords chopped. An archer lost his head beside the river that turned sudden red. A man-at-arms screamed as he was trampled by a destrier, then stabbed with a lance. An English knight held his hands in the air, offering a gauntlet as a token of surrender, and he was ridden down from behind, his spine pierced with a sword, then another horseman cut an axe into his face. ‘Kill them!’ the Duke of Bourbon shouted, his sword wet, ‘kill them all!’ He saw a group of archers escaping towards the bridge and shouted at his followers, ‘With me! With me! Montjoie St Denis!’

The archers, nearly thirty of them, had fled towards the bridge, but when they reached the straggle of reed-thatched houses beside the river they heard the hoofbeats and turned in alarm. For a heartbeat it seemed they would panic again, but one man checked them. ‘Shoot the horses, boys,’ he said, and the bowmen hauled on their cords, loosed, and the white-fledged arrows slammed into the destriers. The Duke of Bourbon’s stallion staggered sideways as two arrows drove through its mail and leather armour, then it fell as another two horses went down, hooves flailing. The other riders instinctively turned away, looking for easier pickings. The Duke’s squire yielded his own horse to his master, then died as a second English volley hissed from the village. The Duke, rather than waste time trying to mount his squire’s horse, lumbered away in his precious plate armour, which had protected him from the arrows. Ahead of him, around the base of Nieulay’s tower, the survivors from the English trenches had formed a shield wall that was now surrounded by vengeful Frenchmen. ‘No prisoners!’ a French knight shouted, ‘no prisoners!’ The Duke called for his men to help him into the saddle.

Two of the Duke’s men-at-arms dismounted to help their master onto the new horse, and just then they heard the thunder of hooves. They turned to see a group of English knights charging from the village. ‘Sweet Jesus!’ The Duke was half in, half out of the saddle, his sword scabbarded, and he began to fall backwards as the men helping him drew their own swords. Where the hell had these English come from? Then his other men-at-arms, desperate to protect their lord, slammed down their visors and turned to meet the challenge. The Duke, sprawling on the turf, heard the clash of armoured horsemen.

The English were the group of men the French King had seen. They had paused in the village to watch the slaughter in the entrenchments and had been about to ride back across the bridge when the Duke of Bourbon’s men had come close. Too close: a challenge that could not be ignored. So the English lord led his household knights in a charge that tore into the Duke of Bourbon’s men. The Frenchmen had not been ready for the attack, and the English came in proper array, knee to knee, and the long ash lances, carried upright as they charged, suddenly dropped to the killing position and tore through mail and leather. The English leader was wearing a blue surcoat slashed with a diagonal white band on which three red stars were blazoned. Yellow lions occupied the blue field that turned suddenly black with enemy blood as he rammed his sword up into the unprotected armpit of a French man-at-arms. The man shook with pain, tried to back-swing his sword, but then another Englishman hammered a mace into his visor that crumpled under the blow and sprang blood from a dozen rents. A hamstrung horse screamed and toppled. ‘Stay close!’ the Englishman in the gaudy surcoat was shouting at his men. ‘Stay close!’ His horse reared up and flailed its hooves at an unhorsed Frenchman. That man went down, helmet and skull crushed by a horseshoe, and then the rider saw the Duke standing helpless beside a horse; he recognized the value of the man’s shining plate armour and so spurred at him. The Duke fended the sword blow with his shield, swung his own blade that jarred on the enemy’s leg armour and suddenly the horseman was gone.

Another Englishman had pulled his leader’s horse away. A mass of French horsemen was coming down the hill. The King had sent them in hope of capturing the English lord and his men, and still more Frenchmen, unable to join the attack on the tower because too many of their fellows were assembling to help kill the garrison’s remnant, were now charging the bridge. ‘Back!’ the English leader called, but the village street and the narrow bridge were blocked by fugitives and threatened by Frenchmen. He could cut his way through, but that would mean killing his own archers and losing some of his knights in the chaotic panic, so instead he looked across the road and saw a path running beside the river. It might lead to the beach, he thought, and there, perhaps, he could turn and ride east to rejoin the English lines.

The English knights slashed their spurs back. The path was narrow, only two horsemen could ride abreast; on one side was the River Ham and on the other a stretch of boggy swamp, but the path itself was firm and the English rode it until they reached a stretch of higher ground where they could assemble. But they could not escape. The small piece of higher ground was almost an island, reachable only by the path and surrounded by a morass of reeds and mud. They were trapped.

A hundred French horsemen were ready to follow along the path, but the English had dismounted and made a shield wall, and the thought of hacking their way through that steel barrier persuaded the French to turn back to the tower where the enemy was more vulnerable. Archers were still shooting from its ramparts, but the Genoese crossbowmen were replying, and now the French slammed into the English men-at-arms drawn up at the tower’s foot.

The French attacked on foot. The ground was slippery because of the summer’s rain and the mailed feet churned it to mud as the leading men-at-arms bellowed their war cry and threw themselves onto the outnumbered English. Those English had locked their shields and they thrust them forward to meet the charge. There was a clash of steel on wood, a scream as a blade slid under a shield’s edge and found flesh. The men in the second English rank, the rear rank, flailed with maces and swords over their comrades’ heads. ‘St George!’ a shout went up, ‘St George!’ and the men-at-arms heaved forward to throw the dead and dying off their shields. ‘Kill the bastards!’

‘Kill them!’ Sir Geoffrey de Charny yelled in return and the French came back, stumbling in their mail and plate across the wounded and dead, and this time the English shields were not touching rim to rim and the French found gaps. Swords crashed onto plate armour, thrust through mail, beat in helmets. A few last defenders were trying to escape across the river, but the Genoese crossbowmen pursued them and it was a simple matter to hold an armoured man down in the water until he drowned, then pillage his body. A few English fugitives stumbled away on the farther bank, going to where an English battleline of archers and men-at-arms was forming to repel any attack across the Ham.

Back at the tower a Frenchman with a battle-axe swung repeatedly at an Englishman, cracking open the espalier that protected his right shoulder, slashing through the mail beneath, beating the man down to a crouch, and still the blows came until the axe had laid open the enemy’s chest and there was a splay of white ribs among the mangled flesh and torn armour. Blood and mud made a paste underfoot. For every Englishman there were three enemies, and the tower door had been left unlocked to give the men outside a place where they could retreat, but instead it was the French who forced their way inside. The last defenders outside the tower were cut down and killed, while inside the attackers began fighting up the stairs.

The steps turned to the right as they climbed. That meant the defenders could use their right arms without much encumbrance while the attackers were forever baulked by the big central pillar of the stairs, but a French knight with a short spear made the first rush and he disembowelled an Englishman with the blade before another defender killed him with a sword thrust over the dying man’s head. Visors were up here, for it was dark in the tower, and a man could not see with his eyes half covered with steel. And so the English stabbed at French eyes. Men-at-arms pulled the dead off the steps, leaving a trail of guts behind, and then two more men charged up, slipping on offal. They parried English blows, thrust their swords up into groins, and still more Frenchmen pushed into the tower. A terrible scream filled the stairwell, then another bloodied body was hauled down and out of the way: another three steps were clear and the French shoved on up again. ‘Montjoie St Denis!’

An Englishman with a blacksmith’s hammer came down the steps and he beat at French helmets, killing one man by crushing his skull and driving the others back until a knight had the wit to seize a crossbow and sidle up the stairs until he had a clear view. The bolt went through the Englishman’s mouth to lift off the back of his skull and the French rushed again, screaming hate and victory, trampling the dying man under their gore-spattered feet and carrying their swords up to the very top of the tower. There a dozen men tried to shove them back down the steps, but still more French were thrusting upwards. They forced the leading attackers onto the swords of the defenders and the next men clambered over the dying and the dead to rout the last of the garrison. All the men were hacked down. One archer lived long enough to have his fingers chopped off, then his eyes prised out, and he was still screaming as he was thrown off the tower onto the waiting swords below.

The French cheered. The tower was a charnel house, but the banner of France would fly from its ramparts. The entrenchments had become graves for the English. Victorious men began to strip the clothes from the dead to search for coins, when a trumpet called.

There were still some Englishmen on the French side of the river. There were horsemen trapped on a patch of firmer ground.

So the killing was not done.

The St James anchored off the beach south of Calais and ferried its passengers ashore in rowboats. Three of the passengers, all in mail, had so much baggage that they paid two of the St James’s crew to carry it into the streets of the English encampment where they sought the Earl of Northampton. Some of the houses had two storeys, and cobblers, armourers, smiths, fruiterers, bakers and butchers had all hung signs from their upper floors. There were whorehouses and churches, fortune-tellers’ booths and taverns built between the tents and houses. Children played in the streets. Some had small bows and shot blunt arrows at irritated dogs. The nobles’ quarters had their banners displayed outside and mail-clad guards standing at their doors. A cemetery spread into the marshes, its damp graves filled with men, women and children who had succumbed to the fever that haunted the Calais swamps.

The three men found the Earl’s quarters, which was a large wooden dwelling close to the pavilion that flew the royal flag, and there two of them, the youngest and the oldest, stayed with the baggage while the third man, the tallest, walked towards Nieulay. He had been told that the Earl had led some horsemen on a foray towards the French army. ‘Thousands of the bastards,’ the Earl’s steward had reported, ‘picking their noses up on the ridge, so his lordship wants to challenge some of them. Getting bored, he is.’ He looked at the big wooden chest that the two men were guarding. ‘So what’s in that?’

‘Nose pickings,’ the tall man had said, then he shouldered a long black bowstave, picked up an arrow bag and left.

His name was Thomas. Sometimes Thomas of Hookton. Other times he was Thomas the Bastard and, if he wanted to be very formal, he could call himself Thomas Vexille, though he rarely did. The Vexilles were a noble Gascon family and Thomas of Hookton was an illegitimate son of a fugitive Vexille, which had left him neither noble nor Vexille. And certainly not Gascon. He was an English archer.

Thomas attracted glances as he walked through the camp. He was tall. Black hair showed beneath the edge of his iron helmet. He was young, but his face had been hardened by war. He had hollow cheeks, dark watchful eyes and a long nose that had been broken in a fight and set crooked. His mail was dulled by travel and beneath it he wore a leather jerkin, black breeches and long black riding boots without spurs. A sword scabbarded in black leather hung at his left side, a haversack at his back and a white arrow bag at his right hip. He limped very slightly, suggesting he must have been wounded in battle, though in truth the injury had been done by a churchman in the name of God. The scars of that torture were hidden now, except for the damage to his hands, which had been left crooked and lumpy, but he could still draw a bow. He was twenty-three years old and a killer.

He passed the archers’ camps. Most were hung with trophies. He saw a French breastplate of solid steel that had been pierced by an arrow hung high to boast what archers did to knights. Another group of tents had a score of horsetails hanging from a pole. A rusty, torn coat of mail had been stuffed with straw, hung from a sapling and pierced by arrows. Beyond the tents was marshland that stank of sewage. Thomas walked on, watching the French array on the southern heights. There were enough of them, he thought, far more than had turned up to be slaughtered between Wadicourt and Crécy. Kill one Frenchman, he thought, and two more appear. He could see the bridge ahead of him now and the small hamlet beyond, and behind him men were coming from the encampment to make a battleline to defend the bridge because the French were attacking the small English outpost on the farther bank. He could see them flooding down the slope, and he could also see a small group of horsemen who he assumed were the Earl and his men. Behind him, its sound dulled by distance, an English cannon launched a stone missile at Calais’s battered walls. The noise rumbled over the marshes and faded, to be replaced by the clash of weapons from the English entrenchments.

Thomas did not hurry. It was not his fight. He did, however, take the bow from his back and string it and he noted how easy that had become. The bow was old; it was getting tired. The black yew stave, which had once been straight, was now slightly curved. It had followed the string, as archers said, and he knew it was time to make a new weapon. Yet he reckoned the old bow, which he had coloured black and onto which he had fixed a silver plate showing a strange beast holding a cup, still had a few Frenchmen’s souls in it.

He did not see the English horsemen charge the flank of the French attack because the hovels of Nieulay hid the brief fight. He did see the bridge fill with fugitives who got in each other’s way in their haste to escape the French fury, and above their heads he saw the horsemen ride towards the sea on the river’s far bank. He followed them on the English side of the river, leaving the embanked road to jump from tussock to tussock, sometimes splashing through puddles or wading through mud that tried to steal his boots. Then he was by the river and he saw the mud-coloured tide swirling its way inland as the sea rose. The wind smelt of salt and decay.

He saw the Earl then. The Earl of Northampton was Thomas’s lord, the man he served, though the Earl’s rein was loose and his purse generous. The Earl was watching the victorious French, knowing that they would come to attack him, and one of his men-at-arms had dismounted and was trying to find a path firm enough for the armoured horses to reach the river. A dozen more of his men-at-arms were kneeling or standing across the French approach path, ready to meet a charge with shield and sword. And back at the hamlet, where the slaughter of the English garrison was finished, the French were turning wolfishly towards the trapped men.

Thomas waded into the river. He held his bow high, for a wet string would not draw, and he waded through the tide’s tug. The water came to his waist, then he was pushing out onto the muddy bank and he ran to where the men-at-arms waited to receive the first French attackers. Thomas knelt just beside them, out in the marsh; he splayed his arrows on the mud, then plucked one.

A score of Frenchmen were coming. A dozen were mounted and those horsemen kept to the path, but on their flanks dismounted men-at-arms splashed through the swamps and Thomas forgot them, they would take time to reach the firm ground, so instead he began shooting at the mounted knights.

He shot without thinking. Without aiming. This was his life, his skill and his pride. Take one bow, taller than a man, made from yew, and use it to send arrows of ash, tipped with goose feathers and armed with a bodkin point. Because the great bow was drawn to the ear it was no use trying to aim with the eye. It was years of practice that let a man know where his arrows would go and Thomas was shooting them at a frantic pace, one arrow every three or four heartbeats, and the white feathers slashed across the marsh and the long steel tips drove through mail and leather into French bellies, chests and thighs. They struck with the sound of a meat-axe falling on flesh and they stopped the horsemen dead. The leading two were dying, a third had an arrow in his upper thigh, and the men behind could not pass the wounded men in front because the path was too narrow and so Thomas began shooting at the dismounted men-at-arms. The force of an arrow’s strike was enough to throw a man backwards. If a Frenchman lifted a shield to protect his upper body Thomas put an arrow into his legs, and if his bow was old, then it was still vicious. He had been at sea for more than a week and he could feel the ache in his back muscles as he hauled the string back. Even pulling the weakened bow was the equivalent of lifting a grown man bodily, and all that muscle was poured into the arrow. A horseman tried to splash through the mud but his heavy destrier floundered in the soggy ground; Thomas selected a flesh arrow, one with a broad, tanged head that would rip through a horse’s guts and blood vessels and he loosed it low, saw the horse shudder, picked a bodkin from the ground and let it fly at a man-at-arms who had his visor up. Thomas did not look to see if any of the arrows were on target, he shot and picked another missile, then shot again, and the bowstring whipped along the horn bracer that he wore on his left wrist. He had never bothered to protect his wrist before, revelling in the burn left by the string, but the Dominican had tortured his left forearm and left it ridged with scar so now the horn sheath guarded the flesh.

The Dominican was dead.

Six arrows left. The French were retreating, but they were not beaten. They were shouting for crossbowmen and for more men-at-arms and Thomas, responding, put his two string fingers in his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle. Two notes, high and low, repeated three times, then a pause and he blew the double notes again and he saw archers running towards the river. Some were the men who had retreated from Nieulay and others came from the battleline because they recognized the signal that a fellow archer needed help.

Thomas picked up his six arrows and turned to see that the first of the Earl’s horsemen had found a passage to the river and were leading their heavily armoured horses across the swirling tide. It would be minutes before they were all across, but archers were splashing towards the farther bank now and those closest to Nieulay were already shooting at a group of crossbowmen being hurried towards the unfinished fight. More horsemen were coming down from the heights of Sangatte, enraged that the trapped English knights were escaping. Two galloped into the marsh where their horses began to panic in the treacherous ground. Thomas laid one of his last arrows on the string, then decided the marsh was defeating the two men and an arrow would be superfluous.

A voice came from just behind him. ‘Thomas, isn’t it?’

‘Sire.’ Thomas snatched off his helmet and turned, still on his knees.

‘You’re good with that bow, aren’t you?’ The Earl spoke ironically.

‘Practice, sire.’

‘A nasty mind helps,’ the Earl said, motioning Thomas to stand. The Earl was a short man, barrel-chested, with a weatherbeaten face that his archers liked to say looked like the backside of a bull, but they also reckoned he was a fighter, a good man and as hard as any of his men. He was a friend of the King’s, but also a friend of any who wore his badge. He was not a man to send others into battle unless he led them, and he had dismounted and removed his helmet so that his rearguard would recognize him and know that he shared their danger. ‘I thought you were in England,’ he said to Thomas.

‘I was,’ Thomas said, speaking now in French for he knew the Earl was more comfortable in that language, ‘then I was in Brittany.’

‘Now you’re rescuing me.’ The Earl grinned, revealing the gaps where he had lost his teeth. ‘I suppose you’ll want a pot of ale for this?’

‘As much as that, my lord?’

The Earl laughed. ‘We rather made fools of ourselves, didn’t we?’ He was watching the French who, now that a hundred or more English archers lined the riverbank, were thinking twice before launching another attack. ‘We thought we might tempt forty of their men to a battle of honour by the village, then half their bloody army comes down the hill. Do you bring me news of Will Skeat?’

‘Dead, my lord. Died in the fight at La Roche-Derrien.’

The Earl flinched, then made the sign of the cross. ‘Poor Will. God knows I loved him. No better soldier ever breathed.’ He looked at Thomas. ‘And the other thing. Do you bring me that?’

He meant the Grail. ‘I bring you gold, my lord,’ Thomas said, ‘but not that.’

The Earl patted Thomas’s arm. ‘We shall talk, but not here.’ He looked at his men and raised his voice. ‘Back now! Back!’

His dismounted rearguard, their horses already led to safety through the rising tide, now hurried to the river and crossed. Thomas followed and the Earl, his sword drawn, was the last man to wade the deepening water. The French, denied their valuable quarry, jeered at his retreat.

And that day’s fighting was done.

The French army did not stay. They had killed the Nieulay garrison, but even the most hot-blooded among them knew they could do no more. The English were too many. Thousands of archers were just praying for the French to cross the river and offer battle, so instead Philip’s men marched away, leaving the trenches of Nieulay filled with the dead and the windswept ridge of Sangatte empty, and next day the town of Calais surrendered. King Edward’s first instinct was to slaughter every inhabitant, to line them beside the moat and cut the heads from their emaciated bodies, but his great lords protested that the French would then do the same to any English-held town they captured in Gascony or Flanders and so the King reluctantly reduced his demand to just six lives.

Six men, hollow-cheeked and dressed in the robes of penitents, with hanging nooses draped about their necks, were brought from the town. They were all leading citizens, merchants or knights, men of wealth and standing, the kind of men who had defied Edward of England for eleven months. They carried the keys of the town’s gates on cushions that they laid before the King, then prostrated themselves in front of the wooden platform where the King and Queen of England and the great magnates of their realm were seated. The six men pleaded for their lives, but Edward was angry. They had defied him, and so the executioner was summoned, but again his great lords argued that he invited reprisals, and the Queen herself knelt to her husband and begged that the six men be spared. Edward growled, paused while the six lay motionless beneath the dais, then let them live.

Food was taken to the starving citizens, but no other mercy was shown. They were evicted, allowed to take nothing except the clothes they wore and even those were searched to ensure that no coins or jewels were being smuggled past the English lines. An empty town, with houses for eight thousand people, with warehouses and shops and taverns and docks and a citadel and moats, belonged to England. ‘A doorway into France,’ the Earl of Northampton enthused. He had taken a house that had belonged to one of the six, a man who now wandered Picardy like a beggar with his family. It was a lavish stone house beneath the citadel with a view of the town quay that was now crowded with English ships. ‘We’ll fill the town with good English folk,’ the Earl said. ‘You want to live here, Thomas?’

‘No, sire,’ Thomas said.

‘Nor me,’ the Earl admitted. ‘A pig sty in a swamp, that’s what it is. Still, it’s ours. So what do you want, young Thomas?’

It was morning, three days after the town’s surrender, and already the confiscated wealth of Calais was being distributed to the victors. The Earl had found himself even richer than he expected, for the great chest Thomas had brought from Brittany was filled with gold and silver coins captured in Charles of Blois’s camp after the battle outside La Roche-Derrien. One-third of that belonged to Thomas’s lord and the Earl’s men had counted the coins, setting aside a third of the Earl’s share for the King.

Thomas had told his story. How, on the Earl’s instructions, he had gone to England to search his dead father’s past for a clue to the Grail. He had found nothing except a book in which his father, a priest, had written about the Grail, but Father Ralph had wits that wandered and dreams that seemed real and Thomas had learned nothing from the writings, which had been taken from him by the Dominican who had tortured him. But the book had been copied before the Dominican took it and now, in the Earl’s new sunlit chamber above the quay, a young English priest tried to make sense of the copy.

‘What I want,’ Thomas told the Earl, ‘is to lead archers.’

‘God knows if there’ll be anywhere to lead them,’ the Earl responded gloomily. ‘Edward talks of attacking Paris, but it won’t happen. There’s going to be a truce, Thomas. We’ll plead eternal friendship, then go home and sharpen our swords.’ There was the crackle of parchment as the priest took up a new page. Father Ralph had written in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French, and evidently the priest understood them all. He made an occasional note on a scrap of parchment as he read. Barrels of beer were being unloaded on the quay, the rumble of the great tuns sounding like thunder. The flag of England’s King, leopards and fleur-de-lis, flew from the captured citadel above the French standard, which was hung upside down as a mark of derision. Two men, Thomas’s companions, stood at the edge of the room, waiting for the Earl to include them. ‘God knows what employment there’ll be for archers,’ the Earl went on, ‘unless it’s guarding fortress walls. Is that what you want?’

‘It’s all I’m good for, my lord. Shooting a bow.’ Thomas spoke in Norman French, the language of England’s aristocracy and the language his father had taught him. ‘And I have money, my lord.’ He meant that he could now recruit archers, equip them with horses and take them on the Earl’s service, which would cost the Earl nothing, but the Earl could then take one-third of everything they plundered.

That was how Will Skeat, common born, had made his name. The Earl liked such men, profited from them, and he nodded approvingly. ‘But lead them where?’ he asked. ‘I hate truces.’

The young priest intervened from his table by the window. ‘The King would prefer it if the Grail were found.’

‘His name’s John Buckingham,’ the Earl said of the priest, ‘and he’s Chamberlain of the Receipt of the Exchequer, which may not sound much to you, young Thomas, but it means he serves the King and he’ll probably be Archbishop of Canterbury before he’s thirty.’

‘Hardly, my lord,’ the priest said.

‘And of course the King wants the Grail found,’ the Earl said, ‘we all want that. I want to see the damn thing in Westminster Abbey! I want the King of damned France crawling on his bloody knees to say prayers to it. I want pilgrims from all Christendom bringing us their gold. For God’s sake, Thomas, does the bloody thing exist? Did your father have it?’

‘I don’t know, my lord,’ Thomas said.

‘Much bloody use you are,’ the Earl grumbled.

John Buckingham looked at his notes. ‘You have a cousin, Guy Vexille?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas said.

‘And he seeks the Grail?’

‘By seeking me,’ Thomas said. ‘And I don’t know where it is.’

‘But he was searching for the Grail before he knew you existed,’ the young priest pointed out, ‘which suggests to me that he possesses some knowledge denied to us. I would advise, my lord, that we seek this Guy Vexille.’

‘We’d be two dogs chasing each other’s tails,’ Thomas put in sourly.

The Earl waved Thomas to silence. The priest looked back at his notes. ‘And, opaque though these writings are,’ he said disapprovingly, ‘there is one thread of light. They seem to confirm that the Grail was at Astarac. That it was hidden there.’

‘And taken away again!’ Thomas protested.

‘If you lose something valuable,’ Buckingham said patiently, ‘where do you begin your search? At the place where it was last seen. Where is Astarac?’

‘Gascony,’ Thomas said, ‘in the fief of Berat.’

‘Ah!’ the Earl said, but then was silent.

‘And have you been to Astarac?’ Buckingham asked. He might have been young, but he had an authority that came from more than his job with the King’s Exchequer.

‘No.’

‘Then I suggest you go,’ the priest said, ‘and see what you can learn. And if you make enough noise in your searching then your cousin may well come looking for you, and you can find him and discover what he knows.’ He smiled, as if to suggest that he had solved the problem.

There was silence except that one of the Earl’s hunting dogs scratched itself in a corner of the room and on the quays a sailor let loose a stream of profanities that might have brought a blush to the devil’s face. ‘I can’t capture Guy by myself,’ Thomas protested, ‘and Berat offers no allegiance to our King.’

‘Officially,’ Buckingham said, ‘Berat offers allegiance to the Count of Toulouse, which today means the King of France. The Count of Berat is definitely an enemy.’

‘No truce is signed yet,’ the Earl offered hesitantly.

‘And won’t be for days, I suspect,’ Buckingham agreed.

The Earl looked at Thomas. ‘And you want archers?’

‘I’d like Will Skeat’s men, sire.’

‘And no doubt they’d serve you,’ the Earl said, ‘but you can’t lead men-at-arms, Thomas.’ He meant that Thomas, not nobly born and still young, might have the authority to command archers, but men-at-arms, who considered themselves of higher rank, would resent his leadership. Will Skeat, worse born than Thomas, had managed it, but Will had been much older and far more experienced.

‘I can lead men-at-arms,’ one of the two men by the wall announced.

Thomas introduced the two. The one who had spoken was an older man, scarred, one eye missing, hard as mail. His name was Sir Guillaume d’Evecque, Lord of Evecque, and he had once held a fief in Normandy until his own King turned against him and now he was a landless warrior and Thomas’s friend. The other, younger man was also a friend. He was a Scot, Robbie Douglas, taken prisoner at Durham the year before. ‘Christ’s bones,’ the Earl said when he knew Robbie’s circumstances, ‘but you must have raised your ransom by now?’

‘I raised it, my lord,’ Robbie admitted, ‘and lost it.’

‘Lost it!’

Robbie stared at the floor, so Thomas explained in one curt word. ‘Dice.’

The Earl looked disgusted, then turned again to Sir Guillaume. ‘I have heard of you,’ he said, and it was a compliment, ‘and know you can lead men-at-arms, but whom do you serve?’

‘No man, my lord.’

‘Then you cannot lead my men-at-arms,’ the Earl said pointedly, and waited.

Sir Guillaume hesitated. He was a proud man, thirty-five years old, experienced in war, with a reputation that had first been made by fighting against the English. But now he possessed no land, no master, and as such he was little more than a vagabond and so, after a pause, he walked to the Earl and knelt before him and held up his hands as though in prayer. The Earl put his own hands round Sir Guillaume’s. ‘You promise to do me service,’ he asked, ‘to be my liege man, to serve no other?’

‘I do so promise,’ Sir Guillaume said earnestly and the Earl raised him and the two men kissed on the lips.

‘I’m honoured,’ the Earl said, thumping Sir Guillaume’s shoulder, then turned to Thomas again. ‘So you can raise a decent force. You’ll need, what? Fifty men? Half archers.’

‘Fifty men in a distant fief?’ Thomas said. ‘They won’t last a month, my lord.’

‘But they will,’ the Earl said, and explained his previous, surprised reaction to the news that Astarac lay in the county of Berat. ‘Years ago, young Thomas, before you were off your mother’s tit, we owned property in Gascony. We lost it, but we never formally surrendered it, so there are three or four strongholds in Berat over which I have a legitimate claim.’ John Buckingham, reading Father Ralph’s notes again, raised an eyebrow to suggest that the claim was tenuous at best, but he said nothing. ‘Go and take one of those castles,’ the Earl said, ‘make raids, make money, and men will join you.’

‘And men will come against us,’ Thomas observed quietly.

‘And Guy Vexille will be one,’ the Earl said, ‘so that’s your opportunity. Take it, Thomas, and get out of here before the truce is made.’

Thomas hesitated for a heartbeat or two. What the Earl suggested sounded close to insanity. He was to take a force into the deep south of French territory, capture a fortress, defend it, hope to capture his cousin, find Astarac, explore it, follow the Grail. Only a fool would accept such a charge, but the alternative was to rot away with every other unemployed archer. ‘I shall do it, my lord,’ he said.

‘Good. Be off with you, all of you!’ The Earl led Thomas to the door, but once Robbie and Sir Guillaume were on the stairs, he pulled Thomas back for a private word. ‘Don’t take the Scotsman with you,’ the Earl said.

‘No, my lord? He’s a friend.’

‘He’s a damned Scot and I don’t trust them. They’re all goddamned thieves and liars. Worse than the bloody French. Who holds him prisoner?’

‘Lord Outhwaite.’

‘And Outhwaite let him travel with you? I’m surprised. Never mind, send your Scottish friend back to Outhwaite and let him moulder away until his family raises the ransom. But I don’t want a bloody Scotsman taking the Grail away from England. You understand?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Good man,’ the Earl said and clapped Thomas’s back. ‘Now go and prosper.’

Go and die, more like. Go on a fool’s errand, for Thomas did not believe the Grail existed. He wanted it to exist, he wanted to believe his father’s words, but his father had been mad at times and mischievous at others, and Thomas had his own ambition, to be a leader as good as Will Skeat. To be an archer. Yet the fool’s errand gave him a chance to raise men, lead them and follow his dream. So he would pursue the Grail and see what came.

He went to the English encampment and beat a drum. Peace was coming, but Thomas of Hookton was raising men and going to war.

PART ONE
The Devil’s Plaything

The Count of Berat was old, pious and learned. He had lived sixty-five years and liked to boast that he had not left his fiefdom for the last forty of them. His stronghold was the great castle of Berat. It stood on a limestone hill above the town of Berat, which was almost surrounded by the River Berat that made the county of Berat so fertile. There were olives, grapes, pears, plums, barley and women. The Count liked them all. He had married five times, each new wife younger than the last, but none had provided him with a child. He had not even spawned a bastard on a milkmaid though, God knew, it was not for lack of trying.

That absence of children had persuaded the Count that God had cursed him and so in his old age he had surrounded himself with priests. The town had a cathedral and eighteen churches, with a bishop, canons and priests to fill them, and there was a house of Dominican friars by the east gate. The Count blessed the town with two new churches and built a convent high on the western hill across the river and beyond the vineyards. He employed a chaplain and, at great expense, he purchased a handful of the straw that had lined the manger in which the baby Jesus had been laid at his birth. The Count encased the straw in crystal, gold and gems, and placed the reliquary on the altar of the castle’s chapel and prayed to it each day, but even that sacred talisman did not help. His fifth wife was seventeen and plump and healthy and, like the others, barren.

At first the Count suspected that he had been cheated in his purchase of the holy straw, but his chaplain assured him that the relic had come from the papal palace at Avignon and produced a letter signed by the Holy Father himself guaranteeing that the straw was indeed the Christ-child’s bedding. Then the Count had his new wife examined by four eminent doctors and those worthies decreed that her urine was clear, her parts whole and her appetites healthy, and so the Count employed his own learning in search of an heir. Hippocrates had written of the effect of pictures on conception and so the Count ordered a painter to decorate the walls of his wife’s bedchamber with pictures of the Virgin and child; he ate red beans and kept his rooms warm. Nothing worked. It was not the Count’s fault, he knew that. He had planted barley seeds in two pots and watered one with his new wife’s urine and one with his own, and both pots had sprouted seedlings and that, the doctors said, proved that both the Count and Countess were fertile.

Which meant, the Count had decided, that he was cursed. So he turned more avidly to religion because he knew he did not have much time left. Aristotle had written that the age of seventy was the limit of a man’s ability, and so the Count had just five years to work his miracle. Then, one autumn morning, though he did not realize it at the time, his prayers were answered.

Churchmen came from Paris. Three priests and a monk arrived at Berat and they brought a letter from Louis Bessières, Cardinal and Archbishop of Livorno, Papal Legate to the Court of France, and the letter was humble, respectful and threatening. It requested that Brother Jerome, a young monk of formidable learning, be allowed to examine the records of Berat. ‘It is well known to us,’ the Cardinal Archbishop had written in elegant Latin, ‘that you possess a great love of all manuscripts, both pagan and Christian, and so entreat you, for the love of Christ and for the furtherance of His kingdom, to allow our Brother Jerome to examine your muniments.’ Which was fine, so far as it went, for the Count of Berat did indeed possess a library and a manuscript collection that was probably the most extensive in all Gascony, if not in all southern Christendom, but what the letter did not make clear was why the Cardinal Archbishop was so interested in the castle’s muniments. As for the reference to pagan works, that was a threat. Refuse this request, the Cardinal Archbishop was saying, and I shall set the holy dogs of the Dominicans and the Inquisitors onto your county and they will find that the pagan works encourage heresy. Then the trials and the burnings would begin, neither of which would affect the Count directly, but there would be indulgences to buy if his soul was not to be damned. The Church had a glutton’s appetite for money and everyone knew the Count of Berat was rich. So the Count did not want to offend the Cardinal Archbishop, but he did want to know why His Eminence had suddenly become interested in Berat.

Which was why the Count had summoned Father Roubert, the chief Dominican in the town of Berat, to the great hall of the castle, which had long ceased to be a place of feasting, but instead was lined with shelves on which old documents mouldered and precious handwritten books were wrapped in oiled leather.

Father Roubert was just thirty-two years old. He was the son of a tanner in the town and had risen in the Church thanks to the Count’s patronage. He was very tall, very stern, with black hair cut so short that it reminded the Count of the stiff-bristled brushes the armourers used to burnish the coats of mail. Father Roubert was also, this fine morning, angry. ‘I have business in Castillon d’Arbizon tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and will need to leave within the hour if I am to reach the town in daylight.’

The Count ignored the rudeness in Father Roubert’s tone. The Dominican liked to treat the Count as an equal, an impudence the Count tolerated because it amused him. ‘You have business in Castillon d’Arbizon?’ he asked, then remembered. ‘Of course you do. You are burning the beghard, are you not?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘She will burn with or without you, father,’ the Count said, ‘and the devil will take her soul whether you are there to rejoice or not.’ He peered at the friar. ‘Or is it that you like to watch women burn?’

‘It is my duty,’ Father Roubert said stiffly.

‘Ah yes, your duty. Of course. Your duty.’ The Count frowned at a chessboard on the table, trying to work out whether he should advance a pawn or retract a bishop. He was a short, plump man with a round face and a clipped beard. He habitually wore a woollen cap over his bald head and, even in summer, was rarely without a fur-lined gown. His fingers were perpetually ink-stained so that he looked more like a fussy clerk than the ruler of a great domain. ‘But you have a duty to me, Roubert,’ he chided the Dominican, ‘and this is it.’ He gave the Cardinal Archbishop’s letter to the Dominican and watched as the friar read the long document. ‘He writes a fine Latin, does he not?’ the Count said.

‘He employs a secretary who is properly educated,’ Father Roubert said curtly, then he examined the great red seal to make certain the document was genuine. ‘They say,’ the friar sounded respectful now, ‘that Cardinal Bessières is regarded as a possible successor to the Holy Father.’

‘So not a man to offend?’

‘No churchman should ever be offended,’ Father Roubert answered stiffly.

‘And certainly not one who might become Pope,’ the Count concluded. ‘But what is it he wants?’

Father Roubert went to a window screened with a lead lattice supporting scraped horn panes that let a diffuse light into the room, but kept out rain, birds and some of winter’s cold winds. He lifted the lattice from its frame and breathed the air which, this high up in the castle’s keep, was wonderfully free of the latrine stink in the lower town. It was autumn and there was the faint smell of pressed grapes in the air. Roubert liked that smell. He turned back to the Count. ‘Is the monk here?’

‘In a guest room,’ the Count said. ‘He’s resting. He’s young, very nervous. He bowed to me very properly, but refused to say what the Cardinal wants.’

A great clash in the yard below prompted Father Roubert to peer through the window again. He had to lean far forward for even here, forty feet up the keep, the walls were nearly five feet thick. A horseman in full plate armour had just charged the quintain in the yard and his lance had struck the wooden shield so hard that the whole contraption had collapsed. ‘Your nephew plays,’ he said as he straightened from the window.

‘My nephew and his friends practise,’ the Count corrected the friar.

‘He would do better to look to his soul,’ Father Roubert said sourly.

‘He has no soul, he’s a soldier.’

‘A tournament soldier,’ the friar said scornfully.

The Count shrugged. ‘It is not enough to be wealthy, father. A man must also be strong and Joscelyn is my strong arm.’ The Count said it forcibly, though in truth he was not sure that his nephew was the best heir for Berat, but if the Count had no son then the fief must pass to one of his nephews and Joscelyn was probably the best of a bad brood. Which made it all the more important to have an heir. ‘I asked you here,’ he said, choosing to use the word ‘asked’ rather than ‘ordered’, ‘because you might have some insight into His Eminence’s interest.’

The friar looked at the Cardinal’s letter again. ‘Muniments,’ he said.

‘I noticed that word too,’ the Count said. He moved away from the open window. ‘You’re causing a draught, father.’

Father Roubert reluctantly replaced the horn screen. The Count, he knew, had deduced from his books that for a man to be fertile he must be warm and the friar wondered how folk in cold northern countries ever managed to breed. ‘So the Cardinal isn’t interested in your books,’ the Dominican said, ‘but only in the county’s records?’

‘So it would seem. Two hundred years of tax rolls?’ The Count chuckled. ‘Brother Jerome will enjoy deciphering those.’

The friar said nothing for a while. The sound of clashing swords echoed from the castle’s curtain wall as the Count’s nephew and his cronies practised their weapons in the yard. Let Lord Joscelyn inherit here, the friar thought, and these books and parchments would all be put to the flames. He moved closer to the hearth in which, though it was not cold outside, a great fire burned and he thought of the girl who must be burned to death next morning in Castillon d’Arbizon. She was a heretic, a foul creature, the devil’s plaything, and he remembered her agony as he had tortured the confession from her. He wanted to see her burn and hear the screams that would announce her arrival at the gates of hell, and so the sooner he answered the Count the sooner he could leave.

‘You’re hiding something, Roubert,’ the Count prompted him before the friar could speak.

The friar hated being called by his simple Christian name, a reminder that the Count had known him as a child and had paid for his elevation. ‘I hide nothing,’ he protested.

‘So tell me why a cardinal archbishop would send a monk to Berat?’

The friar turned from the fire. ‘Do I need to remind you,’ he said, ‘that the county of Astarac is now a part of your domain?’

The Count stared at Father Roubert, then realized what the friar was saying. ‘Oh, dear God, no,’ the Count said. He made the sign of the cross and returned to his chair. He peered at the chessboard, scratched an itch beneath his woollen cap and turned back to the Dominican. ‘Not that old story?’

‘There have been rumours,’ Father Roubert said loftily. ‘There was a member of our order, a fine man, Bernard de Taillebourg, who died this year in Brittany. He was pursuing something, we were never told what, but the rumours say that he made common cause with a member of the Vexille family.’

‘Good Christ Almighty,’ the Count said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘You wish me to bother you with every vaporous story that gets told in the taverns?’ Father Roubert retorted.

The Count did not answer. Instead he was thinking of the Vexilles. The old Counts of Astarac. They had been powerful once, great lords of wide lands, but the family had become entangled with the Cathar heresy and when the Church burned that plague from the land the Vexille family had fled to its last stronghold, the castle of Astarac, and there they had been defeated. Most had been killed, but some had succeeded in running away, even, the Count knew, as far as England, while ruined Astarac, home to ravens and foxes, had been swallowed into the fiefdom of Berat and with the ruined castle had come a persistent story that the defeated Vexilles had once held the fabled treasures of the Cathars in their keeping, and that one of those treasures was the Holy Grail itself. And the reason, of course, that Father Roubert had made no mention of the new stories was because he wanted to find the Grail before anyone else discovered it. Well, the Count would forgive him that. He looked across the wide room. ‘So the Cardinal Archbishop believes the Grail will be found among those things?’ He gestured at his books and papers.

‘Louis Bessières,’ the friar said, ‘is a greedy man, a violent man and an ambitious man. He will turn the earth upside down to find the Grail.’

The Count understood then. Understood the pattern of his life. ‘There was a story, wasn’t there,’ he mused aloud, ‘that the keeper of the Grail would be cursed until he gave the cup back to God?’

‘Stories,’ Father Roubert sneered.

‘And if the Grail is here, father, even if it is hidden, then I am its keeper.’

‘If,’ the Dominican sneered again.

‘And so God cursed me,’ the Count said in wonderment, ‘because all unknowingly I hold his treasure and have not valued it.’ He shook his head. ‘He has withheld a son from me because I have withheld his son’s cup from him.’ He shot a surprisingly harsh look at the young friar. ‘Does it exist, father?’

Father Roubert hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. ‘It is possible.’

‘Then we had best give the monk permission to search,’ the Count said, ‘but we must also make sure that we find what he is looking for before he does. You will go through the muniments, Father Roubert, and only pass on to Brother Jerome those records that do not mention treasures or relics or grails. You understand?’

‘I will seek the permission of my regent to perform that duty,’ Father Roubert responded stiffly.

‘You will seek nothing but the Grail!’ The Count slapped the arm of his chair. ‘You will start now, Roubert, and you will not stop till you have read every parchment on those shelves. Or would you rather I evicted your mother, your brothers and sisters from their houses?’

Father Roubert was a proud man and he bridled, but he was not a foolish man and so, after a pause, he bowed. ‘I will search the documents, my lord,’ he said humbly.

‘Starting now,’ the Count insisted.

‘Indeed, my lord,’ Father Roubert said, and sighed because he would not see the girl burn.

‘And I will help you,’ the Count said enthusiastically. Because no cardinal archbishop would take from Berat the holiest treasure on earth or in heaven. The Count would find it first.

The Dominican friar arrived at Castillon d’Arbizon in the autumn dusk, just as the watchman was shutting the western gate. A fire had been kindled in a big brazier that stood inside the gate’s arch to warm the town’s watchmen on what promised to be the first chill night of the waning year. Bats were flickering above the town’s half-repaired walls and about the tower of the high castle which crowned Castillon d’Arbizon’s steep hill.

‘God be with you, father,’ one of the watchmen said as he paused to let the tall friar through the gate, but the watchman spoke in Occitan, his native tongue, and the friar did not speak that language and so he just smiled vaguely and sketched a sign of the cross before he hitched up his black skirts and toiled up the town’s main street towards the castle. Girls, their day’s work finished, were strolling the lanes and some of them giggled for the friar was a fine-looking man despite a very slight limp. He had ragged black hair, a strong face and dark eyes. A whore called to him from a tavern doorway and prompted a cackle of laughter from men drinking at a table set in the street. A butcher sluiced his shopfront with a wooden pail of water so that dilute blood swilled down the gutter past the friar while above him, from a top-floor window where she was drying her washing on a long pole, a woman screamed insults at a neighbour. The western gate crashed shut at the foot of the street and the locking bar dropped into place with a thud.

The friar ignored it all. He just climbed to where the church of St Sardos crouched beneath the pale bastion of the castle and, once inside the church, he knelt at the altar steps, made the sign of the cross and then prostrated himself. A black-dressed woman praying at the side altar of St Agnes, disturbed by the friar’s baleful presence, made the sign of the cross too and hurried from the church. The friar, lying flat on the top step, just waited.

A town sergeant, dressed in Castillon d’Arbizon’s livery of grey and red, had watched the friar climb the hill. He had noticed that the Dominican’s robe was old and patched and that the friar himself was young and strong, and so the sergeant went to find one of the town’s consuls and that official, cramming his fur-trimmed hat onto his grey hair, ordered the sergeant to bring two more armed men while he fetched Father Medous and one of the priest’s two books. The group assembled outside the church and the consul ordered the curious folk who had gathered to watch the excitement to stand back. ‘There is nothing to see,’ he said officiously.

But there was. A stranger had come to Castillon d’Arbizon and all strangers were cause for suspicion, and so the crowd stayed and watched as the consul pulled on his official robe of grey and red cloth trimmed with hare fur, then ordered the three sergeants to open the church door.

What did the people expect? A devil to erupt from St Sardos’s? Did they think to see a great charred beast with crackling black wings and a trail of smoke behind his forked tail? Instead the priest and the consul and two of the sergeants went inside, while the third sergeant, his stave of office showing the badge of Castillon d’Arbizon, which was a hawk carrying a sheaf of rye, guarded the door. The crowd waited. The woman who had fled the church said that the friar was praying. ‘But he looks evil,’ she added, ‘he looks like the devil,’ and she hurriedly made the sign of the cross once more.

When the priest, the consul and the two guards went into the church the friar was still lying flat before the altar with his arms spread wide so that his body made the shape of the cross. He must have heard the nailed boots on the nave’s uneven flagstones, but he did not move, nor did he speak.

‘Paire?’ Castillon d’Arbizon’s priest asked nervously. He spoke in Occitan and the friar did not respond. ‘Father?’ The priest tried French.

‘You are a Dominican?’ The consul was too impatient to wait for any response to Father Medous’s tentative approach. ‘Answer me!’ He also spoke in French, and sternly too, as befitted Castillon d’Arbizon’s leading citizen. ‘Are you a Dominican?’

The friar prayed a moment longer, brought his hands together above his head, paused for a heartbeat, then stood and faced the four men.

‘I have come a long way,’ he said imperiously, ‘and need a bed, food and wine.’

The consul repeated his question. ‘You are a Dominican?’

‘I follow the blessed St Dominic’s way,’ the friar confirmed. ‘The wine need not be good, the food merely what your poorest folk eat, and the bed can be of straw.’

The consul hesitated, for the friar was tall, evidently strong and just a bit frightening, but then the consul, who was a wealthy man and properly respected in Castillon d’Arbizon, drew himself up to his full height. ‘You are young,’ he said accusingly, ‘to be a friar.’

‘It is to the glory of God,’ the Dominican said dismissively, ‘that young men follow the cross instead of the sword. I can sleep in a stable.’

‘Your name?’ the consul demanded.

‘Thomas.’

‘An English name!’ There was alarm in the consul’s voice and the two sergeants responded by hefting their long staves.

‘Tomas, if you prefer,’ the friar said, seemingly unconcerned as the two sergeants took a menacing pace towards him. ‘It is my baptismal name,’ he explained, ‘and the name of that poor disciple who doubted Our Lord’s divinity. If you have no such doubts then I envy you and I pray to God that he grants me such certainty.’

‘You are French?’ the consul asked.

‘I am a Norman,’ the friar said, then nodded. ‘Yes, I am French.’ He looked at the priest. ‘Do you speak French?’

‘I do.’ The priest sounded nervous. ‘Some. A little.’

‘Then may I eat in your house tonight, father?’

The consul would not let Father Medous answer, but instead instructed the priest to give the friar the book. It was a very old book with worm-eaten pages and a black leather cover that the friar unwrapped.

‘What do you want of me?’ the friar demanded.

‘Read from the book.’ The consul had noticed that the friar’s hands were scarred and the fingers slightly twisted. Damage, he thought, more fitting for a soldier than a priest. ‘Read to me!’ the consul insisted.

‘You cannot read for yourself?’ the friar asked derisively.

‘Whether I read or not,’ the consul said, ‘is not your business. But whether you can read, young man, is our business, for if you are not a priest then you will not be able to read. So read to me.’

The friar shrugged, opened a page at random and paused. The consul’s suspicions were roused by the pause and he raised a hand to beckon the sergeants forward, but then the Dominican suddenly read aloud. He had a good voice, confident and strong, and the Latin words sounded like a melody as they echoed from the church’s painted walls. After a moment the consul held up a hand to silence the friar and looked quizzically at Father Medous. ‘Well?’

‘He reads well,’ Father Medous said weakly. The priest’s own Latin was not good and he did not like to admit that he had not entirely understood the echoing words, though he was quite sure that the Dominican could read.

‘You know what the book is?’ the consul demanded.

‘I assume,’ the friar said, ‘that it is the life of St Gregory. The passage, as you doubtless recognized,’ there was sarcasm in his voice, ‘describes the pestilence that will afflict those who disobey the Lord their God.’ He wrapped the limp black cover about the book and held it out to the priest. ‘You probably know the book as the Flores Sanctorum?’

‘Indeed.’ The priest took the book and nodded at the consul.

That official was still not entirely reassured. ‘Your hands,’ he said, ‘how were they injured? And your nose? It was broken?’

‘As a child,’ the friar said, holding out his hands, ‘I slept with the cattle. I was trampled by an ox. And my nose was broken when my mother struck me with a skillet.’

The consul understood those everyday childhood accidents and visibly relaxed. ‘You will understand, father,’ he said to the friar, ‘that we must be cautious of visitors.’

‘Cautious of God’s priests?’ the Dominican asked caustically.

‘We had to be sure,’ the consul explained. ‘A message came from Auch which said the English are riding, but no one knows where.’

‘There is a truce,’ the friar pointed out.

‘When did the English ever keep a truce?’ the consul retorted.

‘If they are indeed English,’ the Dominican said scornfully. ‘Any troop of bandits is called the English these days. You have men,’ he gestured at the sergeants who did not understand a word of the French conversation, ‘and you have churches and priests, so why should you fear bandits?’

‘The bandits are English,’ the consul insisted. ‘They carried war bows.’

‘Which does not alter the fact that I have come a long way, and that I am hungry, thirsty and tired.’

‘Father Medous will look after you,’ the consul said. He gestured at the sergeants and led them back down the nave and out into the small square. ‘There is nothing to worry about!’ the consul announced to the crowd. ‘Our visitor is a friar. He is a man of God.’

The small crowd dispersed. Twilight wreathed the church tower and closed about the castle’s battlements. A man of God had come to Castillon d’Arbizon and the small town was at peace.

The man of God ate a dish of cabbage, beans and salt bacon. He explained to Father Medous that he had made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain to pray at the tomb of St James and now he was walking to Avignon to fetch new orders from his superiors. He had seen no raiders, English or otherwise.

‘We have seen no English in many years,’ Father Medous replied, making a hasty sign of the cross to avert the evil he had just mentioned, ‘but not so long ago they ruled here.’ The friar, eating his meal, appeared not to be interested. ‘We paid taxes to them,’ Father Medous went on, ‘but then they went and now we belong to the Count of Berat.’

‘I trust he is a godly man?’ Friar Thomas asked.

‘Very pious,’ Father Medous confirmed. ‘He keeps some straw from the manger at Bethlehem in his church. I would like to see that.’

‘His men garrison the castle?’ the friar demanded, ignoring the more interesting topic of the baby Jesus’s bedding.

‘Indeed,’ Father Medous confirmed.

‘Does the garrison hear Mass?’

Father Medous paused, obviously tempted to tell a lie, then settled for a half-truth. ‘Some do.’

The friar put down his wooden spoon and stared sternly at the uncomfortable priest. ‘How many are they? And how many of them hear Mass?’

Father Medous was nervous. All priests were nervous when Dominicans appeared, for the friars were God’s ruthless warriors in the fight against heresy and if this tall young man reported that the folk of Castillon d’Arbizon were less than pious then he could bring the Inquisition and its instruments of torture to the town. ‘There are ten of them in the garrison,’ Father Medous said, ‘and they are all good Christians. As are all my people.’

Friar Thomas looked sceptical. ‘All of them?’

‘They do their best,’ Father Medous said loyally, ‘but …’ He paused again, evidently regretting that he had been about to add a qualification and, to cover his hesitation, he went to the small fire and added a log. The wind fretted at the chimney and sent a back-draught of smoke whirling about the small room. ‘A north wind,’ Father Medous said, ‘and it brings the first cold night of the autumn. Winter is not far off, eh?’

‘But?’ The friar had noted the hesitation.

Father Medous sighed as he took his seat. ‘There is a girl. A heretic. She was not from Castillon d’Arbizon, God be thanked, but she stayed here when her father died. She is a beghard.’

‘I did not think the beghards were this far south,’ the friar said. Beghards were beggars, but not just any importunate folk. Instead they were heretics who denied the Church and denied the need to work and claimed all things came from God and therefore that all things should be free to all men and women. The Church, to protect itself against such horrors, burned the beghards wherever they were found.

‘They wander the roads,’ Father Medous pointed out, ‘and she came here, but we sent her to the bishop’s court and she was found guilty. Now she is back here.’

‘Back here?’ The friar sounded shocked.

‘To be burned,’ Father Medous explained hurriedly. ‘She was sent back to be burned by the civil authorities. The bishop wants the people to see her death so they know the evil is gone from among them.’

Friar Thomas frowned. ‘You say this beghard has been found guilty of heresy, that she had been sent here to die, yet she is still alive. Why?’

‘She is to be burned tomorrow,’ the priest said, still hastily. ‘I had expected Father Roubert to be here. He is a Dominican like yourself and it was he who discovered the girl’s heresy. Perhaps he is ill? He did send me a letter explaining how the fire was to be made.’

Friar Thomas looked scornful. ‘All that’s needed,’ he said dismissively, ‘is a heap of wood, a stake, some kindling and a heretic. What more can you want?’

‘Father Roubert insisted that we use small faggots and that they stand upright.’ The priest illustrated this requirement by bunching his fingers like sticks of asparagus. ‘Bundles of sticks, he wrote to me, and all pointing to heaven. They must not lay flat. He was emphatic about that.’

Friar Thomas smiled as he understood. ‘So the fire will burn bright, but not fierce, eh? She will die slowly.’

‘It is God’s will,’ Father Medous said.

‘Slowly and in great agony,’ the friar said, relishing the words, ‘that is indeed God’s will for heretics.’

‘And I have made the fire as he instructed,’ Father Medous added weakly.

‘Good. The girl deserves nothing better.’ The friar mopped his dish with a piece of dark bread. ‘I shall watch her death with joy and then walk on.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘I thank you for this food.’

Father Medous gestured at his hearth where he had piled some blankets. ‘You are welcome to sleep here.’

‘I shall, father,’ the friar said, ‘but first I shall pray to St Sardos. I have not heard of him, though. Can you tell me who he is?’

‘A goatherd,’ Father Medous said. He was not entirely sure that Sardos had ever existed, but the local people insisted he had and had always venerated him. ‘He saw the lamb of God on the hill where the town now stands. It was being threatened by a wolf and he rescued it and God rewarded him with a shower of gold.’

‘As is right and proper,’ the friar said, then stood. ‘You will come and pray to the blessed Sardos with me?’

Father Medous stifled a yawn. ‘I would like to,’ he said without any enthusiasm.

‘I shall not insist,’ the friar said generously. ‘Will you leave your door unbarred?’

‘My door is always open,’ the priest said, and felt a pang of relief as his uncomfortable guest stooped under the door’s lintel and went into the night.

Father Medous’s housekeeper smiled from the kitchen door. ‘He’s a good-looking one for a friar. Is he staying tonight?’

‘He is, yes.’

‘Then I’d better sleep in the kitchen,’ the housekeeper said, ‘because you wouldn’t want a Dominican to find you between my legs at midnight. He’ll put us both on the fire with the beghard.’ She laughed and came to clear the table.

The friar did not go to the church, but instead went the few paces down the hill to the nearest tavern and pushed open the door. The noise inside slowly subsided as the crowded room stared back at the friar’s unsmiling face. When there was silence the friar shuddered as though he was horrified at the revelry, then he stepped back into the street and closed the door. There was a heartbeat of silence inside the tavern, then men laughed. Some reckoned the young priest had been looking for a whore, others merely supposed he had opened the wrong door, but in a moment or two they all forgot about him.

The friar limped back up the hill to St Sardos’s church where, instead of going into the goatherd’s sanctuary, he stopped in the black shadows of a buttress. He waited there, invisible and silent, noting the few sounds of Castillon d’Arbizon’s night. Singing and laughter came from the tavern, but he was more interested in the footsteps of the watchman pacing the town wall that joined the castle’s stronger rampart just behind the church. Those steps came towards him, stopped a few paces down the wall and then retreated. The friar counted to a thousand and still the watchman did not return and so the friar counted to a thousand again, this time in Latin, and when there was still nothing but silence above him he moved to the wooden steps that gave access to the wall. The steps creaked under his weight, but no one called out. Once on the wall he crouched beside the high castle tower, his black robe invisible in the shadow cast by the waning moon. He watched down the wall’s length where it followed the hill’s contour until it turned the corner to the western gate where a dim red glow showed that the brazier was burning strongly. No watchmen were in sight. The friar reckoned the men must be warming themselves at the gate. He looked up, but saw no one at the castle’s rampart, nor any movement in the two half-lit arrow slits that glowed from lanterns inside the tall tower. He had seen three liveried men inside the crowded tavern and there might have been others that he had not seen, and he reckoned the garrison was either drinking or asleep and so he lifted his black skirts and unwound a cord that had been wrapped about his waist. The cord was made of hemp stiffened with glue, the same kind of cord that powered the dreaded English war bows, and it was long enough so that he was able to loop it about one of the wall’s crenellations and then let it drop to the steep ground beneath. He stayed a moment, staring down. The town and castle were built on a steep crag around which a river looped and he could hear the water hissing over a weir. He could just see a gleam of reflected moonlight glancing from a pool, but nothing else. The wind tugged at him, chilled him, and he retreated to the mooncast shadow and pulled his hood over his face.

The watchman reappeared, but only strolled halfway up the wall where he paused, leaned on the parapet for a time, then wandered back towards the gate. A moment later there was a soft whistle, jagged and tuneless like the song of a bird, and the friar went back to the cord and hauled it up. Knotted to it now was a rope, which he tied around the crenellation. ‘It’s safe,’ he called softly in English, and then flinched at the sound of a man’s boots scuffing on the wall as he climbed the rope.

There was a grunt as the man hauled himself up the rampart and a loud crash as his scabbard thumped on the stone, but then the man was over and crouching beside the friar. ‘Here.’ He gave the friar an English war bow and a bag of arrows. Another man was climbing now. He had a war bow slung on his back and a bag of arrows at his waist. He was more nimble than the first man and made no noise as he crossed the battlement, and then a third man appeared and crouched with the other two.

‘How was it?’ the first man asked the friar.

‘Frightening.’

‘They didn’t suspect you?’

‘Made me read some Latin to prove I was a priest.’

‘Bloody fools, eh?’ the man said. He had a Scottish accent. ‘So what now?’

‘The castle.’

‘Christ help us.’

‘He has so far. How are you, Sam?’

‘Thirsty,’ one of the other men answered.

‘Hold these for me,’ Thomas said, giving Sam his bow and arrow bag, and then, satisfied that the watchman was out of sight, he led his three companions down the wooden steps to the alley which led beside the church to the small square in front of the castle’s gate. The wooden faggots piled ready for the heretic’s death were black in the moonlight. A stake with a chain to hold the beghard’s waist jutted up from the waiting timber.

The castle’s tall gates were wide enough to let a farm cart enter the courtyard, but set into one leaf was a small wicket gate and the friar stepped ahead of his companions and thumped the small door hard. There was a pause, then a shuffle of feet sounded and a man asked a question from the gate’s far side. Thomas did not answer, but just knocked again, and the guard, who was expecting his companions to come back from the tavern, suspected nothing and pulled back the two bolts to open the door. Thomas stepped into the flamelight of two high torches burning in the inner archway and in their flickering glow he saw the guard’s look of astonishment that a priest had come to Castillon d’Arbizon’s castle in the darkness, and the man still looked astonished as the friar hit him hard, straight in the face, and then again in the belly. The guard fell back against the wall and the friar clamped a hand across the man’s mouth. Sam and the other two came through the gate, which they locked behind them. The guard was struggling and Thomas brought up a knee which made the man give a muffled squeal. ‘Look in the guardroom,’ Thomas ordered his companions.

Sam, with an arrow on his bow’s string, pushed open the door which led from the castle’s entrance. A single guard was there, standing by a table on which was a skin of wine, two dice and a scatter of coins. The guard stared at Sam’s round, cheerful face and he was still gazing open-mouthed when the arrow took him in the chest and threw him back against the wall. Sam followed, drawing a knife, and blood slashed up the stones as he cut the man’s gullet.

‘Did he have to die?’ Thomas asked, bringing the first guard into the room.

‘He was looking at me funny,’ Sam said, ‘like he’d seen a ghost.’ He scooped up the cash on the table and dropped it into his arrow bag. ‘Shall I kill him too?’ he asked, nodding at the first guard.

‘No,’ Thomas said. ‘Robbie? Tie him up.’

‘What if he makes a noise?’ Robbie, the Scotsman, asked.

‘Then let Sam kill him.’

The third of Thomas’s men came into the guardroom. He was called Jake and he was a skinny man with crossed eyes. He grinned at the sight of the fresh blood on the wall. Like Sam he carried a bow and an arrow bag, and had a sword at his waist. He picked up the wine skin.

‘Not now, Jake,’ Thomas said and the lanky man, who looked older and far more cruel than the younger Thomas, meekly obeyed. Thomas went to the guardroom door. He knew the garrison numbered ten men, he also knew that one was dead, one was a prisoner and at least three were still in the tavern. So five men could be left. He peered into the courtyard, but it was empty except for a farm wagon heaped with bales and barrels, and so he crossed to the weapon rack on the guardroom wall and selected a short sword. He tested the edge and found it sharp enough. ‘Do you speak French?’ he asked the captive guard.

The man shook his head, too terrified to speak.

Thomas left Sam to guard the prisoner. ‘If anyone knocks on the castle gate,’ he said, ‘ignore it. If he makes a noise,’ he jerked his head towards the prisoner, ‘kill him. Don’t drink the wine. Stay awake.’ He slung his bow on his shoulder, pushed two arrows into the rope belting his friar’s robe, then beckoned to Jake and Robbie. The Scotsman, dressed in a short mail hauberk, had his sword drawn. ‘Keep it silent,’ Thomas said to them, and the three slipped into the courtyard.

Castillon d’Arbizon had been at peace for too long. The garrison was small and careless, its duties little more than to levy tariffs on goods coming to the town and despatching the taxes to Berat where their lord lived. The men had become lazy, but Thomas of Hookton, who had pretended to be a friar, had been fighting for months and his instincts were those of a man who knew that death could be waiting at every corner. Robbie, though he was three years younger than Thomas, was almost as experienced in war as his friend, while cross-eyed Jake had been a killer all his life.

They began with the castle’s undercroft where six dungeons lay in fetid darkness, but a flickering rush-light showed in the jailer’s room where they found a monstrously fat man and his equally corpulent wife. Both were sleeping. Thomas pricked the man’s neck with the sword’s point to let him smell blood, then marched the couple to a dungeon where they were locked away. A girl called from another of the cells, but Thomas hissed at her to be quiet. She cursed him in return, then went silent.

One down, four to go.

They climbed back to the courtyard. Three servants, two of them boys, were sleeping in the stables and Robbie and Jake took them down to the cells, then rejoined Thomas to climb the dozen broad steps to the keep’s door, then up the tower’s winding stair. The servants, Thomas guessed, would not be numbered among the garrison, and there would doubtless be other servants, cooks and grooms and clerks, but for now he worried only about the soldiers. He found two of them fast asleep in the barracks room, both with women under their blankets, and Thomas woke them by tossing in a torch he took from a becket on the stairway. The four sat up, startled, to see a friar with an arrow nocked on his drawn bow. One woman took breath to scream, but the bow twitched and the arrow was pointing straight at her right eye and she had the sense to stifle her alarm.

‘Tie them up,’ Thomas said.

‘Quicker to slit their gizzards,’ Jake suggested.

‘Tie them up,’ Thomas said again, ‘and stuff their mouths.’

It did not take long. Robbie ripped a blanket into strips with his sword and Jake trussed the four. One of the women was naked and Jake grinned as he tied her wrists and then hoisted her up to a hook on the wall so that her arms were stretched. ‘Nice,’ he said.

‘Later,’ Thomas said. He was at the door, listening. There could be two more soldiers in the castle, but he heard nothing. The four prisoners were all being half suspended from the big metal hooks that normally held swords and mail shirts and, when the four were silenced and immobilized, Thomas went up the next winding stair to where a great door blocked his path. Jake and Robbie followed him, their boots making a slight noise on the worn stone steps. Thomas motioned them to silence, then pushed on the door. For a moment he thought it must be locked, but he pushed again, harder, and the door jerked open with a terrible shriek of rusted metal hinges. The sound was fit to wake the dead and Thomas, appalled, found himself staring into a great high room hung with tapestries. The squeal of the hinges died away, leaving silence. The remnants of a fire burned in a big hearth and gave enough light to show that the hall was empty. At its far end was a dais where the Count of Berat, the Lord of Castillon d’Arbizon, would sit when he visited the town and where his table would be placed for any feasts. The dais was empty now, except that at its rear, hidden by a tapestry, there was an arched space where another flicker of light showed through the moth-eaten weave.

Robbie slipped past Thomas and crept up the side of the hall beneath the slit windows, which let in slanting bars of silvered moonlight. Thomas put an arrow on the black bow, then drew the cord and felt the immense power of the yew stave as he took the string back to his right ear. Robbie glanced at him, saw he was ready, and reached out with his sword to pull back the threadbare tapestry.

But before the blade even touched the tapestry it was swept aside as a big man charged Robbie. He came roaring and sudden, astonishing the Scot who tried to bring his sword back to meet the attack, but Robbie was too slow and the big man leaped on him, fists flailing. Just then the big black bow sang. The arrow, which could strike down an armoured knight at two hundred paces, slid through the man’s rib cage and span him around so that he flailed bloodily across the floor. Robbie was still half under him, his fallen sword clattering on the thick wooden floorboards. A woman was screaming. Thomas guessed the wounded man was the castellan, the garrison’s commander, and he wondered if the man would live long enough to answer some questions, but Robbie had drawn his dagger and, not knowing that his assailant was already pierced by an arrow, was flailing the short blade at the man’s fat neck so that a sheet of blood spilled dark and shining across the boards and even after the man had died Robbie still gouged at him. The woman screamed on. ‘Stop her noise,’ Thomas said to Jake and went to pull the heavy corpse off the Scot. The man’s long white nightshirt was red now. Jake slapped the woman and then, blessedly, there was silence.

There were no more soldiers in the castle. A dozen servants were sleeping in the kitchens and storerooms, but they made no trouble. The men were all taken down to the dungeons, then Thomas climbed to the keep’s topmost rampart from where he could look down on the unsuspecting roofs of Castillon d’Arbizon, and there he waved a flaming torch. He waved it back and forth three times, threw it far down into the bushes at the foot of the steep slope on which the castle and town were built, then went to the western side of the rampart where he laid a dozen arrows on the parapet. Jake joined him there. ‘Sam’s with Sir Robbie at the gate,’ Jake said. Robbie Douglas had never been knighted, but he was well born and a man-at-arms, and Thomas’s men had given him the rank. They liked the Scotsman, just as Thomas did, which was why Thomas had disobeyed his lord and let Robbie come with him. Jake laid more arrows on the parapet. ‘That were easy.’

‘They weren’t expecting trouble,’ Thomas said. That was not entirely true. The town had been aware of English raiders, Thomas’s raiders, but had somehow convinced themselves that they would not come to Castillon d’Arbizon. The town had been at peace for so long that the townsfolk were persuaded the quiet times would go on. The walls and the watchmen were not there to guard against the English, but against the big companies of bandits that infested the countryside. A dozy watchman and a high wall might deter those bandits, but it had failed against real soldiers. ‘How did you cross the river?’ he asked Jake.

‘At the weir,’ Jake said. They had scouted the town in the dusk and Thomas had seen the mill weir as the easiest place to cross the deep and fast-flowing river.

‘The miller?’

‘Scared,’ Jake said, ‘and quiet.’

Thomas heard the crackling of breaking twigs, the scrape of feet and a thump as a ladder was placed against the angle between the castle and the town wall. He leaned over the inner parapet. ‘You can open the gate, Robbie,’ he called down. He put an arrow on his string and stared down the long length of moonlit wall.

Beneath him men were climbing the ladder, hoisting weapons and bags that they tossed over the parapet and then followed after. A wash of flamelight glowed from the open wicket gate where Robbie and Sam stood guard, and after a moment a file of men, their mail clinking in the night, went from the wall’s steps to the castle gate. Castillon d’Arbizon’s new garrison was arriving.

A watchman appeared at the wall’s far end. He strolled towards the castle, then suddenly became aware of the sound of swords, bows and baggage thumping on stone as men clambered over the wall. He hesitated, torn between a desire to get closer and see what was really happening and a wish to find reinforcements, and while he hesitated both Thomas and Jake loosed their arrows.

The watchman wore a padded leather jerkin, protection enough against a drunkard’s stave, but the arrows slashed through the leather, the padding and his chest until the two points protruded from his back. He was hurled back, his staff fell with a clatter, and then he jerked in the moonlight, gasped a few times and was still.

‘What do we do now?’ Jake asked.

‘Collect the taxes,’ Thomas said, ‘and make a nuisance of ourselves.’

‘Until what?’

‘Until someone comes to kill us,’ Thomas said, thinking of his cousin.

‘And we kill him?’ Jake might be cross-eyed, but he held a very straightforward view of life.

‘With God’s good help,’ Thomas said and made the sign of the cross on his friar’s robe.

The last of Thomas’s men climbed the wall and dragged the ladder up behind them. There were still half a dozen men a mile away, across the river and hidden in the forest where they were guarding the horses, but the bulk of Thomas’s force was now inside the castle and its gate was again locked. The dead watchman lay on the wall with two goose-feathered shafts sticking from his chest. No one else had detected the invaders. Castillon d’Arbizon either slept or drank.

And then the screams began.

It had not occurred to Thomas that the beghard girl who was to die in the morning would be imprisoned in the castle. He had thought the town would have its own jail, but she had evidently been given into the garrison’s keeping and now she was screaming insults at the newly imprisoned men in the other cells and her noise was unsettling the archers and men-at-arms who had climbed Castillon d’Arbizon’s wall and taken the castle. The jailer’s plump wife, who spoke a little French, had shouted for the English to kill the girl. ‘She’s a beghard,’ the woman claimed, ‘in league with the devil!’

Sir Guillaume d’Evecque had agreed with the woman. ‘Bring her up to the courtyard,’ he told Thomas, ‘and I’ll hack off her damn head.’

‘She must burn,’ Thomas said. ‘That’s what the Church has decreed.’

‘So who burns her?’

Thomas shrugged. ‘The town sergeants? Maybe us, I don’t know.’

‘Then if you won’t let me kill her now,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘at least shut her goddamned mouth.’ He drew his knife and offered it to Thomas. ‘Cut her tongue out.’

Thomas ignored the blade. He had still not found time to change out of his friar’s robe, so he lifted its skirts and went down to the dungeons where the girl was shouting in French to tell the captives in the other cells that they would all die and that the devil would dance on their bones to a tune played by demons. Thomas lit a rush lantern from the flickering remnants of a torch, then went to the beghard’s cell and pulled back the two bolts.

She quietened at the sound of the bolts and then, as he pushed the heavy door open, she scuffled back to the cell’s far wall. Jake had followed Thomas down the steps and, seeing the girl in the lantern’s dim light, he sniggered. ‘I can keep her quiet for you,’ he offered.

‘Go and get some sleep, Jake,’ Thomas said.

‘No, I don’t mind,’ Jake persisted.

‘Sleep!’ Thomas snapped, suddenly angry because the girl looked so vulnerable.

She was vulnerable because she was naked. Naked as a new-laid egg, arrow-thin, deathly pale, flea-bitten, greasy-haired, wide-eyed and feral. She sat in the filthy straw, her arms wrapped about her drawn-up knees to hide her nakedness, then took a deep breath is if summoning her last dregs of courage. ‘You’re English,’ she said in French. Her voice was hoarse from her screaming.

‘I’m English,’ Thomas agreed.

‘But an English priest is as bad as any other,’ she accused him.

‘Probably,’ Thomas agreed. He put the lantern on the floor and sat beside the open door because the stench in the cell was so overwhelming. ‘I want you to stop your screaming,’ he went on, ‘because it upsets people.’

She rolled her eyes at those words. ‘Tomorrow they are going to burn me,’ she said, ‘so you think I care if fools are upset tonight?’

‘You should care for your soul,’ Thomas said, but his fervent words brought no response from the beghard. The rush wick burned badly and its horn shade turned the dim light a leprous, flickering yellow. ‘Why did they leave you naked?’ he asked.

‘Because I tore a strip from my dress and tried to strangle the jailer.’ She said it calmly, but with a defiant look as though daring Thomas to disapprove.

Thomas almost smiled at the thought of so slight a girl attacking the stout jailer, but he resisted his amusement. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked instead.

She was still defiant. ‘I have no name,’ she said. ‘They made me a heretic and took my name away. I’m cast out of Christendom. I’m already halfway to the next world.’ She looked away from him with an expression of indignation and Thomas saw that Robbie Douglas was standing in the half-open door. The Scot was gazing at the beghard with a look of wonderment, even awe, and Thomas looked at the girl again and saw that under the scraps of straw and embedded filth she was beautiful. Her hair was like pale gold, her skin was unscarred from pox and her face was strong. She had a high forehead, a full mouth and sunken cheeks. A striking face, and the Scotsman just stared at her and the girl, embarrassed by his frank gaze, hugged her knees closer to her breasts.

‘Go,’ Thomas told Robbie. The young Scotsman fell in love, it seemed to Thomas, like other men became hungry, and it was plain from Robbie’s face that he had been struck by the girl’s looks with the force of a lance hammering into a shield.

Robbie frowned as though he did not quite understand Thomas’s instruction. ‘I meant to ask you,’ he said, then paused.

‘Ask me what?’

‘Back in Calais,’ Robbie said, ‘did the Earl tell you to leave me behind?’

It seemed an odd question in the circumstances, but Thomas decided it deserved a response. ‘How do you know?’

‘That priest told me. Buckingham.’

Thomas wondered why Robbie had even talked to the priest, then realized that his friend was simply making conversation so he could stay near to the latest girl he had fallen so hopelessly in love with. ‘Robbie,’ he said, ‘she’s going to burn in the morning.’

Robbie shifted uneasily. ‘She doesn’t have to.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Thomas protested, ‘the Church has condemned her!’

‘Then why are you here?’ Robbie asked.

‘Because I command here. Because someone has to keep her quiet.’

‘I can do that,’ Robbie said with a smile, and when Thomas did not respond the smile turned into a scowl. ‘So why did you let me come to Gascony?’

‘Because you’re a friend.’

‘Buckingham said I’d steal the Grail,’ Robbie said. ‘He said I’d take it to Scotland.’

‘We have to find it first,’ Thomas said, but Robbie was not listening. He was just looking hungrily at the girl who huddled in the corner. ‘Robbie,’ Thomas said firmly, ‘she’s going to burn.’

‘Then it doesn’t matter what happens to her tonight,’ the Scotsman said defiantly.

Thomas fought to suppress his anger. ‘Just leave us alone, Robbie,’ he said.

‘Is it her soul you’re after?’ Robbie asked. ‘Or her flesh?’

‘Just go!’ Thomas snarled with more force than he meant and Robbie looked startled, even belligerent, but then he blinked a couple of times and walked away.

The girl had not understood the English conversation, but she had recognized the lust on Robbie’s face and now turned it on Thomas. ‘You want me for yourself, priest?’ she asked in French.

Thomas ignored the sneering question. ‘Where are you from?’

She paused, as if deciding whether or not to answer, then shrugged. ‘From Picardy,’ she said.

‘A long way north,’ Thomas said. ‘How does a girl from Picardy come to Gascony?’

She hesitated again. She was, Thomas thought, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, which made her overripe for marriage. Her eyes, he noticed, had a curious piercing quality, which gave him the uncomfortable sensation that she could see right through to the dark root of his soul. ‘My father,’ she said. ‘He was a juggler and flame-eater.’

‘I’ve seen such men,’ Thomas said.

‘We went wherever we wished,’ she said, ‘and made money at fairs. My father made folk laugh and I collected the coins.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Dead.’ She said it carelessly as if to suggest she could not even remember her mother. ‘Then my father died here. Six months ago. So I stayed.’

‘Why did you stay?’

She gave him a sneering look as if to suggest the answer to his question was so obvious that it did not need stating, but then, presuming him to be a priest who did not understood how real people lived, she gave him the answer. ‘Do you know how dangerous the roads are?’ she asked. ‘There are coredors.’

‘Coredors?’

‘Bandits,’ she explained. ‘The local people call them coredors. Then there are the routiers who are just as bad.’ Routiers were companies of disbanded soldiers who wandered the highways in search of a lord to employ them and when they were hungry, which was most of the time, they took what they wanted by force. Some even captured towns and held them for ransom. But, like the coredors, they would regard a girl travelling alone as a gift sent by the devil for their enjoyment. ‘How long do you think I would have lasted?’ she asked.

‘You could have travelled in company?’ Thomas suggested.

‘We always did, my father and I, but he was there to protect me. But on my own?’ She shrugged. ‘So I stayed. I worked in a kitchen.’

‘And cooked up heresy?’

‘You priests do so love heresy,’ she said bitterly. ‘It gives you something to burn.’

‘Before you were condemned,’ Thomas said, ‘what was your name?’

‘Genevieve.’

‘You were named for the saint?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said.

‘And whenever Genevieve prayed,’ Thomas said, ‘the devil blew out her candles.’

‘You priests are full of stories,’ Genevieve mocked. ‘Do you believe that? You believe the devil came into the church and blew out her candles?’

‘Probably.’

‘Why didn’t he just kill her if he’s the devil? What a pathetic trick, just to blow out candles! He can’t be much of a devil if that’s all he does.’

Thomas ignored her scorn. ‘They tell me you are a beghard?’

‘I’ve met beghards,’ she said, ‘and I liked them.’

‘They are the devil’s spawn,’ Thomas said.

‘You’ve met one?’ she asked. Thomas had not. He had only heard of them and the girl sensed his discomfort.

‘If to believe that God gave all to everyone and wants everyone to share in everything, then I am as bad as a beghard,’ she admitted, ‘but I never joined them.’

‘You must have done something to deserve the flames.’

She stared at him. Perhaps it was something in his tone that made her trust him, but the defiance seemed to drain out of her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall and Thomas suspected she wanted to cry. Watching her delicate face, he wondered why he had not seen her beauty instantly as Robbie had done. Then she opened her eyes and gazed at him. ‘What happened here tonight?’ she asked, ignoring his accusation.

‘We captured the castle,’ Thomas said.

‘We?’

‘The English.’

She looked at him, trying to read his face. ‘So now the English are the civil power?’

He supposed she had learned the phrase at her trial. The Church did not burn heretics, they merely condemned them, and then the sinners were handed to the civil power for their deaths. That way the Church kept clean hands, God was assured that his Church was undefiled and the devil gained a soul. ‘We are the civil power now,’ Thomas agreed.

‘So the English will burn me instead of the Gascons?’

‘Someone must burn you,’ Thomas said, ‘if you are a heretic.’

‘If?’ Genevieve asked, but when Thomas did not answer she closed her eyes and rested her head on the damp stones again. ‘They said I insulted God.’ She spoke tiredly. ‘That I claimed the priests of God’s Church were corrupt, that I danced naked beneath the lightning, that I used the devil’s power to discover water, that I used magic to cure people’s ills, that I prophesied the future and that I put a curse on Galat Lorret’s wife and on his cattle.’

Thomas frowned. ‘They did not convict you of being a beghard?’ he asked.

‘That too,’ she added drily.

He was silent for a few heartbeats. Water dripped somewhere in the dark beyond the door and the rush-light flickered, almost died and then recovered. ‘Whose wife did you curse?’ Thomas asked.

‘Galat Lorret’s wife. He’s a cloth merchant here and very rich. He’s the chief consul and a man who would like younger flesh than his wife.’

‘And did you curse her?’

‘Not just her,’ Genevieve said fervently, ‘but him too. Have you never cursed anyone?’

‘You prophesied the future?’ Thomas asked.

‘I said they would all die, and that is an evident truth.’

‘Not if Christ comes back to earth, as he promised,’ Thomas said.

She gave him a long, considering look and a small smile half showed on her face before she shrugged. ‘So I was wrong,’ she said sarcastically.

‘And the devil showed you how to discover water?’

‘Even you can do that,’ she said. ‘Take a forked twig and walk slowly across a field and when it twitches, dig.’

‘And magical cures?’

‘Old remedies,’ she said tiredly. ‘The things we learn from aunts and grandmothers and old ladies. Take iron from a room where a woman is giving birth. Everyone does it. Even you, priest, touch wood to avert evil. Is that piece of magic sufficient to send you to the fire?’

Again Thomas ignored her answer. ‘You insulted God?’ he asked her.

‘God loves me, and I do not insult those who love me. But I did say his priests were corrupt, which you are, and so they charged me with insulting God. Are you corrupt, priest?’

‘And you danced naked under the lightning,’ Thomas concluded the indictment.

‘To that,’ she said, ‘I plead guilty.’

‘Why did you dance?’

‘Because my father always said that God would give us guidance if we did that.’

‘God would do that?’ Thomas asked, surprised.

‘So we believed. We were wrong. God told me to stay in Castillon d’Arbizon and it only led to torture and tomorrow’s fire.’

‘Torture?’ Thomas asked.

Something in his voice, a horror, made her look at him, and then she slowly stretched out her left leg so that he could see her inner thigh and the raw, red, twisted mark that disfigured the white skin. ‘They burned me,’ she said, ‘again and again. That was why I confessed to being what I was not, a beghard, because they burned me.’ She was crying suddenly, remembering the pain. ‘They used red-hot metal,’ she said, ‘and when I screamed they said it was the devil trying to leave my soul.’ She drew up her leg and showed him her right arm, which had the same scars. ‘But they left these,’ she said angrily, suddenly revealing her small breasts, ‘because Father Roubert said the devil would want to suck them and the pain of his jaws would be worse than anything the Church could inflict.’ She drew her knees up again and was silent for a while as the tears ran down her face. ‘The Church likes to hurt people,’ she continued after a while. ‘You should know that.’

‘I do,’ Thomas said, and he very nearly lifted the skirts of his Dominican’s robe to show her the same scars on his body, the scars of the hot iron that had been pressed on his legs to make him reveal the secrets of the Grail. It was a torture that drew no blood for the Church was forbidden to draw blood, but a skilled man could make a soul scream in torment without ever breaking the skin. ‘I do,’ Thomas said again.

‘Then damn you,’ Genevieve said, recovering her defiance, ‘damn you and damn all the damned priests.’

Thomas stood and lifted the lantern. ‘I shall fetch you something to wear.’

‘Frightened of me, priest?’ she mocked.

‘Frightened?’ Thomas was puzzled.

‘By this, priest!’ she said and showed him her nakedness and Thomas turned away and closed the door on her laughter. Then, when the bolts were shot, he leaned on the wall and stared at nothing. He was remembering Genevieve’s eyes, so full of fire and mystery. She was dirty, naked, unkempt, pale, half starved and a heretic and he had found her beautiful, but he had a duty in the morning and he had not expected it. A God-given duty.

He climbed back to the yard to find everything quiet. Castillon d’Arbizon slept.

And Thomas, bastard son of a priest, prayed.

The tower stood in woodland a day’s ride east of Paris, on a low ridge not far from Soissons. It was a lonely place. The tower had once been home to a lord whose serfs farmed the valleys on either flank of the ridge, but the lord had died without children and his distant relatives had squabbled over ownership which meant the lawyers had become rich and the tower had decayed and the fields had been overgrown by hazel, and then by oak, and owls had nested in the high stone chambers where the winds blew and the seasons passed. Even the lawyers who had argued over the tower were now dead and the small castle was the property of a Duke who had never seen it and would never dream of living there, and the serfs, those that remained, worked fields closer to the village of Melun where the Duke’s tenant had a farm.

The tower, the villagers said, was haunted. White spirits wreathed it on winter nights. Strange beasts were said to prowl the trees. Children were told to stay away, though inevitably the braver ones went to the woods and some even climbed the tower to find it empty.

But then the strangers came.

They came with the faraway Duke’s permission. They were tenants, but they did not come to farm or to thin the ridge of its valuable timber. They were soldiers. Fifteen hard men, scarred from the wars against England, with mail coats and crossbows and swords. They brought their women who made trouble in the village and no one dared to complain because the women were as hard as the soldiers, but not as hard as the man who led them. He was tall, thin, ugly, scarred and vengeful. His name was Charles and he had not been a soldier and he never wore mail, but no one liked to ask him what he was or what he had been for his very glance was terrifying.

Stonemasons came from Soissons. The owls were ejected and the tower repaired. A new yard was made at the tower’s foot, a yard with a high wall and a brick furnace, and soon after that work was finished a wagon, its contents hidden by a linen canopy, arrived at the tower and the new gate in the yard’s wall slammed shut behind it. Some of the braver children, curious about the strange happenings at the tower, sneaked into the woods, but they were seen by one of the guards and they fled, terrified, as he pursued them, shouting, and his crossbow bolt narrowly missed a boy. No child went back. No one went there. The soldiers bought food and wine in the market, but even when they drank in Melun’s tavern they did not say what happened at the tower. ‘You must ask Monsieur Charles,’ they said, meaning the ugly, scarred man, and no one in the village would dare approach Monsieur Charles.

Smoke sometimes rose from the yard. It could be seen from the village, and it was the priest who deduced that the tower was now the home of an alchemist. Strange supplies were taken up the ridge and one day a wagon loaded with a barrel of sulphur and ingots of lead paused in the village while the carter drank wine. The priest smelt the sulphur. ‘They are making gold,’ he told his housekeeper, knowing she would tell the rest of the village.

‘Gold?’ she asked.

‘It is what the alchemists do.’ The priest was a learned man who might have risen high in the Church except that he had a taste for wine and was always drunk by the time the angelus bell sounded, but he remembered his student days in Paris and how he had once thought that he might join the search for the philosopher’s stone, that elusive substance which would meld with any metal to make it gold. ‘Noah possessed it,’ he said.

‘Possessed what?’

‘The philosopher’s stone, but he lost it.’

‘Because he was drunk and naked?’ the housekeeper asked. She had a dim memory of the story of Noah. ‘Like you?’

The priest lay on his bed, half drunk and fully naked, and he remembered the smoky workrooms of Paris where silver and mercury, lead and sulphur, bronze and iron were melted and twisted and melted again. ‘Calcination,’ he recited, ‘and dissolution, and separation, and conjunction, and putrefaction, and congelation, and cibation, and sublimation, and fermentation, and exaltation, and multiplication, and projection.’

The housekeeper had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Marie Condrot lost her child today,’ she told him. ‘Born the size of a kitten, it was. All bloody and dead. It had hair though. Red hair. She wants you to christen it.’

‘Cupellation,’ he said, ignoring her news, ‘and cementation, and reverberation, and distillation. Always distillation. Per ascendum is the preferred method.’ He hiccupped. ‘Jesus,’ he sighed, then thought again. ‘Phlogiston. If we could just find phlogiston we could all make gold.’

‘And how would we make gold?’

‘I just told you.’ He turned on the bed and stared at her breasts that were white and heavy in the moonlight. ‘You have to be very clever,’ he said, reaching for her, ‘and you discover phlogiston which is a substance that burns hotter than hell’s fires, and with it you make the philosopher’s stone that Noah lost and you place it in the furnace with any metal and after three days and three nights you will have gold. Didn’t Corday say they built a furnace up there?’

‘He said they made the tower into a prison,’ she said.

‘A furnace,’ he insisted, ‘to find the philosopher’s stone.’

The priest’s guess was closer than he knew, and soon the whole neighbourhood was convinced that a great philosopher was locked in the tower where he struggled to make gold. If he was successful, men said, then no one would need to work again for all would be rich. Peasants would eat from gold plate and ride horses caparisoned in silver, but some people noted that it was a strange kind of alchemy for two of the soldiers came to the village one morning and took away three old ox-horns and a pail of cow dung. ‘We’re bound to be rich now,’ the housekeeper said sarcastically, ‘rich in shit,’ but the priest was snoring.

Then, in the autumn which followed the fall of Calais, the Cardinal arrived from Paris. He lodged in Soissons, at the Abbey of St-Jean-de-Vignes which, though wealthier than most monastic houses, could still not cope with all the Cardinal’s entourage and so a dozen of his men took rooms in a tavern where they airily commanded the landlord to send the bill to Paris. ‘The Cardinal will pay,’ they promised, and then they laughed for they knew that Louis Bessières, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno and Papal Legate to the Court of France, would ignore any trivial demands for money.

Though of late His Eminence had been spending it lavishly. It had been the Cardinal who restored the tower, built the new wall and hired the guards, and on the morning after he arrived at Soissons he rode to the tower with an escort of sixty armed men and fourteen priests. Halfway to the tower they were met by Monsieur Charles who was dressed all in black and had a long, narrow-bladed knife at his side. He did not greet the Cardinal respectfully as other men would, but nodded a curt acknowledgement and then turned his horse to ride beside the prelate. The priests and men-at-arms, at a signal from the Cardinal, kept their distance so they could not overhear the conversation.

‘You look well, Charles,’ the Cardinal said in a mocking voice.

‘I’m bored.’ The ugly Charles had a voice like iron dragging through gravel.

‘God’s service can be hard,’ the Cardinal said.

Charles ignored the sarcasm. The scar went from his lip to his cheekbone, his eyes were pouchy, his nose broken. His black clothes hung from him like a scarecrow’s rags and his gaze constantly flicked from side to side of the road as though he feared an ambush. Any travellers, meeting the procession, had they dared raise their eyes to see the Cardinal and his ragged companion, would have taken Charles to be a soldier, for the scar and the sword suggested he had served in the wars, but Charles Bessières had never followed a war banner. He had cut throats and purses instead, he had robbed and murdered, and he had been spared the gallows because he was the Cardinal’s eldest brother.

Charles and Louis Bessières had been born in the Limousin, the eldest sons of a tallow merchant who had given the younger son an education while the elder ran wild. Louis had risen in the Church as Charles had roamed dark alleys, but different though they were, there was a trust between them. A secret was safe between the tallow merchant’s only surviving sons and that was why the priests and the men-at-arms had been ordered to keep their distance.

‘How is our prisoner?’ the Cardinal asked.

‘He grumbles. Whines like a woman.’

‘But he works?’

‘Oh, he works,’ Charles said grimly. ‘Too scared to be idle.’

‘He eats? He is in good health?’

‘He eats, he sleeps and he nails his woman,’ Charles said.

‘He has a woman?’ The Cardinal sounded shocked.

‘He wanted one. Said he couldn’t work properly without one so I fetched him one.’

‘What kind?’

‘One from the stews of Paris.’

‘An old companion of yours, perhaps?’ the Cardinal asked, amused. ‘But not one, I trust, of whom you are too fond?’

‘When it’s all done,’ Charles said, ‘she’ll have her throat cut just like him. Simply tell me when.’

‘When he has worked his miracle, of course,’ the Cardinal said.

They followed a narrow track up the ridge and, once at the tower, the priests and the armed men stayed in the yard while the brothers dismounted and went down a brief winding stair that led to a heavy door barred with three thick bolts. The Cardinal watched his brother draw the bolts back. ‘The guards do not come down here?’ he asked.

‘Only the two who bring food and take away the buckets,’ Charles said, ‘the rest know they’ll get their throats cut if they poke their noses where they’re not wanted.’

‘Do they believe that?’

Charles Bessières looked sourly at his brother. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ he asked, then drew his knife before he shot the last bolt. He stepped back as he opened the door, evidently wary in case someone beyond the door attacked him, but the man inside showed no hostility, instead he looked pathetically pleased to see the Cardinal and dropped to his knees in reverence.

The tower’s cellar was large, its ceiling supported by great brick arches from which a score of lanterns hung. Their smoky light was augmented by daylight that came through three high, small, thickly barred windows. The prisoner who lived in the cellar was a young man with long fair hair, a quick face and clever eyes. His cheeks and high forehead were smeared with dirt, which also marked his long, agile fingers. He stayed on his knees as the Cardinal approached.

‘Young Gaspard,’ the Cardinal said genially and held out his hand so the prisoner could kiss the heavy ring that contained a thorn from Christ’s crown of death. ‘I trust you are well, young Gaspard? You eat heartily, do you? Sleep like a babe? Work like a good Christian? Rut like a hog?’ The Cardinal glanced at the girl as he said the last words, then he took his hand away from Gaspard and walked further into the room towards three tables, on which were barrels of clay, blocks of beeswax, piles of ingots, and arrays of chisels, files, augurs and hammers.

The girl, sullen, red-haired and dressed in a dirty shift that hung loose from one shoulder, sat on a low trestle bed in a corner of the cellar. ‘I don’t like it here,’ she complained to the Cardinal.

The Cardinal stared at her in silence for a good long time, then he turned to his brother, ‘If she speaks to me again, Charles, without my permission,’ he said, ‘whip her.’

‘She means no harm, your eminence,’ Gaspard said, still on his knees.

‘But I do,’ the Cardinal said, then smiled at the prisoner. ‘Get up, dear boy, get up.’

‘I need Yvette,’ Gaspard said, ‘she helps me.’

‘I’m sure she does,’ the Cardinal said, then stooped to a clay bowl in which a brownish paste had been mixed. He recoiled from its stench, then turned as Gaspard came to him, dropped to his knees again, and held up a gift.

‘For you, your eminence,’ Gaspard said eagerly, ‘I made it for you.’

The Cardinal took the gift. It was crucifix of gold, not a hand’s breadth high, yet every detail of the suffering Christ was delicately modelled. There were strands of hair showing beneath the crown of thorns, the thorns themselves could prick, the rent in his side was jagged edged and the spill of golden blood ran past his loincloth to his long thigh. The nail heads stood proud and the Cardinal counted them. Four. He had seen three true nails in his life. ‘It’s beautiful, Gaspard,’ the Cardinal said.

‘I would work better,’ Gaspard said, ‘if there was more light.’

‘We would all work better if there were more light,’ the Cardinal said, ‘the light of truth, the light of God, the light of the Holy Spirit.’ He walked beside the tables, touching the tools of Gaspard’s trade. ‘Yet the devil sends darkness to befuddle us and we must do our best to endure it.’

‘Upstairs?’ Gaspard said. ‘There must be rooms with more light upstairs?’

‘There are,’ the Cardinal said, ‘there are, but how do I know you will not escape, Gaspard? You are an ingenious man. Give you a large window and I might give you the world. No, dear boy, if you can produce work like this’ – he held up the crucifix – ‘then you need no more light.’ He smiled. ‘You are so very clever.’

Gaspard was indeed clever. He had been a goldsmith’s apprentice in one of the small shops on the Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité in Paris where the Cardinal had his mansion. The Cardinal had always appreciated the goldsmiths: he haunted their shops, patronized them and purchased their best pieces, and many of those pieces had been made by this thin, nervous apprentice who had then knifed a fellow apprentice to death in a sordid tavern brawl and been condemned to the gallows. The Cardinal had rescued him, brought him to the tower and promised him life.

But first Gaspard must work the miracle. Only then could he be released. That was the promise, though the Cardinal was quite sure that Gaspard would never leave this cellar unless it was to use the big furnace in the yard. Gaspard, though he did not know it, was already at the gates of hell. The Cardinal made the sign of the cross, then put the crucifix on a table. ‘So show me,’ he ordered Gaspard.

Gaspard went to his big work table where an object was shrouded in a cloth of bleached linen. ‘It is only wax now, your eminence,’ he explained, lifting the linen away, ‘and I don’t know if it’s even possible to turn it into gold.’

‘It can be touched?’ the Cardinal asked.

‘Carefully,’ Gaspard warned. ‘It’s purified beeswax and quite delicate.’

The Cardinal lifted the grey-white wax, which felt oily to his touch, and he carried it to one of the three small windows that let in the shadowed daylight and there he stood in awe.

Gaspard had made a cup of wax. It had taken him weeks of work. The cup itself was just big enough to hold an apple, while the stem was only six inches long. That stem was modelled as the trunk of a tree and the cup’s foot was made from the tree’s three roots that spread from the bole. The tree’s branches divided into filigree work that formed the lacy bowl of the cup, and the filigree was astonishingly detailed with tiny leaves and small apples and, at the rim, three delicate nails. ‘It is beautiful,’ the Cardinal said.

‘The three roots, your eminence, are the Trinity,’ Gaspard explained.

‘I had surmised as much.’

‘And the tree is the tree of life.’

‘Which is why it has apples,’ the Cardinal said.

‘And the nails reveal that it will be the tree from which our Lord’s cross was made,’ Gaspard finished his explanation.

‘That had not escaped me,’ the Cardinal observed. He carried the beautiful wax cup back to the table and set it down carefully. ‘Where is the glass?’

‘Here, your eminence.’ Gaspard opened a box and took out a cup that he offered to the Cardinal. The cup was made of thick, greenish glass that looked very ancient, for in parts the cup was smoky and elsewhere there were tiny bubbles trapped in the pale translucent material. The Cardinal suspected it was Roman. He was not sure of that, but it looked very old and just a little crude, and that was surely right. The cup from which Christ had drunk his last wine would probably be more fit for a peasant’s table than for a noble’s feast. The Cardinal had discovered the cup in a Paris shop and had purchased it for a few copper coins and he had instructed Gaspard to take off the ill-shapen foot of the glass which the prisoner had done so skilfully that the Cardinal could not even see that there had once been a stem. Now, very gingerly, he put the glass cup into the filigree wax bowl. Gaspard held his breath, fearing that the Cardinal would break one of the delicate leaves, but the cup settled gently and fitted perfectly.

The Grail. The Cardinal gazed at the glass cup, imagining it cradled in a delicate lacework of fine gold and standing on an altar lit by tall white candles. There would be a choir of boys singing and scented incense burning. There would be kings and emperors, princes and dukes, earls and knights kneeling to it.

Louis Bessières, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno, wanted the Grail and, some months before, he had heard a rumour from southern France, from the land of burned heretics, that the Grail existed. Two sons of the Vexille family, one a Frenchman and the other an English archer, sought that Grail as the Cardinal did, but no one, the Cardinal thought, wanted the Grail as much as he did. Or deserved it as he did. If he found the relic then he would command such awesome power that kings and Pope would come to him for blessing and when Clement, the present Pope, died, then Louis Bessières would take his throne and keys – if only he possessed the Grail. Louis Bessières wanted the Grail, but one day, staring unseeing at the stained glass in his private chapel, he had experienced a revelation. The Grail itself was not necessary. Perhaps it existed, probably it did not, but all that mattered was that Christendom believed that it existed. They wanted a Grail. Any Grail, so long as they were convinced it was the true and holy, one and only Grail, and that was why Gaspard was in this cellar, and why Gaspard would die, for no one but the Cardinal and his brother must ever know what was being made in the lonely tower among the windswept trees above Melun. ‘And now,’ the Cardinal said, carefully lifting the green glass from its wax bed, ‘you must make the common wax into heavenly gold.’

‘It will be hard, your eminence.’

‘Of course it will be hard,’ the Cardinal said, ‘but I shall pray for you. And your freedom depends on your success.’ The Cardinal saw the doubt on Gaspard’s face. ‘You made the crucifix,’ he said, picking up the beautiful gold object, ‘so why can you not make the cup?’

‘It is so delicate,’ Gaspard said, ‘and if I pour the gold and it does not melt the wax then all the work will be wasted.’

‘Then you will start again,’ the Cardinal said, ‘and by experience and with the help of God you will discover the way of truth.’

‘It has never been done,’ Gaspard said, ‘not with anything so delicate.’

‘Show me how,’ the Cardinal ordered and Gaspard explained how he would paint the wax cup with the noxious brown paste that had repelled the Cardinal. That paste was made from water, burned ox-horn that had been pounded to powder and cow dung, and the dried layers of the paste would encase the wax and the whole would then be entombed in soft clay, which had to be gently pressed into place to cradle the wax, but not distort it. Narrow tunnels would run through the clay from the outside to the entombed wax, and then Gaspard would take the shapeless clay lump to the furnace in the yard where he would bake the clay and the beeswax inside would melt and run out through the tunnels and, if he did it well, he would be left with a hard clay mass within which was concealed a delicate cavity in the shape of the tree of life.

‘And the cow dung?’ the Cardinal asked. He was genuinely fascinated. All beautiful things intrigued him, perhaps because in his youth he had been denied them.

‘The dung bakes hard,’ Gaspard said. ‘It makes a hard shell around the cavity.’ He smiled at the sullen girl. ‘Yvette mixes it for me,’ he explained. ‘The layer closest to the wax is very fine, the outer layers are coarser.’

‘So the dung mixture forms the hard surface of the mould?’ the Cardinal asked.

‘Exactly.’ Gaspard was pleased that his patron and saviour understood.

Then, when the clay was cold, Gaspard would pour molten gold into the cavity and he must hope that the liquid fire would fill every last cranny, every tiny leaf and apple and nail, and every delicately modelled ridge of bark. And when the gold had cooled and become firm the clay would be broken away to reveal either a grail-holder that would dazzle Christendom or else a mess of misshapen gold squiggles. ‘It will probably have to be done in separate pieces,’ Gaspard said nervously.

‘You will try with this one,’ the Cardinal ordered, draping the linen cloth back over the wax cup, ‘and if it fails you will make another and try again, and then again, and when it works, Gaspard, I shall release you to the fields and to the sky. You and your little friend.’ He smiled vaguely at the woman, made the sign of a blessing over Gaspard’s head, then walked from the cellar. He waited as his brother bolted the door. ‘Don’t be unkind to him, Charles.’

‘Unkind? I’m his jailer, not his nurse.’

‘And he is a genius. He thinks he is making me a Mass cup, so he has no idea how important his work is. He fears nothing, except you. So keep him happy.’

Charles moved away from the door. ‘Suppose they find the real Grail?’

‘Who will find it?’ the Cardinal asked. ‘The English archer has vanished and that fool of a monk won’t find it in Berat. He’ll just stir up the dust.’

‘So why send him?’

‘Because our Grail must have a past. Brother Jerome will discover some stories of the Grail in Gascony and that will be our proof, and once he has announced that the records of the Grail exist then we shall take the cup to Berat and announce its discovery.’

Charles was still thinking of the real Grail. ‘I thought the Englishman’s father left a book?’

‘He did, but we can make nothing of it. They are the scribblings of a madman.’

‘So find the archer and burn the truth from him,’ Charles said.

‘He will be found,’ the Cardinal promised grimly, ‘and next time I’ll loose you on him, Charles. He’ll talk then. But in the meantime we must go on looking, but above all we must go on making. So keep Gaspard safe.’

‘Safe now,’ Charles said, ‘and dead later.’ Because Gaspard would provide the means for the brothers to go to Avignon’s papal palace and the Cardinal, climbing to the yard, could taste the power already. He would be Pope.

At dawn that day, far to the south of the lonely tower near Soissons, the shadow of Castillon d’Arbizon’s castle had fallen across the heap of timbers ready for the heretic’s burning. The firewood had been well constructed, according to Brother Roubert’s careful instructions, so that above the kindling and around the thick stake to which a chain had been stapled there were four layers of upright faggots that would burn bright, but not too hot and without too much smoke, so that the watching townsfolk would see Genevieve writhe within the bright flame and know that the heretic was going to Satan’s dominion.

The castle’s shadow reached down the main street almost to the west gate where the town sergeants, already bemused by the discovery of the dead watchman on the walls, stared up at the bulk of the castle’s keep outlined by the rising sun. A new flag flew there. Instead of showing the orange leopard on the white field of Berat it flaunted a blue field, slashed with a diagonal white band that was dotted with three white stars. Three yellow lions inhabited the blue field and those fierce beasts appeared and disappeared as the big flag lifted to an indifferent wind. Then there was something new to gape at for, as the town’s four consuls hurried to join the sergeants, men appeared at the top of one of the bastions that protected the castle gate and they dropped a pair of heavy objects from the rampart. The two things dropped, then jerked to a stop at the end of ropes. At first the watching men thought that the garrison was airing its bedding, then they saw that the lumps were the corpses of two men. They were the castellan and the guard, and they hung by the gate to reinforce the message of the Earl of Northampton’s banner. Castillon d’Arbizon was under new ownership.

Galat Lorret, the oldest and richest of the consuls, the same man who had questioned the friar in the church the previous night, was the first to gather his wits. ‘A message must go to Berat,’ he ordered, and he instructed the town’s clerk to write to Castillon d’Arbizon’s proper lord. ‘Tell the Count that English troops are flying the banner of the Earl of Northampton.’

‘You recognize it?’ another consul asked.

‘It flew here long enough,’ Lorret responded bitterly. Castillon d’Arbizon had once belonged to the English and had paid its taxes to distant Bordeaux, but the English tide had receded and Lorret had never thought to see the Earl’s banner again. He ordered the four remaining men of the garrison, who had been drunk in the tavern and thus escaped the English, to be ready to carry the clerk’s message to distant Berat and he gave them a pair of gold coins to hasten their ride. Then, grim-faced, he marched up the street with his three fellow consuls. Father Medous and the priest from St Callic’s church joined them and the townsfolk, anxious and scared, fell in behind.

Lorret pounded on the castle gate. He would, he decided, face the impudent invaders down. He would scare them. He would demand that they leave Castillon d’Arbizon now. He would threaten them with siege and starvation, and just as he was summoning his indignant words the two leaves of the great gate were hauled back on screeching hinges and facing him were a dozen English archers in steel caps and mail hauberks, and the sight of the big bows and their long arrows made Lorret take an involuntary step back.

Then the young friar stepped forward, only he was no longer a friar, but a tall soldier in a mail haubergeon. He was bare-headed and his short black hair looked as if it had been cut with a knife. He wore black breeches, long black boots and had a black leather sword belt from which hung a short knife and a long plain sword. He had a silver chain about his neck, a sign that he held authority. He looked along the line of sergeants and consuls, then nodded to Lorret. ‘We were not properly introduced last night,’ he said, ‘but doubtless you remember my name. Now it is your turn to tell me yours.’

‘You have no business here!’ Lorret blustered.

Thomas looked up at the sky, which was pale, almost washed out, suggesting that more unseasonably cold weather might be coming. ‘Father,’ he spoke to Medous now, ‘you will have the goodness to translate my words so everyone can know what is going on.’ He looked back to Lorret. ‘If you will not talk sense then I shall order my men to kill you and then I shall talk to your companions. What is your name?’

‘You’re the friar,’ Lorret said accusingly.

‘No,’ Thomas said, ‘but you thought I was because I can read. I am the son of a priest and he taught me letters. Now, what is your name?’

‘I am Galat Lorret,’ Lorret said.

‘And from your robes,’ Thomas gestured at Lorret’s fur-trimmed gown, ‘I assume you have some authority here?’

‘We are the consuls,’ Lorret said with what dignity he could muster. The other three consuls, all younger than Lorret, tried to look unworried, but it was difficult when a row of arrow heads glittered beneath the arch.

‘Thank you,’ Thomas said courteously, ‘and now you must tell your people that they have the good fortune to be back under the Earl of Northampton’s rule and it is his lordship’s wish that his people do not stand about the street when there is work to be done.’ He nodded at Father Medous who offered a stammering translation to the crowd. There were some protests, mainly because the shrewder folk in the square understood that a change of lordship would inevitably mean more taxes.

‘The work this morning,’ Lorret said, ‘is burning a heretic.’

‘That is work?’

‘God’s work,’ Lorret insisted. He raised his voice and spoke in the local language. ‘The people were promised time from their labour to watch the evil burned from the town.’

Father Medous translated the words for Thomas. ‘It is the custom,’ the priest added, ‘and the bishop insists that the people see the girl burn.’

‘The custom?’ Thomas asked. ‘You burn girls often enough to have a custom about it?’

Father Medous shook his head in confusion. ‘Father Roubert told us we must let the people see.’

Thomas frowned. ‘Father Roubert,’ he said, ‘that’s the man who told you to burn the girl slowly? To stand the faggots upright?’

‘He is a Dominican,’ Father Medous said, ‘a real one. It was he who discovered the girl’s heresy. He should be here.’ The priest looked about him as if expecting to see the missing friar.

‘He’ll doubtless be sorry to miss the amusement,’ Thomas said, then he gestured to his row of archers who moved aside so that Sir Guillaume, armoured in mail and with a great war sword in his hand, could bring Genevieve out of the castle. The crowd hissed and jeered at the sight of her, but their anger went silent when the archers closed up behind the girl and hefted their tall bows. Robbie Douglas, in a mail haubergeon and with a sword at his side, pushed through the archers and stared at Genevieve who now stood beside Thomas. ‘This is the girl?’ Thomas asked.

‘She is the heretic, yes,’ Lorret said.

Genevieve was staring at Thomas with some disbelief. The last time she had seen him he had been wearing a friar’s robes, yet now he was palpably not a priest. His mail haubergeon, a short coat that came to his thighs, was of good quality and he had polished it during the night, which he had spent guarding the cells so that no one would abuse the prisoners.

Genevieve was no longer ragged. Thomas had sent two of the castle’s kitchen maids to her cell with water, cloths and a bone comb so she could clean herself, and he had provided her with a white gown that had belonged to the castellan’s wife. It was a dress of expensively bleached linen, embroidered at its neck, sleeves and hem with golden thread, and Genevieve looked as though she had been born to wear such finery. Her long fair hair was combed back to a plait secured with a yellow ribbon. She stood beside him, surprisingly tall, with her hands tied before her as she stared defiantly at the townsfolk. Father Medous timidly gestured towards the waiting timbers as if to suggest that there was no time to waste.

Thomas looked again at Genevieve. She was dressed as a bride, a bride come to her death, and Thomas was astonished at her beauty. Was that what had offended the townsfolk? Thomas’s father had always declared that beauty provoked hate as much as love, for beauty was unnatural, an offence against the mud and scars and blood of common life, and Genevieve, so tall and slender and pale and ethereal, was uncommonly lovely. Robbie must have been thinking the same for he was staring at her with an expression of pure awe.

Galat Lorret pointed at the waiting pyre. ‘If you want folk to work,’ he said, ‘then get the burning done.’

‘I’ve never burned a woman,’ Thomas said. ‘You must give me time to decide how best to do it.’

‘The chain goes round her waist,’ Galat Lorret explained, ‘and the blacksmith fastens it.’ He beckoned to the town’s smith who was waiting with a staple and hammer. ‘The fire will come from any hearth.’

‘In England,’ Thomas said, ‘it is not unknown for the executioner to strangle the victim under the cover of smoke. It is an act of mercy and done with a bowstring.’ He took just such a string from a pouch at his belt. ‘Is that the custom here?’

‘Not with heretics,’ Galat Lorret said harshly.

Thomas nodded, put the bowstring back in the pouch, then took Genevieve’s arm to walk her to the stake. Robbie started forward, as if to intervene, but Sir Guillaume checked him. Then Thomas hesitated. ‘There must be a document,’ he said to Lorret, ‘a warrant. Something which authorizes the civil power to carry out the Church’s condemnation.’

‘It was sent to the castellan,’ Lorret said.

‘To him?’ Thomas looked up at the fat corpse. ‘He failed to give it to me and I cannot burn the girl without such a warrant.’ He looked worried, then turned to Robbie. ‘Would you look for it? I saw a chest of parchments in the hall. Perhaps it’s there? Search for a document with a heavy seal.’

Robbie, unable to take his eyes from Genevieve’s face, looked as if he intended to argue, then he abruptly nodded and went into the castle. Thomas stepped back, taking Genevieve with him. ‘While we wait,’ he told Father Medous, ‘perhaps you will remind your townsfolk why she is to burn?’

The priest seemed flummoxed by the courteous invitation, but gathered his wits. ‘Cattle died,’ he said, ‘and she cursed a man’s wife.’

Thomas looked mildly surprised. ‘Cattle die in England,’ he said, ‘and I have cursed a man’s wife. Does that make me a heretic?’

‘She can tell the future!’ Medous protested. ‘She danced naked under the lightning and used magic to discover water.’

‘Ah.’ Thomas looked concerned. ‘Water?’

‘With a stick!’ Galat Lorret interjected. ‘It is the devil’s magic.’

Thomas looked thoughtful. He glanced at Genevieve who was trembling slightly, then he looked back to Father Medous. ‘Tell me, father,’ he said, ‘am I not right in thinking that Moses struck a rock with his brother’s staff and brought water from the stone?’

It had been a long time since Father Medous had studied the scriptures, but the story seemed familiar. ‘I remember something like it,’ he admitted.

‘Father!’ Galat Lorret said warningly.

‘Quiet!’ Thomas snarled at the consul. He raised his voice. ‘“Cumque elevasset Moses manum”,’ he was quoting from memory, but thought he had the words right, ‘“percutiens virga bis silicem egressae sunt aquae largissimae.”’ There were not many advantages to being the bastard son of a priest or to having spent some weeks at Oxford, but he had picked up enough learning to confound most churchmen. ‘You have not interpreted my words, father,’ he told the priest, ‘so tell the crowd how Moses struck the rock and brought forth a gush of water. And then tell me that if it pleases God to find water with a staff, how can it be wrong for this girl to do the same with a twig?’

The crowd did not like it. Some shouted and it was only the sight of two archers appearing on the rampart above the two dangling corpses that quietened them. The priest hurried to translate their protests. ‘She cursed a woman,’ he said, ‘and prophesied the future.’

‘What future did she see?’ Thomas asked.

‘Death.’ It was Lorret who answered. ‘She said the town would fill with corpses and we would lie in the streets unburied.’

Thomas looked impressed. ‘Did she foretell that the town would return to its proper allegiance? Did she say that the Earl of Northampton would send us here?’

There was a pause and then Medous shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Then she does not see the future very clearly,’ Thomas said, ‘so the devil cannot have inspired her.’

‘The bishop’s court decided otherwise,’ Lorret insisted, ‘and it is not up to you to question the proper authorities.’

The sword came from Thomas’s scabbard with surprising speed. The blade was oiled to keep it from rusting and it gleamed wetly as he prodded the fur-trimmed robe at Galat Lorret’s chest. ‘I am the proper authorities,’ Thomas said, pushing the consul backwards, ‘and you had best remember it. And I have never met your bishop, and if he thinks a girl is a heretic because cattle die then he is a fool, and if he condemns her because she does what God commanded Moses to do then he is a blasphemer.’ He thrust the sword a last time, making Lorret step hurriedly back. ‘What woman did she curse?’

‘My wife,’ Lorret said indignantly.

‘She died?’ Thomas asked.

‘No,’ Lorret admitted.

‘Then the curse did not work,’ Thomas said, returning the sword to its scabbard.

‘She is a beghard!’ Father Medous insisted.

‘What is a beghard?’ Thomas asked.

‘A heretic,’ Father Medous said rather helplessly.

‘You don’t know, do you?’ Thomas said. ‘It’s just a word for you, and for that one word you would burn her?’ He took the knife from his belt, then seemed to remember something. ‘I assume,’ he said, turning back to the consul, ‘that you are sending a message to the Count of Berat?’

Lorret looked startled, then tried to appear ignorant of any such thing.

‘Don’t take me for a fool,’ Thomas said. ‘You are doubtless concocting such a message now. So write to your Count and write to your bishop as well, and tell them that I have captured Castillon d’Arbizon and tell them more …’ He paused. He had agonized in the night. He had prayed, for he tried hard to be a good Christian, but all his soul, all his instincts, told him the girl should not burn. And then an inner voice had told him he was being seduced by pity and by golden hair and bright eyes, and he had agonized even more, but at the end of his prayers he knew he could not put Genevieve to the fire. So now he cut the length of cord that tied her bonds and, when the crowd protested, he raised his voice. ‘Tell your bishop that I have freed the heretic.’ He put the knife back in its sheath and put his right arm around Genevieve’s thin shoulders and faced the crowd again. ‘Tell your bishop that she is under the protection of the Earl of Northampton. And if your bishop wishes to know who has done this thing, then give him the same name that you provide to the Count of Berat. Thomas of Hookton.’

‘Hook ton,’ Lorret repeated, stumbling over the unfamiliar name.

‘Hookton,’ Thomas corrected him, ‘and tell him that by the grace of God Thomas of Hookton is ruler of Castillon d’Arbizon.’

‘You? Ruler here?’ Lorret asked indignantly.

‘And as you have seen,’ Thomas said, ‘I have assumed the powers of life and death. And that, Lorret, includes your life.’ He turned away and led Genevieve back into the courtyard. The gates banged shut.

And Castillon d’Arbizon, for lack of any other excitement, went back to work.

For two days Genevieve did not speak or eat. She stayed close to Thomas, watching him, and when he spoke to her she just shook her head. Sometimes she cried silently. She made no noise when she wept, not even a sob, she just looked despairing as the tears ran down her face.

Robbie tried to talk with her, but she shrank from him. Indeed she shuddered if he came too close and Robbie became offended. ‘A bloody goddamned heretic bitch,’ he cursed her in his Scottish accent and Genevieve, though she did not speak English, knew what he was saying and she just stared at Thomas with her big eyes.

‘She’s frightened,’ Thomas said.

‘Of me?’ Robbie asked indignantly, and the indignation seemed justified for Robbie Douglas was a frank-faced, snub-nosed young man with a friendly disposition.

‘She was tortured,’ Thomas explained. ‘Can’t you imagine what that does to a person?’ He involuntarily looked at the knuckles of his hands, still malformed from the screw-press that had cracked the bones. He had thought once he would never draw a bow again, but Robbie, his friend, had persevered with him. ‘She’ll recover,’ he added to Robbie.

‘I’m just trying to be friendly,’ Robbie protested. Thomas gazed at his friend and Robbie had the grace to blush. ‘But the bishop will send another warrant,’ Robbie went on. Thomas had burned the first, which had been discovered in the castellan’s iron-bound chest along with the rest of the castle’s papers. Most of those parchments were tax rolls, pay records, lists of stores, lists of men, the small change of everyday life. There had been some coins too, the tax yield, the first plunder of Thomas’s command. ‘What will you do?’ Robbie persisted. ‘When the bishop sends another warrant?’