Bernard Cornwell - The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond

'This?'

'When you raid across the border.'

'Hell, we stay in the open country. Go after cattle and horses.'

They were among the shelters now and stopped talk-ing. A sound of deep snoring came from one small turf hut and an unseen dog whined, but did not bark. A man was sitting in a chair outside a tent, presumably guarding whoever slept inside, but the guard himself was asleep. A small wind stirred the branches in an orchard by the church and the stream made a splashing noise as it plunged over the little weir beside the mill. A woman laughed softly in one of the houses where some men began to sing. The tune was new to Thomas and the deep voices smothered the sound of the church-yard gate, which squealed as he pushed it open. The church had a small wooden belfry and Thomas could hear the wind sighing on the bell. 'Is that you, Georges?' a man called from the porch.

' Non.' Thomas spoke more curtly than he intended, and the tone brought the man out from the black shadows of the porch's arch and Thomas, thinking he had initiated trouble, put his hand behind his back to grasp the hilt of his dagger.

'Sorry, sir.' The man had mistaken Thomas for an officer, maybe even a lord. 'I've been expecting a relief, sir.'

'He's probably still sleeping,' Thomas said.

The man stretched, yawning hugely. 'The bastard never wakes up.' The sentry was little more than a shadow in the dark, but Thomas sensed he was a big man. 'And it's cold here,' the man went on, 'God, but it's cold. Did Guy and his men come back?'

'One of their horses threw a shoe,' Thomas said.

'That's what it was! And I thought they'd found that ale shop in Saint-Germain. Christ and his angels, but that girl with the one eye! Have you seen her?'

'Not yet,' Thomas said. He was still holding his dagger, one of the weapons that the archers called a misericord because it was used to put unhorsed and wounded men-atarms out of their misery. The blade was slender and sufficiently flexible to slide between the joints of armour and seek out the life beneath, but he was reluctant to draw it. This sentry suspected nothing and his only offence was to want a long conversation. 'Is the church open?' Thomas asked the sentry.

'Of course. Why not?'

'We have to pray,' Thomas said.

'Must be a guilty conscience that makes men pray at night, eh?' The sentry was affable.

'Too many one-eyed girls,' Thomas said. Robbie, not speaking French, stood to one side and stared at the great black shadow of the gun.

'A sin worth repenting,' the man chuckled, then he drew himself up. 'Would you wait here while I wake Georges? It won't take a moment.'

'Take as long as you like,' Thomas said grandly, 'we shall be here till dawn. You can let Georges sleep if you want. The two of us will keep watch.'

'You're a living saint,' the man said, then he fetched his blanket from the porch before walking away with a cheerful goodnight. Thomas, when the man was gone, walked into the porch where he immediately kicked an empty barrel that rolled over with a great clatter. He swore and went still, but no one called from the village to demand an explanation for the noise.

Robbie crouched beside him. The dark was impenetrable in the porch, but they groped with their hands to discover a half-dozen empty barrels. They stank of rotten eggs and Thomas guessed they had once held black powder. He whispered to Robbie the gist of the conversation he had held with the sentry. 'But what I don't know,' he went on, 'is whether he's going to wake Georges or not. I don't think so, but I couldn't tell.'

'Who does he think we are?'

'Two men-at-arms probably,' Thomas said. He pushed the empty barrels aside, then stood and groped for the rope that lifted the latch of the church door. He found it, then winced as the hinges squealed. Thomas could still see nothing, but the church had the same sour stench as the empty barrels. 'We need some light,' he whispered. His eyes slowly became accustomed to the gloom and he saw the faintest glimmer of light showing from the big eastern window over the altar. There was not even a small flame burning above the sanctuary where the wafers were kept, presumably because it was too dangerous with the gunpowder being stored in the nave. Thomas found the powder easily enough by bumping into the stack of barrels that were just inside the door. There were at least two score of them each about the size of a water pail, and Thomas guessed the cannon used one or maybe two barrels for each shot. Say three or four shots a day? So maybe there was two weeks' supply of powder here. 'We need some light,' he said again, turning, but Robbie made no response. 'Where are you?' Thomas hissed the question, but again there was no answer and then he heard a boot thump hollow against one of the empty barrels in the porch and he saw Robbie's shadow flicker in the clouded moonlight of the graveyard.

Thomas waited. A campfire smouldered not far beyond the thorn hedge that kept cattle out of the vil-lage's graves and he saw a shadow crouch beside the dying flames and then there was a sudden flare of brightness, like summer lightning, and Robbie reeled back and then Thomas, dazzled and alarmed by the flare, could see nothing. He had gone to the church door and he expected to hear a shout from one of the men in the village, but instead he heard only the squeal of the gate and the Scotsman's footsteps. 'I used an empty barrel,' Robbie said, 'except it wasn't as empty as I thought. Or else the powder gets into the wood.'

He was standing in the porch and the barrel was in his hands; he had used it to scoop up some embers. The powder residue had flared, burning his eyebrows, and now fire leaped up the barrel's inside. 'What do I do with it?' he asked.

'Christ!' Thomas imagined the church exploding. 'Give it to me,' he said, and he took the barrel, which was hot to the touch, and he ran with it into the church, his way lit by the flames, and he thrust the burning wood deep between two stacks of full barrels. 'Now we get out,' he said to Robbie.

'Did you look for the poor box?' Robbie said. 'Only if we're going to smash the church, we might as well take the poor box.'

'Come on!' Thomas snatched Robbie's arm and dragged him through the porch.

'It's a waste to leave it,' Robbie said.

'There's no bloody poor box,' Thomas said, 'the vil-lage is full of soldiers, you idiot!'

They ran, dodging between graves and pounding past the bulbous cannon, which lay in its wooden firing cradle. They climbed a fence that filled a gap in the thorn hedge, then sprinted past the gaunt shape of the broken springald and the turf-roofed shelters, not caring if they made a noise, and two dogs began to bark, then a third howled at them and a man jumped up from beside the entrance of one of the big tents. 'Qui va lå?' he called, and began to wind his crossbow, but Thomas and Robbie were already past him and out in the open field where they stumbled on the uneven turf. The moon came from behind the cloud and Thomas could see his breath like a mist.

' Halte!' the man shouted.

Thomas and Robbie stopped. Not because the man had given them the order, but because a red light was filling the world. They turned and stared, and the sentry who had challenged them now forgot them as the night became scarlet. Thomas was not sure what he had expected. A lance of flame to pierce the heavens? A great noise like thunder? Instead the noise was almost soft, like a giant's inrush of breath, and a soft blossoming flame spilled from the church windows as though the gates of hell had just been opened and the fires of death were filling the nave, but that great red glow only lasted an instant before the roof of the church lifted off and Thomas distinctly saw the black rafters splaying apart like butchered ribs. 'Sweet Jesus Christ,' he blasphemed.

'God in His heaven,' Robbie said, wideeyed.

Now the flames and smoke and air were boiling above the cauldron of the unroofed church, and still new barrels exploded, one after the other, each one pulsing a wave of fire and fumes into the sky. Neither Thomas nor Robbie knew it, but the powder had needed stirring because the heavier saltpetre found its way to the bottom of the barrels and the lighter charcoal was left at the top and that meant much of the powder was slow to catch the fire, but the explosions were serving to mix the remaining powder that pulsed bright and scarlet to spew a red cloud over the village. Every dog in Evecque was barking or howling, and men, women and children were crawling from their beds to stare at the hellish glow. The noise of the explosions rolled across the meadows and echoed from the manor walls and startled hundreds of birds up from their roosts in the woodlands. Debris splashed in the moat, throwing up sharp-edged shards of thin ice that mirrored the fire so it seemed the manor was sur-rounded by a lake of sparkling flame.

'Jesus,' Robbie said in awe, then the two of them ran on towards the beech trees at the high eastern side of the pastureland.

Thomas began to laugh as he stumbled up the path to the trees. 'I'll go to hell for that,'

he said, stopping among the beeches and making the sign of the cross.

'For burning a church?' Robbie was grinning, his eyes reflecting the brightness of the fires. 'You should see what we did to the Black Canons at Hexham! Christ, half Scotland will be in hell for that one.'

They watched the fire for a few moments, then turned into the darkness of the woods. Dawn was not far off. There was a lightness in the east where a wan grey, pale as death, edged the sky. 'We have to go deeper into the forest,' Thomas said, 'we have to hide.'

Because the hunt for the saboteurs was about to start and in the first light, as the smoke still made a great pall above Evecques, the Count of Coutances sent twenty horsemen and a pack of hounds to find the men who had destroyed his store of powder, but the day was cold, the ground hard with frost and the quarry's small scent faded early. Next day, in his petulance, the Count ordered his forces to make an attack. They had been readying gabions – great basketwork tubes woven from willow that were filled with earth and stones – and the plan was to fill the moat with the gabions and then swarm over the resultant bridge to assault the gate-house. The gateway lacked its drawbridge which had been taken down early in the siege to leave an open and inviting archway which was blocked by nothing more than a low stone barricade.

The Count's advisers told him there were not enough gabions, that the moat was deeper than he thought, that the time was not propitious, that Venus was in the ascendant and Mars in the decline, and that he should, in brief, wait until the stars smiled on him and the garrison was hungrier and more desperate, but the Count had lost face and he ordered the assault anyway and his men did their best. They were protected so long as they held the gabions, for the earth-filled baskets were proof against any crossbow bolt, but once the gabions were thrown into the moat the attackers were exposed to Sir Guillaume's six crossbowmen who were sheltering behind the low stone wall that had been built across the manor's entrance arch where the drawbridge had once been. The Count had crossbowmen of his own and they were protected by pavises, full-length shields carried by a second man to protect the archer while he laboriously wound the cord of the crossbow, but the men throwing the gabions had no protection once their burdens were thrown and eight of them died before the rest realized that the moat really was too deep and that there were not nearly enough gabions. Two paviseholders and a crossbowman were badly wounded before the Count accepted he was wasting his time and called the attackers back. Then he cursed Sir Guillaume on the fourteen hump-backed devils of St Candace before getting drunk.

Thomas and Robbie survived. On the day after they had burned the Count's powder Thomas shot a deer, and next day Robbie discovered a rotting hare in a gap in a hedge and when he pulled the body out discovered a snare that must have been set by one of Sir Guillaume's tenants who had either been killed or chased off by the Count's men. Robbie washed the snare in a stream and set it in another hedge and next morning found a hare choking in the tightening noose.

They dared not sleep in the same place two nights running, but there was plenty of shelter in the deserted and burned-out farms. They spent most of the next weeks in the country south of Evecque where the valleys were deeper, the hills steeper and the woods thicker. Here there were plenty of hiding places and it was in that tangled landscape that they made the Count's nightmare worse. Tales began to be told in the besiegers' encampment of a tall man in black on a pale horse and whenever the man on the pale horse appeared, someone would die. The death would be caused by a long arrow, an English arrow, yet the man on the horse had no bow, only a staff topped by a deer's skull, and everyone knew what creature rode the pale horse and what a skull on a pole denoted. The men who had seen the apparition told their womenfolk in the Count's encampment and the womenfolk cried to the Count's chaplain and the Count said they were dreaming, but the corpses were real enough. Four brothers, come from distant Lyons to earn money by serving in the siege, packed their belongings and went. Others threatened to follow. Death stalked Evecque.

The Count's chaplain said folk were touched by the moon and he rode into the dangerous south country, loudly chanting prayers and scattering holy water, and when the chaplain survived unscathed the Count told his men they had been fools, that there was no Death riding a pale horse, and next day two men died only this time they were in the east. The tales grew in the telling. The horseman was now accompanied by giant hounds whose eves glowed, and the horseman did not even need to appear to explain any misfortune. If a horse tripped, if a man broke a bone, if a woman spilled food, if a crossbow string snapped, then it was blamed on the mysterious man who rode the pale horse. The confidence of the besiegers plunged. There were mutterings of doom and six men-at-arms went south to seek employment in Gascony. Those who remained grumbled that they did the devil's work and nothing the Count of Coutances did seemed to restore his men's spirits. He tried cutting back trees to stop the mysterious archer shooting into the camp, but there were too many trees and not enough axes, and the arrows still came. He sent to the Bishop of Caen who wrote a blessing on a piece of vellum and sent it back, but that had no effect on the black-cloaked rider whose appearance presaged death, and so the Count, who fervently believed he did God's work and feared to fail in case he incurred God's wrath, now appealed to God for help.

He wrote to Paris.

Louis Bessieres, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno, a city he had only seen once when he travelled to Rome (on his return, he had made a detour so he would not be forced to see Livorno a second time), walked slowly down the Quai des Orfevres on the Ile de la Cite in Paris. Two servants went ahead of him, using staves to clear the way for the Cardinal who appeared not to be paying attention to the lean, hollow-cheeked priest who spoke to him so urgently. The Cardinal, instead, exam-ined the wares on offer in the goldsmiths'

shops lining the quai that was named for their trade: Goldsmith's Quay. He admired a necklace of rubies and even con-sidered buying it, but then discovered a flaw in one of the stones. 'So sad,' he murmured, then moved to the next shop. 'Exquisite!' he exclaimed of a salt cellar made in silver and emblazoned with four panels on which pictures of country life were enamelled in blue, red, yellow and black. A man ploughed on one panel and broadcast seed on the next, a woman cut the harvest on the third while on the last panel the two sat at table admiring a glowing loaf of bread. 'Quite exquisite,' the Cardinal enthused, 'don't you think it beautiful?'