Bernard Cornwell - The Grail Quest 2 - Vagabond

'You're cured,' Mordecai told him when Thomas told him that news.

'Thanks to you,' Thomas said, though he knew it was not only Mordecai, any more than it was the friendship of Will Skeat or of Sir Guillaume or of Robbie Douglas that had helped him recover. Bernard de Taillebourg had wounded Thomas, but those bloodless wounds of God had not just been to his body, but to his soul, and it was on a dark spring night when the lightning was flickering in the east that Jeanette had climbed to her attic. She had not left Thomas until the town's cockerels greeted the new dawn and if Mordecai understood why Thomas was smiling the next day he said nothing, but he noted that from that moment on Thomas's recovery was swift.

Thereafter Thomas and Jeanette talked every night. He told her of Charles and of the look on the boy's face when Thomas had mentioned his mother; Jeanette wanted to know everything about that look and she worried that it meant nothing and that her son had forgotten her, but eventually she believed Thomas when he said the boy had almost wept when he heard news of her. 'You told him I loved him?' she asked.

'Yes,' Thomas said, and Jeanette lay silent, tears in her eyes, and Thomas tried to reassure her, but she shook her head as if there was nothing Thomas could say that would console her. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

'You tried,' Jeanette said.

They wondered how the enemy had known Thomas was coming and Jeanette said that she was sure that Belas the lawyer had had a hand in it. 'I know he writes to Charles of Blois,' she said, 'and that horrid man, what did you call him? Epolurantail?'

'The Scarecrow.'

'Him,' Jeanette confirmed, 'l'zpoourantail. He talks to Belas.'

'The Scarecrow talks to Belas?' Thomas asked, surprised.

'He lives there now. He and his men live in the store-houses.' She paused. 'Why does he even stay in the town?' Others of the mercenaries had slipped away to find employment where there was some hope of victory rather than stay and endure the defeat that Charles of Blois threatened.

'He can't go home,' Thomas said, 'because he has too many debts. He's protected from his creditors so long as he's here.'

'But why La Roche-Derrien?'

'Because I'm here,' Thomas said. 'He thinks I can lead him to treasure.'

'The Grail?'

'He doesn't know that,' Thomas said, but he was wrong because the next day, while he was alone at the windmill and shooting arrows at a wand he had planted a hundred and fifty paces away, the Scarecrow and his six men-at-arms came riding out of the town's eastern gate. They turned off the Pontrieux road, filed through a gap in the hedge and spurred up the shallow slope towards the mill. They were all in mail and all with swords except for Beggar who, dwarfing his horse, carried a morningstar. Sir Geoffrey reined in close to Thomas, who ignored him to shoot an arrow that just brushed the wand. The Scarecrow let the coils of his whip ripple to the ground. 'Look at me,' he ordered Thomas.

Thomas still ignored him. He took an arrow from his belt and put it on the string, then jerked his head aside as he saw the whip snake towards him. The metal tip touched his hair, but did no damage. 'I said look at me,' Sir Geoffrey snarled.

'You want an arrow in your face?' Thomas asked him.

Sir Geoffrey leaned forward on his saddle's pommel, his raw red face twisted with a spasm of anger. 'You are an archer' – he pointed his whip handle at Thomas – 'and I am a knight. If I chop you down there's not a judge alive who would condemn me.'

'And if I put an arrow through your eye,' Thomas said, 'the devil will thank me for sending him company.'

Beggar growled and spurred his horse forward, but the Scarecrow waved the big man back. 'I know what you want,' he said to Thomas.

Thomas hauled the string back, instinctively corrected for the small wind rippling the meadow's grass, and released. The arrow made the wand quiver. 'You have no idea what I want,' he told Sir Geoffrey.

'I thought it was gold,' the Scarecrow said, 'and then I thought it was land, but I never understood why gold or land would take you to Durham.' He paused as Thomas shot another arrow that hissed a hand's breadth past the distant wand. 'But now I know,' he finished, 'now at last I know.'

'What do you know?' Thomas asked derisively.

'I know you went to Durham to talk with the church-men because you're seeking the greatest treasure of the Church. You're looking for the Grail.'

Thomas let the bowcord slacken, then looked up at Sir Geoffrey. 'We're all looking for the Grail,' Thomas said, still derisive.

'Where is it?' Sir Geoffrey growled.

Thomas laughed. He was surprised the Scarecrow knew about the Grail, but he supposed that gossip in the garrison had probably let everyone in La Roche-Derrien know.

'The best questioners of the Church asked me that,' he said, holding up one crooked hand,

'and I didn't tell them. You think I'll tell you?'

'I think,' the Scarecrow said, 'that a man searching for the Grail doesn't lock himself into a garrison that only has a month or two to live.'

'Then maybe I'm not looking for the Grail,' Thomas said and shot another arrow at the wand, but this shaft was warped and the arrow wobbled in flight and went wide. Above him the great sails of the mill, furled about their spars and tethered by ropes, creaked as a wind gust tried to turn them.

Sir Geoffrey coiled the whip. 'You failed the last time you rode out. What happens if you ride again? What happens if you ride after the Grail? And you must be going soon, before Charles of Blois gets here. So when you ride you're going to need help.' Thomas, incredulous, realized that the Scarecrow had come to offer him help, or perhaps Sir Geoffrey was asking for help. He was in La Roche-Derrien for only one reason, treasure, and he was no nearer to it now than he had been when he first accosted Thomas outside Durham. 'You daren't fail again.' the Scarecrow went on, 'so next time take some real fighters with you.'

'You think I'd take you?' Thomas asked, astonished.

'I'm an Englishman,' the Scarecrow said indignantly, 'and if the Grail exists I want it in England. Not in some scab of a foreign place.'

The sound of a sword scraping from its scabbard made the Scarecrow and his men turn in their saddles. Jeanette and Robbie had come to the meadow with Oana at Robbie's side; Jeanette had her crossbow cocked and Robbie, as though he did not have a care in the world, was now slashing the tops from thistles with his uncle's sword. Sir Geoffrey turned back to Thomas. 'What you don't need is a damned Scotchrnan,' he said angrily.

'nor a damned French bitch. If you look for the Grail, archer, look for it with loyal Englishmen! It's what the King would want, isn't it?'

Again Thomas did not answer. Sir Geoffrey hung the whip on a hook attached to his belt, then jerked his reins. The seven men cantered down the hill, going close to Robbie as if tempting him to attack them, but Robbie ignored them. 'What did that bastard want?'

Thomas shot at the wand, brushing it with the arrow's feathers. 'I think,' he said, 'that he wanted to help me find the Grail.'

'Help you!' Robbie exclaimed. 'Help you find the Grail? Like hell. He wants to steal it. That bastard would steal the milk from the Virgin Mary's tits.'

'Robbie!' Jeanette said, shocked, then aimed her crossbow at the wand.

'Watch her,' Thomas said to Robbie. 'She'll close her eyes when she shoots. She always does.'

'Damn you,' Jeanette said, then, unable to help it, closed her eyes as she pulled the trigger. The bolt slapped out of the groove and miraculously clipped the top six inches from the wand. Jeanette looked at Thomas triumphantly. 'I can shoot better than you with my eyes closed,' she said.

Robbie had been on the town's walls and had seen the Scarecrow accost Thomas and so he had come to help, but now, with Sir Geoffrey gone, they sat in the sun with their backs against the mill's wooden skirt. Jeanette was staring at the town's wall which still showed the scars where the English-made breach had been repaired with a lightercoloured stone. 'Are you really nobly born?' she asked Thomas.

'Bastard born,' Thomas said.

'But to a nobleman?'

'He was the Count of Astarac,' Thomas said, then laughed because it was strange to think that Father Ralph, mad Father Ralph who had preached to the gulls on Hookton's beach, had been a count.

'So what's the badge of Astarac?' Jeanette asked.

'A yale,' Thomas told her, 'holding a cup,' and he showed her the faded silver patch on his black bowstave that was engraved with the strange creature that had horns, cloven hooves, claws, tusks and a lion's tail. 'I'll have a banner made for you,' Jeanette said.

'A banner? Why?'

'A man should display his badge,' Jeanette said.

'And you should leave La Roche-Derrien,' Thomas retorted. He kept trying to persuade her to leave the town, but she insisted she would stay. She doubted now she would ever get her son back and so she was determined to kill Charles of Blois with one of her cross-bow's bolts, which were made of dense yew heartwood tipped with iron heads and fledged, not with feathers, but with stiff pieces of leather inserted into slits cut crosswise into the yew and then bound up with cord and glue. That was why she practised so assiduously, for the chance to cut down the man who had raped her and taken her child. Easter came before the enemy arrived. The weather was warm now. The hedgerows were full of nestlings and the meadows echoed with the shriek of partridges and on the day after Easter, when folk ate up the remnants of the feast that had broken their Lenten fast, the dreaded news at last arrived from Rennes.

That Charles of Blois had marched.

More than four thousand men left Rennes under the white ermine banner of the Duke of Brittany. Two thou-sand of them were crossbowmen, most wearing the green and red livery of Genoa and bearing the city's badge of the Holy Grail on their right arms. They were mercenaries, hired and prized for their skill. A thousand infantrymen marched with them, the men who would dig the trenches and assault the broken walls of the English fortresses, and then there were over a thousand knights or men-at-arms, most of them French, who formed the hard armoured heart of Duke Charles's army. They marched towards La Roche-Derrien, but the real aim of the campaign was not to capture the town, which was of negligible value, but rather to draw Sir Thomas Dagworth and his small army into a pitched battle in which the knights and men-at-arms, mounted on their big armoured horses, would be released to smash their way through the English ranks. A convoy of heavy carts carried nine siege machines, which needed the attentions of over a hundred engineers who understood how to assemble and work the giant devices that could hurl boulders the size of beer barrels further than a how could drive an arrow. A Florentine gunner had offered six of his strange machines to Charles, but the Duke had turned them down. Guns were rare, expensive and, he believed, temperamental, while the old mechanical devices worked well enough if they were properly greased with tallow and Charles saw no reason to abandon them. Over four thousand men left Rennes, but far more arrived in the fields outside La Roche-Derrien. Country folk who hated the English joined the army to gain revenge for all the cattle, harvests, property and virginity their families had lost to the foreigners. Some were armed with nothing more than mattocks or axes, but when the time came to assault the town such angry men would be useful.

The army came to La Roche-Derrien and Charles of Blois heard the last of the town's gates slam shut. He sent a messenger to demand the garrison's surrender, knowing the request was futile, and while his tents were pitched he ordered other horsemen to patrol westwards on the roads leading to Finisterre, the world's end. They were there to warn him when Sir Thomas Dagworth's army marched to relieve the town, if indeed it did march. His spies had told Charles that Dagworth could not even raise a thousand men.

'And how many of those will be archers?' he asked.

'At most, your grace, five hundred.' The man who answered was a priest, one of the many who served in Charles's retinue. The Duke was known as a pious man and liked to employ priests as advisers, secretaries and, in this case, as a spymaster. 'At most five hundred,' the priest repeated, 'but in truth, your grace, far fewer.'

'Fewer? How so?'

'Fever in Finisterre,' the priest answered, then smiled thinly. 'God is good to us.'

'Amen to that. And how many archers are in the town garrison?'

'Sixty healthy men, your grace' – the priest had Belas's latest report – 'just sixty.'

Charles grimaced. He had been defeated by English archers before, even when he had so outnumbered them that defeat had seemed impossible, and, as a result, he was properly wary of the long arrows, but he was also an intelligent man and he had given the problem of the English war bow a deal of thought. It was possible to defeat the weapon, he thought, and on this campaign he would show how it could be done. Cleverness, that most despised of soldierly qualities, would triumph, and Charles of Blois, styled by the French as the Duke and ruler of Brittany, was undeniably a clever man. He could read and write in six languages, spoke Latin better than most priests and was a master of rhetoric. He even looked clever with his thin, pale face and intense blue eyes, fair beard and moustache. He had been fighting his rivals for the duke-dom almost all his adult life, but now, at last, he had gained the ascendancy. The King of England, besieging Calais, was not reinforcing his garrisons in Brittany while the King of France, who was Charles's uncle, had been generous with men, which meant that Duke Charles at last outnumbered his enemies. By summer's end, he thought, he would be master of all his ancestral domains, but then he cautioned himself against over-confidence. 'Even five hundred archers,' he observed, 'even five hundred and sixty archers can be dangerous.' He had a precise voice, pedantic and dry, and the priests in his entourage often thought he sounded very like a priest himself.

'The Genoese will swamp them with bolts, your grace,' a priest assured the Duke.

'Pray God they do,' Charles said piously, though God, he thought, would need some help from human cleverness.

Next morning, under a late spring sun, Charles rode around La Roche-Derrien, though he kept far enough away so that no English arrow could reach him. The defenders had hung banners from the town walls. Some of the flags displayed the English cross of St George, others the white ermine badge of the Montfort Duke that was so similar to Charles's own device. Many of the flags were inscribed with insults aimed at Charles. One showed the Duke's white ermine with an English arrow through its bleeding belly, and another was evidently a picture of Charles himself being trampled under a great black horse, but most of the flags were pious exhortations inviting God's help or displaying the cross to show the attackers where heaven's sympathies were supposed to lie. Most besieged towns would also have flaunted the banners of their noble defenders, but La Roche-Derrien had few nobles, or at least few who dis-played their badges, and none to match the ranks of the aristocrats in Charles's army. The three hawks of Evecque were displayed on the wall, but everyone knew Sir Guillaume had been dispossessed and had no more than three or four followers. One flag showed a red heart on a pale field and a priest in Charles's entourage thought it was the badge of the Douglas family in Scot-land, but that was a nonsense for no Scotsman would be fighting for the English. Next to the red heart was a brighter banner showing a blue and white sea of wavy lines. 'Is that . . .'