The Archer's Tale (The Grail Quest, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

Most country churches suffered ignorant, pudding-faced priests who were scarce more educated than their parishioners, but Hookton, in Father Ralph, had a proper scholar, too clever to be sociable, perhaps a saint, maybe of noble birth, a self-confessed sinner, probably mad, but undeniably a real priest.

For Easter had come, Christ was risen and the French were ashore.

“And my mother,” Thomas said, “was a priest’s housekeeper and the daughter of a bowyer. I shall go to France as an archer.” “There’s more honor as a man-at-arms,” Sir Giles observed, but Thomas did not want honor. He wanted revenge.

Skeat’s men were the lords of Brittany, a scourge from hell, and the French-speaking villagers in the east of the Duchy called them the hellequin, which meant the devil’s horsemen.

The enemy hated the archers. If they captured an English bowman they killed him. A man-at-arms might be imprisoned, a lord would be ransomed, but an archer was always murdered. Tortured first, then murdered.

All archers wore talismans, maybe a cheap metal pendant showing a saint, or a dried hare’s foot, but Thomas had a desiccated dog’s paw hanging round his neck which he claimed was the hand of St. Guinefort, and no one dared dispute him because he was the most learned man in Skeat’s band. He spoke French like a nobleman and Latin like a priest, and Skeat’s archers were perversely proud of him because of those accomplishments.

“The man’s as poor as we are,” Jake said in wonderment as he raked through the tanner’s coins. He pushed a third of the pile toward Thomas. “You want his wife?” Jake offered generously. “Christ, no! She’s cross-eyed like you.” “Is she?”

“You made a promise to your father, Thomas, and you made it in a church. Isn’t that what you told me? A solemn promise, Thomas? That you would retrieve the lance? God listens to such vows.” Thomas smiled. “Outside this tavern, father, there’s so much rape and murder and theft going on that all the quills in heaven can’t keep up with the list of sins. And you worry about me?” “Yes, Thomas, I do. Some souls are better than others. I must look after them all, but if you have a prize ram in the flock then you do well to guard it.”

It was Christmas time, and back home the yule logs were being dragged across frost-hardened fields to high-beamed halls where troubadours sang of Arthur and his knights, of chivalrous warriors who allied pity to strength, but in Brittany the hellequin fought the real war. Soldiers were not paragons; they were scarred, vicious men who took delight in destruction. They hurled burning torches onto thatch and tore down what had taken generations to build.

“I think, madame,” Belas said, “that you must make up your mind what you are. Are you Louis Halevy’s daughter? Or Henri Chenier’s widow? Are you a merchant or an aristocrat? If you are a merchant, madame, then marry here and be content. If you are an aristocrat then raise what money you can and go to the Duke and find yourself a new husband with a title.”

He would take her house and farms, the Duke would claim Plabennec and she would be left with nothing. Which was what she deserved, for she was a stubborn and proud creature who had risen far above her proper station. “I am always,” Belas said humbly, “at your ladyship’s service.” From adversity, he thought, a clever man could always profit, and Jeanette was ripe for plucking. Put a cat to guard the sheep and the wolves would eat well.

“Silly goddamn bastard,” Skeat said. “What did he want? A tournament? Who does he think we are? The knights of the round bloody table? I don’t know what happens to some folk. They put a sir in front of their names and their brains get addled. Fighting fair! Whoever heard of anything so daft? Fight fair and you lose. Bloody fool.”

Skeat tied his horse to a tree and strung his bow. “There’s a place in York,” he said, “where you can watch the mad folk. They keep them caged up and you pay a farthing to go and laugh at them. They should put those two silly bastards in with them.” “My father was mad for a time,” Thomas said. “Don’t surprise me, lad, don’t surprise me at all.” Skeat said.

“You might find this useful,” Father Hobbe intervened, and offered Thomas a black cloth bundle which, on unrolling, proved to be the robe of a Dominican friar. “You speak Latin, Tom,” the priest said, “so you could pass for a wandering preacher. If anyone challenges you, say you’re travelling from Avignon to Aachen.” Thomas thanked him. “Do many Dominicans travel with a bow?” he asked. “Lad,” Father Hobbe said sadly, “I can unbutton your breeches and I can point you down wind, but even with the Good Lord’s help I can’t piss for you.” “In other words,” Skeat said, “work it out for yourself. You got yourself in this bloody mess, Tom, so you get yourself out. I enjoyed your company, lad. Thought you’d be useless when I first saw you and you weren’t, but you are now. But be lucky, boy.” He held out his hand and Thomas shook it.

“Don’t waste your life, Tom.” “I think I already have, father.” “You’re just young. It seems like that when you’re young. Life’s nothing but joy or misery when you’re young.” He helped Thomas up from his knees.

Thomas again felt panic fluttering in his breast, but he bought time by making the sign of the cross, and as his hand moved so inspiration came to him. “I am a Scotsman, my son,” he said, and that allayed the yellow-eyed man’s suspicions; the Scots had ever been France’s ally. Thomas knew nothing of Scotland, but doubted many Frenchmen or Bretons did either, for it was far away and, by all accounts, a most uninviting place. Skeat always said it was a country of bog, rock and heathen bastards who were twice as difficult to kill as any Frenchman.

They met two priests on the road, but neither suspected that Thomas was an imposter. He greeted them in Latin, which he spoke better than they did, and both men wished him a good day and a fervent Godspeed. Thomas could almost feel their relief when he did not engage them in further conversation. The Dominicans were not popular with parish priests. The friars were priests themselves, but were charged with the suppression of heresy so a visitation by the Dominicans suggested that a parish priest has not been doing his duty and even a rough, wild and young friar like Thomas was unwelcome.

Thomas waited in the yard, offering blessings to ostlers, stray cats and tapmen. Be mad enough, his father had once said, and they will either lock you away or make you a saint.

Thomas had used to pray to St. George, but he no longer did and that made him feel guilty so that he dropped to his knees beside the wagon and asked the saint to forgive him his sins, to forgive him for the squire’s murder and for impersonating a friar. I do not mean to be a bad person, he told the dragon killer, but it is so easy to forget heaven and the saints.

“Merchants,” the Duke said, “have no loyalties other than to money. They have no honor. Honor is not learned, madame. It is bred. Just as you breed a horse for bravery and speed, or a hound for agility and ferocity, so you breed a nobleman for honor. You cannot turn a plough-horse into a destrier, nor a merchant into a gentleman. It is against nature and the laws of God.” He made the sign of the cross.

She was like a moth, he thought, flying to the brightest candle in the room. Her wings had been scorched once, but the flame drew her still.

Why be jealous of a prince? A man might as well resent the sun or curse the ocean.

“Listen, boy,” he said, “I’m going to watch you go through that door, and if you don’t I’ll string your goddamn guts from wall to wall.” Thomas hefted the falchion. “I’ve sworn an oath to St. Guinefort,” he told the man, “to protect all women.” “Goddamn fool.”

“Thomas.” “Mine is Mordecai, though you may call me Doctor. You won’t, of course. You’ll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of Christian children.” This was all said cheerfully. “How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life’s lessons.” “Doctor?” Thomas croaked. “Thomas?” “Thank you.”

“But you love her?” Eleanor asked directly. “No,” Thomas said. “You say that because you’re with me,” Eleanor declared. He shook his head. “My father had a book of St. Augustine’s sayings and there was one that always puzzled me.” He frowned, trying to remember the Latin. “Nondum amabam, et amare amabam. I did not love, but yearned to love.” Eleanor gave him a skeptical look. “A very elaborate way of saying you’re lonely.”

“In the course of copying books,” the monk explained, “one discovers knowledge whether one wishes it or not.

such knowledge is confusing to the unlearned. Men go mad when they know too much.”

“I thank God I shall be dead soon and taken to the bliss above while you must struggle with this darkness.”

His father had ever warned him against prophecy. It drives men’s minds awry,

God help me, Thomas thought, God help me, but I am being asked to do what all the great knights of Arthur’s round table failed to do: to find the Grail.

This was the might of France, and France’s friends had rallied to the cause. There was a troop of knights from Scotland—big, savage-looking men who nourished a rare hatred of the English. There were mercenaries from Germany and Italy, and there were knights whose names had become famous in Christendom’s tournaments, the elegant killers who had become rich in the sport of war.

“It is more than revenge I want,” the Harlequin said quietly. “What?” The Harlequin, a handsome man, smiled at Sir Simon, though there was no warmth in the smile. “Power,” he answered very calmly. “With power, Sir Simon, comes privilege and with privilege, wealth. What are kings,” he asked, “but men who have risen high? So we shall rise too, and use the defeat of kings as the rungs of our ladder.”

It was France’s most sacred symbol, a scarlet banner kept by the Benedictines in the abbey where the Kings of France lay entombed, and every man knew that when the oriflamme was unfurled no quarter would be given. It was said to have been carried by Charlemagne himself, and its silk was red as blood, promising carnage to the enemies of France. The English had come to fight, the oriflamme had been released and the dance of the armies had begun.

“You Christians,” he had said, “insist that prophets tell the future, but that wasn’t really what they did at all. They warned Israel. They told us that we would be visited by death, destruction and horror if we did not mend our ways. They were preachers, Thomas, just preachers, though, God knows, they were right about the death, destruction and horror.

He is very strange, very strange. He had a head filled with dreams and visions. He was drunk on God, that one.”

“If God wished him to, yes, but why should God wish that? And I assume, Thomas, that you think Daniel might foretell what happens here and now in France, and what possible interest could that hold for the God of Israel? The Ketuvim are full of fancy, vision and mystery, and you Christians see more in them than we ever did. But would I make a decision because Daniel ate a bad oyster and had a vivid dream all those years ago? No, no, no.”

“Trust what is before your eyes, Thomas, what you can smell, hear, taste, touch and see. The rest is dangerous.”

Sir Guillaume seemed uncomfortable with that answer. He stared northward. “You are both bastards,” he said after a while, “and I envy that.” “Envy?” Thomas asked. “A family serves like the banks of a stream. They keep you in your place, but bastards make their own way. They take nothing and they can go anywhere.”

“Do you really mock God?” Eleanor asked, worried. “No. But we jest about the things we fear.”

“Because if the story is true,” Thomas said, “then I am not Thomas of Hookton, but Thomas Vexille. I’m not English, but some half-breed Frenchman. I’m not an archer, but noble born.” “It gets worse,” Father Hobbe said with a smile. “It means that you have been given a task.”

But the Grail, I am told, cannot be broken. You could put it in one of those guns that amused everyone at Caen and it would not break even if you dashed it against a castle wall. And when you place the bread and wine, the blood and flesh, of the Mass in that common piece of clay, Thomas, it turns to gold. Pure, shining gold. That is the Grail and, God help me, it does exist.” “So you would have me wander the earth looking for a peasant’s dish?” Thomas asked. “God would,” Father Hobbe said, “and for good reason.” He looked saddened. “There is heresy everywhere, Thomas. The Church is besieged. The bishops and the cardinals and the abbots are corrupted by wealth, the village priests stew in ignorance and the devil is brewing his evil. Yet there are some of us, a few, who believe that the Church can be refreshed, that it can glow with God’s glory again. I think the Grail could do that. I think God has chosen you.” “Father!”

“Most of them are all right,” he went on, evidently talking of knights and nobles. “Once they’ve fought with the archers for a while they learn to look after us on account of us being the mucky bastards what keeps them alive, but there’s always a few goddamn idiots.

The Earl of Northampton, who had plainly been responsible for Skeat’s knighthood, raised him up and led him back to his cheering men, and Skeat was still blushing as his archers clapped him on the back. “Bloody nonsense,” he said to Thomas. “You deserve it, Will,” Thomas said, then grinned, “Sir William.” “Just have to pay more bloody tax, won’t I?” Skeat said, but he looked pleased anyway.

“And the signs are good,” John of Hainault, a close companion of the King and the Lord of Beaumont, added. “The signs?” the King asked. John of Hainault gestured for a man in a black cloak to step forward. The man, who had a long white beard, bowed low. “The sun, sire,” he said, “is in conjunction with Mercury and opposite Saturn. Best of all, noble sire, Mars is in the house of Virgo. It spells victory, and could not be more propitious.” And how much gold, Philip wondered, had been paid to the astrologer to come up with that prophecy, yet he was also tempted by it. He thought it unwise to do anything without a horoscope and wondered where his own astrologer was. Probably still on the Abbeville road.

“Tomorrow’s horoscope?” John of Hainault asked the astrologer. The man shook his head. “Neptune approaches the bendings tomorrow, sire. It is not a hopeful conjunction.” “Attack now! They’re wet, tired and hungry,” Alençon urged. “Attack now!”

THOMAS WAS NOTICING the strange rhythm of battle, the odd lulls in the violence and the sudden resurrection of horror. Men fought like demons and seemed invincible and then, when the horsemen withdrew to regroup, they would lean on their shields and swords and look like men close to death.

SIR GUILLAUME D’EVECQUE had seen nothing like it. He hoped he never saw it again. He saw a great army breaking itself against a line of men on foot.

He would let his son win it, he decided. Or else lose his son. The herald stole a look at his king and saw that Edward of England’s eyes were closed. The King was at prayer.

“That astrologer, John,” the French King said. “Sire?” “Have him put to death. Bloodily. You hear me? Bloodily!” The King was weeping as, with the handful of his bodyguard that was left, he rode away.