“The Count of Berat?” Thomas asked.
“A sad man,” Planchard said. “I quite liked him, but I fear he was one of God’s fools. He was astonishingly learned, but possessed no sense. He was a hard master to his tenants, but good to the Church. I used to think he was trying to buy his way into heaven, but actually he was seeking a son and God never rewarded that desire. Poor man, poor man.” Planchard stared as the dead Count was carried to the gatehouse, then smiled gently at Thomas. “Some of my monks insisted you must be the murderer.”
“Me!” Thomas exclaimed.
“I know it was not you,” Planchard said. “The real murderers were seen leaving. Galloping into the night.” He shook his head. “But the brothers can get very excited and, alas, our house has been much disturbed of late. Forgive me, I did not ask your name.”
“Thomas.”
“A good name. Just Thomas?”
“Thomas of Hookton.”
“That sounds very English,” Planchard said. “And you are what? A soldier?”
“An archer.”
“Not a friar?” Planchard asked in grave amusement.
Thomas half smiled. “You know about that?”
“I know that an English archer called Thomas went to Castillon d’ Arbizon dressed as a friar. I know he spoke good Latin. I know he took the castle, and I know that he then spread misery in the countryside. I know he caused many tears, Thomas, many tears. Folk who struggled all their lives to build something for their children saw it burned in minutes.”
Thomas did not know what to say. He stared at the grass. “You must know more than that,” he said after a while.
“I know that you and your companion are excommunicated,” Planchard said.
“Then I should not be here,” Thomas said, gesturing at the cloister. “I was excluded from holy precincts,” he added bitterly.
“You are here at my invitation,” Planchard said mildly, “and if God disapproves of that invitation then it will not be long before he has a chance to demand an explanation from me.”
Thomas looked at the abbot who endured his scrutiny patiently. There was something about Planchard, Thomas thought, that reminded him of his own father, though without the madness. But there was a saintliness and a wisdom and an authority in the old lined face and Thomas knew he liked this man. Liked him very much. He looked away. “I was protecting Genevieve,” he muttered, explaining away his excommunication.
“The beghard?”
“She’s no beghard,” Thomas said.
“I would be surprised if she was,” Planchard said, “for I very much doubt if there are any beghards in these parts. Those heretics congregate in the north. What are they called? The Brethren of the Free Spirit. And what is it they believe? That everything comes from God, so everything is good! It’s a beguiling idea, is it not? Except when they say everything they mean exactly that, everything. Every sin, every deed, every theft.”
“Genevieve is no beghard,” Thomas repeated the denial, though the firmness of his tone did not reflect any conviction.
“I’m sure she’s a heretic,” Planchard said mildly, “but which of us is not? And yet,” his mild tone vanished as his voice became stern, “she is also a murderer.”
“Which of us is not?” Thomas echoed.
Planchard grimaced. “She killed Father Roubert.”
“Who had tortured her,” Thomas said. He drew up his sleeve and showed the abbot the burn scars on his arm. “I too killed my torturer and he too was a Dominican.”
The abbot gazed up at the sky that was clouding over. Thomas’s confession of murder did not seem to disturb him, indeed his next words even suggested he was ignoring it completely. “I was reminded the other day,” he said, “of one of the psalms of David. ’Dominus reget me et nihil mihi deerit.’”
“‘In loco pascuae ibi conlocavit,’” Thomas finished the quotation.
“I can see why they thought you were a friar,” Planchard said, amused. “But the implication of the psalm, is it not, is that we are sheep and that God is our shepherd? Why else would He put us in a pasture and protect us with a staff? But what I have never fully understood is why the shepherd blames the sheep when they become ill.”
“God blames us?”
“I cannot speak for God,” Planchard said, “only for the Church. What did Christ say? ‘Ego sum pastor bonus, bonus pastor animam suam dat pro ovibus.’” He paid Thomas the compliment of not translating the words which meant: “I am the good shepherd and the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.” “And the Church,” Planchard went on, “continues Christ’s ministry, or it is supposed to, yet some churchmen are sadly enthusiastic about culling their flock.”
“And you are not?”
“I am not,” Planchard said firmly, “but don’t let that weakness in me persuade you that I approve of you. I do not approve of you, Thomas, and I do not approve of your woman, but nor can I approve of a Church that uses pain to bring the love of God to a sinful world. Evil begets evil, it spreads like a weed, but good works are tender shoots that need husbandry.” He thought for a while, then smiled at Thomas. “But my duty is clear enough, is it not? I should give both of you to the Bishop of Berat and let his fire do God’s work.”
“And you,” Thomas said bitterly, “are a man who does his duty.”
“I am a man who tries, God help me, to be good. To be what Christ wanted us to be. Duty is sometimes imposed by others and we must always examine it to see if it helps us to be good. I do not approve of you, either of you, but nor do I see what good will come from burning you. So I will do my duty to my conscience which does not instruct me to send you to the bishop’s fire. Besides,” he smiled again, “burning you would be an awful waste of Brother Clement’s endeavors. He tells me he is calling a bone-setter from the village and she will try to repair your Genevieve’s rib, though Brother Clement warns me that ribs are very hard to mend.”
“Brother Clement talked to you?” Thomas asked, surprised.
“Dear me, no! Poor Brother Clement can’t talk at all! He was a galley slave once. The Mohammedans captured him in a raid on Leghorn, I think, or was it Sicily? They tore his tongue out, I assume because he insulted them, and then they cut off something else which is why, I suspect, he became a monk after he was rescued by a Venetian galley. Now he tends to the beehives and looks after our lepers. And how do we talk to each other? Well, he points and he gestures and he makes drawings in the dust and somehow we manage to understand one another.”
“So what will you do with us?” Thomas asked.
“Do? Me? I shall do nothing! Except pray for you and to say farewell when you leave. But I would like to know why you are here.”
“Because I was excommunicated,” Thomas said bitterly, “and my companions wanted nothing more to do with me.”
“I mean why you came to Gascony in the first place,” Planchard asked patiently.
“The Earl of Northampton sent me,” Thomas said.
“I see,” Planchard said, his tone implying he knew Thomas was evading the question. “And the Earl had his reasons, did he?”
Thomas said nothing. He saw Philin across the cloister and raised a hand in greeting and the coredor smiled back; the smile suggesting that his son, like Genevieve, was recovering from the arrow wound.
Planchard persisted. “The Earl had reasons, Thomas?”
“Castillon d’Arbizon was once his property. He wanted it back.”
“It was his property,” Planchard said tartly, “for a very short time, and I cannot think that the Earl is so bereft of land that he needs send men to defend an insignificant town in Gascony, especially after a truce was signed at Calais. He must have sent you to break that truce for a very special reason, don’t you think?” He paused, then smiled at Thomas’s obduracy. “Do you know any more of that psalm which begins ‘Dominus reget me’?”
“Some,” Thomas said vaguely.
“Then perhaps you know the words ‘calix meus inebri
ans‘?”
“‘My cup makes me drunk,’” Thomas said.
“Because I looked at your bow this morning, Thomas,” Planchard said, “out of nothing but idle curiosity. I have heard so much about the English war bow, but I have not seen one for many years. But yours, I noticed, had something which I suspect most bows do not. A silver plate. And on the plate, young man, was the badge of the Vexilles.”
“My father was a Vexille,” Thomas said.
“So you’re nobly born?”
“Bastard born,” Thomas said. “He was a priest.”
“Your father was a priest?” Planchard sounded surprised.
“A priest,” Thomas confirmed, “in England.”
“I heard some of the Vexilles had fled there,” Planchard said, “but that was many years ago. Before my memories begin. So why does a Vexille return to Astarac?”
Thomas said nothing. Monks were going to work, carrying hoes and stakes out of the gate. “Where were they taking the dead Count?” he asked, trying to evade the abbot’s question.
“He must go to Berat, of course, to be buried with his ancestors,” Planchard said, “and his body will be stinking by the time it gets to the cathedral. I remember when his father was buried: the smell was so bad that most of the mourners fled into the open air. Now, what was my question? Ah yes, why does a Vexille return to Astarac?”
“Why not?” Thomas answered.
Planchard stood and beckoned him. “Let me show you something, Thomas.” He led Thomas to the abbey church where, as he entered, the abbot dipped his finger into the stoup of holy water and made the sign of the cross as he genuflected towards the high altar. Thomas, almost for the first time in his life, did not make the same obeisance. He was excommunicated. The old things had no power for him now because he had been cut off from them. He followed the abbot across the wide empty nave to an alcove behind a side altar and there Planchard unlocked a small door with a big key. “It will be dark downstairs,” the old man warned, “and I have no lantern, so step carefully.”
A dim light found its way down the stairs and when Thomas reached the bottom Planchard held up a hand.
“Wait here,” he said, “and I will bring you something. It is too dark to see in the treasury.”
Thomas waited. His eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he saw there were eight arched openings in the undercroft and then he saw that it was not just a vault, but an ossuary and the realization made him take a step back in sudden horror. The arches were stacked with bones. Skulls gazed at him. At the eastern end there was an arch only half filled, the rest of its space waiting for the brethren who prayed each day in the church above. This was the cellar of the dead; heaven’s antechamber.
He heard the click of a lock turning, then the abbot’s footsteps returned and Planchard held out a wooden box. “Take it to the light,” he said, “and look at it. The Count tried to steal it from me, but when he returned here with the fever I took it back from him. Can you see it properly?”
Thomas held the box up to the small light that came down the stairwell. He could see that the box was old, that its wood had dried out, and that it had once been painted inside and out, but then, on the front, he saw the remnants of the words he knew so well, the words that had haunted him ever since his father had died: Calix Meus Inebrians.
“It is said,” the Abbot took the box back from Thomas, “that it was found in a precious reliquary on the altar of the chapel in the Vexille castle. But it was empty when it was found, Thomas. Do you understand that?”
“It was empty,” Thomas repeated.
“I think I know,” Planchard said, “what brings a Vexille to Astarac, but there is nothing here for you, Thomas, nothing at all. The box was empty.” He put the box back, locked the heavy chest and led Thomas back up to the church. He secured the treasury door, then beckoned Thomas to sit with him on a stone ledge that ran all around the otherwise bare nave. “The box was empty,” the abbot insisted, “though no doubt you are thinking it was filled once. And I think you came here to find the thing that filled it.”
Thomas nodded. He was watching two novices sweep the church, their birch bristles making small scratching noises on the wide flagstones. “I also came,” he said, “to find the man who killed, who murdered my father.”
“You know who did that?”
“My cousin. Guy Vexille. I’m told he calls himself the Count of Astarac.”
“And you think he is here?” Planchard sounded surprised. “I have never heard of such a man.”
“I think that if he knows I am here,” Thomas said, “then he’ll come.”
“And you will kill him?”
“Question him,” Thomas said. “I want to know why he thought my father possessed the Grail.”
“And did your father possess it?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said truthfully. “I think he may have believed he did. But he was also mad at times.”
“Mad?” The question was asked very gently.
“He didn’t worship God,” Thomas said, “but fought him. He pleaded, shouted, screamed and wept at God. He saw most things very clearly, but God confused him.”
“And you?” Planchard asked.
“I’m an archer,” Thomas said, “I have to see things very clearly.”
“Your father,” Planchard said, “opened the door to God and was dazzled, while you keep the door shut?”
“Maybe,” Thomas said defensively.
“So what is it, Thomas, that you hope to achieve if you find the Grail?”
“Peace,” Thomas said. “And justice.” It was not an answer he had thought about, but almost a dismissal of Planchard’s question.
“A soldier who seeks peace,” Planchard said, amused. “You are full of contradictions. You have burned and killed and stolen to make peace.” He held up a hand to still Thomas’s protest. “I have to tell you, Thomas, that I think it would be best if the Grail were not found. If I were to discover it I would hurl it into the deepest sea, down among the monsters, and tell no one. But if another person finds it, then it will merely be another trophy in the wars of ambitious men. Kings will fight for it, men like you will die because of it, churches will grow rich on it, and there will be no peace. But I don’t know that. Maybe you’re right? Maybe the Grail will usher in an age of plenty and peacefulness, and I pray it does. Yet the discovery of the crown of thorns brought no such splendors, and why should the Grail be more powerful than our dear Lord’s thorns? We have vials of his blood in Flanders and England, yet they do not bring peace. Is the Grail more precious than his blood?”
“Some men think so,” Thomas said uncomfortably.
“And those men will kill like beasts to possess it,” Planchard said. “They will kill with all the pity of a wolf savaging a lamb, and you tell me it will bring peace?” He sighed. “Yet perhaps you’re right. Perhaps this is the time for the Grail to be found. We need a miracle.”
“To bring peace?”
Planchard shook his head. He said nothing for a while, just stared at the two sweepers and looked very solemn and immensely sad. “I have not told this to anyone, Thomas,” he broke his long silence, “and you would be wise to tell no one either. In time we shall all know and by then it will be too late. But not long ago I received a letter from a brother house in Lombardy and our world is about to change utterly.”
“Because of the Grail?”
“I wish it were so. No, because there is a contagion in the east. A dreadful contagion, a pestilence that spreads like smoke, that kills whoever it touches and spares no one. It is a plague, Thomas, that has been sent to harrow us.” Plan-chard gazed ahead, watching the dust dance in a shaft of slanting sunlight that came down from one of the high, clear windows. “Such a contagion must be the devil’s work,” the abbot went on, making the sign of the cross, “and it is horrid work. My brother abbot reports that in some towns of Umbria as many as half the folk have died and he advises me to bar my gates and allow no travelers
inside, but how can I do that? We are here to help people, not to shut them away from God.” He looked higher, as if seeking divine aid among the great beams of the roof. “A darkness is coming, Thomas,” he said, “and it is a darkness as great as any mankind has ever seen. Perhaps, if you find the Grail, it will give light to that darkness.”
Thomas thought of Genevieve’s vision beneath the lightning, of a great darkness in which there was a point of brilliance.
“I have always thought,” Planchard went on, “that the search for the Grail was a madness, a hunt for a chimera that would bring no good, only evil, but now I learn that everything is going to change. Everything. Perhaps we shall require a wondrous symbol of God’s love.” He sighed. “I have even been tempted to wonder whether this coming pestilence is sent by God. Perhaps he burns us out, purges us, so that those who are spared will do His will. I don’t know.” He shook his head sadly. “What will you do when your Genevieve is well?”
“I came here,” Thomas said, “to find out all I could about Astarac.”
“Of the beginning and end of man’s labors,” Planchard said with a smile, “there is no end. Would you resent advice?”
“Of course not.”
“Then go far away, Thomas,” the abbot said firmly, “go far away. I do not know who killed the Count of Berat, but it is not hard to guess. He had a nephew, a stupid but strong man, whom you took prisoner. I doubt the Count would have ransomed him, but now the nephew is himself the Count and can arrange his own ransom. And if he seeks what his uncle sought then he will kill any rival, and that means you, Thomas. So take care. And you must go soon.”
“I am unwelcome here?”
“You are most welcome,” Planchard insisted, “both of you. But this morning the Count’s squire went to report his master’s death and the boy will know you are here. You and the girl. He may not know your names, but the two of you are… what shall I say? Noticeable? So if anyone wants to kill you, Thomas, they will know where to look for you. Which is why I tell you to go far away. This house has seen enough murder and I want no more.” He stood and placed a gentle hand on Thomas’s head. “Bless you, my son,” he said, then walked out of the church.