More arrows flew, thumping with a sickening thud into Fulk’s remaining men. “Here!” Guy Vexille was in the doorway at the top of the steps. “Fulk! Here! Leave them! Here!”
Fulk repeated the order in his roaring voice. So far as he could see only three of the defenders were alive in the corner of the courtyard, but if he stayed to finish them off then the archers on the tower would kill all his men. Fulk had an arrow in the thigh, but he felt no pain as he stumbled up the steps and into the big doorway where, at last, he was safe from the arrows. Guy now had fifteen men left. The others were dead or else still in the yard, wounded. One man, already struck by two arrows, tried to crawl to the steps and two more arrows thudded into his back, throwing him down. He twitched, and his mouth opened and closed in spasms until a last arrow broke his spine. An archer whom Guy had not noticed before, a man who had been lying on a bed of straw, struggled a few paces across the yard and used a knife to cut the throat of a wounded man-at-arms, but then a crossbow bolt flashed from the gate to strike the archer and throw him onto his victim’s body. The archer vomited, jerked for a few heartbeats and then was still.
Sir Guillaume was helpless. He had two men left, not nearly enough to attack the doorway, and Sir Guillaume himself was bruised, bleeding and feeling strangely and suddenly weak. His stomach gave a heave and he retched emptily, then staggered back onto the wall. John Faircloth was lying on the dungheap, bleeding from the belly, unable to talk as he died. Sir Guillaume wanted to say something comforting to the dying Englishman, but a wave of nausea swept over him. He retched again, and his armor felt curiously heavy. All he wanted to do was lie down and rest. “My face,” he said to one of the two survivors, a Burgundian, “look at my face,” and the man obeyed and flinched when he saw the red blotches. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Sir Guillaume said, “sweet goddamn Jesus,” and he slumped down by the wall and reached for his sword as if the familiar weapon would give him solace.
“Shields,” Guy said to his men. “Two of you with shields, hold them high, go up the stairs, and we’ll come behind and cut their legs out.” That was the best way to take a stairway, to chop the vulnerable ankles of the defenders, but when they tried it they discovered the two remaining men-at-arms were using shortened lances that Sir Guillaume had placed on the landing to defend the steps, and they hammered the lances on the shields, driving the men back, and an arrow and a crossbow bolt took one man in the helmet so that blood spilled down from beneath its rim to sheet his face. He fell back and Guy pulled him down the steps and put him beside the corpse of the axeman he had dragged off the stairway.
“We need crossbows,” Fulk said. His blunt face was bruised and there was blood in his beard. He went to the doorway and bellowed for the crossbowmen to run to the steps. “Come fast!” he shouted, then spat out a bloody tooth. “It’s safe! The archers are dead,” he lied, “so come now!”
The crossbowmen tried, but Sam and his archers on the battlements had been waiting for them and four of the six were hit by arrows. A loaded crossbow clattered across the stones, hit the barricade and tripped the pawl so that its bolt buried itself in a corpse. One crossbowman tried to run back through the arch and was hurled onto the rubble by an arrow, yet two of the bowmen managed to reach the steps unharmed.
“There are few of them,” Guy told his men, “and God is with us. We need one effort, just one, and the Grail is ours. Your reward will be glory or heaven. Glory or heaven.” He had the best armor so he decided he would lead the next attack with Fulk beside him. The two crossbowmen would be immediately behind, ready to shoot the bowmen waiting behind the curve of the stairway. Once the stairway was clear Guy would hold the base of the keep. With luck, he thought, the Grail would be in whatever room they reached, but if it was another floor up then they must do it all again, but he was certain they would reach the prize and, once it was gained, he would fire the castle. The wooden floors would burn readily enough and the flames and smoke would kill the archers on the battlements and Guy would be victorious. He could leave, the Grail would be his and the world would be changed.
Just one last effort.
Guy took a small shield from one of his men-at-arms. It was scarcely bigger than a serving platter, intended only to fend off sword blows in a melee, and he began the attack by pushing it round the corner, hoping to draw the arrows and then rush the steps while the bowmen upstairs had empty strings, but the archers were not drawn by the ruse and so Guy nodded to Fulk who had snapped off the head and feathered end of the arrow in his thigh, leaving the shortened shaft sticking clean through the muscle. “I’m ready,” Fulk said.
“Then we go,” Guy said, and the two men crouched behind their shields and climbed the winding stair, treading on the blood of their comrades, and they turned the bend and Guy braced himself for an arrow’s strike. None came, and he peered over the shield and saw nothing but empty steps ahead and knew God had given him victory. “For the Grail,” he told Fulk, and the two men hurried, just a dozen steps to go and the crossbowmen were behind them, and then Guy smelt the burning. He thought nothing of it. The stair turned and he could see the hall-way opening up ahead and he shouted his war cry and then the fire came.
It had been Genevieve’s idea. She had given her crossbow to Philin and gone up to the hall where the sick lay and she had seized one of the breastplates captured from Joscelyn’s assault and raked into its shallow bowl a bucket full of glowing embers from the fire. One of the coredor women helped her, scooping smoldering cinders and ash into a great cooking pot, and they carried the fire downstairs, the breastplate burning Genevieve’s hands, and when the first two men came into view they hurled the red hot scraps down the stairs. The ash did the greatest damage. It drifted, hot dust, and some got into the eyes of the crossbowman behind Fulk and he flinched away, his weapon dropped as he pawed the burning scraps from his face, and the crossbow struck the step, fired itself and the bolt went through Fulk’s ankle. Fulk fell into a scatter of red-hot embers and scrambled backwards to free himself of the pain and Guy was alone on the stairs, ash half blinding him, and he lifted the shield as though that would protect his eyes and it was struck by an arrow with such force that it threw him back. The arrow was half through the shield. A crossbow bolt cracked against the wall. Guy staggered, trying to gain his balance, trying to see through the ash-induced tears and the thick smoke, and then Thomas led his few men in a charge. Thomas carried one of the shortened lances that he rammed at Guy, throwing him all the way down the stairs, while the man-at-arms with Thomas stabbed a sword two-handed into Fulk’s neck.
Vexille’s men at the foot of the stairs should have stopped the charge, but they were taken aback by the sight of Guy staggering down, by Fulk’s screaming and by the stench of fire and burning flesh and they backed out of the door as the enemy came howling out of the smoke. Thomas only led five men, but they were enough to panic Guy’s small band who seized their master and fled back into the courtyard’s fresh air. Thomas followed, thrusting the lance forward, and he caught Guy plumb on the breastplate so that he was thrown back down the outer steps to sprawl on the courtyard’s stones. Then the arrows came from the battlements, plunging through mail and plate. The attackers could not go back up the steps, because Thomas was there and the doorway was filled with armed men and smoke, and so they fled. They ran for the town and the arrows followed them through the archway and hurled two of them onto the rubble. Then Thomas shouted for the archers to stop shooting. “Rest strings!” he yelled. “You hear me, Sam? Rest strings! Rest strings!”
He let the shortened lance fall and held out his hand. Genevieve gave him his bow and Thomas took a broad-head from his arrow bag and looked down the steps to where his cousin, abandoned by his men, struggled to stand in his heavy black armor. “You and me,” Thomas said, “your weapon against mine.”
Guy looked left and right and saw no help. The courtyard was stinking of vomit, dung and blood. It was thick with bodies. He backed away, going to the gap at the edge of the ba
rricade and Thomas followed, coming down the steps and staying within a dozen paces of his enemy. “Lost your appetite for battle?” Thomas asked him.
Guy rushed him then, hoping to get within the range of his long sword’s blade, but the broad-head hit him smack on the breastplate and he was brutally checked by it, stopped dead by the sheer force of the big bow, and Thomas already had another arrow on the string. “Try again,” Thomas said.
Guy backed away. Back through the barricade, past Sir Guillaume and his two men who did nothing to interfere with him. Thomas’s archers had come down from the battlements and were on the steps, watching. “Is your armor good?” Thomas asked Guy. “It needs to be. Mind you, I’m shooting broad-heads. They won’t pierce your armor.” He loosed again and the arrow hammered into the plates at Guy’s groin and bent him over and threw him back onto the rubble. Thomas had another arrow ready.
“So what will you do now?” Thomas asked. “I’m not defenseless like Planchard. Like Eleanor. Like my father. So come and kill me.”
Guy got to his feet and backed over the rubble. He knew he had men in the town and if he could just reach them then he would be safe, but he dared not turn his back. He knew he would fetch an arrow if he did and a man’s pride did not allow a wound in the back. You died facing the enemy. He was outside the castle now, backing slowly across the open space and he prayed one of his men would have the wit to fetch a crossbow and finish Thomas off, but Thomas was still coming towards him, smiling, and the smile was of a man come to his sweet revenge.
“This one’s a bodkin,” Thomas said, “and it’s going to hit you in the chest. You want to raise the shield?”
“Thomas,” Guy said, then raised the small shield before he could say anything more because he had seen Thomas draw the big bow, and the string was released and the arrow, headed with heavy oak behind the needle-sharp blade, slammed through the shield, through the breastplate, mail and leather to lodge against one of Guy’s ribs. The impact jarred him back three paces, but he managed to keep his feet, though the shield was now pinned to his chest and Thomas had another arrow nocked.
“In the belly this time,” Thomas said.
“I’m your cousin,” Guy said, and he wrenched the shield free, tearing the arrow head from his chest, but he was too late and the arrow punched his stomach, driving through plate steel and iron mail and greased leather, and this arrow sank deep. “The first was for my father,” Thomas said, “that one was for my woman, and this one’s for Planchard.” He shot again and the arrow pierced Guy’s gorget and hurled him back onto the cobbles. He still had the sword and he tried to lift it as Thomas came close. He also tried to speak, but his throat was filled with blood. He shook his head, wondering why his sight was going misty, and he felt Thomas kneel on his sword arm and he felt the punctured gorget being prized up and he tried to protest, but only spewed blood, then Thomas put the dagger under the gorget and rammed it deep into Guy’s gullet. “And that one’s for me,” Thomas said.
Sam and a half-dozen archers joined him by the body. “Jake’s dead,” Sam said.
“I know.”
“Half the bloody world’s dead,” Sam said.
Maybe the world was ending, Thomas thought. Perhaps the terrible prophecies of the Book of Revelation were coming true. The four dread horsemen were riding. The rider on the white horse was God’s revenge on an evil world, the red horse carried war, the black horse was saddled by famine while the pale horse, the worst, brought plague and death. And perhaps the only thing that could turn the riders away was the Grail, but he did not have the Grail. So the horsemen would run free. Thomas stood, picked up his bow and started down the street.
Guy’s surviving men were not staying to fight the archers. They fled like Joscelyn’s men, going to find a place where no plague filled the streets, and Thomas stalked a town of the dying and the dead, a town of smoke and filth, a place of weeping. He carried an arrow on the string, but no one challenged him. A woman called for help, a child cried in a doorway, and then Thomas saw a man-at-arms, still in mail, and he half drew the bow, then saw the man had no weapons, only a pail of water. He was an older man, gray-haired. “You must be Thomas?” the man said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Sir Henri Courtois.” He pointed at a nearby house. “Your friend is in there. He’s sick.”
Robbie lay on a fouled bed. He was shaking with a fever and his face was dark and swollen. He did not recognize Thomas. “You poor bastard,” Thomas said. He gave his bow to Sam. “And take that too, Sam,” he said, pointing to the parchment that lay on a low stool beside the bed, and then he lifted Robbie in his arms and carried him back up the hill. “You should die among friends,” he told the unconscious man.
The siege, at last, was over.
SIR GUILLAUME DIED. Many died. Too many to bury, so Thomas had the corpses carried to a ditch in the fields across the river and he covered them with brushwood and set the heap on fire, though there was not enough fuel to burn the bodies, which were left half roasted. Wolves came and ravens darkened the sky above the ditch that was death’s rich feast.
Folk came back to the town. They had sought refuge in places that were struck as badly as Castillon d’Arbizon. The plague was everywhere, they said. Berat was a town of the dead, though whether Joscelyn lived no one knew and Thomas did not care. Winter brought frost and at Christmas a friar brought news that the pestilence was now in the north. “It is everywhere,” the friar said, “everyone is dying.” Yet not everyone died. Philin’s son, Galdric, recovered, but just after Christmas his father caught the disease and was dead in three agonizing days.
Robbie lived. It had seemed he must die for there had been nights when he appeared not to breathe, yet he lived and slowly he recovered. Genevieve looked after him, feeding him when he was weak and washing him when he was filthy, and when he tried to apologize to her she hushed him. “Speak to Thomas,” she said.
Robbie, still weak, went to Thomas and he thought the archer looked older and fiercer. Robbie did not know what to say, but Thomas did. “Tell me,” he said. “When you did what you did, you thought you were doing the right thing?”
“Yes,” Robbie said.
“Then you did no wrong,” Thomas said flatly, “and that’s an end of it.”
“I should not have taken that,” Robbie said, pointing to the parchment on Thomas’s lap, the Grail writings left by Thomas’s father.
“I got it back,” Thomas said, “and now I’m using it to teach Genevieve to read. It isn’t any use for anything else.”
Robbie stared into the fire. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Thomas ignored the apology. “And what we do now is wait until everyone is well, then we go home.”
They were ready to leave by St. Benedict’s Day. Eleven men would go home to England, and Galdric, who had no parents now, would travel as Thomas’s servant. They would go home rich, for most of the money from their plunders was still intact, but what they would find in England, Thomas did not know.
He spent the last night in Castillon d’Arbizon listening as Genevieve stumbled over the words of his father’s parchment. He had decided to burn it after this night, for it had led him nowhere. He was making Genevieve read the Latin, for there was little English or French in the document, and though she did not understand the words it did give her practice in deciphering the letters. ”’Virga tua et baculus tuus ipsa conso-lobuntur me,’” she read slowly, and Thomas nodded and knew the words calix meus inebrians were not far ahead, and he thought that the cup had got him drunk, drunk and wild and all to no purpose. Planchard had been right. The search made men mad.
”’Pono coram me mensam,’” Genevieve read, “‘ex adverso hostium meorum.’”
“It’s not pono,” Thomas said, “but pones. ‘Pones coram me mensam ex adverso hostium meorum.’” He knew it by heart and now translated for her. “‘Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies.’”
She frowned, a long pale finger on
the writing. “No,” she insisted, “it does say ’pono.’” She held out the manuscript to prove it.
The firelight flickered on the words that did indeed say “pono coram me mensam ex adverso hostium meorum.” His father had written it and Thomas must have looked at the line a score of times, yet he had never noticed the mistake. His familiarity with the Latin had led him to skip across the words, seeing them in his head rather than on the parchment. Pono. “I prepare a table.” Not thou preparest, but I prepare, and Thomas stared at the word and knew it was not a mistake.
And knew he had found the Grail.
Epilogue
THE GRAIL
THE BREAKING WAVES drove up the shingle, hissed white and scraped back. On and on, ever and ever, the gray-green sea beating at England’s coast.
A small rain fell, soaking the new grass where lambs played and buck hares danced beside the hedgerows where anemones and stitchwort grew.
The pestilence had come to England. Thomas and his three companions had ridden through empty villages and heard cows bellowing in agony for there was no one to take the milk from their swollen udders. At some villages archers waited at barricaded streets to turn all strangers away and Thomas had dutifully ridden around such places. They had seen pits dug for the dead; pits half filled with corpses that had received no last rites. The pits were edged with flowers for it was springtime.
In Dorchester there was a dead man in the street and no one to bury him. Some houses had been nailed shut and painted with a red cross to show that the folk inside were sick and must be left there to die or recover. Outside the town the fields went unplowed, seed stayed in the barns of dead farmers, and yet there were larks above the grass and the kingfishers darting along the streams and plovers tumbling beneath the clouds.