‘I raised it, my lord,’ Robbie admitted, ‘and lost it.’
‘Lost it!’
Robbie stared at the floor, so Thomas explained in one curt word. ‘Dice.’
The Earl looked disgusted, then turned again to Sir Guillaume. ‘I have heard of you,’ he said, and it was a compliment, ‘and know you can lead men-at-arms, but whom do you serve?’
‘No man, my lord.’
‘Then you cannot lead my men-at-arms,’ the Earl said pointedly, and waited.
Sir Guillaume hesitated. He was a proud man, thirty-five years old, experienced in war, with a reputation that had first been made by fighting against the English. But now he possessed no land, no master, and as such he was little more than a vagabond and so, after a pause, he walked to the Earl and knelt before him and held up his hands as though in prayer. The Earl put his own hands round Sir Guillaume’s. ‘You promise to do me service,’ he asked, ‘to be my liege man, to serve no other?’
‘I do so promise,’ Sir Guillaume said earnestly and the Earl raised him and the two men kissed on the lips.
‘I’m honoured,’ the Earl said, thumping Sir Guillaume’s shoulder, then turned to Thomas again. ‘So you can raise a decent force. You’ll need, what? Fifty men? Half archers.’
‘Fifty men in a distant fief?’ Thomas said. ‘They won’t last a month, my lord.’
‘But they will,’ the Earl said, and explained his previous, surprised reaction to the news that Astarac lay in the county of Berat. ‘Years ago, young Thomas, before you were off your mother’s tit, we owned property in Gascony. We lost it, but we never formally surrendered it, so there are three or four strongholds in Berat over which I have a legitimate claim.’ John Buckingham, reading Father Ralph’s notes again, raised an eyebrow to suggest that the claim was tenuous at best, but he said nothing. ‘Go and take one of those castles,’ the Earl said, ‘make raids, make money, and men will join you.’
‘And men will come against us,’ Thomas observed quietly.
‘And Guy Vexille will be one,’ the Earl said, ‘so that’s your opportunity. Take it, Thomas, and get out of here before the truce is made.’
Thomas hesitated for a heartbeat or two. What the Earl suggested sounded close to insanity. He was to take a force into the deep south of French territory, capture a fortress, defend it, hope to capture his cousin, find Astarac, explore it, follow the Grail. Only a fool would accept such a charge, but the alternative was to rot away with every other unemployed archer. ‘I shall do it, my lord,’ he said.
‘Good. Be off with you, all of you!’ The Earl led Thomas to the door, but once Robbie and Sir Guillaume were on the stairs, he pulled Thomas back for a private word. ‘Don’t take the Scotsman with you,’ the Earl said.
‘No, my lord? He’s a friend.’
‘He’s a damned Scot and I don’t trust them. They’re all goddamned thieves and liars. Worse than the bloody French. Who holds him prisoner?’
‘Lord Outhwaite.’
‘And Outhwaite let him travel with you? I’m surprised. Never mind, send your Scottish friend back to Outhwaite and let him moulder away until his family raises the ransom. But I don’t want a bloody Scotsman taking the Grail away from England. You understand?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Good man,’ the Earl said and clapped Thomas’s back. ‘Now go and prosper.’
Go and die, more like. Go on a fool’s errand, for Thomas did not believe the Grail existed. He wanted it to exist, he wanted to believe his father’s words, but his father had been mad at times and mischievous at others, and Thomas had his own ambition, to be a leader as good as Will Skeat. To be an archer. Yet the fool’s errand gave him a chance to raise men, lead them and follow his dream. So he would pursue the Grail and see what came.
He went to the English encampment and beat a drum. Peace was coming, but Thomas of Hookton was raising men and going to war.
PART ONE
The Devil’s Plaything
The Count of Berat was old, pious and learned. He had lived sixty-five years and liked to boast that he had not left his fiefdom for the last forty of them. His stronghold was the great castle of Berat. It stood on a limestone hill above the town of Berat, which was almost surrounded by the River Berat that made the county of Berat so fertile. There were olives, grapes, pears, plums, barley and women. The Count liked them all. He had married five times, each new wife younger than the last, but none had provided him with a child. He had not even spawned a bastard on a milkmaid though, God knew, it was not for lack of trying.
That absence of children had persuaded the Count that God had cursed him and so in his old age he had surrounded himself with priests. The town had a cathedral and eighteen churches, with a bishop, canons and priests to fill them, and there was a house of Dominican friars by the east gate. The Count blessed the town with two new churches and built a convent high on the western hill across the river and beyond the vineyards. He employed a chaplain and, at great expense, he purchased a handful of the straw that had lined the manger in which the baby Jesus had been laid at his birth. The Count encased the straw in crystal, gold and gems, and placed the reliquary on the altar of the castle’s chapel and prayed to it each day, but even that sacred talisman did not help. His fifth wife was seventeen and plump and healthy and, like the others, barren.
At first the Count suspected that he had been cheated in his purchase of the holy straw, but his chaplain assured him that the relic had come from the papal palace at Avignon and produced a letter signed by the Holy Father himself guaranteeing that the straw was indeed the Christ-child’s bedding. Then the Count had his new wife examined by four eminent doctors and those worthies decreed that her urine was clear, her parts whole and her appetites healthy, and so the Count employed his own learning in search of an heir. Hippocrates had written of the effect of pictures on conception and so the Count ordered a painter to decorate the walls of his wife’s bedchamber with pictures of the Virgin and child; he ate red beans and kept his rooms warm. Nothing worked. It was not the Count’s fault, he knew that. He had planted barley seeds in two pots and watered one with his new wife’s urine and one with his own, and both pots had sprouted seedlings and that, the doctors said, proved that both the Count and Countess were fertile.
Which meant, the Count had decided, that he was cursed. So he turned more avidly to religion because he knew he did not have much time left. Aristotle had written that the age of seventy was the limit of a man’s ability, and so the Count had just five years to work his miracle. Then, one autumn morning, though he did not realize it at the time, his prayers were answered.
Churchmen came from Paris. Three priests and a monk arrived at Berat and they brought a letter from Louis Bessières, Cardinal and Archbishop of Livorno, Papal Legate to the Court of France, and the letter was humble, respectful and threatening. It requested that Brother Jerome, a young monk of formidable learning, be allowed to examine the records of Berat. ‘It is well known to us,’ the Cardinal Archbishop had written in elegant Latin, ‘that you possess a great love of all manuscripts, both pagan and Christian, and so entreat you, for the love of Christ and for the furtherance of His kingdom, to allow our Brother Jerome to examine your muniments.’ Which was fine, so far as it went, for the Count of Berat did indeed possess a library and a manuscript collection that was probably the most extensive in