Heretic

Thomas waded into the river. He held his bow high, for a wet string would not draw, and he waded through the tide’s tug. The water came to his waist, then he was pushing out onto the muddy bank and he ran to where the men-at-arms waited to receive the first French attackers. Thomas knelt just beside them, out in the marsh; he splayed his arrows on the mud, then plucked one.

A score of Frenchmen were coming. A dozen were mounted and those horsemen kept to the path, but on their flanks dismounted men-at-arms splashed through the swamps and Thomas forgot them, they would take time to reach the firm ground, so instead he began shooting at the mounted knights.

He shot without thinking. Without aiming. This was his life, his skill and his pride. Take one bow, taller than a man, made from yew, and use it to send arrows of ash, tipped with goose feathers and armed with a bodkin point. Because the great bow was drawn to the ear it was no use trying to aim with the eye. It was years of practice that let a man know where his arrows would go and Thomas was shooting them at a frantic pace, one arrow every three or four heartbeats, and the white feathers slashed across the marsh and the long steel tips drove through mail and leather into French bellies, chests and thighs. They struck with the sound of a meat-axe falling on flesh and they stopped the horsemen dead. The leading two were dying, a third had an arrow in his upper thigh, and the men behind could not pass the wounded men in front because the path was too narrow and so Thomas began shooting at the dismounted men-at-arms. The force of an arrow’s strike was enough to throw a man backwards. If a Frenchman lifted a shield to protect his upper body Thomas put an arrow into his legs, and if his bow was old, then it was still vicious. He had been at sea for more than a week and he could feel the ache in his back muscles as he hauled the string back. Even pulling the weakened bow was the equivalent of lifting a grown man bodily, and all that muscle was poured into the arrow. A horseman tried to splash through the mud but his heavy destrier floundered in the soggy ground; Thomas selected a flesh arrow, one with a broad, tanged head that would rip through a horse’s guts and blood vessels and he loosed it low, saw the horse shudder, picked a bodkin from the ground and let it fly at a man-at-arms who had his visor up. Thomas did not look to see if any of the arrows were on target, he shot and picked another missile, then shot again, and the bowstring whipped along the horn bracer that he wore on his left wrist. He had never bothered to protect his wrist before, revelling in the burn left by the string, but the Dominican had tortured his left forearm and left it ridged with scar so now the horn sheath guarded the flesh.

The Dominican was dead.

Six arrows left. The French were retreating, but they were not beaten. They were shouting for crossbowmen and for more men-at-arms and Thomas, responding, put his two string fingers in his mouth and let loose a piercing whistle. Two notes, high and low, repeated three times, then a pause and he blew the double notes again and he saw archers running towards the river. Some were the men who had retreated from Nieulay and others came from the battleline because they recognized the signal that a fellow archer needed help.

Thomas picked up his six arrows and turned to see that the first of the Earl’s horsemen had found a passage to the river and were leading their heavily armoured horses across the swirling tide. It would be minutes before they were all across, but archers were splashing towards the farther bank now and those closest to Nieulay were already shooting at a group of crossbowmen being hurried towards the unfinished fight. More horsemen were coming down from the heights of Sangatte, enraged that the trapped English knights were escaping. Two galloped into the marsh where their horses began to panic in the treacherous ground. Thomas laid one of his last arrows on the string, then decided the marsh was defeating the two men and an arrow would be superfluous.

A voice came from just behind him. ‘Thomas, isn’t it?’

‘Sire.’ Thomas snatched off his helmet and turned, still on his knees.

‘You’re good with that bow, aren’t you?’ The Earl spoke ironically.

‘Practice, sire.’

‘A nasty mind helps,’ the Earl said, motioning Thomas to stand. The Earl was a short man, barrel-chested, with a weatherbeaten face that his archers liked to say looked like the backside of a bull, but they also reckoned he was a fighter, a good man and as hard as any of his men. He was a friend of the King’s, but also a friend of any who wore his badge. He was not a man to send others into battle unless he led them, and he had dismounted and removed his helmet so that his rearguard would recognize him and know that he shared their danger. ‘I thought you were in England,’ he said to Thomas.

‘I was,’ Thomas said, speaking now in French for he knew the Earl was more comfortable in that language, ‘then I was in Brittany.’

‘Now you’re rescuing me.’ The Earl grinned, revealing the gaps where he had lost his teeth. ‘I suppose you’ll want a pot of ale for this?’

‘As much as that, my lord?’

The Earl laughed. ‘We rather made fools of ourselves, didn’t we?’ He was watching the French who, now that a hundred or more English archers lined the riverbank, were thinking twice before launching another attack. ‘We thought we might tempt forty of their men to a battle of honour by the village, then half their bloody army comes down the hill. Do you bring me news of Will Skeat?’

‘Dead, my lord. Died in the fight at La Roche-Derrien.’

The Earl flinched, then made the sign of the cross. ‘Poor Will. God knows I loved him. No better soldier ever breathed.’ He looked at Thomas. ‘And the other thing. Do you bring me that?’

He meant the Grail. ‘I bring you gold, my lord,’ Thomas said, ‘but not that.’

The Earl patted Thomas’s arm. ‘We shall talk, but not here.’ He looked at his men and raised his voice. ‘Back now! Back!’

His dismounted rearguard, their horses already led to safety through the rising tide, now hurried to the river and crossed. Thomas followed and the Earl, his sword drawn, was the last man to wade the deepening water. The French, denied their valuable quarry, jeered at his retreat.

And that day’s fighting was done.

The French army did not stay. They had killed the Nieulay garrison, but even the most hot-blooded among them knew they could do no more. The English were too many. Thousands of archers were just praying for the French to cross the river and offer battle, so instead Philip’s men marched away, leaving the trenches of Nieulay filled with the dead and the windswept ridge of Sangatte empty, and next day the town of Calais surrendered. King Edward’s first instinct was to slaughter every inhabitant, to line them beside the moat and cut the heads from their emaciated bodies, but his great lords protested that the French would then do the same to any English-held town they captured in Gascony or Flanders and so the King reluctantly reduced his demand to just six lives.

Six men, hollow-cheeked and dressed in the robes of penitents, with hanging nooses draped about their necks, were brought from the town. They were all leading citizens, merchants or knights, men of wealth and standing, the kind of men who had defied Edward of England for eleven months. They carried the keys of the town’s gates on cushions that they laid before the King, then prostrated themselves in front of the wooden platform where the King and Queen of England and the great magnates of their realm were seated. The six men pleaded for their lives, but Edward was angry. They had defied him, and so the executioner was summoned, but again his great lords argued that he invited reprisals, and the Queen herself knelt to her husband and begged that the six men be spared. Edward growled, paused while the six lay motionless beneath the dais, then let them live.

Food was taken to the starving citizens, but no other mercy was shown. They were evicted, allowed to take nothing except the clothes they wore and even those were searched to ensure that no coins or jewels were being smuggled past the English lines. An empty town, with houses for eight thousand people, with warehouses and shops and taverns and docks and a citadel and moats, belonged to England. ‘A doorway into France,’ the Earl of Northampton enthused. He had taken a house that had belonged to one of the six, a man who now wandered Picardy like a beggar with his family. It was a lavish stone house beneath the citadel with a view of the town quay that was now crowded with English ships. ‘We’ll fill the town with good English folk,’ the Earl said. ‘You want to live here, Thomas?’

‘No, sire,’ Thomas said.

‘Nor me,’ the Earl admitted. ‘A pig sty in a swamp, that’s what it is. Still, it’s ours. So what do you want, young Thomas?’

It was morning, three days after the town’s surrender, and already the confiscated wealth of Calais was being distributed to the victors. The Earl had found himself even richer than he expected, for the great chest Thomas had brought from Brittany was filled with gold and silver coins captured in Charles of Blois’s camp after the battle outside La Roche-Derrien. One-third of that belonged to Thomas’s lord and the Earl’s men had counted the coins, setting aside a third of the Earl’s share for the King.

Thomas had told his story. How, on the Earl’s instructions, he had gone to England to search his dead father’s past for a clue to the Grail. He had found nothing except a book in which his father, a priest, had written about the Grail, but Father Ralph had wits that wandered and dreams that seemed real and Thomas had learned nothing from the writings, which had been taken from him by the Dominican who had tortured him. But the book had been copied before the Dominican took it and now, in the Earl’s new sunlit chamber above the quay, a young English priest tried to make sense of the copy.

‘What I want,’ Thomas told the Earl, ‘is to lead archers.’

‘God knows if there’ll be anywhere to lead them,’ the Earl responded gloomily. ‘Edward talks of attacking Paris, but it won’t happen. There’s going to be a truce, Thomas. We’ll plead eternal friendship, then go home and sharpen our swords.’ There was the crackle of parchment as the priest took up a new page. Father Ralph had written in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French, and evidently the priest understood them all. He made an occasional note on a scrap of parchment as he read. Barrels of beer were being unloaded on the quay, the rumble of the great tuns sounding like thunder. The flag of England’s King, leopards and fleur-de-lis, flew from the captured citadel above the French standard, which was hung upside down as a mark of derision. Two men, Thomas’s companions, stood at the edge of the room, waiting for the Earl to include them. ‘God knows what employment there’ll be for archers,’ the Earl went on, ‘unless it’s guarding fortress walls. Is that what you want?’

‘It’s all I’m good for, my lord. Shooting a bow.’ Thomas spoke in Norman French, the language of England’s aristocracy and the language his father had taught him. ‘And I have money, my lord.’ He meant that he could now recruit archers, equip them with horses and take them on the Earl’s service, which would cost the Earl nothing, but the Earl could then take one-third of everything they plundered.

That was how Will Skeat, common born, had made his name. The Earl liked such men, profited from them, and he nodded approvingly. ‘But lead them where?’ he asked. ‘I hate truces.’

The young priest intervened from his table by the window. ‘The King would prefer it if the Grail were found.’

‘His name’s John Buckingham,’ the Earl said of the priest, ‘and he’s Chamberlain of the Receipt of the Exchequer, which may not sound much to you, young Thomas, but it means he serves the King and he’ll probably be Archbishop of Canterbury before he’s thirty.’

‘Hardly, my lord,’ the priest said.

‘And of course the King wants the Grail found,’ the Earl said, ‘we all want that. I want to see the damn thing in Westminster Abbey! I want the King of damned France crawling on his bloody knees to say prayers to it. I want pilgrims from all Christendom bringing us their gold. For God’s sake, Thomas, does the bloody thing exist? Did your father have it?’

‘I don’t know, my lord,’ Thomas said.

‘Much bloody use you are,’ the Earl grumbled.

John Buckingham looked at his notes. ‘You have a cousin, Guy Vexille?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas said.

‘And he seeks the Grail?’

‘By seeking me,’ Thomas said. ‘And I don’t know where it is.’

‘But he was searching for the Grail before he knew you existed,’ the young priest pointed out, ‘which suggests to me that he possesses some knowledge denied to us. I would advise, my lord, that we seek this Guy Vexille.’

‘We’d be two dogs chasing each other’s tails,’ Thomas put in sourly.

The Earl waved Thomas to silence. The priest looked back at his notes. ‘And, opaque though these writings are,’ he said disapprovingly, ‘there is one thread of light. They seem to confirm that the Grail was at Astarac. That it was hidden there.’

‘And taken away again!’ Thomas protested.

‘If you lose something valuable,’ Buckingham said patiently, ‘where do you begin your search? At the place where it was last seen. Where is Astarac?’

‘Gascony,’ Thomas said, ‘in the fief of Berat.’

‘Ah!’ the Earl said, but then was silent.

‘And have you been to Astarac?’ Buckingham asked. He might have been young, but he had an authority that came from more than his job with the King’s Exchequer.