Authors: Tom Harper
We find lodgings at an inn on West Chepe. Hugh takes a room on the first floor, across from the mouth of an alley, and pays the innkeeper handsomely to have it to ourselves. He draws two stools up by the window – hour after hour, we sit there and watch, listening to the drinking, gambling and fighting which drifts through the floorboards. London is a city of constant noise and motion – like Troyes at fairtime, but every day and magnified a hundredfold. The smiths and pewterers and carpenters and masons hammer their metal, wood and stone; the hawkers shout in the markets to be heard over the smiths; and the merchants shout to be heard above the rest.
Down the alley, according to the clerk in Troyes, is the house where Lazar’s debts are settled. I want to go and see it, but Hugh’s worried I’ll be recognised. Two of his men, Beric and Anselm, go and report that the building is locked and shuttered. They pass by twice a day to see if anyone arrives, while I stay confined to the inn, watching men pass beneath the grimy window, trying to make out the features beneath hats, scarves and collars. Even our meals get taken in the room.
Hours stretch into days. One afternoon I ask Hugh, ‘What did Malegant steal?’
I’ve been working up my courage for the last hour to say it. I expect him to tell me to shut up. He stays silent so long I think he’s decided to ignore me. At last he says, ‘There are things in this world we can’t understand.’
‘You mean you won’t tell me?’
He frowns. ‘I mean you won’t understand it.’
He stretches out his legs. ‘There are objects in this world which have powers we can manufacture. A bucket has the power to draw water. An axe cuts wood. But there are other things we can’t explain. The way a single seed contains an entire tree, or a woman’s belly produces a life.’
I pick a lump of eel out of the grail-dish on the table and feel it slither down my throat. I lick the salt juice off my fingers and remember the first time I met Ada. She was carrying a dish like this that night.
‘You’re speaking in riddles.’
‘Because I don’t understand it myself.’
‘Then why try so hard to get these objects back?’
‘Because I know what they can do, even if I can’t explain it. Their powers are terrifying.’
‘Have you seen them?’
‘I have.’
‘Can you tell me what they look like?’
‘Commonplace. They could be any of the objects in this room. But they have powers …’
He’s beginning to irritate me. ‘What sort of powers?’
He waves his hand out the window. ‘Look at England. Ten years ago, this was the happiest country in Christendom. Now it’s a wasteland. That’s the sort of power Malegant stole.’
And then I see him.
It’s a Friday afternoon in late January and Hugh’s gone out: I’m sitting on my own. A man comes up the alley and stands there a moment, sniffing the air like a pointer. A beaver-fur hat covers his face, but he’s too cautious. He looks up, alert to danger from any direction, and as his gaze passes over the inn I see him full on. A grey face wrapped in furs, a single eye scanning the street.
I stifle the urge to draw back. He can’t possibly see me in the dark window, but he might notice the movement. He stands there another moment, then eases forward into the crowds.
I rush out of the room, down the stairs and into the street. The sun’s almost disappeared, but I can just glimpse the crown of his hat weaving through the throng. He turns right towards the river, along a street that stinks of fish. Fish guts clog the gutters; fallen scales make the cobbles slippery. Half-dead fish flop and flounder in crates stacked by the fishmongers’ doors.
The one-eyed man ducks into a wine shop on the corner. The Thames flows just beyond, though I can hardly see it through the fleet of vessels jamming the docks. I stand aside to let two porters go in, then step smartly in after them. If the one-eyed man looks up as they enter, he doesn’t see me behind them.
The room is low, dim and smoky: the few tallow candles the landlord’s put out cast more shadows than light. I look to the
darkest corners and get a vague gleaning of a man taking off his fur hat. I edge around the room towards him. I’m halfway there when he looks up – straight at me.
I freeze. I’m unarmed, and the wine shop looks like the sort of place where brawls are commonplace. A corpse spirited out the back and dropped down a hole into the Thames probably wouldn’t trouble the owner.
A man shoulders his way past me and clasps the one-eyed man’s hand.
He wasn’t looking at me
. My heart starts to beat again.
‘Alberic,’ the other man greets him. His voice is loud, a London voice trained in its markets and trading-halls.
‘Alderman.’
The new arrival takes a seat facing Alberic. White curls bloom from the sides of his cap like hyacinth. His nose droops, his cheeks blush with broken veins. He takes the drink Alberic offers and sips it while he listens. I can’t hear what Alberic says. He’s facing away, and he speaks like a man well used to conspiring in dark corners. But I catch the reply.
‘London supports King Stephen. We were the first to recognise him. When the Empress Maud came to London, we drove her out as a tyrant and a usurper.’
Again, I don’t hear Alberic’s reply, but I see the alderman’s face change.
‘London’s true loyalty will always be to commerce. War is bad for business.’
Alberic swills his drink. His head moves back and forth as if he’s laughing, though if he is, it’s too soft for me to hear. I drag my stool slightly closer.
‘War is excellent for business. We’ve never made so much money as we have since Maud and the Angevins invaded. The weak are crushed; the strong charge what they like.’
The alderman looks alarmed. ‘I thought we were talking about peace.’
Alberic takes his arm, soothing. ‘We are. When Stephen’s victory is secured, all we want is to protect our privileges.’
‘And my consideration?’
Alberic reaches inside his hat and extracts a limp piece of vellum. ‘I thought in a place like this, a bag of gold might be too obvious.’
The alderman smiles. He pulls out his own piece of parchment and slides it across the table.
‘This will get you your audience.’
The two men down the last of their wine. The alderman leaves; Alberic waits a few minutes, stroking the parchment thoughtfully, then goes out. I daren’t follow immediately, and when I do go I find my way blocked at every turn in the crowded room. By the time I reach the street, he’s vanished into the night.
Near Lyons, France
‘Now what?’
Doug and Ellie sat in a tiny restaurant well off the main road. She didn’t even know where they were: an anonymous town, a pretty main square besieged by the usual engines of modernity: hypermarkets, warehouse stores and fast-food outlets. The streets were dark, though it was only five o’clock. She devoured a steak frites and asked for a second helping of chips – their breakfast on the motorway seemed a long time ago. Doug drained a beer and gave the bar a thirsty look.
‘I think I’ve worked out the story so far,’ he said. ‘We’ve stolen something, we don’t know what it is – on behalf of some people, we don’t know who they are – and we’re trying to give it to them, but we’ve no idea where they are and no way to contact them. Is that pretty much it?’
Ellie nodded blankly. ‘Mirabeau was all I had to go on. Now …’ She mashed a chip with her fork. ‘I don’t know where to go.’
‘There must have been something in the Mirabeau chapel.
Something the Brotherhood wanted to protect from Monsalvat.’
‘If only we’d found it. At least Joost would have died for something.’ The guilt turned inside her. If she let herself think about it, she’d go mad. First Harry, now Joost: men on their quests, who stumbled into her and ended up dead.
Dead to save me.
Was she the villain of the story, the woman at the roadside with long hair and wild eyes drawing men to their doom? She looked at Doug across the table. Her stomach flipped so hard she almost lost her supper.
I can’t do that to him.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, to fill the silence.
‘I’m thinking about poems and mazes.’
She despaired. ‘We’re totally lost, and you want to find a maze?’
‘The poem hints at some sort of labyrinth. There was a labyrinthine design on the floor. It’s something.’
‘It wasn’t a labyrinth, it was a geometric shape. It could be anything – just a pretty pattern.’
‘Maybe it’s a pattern that gets you through the maze.’
‘And where is this maze, anyway? Carduel?’
Doug’s shoulders slumped. ‘I’ve been staring at this poem for the last three months. I’ve tried everything I can think of. I’ve had maps out with pieces of string, drawing lines between Troyes and Carlisle – which is ridiculous, because at the time he wrote this poem those sort of maps just didn’t exist.’
‘There’s nothing else in the poem? No clues?’
‘I think the whole poem’s one big clue.’
A catch in his voice grabbed her attention. She looked up from her plate and gave him her best don’t-hold-out-on-me stare.
‘What?’
Doug looked almost embarrassed. ‘You know what Chrétien de Troyes’ greatest contribution to western civilisation was?’
‘Romance poetry?’
He took a deep breath. ‘The Holy Grail. It all starts with him. He’s the first person ever to mention it.’
It was so ridiculous she almost laughed out loud. But Doug wasn’t smiling. Ellie grappled for something sensible to say.
‘Didn’t the Bible get there first? I thought the Holy Grail was the cup of the Last Supper, the one they used to catch Jesus’ blood on the Cross.’
‘That’s part of the legend that grows up around it. In Chrétien’s original poem,
Le Conte du Graal
, it’s just a mysterious dish that appears to Sir Perceval while he’s feasting in a remote castle one night. A beautiful woman carries it, and behind it comes a lance with blood running down from its tip.’
‘The holy lance that stabbed Jesus on the Cross, right?’
‘Chrétien doesn’t say. Again, that’s part of the legend that attaches to it.’ Doug leaned forward. ‘It’s hard to overstate how little Chrétien gives us. There’s a grail – not a cup, incidentally, but a serving dish – and the spear, and that’s it. No explanation. Perceval watches them go by, and specifically doesn’t ask what’s going on, because he thinks it would be rude. The next morning he wakes up and the castle’s empty. He spends the rest of his life trying to find the Grail again.’
‘Does he?’
‘Not so far as we know. Chrétien didn’t finish his poem – it breaks off mid-line. We assume he died writing it, but again we don’t know. Some people think he deliberately didn’t finish it. It certainly adds to the mystery.’
Ellie squeezed her eyes shut; she wondered if she was dreaming. When she opened them, Doug was still staring at her, waiting for her response.
She lowered her voice. ‘You think this poem holds the secret to finding the Holy Grail?’
It sounded insane. She was almost relieved when she saw Doug shaking his head.
‘I think the poem’s got something to do with finding the Brotherhood.’
‘And the Grail?’
Doug stretched his leg forward under the table, as if he was playing footsie. He gave the backpack under her chair a light kick.
‘I think we’ve already got it.’
Mirabeau site, France
The shoes were miniature works of art. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, a wizened cobbler had personally measured the feet, cut the leather, stitched them by hand and polished them until he could see his client’s satisfied face reflected in their toe-caps. ‘Every pair is as individual as the man who wears them,’ he liked to boast. If he could have seen them now, almost buried in silt and ash, he would have wept.
Blanchard didn’t care about his shoes. If he even noticed the mud soaking through the hand-tooled leather, ruining them irreparably, he didn’t show it. He stared at the rubble of the chapel, the tail-fin of the helicopter rising out of it like a twisted cross.
Night had fallen, but there were no stars: they were hidden, or perhaps they had fallen to earth. The rim of the lake had become an unbroken ring of fire, the wastes of the dead forest still smouldering. Overhead, rotor blades thumped the air where his own helicopter hovered, unable to land. The downdraft blew smoke in his eyes.
The Talhouett security chief came up beside him. ‘There
were three of them. Our guards shot one, but two others escaped.’
‘Did they chase them?’
‘Our job is to protect the site – not be the police. My men tried to put out the fire.’
Blanchard took out a cigar, then put it back in his pocket. There was too much smoke already.
‘I want this church completely excavated. Bring in cranes, dredging equipment, whatever it takes.’
‘It will be some time before they can get through, Monsieur. The fires are still blocking the access roads.’
‘Then fly them in. Or bulldoze the trees. Money is no object. I want to see every stone that survives.’
The security chief was a blunt man who’d served twenty years as a paratrooper in the French army. He’d spent half his career in Africa, overthrowing tyrants and defending democracy, or vice versa, as his government demanded. It had brought him into contact with some of the most brutal megalomaniacs in the western hemisphere. But even in their air-conditioned palaces, with machete-wielding bodyguards cocained up to the eyeballs, he hadn’t felt this afraid.
Out of an old habit he thought he’d forgotten, he saluted and ran off, talking urgently into his radio.
Blanchard stared at the devastated church. Billions of euros blown to nothing by a cowboy helicopter pilot and a flare gun.
The improbability of it nagged him. Why send Ellie here, when they knew how hard he, Blanchard, was hunting her?
And what was the Luxembourg break-in about? Again, why Ellie? It was almost as if they were trying to draw attention to the thing they wanted most to hide.
Was it a bluff? A trap gone wrong? Or –
‘She’s on her own,’ he murmured to himself. A smile spread across his face. ‘She’s looking for the same thing we are, and she doesn’t even know what it is.’