King and Emperor

Even so, he had almost committed a mortal sin, in speaking ill of the precious relic. Bruno paused, looked round deliberately. He set his own penances. In time past he had taken a handful of wooden splinters, set them alight, and let them burn on his open palm. Yet the blisters had impeded him in battle. He had no right to disqualify himself from God's work merely for his own sin. And in any case it was not the hand which had sinned. No. Drawing a dagger, he held its tip over a candle, waited till he saw it glow. Then, deliberately once more he thrust out his almost-sinful tongue, laid the red-hot tip to it. Held it for long seconds. A tear slowly trickled down through the dust caked thick on each cheek, but his hatchet-face otherwise did not change. The smell of scorching flesh came to his nostrils, a familiar one now in these days of siege and skirmish.

He pulled the dagger away, looked critically at its tip to see if he had affected its temper. Seemingly not. He looked up and met the disapproving gaze of his confidant and spiritual adviser, the deacon Erkenbert. Erkenbert did not like these ascetic practices, felt they led to spiritual pride.

“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” said Bruno, answering the unspoken accusation.

“Better to attend to the instructions of your confessor,” replied Erkenbert, “always assuming he has any.” Erkenbert had a grudge against Bruno's confessor Felix as well, for Felix, being a priest, could hear confessions and give absolution as Erkenbert, still only a deacon, could not.

Bruno dismissed the incipient argument with a gesture. “Now,” he repeated, “tell me again about the blessed Grail of Our Lord. My faith, alas, needs strengthening once more.”

Erkenbert began the story, still with an air of reluctant disapproval. In a sense he, Erkenbert, was a man trapped by success. He had been with the Emperor, when the latter, a mere Ritter of the Lanzenorden, went into the waste places of the North, to return with the Holy Lance which had once more unified the collapsing Empire of Charlemagne. And because he had been with the Emperor all that time, had done the research which had enabled them in the end to identify the Lance, and had furthermore consoled the despondent Emperor when he felt his search might never end, now he was considered to be an expert on relics and on searches. But the Lance had been proposed and authenticated by the holy Saint Rimbert, Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen. This story that the Emperor was now convinced of had a very different origin.

Nevertheless Erkenbert had studied what few documents could be brought to him: he knew the tale as well as anyone. Maybe it was best that it should be told by one who could not be in any way seduced by it.

“As you know,” he began, “the four gospellers do not all tell the same tale of the Crucifixion of Our Lord. And this of course is proof of their truth, for how often do we not see that four men who have seen the same thing happen will nevertheless tell it in different ways? Yet where they do agree—as they agreed about the centurion who pierced Christ's side with his lance, and venerated him forthwith as the Son of God—we may be sure that something great and holy is meant by it, for all four were inspired by the Holy Ghost to see and write the same thing.”

Bruno nodded, the satisfied expression on his bleak, hard face like that of a child who hears a well-known bedtime story unrolling.

“Yet there may also be great wisdom, or great knowledge, in something vouchsafed to only one witness. Now the Gospel of John tells us many things that are absent from the others. One thing he tells of is strange but not unlikely. I have read in other works that it was the custom of the Romans, a cruel and godless folk, when they crucified a man, to leave his body to be eaten by the birds.”

Bruno, whose gallows groaned all over Europe with un-buried dead, nodded again, perhaps with satisfaction, perhaps with imperial agreement on policy.

“But it was the law of the Jews that no dead thing might be exposed over their holy day of Passover. That is why men were sent to kill Christ and those crucified with him, not in mercy, but so that they might be taken down before sunset on Friday, when the Sabbath of the Jews begins.

“What happened then? Only John says this, but the story is not unlikely, nor need it have been known to all. He says that a rich Jew begged Pilate for the body, to have it wrapped in shroud and laid in a stone sepulchre—as is the custom in stony countries like this one, not laid in earth as we do. He gives the name of the Jew as Joseph of Arimathea. And then the story goes on to tell of the Resurrection, as all the gospellers in their different ways do.

“Now of this Joseph many other stories are told. My own people—not my Northumbrian people, but the English of the far West, have a story that this Joseph sailed from the shores of the Holy Land after the death of Jesus, and came in the end to England, not yet England but rather Britannia. And there, they say, he built a church at Glastonbury and performed many miracles. They say, too, that he brought with him the Holy Grail and that it still lies there.”

“But we do not believe that?” queried Bruno, though he had heard the answer at least a dozen times.

“No. For a rich Jew to leave the Holy Land, if he had become an enemy of his own people, might be possible. But Britannia at the time of the death of Our Lord was not yet within the Empire. It must have been a wasteland inhabited by savage Welshmen. Who would wish to go there?”

“So why do we think there is a Holy Grail?”

Erkenbert managed to conceal a disapproving sniff. He at least did not think there was a Holy Grail; but he knew from experience that if he said as much, his pious but overbearing master would keep him arguing till he had confessed he might be wrong. “Mostly because so many people have believed it. Nevertheless,” Erkenbert hurried on before his master could press for a better answer, “looked at correctly, the accounts of the death of Our Lord do leave room for wonder.

“I have already said that only the Gospel of the holy John tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea. Only that gospel also mentions the Jew Nicodemus, and it mentions him three times: at the end, when Nicodemus and Joseph arrange for Jesus to be laid to rest. In the temple of the Jews, where Nicodemus calls out for a fair trial. And when Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night to ask him a question.

“And yet there is another gospel I have read.”

“Besides the four of the Bible?” prompted Bruno.

“Yes. It is the Gospel of Nicodemus. The fathers of the Church, in their wisdom, decided not to include it among those works called canonical. Yet it is clearly a work of great age. And what it tells us is the story of what happened after Christ died. And before he was resurrected.”

“When he went down into Hell,” breathed Bruno, face rapt.

“It is this gospel which allows us to have the words in the Creed, descendit ad infernos, he descended into Hell. So this Nicodemus saw Christ buried, knew of his Resurrection—and talked with those whom Christ released from Hell. How else could he know the story? He must have been a man far deep in the secrets of Our Lord. More so perhaps even than Joseph. Such men recognized Our Lord as the Son of God as soon, almost, as did the centurion Longinus, who kept his own lance as a relic. They had many chances to put by the things that the Son of God had touched, and one of them may have been the Grail. Some say it is the chalice of the Last Supper, some the jar in which the Holy Blood was collected after the Lance had shed it.”

“But that's because they're bloody French!” yelled Bruno suddenly, driving his dagger with his usual appalling speed and strength deep in and through the table in front of him. “They can't speak their own bloody language! Just gabble gabble Latin till it sounds like nothing on earth! Take aqua, turn it into eau, take caballerus, turn it into chevalier. I ask you. What might a graal have been before those miscegenated bastards got their tongues round it?”

Two bodyguards moved into the tent, weapons ready, saw their lord sitting unharmed by the table. Bruno grinned suddenly, waved at them, spoke in his usual familiar Low German. “All right, boys. Just saying what I think about the French.” His men returned his grin, withdrew. Bruder of the Lanzenorden, they shared their master's opinion: especially after today, when there had been Frenchmen on both sides, and when they felt their own had fought less whole-heartedly than the enemy's.

“Well,” said Erkenbert, trying to answer the question. “A graal can be a sort of flat plate or dish.”

“Couldn't keep blood in it, could you?”

“Maybe it is blood. Maybe when these people say sancto graale, or saint graal, Holy Grail, whatever the pronunciation, their ancestors were trying to say sang real, royal blood. It would be much the same in Latin, too. The one is