King and Emperor

vaches. The cowboys, who rode the marshes of the Camargue on their rough horses, armed with the ten-foot ox-goads that were their trade-tool, strips of jerked beef wound round their hats, watchful at all times for the attacks of the stalking, furious-tempered wild bulls. Too flighty and light-armed for battle, but capable of scouring a countryside like a kitchen-maid sanding rust out of a kettle.

“I want this place sealed off tighter than an abbess's—tighter than a convent dormitory,” Bruno had said, forgetting his usual careful respectfulness to every form of religious life. “We haven't the men now, but as soon as they start to come in, assign them and place them. Till then, Tasso,” he added to his Lanzenorden guard-commander, “you can tell our lads that no one goes to sleep. Me neither. Get them out and watching every rock.”

“What for?” said Tasso.

“You saw the way they all killed themselves. Why? Because they didn't want anyone to tell us something. Tell us where something was. So it must be here. And you can be sure someone will try to get it out. So we'll seal the place off.”

“That won't find anything,” said Tasso, an old comrade allowed to speak freely to a brother of the order, even if that brother was his Kaiser and commander.

Bruno seized him with both hands by the beard. “It won't lose anything either! And now we know it's here, once we're all sealed off, all we have to do is look.”

“We've looked already.”

“Not under every stone we haven't. And we're going to take every last stone of this hill down and throw it in the sea if we have to! Erkenbert!” Bruno shouted to his deacon, busily giving messengers their directions. “Tell the bishops to send pickaxes too! And men to use them.”

Released, Tasso tramped off to survey the ground and set up his too-scanty sentry-posts. As the day wore on his expression grew more and more troubled. A Bavarian himself, from the vineyards of the south, he found the ravines and dense scrub of the sharp, steep Pyrenean foothills baffling.

“Need a thousand men to do this job,” he muttered to himself. “Two thousand. And where's the food coming from? Or the water? Still: Befehl ist Befehl. Helmbrecht, Siegnot, Hartmut, guard this path here. And remember, no one sleeps till reliefs are sent. Kaiserbefehl, understand?”

He tramped on in the heat, scattering detachments here and there. He did not know that keeping pace with him a quarter of a mile outside the ring he was setting up, sliding through the dense thorny scrub as low to the ground as a weasel, eyes watched his every move.

The shepherd lad had expected fear and strangeness as he came in to make his report, but even so he gulped and swallowed convulsively as his eyes adapted to the dim light. Facing him behind a rough table sat a semi-circle of men. At least, they might be men. Every figure was dressed in long grey robes, and each one had a cowl over his head, pulled so far forward that the faces could not be seen. If he had seen them, he might have recognized them. For no one could be sure who the perfecti might be, though among the heretic villages rumors and evaluations ran continually: he refused mutton the other day, maybe he eats no meat, his wife and he sleep together but speak to each other like brother and sister, she has not given birth for three years though her child was weaned last spring. All might be indicators of having passed into the central mystery. But in the heretic villages all strove to live like perfecti even though they might never reach that grade: so fasting or celibacy might indicate only ambition, not achievement. The cowled men could be anyone.

The shepherd boy knelt clumsily, straightened again. A voice came from the semi-circle, not from the middle. It might be that a spokesman had been selected because his voice would not be recognized. In any case he spoke in no more than a whisper.

“What did you see at Puigpunyent?”

The lad considered. “I went close up to the rock, from all sides except the east, where the road is. The gate is battered down, the towers are burnt and much of the stone has fallen in. The Emperor's men swarm over the castle as thick as fleas on an old dog.”

“What of the outside?”

“The Christians have placed men all round the rock, as close to the base of it as they can get, in a ring on all sides. They are heavy men in armor, and walk about very little in the heat. Food and water is brought out to them. I cannot understand what they say to each other, but they do not sleep and they seem not to complain. Much of the time they sing their heathen hymns and prayers.”

The perfecti ignored the lad's equation of Christian and heathen: it was what they thought themselves. The interrogating voice dropped even lower.

“Were you not afraid that they would catch you?”

The lad smiled. “Men in armor? Catch me on the hillside, or in the maquis? No, lords. If they saw me they could not catch me. But they have never seen me.”

“Well then, tell us this. Could you—you and some of your fellows, it might be—could you pierce their ring and get over the wall and inside the castle? Perhaps take one of us with you. A mountain man, but not a swift boy such as yourself?”

The boy's face grew more hesitant. If he said yes, would they ask him to do it? He had no wish to join the corpses he had seen carried out and laid on the green plain below the castle entrance. Yet above all he wished for the good opinion of the men whom all respected, the men of honor.

“Their posts are badly placed, and the sentries start and shoot if so much as a fox rustles in the thickets. Yes, I could make my way through them. And maybe three or four of my friends. An older man… The spines on the scrub grow high, you see, maybe a foot, two feet from the ground. I do not walk, I slide on my belly, fast as another man walks. A heavier man, a man who does not stoop, who says ‘Oh, my back’ ”—for a moment the lad imitated the priest of his village, a heretic like the rest but one who remained in communion with the Church and the bishop, to throw off suspicion—“he could not get through. He would be caught.”

The cowled heads nodded almost imperceptibly as they registered the finality of his statement.

“And caught he must not be,” observed the whispering voice. “Thank you, lad, you have done us a service. Your village shall know of it. Our blessing to you, and may it grow as you grow older. Outside, talk to the men you will find there. Show them the sentry-posts as you have seen them.”

After he had gone out, nothing was said for a while. “Bad news,” said one of the cowls after a while. “He knows there is something there.”

“It was the defiance of Marcabru that alerted him. If they had surrendered and walked out, he would have thought it was just another siege and gone his way. It is best not to attract attention. To surrender, to deny our faith, to vow obedience to the Pope as we have always done. Then return to what we know after they have gone.”

“Marcabru fought to the last because he feared someone would talk. And who knows? They might have done. Maybe he had his orders. After all, we do not know what happened inside the castle. Maybe there were signs of treason.”

The silence descended again. Another voice volunteered information. “They say that after the Emperor took the castle he had all the bodies inside it carried out on to the plain by the river, and there had them burnt. But before he did that his men stripped and searched all the dead. Searched their bellies with knives, even, to be sure they had hidden nothing. After they were burnt his men sifted the ash once more. And everything inside the castle, every stick of chair or table, was carried out and laid out to be inspected by the Emperor and his black deacon. He had them burnt too, before people of the nearby villages, while he watched their faces. He thought they would betray it if they saw a holy relic burnt.”

“He does not know what he is looking for, then.”

“No. Nor does he know how to find the entrance to the place of the Grail.”

“But he is demolishing the castle stone by stone. How long will it take before some pick-stroke lays bare the door, or the staircase?”

“Not for a long time,” said one of the voices, with certainty in its tone.

“But if he digs down to very bedrock?”

For a third time the silence fell. At length, as the sun threw shadows further and further aslant across the dim-windowed room, the most certain of the voices spoke again.