hidden and so, once Vexille had vanished westwards, Bessieres led his men up to the old fortress.
It took less than an hour to prise up the flagstones and reveal the vault, and in another hour Bessieres had pulled out the old coffins and seen that they had already been plundered. The man from the village was fetched and he showed where the Count had been digging and Bessieres ordered his men to uncover the wall. He made them work fast, wanting to finish the job before Guy Vexille returned and accused him of desecrating his family's graves, but the wall was stoutly made and well mortared, and it was not until one of his men fetched the blacksmith's heaviest hammer from the plunder taken from the burned village that he made real progress. The hammer crashed on the stones, chipping and dislodging them, until at last they were able to get an iron spike between the lower blocks and the wall came tumbling down.
And inside, on a stone pillar, was a box.
It was a wooden box, perhaps big enough to hold a man's head, and even Charles Bessieres felt a surge of excitement as he saw it. The Grail, he thought, the Grail, and he imagined riding north with the prize that would give his brother the papacy. Out of the way,' he snarled at a man reaching for the treasure, then he stooped into the low space and took the wooden box from its pedestal. The chest was cunningly made, for it seemed to have no lid. On one side, Bessieres assumed it was the top, was inset a silver cross that had become tarnished over the years, but there was no writing on the box and no clue as to what might be inside. Bessieres shook it and heard something rattle. He paused then. He was thinking that perhaps the real Grail was in his hands, but if the box proved to hold something else then this might be a good time to take the fake Grail from the quiver at his belt and pretend he had discovered it beneath Astarac's ruined altar.
Open it. one of his men said.
Shut your mouth. Bessieres said, wanting to think some more. The Englishman was still at large, but he would probably be caught, and suppose he had the Grail and the one at his hip was thus revealed as a fake? Bessieres faced the same dilemma that had puzzled him in the ossuary when he'd had a simple chance to kill Vexille. Produce the Grail at the wrong time and there would be no easy life in the papal palace at Avignon. So it was best, he thought, to wait for the Englishman's capture and thus make sure there was only one Grail to be carried to Paris. Yet perhaps this box contained the treasure?
He carried it up to the daylight and there he drew his knife and hacked at the box's well-made joints. One of his men offered to use the blacksmith's hammer to splinter the wood apart, but Bessieres cursed him for a fool. You want to break what's inside?' he asked. He cuffed the man aside and went on working with the knife until he finally succeeded in splitting one side away. The contents were wrapped in white woollen cloth. Bessieres eased them out, daring to hope that this was the great prize. His men crowded around expectantly as Bessieres unwound the old, threadbare cloth.
To find bones.
A skull, some foot bones, a shoulder-blade and three ribs. Bessieres stared at them, then cursed. His men began to laugh and Bessieres, in his anger, kicked the skull so that it flew down into the vault, rolled for a few paces, and then was still. He had blunted his good knife to find the few remaining bones of the famous healer of angels, Saint Sever.
And the Grail was still hidden.
The coredors had been intrigued by the activity around Astarac. Whenever armed men pillaged a town or village there would be fugitives who made easy pickings for desperate and hungry outlaws, and Destral, who led close to a hundred coredors, had watched the harrowing of Astarac and noted the folk fleeing the soldiers and watched where they went.
Most of the coredors were fugitives themselves, though not all. Some were just men down on their luck, others had been discharged from the wars and a handful had refused to accept their given place as serfs belonging to a master. In summer they preyed on the flocks taken to the high pastures and ambushed careless travellers in the mountain passes, but in winter they were forced to lower ground to find victims and shelter. Men came and went from the band, bringing and taking their women with them. Some of the men died of disease, others took their plunder and left to make a more honest living, while a few were killed in fights over women or wagers, though very few died in fights with outsiders. The old Count of Berat had tolerated Destral's band so long as they did no great damage, reckoning it a waste of money to hire men-at-arms to scour mountains riven with gullies and thick with caves. Instead he put garrisons wherever there was wealth to attract coredors and made sure the wagons carrying his tax tribute from the towns were well guarded. Merchants, travelling away from the main roads, took care to move in convoy with their own hired soldiers, and what was left was the coredors' pickings, which sometimes they had to fight for because routiers encroached on their territory. A routier was almost a coredor, except that routiers were better organized. They were soldiers without employment, armed and experienced, and routiers would sometimes take a town and ransack it, garrison it, keep it till it was wrung dry and then travel again. Few lords were willing to fight them for the routiers were trained soldiers and formed small vicious armies that fought with the fanaticism of men who had nothing to lose. Their predations stopped whenever a war started and the lords offered money for soldiers. Then the routiers would take a new oath, go to war and fight until a truce was called, and then, knowing no trade except killing, they would go back to the lonelier stretches of country side and find a town to savage.
Destral hated routiers. He hated all soldiers for they were the natural enemies of coredors, and though, as a rule, he avoided them, he would allow his men to attack them if he had a great advantage in numbers. Soldiers were a good source for weapons, armour
and horses, and so, on the evening when the smoke from the burning village and lazar house was smearing the sky above Astarac, he allowed one of his deputies to lead an attack on a half dozen black-cloaked men-at-arms who had strayed a short way into the trees. The attack was a mistake. The riders were not alone, there were others just beyond the woods, and suddenly the gloom beneath the trees was loud with horses' hooves and the scrape of swords leaving scabbards.
Destral did not know what was happening at the wood's edge. He was deeper among the trees in a place where a limestone crag reared up from the oaks and a small stream fell from the heights. Two caves offered shelter, and this was where Destral planned to spend his winter, high enough in the hills to offer protection, but close enough to the valleys so his men could raid the villages and farms, and it was here that the two fugitives from Astarac had been brought. The pair had been captured at the edge of the ridge and escorted back to the clearing in front of the caves where Destral had prepared fires, though he would not light the wood until he was sure the soldiers were dealt with. Now, in the evening's twilight, he saw his men had brought him a greater prize than he had dared dream of because one of the two captives was an English archer and the other was a woman, and women were always scarce among the coredors. She would have her uses, but the Englishman would, have a greater value. He could be sold. He also possessed a bag of money, a sword and a mail coat, which meant his capture, for Destral, was a triumph made even sweeter because this was the same man who had killed half a dozen of his men with his arrows. The coredors searched Thomas's haversack and stole his flint and steel, the spare bowcords and the few coins Thomas had stored there, but they threw away the spare arrow heads and the empty box which they considered a thing of no value. They stripped him of his arrows and gave his bow to Destral who tried to draw it and became enraged when, despite his strength, he could not haul the string back more than a few inches. Just chop off his fingers. he snarled, throwing down the bow, and strip her naked.' Philin intervened then. A man and a woman had seized Genevieve and were hauling the mail shirt over her head, ignoring her shrieks of pain, and Thomas was trying to break away from the two men holding his arms, when Philin shouted that they were all to stop.
Stop?“ Destral turned on Philin in disbelief at the challenge. You've gone soft?” he accused Philin. You want us to spare him?“ I asked him to join us,” Philin said nervously. Because he let my son live.'
Thomas did not understand any of the conversation, which was being held in the local tongue, but it was plain that Philin was pleading for his life, and it was equally plain that Destral, whose nickname came from the great axe that was slung on his shoulder, was in no mood to grant the request. You want him to join us?“ Destral roared. Why? Because he spared your son? Jesus Christ, but you're a weak bastard. You're a lily-livered piece of snot-nosed shit.” He unslung the axe, looped the cord tied to its handle about his wrist, and advanced on the tall Philin. I let you lead men and you have half of them killed! That man and his woman did that, and you'd have him join us? If it wasn't for the reward I'd kill him now. I'd slit his belly and hang him by his own rotten guts, but instead he'll lose a finger for every man of mine he killed.“ He spat towards Thomas then pointed the axe at Genevieve. Then he can watch her warm my bed.”
