those other scores of Locksley men who died on that castle’s walls and in that gore-steeped stable; Brother Dominic, Cardinal Heribert, Master Fulk; the nameless man in the Grand Chastelet gaol, whom I killed with my empty hands just so as to have some-where to sit — even the Knights of Our Lady that I cut down in the rainstorm, who for all their violence believed they were serving the Mother of God.
These shades crowded around my sickbed in the small hours of the night, and silently scolded me for my pride. Sometimes Sir Eustace de la Falaise appeared too, with his lance-dagger projecting from his fist, and he would plunge it into Hanno’s ghostly chest again and again. And I would awake, covered in sweat, my pounding heart threatening to tear my chest apart. These dead men would be alive today had I not been so determined to seek revenge.
The Master — or Brother Michel or the ‘man you cannot refuse’ or Trois Pouces or whatever name he was now travelling under — had fled Paris with Sir Eustace and a handful of the Knights of Our Lady. No one knew where he had gone to, but a safe wager was that he had found refuge with his gangs of bandits in the lawless woods south of Paris. The Master, once the strong right hand of the second most powerful man in Paris, had become a hors-la-loi, an outlaw. But I felt no satisfaction; indeed, I felt like a hapless hunter who had been thrashing blindly in the undergrowth seeking a hare, and who had stumbled upon an angry wild boar, been brutally savaged for his temerity, and then had allowed the beast to escape unharmed.
Robin had visited me daily with news and titbits of Parisian food that he felt sure would restore my strength: delicate pastries, sticky sweetmeats and expensive wines. Many of them I could not eat, for Reuben’s drugs killed my appetite along with my pain, and so I passed them on to the elderly monk who brought me gruel and water and washed my body and changed the bedding. Robin was staying as a guest of Bishop de Sully in the episcopal palace — while the old man himself preferred to remain in the Abbey of St Victor and nurse his ailing health. I gathered that Robin had pressured the Bishop into caring for me, and into providing him with accommodation. I would receive the finest care in the Hotel-Dieu, while I recovered from my wound, I was made to understand, and Robin would remain silent about fact that de Sully’s trusted amanuensis had been a murderous gang-master, and that the building of the cathedral of Notre-Dame had been funded by blood money stolen from innocent travellers.
Reluctantly, and only after a certain amount of undignified pleading for the truth on my part, Robin confessed that he had known about the activities of the Master, and the identity of Brother Michel, for more than a decade. Indeed, while Robin had been an outlaw in Sherwood, robbing churchmen and thumbing his nose at the law, the Master had been, to a certain extent, his counterpart in France. They had met face to face three times, twice in Paris and once in London, and had agreed a pact of sorts that included the stipulation that neither would attack or harm the other — or any of the other’s lieutenants.
Robin had been aware that the Master had ordered my father’s death — although he insisted that he did not know why. In fact, part of the reason why he had taken me into his care when I was a penniless thief on the run from the Sheriff, was because he had known and liked my father and felt pity for his orphaned son. But when I had discovered that Sir Ralph Murdac had merely been following the instructions of the ‘man you cannot refuse’, Robin had become concerned. He realized that I would not rest until I had discovered the identity of the Master and attempted my revenge.
Robin’s fear was that the Master would snuff me out as easily as a man extinguishes a bedside candle, if he suspected that I was even the smallest threat to him. And so Robin had tried to shield me, and had sent a message to Paris that I was not to be touched, and he had at the same time tried to dissuade me from pursuing my enquiries. When it was clear, after the attack by the Knights of Our Lady at Freteval, that the Master planned to ignore their long-standing pact and eliminate me anyway, and when I deserted Robin’s men and the relative safety of the army and began to make my way to Paris, Robin summoned Reuben from Montpellier and dispatched him to follow me and to act as my protective shadow. When Robin heard from Reuben, who knew Paris well, that I had been slung in the notorious Grand Chastelet gaol, there to rot for the rest of my life, my lord had sent Little John to Paris with orders, if necessary, to recruit men and break me out of the gaol as soon as possible: Robin knew that that the longer a man remained inside the Grand Chastelet — and it would have been a matter of days rather than weeks — the less chance he had of ever emerging from that filth-lapped stone coffin.
Robin had indeed watched over me like a mother hen.
On the morning of his arrival in Paris, Little John had gone directly to the Rue St-Denis, discovered from the d’Alles that I had set off for the Abbey of St Victor that morning but had not returned, as promised, for dinner at noon. Knowing of the Master’s connection with Bishop de Sully, and suspecting that he too might be at St Victor’s, Little John had ridden as swiftly as possible to the Abbey with the Seigneur, Roland and Thomas. Once there, he had hurriedly colluded with Reuben, who was inside the Bishop’s quarters, and they had effected my rescue in that dramatic, if destructive, manner.
‘Tell me, Alan,’ said Robin, munching idly on a fig that he had brought for my delectation that day. ‘If I had told you from the beginning that the Master had ordered your father’s death, would you have left him alone?’
‘If I knew then what the cost in lives would be, I think so… I hope so,’ I said.
‘Truly?’ my master asked, swallowing his fig.
‘Truly?’ I thought for a moment, then sighed. ‘No. In truth, at some point, I would have come here and tried to bring him to justice in any way that I could.’
‘So I was right to keep this knowledge from you,’ said Robin.
‘You used to extol vengeance as a virtue, as a man’s duty,’ I said, thinking of one of my first encounters with Robin, a musical evening with Marie-Anne.
‘Only when it is public.’
‘What?’
‘Vengeance only has meaning if it is a public act. If someone wrongs you, and everyone knows that they have wronged you, you must take revenge or people will think the less of you. You will lose your honour in their eyes and will soon come to be thought of as a weakling, a man of no account. Then you are finished. But if some-body wrongs you in private, secretly, away from other men’s eyes — revenge is pointless. You may take vengeance in an attempt to make yourself feel better, although that is not much of a balm, in my experience, but in truth revenge serves no real purpose unless everybody around you understands the circumstances under which it is taken. What I’m saying is that vengeance taken in private is an indulgence. In fact, seeking revenge on a man like Brother Michel for something he did in the greatest secrecy ten years ago, and in the knowledge that he has no plans to do you any further harm, is plain idiocy. Actually, it is closer to suicide. Look at you, lying there with a hole in your chest, and poor, faithful Hanno cold in his grave. What have you achieved by pursuing your manly revenge on him?’
I said nothing. My chest throbbed. He was right. And perhaps oddly, I no longer felt the burning urge for vengeance against the Master. Hanno was dead, I was alive, barely, and the Master was gone. I had not the strength for revenge: this time I would let it lie.
After a while Robin stole another fig from the bowl and said: ‘Did you ever lay eyes on this wondrous object that was the cause of all this trouble, the relic that the Master stole from Heribert as a young man — this Grail thing?’
‘No, but I believe it was in the box on the altar in the chapel. And the Master took it with him when he fled.’
‘And do you think it is real?’ he said, cocking his head to one side, eyes bright and looking more than a little like his avian namesake.
‘I think the Master believes it to be real, and Sir Eustace and the Knights of Our Lady — it is real to them.’
‘What would a holy relic like that be worth, I wonder?’ Robin mused. Then he added: ‘I’ve read Christian of Troyes’s poem; he describes it as being made of pure fine gold and being adorned with many kinds of precious jewels. It should fetch a pretty decent amount at market, I would have thought.’
I looked at him; he had on his acquisitive expression, a glimmering flame of larceny behind his silver-bright eyes. And, for one reason or another, I badly wanted to dowse it.
‘If it is real, it is beyond price,’ I said. ‘A vessel that was used at the Last Supper and that also once held the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ? Men would die for it, kill others for it — it would be the most wondrous, valuable and powerful object in the world — but not something that could be bought or sold with mere money. On the other hand, if it isn’t real, it is no more than a golden bowl worth a few pounds — after looting the French King’s wagon train at Freteval, I’m sure you already have several better pieces.’
Robin caught my eye and, sensing my impatience with him, he dropped the subject. Instead, he pulled out a
