become uneasy — a good many men at the feast had at one time or another rebelled against Richard.
‘I speak, of course, of the traitor Viscount Aimar of Limoges,’ said Robin, to a general sigh of relief. ‘He is a wealthy man, with a hoard of silver and jewels, and his sun-lit southern lands are wide and rich.’ More appreciative murmurs. ‘And I say that, come the spring, we must go south and teach this proud rascal that our King will not be mocked! In the spring, let us go down to the Limousin, punish this haughty Viscount Aimar, and take our swords to this plump nest of rebels!’
A few cheers, but most knights confined themselves with nodding in benevolent agreement, and beginning to discuss with their fellows the delightful prospect of looting the rich territory of the Limousin.
The next day, in the mid-afternoon twilight of the short winter day, the King called me to his private chamber: he wanted me to play a little music for him, he said, to cheer a dreary season. But the real reason he summoned me, I soon discovered, was that he wanted me to play the informer.
‘What was all that nonsense about Viscount Aimar?’ he asked me. ‘Why does Locksley so urgently want me to go down and have at him?’
‘He has rebelled against you, sire,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ the King said impatiently. ‘He’s a fool and Philip has sent him silver and knights and turned his head with extravagant promises. But other men in Aquitaine have rebelled too. Ademar of Angouleme, for example: he’s made an alliance with Philip, too, and he’s a much bigger fish than Aimar. Why does Robin want me to go after the Viscount of Limoges?’
I stood there flat-footed, not knowing what to say to my King. I knew, of course, exactly why Robin wished the army to go south and attack Aimar. And, while he had not actually sworn me to secrecy, it was understood that one did not discuss Robin’s private affairs with anyone, king or commoner. I mumbled something about my lord being a loyal man, who hated all of Richard’s enemies equally.
The King looked hurt; his bright blue eyes clouded with sorrow: ‘My good Blondel,’ he said, ‘we have fought together, side by side, on many a bloody field, over many long years; we made the Great Pilgrimage together to Outremer and battled the Saracen hordes; you came to Germany when I was in despair and languishing in darkness, and you found me and brought me back into the light. Do not speak falsehoods to me now. Why does the Earl of Locksley wish me to humble Aimar of Limoges?’
I could not bear it; I felt that I was being pulled in two, my loyalty to my lord and to my King tugging my soul in different directions. And so I answered him.
‘There is a treasure,’ I said. ‘There is a great and wonderful treasure that Aimar of Limoges, or rather that one of his relatives has in his possession. And my lord the Earl of Locksley burns to possess it.’
‘Not that same treasure that he went off on a goose chase in Burgundy to discover last year?’ said the King.
‘The same.’
‘What do you know of this treasure?’ he said, looking at me keenly. ‘Have you ever seen it? Is it truly valuable?’
‘I have not seen it,’ I said, ignoring the first part of his question. ‘But I believe that it is truly valuable — perhaps the most valuable object in Christendom and certainly something that many men: counts, kings, even the Pope himself, would give a fortune to have in their possession.’
‘I think I should like to see this treasure,’ said the King.
Chapter Twenty-eight
That spring Richard’s knights and Mercadier’s routiers ravaged the Limousin without mercy: and Robin and I played our parts, too. We burned farmsteads, stole livestock and destroyed crops, although I would not allow my men to despoil churches — it was Lent, the season in which all Christian warriors are expected to observe the Truce of God and lay down their arms, but we served King Richard, and he was not a man to allow the strictures of the Church to stand in his way. So, may God forgive us, we fought all through that March even though it was Lent, harrying Viscount Aimar and his knights from manor to manor. We ate meat and eggs, too, when we could get them, but we left places of worship unmolested. It was a sop, a gesture, but my men were not unhappy at that curb: in battle we all need God’s protection, and it would not do to anger Him by stealing from His house. However, I felt the dark shadow of guilt on my soul during that southern spring of blood and fire: I believed Richard and his barons’ enthusiasm for the harrying of the Limousin, and the relentless pursuit of Count Aimar and his men, might have had a good deal to do with my talk of the fabulous ‘treasure’ in his possession. These rich lands were ruined, and many poor peasants were put out of their hovels, their meagre wealth snatched, their children brought to starvation, because Robin and I had moved the King to make it so. Such is war; but I felt the burden of it as a heavy weight on my conscience.
I do not know how Robin came into the knowledge that the Master and the remaining Knights of Our Lady had taken refuge with Viscount Aimar, but Robin had many friends in Paris, and all over France, who had been searching for news of the Master for nearly five years now, and so perhaps a better question would have been why had we not uncovered his whereabouts sooner. From the little that Robin had gleaned, it seemed that the Master and his men had been in hiding on the far side of the Pyrenees, in lands that the original members of the Order would have campaigned over in their glory days fighting the Moors. Doubtless, the Master still had allies there. But recently, Robin’s informants had told him, he had grown in confidence and forsaken the wild lands beyond mountains and had taken up a more comfortable position with his cousin Viscount Aimar — exactly as Bishop de Sully had predicted. And one thing was certain: wherever the Master went, the treasure we sought, the Grail, would go, too.
Whenever Robin spoke of the Grail, which was not often, I noticed that he became strangely animated; and I confess I was puzzled by this. Robin, as I have often mentioned, was not a godly man. Or perhaps I should say he was not a man who respected the Church or subscribed to its teachings, and yet this Grail, this object that was said to have once contained Our Lord’s sacred blood, seemed to have seized his imagination. I think he pretended to himself that it was the vessel’s worldly value that drew him; for it surely would have fetched a mountain of gold if it were shown to be the genuine article. But I think there was more to it than his usual lust for money; in my private heart, I think that Robin was searching for an object that could demonstrate for him the truth — or otherwise — of the Christian faith. For him, the Grail was the embodiment of God — and I dreaded the likely discovery that this thing, which was claimed to have once held the holy blood of Jesus Christ and to possess miraculous powers of life and death, was merely an ancient, dusty bowl.
At this time, I was determined to be indifferent to the Grail — I could not afford to allow myself to believe in its wonders and then to have my hopes dashed. It must be, I told myself firmly, it must be no more than an old bowl, as Bishop de Sully had suggested, merely an object to be used in a bit of mummery to relieve credulous folk of their money. I was aided in this discipline of the mind, this denial of the possibility of the Grail’s authenticity, by the fact that it was, for me, irrevocably stained with death and surrounded by a dark aura of sadness: for the sake of this object my father had been hounded from Paris; in its name both he and Hanno had been murdered before my eyes.
But where the Grail was, there would the Master be. And I nursed my hatred of him to my bosom. If Robin wished to pursue this Grail, and to persuade King Richard to come south with his army, I was happy to follow him, for this path would lead me to the Master and my long-delayed revenge. And I felt in my bones then, in the last weeks of March, in the Year of the Incarnation eleven hundred and ninety-nine, that my vengeance was imminent: for we had Viscount Aimar and his few surviving men cornered, trapped at last in the tiny castle of Chalus-Chabrol, some fifteen miles south-west of Limoges.
While Richard’s men surrounded the castle — a simple affair at the top of a steep round hill, with a curtain wall and one round tower for a keep — we Locksley folk made our main camp to the west of the fortress on the flatter lands on the other side of the river. The castle foolishly defied us — for there cannot have been more than a handful of defenders, forty at most. But the defenders did include at least one man-at-arms in a white surcoat with a blue cross in a black-bordered shield on the chest. He was not a fellow I recognized, but my spirits rose when I saw him on the third day of the siege, leaning over the curtain wall to take a shot with a crossbow at a squad of Robin’s green-clad cavalry, which happened to be riding past. He missed the shot; it flew a dozen yards wide. But I
