Vagabond

They struggled east for the next two days, riding across the dead heaths of the New Forest, which lay under a soft whiteness. At night the small lights of the forest villages glittered hard in the cold. Thomas feared if they would reach Normandy too late to help Sir Guillaume, but that doubt was not reason enough to abandon the effort and so they struggled on. Their last few miles to Southampton were through a melting slush of mud and snow, and Thomas wondered how they were to reach Normandy, which was an enemy province. He doubted that any shipping would go there from Southampton because any English boat going close to the Normandy coast was liable to be snapped up by pirates. He knew plenty of boats would be going to Brittany, but that was a long walk from Caen. 'We go through the islands, of course,' Father Pascal said. They spent one night in a tavern and next morning found space on the Ursula, a cog bound for Guernsey and carrying barrels of salt pork, kegs of nails, barrel staves, iron ingots, pots packed in sawdust, bolts of wool, sheaves of arrows and three crates of cattle horns. It was also carrying a dozen bowmen who were travel-ling to the garrison of the castle which guarded the anchorage at St Peter Port. Come a had west wind, the Ursula's captain told them, and dozens of ships carrying wine from Gascony to England could be blown up-channel and St Peter Port was one of their last harbours of refuge. though the French sailors knew it too and in bad weather their ships would swarm off the island trying to pick up a prize or two. 'Does that mean they'll be waiting for us?' Thomas asked. The Isle of Wight was slipping astern and the ship was plunging into a winter-grey sea.

'Not waiting for us, they won't be, not us. They know the Ursula, they do,' the captain, a toothless man with a face horribly scarred from the pox, grinned, 'they do know her and they do love her.' Which meant, presumably, that he had paid his dues to the men of Cherbourg and Carteret. However, he had paid no dues to Neptune or whatever spirit governed the winter sea for, though he claimed some special foreknowledge of winds and waves and asserted that both would be calm, the Ursula rolled like a bell swung on a beam: up and down, pitch-ing hard over so that the cargo slid in the hold with a noise like thunder; and the evening sky was grey as death and then sleet began to seethe on the torn water. The captain, clinging to the steering oar with a grin, said it was nothing but a little blow that should not worry any good Christian, but others in his crew either touched the crucifix nailed to the single mast or else bowed their heads to a small shrine on the afterdeck where a crude wooden image was wrapped in bright ribbons. The image was supposed to be St Ursula, the patron of ships, and Thomas said a prayer to her himself as he crouched in a small space under the foredeck, ostensibly sheltering there with the other passengers, but the overhead deck seams gaped and a mixture of rainwater and seawater continually slopped through. Three of the archers were sick and even Thomas, who had crossed the channel twice before and had been raised among fishermen and spent days aboard their small boats, was feeling ill. Robbie, who had never been to sea, looked cheerful and interested in every thing that was happening aboard.

'It's these round ships,' he yelled over the noise, 'they roll!'

'You know about ships, do you?' Thomas asked. 'It seems obvious,' Robbie said. Thomas tried to sleep. He wrapped himself in his damp cloak, curled up and lay as still as the pitching boat would let him and, astonishingly, he did fall asleep. He woke a dozen times that night and each time he wondered where he was and when he remembered he wondered whether the night would ever end or whether he would ever be warm again.

Dawn was sickly grey and the cold bit into Thomas's bones, but the crew was altogether more cheerful for the wind had dropped and the sea was merely sullen, the long foam-streaked waves rising and falling sluggishly about a wicked group of rocks that appeared to be home for a myriad seabirds. It was the only land in sight. The captain stumped across the deck to stand beside Thomas. 'The Casquets.' he said, nodding at the rocks. 'A lot of widows have been made on those old stones.' He made the sign of the cross, spat over the gunwales for luck and then looked up to a widening rift in the clouds. 'We're making good time,' he said, 'thanks be to God and to Ursula.' He looked askance at Thomas. 'So what takes you to the islands?'

Thomas thought of inventing some excuse, family perhaps, then thought the truth might elicit something more interesting. 'We want to go on to Normandy,' he said.

'They don't like Englishmen much in Normandy, not since our King paid them a visit last year.'

'I was there.'

'Then you'll know why they don't like us.'

Thomas knew the captain was right. The English had killed thousands in Caen, then burned farms, mills and villages in a great swathe east and north. It was a cruel way to wage war, but it could persuade the enemy to come out of his strongholds and give battle. Doubt-less that was why the Count of Coutances was laying Evecque's lands waste, in hope that Sir Guillaume would be enticed out of his stone walls to defend them. Except Sir Guillaume had only nine men and could not hope to face the Count in open battle.

'We've business in Caen,' Thomas admitted, 'if we can ever reach the place.'

The captain picked at a nostril, then flicked something into the sea. 'Look for the troy frairs,' he said. 'The what?'

'Troy Frairs,' he said again. 'It's a boat and that's her name. It's French. She ain't big, no larger than that little tub.' He pointed to a small fishing boat, her hull tarred black, from which two men cast weighted nets into the broken sea about the Casquets. 'A man called Ugh„ Peter runs the Troy Frairs. He might carry you to Caen, or maybe to Carteret or Cherbourg. Not that I told you that.'

'Of course not,' Thomas said. He supposed the captain meant that Ugly Peter commanded a boat called Les Trois Freres. He stared at the fishing boat and wondered what kind of life it was to drag sustenance from this hard sea. It was easier, no doubt, to smuggle wool into Normandy and wine back to the islands. All morning they ran southwards until at last they made landfall. A small island lay off to the east and a larger, Guernsey, to the west, and from both rose pillars of smoke from cooking fires that promised shelter and warm food, but though that promise fluttered in the sky, the wind backed and the tide turned and it took the rest of the day for the Ursula to beat down to the harbour where she anchored under the loom of the castle built on its rocky island. Thomas, Robbie and Father Pascal were rowed ashore and found respite from the cold wind in a tavern with a fire burning in a wide hearth beside which they ate fish stew and black bread washed down with a watery ale. They slept on strawfilled sacks that were home to lice. It was four days before Ugly Peter, whose real name was Pierre Savon, put into the harbour, and another two before he was ready to leave again with a cargo of wool on which no duty would be paid. He was happy to take passengers, though only at a price which left Robbie and Thomas feeling robbed. Father Pascal was carried free on the grounds that he was a Norman and a priest which meant, according to Pierre the Ugly, that God loved him twice over and so was unlikely to sink Les Trots Freres so long as Father Pascal was aboard.

God must have loved the priest for he sent a gentle west wind, clear skies and calm seas so that Les Trois Freres seemed to fly her way to the River Orne. They went up to Caen on the tide, arriving in the morning, and once they were ashore Father Pascal offered Thomas and Robbie a blessing, then hitched up his shabby robe and began walking east to Paris. Thomas and Robbie, carrying heavy bundles of mail, weapons, arrows and spare clothing, vent south through the city.

Caen looked no better than when Thomas had left it the previous year after it had been laid waste by English archers who, disregarding their King's orders to dis-continue their attack, had swarmed over the river and hacked to death hundreds of men and women inside the city. Robbie stared in awe at the destruction on Ile St Jean, the newest part of Caen, which had suffered most from the English sack. Few of the burned houses had been rebuilt and there were ribs, skulls and long bones showing in the rivers' mud at the falling tide's margin. The shops were half bare, though a few countryfolk were in town selling food from carts and Thomas bought dried fish, bread and rock-hard cheese. Some looked askance at his bowstave, but he assured them he was a Scotsman and thus an ally of France. 'They do have proper bows in Scotland, don't they?' he asked Robbie.

'Of course we do.'

'Then why didn't you use them at Durham?'

'We just don't have enough,' Robbie said, 'and besides, we'd rather kill you bastards up close. Make sure you're dead, see?' He stared open-mouthed at a girl carrying a pail of milk. 'I'm in love.'

'If it's got tits you fall in love,' Thomas said. 'Now come on.' He led Robbie to Sir Guillaume's town house, the place where he had met Eleanor, and though Sir Guillaume's crest of three hawks was still carved in stone above the door there was now a new banner flying over the house: a flag showing a hump-backed boar with great tusks.

'Whose flag is that?' Thomas had crossed the small square to talk with a cooper who was hammering an iron ring down the flanks of a new barrel.

'It's the Count of Coutances,' the cooper said, 'and the bastard's already raised our rents. And I don't care if you do serve him.' He straightened and frowned at the bowstave. 'Are you English?'

' Ecossais,' Thomas said.

'Ah!' The cooper was intrigued and leaned closer to Thomas. 'Is it true, monsieur,' he asked, 'that you paint your faces blue in battle?'

'Always,' Thomas said, 'and our arses.'

'Formidable!' the cooper said, impressed.

'What's he saying?' Robbie asked.

'Nothing.' Thomas pointed at the oak which grew at the centre of the small square. A few shrivelled leaves still clung to the twigs. 'I was hanged from that tree,' he told Robbie.

'Aye, and I'm the Pope of Avignon.' Robbie heaved up his bundle. 'Did you ask him where we could buy horses?'

'Expensive things, horses,' Thomas said, 'and I thought we might save ourselves the bother of buying.' 'We're footpads now?'

'Indeed,' Thomas said. He led Robbie off the island across the bridge where so many archers had died in the frenzied attack, and then through the old city. That had been less damaged than the Ile St Jean because no one had tried to defend the narrow streets, while the castle, which had never fallen to the English, had only suffered from cannon balls that had done little except chip the stones about the gate. A red and yellow hanner flew from the castle rampart and men-at-arms, wearing the same coloured liven', challenged Thomas and Robbie as they were leaving the old city. Thomas answered by saying they were Scottish soldiers seeking employment from the Count of Coutances. 'I thought he'd be here,' Thomas lied, 'but we hear he's at Evecque.'

'And getting nowhere,' the guard commander said. He was a bearded man whose helmet had a great split that suggested he had taken it from a corpse. 'He's been pissing at those walls for two months now and got nowhere, but if you want to die at Evecque, boys, then good luck to you.'

They walked past the walls of the Abbaye aux Dames and Thomas had a sudden vision of Jeanette again. She had been his lover, but then had met Edward Wood-stock, the Prince of Wales, and what chance did Thomas have after that? It had been here, in the Abbaye aux Dames, that Jeanette and the Prince had lived during the brief siege of Caen. Where was Jeanette now? Thomas wondered. Back in Brittany? Still seeking her infant son? Did she ever think of him? Or did she regret fleeing from the Prince of Wales in the belief that the Picardy battle would be lost? Perhaps, by now, she would be married again. Thomas suspected she had taken a small fortune in jewels when she had fled the English army, and a rich widow, scarce more than twenty years old, made an attractive bride.

'What happens' — Robbie interrupted his thoughts — 'if they find out you're not Scottish?'

Thomas held up the two fingers of his right hand that drew the bowcord. 'They cut those off.'

'Is that all?'

'Those are the first things they cut off.'

They walked on south through a country of small steep hills, tight fields, thick woods and deep lanes. Thomas had never been to Evecque and, though it was not far from Caen, some of the peasants they asked had never heard of it, but when Thomas asked which way the soldiers had been going during the winter they pointed on southwards. They spent their first night in a roofless hovel, a place that had evidently been abandoned when the English came in the summer and swept through Normandy. They woke at dawn and Thomas put two arrows into a tree, just to keep in practice. He was cutting the steel heads out of the trunk when Robbie picked up the bow. 'Can you teach me to use it?' he asked.

'What I can teach you,' Thomas said, 'will take ten minutes. But the rest will need a lifetime. I began shoot-ing arrows when I was seven and after ten years I was beginning to get good at it.'

'It can't be that difficult,' Robbie protested, 'I've killed a stag with a bow.'

'That was a hunting bow,' Thomas said. He gave Robbie one of the arrows and pointed to a willow that had stubbornly kept its leaves. 'Hit the trunk.'

Robbie laughed. 'I can't miss!' The willow was scarcely thirty paces away.

'Go on, then.'

Robbie drew the bow, glancing once at Thomas as he realized just how much strength was needed to bend the great yew stave. It was twice as stiff as the shorter hunting bows he had used in Scotland. 'Jesus,' he said softly as he hauled the string back to his nose and realized his left arm was trembling slightly with the tension of the weapon. but he peered down the arrow to check his aim and was about to loose when Thomas held up a hand.

'You're not ready yet.'

'I damn well am,' Robbie said, though the words came out as grunts for the bow needed immense force to hold in the drawn position.

'You're not ready.' Thomas said, 'because there's four inches of the arrow sticking out in front of the bow. You have to pull it back until the arrow head touches your left hand.'

'Oh, sweet Jesus,' Robbie said and took a breath, nerved himself and pulled until the string was past his nose, past his eye and close by his right ear. The steel arrow head touched his left hand, but now he could no longer aim by looking down the arrow's shaft. He frowned as he realized the difficulty that implied, then compensated by edging the bow to the right. His left arm was shaking with the tension and, unable to keep the arrow drawn, he released, then twitched as the hemp string whipped along his inner left forearm. The arrow's feathers flashed white as they passed a foot from the willow's trunk. Robbie swore in amazement, then handed the bow to Thomas. 'So the trick of it,' he said,

'is learning how to aim it?'

'The trick,' Thomas said, 'is not aiming at all. It's something that just happens. You look at the target and you let the arrow fly.' Some archers, the lazy ones, only drew to the eye and that made them accurate, but their arrows lacked force. The good archers, the archers who drove down armies or brought down kings in shining armour, pulled the string all the way back. 'I taught a woman to shoot last summer,' Thomas said. taking back the bow, 'and she became good. Really good. She hit a hare at seventy paces.'

'A woman!'

'I let her use a longer string,' Thomas said, 'so the bow didn't need as much strength, but she was still good.' He remembered Jeanette's delight when the hare tumbled in the grass, squealing, the arrow pinned through its haunches. Jeanette. Why was he thinking of her so much?

They walked on through a world edged white with frost. The puddles had frozen and the leafless hedgerows were outlined with a sharp white rime that faded as the sun climbed. They crossed two streams, then climbed through beechwoods towards a plateau which, when they reached it, proved to be a wild place of thin turf that had never been cut with a plough. A few gorse bushes broke the grass, but otherwise the road ran across a featureless plain beneath an empty sky. Thomas had thought that the heathland would be nothing but a narrow belt of high country and that they must soon drop into the wooded valleys again, but the road stretched on and he felt ever more like a hare on a chalk upland under the gaze of a buzzard. Robbie felt the same and the two of them left the road to walk where the gorse provided some intermittent cover. Thomas kept looking ahead and behind. This was horse country, a firm-turfed upland where riders could go full gallop and where there were no woods or gullies in which two men on foot could hide. And the high ground seemed to extend for ever. At midday they reached a circle of standing stones, each about the height of a man and heavily encrusted with lichen. The circle was twenty yards across and one of the stones had fallen and they rested their backs against it while they took a meal of bread and cheese. 'The devil's wedding party, eh?' Robbie said.

'The stones. you mean?'

'We have them in Scotland.' Robbie twisted round and brushed fragments of snail shell from the fallen stone. 'They 're people who were turned into rocks by the devil.'

'In Dorset,' Thomas said, 'folk say that God turned them into stone.'

Robbie wrinkled his face at that idea. 'Why would God do that?'

'For dancing on the sabbath.'

'They'd just go to hell for that,' Robbie said, then idly scratched at the turf with his heel. 'We dig the stones up when we have the time. Look for gold, see?'

'You ever find any?'

'We do in the mounds sometimes. Pots anyway, and beads. Rubbish really. We throw it away as often as not. And we find elf stones, of course.' He meant the mysterious stone arrow heads that were supposedly shot from elfin bowstrings. He stretched out, enjoying the feeble warmth of the sun that was now as high as it would climb in the midwinter sky. 'I miss Scotland.'

'I've never been.'

'God's own country,' Robbie said forcefully, and he was still talking about Scotland's wonders when Thomas fell gently asleep. He dozed, then was woken because Robbie had kicked him.

The Scot was standing on the fallen stone. 'What is it?' Thomas asked.

'Company.'

Thomas stood beside him and saw four horsemen a mile or more to the north. He dropped back to the turf, pulled upon his bundle and took out a single sheaf of arrows, then hooked the bowstring over the nocked tips of the stave. 'Maybe they haven't seen us,' he said optimistically.

'They have,' Robbie commented, and Thomas climbed onto the stone again to see that the horsemen had left the road; they had stopped now and one of them stood in his stirrups to get a better look at the two strangers at the stone circle. Thomas could see they were wearing mail coats under their cloaks. 'I can take three of them,' he said, patting the bow, 'if you manage the fourth.'

'Ah, be kind to a poor Scotsman,' Robbie said, draw-ing his uncle's sword, 'leave me two. I have to make money, remember.' He might have been facing a fight with four horsemen in Normandy, but he was still a prisoner of Lord Outhwaite and so bound to pay his ransom that had been set at a mere two hundred pounds. His uncle's was ten thousand and in Scotland the Douglas clan would be worrying how to raise it. The horsemen still watched Thomas and Robbie, doubtless wondering who and what they were. The riders would not be fearful; after all they were mailed and armed and the two strangers were on foot and men on foot were almost certainly peasants and peasants were no threat to horsemen in armour. 'A patrol from Evecque?' Robbie wondered aloud.

'Probably.' The Count of Coutances would have men roaming the country looking for food. Or perhaps the horsemen were reinforcements riding to the Count's aid, but whoever they were they would regard any stranger in this countryside as prey for their weapons.

'They're coming,' Robbie said as the four men spread into a line. The riders must have assumed the two strangers would try to escape and so were making the line to snare them. 'The four horsemen, eh?' Robbie said. 'I can never remember what the fourth one is.'

'Death, var, pestilence and famine,' Thomas said, putting the first arrow on the string.

'It's famine I always forget,' Robbie said. The four riders were a half-mile away, swords drawn, cantering on the fine solid turf. Thomas was holding the bow low so they would not be ready for the arrows. He could hear the hoofbeats now and he thought of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the dreadful quartet of riders whose appearance would presage the end of time and the last great struggle between heaven and hell. War would appear on a horse the colour of blood, famine would be on a black stallion, pestilence would ravage the world on a white mount while death would ride the pale horse. Thomas had a sudden memory of his father sitting bolt upright, head back, intoning the Latin: 'et ecce equus pallidus'. Father Ralph used to say the words to annoy his housekeeper and lover, Thomas's mother, who, though she knew no Latin, understood that the words were about death and hell and she thought, rightly as it turned out, that her priest lover was inviting hell and death to Hookton.

'Behold a pale horse,' Thomas said. Robbie gave him a puzzled look. “'I saw a pale horse,”' Thomas quoted, —and the name of its rider was Death, and Hell followed him."'

'Is hell another of the riders?' Robbie asked.

'Hell is what these bastards are about to get,' Thomas said and he brought up the bow and dragged back the cord and felt a sudden anger and hate in his heart for the four men, and then the bow sounded, the cord's note hard and deep, and before the sound had died he was already plucking a second arrow from where he had stuck a dozen point-down in the turf. He hauled the cord back and the four horsemen were still riding straight for them as Thomas aimed at the left-hand rider. He loosed, took a third arrow, and now the sound of the hooves on the frost-hardened turf was as loud as the Scottish drums at Durham and the second man from the right was thrashing left and right, falling back, an arrow jutting from his chest and the rider on the left was lying back on his saddle's cantle, and the other two, at last understanding their danger, were swerving to throw off Thomas's aim. Gobbets of earth and grass were thrown up from the horses' hooves as they slewed away. If the two unwounded riders had any sense, Thomas thought, they would ride away as though Hell and Death were on their heels, ride back the way they had come in a desperate bid to escape the arrows, but instead, with the rage of men who had been challenged by what they believed to be an inferior enemy, they curved back towards their prey and Thomas let the third arrow fly. The first two men were both out of it, one fallen from his saddle and the other lolling on his horse that just cropped the winter-pale turf; and the third arrow flew hard and straight at its victim, but his galloping horse tossed up its head and the arrow slid down the side of its skull, blood bright on the black hide: the horse twisted away from the pain and the rider, unready for the turn, was flailing for balance, but Thomas had no time to watch him for the fourth rider was inside the stone circle and closing on him. The man had a vast black cloak that billowed behind as he turned the pale grey horse and he shouted his defiance as he stretched out the sword to whip the point like a lance head into Thomas's chest, but Thomas had his fourth arrow on the cord and the man suddenly understood that he was a split second too late. ' Non!' he shouted, and Thomas did not even draw the bow fully back, but let it fly off the half-string and the arrow still had enough force to bury itself in the man's head, splitting the bridge of his nose and driving deep into his skull. He twitched, his sword arm dropped, Thomas felt the wind as the man's horse thundered past him and then the rider fell back over the stallion's rump. The third man, the one unseated from the black horse, had fallen in the stone circle's centre and now approached Robbie. Thomas plucked an arrow from the turf. 'No!' Robbie called. 'He's mine.'

Thomas relaxed the string.

' Chien batard,' the man said to Robbie. He was much older than the Scotsman and must have taken Robbie for a mere boy for he half smiled as he came fast forward to lunge his sword and Robbie stepped back, parried, and the blades rang like bells in the clear air. ' Batard!' the man spat and attacked again. Robbie stepped back once more, yielding ground until he had almost reached the stone ring, and his retreat worried Thomas who had stretched his string again, but then Robbie parried so fast and riposted so quickly that the Frenchman was going backwards in a sudden and desperate hurry. 'You English bastard,' Robbie said. He swung his blade low and the man dropped his own blade to parry and Robbie just kicked it aside and lunged so that his uncle's blade sank into the man's neck. 'Bastard English bastard,' Robbie snarled, ripping the blade free in a spray of bright blood. 'Bloody English pig!' He freed the sword and swung it back to bury its edge in what was left of the man's neck. Thomas watched the man fall. Blood was bright on the grass. 'He wasn't English,'

Thomas said.

'It's just a habit when I fight,' Robbie said. 'It's the way my uncle trained me.' He stepped towards his victim. 'Is he dead?'

'You half cut off his head,' Thomas said, 'what do you think?'

'I think I'll take his money,' Robbie said and knelt beside the dead man. One of the first two men to be struck by Thomas's arrows was still alive. The breath bubbled in his throat and showed pink and frothy at his lips. He was the man lolling in his saddle and he moaned as Thomas spilled him down to the ground.

'Is he going to live?' Robbie had crossed to see what Thomas was doing.

'Christ, no,' Thomas said and took out his knife.

'Jesus!' Robbie stepped back as the man's throat was cut. 'Did you have to?'

'I don't want the Count of Coutances to know there are only two of us,' Thomas said. 'I want the Count of Coutances to be as scared as hell of us. I want him to think the devil's own horsemen are hunting his men.'

They searched the four corpses and, after a lumbering chase, managed to collect the four horses. From the bodies and the saddlebags they took close to eighteen pounds of had French silver coinage, two rings, three good daggers, four swords, a fine mail coat that Robbie claimed to replace his own, and a gold chain that they hacked in half with one of the captured swords. Then Thomas used the two worst swords to picket a pair of the horses beside the road and on the horses' backs he tied two of the corpses so that they hung in the saddle, bending sideways with vacant eyes and white skin laced with blood. The other two corpses, stripped of their mail, were placed on the road and in each of their dead mouths Thomas put sprigs of gorse. That gesture meant nothing, but to whoever found the bodies it would suggest something strange, even Satanic. 'It'll worry the bastards,' Thomas explained.

'Four dead men should give them a twitch,' Robbie said.

'They'll be scared to hell if they think the devil's loose,' Thomas said. The Count of Coutances would scoff if he knew there were only two young men come as reinforcements for Sir Guillaume d'Eyecque, but he could not ignore four corpses and hints of weird ritual. And he could not ignore death.

To which end, when the corpses were arranged, Thomas took the big black cloak, the money and the weapons, the best of the stallions and the pale horse. For the pale horse belonged to Death.

And with it Thomas could make nightmares.

A single short burst of thunder sounded as Thomas and Robbie neared Evecque. They did not know how close they were, but they were riding through country where all the farms and cottages had been destroyed which told Thomas that they must be within the manor's boundaries. Robbie, on hearing the rumble, looked puzzled for the sky immediately above them was clear, although there were dark clouds to the south. 'It's too cold for thunder,' he said.

'Maybe it's different in France?'

They left the road and followed a farm track that twisted through woods and petered out beside a burned building that still smoked gently. It made little sense to burn such steadings and Thomas doubted that the Count of Coutances had initially ordered the destruction, but Sir Guillaume's long defiance and the bloody-mindedness of most soldiers would ensure that the pillage and burning would happen anyway. Thomas had done the same in Brittany. He had listened to the screams and protests of families who had to watch their home being burned and then he had touched the fire to the thatch. It was war. The Scots did it to the English, the English to the Scots, and here the Count of Coutances was doing it to his own tenant.

A second clap of thunder sounded and just after its echo had died Thomas saw a great veil of smoke in the eastern sky. He pointed to it and Robbie, recognizing the smear of campfires and realizing the need for silence, just nodded. They left their horses in a thicket of hazel saplings and then climbed a long wooded hill. The setting sun was behind them, throwing their shadows long on the dead leaves. A woodpecker, redheaded and wings barred white, whirred loud and low above their heads as they crossed the ridge line to see the village and manor of Evecque beneath them. Thomas had never seen Sir Guillaume's manor before. He had imagined it would be like Sir Giles Marriott's hall with one great barn-like room and a few thatched outbuildings, but Evecque was much more like a small castle. At the corner closest to Thomas it even had a tower: a square and not very tall tower, but properly crenellated and flying its banner of three stooping hawks to show that Sir Guillaume was not yet beaten. The manor's saving feature, though, was its moat, which was wide and thickly covered with a vivid green scum. The manor's high walls rose sheer from the water and had few windows, and those were nothing but arrow slits. The roof was thatched and sloped inwards to a small courtyard. The besiegers, whose tents and shelters lay in the village to the north of the manor, had succeeded in setting fire to the roof at some point, but Sir Guillaume's few defenders must have managed to extinguish the flames for only one small portion of the thatch was missing or blackened. None of those defenders was visible now, though some of them must have been peering though the arrow slits that showed as small black specks against the grey stone. The only visible damage to the manor was some broken stones at one corner of the tower where it looked as though a giant beast had nibbled at the masonry, and that was probably the work of the springald that Father Pascal had mentioned, but the oversized crossbow had obviously broken again and irremediably for Thomas could see it lying in two gigantic pieces in the field beside the tiny stone village church. It had done very little damage before its main beam broke and Tho-mas wondered if the eastern, hidden, side of the building had been hurt more. The manor's entrance must be on that far side and Thomas suspected the main siege works would also be there.

Only a score of besiegers were in sight, most doing nothing more threatening than sitting outside the vil-lage houses, though a half-dozen men were gathered around what looked like a small table in the church-yard. None of the Count's men was closer to the manor than a hundred and fifty paces, which suggested that the defenders had succeeded in killing some of their enemies with crossbows and the rest had learned to give the garrison a wide berth. The village itself was small, not much bigger than Down Mapperley, and, like the Dorset village, had a watermill. There were a dozen tents to the south of the houses and twice as many little turf shelters and Thomas tried to work out how many men could be sheltered in the village, tents and turf huts and decided the Count must now have about 120 men.

'What do we do?' Robbie asked.

'Nothing for now. Just watch.'

It was a tedious vigil for there was little activity beneath them. Some women carried pails of water from the watermill's race, others were cooking on open fires or collecting clothes that had been spread out to dry over some bushes at the edge of the fields. The Count of Coutances's banner, showing the black boar on a white field spangled with blue flowers, flew on a make-shift staff outside the largest house in the village. Six other banners hung above the thatched rooftops, show-ing that other lords had come to share the plunder. A half-dozen squires or pages exercised some warhorses in the meadow behind the encampment, but otherwise Evecque's attackers were doing little except wait. Siege work was boring work. Thomas remembered the idle days outside La Roche-Derrien, though those long hours had been broken by the terror and excitement of the occasional assault. These men, unable to assault Evecque's walls because of the moat, could only wait and hope to starve the garrison into surrender or else tempt it into a sally by burning farms. Or perhaps they were waiting for a long piece of seasoned wood to repair the broken arm of the abandoned springald. Then, just as Thomas was deciding that he had seen enough, the group of men who had been gathered about what he had thought was a low table beside the churchyard hedge suddenly ran back towards the church.

'What in God's name is that?' Robbie asked, and Thomas saw that it had not been a table they were crowding round, but a vast pot cradled in a heavy wooden frame.

'It's a cannon,' Thomas said, unable to hide his awe, and just then the gun fired and the great metal pot and its huge wooden cradle both vanished inside a swelling burst of dirty smoke and, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a piece of stone fly away from the damaged corner of the manor. A thousand birds flew up from hedgerows, thatch and trees as the gun's booming thunder rolled up the hill and washed past him. That vast clap of sound was the thunder they had heard earlier in the afternoon. The Count of Coutances had managed to find a gun and was using it to nibble away at the manor. The English had used guns at Caen last summer, though not all the guns in their army, nor all the best efforts of the Italian gunners, had hurt Caen's castle. Indeed, as the smoke slowly cleared from the encampment, Thomas saw that this shot had made little impact on the manor. The noise seemed more violent than the missile itself, yet he supposed that if the Count's gunners could fire enough stones then eventually the masonry must give way and the tower collapse into the moat to make a rubble causeway across the water. Stone by stone, fragment by fragment, maybe three or four shots a day, and thus the besiegers would undermine the tower and make their rough path into Evecque.

A man rolled a small barrel out of the church, but another man waved him back and the barrel was taken back inside. The church had to be their powder store, Thomas thought, and the man had been sent back because the gunners had shot their last missile for the day and would not reload until morning. And that suggested an idea, but he pushed it away as impractical and stupid.

'Have you seen enough?' he asked Robbie.

'I've never seen a gun before,' Robbie said, staring down at the distant pot as if hoping that it would be fired again, but Thomas knew it was unlikely that the gunners would discharge it again this evening. It took a long time to charge a cannon and, once the black powder was packed into its belly and the missile put into the neck, the gun had to be sealed with damp loam. The loam would confine the explosion that propelled the missile and it needed time to dry before the gun was fired, so it was unlikely that there would be another shot before morning. 'It sounds more trouble than it's worth,' Robbie said sourly when Thomas had explained it. 'So you reckon they'll not fire again?'

'They'll wait till morning.'

'I've seen enough then,' Robbie said and they crawled back through the beeches until they were over the ridge, then went down to their picketed horses and rode into the falling night. There was a half-moon, cold and high, and the night was bitter, so bitter they decided they must risk a fire, though they did their best to hide it by taking refuge in a deep gully with rock walls where they made a crude roof of boughs covered in hastily cut turfs. The fire flickered through the holes in the roof to light the rock walls red, but Thomas doubted that any of the besiegers would patrol the woods in the dark. No one willingly went into deep trees at night for all kinds of beasts and monsters and ghosts stalked the wood-lands, and that thought reminded Thomas of the sum-mer journey he had made with Jeanette when they had slept night after night in the woods. It had been a happy time and the remembrance of it made him feel sorry for himself and then, as ever, guilty for Eleanor's sake and he held his hands to the small fire. 'Are there green men in Scotland?' he asked Robbie.

'In the woods, you mean? There are goblins. Evil little bastards, they are.' Robbie made the sign of the cross and, in case that was not sufficient, leaned over and touched the iron hilt of his uncle's sword.

Thomas was thinking of goblins and other creatures, things that waited in the night woods. Did he really want to go back to Evecque tonight? 'Did you notice,' he said to Robbie, that no one in Coutances's camp seemed very disturbed that four of their horsemen hadn't returned? We didn't see anyone going looking for them, did we?'

Robbie thought about it, then shrugged. 'Maybe the horsemen didn't come from the camp?'

'They did,' Thomas said with a confidence he did not entirely feel and for a moment he guiltily wondered if the four horsemen had nothing to do with Evecque, then reminded himself that the riders had initiated the fight. 'They must have come from Evecque,' he said, 'and they'll be worried there by now.'

'So?'

'So will they have put more sentries on their camp tonight?'

Robbie shrugged. 'Does it matter?'

'I'm thinking,' Thomas said, 'that I have to tell Sir Guillaume that we're here, and I don't know how to do that except by making a big noise.'

'You could write a message,' Robbie suggested, 'and put it round an arrow?'

Thomas stared at him. 'I don't have parchment,' he said patiently, 'and I don't have ink, and have you ever tried shooting an arrow wrapped up in parchment? It would probably fly like a dead bird. I'd have to stand by the moat and it would be easier to throw the arrow from there.'

Robbie shrugged. 'So what do we do?'

'Make a noise. Announce ourselves.' Thomas paused. 'And I'm thinking that the cannon will break the tower down eventually if we don't do something.'

'The cannon?' Robbie asked, then stared at Thomas. 'Sweet Jesus,' he said after a while as he thought of the difficulties. 'Tonight?'

'Once Coutances and his men know we're here,' Thomas said, 'they'll double their sentries, but I'll bet the bastards are half asleep tonight.'

'Aye, and wrapped up warm if they've any damn sense,' Robbie said. He frowned. 'But that gun looked like a rare great pot. How the hell do you break it?'

'I was thinking of the black powder in the church,' Thomas said.

'Set fire to it?'

'There're plenty of campfires in the village,' Thomas said and he wondered what would happen if they_ were captured in the enemy encampment, but it was point-less to worry about that. If the gun was to be made useless then it was best to strike before the Count of Coutances knew an enemy had come to harass him, and that made this night the ideal opportunity. 'You don't have to come,' Thomas told Robbie. 'It's not as if your friends are inside the manor.'

'Hold your breath,' Robbie said scornfully. He frowned again. 'What's going to happen afterwards?'

'Afterwards?' Thomas thought. 'It depends on Sir Guillaume. If he gets no answer from the King then he'll want to break out. So he has to know we're here.'

'Why?'

'In case he needs our help. He did send for us, didn't he? Sent for me, anyway. So we go on making a noise.

We make ourselves a nuisance. We give the Count of Coutances some nightmares.'

'The two of us?'

'You and me,' Thomas said, and the saying of it made him realize that Robbie had become a friend. 'I think you and I can make trouble,' he added with a smile. And they would begin this night. In this bitter and cold night, beneath a hard-edged moon, they would conjure the first of their nightmares.

They went on foot and despite the bright half-moon it was dark under the trees and Thomas began to worry about whatever demons, goblins and spectres haunted these Norman woods. Jeanette had told him that in Brittany there were nains and gorics that stalked the dark, while in Dorset it was the Green Man who stamped and growled in the trees behind Lipp Hill, and the fishermen spoke of the souls of the drowned men who would sometimes drag themselves on shore and moan for the wives they had left behind. On All Soul's Eve the devil and the dead danced on Maiden Castle, and on other nights there were lesser ghosts in and about the village and up on the hill and in the church tower and wherever a man looked, which was why no one left his house at night without a scrap of iron or a piece of mistletoe or, at the very least, a piece of cloth that had been touched by a holy wafer. Thomas's father had hated that superstition, but when his people had lifted their hands for the sacrament and he saw a scrap of cloth tied about their palms he had not refused them.

And Thomas had his own superstitions. He would only ever pick up the bow with his left hand; the first arrow to be shot from a newly strung bow had to be tapped three times against the stave, once for the Father, once for the Son and a third time for the Holy Spirit; he would not wear white clothes and he put his left boot on before his right. For a long time he had worn a dog's paw about his neck, then had thrown it away in the conviction it brought ill luck, but now, after Eleanor's death, he wondered if he should have kept it. Thinking of Eleanor, his mind slid back to the darker beauty of Jeanette. Did she remember him? Then he tried not to think of her, because thinking of an old love might bring ill luck and he touched the bole of a tree as he passed to cleanse away the thought. Thomas was looking for the red glow of dying camp-fires beyond the trees that would tell him that they were close to Evecque, but the only light was the silver of the moon tangled in the high branches. Nains and gorics: what were they? Jeanette had never told him, except to say they were spirits that haunted the country. They must have something similar here in Normandy. Or perhaps they had witches? He touched another tree. His mother had firmly believed in witches and his father had instructed Thomas to say his paternoster if he ever got lost. Witches, Father Ralph had believed, preyed upon lost children, and later, much later, Thomas's father had told him that witches began their invocation of the devil by saying the paternoster backwards and Thomas, of course, had tried it though he had never dared finish the whole prayer. Olam a son arebil des, the backward Paternoster began, and he could say it still, even managing the difficult reversals of temptationem and supersubstantialem, though he was careful never to finish the whole prayer in case there was a stench of brimstone, a crack of flame and the terror of the devil descending on black wings with eyes of fire.

'What are you muttering?' Robbie asked.

'I'm trying to say supersubstantialem backwards,' Thomas said. Robbie chuckled. 'You're a strange one, Thomas.'

' delait nats bus repus,' Thomas said.

'Is that French?' Robbie said. 'Because I have to learn it.

'You will,' Thomas promised him, then at last he glimpsed fires between the trees and they both went silent as they climbed the long slope to the crest among the beeches that overlooked Evecque.

No lights showed from the manor. A clean and cold moonlight glistened on the greenscummed moat that looked smooth as ice –perhaps it was ice? –and the white moon threw a black shadow into the damaged corner of the tower, while a glow of firelight showed on the manor's farther side, confirming Thomas's suspicion that there was a siege work opposite the building's entrance. He guessed that the Count's men had dug trenches from which they could douse the gateway with crossbow bolts as other men tried to bridge the moat where the draw-bridge would be missing. Thomas remembered the cross-bow bolts spitting from the walls of La Roche-Derrien and he shivered. It was bitter cold. Soon, Thomas thought, the dew would turn to frost, silvering the world. Like Robbie he was wearing a wool shirt beneath a leather jerkin and a coat of mail over which he had a cloak, yet still he was shivering and he wished he was back in the shelter of their gully where the fire burned.

'I can't see anyone,' Robbie said.

Nor could Thomas, but he went on looking for the sentries. Maybe the cold was keeping everyone under a roof? He searched the shadows near the guttering campfires, watched for any movement in the darkness about the church and still saw no one. Doubtless there were sentinels in the siege works opposite the manor entrance, but surely they would be watching for any defender trying to sneak out of the back of the manor? Except who would swim a moat on a night this cold? And the besiegers were surely bored by now and their watchfulness would be low. He saw a silver-edged cloud sailing closer to the moon. 'When the cloud covers the moon,' he told Robbie, 'we go.'

'And God bless us both,' Robbie said fervently, making the sign of the cross. The cloud seemed to move so slowly, then at last it veiled the moon and the glimmering landscape faded into grey and black. There was still a wan, faint light, but Thomas doubted the night would get any blacker and so he stood, brushed the twigs off his cloak and started towards the village along a track that had been beaten across the eastern slope of the ridge. He guessed the path had been made by pigs being taken to get fat on the beechmast in the woods and he remembered how Hookton's pigs had roamed the shingle eating fish heads and how his mother had always claimed it tainted the taste of their bacon. Fishy bacon, she had called it, and compared it unfavourably with the bacon of her native Weald in Kent. That, she had always said, had been proper bacon, nourished on beechmast and acorn, the best. Thomas stumbled on a tussock of grass. It was difficult to follow the track because the night suddenly seemed much darker, per-haps because they were on lower ground.

He was thinking of bacon and all the time they were getting closer to the village and Thomas was suddenly scared. He had seen no sentries, but what about dogs? One barking bitch in the night and he and Robbie could be dead men. He had not brought the bow, but suddenly wished he had – though what could he do with it? Shoot a dog? At least the path was easily visible now for it was lit by the campfires and the two of them walked confidently as though they belonged in the village. 'You must do this all the time,' Thomas said to Robbie softly.

'This?'

'When you raid across the border.'

'Hell, we stay in the open country. Go after cattle and horses.'

They were among the shelters now and stopped talk-ing. A sound of deep snoring came from one small turf hut and an unseen dog whined, but did not bark. A man was sitting in a chair outside a tent, presumably guarding whoever slept inside, but the guard himself was asleep. A small wind stirred the branches in an orchard by the church and the stream made a splashing noise as it plunged over the little weir beside the mill. A woman laughed softly in one of the houses where some men began to sing. The tune was new to Thomas and the deep voices smothered the sound of the church-yard gate, which squealed as he pushed it open. The church had a small wooden belfry and Thomas could hear the wind sighing on the bell. 'Is that you, Georges?' a man called from the porch.

' Non.' Thomas spoke more curtly than he intended, and the tone brought the man out from the black shadows of the porch's arch and Thomas, thinking he had initiated trouble, put his hand behind his back to grasp the hilt of his dagger.

'Sorry, sir.' The man had mistaken Thomas for an officer, maybe even a lord. 'I've been expecting a relief, sir.'

'He's probably still sleeping,' Thomas said.

The man stretched, yawning hugely. 'The bastard never wakes up.' The sentry was little more than a shadow in the dark, but Thomas sensed he was a big man. 'And it's cold here,' the man went on, 'God, but it's cold. Did Guy and his men come back?'

'One of their horses threw a shoe,' Thomas said.

'That's what it was! And I thought they'd found that ale shop in Saint-Germain. Christ and his angels, but that girl with the one eye! Have you seen her?'

'Not yet,' Thomas said. He was still holding his dagger, one of the weapons that the archers called a misericord because it was used to put unhorsed and wounded men-atarms out of their misery. The blade was slender and sufficiently flexible to slide between the joints of armour and seek out the life beneath, but he was reluctant to draw it. This sentry suspected nothing and his only offence was to want a long conversation. 'Is the church open?' Thomas asked the sentry.

'Of course. Why not?'

'We have to pray,' Thomas said.

'Must be a guilty conscience that makes men pray at night, eh?' The sentry was affable.

'Too many one-eyed girls,' Thomas said. Robbie, not speaking French, stood to one side and stared at the great black shadow of the gun.

'A sin worth repenting,' the man chuckled, then he drew himself up. 'Would you wait here while I wake Georges? It won't take a moment.'

'Take as long as you like,' Thomas said grandly, 'we shall be here till dawn. You can let Georges sleep if you want. The two of us will keep watch.'

'You're a living saint,' the man said, then he fetched his blanket from the porch before walking away with a cheerful goodnight. Thomas, when the man was gone, walked into the porch where he immediately kicked an empty barrel that rolled over with a great clatter. He swore and went still, but no one called from the village to demand an explanation for the noise.

Robbie crouched beside him. The dark was impenetrable in the porch, but they groped with their hands to discover a half-dozen empty barrels. They stank of rotten eggs and Thomas guessed they had once held black powder. He whispered to Robbie the gist of the conversation he had held with the sentry. 'But what I don't know,' he went on, 'is whether he's going to wake Georges or not. I don't think so, but I couldn't tell.'

'Who does he think we are?'

'Two men-at-arms probably,' Thomas said. He pushed the empty barrels aside, then stood and groped for the rope that lifted the latch of the church door. He found it, then winced as the hinges squealed. Thomas could still see nothing, but the church had the same sour stench as the empty barrels. 'We need some light,' he whispered. His eyes slowly became accustomed to the gloom and he saw the faintest glimmer of light showing from the big eastern window over the altar. There was not even a small flame burning above the sanctuary where the wafers were kept, presumably because it was too dangerous with the gunpowder being stored in the nave. Thomas found the powder easily enough by bumping into the stack of barrels that were just inside the door. There were at least two score of them each about the size of a water pail, and Thomas guessed the cannon used one or maybe two barrels for each shot. Say three or four shots a day? So maybe there was two weeks' supply of powder here. 'We need some light,' he said again, turning, but Robbie made no response. 'Where are you?' Thomas hissed the question, but again there was no answer and then he heard a boot thump hollow against one of the empty barrels in the porch and he saw Robbie's shadow flicker in the clouded moonlight of the graveyard.

Thomas waited. A campfire smouldered not far beyond the thorn hedge that kept cattle out of the vil-lage's graves and he saw a shadow crouch beside the dying flames and then there was a sudden flare of brightness, like summer lightning, and Robbie reeled back and then Thomas, dazzled and alarmed by the flare, could see nothing. He had gone to the church door and he expected to hear a shout from one of the men in the village, but instead he heard only the squeal of the gate and the Scotsman's footsteps. 'I used an empty barrel,' Robbie said, 'except it wasn't as empty as I thought. Or else the powder gets into the wood.'

He was standing in the porch and the barrel was in his hands; he had used it to scoop up some embers. The powder residue had flared, burning his eyebrows, and now fire leaped up the barrel's inside. 'What do I do with it?' he asked.

'Christ!' Thomas imagined the church exploding. 'Give it to me,' he said, and he took the barrel, which was hot to the touch, and he ran with it into the church, his way lit by the flames, and he thrust the burning wood deep between two stacks of full barrels. 'Now we get out,' he said to Robbie.

'Did you look for the poor box?' Robbie said. 'Only if we're going to smash the church, we might as well take the poor box.'

'Come on!' Thomas snatched Robbie's arm and dragged him through the porch.

'It's a waste to leave it,' Robbie said.

'There's no bloody poor box,' Thomas said, 'the vil-lage is full of soldiers, you idiot!'

They ran, dodging between graves and pounding past the bulbous cannon, which lay in its wooden firing cradle. They climbed a fence that filled a gap in the thorn hedge, then sprinted past the gaunt shape of the broken springald and the turf-roofed shelters, not caring if they made a noise, and two dogs began to bark, then a third howled at them and a man jumped up from beside the entrance of one of the big tents. 'Qui va lå?' he called, and began to wind his crossbow, but Thomas and Robbie were already past him and out in the open field where they stumbled on the uneven turf. The moon came from behind the cloud and Thomas could see his breath like a mist.

' Halte!' the man shouted.

Thomas and Robbie stopped. Not because the man had given them the order, but because a red light was filling the world. They turned and stared, and the sentry who had challenged them now forgot them as the night became scarlet. Thomas was not sure what he had expected. A lance of flame to pierce the heavens? A great noise like thunder? Instead the noise was almost soft, like a giant's inrush of breath, and a soft blossoming flame spilled from the church windows as though the gates of hell had just been opened and the fires of death were filling the nave, but that great red glow only lasted an instant before the roof of the church lifted off and Thomas distinctly saw the black rafters splaying apart like butchered ribs. 'Sweet Jesus Christ,' he blasphemed.

'God in His heaven,' Robbie said, wideeyed.

Now the flames and smoke and air were boiling above the cauldron of the unroofed church, and still new barrels exploded, one after the other, each one pulsing a wave of fire and fumes into the sky. Neither Thomas nor Robbie knew it, but the powder had needed stirring because the heavier saltpetre found its way to the bottom of the barrels and the lighter charcoal was left at the top and that meant much of the powder was slow to catch the fire, but the explosions were serving to mix the remaining powder that pulsed bright and scarlet to spew a red cloud over the village. Every dog in Evecque was barking or howling, and men, women and children were crawling from their beds to stare at the hellish glow. The noise of the explosions rolled across the meadows and echoed from the manor walls and startled hundreds of birds up from their roosts in the woodlands. Debris splashed in the moat, throwing up sharp-edged shards of thin ice that mirrored the fire so it seemed the manor was sur-rounded by a lake of sparkling flame.

'Jesus,' Robbie said in awe, then the two of them ran on towards the beech trees at the high eastern side of the pastureland.

Thomas began to laugh as he stumbled up the path to the trees. 'I'll go to hell for that,'

he said, stopping among the beeches and making the sign of the cross.

'For burning a church?' Robbie was grinning, his eyes reflecting the brightness of the fires. 'You should see what we did to the Black Canons at Hexham! Christ, half Scotland will be in hell for that one.'

They watched the fire for a few moments, then turned into the darkness of the woods. Dawn was not far off. There was a lightness in the east where a wan grey, pale as death, edged the sky. 'We have to go deeper into the forest,' Thomas said, 'we have to hide.'

Because the hunt for the saboteurs was about to start and in the first light, as the smoke still made a great pall above Evecques, the Count of Coutances sent twenty horsemen and a pack of hounds to find the men who had destroyed his store of powder, but the day was cold, the ground hard with frost and the quarry's small scent faded early. Next day, in his petulance, the Count ordered his forces to make an attack. They had been readying gabions – great basketwork tubes woven from willow that were filled with earth and stones – and the plan was to fill the moat with the gabions and then swarm over the resultant bridge to assault the gate-house. The gateway lacked its drawbridge which had been taken down early in the siege to leave an open and inviting archway which was blocked by nothing more than a low stone barricade.

The Count's advisers told him there were not enough gabions, that the moat was deeper than he thought, that the time was not propitious, that Venus was in the ascendant and Mars in the decline, and that he should, in brief, wait until the stars smiled on him and the garrison was hungrier and more desperate, but the Count had lost face and he ordered the assault anyway and his men did their best. They were protected so long as they held the gabions, for the earth-filled baskets were proof against any crossbow bolt, but once the gabions were thrown into the moat the attackers were exposed to Sir Guillaume's six crossbowmen who were sheltering behind the low stone wall that had been built across the manor's entrance arch where the drawbridge had once been. The Count had crossbowmen of his own and they were protected by pavises, full-length shields carried by a second man to protect the archer while he laboriously wound the cord of the crossbow, but the men throwing the gabions had no protection once their burdens were thrown and eight of them died before the rest realized that the moat really was too deep and that there were not nearly enough gabions. Two paviseholders and a crossbowman were badly wounded before the Count accepted he was wasting his time and called the attackers back. Then he cursed Sir Guillaume on the fourteen hump-backed devils of St Candace before getting drunk.

Thomas and Robbie survived. On the day after they had burned the Count's powder Thomas shot a deer, and next day Robbie discovered a rotting hare in a gap in a hedge and when he pulled the body out discovered a snare that must have been set by one of Sir Guillaume's tenants who had either been killed or chased off by the Count's men. Robbie washed the snare in a stream and set it in another hedge and next morning found a hare choking in the tightening noose.

They dared not sleep in the same place two nights running, but there was plenty of shelter in the deserted and burned-out farms. They spent most of the next weeks in the country south of Evecque where the valleys were deeper, the hills steeper and the woods thicker. Here there were plenty of hiding places and it was in that tangled landscape that they made the Count's nightmare worse. Tales began to be told in the besiegers' encampment of a tall man in black on a pale horse and whenever the man on the pale horse appeared, someone would die. The death would be caused by a long arrow, an English arrow, yet the man on the horse had no bow, only a staff topped by a deer's skull, and everyone knew what creature rode the pale horse and what a skull on a pole denoted. The men who had seen the apparition told their womenfolk in the Count's encampment and the womenfolk cried to the Count's chaplain and the Count said they were dreaming, but the corpses were real enough. Four brothers, come from distant Lyons to earn money by serving in the siege, packed their belongings and went. Others threatened to follow. Death stalked Evecque.

The Count's chaplain said folk were touched by the moon and he rode into the dangerous south country, loudly chanting prayers and scattering holy water, and when the chaplain survived unscathed the Count told his men they had been fools, that there was no Death riding a pale horse, and next day two men died only this time they were in the east. The tales grew in the telling. The horseman was now accompanied by giant hounds whose eves glowed, and the horseman did not even need to appear to explain any misfortune. If a horse tripped, if a man broke a bone, if a woman spilled food, if a crossbow string snapped, then it was blamed on the mysterious man who rode the pale horse. The confidence of the besiegers plunged. There were mutterings of doom and six men-at-arms went south to seek employment in Gascony. Those who remained grumbled that they did the devil's work and nothing the Count of Coutances did seemed to restore his men's spirits. He tried cutting back trees to stop the mysterious archer shooting into the camp, but there were too many trees and not enough axes, and the arrows still came. He sent to the Bishop of Caen who wrote a blessing on a piece of vellum and sent it back, but that had no effect on the black-cloaked rider whose appearance presaged death, and so the Count, who fervently believed he did God's work and feared to fail in case he incurred God's wrath, now appealed to God for help.

He wrote to Paris.

Louis Bessieres, Cardinal Archbishop of Livorno, a city he had only seen once when he travelled to Rome (on his return, he had made a detour so he would not be forced to see Livorno a second time), walked slowly down the Quai des Orfevres on the Ile de la Cite in Paris. Two servants went ahead of him, using staves to clear the way for the Cardinal who appeared not to be paying attention to the lean, hollow-cheeked priest who spoke to him so urgently. The Cardinal, instead, exam-ined the wares on offer in the goldsmiths'

shops lining the quai that was named for their trade: Goldsmith's Quay. He admired a necklace of rubies and even con-sidered buying it, but then discovered a flaw in one of the stones. 'So sad,' he murmured, then moved to the next shop. 'Exquisite!' he exclaimed of a salt cellar made in silver and emblazoned with four panels on which pictures of country life were enamelled in blue, red, yellow and black. A man ploughed on one panel and broadcast seed on the next, a woman cut the harvest on the third while on the last panel the two sat at table admiring a glowing loaf of bread. 'Quite exquisite,' the Cardinal enthused, 'don't you think it beautiful?'

Bernard de Taillebourg scarcely gave the salt cellar a glance. 'The devil is at work against us, your eminence,' he said angrily.

'The devil is always at work against us, Bernard,' the Cardinal said reprovingly, 'that is the devil's job. There would be something desperately amiss in the world if the devil were not at work against us.' He caressed the salt cellar, running his fingers over the delicate curves of the panels, then decided the shape of the base was not quite right. Something crude there, he thought, a clumsiness in the design and, with a smile for the shopkeeper, he put it back on the table and strolled on. The sun shone; there was even some warmth in the winter air and a sparkle on the Seine. A legless man with wooden blocks on his stumps swung on short crutches across the road and held out a dirty hand towards the Cardinal whose servants rushed at the man with their staves. 'No, no!' the Cardinal called and felt in his purse for some coins. 'God's blessing on you, my son,' he said. Cardinal Bessieres liked giving alms, he liked the melting gratitude on the faces of the poor, and he especially liked their look of relief when he called off his servants a heartbeat before they used their staves. Sometimes the Cardinal paused just a fraction too long and he liked that too. But today was a warm, sunlit day stolen from a grey winter and so he was in a kindly mood.

Once past the Sabot d'Or, a tavern for scriveners, he turned away from the river into the tangle of alleys that twisted about the labyrinthine buildings of the royal palace. Parliament, such as it was, met here, and the lawyers scuttled the dark passages like rats, yet here and there, piercing the gloom, gorgeous buildings reared up to the sun. The Cardinal loved these alleys and had a fancy that shops magically disappeared overnight to be replaced by others. Had that laundry always been there? And why had he never noticed the bakery? And surely there had been a lute-makers' business beside the public privy? A furrier hung bear coats from a rack and the Cardinal paused to feel the pelts. De Taillebourg still yapped at him, but he scarcely listened. Just past the furrier's was an archway guarded by men in blue and gold livery. They wore polished breast-plates, plumed helmets and carried pikes with brightly polished blades. Few folk got past them, but the guards hastily stepped back and bowed as the Cardinal passed. He gave them a benevolent wave suggestive of a bless-ing, then followed a damp passage into a courtyard. This was all royal land now and the courtiers offered the Cardinal respectful bows for he was more than a cardinal, he was also Papal Legate to the throne of France. He was God's ambassador and Bessieres looked the part for he was a tall man, strongly built and burly enough to overawe most men without his scarlet robes. He was good-looking and knew it, and vain, which he pretended he did not know, and he was ambitious, which he hid from the world but not from himself. After all, a cardinal archbishop had only one more throne to mount before he came to the crystal steps of the greatest throne of all and Bernard de Taillebourg seemed the unlikely instrument that might give Louis Bessieres the triple crown for which he yearned. And so the Cardinal wearily turned his attention to the Dominican as the two left the courtyard and climbed the stairs into the Sainte-Chapelle. 'Tell me' – Bessieres broke into whatever de Taillebourg had been saying – 'about your servant. Did he obey you?'

De Taillebourg, so rudely interrupted, took a few seconds to adjust his thoughts, then he nodded. 'He obeyed me in all things.'

'He showed humility?'

'He did his best to show humility.'

'Ah! So he still has pride?'

'It is ingrained in him,' de Taillebourg said, 'but he fought it.'

'And he did not desert you?'

'No, your eminence.'

'So he is back here in Paris?'

'Of course,' de Taillebourg said curtly, then realized what tone he had used. 'He is at the friary, your eminence,' he added humbly.

'I wonder whether we should show him the under-croft again?' the Cardinal suggested as he walked slowly towards the altar. He loved the Sainte-Chapelle, loved the light that flooded between the high slender pillars. This was, he thought, as close to heaven as man came on earth: a place of supple beauty, overwhelming brightness and enchanting grace. He wished he had thought to order some singing, for the sound of eunuchs' voices piercing the high fanwork of the chapel's stones could take a man very close to ecstasy. Priests were running to the high altar, knowing what it was that the Cardinal had come to see. 'I do find,' he went on, 'that a few moments in the undercroft compel a man to seek God's grace.'

De Taillebourg shook his head. 'He has been there already, your eminence.'

'Take him again.' There was a hardness in the Cardinal's voice now. 'Show him the instruments. Show him a soul on the rack or under the fire. Let him know that hell is not confined to Satan's realm. But do it today. We may have to send you both away.'

'Send us away?' De Taillebourg sounded surprised.

The Cardinal did not enlighten him. Instead he knelt before the high altar and took off his scarlet hat. He rarely, and only reluctantly, removed the hat in public for he was uncomfortably aware that he was going bald, but it was necessary now. Necessary and awe-inspiring, for one of the priests had opened the reliquary beneath the altar and brought out the purple cushion with its lace fringe and golden tassels, which he now presented to the Cardinal. And on the cushion lay the crown. It was so old, so fragile, so black and so very brittle that the Cardinal held his breath as he reached for it. The very earth seemed to stop in its motion, all sounds went silent, even heaven was still as he reached and then touched and then lifted the crown that was so light it seemed to have scarce any weight at all.

It was the crown of thorns.

It was the very crown that had been crammed onto Christ's head where it became imbued with his sweat and blood, and the Cardinal's eyes filled with tears as he raised it to his lips and kissed it gently. The twigs, woven into the spiky circlet, were spindly. They were frail as a wren's leg bones, yet the thorns were sharp still, as sharp as the day when they had been raked over the Saviour's head to pour blood down His precious face, and the Cardinal lifted the crown high, using two hands, and he marvelled at its lightness as he lowered it onto his thinning scalp to let it rest there. Then, hands clasped, he stared up at the golden cross on the altar.

He knew the clergy of Sainte-Chapelle disliked his coming here and wearing the crown of thorns. They had complained of it to the Archbishop of Paris and the Archbishop had whined to the King, but Bessieres still came because he had the power to come. He had the Pope's delegated power and France needed the Pope's support. England was besieging Calais and Flanders was warring in the north and all of Gascony was now again swearing allegiance to Edward of England and Brittany was in revolt against its rightful French Duke and seethed with English bowmen. France was assailed and only the Pope could persuade the powers of Christendom to come to its aid. And the Pope would probably do that for the Holy Father was himself French. Clement had been born in the Limousin and had been Chancellor of France before being elected to the throne of St Peter and installed in the great papal palace at Avignon. And there, in Avignon, Clement listened to the Romans who tried to persuade him to move the papacy back to their eternal city. They whispered and plotted, bribed and whispered again, and Bessieres feared that Clement might one day give in to those wheedling voices.

But if Louis Bessieres became Pope then there would be no more talk of Rome. Rome was a ruin, a pestilent sewer surrounded by petty states forever at war with each other, and God's Vicar on earth could never be safe there. But while Avignon was a good refuge for the papacy. it was not perfect because the city and its county of Venaissin both belonged to the kingdom of Naples and the Pope, in Louis Bessieres's view, should not be a tenant.

Nor should the Pope live in some provincial city. Rome had once ruled the world so the Pope had belonged in Rome, but in Avignon? The Cardinal, the thorns resting so lightly on his brow, stared up at the great blue and scarlet of the passion window above the altar; he knew which city deserved the papacy. Only one. And Louis Bessieres was certain that, once he was Pope, he could persuade the King of France to yield the Ile de la Cite to the Holy Father and so Cardinal Bessieres would bring the papacy north and give it a new and glorious refuge. The palace would be his home, the Cathedral of Notre Dame would be his new St Peter's and this glorious Sainte-Chapelle his private shrine where the crown of thorns would be his own relic. Perhaps, he thought, the thorns should be incorporated into the Pope's triple crown. He liked that idea, and he imagined praying here on his private island. The goldsmiths and the beggars, the lawyers and the whores, the laundries and the lute-makers would be sent across the bridges to the rest of Paris and the Ile de la Cite would become a holy place. And then the Vicar of Christ would have the power of France always at his side and so the kingdom of God would spread and the infidel would be slain and there would be peace on earth.

But how to become Pope? There were a dozen men who wanted to succeed Clement, yet Bessieres alone of those rivals knew of the Vexilles, and he alone knew that they had once owned the Holy Grail and might, perhaps, own it still.

Which was why Bessieres had sent de Taillebourg to Scotland. The Dominican had returned empty-handed, but he had learned some things. 'So you do not think the Grail is in England?' Bessieres now asked him, keep-ing his voice low so that Sainte-Chapelle's priests could not overhear their conversation.

'It may be hidden there,' de Taillebourg sounded gloomy, 'but it is not in Hookton. Guy Vexille searched the place when he raided it. We looked again and it is nothing but ruin.'

'You still think Sir Guillaume took it to Evecque?'

'I think it possible, your eminence,' de Taillebourg said. Then: 'Not likely,' he qualified the answer, 'but possible.'

'The siege goes badly. I was wrong about Coutances. I offered him a thousand fewer years in purgatory if he captured Evecque by St Timothy's Day, but he does not have the vigour to press a siege. Tell me about this bastard son.'

De Taillebourg made a dismissive gesture. 'He is nothing. He doubts the Grail even exists. All he wants is to be a soldier.'

'An archer, you tell me?'

'An archer,' de Taillebourg confirmed.

'I think you are wrong about him. Coutances writes to say that their work is being impeded by an archer. One archer who shoots long arrows of the English type.'

De Taillebourg said nothing.

'One archer,' the Cardinal pressed on, 'who probably destroyed Coutances's whole stock of black powder. It was the only supply in Normandy! If we want more it will have to be brought from Paris.'

The Cardinal lifted the crown from his head and placed it on the cushion. Then, slowly, reverently, he pressed his forefinger against one of the thorns and the watching priests leaned forward. They feared he was trying to steal one of the thorns, but the Cardinal was only drawing blood. He winced as the thorn broke his skin, then he lifted his finger to his mouth and sucked.

There was a heavy gold ring on the finger and hidden beneath the ruby, which was cunningly hinged, was a thorn he had stolen eight months before. Sometimes, in the privacy of his bed chamber, he scratched his forehead with the thorn and imagined being God's deputy on earth. And Guy Vexille was the key to that ambition. 'What you will do,'

he ordered de Taillebourg when the taste of the blood was gone, 'is show Guy Vexille the undercroft again to remind him what hell awaits him if he fails us. Then go with him to Evecque.'

'You'd send Vexille to Evecque?' De Taillebourg could not hide his surprise.

'He is ruthless and he is cruel,' the Cardinal said as he stood and put on his hat, 'and you tell me he is ours. So we shall spend money and we shall give him black powder and enough men to crush Evecque and bring Sir Guillaume to the undercroft.' He watched as the crown of thorns was taken back to its reliquary. And soon, he thought, in this chapel, in this place of light and glory, he would have a greater prize. He would have a treasure to bring all Christendom and its riches to his throne of gold. He would have the Grail. Thomas and Robbie were both filthy; their clothes were caked with dirt; their mail coats were snagged with twigs, dead leaves and earth; and their hair was uncut, greasy and matted. At night they shivered, the cold seeping into the marrow of their souls, but by day they had never felt so alive for they played a game of life and death in the small valleys and tangled woods about Evecque. Robbie, clad in a swathing black cloak and carrying the skull on its pole, rode the white horse to lead Coutances's men into ambush where Thomas killed. Sometimes Thomas merely wounded, but he rarely missed for he was shooting at close range, forced to it by the thickness of the woods, and the game reminded him of the songs the archers liked to sing and the tales their women told about the army's campfires. They were the songs and tales of the common folk, ones never sung by the troubadours, and they told of an outlaw called Robin Hood. It was either Hood or Hude, Thomas was not sure for he had never seen it written down, but he knew Hood was an English hero who had lived a couple of hundred years before and his enemies had been England's French-speaking nobility. Hood had fought them with an English weapon, the war bow, and today's nobility doubtless thought the stories were subversive which was why no troubadour sung them in the great halls. Thomas had sometimes thought he might write them down himself, except no one ever wrote in English. Every book Thomas had ever seen was in Latin or French. But why should the Hood songs not be put between covers? Some nights he told the Hood tales to Robbie as the two of them shivered in whatever poor shelter they had found, but the Scots-man thought the stories dull things. 'I prefer the tales of King Arthur,' he said.

'You have those in Scotland?' Thomas asked, surprised.

'Of course we do!' Robbie said. 'Arthur was Scots.' 'Don't be so bloody daft!' Thomas said, offended. 'He was a Scotsman,' Robbie insisted, 'and he killed the bloody English.'

'He was English,' Thomas said, 'and he'd probably never heard of the bloody Scots.'

'Go to hell,' Robbie snarled.

'I'll see you there first,' Thomas spat and thought that if he ever did write the Hood tales he would have the legendary bowman go north and spit a few Scots on some honest English arrows.

They were both ashamed of their tempers next morn-ing. 'It's because I'm hungry,'

Robbie said, 'I'm always short-tempered when I'm hungry.'

'And you're always hungry,' Thomas said.

Robbie laughed, then heaved the saddle onto his white horse. The beast shivered. Neither horse had eaten well and they were both weak so Thomas and Robbie were being cautious, not wanting to be trapped in open country where the Count's better horses could outrun their two tired destriers. At least the weather had turned less cold, but then great bands of rain swept in from the western ocean and for a week it poured down and no English bow could be drawn in such weather. The Count of Coutances would doubtless be beginning to believe that his chaplain's holy water had driven the pale horse from Evecque and so spared his men, but his enemies were also spared for no more powder had come for the cannon and now the meadows about the moated house were so waterlogged that trenches flooded and the besiegers were wading through mud. Horses developed hoof rot and men staved in their shelters shivering with fever. At every dawn Thomas and Robbie rode first to the woods south of Evecque and there, on the side of the manor where the Count had no entrenchments and only a small sentry post, they stood at the edge of the trees and waved. They had received an answering wave on the third morning that they signalled the garrison, but after that there was nothing until the week of the rain. Then, on the morning after they had argued about King Arthur, Thomas and Robbie waved to the manor and this time they saw a man appear on the roof. He raised a crossbow and shot high into the air. The quarrel was not aimed at the sentry post and if the men on guard there even saw its flight they did nothing, but Thomas watched it fall into the pasture where it splashed in a puddle and skidded through the wet grass. They did not ride out that day. Instead they waited until evening, until the darkness had fallen, and then Thomas and Robbie crept to the pasture and, on hands and knees, searched the thick svet grass and old cow-dung. It seemed to take them hours, but at last Robbie found the bolt and discovered there was a waxed packet wrapped about the short shaft. 'You see?' Robbie said when they were back in their shelter and shivering beside a feeble fire. 'It can be done.' He gestured at the message wrapped about the quarrel. To make the bolt fly the message had been whipped to the shaft with cotton cord that had shrunk and Thomas had to cut it free. then he unwrapped the waxed parchment and held it close to the fire so he could read the message, which had been written with charcoal.

'It's from Sir Guillaume,' Thomas said, 'and he wants us to go to Caen.'

'Caen?'

'And we're to find a' – Thomas frowned and held the letter with its crabbed handwriting even closer to the flames – 'we're to find a shipmaster called Pierre Villeroy.'

'I wonder if that's Ugly Peter,' Robbie put in.

'No,' Thomas said, peering close at the parchment, 'this man's ship is called the Pentecost, and if he's not there we're to look for Jean Lapoullier or Guy Vergon.' Thomas was holding the message so close to the fire that it began to brown and curl as he read the last words aloud. 'Tell Villeroy I want the Pentecost ready by St Clement's Day and he must provision for ten passengers going to Dunkirk. Wait with him, and we shall meet you in Caen. Set a fire in the woods tonight to show you have received this.'

That night they did set a fire in the woods. It blazed briefly, then rain came and the fire died. but Thomas was sure the garrison would have seen the flames. And by dawn, wet, tired and filthy, they were back in Caen.

Thomas and Robbie searched the city's quays but there was no sign of Pierre Villeroy or of his ship, the Pentecost, but a tavern-keeper reckoned Villerov was not far away. 'He carried a cargo of stone to Cabourg,' the man told Thomas, 'and he reckoned he should be back today or tomorrow, and the weather won't have held him up.' He looked askance at the bowstave. 'Is that a goddamn bow?' He meant an English bow.

'Hunting bow from Argentan,' Thomas said carelessly and the lie satisfied the tavernkeeper for there were some men in every French community who could use the long hunting bow, but they were very few and never enough to coalesce into the kind of army that turned hillsides red with noble blood.

'If Villeroy's back today,' the man said, 'he'll be drink-ing in my tavern tonight.'

'You'll point him out to me?' Thomas asked.

'You can't miss Pierre,' the man laughed, 'he's a giant! A giant with a bald head, a beard you could breed mice in and a poxed skin. You'll recognize Pierre without me. Thomas reckoned that Sir Guillaume would be in a hurry when he reached Caen and would not want to waste time coaxing horses onto the Pentecost, therefore he spent the day haggling about prices for the two stal-lions and that night, flush with money, he and Robbie returned to the tavern. There was no sign of a big-bearded giant with a bald head, but it was raining, they were both chilled and reckoned they might as well wait and so they ordered eel stew, bread and mulled wine. A blind man played a harp in the tavern's corner, then began singing about sailors and seals and the strange sea beasts that rose from the ocean floor to howl at the waning moon. Then the food arrived and just as Thomas was about to taste it a stocky man with a broken nose crossed the tavern floor and planted himself belligerently in front of Thomas. He pointed at the bow. 'That's an English bow,' the man said flatly.

'It's a hunting bow from Argentan,' Thomas said. He knew it was dangerous to carry such a distinctive weapon and last summer, when he and Jeanette had walked from Brittany to Normandy, he had disguised the bowstave as a pilgrim's staff, but he had been more careless on this visit. 'It's just a hunting bow,' he repeated casually, then flinched because the eel stew was so hot.

'What does the bastard want?' Robbie asked. The man heard him. 'You're English.'

'Do I sound English?' Thomas asked.

'So how does he sound?' The man pointed to Robbie. 'Or has he lost his tongue now?'

'He's Scottish.'

'Oh, I'm sure, and I'm the goddamn Duke of Normandy.'

'What you are,' Thomas said mildly, 'is a goddamn nuisance,' and he heaved the bowl of soup into the man's face and kicked the table into his groin. 'Get out!' he told Robbie.

'Christ, I love a fight!' Robbie said. A half-dozen of the scalded man's friends were charging across the floor and Thomas hurled a bench at their legs, tripping two, and Robbie swung his sword at another man.

'They're English!' the scalded man shouted from the floor. 'They're Goddamns!' The English were hated in Caen.

'He's calling you English,' Thomas told Robbie.

'I'll piss down his throat,' Robbie snarled. kicking the scalded man in the head, then he punched another man with the hilt of his sword and was screaming his Scottish war cry as he advanced on the survivors.

Thomas had snatched up their baggage and his bow-stave and pulled open a door.

'Come on!' he shouted.

'Call me English, you tosspots!' Robbie challenged. His sword was holding the attackers at bay, but Thomas knew they would summon their courage and charge home and Robbie would almost certainly have to kill one to escape and then there would be a hue and cry and they would be lucky not to end dangling at rope ends from the castle battlements, so he just dragged Robbie backwards through the tavern door. 'Run!'

'I was enjoying that,' Robbie insisted and tried to head back into the tavern, but Thomas pulled him hard away and then shoulder-charged a man coming into the alley.

'Run!' Thomas shouted again and pushed Robbie towards the Ile's centre. They dodged into an alley, sprinted across a small square and finally went to ground in the shadows of the porch of St Jean's church. Their pursuers searched for a few minutes, but the night was cold and the patience of the hunters limited.

'There were six of them,' Thomas said.

'We were winning!' Robbie said truculently.

'And tomorrow,' Thomas said, 'when we're supposed to be finding Pierre Villeroy or one of the others, you'd rather be in Caen's jail?'

'I haven't punched a man since the fight at Durham,' Robbie said, 'not properly.'

'What about the hoggling fight in Dorchester?'

'We were too drunk. Doesn't count.' He started to laugh. 'Anyway, you started it.'

'I did?'

'Aye,' Robbie said, 'you chucked the eel stew right in his face! All that stew.'

'I was only trying to save your life,' Thomas pointed out. 'Christ! You were talking English in Caen! They hate the English!'

'So they should,' Robbie said, 'so they should, but what am I supposed to do here? Keep my mouth shut? Hell! It's my_ language too. God knows why it's called English.'

'Because it is English,' Thomas said, 'and King Arthur spoke it.'

'Sweet Jesus!' Robbie said, then laughed again. 'Hell, I hit that one fellow so hard he won't know what day it is when he wakes up.'

They found shelter in one of the many houses that were still abandoned after the savagery of the English assault in the summer. The house's owners were either far away, or more likely their bones were in the big common grave in the churchyard or mired in the river's bed.

Next morning they went down to the quays again. Thomas remembered wading through the strong cur-rent as the crossbowmen fired from the moored ships. The quarrels had spat up small fountains of water and, because he dared not get his bowstring vvet, he had not been able to shoot back. Now he and Robbie walked down the quays to discover the Pentecost had magically appeared in the night. She was as big a ship as any that made it upriver, a ship capable of crossing to England with a score of men and horses aboard, but she was high and dry now as the falling tide stranded her on the mud. Thomas and Robbie gingerly crossed the narrow gangplank to hear a monstrous snoring coming from a small fetid cabin in the stern. Thomas fancied the deck itself vibrated every time the man drew breath and he wondered how any creature who made such a sound would react to being woken, but just then a waif of a girl, pale as a dawn mist and thin as an arrow, climbed from the cabin hatch and put some clothes on the deck and a finger to her lips. She looked very fragile and, as she pulled up her robe to tug on stockings, showed legs like twigs. Thomas doubted she could have been more than thirteen years old.

'He's sleeping,' she whispered.

'So I hear,' Thomas said.

'Sh!' She touched her finger to her lips again then hauled a thick woollen shirt over her night-gown, put her thin feet into huge boots and wrapped herself in a big leather coat. She pulled a greasy woollen hat over her fair hair and picked up a bag that appeared to be made of ancient frayed sailcloth. 'I'm going to buy food,' she said quietly, 'and there's a fire to be made in the forepeak. You'll find a flint and steel on the shelf. Don't wake him!'

With that warning she tiptoed off the ship, swathed in her great coat and boots, and Thomas, appalled at the depth and loudness of the snoring, decided discretion was the best course. He went to the forepeak where he found an iron brazier standing on a stone slab. A fire was already laid in the brazier and, after opening the hatch above to serve as a chimney, he struck sparks from the flint. The kindling was damp, but after a while the fire caught and he fed it scraps of wood so that by the time the girl came back there was a respectable blaze. 'I'm Yvette,' she said, apparently incurious as to who Thomas and Robbie were, 'Pierre's wife,' she explained, then fetched out a huge blackened pan onto which she broke twelve eggs. 'Do you want to eat too?' she asked Thomas.

'We'd like to.'

'You can buy some eggs from me,' she said, nodding at her sailcloth bag, 'and there's some ham and bread in there. He likes his ham.'

Thomas looked at the eggs whitening on the fire. 'Those are all for Pierre?'

'He's hungry in the morning,' she explained, 'so why don't you cut the ham? He likes it thick.' The ship suddenly creaked and rolled slightly on the mud. 'He's awake,' Yvette said, taking a pewter plate from the shelf. There was a groan from the deck, then footsteps and Thomas backed out of the forepeak and turned to find the biggest man he had ever seen.

Pierre Villeroy was a foot taller than Thomas's bow. He had a chest like a hogshead, a smoothly bald pate, a face terribly scarred by the childhood pox and a beard in which a hare could have become lost. He blinked at Thomas. 'You've come to work,' he grunted.

'No, I brought you a message.'

'Only we've got to start soon,' Villeroy said in a voice that seemed to rumble from some deep cavern.

'A message from Sir Guillaume d'Evecque,' Thomas explained.

'Have to use the low tide, see?' Villerov said. 'I've three tubs of moss in the hold. I've always used moss. My father did. Others use shredded hemp, but I don't like it, don't like it at all. Nothing works half as well as fresh moss. It holds, see? And mixes better with the pitch.' His ferocious face suddenly creased into a gap-toothed smile. ' Mon caneton!'

he declared as Yvette brought out his plate heaped with food. Yvette, his duckling, provided Thomas and Robbie with two eggs apiece, then produced two hammers and a pair of strange iron instruments that looked like blunt chisels.

'We're caulking the seams,' Villerov explained, 'so I'll heat the pitch and you two can ram moss between the planks.' He scooped a mess of egg yolk into his mouth with his fingers.

'Have to do it while the ship's high and dry between tides.'

'But we've brought you a message,' Thomas insisted.

'I know you have. From Sir Guillaume. Which means he wants the Pentecost for a voyage and what Sir Guillaume wants he gets because he's been good to me, he has, but the Pentecost ain't no good to him if she sinks, is she? Ain't no good down on the seabed with all the drowned mariners, is she? She has to be caulked. My darling and I almost drowned ourselves yesterday, didn't we, my duckling?'

'She was taking on water,' Yvette agreed.

'Gurgling away, it was,' Villeroy declared loudly, 'all the way from Cabourg to here, so if Sir Guillaume wants to go somewhere then you two had better start work!' He beamed at them above his vast beard, which was now streaked with egg yolk.

'He wants to go to Dunkirk,' Thomas said.

'Planning on making a run for it, is he?' Villeroy mused aloud. 'He'll be over that moat and on his horses and up and away before the Count of Coutances knows what year it is.'

'Why Dunkirk?' Yvette wondered.

'He's joining the English, of course,' Villeroy said without a trace of any resentment for that presumed betrayal by Sir Guillaume. 'His lord has turned against him, the bishops is pissing down his gullet and they do say the King has a finger in the pie, so he might as well change sides now. Dunkirk? He'll be joining the siege of Calais.' He scooped more eggs and ham into his mouth. 'So when does Sir Guillaume want to sail?'

'St Clement's Day,' Thomas said.

'When's that?'

None of them knew. Thomas knew which day of the month was the feast of St Clement, but he did not know how many days away that was, and that ignorance gave him an excuse to avoid what he was certain would be a disgustingly messy, cold and wet job. 'I'll find out,' he said, 'and be back to help you.'

'I'll come with you,' Robbie volunteered.

'You stay here,' Thomas said sternly, 'Monsieur Villeroy has a job for you.'

'A job?' Robbie had not understood the earlier conversation.

'It's nothing much,' Thomas reassured him, 'you'll enjoy it!'

Robbie was suspicious. 'So where are you going?'

'To church, Robbie Douglas,' Thomas said, 'I'm going to church.'

The English had captured Caen the previous summer, then occupied the city just long enough to rape its women and plunder its wealth. They had left Caen battered, bleeding and shocked, but Thomas had stayed when the army marched away. He had been sick and Dr Mordecai had treated him in Sir Guillaume's house and later, when Thomas had been well enough to walk, Sir Guillaume had taken him to the Abbaye aux Hommes to meet Brother Germain, the head of the monastery's scriptorium and as wise a man as any Thomas had ever met. Brother Germain would certainly know when St Clement's Day was, but that was not the only reason Thomas was going to the abbey. He had realized that if any man could understand the strange script in his father's notebook it was the old monk, and the thought that perhaps this morning he would find an answer to the Grail's mystery gave Thomas a pang of excitement. That surprised him. He often doubted the Grail's existence and even more frequently wished the cup would pass from him, but now, suddenly, he felt the thrill of the hunt. More, he was suddenly overwhelmed with the solemnity of the quest, so much so that he stopped walking and stared into the shimmering light reflected from the river and tried to recall his vision of fire and gold in the northern English night. How stupid to doubt, he thought suddenly. Of course the Grail existed! It was just waiting to be found and so bring happiness to a broken world.

'Mind out!' Thomas was startled from his reverie by a man pushing a barrow of oyster shells who barged past him. A small dog was tied to the barrow and it lunged at Thomas, snapping ineffectually at his ankles before yelping as the rope dragged it onwards. Thomas was hardly aware of man or dog. Instead he was think-ing that the Grail must hide itself from the unworthv by giving them doubts. To find it, then, all he had to do was believe in it and, perhaps, to request a little help from Brother Germain. A porter accosted Thomas in the abbey's gateway, then immediately suffered a coughing fit. The man doubled over, gasped for breath, then straightened slowly and blew his nose onto his fingers, 'I've caught my death,' he wheezed, 'that's what it is, I've caught my death.' He hawked up a gob of mucus and spat it towards the beggars by the gate. 'The scriptorium's that way,' he said, 'past the cloister.'

Thomas made his way to the sunlit room where a score of monks stood at tall, sloping desks. A small fire burned in a central hearth, ostensibly to keep the ink from freezing, but the high room was still cold enough for the monks' breath to mist above their parchments. They were all copying books and the stone chamber clicked and scratched with the sound of the quills. Two novice monks were pounding powder for paints at a side table, another was scraping a lambskin and a fourth was sharpening goose quills, all of them nervous of Brother Germain who sat on a dais where he worked at his own manuscript. Germain was old and small, fragile and bent, with wispy white hair, milky myopic eyes and a bad-tempered expression. His face had been just three inches from his work until he heard Thomas's footsteps, then he abruptly looked up and, though he could not see well, he did at least observe that his unannounced visitor had a sword at his side.

'What business does a soldier have in God's house?' Brother Germain snarled. 'Come to finish what the English started last summer?'

'I have business with you, brother,' Thomas said. The scratching of the quills had abruptly ceased as the monks tried to overhear the conversation.

'Work!' Brother Germain snapped at the monks. 'Work! You are not translated to heaven yet! You have duties, attend to them!' Quills rattled in ink pots and the scratching and pounding and scraping began again. Brother Germain looked alarmed as Thomas stepped tip onto the dais. 'Do I know you?' he snarled.

'We met last summer. Sir Guillaume brought me to see you.'

'Sir Guillaume!' Brother Germain, startled, laid his quill down. 'Sir Guillaume? I doubt we'll see him again! Ha! Mewed up by Coutances, that's what I hear, and a good thing. You know what he did?'

'Coutances?'

'Sir Guillaume, you fool! He turned against the King in Picardy! Turned against the King. He made himself a traitor. He was always a fool, always risking his neck, but now he'll be lucky to keep his head. What's that?'

Thomas had unwrapped the book and now placed it on the desk. 'I was hoping, brother,' he said humbly, 'that you could make some sense of—'

'You want me to read it, eh? Never learned your-self and now you think I have nothing better to do than read some nonsense so you can determine its value?' Folk who could not read sometimes came into possession of books and brought them to the monastery to have them valued, hoping against hope that some collection of pious advice might turn out to be a rare book of theology, astrology or philosophy. 'What did you say your name was?' Brother Germain demanded.

'I didn't,' Thomas said, 'but I'm called Thomas.'

The name held no apparent memories for Brother Germain, but nor was he interested any longer for he was immersed in the book, mouthing words under his breath, turning pages with long white fingers, lost in wonder, and then he leafed back to the first page and read the Latin aloud. ' “Calix mens inebriwn”.' He breathed the words as if they were sacred, then made the sign of the cross and turned to the next page which was in the strange Hebrew script and he became even more excited. '“To my son,”' he said aloud, evidently translating, ' “who is the son of the Tirshatha and the grandson of Hachaliah.”'

He turned his short-sighted eyes on Thomas. 'Is that you?'

'Me?'

'Are you the grandson of Hachaliah?' Germain asked and, despite his bad eyesight, he must have detected the puzzlement on Thomas's face. 'Oh, never mind!' he said impatiently. 'Do you know what this is?'

'Stories,' Thomas said. 'Stories of the Grail.'

'Stories! Stories! You're like children, you soldiers. Mindless, cruel, uneducated and greedy_ for stories. You know what this script is?' He poked a long finger at the strange letters which were dotted with the eye-like symbols. 'You know what it is?'

'It's Hebrew, isn't it?'

“'It's Hebrew, isn't it?”' Brother Germain mocked Thomas with mimicry. 'Of course it's Hebrew, even a fool educated at the university in Paris would know that, but it's their magical script. It's the lettering the Jews use to work their charms, their dark magic.' He peered close at one of the pages. 'There, you see? The devil's name, Abracadabra!' He frowned for a few seconds. 'The writer claims Abracadabra can be raised to this world by invoking his name above the Grail. That seems plausible.' Brother Germain made the sign of the cross again to ward off evil, then peered up at Thomas. 'Where did you get this?' He asked the question sharply, but did not wait for an answer. 'You're him, aren't you?'

'Him?'

'The Vexille that Sir Guillaume brought to me,' Brother Germain said accusingly and made the sign of the cross again. 'You're English!' He made that sound even worse. 'Who will you take this book to?'

'I want to understand it first,' Thomas said, confused by the question.

'Understand it! You?' Brother Germain scoffed. 'No, no. You must leave it with me, young man, so I can make a copy of it and then the book itself must go to Paris, to the Dominicans there. They sent a man to ask about you.'

'About me?' Thomas was even more confused now.

'About the Vexille family. It seems one of your foul brood fought at the King's side this summer, and now he has submitted to the Church. The Inquisition have had . . .'

Brother German paused, evidently seeking the right word, '. . . conversations with him.'

'With Guy?' Thomas asked. He knew Guy was his cousin, knew Guy had fought on the French side in Picardy and he knew Guy had killed his father in search of the Grail, but he knew little more.

'Who else? And now, they do say, Guy Vexille is reconciled to the Church,' Brother Germain said as he turned the pages. 'Reconciled to the Church indeed! Can a wolf lay down with lambs? Who wrote this?'

'My father.'

'So you are Hachaliah's grandson,' Brother Germain said with reverence, then he closed his thin hands over the book. 'Thank you for bringing it to me,' he said.

'Can you tell me what the Hebrew passages say?' Thomas asked, baffled by Brother Germain's last words.

'Tell you? Of course I can tell you, but it will mean nothing. You know who Hachaliah was? You are familiar with the Tirshatha? Of course not. The answers would be wasted on you! But I thank you for bringing me the book.' He drew a scrap of parchment towards him, took up his quill and dipped it in the ink. 'If you take this note to the sacris-tan he will give you a reward. Now I have work.' He signed the note and held it towards Thomas.

Thomas reached for the book. 'I can't leave it here,' he said.

'Can't leave it here! Of course you can! Such a thing belongs to the Church. Besides, I must make a copy.' Brother Germain folded his hands over the book and hunched over it.

'You will leave it,' he hissed.

Thomas had thought of Brother Germain as a friend, or at least not as an enemy, and even the old monk's harsh words about Sir Guillaume's treachery had not altered that opinion, Germain had said that the book must go to Paris, to the Dominicans, but Thomas now understood that Germain was allied with those men of the Inquisition who, in turn, had Guy Vexille on their side. And Thomas understood too that those formidable men were seeking the Grail with an avidity he had not appreciated until this moment, and their path to the Grail lay through him and this book. Those men were his enemies, and that meant that Brother Germain was also his foe and it had been a terrible mistake to bring the book to the abbey. He felt a sudden fear as he reached for the book. 'I have to leave,' he insisted.

Brother Germain tried to hold onto the book, but his twig-like arms could not compete with Thomas's bow-given strength. He nevertheless clutched it stubbornly, threatening to tear its soft leather cover. 'Where will you go?' Brother Germain demanded, then tried to trick Thomas with a false promise. 'If you leave it,' he said, 'I shall make a copy and send the book to you when it is finished.'

Thomas was going north to Dunkirk so he named a place in the other direction. 'I'm going to La Roche-Derrien,' he lied.

'An English garrison?' Brother Germain still tried to pull the book away, then yelped as Thomas slapped his hands. 'You can't take that to the English!'

'I am taking it to La Roche-Derrien,' Thomas said, finally retrieving the book. He folded the soft leather cover over the pages, then half drew his sword because several of the younger monks had slipped from their high stools and looked as though they wanted to stop him, but the sight of the blade dissuaded them from any violence. They just watched as he walked away.

The porter was coughing still, then leaned against the arch and fought for breath while tears streamed from his eyes. 'At least it ain't leprosy,' he managed to say to Thomas, 'I know it ain't leprosy. My brother had leprosy and he didn't cough. Not much anyway.'

'When is St Clement's Day?' Thomas remembered to ask.

'Day after tomorrow, and God love me if I live to see it.'

No one followed Thomas, but that afternoon, while he and Robbie were standing up to their crotches in flooding cold river water and pounding thick moss into the Pente- cost's planking, a patrol of soldiers in red and yellow livery asked Pierre Villeroy if he had seen an Englishman dressed in mail and a black cloak.

'That's him down there,' Villeroy said, pointing to Thomas, then laughed. 'If I see an Englishman,' he went on, 'I'll piss down the bastard's throat till he drowns.'

'Bring him to the castle instead,' the patrol's leader said, then led his men to question the crew on the next boat.

Villeroy waited till the soldiers were out of earshot. 'For that,' he said to Thomas, 'you owe me two more rows of caulking.'

'Jesus Christ!' Thomas swore.

'Now He was a properly skilled carpenter,' Villeroy observed through a mouthful of Yvette's apple pie, 'but He was also the Son of God, wasn't he? So he didn't have to do menial jobs like caulking, so it's no damn good asking for His help. Just bang the moss in hard, boy, bang it in hard.'