The Lazarus Vault Part 30

'What about the men with guns?'

'I take care of them.' Joost fished in the pockets of his flak jacket and pulled out a gla.s.s beer bottle filled with clear liquid, a cotton handkerchief and a cigarette lighter. He opened the bottle and poured some of the fluid over the handkerchief, then stuffed it in the bottle's mouth. Ellie smelled petrol.

'What sort of environmentalist are you?'

'A p.i.s.sed-off one.'

He flicked the lighter. Flames flared up from the rag in the bottle. He got to his feet, crouched like a quarterback and threw.

The bottle hit a tree trunk and shattered over a pile of brushwood. The dead forest lit up like a tinderbox: flames raced through the dry gra.s.s and pine needles, spreading in every direction.

'There goes my carbon footprint,' said Joost. He aimed the rifle through the flames.

Only afterwards did Ellie realise she'd heard the shots before he pulled the trigger. At the time, all she felt was a surge of confusion, a sense that the order of the world had broken down. A second later she saw why.

Joost reeled backwards. Blood bloomed from three holes punched in his chest. The gun fell to the ground, and Joost fell with it, sprawling into the undergrowth. He hadn't thrown his firebomb far: already, the flames were licking back towards him.

Doug stared, hypnotised. Ellie pulled him away.

'We'll be next if we don't get out of here.'

They ran up the hill to the fence. They found the tree, a plastic red ribbon hanging limp from the branch, and behind it a small segment of fence which came away when they tugged. They crawled through, sprinted across the road and into the forest on the far side. Ellie found herself scampering like a hunted animal, bounding through the woods on all fours as she tried to keep low. Smoke began to drift across the road.

She saw a flash of silver ahead and changed course. There was the car undisturbed and unguarded. She almost wrenched the door off its hinges. Doug reversed on to the road, changed gears and floored the accelerator. The smell of burning rubber was lost among the smoke of a far greater inferno building behind them.

XLII.

London, 1143 Our boat glides up the Thames. Around Woolwich bend we see London like a blot on the horizon. A white stone tower guards its approach, looming over the whole city. It dwarfs everything. Cranes and scaffolds around it show tributary defences still under construction.

'The city's well protected,' I say.

Hugh, standing by the bow wrapped in a dark cloak, grunts. 'The tower isn't there to defend the city. It's there to dominate it. Even the colour is foreign the Normans brought white stone across the sea from Caen to build it.' He grunts. 'Literally, putting our land under theirs.'

We've travelled together for six weeks now, but the facts I know about Hugh would barely fill eight syllables of verse. He's English. His family must have made some compromise with the Normans, or he wouldn't be a knight, but every so often I glimpse the hatred he has for them. I don't know if he counts me as a Norman. He has so many other reasons to hate me, it's hard to tell.

It's almost eight years since I was last in England. Back then, the country was in its springtime ripe fields, safe roads, handsome towns and well-loved King Henry. Now, winter has fallen. Civil war has split the country open, and the wound is festering. King Henry died without a son: his nephew, Stephen, seized the crown, but Henry's daughter, the Empress Maud, contests it. They've been trading blows, gaining and losing territory, these past four years.

As we travel upriver every town we pa.s.s has its gates barred and fires set in the watchtowers. Occasionally, we see strange mounds erupting from the flat landscape, the mottes where castles have been thrown up and thrown down again during the war. Some still show the scorch marks: blackened lumps, bruises on the body of the country. Severed heads, in various degrees of decomposition, shrivel on spikes along the riverfront.

London looks as if it's preparing for a siege. So many s.h.i.+ps crowd its wharves that we need three hours just to reach our mooring. The sheriff's men ask us hard questions when we land even the barrel of wine we give them doesn't deter them. But they don't find the false bottom in our hull, the mail s.h.i.+rts, s.h.i.+elds, swords and spears that give the boat its ballast.

We find lodgings at an inn on West Chepe. Hugh takes a room on the first floor, across from the mouth of an alley, and pays the innkeeper handsomely to have it to ourselves. He draws two stools up by the window hour after hour, we sit there and watch, listening to the drinking, gambling and fighting which drifts through the floorboards. London is a city of constant noise and motion like Troyes at fairtime, but every day and magnified a hundredfold. The smiths and pewterers and carpenters and masons hammer their metal, wood and stone; the hawkers shout in the markets to be heard over the smiths; and the merchants shout to be heard above the rest.

Down the alley, according to the clerk in Troyes, is the house where Lazar's debts are settled. I want to go and see it, but Hugh's worried I'll be recognised. Two of his men, Beric and Anselm, go and report that the building is locked and shuttered. They pa.s.s by twice a day to see if anyone arrives, while I stay confined to the inn, watching men pa.s.s beneath the grimy window, trying to make out the features beneath hats, scarves and collars. Even our meals get taken in the room.

Hours stretch into days. One afternoon I ask Hugh, 'What did Malegant steal?'

I've been working up my courage for the last hour to say it. I expect him to tell me to shut up. He stays silent so long I think he's decided to ignore me. At last he says, 'There are things in this world we can't understand.'

'You mean you won't tell me?'

He frowns. 'I mean you won't understand it.'

He stretches out his legs. 'There are objects in this world which have powers we can manufacture. A bucket has the power to draw water. An axe cuts wood. But there are other things we can't explain. The way a single seed contains an entire tree, or a woman's belly produces a life.'

I pick a lump of eel out of the grail-dish on the table and feel it slither down my throat. I lick the salt juice off my fingers and remember the first time I met Ada. She was carrying a dish like this that night.

'You're speaking in riddles.'

'Because I don't understand it myself.'

'Then why try so hard to get these objects back?'

'Because I know what they can do, even if I can't explain it. Their powers are terrifying.'

'Have you seen them?'

'I have.'

'Can you tell me what they look like?'

'Commonplace. They could be any of the objects in this room. But they have powers ...'

He's beginning to irritate me. 'What sort of powers?'

He waves his hand out the window. 'Look at England. Ten years ago, this was the happiest country in Christendom. Now it's a wasteland. That's the sort of power Malegant stole.'

And then I see him.

It's a Friday afternoon in late January and Hugh's gone out: I'm sitting on my own. A man comes up the alley and stands there a moment, sniffing the air like a pointer. A beaver-fur hat covers his face, but he's too cautious. He looks up, alert to danger from any direction, and as his gaze pa.s.ses over the inn I see him full on. A grey face wrapped in furs, a single eye scanning the street.

I stifle the urge to draw back. He can't possibly see me in the dark window, but he might notice the movement. He stands there another moment, then eases forward into the crowds.

I rush out of the room, down the stairs and into the street. The sun's almost disappeared, but I can just glimpse the crown of his hat weaving through the throng. He turns right towards the river, along a street that stinks of fish. Fish guts clog the gutters; fallen scales make the cobbles slippery. Half-dead fish flop and flounder in crates stacked by the fishmongers' doors.

The one-eyed man ducks into a wine shop on the corner. The Thames flows just beyond, though I can hardly see it through the fleet of vessels jamming the docks. I stand aside to let two porters go in, then step smartly in after them. If the one-eyed man looks up as they enter, he doesn't see me behind them.

The room is low, dim and smoky: the few tallow candles the landlord's put out cast more shadows than light. I look to the darkest corners and get a vague gleaning of a man taking off his fur hat. I edge around the room towards him. I'm halfway there when he looks up straight at me.

I freeze. I'm unarmed, and the wine shop looks like the sort of place where brawls are commonplace. A corpse spirited out the back and dropped down a hole into the Thames probably wouldn't trouble the owner.

A man shoulders his way past me and clasps the one-eyed man's hand. He wasn't looking at me. My heart starts to beat again.

'Alberic,' the other man greets him. His voice is loud, a London voice trained in its markets and trading-halls.

'Alderman.'

The new arrival takes a seat facing Alberic. White curls bloom from the sides of his cap like hyacinth. His nose droops, his cheeks blush with broken veins. He takes the drink Alberic offers and sips it while he listens. I can't hear what Alberic says. He's facing away, and he speaks like a man well used to conspiring in dark corners. But I catch the reply.

'London supports King Stephen. We were the first to recognise him. When the Empress Maud came to London, we drove her out as a tyrant and a usurper.'

Again, I don't hear Alberic's reply, but I see the alderman's face change.

'London's true loyalty will always be to commerce. War is bad for business.'

Alberic swills his drink. His head moves back and forth as if he's laughing, though if he is, it's too soft for me to hear. I drag my stool slightly closer.

'War is excellent for business. We've never made so much money as we have since Maud and the Angevins invaded. The weak are crushed; the strong charge what they like.'

The alderman looks alarmed. 'I thought we were talking about peace.'

Alberic takes his arm, soothing. 'We are. When Stephen's victory is secured, all we want is to protect our privileges.'

'And my consideration?'

Alberic reaches inside his hat and extracts a limp piece of vellum. 'I thought in a place like this, a bag of gold might be too obvious.'

The alderman smiles. He pulls out his own piece of parchment and slides it across the table.

'This will get you your audience.'

The two men down the last of their wine. The alderman leaves; Alberic waits a few minutes, stroking the parchment thoughtfully, then goes out. I daren't follow immediately, and when I do go I find my way blocked at every turn in the crowded room. By the time I reach the street, he's vanished into the night.

XLIII.

Near Lyons, France 'Now what?'

Doug and Ellie sat in a tiny restaurant well off the main road. She didn't even know where they were: an anonymous town, a pretty main square besieged by the usual engines of modernity: hypermarkets, warehouse stores and fast-food outlets. The streets were dark, though it was only five o'clock. She devoured a steak frites and asked for a second helping of chips their breakfast on the motorway seemed a long time ago. Doug drained a beer and gave the bar a thirsty look.

'I think I've worked out the story so far,' he said. 'We've stolen something, we don't know what it is on behalf of some people, we don't know who they are and we're trying to give it to them, but we've no idea where they are and no way to contact them. Is that pretty much it?'

Ellie nodded blankly. 'Mirabeau was all I had to go on. Now ...' She mashed a chip with her fork. 'I don't know where to go.'

'There must have been something in the Mirabeau chapel. Something the Brotherhood wanted to protect from Monsalvat.'

'If only we'd found it. At least Joost would have died for something.' The guilt turned inside her. If she let herself think about it, she'd go mad. First Harry, now Joost: men on their quests, who stumbled into her and ended up dead.

Dead to save me. Was she the villain of the story, the woman at the roadside with long hair and wild eyes drawing men to their doom? She looked at Doug across the table. Her stomach flipped so hard she almost lost her supper.

I can't do that to him.

'What are you thinking?' she asked, to fill the silence.

'I'm thinking about poems and mazes.'

She despaired. 'We're totally lost, and you want to find a maze?'

'The poem hints at some sort of labyrinth. There was a labyrinthine design on the floor. It's something.'

'It wasn't a labyrinth, it was a geometric shape. It could be anything just a pretty pattern.'

'Maybe it's a pattern that gets you through the maze.'

'And where is this maze, anyway? Carduel?'

Doug's shoulders slumped. 'I've been staring at this poem for the last three months. I've tried everything I can think of. I've had maps out with pieces of string, drawing lines between Troyes and Carlisle which is ridiculous, because at the time he wrote this poem those sort of maps just didn't exist.'

'There's nothing else in the poem? No clues?'

'I think the whole poem's one big clue.'

A catch in his voice grabbed her attention. She looked up from her plate and gave him her best don't-hold-out-on-me stare.

'What?'

Doug looked almost embarra.s.sed. 'You know what Chretien de Troyes' greatest contribution to western civilisation was?'

'Romance poetry?'

He took a deep breath. 'The Holy Grail. It all starts with him. He's the first person ever to mention it.'

It was so ridiculous she almost laughed out loud. But Doug wasn't smiling. Ellie grappled for something sensible to say.

'Didn't the Bible get there first? I thought the Holy Grail was the cup of the Last Supper, the one they used to catch Jesus' blood on the Cross.'

'That's part of the legend that grows up around it. In Chretien's original poem, Le Conte du Graal, it's just a mysterious dish that appears to Sir Perceval while he's feasting in a remote castle one night. A beautiful woman carries it, and behind it comes a lance with blood running down from its tip.'

'The holy lance that stabbed Jesus on the Cross, right?'

'Chretien doesn't say. Again, that's part of the legend that attaches to it.' Doug leaned forward. 'It's hard to overstate how little Chretien gives us. There's a grail not a cup, incidentally, but a serving dish and the spear, and that's it. No explanation. Perceval watches them go by, and specifically doesn't ask what's going on, because he thinks it would be rude. The next morning he wakes up and the castle's empty. He spends the rest of his life trying to find the Grail again.'

'Does he?'

'Not so far as we know. Chretien didn't finish his poem it breaks off mid-line. We a.s.sume he died writing it, but again we don't know. Some people think he deliberately didn't finish it. It certainly adds to the mystery.'

Ellie squeezed her eyes shut; she wondered if she was dreaming. When she opened them, Doug was still staring at her, waiting for her response.

She lowered her voice. 'You think this poem holds the secret to finding the Holy Grail?'

It sounded insane. She was almost relieved when she saw Doug shaking his head.

'I think the poem's got something to do with finding the Brotherhood.'

'And the Grail?'

Doug stretched his leg forward under the table, as if he was playing footsie. He gave the backpack under her chair a light kick.

'I think we've already got it.'