‘All that climbing and hiding for nothing,’ he smiled ruefully. ‘We could have walked directly here along the path.’
We went in through the broken gate and I looked round. The enclosure did duty as a sheep pen. The dusty ground was strewn with animal droppings. A length of canvas had been draped over branches propped against the outer wall to make a lean-to shelter. Someone had kindled a fire on the ground in front of it. The charred fragments looked fairly recent.
‘Whoever stays here didn’t want to occupy the building itself,’ said Hroudland. He was checking the door. It was locked.
‘I would have expected there to be some sort of caretaker or a guard?’ I said. The emptiness of the place struck me as unnatural.
‘He could have gone off to Pamplona,’ said Hroudland. He was probing the door jamb with his sword point to see if he could find a weakness. ‘His friends needed help to empty the city of valuables and carry them up into the mountains.’
‘No point in damaging Durendal,’ he commented, slipping his sword back into its sheath. He walked over to a boundary wall made of rocks. They were neatly stacked one on top of the other without any mortar. He picked out a large stone and brought it back.
‘Stand aside!’ he warned, and then slammed the rock against the timber. The door was sturdy and it took a dozen hefty blows before the lock gave and it finally burst open.
Hroudland peered inside.
‘It’s too dark to see much.’
The lintel was so low that he had to duck his head as he stepped over the threshold. I followed him cautiously.
There was a faint aroma of burned herbs. The interior was more like a cave than a room. If I stretched my arms out sideways I would nearly have touched the opposite walls, and I could barely stand upright. The only window was a fist-sized hole left open in the far wall and close to the ceiling. The light from it scarcely penetrated the deep gloom. Both of us had to stop for a moment to allow our eyes to adjust to the darkness.
I heard Hroudland give a low grunt, part astonishment, part satisfaction.
‘There, straight ahead.’
I moved aside to allow more light to enter through the smashed doorway behind me. A thick stone slab set in the far wall made a broad shelf running almost the width of the building. On each end of the shelf stood a small wooden block. They were holders for rush lights, though both were empty. On the shelf between them lay two commonplace items that might have been found in the kitchen of a modest home. One was a small goblet. Five or six inches high, it looked dull and very plain. Beside it was a plate that was even more ordinary, the sort of serving dish for a small joint of meat or a fish. Otherwise the little room was bare.
Hroudland stepped forward.
‘Could this be the Graal?’ he asked tentatively. He sounded more than a little disappointed. He picked up the goblet from the shelf and carried it back to the doorway to look at it in better light.
The sun had now sunk far below the horizon and the chapel, if it was that, was deep in shadow. Nevertheless as he held up the goblet up, I saw a very faint glow, tawny brown within the bowl.
‘It’s made of some sort of stone,’ the count said. On the middle finger of his left hand he wore a gold ring set with a large piece of amber. He tapped the goblet with it and it rang with a hard, flat sound.
He handed me the goblet.
‘What do you make of it, Patch?’ he asked.
If I had seen the goblet displayed on an altar I might perhaps have described it as a small chalice. The upper part, the bowl, appeared to have been hollowed from a single piece of a dark coloured stone, which had a brownish tint in its depths. This bowl had been fixed on to a base made from a dense dark wood that contained black streaks. The effect was rather clumsy and heavy, and the goblet with its thick rim looked neither valuable nor very elegant. I turned it over in my hand, half-expecting to find some pattern or decoration like that I had seen on the bronze cup from the fountain of Broceliande. There was nothing.
‘Maybe this is not the Graal, if such a thing even exists,’ I said carefully.
‘Then why hide it away up here in the mountains?’ demanded Hroudland, taking it back from me and returning inside the chamber.
He replaced the cup on the shelf and picked up the dish that had been lying next to it, and brought that into the light. Again I saw the tawny brown glow. The plate was made from the same material as the goblet. I could only compare it to a fine marble. The dish had swirls of other colours – grey and pale white – within the stone. I had never seen anything like it before.
Hroudland examined both sides of the dish. Again there were no marks. The plate had been carved from the unknown stone and then polished.