‘There is a treasure,’ I said. ‘There is a great and wonderful treasure that Aimar of Limoges, or rather that one of his relatives has in his possession. And my lord the Earl of Locksley burns to possess it.’
‘Not that same treasure that he went off on a goose chase in Burgundy to discover last year?’ said the King.
‘The same.’
‘What do you know of this treasure?’ he said, looking at me keenly. ‘Have you ever seen it? Is it truly valuable?’
‘I have not seen it,’ I said, ignoring the first part of his question. ‘But I believe that it is truly valuable – perhaps the most valuable object in Christendom and certainly something that many men: counts, kings, even the Pope himself, would give a fortune to have in their possession.’
‘I think I should like to see this treasure,’ said the King.
Chapter Twenty-eight
That spring Richard’s knights and Mercadier’s routiers ravaged the Limousin without mercy: and Robin and I played our parts, too. We burned farmsteads, stole livestock and destroyed crops, although I would not allow my men to despoil churches – it was Lent, the season in which all Christian warriors are expected to observe the Truce of God and lay down their arms, but we served King Richard, and he was not a man to allow the strictures of the Church to stand in his way. So, may God forgive us, we fought all through that March even though it was Lent, harrying Viscount Aimar and his knights from manor to manor. We ate meat and eggs, too, when we could get them, but we left places of worship unmolested. It was a sop, a gesture, but my men were not unhappy at that curb: in battle we all need God’s protection, and it would not do to anger Him by stealing from His house. However, I felt the dark shadow of guilt on my soul during that southern spring of blood and fire: I believed Richard and his barons’ enthusiasm for the harrying of the Limousin, and the relentless pursuit of Count Aimar and his men, might have had a good deal to do with my talk of the fabulous ‘treasure’ in his possession. These rich lands were ruined, and many poor peasants were put out of their hovels, their meagre wealth snatched, their children brought to starvation, because Robin and I had moved the King to make it so. Such is war; but I felt the burden of it as a heavy weight on my conscience.
I do not know how Robin came into the knowledge that the Master and the remaining Knights of Our Lady had taken refuge with Viscount Aimar, but Robin had many friends in Paris, and all over France, who had been searching for news of the Master for nearly five years now, and so perhaps a better question would have been why had we not uncovered his whereabouts sooner. From the little that Robin had gleaned, it seemed that the Master and his men had been in hiding on the far side of the Pyrenees, in lands that the original members of the Order would have campaigned over in their glory days fighting the Moors. Doubtless, the Master still had allies there. But recently, Robin’s informants had told him, he had grown in confidence and forsaken the wild lands beyond mountains and had taken up a more comfortable position with his cousin Viscount Aimar – exactly as Bishop de Sully had predicted. And one thing was certain: wherever the Master went, the treasure we sought, the Grail, would go, too.
Whenever Robin spoke of the Grail, which was not often, I noticed that he became strangely animated; and I confess I was puzzled by this. Robin, as I have often mentioned, was not a godly man. Or perhaps I should say he was not a man who respected the Church or subscribed to its teachings, and yet this Grail, this object that was said to have once contained Our Lord’s sacred blood, seemed to have seized his imagination. I think he pretended to himself that it was the vessel’s worldly value that drew him; for it surely would have fetched a mountain of gold if it were shown to be the genuine article. But I think there was more to it than his usual lust for money; in my private heart, I think that Robin was searching for an object that could demonstrate for him the truth – or otherwise – of the Christian faith. For him, the Grail was the embodiment of God – and I dreaded the likely discovery that this thing, which was claimed to have once held the holy blood of Jesus Christ and to possess miraculous powers of life and death, was merely an ancient, dusty bowl.
At this time, I was determined to be indifferent to the Grail – I could not afford to allow myself to believe in its wonders and then to have my hopes dashed. It must be, I told myself firmly, it must be no more than an old bowl, as Bishop de Sully had suggested, merely an object to be used in a bit of mummery to relieve credulous folk of their money. I was aided in this discipline of the mind, this denial of the possibility of the Grail’s authenticity, by the fact that it was, for me, irrevocably stained with death and surrounded by a dark aura of sadness: for the sake of this object my father had been hounded from Paris; in its name both he and Hanno had been murdered before my eyes.