Authors: Tom Harper
‘OK.’
‘Both Limoges and Beirut were once Roman towns. Limoges was called
Augustoritum
, Beirut was
Colonia Julia Augusta
.’
‘Both named after the emperor Augustus.’
‘Exactly. I looked up a gazetteer of Roman place names in Britain. There was one place here that was also called Augusta. It’s now called Aust – I suppose it’s a corruption of the old name.’
Ellie remembered the sign. ‘The village we just went through.’
Doug gazed out over the Severn. The tide was low – brown sandbanks sloped down to the river, etched with crooked channels where the water ran off. A large boulder poked out of the stream.
‘Just before Perceval came to the Grail castle, he reached a river. He looked at the deep and rushing waters, but didn’t
dare try to cross. The fisherman told him there was no bridge, ford or ferry for twenty leagues in either direction.’
He looked to his left, where the white cables of the suspension bridge swooped across the river.
‘Luckily, we’ve got the motorway.’
They got back in the car and crossed the river. On the far bank, a painted sign welcomed them to Wales.
‘The Severn’s always been a border,’ Doug said quietly. ‘Between English and Welsh, Saxon and Celt. Rational civilisation and wild, ungovernable magic.’
Ellie laughed. ‘I must have grown up on the wrong side of it.’
Doug took the next exit and drove a few miles through farmland. He pulled up on the edge of the road by a golf course and took two backpacks out of the boot. He handed her one.
‘I brought a picnic.’
She didn’t have to ask what was in the other bag. Since they came back from France it had been a constant presence, like a shadow or an odour. Neither good nor bad, but always there.
They found a stile in the fence. A fingerpost pointed to a footpath leading down into a valley.
‘“Perceval turned back from the river and climbed to the top of the hill,” Doug quoted. “Almost invisible in the trees, he saw the top of a castle.”’
‘I can’t see any castle.’
‘It’s a mysterious place. It appears and disappears.’
They followed the path down into a shallow combe, walking single file. Birds sang; flies buzzed around and the sun was hot on her face. She paused to take off her cardigan and walked with bare arms, enjoying the touch of the sun on her skin, the long grass under her fingers. There was a spring at the bottom
of the hill; she crouched beside it and scooped water in her mouth. The chill gave her a headache.
The valley narrowed; the path turned between two hills. Doug took a map out of his bag and consulted it.
‘This should be it.’
He veered off the path and led her up a steep slope through the trees. The scar in her side pulsed, but she didn’t complain. They crossed a field and came to a barbed-wire fence. There was no gate or stile: Doug held the strands apart for Ellie to squeeze between.
‘Are we trespassing?’
‘It’s not the worst thing we’ve done.’
They re-entered the trees. After the glare in the field, Ellie’s eyes took a moment to get used to the dappled light. Walls began to emerge from out of the undergrowth. An ivy-clad column she’d thought was a tree turned out to be the corner of a ruined tower, twenty feet high. Rough-coursed brown stones stuck out of the broken masonry like branches. Gnarled trees sprouted everywhere: further along, a chunk of wall lay tilted on its end, twined in the roots of a large old yew.
She turned to Doug. ‘You knew this was here.’
‘It’s in the register of historic Welsh buildings. I found it online.’
‘If only Sir Perceval had had the Internet.’
They walked across the site, picking their way among the trees, tracing the outlines of the old buildings that now barely poked above the forest floor.
‘It dates back to the twelfth century, but it’s been ruined for ages,’ Doug was saying. Ellie wasn’t really paying attention. ‘If you look at the remains, you can see it was oriented east-west. A lot of people thought it might have been a chapel.’
‘Do you think –?’
Ellie heard a rustling in the leaves behind her. She turned, drawing a sharp protest from the bullet wound, and stared.
A bearded old man had come up behind them. He wore green rubber boots and a quilted jerkin, with a flat tweed cap over his woolly white hair and an ash walking stick in his hand. He could have been any farmer or fisherman out in the country – or the landowner whose fence they’d crossed – but there was a gravity in his eyes that was neither curious nor angry.
‘I thought you might come here.’
‘Who are you?’ Ellie asked. She’d almost stopped breathing, though she wasn’t afraid.
He leaned on his stick. ‘You can call me George. That’s how Harry knew me – your father, too. He would have been very proud of what you’ve done, Ellie.’
He walked around a cluster of crudely mortared stones, tapping at them with his stick. ‘If you’re looking for the lance, I’m afraid you’re a few hundred years too late.’
‘Did Chrétien hide it here?’
‘He did. He tried to hide it from us, thinking that would hide it from Saint-Lazare as well. He forged a replica and gave it to us, which had us fooled for a number of years. When we realised he’d written
Le Conte du Graal
, we followed the same clues you did.’
‘Where’s the lance now? The real lance.’
‘Somewhere safe.’ He picked up an acorn and rubbed it in his hand. ‘Every few hundred years, we have one of these aberrations and someone outside the Brotherhood rescues one of the treasures in our charge. They always think it’ll be safest hidden from us, but in the end, we get it back. It is best that way.’
He looked pointedly at Doug’s bag. Doug backed away, a fierce look on his face.
‘You could join us, you know. Both of you. You’ve certainly earned your spurs.’
‘Join what?’ Doug demanded. ‘An organisation that can’t protect its own members? That uses innocent people and then cuts them loose? You’d happily have seen Ellie buried under a French hillside to get to Saint-Lazare.’
Pain clouded the old man’s face. ‘We’d been stalemated with Monsalvat for eight hundred years. Unwilling to wield the weapon we had, unable to heal the wounds they made. You can’t imagine how debilitating it became. Perhaps, in the end, we lost sight of who we are.’
‘Then perhaps losing this is the price you pay.’
‘Give it to him,’ Ellie said quietly. Doug rounded on her.
‘You’re the one who got it out of the bank – you carried it across Europe and kept it safe. It should be yours.’
‘If it has any power at all, if it can do anything good, it’s better with him.’
Doug resisted for a moment longer, standing his ground and staring defiantly into her eyes. Then, with a sullen glare, he handed over the bag. Though she hadn’t touched it, Ellie felt a great weight pass from her body and knew she’d made the right decision.
The old man nodded gravely. ‘Thank you.’
A random thought struck Ellie. ‘What do you call it? Can you tell me that?’
To her surprise, the old man actually blushed. ‘Even we can’t completely escape Chrétien’s spell. We call it the Grail.’
They hiked back to the car in silence. At first Doug walked ahead, alone and stiff-backed, but gradually he slowed enough for Ellie to catch up. She slipped her arm in his and tilted her
head against his shoulder. They walked up the hill together, parting only to cross the stile.
They reached the car, but didn’t get in. They lingered on the roadside, unwilling to go. Doug leaned against the side of the car, and she hugged herself to him, burying her head against his chest.
‘Do you feel it too?’ she asked. ‘That we’ll never be able to come back to this place?’
Doug nodded slowly. ‘In Chrétien’s stories you have the staid world of the court, full of laws and customs and protocols; and the wild world of the forest, where the quests and battles and magic happen. I think we’re about to leave that place. The story’s over.’
‘Some stories end,’ she said firmly. ‘Ours isn’t finishing any time soon.’
But something still troubled her. She wanted to say it now, before the enchantment broke irrevocably. She pushed back so she could look Doug in the eye.
‘About what Blanchard said – that night, in Annelise Stirt’s basement …’
Doug silenced her with a kiss.
‘I don’t want to know.’
Bruges, 1184
The candle has burned low. I sit in a room in a high tower, scribbling myself blind. Over the years I’ve told many tales of men and women trapped in their towers. In the stories it’s a challenge, an obstacle to be escaped. The reality is different.
I have outlived myself. My story finished forty years ago, but I’ve lingered on, a singer on the stage long after his audience has left. I served the Count of Blois, and his son the Count of Champagne – both are dead. The man I serve now, Philip of
Flanders, wasn’t even born when my story happened. He pays my stipend and I flatter him: I write that he is more worthy than Alexander the Great. He pretends to be embarrassed, but secretly he wants to believe me. I praise his wisdom, his love of truth, justice and loyalty. I praise his generosity, particularly when my pay is due.
Bruges is a strange place. The men here are dour and humourless and care for nothing except commerce. Instead of roads they have canals – harder for walking, but easier for transporting their goods. The city exists because of sheep, but you never hear the bleat of lambs, or screams from the slaughterhouse. The sheep live elsewhere, beyond the walls, beyond the sea. Here they only exist in ledgers. They come here as sacks of raw wool; as bales of cloth, dyed and fulled; as skins for the tanners and hides scraped clean for vellum. All the Flemings shepherd here is money.
I’m no different. I stay in my tower, keeping the world at bay; I keep up with life through gossip and hearsay. I write secondhand accounts of second-hand lives, when Count Philip insists, but mostly I write my own story. Written and rewritten – for forty years. I don’t know any other. Not one hour goes by that I don’t think of the stone, and of the spear that makes wounds that never heal. I thought if I surrendered it I could be free of its power. Instead, it haunts my imagination.
I’ve taken some of those vellum pages and written my story, but the last pages are blank. When you’re the storyteller, you can choose the ending. But I don’t know how to finish it. I write and rewrite, but the final page remains incomplete.
A woman on the balcony heard the lamentations and ran down to the hall. She went straight to the Queen and asked her what was wrong.
What is wrong?
The story doesn’t end. The quest isn’t finished. All I can do is tell the tale, as far as I know it.
I put down my pen. A blot of ink spreads darkness across the parchment, but it doesn’t touch the words.
I pinch out the candle.
Chrétien de Troyes is arguably the perfect artist: unknowable, except through his work. All that survives of him are the five Arthurian poems he wrote in the second half of the twelfth century, which laid the foundation for the entire genre of Arthurian romance. Without Chrétien’s imagination there would be no Camelot, no Lancelot and his illicit love for Queen Guinevere – and no Holy Grail.
It’s almost impossible, now, to imagine a world where the Holy Grail didn’t exist. Such was the power and mystery of Chrétien’s elusive vision that within a generation his readers had begun a process of expanding, adapting and confusing it that continues to this day. Looking backwards, scholars have expended huge energy and ingenuity in trying to trace the Grail’s mythic antecedents. For all their efforts, it’s clear that while the life-giving vessel is a recurring archetype in human mythology, the specific instance of the Holy Grail belongs to Chrétien alone.
All the businesses featured in this novel are entirely fictitious and any similarities to actual companies or their employees are either wholly coincidental, or the result of a far deeper conspiracy than I can fathom.
Like Chrétien, I’ve drawn together my story from a mass of pre-existing material. I’m very grateful to everyone who gave me insights into the workings of the City of London, especially Mark Kleinman, Sophie and Marcus Green, Nick, Edward Sawyer, Don Simon Wapping and Mark Hallam. I’ve also benefited hugely from resources in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Library, the York Minster Library and the University of York library. The
Tristan und Isolde
described in chapter fifteen is based on an actual production at the Royal Opera directed by Christof Loy and designed by Johannes Leiacker.
At Random House, I’d like to thank the three editors who worked on this book – Oliver Johnson, who commissioned it; and Kate Elton and Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, who saw it through – as well as all the people who’ve helped design, produce and promote the book. In changing times one of the constants has been my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon, who continued her indomitable tradition of good cake and good advice.
Like my fictional Chrétien, I began writing to impress the woman I was in love with. My stories might not measure up to his, but my romance has been happier: my wife Emma is still the cornerstone of everything I do. Our son Owen accompanied me on a long, tiring research trip with astonishing good humour, and only the occasional croissant and
moules frites
by way of compensation.
For three thousand years, the world’s most dangerous treasure has been lost. Now the code that reveals its hiding place is about to be broken …
Sam Grant is a disgraced ex-SOE soldier and an adventurer by trade. But he has a secret: six years ago, a dying archaeologist entrusted him with his life’s work – transcripts of mysterious writing found in a hidden cave on Crete. Deciphered, it could lead to one of the greatest prizes in history. But the treasure is as dangerous as it is valuable. The CIA wants it; so does the KGB. Helped by a brilliant Oxford professor, and a beautiful Greek archaeologist with her own secrets to hide, Grant is plunged into a labyrinth of ancient cults, forgotten mysteries and lost civilizations. But time is running out.