Heretic Read online

  “I’ve made my decision,” Thomas said.

  Father Roubert raised his voice so that the men behind Thomas could hear him. “She is a beghard!” he called. “She is a heretic! She has been excommunicated, cast out of God’s holy precincts, and as such she is a doomed soul! There can be no salvation for her and none for any man who helps her! You hear me? It is God’s Church on earth that talks to you, and your immortal souls, all your immortal souls, are in dire peril because of her.” He looked back to Genevieve and could not resist a bitter smile. “You will die, bitch,” he said, “in earthly flames that will usher you to the eternal fires of hell.”

  Genevieve raised her small bow which had a broad-head on the string. “Don’t,” Thomas said to her.

  “He is my torturer,” Genevieve said, tears on her cheeks.

  Father Roubert sneered at her bow. “You are the devil’s whore,” he told her, “and worms will inhabit your womb and your breasts will give forth pus and the demons will play with you.”

  Genevieve loosed the arrow.

  She snatched at the shot. She did not aim. Anger made her pluck the cord far back and then she loosed and her eyes were so filled with tears that she could hardly see Father Roubert. In practice her arrows had usually flown madly wide, but at the very last moment, just as she loosed, Thomas tried to knock her arm away; he barely touched her, just tapped her bow hand, and the arrow twitched as it leaped from the string. Father Roubert had been about to insult her toy bow, but instead the arrow flew true and struck him. The broad, tanged head slashed into the priest’s throat and the arrow stayed there, its white feathers turning red as blood poured down the shaft. For a heartbeat the priest sat in the saddle, a look of utter astonishment on his face, then a second great gout of blood spurted out over his horse’s ears, he made a choking sound and fell hard to the ground.

  By the time Thomas reached him the priest was dead.

  “I told you he’d go to hell first,” Genevieve said, then spat on the corpse.

  Thomas made the sign of the cross.

  THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN JUBILATION after the easy victory, but the old mood, the sullen mood, returned to haunt the garrison at Castillon d’Arbizon. They had done well in the fight, but the death of the priest had horrified Thomas’s men. Most of them were unrepentant sinners, some had even killed priests themselves, but they were all superstitious and the friar’s death was regarded as an evil omen. Father Roubert had ridden forward unarmed, he came to parley, and he had been shot down like a dog. A few men applauded Genevieve. She was a proper woman, they said, a soldier’s woman, and the Church could be damned for all they cared, but those men were a small minority. Most of the garrison recalled the priest’s last words that had damned their own souls for the sin of harboring a heretic, and those harsh threats brought back the fears that had haunted them when Genevieve’s life was first spared. Robbie propounded that view relentlessly and, when Thomas challenged him by asking when the Scot planned to ride to Bologna, Robbie brushed the question off. “I’m staying here,” he said, “till I know what ransom I’m getting. I’m not riding away from his money.” He jerked a thumb at Joscelyn who had learned of the antagonism inside the garrison and did his best to encourage it by forecasting dire things if the beghard was not burned. He refused to eat at the same table as Genevieve. As a nobleman he was entitled to the best treatment the castle could offer and he slept in a room of his own at the top of the tower, but rather than eat in the hall he preferred to take his meals with Robbie and the men-at-arms and he beguiled them with tales of his tournaments and scared them with dire warnings of what happened to men who protected the enemies of the Church.

  Thomas offered Robbie almost all the money in his keeping as his share of Joscelyn’s ransom, the final amount to be adjusted when that ransom was negotiated, but Robbie refused it. “You might end up owing me far more,” he claimed, “and how do I know you’ll pay it? And how will you know where I am?”

  “I’ll send it to your family,” Thomas promised. “You trust me, don’t you?”

  “The Church doesn’t,” was Robbie’s bitter answer, “so why should I?”

  Sir Guillaume tried to ease the tension, but he knew the garrison was falling apart. A fight broke out in the lower hall one night between Robbie’s supporters and the men who defended Genevieve, and at the end of it one Englishman was dead and a Gascon had lost an eye to a dagger. Sir Guillaume thumped heads hard, but he knew there would be other fights.

  “What do you propose to do about it?” he asked Thomas a week after the skirmish by the River Gers. The air was cold from a north wind, the wind that men believed made them dull and irritable. Sir Guillaume and Thomas were on the Keep’s battlements, beneath the Earl of Northampton’s fading banner. And beneath that red and green flag hung the orange leopard of Berat, but upside down to show the world that the standard had been captured in battle. Genevieve was there too, but sensing that she did not want to hear what Sir Guillaume had come to say she had gone to the farthest corner of the ramparts.

  “I’ll wait here,” Thomas said.

  “Because your cousin will come?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Thomas said.

  “And suppose you have no men left?” Sir Guillaume asked.

  Thomas said nothing for a while. Eventually he broke the silence. “You too?”

  “I’m with you,” Sir Guillaume said, “fool that you are. But if your cousin comes, Thomas, he won’t come alone.”

  “I know.”

  “And he won’t be as foolish as Joscelyn was. He won’t give you a victory.”

  “I know.” Thomas’s voice was bleak.

  “You need more men,” Sir Guillaume said. “We have a garrison; we need a small army.”

  “It would help,” Thomas agreed.

  “But no one will come while she’s here,” Sir Guillaume warned, glancing at Genevieve. “And three of the Gascons left yesterday.” The three men-at-arms had not even waited for their share of Joscelyn’s ransom, but had simply ridden away westwards in search of other employment.

  “I don’t want cowards here,” Thomas retorted.

  “Oh, don’t be such a damned fool!” Sir Guillaume snapped. “Your men will fight other men, Thomas, but they won’t fight the Church. They won’t fight God.” He paused, evidently reluctant to say whatever was on his mind, but then took the plunge. “You have to send her away, Thomas. She has to go.”

  Thomas stared at the southern hills. He said nothing.

  “She has to go,” Sir Guillaume repeated. “Send her to Pau. Bordeaux. Anywhere.”

  “If I do that,” Thomas said, “then she dies. The Church will find her and burn her.”

  Sir Guillaume stared at him. “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said.

  “Jesus goddamned Christ,” Sir Guillaume said in exasperation. “Love! It always leads to trouble.”

  “Man is born to it,” Thomas said, “as the sparks fly upwards.”

  “Maybe,” Sir Guillaume said grimly, “but it’s women who provide the bloody kindling.”

  And just then Genevieve called to them. “Horsemen!” she warned, and Thomas ran across the ramparts and stared down the eastern road and saw that sixty or seventy horsemen were emerging from the woods. They were men-at-arms wearing the orange and white jupons of Berat and at first Thomas assumed they were coming to offer a ransom for Joscelyn, then he saw that they flew a strange banner, not the leopard of Berat, but a Church banner like those carried in processions on holy days. It hung from a cross-staff and showed the blue gown of the Virgin Mary and behind it, on smaller horses, were a score of churchmen.

  Sir Guillaume made the sign of the cross. “Trouble,” he said curtly, then turned on Genevieve. “No arrows! You hear me, girl? No damn arrows!”

  Sir Guillaume ran down the steps and Genevieve looked at Thomas. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For killing the priest? Damn the bastard.”

 
“I rather think they’ve come to damn us,” Genevieve said, and she went with Thomas to the side of the battlements that overlooked Castillon d’Arbizon’s main street, the west gate and the bridge across the river beyond. The armed horsemen waited outside the town while the clergy dismounted and, preceded by their banner, trooped up the main street towards the castle. Most of the churchmen were in black, but one was in a white cope, had a mitre and carried a white staff topped with a golden crook. A bishop, no less. He was a plump man with long white hair that escaped from beneath the golden hem of his mitre. He ignored the townsfolk who knelt to him as he called up to the castle. “Thomas!” he shouted. “Thomas!”

  “What will you do?” Genevieve asked.

  “Listen to him,” Thomas said.

  He led her down to the smaller bastion above the gate that was already crowded with archers and men-at-arms. Robbie was there and, as Thomas appeared, the Scotsman pointed at him and called down to the bishop, “This is Thomas!”

  The bishop struck his staff on the ground. “In the name of God,” he called out, “the all-powerful Father, and in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost, and in the name of all the saints, and in the name of our Holy Father, Clement, and by virtue of the power which has been granted us to loose and to bind in heaven as it is loosed and bound upon earth, I summon you, Thomas! I summon you!”

  The bishop had a fine voice. It carried clearly, and the only other sound, except for the wind, was the murmur as a handful of Thomas’s men translated the French into English for the benefit of the archers. Thomas had assumed that the bishop would speak in Latin and that he alone would know what was being said, but the bishop wanted everyone to understand his words.

  “It is known that you, Thomas,” the bishop resumed, “sometime baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, have fallen from the society of Christ’s body by committing the sin of giving comfort and shelter to a condemned heretic and murderer. So now, with grief in our heart, we deprive you, Thomas, as we will deprive all your accomplices and supporters, of the communion of the body and the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He banged his staff on the ground again and one of the priests rang a small handbell. “We separate you,” the bishop went on, his voice echoing from the castle’s high keep, “from the society of all Christians and we exclude you from all holy precincts.” Again the staff struck the cobbles and the bell rang. “We banish you from the bosom of our holy mother the Church in heaven and upon earth.” The bell’s clear tone echoed back from the keep’s stones. “We declare you, Thomas, to be excommunicated and we judge you to be condemned to eternal fire with Satan and all his angels and all the reprobates. We pronounce you accursed in this wicked fact and we charge all those who favor and love our Lord Jesus Christ to hold you for punishment.” He thumped his staff a last time, glared defiantly at Thomas and then turned away, followed by the priests and their banner.

  And Thomas felt numb. Cold and numb. Empty. It was as though the foundations of the earth had vanished to leave an aching void above the blazing gates of hell. All the certainties of life, of God, of salvation, of eternity, were gone, had been blown away like the fallen leaves rustling in the town’s gutters. He had been changed into a true hellequin, excommunicated, cut off from the mercy, the love and the company of God.

  “You heard the bishop!” Robbie broke the silence on the rampart. “We’re charged to arrest Thomas or else share his damnation.” And he put his hand on his sword and would have drawn it if Sir Guillaume had not intervened.

  “Enough!” the Norman shouted. “Enough! I am second-in-command here. Does anyone dispute that?” The archers and men-at-arms had drawn away from Thomas and Genevieve, but no one intervened on Robbie’s behalf. Sir Guillaume’s scarred face was grim as death. “The sentries will stay on duty,” he ordered, “the rest of you to your quarters. Now!”

  “We have a duty…” Robbie began and then involuntarily stepped back as Sir Guillaume turned on him in fury. Robbie was no coward, but no one could have withstood Sir Guillaume’s anger at that moment.

  The men went reluctantly, but they went, and Sir Guillaume slammed home his half-drawn sword. “He’s right, of course,” he said gloomily as Robbie went down the steps.

  “He was my friend!” Thomas protested, trying to hold on to one piece of certainty in a world turned inside out.

  “And he wants Genevieve,” Sir Guillaume said, “and because he can’t have her he’s persuaded himself his soul is doomed. Why do you think the bishop didn’t excommunicate all of us? Because then we’d all be in the same hell with nothing to lose. He divided us, the blessed and the damned, and Robbie wants his soul to be safe. Can you blame him?”

  “What about you?” Genevieve asked the Norman.

  “My soul withered years ago,” Sir Guillaume said grimly, then he turned and gazed down the main street. “They’ll be leaving men-at-arms outside the town to take you when you leave. But you can go out by the small gate behind Father Medous’s house. They won’t be guarding that, and you can cross the river at the mill. You’ll be safe enough in the woods.”

  For a moment Thomas did not comprehend what Sir Guillaume was saying, then it struck him with awful force that he was being told to go. To run. To hide. To leave his first command, to abandon his new wealth, his men, everything. He stared at Sir Guillaume, who shrugged. “You can’t stay, Thomas,” the older man said gently. “Robbie or one of his friends will kill you. My guess is that a score of us would support you, but if you stay it will be a fight between us and them and they’ll win.”

  “You’ll stay here?”

  Sir Guillaume looked uncomfortable, then nodded. “I know why you came here,” he said. “I don’t believe the damn thing exists nor, if it does, do I think we have a cat’s chance of finding it. But we can make money here, and I need money so, yes, I’m staying. But you’re going, Thomas. Go west. Find an English garrison. Go home.” He saw the reluctance on Thomas’s face. “What in Christ’s name else can you do?” he demanded. Thomas said nothing and Sir Guillaume glanced at the soldiers waiting beyond the town gate. “You can take the heretic to them, Thomas, and give her over to the burning. They’ll lift your excommunication then.”

  “I won’t do that,” Thomas said fiercely.

  “Take her down to the soldiers,” Sir Guillaume said, “and kneel to the bishop.”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not.”

  “Because you love her?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said, and Genevieve took his arm. She knew he was suffering, just as she had suffered when the Church withdrew the love of God from her, but she had come to terms with the horror. Thomas had not and she knew it would take him time.

  “We shall survive,” she said to Sir Guillaume.

  “But you must leave,” the Norman insisted.

  “I know,” Thomas could not keep the heartbreak from his voice.

  “I’ll bring you supplies tomorrow,” Sir Guillaume promised. “Horses, food, cloaks. What else do you need?”

  “Arrows,” Genevieve said promptly, then she looked at Thomas as if expecting him to add something, but he was still too shocked to think properly. “You’ll want your father’s writings, won’t you?” she suggested gently.

  Thomas nodded. “Wrap them up for me?” he asked Sir Guillaume. “Wrap them in leather.”

  “Tomorrow morning, then,” Sir Guillaume said. “Wait by the hollow chestnut on the hill.”

  Sir Guillaume escorted them out of the castle, through the back alleys behind the priest’s house to where a small door had been let through the town wall to give access to a path which led to the watermill on the river. Sir Guillaume shot the bolts and opened the gate warily, but no soldiers waited outside and so he led them down to the mill and there he watched as Thomas and Genevieve crossed the stone sill of the mill pond. From there they climbed into the woods.

  Thomas had failed. And he was damned. r />
  PART TWO

  Fugitive

  IT RAINED ALL NIGHT. It was a pelting rain driven by a cold wind that snatched the leaves from the oaks and chestnuts and swirled spitefully into the ancient tree that had been broken by lightning and hollowed by time. Thomas and Genevieve tried to shelter in the trunk, flinching once when a burst of thunder sounded in the sky. No lightning showed, but the rain slashed down even more forcefully. “It’s my fault,” Genevieve said.

  “No,” Thomas said.

  “I hated that priest,” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t shoot, but I remembered all he did to me.” She buried her face on his shoulder so her voice became muffled and Thomas could hardly hear her. “He would stroke me when he wasn’t burning me. Stroke me like a child.”

  “Like a child?”

  “No,” she said bitterly, “like a lover. And when he’d hurt me he’d say prayers for me and tell me I was precious to him. I hated him.”

  “I hated him too,” Thomas said, “for what he did to you.” He had his arms about her. “And I’m glad he’s dead,” he added, and then reflected that he himself was as good as dead. He had been sent to hell, cut off from salvation.

  “So what will you do?” Genevieve asked in the shivering dark.

  “I won’t go home.”

  “So where will you go?”

  “Stay with you. If you want.” Thomas thought of saying that she was free to go wherever she wished, but he knew she had entwined her fate in his so he did not try to persuade her to leave him, nor did he want her to leave him. “We’ll go back to Astarac,” he suggested instead. He did not know what good that would do, but he knew he could not just crawl home defeated. Besides, he was damned now. He had nothing to lose and all eternity to gain. And perhaps the Grail would redeem him. Perhaps now that he was doomed, he would find the treasure and it would restore his soul to grace.

  Sir Guillaume arrived soon after dawn, escorted by a dozen men who Sir Guillaume knew would not betray Thomas. Jake and Sam were among them and both wanted to accompany Thomas, but he refused. “Stay with the garrison,” he told them, “or go back west and find another English fort.” It was not that he did not want company, but he knew it would be difficult enough to feed himself and Genevieve without having two other mouths to worry about. Nor did he have any prospect to offer them except danger, hunger and the certainty of being hunted across southern Gascony.