They filled it with eternal life, undying death, unsleeping dreams; its draught unsealed the shadow-gate between the World that Is, and Seems.

This is the cup to loose the soul, the blood that sets the legends free, and we who dare to drink must taste, each in ourselves, eternity.

PROLOGUE The Chapel

There were three things moving through the wood that evening: the boy, the dog, and the sun.

The slope faced north-west and as the cloud-shadow retreated the sun’s rays advanced through the trees on a collision course with the two companions, who were descending on a more or less diagonal route towards the light. The boy was dark, too dark for the Anglo-Saxon races, his skin a golden olive, his hair so black that there were glints of blue and green in it, and green and blue flecked the blackness of his eyes. His face was bony for his twelve years, a strange, solemn, mature face for someone so young. The dog was a shaggy mongrel, long-legged and wayward of tail, gambolling beside his friend with one ear pricked and the other lopped, his brown eyes very intelligent under whiskery eyebrows. He was known as Hoover from his habit of mopping up crumbs, though it was not really his name. The boy was called Nathan, and that was his name, at least for the moment. He had spent much of his short life exploring the woods, and around Thornyhill Manor he knew every tree, but here in this folded valley was the Darkwood where no paths ran, and he could never remember his way from one visit to the next. He sometimes fancied the trees shifted, rustling their roots in the leaf-mould, and even the streamlet which gurgled along the valley bottom would play curious tricks, switching its course from time to time as such little streams do, but without the excuse of sudden rain. It was very quiet there: few birds lived in the Darkwood. All this land had once been the property of the Thorn family (spelt Thawn in some of his uncle’s ancient books), and they had built a chapel down in the coomb, in the long ago days of chivalry and legend before history tidied things up. It had been struck by lightning or otherwise destroyed after a renegade Thorn sold his soul to the devil, or so it was rumoured, but the ruin was still supposed to exist, in some secret hollow beneath the leaves, and Nathan had often looked for it with his friends, though without success. It said in one of the books that an ancient cup or chalice was kept there, some sort of holy relic, but his best friend Hazel said he would never find it, because it could only be found by the pure in heart. (The other boys said he couldn’t have a girl for a best friend, it wasn’t done, but Nathan didn’t understand why, and did what he pleased.)

He wasn’t really looking for the chapel that evening, just walking with his uncle’s dog, the foot-companion he preferred, sniffing along the borders of some undiscovered adventure. There was a dimness among the trees, more shadow than mist, and as they went deeper into the valley the branches grew gnarly and twined together into nets, or reached out to snag fur and clothes. Nathan had to pick his way, but he rarely stumbled and never fell, and the dog, for all his casual gait, was swift and sure-pawed. Concentrating on the ground, they did not see the cloud-edge passing until it slid over them, and the sun struck, slanting through the leafless boughs, filling their vision with a golden haze. For several moments Nathan strode on, half-dazzled, uncertain where he was going. And then the woodland floor gave beneath him, and he was falling in a shower of earth-crumbs and twig-crumbs, bark-scratchings and leaf-crackle, falling down into the dark.

He fell perhaps ten feet, landing on more tree-debris which softened the impact. He seemed to be in a hollow space, like a cave, but the quick changes from dusk to dazzle, from dazzle to semi-dark, proved too much for his brain and his sight took a while to adjust. He glanced upwards, and saw a ragged hole filled with sunlit wood, and a dog-shaped head peering down. He tried to say: I’m all right, but the fall had winded him and his voice emerged as a croak. His arms and legs felt bruised but not broken; his jolted insides gradually settled back into place and a brief queasiness passed. There was a scrabbling noise from above, followed by a slither as Hoover came down to join him. Nathan’s eyes had adjusted by now and he could see they were in a rectangular chamber some twenty feet long, too regular in outline for a cave. Above them the ceiling consisted of a tangle of roots sustaining loose earth, but beyond he made out stubby pillars curving upwards, into arches, and a glimpse of man-made walls on either side, with pointed window-holes choked with leaf-compost and snarled tubers.

Nathan reached in his pocket for the small torch which had been part of his Christmas stocking. The beam was weak and the gloom was not deep enough to enhance it, but it cast an oblong of vague pallor which travelled over the squat columns and the chinks of wall. The stone looked dry and crumbly, like stale bread. He stood up, rather stiffly, and followed the torch-beam into the dimness, Hoover at his side. The soil underfoot thinned, revealing flagstones, some cracked, some thrust upwards by burrowing growths. The beam picked out fragments of carved lettering on the floor and a strange little face peeping out from an architrave, its features blunted with erosion, leaving only the bulge of pitted cheeks under wicked eye-slits, and the jut of broken horns. ‘This is it,’ Nathan whispered. There was no need for him to whisper, but in that place it was instinctive. ‘This is the lost chapel of the Thorns. That face doesn’t look very Christian, does it?’

Hoover made a snuffling noise by way of agreement and thumped his tail against the boy’s leg.

At the far end they found three steps up to a kind of dais – ‘This is where the altar was’ – and above it a recess in the wall overhung with a fringe of root-filaments and silted up with earth-dust. ‘Perhaps that was where it stood,’ Nathan said. ‘The holy relic …’ He felt inside, but the recess was empty. As he withdrew his hand, he heard a sound so alien he felt his skin prickle. A low, soft growling, deep in the throat. Hoover never growled. But he was staring at the recess, his lip lifted, backing away step by step. The hairs along his spine bristled visibly. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nathan demanded, but the dog did not even glance in his direction. All his attention was focused on the vacant hollow in the wall.

Nathan didn’t say: ‘It’s all right. There’s nothing there.’ He knew that if Hoover sensed something, then there was something to sense. The dog had been his friend for as long as he could remember, and had never been seen to growl at anyone, human or animal. Canine hostilities were conducted in barks. He had always seemed to be the sort of dog who was good with small children, did not bite the postman and would deal with a burglar by licking his face. But he understood everything people said, Nathan was sure of that, and would follow him into every adventure. And he was old. Older than me, the boy thought, and for the first time he wondered how old, since eleven was a fair age for a dog. He found himself backing away too, keeping close to Hoover. Watching the hollow.

Afterwards he couldn’t recall which came first, the light or the voices. Perhaps they weren’t voices, just sounds, soft, whispery sounds, word-shaped though he couldn’t make out the words, thread-like ghosts of noises long gone. Hoover ceased growling and froze; there was froth round his mouth and all his teeth showed. Nathan had a hand on his neck, and found he was trembling. He had switched off the torch and they were both staring at the light, a tiny green mote that had appeared in the back of the recess. But either the cavity was much deeper than he had thought or the light was coming from somewhere else, somewhere dark and very far away. It grew slowly, as if it were drawing nearer, emerging from an abyss of blackness, until they could see it consisted of a nimbus encircling some small object. The whispering increased, becoming a chorus of hissing murmurs. And now Nathan could make out the words, or rather a single word, repeated over and over again: he thought it was sangré, but the voices were so blurred he could not be certain. His heart was beating very hard, bumping against his ribs. His bruises were forgotten.

The green halo filled the hollow and spilled over. The object within it seemed to be floating not resting in the cavity, a cup or goblet with a short stem and a bowl as wide as it was deep. It looked as if it was made of some greenish stone, polished to a metallic lustre, or even opaque glass. There were designs engraved on it that appeared significant, though what they might signify he could not guess, and here and there the gleam of furtive gemstones, but all green. He found he was drawing closer, or being drawn; his body seemed to have no will in the matter any more. Now he could see inside the cup. He had expected it to be empty, but it was full almost to the brim. In that light the liquid looked black, but it wasn’t. It was red.

Behind him, the dog gave a strangled whine of protest. He reached out, and the cup began to drift towards him, and he knew with a knowledge beyond understanding that he must drink. (Only the pure in heart …) It was full of blood, and he must drink … The voices sounded like a host of snakes murmuring with forked tongues. Sangré, sangré, sangreal …

With a supreme effort the dog broke free of the spell and sprang forward, seizing a mouthful of Nathan’s jacket. The boy stumbled backwards. The snake-voices fragmented into a crackle like radio interference and were gone, vanishing on a snarl. The green light was abruptly extinguished. ‘Where is it?’ Nathan cried, and as Hoover released him he flung himself down on hands and knees, groping on the floor for the cup. Then he stopped, and confusion slid like a cloud from his mind. He turned back to the dog, who was regarding him with vivid concern, tail motionless. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

It was easier said than done. Earth-falls and woodland detritus had built up a slope close to the hole where Nathan had tumbled through, but it was steep and sliding soil made purchase difficult. It took at least half an hour before he and Hoover managed to climb back up, enlarge the gap, and scramble back into the open air. Nathan had no idea how long they had been down there but the last of the sunset had faded and the night-filled wood lived up to its name. He switched on the torch but in the dark it was impossible to be sure of his route and he let the dog guide him, trusting to Hoover’s instincts. Only when he had gone several yards did he realize that he had not marked the location in any way. He had found it walking blindly with the sun in his eyes and had emerged into darkness; he hadn’t even registered the appearance of the trees in the vicinity. He tried to turn back but Hoover wouldn’t accompany him, insisting with short staccato barks that they should go on. I know the direction we came, Nathan reflected, and there’s a big hole in the ground now. I can’t miss that. ‘Okay,’ he told the dog. ‘Let’s go home.’ They went on up the slope.

At the edge of the Darkwood where the ground levelled out and the trees changed, becoming taller and friendlier, making way for paths and glades, Hoover suddenly stopped. His fur ruffled though there was no wind. Something like a shadow passed over his eyes and fled, leaving them bright and unworried. When he set off again, it was with his customary lolloping stride, without the air of prudence and purpose that he had shown since they left the chapel. Nathan could not know it, but the whole incident had been wiped from Hoover’s mind.

The boy remembered it – he remembered every detail – but when he tried to speak of it, to Hazel, or his mother, or Barty, the man he always called uncle, his tongue would not form the words, and the chapel and its contents stayed locked in his head, a guilty secret that he did not want to keep. He would dream of it sometimes, and wake to hear the snake-whispers calling to him from the corners of the room for seconds after: Sangré sangreal … Once in his dream he lifted the cup and drank, and his mouth was full of blood, and the sweat that poured off him was red, and when he opened his eyes it was a relief to find himself wet with nothing but perspiration.

He looked for the place again, though always with a friend, not saying what he was searching for, half afraid of finding it. But even the hole seemed to have gone, and the sun stayed out of his eyes, and the chapel had vanished into the secrecy of the wood.

ONE The Fugitives

At the dark end of a winter’s afternoon early in 1991 a young woman climbed down from a lorry on the road through Thornyhill woods.

‘Are you sure?’ said the driver. ‘I can take you on to Eade.’

‘I’m sure.’ He had placed a hand on her knee. That was enough. She had insisted on being set down.

‘It’s a lonely stretch of road,’ he said, hefting her bags out of the cab, too slowly for her taste. She reached up, tugging her suitcase from his grasp and stumbling under the sudden weight. The baby suspended in a sling about her neck woke at the jolt but didn’t cry, only staring about him with wide-open eyes. They were very dark, the iris so large they seemed to have almost no whites, like the eyes of some small nocturnal animal. But the lorry-driver wasn’t watching the child. He thought the woman looked very young to be a mother, little more than a girl, her round face unmade-up and somehow vulnerable, framed in a soft blur of hair, her colouring far paler than her baby. He wanted her to stay in his cab for all sorts of reasons, some kindly, some less so. ‘I thought you were going on to Crawley.’

‘I know where I’m going.’ Her determination belied her softness. She didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She slammed the door, hooking the strap of her holdall over her shoulder and dragging the suitcase behind on inadequate wheels. After a few minutes, the lorry drove off.

They were alone now. It was a relief the lorry had gone, but one fear was swiftly replaced by others. She had been going to Crawley – she had a contact there, a child-minder, the friend of a friend, and the possibility of a job – but instead here she was, miles from anywhere, with little hope of another lift even if she had the courage to accept one. The baby was quiet – he cried so rarely it worried her – but she knew he would soon be hungry, and it was growing darker, and the road was lonely indeed. The suitcase trundled awkwardly at her heels, swaying from side to side, regularly banging against her leg, and the woods seemed to draw closer on either hand, squeezing the road into a narrow slot between thickets of shadow. She was a country girl with no real fear of the night, but she thought she heard a whisper on the windless air, the crack of a twig somewhere nearby, strange stirrings and rustlings in the leaf-mould. Since the birth of her child she had been subject to nervous imaginings which she had not dared to confide in anyone, dreading to be called paranoiac. There were footsteps pattering on empty streets, doors that shifted without a draught, soft murmurings just beyond the reach of hearing. And now the woods seemed to wake at her presence, so she thought the branches groped, and shreds of darkness slithered from tree to tree. They were there, always following, getting closer, never quite catching up …

When she saw the lights, she thought they too must be an illusion, and she was becoming genuinely unbalanced. Twin gleams of yellow, twinkling through the trees, the yellow of firelight, candlelight, electric light. As she drew nearer she feared they would vanish, but they grew clearer, until she could make out the source. Windows, windows in a house, and the yellow glow between half-drawn curtains. The house appeared to be set in a clearing among the trees: she could see gables pointing against the sky, and the dim suggestion of half-timbering criss-crossing the façade. It looked a friendly house, even in the dark; but she wasn’t sure. ‘What do you think?’ she whispered to the baby. ‘Shall we ask for help? Maybe they’ll offer us tea …’ Maybe it was a witch’s cottage, made of gingerbread, and the door would be opened by a hook-nosed crone who would show them the shortest way to her oven.

Footsteps. Footsteps on the empty road. She looked round, but could see nothing. Yet for a moment they were quiet and clear, soft-shod feet, or padded paws. And in the gloom there was a deeper dark, like a ripple running through the woods, and the sound of breathing, very close by, as if the wind itself had a throat, and was panting on her neck … Her suitcase bounced and lurched as she tugged it up the path to the door. There was a knocker, and an old-fashioned bell-pull that dangled. She tried both.

The door opened, and there was no hook-nosed crone but a large, comfortable-looking man with a looming stomach, shoulders to match, and very graceful hands. His hair was pale, his complexion a faded pink. His face wore an expression of vague benevolence, or maybe the benevolence was in the arrangement of his features, since his manner was initially hesitant, almost guarded. His eyes were periwinkle-blue between fat eyelids.

‘We’re lost,’ the young woman began, uneasily, ‘and I wondered …’

He was looking beyond her, into the night, where the footsteps were, and the breathing of the wind. For a fleeting instant she fancied he too heard or saw, though what he saw she didn’t know; she didn’t look round. Then his gaze came back to her, and he smiled. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come in. It’s getting late, and I was just making tea. If you need to feed the little one …’

‘Thank you so much!’

She stepped into the hallway, and the closing of the door shut out the dark and its phantoms. Long afterwards, she knew she had trusted him without thinking, on instinct. Maybe it was because he was fat, and benevolent-looking, and she was desperate and alone, or because the blue twinkle of his eyes had worked a charm on her, but in the end she realized it was because he had looked behind her, and seen something, seen them. He showed her into a room with oak beams, shabby capacious chairs, firelight. A large dog was sprawled on the hearthrug, a dog with shaggy fur and waggy tail, plainly a mongrel. It got up as they came in, stretching its forelegs, rump in the air, tail waving. ‘Why don’t you leave the child by the fire?’ the man said. ‘Hoover will look after him. I call him Hoover for obvious reasons: he cleans up the crumbs. My name is Bartlemy Goodman.’

‘Annie Ward.’ She lifted the baby out of the sling and set him down on the hearthrug, which was as shaggy as the dog and so similar they might have been related. ‘This is Nathan.’

Baby and dog surveyed each other, wet black nose almost touching small brown one. Then suddenly Nathan laughed – something as rare as his tears – and she imagined they had formed a bond which transcended any differences of species or speech. ‘I’d like to heat his milk,’ she said. ‘Would – would you mind watching him for me?’

‘Hoover will take care of it. He’s like Nana in Peter Pan. The kitchen’s this way.’

Looking back, doubtfully, she saw the dog gently nudging the child away from the fire with his muzzle. ‘He must be awfully well-trained,’ she said.

‘He’s very intelligent,’ said her host. Afterwards, she thought it wasn’t really an affirmation.

The kitchen was heavily beamed and stone-flagged as she might have expected, with an old-fashioned cooking range on which something that resembled a small cauldron was simmering. A drift of steam came from under the lid, bringing with it a rich, meaty, gamey, spicy smell that made her mouth water. She had eaten nothing but a sandwich at lunchtime, and it occurred to her that she was very hungry; but the baby came first. Bartlemy provided a saucepan and she heated milk while he made tea and set out a tray with earthenware mugs, pot and jug, fruit cake. She longed to ask what was in the cauldron, but was afraid of sounding too greedy, or too desperate. The room was of irregular shape and there were many small shelves on every angle of wall, bearing hand-labelled bottles and jars containing pickled fruits, chutney, strange-looking vegetables in oil. Herbs grew in pots and dried in bunches. There was a bowl of onions, white and purple, and another of apples and Clementines. No washing up stocked the sink and the draining board was very clean.

Back in the living room, she gave Nathan his bottle and some bread-and-butter with no crusts that her host had prepared. ‘You’re being very kind,’ she said. ‘You must think …’

‘I think only that it’s dark outside, and cold, and you seem to be in difficulty. You can tell me more when you’re ready, if you wish to.’

She drank the tea, bergamot-scented, probably Earl Grey, and ate a large slice of the cake. Perhaps because she was famished, it seemed to her the nicest cake she had ever tasted.

‘Do you feel you can tell me now where you’re going?’ Bartlemy asked.

‘I was heading for Crawley,’ she said. ‘ There are jobs there – at least I hope so – and a friend of mine knows a good child-minder. Before, we … we were staying with one of my cousins, but things got awkward – I felt I was imposing – and she didn’t really want the baby. So … I thought it was time to move on. Be independent.’ She didn’t mention the pursuing shadows, or the whispers in the night. In this warm, safe haven they seemed almost unreal.

If it was safe. If it was a haven. She trusted him, but that very trust disturbed her, and she feared her own weakness, her cowardice – she feared to go back into the dark.

‘What about your parents?’

‘They’re in the West Country. I don’t see them much since my – my husband died.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He asked her nothing more, nor did she volunteer any further information. They watched the child on the hearthrug, romping with the dog, pulling his floppy ears. ‘Do you want to continue your journey tonight?’ Bartlemy said. ‘You can stay here if you wish: I have plenty of space. There’s a bolt on the bedroom door, if that would make you feel more comfortable.’

She opened her mouth to say that she couldn’t, she couldn’t possibly, but all that came out was: ‘Thank you.’ And: ‘I’m not worried.’ And she knew that, for a little while at least, she wasn’t.

For supper he filled a mug from the cauldron – it was some kind of broth, with so many mingled flavours she couldn’t identify them – and it flooded her whole body with warmth and ease. She slept side by side with her son, on a mattress that was both firm and soft, sliding the bolt because she knew it was a sensible precaution, though she didn’t really feel it was necessary. And somehow they stayed the next night, and the next, and she forgot to bolt the door, and Hoover woke them in the morning, plumping his forepaws on the quilt so he could lick Nathan’s face.

The Goodmans had lived at Thornyhill for as long as anyone could remember. In the village of Eade, about two and a half miles down the road, the most venerable residents claimed they could recall Bartlemy’s grandfather, or even his great-grandfather, but people were vague as to which generation was which: they were all called Bartlemy, or some similar name, and they all looked alike, fat and placid and kindly. None of them ever seemed to be very young, or to grow very old. It was assumed that womenfolk and childhood were details that happened somewhere else, and they gravitated to Thornyhill in middle age. They had money from some unspecified source, and they appeared to live retired, reclusive but not unfriendly, mixing little in local affairs. They were regarded as mildly and acceptably eccentric, part of the scenery, arousing no curiosity, subject to no prying questions. The dog, too, was said to be one of a succession, all mongrels, strays perhaps, rescued from dog homes. If they had been asked, the villagers might have said that one had been part retriever, another part wolfhound, a third had shown traits of Alsatian or Old English sheepdog; but no one would have been sure. Hoover had a retriever’s brown soulful eyes, the long legs of a hound, a coat shag-headed, maned, tufted like anything from an Afghan to a husky. He chased cats from time to time to prove his doghood and slobbered a good deal over friend and stranger alike. It was inferred that the present generation of both dog and master had been at Thornyhill for some twenty years, doing little, staid and respectable as hobbits in a hobbit-hole, aloof from the workaday world. If twenty years was a long time for a dog to live, nobody remarked on it.

Once, Thornyhill had been the property of the Thorns, a family that was ancient rather than aristocratic, tracing their line back long before the Normans. Local historians said there had been a house on the hillside where now the Darkwood grew, a house that dated from Saxon times with a sunken chapel where Josevius Grimling Thorn, called Grimthorn, had traded with the Devil, though what he had traded, or why, remained a mystery. But the tales about him were confused and confusing, stating he had lived nearly two thousand years ago yet died around 650 AD, and the house had been razed, and the chapel was lost, and Josevius faded into legend, and the Darkwood had grown over all. In the Tudor age later Thorns had built the surviving house, where the woodland was lighter and greener, and bluebells carpeted the ground in spring, and there were woodpeckers and warblers, and deer in the thickets, and squirrels in the treetops. The house was criss-crossed with half-timbering, showing glimpses of plaster and brickwork in between, and cloaked in creepers which turned fire-red in autumn, and tall chimneys jutted higgledy-piggledy from the pointed roofs. There, the family had lived for centuries, keeping their secrets, until the eldest son died in the First World War, and his brother in the ’flu epidemic that followed, and presumably it was then the Goodmans came, though none could be found to remember clearly. There were still offshoots of the family in and around the village: the Carlows were known to be descended, on the wrong side of the blanket, from a black sheep of the Jacobean era, and the widowed Mrs Vanstone, now in her late fifties, was invariably called Rowena Thorn in acknowledgement of her antecedents. She would visit Bartlemy from time to time and talk about the past, and she was always impressed by how much he knew, in his unassuming way, about her more distant ancestors. It occurred to her, once or twice, that his residence there seemed to be a kind of guardianship, though what he was guarding, or for whom, she could not imagine, and she put it down to fancy.

Occasionally – very occasionally – Bartlemy had visitors who were not from the village or its environs, visitors who came late at night, and stayed indoors, away from the gaze of locals, and left after one day or many in the pre-dawn hour when no one would see them go. Sometimes an early riser or a reveller returning late from the pub at Chizzledown would catch sight of a hooded stranger striding along the road through the woods, or glimpse an unfamiliar figure on the twisty path to Bartlemy’s door, but gossip took no interest, since there was neither sex nor scandal afoot, and such sightings were too rare to be thought significant. There were beginning to be Londoners in the area now, high-earning, high-spending West End ex-pats, generally with media connections, who bought into the country lifestyle as pictured in the glossy magazines, and installed Agas in their kitchens, and filled their fridges with Chardonnay, and invited their city friends down for summer parties in their carefully sculpted gardens. Some of them made inquiries about the Goodmans, and Thornyhill, but their questions went unanswered, and the house was not for sale. Nothing seemed to happen there for a long, long time, until Annie Ward and her baby came to the door on a dark afternoon in 1991, and found sanctuary.

Bartlemy had a car of sorts, a blunt-nosed Jowett Javelin from the Fifties. It was dirty and tired-looking but it always managed to go, and in it he drove Annie to Crawley, and waited while she visited the child-minder and the job centre, and came away disheartened. ‘What do you do?’ he had asked her.

12 İz.

The Greenstone Grail: The Sangreal Trilogy One

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ITHE GREENSTONEGRAIL

Contents

The Grail

PROLOGUE The Chapel

ONE The Fugitives

I
THE GREENSTONE
GRAIL