The Hallowed Grail

  A Warne and Elias Adventure

  Will Adams

  Opalmaze

  Copyright © 2025 Will Adams

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by: Victoria Barbera

  To James and Ellie, without whose generous hospitality over many, many years, I’d likely never even have known of Badbury.

  His body was discovered at Glastonbury in our own times, in a hollowed oak deep beneath the earth, hidden between two ancient stone pyramids and sealed with miraculous tokens. They carried him into the church with full honours, and there transferred him into a marble tomb. A lead cross was fastened to the underside of the stone, not above it as we usually see. I myself have traced the letters engraved upon it— not facing outwards but rather turned inwards to the stone. It read: "Here lies our glorious King Arthur, with Guinevere his second wife, on the Isle of Avalon.

  Gerald of Wales c1146 – c1223

  PROLOGUE

  Avebury, Wiltshire

  483 CE

  The man on the dappled brown mare had plaited long hair and tattoos all over his arms and chest and neck, along with frightening quantities of dried blood. Not that the blood was his own, judged Tully, for he jumped down with impressive ease for a man of his size and age, showing no hint of fresh injury or wound. Only scars. Lots and lots of scars. He threw his reins to one of his footsoldiers then strode across to the side of the track, where the man who’d caught Tully was holding him prisoner by his ear. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ he asked.

  ‘Not entirely sure,’ said this other man, short and thin and so stealthy of movement that he’d somehow had his knife to Tully’s throat before Tully had even heard him coming, despite him having hidden himself in among these giant stones – a precaution he’d only taken because everyone in the village had been so on edge these past two days, what with all the talk of a great battle between the king and the usurper, and no-one yet knowing which side had won. ‘It squeals like a pig, though, when you pinch its ear like this.’

  ‘Ow,’ said Tully.

  ‘Good stuff,’ said the big man. ‘I’m starving. Shove a stick up its arse and we’ll cook it over the fire.’

  ‘I’m not a pig,’ said Tully, blinking away his tears.

  ‘It talks. It’s a blooming miracle.’ He crouched down low on his haunches until he was on Tully’s level. He had an unmistakable air of authority about him, yet his eyes lacked the cruelty that Tully had seen before in such men, so that – despite all his scars and blood and tattoos – he knew instinctively that he wasn’t the kind to hurt children. Not if he had a choice. ‘You got a name, boy?’ he asked. ‘And don’t even think of lying.’

  ‘Tully,’ said Tully.

  ‘And you live round here, do you, young Tully?’

  Behind his back, the double line of soldiers tramped wearily onwards, either side of a train of wooden carts. It distressed Tully to see all the wounded men lying upon them, and to hear the anguish in their groans. Worse was to follow, however, for the next few carts were stacked high with dead, their lifeless limbs jerking and jolting over the winter potholes. Yet the greatest shock by far was reserved for the next cart, though it only had the one body in it – a body that should have been covered head to toe by a rich red robe, except that all the bumping around had thrown it off enough for Tully to glimpse the face beneath. The sight made him so dizzy that for a moment he thought he’d faint, for he recognised him instantly from the day he’d ridden bareheaded through their village on a great white stallion, his armour gleaming and his famous sword hanging from his belt, all while attended by an honour guard of a dozen men almost as big as himself. He’d looked extraordinary that day. Untouchable. Immortal. ‘See,’ his father had told him proudly, while scruffing up his hair. ‘That’s who I’ll be fighting for.’ But now he just lay there in the back of a wooden cart, half covered by a dusty, bloodstained robe, with a gaping great wound in his chest.

  ‘He’s dead,’ muttered Tully, stunned, as the cart trundled by. ‘The king is dead.’

  The big man looked around. ‘For the love of god,’ he scowled. ‘Keep him covered up. That’s your one bloody job.’ He turned back to Tully. ‘I asked you a question, boy. Are you from around here?’

  It took an effort of will for Tully to tear away his gaze. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You have family? A father?’

  Tully nodded. ‘He was one of you,’ he said. ‘He was the best of you. The king told him so himself.’

  ‘Did he, now? Maybe I knew him, then. What was his name?’

  ‘They called him Tully too,’ said Tully.

  The big man stood up, looked around. ‘Anyone know a Tully?’ he shouted out. ‘Lived around here somewhere.’

  One of the footsoldiers came limping over. His arm was in a sling, and he looked wearier than any man should rightly look. ‘There was a Tully in Gawain’s crew that I think came from around here,’ he said. ‘A right mad bastard. Always first to put his hand up. Could tell a cracking story too. We lost him a year or so back, outside Bourges.’ Despite his weariness, he looked at Tully with kindness in his eyes. ‘That would make your mum Aggie, right?’

  The moment was so bittersweet that it took everything Tully had not to cry. He had to nod instead.

  The big man crouched back down. ‘Okay, then,’ he said, giving Tully’s shoulder a friendly squeeze. ‘I want you to listen carefully to me, Tully son of Tully. You didn’t see any of this here today. No retreating soldiers, no carts, no bodies, especially not his. If even a whisper gets out, it’ll be a disaster for us all. I mean that. Those murderous Saxon bastards will be straight over, to steal all your land for themselves. But it’s not them you should fear the most. It’s me. Because I know your name now, and your mum’s, and where you live. You hear me?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Tully, for though he didn’t for one moment believe the threat, he’d taken to the man, and didn’t want to disrespect him in front of his men.

  The shorter, slyer man was still squatting down behind Tully, holding him by his ear. ‘Word’s going to get out anyway,’ he said. ‘You know it is. Too many people saw him going down, on that bastard traitor’s side as well as ours.’ He spat sideways then wiped his forearm across his mouth. ‘All we can hope for now is to shape the story.’

  ‘Shape it how?’

  ‘Well, for a start, we could have the boy go home and tell everyone how he saw him sitting up in the back of one of our carts. Wounded and bandaged, yeah, but in good spirits, chatting merrily away, making plans for his return.’

  ‘You think they’d believe him?’

  ‘Maybe, if we gave him a token to show them.’ The king’s cart had pulled into the side so that his body could be properly covered. The man jumped up onto the back of it and pulled aside his robe once more, then stripped a ring from his finger that he tossed to Tully to catch. But Tully had always been hopeless with his hands, and inevitably he dropped it into the churned up mud.

  The big man reached down to pick it up. He wiped it clean on his tunic and gazed inscrutably at it for a moment or two, then held it out for Tully to take, though without letting go of it just yet. ‘Did you get all that, son?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Tully.

  ‘You better have, because if word of this gets out, the whole world will be at our throats. All our throats, I mean. Not just mine and my men’s. Yours and your mum’s too, and all your friends. You get what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Go on, then. Tell me what you’ve seen today. And make me believe it.’

  Tully nodded vigorously. He lacked his father’s courage, no one would dispute that, but he had at least inherited his gift for telling tall tales. ‘I saw the king passing by,’ he said, closing his eyes, because picturing stories in his mind helped to make them real. ‘He was sitting up in the back of a cart, joking with his men. He saw me standing by the side of the track and waved me over. There was a bit of blood on his tunic, so I asked him if he was badly hurt. He laughed and tossed me this ring and said he was going to have to rest up for a bit; but that I wasn’t to worry, he’d be fighting fit again very soon, in plenty of time to…’ He broke off, struggling to remember how the man had phrased it. But he’d lost the trail somewhere, and had to find his own way to the finish. ‘…in plenty of time to help us in the hour of our need.’

  ‘The hour of our need,’ grinned the big man, giving Tully the ring along with a friendly pat on the arm. ‘Yes. That’s the stuff to give them.’

  ONE

  CHEPSTOW, WALES

  It was a gorgeous Friday afternoon in Chepstow, and cheerful too, what with the sun out and everyone leaving work early to celebrate the spring bank holiday. Boisterous crowds of locals and visitors thronged the streets and castle grounds, enjoying the medieval pageantry of the entertainments put on to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the building of the town’s famous Port Wall. Minstrels in colourful clothes strummed lyres and sang their fah-la-la lyrics as they wandered to and fro. Drums were banged and trumpets blown. Stallholders yelled out for custom, offering bites of mouthwatering fo
ods or trying to interest passers-by in their lovingly-crafted dolls and jewellery. Friends hailed friends they hadn’t seen all winter. Families flapped out rugs to picnic on the grass. Children shrieked in delight as they played catch and tag and Frisbee. And a hopeful father ran back and forth in a fruitless effort to launch his kite, despite the stillness of the day and the mortified look of his young son.

  Anna Warne was getting none of that, however. She was sitting inside instead, at a table by the front window of Chepstow’s oldest bookshop, gazing enviously at all these happy folk. How she wished she was out there with them, rather than stuck in here for the afternoon, trying vainly to sell copies of her new book on William Marshal, history’s greatest knight. She’d had some faint hope that it would be popular here, if nowhere else, for he’d been the town’s most celebrated lord, having rebuilt its castle back in the late twelfth century before going on to serve as England’s regent. But nearly eight hundred years had passed since then, and the town’s good citizenry seemed to have developed a healthy lack of interest in the man – at least when it came to a straight fight between him and the May sunshine. And those few who did come in managed somehow to look anywhere but at where she was sitting with her stack of hardbacks and her pen at the ready, as though that whole section of the shop was swathed in some kind of invisibility cloak. Two hours she’d been here already, and only three copies sold – and one of those to the bookshop’s owner, embarrassed for her, and taking pity. And so she thought dark thoughts of her editor, who’d suggested this trip to give her sales a boost, and vowed to have words with her next time she found herself in London. But she knew in her heart that the fault was truly hers, for writing a book that was too academic to be popular, and too popular to be academic.

  The bell above the door gave another of its melodic chimes. She’d come to dislike it in an almost Pavlovian way already, signalling as it did yet another disappointment. A great bull of a man strode in, tall and broad and meaty, in his mid to late fifties and with his scalp shaven close, presumably to hide the baldness she could make out in the shadow left behind. Of Indian or at least subcontinental heritage, though dressed very much like an English man of business, with polished black brogues, a powder blue silk shirt and a pearl grey suit that looked incongruously formal for a bank holiday weekend, all covered by a gorgeous Astrakhan overcoat that was surely far too heavy for so pleasant a day. His face was flushed and shiny with perspiration, and he was breathing hard, as though he’d been walking fast. Yet, now that he was here, he didn’t seem in any particular hurry. He looked around the shelves with an expression of mild contempt, as though he hadn’t read a book since leaving school, and was proud of it too. Then, to Anna’s surprise, he noticed her sitting in her lonely corner and came marching on over. He picked up one of her hardbacks, turned it around and held it out at arm’s length to check her face against the photograph on its back cover, like he was working at passport control. ‘You wrote this?’ he asked, with more than a hint of suspicion, clearly thinking her altogether too young and too slight to have produced so substantial a book.

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘I just had the jackets printed up so that I could sit here all afternoon answering daft questions.’

  He gave a grunt of what might equally have been umbrage or amusement. ‘Name’s Ravindra,’ he told her, in a disconcertingly broad East Midlands accent. ‘Ravindra Pandey. Can we talk?’

  ‘We already are.’

  ‘Not here. In private. I’m parked nearby.’

  ‘Are you for real?’ asked Anna, who’d learned in the most brutal way possible never to trust strange men who wanted to get her into their car. ‘I’m signing books.’

  The man looked disdainfully around the near-empty shop. ‘I’m sure they can spare you for ten minutes.’

  To her relief, the doorbell chimed again before she had to answer, and two more people came in – a handsome woman in her late thirties, slender and of medium height, expensively dressed in a leopard-print haircalf jacket, tan wool trench trousers and suede ankle boots. She had striking bright green eyes and a pair of designer sunglasses that she’d pushed up like an Alice band over her crinkly, shoulder-length russet hair. She was closely followed by a diffident-looking man of fifty or so, short, hunched and a little overweight, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses on a string around his neck. He was wearing trainers, baggy blue jeans that slouched down over his hips despite his leather belt, a plain green T-shirt and a thin blue waterproof jacket, all well worn and rather shabby, and made to look even more so by the elegance of his companion. ‘Sorry,’ said Anna to Ravindra, glad of the excuse. ‘Looks like the afternoon rush has arrived.’

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ replied Ravindra. ‘They’re with me.’

  She gave him a sceptical look, for they didn’t seem to have much in common. But indeed they came straight over. ‘You walk so fast, Ravi,’ complained the woman.

  ‘I didn’t come all this way for the sightseeing,’ he told her. He took a step back and crouched to check the cardboard boxes beneath the table. ‘How many copies?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anna. Except she did. Her editor had, rather optimistically, shipped six boxes down here, both for this afternoon’s signing and then for her evening talk. At eight copies apiece, minus the three she’d sold, it made the maths painfully easy. ‘Forty-five.’

  ‘And how much are they a pop?’

  ‘Nineteen ninety-nine.’

  ‘Nineteen ninety-nine? Bloody hell.’ But he took out his wallet anyway, strode up to the counter. ‘Pack them up, then, love,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘I’m having the lot.’

  TWO

  Quentin Parkes had just turned fifty-three years old, yet he’d still not fully conquered the childhood shyness that had made him stand in dark corners at teenage parties, praying that his clothes would blend in with the wallpaper, or at least that his fellow guests would mistake him for a standard lamp or coat-rack. Diffidence was the last trait you needed as a university lecturer, of course, but thankfully he’d discovered in himself an ability to perform, to adopt a brash persona even as he’d walked into the lecture hall. Yet sustaining that illusion was so draining that once he’d strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage, he’d always deflated back into his true self, as uncomfortable as any self-respecting Englishman with people making scenes anywhere, but most particularly in bookshops. And so it was with envy as much as with embarrassment that he watched Ravindra dominate the place like a circus barker, making sure everyone there knew he was buying Anna Warne’s complete stock of books, save for the few she insisted on keeping back for her talk that night. He wasn’t sure what he coveted most – his air of command, his indifference to opinion, or his absurd wealth.

  ‘Are you at least going to help us carry them to my car?’ Ravindra asked Anna, once the transaction was done. And what could she say to that? She shook her head in bemusement but picked up one of the boxes, as did Melissa, leaving the others for Quentin and Ravindra. The bookshop’s owner gave them a delighted smile as he held open the door for them. They filed along the pavement to the zebra crossing then across the road to the car park, where they packed the boxes away into the capacious boot of Ravindra’s beautifully waxed royal blue Rolls Royce Phantom.

  ‘Well?’ Anna asked Ravindra, rubbing her hands on her trousers. ‘You know how to grab an author’s attention, I’ll give you that. What do you want with it?’

  ‘It’s not me that wants it,’ he said, nodding at Quentin. ‘This is all that one’s idea.’

  Quentin found himself hesitating. Anna was younger than he’d expected; younger and smaller and scruffier, attractive enough of feature yet dressed in shapeless drab clothes and with messy short brown hair, making her look more like one of his old archaeology students than an authority in her field, so that suddenly he felt foolish for ever having suggested they come. But then he reminded himself that, however mousy and innocuous she might look, she’d dispatched first a Russian mobster and then a murderous rapist on her way to finding King John’s lost crown jewels, before seeing off another equally vicious killer during the Beowulf affair. So maybe there was more to her than first appeared. Maybe she was the right person for this after all.