Overview

The eagerly anticipated follow-up to the number one bestseller Vagabond, this is the third instalment in Bernard Cornwell's Grail Quest series. In 1347 the English capture Calais and the war with France is suspended by a truce. But for Thomas of Hookton, the hero of Harlequin and Vagabond, there is no end to the fighting. He is pursuing the grail, the most sacred of Christendom's relics, and is sent to his ancestral homeland, Gascony, to engineer a confrontation with his deadliest enemy, Guy Vexille. Once in the south country Thomas becomes a raider, leading his archers in savage forays that will draw his enemy to his arrows. But then his fortunes change. Thomas becomes the hunted as his campaign is destroyed by the church. With only one companion, a girl condemned to burn as a heretic, Thomas goes to the valley of Astarac where he believes the grail was once hidden and might still be concealed, and there he plays a deadly game of hide and seek with an overwhelming enemy. Then, just as Thomas succeeds in meeting his enemy face to face, fate intervenes as the deadliest plague in the history of mankind erupts into Europe. What had been a landscape of castles, monasteries, vineyards and villages, becomes death's kingdom and the need for the grail, as a sign of God's favour, is more urgent than ever.

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9780007172443

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Praise for Bernard Cornwell and the Grail Quest series: 'It is all spectacular, rattling good stuff: war and torture; love, lust and loss.' The Times 'Amidst a wonderful cast of kings, monks, cardinals and mercenaries - Thomas finally confronts a magnificent villain...Crackling with good deeds, fine characters and sparkling set pieces, it confirms yet again Cornwell's reputation for masterly historical novels.' Daily Mail 'What a very fine writer Mr Cornwell has become.' Economist

Beset by the plague and those hellacious Dominican inquisitors, the sure-shot hero of Cornwell's Archer series (Vagabond, 2002, etc.) continues his eventful search for the Holy Grail. Armed with his own Weapon of Mass Destruction, the deadly English longbow Thomas Hookton, ne (on the wrong side of the sheets) Vexille, has made it through the battle of Crecy and torture at the hands of a Dominican madman, comforted by a succession of equally tough and healthy young ladies, to arrive at last in the Languedoc, the southern French country where the Vexilles, before falling into the Cathar heresy, were lords of Astarac and where the few clues left by Thomas's father seem to lead to the holy relic. Accompanied by Robbie Douglas, the tough young Scot he rescued in Vagabond and by landless, one-eyed, Norman turncoat Sir Guillaume D'Evecque, and backed by his own posse of longbowmen, Thomas has seized the stronghold of Castillon d'Arbazon in order to lure his ruthless crypto-Cathar cousin Guy Vexille to the neighborhood. Guy and Thomas each believe the other holds the clues to the location of the Grail that everybody is sure the Vexilles held and hid. Everybody, that is, except the spectacularly cynical Cardinal Archbishop Louis Bessieres, who has imprisoned a gifted Parisian goldsmith and his doxy with orders to run up a state-of-the-art fake, which, once planted and then discovered, will put the Cardinal in the papal throne at Avignon. There is, of course, a lovely lass for Tom in Castillon d'Arbazon. She's Genevieve, scheduled for burning by a creepy fanatic priest who decided, after some lustful torture, that she's a heretic. Lissome, blond, and a quick student of the crossbow, Genevieve, property of the devil though she may be, is just the gal for our archer, and together they take on the Cardinal, Guy, the local baron, and any number of Genoese crossbowmen, and, as the Black Plague arrives, get their hands on the box that leads to the cup of everyone's dreams. The usual Cornwell bull's-eye. (Kirkus Reviews)

Praise for Bernard Cornwell and the Grail Quest series: 'It is all spectacular, rattling good stuff: war and torture; love, lust and loss.' The Times 'Amidst a wonderful cast of kings, monks, cardinals and mercenaries -- Thomas finally confronts a magnificent villain!Crackling with good deeds, fine characters and sparkling set pieces, it confirms yet again Cornwell's reputation for masterly historical novels.' Daily Mail 'What a very fine writer Mr Cornwell has become.' Economist

Author Information

Bernard Cornwell worked for BBC TV for seven years, mostly as producer on the Nationwide programme, before taking charge of the current Affairs department in Northern Ireland. In 1978 he became editor of Thames Television's Thames at Six. Married to an American, he now lives in the United States.

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