Alice broke off and looked self-consciously at Baillard.
“A gift?” he asked, shaking his head. “No, not a gift.” He sighed. “And where do you think these stories come from in the first place?”
“The Bible, I suppose. Or possibly the Dead Sea Scrolls. Perhaps from some other early Christian writing, I’m not sure. I’ve never really thought about it in those terms before.”
Audric nodded. “It is a common misconception. In fact, the first versions of the story you talk about originate from the twelfth century, although there are obvious similarities with themes in classical and Celtic literature. And in medieval France in particular.”
The memory of the map she’d found at the library in Toulouse suddenly came into her mind.
“Like the labyrinth.”
He smiled, but said nothing. “In the last quarter of the twelfth century lived a poet called Chretien de Troyes. His first patron was Marie, one of daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was married to the Count of Champagne. After she died in 1181, one of Marie’s cousins, Philip of Alsacee, Count of Flanders, became his patron.
“Chretien was immensely popular in his day. He’d made his reputation translating classic stories from Latin and Greek, before he turned his skill to composing a sequence of chivalric stories about the knights you will know as Lancelot, Gawain and Perceval. These allegorical writings gave birth to a tide of stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.” He paused. “The Perceval story- Li contes del graal- is the earliest extant narrative of the Holy Grail.”
“But…” Alice started to protest. She frowned. “Surely he can’t have made the story up? Not something like that. It can’t have appeared out of thin air.”
Again, the same half-smile appeared on Audric’s face.
“When challenged to name his source, Chretien claimed that he had acquired the story of the Grail from a book given to him by his patron, Philip. Indeed, it is to Philip that the story of the Grail is dedicated. Sadly, Philip died at the siege of Acre in 1191 during the Third Crusade. As a result, the poem was never finished.”
“What happened to Chretien?”
“There is no record of him after Philip’s death. He just disappeared.”
“Isn’t that odd, if he was so famous?”
“It is possible his death went unrecorded,” said Baillard slowly.
Alice looked sharply at him. “But you don’t think so?”
Audric did not answer. “Despite Chretien’s decision not to complete his story, all the same, the story of the Holy Grail took on a life of its own. There were direct adaptations from Old French into Middle Dutch and Old Welsh. A few years later, another poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, wrote a rather burlesque version, Parzival, around the year 1200. He claimed he was not following Chretien’s version but another story by an unknown author.”
Alice was thinking hard. “How does Chretien actually describe the Grail?”
“He is vague. He presents it as some sort of dish, rather than a chalice, like the medieval Latin gradalis, from which comes the Old French gradal or graal. Eschenbach is more explicit. His Grail – gral – is a stone.”
“So where does the idea come from that the Holy Grail is the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper?”
Audric pressed his fingers together. “Another writer, a man called Robert de Boron. He wrote a verse poem, Joseph d’Arimathie, some time between Chretien’s Percevaland 1199. De Boron not only has the Grail as a vessel – the chalice of the Last Supper, which he refers to as the san greal – but he also fills it with the blood taken from the Cross. In modern French the sang real, the ”true“ or ”royal“ blood.”
He stopped and looked up at Alice.
“For the guardians of the Labyrinth Trilogy, this linguistic confusion san greal and sang real- was a convenient concealment.”
“But the Holy Grail is a myth,” she said stubbornly. “It cannot be true.”
The Holy Grail is a myth, certainly,“ he said, holding her gaze. ”An attractive fable. If you look closely, you will see that all these stories are embellishments of the same theme. The medieval Christian concept of sacrifice and quest, leading to redemption and salvation. The Holy Grail, in Christian terms, was spiritual, a symbolic representation of eternal life rather than something to be taken as a literal truth. That through the sacrifice of Christ and the grace of God, humankind would live forever.“ He smiled. ”But that such a thing as the Grail exists is beyond doubt. That is the truth contained within the pages of the Labyrinth Trilogy. It is this that the Grail guardians, the Noublesso de los Seres, gave their lives to keep secret.“
Alice was shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re saying that the Grail is not a Christian concept at all. That all these myths and legends are built on a… a misunderstanding.”
“A subterfuge rather than a misunderstanding.”
“But for two thousand years the debate has been about the existence of the Holy Grail. If now it is revealed not only that such a thing as the Grail legends are true but…” Alice broke off. She found it hard to believe what she was saying. “It is not a Christian relic at all, I can’t even begin to imagine…‘
The Grail is an elixir that has the power both to heal and significantly prolong life. But for a purpose. It was discovered some four thousand ago in Ancient Egypt. And those who developed it and became aware of its power realised that the secret had to be kept safe from those who would use it for their own benefit as opposed to the benefit of others. The sacred knowledge was recorded in hieroglyphs on three separate sheets of papyrus. One gave the precise layout of the Grail chamber, the labyrinth itself; one listed the ingredients required for the elixir to be prepared, the third the incantation to effect the transformation of the elixir into the Grail. They buried them in the caves outside the ancient Avaris.“
“Egypt,” she said quickly. “When I was doing some research, trying to understand what I had seen here, I noticed how often Egypt came up.”
Audric nodded. “The papyri are written in classical hieroglyphs – the word itself means ”God’s words“ or ”divine speech“. As the great civilization fell into dust and decay, the ability to read the hieroglyphs was lost. The knowledge contained in the papyri was preserved, handed guardian to guardian, over the generations. The ability to speak the incantation or summon the Grail was lost.
“This turn of events was without design, but it, in turn, added an additional layer of secrecy,” he continued. “In the ninth century of the Christian era, an Arab alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah, decoded the secret of the hieroglyphs. Fortunately, Harif, the Navigataire, became aware of the danger and was able to confound his attempts to share his knowledge. In those days, centres of learning were few and communication between peoples slow and unreliable. After that, the papyri were smuggled to Jerusalem and concealed there within underground chambers on the Plains of Sepal.
“From the 800s to the 1800s, no one made significant progress in deciphering hieroglyphs. No one. Their meaning was only elucidated when Napoleon’s scientific and military expedition to North Africa in 1799 uncovered a detailed inscription in the sacred language of hieroglyphs, in everyday demotic Egyptian of the time and Ancient Greek. You have heard of the Rosetta Stone?”
Alice nodded.
“From that point, we feared it was only a matter of time. A Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion, became obsessed with breaking the code. In 1822, he succeeded. The wonders of the ancients, their magic, their spells, everything from funerary inscriptions to the Book of the Dead, all suddenly could be read.” He paused. “Now, the fact that two books of the Labyrinth Trilogy were in the hands of those who would misuse it became a cause for fear and concern.”