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  THE WASTE LAND

  THE WASTE LAND

  An Entertainment

  by

  Simon Acland

  Copyright © 2013 by Simon Acland

  FIRST EDITION US Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  All the characters in this novel are fictitious or are historical figures whose words and actions are fictitious. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Acland, Simon.

  The waste land : an entertainment / by Simon Acland.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8253-0068-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8253-0624-2 (ebook)

  1. Crusades—First, 1096-1099—Fiction. 2. Knights and knighthood—Fiction. 3. Grail—Fiction. 4. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PR6101.C28W37 2013

  823′.92—dc23

  2012033179

  For inquiries about volume orders, please contact:

  Beaufort Books

  27 West 20th Street, Suite 1102

  New York, NY 10011

  [email protected]

  Published in the United States by Beaufort Books

  www.beaufortbooks.com

  Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books

  www.midpointtrade.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Interior design by Jane Tatam, Amolibros

  Cover Design by Tony Denton

  Cover Illustration by John Vernon Lord

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Simon Acland spent over twenty years as a venture capitalist. When his company was sold in 2007 he took the opportunity to turn to writing. His interest in the myths and legends surrounding the Holy Grail stems from studying twelfth and thirteenth century French grail romances at university.

  The Waste Land is his first novel. It will shortly be followed by a sequel, The Flowers of Evil.

  Simon has also written a non-fiction book about venture capital, entitled Angels, Dragons and Vultures – how to tame the venture capital beasts.

  You can find more information about the genesis of The Waste Land on the website www.simonacland.com.

  What Other Writers Say About The Waste Land

  Catherine Bailey “An intriguing tale…”

  Douglas Hurd “The Waste Land will be thoroughly enjoyed by anyone with a taste for rollicking adventure laced with a subtle dose of literary learning.”

  Stanley Johnson “Sex, violence and more than a dash of romance: Simon Acland’s gripping First Crusade mystery thriller rivals the Da Vinci Code for interest and suspense.”

  Giles MacDonogh “I found it utterly gripping.”

  Juliette Mead “Simon Acland’s debut novel is a potent cocktail: take one part First Crusade historical romance, one part modern academic satire – and add three jiggers of coming-of-age, Grail-questing, spur-winning Knight’s tale. A rollicking, galloping read from a highly individual story teller.”

  Tim Waterstone “Highly original and a most enjoyable read.”

  For Tiresias

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to Ranjit Bolt for his translation of Ovid, to Wayne Barron for his help with my Greek, and to Noonie Minogue for her help with my Latin. Thank you to John Vernon Lord for permission to use his splendid illustration on the cover, to Dennis Hall for his design advice, to Richard Unthank for his maps, and to Jane Tatam for making this publication a reality.

  I would like to thank everyone who read various drafts of this book and gave a nervous first-time author ideas and encouragement, especially my family, Peter and Claire Ainsworth, Hugh Barnes, Candida Brazil, Felicity Bryan, Robert Dudley, Douglas Hurd, Stanley Johnson, Katie Lee, Giles MacDonogh, Julie Mead, Jack Tenison, Chris Wakling and Tim Waterstone. Thank you to them, and to Susannah and Martin Fiennes, Caroline and Simon Clarke, Mark Hudson, Patrick Seely and Julia Kreitman for the helpful introductions they made.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

  Although the nature of every person in this book is imaginary, the following characters are based on actual historical figures:

  Hugh de Semur (1024-1109), sixth Abbot of Cluny from 1049 (known as “the Great”), canonised 1120

  Otto de Lagery (1042-1099), Prior of Cluny until 1078, then Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, elected Pope Urban II in 1088

  Adhemar de Monteil (d. 1098), Bishop of Le Puy, representative of Pope Urban II on the First Crusade

  Godfrey de Bouillon (c. 1058-1100), Duke of Lower Lorraine from 1087, Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri from 1100

  Eustace de Boulogne (c. 1055-c. 1125), elder brother of Godfrey, Count of Boulogne from 1087

  Baldwin de Boulogne (c. 1059-1118), younger brother of Godfrey, Count of Edessa from 1098, King of Jerusalem from 1100

  Godehilde (d. 1098), Baldwin’s wife, daughter of Ralph de Conches

  Bagrat (dates uncertan), Baldwin’s Armenian friend and guide

  Walter Sans Avoir (d. 1097) Lord of Boissy, a leader of the first wave of the First Crusade

  Hugh de Vermandois (1053-1101), son of Henry I of France

  Alexios Comnenos (1048-1118), Byzantine Emperor 1081-1118

  Peter the Hermit (d. 1115), a leader of the First Crusade

  Bohemond of Taranto (c. 1058-1111), son of Robert Guiscard, from 1099 Prince of Antioch

  Raymond de Saint Gilles (c. 1041-1105), from 1094 Count of Toulouse, Duke of Narbonne and Margrave of Provence

  Tatikios (dates unknown), trusted general of Emperor Alexios

  Tancred (1072-1112), nephew of Bohemond, later Prince of Galilee

  Hasan-i Sabbah (c. 1058-1124), founder of the Assassins, known as the Old Man of the Mountains

  Mohammed (dates unknown), his son

  Peter Bartholomew (d. 1099), a soldier in the service of Provençal knight William de Cunhlat

  Guillermo Embriaco and his brother (dates unknown), Genoese sea captains

  Geldemar Carpenel (d. 1101), a knight under Godfrey’s command, later Lord of Haifa

  PROLOGUE

  The Master of St Lazarus’ College was annoyed. His guest of honour for dinner at high table was late. The Master remembered that the Best-Selling Author had been a poor timekeeper as an undergraduate at the college. When he had turned up for anything at all, that was. Still, a little inconvenience could be suffered if it proved possible to extract the coveted donation to the College’s funds.

  The other members of the Senior Common Room stayed well out of the Master’s way, even though this meant loitering in the colder corners of the classically proportioned room, away from the fire blazing under the Adam mantelpiece. They had all learned to read the expression of irritation in those harsh eyes, magnified and distorted by the hard steel-rimmed bifocals. The Master’s temper had not been improved by five years away from the college presiding over an obscure branch of the intelligence service. An unacademic brusqueness had entered his manner. This now notched with his undeniable intellect to fire cruel shafts of sarcasm that were hard to bear before a couple of glasses of sherry.

  Had the College Fellows been given to kindly thoughts, they might have blamed the parlous state of the College finances for the Master’s moods. His frosty eyes glanced with scorn around the room. What did they know about the real world outside, where cold winds blew? Did they even begin to understand the threat to their comfortable lives if he could not raise the millions needed to make good the damage to the College F
oundation by a series of disastrous private equity investments? Gah. What did he care about keeping them lazy in their cosy chambers? Why on earth had he taken on the task of dragging the most backward of colleges into the modern age? St. Lazarus indeed! If ever an institution needed to be raised from the dead it was this one. But what really mattered was his peerage. Everyone recognised that it was richly deserved, but it would still elude him if he failed in his task and instead became the first Master to preside over the bankruptcy of an ancient college. It would make no difference that those foolish investments had been made before his time.

  This painful reverie was interrupted by the door to the Common Room. It opened to reveal the Best-Selling Author wearing an unaccustomed expression of shame-faced apology under his affectedly tousled leonine hair.

  “I’m so sorry, dreadful traffic. My driver, lost in the one way system. All very different to my day.”

  “Well, there we are. There’s just time for a quick glass of sherry before dinner. Dry?”

  The Best-Selling Author brightened at the offer of a drink. He perked up even more when he saw that he was the focus of the room’s attention. The bloody College had taken his scholarship away – justifiably maybe as he had done no work and ended up with a Third – but now they were fawning over him.

  The critics had never exactly focused their praise on the Best-Selling Author’s sensitive understanding of third party characters. Plot yes, excitement yes, definitely hard to put down. Plenty of page-turning Boy’s Own action. Some quite good sex. But subtle characterization? No, not really. In fact not at all. So it was no surprise that the Best-Selling Author basked in the Senior Common Room’s attention under a misapprehension.

  For in fact the fellows hid critical appraisal behind their bland expressions. Each was busy matching the Best-Selling Author’s features to the publicity photographs so well-known from the back cover of his books. Not one of them would have owned up to buying the Best-Selling Author’s oeuvre. Of course not. Too low brow by far. But the truth was that curiosity had conquered their intellectual snobbery. Each had surreptitiously plucked a gaudy volume from a bookstand in airport or railway station before paying at the counter with the shamefaced bravado normally reserved for purchases of pornography.

  “Airbrushed,” thought the History Don caustically. “The true facts eliminated. The source material rewritten and distorted by the addition of more, thicker, darker curls.”

  “How cruel the passage of time,” thought the Chaplain with a modicum of Christian charity. “How the lines have deepened and the cheeks have sagged.”

  “What a clever point of view,” thought the Professor of English. “A neat perspective created by showing only the head, not the loose decaying spread of the body underneath.”

  “A poor translation,” thought the Modern Languages Tutor. “An inaccurate rendering.”

  “The adjective does not agree with the noun,” thought the Classics Fellow. “Definitely the wrong case.”

  And then there was just time to arrange the smiles, extend the hands, and murmur appreciation at their introduction to the celebrity, before dinner was announced. They all marched to their stations in the oak-panelled hall.

  High Table was the battlefield across which the dons were accustomed to ride their hobby-horses, jousting with whichever lance their research or teaching had that day provided.

  “At least he has not written a holy grail book yet,” remarked the Chaplain with sotto voce mischief to his neighbour the Professor of History. “I hate all that cod religion. As far as I’m concerned, it’s downright blasphemous.”

  As the Chaplain had intended, the Modern Languages Tutor overheard and looked affronted. Modern Languages was not quite the right way to describe his subject because he was a medieval specialist and believed that no French literature was worth reading after Rabelais – except Nerval perhaps.

  “Actually Chrétien de Troyes’ ‘Roman de Perceval’ shows a great poetic imagination. There is nothing specifically Christian about Chrétien’s grail, if you’ll excuse the pun. The word graal in the original just translates as dish – the sort of dish in which you’d serve a large fish.”

  The Chaplain snickered slightly because just at that moment one of the ancient college servants began to pass round a plattered poached salmon. The Modern Languages Tutor ignored him with as much scorn as he could muster.

  “All the religious stuff was tacked on later by Robert de Boron and the rest. If Chrétien had only lived to finish his story the grail would never have become holy, much less a popular mystery.”

  The Professor of English leant forward aggressively. “I’d take issue with the idea that there is any real originality in the grail romances at all. Most of the imagery is just recycled from earlier fertility legends. I know that it is fashionable these days to rubbish Jessie Weston but nobody who has read Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ can really doubt the arguments in her ‘From Ritual to Romance’. The real poet of imagination was Eliot, whose genius melded the grail stuff with Ovid and the earlier myths. ‘The Waste Land’ is simply the last word on the subject.”

  The History Don intervened quickly because he knew from past experience that the misty expression now creeping over the Professor of English’s face presaged a torrent of quotation. “It’s all a load of nonsense. Simply not rooted in fact. A waste of time.”

  The Classics Fellow liked the last word to be his, like the proper thump of a Latin verb at the end of a sentence. “Just comparing the crudeness and lack of sophistication of the grail romances with the magnificent achievements of Homer, Virgil and Ovid so many centuries before, will show you instantaneously the distance of civilization’s backward movement since the glorious era of Ancient Greece and Rome.”

  The combatants glared at each other across the table.

  In the body of the hall the undergraduates had finished their lesser meal and trooped away noisily from their hard benches. The Master leant back in his comfortably armed chair, withdrawing before re-engaging his guest.

  “Do have some port. In your honour I’ve had them dig out the last couple of bottles of the Taylor ’45. I think you’ll find it’s still drinking exceptionally well. Of course, at the rate we are going, the whole cellar will have to be sold off to pay the College debts. That is unless an insolvency practitioner gets to it first. My predecessor allowed some truly terrible investment decisions. So we need help and I am talking to as many of our distinguished alumni as I can.”

  The Best-Selling Author had known that this moment would come and as his final fortification took a deeper draft of the old port than was quite decent. He sighed as the sweet-sharp warmth travelled down his throat. He avoided the steel of the Master’s gaze by making a great play of appreciative concentration on the ruby glow refracting in the antique cut glass.

  “Yes of course, I quite understand. I’d really like to help the old alma mater. The trouble is, I’m in a bit of a pickle myself. My divorce was painful, and came just after that fantastic film rights deal. You might have read about it in the tabloids. So the bloody wife got half of it. And frankly we creative types are not much good at looking after money either. It just seems to trickle away.”

  Now he leaned forward and injected a confidential tone into his voice.

  “But to be honest, the real problem is that I haven’t written anything new for quite a while. My last book goes back three, no four years. It takes a long time for these things to reach the shop shelves, you know. Sometimes I wonder what my publisher does all day. And the advance was spent a long time ago. My agent negotiated such a good deal up front that there is no chance of any royalties coming through. Now I just seem to have run out of ideas. I can’t get any good plots going.”

  A deep gloom fell as the diners silently contemplated their problems. The fire at the side of the hall burned too far distant to cast any warmth, and instead just flickered ominous shadows on the hammer beam ceiling. The dark corners of the ancient room closed in menacingly
around the small pools of light cast on the table under the heavy silver candelabra. A breath of cold air whispered through the chamber, guttering the candles and chilling the dons under their gowns. One or two of them glanced over their shoulders, as if to see what had caused the draught, but in reality anxious to check that nothing was creeping up behind them. The ancient spirits of long-dead fellows seemed to circle the room in threatening disapproval.

  A voice, harsh and nasal, cut the silence. It came from the dark shadows beyond the candles’ range.

  “I think the time has come for me to share what I have been working on these past few months.”

  The Fellows started at this unexpected intrusion. They had forgotten the insignificant Research Assistant, who now leaned forward into the light. The other members of the Senior Common Room shuddered as the candles lit up the livid red scar which so grotesquely disfigured one side of his twisted face. The Chaplain felt some Christian pity for the Modern Languages Tutor who had to supervise this monstrosity.

  “A few months ago I made the most extraordinary discovery in the library. I found a parchment manuscript, written partly in old French, interspersed with medieval Latin and occasional koine Greek. It was stuck in the middle of an uninteresting palimpsest – probably the reason it had not been spotted before. I’d date it to the first half of the twelfth century. It certainly predates Chrétien de Troyes. One really interesting thing is that there are bits of it that Chrétien must have drawn on for his Perceval. I’ve deciphered virtually all of it now. It seems to be the journal of some Crusader monk who claims to have discovered the truth of the Holy Grail. It is an extraordinary story, as gripping as anything that our honoured guest has ever devised.”

  The Best-Selling Author gathered himself to challenge such an outrageous statement. But the History Don got his blow in first.