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believed nor cared whether it had genuinely come from the cross of Jesus Christ. As a connoisseur of relics, however, he knew that it must have considerable value, given its unusual authentication.
    Cynically, but realistically, he knew that if all the alleged fragments of the True Cross revered in abbeys, priories and cathedrals across Europe were assembled together, they would not reconstitute a cross, but a small forest! Similarly, most of the bone fragments of the saints and martyrs owed their origin to sheep, swine and even fowls. Still, no religious establishment that wished to attract the lucrative pilgrim trade could afford to be without a relic or two–and the more extravagant the claims of origin, the more valuable they were.
    Robert Blundus slipped the relic back into its tube and replaced the wooden plug. Though ostensibly he was a common chapman, this was a cover for his real trade, as a dealer in religious relics. He travelled the roads of England in his search and often went to France, Spain and even Italy to seek sanctified artefacts. He prided himself on dealing in a better class of relics than the many pedlars who hawked homemade or obviously spurious objects about the countryside, and he had built up a reputation for procuring good material. This particular relic was such a prize addition to his stock because it had a certificate of provenance. He felt in the little box and took out a folded strip of parchment, bearing a short sentence in Latin. He could not read it, but for a silver coin a clerk in Fontrevault Abbey had translated it for him. This is a fragment of the True Cross, stained with the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which was preserved for safe-keeping in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It was signed by Geoffrey Mappestone, Knight–and, most important of all, bore a small wax seal carrying an impression from his signet ring over the date, July 1100.
    Blundus grinned to himself as he carefully put away the vial and parchment and wrapped up the wooden box. Thankfully, the Crusader’s certificate of authentication made no mention of Barzak’s curse, which might well have reduced the value of the relic to almost nothing.
    As he lay back on his pallet, trying to ignore the influx of strange fleas that entered his clothing to breed with his own French mites, he sleepily went over in his mind what the abbey clerk had told him. The man was a priest in lower orders, employed in the chancery of Fontrevault, the famous abbey in Anjou, and was thus well acquainted with the gossip and legends of that place. Sweetened by his translation fee and several cups of red wine, he told Blundus that the relic had been brought to the abbey over ninety years earlier, in the first years of the century. It had been sold to the then abbot by one Julius, who had travelled from Marseilles, where he had landed by ship from the Holy Land.
    He was paid for it in gold, on the basis of Sir Geoffrey’s authentication, but that evening, on his way to the nearby Loire to take a boat down to the coast, Julius had been struck by lightning in a sudden violent thunderstorm that had appeared from a clear blue sky. The clerk was happy to relate the gruesome fact that when the blackened corpse was found, the gold had been fused into a molten mass which had burned into Julius’s belly!
    The abbot had had a special gilded box made for the relic, which was placed in an ornate casket upon the altar of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, off the main nave of the great abbey. Though originally vaunted as a most important acquisition, it soon fell out of favour, as pilgrims and cripples who came to pray and supplicate before it either gained no benefit or actually became worse. Within a few years, the relic was shunned and ignored, especially after ominous rumours began circulating about the curse, brought back by knights and soldiers returning from the First Crusade, especially some of the newly formed Templars. The chancery clerk