La piedra angular

The 1st plot line follows the old baron, Ansiau of Linnieres, as he goes on his last pilgrimage to the Holy Land. With companions he meets & loses en route, we follow him 1st to southern France. There's a war going on against the heretics--if marauding bands of soldiers pillaging helpless villages in god's name can be referred to as such--& Ansiau, mistaken for a soldier by the peasantry, barely escapes having his hands hacked off & being nailed to a tree. He gets thru this & is able to make it, finally, to his destination, where his grim adventures continue. Constantly hungry, footsore, weary, robbed & beaten, they beg for alms wherever they go, along with thousands of other desperate people. His story ends in the Holy Land. It's not pretty. The other story line concerns Herbert, his son, now the Baron, & Herbert's son, Haugenier, now a knight, at Linnieres. Again, as with the 1st book, The World Is Not Enough, their lives are dominated by religious superstition & strict social codes. Nobody in their class weds for love. Marriage is a political alliance. True love is always illicit. With the strict, gloomy eye of the Catholic Church brooding over everything, happiness is difficult to achieve. It's impossible for anybody to reconcile basic human desires with the codes governing their lives. Herbert, despairing early of ever achieving goodness, simply abandons the attempt, becoming a self-indulgent, evil man. Haugenier, the best of them, goes the other way, giving up everything: his home, his child & his true love, to become a monk.--Paul McGrath (edited)