Ben wished he could lie. He wished all the lies that flowed so easily would pour out of him like honey. But he couldn’t. Not about this. He had never been able to. The impossibility of it, the impossibility of lying about it had poisoned Judaism for him - made it the great temptation, just beyond reach. He had grown up in an area with Holocaust survivors. Every time he looked at them he thought of his grandparents and he ran away. He couldn’t pretend his family had suffered like theirs. That would be the ultimate betrayal. He took a deep breath.
“No concentration camp.”
“What, then,” Luke was impatient. He liked his information to be neat and this was getting messy.
There was an empty silence. “My grandfather was quite senior in the army. He married someone who converted to Judaism. So he was allowed to stay. They were all allowed to stay. Some of them had mischling stamps and all of them had special permission. They were hounded, but not sent away.”
The silence became emptier and then it became angry. And then… “I don’t believe you,” Luke said, abruptly. “No German Jew would fight for Hitler.”
“He wasn’t fighting for Hitler. He was fighting for Germany. Besides, there was no way out. None. Every country closed its borders to Jews. God knows my family tried. So they stayed alive and fought for Germany.” Konig was bitter. He had been bitter about it all his life. Bitter and ashamed.
“Well, I don’t believe you. Your family is lying. Or this is one of your inventions.”
“Maybe.” Ben was tired. If Luke wanted to believe this was a lie, then he would let him. This was a battle Ben could only lose. “Put whatever you like on your damned form.”
* * *
Ben dressed in his medieval costume and went for a walk. He took no equipment. He needed to get away from Luke and from his own past, and the only way he could do that was to go further into the past. He noticed a farmer silently working in a vineyard, alone. First grapes of the season. That was something that needed company. An event.
Ben swung himself up three levels of terracing, grabbed a spare basket, took out his knife and started picking grapes. The man looked across and checked that Ben knew what he was doing, and then he nodded. The farmer was silent. Ben was silent. It helped.
* * *
30 September (St Jerome)
The grape harvest had finally begun, Artemisia noticed, and told Ben. “Early grapes only,” Ben noted in his diary. It wasn’t simply a bad year. It was a very bad year.
Bad years had consequences.
There was a rumble right along the bent street that led from the wall to the Hérault. The rumble was that the blue water had been an omen. That the wine would be sour and that people would go hungry. It wasn’t just those who grew vines. Guilhem-the-smith would have to tighten his belt until there was more money. Berta’s husband would have to sell her cloth farther afield and seek higher prices. Even Fathers Peire and Louis were affected by lower tithes. Omens were in order.
Bad temper was also in order. That temper caught the mood of those who were too busy working at bringing in the poor harvest and producing possibly the worst vintage on record. Sour grapes were everyone’s lot.
Guilhem took on the mood of the town and so did his page. Not publicly. But words were said and blows were given. “There is a price for laziness,” Guilhem informed his protégé.
“Oh yeah,” said the young man, uncaring. He just wanted to leave this place. Leave Guilhem. But he was tied. His whole family was tied by the brilliant opportunity that had arisen when Guilhem was shamed, but he was the one paying.
“You will stay here, in this miserable stone village, while I do some errands in Montpellier. You will demonstrate to me you’re not as lazy as you look and then you will demonstrate to me that you’re not as disrespectful as you sound. If you do this, I may talk to a friend about taking you on. We’re obviously not suited.” His page hated Guilhem for his honesty and his generosity and for the fact that he now had no reason not to work.
This argument was why Fiz found himself sitting in a high stone hall a very long way from home, outside a decorated wooden door, while, below, someone was practising on a stringed instrument. At first it was delightful and exotic — the sound was given a plaintive lilt by the stone and it reduced the size and grandeur of the place to something more comfortable. Even the wide stone stairs (worked stone, smooth and polished) seemed almost like the softer stone of home. It started to annoy, as she played the same riff over and over. Fiz wondered what the penalty was for murdering musicians in Montpellier.
* * *
The text sat on the computer screen, glaring in dark red.
Jimmy, thinking life a bore, drank some H2SO4.
His father - a GP - gave him CaCO3.
Now Jimmy’s neutralised, it’s true; but he’s full of CO2!
“It wasn’t me,” Geoff said.
“You look too innocent.” And indeed he did. He was all hair and big dark eyes at this moment. Artemisia looked up into those eyes, trying to work out if they hid a lie. Ben didn’t look into Geoff’s eyes. Instead, he argued. “It’s been you other times.”
“Yes, it’s been me. And Mac. And once it was Sylvia. Twice it was Pauline. You can blame all of us, if you want.” He was entirely unconcerned.
“You started it.” This was sounding like the playground.
“Actually,” said Artemisia, a little timidly, “I think I did.”
“Sorry?” Ben’s startlement was painfully clear.
“I put a second version of the saints’ lives under a hyperlink. We all used to do it in my old department, and I was bored.”
“Let me show you,” said Geoff, far too enthusiastically.
Ben clicked and read and clicked and read, then he swivelled on the chair and look at the errant duo. “This has been here, all along?” Konig gave up. He shook his head, then laughed. “You two deserve each other,” was all he said.
Chapter Thirty
Places in Time
Guilhem was always astonished by Notre Dame des Tables. It was halfway between the shapes of the Christian lands he knew best and the lands of the Moslem world. It dominated the square, not just though its size, but through its strange mixture of round and square and columned, and because people thronged around it in a very precise manner. They ebbed and flowed like the tide. Pilgrims went in one door, those with business flowed around them. If one watched, one could see the world happen.
“I’m hungry,” said a voice at his elbow.
Guilhem looked at Fiz and wondered why he had brought him. This boy was nothing but complaints. “Stay close inside the church,” was all he said.
They avoided the pilgrims and the nave, crossing only where they had to. Guilhem headed straight for where he needed to be - the statue of the Black Virgin. He made his courtoisies, and then went directly to the moneychanging tables outside and to business.
There were definite advantages to a city famous for its decadence. One of those advantages was that business was neat and fast and no-one asked one’s background. Word of his business here would not reach the north. This was one of his reasons for accepting such an exile - Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert looked to Montpellier, so no-one thought it surprising that Guilhem should visit. In fact, it was expected, and he carried messages from the town to the city. Almost as if he belonged. Almost.
Guilhem ensured the silence of his young man using a very simple but effective technique. He warned Fiz about the taverns and hostels frequented by the pilgrims. “They’re not as holy after they’ve been to the church,” he said. “And Montpellier is decadent. Not a sensible place for a young man to go by himself.”
Of course Fiz went. Guilhem had to haul him out of a ditch by the elbow and he did so without grace and without gentleness. Yes, Fiz would be silent, for if word of that ditch and his doings near it had got back to his family, there would be trouble. There were advantages in borrowing a young man from a small place to be one’s servant.
Fiz found Mo
ntpellier big and desperately exciting. The streets were different and there were some houses that were impossibly huge and there were so many, so many trades and talkings and people. Whenever he found himself overwhelmed, he would reach out and touch the stone and orient himself and remind himself of his native town. People walked differently and talked differently and spoke strange languages and used strange money. Not his people.
He wondered how Bona would handle her apprenticeship in this foreign city — he was pleased he had no-one to push him forward for such a thing. Even so, he eyed the shops of the silversmiths enviously. He would never be able to buy anything from them if he inherited those small patches of land and remained his mother’s son. And yet… Fiz stomped the stones underneath his feet and felt himself, rooted to the rock, safe in what he knew and who he was.
There was a summer thunderstorm. Such a wet summer, everyone was saying to each other as they flowed past, going about their strange city lives. The aftermath of the shower changed the stones beneath Fiz’s feet and made them less secure.
All sorts of scents emerged from beneath the heavy streets. Some were charming: some were foul. At one moment it seemed that every dog and every horse in the whole city had shat at once and that the ordure had settled beneath the rock and developed in rankness and that the rain had brought all that smell forth.
In Saint-Guilhem, the water always ran and such smells weren’t given time to develop. Even when he and his friends had tried to create them, the rain mostly washed them downstream and downstream again. Maybe that was what he was smelling here? Himself from a month ago? Bah. He didn’t know. All he knew was that, despite the odours after the storm (or maybe because of it, as the sweet smell of mint and then lavender chased the dung away) he was glad to be here, in one of the biggest cities in the world. Still, he was happier at home. He didn’t want to live here.
In reflecting on his future, Fiz had decided something important. If he was not coming back here, he needed to see the place properly. He ignored Guilhem’s instructions a second time. While Guilhem was dining in elegance with his friends, he paid a visit to the places the pilgrims stayed, taking just enough coin to get a little drunk. He emerged bruised and cut and impressed.
Fiz took care of his bruises and cuts before Guilhem woke up and arranged his sleeves carefully to cover the worst of them. His care was wasted - he kept drawing back his sleeve to check the very best one. Such well-earned pain! Guilhem found him watching bruises grow and darken while he was waiting for Guilhem to emerge from yet another message in yet another shop, next morning.
“It doesn’t really hurt,” he explained.
“That’s not the point,” said Guilhem, “The point is that you’re a fool.” Fiz gave a big grin, happy in his foolery.
Guilhem’s mind was only half on Fiz. He had personal business. For the last few months his mind had revolved around it, wavering between Lodève (possible) and Nîmes (preferable). Finally, he had decided to sort himself out at Montpellier, because it was possible to remain anonymous here and because there were more available prostitutes. Pézenas, of course, had been the easiest, but he wasn’t ready to annoy the good brother-knights again, so he would save that possibility. His need would grow again, no doubt.
Guilhem had finally found the details of a safe and clean establishment while he did business that day. His mind tossed around how much worry it had concerned him, deciding where he would find a woman and how that worry was nearly past.
The next day he spent some of his new money. Upon emerging, and upon grabbing Fiz by the collar and marching him away from trouble, his mind dwelled on chastity again. Did he want to become a priest? Did he want to follow one of the many wishes his family had for him and become a Templar or perhaps a Hospitaller? He doubted he was suited to priesthood, for his chastity was rare and hard-won. Maybe, however, a militant order? Still, priest or knight militant - both held appeal.
Two possible paths. Guilhem laughed aloud at the thought of himself as a bishop. He didn’t want to go that route (couldn’t go that route) because his legitimate half-brother was already one and the family believed in not keeping all their eggs in one basket. And other orders were not possible either, for similar reasons. And here he was re-inventing the wheel, when this had all been discussed in tedious detail before he was sent south. All that was left was returning to the fold or joining the Knights Templar. As his aunt had convinced his uncle. Those reasons were all tired, but still they returned and returned and wove threads of annoyance into cloth of dissatisfaction. It had all been easier when he had been Fiz’s age.
Guilhem visited the guild of goldsmiths and delivered a promise that Bona would be there next season. He carried a long message back for her family, entrusting it to Fiz, who rehearsed it over and again as they walked the distance back to the moneychangers. He tried to remember the child or her parents but couldn’t. The request itself had come from Guilhem-the-smith.
After sorting out his money for a second time, ready to spend some of it on objects of need and desire, Guilhem found himself admiring the gros. It was not a coin from the north. Such a big coin. So much buying power. Also, it featured the king of Aragon instead of the king of France. An improvement on familiar coinage in almost every way.
Final messages and tasks and then he would return home. If one could call a cream and cream stone village in the middle of nowhere ‘home.’
One of the links on the guard chain for his helm looked very insecure. It might be a long time before he used it, but he wanted it fixed. He left it with the specialist and went to do the remaining messages, now that he knew how much money he had left. He eyed off lanceheads made with Bordeaux steel — if he bought weapons now, however, he would send the wrong message to his family. He dreamed of a lance with such a head. He dreamed of it piercing plate, driving through aventail and killing his opponent. His mind dwelled on the image, of the lance pushing through the neck and his enemy awash with blood. He shook his own neck to clear his head. He had business to attend to. More business.
The most pressing business was financial. He had miscalculated the amount of money he needed. He paid a quick return visit to Notre-Dame-des-Tables to find a moneychanger. After that, he walked lightly. The coins his aunt had sent, so hard to spend, were all instantly disposable whenever he wanted. And he had done this in Montpellier. Outside France. Where his cousin had no jurisdiction. Where the coins were stronger and the government very much not that of Paris. Guilhem felt faintly wicked, like a child who had done something forbidden. He would soon do more that his cousin would dislike. He wanted luxury goods, from the Levant in particular. He wanted the stuff of his own exotic past, where he had the special freedom of a noble pilgrim.
* * *
“It’s a horseshoe,” Artemisia said, a bit blank. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Tell me about it,” said Pauline.
Sylvia wasn’t near. Artemisia sighed inside. She wasn’t going to get into squabbles about how Pauline managed to get a horseshoe, nor about who should be where. Nor was she going to hide anything. She would do this by the book. “I’ll have to ask Guilhem. He knows horses. Horses are to these people what computers are to us. Make the world go round. So I need to ask someone who knows.”
This she did, at the very first opportunity.
“Old,” he said, squinting in the golden sun. “Shoes today do not have this,” and he pointed to the wavy rim. He had learned not to use too much technical language in talking to Artemisia. Artemisia understood most things - except when Guilhem forgot and simply spoke, at great length. “Also,” he added, “it’s light. Very old. Dropped long ago.” He handed the shoe back.
The two walked until Guilhem said, “We can hear the bells from here.” They sat down and waited for those bells. Guilhem’s head tilted towards the abbey, “This place has a good mass. So does the church near the Hérault.”
Artemisia knew mass, but, “A good mass?”
“They pay proper
attention to the dates and the correct prayers.”
“Where I come from all masses are good.”
“Such a perfect place,” Guilhem mocked.
“No, just a place with well-instructed priests.”
“Not all places are fortunate.”
“You have encountered some that are less blessed? On your travels?”
Guilhem paused to remember. “Sometimes,” he said, “Sometimes I wish that I were a Cathar. Or a pagan. Did you know…” and his voice tailed off before he turned to her, enthusiastically. “Did you know that pagans do not really worship Tervagant or Apollon?”
“You asked?”
“I did.”
“How wonderful and strange is the world,” remarked Artemisia and the two sat there in peace, the scent of lavender and rosemary and the hum of bees making it pastoral and carefree. The mood was spoiled by two children peeping out from behind a kermes oak.
“It doesn’t hide you,” Guilhem called out, cheerfully.
“Not them. The other one is better,” the girl told the boy, and they ran away giggling.
* * *
Since vintage brought the townsfolk into the hills and the time team had no idea how to handle it, most of the team was underground until harvest was done. The exceptions to this were Ben and Artemisia.
For Artemisia, Guilhem brought a sample of the new wine from Fr Peire, to thank the holedwellers for staying out of the way. “It’s very earthy, but not bad,” Ben said, and didn’t let on that he’d already sampled it.
Ben then performed some proper tests on some of the wine, put some away for return home, and spent an evening writing it up. While his notes were theoretically triggered by Fr Peire’s gift, in reality they were from his experiences in the field and what his farmer-friend had taught him. He was determined to make it possible for the wine to be produced from the descendant grapes, upon their return to the twenty-first century.
* * *
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