I was dazed, and I went forth without knowing where, feeding on cries of hatred and despair, experiencing in the utmost depths of my flesh a new and monstrous sensuality. I had the sensation that a sort of hydra, a fantastic beast with teeth and tentacles, had been born in the depths of my heart and was growing there. I was possessed by the ambient evil. I could not detach myself from it and I suffered from only being one with that frightful beast.
The wounded had been brought to a large square. It was said that one quarter was being defended. I learned that more than six thousand people had taken refuge in the Church of Saint Nazaire, but the soldiers had been able to throw torches in through the roof. The dresses of women had caught fire. They had run around, spreading the fire that was consuming them. The pews and the woodwork of the choir had started to burn in their turn, and then the entire church. God had then wrought a miracle. The walls of the cathedral had split without anyone being able to explain how and all the sinners it sheltered had been buried.
I was exhausted by fatigue. I sensed my reason quitting me. At a corner of what must have been the main street of the city, which had been particularly looted, I heard acclamations. The soldiers who were standing fell to their knees. Those who were in the shops and feasting there appeared on the threshold with their red faces, with their helmets suspended around their necks by the visor, and immediately prostrated themselves.
Preceded by a sergeant-at-arms carrying an iron cross and followed at a distant by a group of Templar knights, a man—or, rather, a phantom—had just surged forth within that scene of destruction. He was wearing the white robe of Cistercian monks and mounted on a white horse with a floating mane. I thought of Jesus Christ, and then of the angel Lucifer; but I immediately recognized that handsome regular face with a big nose and frowning eyebrows that made one thing of an ever-irritated Jupiter. It was the papal legate, Arnaud, Abbot of Cîteaux, who commanded the army of crusaders with Simon de Montfort.
He raised his right hand, and with a regular, automatic gesture like that of a man throwing manna, he blessed the murderers, the drunkards and the profaners; he blessed the weapons that had slaughtered; he threw toward everyone the manna of spiritual recompense, the promise of eternal paradise. After his passage, foreheads were raised, illuminated by delight, and the soldiers of Christ measured the merit they had acquired by means of that day of victory.
In the midst of the Templars riding behind the legate I recognized the latter’s counselor, the Spanish monk Dominic,13 to whom miracles were attributed, and who was reckoned to be a saint throughout Christianity. His enormous forehead and his entirely bald cranium made a dull patch in the midst of the gleam of helmets.
At the street corner where I was standing there was a heap of corpses piled one atop another, and above which someone had thrown a leather sheet. But the sheet, being too narrow, allowed mutilated feet and dislocated heads with tresses like sinister vegetation to protrude. Dominic’s horse collided with the foot of a dead man and reared up. I followed the monk’s gaze and I understood that he did not see the corpses over which he had nearly stumbled. He only had the faculty of seeing the living, those who wore a red cross on their breasts. He saw me, and my cross, and his jaws clenched benevolently. He did not turn his head to avoid the sight of the heaped-up dead. They were invisible for him. I noticed a large patch of fresh blood soling his robe and causing it to stick to his knee, but for the same reason, he must not have sensed either the dampness or the odor.
I do not know exactly what happened to me during the hours that followed. At a given moment, I must have fallen down somewhere and fallen asleep with the hydra of evil stuck to my flesh, so alive within me, identified so closely with my being, that I would not have been astonished to feel long claws instead of nails at the tips of my fingers and to see my teeth elongating over my breast.
When I woke up, the setting sun was singularly low in the sky. It cast a disquieting fiery light, by means of which I orientated myself in order to emerge from the city, but in looking toward the east I saw the glare of another sun, which seemed to be setting in the midst of more ardent blazes. A third, flamboyant to the north, and a fourth, to the south, caused formidable sheaves of sparks to rise toward the heavens. There were suns at the four cardinal points.
I started running straight ahead, prey to an unnamable terror. I was witness to cosmological phenomena that, since time immemorial, had been held to be the presages of the end of the world. Four globes of fire were illuminating the wretched planet of human beings, in order to expose the most secret coverts of their souls. They cast a light so vivid that by their clarity I was able to decipher the interior book of my thoughts. There I read my cowardice, my reckless self-esteem and the enjoyment of evil that, hypocritically, I named curiosity. I had taken pleasure in the crime. I had been an impassive witness to the slaughter of the lamb, and I would justly share the punishment of the accursed.
My teeth chattering, I stopped in a square before a little church, the portal of which was smoking. And it seemed to me that from that smoke sprang the rainbow announced by John in the Apocalypse. I thought I saw on his throne the one who is similar to a stone of jasper and sardonyx. The twenty-four old men clad in white emerged slowly from the church. The four mysterious beasts beat their wings and stared at me with their innumerable eyes.
Then an idea occurred to me. Someone had killed me while I slept. I was dead. That church, which was being extinguished, those open dwellings from which death-rattles emerged, and all those streets elongating in sinister fashion, were nothing but he dream of a soul wandering in the afterlife. Hell had taken the form imposed by the final image of my life. I had mingled with the murderers, I was one of them, and now the sword of the archangel was about to drive me somewhere, with reproofs, against the bloody robe of the Spaniard Dominic, against the eyeless cranium of the Englishman Simon de Montfort. I was so frightened that I started screaming.
Other screams responded to mine. Alongside me, other dead souls were running, in fear of the four apocalyptic suns. And one of them expressed in the language of living men that fires, terrestrial fires lit by human hands, had been set in the four corners of the city.
“It’s the Truands!” he cried. “They’re fighting with the Italians over the prisoners.”
And another said; “They’ve dragged away three hundred young women with ropes around their necks and are making them walk by pricking them like beasts.”
Then I returned to myself. I considered the appearance of the streets. I was still in the city of Béziers and I was navigating as best I could, wanting at any price to escape the funereal circle in which I was turning.
Suddenly, I recognized the place where I was. I recognized the small square, the fountain and the plane tree. I noticed a cadaver sitting up, one of those killed by the admirable archer on the high roof, in the same position where I had left him. In the basin of the fountain, the corpse of the baby that had been thrown from a window was floating in the water, eyes open. It was bloated and its face, rendered enormous and black, was like that of a monster. But the location, with the dusk and the silence of death, had recovered the placid calm that had impressed me in the morning.
I was not far from the Catalans Gate. I was about to launch myself into the side-street that led to it when I heard a joyous cry and a name: “Gunnur!” I saw the pilgrim with the cutlass by whose side I had marched. He recognized me and gave me an amicable wave. His face still had an expression of benevolence but its color had become earthen. He was dragging after him a chest attached to him by straps, into which he had put his booty. He showed it to me triumphantly. In the midst of miscellaneous objects, partly wrapped around a golden candlestick, there was a long hank of a woman’s hair, which he must have cut off with his cutlass, because the extremity was bloody. He saw the direction of my gaze and picked up the tress proudly in order to show it to me. He made it stir like a snake. Without knowing why, I thought of the divine tresses of Esclarmonde. He must have tho
ught that I envied him such a possession, because he emitted a loud burst of laughter.
Then, with all the strength of my arm, I struck him on the head with my sword, the same blow with which he had struck the fleeing woman. But I delivered it from in front, and I shouted with all my might: “Gunnur!” He fell face down and did not move again. The square had become darker and more silent, and I started running toward the Catalans Gate.
I got through it unhindered, but when I was far enough from the ramparts I took a small path that followed a direction opposite to that of the crusaders’ camp, which ought to lead to the road to Carcassonne.
I was hungry, thirsty and exhausted. When I had marched for a long time and night had fallen, I sat down on the roadside. In the distance, the glow of the burning city could be distinguished, and the outline of its calcined skeleton. A continuous, desperate clamor reached me, which must have been the plaint of the young women that the Truands were raping.
A shadow extended before me and I realized that I was at the foot of a cross. I got up, threw my arms around it, and shook it with all my might. But it had been profoundly embedded in the earth and it resisted as if it had had roots. In the end, I finished up extracting it and bringing it down. Then I tore off the body-stocking on which the red cross of the crusaders was sown, and scattered the fragments. Only then did it seem to me that I was liberated from the monstrous beast that I had carried in my heart. And as the guard of my sword was also in the form of a cross, I armed myself with a stone and struck it until it was twisted.
IV
In Narbonne, it was impossible for me to buy a horse. The number of people who were fleeing was so great that I would not have been able to find one even if I had wanted to pay a fortune. A Jew sold me a donkey and with that equipment I set forth for Carcassonne.
At the foot of the mountain of Alaric, two days later, I was stopped by a group of the Vicomte’s soldiers. They were not letting anyone into Carcassonne except combatants. They saw solely by the color of my gaze that I was one, and they let me pass.
It was very hot and I had dismounted in order to relieve my donkey. When I reached the ramparts I saw that there were watchmen on all the towers and that the posterns were closed. Carcassonne, dating within its walls from the Visigoths, was enclosed like a warrior in stone armor.
As I prepared to cross the drawbridge I crossed the path of a few cavaliers who were emerging from the city. By the pennants that floated from their lances I recognized that they belonged to the Comté de Foix. Behind them was a woman covered from head to foot in a long back cloak. She turned round to make an amicable sign to a bare-headed young man of short stature who was watching her draw away, motionless, leaning on his sword. I recognized the impassive features and dreamlike eyes of Esclarmonde de Foix, Vicomtesse de Gimoez.
With my unkempt beard, covered with dust, and drawing my donkey by the bridle, I had such a wretched aspect that my first thought was to hide. But Esclarmonde rejoined a cavalier with the head of a peasant who must be her husband, the Vicomte de Gimoez, and passed by without letting her gaze fall on me.
I followed her with my eyes as she drew away. I envied the men of her escort for breathing the same air as her and raising the same dust. I would gladly have paid with my life for the joy of holding her horse or carrying a message written by her hand.
A voice questioned me rudely.
“Where are you going? Where have you come from? I’m wondering why a beggar was allowed to pass.”
I was in the presence of a short, stout man who had unlaced his breastplate, doubtless because of the heat. He had to be a person of some importance for, at a sign from him, two soldiers got ready to seize me.
Doubtless my attitude lacked respect, for he shouted at me again.
“I’m the Seigneur d’Espinouse, do you hear?”
I hastened to reply that I was Dalmas Rochemaure, squire of the Comte de Toulouse, and that I had just done battle with the men of my homeland.
He shook his head dubiously and murmured a phrase that included the word “spy” and also “prison.”
But at that moment the young man to whom Esclarmonde had made a sign of adieu came forward. He wore a soldier’s hauberk with thick mesh. His movements were lively. He had a cheerful attitude full of enthusiasm. By the marks of respect with which he was surrounded, I recognized Roger Trencavel, Vicomte de Béziers and Carcassonne.
“Why not? Perhaps my uncle has a servant more courageous than he is,” he said, turning to an old knight with a long gray moustache whose costume was singular and whose gaze was full of malice. I discovered subsequently that he was the celebrated Pierre de Cabaret, who had retained from his sojourn in the Orient the habit of wearing a red turban and a striped silk surcoat, and carrying a large Moorish scimitar.
Roger Trencavel made me a sign to follow him beyond the second enclosure, all the way to the foot of the Tour Narbonnais. There he asked me to tell him what I knew about the crusaders’ army and the destruction of Béziers.
I recounted all the scenes that I had witnessed, and while I was speaking he tapped a flagstone with the point of his sword, with blows that became increasingly forceful.
When I had finished he remained silent for a long time, sometimes darting a severe glance at me, as if I had unleashed such great calamities personally. Then he said to Pierre de Cabaret: “They’ll be here within a week.”
The old warrior in the turban leaned toward him and murmured something in a low voice, pointing at me.
“You think so?” said Trencavel. And I sensed benevolence radiating from him.
“He can come with me,” said Pierre de Cabaret. “I’ll utilize him for the defense of the Samson Tower.”
Roger Trencavel had charged each of his Barons with the defense of a tower, and Pierre de Cabaret commanded the Samson Tower. He had brought men-at-arms from his château, who numbered scarcely more than thirty. In order for them to be instructed in the art of war, he had also brought workmen from the workshops of the Mint, who formed a proud corporation that affected to scorn the obligatory handling of arms. I received the command of ten of them.
It was on the ninth day after my arrival that we perceived the advance guard of the crusaders from the height of the ramparts. For an entire day the immense army flowed round the city like a swarm of iron insects and surrounded it completely. The waves that divided it had the appearance of a blue blade thrown across an anthill.
The crusaders had left a wide empty space between their front lines and our ramparts. No one knew exactly how the death came about of the Seigneur d’Espinouse, who was commanding the Narbonnais Gate. As he was fat, he had the habit of taking off his breastplate in order to breathe more easily. He was watching the sunset from behind a crenellation when an arrow launched with infernal skill pierced his belly clean through.
Roger Trencavel immediately gave strict orders that no one was to expose himself needlessly. The Mint workers took advantage of that to give evidence of a ridiculous pusillanimity while patrolling the round-path. Those I had under my orders often laughed at me behind my back, making insulting remarks about my master, the Comte de Toulouse and speaking scornfully about the Toulousans, who—out of cowardice, according to them—had made a pact with the crusaders. I wanted to show those metal-founders that the soul of a Toulousan might surpass fear.
I knew that they were great lovers of music and songs. I borrowed a viol from one of them and on the evening after the death of the Seigneur d’Espinouse, as they were all gathered in the guard-room of the Samson Tower, I told them that I was going to sing but that I needed celestial space before me and the light of the stars above my head. I went out and went to sit down on a crenellation, in the open, with my legs dangling over the void.
Accompanying myself on the viol, I sand the ancient Song of the Violet, which I had learned from a wandering singer under an elm tree in the Place Saint-Sernin. Among the talents I had received at birth that remained latent in me, for want of being develope
d, was that of singing with a moving intonation and an incomparable force. My voice expanded into the distance, traversing the extent, reaching as far as the camp where the men of the North were sleeping heavily like oxen. Many of them, marveling, advanced silently in order to hear me better. When I finished, I could see blurred human silhouettes beyond the ditches, in the ecstatic pose that reverie and music produce.
Then, lifting up my seven-stringed viol I stood up on a crenellation, expressing with a gesture of my arms my delight at having created, but virtue of my singing, a few minutes of truce consecrated to beauty.
And as the poltroons of the Mint shouted to me to beware, and I lifted my viol again, I received a violent impact in the breast that projected me on to the stone. An arrow, perhaps launched by the same archer who had killed the Seigneur d’Espinouse, had just struck me over the heart. Fortunately, I had put my coat of mail on beneath my body-stocking, because of the prudence from which is customary in Toulouse not to depart, even if one is reckless. I spat over the rampart to express the disgust inspired in me by the savages who, after having profited from the song, had attempted to kill the singer.
We made sorties, and the crusaders attempted to take the city by assault. The two fortified outlying districts that extended along the right bank of the Aude were lost in turn, captured and burned. Many valiant men fell in combat. War machines were seen in the distance looming over the tents like fabulous beasts.
The men who were confided to me were singularly transformed. One was killed, several were wounded, all of them sensed the proximity of death, but gradually, their initial fear was transformed into a courage that almost equaled mine. At first I sensed a secret bitterness at that; but I thought afterwards that it was to my example that the courage in question was due, even though no one admitted it. I reflected also that the men who come from the land that extends from Marseille to the sandy pine forests are like that; they only manifest their courage after an ostentation of poltroonery.
The Blood of Toulouse Page 11