Painted in Blood

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  ‘God, no … no, I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, then. The problem is that they – the lords of this world, those with the pretty colours and fierce beasts on their shields – do not understand that you are free. They do not understand freedom at all. You do, by now.’

  He was right: I did understand freedom, well enough to see that Raymond of Toulouse had almost lost his, and that it filled him with dread. ‘Do I take it that you are agreeable, my lord?’ I asked him. He drummed his fingers on the table.

  ‘I have been asked this question before. Richard sent a man – a bishop, I think, name of Pierre. He was most impertinent. To him my answer was no, although the fellow was so wrapped up in his own bluster that I am not sure he took it thus.’ The Count winced, as if his anger had taken a bite out of his innards. He was growing old, and he had no son. The young daughter of the lord of Provence would have given him a last chance to sire an heir. It was no love match, but Raymond was struggling to make his choice, that was plain. Finally he bit his thumbnail savagely and pointed the ragged end at me grimly.

  ‘Circumstances are somewhat altered now, young man. So I will allow you to achieve what bishop Pierre did not. You may send word to Richard of Cornwall. Tell him he may have his little Sanchia.’

  ‘That I will do, my lord,’ I said. So he would forfeit an heir to save his land. It was the braver choice, I had to admit.

  ‘How can I serve you now, Lord Raymond?’ asked the Captain.

  ‘You can do no more, Michel. I will have to ride out to the borders and wait for Louis to show his intentions, but we know what those will be. I will have to grovel to him, and let the wolves in to my lands again. Your people will not survive them this time, my friend,’ he said, quietly. The Captain lifted his head and watched the sparrows fly from beam to beam.

  ‘You must seek a treaty with France,’ he said. ‘Send word to Blanche: Louis’ mother will do what she can to stop any more bloodshed. You must stop fighting, Lord Raymond, but I cannot. The Good Christians will either fight to the death, or be led to the slaughter. They are your people too, my lord. What would you have them do?’

  ‘You must look to yourself, Michel,’ said Raymond, pushing himself upright. ‘When France is let in, I will not be able to protect you.’ He turned and walked slowly away from us towards the cold hearth, and stared for a moment into its cavernous black mouth. ‘You have been a loyal servant,’ he said, and his voice echoed hollowly from the fireplace. ‘Many years ago you helped my father to win a marvellous victory, and your reward was exile. You have done all you could to help me again, and your reward …’ He turned to face us, and leaned back against the stones. ‘The only reward I can offer you is the truth. Which is that Louis will force the Inquisition upon me and my subjects, heretic or not. I will have almost no power, and that I will use to keep Rome and the Dominicans out of my lands. I must beg for mercy from the king: I shall not bend my knee to the pope as well. The Good Christians are finished. I am an excommunicate. I have no son, and my daughter is married to Louis’ brother. If I cannot give my people a son, this country of ours will vanish at the moment of my death. I have fought against that fate all my life. I must be allowed to marry and get an heir. If I have to turn against your people to save mine, I shall, with a glad heart. There. That is my gift, old friend.’

  The Captain smiled and drew himself up to his full height. I had not noticed that his back had become a little bowed, but now, in his long tunic of black damask, he stood like a looming shadow, as if the cold fireplace had breathed a black flame out into the hall.

  ‘We all strive, Lord Raymond, and we all fail. Your world will fade, and your place in the memories of men will be stained with that fading, that defeat. I will not be remembered, and nor will my brothers and sisters, but we will leave this world behind, far behind. You and all lords, and kings, and popes, will roam for ever through the ruins of your vanity, but we shall walk through the fire, and be gone.’ He bowed to Raymond, and held up his hand.

  ‘Goodbye, Count. If you must fight the Devil by joining his army, then so be it. There is no victory in it for you, and that, as you understand, is your curse. But know this, lord. The Good Christians have their victory already.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Outside, the sun was blazing down, and there was a breeze coming up from the south, sharp with pine resin and sage. The birds chirped and clattered in their wicker cages. The Captain led me unhesitatingly, silently, through the chaotic tangle of alleyways until we came to the city walls. There was a steep flight of stairs and we climbed them, the Captain’s legs as spry as my own. When we were on the parapet, which was crowded with lounging guards, courting youngsters and peddlers, he led me again past a watchtower and then another until we had escaped the crowd. Finally he stopped and leaned on the rosy bricks of the wall. We gazed out northwards over the flat, fertile lands that stretched away to the soft hills far in the distance.

  ‘It was here, or hereabouts,’ said the Captain at long last. I said nothing, for I had nothing to say. It seemed that the time for idle questions was past.

  ‘When I was something like your age I … No, wait,’ he said. ‘I told you, a long time ago, something of my family, didn’t I?’

  ‘In Viterbo,’ I said, remembering that strange night in the pope’s palace when we had dined with an Inquisitor and stayed up very late, talking of the past and of the future. ‘Only that Simon de Montfort …’

  ‘I told you everything important, then,’ said the Captain, holding up a finger. ‘Yes: de Montfort. I escaped him, with some others of our village, but my family did not. And so I took to the fields of my homeland and, I suppose, cheated death not once but many times. So it was with all of us who survived the French. It was a land of refugees and outlaws – who had been the highest folk in the land before de Montfort came. Many died. I found my way to my liege lord, Count Raymond of Toulouse, and became a knight in his army. I was lord of Montalhac – there were hundreds of us, nobles without land. Faydits, they called us, young men in rusty armour, bellies empty, hearts raging. Anyway. I fought de Montfort, killed Frenchmen when I could. There was a great battle, at Muret, when the King of Aragon joined us and we thought we would drive the wolves from our country. De Montfort faced us, and we had twenty men to every one of his. I was in the army that day. I saw his little army all huddled around the red lion on de Montfort’s flag. I faced the French charge, when it struck us like a mountainside crumbling into a valley. It was a sound …’ He touched his ear, and grinned at me, but there was nothing in his face but remembered horror. ‘I still hear it. We could not lose, and then that terrible sound, two armies crashing together like a great mountain toppling down into a valley. Thousands of our people died – seven or more thousand. We fled. The pope gave Languedoc to Simon de Montfort, and ordered him to hunt us Good Christians to the death.

  ‘And then came Toulouse. Five years of scrabbling, fighting off the French, who were everywhere, gorging themselves like rats in a tithe-barn on our land and our people. And de Montfort was fighting us for his land – his land, mark you, the pope’s gift. And in 1217 he was ready to take the prize, which was Toulouse itself, his capital – except that the folk of Toulouse had decided that they did not want the French devil as their lord, for they had one already. He came to terrorise, to tyrannise, but then, greedy swine that he was, he left to steal more land down in the south.

  ‘So we came in disguise, early in the morning, riding like fury through the gateway, and when we were inside we unfurled our banners and Count Raymond threw back his cloak to receive the kisses and tears of his people. “The morning star”, they called him, and though he was an ageing man by then he did shine, to me and to all of us, for there was still hope then, and he carried it with him.

  ‘The French were furious, as you might imagine, and de Montfort brought his red lion flying up from the south. He laid siege to the city – his city. All through the winter we held him off, and it was terrible, because the
French were brave as beasts are brave, and hurled themselves at the walls until we butchered them. And then we rode out and were butchered in our turn. But the countryside was against Simon, and we were supplied with ease. Then Raymond’s son joined us – Raymond the Younger, whom you have just met. Achilles, they called him, fairer than a rose, for he was young and strong, and gave the city new life. We held out through the winter and into the next summer, until Simon’s patience snapped. In his vanity he built a great siege engine that towered over our walls, a wooden monster that began to lumber very slowly towards the city, a few yards a day. When it reached the walls we would be lost – how we cursed it, the great lumbering thing, covered all over with raw cowhides that stank like a mountain of corpses. So we made a great sally, all the men of the city, and the Wolf met us and hurled us back. But just when he seemed to have bested us, one of the mangonels on the walls behind us let fly, and the stone found Simon’s head and crushed it like a ripe fig.

  ‘The Wolf is dead! The whole city took up the cry. The French were finished. We attacked them again and again, burned their stinking tower … and they slunk away. I tell you, Patch … but you look puzzled, my friend.’

  ‘No, sir, no, not puzzled. It is a mighty story,’ I said hurriedly. For it was, and my head was fairly spinning with strange pictures: the Captain as a young man, that was odd enough, but charging at Muret? Riding into a besieged city? It was almost as if I had not seen this man properly in the seven long years I had been at his side.

  ‘It is simply that …’ I bit my lip, then pressed on. ‘It is simply that I cannot imagine you as a knight,’ I finished, wondering if I had presumed too much. But he laughed, something like a proper laugh at last.

  ‘Aha. Well, I might say the same about you. I told you about the stone that crushed the Wolf’s head? It is a famous story, that.’

  ‘I have heard it, of course,’ I said. ‘It was a woman who cast the stone – that is the tale, anyway.’

  ‘That is so. The walls were manned by women and even girls, children, when the men went forth. Noblewomen, in fact, for everyone was caught up in this great, burning thirst for vengeance, and Count Raymond – well, they called him Morning Star, but also Christ, even the Good Christians; and his son was our springtime. The people of Toulouse, every living soul, were ready to give their life for their lord. But you have heard the story. The stone was thrown by a mangonel crewed by a lady from Béziers and her three daughters. If you know what the Wolf did to Béziers, you will know that this lady sought to avenge twenty thousand souls slaughtered there, her mother and father, her husband and oldest son amongst them.’

  ‘Can you aim a mangonel?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘Hardly. But a quick eye can judge distance, and when a target comes into range … No, what the lady from Béziers took was an opportunity. It was chance that brought the Wolf under her machine, but she took his head off just the same. That mangonel was lashed down where you are standing, by the way. Over there …’ He pointed to where a poplar tree stood at the edge of a field of corn. ‘That was where the tower came down. Do you see that tree with the vines growing over it?’ I shielded my eyes: there it was, a crossbow-shot away. ‘Simon de Montfort fell there. I did not see it: I was down in the fight for the tower. But I heard the cry go up. And I turned and looked back, up here.’ He slapped the bricks. ‘The next day when I looked out from here, all you could see below were corpses and naked limbs, white like maggots around the carcass of the tower.’

  ‘I have seen that, now,’ I said. ‘How strange – now I have met two men who were here that day.’

  ‘Who is the other?’ asked the Captain.

  ‘Simon, Earl of Leicester. He saw his father go down, so they say, and he could not have been more than ten years old.’

  ‘Strange again,’ said the Captain, picking at a yellow disc of lichen on the wall. ‘I was ten when his father killed mine.’ He flicked the lichen out into space. ‘It looks peaceful enough, doesn’t it? Much like when I was a boy. But there are invisible chains that bind everyone here to some horror or other. Count Raymond – he is no more free than that tethered goat down there. And now that I have returned, neither am I.’

  ‘What will we do, then?’ I asked.

  ‘We?’ The Captain turned his face to mine. I could see the lines that were deepening in it, like a dry slope scored by a summer downpour.

  ‘There is nothing left in the Pharos Chapel for Louis to buy. I would dearly love to go back to Devon, but I will not be any man’s vassal. And the comforts of Venice will be all the more welcome if I postpone them for a while,’ I said. I was thinking of the corpses I had seen in the fields around Saintes, and of the death of fathers, and so I was almost startled when the Captain laid his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You can come with me, if you like,’ he said simply. ‘I am going to see Gilles.’

  ‘Very well. Where are we going?’

  ‘To the Synagogue of Satan.’ He began to laugh, and the breeze caught the sound and swept it away towards the hills. ‘That is, we will ride south,’ he said, sombre again, ‘to where the Good Christians will be gathering. The Inquisition likes to call it that, but men of reason have always called it the castle of Montségur.’

  We left the next morning early, and the Captain led us in a canter across the flat water meadows. He wanted to shake the gloom of the city and its defeated lord from his bones, I guessed, and we did not look back. Soon we were riding through hilly country, heading south-east. We were heading for Mirepoix, where the Captain had an errand, and we got there at noon the next day. It was a market day, and we found ourselves struggling against a tide of cattle and oxen coming into the town to meet their fate. The whole place smelled of dung, but it seemed rich and content. We put up for the night in a good inn near the covered market, and as soon as we had thrown our packs onto the bed, the Captain patted me on the shoulder.

  ‘Let us go out. There is someone I want you to meet.’

  We made our way across the square, past countrywomen with wind-scoured faces hawking chickens and geese, through herds of stolid cows, confusion in their gentle eyes. The Captain led me along the side of the church and into a narrow alley between old and leaning houses. It was alive with gossiping women yelling to each other from their doorways in thick Occitan dialect, and though the Captain did not look left or right he was smiling. Then he halted before an archway, glanced up and down the alley and stepped through it. I followed him into a dim courtyard filled with geese and reeking of their turds, and up a worn flight of stairs at the far end. There was a door studded all over with rusty iron bosses at the top, and he rapped a quick rhythm with his knuckles on the stained wood. The door opened and an old man stuck his head out, recognised the Captain and beckoned us inside.

  Straight away I knew we were in a Cathar house. I had been inside one once before, in Venice, and it had the same sparse furnishings, the same whitewashed walls, the same calm hanging in the air like incense. The old man, who was dressed all in black and whom I guessed was a bon homme, led us into an inner chamber and bade us sit on one of the benches that lined the walls. He left, and returned with another bon homme. At once the Captain sprang to his feet and embraced him warmly, planting a kiss on both his cheeks while the man patted his back joyfully.

  ‘So you have returned to us!’ he said, and his voice was low and rich – a priest’s voice, or I missed my guess.

  And I did not. ‘Petroc, this is Bertrand Marty, bishop to the Good Christians of Toulouse, though his diocese stretches over all these hills and mountains.’

  So this was Bertrand Marty, the heretic bishop. If the Good Christians had such a thing as a leader, it was he. I knew of Bishop Bertrand, for it was to him that the Captain and I had sent the Mandylion, three years ago now. Now I found that he was a very different bishop to any I had met before. Prelates – and by now I had known many – tend to be haughty, self-serving beasts who love to see the laity cower and kiss their amethyst rings. Ranulph o
f Balecester, vile though he might be, was by no means unusual in my experience. But Bertrand Marty was exactly as he seemed: a stocky, pewter-haired man of sixty years or so, burned nut brown by the sun; warm, bustling, filled with energy that seemed inseparable from the love he bestowed on everyone around him. He had spent his whole life pursued by the Church, roaming this land and sleeping in barns and hedges. And yet he had managed to keep himself a free man, and even thrive as the anti-prelate of the Languedoc.

  The bishop held out his arms to me and folded me in a strong embrace. ‘You are Michel’s friend who has been working for us in far-off lands!’ he cried, and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Welcome, dear man! Are you bound for Montségur?’

  ‘It seems so,’ I said, laughing. So this was the man whose cause I had been serving. Suddenly my trials almost seemed worthwhile.

  ‘Now then. Let me tell you what has been going on here,’ he said, inviting us to sit. The older man brought out a brown loaf of bread and three horn cups of water, and the bishop divided the loaf between us.

  ‘Pierre-Roger is assembling a force to garrison Montségur,’ he said, munching. ‘He has already gone down to the castle. I am going out into the country again to bring in as many of the faithful as I can. War is coming, I can feel it. But how soon? Can you tell me, Michel?’

  ‘Sooner than we would have liked,’ said the Captain, and he told the bishop of our words with the Count of Toulouse. ‘He will not defend us again,’ he finished. ‘Once more we find ourselves alone.’

  ‘Alone? How can we be alone in the company of our friends, our brethren?’ laughed the bishop. ‘No, no, I take your point, Michel. The storm is racing down from the north. But it will break against the rock of Montségur as it has before. The French will give up when harvest time comes, and Raymond will realise that his own people are his truest friends. Despite his words, he will not desert us for ever.’