Some of the inhabitants, like the old woman, sat or knelt beside their homes, praying or contemplating the play of sun and clouds upon the far mountainsides. Others read or worked upon books with pen and ink – and it was a strange sight indeed to see wagging quills in this wild place. Still others sat surrounded by groups of men and women who nodded and murmured – these were teachers and their pupils, I realised. Before me, an almost young woman with a crooked shoulder and wiry red hair struggling out from a plain white coif stirred a pot of beans. She beckoned me over and offered me a ladleful, for plainly strangers were welcome here, but I declined politely.
‘Good sister, do you know Gilles de Peyrolles?’ I asked her. She did, and raising her bad arm, shattered in some long-ago fall and ill-set, she pointed out a hut that leaned against an outcrop of rock beneath the wall. Thanking her, I scrambled up the steep bank.
Gilles was sitting in the sun, leaning back against the warm rock. He wore a long smock of white flax, and his feet were bare. He had lost weight up here in the thin air, and his flesh was stretched tight across his cheekbones. I had not seen him look so gaunt since we had crossed the Sea of Darkness together, but now, instead of the gnawing of fatigue and scorbutus, it was as if the sun had burned away all the soft living of Venice and released a younger, happier man.
‘Hello, Patch,’ he said, opening his eyes. He did not seem in the least bit surprised to see me. His eyes, shaded from the sun by his hand, were more piercing than I remembered.
‘The same to you,’ I told him. ‘I have risked my neck to seek out this horrible perch of yours, and that is all you have to offer me?’ I squatted down in front of him, and then we were hugging, and his beard was scraping my new-shaved cheek.
‘Michel told me you were here,’ he told me, patting the rock beside him. I sat, and felt the warmth of the rock seep through my clothes.
‘Where is he?’ I asked.
‘He has gone down to the village with Pierre-Roger. Making plans.’
‘Plans for what?’
‘You know that better than I,’ said Gilles, laughing. The knowledge that dwelt within those words was heavy as lead, and yet he sounded as if we were lounging in the prow of the Cormaran, watching flying fish shoot across our path.
‘You have heard, of course,’ I said.
‘Of course. Such a great and wonderful plan, broken into ugly shards. Vanity, Patch, is a terribly poor craftsman – his work is always shoddy, don’t you think?’
‘Vanity? Desperation, more like.’
‘To think we can order the affairs of man and write the chronicles before anything has actually happened – pure vanity. You’ve had a time of it, I hear. A battle. So you understand me.’
I thought of King Henry in the field before Taillebourg, and his expression when the French army had begun to pour across the bridge, and then the muddled, butchered corpses in the vineyards outside Saintes. All Count Raymond’s hopes were shattered on the reef of a king’s frozen smile. And if we had beaten the French, then what? A hundred, a thousand more pitfalls, accidents, cruelties of fate were waiting their turn. Yet Raymond must have thought he had at least a decent chance of success. Vanity? Plain old delusion, perhaps …
‘I see what you mean,’ I told Gilles. ‘So is that what you do up here? Meditate upon Man’s vanity?’
‘I am still wrestling with my own,’ he chuckled. ‘I don’t think I’m quite ready to tackle the whole of mankind. But tell me everything. It is very quiet up here, and very far from the world.’
‘That is why you are here, Gilles,’ I said. ‘The Captain told me you have taken the Consolamentum. What do you care about the world?’ I was teasing him, though I wondered whether I should. But he just chuckled again.
‘I suppose I am waiting for the world to end,’ he said. ‘But it can be a little boring. If you think I have turned into some strange beast, or a mad zealot, you will be disappointed. I am still your friend Gilles – or rather, this is who I have always been underneath it all. Nothing … no, everything has changed, I will grant you, but while I still inhabit this flesh and blood I can still, apparently, be bored. If you can bring yourself to entertain me, you will put yourself on the path to your own sainthood.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘But if stories can get a man beatified, I’ll be Francis of bloody Assisi by the time I’ve done telling mine.’
‘Ah, good,’ said Gilles, stretching out his legs luxuriously and arching his back against the rock. ‘Tell away, Patch, tell away.’
I had just finished describing the audience with Count Raymond when there was a skittering of loose stones and the Captain dropped down beside me. He was breathing hard, and beads of sweat were glinting on his brow, but he was grinning.
‘You found each other, then!’ he panted. ‘Excellent. So, Gilles, has he told you everything? He has? Well, if that is so, nothing I can say will dampen your spirits further!’
Perhaps it was the thin mountain air, for what other reason could there be for these two grown men laughing in the face of the end of all their hopes? But the Captain was tucking his rolled cloak behind him, and Gilles was pointing out an eagle that floated, huge but weightless, half a mile out in the void.
‘We were talking, earlier, about the Inquisitor’s letter,’ said the Captain. ‘It was strange, was it not, to see the name of Andrew of Longjumeau?’
‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘Before I left Paris, Louis commissioned me to find the Mandylion, whatever the cost. And meanwhile, it seems that now everyone has heard of the Cathar crucifix. Louis, and Queen Isabella, and the Bishop of Balecester – and the Earl of Cornwall, of course. I’m not sure what they know or what they think they know. Louis brought up Robert de Clari.’
‘So far as I know, de Clari is the only Frank who ever wrote about the Mandylion,’ said the Captain. ‘There may have been stories brought back by Crusaders … but my guess is that Louis, who is no fool, heard of our crucifix, remembered de Clari, put two and two together …’
‘And told Brother Andrew,’ I finished. ‘So the rumours found their way into the Church gossip mills, and now every collector has heard of a miraculous image at large.’
‘Strange are the workings of the world,’ said the Captain. He did not sound all that worried. ‘The one relic we gave away is the one everyone wants.’
‘Typical, eh, Michel?’ Gilles stretched again and sat up. ‘Are you thinking that we should have sold the thing to Louis and had done with it?’
‘Of course!’ he laughed. ‘We would have become richer than … well, even richer than we are.’
‘Were,’ Gilles corrected him. ‘Yes, and there’s so much to spend money on up here, eh, Patch?’
I shrugged. ‘It would have been simpler,’ I told him. ‘
I know,’ said Gilles, suddenly grave. ‘This is very strange to you, isn’t it? All this?’
‘You mean finding that you’ve both renounced everything and turned into believers? Yes, it’s a little odd. The way I feel about this – the Mandylion, Louis, all of it – is the way you both taught me to think. Opportunity. Find where greed and credulity share the same purse, and go to work. I learned that from you. But it isn’t that …’
‘I know. It’s that we are believers after all. That is what troubles you.’ Gilles put his arm around my neck and hugged me to him. ‘We always were, Patch. We always were. Do you know what we believed in? This.’ He swung his free hand to take in the valley, the mountains, the drifting eagle. ‘We believed in the homes we left, and our faith – the faith of our fathers and mothers, who died in this land because they believed in something other than the pope’s lies – our faith has been our home as we wandered. We have stopped wandering. We are still, we are home, and we believe.’ He slapped the rock on which we sat. ‘This is my home.’ Then he laid his hand on his heart. ‘And so is this.’
I remembered how the sweet breeze from Dartmoor had wound itself like columbine around my soul as I had rode towards Buckfast, and how I
had found that I desired nothing more in this world than to find myself a home in one of its deep green valleys. But I did not believe in anything, except perhaps the thick, cloying scent of hawthorn flowers hanging in a Devon lane, or the clear yellow of primroses, or the cuckoo’s chant. Perhaps … perhaps that was enough. I stared out at the white blades of the mountains, and the singer’s voice came to me again.
‘Will you ever leave?’ I asked.
‘Why would I?’ answered Gilles. The Captain nodded in agreement.
‘The French will come,’ I said.
‘Of course they will. But that means nothing. No one could take this place – angels, perhaps, but they do not fight for Louis.’
‘He thinks they do. No, you are right: your Montségur is invulnerable. So what should I do?’
‘Must you do anything?
‘I mean, the business.’
‘Oh, the bank will run without us,’ said the Captain calmly. ‘It is growing. Roussel has Florence grasped tight in his fist. Our agents are trustworthy, and even if they are not, they will not plunder us while there is the promise of yet more wealth. While our star is rising, we will be fine.’
‘So, my good men, what should I do?’ I asked again.
‘What does your heart tell you?’ asked Gilles. He raised himself into a crouch and brushed the dust from his white robe. He seemed … he seemed at home, within his own flesh as much as on this otherworldly crag.
‘Perhaps I will stay, for a while,’ I said. ‘What is winter like up here?’
‘Dreadful!’ said the Captain, leering.
‘Horrifying!’ echoed Gilles. I looked at them both – transformed for a moment, it seemed, into their young selves – and burst out laughing.
‘I’ll leave in the spring,’ I said.
Chapter Nineteen
Having made up my mind to stay, I spent but one more night on the pog of Montségur before I was off again, for the Captain, after spending a long day shut in the castle solar with the castellan and Pierre-Roger, asked me if I would be agreeable to riding, with all speed, to Marseilles. The company had an agent there, and the Captain and Gilles had resolved to withdraw the last of their funds to pay for supplies and men. I agreed, somewhat reluctantly, for although I did not particularly enjoy sleeping in a room full of perfecti who, though they were the kindest souls imaginable while awake, snorted and snuffled like a sty-full of hogs as they slumbered, I was sick of being propelled by the plans of others across the face of the earth.
And there was the singer. I woke early, picking my way through my wheezing roommates, and went outside. I leaned in the doorway, buckling on my sword, and ran my eyes around the battlements, but the only silhouettes were those of the guards slumped in their embrasures. The courtyard was just coming to life: damp wood was smoking, a knife was being sharpened, a baby was crying as its bleary, red-faced mother rocked it with the jerky rhythm of absolute exhaustion. I looked around for Iselda – was that her name? – and realised that I had never seen her face. Never mind. But what a sweet voice. Maybe when I returned I would hear it again.
Stepping through the gateway I almost dropped my bag in shock. Montségur was marooned in a sea of white mist brushed with the burned umber of sunrise. Instead of a mile’s drop to the valley floor a gently undulating shoreline lay only a hundred or so yards beneath me. I started off down the path towards the village. To make the almost sheer side of the pog climbable, the path, no wider than two men standing abreast and made of nothing more than loose stones and gravel, zigzagged sharply. Even so the slope was almost as hard to descend as climb, and my knees were already aching by the time I reached the first defensive wall. This was no more than a rough dry-stone affair, and it did not need to be anything more fancy, for a defender would hold every possible advantage over any exhausted man struggling up from below. The gateway was not guarded, and I stepped through to find that the ocean of clouds began only a couple of paces beyond.
Now comes winter, the thief
To rob us of leaves and buds and blooms.
And snow and ice and mud
Are all the earth can give.
And how will my love keep warm
When the fire trembles in the hearth
And the birds will not sing?
The mist was reaching for my boots as the words caught me. I turned, and there, leaning against the wall, stood a woman. She was in shadow, and I could not properly see her face which was no more than an impression of eyes, nose and mouth all framed by the heavy tresses of her dark hair, which hung down in two thick ropes almost to her waist. She wore a long tunic of plain linen, a dark ivory, almost the colour of the mist. How long I watched her I do not know, but I did not stir until her song was finished.
‘I did not seek an audience,’ she said. Her voice was deep, even, and warm, not the desolate instrument that had given life to her song. But it was not friendly. Confused, for I felt as if a fever had just passed from my head, or an enchantment, I stepped back and found the smokey rags of the mist-sea writhing about my chest.
‘Your pardon, my lady. I did not mean to offend. I think your music has turned me to stone …’
‘To stone? Like a curse? I am sorry I petrified you. You are released.’ I stood there, stupidly, feeling the damp fingers of the mist searching through my clothes. ‘I release you: please go,’ she said, her voice honed fractionally, an edge now where no edge had been before.
‘I am going, my lady,’ I said, hurriedly, bowing and sending the mist swirling. ‘I am unmannerly. Petroc of Auneford … is my name. I am a companion of Michel de Montalhac. I … I am going to Marseilles,’ I finished, holding up my arms in confusion, in supplication.
‘Then I wish you all speed,’ she said, and not knowing what else to do I bowed again and stepped back down the path. Instantly the mist closed over my head, and for a moment, through the grey wetness, I saw the singer sink down onto her haunches and clasp her hands around her knees. I turned, and let the murk swallow me up.
The gloom hung over me until midday, by which time I was almost at Mirepoix, for I had set off hard, spurred on by a lingering sense of mortification and of an opportunity squandered that had been with me since I had left the pog. I reached the town before nightfall, and next day started again in driving sleet. In less than a fortnight I was at Marseilles, in the cool sunshine, signing papers in the counting-house of Don Bonasasch. I knew this gentleman from a week he had spent in Venice, and as I scratched with my pen he regarded me over steepled fingers. He was a Jew of Valencia, and therefore one of the most mannerly and cultured beings in all Creation. So he did not enquire how it came to be that Michel de Montalhac and Gilles de Peyrolles were, in effect, leaving the company of the Cormaran, and I did not offer an explanation, for I had none that would make sense to a businessman, a scientist and a man of reason, all qualities I knew Don Bonasasch possessed in abundance. Gilles, along with myself, Roussel and Isaac of Toledo, were the last remaining partners in the company, but Michel de Montalhac was its master, its owner and its creator. The Captain must have a plan, I reasoned uneasily, and not for the first time. There was always a plan. I read over the papers he had prepared while he poured us some excellent pink wine in silver cups, and scratched my name and initials where appropriate.
As I worked I could see a distorted image of myself in the silver of his goblet, which had been polished until it shone like the full moon. Although my tiny reflection bulged and curved I could tell I was not the easy young fellow he had met amidst the finery of the Ca’Kanzir: my cheeks were hollow, and I had let a dark brush-stroke of beard grow into a point beneath my chin. My hair, the height of fashion three months ago, was a lank ivy-tangle of long ringlets that had receded somewhat from my temples. Half an eyebrow was struggling to grow back through a dark red scar. As my face had thinned so my eyes had apparently grown, so that it seemed for all the world as if some feral night-creature had been trapped in the glossy meniscus of the silver cup. How old was I? Christ, it escap
ed me. Ink splattered from my quill as I tried to work it out. Twenty-five years? Twenty-six? Was that what a man of twenty-six years should look like? Nudging the goblet from my line of sight I concluded my business and left, to Don Bonasasch’s concerned but evident relief.
I went and stood on the seafront, staring out at the shimmer. Akdeniz, the Turks call it: the White Sea, and today it was the white of polished metal. But the wind was ruffling the surface and I could not see myself, thank God. How I missed this sea, which I had crossed so many times. I had seen the sun rise and set in her, turning the waters golden, purple, black; and I had learned her moods and endured her fury. With a sailor’s eye I plotted a course out of the bay, past the islands of Frioul and out into the Gulf of Lions. In my head I drew a line across the cat’s paws: slipping between Elba and Corsica, dropping like a stooping hawk to the Straits of Messina, around Spartivento and Capo d’Otranto and into the icy teeth of the Bora gales, to beat a way up the Adriatic until the dark line of the Lido of Venice came into sight and then, at last, the golden domes of San Marco. I could do it now. There was nothing keeping me here, and the business needed me back in Venice or perhaps in Florence.
But no, it did not need me. And while the Captain had never once commanded me to stay at his side, or even, if I thought about it, asked me, I seemed to have made my choice. This sea, which lapped so politely at my feet, would wait. I picked up a warm disc of chalky stone and sent it skipping out into the harbour. A silvery spray of tiny fish leapt over its wake. A little way away, an old fisherman yelled at his bothersome grandchild in the name of Jesus, Joseph and every fucking saint to make himself a bit fucking useful. I would be useful too. I knelt down, dabbled my hand in the water, smelled its brine on my finger-ends, and went off to fetch my horse.
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