The Captain had told me to seek out the White Dove hostelry in Narbonne on my way back. It was owned by a family of Good Christians, and was a place where heretics left messages for one another. If the Captain had any other tasks for me, he would leave word with the innkeeper. And indeed there was a message for me. If I chose to, I could ride to Toulouse, for Count Raymond had some words for the garrison of Montségur. It was a long detour, to be sure, and the weather was growing worse, the cold breath of the mountains meeting the damp of the north and making thin, chilly rain which seeped into my bones and surrounded me with the reek of wet, miserable horse. But the dogged beast kept his feet on the rutted, muddy roadways and on the last day of October I rode into the city.
The Count was not there after all, for he was at the town of Lorris, signing a treaty with King Louis. So it was all over, as Raymond had known it must be. I scratched about to find any information I could about the peace terms, but no one knew anything, save that Louis’ mother Queen Blanche had brokered the treaty and that could mean only one thing: for the Queen Mother and her son were both ardent defenders of the faith, and any treaty with Raymond must hinge upon him ridding his lands of heresy for good and all. But there were indeed words from the Count for Montségur, that I could make no sense of, but that were whispered to me by Raymond’s chamberlain: wait for my affairs to prosper. That was all, and the chamberlain had no explanation, just tight lips and narrowed eyes.
My horse had grown lame within sight of the city walls and so I rested him for a week before setting out again. The weather had cheered up but I had to go carefully, for suddenly the countryside was full of soldiers: the Count’s men returning home from a war they had not had to fight, and French adventurers trying to steal a march on the flood-tide of their victorious countrymen which, no doubt, was about to engulf the Languedoc. So I did not climb the path up to Montségur until three weeks had passed, December had come, and winter had descended upon the pog and wrapped it tightly in a pall of snow and ice.
That evening I clutched a mug of hot wine in my chilblained hands and told what I had learned. The Captain was there, and Pierre-Roger, and the castellan too, Raymond de Perella, a calm, handsome man in his late middle years, going grey about the ears, with sandy eyebrows and beard and grey eyes. He was the inverse, it seemed, of Pierre-Roger, for he was thoughtful, indeed fatherly. And as I was to learn, his family lived at Montségur with him: Corba his wife, his daughters Arpaïs, Esclarmonde and Phillipa – who was married to Pierre-Roger – and his little son Jordan. Corba’s mother, Marquésia, lived there as well, and she was a perfecta. Now Raymond looked grave as he heard the odd words of the Count of Toulouse. Pierre-Roger tugged at his short beard and rapped on the tabletop with his fingernails.
‘My affairs? Nothing more?’ he asked, the tension sharp in his voice. I nodded.
‘I could get nothing more from any soul in the palace,’ I said. ‘But I am sure that those words were delivered just as Count Raymond intended them.’
‘But what can it mean? His affairs are in the midden! They are being trampled as we speak by the King of France, trodden into the shit …’
‘Nevertheless he means us to heed them,’ said the castellan, thoughtfully, and put his hand on his son-in-law’s arm. Immediately, Pierre-Roger inclined his head almost sheepishly and patted the castellan’s hand. There was a real affection between these two very different men, I saw to my surprise.
‘Well, my good Petroc,’ said Pierre-Roger. ‘Thank you for this news, vexing though it is. If my lord the Count has indeed made peace with Louis, I fear that we will not be peaceful here for long. I will begin to ready the garrison – what do you say, Raymond?’
‘Let us look to our provisioning, and to the state of our defences. Thank you, young man—’ and he took my hand and clasped it warmly. Then he turned back to Pierre-Roger and the two fell into a rapid discussion of stores and supply-lines. The Captain stood and beckoned me from the room.
‘Even if you wanted to leave – and I could not blame you – you will have to wait awhile,’ he said, nodding towards the open doorway. Snow was driving, thick white snowflakes by the thousands, straight across the opening, and it was beginning to drift against the door posts. The wind moaned, hollow and hungry.
‘I am not planning to leave,’ I said, gently, and the Captain smiled and said something about dinner, and the greedy wind took away my next words, which were:
‘I will not leave you here.’
The singer was gone. I asked the folk who lived in the courtyard – in crude huts and tents and lean-tos that took up every inch of wall around the yard – but they had not seen or heard her for a month or more. So she had left before the weather closed in. That had been sensible of her. The jolly woman who baked good bread, who had told me the singer’s name that first morning, could give me no more information than that her name was Iselda, which I knew, and that she came from Rosers, though she did not know where that might be. Another woman thought she was a dispossessed noblewoman, a widow or a perfecta, but not all three, and a girl said she had heard, from another, that Iselda was a trobairitz, a woman troubadour. I had never heard of such a thing, but it seemed reasonable to suppose she was some sort of lady driven from her lands, and was it not likely she had found herself widowed in the process? I asked the Captain about her, but he harrumphed and gave me a look that suggested my time might be better used by addressing more pressing matters. Gilles, of course, gave me a blank look. He had not been inside the castle for months, and in his present state of mind I doubted he would have even heard her had she raised her voice next to his ear.
And the Captain was right: there was much to do. The castle was not large, but it did not need a big garrison to defend it: the land itself was its armour. Food began to come up the pog from the country all around: sacks of wheat, barley and oats, hogsheads of flour, of salt pork and lard, kegs of olive oil, wine and beer. Men were recruited: crossbowmen mostly, soldiers who owed some allegiance to Pierre-Roger or Raymond. They trickled in when the snow paused, or on warm days when the wind came from the sea, and when spring at last showed its face they came in earnest, toiling up the slope with their weapons over their shoulders, sweat blotting their leather armour.
One day the evening brought Bertrand Marty, who came tramping into the castle followed by nine bons hommes. He passed through the courtyard and many of the people there gathered round him and touched his robe or knelt as he went past. That first evening the bishop held a service in the keep for the faithful, which Gilles told me about the next day. After he had blessed and prayed, a box had been opened and the Mandylion itself had been taken out and shown to the congregation. At the time I felt nothing but a sort of professional relief that the thing I had stolen from Constantinople, and that half of Christendom seemed to be lusting after, was still safe and intact. But Gilles was troubled. ‘The believers fear it,’ he said. ‘We thought it would show them that the Christ who died at Golgotha was a ghost, an illusion, but those who see the shroud see something different.’ Contrary to everything they had held sacred all their lives, the Good Christians now found, in the ancient shape on the cloth, proof that Christ had indeed suffered and died as a man, and my friend had begun to worry that it had brought a new and troubling desire for death to the faithful.
‘And what do you think of it?’ I asked him.
‘Old bedsheets,’ he said. ‘Good work, very good – but I wish, though, that we had sold it while we had the chance. It seeps death, somehow, but with no promise of reward. What a pity it isn’t making King Louis miserable instead of us.’
It had worked its way into me, into my bones, this odd place – not the place so much as the people who lived here, I should say, but even the castle itself had begun to feel like my home long before the snow had started to melt from the mountains to the south. Winter had indeed been savage, the wind slicing across the top of the pog like a great scythe blade day in, day out, snow piling man-height in the courtyard, fir
e seeming to lose its power to give warmth. The sky would change day by day: pressing down upon us, yellow and heavy with freezing fog like a vast, sodden fleece, or glaring, high and impossibly blue, the gaze of someone’s merciless god – not mine, and not the god of the perfecti either, but perhaps the God to whom I used to pray, the God who had brought the French down to the land of the Good Christians.
At first I had stayed to be with my two friends – they were not my employers any more, somehow, and though they were officially my business partners, that had come to seem a very desiccated way to describe our friendship. We were the Cormaran’s last crew, we were comrades in arms, we were, as we had always been, friends. I spent most of my days with Gilles or Michel, out beyond the walls in Gilles’ hut. He had built himself a sturdy little dwelling out of the remains of some previous hovels that had stood nearby, for the village of the perfecti had waxed and waned with the fortunes of the lands below, and as brothers and sisters left or died, so their huts were taken over or were brought down by the wind and snow. Gilles had provided himself with four walls of carefully laid stone and a roof of timbers overlaid with faggots of broom, over which he had stretched a large piece of sailcloth – he would not say where he had got it, but all manner of things came and went from the pog in those days – which was lashed down with rope and sailor’s knots. It rustled and crackled in the slightest breeze, which is to say always, but kept him warm and dry, though when a fire was burning in the hearth the smoke did not always find the hole that passed for a chimney, and I would stagger out feeling like a smoked ham. I did not make a fuss over it, though, because Gilles only lit the fire when the cold was too harsh to be kept at bay with skins and blankets, and even then it was for my benefit alone.
For Gilles de Peyrolles, always the dandy, always quick with his tongue and swift with his blade, had passed through a profound transformation. I drew the story from him slowly, not that he was reluctant, but time had slowed inside his head as it had, seemingly, for all those who lived out here on the cliff’s edge. Gilles had heard the summons that had brought the Captain to Toulouse, and at first he had intended to enlist as a knight in the Count’s army. But somewhere on the way – on the road from Montpellier to Toulouse, I gathered – he had been caught in one of the brief, savage thunderstorms that sweep across the southern lands as he was passing through a little village, and a perfecta had taken him into her cottage. She had a fire going in the hearth, and as he knelt in front of it to dry his clothes, she threw a piece of wood into the flames. A shower of sparks flew up, like red stars against the sooty chimney, he told me. ‘See those sparks, my son? That is you, and I, and every poor soul,’ she had said, for that is what the Good Christians believe: that this world is the Devil’s creation, and to people it he stole light from God and trapped it inside the flesh that is our bodies. If a man or woman becomes perfect, is perfected, as they say, at the moment of their death the spark of God’s light is released and joins Him. For the rest of us, we are doomed to be reborn and reborn again, to drag our fleshly prisons around with us and to pay, with the suffering of our bodies, the Devil’s rent for occupying his creation.
Gilles knew that, of course, for he had learned the Cathar creed at his mother’s breast. I wondered if the old woman had reminded him of that long-dead mother, but he had shaken his head. ‘Nothing so grand,’ he had told me. It was simply that he was squatting, drenched, chilled and shuddering, the crashes of thunder still piping in his ears, and the sparks … each one had been so warm, a tiny fire all to itself, and there they were, tiny conflagrations whirling up into the black. He had felt it inside him, the heat of his own spark, for the first time since he was a little boy, since before his memory had even begun to set down the story of his life. ‘It was as if someone or something had opened me up like a lantern and blown on an ember inside, until it burst into flame,’ he said. The old perfecta had held him until he stopped shaking and weeping, and had given him the Consolamentum there and then.
‘I was light, all light after that,’ he said. ‘I gave my clothes and my sword to the people of the village, who were very poor, and followed the hidden paths of our people until they brought me here.’
I would study him sometimes, for we often sat in silence, looking out over the void or staring into the little fire in its ring of blackened stones. He had the hollow-cheeked look of a mendicant, the slightly loosened limbs of one whose bonds to the earth have grown frayed beyond repair. You may see men like him in any town. They are the madmen who are fed and cared for, though they do not ask for it, the thin, ragged men who stand in marketplaces or in the shadows of church doors, whom country women will shyly touch for a blessing. They are different from the beggars and the zanies who get only stones and blows for their pains. Gilles was not mad, I do not believe, but after I had spent a month in his company I began to question what madness might really be. Even as a monk, when I had spent every waking minute supposedly in the service of the Holy Spirit, the strange figures, touched, as some called them, whom the Spirit seemed to have entered, repelled me and filled me with a superstitious dread. Now I wondered how many faces madness wore, and if we all put on its mask sometimes. He was not mad, this man who was my dear friend, but he was not entirely sane either, but somehow that did not matter, especially when I remembered the hollow-cheeked creature with the dark, haunted eyes I had glimpsed in the worthy Don Bonasasch’s polished silver; and as time slipped past us on the scoured top of that mountain I let myself join him, as much as I dared, in the luminous calm with which he had clothed himself.
Chapter Twenty
Montségur, May 1243
‘Fucking idiots,’ grunted Marc le Forestière, spitting a thick gob out into space. We watched it drop towards the French, almost a mile below.
The French army had arrived the day before, a dark stain creeping up the valley from the north. As they had arrived at the village at the foot of the pog, I had seen the commander, flanked by his standards. He was only a black dot, but I knew he would be craning his neck, looking up at the castle he had been ordered to capture. Hughues des Arcis was his name, the seneschal of Carcassonne. Was he feeling cocksure or deflated as he stared up towards the sky? The garrison was yelling down at the French to give up and go away, to surrender, or to come on then, get up here! They could not hear us. Instead they took over the village, all but empty, for the inhabitants had either fled or joined us up here. A hut had gone up in flames as dusk fell, no doubt a warning to us, but all in all, for the beginning of a siege it was all very dull.
‘They couldn’t take Montségur with ten thousand men, let alone that poxy lot,’ Marc went on. He slapped the stone of the embrasure. ‘I don’t know why they even bothered to build these walls. Those swine won’t ever get up here.’
Marc, a crossbowman from the valleys around Mirepoix, was cheering himself up with a bit of bravado, but he was absolutely right. That army could not take Montségur. They were clearly planning to starve us out, but our storerooms had enough food for ten years of siege, and there were a score of men, and women too, among the garrison who could make their way up and down the mountain by day and night. There were not enough Frenchmen to seal off the bottom of the pog. If they tried to climb up the path, we would kill them. If they tried to climb the cliffs, they would kill themselves. That morning, my only worry was how long it would take for Hughues des Arcis to get bored and give up – and it was hardly a worry. Marc, like most of the fighting men in Montségur, was a vassal of the lord of Mirepoix; they left their families and their harvests to defy the French invaders. They were used to fighting, these hard, creased men. Marc had two daughters and a pregnant wife waiting for him, but he did not seem to think he would have long to wait before he saw them again. It was a warm day, and I allowed myself the luxury of a stretch, and to ponder, lazily, why we had all worried through the winter if this was the extent of our enemy.
The soldiers were yelling and waving cuckolds’ horns at the almost invisible army below,
but the Good Christians were quiet, either going about their business or peering, expressionless, from the walls. Below on the cliff-edge a crowd of them had gathered, very still and quiet. The little black specks swarmed around the village, spreading outward, intent on surrounding the pog. But how could you surround a mountain? It was absurd. To take the path would be certain death. We had mangonels aimed at the knife-sharp ridge that led to the Roc de la Tour, and no man would last five minutes in that dreadfully exposed place. I peered out again. A flock of ravens was drifting slowly past, two hundred feet down. One of them broke off and tumbled, rolling over and over before opening its wings and soaring up to its companions, who whistled and croaked in appreciation. From the parapet of the keep, little Jordan de Perella, perched on his father’s shoulders, was screeching in his little boy’s voice at the French. He shook his fist, and then hurled something – a small stone or perhaps a toy – out over the edge. It described a puny arc and dropped into a broom shrub that grew at the brink of the cliff. The ravens had found a current of rising air. They rose slowly, wings still, the great black feathers at the tips fluttering. There were ten of them, twelve perhaps. Silently they rose and rose, so close I could see the sun reflected in the jet beads of their eyes. Up and up, until the sun’s glare swallowed them all.
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