Painted in Blood

by Pip Vaughan-Hughes

  For five long months nothing more happened. The French specks in the valley seemed to be busy, but what it had to do with us up on the pog was less than clear. They had cut us off from the world outside – but they had not quite managed even that. Men whose families had lived in the valley beyond the reach of memory knew that a web of pathways covered the mountain, all of them secret, most of them impossible for all but the most fearless mountaineer. They came up and down at will, bringing us food, letters and news – in July, we heard that Rome was at last rejoicing in a new pope, one Sinibaldo Fieschi, who was calling himself Innocent the Fourth – and if one of the garrison needed to leave – and Pierre-Roger sent messengers regularly to call for arms or men – there were one or two tracks that an ordinary soul could manage without the fear of certain death. They moved at night, and if I was awake before dawn on sentry duty I often saw the small groups of dark-clothed men, stout boots on their feet, emerge through the postern gate, shepherding a blinking, ghost-white messenger who was still coming to grips with the fact of his survival.

  It was on one such morning, a cold one in early October, when hoar frost was already crusting on the stones of the parapet, that I heard the challenge at the postern and, looking down from my place on the walls, saw a woman’s head amongst the shaggy locks of the mountaineers. She was untying her braids, and when she was done she glanced up at the sky and I saw that it was Iselda de Rosers. She bid farewell to her guides and disappeared inside the keep. For a moment I wondered if I had imagined her. But the mountaineers were cackling and leering in loud whispers, and even through the jabber of their dialect it was not hard to guess what they were talking about. I went back to my post and waited for the dawn with a lighter heart than usual. The siege had been nothing but boredom for the garrison, of which I was now a member, for as a knight I was supposed to know how to handle myself. When I was not on duty I spent my time with Gilles and Captain de Montalhac, and so I had a foot in the two worlds of Montségur: the dull, duty-bound life of the soldier, and the deep, calm waters of the perfecti, in which time was suspended and events wavered in and out of view like river weeds in a lazy current.

  The sergeant, Bernard Rouain, relieved me after sunrise, and as I was walking stiffly down the stairs, for hoar frost makes lovely patterns on chain-mail while it is freezing the flesh inside, Pierre Ferrer, Pierre-Roger’s bailiff, called to me from the doorway of the keep. I was summoned to a meeting with the castellan and the commander. That was unusual but not unheard of: the Captain, who was very close to the two leaders, had been putting in a good word for me, and I had found myself in the inner circle of the garrison, somewhat to my surprise. After so much time under siege, and in such a small group of men – the garrison was no more than a hundred and fifty souls at its fullest – the boundaries between master and servant become frayed, and the influence of the Good Christians made that even more true. Still, the earthly power of Montségur lay with the commander, Pierre-Roger; Castellan Raymond; Bailiff Ferrer; the Captain; and Imbert de Sallas, the sergeant-at-arms. There were plenty of other knights on the pog, most of them Pierre-Roger’s men. But no doubt Captain de Montalhac had presented me as a man with friends and influence in exalted places; and he had been telling the truth, so far as that went. In any case I was occasionally consulted or given important jobs to do, and that made the time pass very slightly faster.

  ‘The lady Iselda has brought us some news,’ said the bailiff as I walked into the solar, blowing on my fingers and wiping the dewdrops from my nose. Pierre-Roger sat at the table next to Raymond de Perella. The Captain sat next to Pierre-Roger, and next to the castellan Bertrand Marty sat bolt upright, his hands placed carefully on the tabletop in front of him. It was unusual to see the bishop here, for he tried not to interfere with garrison matters. I bowed to the commander and the castellan and then to the singer, who gave me the politely blank look of someone who has not slept in days. She had great dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was full of furze twigs. And she was beautiful, I saw again, although I forgot it as soon as I sat down and the freezing metal of my chain-mail shirt began to gnaw at my backside.

  ‘She has come from Narbonne. Domna, would you tell us again what you heard there?’ Raymond de Perella pushed back a lock of thinning hair from his forehead. He looked more tired than usual. Pierre-Roger leaned back in his chair, gaunt and tight-lipped. I glanced at the Captain, but he was studying the singer’s face and I could not tell what he was thinking.

  ‘I heard this news two days ago. It was announced in the cathedral by the archbishop. Pope Innocent has lifted his ban of excommunication on Count Raymond.’

  ‘That is the ban placed on him by the Inquisitor Ferrier as punishment for Avignonet,’ said the bishop. Pierre-Roger’s lips went white for a moment, but then he shook his head wearily.

  ‘So we are forgiven,’ he said coldly. He did not seem to welcome the prospect.

  ‘Raymond is forgiven,’ the bishop corrected gently. ‘There is another ban, that imposed by the Archbishop of Narbonne himself, but if Innocent has lifted one he will soon lift the other.’

  ‘What does this mean?’ asked the castellan.

  ‘It means that Count Raymond has made friends with Rome,’ said the Captain. ‘He is trying to outfox the Inquisition. The pope will not inflict his Inquisitors upon a friend, or so Raymond hopes.’

  ‘But are we not here because of Avignonet?’ asked Pierre-Roger.

  ‘You are here because of us,’ said Bishop Marty. The castellan laid his hand over the bishop’s.

  ‘We all know why we are here,’ he said, and Pierre-Roger nodded. ‘Amen,’ he said.

  ‘That is news enough,’ said the Captain. ‘But is there more?’

  ‘None, save that the French are making very bold in our lands, they are calling this siege a Crusade, and that Sanchia of Provence is marrying the King of England’s brother.’

  The Captain met my eyes and our eyebrows went up in unison. So my duty to Richard of Cornwall was discharged. But the others were talking in low voices about Count Raymond and the pope.

  ‘I have asked him twice since the French invested us about his affairs,’ Pierre-Roger was saying. ‘And always the answer is “they prosper”. Is this what he meant? He is mocking us.’

  ‘Not so, not so,’ said the castellan. ‘It may be that he has been parleying with Innocent, getting Rome to call off the dogs, so to speak. Raymond does not wish us ill.’

  ‘He does not wish you ill or good,’ I said, and repeated what we had heard in Toulouse. These men had heard them before, but now the words seemed to fall, leaden, to the tabletop for us to examine. ‘Count Raymond wants the Church out of his lands,’ I went on. ‘He knows he must be France’s whipping-boy, but he can keep Louis at arm’s length. He can’t keep Rome out, though, unless he stamps out heresy himself. See how good a son I am, he is saying to Innocent. And so far, the pope has believed him.’ I turned to Iselda. ‘My lady, what is the mood in the countryside?’

  ‘It is black. The Good Christians are trying to get across the mountains to Aragon or Navarre, or take ship for Italy, but they are not wealthy, those who are left down there.’ She glanced towards the window. ‘They believe that the Count has turned against them, that he blames the Good Christians for everything that bedevils him. Louis is his master now, he has no bride and no heir, and the only power he has left is the power to snuff out heresy. That is what they are saying. Are they right?’

  She turned and studied us in turn. She was pale and perhaps fevered. Somehow I knew she was getting a headache, that kind which starts behind the eyes when you are exhausted. The bleakness I had heard in her song was in her face, as if she were weary of loss, of carrying the shadowy burden that people and things leave when they are taken from us against our will – weary, but determined.

  ‘Yes, they are right,’ Bertrand Marty said quietly. ‘Raymond is doomed to play off his tormentors one against the other for the rest of his days. But as he is a man full of
faults – on that we can all respectfully agree – the sin of pride is very strong in him, and to lose Montségur, with two of his most famous knights—’ and he smiled and nodded to Pierre-Roger and the castellan ‘—would perhaps seem intolerable to him. If he has won some sort of pardon for himself regarding Avignonet, is it impossible to believe that he will try to extend that to …’ He lifted his hands and encompassed us, the room, the mountaintop. ‘In a sense, we are all that is left of the County of Toulouse,’ he said. ‘That is something he will wish to save.’

  That was the end of the discussion, for there were no answers, either good or bad. Pierre-Roger jerked to his feet, propelled as usual by the coiled anger within him. The castellan exchanged a few whispered words with Bishop Marty, and the two left together, I guessed to visit Lady Corba, whose reputation as a holy woman had recently been growing. The Captain, with a rare display of gallantry, bent and kissed Iselda’s hand before leaving. That left the singer and me, at opposite ends of the table. She was slumped, almost asleep, and I was tempted to leave her there in the quiet of the room, but as I stood up my mail shirt clacked against the wood of the chair and she startled and turned her face to me, her eyes confused. They were green, those eyes, the colour of moss seen through the golden water of a Dartmoor brook. And they were bleared and rimmed with red, and her nose was running worse than mine. She sniffed loudly and sighed.

  ‘My lady, I have been meaning to apologise for my rudeness,’ I said, to break the tension I was beginning to feel in my chest and to allow me to leave gracefully.

  ‘When was that?’ she said, frowning at me, not really listening.

  ‘Last year,’ I began.

  ‘Last year?’ she asked, sceptically. Her frown had deepened. She blinked at me, trying to focus her tired eyes. I gathered that I was either an irritation or a madman.

  ‘Yes, in the autumn. I was leaving the pog, it was morning – foggy – and you were singing outside the second gate. I said you had turned me to stone.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘That you had not meant to petrify me.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was a long and prickly silence. Then suddenly she brightened. ‘Oh! A man sinking into a cloud. That was you?’

  ‘It was. Petroc of Auneford is my name.’

  ‘That was a lovely morning – the last warm day. Winter came after that.’

  ‘Winter was already there. I found it beneath the mist.’

  ‘Ah. So it was an illusion, my beautiful day?’

  ‘Your beautiful song was no illusion,’ I said. She frowned again, and I made a pretence of stretching. ‘You are exhausted,’ I said. ‘Do not let me keep you from sleep, my lady.’ I edged between the chairs, but she fluttered her fingers at me, distracted.

  ‘Wait a minute. Are you a knight? You don’t look like a bon homme, and you aren’t Occitan. Are you in the service of my lord of Mirepoix?’

  ‘Yes, I am a knight, and I am called Sir Petrus Blackdog by some, and I am English, but I am in no man’s …’ I paused. It was an easy and tempting lie, but the truth was complicated and stung me where I kept my pride and illusions of freedom. ‘I do not owe homage to Mirepoix,’ I said instead. ‘I came here with Captain de Montalhac. We are colleagues – partners.’

  ‘Why, then? Why here?’

  ‘Why did I come? I was on a mission to the Count of Toulouse, Captain de Montalhac was also there, and I came here with him to see my old friend Gilles de Peyrolles, who lives as a perfectus beneath the walls.’

  ‘But then you stayed.’ She was studying me as intently as her fatigue allowed.

  ‘Not quite. I came back. When you saw me I was leaving for Marseilles. Then …’

  ‘You could have left. Captain de Montalhac came from Venice, I’ve heard. And you: you have a foreign look to you. Not English – something else. So why didn’t you just go back to Venice? Much nicer there, I should think. I … I’m sorry,’ she said brightly, and sniffed again. ‘I am talking too much – I’m asleep on my feet. Do not let me keep you.’ The edge – which was self-control and perhaps not coldness, I wanted to believe – had left for a moment, but now it was back.

  ‘No, you are not – talking too much,’ I said. ‘I am going to find my breakfast.’ I walked past her and then paused in the doorway. ‘But to answer your question: yes, in fact I did think of leaving. Of going home to Venice. But alas, when I thought about it … I have four walls in Venice, and my own country that I still dream about, but as to a home, I came back to be with my companions, for the only home I possess is, it seems, with them. Now I have talked too much, so I’ll bid you good morning, Lady Iselda.’

  I went off and got stiffly out of my chain-mail. I shared a room – it had been intended as a stable, and gave out onto the courtyard – with six other knights. Two were sleeping and another was mending a shirt. I threw a log onto the fire that burned in a makeshift hearth and squatted down before it, gazing at the sparks as they flew. I could never find, in their twinkling ascent, even a hint of the epiphany that had struck Gilles, but I had taken to studying them anyway, for keeping warm was serious business on the pog, and everyone tried to spend as much time as they could in front of fires. Sometimes I saw firebirds such as are said to dwell in the mountains of Persia, sometimes souls ascending to Heaven, and other times souls writhing in Hell. But I found no answers. Now I wondered why I had said so much, and so unguardedly, to the singer. I prodded the embers with the cooking spit and the sparks whirled and eddied against the soot-black stone. The sparks made the black more absolute. I watched a point of orange light as it hovered and went out. That is why we watch the sparks, I said to myself: so we do not have to look at the darkness between them. That was why I had come back to Montségur. That was why I had told the singer what was in my heart.

  My mail shirt needed oiling. I went off to find the tallow pot, stepping over William de l’Isle, a young man from the mountains near Foix. I wondered, as I did every hour of the day – and as every man in the garrison did, I knew – how long I would have to stay up here in this cold, smelly little castle, and how in the name of Joseph’s blue bollocks I was going to leave it. I liked my comrades-in-arms well enough and we all got on in a way I understood, for it was not unlike a huge ship, this place – becalmed, of course. But I had heard all their stories about chasing country girls, and the little skirmishes they had fought against their rivals across valley or mountain, and though I loved to listen to Gilles and the other bons hommes I did not, in the end, understand what kept the fires of conviction alive in their souls. The only pretty women up here were Good Christians or the wives or daughters of the important knights. There were a couple of tarts, big, brisk and with arms like bakers, who were tolerated by the garrison and the heretics alike because they kept the soldiers from getting out of hand, but I could not bring myself to visit them, even though my roommates had, secretly and with a good deal of shame after the fact and, no doubt, the drip as a reward for their lust. So I found myself thinking of Letice, very often, as she had been in the happy days in Venice, and sometimes of Iselda de Rosers who, although we shared the same crowded little castle, I almost never saw and who did not sing as the sun rose any more. And sometimes I thought of Anna, when the sky was the blue of Greece or when the stars were bright. At night I often dreamed of Margarete, and of the women of Venice, and the girls of Paris and Florence and London, and it brought me nothing but aches in the crotch and in the head. As is well known to the men who lead others to war, if a man needs to fuck but cannot, the next best thing is a fight, and with our enemy a mile below us and showing no signs of coming up, that was as distant as clean sheets and a cunning, willing lover.

  It will soon be Christmas, I told myself. The Crusaders will have had enough by then. They will want to be home. They will leave, and it will be over. I was not trying to see the future, that morning as I rubbed tallow across the rusting mesh of my armour, but as it turned out I was half right. The Crusaders ran out of patience. And then everythi
ng changed.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  If you want to know about the battle for Montségur, more than I can tell you, go to Rome. The details are stored in the library of the Inquisition. Ask a Dominican to see them should you ever find yourself there. If you put on a holy enough face, or pull out a properly bulging purse, no doubt the good brothers will be happy to find the pages for you with their dates, confessions, the names of the dead, of the burned.

  I wonder if the name of the traitor is among them. I do not know it, but, perhaps I once knew his face. For our story – you know how it ends, of course you do – must have a traitor, as how else could the impenetrable castle of the heretics fall? I will not take long to tell it, for in a sense the whole tale is told by the black ground at the foot of the pog, where the grass, so they tell me, has never grown back. If you wish to learn more, read it there. The oily black soot that stains the rocks all around the burning place, the wisps of charred bone, the smell that is not there but yet hangs like a corpse-grimed shroud over the whole valley – that is where you will find your tale. The Church set down the history of the Good Christians in ink at Rome, and in blood at Montségur.

  I remember the morning that the first Crusaders appeared on the ridge. They were Gascon mercenaries, we would discover, who had dragged themselves up goat paths and fissures all night. There they squatted, and as we watched they stood up and attacked, a long file of men trotting along the spine of the pog. I was on the wall next to a crossbowman called Guillaume Delpech, ready to hand him his bolts, for a knight who cannot shoot a bow is not much use when the enemy is at a distance. There were two dozen Crusaders, their white flag with its red cross straining out in the wind that blew from their backs carrying a hissing burden of ice fragments. The ice was lashing our faces but the crossbowman shook his head.

  ‘Let them come on,’ he muttered.

  The French had come within a spear’s throw of the walls when we let fly from the walls. Not one of them lived longer than five minutes, as arrows and bolts sent them spinning down the precipices on either side. They did not try that again right away, but try again they did, and we cut them down. Handing bolts to my busy crossbowman became as mindless as threshing wheat. Sometimes a few brave souls got close enough to loose off a bolt or arrow of their own, and twice our men were hit: one got a clean wound in the shoulder, the other was nicked in the throat by an arrow and bled to death on the parapet. We had not lost a man to the enemy until then, unless you counted the three or four old folk who had died for want of care that perhaps they would have found in the outside world, or the girl who had died in childbirth, or her little boy, who had not lived to see his third sunrise.