It was around Christmastide. I had been on guard at the Roc de la Tour, our barbican that stood at the other end of the pog’s sharp ridge. It had been a day of beautiful dullness, for the day was dazzlingly clear and thick, diamond-bright pelts of hoar frost clung to every blade of grass and curl of bramble. I had chatted to my companions, the sergeant Bernard de Carcassonne, Raymond de Belvis, and my mess-mate William de l’Isle, and listened to the snow buntings chirp among the stones. Our relief arrived just after dusk and as was our habit we stayed with them for a while, sharing our supper, such as it was. The night watch was eight men strong. I cannot recall every name, but one of them was Marc le Forestière, who had mocked the French on that first day when they had swarmed impotently around the foot of the mountain. Bernard and Raymond were believers but the rest of us were not, so no doubt we talked longingly of women and what we had done and would do again in tavern and brothel, when we finally got down off this freezing pog.
When my watch got up to leave the hunter’s moon, no more than a wisp of silver hair, was slipping behind the mountains and Orion was loosing his dogs across the sky. We bid our mates goodbye and held our hands as close as we could to the brazier before pulling our mitts on fast to trap the heat. Wrapped in plumes of our own white breath we set off crunching through the frost. It was stunningly cold and we were silent, each one of us clenched in every muscle against the chill, thinking of nothing but the dim orange lights of the castle not far up ahead.
All at once there was a rattle of stones behind us. We all turned, expecting, perhaps, to see a fox or even a wolf, for those creatures skulked around at night, feeding on the dead and on the rubbish of the living. But instead we saw a tall shadow, then another and another, rising over the lip of the sheer cliff that dropped down a yard from the walls of the barbican. Like ripples in the darkness they seemed, but then came a flash of something thin and pale, and in the next moment there was a scream from inside the tower and then another and another, and then a crash and a shower of sparks boiling from the window as the brazier was kicked over.
We had all drawn our swords, and with a wild look at each other we dashed back down the stony ribbon of the track towards the tower. We were seven or eight paces away when the air filled with whirring, whining shapes. A quarrel struck William in the face and he dropped with a grunt in mid-stride. Something had caught fire inside the tower and by its light we saw that men were pouring out of the door, dropping to their knees as they aimed their crossbows. There were at least fifteen of them, and more shadows seemed to be pouring over the cliff-edge, but our own momentum was carrying us towards them. Another quarrel hit Bernard in the left arm and he yelped in pain and rage.
‘Stop! Stop!’ I screamed, grabbing at him. ‘Too many! Back to the walls, for God’s sake!’
The three of us skidded to a juddering stop, turned and ran for our lives, hunched over as the quarrels hissed around us. I found myself leaping over William’s still body. Ahead, the lights on the castle walls bobbed. There was an ugly clamour of voices behind us, mocking us as we fled in some harsh dialect. From inside the tower, a last scream.
‘They’ve taken the barbican!’ Raymond was yelling. ‘To the walls! To the walls, men of Montségur!’
It was not far to the postern gate, but that desperate run across the edge of the mountain, surrounded by a void of dark and freezing air through which quarrels flew like maddened bats, might have been the longest of my life. By the time I crashed into the wall and hung there, panting into the mortar, my lungs were racked by the cold air I had forced into them and sweat was steaming up through the neck of my mail shirt. Determined hands grabbed us and pulled us to safety as the quarrels smacked and chinked on the stones and the thick oak planks of the door.
The rising sun showed us a banner flying from the little tower, and it was not ours. The watch had not stood a chance, it was easy to see that now. They had been overpowered by at least thirty men, Basques, who must have been led by one of our guides up the almost sheer face of the cliff. By now they had dowsed the fire and were pulling out the bodies of the watch. One of those dark shapes had been Marc le Forestière, who would never see his new baby. They dragged them to the precipice and kicked them over the edge, and as each body fell a great cry of anger, of horror, went up from our walls.
The name of the traitor who had shown the Basques our secret paths might be found, I would guess, in the ledgers of the good Bishop of Albi, whose deep pockets were keeping the Crusaders’ zeal alive. He had not been keeping idle down in the valley, but drawing up plans and working the Crusaders into a fury of hatred for the garrison of Montségur. And once they had their claws in, the French went to work. All those thousands of swarming ants in the valley, that vast legion of helpless and frustrated men finally had something to do. Like maddened spiders they threw a great, ugly web of ropes, ladders and pulleys over the north-eastern cliffs and up this devil’s lattice they heaved a puzzle of beams and blocks and ropes that we could just see, those of us with young-ish eyes. They worked by day and by night, torches edging, like burning snails, up and down the cliffs. And all the time they poured arrows and quarrels into the castle, which we picked up and shot back at them.
The sun came up three days after that, and we saw what the French had been making. It was a trebuchet, bought by the ever-generous Bishop of Albi, and they had scratched out a platform for it a good stone’s throw in front of the tower. They fitted the arm and counterweight as we watched helplessly. A little after midday the arm swung and the first stone flew high above the ridge, to land with a harmless thud thirty yards from the barbican wall. The second and the third fell short, but the fourth struck the parapet, careened off and smacked into the wall of the keep. A shard of stone as big as a crow sliced off the arm of the bon homme Sicart de Lastours, and he died an hour later in the solar, watched over by the castellan’s wife, Corba. That was when we started to die.
I was sitting with Gilles in his hut a few days after that. The village of the Good Christians was quite safe then, for even though it was undefended, all the danger was on the other side of the castle. It was a strange fact of life in Montségur that, although there were almost as many able-bodied men amongst the bons hommes as there were soldiers in the garrison, the soldiers did not begrudge them their life of prayer. Gilles was a warrior. I had fought alongside him, and he had taught me many tricks of war, some subtle, some brutish. But I could no more imagine the Gilles who sat cross-legged in his thin robes wielding a sword than I could see the castellan’s little son Jordan pulling back a crossbow string. I went to talk to him because he made me feel lighter, somehow, and indeed many, even most of the garrison would seek out a favourite perfectus or bon homme for the comfort and strength they seemed able to give.
‘What do you see, Gilles?’ I asked him that evening. The sun was dipping below the mountains, and we were standing beside his hut. All around us, men and women were going about their quiet business, greeting one another, exchanging the day’s news or asking some obscure question about their strange doctrine, which seemed to grow deeper and more complicated the more it was examined; and their voices made a strange sound, almost like leaves in an oak wood, reverent and soothing. Gilles was gazing over at the crest of Planas that towered above us on the far side of the valley.
‘I see the mountains and the end of the day,’ he said. ‘What else is there to see?’ He looked at me and smiled.
‘You know what is happening on the eastern side,’ I said. ‘The French can get up onto the pog at will. There are thousands upon thousands of them, and …’ It was not worth finishing my sentence. Gilles sat down on a stump of broken wall.
‘Are you afraid?’ he asked.
‘You know what will happen when they take the castle – I can say when out here, although I would hardly dare utter if inside. They came here for one reason alone. They will not let any of us live.’
‘But are you afraid?’
‘Yes! Of course I am afraid. Not o
f being shot or stabbed, which is funny, but I have come to understand that. What I’m afraid of is being taken, and judged, and led to my death like an ox.’
‘That is not your fate, my dear friend.’
‘Can you see the future now, Gilles?’ I was jesting – at least I hoped I was.
‘Yes.’ He waved his hands mysteriously, comically, in the air before him. ‘We are all going to die,’ he said hollowly. ‘At some point, I’m afraid,’ he added, patting my leg reassuringly. ‘No, I have not been given second sight, but Michel has told me of some to-and-fro between Count Raymond and Pierre-Roger. I guess – and it is Michel’s guess as well – that Raymond, who do not forget has been pardoned for Avignonet, has bargained some sort of pardon for Pierre-Roger and his men, which means the garrison, and which would also mean you. Without a doubt he used us heretics as his gaming pieces. The death you fear is mine, not yours, and I do not fear it.’
‘You will let the Inquisition kill you?’
He shrugged. ‘I intended, from the minute I became perfect, to spend the rest of my days here. My wish will be granted.’
‘And the others?’
‘Have you been listening to me, Patch?’ His words were abrupt, but his voice was kind. ‘This is not life, it is all a dream wrought by our captor.’ He pointed over at the ominous bulk of Monts d’Olmes. ‘All this … all this great, terrible weight of matter is an illusion. Just that. The Devil has decorated our prison for us, and he has done it well, but once the bars have been glimpsed, they cannot be forgotten. Can you not feel it, Patch? There is so much lightness here. It pulls you up, ever up, even as the world seeks to pull you down. I will be set free, dear friend. I am glad. Be glad for me.’
After that, there are only fragments of memory, gouged into my mind like the desperate drawings scratched by condemned men on their dungeon walls. I have tried to forget some things and remember others, but these are all that remain.
I am on the ridge in front of the barbican. We have made a sally to try and wreck the trebuchet. It is appallingly cold. I am screaming through the thick woollen scarf I have tied around my face, and the hand that swings my sword cannot feel the hilt. The blade strikes the helmet of the Frenchman in front of me and slices into the metal as if it were an apple. The blood that pours out over his face smokes. I wrench out my sword. We are falling back. Three of my friends are dead, chopped up like mutton, and their blood smokes as well. A quarrel-shaft tocs against my arm. I run, while the scarf grows thick with ice. By the time I reach the postern gate it is frozen against my lips.
I am waiting my turn to dip my bowl in a cauldron of thin soup. It is thin, and I know what it will taste like: turnips and cabbage. The steam is rising, thick and white, and gives the soup a promise that every one of us knows it cannot live up to, but we are grateful nonetheless. There is a persistent knocking against the outer wall: the French trebuchet is out of action today, and the mangonels cannot find their range. But two people are already dead this morning, a crossbowman with a slight wound who went to bed cheerful and did not wake up, and a bon homme from Limoux who has been sinking for days into fever and then delirium. I have a low fever, and my nose is crusted and yellow. All my joints ache, and I have weeping chilblains on my hands. It is past the turning of the year, at least. The sun is coming back to us, slowly.
Through the steam I glimpse the long dark braids of Iselda de Rosers. She has her arms around a perfecta I recognise as Saissa de Congost. The older woman says something and Iselda smiles and shakes her head. She catches sight of me and waves a friendly hand. I have seen her every day since her return but we have not spoken. I have often wished to hear her song, but there is no singing in Montségur, only the croak of the ravens.
Two vultures are hacking at a French corpse out on the ridge. From the walls we can hear the chack, chock of the great beaks as they strike, hatchet-like, at the frozen meat.
Guillaume the baker is carrying a tray of loaves across the courtyard. It is balanced on his head. A spent crossbow quarrel drops into the courtyard and hisses across the cobbles towards him. He skips over it, and the tray stays up. A ragged cheer goes up from the walls.
A man stands, exhausted, in the solar of the keep. It is Matheus, the man who had bought me sausages in Paris. People still come and go, those who can face a terrifying scramble in darkness. Messages, letters, even hams and chickens get through to us, but rarely, for the paths still open to us were the most dangerous ones on the pog. Matheus holds out a letter to Pierre-Roger, who tears it in his impatience. He reads it, bites his lip, hands it without a word to Bishop Marty.
‘Count Raymond wishes us to hold Montségur until Easter,’ the bishop tells us – the Captain, the castellan and myself. I am only in the room as Matheus’ escort. ‘So says the author of this note, a bon homme whose brother is a secretary of the Count’s chamberlain. Not the most direct of routes. He goes on to say that the Count’s affairs continue to prosper.’
‘The Count and his affairs,’ mutters Pierre-Roger grimly. A ball from the trebuchet hits the wall of the keep with a thud that rattles the empty trencher on the table, and crashes down into the courtyard. ‘We will hold out.’
A sergeant called Raymond de Ventenac has taken an arrow in the groin. He is lying in the shadow of the wall, very still, very white. Blood is pouring from him in gouts as if from a cup spilled again and again over the stones. A bon homme, Pierre Robert, is cradling his head in his lap while a perfecta speaks the words of the Consolamentum to the dying man.
This holy baptism, by which the Holy Spirit is given,
The Church of God has preserved from the time of the apostles until this time
And it has passed from Good Men to Good Men until the present moment,
And it will continue to do so until the end of the World.
Iselda de Rosers is holding his hands so that he cannot pull out the arrow, and crooning something under her breath. Perhaps it is a lullaby. I am hurrying past with a bundle of arrows I have been gathering from the yard. I step over the stream of blood. The cobbles are white with frost, but where the blood has bathed them they shine like garnets. Raymond says ‘Oh, my mother!’ He twists his head in the bon homme’s lap and dies. I hurry off to my archers.
Bertrand Marty holds a service in the courtyard, standing in the door of the keep. The Good Christians stand tensely, listening for the whoop of balls from the French stone guns. They have three more mangonels now, and the balls, those that we have not shot back with our own puny machine, are beginning to pile up under the walls, and to live inside Montségur is to live inside a great bell that is constantly ringing with the smash and boom of stone upon stone. Our ears hum and we go about hunched, always ducking and bobbing as the stones sail in. Now the bishop raises his hand. His assistant, old Pierre Sirven, nudges Pons the miller and the two men stoop over the long wooden box at their feet and draw out a sheet of white linen. The watery sunlight is almost too strong, but every eye can see the dark outline of a bearded man, his hands crossed over his chest. Something passes across the crowd, cat’s-paws of unease, and three or four women cover their faces and moan. The figure upon the shroud flutters slightly, a ghost, a shade painted in blood, a patient guide awaiting the end of the world.
*
A trebuchet ball sails over the parapet four paces from me, whistling faintly, and hits the wall of the stable where I am quartered. There is a crash and a clatter as the fragments of stone spray out, and then a man’s cry, surprised and angry. I look down out of habit, and see a figure in black sitting on the cobbles, his legs straight out in front of him. He clutches at his upper thigh with bloody hands, and raises his head, for another ball is flying in, and I see it is Captain de Montalhac. I run down the stairs and join the bons hommes who have helped him up and are examining his wound. There is a blade of stone the size of a priest’s blessing fingers jutting from his thigh but not much blood, so the artery is safe. The Captain’s lips are white but he laughs when he sees me and let
s me help him into the keep, where Corba de Lantar will help him. It is the last Sunday in January.
I am summoned from the walls, where I am shooting at a band of Crusaders who are trying to dig an entrenchment. I have learned to use a bow, not well, but skill does not matter any more. It is twilight, and the moon is rising in a strip of clear sky between the mountains and the clouds. I am sore, because a mangonel stone struck the embrasure I had been standing in the day before and sprayed me with shards. My wounds are not bad, but there are many of them, and I ache all over, most of all from a deep gash under my left arm. I follow the sergeant into the keep. In the solar I find Pierre-Roger and Raymond de Perella, Bishop Marty and Captain de Montalhac. He is sitting, uncomfortably, looking white and drawn. It is less than a week since his wounding, and he has not healed yet. A dark-haired man with no front teeth is leaning on the table.
‘This is Arnaud Teuly,’ says the Captain. ‘He has come from our brothers in Cremona. There are many Good Christians from our country living there, and they have written, begging the faithful to abandon Montségur and seek refuge with them. I am afraid that they do not quite understand our predicament, however.’
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