‘Down here,’ Iselda whispered, and lowered herself feet-first into the black fissure. One by one we followed. When it was my turn I dangled my legs above Bertranz’ head and pushed off. For a nasty moment I was caught by my shield and twisted myself in a growing panic until suddenly I came unstuck. I found that if I wriggled I slipped and scraped downwards, the jagged stone biting at my knees and elbows, my wounds protesting. A vein of faint light showed where the crack opened onto the void, and as we descended the crack became wider until I found myself suspended, as if in a window. Only the pressure of my arms and legs against the sides of the crack kept me from falling forward into the black nothing. I took my parchment-dry lip between my teeth and eased myself down again. Suddenly a boulder appeared, wedged somehow in the crack, and Bertranz was squeezing himself behind it. I followed and popped out onto a narrow ledge. The Captain was sitting down, resting against the rock wall, and Iselda was crouched over him.
‘Is he all right?’ I hissed.
‘Yes,’ grunted the Captain.
‘I think his wound has opened, but it is not bleeding too badly,’ said the woman. The Captain was retying his bandage, and when he was done he levered himself upright and shook himself like a great grey dog. He grinned at me encouragingly. Iselda stepped around him and beckoned us onward.
We edged along the narrow shelf of stone, which wavered and grew wider and more narrow by turns. In one place it vanished altogether for an arm’s breadth, and we had to reach up and grasp a twisted root of some tree that clung there, and heave ourselves across the gap. Then we were in another fissure, angling like crabs first one way and then another. I felt my nails split and my fingers begin to bleed as I scrabbled again and again for a handhold. Once, Bertranz slipped and, with a strangled howl, dropped, flailing, onto the Captain’s shoulders. By pure good fortune the Captain’s feet were firmly set and his body braced and the bon homme was brought up short and managed to cling on with his hands, but I heard his boots strike the Captain and winced. My friend was all skin and bone, and his wound weakened him even more than cold and hunger had already managed. We stayed, trembling, for an eternity.
‘I am secure,’ said Bertranz at last. The Captain coughed and shifted his weight.
‘Let us go on,’ he said, and his voice sounded choked. Iselda was already far below. I heard the Captain’s feet searching for a hold, and then with a sudden hiss of loose stone he fell. There was a surging and a clattering that echoed up the rock walls, and for a moment a thin wail, as if a scream had been bitten down upon. Then silence.
‘I’m all right,’ came the Captain’s voice from very far down. ‘I slid.’ There was another silence. When it came again, his voice sounded strangled, but it was at least strong and loud. ‘You can come down on your arses, my lads, but be more careful than me.’
We found him on another ledge, leaning against the cliff. His clothes were white with dust, and Iselda was kneeling at his side. She looked up as we came out of the fissure.
‘He slid down on his bad leg,’ she said, her voice soothing. ‘It has opened, but I’ve bound it tight, and he says he will go on. Ready?’ She looked up at the Captain, and he nodded.
‘How does it go with you?’ I whispered, a hand on his shoulder.
‘I am fine. I thought I was falling into nothing, but ’twas just a little hard on my backside after all. Let us get on now.’
Iselda started down once more and the Captain followed, and Bertranz – whose breath was coming in shuddering gasps, for he had clearly not mastered the fright he had taken when he fell – and then myself.
‘Now we have to jump,’ said Iselda. ‘There was a rope here, but it has gone. It is not far – three times my height, if that. The landing is hard but flat. Watch me.’ She sat down and twisted herself around until the pale oval of her face was towards us. Then she vanished. There was a soft thud.
‘There is an overhang,’ she called up. ‘Let go and bend your legs when you land.’
‘You go next, Bertranz, and then me. Captain, we will catch you.’ I motioned Bertranz to the brink and he sat down, somewhat reluctantly, I thought. Then he dropped, and I followed. It was not dreadful, but I made sure that we broke the Captain’s fall just the same. As he landed I took his weight, and felt his fingers squeeze my shoulder.
‘Still faring well?’ I whispered.
‘Ach. This is delightful, isn’t it?’ he muttered back.
There was a path after that, and one more scramble down a steep ramp of scree, and then we were in the trees. The bare, stunted oaks rattled their branches at us, but we were almost down. The path under our feet was made by sheep or goats, and we were back in the realm of the living, at least. So we marched, down and down, until we came to the course of a frozen stream thickly overhung by leafless rowans and willows. Iselda led us along its narrow bank for perhaps three miles, until the sky was beginning to grow light. Then we sat down under the lean of a huge boulder to rest. I felt the frozen grass crackle beneath me, laid my head back and closed my eyes. There was a slide and a rustle beside me.
‘Don’t get too comfortable, sir knight. We must be at our journey’s end by dawn.’
‘Christ. And where is that?’ I said. Iselda wriggled herself comfortable against the stone.
‘Not far. It is a farm where the family is loyal to Mirepoix. They will have horses for us.’
‘Where are the French lines?’
‘We already passed through. Do you remember when we came down out of the trees? The sentries should have been there. But they are boys from Camon sur l’Hers, and their fathers farm their land at the say-so of Pierre-Roger, and so at certain times of night they make sure they are investigating suspicious noises on the other side of the wood.’ She leaned closer. I felt myself prickle with something I had not felt for months, and though I caught only the sourness of hunger on her breath, the scent of the besieged, my blood began to warm a little.
‘Your Captain is not well,’ she whispered, and I went cold again. ‘His leg is still bleeding, and it does not smell right. And he is old.’
‘I don’t know about that. He was … he was my age at the siege of Toulouse, he said. So he is fifty-five or thereabouts.’
‘As I thought, near enough. He is too old to be here. I fear for him.’
‘What can we do?’ I asked after a long silence.
‘I have some skill with herbs and such. They may have something at the farm. If we can get to Montpellier in time … He was strong, before all this.’
‘He was.’
‘So much waste. How thin us hunted beasts become, and how frail. And now our country belongs to the huntsmen.’
I said nothing, but leaned back and stared up at the sky. The great swathe of the Milky Way was fading, and just above the ragged jawbone of the valley hung a spark of green light.
‘Sweet friend, the morning star has risen in the east,’ I murmured. Iselda turned to me. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again they held a ghost of reflected starlight.
‘That song does not end happily, my friend,’ she said.
We slept through the day that followed in a barn, covered in sweet hay. The farmer’s wife brought us warm goat’s milk and knelt for a while at Bertranz’ feet, for she was a believer. Horses were found, and at nightfall we took the road north. It was strange being on horseback again, and my arse had become lean and bony, so at first the jolting gait of the horse was agony. But, by the time we had passed Le Peyrat, my arse had gone numb while the rest of me began to come alive. We were free.
We rested for a few hours before dawn in an old tower, woke up before noon and set off again. We were far enough away from Montségur now that there was no reason for a watcher to take us for anything but ordinary travellers. And as Iselda told me as we shared out the bread the farmer had given us, everyone knew that the heretics and their guardians were all locked up on the pog. To all intents and purposes we were an English knight, a wealthy merchant and their two companions.
All at once the appalling dead-weight of threat that had lain across my shoulders since the day the first Frenchmen scrambled up onto the ridge had vanished.
The Captain was feeling better that morning, and was straight and sure in the saddle. We rode close together for a while, but after a while the Captain and Bertranz crept to the front, leaving Iselda and I together a few lengths behind. It was a fine day, and as the miles passed by and Montségur grew further and further away, I found myself growing lighter inside. And here beside me was the woman who had been haunting my thoughts for so long.
Iselda de Rosers. It had been many, many days since I had first heard her voice, and she had drifted in and out of my life since then, and neither of us had paid much attention to the other, for in the roar of the French bombardment and the howling of the wind there had never been time. I had seen her every day, I suppose, and we would smile at each other when we chanced to meet in the courtyard or in the keep, and perhaps exchange some pleasantry. I wished, always, to tarry with her and speak more, to open my heart a little more, and hers likewise, as we had done that morning in the solar. But then the grinding toil of the siege would scrape those feelings away, for I would be back on the walls or in the armoury, and she would be with the women in the keep, tending to the sick, the wounded and the dying. But what never left me, in all those long months, was the desire to hear her sing once more, and it hid inside somewhere deep and dark, like a tortoiseshell butterfly sleeping the winter through, tucked away in some crack in a wall. Now here she was, at my side. There were many things I wished to ask her, but one thing above all, and as I jogged along I gathered my courage like a bashful youth, until the words could stay in my throat no longer.
‘Will you ever sing again?’ I asked her finally, after we had ridden together in companionable silence for the better part of an hour. She looked at me with something more than surprise, and I winced inside, hoping I had not broken the spell that had created some warmth between us today. But at last she gave me a wan smile and shook her head.
‘What’s there to sing about?’ she asked. It was a statement, but also a challenge.
‘We are alive …’ I began, but found myself sighing as I said it.
‘We are alive because we have left our friends to die. Shall I sing about that?’ she snapped. But she hung her head, and her next words were more gentle. ‘Forgive me. But both of us know we shall not see them again.’
I had been thinking of little else since we had left Montségur, and I was about to blurt out the words that I was clinging to as guilt tossed me about with its cold teeth: that when the castle fell, those who were not heretics would be safe, more than likely, and the Good Christians had already resolved to die and would welcome their end when it came. But however true that might be – and there are no certainties in war, especially when matters of faith are the cause of it – I had left my post. A soldier would have told me that I had been so commanded and therefore had no choice in the matter, but though I had learned the skills of war in the long months since I had ridden up to Taillebourg, I had not learned the soldier’s habits of mind.
‘You are right,’ I said. ‘I feel like a deserter. I am a deserter.’
‘Is that really what you think?’
I looked at her in surprise. ‘Yes. Of course it is.’
‘You, a man from another land, with no master – you told me that, remember? – who owed nothing to any man on Montségur, a deserter? You aren’t subject to Pierre-Roger, and you aren’t a Good Christian. Who, my friend, are you deserting?’
I closed my eyes for a moment and saw Gilles, serene, gazing out over the valley. Could you abandon someone who had already left the world and you along with it?
‘The perfecti knew their fate when they climbed the pog,’ said Iselda, as if hearing my thoughts. ‘And the soldiers? They are there for their lord, and because they hate the French. Do you hate the French as well?’
‘Not particularly,’ I muttered. ‘No more than … no, I don’t. I have been filled to the brim with hate for one sort of person or another, for the whole world, even. But not any more. What’s the point? We are all fools, we shall all die.’
She shuddered. ‘Lord! Is that what you believe?’
‘I’ve had enough of believing,’ I told her. ‘I used to believe in Holy Mother Church, and nearly died because of it. I believed in power, but what a midden that turned out to be! And I have lost a dear friend to belief, and though he is happy, I only see that he will die for nothing. All those wretches back there – the sergeant, Raymond? Remember him? What did he die for, with his blood coming out all over the stones?’
‘You rail at belief because you have none,’ Iselda replied gently. ‘I think you saw the peace that the Good Christians found, and it showed you the turmoil inside your own soul.’
‘Listen. My friend Gilles – he lives out in the village of the bons hommes – used to stare out into the distance and see nothing but illusion. This is a man who saw beauty in everything, or worth, at least. He would pluck a beetle from a tree and show you the patterns on its back, or pull out an ancient stone and marvel at the way it had been carved so that the eye at its heart shone through, until you would marvel with him. His belief, it turns out, took all that away. So for all those years, when he was looking at things, should he rather have been looking through them? Life was not an illusion then …’
‘And was he right?’
‘About what?’
‘About things. Beetles and stones. The world. Is it all the Devil’s dream?’
I laughed emptily. ‘Up on the walls, at night, with the ice and the quarrels coming at me out of the dark, how I used to wish it was all something I would wake up from. Alas, the world may be the Devil’s work, but it is real enough. But what about you, my lady? You don’t believe the perfecti either – or do you?’
It was her turn to laugh. ‘No. I am no believer. My grandmother, God rest her, was a perfecta, and she died up on the pog …’
‘Oh! I am sorry. I did not mean to be so scornful.’
‘Don’t worry. She was old, and it was a year or more before the siege began. She taught me most of the songs I know, so you see that Good Christians can find joy in the world, before they say farewell.’
‘Your songs aren’t altogether joyful,’ I said, though I was pleased, for at last she was talking of the thing I so dearly wished to learn about.
‘But they are about love,’ she pointed out. She was looking at the road ahead, so I could not see what look was on her face, but I knew that, somehow, she had decided to be gentle with me.
‘And yet you do not sing any more,’ I said. ‘What happened to love, then?’
She turned to me, and her mouth was tight with sudden anger. ‘You ask too much, sir!’ she growled.
‘Peace, Lady Iselda. I did not mean to sound so callow. And I do know something of love, to my misfortune. Here: I will tell you, and put myself in your power.’ She scowled but said nothing, so I went on hurriedly. ‘My first love died in my arms with her beautiful face in ruins. My second love saw me grow cold and greedy and so she left me, and now she will not have me back, though I am a good deal changed. Not enough for a great song, perhaps, but a verse or two?’
‘Tss. You do feel sorry for yourself, don’t you?’
‘I did. Not any more. She was right to leave me. I had become the kind of man I have always despised.’
‘And she who died?’
‘The longer we live, the more dead we leave behind us. For a long time I wished I had died with Anna, but she would have thought me a great fool, had she known. Still, I did not care much for life.’
‘You would make a good bon homme,’ she said, a little slyness creeping into her voice.
‘Yes, I suppose so!’ I admitted. ‘Strange, though. I have been around death far too much these past two years, and at times perhaps it would have been easier just to let go. To renounce everything, like Gilles. But here I am. I’m still alive, and I don’t want
to die any more.’
‘You’ve found something to live for, then?’
‘I don’t know. But I haven’t found anything to die for.’
‘Or anyone.’
‘And you?’ I asked again.
‘I make my own way,’ she said, and I thought I saw her set her jaw a little.
‘Come on, my lady. I showed you the scars on my heart. Show me yours.’
‘Not much to show.’
‘I doubt that. No one could sing of love as sweetly and as coldly as you do and not have … not have …’
‘Lived? Very well. I loved a man, and he betrayed me. I loved my country, and it died. Are those the qualifications you sought?’
‘Ah, Lady Iselda. We are not trying to hurt each other, are we? Tell me about your life. You are a trobairitz. I know nothing about your art, for you are not mere entertainers, are you? I’ve heard my Occitan friends talk about the troubadours as though they were poets and prophets rolled into one. You must have sung for some worthy audiences.’
She shrugged rather prettily and rolled her eyes. ‘When I was a girl there were still courts that welcomed the troubadours. And yes, I sang for the lords and ladies.’
‘And your lover – was he one of them? A lord?’
She gave me such a look that I thought she was about to attack me, but instead she threw back her head and laughed.
‘God, no! He was a lawyer, a Genoese lawyer. Of noble birth, I should add – oh, salve my pride! A pretty man, and charming as a jackdaw. The surprise was not that he betrayed me, but that he took so long to do it. I do not sing for him, as I think you suppose. My songs are for my … if you can understand, for my grandmother’s world, the things she saw when she was a girl, that I will never see. This land when it was the fairest in the world, with the most gentle and wise rulers, courts full of poets and scholars from across the seas, songs and poems and deep talk of God, and how the world is made … All that is gone. That is what I grieve for.’
‘You could have died with it,’ I said. ‘You have chosen to live too.’
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