‘You’re not French, so I’ll tell you,’ she said bitterly. ‘A messenger came last night from the south. Montségur has surrendered, and they’ve burned all the bons hommes, every one, even the castellan’s wife and our own Bishop Bertrand. Eight days ago, it was. You could see the smoke from twenty miles away, or so the man said. I’m not a believer, mind, but the bons hommes were kinder and made a lot more sense than all these greedy pigs from Rome, with their greasy hands in our pockets and their beady eyes in our houses.’
‘Oh Christ,’ I said. ‘So the bells …’
‘One priest, one fucking French priest, thought he’d celebrate. I suppose he thought we’d all join in. Didn’t notice we all have our faces in the mud. Curse them with the red plague, every one.’
I found a shadowy spot under the walls and sat down in the cool dampness. I could see the greasy smoke rising behind my eyes, rising above the valley with the sharp pog and the little castle rising at its end. Gilles was dead. Escaping, he had said, but it did not seem like escape, herded into fire. I thought of farmers swaling their fields back home, how the rats would come out of the stubble as blaze marched across the furrows, and how the children would beat them back into the fire where they leapt and twisted and became dancing coals. That was not escape. There could be no escape. Beside me, the Mandylion sat in its bag. The good people who gazed on you with such fear, but yet begged to look again, are all dead, I thought. Did you prepare them to meet their death? Or did you bring it upon them? I asked it, remembering how its face, sketched out in ancient blood, had seemed to regard the crowd of believers that day on Mont-ségur. If you are Christ, then bring them back, I told it silently, and then I grabbed the bag and began to cast around for the way up onto the walls.
‘If you are Jesus Christ, who brings the dead back to life, bring back the Good Christians, who loved the words you spoke to men, and whose only prayer was the prayer you taught the world!’ I said aloud. In my head I saw myself standing on the southern wall, unfurling the shroud into a gonfalon. I was almost on the parapet when I slipped and landed on my elbow, and the pain cleared my thoughts. Christ, I am going mad, I thought. And then, because I was bursting with rage and grief, I decided what I would really do. I would go to Count Raymond and make him tell me what he had meant with all his cryptic talk of affairs, and why he had dragged out the agony of Montségur only to turn his back on its defenders at the end.
‘Who is prospering now?’ I muttered as I marched through the alleys towards the palace. ‘All the Good Christians are dead, and Gilles and your old friend Michel de Montalhac, while the Roman priests ring their bells.’ I had no plan, but strode into the Palace of the Counts, evidently looking rich and grim enough that the guards did not challenge me, and not until I was demanding, through clenched teeth, to see Count Raymond, and the chamberlain was gently but expertly steering me to a chair in the antechamber, did it occur to me how feckless I was being. But I did not care. I sat there fuming, jiggling my leg with a fury I could not keep tamped down, rudely hailing the secretaries and officials who scurried here and there, ignoring me.
A good hour had passed, and I was beginning to wonder if I should just walk in on the Count, and what was likely to happen if I did, when there was a tramping of shod feet, and a sound I had not heard for a long time, that of English voices, rang out far too loudly in the corridor. A moment later, and three knights entered the room, chatting amongst themselves, and to my horror I saw that one of them was a man I knew from my time with King Henry’s army. I willed myself invisible, but his eye fell upon me and he exclaimed in surprise.
‘God’s teeth! It is … it is! Sir Petrus! Good God, man, what are you doing here?’
I rose, reluctantly, and nodded hello. ‘Geraint?’ I hazarded. ‘Well, what are you doing here, then?’ I said, somewhat rudely.
‘Jeffrey! Jeffrey of Abbot’s Dene. I have come on an embassy from Earl Richard to the Count. Still finalising some things relating to the earl’s wedding, you know.’
‘Oh. Did he marry Sanchia, then?’
‘You should know, my dear fellow. Was it not you who brought the thing off ? Where have you been? The wedding was last November. And Earl Richard has been looking for you, before and since. Any man coming into France was given orders to keep their eyes out for the Knight of the Black Dog. And, strike me dead, I have found you!’
I was sorely tempted to take him at his word and strike him down there and then, but I gave him a wince disguised as a smile instead.
‘What could be so important that all these good men have been looking for me?’ I enquired coolly.
‘You are to be entreated to come back to England. No doubt the earl has some reward to bestow upon you, dear man. But when my party left, he asked us to leave word wherever we went that you were very earnestly enjoined to come to a wedding.’
‘I thought you said that the earl’s marriage had already happened.’
‘No, no, not the earl’s! It is his ward who is being wed – your cousin, the brave Lady Agnes de Wharram. I am amazed you did not know of it.’ He stared hard at me, as though he had just realised that I was a simpleton or a mooncalf. ‘To one Aimery de Lille Charpigny.’
‘Good heavens,’ I breathed. ‘I …’ Casting about desperately for something to say, an image came to me of Aimery holding Letice’s ankle after the battle, and looking up at her so tenderly, as if she were a wounded bird. ‘There could be no better match,’ I said at last. ‘Please send my congratulations.’
‘You must come!’ they all cried, gathering round me. I began to feel uncomfortable.
‘Alas, I have urgent business in the east.’
‘But you are here to speak with Count Raymond, even though he is not here.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I was beginning to think that these English buffoons were some manner of vision sent to try me.
‘He is in Narbonne. We are here to deliver something to his equerry. Where have you been, Sir Petrus?’
‘On a very long journey.’
‘It looks to have been arduous. ’Tis only a year and a half since Taillebourg, but you are somewhat altered, my friend.’
‘I have been in strange lands. When is this marriage? Where?’
‘In London, a month next Tuesday,’ chimed the youngest knight.
‘I will not be able to attend, in that case. My affairs will keep me …’
‘In the east,’ said Jeffrey. ‘So you said.’
I made my excuses as politely as I could and hurried out of the antechamber while they gaped, astonished, at my back. Almost running down the hall I all but collided with the Count’s chamberlain, and before I knew what I had done I took him by the shoulder and all but shouted at him, all the confusion and anger of the day pouring out into the bewildered man’s face.
‘So the Count is not here, eh? Has he heard the news from Montségur? Does he know the end he has made of the Good Christians with his affairs?’
‘Take your hands off me!’ squealed the man, outraged. But I held on.
‘Week after week we had word from here, from this palace! Hold on, wait for Easter, wait for the Last Trumpet! Why, for God’s sake! Why?’
The chamberlain had gone pale. ‘Stop, stop,’ he said, his voice dropped to an urgent hiss. ‘You were there? Who are you?’
‘Petroc of Auneford, companion of Michel de Montalhac and sergeant of the garrison of Montségur,’ I told him.
‘De Montalhac … Is he here?’
‘No, he is not. He is very far from here.’
‘Ah …’ He pinched his nose and gritted his teeth. ‘Did they burn him? Curse them all.’
‘No, he was not burned, but he is gone nonetheless.’
‘I am sorry. I truly am: I knew Michel years ago when de Montfort was outside these walls. Did he take the Consolamentum?’
‘He did,’ I said, letting go of the man’s shoulder. ‘But what is it to you?’
‘Nothing, save that I knew the man, and we spoke when h
e was here last.’
‘When the Count said he would abandon the Good Christians.’
‘Yes. I am … again, I am truly sorry. Some of us here did try to help, you know. But what could we do?’
I remembered that some of the messages that Iselda and Matheus had brought were from someone close to the chamberlain. ‘It was the Count who could have helped us, but he did not.’
‘He wanted to, and he did try. The garrison has gone free, did you know? Your comrades, at least, are safe.’
‘They were all, all of them, my comrades,’ I said, swallowing down a bitter surge of grief.
‘Listen to me. You must leave the palace, and do not come back. The French are everywhere now, and the Inquisition as well. If they sniff you out …’ He gave me a haunted look. ‘If it means anything to you, Count Raymond has lost everything. He has bowed his knee to the pope, and the bloody King of France, and in return for his freedom he will see his lands overrun by every sort of foreign louse, and sucked dry. Toulouse is finished. Languedoc is finished. You have seen the end of a world, young man. Now go, and if you have a story to tell you must tell it, but do so when you are far from here.’ He took my hand and patted it hurriedly, and with a glance over his shoulder at me he hurried away.
‘Wait.’ I ran after him, and he paused, looking harried. ‘Do you know Iselda de Rosers? The daughter of Assenda? You do, I see it in your face. Is she in Toulouse?’
‘Iselda the trobairitz? I gave … that is, I believe she took a message there some months ago. No, she is not here, and her friends, some of whom are mine as well, have not seen her. I fear she will have been at Montségur.’
I left the palace and went out into the city. I made my way up on to the walls, to the place where Domna Assenda’s mangonel had stood. Once again I did not know what to do. Somehow I believed the chamberlain: Iselda was not in Toulouse. So where was she? Narbonne? Montpellier, Foix? The thought of roaming through Languedoc suddenly filled me with dread. I did not wish to see this land die. I looked through the embrasure, out over the fields to the spot the Captain had pointed out. Simon de Montfort had died there, his head knocked off by a mother and her pregnant daughter – or perhaps not, but it made a good story. A story that no doubt a granddaughter would be glad to sing. Christ, there had not been enough songs lately.
Then and there I made up my mind. I would go to London and see Letice Londeneyse wed. I had meant what I had said to Sir Jeffrey. Rarely had I met a better man than Aimery de Lille Charpigny, indeed I could not say that I knew anyone else who acted entirely out of fairness and honour. I would always owe him my life, no matter how I repaid him, and besides, Letice Londeneyse and I had said goodbye to one another years ago. I had thought of her often, very often, during the siege. By day she had come into my daydreams as my dearest companion, and by night as lust incarnate; and many times I had sworn to myself that if I ever came down from the pog alive I would seek her out and win her love as I had won it before. But I had slowly forgotten the real woman as life itself became less and less real, and when she had gone the phantom girl of my dreams faded as well. Now here were two people whom I could wish well with all my heart, and it would be a fine balm for my battered spirit if I did exactly that.
And then I would rid myself of this dreadful thing I was carrying with me. I had thought many times of what the Captain had intended me to do with the thing, and now I guessed that he had meant for me to get rid of it, for it was a curse. I could not fulfil his last wish and find Iselda de Rosers while I still possessed it, for if I did so I would be bringing the shadow of death with me, and I was sure – suddenly, there on the walls of Toulouse, as the bells of the city still tolled defiantly for the dead of Montségur – that the Captain had meant me to bring life. Richard of Cornwall would give the mountains of the moon for the shroud, and I would make him dissolve the bond between us into the bargain. And then I would come looking for Michel de Montalhac’s daughter. All at once I wanted, more than anything else, to hear her sing once more. Remembering my jealousy, I scratched at the lichen on the warm brick in embarrassment. At least I could make it right again. I would find her – I had tracked down far more elusive things, had I not? – but first, London. Feeling lighter already, I picked up a crumbling chunk of brick and flung it hard towards de Montfort’s dying place, watching as it flew and dropped, lamentably short, into a stand of dry reeds. It would be good if someone could put the last year of Montségur into song. Perhaps, if the story were told, true and clear, in a voice as pure as the wind that blew down from the January mountains onto the pog, it might make sense. Perhaps it would even bring me rest.
I returned to London a day early for the wedding of Letice and Aimery. The road to Bordeaux had been crowded with soldiers, but they had all been going the other way, down into the southern lands, and no one bothered an English knight, for the French and the English seemed to be friends again. It was a vile crossing, stormy and wet, and twice we came in sight of the South Downs before the weather blew us back to Cherbourg, but at last I stepped ashore in Portsmouth, in rain so thick the town seemed to have slipped beneath the sea. It took me a week on England’s vile and muddy tracks to reach London, but on the twenty-eighth day of April, as the afternoon was waning, I rode into the Borough and threaded my horse through the mêlée on London Bridge. I took a room at the Three Coneys and went to bed early, though I lay there for a long time, listening to the clip and clatter of footsteps in the alley below, and the London voices.
Next morning, early, I sought out a haberdasher that I remembered the courtiers mentioning, while we languished in Royan with nothing better to do than compare clothes. His wares were dowdy compared to the best of Venice, but I found some good sakarlat leggings and a tunic of fine bronze damask and paid over the odds for them. At least I would go unremarked at Westminster, for I would be as badly dressed as the rest of them. With Thorn on my belt and the fancy satchel with its secret cargo across my shoulder, I left the city by Lud Gate and rode across the meadows towards the Palace of Westminster. The tide was out, and the Thames mudflats looked like dirty pewter in the sunlight, but the rushes were putting out their spring shoots, and catkins hung from the hazel thickets. I thought I heard a cuckoo, though it was just a child calling his dog, but by the time I had come to the palace I was not so sunk in gloom as I had thought I might be. No: I was happy. I had not been to a wedding since Zianni, to everyone’s amazement, had got himself married to a pretty, plump Tiepolo cousin, and that had been four long years ago now. And as Letice had just left me and I was still cancelling my own wedding plans, I had never been likely to enjoy it.
I knew nothing about today’s marriage save that I had got the date right. So I thought I would make my way to court and ask. Presumably it was an important occasion, if Earl Richard were giving away the bride. As I knew my way around Westminster after my fruitless week there, all of two years ago now, I wandered through the throng of courtiers, all as peevish and unfashionable as I remembered them, making for the hall where supplicants waited for their audience with the king. I was in sight of an archway I recognised when a loud, rich voice boomed out behind me:
‘Zennorius! Zennorius! Hold, man!’
I whipped round to see Bishop Ranulph of Balecester, bedecked in the full regalia of his office, striding through the crowd towards me. God, no! Of the many people I did not wish to see, Balecester was the very least welcome at that moment. I lifted an arm in reluctant greeting, but as I resigned myself to his loathed company a swarm of clerics separated from the throng and began to assault him like horseflies, each jabbering and waving their arms, trying to outdo the other in forcing their petitions into his ears, and even plucking at his dalmatic. As he tried to beat them off I slipped behind a pillar and, hurrying along the wall, soon found myself at the hall of waiting. The door-keeper was the same thin and foxy fellow who had made my life miserable before, and he leaned on his gold-knobbed staff and gave me a withering look, though he could not have recognised m
e. Somewhat elated by my fortunate escape from the bishop, I gave him a beaming smile that deepened his frown instantly, as lemon juice curdles milk the instant one touches the other.
‘My good man, I am here for the wedding of Lady Agnes de Wharram,’ I said. ‘I am invited.’
‘And who are you, sir?’ he asked grudgingly. I had not impressed him yet: it must be a big wedding, then.
‘Sir Petrus Zennorius,’ I said, ‘lately back from distant lands.’ That always sounded impressive, but I was not prepared for the transformation my words brought about in the odious doorman.
‘Sir Petrus?’ he said, plainly amazed.
‘I am he. I may have given the impression that I would not attend, but I was in London, so …’ I said airily. The man was not listening.
‘Please wait here, sir,’ he said in an unctuous tone I had not heard in all that long week I had spent at his mercy. He showed me to a seat in the inner waiting room and disappeared through one of the doors. I had always assumed that beyond this room the king was waiting in all his glory, but now I thought about it, there wasn’t anything grand about this room. There must be a dozen more beyond it, I mused as I sat there alone, all occupied by poor sods who know they are more favoured than the man in the room before, but who have no idea that the doors are endless. Much like life itself, I was thinking, when the doorman returned. He bowed most convincingly and indicated one of the other doors.
‘This way, sir,’ he said, silkily. I followed him through another door, bracing myself for the dazzle of the royal presence, for I seemed to have hit squarely in the red today. But instead I found myself in another corridor, down which the doorman hurried, his claret-coloured tunic fluttering behind him. The door at the end was shut, and the man rapped on it with the end of his staff. It was opened from within. The doorman bowed again and ushered me inside.
It was rather dark inside, but it seemed to be a small chamber. You see? Another waiting room, I said to myself. Someone held a lighted lamp very close to my face and the flame dazzled me. How rude. For a waiting room it seemed to be quite full. Perhaps these were the other wedding guests. All these thoughts went through my head as the door was closing behind me and my eyes tried to blink away the flare of the lamp.
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