Painted in Blood
Page 36
‘It looks different,’ said Iselda. We were only three miles away now. A buzzard mewed high overhead.
‘The castle!’ I said, squinting. ‘They’ve pulled down the castle.’
As we rode closer we could see that nothing remained of the walls of Montségur. The bastions that had given the pog its austere crown had been razed and the stones scattered, for there was no sign, from down in the valley, that men had ever set their mark on that high place. We reined in and stood in the middle of the track, staring. I turned to Iselda and found my confusion reflected in her eyes. The centre of our world for two years – no, it had been our whole world – might never have existed.
The village at the foot of the pog was deserted, doors hanging off, thatch beginning to rot. The French had been quartered here and the villagers had not dared to return, not yet. There were piles of pig, sheep and cattle bones; and heaps of men’s excrement, and a dead dog lying in the main pathway, nothing but a bag of dappled white and black hair collapsed over its skeleton. We rode on, ears pricking, but there was no sound except the thud of our horses’ hooves. We could already see where we were going. Further ahead, just before the rise of the ground where the pog began to jut from the hillside, a shadow lay among the abandoned fields. A great patch of black was smeared from the foot of the cliff and out into the sheep pasture, overgrown now, for all the sheep were dead. Like the pupil of a vast eye it stared up at the blue sky. We could smell the ash even here, see the greasy soot where it had drifted down onto the failing whitewash of the village walls.
It took no time at all to reach the burned field. As we rode up I saw where they had built their monstrous pyre, and how every tree and bush for half a mile around had been hacked off at its base to feed it. A soot stain like the frozen shadow of flame lapped up the face of the cliff, higher than a church steeple. The grass was burned right up to the track, wildfire that must have taken off the dry grass of winter. Lush new grass and late flowers grew happily through the dark crust of ash, but at the heart of the field nothing grew at all.
Silently, reluctantly, we swung our legs over our horses and slipped down onto the ground. The burned layer gave a breathy crunch. We stood at the edge of the devastation – but it was not that, nothing more, really, than a farmer’s swaling, a day’s work to make the grass grow stronger next year. Except that no farmer had done this, for nothing would be growing here when spring came. Towards the centre of the field, the fire had burned so fiercely that the earth itself had been consumed, and white rocks were shoving through the cinders. But at the very middle a low mound rose, no higher than a man’s knee, and the things that were jumbled there were not stones.
Two hundred and more people lay here, turned to powdery ash, to grey clinker, to blackened chips of bone. Here and there the fist of a knee-joint or the bowl of a skull-top poked through the desert. Here were two eye sockets, burned to coal and without the rest of their skull. I reached for them, but they crumbled in my hands. I stuck my fingers into the ash pile and thought for an instant that the ground was still warm. But it was not.
‘Raymonde.’ Iselda’s voice rang against the sooty cliff. A spark burst into life on the mound of ash, the white petals of a daisy.
‘Bruna.’ Another flower dropped beside me. ‘Ermengarde. Rixende. India. Braida. Arsende.’ Every name was the tolling of a clear bell. And with every name, a flower. ‘Maurina. Esclarmonde. Rixenda. Marquesia. Oh, God …’
I took her in my arms as she folded. ‘She sewed our clothes … Poor old Marquesia! How could they burn her? How could they do this? How could they do it?’
‘I don’t know, my love. I don’t know.’ I could smell the daisies in her fist, crushed into white and yellow crumbs. Her tears were hot against my neck. I pressed my thumb against my own eye to stop the tears, so my grief took my voice instead and we clung together in the great silence of that desert place, dumb, shaking. At last I took her hand and brushed the damp mash of ruined flowers from it onto the ground.
‘Gilles,’ I said.
‘We cannot leave him here,’ I said. We were sitting on the other side of the track, over where the path began to rise steeply up towards where the castle had been. ‘He always wanted to be free, and he had his wish. But here is the end of hope. I cannot imprison his bones in this wasteland.’
‘I know,’ said Iselda. She leaned against me, her hand in mine, resting in her lap over the sack of bones. We rose, and made our way over to the mound. The sun was slanting towards the high mountain tops, and the shadows seemed to be gathering in the blackness at the heart of the field. I set down the bag, and the contents brushed against each other, a sigh and a scratching. Then, as if a great, soft hand had touched me between the shoulder blades, I found myself kneeling in the ash, which yielded with a tiny hiss. Under my knee, the blunt pressure of splintered bone. With the bowl of my cupped hands I gathered up a heap of the ashes and held them up to my face.
‘Gilles?’ I whispered. ‘Gilles de Peyrolles.’ Then I tipped them gently over the jumbled bones of his friend.
The Sea of Crete, May 1245
The Cormaran nodded its head to the south, to where the dark brush-stroke of Crete would soon be rising. There was a gentle wind out of the East, and we were dropping down slowly across the Aegean, Milos just sunk behind us, the waves flashing from blue to silver, to quicksilver, to flying spray. A porpoise had shadowed us from Milos, but now he had gone, back to the island or away on some errand. We had our relics with us, and our own errand to perform. Here, over the deep waters, cradled by a hundred unseen islands, we had all come home.
Most of the crew were strangers, Venets and Croats hired off the Molo in Venice for a trading run to Alexandria. Of the Captain’s old crew only Isaac the doctor and Dimitri, the Cormaran’s old master-at-arms, now older and a little fatter, with the damp of Venice turned to rheumatism in his knees, were aboard. The others were far away, or like Zianni, further still, for he was dead of an ague, and Istvan had been taken by an apoplexy at the turn of the year. The sailors hung back around the stern castle or tended to barely needed chores, giving us some peace. I stood with Iselda in the prow, where I had often stood with the Captain and Gilles. The rail was worn and smooth where our hands had gripped it year in and year out as many seas had passed beneath us. Isaac leaned nearby with Dimitri, silent, staring out over the water. The old master-at-arms cradled two swords in his arms, the Captain’s old-fashioned, heavy blade with its iron handle, and the newer sword that Gilles had been so proud of. They had taught me to fight, these men, here on this deck, while the crew jeered and clapped.
‘Are you ready?’ I asked Iselda. She nodded, and lifted the plain sailcloth bag from where it had been resting in a coil of rope. She cradled it for a moment, then handed it to me. I held it against my chest, and felt the smooth bones within move against each other, the long bones, the ribs, the jumbled spine and fingers and toes shifting with the ashes, the gentle orb of the skull. I held out the bag to Isaac and Dimitri, who laid their hands on it. Dimitri crossed himself, and Isaac began to murmur the words of the Kaddish. I turned back to the sea, and Iselda helped me open the mouth of the bag, our fingers fumbling with the cords. When it was open, Dimitri slipped the two swords inside, hilts first. I drew the cords tight and knotted them around the worn leather of the scabbards.
‘Here,’ said Iselda. Together we leaned over the side, the cloth of the bag in our fists, our arms in the sea spray. I cannot recall who let go first.
‘Pray God made you Good Christians, and brought you to good ends,’ said Iselda, her voice cracking. Salt was sparkling on her cheeks. I took her hands, cold from the sea.
‘Amen,’ I said.
The End
Author’s Note
This is fiction, but the main events – battles, the massacre at Avignonet, the plots and intrigues of England, France, Toulouse and Poitou – are matters of record. The rest is a coarse weave of what-ifs and why-nots, but the loose ends I gathered are also based on
fact:
The Mandylion of Edessa disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and has not been seen since.
Geoffrey de Charny, killed fighting the English at Poitiers in 1356, is the first recorded owner of the relic that we know as the Shroud of Turin. An ancestor of Geoffrey, one Hugh de Lille Charpigny, was present at the sack of Constantinople, however, and the de Lille Charpignys, and the Charnys, as they later became, ended up as one of the most renowned noble families in all of France. How the shroud came to be in their possession has never been established.
The Sieur de Bourbon was killed at the battle of Saintes in 1242, but the name of his killer has not been passed down to us.
All the Good Christians who survived the siege of Mont-ségur perished in a huge bonfire prepared for them at the foot of the pog. The place where they died is still known as the Prat dels Cremats – the Field of the Burned.
Pip Vaughan-Hughes grew up in South Devon. He studied medieval history at London University and later worked as a reader for a literary agency when he wasn’t dabbling as a bike messenger, saxophonist, food critic, gardener and restaurant owner. He now lives in Vermont with his wife and children. Pip’s other novels are also available in Orion paperback.
Also by Pip Vaughan-Hughes
Relics
The Vault of Bones
Painted in Blood
The Fools’ Crusade
Writing as Philip Kazan
Appetite
The Painter of Souls
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Orion Books.
First published in ebook in 2011 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Pip Vaughan-Hughes 2008
Extract from The Fools’ Crusade copyright © Pip Vaughan-Hughes 2010
The right of Pip Vaughan-Hughes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 3909 6
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