by Kate Mosse
‘I didn’t.’
‘It’s a common mistake. You blink, your arm moves, the bullet misses its target.’
Raoul came round and stood close behind her, touching her shoulder, her elbow, moving her arm a little higher. Sandrine could feel his breath on her cheek, the sweet smell of soap and tobacco. She felt herself blush.
‘Now,’ Raoul said, once he was satisfied with her position. ‘Try again.’
Sandrine took aim. Determined to do it right, she counted down in her head, like swimming in the deeper part of the river at Rennes-les-Bains, slow and steady, breathing in, breathing out. This time, she squeezed the trigger and imagined the bullet shooting down the barrel and out. This time, the glass shattered.
‘There!’ she said with triumph, turning round to face him.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a marksman of you yet.’
‘Haven’t we practised enough?’ she said. ‘It makes me nervous being out here.’
He smiled. ‘There’s no one about.’
Raoul leant forward, aligning his arm with the length of hers. Now he was folding his hand over hers, helping her to raise the gun, her exact shadow. Heat flooded through her, making her aware of every inch of her skin, of his skin, of his breath on the back of her neck.
‘Now,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Try again.’
When the shadows were beginning to lengthen, Raoul and Sandrine returned to the house.
She put her head around the door into the salon. Liesl and Marieta were playing ‘vingt-et-un’. Marieta had more colour in her cheeks. Liesl seemed to have recovered from her attack of nerves. Sandrine went back into the hall.
‘I can’t find Monsieur Baillard,’ Raoul said, appearing at the end of the corridor. ‘I wanted to tell him about my star pupil.’ He took her hand and held it tight.
‘What is it?’ she said, feeling the urgency in his grasp.
‘I was going out of my mind at the thought of not seeing you again.’
Sandrine raised her hand to his cheek, and all the words, spoken and unspoken, shimmered in the air between them. Then, sharp, a glimpse of how life might have been. In different times, not these times, the vision of years of marriage and love and company. The smile slipped from her lips.
‘If something happened to you, I don’t think I could bear it,’ she said.
‘Nothing’s going to happen to me,’ he said.
‘You can’t say that.’
‘I can look after myself.’
Sandrine sat down at the bottom of the stairs. ‘When you were taking refugees across the border, when you were risking your life for people you didn’t even know, probably wouldn’t see again, what were you thinking?’
He sat down beside her. ‘Mostly you’re not thinking at all, only about where to sleep, where the next meal’s coming from, if there are police or patrols about.’
‘Were you scared?’
He laughed. ‘All the time. It’s how you survive. Fear keeps you on your guard, keeps you safe.’ He threaded her fingers through his. ‘You think about one day at a time. Today’s the only day that matters.’
‘And if things never change?’
‘They will,’ he said quickly. ‘They have to. We’ll keep fighting, more people will come over to our way of seeing things, we won’t . . .’ He stopped. ‘Things will get better, you’ll see.’
Sandrine looked at his serious, proud face, his restless eyes bright in his tanned face, then put her arm around his waist. Sensing a change in her, perhaps, Raoul felt suddenly awkward.
‘What?’ he said, nervous now.
Sandrine stood up and took a couple of steps up the stairs. ‘Today is what matters, that’s what you said.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘And you can’t say you’ll be all right, because you don’t know. We don’t know what will happen when the sun rises tomorrow.’
She kicked off her shoes, which fell clattering back down to the floor, then turned and walked up the narrow stairs, feeling his eyes on her. She didn’t know what she intended, not really. Only a voice in her head telling her how little time they might have.
Sandrine stopped, turned then. Looked back at him. Watched as Raoul ran his fingers over his hair, glanced at the shoes lying like an invitation on the floor, not sure what he was supposed to do.
She smiled. In slow motion, it seemed to her, he started to walk up the stairs, then faster, taking them two at a time, until he was standing in front of her.
‘Today is what matters,’ she said again.
Chapter 79
The sun was sinking down to earth, covering the garrigue in a golden light. Everything was sharp, outlined against the whitening sky.
Audric Baillard stood beside the largest of the capitelles, his hand resting on the stone, still warm from the heat of the day. He looked down the low wall that ran alongside the track back towards Coustaussa. Past the old holm oak, past the white walls of the outbuildings of the Andrieu farm, to the cemetery.
To the west, the ruins of the old château-fort. To the east, Arques and Rennes-les-Bains hidden in the green folds of the woods. Ahead, on the far side of the valley, the village of Rennes-le-Château, a semi-circle of green houses and the flat red turrets and towers of the ancient Château des seigneurs de Hautpoul. The Visigoths had made the hilltop the capital of their spreading empire, building on older remains. The square towers and high arched windows of the more recent castle were reminiscent of the oldest sections of the walls of the medieval Cité of Carcassonne.
Baillard took the fragile scrap of woollen cloth from its linen shroud in his pocket and held it before him, still unable to believe the turn of fate that had brought it into his hands. Crude though the picture undoubtedly was, he was certain the tallest of the peaks shown was the Pic de Vicdessos. He followed the line to the hiding place at its centre with his eye. Hard to tell without an indication of scale, but he estimated it might be some three or four kilometres north of there. Even so, it was a large area, filled with caves and labyrinthine fissures in the rocks. Once, most of the lower slopes would have been forest. Today, open spaces punctuated the woods.
‘A la perfin,’ he murmured. At last.
Baillard took a deep breath, then began to read out loud the few Latin phrases written on the map. Repeating the words once, then again, hoping to hear the voices calling to him from deep within the earth. He closed his eyes.
‘Come forth . . .’
And this time, although the sound was still indistinct and blurred and distorted, Baillard perceived the shift of bones within the land. For an instant, a cooling of the air and the light metamorphosing from pink to silver to white. He caught his breath. The rattle of metal and leather, of swords and marching feet. Banners and battle colours, one row behind another behind another, shimmering like a reflection in a mirror. The heroines of antiquity, Pyrène and Bramimonde, the Queen of Saragossa, Esclarmonde de Servian and Esclarmonde de Lavaur. The song of the dead awakening.
‘. . . the spirits of the air.’
Harif, Guilhem du Mas and Pascal Barthès, all those who dedicated their lives so that others might live. The Franks and the Saracens, the battles of Christianity against another new faith. Stories of treachery and betrayal in the eighth century as in the fourth, Septimania conquered and subjugated and occupied once more. The force of arms and the clash of belief.
‘A sea of glass . . .’
In his mind’s eye, Baillard could see the walls of Carcassonne. Charlemagne’s army camped on the green plain beside the river Atax. Looking out over the plains of Carsac, the widow of King Balaak, the sole survivor in the besieged Cité. Straw soldiers set along the ramparts to protect Carcas, the Saracen queen, from the power of the Holy Roman Emperor. No man left living to send out to parley. Burning what little remained for warmth.
‘A sea of fire.’
Baillard closed his eyes as the legend took shape in his mind. Every schoolchild knew the story. How Dame Carcas fed the very
last grains of food in the starving city to a pig, then tossed the animal over the wall. When its sides split open, and undigested food spilled out, the deception was sufficient to persuade Charlemagne that the Cité had food and water enough to withstand. He lifted the siege and struck camp, until the single note of an elephant’s tusk horn called him back and the Tour Pinte bowed down in homage at Dame Carcas’ behest.
Carcas sonne, so went the phrase. Carcas is calling.
A story to explain how Carcassonne got its name. A fairy tale about a brave woman and an army of straw men defeating the might of the army of the Holy Roman Emperor. A myth, no more.
And yet.
Baillard took a deep breath. However impossible the legend of Carcas might be, the Cité itself never did fall to Charlemagne. What had saved Carcassonne? Could it be that, behind this schoolboy legend, lay a deeper and different truth?
‘And come forth the armies of the air.’
Now, in the smallest of spaces between one beat of the heart and the next, Baillard thought he could see the transparent imprint of those he had loved. Foot soldiers in the shimmering ranks of the ghost army as it began to breathe and take form. Viscount Trencavel and the seigneurs of the Midi. From Mirepoix and Fanjeaux, Saissac and Termenès, Albi and Mazamet. And further back in the serried ranks, the cavaliers alongside whom he had once fought.
He caught his breath. Could he see Léonie’s copper hair, like a skein of burnished cloth? The chanson de geste, earlier than the Song of Roland, earlier even than la canso of Guilhèm de Tudèla, a poem that Baillard himself had completed. And her? Might he yet see her? The girl in a red cloak and a green dress, for whom he had waited for eight hundred years.
‘Alaïs,’ he murmured.
Baillard spoke the words once more, but the atmosphere was different. The boundaries of what was and what might be no longer merged one into the other. A diminuendo, the voices fainter now, the outlines faded to grey.
He opened his eyes. He was left with the promise of what might be, nothing more. He understood. The fragments he had spoken were not enough, not sufficient unto the task. He clenched his fist. These times had been foretold by Ezekiel and Enoch. By Revelation. Of the seas turning to blood and the skies black, fish dying on the shore and the trees dead in the soil, mountains torn from earth in protest. In these modern times of the twentieth century, ancient prophecies of thousands of years ago were, finally, coming to pass.
Baillard knew he must find the Codex. Not only because it was the one thing that might serve their cause and change their present. But also because in it lay his only chance of salvation. If he found it and spoke the verses set down, not merely fragments of them, then the army would come. Alaïs might come. Baillard did not think he could carry on living without her.
‘Every death remembered . . .’
The minutes passed. The air became still. The land began to sing its usual song. Cicadas, the wind in the garrigue, the whistling of birds.
Little by little, Baillard returned to the present. No longer the soldier he once had been, but an old man again, standing in the fields beyond the Andrieu farm. The sun was sinking to earth now, setting the shadows chasing one another across the hills on the far side of the valley. He sighed, then turned his attention once more to the map in his hands. He didn’t think Sandrine or Raoul had noticed there was a rudimentary signature on the bottom left-hand corner. Seven letters and an icon, some kind of mark, after the name. He peered closer. It was a cross with four equal arms, a symbol that had more in common with Roman images of the sun and the wheel than the Christian cross.
Proof, surely, that the Codex had been smuggled from the great library of Lugdunum. Someone who was part of the community. He looked at the signature again, holding it carefully to catch the light and managed to read the name written in the corner of the map.
Arinius.
‡
Codex XII
‡
GAUL
AQUIS CALIDIS
AUGUST AD 342
Arinius woke at dawn after a restless night. He knew he soon would have to leave his stone sanctuary. August was entering her final weeks, the temperature was growing less fierce. It was time for him to move on. He could not afford to stay any longer in these tranquil valleys.
For a week and more he had slept well. But last night the sweats had come once more and he had coughed and coughed until he thought his ribs might break. There were specks of blood on his clothes and a tight pressure in his chest. He was bone tired. A visit to the baths in Aquis Calidis, he hoped, might just keep the illness from taking hold.
The path down the hillside was pleasant, following the river on its meandering path through the valley through deep and ancient woods. Arinius felt his spirits lift. There was a breeze, and white wisps of clouds were veiling the face of the sun. There was no one about. He’d seen no one since Couzanium. No sign of bandits or trouble of any kind.
The confluence of salt- and freshwater rivers made Aquis Calidis a natural place for the Roman conquerors of the region to build a bathhouse. Hot, warm and cold springs, bristling with minerals, flowing naturally out of the ferruginous rock. Once, so he had heard in Couiza, visitors from all over Septimania had travelled the Via Domitia to the settlement. Senators, generals, the descendants of the families of the Tenth Legion, who had settled the land when Gaul had been absorbed by Caesar into Rome’s Empire. Times had changed. Now, most of those old spa towns were deserted, down on their luck, the once busy streets echoing with the footsteps of the past.
At the entrance to the town, Arinius stopped and looked at the buildings of the thermae with pleasure. Like the town itself, the buildings had seen better days, but there was nonetheless an elegance and a faded beauty in the Ionic columns and white marble caryatids and vaulted ceilings of the atrium. A row of arched windows and diamond-shaped openings, all perfectly in proportion. A classical building in the folds of the green hillside.
He peered into the gloom beyond. There was no attendant on duty and, not knowing the way things were run, he couldn’t tell if that was because he had come too early or because the baths no longer regularly opened. He could see no signs or smells of an unctuarium or gymnasium. The mosaic floors in the tepidarium were chipped and dull.
Arinius was disappointed, even though he had not expected much. The merchant had told him that few made the journey here any more and that local people – the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original inhabitants of the valley – had, little by little, turned away from the customs the Romans had imposed upon them and gone back to the ways of their ancestors.
Giving up on the idea of the bathhouse itself, he followed the signs to the hot springs, which were accessed via a narrow path leading down to the gorge cut by the flow of the water. He made his way along the riverbank on the far side, until he saw the hot spring at the side of the river. Arinius removed his leather sandals, left his cloak, tunic and undergarments folded on a rock, took off the bottle from around his neck. Then he climbed down into the hot, rust-coloured waters and settled himself comfortably.
With the water lapping pleasantly on his legs and feet, he looked up at the halo of green and wine-coloured leaves on the hillside that flanked the river gorge. He wondered what the archbishop of the community in Lugdunum would say if he could see him.
Arinius was aware that, in his months of solitude, he had travelled some distance from the strictures of the way of life in which he had been raised. He no longer saw privation as requisite, as essential for a greater understanding of God. Now he believed that God dwelt more in the natural world than in the confines of a building, a church, a shrine, anything made by men. He saw the hand of God in the stars at night, heard His breath in the birdsong and the music of the river. As he had become stronger, Arinius felt God moving in his blood, his bones, his muscles. This was the essence of his faith. Not in proselytising, not in the impulse that sought to subdue heresy, other faiths, but rather in a private and personal coven
ant. Arinius lay back in the water, a stone for his pillow, and closed his eyes.
He had no idea how long he had been lying there, only that the voice, when it came, was shockingly loud in the silence of the day.
‘Salve.’
His eyes snapped open. He looked up to see a man of middle years, a shock of grizzled grey hair on his head and chest, with broad arms and shoulders.
‘Mind if I join you?’
Arinius could not place the accent. He was immediately on his guard, but he gestured with his hand.
‘Of course not, please.’
The newcomer lowered himself into the waters with a grunt and a sigh. To begin with, he seemed content to sit in silence. From the scars and marks on his torso, the crooked line of his nose, Arinius suspected he had once been a soldier.
‘Where are you from, friend?’ the man asked.
Arinius didn’t believe the Abbot would still be hunting him after all these months, or so far south, but he blurred his answer all the same.
‘Carcaso,’ he replied. ‘A castellum some forty miles north.’
The stranger nodded. ‘I know it.’
‘What of you, amice?’
‘Tolosa,’ he replied.
Arinius recognised the name. He knew there was a large Christian community there. He looked at the stranger with a keener interest, wondering if he was of the same faith.
‘You are a long way from home,’ he said lightly.
The man looked directly at him. ‘As are you.’
Arinius nodded, but said nothing more. For a while longer they sat in awkward proximity, their feet nearly touching. Arinius glanced at the pile of clothes the man had placed on the riverbank, seeing the iron tip of a dagger in a leather sheath, resting on a heavy brown tunic. His sense of calm had left him and he was nervously aware that the Codex in its cedar tomb was in his bag. He had not felt he could leave it unguarded in his shelter, but the man had only to reach out a hand to find it. Arinius wanted to leave the pool, but he didn’t wish to offend his companion. Or provoke trouble.