“Now tell me, is there someone you like?” Giulietta asked. “We’ll see if we can’t make a marriage to suit everyone’s needs.”
Thus with whispers and nudges she pulled Jeanne’s secret out—that Jeanne had eyes for Rogert of Foix, whose father was a cousin of Esclarmonde.
“I watch him all the time,” she confided, “but he doesn’t know that I’m alive.”
THREE
The sight of the Inquisitors riding past has upset me. I huddle by the river here, hugging my knees and feeling the sickness waver in my stomach.
They say the war was fought against heresy. I say they want our land. You don’t see war up north, near Paris. Here they kill everyone—Moors, Jews, Cathar heretics. They say we are demons, and no trace must remain. Burn our bodies, expunge all memory. They exhume dead bodies buried fifty years or more, dry skeletons buried in holy, consecrated ground on cathedral land. They dig up the bones and toss them on the flames, tear down our houses stone by stone. Nothing must remain, they say.
They burnt two hundred and ten people at Moissac, not without resistance. Was I still married then? When were the Dominicans expelled from Toulouse? It’s all a muddle in my mind. And yet the first one, the Spaniard Dominic Guzman—he was a good and holy man. Everyone said so. If he were alive today, I wonder if his Preaching Friars would be behaving so. He asked Pope Innocent III to send him as a missionary to convert the Tartars in Russia, and instead the Pope sent him to evangelize the heathen Christian Albigensians here in the south. He’d already taken up our Cathar ways: he walked barefoot in sandals, ate no meat, lived in poverty, like the Cathar priests. He preached the love of Christ just as the Good Christians did in the Church of Love. He took the same vows of kindness and constant prayer, and in fact he converted a handful of men and women to his order—and now look at the Preaching Friars, killing the Good Christians because they refuse to leave the Way.
They call us the Cathars, or “Pure Ones,” because we trace our path right back to the original apostles of Christ. We are the sons and daughters of Jesus, following His Way. “I am the Way,” He said. “Anyone who wants to enter the Kingdom of God must come by my Way.” That’s from the Apostle John. We have followed the Way, handed down one on one, mouth to ear, for more than a thousand years, the direct heritage of Jesus Christ our Lord, whose children we are.
The Inquisitors call our priests the “perfected heretics,” haeretici perfecti. We call them simply the Good Men or Good Women, the Good Christians, the Friends of God. There are Good Christians up north too, in Paris, Orleans, Reims, and around Champagne, worshiping in the Church of Love. But mostly in the south, stretching from Aragon across to Lombardy.
It’s strange to think we cannot live in tolerance and peace. First the Pope tried to argue people back to their Catholic faith. He sent out missionaries, but the Catholic Church had become a laughingstock, the province of illiterate or foolish priests, and often drunken ones. Some kept their women right in their houses, concubines and mistresses. It was a scandal. Certainly it scandalized our chaste Friends of God, who taught that we were fallen angels, struggling to return back home. The Friends were opposed to unwed sensuality. Once when I was a young married woman, I came down to the village at Peyrepertuse and saw the priest, Pierre Laclergue, coming out of the house of Na Mengarde, hitching up his hose under his skirts with the satisfied smile of a cat; and I had only to look at Na Mengarde to know how well the priest had done. That’s the true sign. If the lover has not yet achieved his prize, his eyes will follow the woman, while she appears indifferent. But once he’s gained his goal, it’s the woman’s eyes that follow him, while the man seems careless and indifferent. So that’s how I knew about the priest and Na Mengarde, but it’s nothing odd.
You can go to any monastery in the Occitanie and see the wives and girlfriends living in outlying houses, or the whores leaning out their windows right nearby. I know one abbot who keeps his mistress in one house and his wife in another. And I’m not saying anything against them, but they’ll burn a heretic for chastity. For shame!
Take the cleric Gervais Tilbury. It was common gossip at the time. One day he and other clerics were walking with the archbishop in the gardens outside town when they spotted a young girl in a nearby vineyard. Gervais nudged his brothers, leering, and made a bet that he could take her, and they all hooted and catcalled at him—even the archbishop!—as if they hadn’t each one taken vows to God. And then Tilbury strode through the vineyard, jaunty and polished, to seduce that poor country girl. There—I see how she shies away with downcast eyes—she knew about these priests—and picks up her pace, eyes glued to the dusty road before her. He slips one arm around her waist. She freezes. He bends over her and whispers pretty words (“No,” she twists away) about her fine breasts and her lips that should be used for more than words (haven’t I heard such whisperings myself) and how he can provide food and drink such as her tongue has never tasted, should she go into the bushes there with him, and there he will show her pleasures known only to the angels in heaven. It would be no sin, he says, since he is a man of God.
But this girl was a believer, a credens. She had taken a vow of chastity until she married.
He tried to kiss her anyway, and he thrust his hand under her dress—at which she pushed him so hard that he fell in the dirt. Then she lifted her skirts and ran as fast as she could, back to the safety of her peasant home; and all the while the archbishop and the other priests were howling with laughter and egging on their comrade and calling for payment on their bets.
“It’s a scandal!” I shout so loud that a raven flies up off the tree with a raucous croak and flaps away like a loose-shouldered, black-garbed cleric himself. The demon-birds.
Gervais Tilbury accused the girl of being a heretic. Because of her vow of chastity. She was burnt at the stake, alive. Hair on fire. Clothes on fire. Feet hands eyes, ahyiiie!
That’s the Catholic Church that invaded the Languedoc in 1209. Pope Innocent III called up a Crusade not against pagan Saracens but against good Christian folk who follow Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who could not die on the cross because He was more than human. The Pope called for a Crusade against those who believe in Baptism not by water but by the Holy Spirit, as Christ taught. Who believe in the power of prayer, and rebirths, and our climbing steadily toward the godhead Light. Who believe in the laying on of hands to heal us with the holy Spirit of Christ’s Light. And believe in women serving also as the priests of Christ. But I don’t think the Pope cared about those things; I think his Crusade was because we wouldn’t tithe.
Esclarmonde says that in the end we shall win, in God’s own time, that the others will eventually come round to our Way; but I remember when even women—myself among them—were taught to read and write, when the Bible was translated into the common tongue, when the free towns were governed by freely elected consuls—as had been done for eight hundred or a thousand years, ever since the time of the Romans—and when Jews and Arabs were elected to high office too. Now the Jews wear a yellow circle on their breast, released heretics wear a cross on both sides of their breast, lepers wear gray clothing with a red hat, and I have no more bright, gaudy, green or azure gowns.
FOUR
The memories come in flashes, like sunlight shining in a forest grove, while all around lies the blind blackness of lost time. But I’m scared. In the blackness the other memories lunge out at me, but I won’t look at them. I’m angry. Control the horses of my thoughts. Hurrying, I stumble to my feet and walk. Te-tum-tum-tum: I hum a tune to keep the fear away. “Be grateful; count your blessings,” Esclarmonde used to say, “because God loves us when we sing”; and pretty soon my mood brightens. “You’re only as happy as you decide to be,” she’d say, and so I sing to the joyous air of Christ.
Look at me, so blessed here. I have a place to live, that only leaks a little. I have clothes and food; I’m never hungry for long. And if I hadn’t lost everything, including my mother (indeed, two mothers), and m
y husbands (two), and country, friends, and all my money and lands—everything material—would I be so rich as I am now? So why am I weeping? I can’t stop crying. I could cry for a thousand years.
The others envy me. That’s why the little boys throw stones: they’re scared of my happiness; it confuses them. And the ladies in the convent pray for me—imagine!—as if they’re luckier than I.
A butterfly has landed on that leaf. It’s so pretty, with its blue and yellow markings, that I stop to marvel, and it waves its wings as if its little fanning cools the very earth, so sweet a butterfly, cooling my heated memories. And now I’m crying for the beauty. The Friends of God believe this earth, all physical matter, was created by the Evil One, all pain and wickedness masking itself as beauty and delights. (They also think that we ourselves were angels once, except that we’ve forgotten.) I’m weeping for love of Satan, then, but how can that be when my heart curls around the tender butterfly? Scripture says that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. And wouldn’t the God of power and love bend over the earth and all the animals—except (slap!), all right, except the black flies. I’ll give Beelzebub the flies that buzz on the bleeding carcasses of war, or are they God’s way of cleaning up cadavers? Oh, now I’m confused again.
The Good Men want to leave this life of suffering and move into the Light—Christ’s Light—but I cling to my life with both white-knuckled hands, terrified of dying, in spite of pain and flies. That’s why I’m not perfected yet. Because it seems to me, looking back, that each moment has moved me inexorably to this imperfect moment, as if my life were writ in the Book of God before I even agreed to come be born; and I had no more choice in what’s happened than in where the wind decides to blow—not in Rogert, who led me to Montségur, not in loving William, or finding the cave, not in hiding the treasure, not in my weakness—and then I whimper and throw my shawl over my head, because if that were so, then it would mean that God meant for me to lose the treasure of Montségur, now gone, now lost. Ah woe, ah me! Unless it was the crafty Devil. Or was the fault mine, made by my free will? How do I tell?
Now I’m walking faster, trying to outrun my thoughts. It begins to rain; the big, scattered drops are like the tears of God, and between the rain and my own tears I think we’ll have another Flood.
The age-old question eats at my heart: Was it my will or God’s? I have always felt different. With cause, of course—the foundling, found playing among the grasshoppers in the hot green July meadow-grass. How old was I? Two or three at most, in my white silk gown with its tiny pearls sewn down the front—the garb of a noble’s daughter, so they said, but smeared all down the front with blood. One red satin slipper on one tiny foot, and no sign of the other, and I not crying in my orphan-state, but singing little baby songs while pulling at the stalks of grass, as if the black smoke of the city weren’t still rising in the silent, hot, blue summer sky. How had the baby gotten there? Some said she was an angel-baby and some a changeling or the Devil’s spawn. But Esclarmonde, who called me her angel-child, said I was only an orphan, saved when the city fell.
Twenty thousand people were massacred at Béziers. I’ve heard the story many times. The slaughter went on for days. Men, women, children, babies. Were the soldiers’ arms tired from wielding their knives and heavy swords?
“How will we know the heretics from the Catholics?” one soldier had asked.
“Kill them all,” replied Bishop Arnard-Amalric, commander of the Crusade of 1209. “God will recognize His own.” (My arm flailing at the raindrops in my rage!)
In the cathedral alone they butchered two thousand screaming people who had fled there for sanctuary. Blood splattered the painted walls and dripped in the dusky shadows to pool around the bodies on the stone floor; while outside, amidst the constant screams and shrieks, blood flowed in the gutters, and the corpses, beheaded, stabbed, mutilated, lay in the alleys and streets and in the rooms of ransacked houses, while the drunken Crusader routiers, the mercenaries, roared and raped. Other citizens were whipped out of Béziers, their hands or noses chopped off, or their eyes put out, and they were bumping blindly into trees and stumbling over roots, their bleeding, handless stumps held helplessly out before them, these homeless, mutilated ones. They wandered through the forest until they starved or until the peasants bludgeoned and pitchforked them in mercy. (My arm exhausted from the sweeping and the stabbing.)
And then the fires began—no one knows quite how—and burnt up this rich city, while the French knights fought their own men, swords swinging, in an effort to restore order amidst the roaring, screaming blaze; and when they’d put the fires out, nothing at all was left.
And then the silence.
When it was all over, the French marched away no richer than they came. The silent wind whipped up the empty streets, where the rats gnawed on the silent corpses, toasted by the flames. The only sound was the buzzing of Beelzebub’s black bottlenose flies.
A child was found in a field outside the walls, a baby, singing baby songs and playing with green stalks of grass. She was dressed in a white silk dress with pearls sewn down the front. The Lady Esclarmonde took her in as one of her orphans, to raise Cathar. But I remember nothing of either massacre or field, nothing of the mushroom woman who found me or of the two perfected women who walked me to Pamiers. I remember only one moment shot with light. It comes as a glimmer, fragile as if seen through water, of a lady dressed in shining white. She is smiling sweetly down at me. She takes my hand, a Lady in light, sheltering me in shimmering love. We are walking in tall grass together. I’m not afraid, but follow trustingly. The grass is higher than my head.
To this day I don’t know if it was a dream or not…. I wish I’d see her again. But how did the infant get into the field? And another miracle: the mushroom woman didn’t smash the baby’s head against a rock and steal her little pearl-strewn dress.
My gnarled old hands. Knuckles knotted. Nails torn. Baiona used to clip my nails and massage my hands with creams; we’d laugh and talk and braid each other’s hair, kissing one another, my other heart.
Ah, there’s my cozy stable, and the rain is coming hard.
FIVE
Anger! Anger! It beats like waves of fire in my spine.
I’ve hurt my foot.
“Beware of what you pray for,” Esclarmonde would say, “because you might get it.” Instead, surrender everything to God. “God knows what will bring you happiness,” she’d say. “Leave everything to God and to His angels, and do you try only to love like God, to live like Christ.” I’ve never succeeded at that. “Pray, Jeanne, that you can have the heart of Christ.”
It’s raining. I’d like a mug of hot wine or cider. Something warm and thick running down my throat. I must be close to forty, and yet I want to snuggle down in a featherbed and hide. I want my mother to care for me. Instead, I scrunch down in the straw of my lean-to shed and pull my cloak around me. I could boil some hot water to soothe my throat. That would be good. Especially if I had some honey to put in it, which I don’t. Next door I can hear the donkey moving about in his stall, and the bleat of the three black-faced sheep, and there is a fine, thick animal smell.
My shed is roughly three feet wide, with barely space for me to stretch out. Still, it feels good to lie down. Beneath my throbbing foot, hidden under a board, is my treasure. The gift from Poitevin. If I take it out, if I remove the green oilcloth wrapping, I can stroke the silver inlay on the black, hard calf-leather cover. It has silver clasps to hold it shut. My eyes are too weak to read the beautiful inked print, and I could be burnt for owning it, not in Latin but in the common tongue—all four Gospels, and each title letter illuminated in gold and red and lapis blue. I don’t dare remove it from its nest, but I rest my ankle over the straw-strewn board that covers it. Perhaps it will heal my foot.
“Hey, beggar-woman!”
I look up. It’s the mistress’s servant here, the one who doubles as the stableboy. He stands in the stableyard, under the dr
ipping eaves, holding a tray covered with a napkin. The rain is pouring down the thatch into his collar, and he’s wet as a drowned cat. I give a cackle.
“What are you laughing at, old hag?” He pushes into my little lair that’s hardly big enough for me roll over in. “Move over.” He shoves me with one foot.
“What do you want?” I ask, but I move back lest he step on my hurt foot. I won’t get up for the likes of him. He’s dressed in his rich black velvet jacket and black hose, pretending to be a squire in the castle perhaps, instead of the gardener and the stableboy. Oh, he’s a dandy, he is. He likes boys. I have seen him strolling at dusk, or standing on the stone bridge, looking out for fun. Now he tosses back his fine brown curly hair, which does not toss easily since it’s dripping wet.
“What do you come here for?” I ask.
“Not by choice,” he snarls. “Move over, damn you, witch. I’m getting wet.”
“Well, don’t come out in the elements,” I say, laughing up at him, “and they won’t turn on you.”
The Treasure of Montsegur Page 3