Oh! A mouse, scampering in the thick grass at the roots of the hedge, just sprouted wings and flew off as a little bird! Goodness. I thought it was a mouse, rustling in the hedge, and instead it was a bird. It was beautiful, the way its wings lifted it into the air, mouse or bird, flying off so free. Suddenly my eyes can almost taste the yellow and red and pink wildflowers, they’re so alert with joy; and for a time I feel as if I can hear the grassy growing color green, and then to my surprise I notice that I am not alone on this road.
There’s a peasant woman with her basket of eggs coming toward me, and behind her a pair of reapers, scythes over their shoulders, going home perhaps, or moving to another field. The men swing their shoulders as they walk, as if still plying their monotonous harvest trade; their heads bend toward each other. They’re father and son, I think, as they approach and pass me seated on my rock. We nod good-day. Buon giornata. Giorno. Gior.
When they have passed, I push to my feet and pick up my stick again, trailing after them. If I were a Good Christian, the Our Father would run like music through my steps. I could do it now, as I have done it many times before; praying the sacred words for an hour at a time or more, and watching how the meaning changes with each repetition, watching how happy I become. The meaning of Our extends outward to encompass the various green grasses, the hard road, the mice that change to birds on the wing, Our Father. And though He sent His Son to die, my arms lift up like a child’s for its daddy—for Him. I’m climbing on His lap, enfolded in His arms; and heaven (when I continue minute by minute to say the prayer as my feet eat up the road) is no longer somewhere in the sky, the paradise to which I shall go upon my death, but lounging in the trees, slouching at my moving feet, sifting in the scent of mown hay, inside the very center of my being, the Kingdom of God within, right inside me here, and I am breathing the spaces between the limbs of trees.
Ahead of me the road forks. I lean on my stick, waiting for direction. To the west the sky is lowering, the clouds piling up gray and purple with a coming storm, and suddenly I remember I have no place to lay my head this night.
I push down the rising panic. This is no time for fear: I need clarity. I reach out, listening. Which path? The reapers have stopped on the right-hand road a little ahead, deep in conversation, leaning on the shafts of their scythes. The peasant woman has also taken the right-hand road. I wait at the Y, shifting from foot to foot. There’s a little altar here, with a crucified Christ hanging skinny from his bleeding hands and honored by a vase of withered flowers. I’ve heard that there’s a saint in Italy who had stigmata—the true nails of Christ—embedded in his palms. When he died, they tried to take the nails out and found them curled so tightly across the backs of his hands that they couldn’t pull them out. So they left them in when they laid him in his grave. I myself would have opened his grave, once the body had rotted, and removed the nails from his bones. Out of curiosity alone. To see if they had healing power, or held the key to love.
There: the nudge of Knowing. I turn left, toward the steeper, narrower path, and as I climb the mountain I think back on my youth with the Friends of God. In those days we worshiped in ordinary houses. “Your house on Saturday,” we would say, and the host would prepare a room with a simple table on which would be a striking pure white linen cloth. And that was all. No image of the bleeding, hanging body of our Lord. No crucifix. No images of God or Mary or the lovely angels—only a table, a white cloth, our prayers, our selves, sitting in the silent privacy of our most secret hearts, as the Master taught: to go into our close—our close-et—and there to listen humbly for the resurrected touch of God.
Some believe that Christ did not die on the cross, but being pure spirit jumped happily down and walked away. And others add that He met His mother and some of the apostles, and Mary of Magdala, who they say was His wife, and together they all took ship and landed at Marseilles and taught the Cathar faith. Still others affirm that the Good Men and Good Women are descended from the sons of Christ and the Magdalene. I myself don’t know what to believe; I wasn’t there. But I always liked it when one of the perfecti would visit and we would gather for adoratio and for spiritual baptism by his light-struck hands.
Of course, we worshiped in the Catholic Church as well. Many of us took the sacraments on Sundays, confessed to priests, and undertook Catholic pilgrimages to Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, where you could see the actual manger where Christ was born, or to Saint John Lateran, where they display the holy steps He ascended while wearing a crown of thorns. In later years, the Dominican Inquisitors sometimes sent converted heretics on pilgrimages to Santiago de Campostella across the Pyrenees or as far away as Jerusalem sometimes, or north to visit the new cathedrals being built in Chartres or Canterbury or Paris or Reims. It was one of the penances required of Cathar believers. It had the advantage of forcing them out of town. And then they’d come home, reconstituted Catholics, and kneel to the perfecti as before.
We worshiped both ways, many of us. Why not? We were all cousins, brothers, wives, mothers. We’d been raised in the same families, were tolerant of one another’s thoughts. I know a Catholic priest who used to come to our Cathar services and said he found no heresy.
Unless you count our stifled laughter during prayers when we were young, green, golden girls, and the flashing of our eyes at the boys across the room, or how we dropped them in self-conscious modesty. I laugh aloud remembering—it was so good!
This steeper path has no one on it. I am climbing up a cartroad so little used that grass grows not only in the mounded center but also in the two rutted wheel-tracks—though not so high, of course. And I notice how the air is getting cooler, the sun lower, and there’s a hint of orange in the sky behind me against the dark gray, purple piling clouds; and a tremor of fear passes through me when I think of spending one more night in the cold, exposed to bears and wolves, shivering under a tree perhaps, with no food or fire unless I can collect some wood.
Just then I hear the creaking of wheels. I turn on my two swollen feet to look behind me. Up the hill comes a slant-floored, two-wheeled cart drawn by a sturdy Basque pony, a shaggy dun with a thick, white mane that hangs below its neck and a long, white tail dragging at its muddy heels. Beside the pony walks a farmer, his face hidden under his soft, slouched hat. I step off the path to let them pass, for there is hardly room for the cart on this mountain lane, and I wish I could get a ride with him. My poor knees.
“Do you wish a lift, Mother?” He pulls the pony to a halt. He is youngish with a broad face and a flat, short nose. His beard is all pepper and salt. I wait, listening for direction: friend or French?
“Why, thank you, yes.”
“You look tired plowing up this hill,” he says, looking me over. I give him a once-over too. Eyes the stormy color of the gray salt sea. On closer inspection, I see he’s no spring chicken anymore. He sucks a blade of grass. He is missing one tooth and two fingers of the left hand.
“I’ll be glad to rest my feet a while, very kind of you.”
I haul myself onto the cart and wedge body and satchel between the baskets. He slaps the pony with brown cracked-leather reins.
“Eh, nice to have a lift,” I remark. “Be carried for a bit.” I’m amused to hear myself using a country twang—I, who can read Latin and speak the French tongue too, and who learned her high-caste accent from the Lady Esclarmonde herself. “Good-hearted pony,” I add.
“Aye,” he says amiably, smacking its back affectionately.
We travel up the hill in silence. I appreciate the man’s ability to walk without chatter. I take the time to look around me at the twisting road with its views of distant mountains, and to straighten my hair and wonder why my heart is singing uncontrollably—a lark leaping in the air. But then I notice that my hands are as big and coarse as a cook’s. Good hands. They lie in my lap like sausages, ten sausages, the nails split and black with dirt, and the skin burnt brown with the sun. The white hands of the nobility are cleansed in milk. I used to
wrap my hands in gloves filled with goat-cream batter. Baiona and I would comb each other’s hair and paint our eyes and lips; then we would put on our milk-gloves and dance around the room with our hands held high, singing songs and patting at each other’s gloves.
What’s queer is that I don’t feel any older now, so that it’s a shock to see in my lap these good, hard-worked hands, the appendages of an old woman, when inside I don’t feel more than twenty-two. I mash down my rambunctious hair with both hands, and then I do an odd, flirtatious thing: I take out my hankie and tie it round my head. Why am I so happy? As if a man would look at me!
“How far are you going?” he asks, spitting out the blade of grass he’s been sucking on.
“Till I arrive,” I answer openly, and break out laughing. Not often do I feel so comfortable with anyone. Then, to my surprise, I hear myself whisper, “To Montségur.” Until it’s said, I hadn’t known my destination.
He gives me a quick sideways glance, and I’m giving a similar marveling one to myself.
“That’s in the hands of the French now.”
“Hmm.”
“Have you seen it recently?”
I say nothing. What does recently mean?
“I remember the massacre,” he says.
Again I say nothing. I’m sorry I brought the subject up.
“Two hundred heretics burnt,” he continues. “The smoke was so thick the sky went black. And the stench? Faugh!”
He glances over at me, but I’m staring into the distance, thank you kindly, quite absorbed by the view.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My accent no longer country. I want to cry again; my throat working. Was he there? One of the French murderers?
He grunts and spits into the grass. “It must be haunted now. I wouldn’t want to go.”
I want to change the subject. “You soldiered for the French,” I hazard.
“No. Not I. But everyone’s heard of Montségur. I work the farm. My father’s and grandfather’s before me. My wife died five years ago. We had two daughters, one boy that died. The girls are gone now, both married. I live alone up the way. It’s not bad,” he added. “I’ve lived here all my life, just about, except conscripted into the army for one little while when I was young, and one time on a pilgrimage into Aragon.”
“You never remarried?” Get off the subject of war.
“Not yet. At first I couldn’t find a woman I liked, and then I couldn’t find one that liked me in return or wanted to live so remote. It’s all right—a bachelor’s life.”
We lapse into silence for another mile, the only sound being the comfortable creaking of the wheels, the whistle of birds in the brush, the soft stamp of the pony’s hooves on the sweet-smelling, grassy road.
“I live up the hill.” He breaks the silence suddenly, gesturing with one thumb. His words spill over themselves in a dialect so fast that I can hardly grasp them. “Listen carefully. My name is Jerome Ahrade. I have this pony, three sheep, ten chickens. Quick, what do I have?”
I stare at him, my mouth open in astonishment, then hear the hoofbeats behind us. “The pony, three sheep, ten chickens,” I repeat.
“I’m coming back from market. I have two hectares. The house is made of stone and wood. And your name?”
He speaks so urgently that I turn in the cart to look behind.
“Jeanne. Jeanne Béziers.”
“From Béziers?”
“I was perhaps a babe at the massacre. No one knows.”
“You’re lucky to be alive. Do you know these?”
I have only time to shake my head, for now they are almost on us, two Dominicans on horseback and two bodyguards in leather and chain-mail. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The track is so narrow that they cannot pass, but pull their horses’ chests up against the cart, their foam-flecked muzzles and hot breath right at my back.
One of the soldiers slaps his leather whip on the wood of the cart with a curse. “Hyaa! Goddamn you,” he shouts. “Move over; get out of the road.”
The pony jumps forward at the same moment that Jerome leaps to its head. He leads the pony by the bridle up onto the verge, and the monks and their bodyguards swarm around us.
“Get down,” says one of the monks to me.
I hardly dare to look at them. The magpies. Straight and narrow—God save us from the righteous of this world. They tower over us on their dancing horses, and one of the beasts rolls its eyes, exposing the whites, and tosses its head, gnashing at the bit. Flecks of foam shake loose onto my skirt. I stumble off the cart to stand beside Jerome, who puts one arm around my shoulder.
“Who are you?” demands the taller monk.
“No one, Father,” says Jerome. “We’re returning home from market. Selling butter, eggs. Mushrooms gathered in the woods.”
I look behind me. The sun’s antlers are caught in the branches of the trees, and the fiery orb is bleeding across the purple sky.
The soldiers lift the tops of the two baskets in the cart. Peer inside. Jerome squeezes my shoulder. I drop a curtsey to the Dominicans, as the peasant women do. I consider crying for a blessing, but I distrust my voice and my peasant accent. Instead, I stand, hands folded before me, and my eyes make lace on the ground. Praying. Listening. I’m afraid. Why does my Knowing leave when people come around?
“We’re looking for a woman,” says one monk. “A witch or a heretic traveling alone. Crazy, babbling to herself. Gray hair flying loose down her back, without a wimple.”
“Not seen her,” says Jerome. “There were many people on the main road, down below.”
“They said she took the mountain road,” says the monk.
“Unless the two peasants were lying,” murmurs his companion, and they confer for a moment quietly. Their horses still prance slightly from the exertion. The pony drops his indifferent head to crop the grass with brisk sideways swipes of his strong teeth. The two monks whisper together, looking over at us every now and then.
“Take off your clothes,” says the younger monk, looking my way.
“Father!” cries Jerome piteously. “She’s my woman, my own wife! What are you thinking of? A good woman, she’s borne children, and—”
“Strip her,” orders the other monk. He nods at one of the bodyguards to assign the chore.
I give a shriek. “Keep your damned bloody hands off me, you shit-face,” I scream in as flat an accent as I can muster, and I fight the soldier off, kicking and biting. They are looking for the perfecta’s cord around my neck or waist, and if they look much harder they’ll find my treasure too. I scream like a ghoulie, and not only the soldier but now Jerome is trying to hold my hands.
“Woman, stop it!” he cries, then hits me across the mouth.
I stop. He takes my face in his hands. “Hush now, Jeanne,” he says, speaking in a slow, loud voice, as if talking to a baby—or for the benefit of the men.
“Sirs, we are poor peasants. We are good Catholics. We go to Mass.”
I stand quietly, but my heart is pounding.
“Where do you live?” the soldier shouts at me.
“Up the hill,” I say, gesturing imprecisely with my whole arm. Which hill? Where?
“How much land do you have?”
“Two hectares.”
“What animals?”
“This pony, three sheep, a few weak, scraggly chickens. Honored sirs, we’re not rich.” I’m not about to tell the tax-collectors what there is.
“Almaric, go investigate.”
The soldier who’s still mounted turns his horse and gallops on ahead, up the mountain.
“Go on,” says the monk to Jerome. “We’ll follow you. If you have a well, you can give us a drink.”
The procession begins again, with the little pony trotting along and the horses stepping at an impatient walk behind.
“Meanwhile, the woman gets away?” says the other monk to his partner.
“Don’t be impatient,” says the first.
“I
am impatient. I’m impatient for the purity of my Lord Jesus Christ, and to flush out every unsanctified heretic for the glory of His name. So this one gets away while we waste time with peasants?”
“We’ll have time.”
“Brother, the two scythers misspoke. The woman took the main highway, down below. Why would she come off on the mountain track?”
At this point I remember what I should be doing—that’s how stupid I am, forgetting my help in times of peril—and silently I pray to my Lord Jesus Christ, to whom these monks offer reverence as well. But praying is hard, because I’m frightened, coward that I am. My hands shake. I want to vomit.
I pray first simply for the strength to pray. Then I place myself in the light of God and send my Lord Christ to the soldiers and monks to make them go away. Giving thanks that it is done, giving thanks and sending the light of Christ from my heart to theirs as best I can, as Guilhabert de Castres taught me long ago; and this is hard when you are afraid, when what you want to do is run. Or kill. Instead, I need to send the light.
My heart is stone. It is locked in a box and the key thrown away. A new heart I will give you. And a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. That’s from the Book of Ezekiel. Guilhabert made me copy that passage. I take a breath. Begin again. Take out the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. A heart of flesh is human and afraid. How can I pray? God, help us, please!
Jerome is walking beside the cart with me, and suddenly I understand that he is praying as well. The two of us are praying in a golden wave of light, and then I feel my heart open—click!—and I know the prayer is finished. It has flown to the Source.
“You’re right,” says the senior monk suddenly. “Turn back. We still have time to catch her on the low road.”
“Go get Almaric,” the other monk orders, and without a word the second soldier pushes his horse ahead and gallops up the hill after his comrade. We could kill them now, the two Dominicans, unarmed as they are. Jerome and I—it’s a passing thought—but I return to my original duty: send out the light of Christ, though it’s hard when I’m so afraid.
The Treasure of Montsegur Page 9