“You do that just like a wolf.” Jerome smiled his happy, gap-toothed grin.
“The townspeople gathered with pitchforks and spears and knives and nets to kill the wolf, but just then Francis stepped out. He held out his hand, and the wolf rubbed up against him like a cat, and stretched out his forepaws and knelt down in a bow.”
“No! Is that true?”
“Then the holy friar took the wolf’s head in his hand and told him it was wrong to eat the villagers’ children and livestock and that he must stop, and that God would take care of him always. And also the townsfolk. What’s wondrous: the wolf understood, and after that the wolf lived or maybe still lives in Gubbio like a dog. The townsfolk fed him as if he were a gentle dog, and never did he kill again.”
“You wouldn’t find folk doing that round here,” says Jerome, after a minute of chewing over the tale. “Taking in a wolf.” He shakes his head. “But now I remember, not long ago a man across the mountain found a wolf-pup and brought it home with him. He tamed it. It acted like a dog, and he loved it like a dog.”
“Did it turn wild?”
“No. It stayed a dog,” he says. “It had white eyes.”
Then, because I’ve been thinking about Loup-Baiard, I tell another famous story in return.
“Once there was a valiant knight who had a fine, big, loyal staghound. Its name was Berenger. This dog was renowned for his gentleness with his lord and for his ferocity in the hunt. He was a king of dogs. Nothing pleased the knight so much as the fact that the dog loved him with unbounded love, and he returned that love in kind. They were inseparable, knight and dog.”
“What did he look like?” Jerome asks, loving a good story.
“He was gray, with shaggy, wiry fur,” I say, describing Loup-Baiard. “Big head. Strong white teeth. Ears half flopped like this. But let me get on with the tale.
“The knight married, and soon his lady gave birth to a healthy, strong son. The knight was pleased; he loved the boy. When he left his house he put the dog in charge, to guard the baby—that’s how loyal that dog was, and how much the knight trusted him.
“One day the knight and his lady went hunting. They left the baby in its cradle in the garden, protected by the dog. And a wolf—!” I shoot out my claws at Jerome, who jumps, then laughs into my laughing eyes.
“A wolf came out of the forest,” I continue, pleased with myself, “and you should have seen the fight that followed—fur and fury, growling and groiling—and for a time no one could tell which was stronger, the wolf or the dog, until the one was dead, and the other bleeding bitterly.
“That evening, when the knight returned with his lady, he ran up the steps and through the archway into the garden to see his fine young boy. Imagine his horror! The cradle is overturned, the bedclothes bloody, the baby gone—and up leaps the great dog, Berenger, to greet his master. His jaws are red with blood, and blood drips down his shaggy chest. With a cry the knight pulls out his sword and cuts the big dog’s throat.”
“Ah!”
“There.” (Dropping my sword-arm.) “The huge dog fell at his master’s feet, and still he tried to crawl forward to lick his master’s hand. The knight pulled back. He would not touch the dog. He leaned on his sword, the tears running down his cheeks, and watched his dog die—the noble Berenger, whom he had loved and who had killed his babe.
“Then suddenly he hears a cooing in the underbrush. He looks, and what does he see?”
“His baby?”
“His baby chewing happily on his toes and gurgling to himself, and next to him the wild, dead, bloody body of a wolf.”
“Ah!” groans Jerome again.
“At this moment the knight’s good lady appears.
“‘What have you done, my lord?’ she cries.
“‘I have killed my best friend,’ answers he. ‘I have killed a dog so noble that nothing can replace him. Alas! Ah, ahimé.’”
We sit in silence a moment, thinking about the dog named Berenger.
“Well, what do you think?” I ask. “It’s a sad tale, isn’t it?”
“That’s what comes of having a sword to hand. If it had been a peasant, you know, he’d have had to go get a pitchfork from out behind the stable or find a knife to kill the dog, and by the time he’d come back he’d have found the living baby and the dead wolf.”
“It’s a lesson about acting in too much haste,” say I, “in heat.”
“On the other hand, I think anyone would have done it,” says Jerome thoughtfully. “It’s a sad tale, but who wouldn’t kill the dog that killed your child? That’s the way life is, full of blunders and mistakes. It’s a nice story, though.”
He thinks a while longer. “Still.” His voice shakes with anger. “Who leaves a child with a dog? I fault the knight. What stupidity! Where was the wet-nurse? Or an older child to watch for it? That’s what children are for, to help out, and the nobility have plenty of servants. Where were the servants?” His eyes flash.
“It’s just a story.” I am laughing. He looks over at me, abashed.
“It’s a nice story too,” he says apologetically. “I liked it. Do you know more?”
“I know a lot of stories. About the lovers Tristan and Iseult. Or Roland the knight of Charlemagne. Or I could tell you about Orpheus, who searched in hell for his wife, Euridice.” Why do I want to impress him with my tales? I want him to admire me. I want to have him let me stay. “I’ll tell more later,” I promise.
Night has fallen, and the stars are blinking down at us. They cover the sky like grains of sand, like golden dust, so cold, so close.
“It’s time for bed,” says Jerome, but neither of us moves. Then: “Here’s a knife,” he says, pulling it from a pocket. “Cut off the cord and give it to me.”
“What cord?” I feel the rush of blood to my face, the tingling of terror.
“You said you wore a heretic’s cord. Give it me.”
“It’s not real.”
“Cut it off.”
I turn the knife over in my hand, feeling little waves of shock run through me. It’s so long since I’ve held a knife. I’m moved at its shape in my hand, but how can I cut the cord that binds me to William and Guilhabert and Poitevin and Hugon? To the siege, the cave? I want to flee. I could stab Jerome right now and run. Or slip the knife under my skirts and slice into my own belly and follow the others, and suddenly the tears are coursing down my cheeks and the knife is singing in my ear its high-pitched metal siren-song, the whine of blades, because how could Jerome know what he’s asking me to do?—he who never met the lovely, gentle Baiona or saw the way William would tip back on his heels or spread his ungainly large hands, lifting his copper head and laughing down at me. I could cut my own hand off. The knife wants blood. It wants to cut.
“It’s all right, old girl. No reason for tears.”
I’m standing inside the house now, near the fire, and Jerome has taken back the knife. How did I get here? I don’t remember moving. The red eyes of the fire glitter on the hearth.
It’s late.
“Come on, now. Let me cut it off.”
“Cut what?”
“The cord. You said you’re wearing a cord.”
“What cord? What are you talking about?” I cry. “Always ready with a lie. Dirty old man, trying to get under my skirts.”
“Come on, you’ve been standing here with the knife in your hand and bawling. It’s not safe to wear it. And you know”—he speaks in the gentle, wheedling tone he would use to a wounded animal—“your friends wouldn’t want to see you hurt. Or me either. It’s dangerous for me too.”
I remember now. He’s right, of course. I look around me absently. What am I doing in this house? Everything looks strange and unfamiliar, but this farmer is standing foursquare in front of me, steady as a rock, watching with the patience of a countryman.
He holds out the knife again.
“Or untie it if you don’t want it cut. Then hand it over to me. I’ll keep it safe until you leave.
”
“Turn your back.”
“I won’t look.”
I take the knife, reach under my skirts, and cut the string that I wear at my waist. After a moment I hand it to him. So easy. It seemed so easy with him nearby.
“It’s wool,” he observes irrelevantly. “Not even white. Now, no more about the heretics and all your fantasies. Whatever happened to you is done and finished long ago. Come on. Stop shaking now. There, there. It’s time for bed.”
He eases me into the storeroom and lights me to my bed with the little oil lamp.
“Tomorrow we’ll have to figure out what to do about you.”
“I’ll move on.”
“Not without putting me in prison,” he murmurs, covering me with my cloak. All his moves are soft and thoughtful. “It was a foolish thing I did, to call you my woman. Just blurted out. It means you’ll have to stay a while.”
“Well, I’ll stay a day or two, no more.”
“I’ll think out what we tell the neighbors. Sleep well.”
He drifts away. I lie there thinking. He doesn’t know that tucked in my skirt is something more dangerous than the imitation cord, which was only a fantastical fantasy, a make-believe. Underneath my skirts rests the precious Word of God, and if that were found it would send us both to the stake.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him….
That night my dreams are of being chased, and I am running eternally, a stag before the hunter’s spears, antlers high, and terrified because I’ve lost the treasure, and in the dream I’m hunting for it before the others find it first.
FOURTEEN
It took two days to walk to Montségur, and by the end of that first day, she was entranced, despite the disapproval of Esclarmonde. What an adventure! She’d never been so far from home, and she could hardly stop looking at the beauty of the landscape: the wind rippling a field of wheat, the silver olive trees shivering as they waved the undersides of their thin leaves. Were they praying too? Clapping their little hands? There were moments when she’d be trudging along, look up, and see the snowcapped mountains in the distance, and the beauty would take her breath away.
On that long walk, Esclarmonde and Ealaine told her about Guilhabert de Castres, bishop of the Cathar Church. Rumor had it that the bishop was so holy that he did not need to sleep. They said he had lived in a cave for twelve years as a hermit, and in that time had never spoken, though he’d met with God Himself. Later, after he returned from his isolation, it was so hard for him to enter ordinary life that he wept constantly. People were afraid his eyes would fall out from the abundance of his tears. But gradually the weeping stopped, and gradually he took his place at the forefront of the Cathar Church. Esclarmonde said he never ate even now. Food hadn’t passed his lips in eight long years.
Once a knight met him on the road. The knight leapt from his horse and made adoratio, and when the bishop had walked on, the knight turned to his squire: “I would rather be that man than anyone on earth,” he said.
The bishop was a small man with tiny, well-shaped hands and feet, they told her, but he was so powerful that when he walked the crowd parted before him, in respect, as if he emitted an invisible bow-wave: people stepped back. He bowed to left and right, smiling joyous blessings to everyone as he walked. People wanted to throw themselves at his feet. He had an air, said Esclarmonde, of such gentle kindness, such jolly, warm-hearted happiness, that when you met him, you felt he had been waiting all his life to meet and talk to you: how happy your presence made him!
“It’s his smile,” said Ealaine, “and his shining eyes.”
“It’s his love,” added Esclarmonde.
But what truly set him apart, they agreed, were his visions—what he called his Knowings and Showings. His exquisite intuition could pierce the veil that covers the invisible. Because of this gift he had asked the knight Raymond de Perella to donate Montségur to the Cause and then to rebuild and fortify it: apparently he knew something about Montségur that others didn’t know.
“What?” I asked.
“We don’t know; he will not say. He knows something, though. You’ll be surprised when you see the fortress.”
But nothing prepared Jeanne for that first view of the mountain sticking straight up from the plain like a thumb. Or the fortress perched stonily on its peak, or, once they had climbed to the height and arrived—breathless at the top of the pog—to see that colossal wooden gate built into the surrounding wall. The gate was so large that two smaller portals had been cut into it—one large enough for a loaded haywagon (if such a vehicle could climb the twisting path), a smaller one that was only large enough to let a single person through on foot; and both were set within that formidable, monumental gate: the work of giants, it seemed. A short distance away, the cliff face fell twelve hundred meters straight down to the valley floor.
This was Montségur. The “Safe Mountain,” impregnable.
The three women had climbed up the winding path alone, leaving the guards below. They had pulled themselves over up the path, sometimes holding on to the scrawny pines and boxwood trees that grew everywhere and that filled their nostrils with the acrid scent of pine—and of boxwood—the same odor (Jeanne thought) as in the castle maze. The woods sent out tangled roots that twisted and writhed across the boulders, thick as snakes and just as ready to whip around her feet. Jeanne had had to watch each footfall as she climbed.
Now, though, they stood before the fortress, catching their breath, chests heaving, and surveying their surroundings.
Every foot of land here at the top of the mountain, under the fortress walls, was terraced or cultivated, every outcropping of rock amidst the numerous wooden or stone huts sprouted herbs or edible vegetation.
“Who lives in those?” Jeanne asked, pointing to the huts, some no more than shallow caves, a partial bricked-up wall built around a jutting rock.
“The perfecti,” answered Esclarmonde. “The fortress can’t hold everyone. Some are hermits, some more companionable.”
Jeanne looked about her in dismay. The huts leaned like children against the fortress wall or bulged or burst dangerously out into the sky from their precarious perches on the cliff. And everyone was old—old men, old women—and they were all dressed in their perfect black. She wanted to throw herself at Esclarmonde’s feet and beg forgiveness, but the older woman was already stepping through the open gate.
“Come. Let’s get you settled with the bishop,” said Esclarmonde.
Jeanne cast one last horrified look about her and saw a workman grinning at her openly. He wore a leather jacket and leaned on his crowbar, a blue-eyed man with copper hair, not yet perfected, clearly. Jeanne tossed her head disdainfully and looked away, but as she followed the two women through the fortress gate, she slyly managed to shift and look back over her shoulder. He was still watching her. Her eyes flicked over him coldly—up, down, swiftly—before she entered the castle courtyard.
The following day Esclarmonde and Ealaine bade her farewell and made their way down the steep incline, while Jeanne stood, hands dangling and tears pouring down her cheeks at being abandoned here among the ancient Pure Ones.
“Don’t go, don’t go.” She thought her heart would break, and shatter, and spill down the cliff face after them like so many pebbles, and afterward, when she could not see them anymore, she ran partway down the path and flung herself to the earth, sobbing with deep, gasping cries of loneliness and loss.
To her surprise, as the days passed, Jeanne grew happy. She lived in a cramped stone hut with an old, old lady, Marquésia de Forli, already in her eighties, and she may as well have been a thousand years old in Jeanne’s eyes, for over her parchment skin lay a network of wrinkles and grooves as fine as the veins of a leaf and as fragile as her wispy smile; her hands were mottled with liverspots, and her eyelids drooped until Jeanne wondered how she had space between the skin to see.
Her socia had died. Jeanne prepared her food, ran errands, helped her to the latrine, and walked her where she needed to go.
Here was Jeanne’s day, as ordered by Bishop Guilhabert de Castres:
Rise at first light, with the pearl shadows opening up the valleys below. She staggered sleepily to the doorway of her stone hut to greet and praise the day. Hello! Thank you for coming! What a good day you will be! And, dutifully: Lord God, this day is Yours. She washed her hands in a earthen pot, brushed her teeth with a shaggy twig, dressed, and helped her old lady wash and dress. They went together to the meditation hall, her companion lurching on her cane. There almost everyone except the cooks sat in silence for an hour. Sometimes Jeanne squirmed in boredom. Sometimes she dozed and snapped awake. Or sometimes she slyly played with the shadows that her fingers flashed on the floors or wall. Occasionally, though, she felt great happiness, and as the summer progressed she began to look forward to this time alone with her own thoughts.
Later still, William—now she had a name to put to the man with copper hair—began to attend sporadically as well, and then she found pleasure merely in watching him (when he deigned to come), allowing her eyes to caress the curve of his throat or the spread of his awkward hands on craggy knees. Yes, she came to like this quiet time.
After breakfast, she settled to her studies with one of the perfected women. Jeanne already knew how to read and write both in Latin and her native tongue; she had studied grammar and rhetoric as well. She’d heard that in Paris the scholars also studied dialectic, or the art of logic and reasoning. But that was too advanced for her. Instead, de Castres—Bishop Berto, as she called him—had her copy and memorize long passages from the Good Book. He set her mathematical problems too, and he had her practice composing on the mandolin (at which she showed little talent). On other mornings she learned to write in different styles—a business letter, a diplomatic letter, a courtly letter, a letter of condolence.
The Treasure of Montsegur Page 12