Siege Perilous

by E. D. Debirmingham

  “We have received an interesting proposal from the fortress,” said Hugue.

  “It is not interesting, Your Holiness,” corrected the archbishop. “It is absurd. It should be dismissed out of hand.”

  “His Holiness has requested that we confer with him before taking action of any sort,” said Hugue to Pierre Amelii. “If he agrees with Your Eminence that it should be dismissed, of course it will be. But it involves the knight he once had an interest in, and that, I think, is not nothing.”

  Innocent put his knife down on the trencher and stopped chewing for a moment to ask. “Percival?” he asked.

  Hugue nodded, and waved a scroll. “He has proposed to myself and the archbishop that the Perfecti be allowed to go free provided they leave Occitania forever and never return, and never attempt to stir up trouble for His Majesty.”

  “That does not address the matter of their heresy,” argued the archbishop. “That would not contain the heresy; it would spread it.”

  “There’s only about a hundred, two hundred, of them up there,” said Hugue, relishing the opportunity to speak in a patronizing tone to a man who had treated him like an inferior for months now. “How much damage can they do? There are already hundreds more like them throughout Christendom.” He returned his attention to Innocent. “If there is a way to end this debacle without making martyrs of anyone, I am in favor of it. Burning beloved members of a society is a terrible way to bring that society to heel. If we can offer amnesty to all of them, to every living soul up there, I tell you, after decades of slaughter, we will be worshipped for our mercy. The armed rebels will lose their right to call us butchers. True peace might come, and I can rest easy in my bed as I have never done since His Majesty made me lord of Carcassonne. I think we should accept his offer.”

  “Offer?” said Innocent. “What is he offering us?”

  “He does not expect to simply reverse our position on the Perfecti. He acknowledges that such clemency must be earned. He offers to earn it on their behalf.”

  Innocent sat up very straight. Even Ocyrhoe, wrapped in a ratty blanket in the corner, sat up straight.

  “How does he propose to do that?” asked Innocent.

  “In the standard, primitive way that men of his background make such offers,” said the archbishop with disgust.

  “It is grandiose and symbolic, but sincere,” Hugue spoke over him. “He says he will duel with any man in my army. If he wins, the Perfecti go free. If he loses, things keep as they are.”

  “I will do that!” Dietrich said hungrily, almost before Hugue had finished the statement.

  Fieschi’s heightened alertness relaxed. “Calm yourself, Dietrich. That is not enough,” he said to Hugue. “We require more for this to be acceptable.”

  “The entire premise is unacceptable,” the archbishop nearly bellowed. “To allow the heretic leaders to go free makes a mockery of this entire crusade.”

  “As I told you when I arrived,” said Innocent sternly, “this crusade is not the most important thing at stake here. It is a pond, while I am trying to navigate an ocean. Do you understand?” He turned to Hugue. “Send back word that we will accept this offer as long as it is amended to include the grail. Whoever wins the duel wins possession of the grail.”

  “He will never agree to that,” said Ocyrhoe from the corner, in a voice of almost amused disgust.

  Innocent ignored her. “Send that message and sign it with both your signets.” He looked warningly at the archbishop.

  “He can’t agree to it,” said Ocyrhoe, a little nervous now. “The cup is not in his possession. It’s not his to offer up.”

  “Who has it?” Innocent asked.

  Ocyrhoe immediately lowered her eyes to the earthen floor and folded her hands on her lap. She pulled the blanket tighter round her narrow shoulders and set her jaw.

  “Ocyrhoe,” said His Holiness. “If you have friends among the Perfecti whom you would see survive, assist me now. Possession of the cup is a condition of the duel. Without the duel, your Cathar friends will be burned at the stake in two days’ time. If there is a duel, they might be saved. Given that, you should want this duel to proceed.”

  “That’s true,” said Ocyrhoe, unhappily.

  “By extension, that means you must want the cup to be on the table, as it were. You are claiming that’s not possible. Tell us how to make it possible. Is somebody up there holding it in reserve, in secret, for you?”

  Ocyrhoe blinked in surprise before she could control herself.

  “I thought as much,” said Innocent. “So with our response to this challenge you must also send word to that individual, telling them to release the cup.”

  Ocyrhoe bit her lower lip and glanced down into her lap again. Why was she fated never to escape responsibility for what happened to that infuriating piece of metal? It had been such a relief these past few weeks for it to rest in limbo with Rixenda.

  Watching in the camp over the past few days, she knew already that Dietrich von Grüningen would be the chosen champion of the French army. He unarmed every opponent regardless of their weapon. In a duel between Percival and Dietrich, she had no idea who would survive. Putting the cup in Pope Innocent’s grasp was an alarming prospect, but if she risked it Rixenda and the others might be spared a gruesome, pointless death.

  “I will send such a message willingly,” she said. “But Percival will never agree to the terms.”

  The response was drafted, a messenger was sent up the mountain, and Innocent resumed dining.

  Ocyrhoe curled up in the corner and slept. Her dreams were troubled. In them, Raphael, Rixenda, and everybody else—Peire-Roger, Vera, even Ferenc, even Léna, even kindly Father Somercotes, who had died in Rome at the hands of Cardinal Fieschi; even Father Rodrigo—everyone interpreted her message to mean that she had joined forces with Sinibaldo Fieschi, Pope Innocent IV. That she was conspiring with him for his possession of the cup.

  In the dim of the keep, Peire-Roger pushed the message across the trestle table toward Raphael and Vera. At Raphael’s request, Percival had not been told yet that an answer had arrived. Seeing the answer, he was very glad he’d issued the request. “This is quite a remarkable bit of scribbling,” Peire-Roger said. “It requires not only my cooperation but Rixenda’s.”

  “I will not cooperate,” said Rixenda, her broad, motherly face looking pained.

  “You have often said the cup is Ocyrhoe’s, and that Ocyrhoe has the right to determine its fate,” argued Raphael. “Ocyrhoe is formally offering it to the winner of the duel. Why would you hesitate to honor that?”

  “The whole point of Percival’s proposed duel is that we are to be preserved by his murdering another man,” said Bishop Marti sharply. “That goes against our principles.”

  “He will be saving your lives,” said Vera rebukingly.

  “At a price too high for us to accept,” said Rixenda. “Nobody further should suffer because of us, regardless of whose side they belong to. There has been too much suffering of innocents already.”

  Irritated, Vera tapped the piece of velum. “Your friend Ocyrhoe has said in writing, right here, that the cup should be brought out of hiding.”

  “That could be coerced,” said Rixenda. “She has so deftly kept the thing a secret for years. Why should she suddenly agree to place it in plain sight?”

  “To save her friends’ lives, of course,” said Raphael, exasperated. “You show disrespect not only for her request but for her very nature if you do not acknowledge her instructions in this matter.”

  Rixenda pursed her lips and lowered her eyes.

  “Do not be swayed by sentimentality,” warned the bishop.

  Rixenda shook her head. “As long as we are trapped on this plain, Your Eminence, there are few things holier than bonds of loving loyalty. Our visitors are correct in this: Ocyrhoe trusts me to honor her requ
est, and I would be betraying her not to do so.” Her wide, blue eyes looked up at Raphael from her weathered face. “By Ocyrhoe’s request, the cup may go to the winner of this duel.”

  Ocyrhoe was awakened from vague, troubled, afternoon dreams by a most peculiar sound: an excited chortle, coming from the door.

  “The terms are accepted!” said Dietrich von Grüningen’s voice. “I fight him tomorrow!”

  Ocyrhoe assumed she was still sleeping, until she heard Cardinal Fieschi’s voice reply, with equally unwonted glee, “God be praised! See that the little wretch is bathed and given back those nice clothes we had made for her.”

  She opened her eyes and looked into the middle of the room. Pope Innocent, beaming with an excitement she could never have imagined, was reading a message over Dietrich’s broad shoulder in a shaft of sunlight that poured through the open door.

  “If you kill him, you’ve lost your agent,” she pointed out. “The cup is nothing without a madman to be possessed by it.”

  “We won’t kill him,” Innocent said.

  Dietrich looked disappointed.

  “Wound him,” His Holiness instructed. “Very badly. Render him useless as a warrior forever. But do not take his life. Spare his life at the last moment, magnanimously, and claim the grail as your prize. Once we have the grail, we will have Percival. He will tag along behind it, wherever it goes and whoever goes with it. And if he doesn’t, the cup will summon someone else.”

  Dietrich grimaced. “I hope Your Holiness realizes what a sacrifice you ask of me.”

  “Get over your petty rivalries, Dietrich,” said the Pope, a gleam in his eyes. “You are about to become a Knight of the Grail. Peevishness does not become you.” He slapped the German companionably on the shoulder, beaming with such pleasure Ocyrhoe almost did not recognize him. “Ha! But this is wonderful.”

  “The archbishop might not think so,” Ocyrhoe commented drily from the corner.

  “The archbishop,” said the priest, “will not be told.”

  The following day was mild for the time of year. The sky was a brilliant blue, the air unusually still on the mountaintop. The ground was soft and moist to the step, the limestone slick with damp. Ocyrhoe was given back the new clothes to wear. She was left alone to change, and then her hands were bound loosely before her and she was led out of the house into the square. Here, the other hostages were already standing, also with hands bound. They nodded solemnly to her, and she to them. She felt relief flooding over her to see them. This was, thank God, almost over.

  Father Sinibaldo and two groups of knights joined them: the Livonians who lodged with Father Sinibaldo, and Hugue de Arcis and his men, wearing the colors of Carcassonne. They all began to walk the main pathway to the fortress, up the southwest flank of the mountain, past mounds of gorse and scrub. Ocyrhoe was glad to leave the hideously transformed village after so many days cooped up in one small corner of it.

  A few hundred paces up was an expanse of relatively level ground, almost a small field, that bulged out of the side of the pog. During Ocyrhoe’s confinement, the French had built a wooden pen here, with a broad, wooden stepladder straddling the southern side. The walls were too high to view what was within; she could see only the tops of stakes, dozens of them, placed in rows. As they walked past it, soldiers were hauling bundles of straw, twigs, and branches up the ladder, and dropping them below.

  “Oh, God,” she said aloud, realizing. She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep a sob from escaping.

  “Yes,” said Dietrich smugly. “That is where your heretic friends will find their way to hell tomorrow at dawn.”

  “Unless Percival wins the duel,” Ocyrhoe said hurriedly. “Then you’ve built it for nothing. That’s right, isn’t it?” she said, turning plaintively toward the Holy Father. “In that case they’ve built it for nothing.”

  “They won’t have built it for nothing,” said Dietrich. “Those heretics are dying in the morning. His Holiness should have staked even more upon the outcome.”

  “I have staked enough,” said Father Sinibaldo. “In a sense, I have staked everything.”

  CHAPTER 38:

  OFFERING TERMS

  Percival had been told by Raphael only that his challenge had been accepted. He’d spent the day before the duel sparring with any knight on the mountaintop able and willing.

  The civilians and soldiers of the fortress were gathered in the courtyard awaiting the party from the French camp. With light blankets and mantles wrapped around them, most of the Credents clustered on the southern side of the courtyard, facing the donjon, for the ritual that was to come. The Good Ones, in contrast, were inside the keep, up in the chapel, meditating. That had clearly stated their disapproval of the duel.

  “I won’t kill him,” Percival assured Peire-Roger. “I will disarm him without hurting him and demand his concession.”

  “It’s still violence. Violence and coercion. They do not want their lives ransomed at so high a price.”

  Handsome Percival frowned with dismay. “A knight’s destiny is only to protect the innocent, not to be appreciated by them for it.”

  A trumpet sounded. Ferrer opened the western gate. Into the courtyard stepped a small, grim group: Surrounded by guards were Hugue, his soldiers, and most of the hostages.

  “Where is Ocyrhoe?” Raphael muttered unhappily.

  After a moment, a second, smaller group entered the courtyard: the so-called priest, Dietrich von Grüningen, with his fellow Livonians and the Roman orphan girl.

  Peire-Roger stood at attention across the center of the courtyard. His father-in-law and the other hostages stared back at him. The space separating them was no more than twenty strides across, but it reflected an unfathomable gulf.

  “As you see,” said Hugue, “Here are our hostages, well treated and well behaved. Tomorrow morning they will be returned to you, but for this hour you may have their presence. It seemed cruel to come up here to see you and not bring them along.”

  “More cruel to let us see them only and then be forced to part with them again,” said Peire-Roger gruffly. “But thank you enough for it.”

  Percival felt sorry for Ocyrhoe, whom nobody was particularly emotional about seeing. Her downcast expression made it hard to sense her state of mind.

  Percival stepped forward. “I am Percival of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, and with the blessing of Peire-Roger de Mirepoix of Montségur I have challenged you, Hugue de Arcis of Carcassonne, to a duel to the death for the sake of the lives of the Good Ones of Montségur.”

  Hugue stepped forward across from him. “I have accepted your challenge, and my champion, Dietrich von Grüningen of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, shall fight on my behalf.” Dietrich stepped forward beside Hugue.

  “Recite the terms of the duel,” Peire-Roger said over his shoulder. Raphael on cue stepped stoically into the no-man’s-land between the two swordsmen.

  “Sirs,” said Raphael. “The terms of the duel are these. You will each fight with a longsword and a dagger. You will have no armor but a helm.”

  “I forgo the helm,” said Percival. “But I do not begrudge my honored opponent to wear his.”

  Dietrich gave him a scornful look and said nothing.

  Raphael pushed on, eager to conclude. “In the event of a win by Percival of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae you will release all residents of Montségur to freedom, Good Ones included, provided they remove themselves permanently from lands held by His Majesty the King of France. In the event of a win by Dietrich von Grüningen of the Livonian Order, the Good Ones who do not forswear their religious beliefs today will be burned en masse at the foot of this mountain at dawn tomorrow, and the cup come to be called the grail will be relinquished by the people of Montségur to the French army, to be dispersed as Hugue de Arcis sees fit.”

  Percival whirled around to stare at
him, alarm on his face. Raphael ignored him and continued to speak. “Once the duel has begun…”

  “What?” said Percival in a shocked whisper.

  “You heard him,” growled Vera, who was close, through gritted teeth.

  “But—”

  She glared at him. “If you are killed, the damn cup is no use to you,” she whispered fiercely. “The rest of us have no love for it.”

  Percival grimaced. It was the first time Ocyrhoe had ever seen him angry.

  Raphael pushed on: “Once the fight has begun, there is to be no interruption nor assistance from anyone on either side. The fight will end when one of the combatants is dead, too wounded to move, or acknowledges defeat, which amounts to conceding their impending death. If there are any here who oppose these terms, speak now or hold your peace hereafter.”

  Percival wanted to object, but Raphael and Vera gave him warning expressions.

  “Where is the cup?” demanded the priest. “It should be placed somewhere neutral, where it can be seen by all, so that there is no question of its whereabouts.”

  “Get Rixenda,” Raphael said quietly to Vera. “If she’ll come. She said she’d be here.” As Vera jogged toward the keep, Raphael turned his attention to Father Sinibaldo. “Release your hostage in the meanwhile, good Father.”

  “The hostages are released tomorrow,” he retorted. “When the fortress is emptied. You may have her then. It is an indulgence to her that we have brought her to witness this today.”

  Raphael gave Ocyrhoe a sympathetic grimace from across the yard. She lifted her shoulders and dropped them in return, enervated.

  For a long moment, people waited, shifting their weight and stamping their feet against the cold. Finally Vera and Rixenda exited the donjon and came down the steps, arm in arm—an unusual gesture for either woman. They crossed the courtyard to the dueling circle, and Vera led Rixenda to a spot where the limestone of the mountain caused a natural bulge in the uneven courtyard floor. As the assembly watched, Rixenda opened her arms to reveal a small packet wrapped in undyed wool, standing in sharp contrast against the black of her robe.