Almodis

by Tracey Warr

  ‘Well, that was quite easy,’ says Ramon, congratulating me on my strategem.

  Adelais begins greatly ashamed when she first arrives but I tell her that to love a man and to bear a child is no shame, it is the way of the body of a woman. I am not so kind in a letter to my son, who claims that he has no way to know that the child is actually his and is proceeding with his marriage plans to Emma of Mortain. When Adelais’ child is born, I will send them back to Raingarde and she must make shift to live with her abandonment. ‘Your mother and I will take care of you,’ I soothe her, ‘I will have five grandchildren now.’ But she knows that her reputation is irretrievably damaged and her child will be an unacknowledged bastard.

  Bernadette tells me that Pere’s court contingency are whispering in corners that my niece is a whore, like her aunt. I do my best to shield Adelais from these calumnies, although it is clear from the cold way that some courtiers look at her, what they are thinking. I resist the temptation to retaliate by pointing out to Pere that his own wife’s belly remains flat and girlish.

  Raingarde has drawn up formal charters acknowledging Ramon and myself as the overlords of Carcassonne. Guillaume and Raymond have objected of course, since Carcassonne was at least nominally in their suzerein. Guillaume, I have silenced with the pressure of his guilt over Adelais and the promise of some gold. I have written to Raymond to tell him that Ramon and I intend to take possession of the city and install our son Ramon Towhead as count. He has not replied. He knows that a Barcelonese garrison in the city would not be so easy a target as my sister presented alone. Raymond has allied himself with Archbishop Guifred and together they are eeking out their domains little by little.

  The other contenders to Carcassonne will have heard of the changed situation and will, I hope, draw back and decide that though rich, Carcassonne, is not worth a confrontation with us. I have sent another letter to Guillaume and Raymond making them a very generous offer of a share each in the trade routes and rights through the city. I hope this will work. The thought of warring with my own sons is not a pleasant one and I sense that once in the battlefield, Raymond might show the resilience of his mentor, Geoffrey. Everything depends on our acting quickly, with decision and on a show of force. Our garrison troops are already assembled in the city and Ramon and I will travel there next year to take the oaths of allegiance from all the main castellans on the routes between here and Carcassonne.

  On the first day of March 1068 Ramon and I invested Ermengard and Raymond Bernard Trencavel as viscounts of Carcassonne, with the condition that the usufruct of the city’s rights remain with my sister. We have had to pay off her Carcassonne nephews but they came a great deal cheaper than the Count of Cerdanya.

  Ramon is pleased to advance the Barcelonese frontier in Languedoc beyond Narbonne and to have his trade routes thus assisted. I think there will be some benefit too in demonstrating to Pere that he will indeed inherit Barcelona if my sons are suitably invested with rights elsewhere. Raingarde has grown very fond of Towhead during his time of training in the region and is not displeased to see her nephew take up her husband’s and her son’s title.

  ‘Though I have doubts about Pere, Almodis,’ Ramon says to me.

  ‘Doubts?’ I have plenty of doubts too, but it is not for me to criticise his son.

  ‘I do not know that he will rule Barcelona well.’

  I stay silent for a while. ‘It is his right; he is the heir. We must help him to learn to rule well.’

  We are due to begin our journey to Carcassonne when a great tragedy befalls us and delays our departure. Our son, Arnau, has died. Ramon and I are inconsolable together. Now I am like Raingarde again: we have both lost our sons this year, and I long to be with her. Ramon understands my longing and resumes the plans for our journey. The doctors can give us no explanation. Arnau was well and then suddenly he complained of pains in his stomach and was dead so quickly.

  ‘It could be poison,’ Dia tells me when we are alone and I am done crying, cried dry.

  ‘Poison? No. Why would anyone poison Arnau, a little boy?’

  ‘For practice,’ says Dia.

  44

  Autumn

  In the early autumn of 1069 Ramon and I cross the Pyrenees with more Barcelonese reinforcements for Carcassonne and the landscape is transforming dramatically all around us. The flaming colours of trees in the valleys shift to muted fustian browns and dark greens. The trees along the river are nearly all bare so that it becomes possible to see more of the surrounding landscape. Many little birds congregate in the branches preparing to fly further south. Instead of the route I took into my homeland a few years ago, we follow the coast for some way and then crossing the mountains we head for the tower of Dourne, high above the gorges of the upper Aude. After that we wend our way through Razès along the river, taking oaths from the castellans at Niort, Auriac and Rennes. Heading towards Conffoulens, we ride through the thick trees and the forest floor is littered with mushrooms of all kinds: red and white, brilliant white like angel’s wings, shiny brown caps, and mushrooms decaying so that they look like the faeces of an unknown animal.

  In Carcassonne I reunite Adelais and her new son, William-Jourdain, with her mother. She will live with Raingarde, and Ermengard has also promised her a home. Raingarde is well, despite the terrible losses she has sustained over the last few years. She is confident in our new strategem to protect her and her family’s rights.

  Ramon and I continue our journey of oath-taking to the castle of Ornaisons near Narbonne. ‘I keep expecting to see your son’s army camped on the road before us,’ Ramon tells me, meaning Raymond, but there is no sign of him. When we visit Garsenda in Narbonne I am sad to see her alone, now that my dear friend Berenger has died. After Narbonne we strike back towards Toulouse, taking oaths from the castellans at Caberet and Saissac on the southern slopes of the Montagne Noire and at the fortress of Cintegabelle on the road from Foix.

  In Toulouse my Barcelonese twins, Ramon Towhead and Beren, are knighted by Guillaume and will travel back to Barcelona with us. Towhead is excited to find that he will be Count of Carcassonne when he comes of age. Guillaume tells me he will not meet Adelais or look at his son. ‘I can’t do that, Mother,’ he says gruffly and my heart aches to think of him as a boy and now this unkind man, dishonouring his cousin.

  ‘You will regret it,’ I tell him and he is angry with me.

  Adalmoda arrives to see me with her husband Pierre and two baby boys named Raymond and Pons. I try not to show her how I dislike the last name. She looks well and happy and is very proud of her sons.

  Guillaume gives me news that Agnes of Mâcon became a nun at her Abbey of Notre Dame de Saintes near Poitou and that she has recently died there. Though I had good cause to loathe her all my life, I go to the cathedral and say a pray for her soul for she, like Ermessende, was a very great lady.

  On our return to Barcelona the city is in uproar with the news that Seljuk forces have taken control of Jerusalum from the Fatimid caliph of Egypt. The Seljuk will be even more intolerant of Christian pilgrimages. ‘The pope must act,’ are the words in the mouths of many people.

  Shortly after our return my daughter Inés was married to Guigues Count of Albon and has left me. ‘She is too young,’ I had protested to Ramon since she is only fifteen.

  ‘I was that age when I first married,’ he told me. ‘I’ve talked it over with her and she is more than happy about it. You know I would not let her go otherwise.’

  I hug fourteen-year-old Sancha to me, my only child left of twelve! ‘Sancha will not wed early,’ I tell him and he bows to us both. ‘You know that your word is law in this household,’ he says. Pere stands scowling against the wall.

  The atmosphere of the court has shifted substantially since our return with Towhead and Beren, and not for the better. Now there are the conroi, the followers, of three young princes jostling and vying with each other daily. My Barcelonese twins have returned moulded to the military bearing of my Toulouse son
s, who in their turn were moulded by Geoffrey the Hammer. They wear their hauberks and gambesons most days, despite the heat, as part of their toughening regime, and the young men of the court and the city who Pere has not favoured, flock to them instead.

  Bernadette tells me she has overheard an argument between Pere and Beren. ‘Pere taunted Beren that his brother is Count of Carcassonne and he will have nothing.’

  ‘Tsch! He is wicked.’

  ‘Beren more than stood up to him though,’ she tells me proudly. ‘Clouted him round the head he did, and told him he’d have Barcelona and his mother would see to it.’

  ‘In the spring,’ I say to Ramon, ‘we will send Pere on a mission to Rome on our behalf. He needs responsibilities and to see the world.’

  Ramon and I ride out alone from the city for a rare day off from our own responsibilities. We ride past olive groves where children are knocking the ripe olives down with sticks, until we reach a secluded place on the river with willows dipping their leaves in the water. I take off most of my clothes and lie on my back by the riverbank, watching a procession of wispy clouds across the blue sky, while he tethers the horses and unpacks a picnic. My chemise barely comes down far enough to cover my privates. I have a pair of Ramon’s short breeches on to do that and I stretch out my bare legs feeling the sun hot on my skin, although these will be the last days of this summer and the air has a hint of the coming chill.

  ‘Come on then,’ I say, ‘are you coming in?’

  He is divesting himself of his clothes. His legs, and his bare chest when he pulls his shirt up over his head, ripple with muscle.

  ‘We are in good shape for two middle-aged people,’ I say smiling at him. ‘We are a happy middle-aged couple.’

  ‘Really? Feels to me somedays as if I am in a marriage with a hedgehog.’

  He throws himself down beside me laughing, wearing only his breeches, luxuriating with his eyes shut in the sun. He opens one blue eye and squints at me. ‘It’ll be cold.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I say, standing up and pulling him up with me and down to the river’s edge. The sun sparkles on the surface. Frogs are mating noisily. Blue dragonflies skid along the water. Fish jump and splash back down. Large black and white butterflies flap along the bank like handkerchiefs. I stand hand in hand with him like the earth’s first man and woman.

  ‘Here,’ he says, pointing to a place where a flat rock juts out from the bank into the water. ‘It’ll be easiest here.’

  I go first, slipping into the water, gasping at the initial full immersion. ‘It’s lovely!’

  He looks doubtfully at me, dipping a toe in, but then somersaults spectacularly into the water, so that I am drenched. He swims up beside me. ‘Whur-huh-huh! It’s lovely and cold!’

  Ducks look at us with amusement, that we have assumed duckness for the day. ‘Or fishness of frogness,’ says Ramon, demonstrating fishy and froggy swimming moves. I laugh and the sounds echo up from the water, bouncing off trees and light.

  45

  17 November 1071

  A plate of pink and green and vermilion marzipans fashioned in the shapes of flowers. The sweetmeat is sweet on my tongue but now I feel a burning sensation in my throat, coughing, choking.

  Poison.

  I turn my head to where I know Pere stands, holding the plate, but my vision blurs and I cannot see him. I fall and lie on my back, looking at the intense blue of the sky. Shouts and running feet come to me muffled, and then silent, but still vibrating through the ground. Something obscures my vision, gossamer cobwebs I would like to wipe away from my face, but I cannot move my hand. A small oval of blue, contracting.

  ‘Almodis!’ A quiet shout. I know he is kneeling at my side, but it seems that he is standing on a distant mountain, calling to me. The blue oval of the sky, has become the blue circle of Ramon’s eye, washed and swimming in tears, his tears, my tears.

  I try to move my hands to leave some trace of my fingers in the dust.

  I think: but I haven’t finished yet.

  Epilogue

  The Castle of Parthenay

  31 December 1099

  I, Dia, trobairitz of Barcelona, am dying with the old century. It was all so long ago and I forget so much, but I remember everything about Almodis. Every word. I remember her, my dear friend. I remember Ramon’s grief, as deep as a gaping well sunk far into the ground, as black as a moonless night.

  ‘L’heureuse Almodis, resplendissante sur terre, est passée, par sa mort, a la demeure de la vie,’ he wrote on her epitaph in Girona Cathedral: Happy Almodis, radiant on earth, is passed by her death, to the residence of the life.

  ‘Though one may seem to live long in the world,’ wrote her favourite author, Dhuoda, ‘one’s life is short, like that woven cloth that is measured and snipped off in the market place.’

  We all knew that Pere had murdered her and Ramon’s grief at that was terrible too: that the warnings had been there, but he hadn’t been able to believe them. Pere was banished and forbidden to bear arms for twenty-five years. He lost the kingdom that he had lusted after and hoped to gain by his wickedness. He died young, just thirty-five, and alone, in Muslim Spain. When he was on his death-bed Pope Gregory gave him a pardon for Almodis’ murder. But God will not pardon him. I do not pardon him.

  Ramon outlived her only five more years, years of unremitting grief and loss. The people called him Count Ramon the Old, but he was not old. When she died his hair turned white and the youth dropped from him like a silk shift. I stayed with him for those years and when he too died and went to join her, I travelled with Rostagnus to Parthenay to make our home under the patronage of her daughter, Lady Melisende.

  At the moment of Almodis’ death, Raingarde let out a great cry in Carcassonne and never spoke again and died herself a week later.

  Some say Almodis was a serpent, a scandal, a whore. They say wrong. She was a sweet lady and worked her whole life for the good of her subjects, her friends and her children. Before she died, I think she learnt to love her husband. She left a great legacy behind her: her sons, daughters and kin are rulers in Occitania, Catalonia and the Holy Lands. She never liked women’s work and was happier with a pen in her hand rather than a needle and thread, but she wove together an empire and a society. Those who come after her now do not have her skill to hold it together.

  Bernadette laid out her beautiful lady in her shroud and sat with her in the Cathedral of Barcelona for ten days, rocking herself backwards and forwards, and then she blew her nose, took her son, and set up a hostel on the Santiago de Compostela route. Her business flourished and Bernadette’s sayings were famous amongst pilgrims across Christendom. She died peacefully in her sleep a few years back and Charles continues in the hostel still with his large family. He looks very like Piers.

  In Catalonia, after Ramon’s death, the twins became joint rulers of Barcelona and all its domains and they left Carcassonne to Raingarde’s daughter, Ermengard and the Trencavels. Ramon Towhead married Lady Mahalta of Apulia, the daughter of the Norman, Robert Guiscard, who ruled Sicily. Through these contacts Barcelona’s commerce grew more and more and the city’s population with it. Ramon Towhead, Cap d’Estop, was loved for his boldness, kindness, joyfulness and his attractive appearance. He was much like her.

  After six years of joint rule, the twins quarrelled and Beren demanded a division that Ramon Towhead would not agree to. After the birth of his son, Towhead was murdered while hunting in the forest on the feast day of Saint Nicholas. Many believed that his brother Beren was the murderer. Beren ruled as regent for his nephew and never married, but he was not all bad. He formed a tight-knit drut, a war-band with his half-brothers, Hugh the Devil of Lusignan, Guillaume and Raymond of Toulouse. They fought together in Spain and Beren was with Guillaume six years ago when he died on pilgrimage. A trial by combat found Beren guilty of his brother’s murder and he died seeking penance in Jerusalem two years ago.

  All the children of Almodis and Ramon are gone now: little Inés, she die
d in childbirth a few years after her marriage to the Count of Albon; Sancha was married off by her brothers to the Count of Cerdanya who had repudiated Raingarde’s daughter Adelais all those years before. Sancha had two sons and one of them is Count of Cerdanya now, but Sancha is gone in childbed too. The only survivor of their dynasty is Almodis’ grandson, Ramon Berenger III, a great king, Count of Barcelona and Duke of Provence. Lucia was regent in Pallars Sobirà and ruled well, and the Count of Urgell made her guardian to his children, such was her prestige. Her son, Artaldo, is the count now.

  In Toulouse, Guillaume tried to atone for his sins with his cousin Adelais by building a great cathedral but his first wife was barren and his second wife, Emma of Mortain, gave him a daughter, Philippa, and no living sons. So, according to the treaty contracted after the siege of Lusignan in 1060, Philippa has been wed to Agnes’ grandson, Guillaume IX Duke of Aquitaine, who is called the troubadour prince for his poetry.

  Guillaume of Toulouse named his brother, Raymond, as his heir some time back and now that Guillaume is gone, Raymond is Count of Toulouse and Saint Gilles and much more besides, and names himself the Duke of Septimania, Provence and Narbonne. Of all her children, Raymond reminds me most of her: a fearless autocrat. When the pope excommunicated him for his consanguinous marriage to his cousin Bertranda, Raymond ignored the ruling saying, ‘The church has no right to pontificate on my marriage.’ He has become a great warrior in the mould of Geoffrey the Hammer of Anjou. Raymond lost an eye in one of his battles. He was the very first lord to take up the pope’s call for a holy crusade and he left Toulouse four years ago with his third wife, Elvira and their baby son, leading the forces of all Occitania. He discovered the Holy Lance and this summer he was triumphant, taking Jerusalem from the heathens. He turned down the offer of the title King of Jerusalem, saying it made him shudder for that name belonged to Christ. He hasn’t come back from the Holy Land. He is still out there fighting for other kingdoms with a name he’d like. He left his son Bertrand ruling Toulouse, and sure enough Bertrand’s cousin Philippa and her husband, the Duke of Aquitaine are fighting him for it. So Almodis’ children and grandchildren fight on between themselves when she would have woven peace.