‘They have denied the cross. So I thought it might be instructive for them to find out at first hand what it is they think does not exist. Do you not think so, Father Ortiz?’ He turned to the captain of the soldiers and started to interrogate him. One of his men, who spoke the Oc dialect better, relayed his questions. Where are the rest of the townspeople? Which way did they go? Why did they leave?
‘They heard you were all butchers,’ the captain said, ‘and they begged us to let them leave. We planned to hold you off for two days more, then we would have done the same if that filthy dog the bayle had not betrayed us.’
‘Where were they headed?’
‘Into the mountains. Where you’ll never find them.’
Gilles turned to Hugues. ‘Go after them. They are on foot; so despite what this flea says you have a good chance of finding them and when you do, show them God’s justice.’ He remounted his destrier and wheeled away. ‘Now show them what we do to heretics round here.’
A good summer for the meat flies. No excuse for any of them not to get fat and bloated and drowsy in the sun.
XLVII
THEY FOLLOWED THE old Roman road that led through the Minervois, through smoke-blackened and deserted villages and castra. The first man hanging by his neck from an olive tree was remarked upon; after a dozen it was just a commonplace. With each league Philip lost a little of his soul. How many abandoned babies do you pretend not to see, because you cannot rescue even one of them, and you might see a score of them every day?
And what of the soldier they had found lying by the side of the road without feet or hands? Philip could still hear his cries and his curses, as he begged them to put him out of his agony. Christian soldiers had done this to him, not in the heat of combat, but as a means of terror.
But if Christian soldiers had undertaken such an act, what should his response be, sinner that he was? Did he leave the man to suffer from thirst and let the carrion crows finish him while he yet lived?
He had jumped from his horse, sword drawn.
‘Do it! For the love of God!’ the man screamed at him. ‘Why are you waiting? Please, don’t let me suffer like this! I beg you!’
One thing to kill a man in battle; another to murder in the name of kindness. His men watched, but no one spoke.
The man screamed, rolled on to his side and tried to shuffle closer. ‘Please, m’sieur, I beg you! Do it! I will speak for you a thousand times in paradise, but please!’
How old was he? Philip wondered. His face was so covered in blood and dirt it was impossible to tell. Pain had furrowed great lines in him. He could have been twenty or eighty.
Philip raised his sword, but something made him hesitate. Not as easy to kill a man you do not hate or fear. As he was about to bring down the sword an arrow thudded into the man’s chest. For a moment he looked only surprised, and then the light went from his eyes and he died with no fuss at all.
Philip knew who had shot the fatal bolt. ‘Thank you, Renaut. But I did not need your assistance.’
‘I am sorry, seigneur. I just couldn’t stand to watch it any longer. I don’t fear death as much as I fear that.’
Their eyes met. ‘Then let us do what we came here to do and get out of this land of carrion crows,’ Philip said, and got back on his horse.
*
The evening was windless, the shadows intensely black and the light as vivid as fresh paint. The land here reminded him a little of Outremer; olives and figs flourished in the thin, stony soil and drystone walls kept out the free-running goats and sheep.
Under the shadow of the walls, the terraced vineyards were laced with tendrils of mist. They said these vines were planted under the crack of the Roman overseer’s whip in the time of Jesus. Now look at them. They had been torn up by the crusaders, the roots burned and twisted and dead.
The air smelled of thyme and of the charnel house.
The village had been burned recently, for last night’s rain had not yet washed out the soot. Wisps of grey smoke still rose from the ruins. Foxes and wolves picked their way carefully through the scorched ground, lured into the open by the promise of fresh meat. They followed the road up the narrow lane from the portal. Philip put a hand over his mouth and nose, heard several of his men gagging also. In the square there were seven crosses. Before this the only crucifixions he had ever seen had been carvings of the Lord, inside a church. He did not imagine that men might still torture one another this way.
A tree outside the church had been blackened and almost consumed by fire. Enough of it remained that they had been able to hang someone from it. The man’s corpse twisted in the wind. A vulture flapped its wings to drive away the crows that were gathering around the carcass.
No one spoke.
Philip turned his horse’s head and rode back out of the town. All this way, for nothing. The poor girl he had come to find was no doubt one, or several, of these pieces of raw and blackened flesh lying around the square.
God have mercy. She had been his last hope.
*
The crusaders had camped by the river to the south of Saint-Ybars; they found horse dung, flattened earth, and the warm ashes of their camp fires. There could not have been more than two or three hundred, Philip guessed.
Philip sat slumped under a fig tree with his head in his hands.
‘What shall we do?’ Renaut asked him.
‘We can’t do anything until the morning. Tell the men to make camp here tonight.’
He saw a shadow moving under the trees, a woman in a hooded tunic.
Renaut saw it too. ‘What’s that?’ he said.
Philip was already on his feet and running. His quarry was hampered by her long dress and the treefall underfoot and he soon overtook her and wrestled her to the ground.
She lay where she fell, and did not try to fight him. He stood up. Her hands and feet were filthy and covered in cuts. She said something in the langue d’oc that he could not make out. And then she rolled on to her back and opened her legs.
Renaut ran up beside him. Loup had followed also.
The woman said something else to Philip. ‘What did she say?’ Renaut asked Loup.
‘She said to do whatever you want but asks that you don’t hurt her.’
Philip knelt down. ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said. There was blood on her tunic. ‘Did you live in Saint-Ybars?’
She shook her head. She was from Béziers, she said. She and her husband had fled before the crusaders arrived, but bandits had ambushed them on the road. They had killed her husband and her baby and then raped her. By some caprice, they had left her alive. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.
‘Guilhemeta.’
‘Guilhemeta, we will help you if we can.’
‘I don’t want your help,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anybody’s help.’
‘What are you doing here?’ he said.
‘The crusaders brought me. They had a priest with them and he was kind to me and helped me bury my baby and blessed him so he will go to heaven. But then their soldiers raped me and so I ran away.’
‘What happened to the village?’
‘The soldiers got angry when the people would not open the gates. They fought them and then they ran away. So they killed everyone left behind. Even the bayle who helped them. They hanged him.’
‘Some of the people got away?’
‘In the night. They escaped and went into the mountains.’
Philip turned to Renaut. ‘It seems the witch might still be alive.’
Renaut shook his head, horrified at the turn this interrogation had taken. ‘Please, seigneur. Let’s leave the woman in peace and go. It’s hopeless. This sorceress you’re looking for could be anywhere in these mountains now. We would never find her.’
‘If she’s alive, trust me, I will find her.’
‘But we don’t know if she is still alive. We don’t even know if she can do miracles. We could be just chasing a phantom.’
‘I di
d not come this far to give up now, Renaut. Tell the men.’ He stood up and held out a hand to Guilhemeta. ‘Stand up. Come with me. No one’s going to harm you here. We are men of honour. Òmes de paratge,’ he said, using the Oc words.
Guilhemeta hesitated. She looked at the boy for reassurance. Loup nodded. Philip helped her to her feet and led her back to the camp.
XLVIII
NEXT MORNING, AS he rode, Philip thought about the mutilated soldier they had found on the way to Saint-Ybars.
He should have finished the wretch himself. Why did he hesitate? Renaut had had no such qualms. He could not forget the look on his young squire’s face. It was neither pity nor terror; it had terrified him.
Philip had put Guilhemeta on a pony with Loup. Look how they clung to each other. Good for her to have another to care for, he thought, it might break her out of her despond. And Loup, he needed another mother perhaps.
Finally his mind ranged, as it always did, back to Alezaïs; she crept up to surprise him in death much as she did in life. You’re like a sprite, he used to say to her, I should put a bell on you so I know where you are. Now he saw her in the dust spirals of midday, the clouds at evening. Four years in her grave and still she haunted him.
Let me go, my heart; if you cannot be here, let me go.
His throat was parched. Heat hummed in the rhythms of the cicadas, his own sweat tickled as it inched down his nose. A smudge of ink-black cloud appeared in the northern sky, the promise of a thunderstorm to cool the air. They saw no one, just stunted oak and beech.
And then a scream.
Not just one scream; many screams, from many people. Renaut pointed, and Philip saw them at the same moment that he did. The soldiers had caught their victims in the open, as they were crossing the neck of the valley. It was a well-executed ambush, three chevaliers sweeping in from the wooded spurs to chase the wretches into the path of their companions, who cut them down with slashes from their swords or trampled them under the hooves of their warhorses.
‘These must be the refugees from Saint-Ybars,’ Renaut said.
‘They intend to massacre them.’
Renaut’s palfrey smelled the blood in the air and shied on its back legs. He fought to calm her. ‘What do we do?’
‘We cannot just do nothing,’ Philip said. He and his men were all wearing steel mail, had been travelling armed since Béziers, despite the heat. They had been expecting trouble and now they had found it.
Philip turned to his sergeant. ‘Wait till they are all down from the spurs. Then we take them.’
The men seemed startled by his order. The knights and chevaliers down there wore the cross. Was it right to go against crusaders? But they were his liegemen and Philip knew they would do as he ordered them to.
He turned back to the skirmish and saw a woman trying to outrun a horse, splashing into the shallows of the ford, stumbling on the wet stones. The chevalier who pursued her did not even bother to raise his sword. He let his horse trample her and then went after a child who was running for the shelter of the trees.
Philip spurred his horse forward. It was a steep descent but Leyla went at the gallop, sure-footed as any mount he had ever had, and he gave her free rein. The crusader turned only at the last moment; he did not have the visor down on his helmet and the look on his face changed in a moment from surprise to terror. He had no time to evade the sword stroke that unseated him; then Philip was past him and after the next.
A blur of movement: a woman fleeing up the bank, a crusader with a fiery red beard pursuing her. Another of the villagers, a man, threw himself on top of her to protect her. The bearded knight was about to dismount to execute them both when he saw Philip. He tried to wheel his horse around to face him but before he could react Philip was on him. He slashed at him and the redbeard could only half-parry his blow and then his head snapped back and his helmet flew into the water and he fell.
Philip turned Leyla around and saw the rest of his men complete their charge. Shocked and outnumbered, the crusaders fled, escaping any way they could. The red-bearded knight remounted, shook his fist at Philip and followed his men into the hills.
Over in moments.
The ford was littered with bodies. Just four were crusaders, the rest were refugees. The river was stained with their blood. A child floated in the shallows face down, a sword slash on his back.
Renaut appeared beside him. ‘Is this what the Pope had in mind when he ordered this crusade, do you think?’ Philip said. ‘Renaut, I will tell you this. I may never find my way into heaven, but sometimes I believe His Holiness himself will have some difficulty squeezing through the gate. Come, let’s not linger. I wager Redbeard and his men will be back with their fellows soon enough to try and finish this business.’
*
A ragged lot, these benighted souls he had saved. A leper in a grey coat and scarlet hat, a ploughboy, a tinker, a stonemason. He had found them shelter in an abandoned shepherd’s hovel, four walls with gaping holes in the mud and thatch. The mother of the murdered child was keening in the corner; others bathed their wounds as best they could with water from the ford. There was the smell of straw and goat and blood.
The refugees built a fire in the hearth with windfall twigs to cook up the little food they had with them. Philip gave them some of the salted pork. They seemed glad of it, but then they had not eaten for days.
Little children with huge dark eyes stared up at him from the straw. A woman put an infant to her breast. The woman still cradled the dead child in her arms, her shrill grief making him wince.
The sky was on fire somewhere near Carcassonne.
A man with shoulders as wide as his broadsword knelt at his feet. Philip recognized him as the man he had saved from the redbeard, the one who had thrown himself over the grey-haired woman to protect her. ‘Whoever you are, seigneur, we thank you.’
Philip hauled him back to his feet. God’s blood, he’s as big as me, this one. ‘Who are you?’ Philip asked him.
‘My name is Anselm,’ the man said. ‘I am a stonemason, from Saint-Ybars.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the Trencavel fortress at Montaillet. We hope to find protection there from the crosats – the crusaders.’
‘How far is it? Those men will come back for you.’
‘We can turn east, into the forest. It is a longer way but we will be harder to find.’
‘Then you should do that. Rest here tonight if you must, but make sure you are gone before dawn.’
‘May we know who has saved us? You talk like a northerner, like a crosat.’
‘I am a northerner. My name is Philip of Vercy, I am from Burgundy.’
‘Why don’t you wear the cross? And why did you help us?’
‘I am not a crusader. I am here looking for someone, a healing woman. You may know her, for Saint-Ybars was where I was told she lived.’
Anselm frowned and looked at his wife, then back to Philip. ‘You came all the way from Burgundy for a healing woman?’
‘Her name is Fabricia Bérenger. Did you know her? Is she here, with you? Is that her?’ Philip pointed at the trembling waif in the corner of the hut. Aware of the attention, the girl ducked her head. ‘Well, man? Speak up.’
‘How do you know her name, seigneur?’
‘Her reputation has travelled. I heard it first from a wise woman on my lands. She in turn heard it from a pilgrim who had just returned from Toulouse.’
‘What do you want of her?’
‘My son is dying. I came here to ask her to help me. I want her to come back with me and heal him for he is too sick to come here.’ Philip saw the looks between the man and his wife. ‘You know this woman?’
‘You must have enormous faith to do such a thing.’
‘He is all I have left. If I lose my son, I lose everything. Is it faith or is it desperation? I don’t know. Please tell me what you know.’
Anselm sighed. ‘This woman you are seeking – she is our daughter.�
��
‘Your daughter?’
‘Whether she can perform such miracles as you speak of, I don’t know. If it’s true, then it has brought her and us nothing but heartbreak. She left Saint-Ybars several months ago.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘To the monastery at Montmercy.’
‘So she’s alive?’
‘Yes, she’s alive, God be with her. She went there to try and find a little peace. In the village people called her witch or saint; either way they would not let her be, so she took orders. I don’t know if it did any good.’
‘Where is this monastery? How do I find her?’
‘It’s to the east, in the mountains near Montaillet, where we ourselves are headed. But the quickest way is back the way you came and then follow the Roman road. You will see the abbey four leagues on. There is a spur shaped like a horn and you will see it there, below a mountain they call Mont Maissac.’ Anselm placed a hand on his arm. ‘Seigneur, please, if you get there, tell her we are all right. She will have heard of the massacres. Tell her we still live and we send her our blessings and that there is not a day we do not say a prayer for her. Tell her we are headed for Montaillet.’
*
Night had fallen. Philip found Renaut sitting alone by the fire under the trees. He sat down next to him and shook him by the shoulder, unable to hide his excitement. ‘I have found her!’
‘Seigneur?’
‘The healer! Her mother and father are here among these refugees! They say she is not far from here, at a monastery called Montmercy. Just a day’s ride!’
‘Seigneur, do you realize what we have done here today? We have killed men wearing the crusader cross. Even if they did not recognize us or our pennants, they will discover who we are soon enough. This makes us heretics. Although I do not doubt the rightness of what we did we are in great danger if we remain in the Pays d’Oc.’
‘She’s alive, Renaut! I will not give up on this now.’
Renaut shook his head.
‘You have more to say on this subject?’
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