by Glen Craney
The taller, dark-complexioned Loupe was a few months younger than Chandelle but more precocious in strength and willfulness. Her distrustful eyes resembled hard black currants and her narrow face shadowed so swiftly with rankled emotion that those around her remained perpetually on guard for the inevitable tantrums. Fiercely protective, she would gambol through the village with her new companion playing knightly escort with a wooden sword and thwacking the knee of any malingerer who dared look askance at them. She had inherited her aunt’s questioning nature and her father’s saturnine, pugnacious temperament, a mixture that Esclarmonde feared would one day prove volatile.
Despite such antipodal personalities, the girls did share one trait: a craving to hear more about Esclarmonde’s childhood adventures. Spurred by their pleas, Esclarmonde had decided it was time they visited the holy mountain.
Loupe interrupted her nibbling on a carrot to ask, “Did you once love a troubadour, Aunt Essy?”
Chandelle nudged Loupe, whispering, “Momma said never mention that.”
Esclarmonde found a seat on a boulder and ran her fingers across the pocked surface heated by the midday sun. She recognized the clearing as the spot where she and Guilhelm had first held hands. She nestled closer to the girls, then answered Loupe’s question, “I did ... but now I love God.”
“Can’t you love a boy and God at the same time?” asked Chandelle.
“God’s the biggest boy,” explained Loupe. “He’d beat the others up.”
Esclarmonde conceded with a bittersweet sigh, “Sometimes what we want is not what God wishes for us.”
“So God wanted Chandelle to be blind?” demanded Loupe.
Esclarmonde never failed to be taken aback by the alacrity with which Loupe’s vehemence could surface without warning. Yet she herself would have asked the same perforating question in her youth. “I think there are two gods, a good one and a bad one. The good God never wanted Chandelle to be blind. But when our souls became lost, the bad god captured us and put us into bodies.”
“Like the Devil,” insisted Loupe.
Esclarmonde stroked Loupe’s curly black hair while searching how best to explain something quite complicated. “The pope in Rome says that the original sin of our first ancestors caused Chandelle to be born blind. But you must never let anyone tell you what to believe if it doesn’t feel right. The good God talks to all people, and He will talk to you if you ask.”
Chandelle sensed that the answer had left Loupe unsatisfied. “It’s okay.”
Loupe exploded to her feet. “The good God should never have let the bad God do it!” She grabbed Chandelle’s hand and raced up the path in a rage.
“Come back!” ordered Esclarmonde. “You mustn’t run!” The girls disappeared into the scrub brush. In her haste to catch them, she stumbled on a burrow hole and wrenched her knee. She tried to stand but the sharp pain sent her crumpling back to the ground. “Loupe! Where are you?”
Loupe came hurrying back, her face contorted in fear. “Chandy’s fallen!”
Esclarmonde crawled in anguish toward the crevice. A wide section of the path had caved in. Through the fissure she saw Chandelle, bloodied and thrashing near a parlous ledge several feet below. A few garrigue roots were all that kept the lip of the rocks from avalanching. “Chandelle, don’t move!”
Disoriented, Chandelle groped the ground. “Where am I?”
Esclarmonde searched for a way down, but the rift was too narrow. Loupe could not ride alone to Foix. If she herself tried to go, she would need Loupe’s support to make it down the pog. Chandelle would be left helpless. She went blank with panic. Loupe bolted from her grasp and squeezed past two boulders, lowering herself down along the edge of the cliff.
“No!” cried Esclarmonde.
Loupe wiggled through the narrow cleft and slid from rock to rock. Her hand dislodged a clod. Slabs of shale crumbled off and narrowly missed Chandelle. Loupe lost her balance but broke her fall by grasping a branch. If the larger boulders cut loose, both she and Chandelle would be crushed.
Despite the pain of her injury, Esclarmonde knelt on the precarious scarp and pressed her hands together in desperate supplication. This mount had taken her mother and daughter. She could not bear the thought of it also devouring these two girls.
Build it here.
She searched for the source of that command. On the summit, the sun’s rays fell on the ruins of the ancient chateau. The outline of the rubble seemed to have transformed into an image of a ship, docked and ready for a deluge.
My Ark of Light.
She did not understand the enigmatic utterance, but she promised to find a way to obey it if only the girls were saved. In that instant, clouds sailed overhead and swept shadows across the cliff, causing her to look down.
Loupe was leading Chandelle to the safety of an overhanging cleft. “I’m sorry, Chandy,” Loupe repeated. “I’ll never leave you again.”
Although her knee was still swollen, Esclarmonde insisted on returning to Montsegur a fortnight later. A few nights earlier, she had been visited with a fleeting dream of the ark that she had been commanded to build. Assisted by Castres and Raymond de Perella, she managed the onerous climb with difficulty and led the two men past the Visigoth ashlars scattered across the summit. She had delayed revealing the reason for their journey for fear they would dismiss her plan outright before she could defend it.
Castres lost patience with her coyness. “Now, child, what is this undertaking of such great secrecy you would have us consider?”
She spoke rapidly to lessen the impact. “I wish to build a temple here.”
Castres dropped his eyes in sharp disappointment, but Esclarmonde had steeled herself for the censorious reaction. He had always been adamant in expressing his distaste for embellished edifices, deeming them seductions of the Demiurge to keep mortals chained to the material world. She persisted, “Our people have nowhere to seek refuge and lift their spirits. Those of the Roman faith are permitted to make pilgrimages to Compostela and Jerusalem.”
“We have the mountains and the forests,” reminded Castres.
“I once stood in the nave of St. Denis,” she said. “The light from the rose window is said to deeply transform all who experience it.”
“Thousands could have been fed with the monies wasted on that vanity.”
“You teach that we can transfigure our bodies,” she said. “Think of the blessings possible if we could speed the work with a configuration of stone.”
Her contagious passion for the project gave Castres pause. “What sort of temple do you have in mind? We don’t possess the coffers of the Vatican.”
“The night of my entombment ...”
Castres frowned at her cavalier mention of the ritual. Sensing the Bishop’s unease, Raymond retreated to a far corner, aware that certain matters could only be discussed by initiates. When alone with Esclarmonde, Castres whispered, “You were buried to experience the true nature of death and rebirth.”
“Buried in stone,” she reminded him. “Why not create that transforming experience on a grander scale for all who come here?”
“The gnosis could be stolen and misused.”
“The wisdom can be concealed from those not worthy of it.”
“Concealed how?”
“With the vibrations of sacred form.” When that possibility was not immediately rejected, Esclarmonde called up their escort before the Bishop could change his mind. “Raymond, I’d have you rebuild this chateau.”
Raymond waited for Castres to countermand the impractical request, certain that the wise cleric would never sanction such a folly. But Castres merely shrugged to indicate that he had already lost that battle. Incredulous, Raymond prosecuted his protest alone. “I have no means for such an undertaking.”
“I will raise the funds,” said Esclarmonde. “And you’ll have no shortage of volunteers. It will be a special place.”
Raymond shook his head as he scanned the rocky spine. “This terrain
is too severe and uneven to support towers and battlements.”
She smiled with the memory of Guilhelm offering a similar tactical assessment. “It won’t be a defensive fortress. More like a cathedral. I intend to commission masons from Toulouse, men branched from the Druidic schools who will be in sympathy with our faith.”
“The quarry contracts would have to be drawn up immediately if we’re to commence the work by spring,” said Raymond.
“We won’t wait for the thaw,” she said. “I’ve already sent orders to Lavalanet for scaffolding timber. I want to celebrate the spring equinox inside its walls.”
That winter, hundreds of perfects and laymen from the far reaches of Occitania converged on Montsegur to help build Esclarmonde’s temple. The snow-shrouded pog resembled a giant anthill as one line of black-robed volunteers hauled up material on sleds while a second line descended to repeat the task. On the summit, the women stoked bonfires to boil soup in giant cauldrons and provide beacons visible from ten leagues away. The troubadours competed with the screech of mortise chisels and carpenter planes and took turns singing chansons to inspire the workers.
Two months into the preparations, Esclarmonde decided that the auspicious moment had arrived for the laying of the plat. Accompanied by Phillipa, Corba, and the girls, she walked across the crag and unrolled a ball of cord knotted in the sacred proportions while a musician played a lute at her side. “Listen,” she instructed. “The harmony is sweeter in certain places.”
Corba shot a look of exasperation at Phillipa, questioning if their mutual friend had gone soft in the head.
Esclarmonde gathered up Chandelle into her arms. “You can tell the difference, can’t you, Little Candle?”
The blind child nodded and swayed with the music.
Watching this strange ritual with unchecked contempt was the project’s master mason, a bald Provencal named Berengar, who had a round, sunburnt face and thick hands gnarled from fifty years of working stone. He dismissed her intuitions as womanly nonsense, having argued for the enclosed cruciform plan used in cathedrals. But Esclarmonde would approve no design that incorporated the Roman cross. Instead, she had opted for a more ancient method of determining the temple’s appropriate shape. She was convinced that telluric lines of a healing force, heated by underground streams, coursed through the pog’s limestone shafts. On certain days, the effect was as if mercurial serpents slithered up the tail of the rock toward the highest point.
When Esclarmonde had finished her dowsing, the perfects and laborers stood atop the stones to examine what she had traced: A five-sided structure whose corners, when connected, would form an elongated pentagram. A rectangular chapel would crown its northern end.
Castres was astonished by the result. He had never confided to Esclarmonde that their faith treasured the power of the pentagram, whose points embodied the soul of Light entrapped within the four corners of the world’s foundation stone. The ancient graves of his Bogomil ancestors in Bulgaria were engraved with the esoteric symbol to represent the inner heart of the divine spark. He blessed her layout with his arms raised in benediction. “It is divinely inspired.”
That night, after the masons and perfects retired to their lodgings, Castres led Esclarmonde to a flat area within the staked enclosure. “Your geomancy was more accurate than you know.” With a spade, he dug into the hardpan and exposed a hewn capstone that opened to an underground grotte.
Esclarmonde realized that they were standing on the spot where she had been abandoned on the night of her secret initiation.
Castres replaced the capstone and concealed it with pounded dirt. “We bury our perfects in a necropolis below to hide the bodies from the Romans. I’ve been thinking about what you said about our need to preserve the mysteries. I haven’t many more years to live. I must find a way to ensure that the location of this grotte is not lost.”
Esclarmonde studied the perimeter of the scarp and tried to imagine how the temple would look when completed. The moon, attended by the constellation of Sirius, crowned the St. Barthelemy massif to the west. This pog was a natural observatory of the heavens. Struck by an epiphany, she led Castres to the cabins along the north ridge and pounded on the master mason’s door.
A grumpy voice inside bellowed, “The guild requires no work at night!”
She had learned during their many arguments that the gruff mason could not resist a challenge in Pythagorean geometry. Winking at Castres, she said in mock resignation, “I told you we were wasting our time. Only the Paris masons know how to determine the cardinal points without a compass.”
The door flew open. Berengar, in his nightshirt, confronted them. “Overpaid chisel hacks! I can do that with one eye closed! You calculate the high and low reaches of the sun on the shortest and longest days of the year. Divide the angle to find east and west, then draw right angles for north and south.”
Esclarmonde primed the mason’s conceit. “Can you also predict the precise angle of the sun between two points?”
“Of course! Angles! The world is angles!”
“Then it is possible to construct archere slits on opposing walls to focus the sun into a ray that would travel the length of the temple during the solstices?”
The mason warmed to her conundrum. “It has been done.
“And at some point on the ground, the solstice rays would cross?”
“The dawn would have to be unimpeded by clouds,” said the mason. “And the same person would have to be present on both solstice days to discover the spot where the lines intersect.”
Esclarmonde smiled at Castres in conspiracy. “I wonder who would choose to climb this mount every solstice?”
“Only an initiate,” said Castres, finishing her thought.
The mason’s eyes widened. “Sun worship? I’ll not abet idolatry!”
“Rest your fears, brother,” said Castres. “The fiery orb merely represents the outer manifestation of the Kingdom of Light. By mapping the heavens, we will locate the secrets of the constellations within our hearts.”
“Even if what you say is true, the monks will accuse me of devilry.”
“The purpose of the design will never be disclosed,” promised Castres.
Esclarmonde marked an “X” in the middle of her drawing to indicate the concealed entry to the necropolis. “The alignment of the slits must be so precise that the solstice rays will cross here, at a location we will reveal only to you.”
Berengar’s look of astonishment confirmed his growing realization that Esclarmonde was much more clever than he had first believed.
At dawn on Easter morning, the day chosen for the temple’s dedication, Esclarmonde lay awake in her hut below the crag. Too excited to sleep, she climbed from her pallet and found Chandelle sitting up and listening to the chirping of the blue jays. She placed a finger to the child’s lips in a warning not to awaken her mother. “Shall we go bathe?” Hand in hand, they walked to the gurgling Lasset creek. The lit tapers on the summit flared above the beeches. Castres and the perfects had spent the night atop the pog, fasting and preparing for the ceremony. She left Chandelle on the bank and waded into the cold stream. The sun was just breaking over the horizon, but the morning was still dark enough that she felt safe in removing her robe and allowing it to cleanse. Minutes into the bath, her solitude was interrupted by a tornado of leaves on the hoar-frosted ground.
“Remove yourself from my sight, despicable Eve!”
She sank to her neck and retrieved her robe. In the water’s reflection, she saw a tonsured monk, barefoot and clad in a ragged black habit with a hood that dropped to his waist. He had long eyelashes and a sallow forehead stained with a quarter-moon birthmark. He leapt from his lean-to, scattering a ratty knapsack filled with notebooks, and began flogging his back with birch twigs.
How odd, she thought; perfects always traveled in pairs. “Who are you?”
The monk kept his welted back turned. “Away, Satan! Tempt me not with voluptuous flesh! I call upon the le
gions of St. Michael to chase you!”
“Remove yourself! I am equally entitled to enjoy God’s creation.”
“Aunt Essy?” cried Chandelle, frightened by the man’s voice.
“It is only a perfect who has lost his way,” said Esclarmonde.
Hearing the Cathar denomination for a cleric, the pigeon-legged monk girded for spiritual warfare by signing his breast three times with the Roman cross. “Give up the black tunic of sin, woman!”
“Your garb is the same color as mine.”
The monk looked down in horror at his habiliment, severely vexed why God would allow such similarity to abide. “Allow me at least to save the child. I’ve installed a new convent in Fanjeaux. Only this week I returned to Christ two wayward souls whose simple minds were overwhelmed by your false doctrines.”
“If their minds were so simple,” she asked, “how is it they came to understand the superiority of yours?”
The monk’s face filled with a vein-raised fury. “Faith, woman! Faith! God makes amends for His lesser creatures who, like you, have not the faculties to comprehend the logic of His cosmic plan.”
“Do you have a name? Or does your pious humility preclude such vanity?”
“I am Dominic Guzman. Prior of the cloister in Osma.”
She was puzzled how a monk from Espagna could have strayed so far from home. “You are the lost one. Castile is on the other side of the mountains.”
“I know where I stand, both in this world and the next. I’ve come here to seek out the heresiarch Guilbert de Castres.”
“What is it you want from him?”
“Capitulation unto God’s righteous judgment! My superior, Bishop Diego de Osma, proposes a challenge. Four clergy of our True Faith shall hold a disputation with your sorcerers in Pamiers on the fourth Sunday of next month.”
“And who is to judge this disputation?”