The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  The Marquessa screeched with delight.

  Red-faced, Folques could only manage a weak nod for her to continue.

  The hot intensity of Esclarmonde’s coal-black eyes threatened to set the chamber ablaze. “Yahweh ordered a bear to maul the children of Bethel, but the God of Light said we should all be as children. Yahweh commanded the massacre of all Canaanites in Jericho, but the God of Light tells us to love our enemies. Yahweh created Adam and Eve, then withheld all essential knowledge while cruelly imbuing them with an insatiable hunger for it. He exiled them, persecuted their descendants, burdened them with laws of prohibition, threatened them with annihilation, and carried out the threat by wiping out humanity with a flood.” She raised her voice to drive the dagger to its hilt. “And when the children of Noah returned, Yahweh started over by hurling fires and catastrophes on them again!”

  A lute player twanged a fortissimo chord to punctuate her winning point.

  Dominic jangled to his feet, his preening arrogance unraveling like a rolling ball of twine. “The Jews deserved to be punished! They worshipped idols and murdered Our Lord!”

  Esclarmonde exposed the shrillness of Dominic’s diatribe by modulating her own tone. “There was one Jew who did not worship idols. By Yahweh’s admission, Job was a righteous man. And yet Yahweh inflicted suffering on him merely to enjoy a wager with Satan. What father tortures his own son to atone for the sins of his family? Do we throw the son into prison for the debts of the father? You would have us worship a god who does precisely that.”

  The audience bolted to its feet with raucous applause.

  Face scorched, Dominic pressed the hair shirt against his chest, as if by distressing his flesh he could gainsay the power of her refutations. “The venerable Augustine clearly demonstrated how a woman caused—”

  “The Bishop of Hippo was himself a dualist at heart.” Esclarmonde would not allow the monk to gain wind for his billowy sails. “He transformed his self-loathing into such hatred for my sex that one wonders how he ever looked upon a statue of the Virgin. You cannot have it both ways, Brother Guzman. Either your god is all powerful and responsible for evil, or He is in constant battle with an equally potent god of darkness.”

  Intrigued, Bishop Diego grasped Dominic’s arm for assistance to arise. He was a Catholic version of Castres; both were tired old men whose faith was of the heart, not the head; both had been worn down by the wrangling of youthful minds. His trips on horseback to Denmark to find a wife for the Castilian Infanta had worsened his fragile health, but the Holy Father refused his pleas for retirement. To enforce his obedience on this mission against the heretics, Innocent had saddled him with the legate Castelnau, whose invective was so incendiary that he had already received several assassination threats.

  “My lady, I see a different world than do you,” said Diego, softly. “The harmony of the birds flying to the south in winter, the sun breaking the horizon on a crisp fall morning. Is there not a Oneness in all of this?”

  Esclarmonde mirrored the aged cleric’s gentleness. “Have you not also seen starving wolves tear at their own pups for sustenance? Is not nature itself imbued with both good and evil?”

  “But Christ died to change all of that.”

  “Then He died in vain. For evil still pervades the world.”

  Dominic prowled the dais, tortured by their civil exchange. Unable to endure it further, he pointed a waspish finger at Esclarmonde in accusation. “Enough of this sophistry! You trample the crucifix!”

  Castres came to her defense. “Does the condemned man worship the garrote? The Demiurge seduces us with the illusion that the body is real.”

  “Our Lord is nothing but a spectre to you cloggers!” charged Folques.

  “The Master came to show us the way back home,” said Castres.

  “To Heaven!” corrected Dominic.

  “Not to Heaven,” said Esclarmonde. “Christ taught that we should not look for the Kingdom here or over there. He said the Kingdom is attainable in this life without physical death.”

  “A blasphemy against the Resurrection of the flesh!” shouted Castelnau.

  Esclarmonde refused to be cowed. “When your flocks discover that the Kingdom of Light can be gained without the Church—”

  Folques tried to shout her down. “If you hide heretical writings with such false claims, they will be your undoing!”

  “Why should people not be allowed to read what they wish?” she asked.

  Folques held up a Bible to demand its obeisance. “Laymen untrained in theology are incapable of understanding the Word.”

  “So your god made our nature inferior?” she asked.

  Dominic double-teamed her. “He made us exactly the way He wished!”

  “Why then did He have to save us from ourselves?”

  Exasperated, Dominic flogged the air with his floppy sleeves. “What salvation would you claim for us, woman?”

  Esclarmonde suppressed a prescient smile. She had coaxed the acidic monk into violating the first rule of disputation: Never ask an opponent a question whose answer you do not know. “The salvation of gnosis. The soul must be elevated by meditation, fasting, and prayer, not by blind belief. The Lord came to show us the way to the Light, not to enforce the dogma of men. He refuted the priests of His day, who condemned Him, as you now condemn us.”

  Diego wanted to hear more about this Cathar gnosis. “How does one know when such elusive enlightenment has been attained?”

  Esclarmonde took quick advantage of the dissension in the Catholic delegation. “The way to the Light cannot be described. It is like a man who becomes drunk with wine and then becomes sober. He is aware that he knows more when he is sober, and he knows when he is sober. Yet no one can convince him while he is drunk that he is befuddled. When people cease experiencing God, they are left only to believe in Him.”

  Dominic cried, “You would turn every man into a church unto himself!”

  “By their fruits ye shall know them,” she reminded the Castilian, quoting Christ. “Examine the lives of those who spread God’s teachings. Do they sit on thrones of gold and porphyry? Or do they walk among the people sharing all they own, as did the Master?”

  Dominic fell to his knees as if possessed by the Holy Ghost. “Our Lord never rejected anyone, be they master or slave!”

  Esclarmonde was prepared for this tactic of divine inspiration. In a low but firm voice, like a mother chastening a child from a tantrum, she admonished, “Even St. Paul preached that only the few could understand the true teachings.”

  “The woman is an elitist!” cried Folques.

  “You call me an elitist? You who dismiss my sex as incapable of understanding Holy Writ? You who deny the laity the right to read the Bible? The freedom of the Garden of Eden is turned on its head into an accusation of guilt, appeased only by your lust for emoluments.”

  “The Church must be financed!” said Folques.

  Esclarmonde was so charged with exhilaration that she could hear the blood pulsing in her ears. Folques had stumbled into her second trap: Divide and conquer. “And must poor Christians finance your silks and sapphires? When did Christ ever dress as finely as you?”

  Folques retracted his jeweled fingers into his miniver-cuffed sleeves. “You expect us to walk in rags? The City of God is entitled to tithes.”

  “And to a lucrative trade in relics,” she said dryly.

  Folques appealed to the assembly, “Who here has not been blessed by grace from gazing upon the bones of a saint?”

  “And who here has not seen enough pieces of the True Cross to build a bridge across the Ariege?” she countered.

  The Catholic disputants stewed in bridled agitation, unable to dredge up a controverting point. The spate of snickering in the hall during the caesura flooded their ears like screams. Dominic carried on the disquisition with himself, expostulating on Aristotle’s assertion that the female was a deformity of nature, citing the encyclopedist Vincent de Beauvais’s insistence th
at woman is the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a daily ruin. But the audience was no longer listening to him. All eyes had turned toward the Waldensian judge, who shifted anxiously while awaiting a response from the Catholic side.

  Folques moved to change the trajectory of the debate. “You deny the transformation of the Eucharist!”

  “An invention of your priests who wish to control our path to God,” said Esclarmonde. “The God of Light calls us with the shedding of the physical. He has no need to wallow in our mouths and intestines.”

  “Your own hermits lay hands on the infirm in a demonic transmission of spells,” accused Dominic.

  “Our healing is given freely,” said Esclarmonde. “Any member of our faith may transmit the Light. Nor do we ask remuneration for the service, as do you in your selling of God’s grace.”

  Folques paced the dais in spiraling frustration. “Do you deny swearing off sexual relations in order to strangle God’s creation?”

  “Do you deny that you have done the same?” she asked. “Or was the vow of chastity not included in your ordination, as seems to be the case with the Abbot of Citeaux, who slakes his wanton desires on innocent virgins?”

  The Catholic delegation shouted protests against the slander. Folques stole a sharp glance at Phillipa, fearful she might confirm Almaric’s lapse from propriety in Lochers dungeon. “The Abbot of Citeaux is an honorable cleric!”

  “As am I,” said Esclarmonde. “Yet you afford me no respect. I have taken my faith’s vow of celibacy, as have you. We believe the Light can be reached sooner by avoiding the physical act. And I have done my duty as a woman.”

  “We know well enough how you performed your wifely obligations,” said Folques. “A husband lies murdered and a daughter languishes in Limbus.”

  Stung by that calculated aspersion, Esclarmonde struggled to maintain her composure. “You accuse us of an unnatural hatred for the body. Yet this Castilian mortifies his flesh in every imaginable perversion.”

  “An offering!” protested Dominic.

  “If God so loves the flesh, why would He wish you to scourge it?” she asked. “We do not tempt the flesh. But neither do we hack at it in abominable pride.”

  The Catholics fractured into heated whispers. Unnerved, Folques turned to the judge and ordered, “We submit the decision.”

  The audience lurched up from their seats to protest the attempt to abort the disputation. “Answer the Perfecta’s question! It is not finished!”

  The Waldensian looked nervously to Castelnau for guidance. The papal legate dipped his chin in a prearranged signal for the proceedings to be concluded. With trepidation, the arbiter arose unsteadily to issue his judgment. “I find the arguments of Rome have prevailed by—”

  “No!” The outraged Occitans pressed forward and shouted to drown his verdict. “Treachery and artifice!”

  Fearing for his safety, the Waldensian dropped to his knees in front of Dominic. “I ask to be returned into the True Church.”

  Dominic placed his hands on the judge’s head. “This day you are saved.”

  “Sold to the Devil!” screamed the Marquessa.

  Dominic turned toward the riotous assembly with open arms. “Come to me, all of you! Do not pass up this last chance for redemption.”

  Two Waldensians disguised in Cathar robes rushed up from the audience and prostrated themselves before the Castilian monk.

  Dominic screamed their penance over the scoffs of ridicule. “On every Sunday for three months, you shall walk with your bared backs flogged. And for the rest of your lives, you shall wear the yellow cross of heresy on your breast.” He waited for more apostates to come forward. When not one Cathar accepted his offer, he shook his fist at them and shouted, “You are not Christians!”

  Esclarmonde stood her ground. “St. Bernard said he found nothing contrary to Scriptures in the manner of our living.”

  Pale with rage, Dominic aimed the tip of his staffed crucifix at her. “We have used words of sweetness to no avail! Now shall be called forth the rod and the sword! God’s fiery wrath shall be brought down on this faithless land!” While he harangued the Occitans on the certainty of Hell’s approach, his fellow Catholics scurried for the doors.

  Grenac, the hot-headed knight from Toulouse, manhandled Castelnau and pinned him against a column. “You profess to know all there is about salvation. You’d best prepare for it.”

  The legate burned the knight’s face into his memory. “Advise the Count of Toulouse that he’ll soon hear from Rome.”

  In the bedlam, Esclarmonde was left forgotten on the dais. She saw Folques standing a few steps away, monitoring the enfilade of threats and imprecations with riveted interest. The courage she had managed to muster for the disputation was trivial compared to that she now required. She approached him with trepidation and whispered, “Sir, may I have a word with you in private?”

  Folques drew an inward breath of surprise. Assured that the other members of his delegation had hurried off, he retreated with her into an alcove.

  “I beg of you,” she said. “Grant me some news of my son.”

  Concealed behind a chamfered column, Folques weighed her plea, assaying if some advantage might be gained from it. If he were to return the most notorious Occitan heretic to the Church’s fold, he would be lauded as the great hope of the Languedoc, eclipsing even Dominic as a fisher of lost souls. He had no illusions about which side had won the disputation. His old troubadour competitors would spread word across the Continent that Esclarmonde had matched the greatest minds of the Church. Did the Almighty give him custody of her son to bring this moment of reconciliation to fruition? Yes, the boy was the bridge back to her heart. In time, she would come to recognize God’s original plan for them to be together, an Abelard and Heloise in reversed fortune. He revealed to her, “He is being instructed in catechism at Grandselve.”

  “Does he ask of me?”

  “He has been told the truth. That his mother abandoned him for her heretic faith.” Seeing her eyes dampen, Folques placed a hand on her arm in an attempt at intimacy. He lowered his forehead to hers and, with a sigh in remembrance of more joyous times, whispered with measured solicitude, “Publicly repent of your apostasy, my lady, and I shall see that he is returned to you this night.”

  Esclarmonde’s throat constricted as if coiled by an adder. Would men never cease tempting her faith? Jourdaine had offered her freedom in exchange for Montsegur. Now Folques was dangling her own son as bait to gain her betrayal. She shuddered with revulsion at his touch, as calculating as it had been during their first encounter in Foix. She had committed a fatal error by asking him this boon, exposing her most vulnerable weakness. She feared that one day she would pay dearly for it.

  She removed his hand and walked away.

  Jesus said: Woe to the Pharisees, for they are like a dog sleeping in the food trough of cows; the dog neither eats nor lets the cows eat.

  -The Gospel of Thomas

  XIX

  St. Gilles

  June 1209

  Disguised in mendicant’s rags, Guilhelm dragged his scarred feet through the brackish muck of the Camargue wetlands and fell in with the hundreds of dry-shod travelers who were walking the levee road into St. Gilles, the patron city of cured cripples and the ancient home of the counts of Toulouse. During his four-year hegira, Guilhelm had eluded the Cistercians by traveling at night through the forests of Aquitaine and Brittany, then moving south in the hope of finding transport to the British Isles. On this sweltering morning, he was forced to abandon the protection of the delta’s tall reeds to refill his water skin at the city’s common well. He slipped past the gate gendarmes and merged into the anonymity of the dusty pilgrims being herded down the corbel-shaded warrens.

  A street hawker pulled him aside and offered a drink from his ladle. When Guilhelm’s thirst had been slaked, the pedlar shoved a strand of obsidian beads into his hands in the hope of making a transaction. “Brother, you must have the latest in
miracles. A holy man from Castile passed here with them only last month.”

  “A holy man in this godforsaken land,” grumbled Guilhelm. “That would be the miracle.”

  “Dominic was his name. The Blessed Virgin drew rosebuds from his lips to form the beads. He calls them ‘rosaries.’ I am certain he will be declared a saint. These are the only ones left that were touched by his hand. Because of your evident piety and mortification, good brother, I will give you a deal.”

  Guilhelm fingered the cord, which resembled the Arab worry beads he had seen carried by the Caliph’s soldiers in Palestine. “What brings these hordes into the city on such a hot day?”

  The hawker flipped up the brim of his floppy hat in astonishment. “God bless you, Lazarus! Have you just risen from the dead? Our liege is to be scourged in front of the church for murdering Peter Castelnau.”

  “Murdered? When?”

  “A week after the disputation at Pamiers.”

  Guilhelm tossed the rosary back to the huckster. The man was obviously a spinner of lies. Raymond de Toulouse might be an adulterer and a wastrel—he had been married five times, and two of his former wives still languished in nunneries; as a boy, he had even bedded his father’s mistress—but he didn’t have the balls to kill a papal legate in cold blood.

  Repulsed in his bartering, the hawker suspected Guilhelm’s sympathies lay with the heretics. Under the cover of his sleeve, he furtively displayed a miniature dove carved from mahogany, the symbol of peace so treasured by the Cathars. “Some say the Bishop of Toulouse had a hand in the deed.”

  The bustling crowds suddenly parted to make way for a column of monks chanting Te Deums. At the head of this procession walked a cleric dressed in the regalia of high rank. He led the half-naked Count of Toulouse by a rope tied to his neck and periodically thrashed the corpulent baron’s bloodied back with a stave of birch twigs. The punishment drew groans and cries for mercy from the horrified onlookers.