The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  Awakened by the alarums, Almaric and Folques came running up in their nightshirts. They found the Count de Nevers watching the skirmish while spitting the night’s dryness from his mouth with vinegar wine. The other barons stumbled cursing from their tents. They relieved their bladders and bowels with a concatenation of hissing arcs of urine and detonating farts.

  “Shouldn’t you disperse them?” asked Almaric.

  “My knights won’t go near that scum,” said Nevers, gargling loudly. “Let the devils exhaust themselves. It’ll save us the trouble of having to hang a few for general mischief.” When he and his fellow barons prepared to retire in search of breakfast, they found Simon de Montfort strapping on his armor.

  “What are you doing?” asked Folques.

  Simon squinted repeatedly in an attempt to monitor the progress of the fight. “Opportunity gestates in this melee.”

  Nevers and the other barons laughed at the nearsighted Norman. “You can’t even see your own hand in broad daylight. There on the bridge, de Montfort! The Lionhearted rides to meet you! Your day of fame awaits!”

  Simon strode with grim determination toward his horse. “With your superb eyesight, Nevers, you can watch me gain glory from afar, as is your custom.”

  Before Nevers could counter that slander, de Montfort saddled and took his position on the crest of the hill that overlooked the bridge. One by one, the crusaders reconsidered their bluster and began following his lead. Soon the horizon was lined with knights mounted and at the ready. Simon drew his sword as the Beziers peasants began getting the worst of the scuffle. When the Occitans broke into a retreat, the Norman baron spurred to the charge. His advance on the river was so swift that the yeoman bringing up the siege engines abandoned their stations to avoid being left behind for the looting.

  On the ramparts, Servian rang the tocsins for his garrison spread throughout the city to converge on the gate. “Don’t allow the damn fools back in!”

  His knights were too slow in ramming the planks into the gate slots. The bloodied Occitan horde debouched through the portal and eddied back into the city, swallowing all who came within its panicked undertow. Montfort galloped across the bridge at the head of his Northern knights and cut an indiscriminate swath through the laggards. The routiers running alongside him overwhelmed Servian’s garrison at the gate and poured into the burgh like the demon-possessed swine sent by Christ over the Galilean cliffs. De Montfort and the crusaders were so stunned by their ease of entry that they were forced to fight a second battle with their own thugs for control of the narrow streets.

  On the tower, Esclarmonde stood immobilized. The Northerners were dragging half-naked women from the houses and throwing infants from the windows. The cathedral priest knelt down before the onslaught with his crucifix raised to remind them of Christ’s pacifism. A routier armed with an ax sliced the priest’s scalp and the icon with one stroke.

  Entrapped by the mash of his own men, de Montfort reared his charger to kick open a path. He looked up to the walls in discovery and rubbed the soot from his blurred eyes to confirm that they were not deceiving him. “Ten gold pieces to the man who brings me that black-shrouded minx!”

  Dozens of routiers clambered up the hoarding like monkeys. Esclarmonde could not comprehend what was happening. The hellish phantasmagoria was playing out in slowed time—her body seemed to float above the screams and blood-spurting churn of heads and limbs. An Occitan knight shook her back to her senses and dragged her across the allures. They had nearly reached the next tower when her protector straightened from an arrow in his back. With his last breath, he ordered her, “To the cathedral!”

  A frantic pealing of bells called the survivors toward the protection of the city’s two churches. Esclarmonde leapt from the allures and was swept into the whirlpool of mayhem. She saw the spires of St. Nazaire above the smoke and ran for its doors, but so many Occitans had pushed their way inside that corpses were being thrown from its towers. A perfect reached a hand out to pull her to safety. She neared his grasp—and was dragged back.

  “I am a nun!”

  A routier with half an ear ripped at her robe. “I fulken know who you are! A little romp and then ten shillings from—” His head snapped back violently. A crusader in black armor circled his horse around her attacker. Eyes glutinous as oysters, the routier bared his canine incisors and lunged for the reins. “Getch yer own!”

  Denied a full arc for his sword, the crusader pommeled the routier’s scalp with the knob of his hilt. Tusks of blood drooled down the corners of the wretch’s mouth as he hung on and dragged the knight’s horse down with him. The knight cried out in anguish—his leg was pinned under the steed’s flanks.

  Freed, Esclarmonde staggered on hands and knees toward the cathedral. The crusaders charged past her and funneled through the splintered door planks, hacking away as if cutting through bramble. Curdling screams echoed from the nave. Rivulets of blood oozed down the steps. The church reeked from an effluvium of urine, vomit, and evacuated bowels. The local Catholics made the sign of the cross and recited the Apostles’ Creed, to no avail. Some climbed the pillars only to tire and fall like spitted salmon on waiting spears. Those who escaped into the murk of the crypt were smothered in heaped piles. The Cathars in their black robes were easily spotted; their limbs were sliced off one by one to prolong their suffering. Old men, women, children, invalids —none were spared by the French knights who high-stepped through the muck bashing skulls and cutting gold fillings from teeth.

  Esclarmonde crawled across the corpses on the outer portico. Her hair was yanked back to expose her windpipe for the knife.

  I commit my soul.

  A viscous wetness splashed across her face. She opened her eyes in horror— she had been splattered by the routier’s brains. She stumbled to her feet and was concussed by an onrushing horse. The crusader who had skulled the routier was hoisting her to his saddle. The last sounds she heard before passing out were the screams of Occitans jumping to their deaths from the cathedral’s tower.

  A detachment of mounted crusaders led Almaric and Folques through the carnage-strewn city toward the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, where the last of the Occitan survivors had barricaded themselves. The Northern barons and their exhausted men sat near a battering ram at the front doors of the looming brick edifice that was winged with flying buttresses and protected by thick walls constructed like those of a fortress.

  “Why haven’t you taken it?” asked Folques.

  “The beams are too stout,” said de Montfort.

  Nevers sat peeling an apple with his dagger. “We can wait and starve them out. There’s plenty of gold still to be found in the city.”

  Almaric studied the thick oak planks that framed the church’s bell tower. “Will the roof take a flame?”

  The barons turned on the Abbot in disbelief. There were ten thousand people crammed inside the church, most loyal Catholics.

  “I don’t intend to spend the summer laying sieges to these heretic nests,” said Almaric. “An example needs to be made.”

  “There is precious treasure within those confines,” said de Montfort with a percipient grin. “You may wish to recover it first.”

  “I have enough chalices,” said the Abbot.

  “I’m talking about a vessel more valuable than gold ... I saw the Count of Foix’s sister running down that street.”

  Nevers laughed and tossed his apple core at de Montfort’s boots to dismiss the absurd claim. “What would she be doing this far east? Besides, you couldn’t tell a fox from a chicken if both were hung on your nose.”

  Folques broke the two scrapping knights apart. Shaken by the possibility that Esclarmonde was trapped inside the church, he suggested, “Perhaps we should take the viscountess alive to make a spectacle of her capture.”

  Almaric chastised his protege with a peremptory glare, suspecting him of harboring a more personal motive. “The woman can burn now or burn later.” He glowered with intimidation. “I a
m certain the Bishop of Toulouse agrees.”

  Folques gave up a reluctant half-nod.

  “What about our own believers?” asked Nevers. “There are more of them in there than the cloggers.”

  Almaric meditated on the jeweled crucifix at his breast. After nearly a minute of prayer, he made the sign of the Cross on the church doors as if dispensing the sacrament of penance. With his face shuttered in cold indifference, he turned to the barons and ordered, “Kill them all.”

  The crusaders traded startled glances, uncertain if they had heard the Abbot correctly. De Montfort reminded him, “There are innocent—”

  “God will know his own,” said Almaric.

  De Montfort shrugged at the inscrutability of the Almighty’s ways and ordered his men to jam the doors with wooden wedges. His archers swabbed their arrows with oiled rags and shot the flaming missiles to the roof timbers. Within minutes, black smoke churned from the embrasures in the cathedral’s walls and screams could be heard above the crackling firestorm inside. The doors rumbled from the violent pounding of bodies and fists.

  Folques could not bear the agony that Esclarmonde was now enduring in the inferno. In a reflex of pathos, he risked the Abbot’s censure by rushing to the barred portal, but the scorching flames leapt at him like Hell’s salamanders and drove him back. The buttresses crumbled and the rose window exploded. Shards of glass rained down on him as he crawled for cover. With a groaning heave, the church’s brick walls imploded in a billowing cloud of black smoke and debris. He reached the nearest awning seconds before streams of hot cinders shot onto the thatched roofs of the surrounding buildings.

  De Montfort and the barons cursed the unforeseen catastrophe and whipped the routiers to the task of forming bucket brigades to douse the shingles before the flames could spread. But the mercenaries were so embittered at being denied a share of the booty that they began fanning the embers with their rags, laughing and dancing like demented fools as the afternoon winds stoked the conflagration.

  That night, after the burned city had cooled, Almaric and Folques were carried in a baroche around the smoldering battlements to inspect the results of the holocaust. Satisfied with their work, the Abbot ordered a report be sent to Rome expressing gratitude that fifteen thousand Occitan souls had been sent to the Almighty’s righteous judgment.

  If in the darkness of ignorance you don’t recognize a person’s true nature, look to see whom he has chosen for a leader.

  - Rumi

  XXI

  Carcassonne

  August 1209

  Esclarmonde came to consciousness pinned over the saddle of the helmeted knight who had abducted her in Beziers. Disoriented, she could not lift her head to see where she had been taken. The ground was covered in thick cotton grass and her eyes stung from a sea-blown wind that was peppered with the stench of burnt flesh. She listened for sounds of fighting but heard only the peaceful chirping of kestrels.

  The crusader had brought her into the wilds to have his way with her.

  She fought frantically to break loose from his hold. He did not react to her jostling but kept his elbows pressed against her back. Had he expired from a wound and stiffened in rigor mortis? She jabbed a knee against his leg and finally elicited a sign of life. His chin dipped and recoiled, then came back to rest on his chest. The kidnapper was asleep! She waited until his groggy agitation eased again into slumber, then stole the reins and pulled the aimless horse to a stop. She shoved him from the saddle and galloped off.

  Several lengths into her escape, a whistle halted the Arabian.

  She kicked and cursed, but the horse would not move. Two more whistles turned it into a determined canter back toward its master, who was on one knee taking stock of the abrasions to his leg. Before she could dismount and run, the knight captured her. He subdued her thrashing arms.

  “Unhand me!” she shouted. “Damn you to Hell!”

  “I thought the famous Perfecta of Montsegur didn’t believe in Hell.”

  Confounded by that reminder, she yanked off the knight’s helmet. A ghostly spectre stood before her, so gaunt in body and spirit that she feared the strain of the day’s horrors had cracked her mind. There was a hint of familiarity in his features, but they were more of the visage she might have imagined of him in old age. His limbs were so emaciated that she could see the blue blood pulsing in their strained veins. His ashen-rimmed eyes were hollow from hunger and his copper face was indelibly scored with deep sun lines. She raised a hand to his stubbled jaw to confirm its reality.

  “I’m only half dead,” he assured.

  Overjoyed, she fell into Guilhelm’s arms. Only when she had recovered from the shock of his miraculous arrival did the troubling circumstances that had brought it about suddenly dawn on her. The pendulum of her emotions swung from relief to hot anger. She shoved him away and attacked his chest with her fists. “You joined those murderers?”

  Guilhelm restrained her until she had spent her fury. Too weak to move, he rested his forehead against hers, as if her touch alone could nourish him back to health. In a voice husky with fatigue, he explained, “Folques forced me to accompany the crusade to witness your capture.”

  He buckled from faintness before she could question him on how he had fallen into the clutches of the Cistercians. She eased him to the ground and dipped her hem into a pool of rainwater to wipe the caked blood from his face. She only then saw that he was not wearing his Templar mantle. “Your cross?”

  “I am done with that Order and its lies.”

  “You must never go against your promises to God.”

  He unfastened his breastplate and flung it aside. “What promises has God kept to me?” He seized her shoulders roughly and turned her toward the black plumes curdling over Beziers. “Haven’t you seen enough killing this day to know there is no God?” He hesitated to gather the words that he had rehearsed a thousand times. “Sail with me to Ireland. They say the monks there let you live by your own conscience.”

  She had prayed for years to hear that request. But now she turned away, avoiding his expectant eyes. “I’m not the same woman you once knew.”

  “You care more for those heretics than me?”

  “Phillipa and Corba have daughters who carry on my name.” Her voice cracked from shame. “After you left ... a girl did not survive. Folques keeps her twin brother in a monastery.”

  Several moments passed before Guilhelm deciphered what she could not bring herself to reveal explicitly. He fixed on her with a incredulous stare and tried to recreate the chain of events that had culminated in such an abomination. “If the Gascon sired the boy, then you are better off rid of him.”

  “You don’t understand what it is to lose a child!”

  “I’ll give you more sons and daughters.”

  “I took an oath—”

  “To damnation with your oath!” he said. “That is where mine resides. Did you not beg me to take you away that night in Gascony?”

  “And you refused!” She had never before admitted the depth of resentment she nurtured against him for choosing duty over love during those fateful hours in Toulouse and Gascony. Now he was reproaching her for the same act of allegiance. Would she never be freed of the hypocrisy of men? “You said our vows were more important than—”

  He stole her breath with a forceful kiss.

  She surrendered in savage abandon, giving vent to years of rage, all the nights under Jourdaine when she had willed her skin to numbness during his many invasions. She would finally have recompense against the flesh! She rolled him onto his back and came sitting astride him. She ripped away his sweat-soaked shirt and pressed her face into his chest, luxuriating in the matte of coarse hair that branched from his taut abdomen. His calloused hands found her waist and traveled up her sides with such force that she feared her ribs might crack. Why am I shaking? He cupped her breasts and with a pant of desire pulled her down. No, it was his hands that were quivering. He has never lain with a woman. She found his lips
again and felt him rise with arousal. St. Augustine’s famous prayer came to her:

  Make me chaste, Oh God. But not yet.

  She surfaced to gain a breath, but she could not find air. An unbearable weight pressed against her chest, as if the aethers were congealing to collapse her lungs. I am strangling. She tried to warn him but could not force a sound from her mouth. Guilhelm looked up at her in confusion, as if questioning whether she was enthralled in some arcane feminine rapture that traveled the border between pain and ecstasy.

  What is happening to me?

  A flitting vision of a sarcophagus flashed across her memory’s eye. She shuddered in recall. On the night of her initiation, she had suffered the same panic of suffocation, crafted by the elders to test her recognition of the world’s illusion. She was being sent a warning—the Demiurge was tempting her.

  She finally recovered and pulled away, overcome with guilt for having desired Guilhelm so wantonly. She loved this man, that she could not deny even before God, and all she had ever dreamed was to be his wife. Yet she could not abandon Bishop Castres and those who had sacrificed so much for her. Guilhelm had saved her life, but they had saved her soul. She covered herself and turned aside to reconcile her conflicting thoughts. After several moments of agonized debate, she spoke in a hushed tone to blunt the impact of what she was about to ask. “Will you take me to Carcassonne?”

  Guilhelm, still recovering from her abrupt retreat, could make no sense of what he had just heard. Had the horrors of the day fractured her sanity? Or were all women this inconstant in the throes of passion? Why would she wish to put them both in harm’s way again? He began to question if the heretics had instilled her with a death wish fueled by some nihilistic obsession for tempting fate’s wrath. She knew that Folques carried a warrant for her arrest. Did she want to be captured? Perhaps she still held a perverse attraction for the former troubadour. The hope of taking her away from Occitania was all that had sustained him during these five long years. Crestfallen, he interrogated her with a brittle glare. When she would not waver from her request, he cursed this depraved world whose workings made less and less sense to him. He watched the scudding clouds rush west over the willow-lined Orb river and imagined them as sails of the Catalan carrack that could take him far away from this war. He could not shake the premonition that this would be his last chance to escape the madness descending upon the Languedoc.