The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  The cell door creaked open—Guilhelm hissed a signal for silence.

  Torches cast a blinding light on their pallid faces. De Montfort and Folques, accompanied by two guards, stood before them.

  De Montfort kicked Trencavel’s shin. “Look at me!”

  The guards unlocked Trencavel’s chains. He tried to arise and meet their haughty grins, but he collapsed to the floor, too weak to stand. Folques laughed at his pitiful effort and forced a parchment to his eyes.

  Restrained by the guards, Trencavel read the terms of the document that required the forfeiture of his kingdom to de Montfort. He spat on the space left for his signature. “Not if dipped in your blood.”

  The guards dragged Trencavel to the wall and pinned his arms behind his head. They wrapped a buckskin strap around his throat with a knotted cord and twisted it with a rod. “Your hand will do its work,” warned Folques. When Trencavel clenched his fist to prevent the quill from being forced into his hand, Folques ordered the executioner, “Leave no marks.”

  The guard rotated the garrote rod another turn. Eyes bulging, Trencavel motioned for Folques to come closer to his quivering lips. Folques smiled as he leaned in to hear the Viscount’s concession.

  Trencavel bit into Folques’s ear.

  Folques escaped with blood trickling down his neck. Enraged, he clasped Trencavel’s chin and ordered another turn of the garrote. “The bards will sing that you passed tragically from the flux. We will lament that all was done to save you. Your body will lie in state in St. Nazaire with not a scratch upon it. Tears of pity will be shed for your poor widow and son.”

  Trencavel’s legs buckled. A lesser man would have offered up Guilhelm’s revelations about the Jerusalem Temple to save his life, but Trencavel remained mute, staring out in silence as death welled up in his straining eyes.

  Guilhelm fought to escape. “Murderous bastards!”

  While the garroter prosecuted his grisly work, de Montfort kicked Guilhelm in the ribs. “What about this one?”

  “Throw him with the others,” said Folques. “He’s earned a slower demise.”

  As he was dragged away, Guilhelm remembered what a Syrian mystic had once told him: At the moment of passing, one must chase all doubt if the soul is to avoid becoming lost on its journey to Paradise. He turned back to his dying cell mate and screamed, “Trencavel!”

  Trencavel opened his eyes as the garrote stole his last breath.

  “I believe!”

  That lie released a chivalrous soul to the Light.

  Guilhelm regained consciousness in a larger gallery of the Comtal dungeon. Aching from the previous day’s beating, he was surrounded by dozens of prisoners, most of whom had long since passed the threshold of sanity. His throat was so swollen that he could barely swallow saliva. He moaned for water.

  A long-nailed hand poured a few drops into his seared mouth. He gurgled the offering, lubricating his inflamed cords. A crone with wild white hair and bare gums came over him. Her skin was striated with the purplish splotches that foreshadowed death. He felt a stirring under his shirt. She was examining the Cathar merel. He pulled it from her grasp. “I’ll rip off that thieving hand!”

  The woman recoiled into the darkness. “Forgive me. I once owned such a talisman. I thought you might know of its origins.”

  He pulled her hoary face into the vague light and tried to reconstruct her features as they might have appeared in youth. “What is your name?”

  The woman glanced worriedly at the grille door. “Cecille.”

  That name meant nothing to him. He cursed the trouble she was causing and rolled over to find respite from his misery in sleep.

  “An old hermit once gave such a merel to me in Foix.”

  He sprang to his knees with such alacrity that the other prisoners regarded him with suspicion. He waited until they had returned to their lethargy, then asked her in a whisper, “Do you know the count of that domain?”

  The woman was uncertain if he could be trusted. “I am his wife.”

  Guilhelm waved her off as deranged. He had dispatched Phillipa with his own hands. The Wolf would not have taken another wife in such a short time, particularly an old hag like—

  “I’ve not seen him in thirty years.”

  He assayed her face again—she had the same elegant Catalan chin and piercing black eyes. “You are the mother of Esclarmonde de Foix?”

  She glared at him with suspicion. “You know my daughter?”

  He hesitated. “I ... love her.”

  She studied him with damp, shrouded eyes. “Tell me of her.”

  “She was told you were burned as a heretic.” When the crone began sobbing, he tried to comfort her. “She is renowned throughout Christendom. The troubadours sing of her as the Lady of Montsegur.”

  “Montsegur? What does she have to do with that rock?”

  “She built a temple on its pinnacle.”

  “A temple? Why?”

  “She teaches the faith of the Cathars within its walls. The Pope and his assassins prosecute a war against her.”

  Cecille unleashed a weak shriek of despair and began clutching at her thinned hair in self-recrimination. ““Does my husband not defend her?”

  “He died in a hunting mishap. Your son is hard-pressed by a ruthless Norman named de Montfort.” In a disorienting flash, Guilhelm saw in the crone’s wasting frame an image of Esclarmonde as she might look in old age. “I must get a message to Foix at once. Your son will come for you.”

  “No!” Cecille dug her nails into his arm to protest such an attempt. “You can never reveal that I am here. Promise me! My children would place themselves in harm’s way to obtain my release.”

  Guilhelm knew she was right. Besides, in her wasted condition, she would not survive much longer. He reluctantly nodded his agreement to her demand.

  Cecille eased into her corner with a distant, reminiscing look. “It is a misfortune that you did not meet my daughter before she took the vow.”

  Guilhelm snorted at the irony in that observation. “I did. She was an initiate in the Marquessa de Lanta’s court.”

  The crone smiled, drawn back to her youth. “The Marquessa was my maid of honor. I met my husband in that hall during one of our many courts. I can still hear him singing our wedding ballad.” She looked deeply into Guilhelm’s eyes as if weighing his soul. “Does Esclarmonde share your love?”

  He was not accustomed to sharing such intimacies, particularly with a woman he had only just met. “She has said as much.”

  “Why did the two of you not become betrothed?”

  “At the time, I was bound by a Templar oath.”

  “Have you abandoned the Order?”

  “No one is allowed to leave the Temple, at least not alive. When I returned from the Holy Land, your daughter was ...” He thought it best to spare her the news of Esclarmonde’s marriage to Jourdaine. Instead, he mercifully conflated the history of her life. “She had taken the vow of perfecta.”

  Cecille grasped his hand. “The two of you are joined at the heart. One day you will come together again.”

  “Our natures are as different as night and day. I fail to understand your faith. Your people die without offering resistance.”

  “As a Templar, you have fought against evil, no?”

  “It has been my profession, it seems.”

  “Did good come of it? Or did only more suffering arise?”

  He pondered the question. Which would have been preferable: Allowing Esclarmonde to remain bound to Jourdaine, or releasing her to confront the Cistercian menace? A shuddering thought came to him: What if true Evil was the very violence that he had always employed to confront it? Could the Demiurge so hated by the Cathars have constructed a world in which acts of resistance spun one deeper into its stranglehold? He remembered having once come upon a Muslim ghazi warrior who had stumbled into one of the many quicksand pits in the Egyptian desert. The infidel’s horse had become completely submerged and he was up to his
chin in the quagmire. The ghazi knew that he was doomed to suffocate, for the more he struggled against his fate, the deeper he sank. He could only sit and accept the horrid death that Allah had decreed to him. If these Cathars spoke true, then the world was like that sandpit. The more one fought against its depravity, the stronger became its choking grip. Finding Cecille still waiting for a reply, he conceded, “It does seem that perdition has stalked me on every road I have taken.”

  “The Lords of Darkness tighten their chains by seducing us to strike back in violence,” she said. “If we purchase into their lust for vengeance, we will only be forced to incarnate to learn the lesson again.”

  “I will always draw the sword and—”

  The approach of torches elicited howls from the half-dead inmates.

  Guilhelm removed the medallion and offered it to its first owner, but Cecille shoved it back into his hands and crawled into the shadows.

  De Montfort strode through the dungeon with two guards. “Get up, Templar. You’re going out for some fresh air.”

  Guilhelm signed his breast in preparation to meet his death. The guards unlocked the shackles on his ankles and dragged him toward the door.

  De Montfort stumbled over Cecille. He drove a heel into her side in retaliation for tripping him. When Guilhelm moved to go to her aid, the Norman became intrigued. He pulled the woman to her feet and studied her scabbed face.

  The crone broke away from de Montfort’s nearsighted inspection and charged at Guilhelm with flailing hands. “He tried to have his way with me!”

  De Montfort studied the woman for a dangerous moment, then laughed and threw her aside. “I doubt that, sweet one. Comely as you are, this monk is trained to mount goats and sodomites.”

  Cecille slithered back into the darkness. From the shadows, she turned and risked one last glance at the man who loved the daughter she never knew.

  Then there was so great a killing that I believe it will be talked of until the end of the world.

  - Guillaume de Tudela, La Chanson de la Croisade Albigeois

  XXIV

  Lavaur

  April 1211

  The infidel catapults that Guilhelm had confronted in Palestine were primitive imitations of David’s sling compared to de Montfort’s new trebuchet. Cut whole from giant Argonne oaks, its beams had to be transported to the Languedoc on forty sleds. Folques and Almaric, adorned in their purple Lenten mantles, consecrated the wooden colossus with holy water while Dominic tapped his staff against its foundations to banish demons.

  “What think you of my newest recruit, Templar?” asked Simon. “I’ve christened it ‘Malevoisine.’ I’m told that’s Oc for ‘Bad Neighbor.’ I dare say it will wear out its welcome here soon enough.”

  Shackled to the engine’s front girders, Guilhelm measured the distance to Lavaur’s redstone walls. He was reassured by the depth of the briar-thicketed gorge that separated the village from the crusader army. The German engineer in de Montfort’s employ might build cathedrals that defied the limits of space, but he held no credentials in weaponry. “If you emptied your purse for this contrivance, you’ve been robbed.”

  Simon answered with a dismissive snort. “We’ll find out soon enough. One thing is for certe. You’ll have the best view.”

  Guy and Amaury de Montfort, Simon’s brother and eldest son, had arrived from the Holy Land earlier that month and had wasted no time in demonstrating cruelty to be a familial trait, convincing Simon to keep Guilhelm alive merely to increase his misery. Yet despite their many punitive campaigns, the de Montforts had failed to subjugate the Languedoc. The massacres at Minerve and Termes had only caused the Southern nobles to fight more fiercely, the Cathars to accept martyrdom more willingly, and the Occitan peasants to believe with more certainty that an evil god ruled from Rome.

  Confronted with these setbacks, Almaric persuaded Simon that capturing the perfecta Giraude and her four hundred Cathars in Lavaur would provide the coup de grace against the heretic hierarchy on Montsegur. But the Abbot was becoming alarmed at how quickly his donations were being spent. He opened Simon’s coffer and found only a few coins. “How was the engine financed?”

  Simon gave a jerk of his head toward a near hill where a swarthy burgher held court in a well-appointed pavilion.

  Almaric and Folques shared dismayed glances. Simon was resorting to usurious loans. The Abbot asked him, “You summoned me from Paris to bless a trebuchet that has yet to be purchased?”

  “If Rome insists on withholding funds, I have no choice but to find other sources,” said Simon. “The man has credit with the Jew bankers in Seville. If he is satisfied with the engine’s capabilities, he will provide the backing.”

  “What advantage is in it for him?” asked Folques.

  “The town’s gold and jewels.”

  The Abbot whipped his sleeves to his elbows in protest. “Property confiscated from the heretics belongs to the Church!”

  Simon slammed the coffer’s lid, nearly smashing the Abbot’s hand. “If his offer offends your haute sensibilities, I can return to Carcassonne.”

  Guilhelm strained against his chains to overhear their confrontation. The Cistercian war would be set back a year if the Lavaur siege was abandoned. Simon alone now held the allegiance of these troops, who fought for forfeited estates, not indulgences. To Guilhelm’s disappointment, Almaric grudgingly agreed to postpone his decision until after the engine’s demonstration.

  Simon collared the elfish German engineer. “If I don’t see stones flying from that wall on the first shot, I’m going to sell your hide for reimbursement.”

  Duly motivated, the engineer herded the clerics from the trebuchet like a stable master preparing to liberate a wild bull. When the trebuchet was brought to life, Guilhelm knew at once that he had underestimated the German. The Bad Neighbor was evidence that the Arabs did not hold the patent for ingenuity. Braced by thick buttresses, the engine featured a large counterweight box that when loaded with stones pulled a sling along a railed trough. The German brought down a sledgehammer on the latch, jolting Guilhelm violently. The sling raced down its track and jerked its load high into the sky.

  “The path’s too steep!” warned Simon.

  The engineer watched the missile like a falconer judging the trajectory of his bird. Just before impact, Lavaur’s defenders leapt from the walls to avoid being hit. The stone smashed a ragged hole in the corner tower. Guilhelm dropped his chin to his chest. He knew that the village stood no chance.

  “How quickly can you reload and fire it?” asked Simon, grinning.

  The German accepted the question as an apology. “On the half-hour, provided I am kept supplied with a sufficient arsenal.”

  “And to breach the main tower and wall?”

  “A month, if we have clear weather.”

  Simon’s good cheer evaporated. “I don’t have a month.”

  “I cannot alter the natural laws of God.”

  While Simon and the engineer argued, Folques walked to the edge of the gorge and watched as Lady Giraude’s brother, Aimery, and his Occitan knights scurried to replace the stones in the breach. At such a languid pace of firing, the defenders could repair the walls as rapidly as the trebuchet could bring them down. Perhaps a different kind of missile would have more effect. He dragged up twenty Cathar prisoners and chose one man and one woman. He turned to Guilhelm with a sinister smile. “Do you see the irony of it, Templar? Because of their depravity, these two sinners have abstained their entire lives from touching the opposite sex. Now they will go to their deaths arm in arm.”

  The German engineer suddenly fathomed what Folques was proposing. “I’ll not allow my engine to be profaned!”

  Simon turned toward the burgher, who signaled his agreement. “It’s no longer your engine,” Simon said. “Fire it, or take the cloggers’ place.”

  The engineer spat with disgust and reluctantly waved his yeomen to the task. The two Cathars chosen for martyrdom offered no resistance as they w
ere thrown into the sling. When the engineer refused to wield the hammer, Simon pushed him aside and unleashed the latch. The bound Cathars were launched on a high parabola and deposited into the gorge with a sickening thud. The defenders on the walls looked down in seething anger at the mangled bodies.

  Simon shouted at the Occitans, “Each day you resist, two more will be sent over to join you!”

  Simon made good on his promise. Six more heretics were dispatched into the rocks and Lavaur was punished with a quarry haul of stones. Yet Giraude and the Occitans refused to yield. On the fourth night of the siege, the weary crusaders suspended their bombardment until dawn and retired to their tents for wine and much-needed sleep.

  Guilhelm was left chained to the trebuchet with the surviving Cathars, forced to endure the blood-sucking mosquitoes and lurking wolves. After several hours in the chill, he finally fell into a fitful slumber. Hours into the night, he was awakened by choking smoke. Groggy, he looked up to find Aimery and his knights filling the engine’s rigging with pitch and setting its bowels afire. The raiders cut the Cathar prisoners free and delivered them to Lady Giraude, who herded them toward the gorge. She discovered Guilhelm chained to the far side of the trebuchet. “What about this one?”

  “Leave him,” whispered Aimery. “He’s likely a deserter.”

  Giraude was distracted by a metallic flash reflected in the growing flames. She came closer and found the merel around Guilhelm’s neck. “From whom did you steal this?” When he turned aside to deflect her inspection, she persisted, “Answer me! I knew a woman who wore it.”

  “I can best that,” said Guilhelm with indifference. “I have known two.”

  Stunned, Giraude brought the torch closer to Guilhelm’s battered face. “You are Esclarmonde’s Templar. But how could you know ... Cecille is alive?”

  Guilhelm remained silent, refusing to break his vow made in Carcassonne to Esclarmonde’s mother.