The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

Esclarmonde wiped the smoky haze from her eyes as she watched Simon and Folques lounge under their open pavilion. “It is not like them to wait like this. How long can we hold out?”

  Guilhelm studied the gray-tipped mountains, whose white caps had long since melted. The cistern levels had been drained so low that the water ration was already cut in half. “Without rain, two weeks.”

  Esclarmonde saw that the disastrous endgame of Carcassonne was being played out again. This time, she would not stand by and watch her own family suffer thirst and starvation. “Take me to Folques this night.”

  Guilhelm stared at her as if questioning whether the months of solitary meditation had unhinged her mind. “Have you forgotten what happened to Trencavel?”

  “Perhaps I can convince him to raise the siege.”

  “That crowing rooster won’t be reasoned with. Especially by you.”

  “I don’t intend to reason with him.” She descended the tower steps and left Guilhelm shaking his head. She knew that brooding silence. He would pout, but he would eventually do as she had asked.

  Hours later, deep into the night, Guilhelm appeared at her door provisioned with a scaling rope. Esclarmonde disguised herself in a soldier’s cloak and followed him under the shadows along the walls. When Guilhelm offered to take the watch at the postern gate, an exhausted sentry eagerly accepted the exchange. Guilhelm motioned Esclarmonde from her hiding and together they slithered out and swam across the shrunken river, careful to avoid the light of the waxing moon. She waited below the crest of the bank while he crawled into the camp and knocked a guard senseless with a blow to the neck. He motioned her up. They stole from tent to tent until they found the Cistercian insignia.

  Guilhelm pierced the flap and found Folques sleeping alone. He lowered a dagger to the throat of his old nemesis. Startled, Folques awoke and tried to call for help, but a sharp prick from the blade caused him to reconsider.

  Esclarmonde heard Guilhelm’s hiss and entered. She stared at Folques for several moments, then ordered Guilhelm, “Leave us.”

  Guilhelm stood dumbstruck. Her tenacious glare finally drove him to comply, but not before he gave the dagger another half-turn under Folques’s chin. “I’ll return to those walls with the lady or your worthless manhood.” He tried to divine Esclarmonde’s purpose for this risk, but she would not even look at him. He warned her before departing, “New guards will be posted on the hour.”

  Alone with Folques, Esclarmonde tied the tent’s bindings, then came closer into the candlelight’s glim. She slowly unhooked her soaked cloak and dropped it to expose her shoulders. Folques cowered into his cot, unable to fathom what she intended. He was possessed by her ravishing form revealed through the sheer wet blouse. Though still slender from the spartan heretic diet, she had regained much of the weight she had lost in the siege at Carcassonne. She approached him with a heavy-lidded look of seduction. “Take me.”

  “What ... what are you doing?”

  “Have your way with me.”

  “You know I am sworn to celibacy!”

  “You are sworn only to the bile in your heart.” She loosened the crease of her chemise to reveal her bosom. “You started this war because I denied you this night. Stop the killing and I am yours to do with what you wish.”

  Folques’s cheeks flamed with rising heat. He was mesmerized by her nakedness, unable to marshal a coherent thought.

  She pulled the strings of her under-blouse and dropped it to her waist, revealing the fullness of her breasts. No man but Jourdaine had ever seen her so uncovered. “Is this not what you want?”

  He made a halfhearted attempt to shield his eyes. “Your love is all I’ve ever wanted!”

  She brought his quavering hand to her breast. “You can have what Guilhelm will never have. Take this as recompense for the injury I have caused you.”

  Folques winced with agonized passion. It had taken years of mortification to tame his urges. Now the temptations had returned, more forceful than ever. “I would stop it all if I could! It is beyond me now!” He slid to his knees, sobbing. “I beg you! Help me! I am constantly plagued by visions of the burnings!”

  She lifted his chin and brought his fevered gaze to her provocative eyes. “If you save my people—our people— you can still gain God’s forgiveness.”

  He stroked her wrist, as he had done years ago in that tower across the river. “Let’s return to how we once were. I’ll sing you songs and you’ll blush.”

  “I have seen too much to ever blush again.”

  He arose and cradled her face, desperate to taste her lips. “You haunt every hour of my existence!”

  She surrendered without resistance, remaining rigid, drawing the strength she required from the memory that she had survived worse in Jourdaine’s bed. Eyes closed, she retreated into the refuge of meditation. For months she had practiced the art of disconnecting from the flesh. This was only dust upon dust, she told herself.

  He surfaced from the cold kiss and pushed her away. “Your heretic body means nothing to you! You’re trying to deceive me!” When she dropped the chemise to her feet to tempt him, he knelt before the crucifix and fixed his eyes upon the mortified Christ. “You think your faith is stronger than mine?”

  Standing exposed, she prayed for him to weaken. He tore away his nightshirt and began whipping his back with the knotted cord of his rope belt, crying out and sobbing with each welt. Resigned to failure, she gathered her robe around her shoulders and retreated toward the flap.

  He crawled after her. “What does that Templar offer that I cannot?”

  Without turning, she said, “The courage to let me go.”

  Guilhelm slipped back into the chateau with Esclarmonde and quietly called the guards to him, making certain that the tocsins were not sounded. Roused by the commotion, the perfects crawled from their sleeping niches along the walls. Roger rushed to the armory convinced that they were under attack, too distracted to question why the Templar and his sister were soaking wet. Guilhelm halted the Wolf’s frenzied preparations with a finger to his lips to demand silence. The Occitans watched in confusion as Guilhelm filled a ceramic bowl with water and placed it on the rampart. Seconds later, the water in the vessel reverberated slightly.

  Guilhelm whispered, “De Montfort is sapping the south tower.”

  “How do you know?” asked Roger.

  “I saw the mining shed in their camp.”

  Roger blinked hard. “When were you in their camp?”

  Guilhelm allowed him no time to press that inquiry. “If they’ve been digging for a month, the tunnel will be near the walls.”

  Roger ordered up his armor. “We must counterattack at once.”

  “Their defenses are too heavily manned,” said Guilhelm.

  “I won’t wait until they collapse the foundations.”

  Guilhelm searched the bailey and saw three bony cows suckling half-starved calves in the livestock pen. “How much grain is left in the bins?”

  “Enough for three weeks if we are judicious,” said Roger.

  “Feed it to the calves. When they founder, cut their throats and store the carcasses in the cellar.”

  Roger could make no sense of the bizarre order. “I have three hundred people to sustain here. And you want me to gorge the beasts?”

  Guilhelm climbed to the parapets and scanned the brambled cleft in the camp where he had spotted the mine. This limestone promontory was riven with underground channels. If de Montfort’s sappers hit one, the Northerners could be digging under the tower within hours. He traced a line in his mind’s eye from the shaft’s entrance to the base of the chateau. He hurried back down to the bailey, walked off ten steps from the wall, and impaled his sword to indicate the spot where the counter-mine should be commenced.

  During the next five days and nights, the Occitans burrowed their narrow shaft while the Cathars prayed aloud to muffle the clang of the excavation. Even in the dead of night, the heat was so stifling that the miners had to pace themse
lves to avoid prostration. When they reached a depth judged to be ten feet below the crusader tunnel, Guilhelm ordered the sides of the hole braced with planks that had been scavenged from the stable stalls. Accuracy was critical; if their shaft was dug too near the crusader mine, the soft veins in the limestone would collapse and the ramparts would cave. The diggers meticulously angled their tunnel horizontally to pass just under the foundations, leaving barely enough space for one man to creep on his stomach through it to the elbow.

  Three hours before dawn, Guilhelm reconnoitered their progress. He reemerged from the shaft downcast. “De Montfort will reach the wall before morning.”

  “What can we do?” asked Esclarmonde.

  “We have no cloth long enough for a fuse.”

  “You wish our prayers?”

  “I need your robes.”

  Esclarmonde was thrown on her heels. She and her Cathars placed little value on material possessions, but their black habiliments were their most sacred possessions, blessed at their ordinations. “Our vows forbid us from making accoutrements for the prosecution of violence.”

  Guilhelm’s patience with her inane faith had run its course. “You were willing enough to give up your virtue! Now you refuse to relinquish your rags?”

  Esclarmonde was stunned—how had he divined her proposal to Folques?

  Guilhelm spun her to face Loupe and Chandelle. “If you want to throw away your life, so be it. But you’ve no right to abandon these girls to de Montfort’s cruelty. This tower will come down before the day is finished.”

  “I’ll not order my flock to forfeit their souls!”

  Guilhelm tightened his insistent grip on her shoulders. “Would you see destroyed the very hall where your mother met your father? Had she not fallen in with these damnable ...” Too late, he realized what he had just disclosed.

  Esclarmonde turned on the Marquessa with wide-eyed suspicion. How had Guilhelm obtained such intimate details of her mother’s life? She herself had never revealed the place where her parents had met nor the fact that Cecille had disappeared on Montsegur.

  “I told no one,” insisted the Marquessa.

  Roger slammed Guilhelm against the wall. “You said my mother was taken. What do you know about her?”

  Guilhelm had no time to parry questions; he was forced to break his commitment to Cecille. “I found her in de Montfort’s dungeon. She required from me a promise never to tell you.”

  “My mother,” cried Esclarmonde, “is alive?”

  Guilhelm’s lowered eyes betrayed the horrid truth: In Cecille’s wasted condition, she had likely expired soon after their encounter.

  The blood drained from Esclarmonde’s sunken cheeks. She circled in a tempestuous daze of grief and rage, at a loss over how Guilhelm could have kept the discovery from her. Had she been told in time, something might have been done. The Cistercians stole her son. Now they had condemned her mother to a miserable death. Each time she relinquished someone dear to her, the demand for sacrifice was doubled. She knifed to her knees in obliterating despair. There was only so much denial she could bear. No, she would not deliver up her home! To Hell with God and His betrayals! If necessary, she would come back in the next life to this detestable existence and kill those murderous bastards across the river with her own hands! Eyes brimming with hot tears, she rent her robe and threw the stripped rags at Guilhelm. The Cathars followed her example by tearing their outer garb into ribbons and binding them end to end.

  One of the miners peered out from the tunnel. “We hit rock. There’s a crevice, but it’s too narrow for us to pass through.”

  “How far from the wall?” asked Guilhelm.

  “Not far enough.”

  Seeing the men drop their heads in defeat, Loupe escaped from her father’s grasp and ran to the tunnel.

  “No!” screamed Esclarmonde.

  Loupe disappeared into the hole.

  Guilhelm restrained Roger from going after her. “You’ll risk knocking out the props.”

  After several seconds, Loupe clambered back up the rope in the shaft. “I can do it.”

  “I forbid it!” shouted Esclarmonde.

  Roger searched Loupe’s determined eyes and nodded with pride. “She’s the daughter of the Wolf. Braver than any man here.”

  The miners dragged out the bloated carcasses and lowered them into the shaft. Guilhelm soaked a kerchief in water and wrapped it around Loupe’s face to protect her from the stench and dust. He mixed a pulverized concoction of sulfur, ground hooves, and hemp, then poured the powder into a knapsack hung around the neck of one of the carcasses. “At all cost, you must avoid rupturing the guts. Do you understand?”

  Loupe nodded, swallowing her fear.

  “When you reach the crevice, climb in first. Then pull the carcasses through behind you and tie the bindings to this bag.” As she descended, Guilhelm called her back and patted her head. “Your mother would be proud of you.”

  For the first time, Loupe did not burn him with her usual glare of hatred for having killed Phillipa. “I know it wasn’t your fault.” She signaled to her father that she was ready to be lowered into the blackness.

  Esclarmonde paced around the hole, unable to watch. She rushed up on seeing the uncoiling of the makeshift fuse come to a halt. “Has she made it?”

  Guilhelm pressed his ear to the orifice. “Loupe?”

  The child’s faint voice echoed back, “I’m stuck.”

  Guilhelm’s heart raced. With a blood-drained look of apprehension, he searched the bailey for any means of saving the girl. A gripping madness swept the chateau. Esclarmonde and the women fell to their knees crying and beating their breasts with their fists. The Marquessa stomped the ground as if convinced that the earth had betrayed her. The perfects huddled in silent prayer, bowing and rising with gathering intensity as if the propulsion of their bending bodies would speed their pleas to the Light. The livestock and bloodhounds, exorcised by the hellish wailing, erupted in a caterwaul so dinning that the stale air felt sucked from the cramped confines.

  Roger tried to enter the hole, but Guilhelm forced him back. “You’ll block what air she has left.”

  Chandelle stepped forward. “I’ll go.”

  “My God, no!” shrieked Esclarmonde.

  “The darkness doesn’t scare me,” said Chandelle.

  Corba pleaded with Roger to spare her daughter from the suicidal attempt. Esclarmonde rushed past Guilhelm and tried to capture the blind girl. “She’s only a child! What does she know?”

  “You would throw away your life for an indifferent god,” said Guilhelm. “She’s willing to risk hers for a friend. I’d say she knows more than you.”

  Withered by that indictment, Esclarmonde pulled Chandelle aside. “You don’t have to match Loupe in courage.”

  Chandelle groped for the hole. “She saved me on the mountain.”

  Guilhelm tied the rope snugly around Chandelle’s waist. “When you get to the bottom, feel for the fuse and follow it.”

  The blind girl was lowered into the shaft. Nearly a minute passed, but no sound from her could be heard.

  A thunderous report shook the night sky—the chateau rumbled.

  Guilhelm rushed to the allures in time to see the Bad Neighbor’s cogwheel being cranked for another launch. The Northerners had renewed their bombardment at the worst possible moment. Dirt trickled and then cratered into the mine hole. Roger scooped furiously to hold the edges while his men retracted the rope. Another missile rocked the scarp and caused the tunnel to crumble faster.

  The girls emerged arm-in-arm and slathered with loam. Esclarmonde ran to them with a cry of relief. The girls were grasping the rope so tightly that their hands had to be peeled off. The men drove slats into the partially collapsed tunnel and pulled up buckets of dirt until the bottom was reached.

  Guilhelm lowered himself head first into the hole. He came back up and hugged the two girls. “The sides have held. The fuse is still in place.” He poured the remaining oil
down the shaft to drench the fuse. The women and children retreated to the tower while Roger and his knights strapped on their armor in preparation for an assault. If the mine backfired and the walls collapsed, the defenses would be overrun by the Northerners.

  Guilhelm lit the fuse. The strips of cloth took the flame and the fire snaked into the hole. He hurried up the rampart steps to monitor the ground over the crusader mine. When several minutes passed with no detonation, he shook his head in exhausted failure. The fuse spark should have reached the carcasses by now. He prepared to descend the steps and—

  An explosion catapulted him from the allures.

  He recovered his senses and clambered again to the wall slats. Below him, the embankment had imploded into a sinkhole thirty paces from the chateau’s foundations. A second detonation nearer the river lit up the night sky again.

  Panicked shouts rang out from the crusader camp.

  He raised his fist in triumph. His crude imitation of Greek fire had not failed after all. The sulfurous gases inside the bloated calf bellies had ignited to form natural bellows that blew out the props holding up the crusaders’ mine. Those Franks not crushed in the sinkhole were crawling out of the mine, seared with burns and gagging from the noxious fumes.

  At dawn the next day, a heavy rain began to fall, the first in a month. Hundreds of crossbills and finches eructed from their thirst-induced somnolence in the chalky trees and serenaded the chateau with a deafening whir of excitement.

  The weary Occitans peered over the walls, half-expecting to discover that the Northerners had unleashed a plague of disease-carrying birds. To their amazement, they found the crusader camp abandoned. The pavilions had been left pinioned to the ground, still covered with the debris from the previous night’s explosions. Roger threw open the gates and led his cheering men in a splashing race across the trickling river to search for foodstuffs and provisions.

  Weak from hunger, Esclarmonde panted her way with difficulty to the ramparts. She was forced to pause at the top to chase an attack of dizziness. When she recovered, she looked into the valley and was confirmed in her hope. “God has granted us a miracle.”