The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  - Rumi

  XXX

  Thoronet Abbey

  November 1231

  “Father, I have witnessed a glorious miracle.”

  Hunched over a kneeler, Folques interrupted his hymn singing and squinted into the obscured, dust-speckled light. “How many times must I tell you? No breakfast! I cannot keep it down!”

  A slender monk entered the sparse dorter cell and drew a breath of shock at the wasted visage before him. “It is me ... Otto.”

  That name rattled distantly in Folques’s senescent ears. He then vaguely remembered having sent Esclarmonde’s son to Rome several years ago to study at the Abbey of Casamari and gain valuable introductions. Otto assisted him to his cot in this Cistercian enclave where he had first sought refuge from heartbreak thirty-seven years ago. The swish of a black robe in the shadows near the threshold crossed his line of sight. He dismissed it as another of the many diabolic apparitions that now attacked him with greater frequency. “Otto, my boy, I am a walking martyr. Pray you die before growing old. My liturgics are all I have to ease my suffering.”

  Otto soaked a compress in tepid water and daubed Folques’s heated forehead. “I have joyous news, father. Dominic Guzman is to be declared a saint.”

  Folques’s sleepy eyes flared. “No more saints! There aren’t enough days in the year!” He was distracted again by a distant cough. “Is that Dominic at the door? Bring him to me at once. I must hear of his work in Fanjeaux.”

  Alarmed by his stepfather’s mental deterioration, Otto stole a quick glance of embarrassment at the unidentified companion who remained beyond the door’s light. “Father, you remember ... Dominic has been dead for ten years.”

  Folques’s knees buckled from the revelation. “No! Simon would never allow Dominic to be captured!”

  “De Montfort lies buried in a crypt in Carcassonne,” said Otto. “The war is over. Count Raymond signed the Treaty of Meaux and agreed to marry his daughter to the King’s brother.”

  Folques gasped for breath as he fell onto his pallet. “Raymond surrender? The mountains would fall into the sea first!”

  Otto offered a cup of weak tea to aid Folques’s faltering memory. “You and I stood on the steps of Notre Dame and watched the baron flogged.”

  Folques rubbed his mottled temples in frustration. During the past months, the Devil had twisted his thoughts so wickedly that at times he could not distinguish between the real and the imaginary. In his defense, he had witnessed the two recalcitrant counts of Toulouse scourged so many times that the punishments seemed to have merged into one perpetual rite of expiation. He looked up at Otto with eyes glazed in confusion. “What does it all mean?”

  “Occitania will pass to the crown,” said Otto. “The heretics are finally to be dispossessed of their lands.”

  Folques found himself weeping, not from joy, but from the cruel passage of time. In his lucid moments, he was haunted by the losses that had befallen him in the years following Simon’s death. A few months after the Black Brotherhood broke the Toulouse siege, he was forced to abandon the city that had never accepted him as its bishop. He retired in ignominy to this abbey of his ordination where the younger monks regarded him as a curious relic.

  It seemed only yesterday that he had led Simon’s funerary procession across the burnt causses with the widow Alice and her three young sons. The Ocs threw so many rocks from the hills that day that the coffin nearly disintegrated. The Lion was soon joined in death by nearly all of the luminous stars that orbited his violent life. Almaric succumbed a bitter man in his embattled Narbonne tower. Honorius followed Innocent to a nondescript grave, passing the Keys of St. Peter to Dominic’s fellow Spaniard, Cardinal d’Ostia, now Gregory IX, a firebrand whose hatred of heresy exceeded even that of his predecessors. Two kings of France had come and gone, leaving nine-year-old Louis IX in the overbearing regency of his mother, Blanche de Castile. The ambitious Blanche now schemed to drag away the carcass of the Languedoc prey that he and de Montfort had spent decades subduing.

  Yet he took some small solace in the knowledge that most of his old enemies had fared no better. The elder Raymond de Toulouse had died an excommunicate; his cursed head was still displayed under glass to pilgrims on their way to Compostela. That other thorn in his side, the Count de Foix, was permitted, for reasons known only to the Almighty, a natural death in some isolated mountain keep. The Dominicans had seized Foix and extracted a postmortem punishment on the Wolf by scattering his unshriven bones in a thistle field below his towers. The heresiarch Castres had not been heard from in years and had likely found his due entrance to Hell in some black Pyrenean cave.

  “Did you hear me?” asked Otto. “Dominic is to be a saint.”

  “Dominic was no more a saint than any of us!” Folques tried to rise from the cot. “He stood at the pyres with me and fanned the flames!”

  Otto nervously regarded the door. “Father, you must not say such things. Dominic converted thousands to the forgiveness of Christ.”

  “His only conversion was Innocent’s ear!”

  “If only you had been at the inquest,” said Otto. “Thousands of believers pressed upon Dominic’s tomb. If the legates had found a malodorous emanation, the pilgrims would have rioted.”

  Folques stood with a faltering effort and shuffled to the chamber pot in the corner. Steadying himself with one hand against the wall, he urinated and fouled the air. “He always stank of that hair shirt when I was with him.”

  “The most heavenly fragrance came from his opened sarcophagus,” insisted Otto. “We fell to our knees weeping with joy.”

  Folques kicked over the pot as he stumbled back to his cot. “Remind me to douse my ass with oils before I croak! Better yet, I’ll graze on honeysuckles and fart my way to sainthood.”

  “Father!”

  Folques angrily waved off the scolding. After several moments of retreat into his tortured thoughts, he beckoned Otto closer to ease his effort to speak. “Your mother ... Has Montsegur been taken?”

  Otto angled his shoulder sideways to prevent his unidentified companion at the door from overhearing his whispered answer. “The heretics still infest the mountain, but—”

  “Then the war is not over!” Folques thrashed away Otto’s solicitous hands and glared at the irksome swishing that persisted near the door. “Bring me my crucifix, boy! You’ve let the demons slip in!”

  A tall monk stepped forward from the shadows. Bald and gaunt, he possessed an austere forehead and the lean, sallow face of a greyhound. His flaccid hand gestures and mechanical, self-assured comportment dripped with the same smarmy unctuousness practiced by the sycophants who inhabited the inner circles of the Vatican. He kept his supercilious, heavy-lidded eyes fixed on Folques while he questioned Otto, “What was it the old fool asked about your mother?”

  “What business is it of yours?” demanded Folques.

  “I am William Arnaud,” he said in a peremptory tone.

  “That name means nothing to me.”

  “Then you are even more doddery than I suspected.”

  Folques looked to Otto for an explanation of this interloper’s presence. “Why do you bring a jackal into my cell to insult me?”

  Otto tried to find the courage to reveal what he had withheld too long. “Father, I wish to join the Black Preachers. I’ve come home to ask your blessing.”

  Folques did not want to trust his failing ears. He turned one eye on Otto, then the other coldly on the stranger who had beguiled his stepson. “The Rule of St. Bernard is no longer good enough for you?”

  Arnaud placed a firm paternal hand on his new recruit’s shoulder. “Brother Otto wants to cleanse the heretics from his motherland.”

  “We Cistercians fight the heretics!” reminded Folques.

  “Fought the heretics,” corrected Arnaud. “My Dominicans have been assigned the task of finishing what you could not. You and your brethren have been freed to pursue your calling in the cheese cellars and milking stalls.”r />
  Folques jerked upright. “Upstart! How many walls have you breached? How many disputations waged?”

  Arnaud held a gloating half-smile. “There will be no more disputations.”

  Unsettled by the confrontation, Otto tried to calm Folques. “Brother Arnaud has been sent by Rome to lead the new Dominican mission. He has agreed to teach me how to convert our Occitan countrymen and renew Christ upon their hearts. My father would have given his—”

  “Your father? I would never—” Folques suddenly realized from Otto’s guilt-tinged reaction that he had been speaking of Jourdaine. The boy had always referred to him as father. Those sodomites in Rome had filled the boy’s ears with promises of glory in the service of the saints, stoking him with fables that Jourdaine had been a holy crusader and taken up to Heaven in martyrdom. Yes, that was how the preening eunuchs gathered their nets, twisting history and burning evidence. He had lost Otto to the machinations of the Curia schemers.

  Could it truly have been thirty-three years ago? Every sensation came back to him from that sweltering day in Rome when he too had been seduced by the allure of spiritual power; climbing the Santa Scala, navigating the mazed archives, overhearing whispered intimations about the next appointment. He could still smell the sweet claret on Innocent’s warm breath. Now the most precious person left to him in this world had stumbled onto the same path that led to this purgatory before death. These barking dogs of Christ—as the Dominicans were being derisively called by the villagers—had the audacity to claim that they were now the new legions of St. Michael riding forth to save the Church, just as his Cistercians had—

  Otto jostled Folques back to the present. “Brother Arnaud has developed novel methods for bringing our strayed brothers and sisters back to the Church.”

  Folques shot a contemptuous ball of sputum toward the chamber pot, missing badly. The lad had already been indoctrinated into the high-sounding argot of heretic-hunting. Strayed brothers and sisters, my wrinkled ass! The boy would learn soon enough that dogs and cats stray. These Occitans who walk into the fires willingly would not be herded back into the fold by whistles and cowbells. “I’d pay pretty coin to see these novel methods.”

  “Perhaps one day your wish will be granted,” said Arnaud. “In the interim, I have learned only this morning that a dying woman in the town here has requested her bishop for the last rites.”

  “She has asked for me?” asked Folques with a swell of pride.

  “Who else could she mean?” said Arnaud.

  Offered the rare opportunity to minister to a soul outside the abbey, Folques hurried to don his sandals and the white cloak that he always kept hanging on the wall peg. Arnaud watched with a smirk as Folques fumbled pitifully around the cell, unable to find his garb. Finally, the inquisitor provided a spare Dominican robe that he had brought for the occasion. Without giving a thought to its color, Folques gathered the robe over his shoulders and armed himself with candles and his dispenser of holy water. “I have never failed to timely convey the sacrament of death. It is truly a solemn undertaking. The lady no doubt remembers my high status and wishes my intercession.”

  “Yes, no doubt,” said Arnaud with a sinister glint.

  The morning was raw; the slate clouds scudding over the scrubland carried the promise of sleet. Careful not to step in the offal rut, Folques relied on his staff as he hobbled down the lone rue of Thoronet. He was taxed to keep up with Otto and Arnaud as they led him briskly into a cobblestoned warren darkened by the tilt of thatched-roof houses. He remembered similar winter days during the campaigns of old when Simon, refusing to take bivouac, would drive the army through storms so punishing that even the wolves refused to leave their dens. He prayed not to be late in administering the unction. Perhaps if he performed admirably the Abbot would offer him more assignments. Unaccustomed to the rush of the cold air to his lungs, he began to feel light-headed. He could not recall the last time he had ventured beyond the abbey walls. The gusts were strong but the sting against his face was bracing. He must get out more often, he reminded himself. It was good for the soul.

  Arnaud reached a cul-de-sac and knocked on the door of a squat daub-and-wattle hut. “We have brought the Bishop as you asked.”

  A dirty-faced boy with eyes ringed like dark saucers cracked the door. Confirming that the three cowl-draped monks were clad in black robes, he opened it a bit more. “She suffers terrible. Can’t swallow the soup.”

  “Fear not, lad,” assured Arnaud. “We shall ease her pain.”

  The boy scanned the inscrutable faces. Finally, he allowed the clerics to enter. The humble room was thick with the stench of decay and poorly lit by a struggling fire. Otto began to cross his breast for protection, but Arnaud restrained his hand. The old woman lay in the corner on a ratty straw mattress surrounded by candles. She mumbled words that sounded like an Occitan version of the Pater Noster. Above her on the wall were etched pentagrams and other signs of witchery. Eyes shrouded with cataracts, she managed to turn her head just enough to make out the outlines of their black robes. The arrival of the holy men seemed to give her great comfort. She eased back into her matting and wheezed consumptive breaths. “I feel the darkness coming.”

  “Have you followed God’s teachings?” asked Arnaud.

  “I’ve tried my best to abide the faith,” she said.

  “You wish the Bishop to give you the last rites?”

  “I’ve waited all my life for his blessing.”

  Cued to his moment, Folques lowered to his knees and fumbled through his knapsack. Finally, he pulled out an ampulla, spilling half the holy water. To aid his sight, he hovered over the woman’s face and tried to place her features.

  “Don’t you remember?” the woman asked, disappointed. “Of course you wouldn’t. We met years ago ... on the sacred mount.”

  Folques’s brow creased with confusion. He gave no more thought to the woman’s ramblings and reached his palsied hand to her forehead. “Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God?”

  “I do.”

  “And do you believe in the one true Apostolic Church of Rome, in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth?”

  Something about his voice troubled her. “Bishop Castres?”

  That name stung Folques’s ear like a serrated arrow. Flustered, he looked up at Arnaud for an explanation.

  Arnaud nudged him aside and grasped the woman’s hand. “Tell us in your own words what you believe. God will be satisfied with that.”

  “I believe in the God of Light, just like the Bishop here taught,” she said. “I believe that I will go to the Light and be with my daughter, blessed be her soul. She was burned at Toulouse.”

  “Your daughter was burned?” repeated Arnaud, savoring the moment.

  The woman’s face blackened from the memory. “By Folques the Butcher.”

  Folques sputtered and struggled to arise from his knees, but the inquisitor’s hand pressed against his shoulder to keep him down. He tried to focus his befuddled mind. “What ... what deceit is this?”

  The woman’s glassy orbs widened in agitation. “You don’t sound nothing like the Bishop.”

  Arnaud firmed his hold on her hand in threat. “We have brought you a true bishop of God ... Bishop Folques of Toulouse.”

  Several moments passed before the woman could make sense of the inquisitor’s horrid revelation. She lurched up and pulled Folques’s face to her failing gaze, then unleashed a terrifying wail. In that moment, she was drained of what little faith she had managed to hoard during her wretched life. She turned to the boy with a stricken look. Gurgling sounds came from her mouth as if she had just swallowed her tongue. “Child, what have you done?”

  The frightened lad ran for the door, but Arnaud sent him tumbling to the corner. “Grandma, you told me to ask for the black bishop.”

  “At night, child!” cried the woman. “At night!”

  Folques floundered on his hands and knees, drooling and bewildered.
Otto was nonplussed by the discovery that he too had been kept uninformed of the inquisitor’s true intentions.

  Arnaud reassured his shaken charge. “Your first lesson, my son. We must ensnare these heretics using their own deceit as bait.”

  “The Touch!” begged the crone. “Don’t let me die without the Light!”

  Drawn by the screams, the sheriff of the village came running and threw open the door. “What goes on here?”

  “A plague rampages through your burgh,” said Arnaud.

  The sheriff took a step back and examined the room. “A plague?”

  “This woman is infected with heresy,” said Arnaud. “By authority of Holy Mother Church, I order you to take her to the field of execution and cleanse her soul in the flames of Christ.”

  The sheriff stared at the inquisitor in disbelief. “The Devil I will! Agnes Broielel is a good woman.”

  “Any person who harbors a heretic is subject to examination,” reminded Arnaud. “Now, you spoke of the Devil?”

  The sheriff saw Folques prostrate on the floor and narrowed his gaze in sudden recognition. “You were the Bishop of Toulouse.”

  Folques enlivened at hearing his name. “Yes, my son?”

  “I’m a devout churchgoer,” said the sheriff. “The parish priest will attest to that. I don’t know this woman’s beliefs and I don’t ask. She’s only hours from death anyway.”

  Arnaud allowed Folques no time to form a defense. “If it is mercy you seek, constable, you are petitioning the wrong man. Difficult as it is to believe, this broken-down old mule once consigned thousands of souls to God’s judgment.”

  The sheriff punished Folques with a glower of condemnation. “Aye, I saw plenty of his bloody work firsthand. I was conscripted into de Montfort’s army. Where were you, Bishop, when this woman required tending? Off ransacking cities and stripping furs from corpses. Her only crime was turning to those who succored her with the Almighty’s mercy.”

  Folques could only hang his head in shame.