The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  “A fine speech,” said Arnaud. “Now, what will it be? Carry out my orders, or appear at an inquest to answer for your own orthodoxy?”

  Weighing the threat, the sheriff reluctantly surrendered to the inquisitor’s demand. He tried to lift the dying woman to her feet, but she collapsed to the floor, unable to stand.

  “Carry her in the bed,” ordered Arnaud.

  The inquisitor marched down the street pronouncing condemnations in Latin while Otto and the sheriff hauled the woman on her cot. Folques straggled several steps behind, stumbling and dazed, the strands of his ragged tonsure whipped up to resemble horns by the wind. Too frightened to come out of their homes, the townsfolk shuttered their windows and peered through the cracks. Arnaud led the execution entourage to a small clearing that was deemed an appropriate distance from the church and its sanctified graveyard.

  When the sheriff could not drag the delirious crone from the bed, Arnaud ordered him, “Burn her where she lies.”

  The sheriff searched the square for anyone who would come forth and support him in a challenge to this injustice. But the village, dependent as it was on the abbey for sustenance, had turned so somnambulant that it might have been mistaken for abandoned. If he pressed the matter before a tribunal, it would be his word against these monks. He held no illusion of what the result would be. Given no choice, he whispered prayers for forgiveness as he tied the woman’s frail wrists to the bedposts and surrounded her with brush.

  Arnaud brandished a crucifix over the babbling woman. “By the authority of Holy Mother Church, I commend your unrepentant soul to the glorious judgment of God.” The sheriff lit the torch and offered it to Arnaud, but the inquisitor declined it. “I am not permitted to shed blood.”

  With a huff of disgust, the sheriff threw the torch on the makeshift pyre and turned away, unwilling to watch. The mattress of hay quickly exploded. The woman screamed in agony as the flames enveloped her. Heaving and gasping, she disappeared under a billow of black smoke. Otto restrained the boy from going to her aid. Minutes later, the smoke finally cleared. The woman’s charred arms were still tied to the smoldering bedposts.

  Arnaud captured the distraught Folques by the elbow and walked him closer to inspect the blackened corpse. “Bishop, is it not like the fire called down by Elijah to confuse the priests of Baal? No doubt you were visited with such comparisons during your crusading days.”

  Folques caved to his knees, too overcome to form a response. The old queasiness that had attacked him below the flames at Lavaur and Minerve now swelled up in his throat again. He retched and soiled his robe, then looked down in horror—aghast not at the vomit, but at the black shade of the Dominican cloth he wore. He looked up at Otto and questioned in vain how such an abomination could have manifested.

  Arnaud wrapped an arm around Otto’s shoulder and led his young recruit away. “Come, my son. We must not be late for matins.”

  Folques remained confined to his pallet, taking no food, his mind meandering in and out of saneness. During the two days since the old woman’s burning, he had been constantly frightened by shadows flickering across the walls. At this hour, just before dawn, another nigrous presence came hovering over him to darken his face. He flailed and contorted and cried out, “Help me, for Jesu’ sakes! The demons are on me again!”

  Otto’s voice cracked with grief. “Father, the hospitalier says you must take the last rites at once.” He motioned five Cistercian monks into the room and bade them sing the hymns that Folques had composed during these last years in the abbey. “The brothers will comfort you with the chants. Pray fervently and I will return soon from the sacristy with the Eucharist.”

  Folques’s terrors eased as he sank into the rhythms of the antiphonal plain-song. He took revenge in the assurance that he would be transported and buried at Grandselve, in the abbey overlooking the city that so despised him. There he would perpetually haunt the ungrateful Toulousians from the grave. He mouthed the chant, fearful of descending too deeply into sleep and not returning.

  After several minutes, a woman’s lulling voice overtook the song and melded it from Latin into Occitan. The strings of a lone viol strummed in the background. Folques tried to rise to find the source of this disturbing transformation, but he was prisoner to a deep paralysis. The words, oddly familiar, were not the ones he had written for the hymns:

  Love, have mercy! Let me not die so often, for you could easily kill me outright, but instead you hold me on the brink of life and death, thus increasing my martyrdom; but though half-dead, I am still your servant, and this service I prefer a thousand times to any other facile recompense.

  The profane spewings punished him like hammer blows. He cried out, “Cease these damnable verses!”

  For you know, Love, that it would be a sin to kill me, since I have not rebelled against you; but too much service often does great harm and—or so I have heard—makes friendship flee. I have served you and still do not turn away, but since you know I await some recompense, I have now lost you and the service, too.

  Unable to raise his head, he panicked, strafed by memories of the screams and the clawing nails of the heretics who had been buried alive at Minerve. “Otto! Remove this nun from my presence! Am I to be tortured in my final hours?”

  But you, my Lady, who have the power, persuade Love and yourself, whom I so desire, not for me, but merely out of pity and because my sighs thus plead with you. For when my eyes laugh, my heart cries, and through fear of seeming troublesome I fool myself and bear the grievous loss.

  He began weeping uncontrollably. The salt in his tears burned his chapped lips like acid. “Enough! I beg of you!”

  The woman’s singing gave way to a silence that was even more frightening. And then a voice asked, “Do you not remember them?”

  “Ramblings of a love-sopped fool!” cried Folques.

  “You wrote them ... They are your chansons.”

  He gasped, “That cannot be!”

  “You once sang them to me.”

  He gave an inward-sucking gasp. Could it truly be her? Why could he not turn his head? His field of vision was narrowing—had he passed across the veil? She has come to escort me into Purgatory, or worse. No, the Almighty would not allow that! I served the Church faithfully. Wispy shadows converged on the ceiling and metamorphosed into the most beautiful maiden he had ever laid eyes upon. Why was he being tempted?

  Esclarmonde’s fey face, not quite in focus, came closer and stared down on him from above. “There is still time.”

  “Let me die in peace!” he begged. “I want to meet my Savior!”

  “Ask the God of Light for forgiveness,” she implored.

  A cascade of tormenting scenes swirled around Esclarmonde: Thousands burning in Beziers; the cloggers freezing in the snow at Minerve; Lady Giraude stoned in the well at Lavaur; de Montfort gouging out the eyes of the heretic knights at Bram. His heart raced from terror—he suddenly remembered the curse he had cast on her in the Aragon court years ago.

  The next meeting of our eyes will be the last.

  He cried, “No!”

  “You must understand the purity of Love before you go,” said Esclarmonde. “You were sent into this world to fulfill this task.”

  “I loved only you!”

  “True love requires giving up this world for the beloved. And giving up the beloved for this world.”

  “Heretic lies!”

  “Did Our Lord not teach that we are not of this world? Surrender what has been most precious to you, Folques, and you will be saved.”

  “I cannot ... give you up!”

  “I forgive you. Offer up your hatred to the crucible of the Light. This precious opportunity comes but once in a lifetime.”

  He felt as if he were drowning in a sea of crystal. The crushing radiance was a thousand times brighter than the lurid flames that he had stared into at Lavaur. “I did it all for you!”

  Her celestial image began to recede.

  “Esclarmonde!
Don’t leave me!”

  The water of holy absolution splashed against his lips. Reviving, he looked up with red-streaked eyes. Otto was staring down at him in disapproval.

  “Father, you must not speak that woman’s name when you are so near to God’s blessed reward.”

  Folques’s heart sank. She had only been a figment of his fractured mind. And yet her presence felt so real. He remembered having taken the torture-induced confessions of several Cathar prisoners who claimed the ability to transport their spirits across time and space to comfort fellow believers in the final throes of the fires. Sweating profusely, he grasped Otto’s wrist and begged, “Hear my confession.”

  “I will call the Abbot—”

  “No! Only you! It must be written down.”

  Otto motioned the other monks from the room. Alone with Folques, he pulled up a chair near the bed and draped a penitential stole around his neck. He brought a quill and parchment to the table, then placed the Eucharist host to his stepfather’s chapped lips. “You must not try to swallow it. Allow it to melt on your tongue.”

  Folques gagged and spit out the wafer, frantic to speak while he still possessed the faculties. “I have sinned grievously in my life.”

  “We all falter.”

  “I loved your mother! More than God Himself!”

  Otto held back the quill. “I’ll not write such blasphemous utterances!”

  Folques convulsed with sobs. “I took you away from her. I wanted some part of her to hold forever.” He locked on Otto’s eyes with a look of fierce intensity. “Renounce the madness of this war! Go to her!”

  “Never!”

  “I beg of you! I gave you a life built on hollow stones. Make it right with her! For your sake and mine!”

  “She abandoned me!”

  His breath began to falter. “You had a sister.”

  Otto blinked hard in denial. “You’re not in your right mind!”

  “I am more clear than I have ever been in my misbegotten life.” Folques arched with spasms as he fought for the breath to finish. “Your mother protects a mystery of Our Lord on that mountain ... The Vatican has long sought to wrest it from her ... You must not let those Dominicans find—” His neck arched in a paroxysm of coughing.

  Otto placed a drop of water on his stepfather’s blistered tongue to spur the revelation. “What does she possess?”

  “Write it!” Folques’s voice began slurring, his breath dying with each word. “Esclarmonde of Foix is declared free of heresy ... By order of the Bishop of Toulouse.” With the dictation completed, Otto placed Folques’s trembling hand on the quill and helped him scribble his signature. Folques dropped the instrument to the floor. “Seal it with the impress of my episcopal ring ... deliver it to her ... tell her I ask forgiveness with—”

  “Father! The mystery! Tell me!”

  Folques gave a heaving sigh and fell back into the pallet. His gaze remained fixed on the icon of the Blessed Virgin on the wall.

  Otto pressed his stepfather’s lids closed in death and signed his soul to Heaven. Troubled, he walked to the hearth and studied the written confession, trying to decipher the heretic secret that Folques had desperately tried to reveal. Finding no hint of it, he dispatched the parchment to the flames.

  Part Three

  The Mount of Salvation

  1242-1244 AD

  Know that between the Faithful is an ancient union.

  The Faithful are numerous, but the Faith is one.

  - Rumi

  Become Passers By.

  - The Gospel of Thomas

  XXXI

  Montsegur

  May 1242

  Esclarmonde awoke with an aching rigor in her rheumy knees. Her sleeping Cathar priestesses sat huddled along the chapel walls with their heads sunk into their robes. The dawn sun pierced the mullioned window and inched across the floor, beckoning her outside. This temple was alive, she knew, and she had long ago learned to heed its callings. She arose with a wince of effort and clapped her hands softly. “Who feels like a walk?”

  Chandelle roused and brightened at the prospect. “Wonderful idea! I’ve not yet seen the morning glories this spring.” The women laughed at the blind perfecta’s self-deprecating jest as they stretched with yawns and stored away their sleeping shawls. Chandelle brushed her hand across the Marquessa’s mottled cheek. “Grandma, we will return soon.”

  The ninety-year-old matriarch lay on the same pallet that she had been carried on for ten years. She nodded weakly in disappointment, informed that her prayer to be taken by death in sleep had again been denied.

  Chandelle always annulled these supplications by predicting that her grandmother would outlive them all. Having recently celebrated her forty-first birthday, Chandelle remained youthful-looking and cheerful despite the hardships of living on the mount. Some ascribed her optimistic disposition to being spared eyewitness to the war’s depredations. In truth, she suffered more than the others, being prisoner to a powerful imagination that recreated the horrors from the descriptions of the refugees. Unable to share in many of the communal tasks, she tried to compensate for her infirmity by patiently listening to the tribulations of the other perfectas and lifting their spirits with prayers and encouragement.

  Time had not been so kind to Esclarmonde. Her white hair contrasted starkly with her black robe, and though she still possessed the statuesque posture, her lean figure and sun-weathered face betrayed the emaciating effects of the severe Cathar diet, which consisted of legume soup, an occasional white-fish, and what vegetables, nuts, and berries could be found. Having lived in the chateau at Pamiers for a time, she had found herself coming here more and more. No longer able to manage the long walks without assistance, she took Chandelle’s arm and together they led the women through the temple’s eastern gate. The summit buzzed with activity as the perfects toiled at their looms and forges while the small garrison under Raymond de Perella’s command carried up stones to build a new tower and barbican on the eastern spine.

  Was that the faint glim of Foix’s towers on the azure horizon? Esclarmonde wondered how the chateau was being maintained. If the Dominicans imitated their deceased founder in prideful austerity, the rooms had no doubt been stripped of all tapestries and furniture. In the pleated meads below, Roger’s unshriven bones lay scattered, picked clean by the carrion crows. She turned aside to chase the memory of that indignity. After Folques’s death, she had held out hope that the persecutions would end, but she had learned to her despair that the Demiurge kept fresh troops in reserve: De Montfort and the Cistercians had been replaced by the King of France and Dominic Guzman’s Black Friars.

  Before passing to the Light two years ago, Bishop Castres had assigned formal leadership of the surviving Cathars to her and Bertrand Marti. Four hundred of them still lived in the cluster of huts on the terraces and in the vale below. Those who fled to the forests risked capture on feast days by returning to receive her blessing and what grain could be spared. The temple had avoided the fate of Lavaur and Minerve only because the Catholic engineers could not conceive a method for hauling their trebuchets up the crag.

  Halfway down the path, the women hushed their conversations. Before them stood a jutting scarp crowned by a small pyramid of rocks. Esclarmonde stooped with difficulty and placed another stone on the grave of her daughter. Over the years, she had granted herself the indulgence of tending a small pleasaunce here; the sprigs of mint and absinthe gave off a welcoming bouquet and the orange lilies added brightness. She peered over the cliff where she had nearly taken her life. The serrated descent still looked threatening. Would her family have been better off if she had jumped that night?

  Sensing the dark turn of Esclarmonde’s thoughts, Chandelle nudged her on. Nearby sat a small dolmen nestled in tufts of thyme and lavender. The briars had been kept trimmed on the spot where she and Guilhelm had first kissed. On the far side, the roots of a stripling gripped the fissure where Loupe had rescued Chandelle. There, on the ledge below,
lay the stones broken off by Chandelle’s fall. Lord God, this was a via dolorosa of memories.

  Esclarmonde stopped to regain her breath—her throat tightened with a frisson of foreboding. She knew intuitively that this would be her last descent down the pog. The Light had granted her this hoar-frosted morning to walk the path one more time. In a flash of gnosis, everything became clear: The pitch of her life, like this switchback, had not been straight, but spiraling. Often it seemed she had made no spiritual progress, but as she looked back, she realized that she had been climbing steadily all along. If she failed to merge with the Light in what little time was left to her, she would try to find this wondrous place in the next incarnation. She burned into her soul’s memory every aspect of the landscape: The snowcaps crowning the St. Barthelemy massif; the dark holm groves hanging over the Ariege like weeping mothers; the lacerated profile of the pog’s western approach—she stumbled from the accretion of remembrances.

  Corba steadied her. “You mustn’t let your mind wander!”

  Esclarmonde smiled ruefully. “Time demands recompense for past slights. Do you remember how I’d tease you about being scatterbrained?”

  “You’d have me so flustered I couldn’t remember my name.”

  Chandelle playfully pinched Esclarmonde’s arm. “Tell me. What were the two of you like as maidens?”

  “My memory doesn’t go back that far!”

  “Mine does,” chided Corba. “Your godmother is saintly only because she must do penance for her past intrigues with the poets.”

  Esclarmonde playfully slapped her wrist. “Corba!”

  Corba leaned to her daughter with a smile of intrigue. “She’d always blackmail me into sitting near her intended conquest. I was required to casually mention that another troubadour had secretly offered his love to her.”

  Chandelle bristled with mock outrage. “Scandalous!”

  “We were only practicing the lessons taught us by your grandmother.” Esclarmonde’s stride became lighter with the recall of their flirtatious idylls. “True jealousy always increases love’s ardor.”