The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  Only then did she discover the true reason he had taken the vow. “You’ve condemned yourself for me?”

  “Our Lord said there is no greater love.”

  “But—”

  “If Jesus is the son of the Good God, then He’ll not care if I am Catholic or Cathar.”

  She sobbed with joy. She had not been abandoned after all. Within hours, she would be with Phillipa and Father Castres. She was so moved by Jean’s sacrifice that she could barely utter the credo, “I believe in the God of Light and in His son, the Christ Jesus.”

  “Do you promise to die”—Jean’s voice broke—“to die in Christ, and not waver from the fire?”

  “With all my heart.”

  Jean pressed the Consolamentum kiss to her cheek and placed a small, flat stone into her hand. “A gift. In memory of your special day. I’m not much good at it, but I like to draw. I made a likeness of you while you were asleep.”

  “But I can’t see it!”

  “Mayhaps in the world to come.”

  “I want one of you,” she said. “Please. It makes no sense, I know.”

  Jean etched a self-portrait on the reverse side of the stone. When it was finished, he gave it back to her.

  “What do you look like?” she asked.

  “That would spoil the surprise for—”

  The door clanged open. “On your feet,” ordered a menacing voice.

  Chandelle tried to arise, but Jean pressed the stone into her fist and hurried from the cell with the soldiers before she could stop him.

  Loupe and Raymond de Perella muzzled their horses in a thicket of purple beeches above the outskirts of Avignonet. Accompanied by a dozen Occitan knights, they waited in the pre-dawn haze until a lantern flashed three squints from the village’s campanile. Loupe counted the sequence again to confirm the prearranged signal. “You are certain that Toulouse has given its sanction?”

  “The constable is in Count Raymond’s employment,” whispered Pierre-Roger, who had been entrusted with the preparations for the avenging raid. He led Loupe and the Occitans down a ridge in stealth, angling from tree to tree. When they reached the entry archway into the village, he held back. “I’ll keep the horses at the ready.”

  Loupe found Pierre-Roger’s change of plans suspicious, but she had no time to challenge him. She regretted leaving Bernard behind to protect Montsegur; his uncanny ability to divine an enemy trap would have been invaluable. She and her cohorts stole along the shadows and rendezvoused with the local sheriff, who motioned them into the armory and supplied them with axes. He guided them into the alley adjacent to the abbey and tried the latch. The door was locked. As the Occitans prepared to storm the chapel, the sheriff whispered, “Give the slippery dogs no time to scatter.”

  Loupe and Raymond made quick work of the planks. They burst into the sanctuary and found William Arnaud behind the altar. Eyes dilated in a start, the inquisitor held a bible at his chest as a shield. Six monks in the side stalls dropped to their knees and began chanting the Salve Regina. Their twitchy voices rose an octave with each verse.

  Loupe gripped her ax as she strode down the aisle. “Where is she?”

  Arnaud glared his frightened charges to silence. Raymond captured one of the timorous novices by the scruff and dragged him to the altar platform. When the monk refused to disobey his superior, Raymond splattered his brains across the stones. Terrorized by the gruesome martyrdom, the Dominicans doubled the intensity of their prayers and converged in a tight circle. Finding Arnaud still defiant, Raymond hammered another monk to his knees.

  Loupe found a scrivener’s tome on a table. She tore open its lock and read:

  The heretic who revealed herself only by the name Chandelle is sentenced to die at the stake on Our Lord’s Day of May 28, 1242.

  Loupe tied Arnaud’s hands behind his back. She ripped several pages from the ledger and rammed them into the inquisitor’s stretched mouth, then lit the protruding wad with a torch. Arnaud snorted and fought to spit the burning fuse as he squirmed across the nave. She ordered, “Take us to her.”

  Arnaud dripped with flensed skin as he stumbled in muzzled agony toward a side door. The Occitans kicked him down a circular stairwell and rammed open the first cell grille.

  Chandelle, shivering and terrified, sat curled up in the corner.

  Tears streamed down Raymond’s face as he lifted his daughter into his arms. “Come, my love.”

  Startled, Chandelle raised her bruised face in hope. “Papa?”

  “You’re going home,” said Raymond.

  Chandelle struggled against her father’s attempt to carry her up the stairwell. “I won’t leave without Jean!”

  Loupe held the torch under Arnaud’s seared face to speed an explanation for Chandelle’s plea. The inquisitor reluctantly nodded her toward a far room down the length of the dungeon’s gallery. She ran to the door and cleaved it open. Jean’s body hung lifeless from a rope. His face was horribly lacerated and his feet bones had been crushed from the instruments of torture. A transcript lay on a table next to a fresh candle and a well of ink. The document’s last entry read:

  The apostate Jean Fressyre refused to reveal what he had learned from the heretic captured at Montsegur. He spoke only of a dualist demon and ...

  A trail of splotched ink crossed the floor, evidence that the scribe who wrote the entry had escaped in haste.

  From the outer gallery, Chandelle called out, “Have you found him?”

  Loupe emerged from the torture cell and signaled for Raymond to say nothing of her discovery. Fearing that the Dominican guards billeted in the village would soon be upon them, Raymond muffled Chandelle’s cries and wrestled her up the stairs. The Occitan knights dragged the inquisitor and his monks with them.

  Alone in the crypt, Loupe could hear the screams of Arnaud and the monks being dispatched in the nave. She searched the niches in the dripping undercroft and caught a swish of movement in the granary room. She flashed the torch across the top of the bin and watched as a small depression formed in the sea of kernels. She parted the barley and exposed a hollow reed. When she pinched its tip, the grain erupted with the head of a crimson-faced friar. She was about to gut him when her eyes blinked in recognition.

  Otto scrambled out of the bin with his hands raised. Gagging for breath, he heaved and wheezed, “I’m only a minor notary.”

  “Minor enough to preside over an execution.”

  “I swear I didn’t touch the man. I only took down his confession.”

  Loupe brought the dagger to his arched chin. “The woman you were preparing to burn ... Do you know who she is?”

  Otto backed away until trapped by the wall. “Her name was Chandelle. That’s all she would say.”

  She pricked his throat, drawing a grunt. “Your mother’s goddaughter!”

  Otto’s look of trepidation gave way to a glare of spitting disdain. The blue vein throbbed at his temple. “My mother can rot in her grave!”

  “You’ll have to wait until she gets—” Too late, Loupe saw from Otto’s surprised reaction that he had assumed Esclarmonde to be dead. She would now have to kill him to prevent the revelation from reaching his superiors.

  “Be done with it!” taunted Otto, exposing his neck.

  Loupe drew a thin trail of blood below his ear to test him. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “We share the same hatred.”

  “We share nothing.”

  “I saw it in your eyes when your father spoke her name in Rome. Ours is a bond thicker than blood. Kill me and you will wrong the woman we both despise. Your score with her will then be even.” He allowed her a moment to digest the unassailable truth of that prophecy. “And you’ll no longer have an injury to hold against her.”

  Loupe’s hand quivered slightly with indecision, confirming that he had hit his mark. This cousin was diabolically possessed of the ability to divine her darkest emotions and twist them to his will. She drove his chin to its limit—and sheat
hed the dagger.

  Released, Otto slid along the wall and escaped into the recesses of the crypt with the darkness shading his long-jawed smile.

  In time we shall make them fully understand our signs.

  In the farthest horizons and within themselves.

  - Rumi

  XXXIII

  Lorris, France

  January 1243

  Seated three tables from the royal dais, Otto shielded his eyes under the dazzling ceiling of Lorris, the ancient chateau that guarded a strategic crossroads ten leagues east of Orleans. On the morning prior, an advance team—led by the French lord chamberlain and comprised of a clattering host of heralds, carders, clerks, scullions, stewards, barbers, ewerers, cooks, carpenters, minstrels, and almoners—had descended on this lugubrious hall and in a miracle of light and color had transformed it into a scaled-down version of the dining chamber in the Palais de la Cité. The sinking rafters were draped with billowing canopies of sapphire velvet and studded with candelabra chandeliers that spun like miniature zodiacs. Savory aromas lingered from the remnants of fricasseed boar. Fresh floor rushes, transported from the nearest baronial barns at Sens, insulated the floor stones and eucalyptus and hibiscus roasted in the warming kettles, infusing the evening’s three hundred glutted guests with a soporific balm. All of these preparations had been consummated at an exorbitant expense because the ponderous Capetian court returning from its winter circuit of the duchies had decided that the six-hour journey back to Paris would be too grueling to attempt in one day.

  The head table had been cleared and replaced by a cushioned couch where King Louis IX lay sprawled for all to observe. His frail frame and soft beryl eyes belied the fierce reputation he had gained months earlier against Henry III on the field of Taillebourg. Eyes rimmed in a slagish pallor, the young monarch writhed from a thigh wound that had been bandaged in a silk tourniquet.

  A blond page ran down the rows of trestles and waved a lance that dripped with a seemingly endless flow of blood. The courtiers gasped and blenched, forced to examine the dolorous weapon up close. Louis fainted into the chaise and moaned as if in his last throes.

  Otto closed his eyes and made the sign of the Cross. The shedding of the sang graal always reminded him of Christ’s breast being pierced on Calvary.

  The rear doors opened with an ear-cracking fanfare of trumpets. A wimpled maiden led forth a solemn cortege of white-draped female attendants who carried a large platter laden with silver candlesticks, an ivory dagger, and a vial of burning balsam.

  “Make way for Repanse de Joie!” shouted the page.

  Bringing up the rear of this fluttering cavalcade was the most imposing woman that Otto had ever laid eyes upon. Announced by a miasma of civet-laced musk, her deltoid face featured a fine layer of powdered lead and her flaxen hair was curled in the fashion worn by ladies half her age. She wore a royal blue mantle of Tripoli camel hair, circumscribed with a wide white belt that was hung low to create the illusion of a lengthened waist.

  Among Blanche de Castile’s manifold skills was the art of the entrée.

  The Queen Mother, twice ruler of France as regent, was exceeded in distaff fame across Christendom only by her deceased grandmother, Eleanor de Aquitane. Having birthed eleven children, Blanche still elicited murmurs of admiration from those required to attend her monthly reenactments of the Holy Grail ritual.

  Admiration from all, that is, except Count Raymond VII de Toulouse and King Louis’s new bride, Marguerite de Provence. If misery begged company, then these two star-crossed souls had been aptly seated together. Otto’s agents had confirmed the gossip: Although Louis had long since reached the age of majority, Blanche continued to hold sway over his affairs. She made no effort, even in public, to hide her disdain for the mousy Marguerite, whose father, the count of that southern domain, had turned traitor against her family. In her prime, Blanche had enjoyed scandalous dalliances with Cardinal Frangipani and the Count de Champagne. But that sordid record did not prevent her from constantly reminding her son that she would rather find him dead than wallowing in the snares of carnal temptation. She had become so militantly pious in her later years that many in the country feared she would drive the impressionable King to the priesthood before he sired an heir.

  Poor Marguerite’s existence, however, was blessed compared to that dealt Count Raymond. The boy on whom Occitania once placed so much hope had become his feckless father in both degradation of body and callowness of spirit. He sat slumped and bleary-eyed from too much wine, impatiently tapping his fingers on his knee, forced to endure yet another of Blanche’s traveling costume performances. His relationship with this meddlesome aunt was composed of equal parts revulsion and masochistic love. She was determined to eradicate the Cathar heresy from his domain by attaching it to the French kingdom. To that end, she had compelled the marriage of her youngest son to Raymond’s daughter. Under the terms of that enforced agreement, the Capetians would inherit Toulousia if Raymond failed to produce a male heir.

  Raymond had thus been cast upon an all-consuming quest to find a replacement for his deceased wife, one who would earn his aunt’s approval while satisfying the Church’s law on consanguinity. Dulled by years of accidie and drink, he had only recently discovered that Blanche had schemed to undermine every feminine alliance he nurtured. Sentenced to be scourged again in Notre Dame for failing to round up the heretics with sufficient zeal, he had fled to England to recruit supporters for a rebellion. But his plan to entice the Plantagenet monarchy into an allied invasion was strangled in the crib when French galleys intercepted three of his ships loaded with arms for Marseille. Isolated and paranoid, he was arrested and forced to tramp along with the French court for two weeks, waiting to hear his fate. This evening’s drawn-out stage mummery was only more cruel torment for a man who did not know if his head would be attached to his shoulders come dawn.

  When the slow Grail procession finally reached the dais, Blanche revived the dying King with a draught of wine from the holy chalice. As always, she played the role of her son’s wife in these elaborate productions, a choice that elicited more than a few snickers. Finding Louis at a loss for his lines, she whispered his cue and followed it up with a tight-lipped glare.

  “Where is Parsifal, my lady?” asked Louis, dutifully reminded.

  “Upon his divine quest,” said Blanche.

  Louis swept a limp hand to his forehead, swooning from the loss of blood. “This mortal flow cannot be stanched without the Question.”

  The lance-wielding squire leapt to the dais and posed the penultimate inquiry of the evening, “Whom does the Grail serve?”

  The assembly, forced to memorize every word of the play, dutifully replied, “The Grail serves those who serve the Grail.”

  Louis took an uncertain step to test the cure. “Parsifal has saved me!”

  The onlookers burst into wild applause—not from spiritual catharsis, but in relief that their imprisonment to this tiresome ordeal was nearing an end. Lute and viol players broke into melody as Blanche took Louis to her ample embrace. Without warning, she turned on the celebrants with a ferocious mien and screamed, “Out! All of you!”

  The startled musicians stopped in mid-chord. Mindful of Blanche’s notorious temper, the guests rushed from the hall in a near stampede. Marguerite tried to dredge the courage to remain with her husband, but she too was routed. Otto retreated with the Archbishop de Narbonne, a syphilitic-looking gimp whose skin was so scabrous that he appeared on the verge of molting. The two clerics had nearly reached the portal arch when Blanche called them back.

  Blanche took a seat next to her recumbent son. She motioned Count Raymond up and forced him to remain on his knees while the ominous silence stretched out. Finally, she asked, “Have I not been generous with you, nephew?”

  The Count hiccuped a nervous laugh as he pawed for her hand. “I am loyal and true, dearest aunt. I was coming freely to do homage when ...”

  She repulsed his reach. “Why do I sho
wer you with undeserved clemency?”

  “I have made every effort to maintain my treaties!”

  “By murdering monks?”

  “I played no part in that affair! I shall swear it on the Holy Book!”

  Blanche slapped down his grasp. “No excommunicate touches Holy Writ in my presence!”

  “Am I to be condemned without proof? Every hole in Toulousia has been scoured to find the murderers. I firmly believe them to be Gascon ruffians.”

  Blanche turned toward Otto with calculation. “I am told, Dominican, that you survived the massacre.”

  That revelation drove the color from Raymond’s puffy cheeks. Otto paused to enjoy the baron’s discomfiture, holding no doubt that he had given his blessing to the Avignonet murders after receiving assurances that all witnesses to the deed would be eliminated. He allowed Raymond another moment to choke on his astonishment before confirming, “The saints saved me so I might give witness to God’s ardent avenger.”

  “Did you recognize the perpetrators?” asked King Louis.

  Otto took an accusing step toward Raymond. “They were outlaws from the heretic den at Montsegur. Commanded by an officer who once served the deceased Count de Foix.”

  Blanche spat the next words as if having tasted verjuice. “That blighted patch of Hell! Describe for my nephew what you witnessed.”

  “The rebels broke into the abbey during mass and set upon us with axes,” said Otto. “Brother Arnaud’s blood still stains the altar. The heretics parade curiosity seekers through the chapel in profane pilgrimages.”

  Raymond’s brows kneaded in suspicion. “If these partisans were so thorough in their butchery, how is it, monk, that you walked away without a scratch?”

  Otto bristled at the implication. “God in His infinite mercy saw fit to scatter the curs before they finished me off.”

  “Indeed, how fortunate.” Raymond turned in fawning supplication to Blanche. “What does any of this have to do with me?”