The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  Raymond offered a welcoming handshake. “We are in your debt, seigneur.”

  The bandy engineer made a quick survey of the temple’s broken walls. “Did not Our Lord say that it is better to give than to receive? Bring me your largest stones. It’s nigh time the meek inherited some earth.”

  “The French are massing!” screamed a knight on the walls.

  Guilhelm climbed to the ramparts while the engineer and his charges broke down their crosses with a practiced precision. The Cathars watched in amazement as the Aragonese knights mortised the beams to form a triangular frame, then knotted strands of the rope and constructed a sling by piecing together their robes. Within minutes, they had raised a small trebuchet.

  The engineer calibrated the trajectory. “Ten degrees left!”

  On Guilhelm’s signal, the engine heaved its maiden load over the wall. The onrushing crusaders came to a lurching halt, baffled by the appearance of the stone arcing across the horizon. They cast glances over their shoulders toward their loaded engine and again to the sky, convinced that God had wrought some unnatural phenomenon. Before they could make sense of the marvel, the projectile caromed into their ranks. Raymond’s men riddled the French survivors with arrows and forced them to retreat in such bewilderment that they left their wounded behind. The Occitans let loose with a hoarse cheer—the first heard on these ramparts since the commencement of the siege.

  Guilhelm jumped from the allures and threaded his way through the converging Cathars to find Corba. Drawing a bracing breath for courage, he asked the question that had brought him back to this mount.

  The spasms in Esclarmonde’s viscera and the tormenting thirst had been replaced by a dull, fragmented awareness. Lying on a stone slab cushioned only by a ragged quilt, she was again reminded of time’s torturous passage by the metronomic flapping of the robes draped across the chapel’s ceiling to blunt the wind. The hearth sat frozen and sparkling snow dusted the walls. The moon’s pallid light cocooned her in a bluish mist. Soaked in cold sweat, she shivered so intensely she could hear her teeth chattering. She tried to look down at her swollen feet in the hope of seeing the purplish mottling said to be the portent of death, but she could not move her head. Having taken no food and only a thimble of water in the five days since commencing the Endura, she was entombed in a body that no longer responded to her commands. Her physical sheath had surrendered its resistance, but her mind had become even more manic, compensating for the recession of her senses. As the icy numbness in her limbs increased, her interior landscape turned frightfully vivid and overpowering, afflicting her with a menagerie of visions, wrenching fears, dissonant thoughts, and once-lost memories, all alloyed in a narrative that seemed always on the verge of profundity and revelation, only to elude her grasp when she struggled to weave them into coherence.

  This war between spirit and body brought to her feverish mind a story she had once been told about the Vestal Virgins of Rome. After a disastrous military defeat, the senators immured one of the young female initiates inside the city’s ramparts as a sacrifice to the gods. Decades later, when the wall was excavated, the victim’s corpse was found with her garments shredded and her fingers eaten off. The poor girl had cannibalized her own flesh.

  The memory of that account plunged her into a panic. What if she were not dead when her body was delivered up to the Dominicans? Would she revive in the immolation fires and suffer the death throes anew? Castres had told her of holy men in the East who, after years of practice, gained such mastery of meditation that they could mimic death by suspending their pulse and humours. These magicians of the body would demonstrate their remarkable powers by having themselves buried alive for days at a time. In Occitania, death had become so banal and was met with such indifference by the living that the funeral gangs became slipshod. So numerous were the reports of accidental entombments that many of the dying left instructions for their passage to be confirmed by the insertion of garlic or vinegar into the nose.

  Vinegar. The last taste experienced by Jesus before giving up His spirit. Had the Romans offered Him the gall-laced drink to test His survival? She had always wondered about the whispered claims that the Master did not die on the cross. Some believed that He had merely retreated into the little death of meditation, as had Lazarus. She prayed that the claim was true. Why would anyone find hope in such senseless agony on the cross? The popes insisted that God sent His only son to be nailed and flayed to pay off a karmic debt for sins long since lost to our understanding. How could people worship such a cruel divinity?

  When, as a young girl, she had listened to the priests describe the horrors of the Way of the Cross, she would think about a tome that she had come across in the library of her Catalan tutor. The work was an Occitan translation of a history written by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish scribe who had gone over to the Romans. What always gave her pause was not the chronicler’s confirmation of Jesus’s death, but his description of the thousands of Jewish rebels who had also been crucified along the road leading into the Holy City. Those Jews had suffered the same horrid end as Christ for their country, yet their sacrifice had long since been forgotten. Why, she had asked her father, was Christ’s crucifixion so elevated in worship when the others were not? He died to save his fellow man, she was told. But so had those Jewish rebels, she insisted, and unlike Christ, they had not been comforted with the divine foreknowledge of their resurrection. She could still remember her father staring down at her in utter perplexity, unable to fathom how a child could—

  She heard the door bolt slide open.

  A blast of air pricked her skin. She lifted her swollen lids through the filmy gauze and saw the blurred outline of a face. Its doleful features were distantly familiar, but several moments passed before she could place them. Her heartbeat quickened. Yet just as swiftly she sank in black disappointment, having almost fallen for the clever temptation. The Demiurge was again upon her with his deceiving visions.

  Allow me to die in peace. Let it come soon, I pray you.

  A muffled sob was followed by a cold tear that fell to her cheek with the impact of an avalanche. The apparition took on more detail: Eyes luminous and blue, salted beard, long gray hair speckled white. Her flesh began to awaken as if attacked by spiders. Against her wishes, her body was fighting for life.

  “Come back to me,” said an echoing voice.

  She pressed her sodden eyes closed to chase the Evil One whose cruelty knew no bounds. In these final hours of her life, the Demiurge was conjuring the one image that might tempt a retreat from her duty. She tried to will the pernicious cacodaemon away, but he would not be ignored. Her skin burned from the press of his hand against her forehead. Her fingers were opened and her palm was pressed against the cold surface of rounded metal. She made out the edges of a raised carving—an image slowly took form in her mind: A cross with three traverse beams.

  The merel.

  “Would Satan know when our eyes first met?” asked the archon. “Would He know how you sent me tumbling down that ladder in Lombrives? Would He know of that sun-drenched day when you stole a kiss on this very mount and promised me another years hence?”

  “Guilhelm!”

  His warm mouth met her chapped lips and ignited her cheeks with tears that stung like acid. She tried to turn her head to conceal her wasted condition; her hair was matted with grime and her gums bled. “Don’t look at me.”

  “You’re the most blessed sight I’ve ever seen.”

  Guilhelm’s tortured thoughts fled back to that night after Muret, when he had been consumed by rage at her mindless loyalty to this life-hating faith. How many years had he suffered for his impetuous decision to abandon her? Retreating to Aragon, he had absconded from lair to lair across the waste scapes of Christendom, living on bile and venom, nursing his anger against the phantom God of Light that she worshipped. Not a night had passed that he did not angrily defy Christ and His saints, taunting them to retaliate and accusing them of sleeping while the world wept.
Until this moment, he thought his reproaches and challenges had gone unmarked. But now he saw that the Almighty’s agents of retribution had only been biding their time until the appropriate punishment for his defiance could be arranged. He could barely speak the words. “I am the cause of this.”

  “You must never think that,” she whispered.

  He tightened his petitioning grasp on her frail hand. “I once carried you down this mountain. I can do it again.”

  “You and I are both too old to start over.”

  “I’ll take you to Ireland,” he promised. “The people there live to be a hundred. We’ll end our days together.”

  “Would we have horses?”

  “Stallions as white as the mountain caps,” he said. “Dogs and falcons, too. I shall even find you a unicorn, if you wish.”

  “And courts of love?” Her voice began to strengthen.

  “The Irish bards sing so sweetly, one cannot help but dance.”

  She smiled weakly. “You never danced. Frivolity you called it.”

  He raised her limp shoulders and brought her bruised eyes closer to his gaze. He could feel the faint thud of her heart against his. “If you’ll stay alive in my arms, I’ll never stop dancing.”

  Listless as a rag doll, she winced from the razored agony caused by even the slightest movement. She began to feel faint from the exertion. He pulled a piece of bread from his knapsack and brought it to her lips. The aroma of barley revived her. She struggled against its seduction by turning away. “I beg of you, Guilhelm. Aid me in this passage.”

  “You cannot ask me to stand by and watch you die!”

  “You and I were not put upon this earth for contentment,” she said. “We have been assigned greater tasks.”

  “We can assign our own fates.”

  “Each time I have tried to avoid the call, I have stumbled badly.” Her vision was tunneling into darkness. She remembered the signs that Castres had said would announce the Light’s approach. The end, she knew, was drawing near. “You must bring the others to me.”

  Guilhelm delayed, desperate to have her to himself in these last moments, but finally he obeyed her request, as he always did. He covered her with his mantle and returned moments later with Corba, Chandelle, and the Marquessa, who was carried in on her pallet.

  Esclarmonde’s head was propped up so she could see their faces. She could barely make out the tracings of their features. She slid her arm across the slab and wrapped her fingers around the desiccated sinews of the Marquessa’s wrist. “Chandelle was right. You will outlive us all.” That prophecy had never failed to arouse the matriarch’s ire, but for the first time in her life, the Marquessa was too overwrought to form a protest. Esclarmonde reached next for Corba’s shaking hand. “Tell me again your favorite maxim.”

  Corba pleaded, “Esclarmonde, we can still—”

  “Must I always start it for you? Love can ...”

  “Love can deny nothing to Love,” said Corba, crying.

  “You must be strong.”

  “Loupe will come,” pleaded Corba. “Guilhelm has learned that she made it through the French lines. If you will only wait.”

  Esclarmonde smiled faintly with pride, confirmed in her belief that Loupe could survive for weeks on stubbornness alone. Yet she knew it was too late. Even if Count Raymond and his Toulousian army arrived this hour with the sustenance necessary to reverse death’s approach, her internal organs had suffered too severely to mend. She could hear Chandelle’s wheeze deepen, evidence that the pneumonia was worse. “Little Candle, you know we’ll be together again. Never doubt this.”

  Chandelle brought Esclarmonde’s palm to her own cheek to savor its miraculous touch one last time. “I have never doubted you.”

  When Esclarmonde’s eyes dimmed, Guilhelm hurried Bernard Marti and the other Cathars into the chapel for their final Touch of Love. Those too ill to walk were carried in on stretchers. Raymond, the last to approach, broke down sobbing. “I am lost without your guidance.”

  “Guilhelm will assist you,” she rasped. “Remember, the negotiation must be in writing. The Dominicans will ...” The blackness was closing faster. A horrible thud shook her soul to its core. The door closed—they were gone. She began to sink into a bottomless whirlpool of despair. Had she given up her spirit so soon? She cried out, “Don’t leave me!”

  Guilhelm reappeared from the shadows. “Never again.”

  She refused to surrender his hand. “I must ask one last promise of you.”

  “I have never been virtuous at keeping them.”

  Her ears throbbed from a howling wind; the First Station of the Path to the Light was near. “Promise me you’ll not let what happened on this mount be forgotten.”

  He did not answer immediately. “What would you have me—”

  “There is an underground chamber...” She now fought for every breath. “I never told the others ... The sun enters on each solstice.” She heaved and coughed up blood—the internal moorings were giving way. She reminded herself not to fear the beasts that guarded the entrance to the death realms. She felt Guilhelm’s palm pressing against her chest to ease the inhalations. She arched and gasped for air. “Lines intersect.”

  “How do I find these lines?”

  “Connect the crosses on the walls and ...” The roiling clouds of blackness frightened her. “Guilhelm!”

  “I am still here.”

  “So cold.”

  He lay beside her and pulled her wasted body into his arms for warmth, attempting to meld her heartbeat with his. Her vows forbade such intimacy, but she had never been so afraid. All her life the God of Light had denied her this man. Would He deny her even this last embrace? She had counseled others to go bravely to their deaths. Hypocrite! The hour was nigh but she could not remain faithful to her own teachings. She then remembered Folques’s curse on that fateful night in Foix’s chapel:

  You will never have him.

  Beyond the chapel, the trebuchet’s groan and recoil grew louder with each successive launch. That excruciating screech tortured her beyond endurance. She could not bear the thought that this grinding ruination of her temple would be the last sound she would ever hear. She squeezed his hand feebly and begged, “A story.”

  “I am not a bard.”

  He had raised that same protest when he had saved her from Folques in the court of love. With great difficulty, she turned her head and looked up at him in fierce desperation. “You are my troubadour!”

  Shaken by her desperation, Guilhelm searched his memory for anything that might offer her comfort in these last moments. She had always been the believer, but now God in His perversity was requiring him to minister to her—the same God who had schemed to keep them apart. What misshapen divinity would sabotage such a love? She had been right all along. The god who ruled this world was evil. The same bitterness of old came rushing up his throat. He ran his hand across the coarse weave of her black robe and recalled how she had first appeared to him that first day in Foix: Draped in green silk, flashing with jewels and cinched at the waist to reveal the form that had cost him countless nights. There were few things in his wretched existence of which he was certain, but this was one:

  She was never meant to wear black.

  He searched the sanctuary and found a small burrell sack that contained what few belongings she owned. Among the rags was the wedding dress that Phillipa and Loupe had worn, the same gown that she had talked of wearing at his side in matrimony. Strips had been ripped from its hem for bandages. He lifted its folds over her shoulders and pulled the silk across her body. He imagined her next to him in this chapel, their hands intertwined in the symbol of infinity. Inexplicably, what next came to his mind was a parable once told to him by a Nasorean hermit in Jerusalem. He eased her head under his arm and whispered, “Do you remember St. Thomas of the Bible?”

  “The doubter,” she said. “Like you.”

  That truth drew the semblance of a rueful smile. He coughed back the swell
of ragged emotion, reminded that she could still pierce his armor. He held her tighter in the hope of speeding the blood through her veins, then he forced himself to begin the story. “When St. Thomas was a boy, a monk prophesied that he was destined to go to Egypt and find a pearl that could be exchanged for a magical robe.” His thoughts turned to the night in Lavaur when he had sacrificed a hand to see her face again. If offered the choice anew, he would gladly give his life for just one night more.

  “Guilhelm?” she said, softly calling him back.

  He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Thomas gave no more thought to the oracle. For forty years, he toiled in misery, barely staying alive. Then one day, in old age, he had a dream of the monk’s promise. Inspired, Thomas resolved to give up all earthly desires and finish the quest to Egypt that he had abandoned so many years before.”

  A tingling coursed through Guilhelm’s arm. Was this the same spiritual heat that had miraculously healed his wounds after the tilting duel in Toulouse? Even in these last moments, her touch still held the ineffable power. Reluctantly, he continued the story, “When Thomas approached the borders of Egypt, he reached into his pocket for his last coin to pay the toll. It was then that he found the lost pearl. The old monk had sewn it into his cloak.”

  Esclarmonde lifted her drooping lids. “Thomas always possessed what he sought all his life?”

  Guilhelm tried to delay the finish, but Esclarmonde’s faint press against his hand bade him to go on. “At this moment of discovery, Thomas was transported to Heaven. Jesus met him at the gate with the promised gift, a robe refulgent with a brilliant Light. Thomas asked, ‘Lord, what is this robe that blinds me?’”

  He paused and waited for her protest to his delay. The brash girl he once knew would have demanded an answer before he could finish. But no such impetuous urging now came. He felt her wrist and found a faint pulse. For the first time since that day his mother had abandoned him at the door of the Temple, he prayed aloud. He prayed that if only one miracle were granted in his life, this woman would be returned to him.