Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

  She sat on a bench behind her house, poured herself a glass of chilled Chinon rouge and gazed across the Vienne to the town, letting her thoughts wander back through the long years to when another troubadour had stayed here. It must be nearly twenty years ago, when Aliénor held her Courts of Love in Poitiers. This was halfway through her marriage to Henri, when things might have been difficult between them, as they often were, but before they became impossible.

  *

  Alis had been glad to have come to Chinon, and she knew Aliénor was pleased to be here. Chinon was Henri’s Angevin capital, but Poitiers was near, only a good day’s ride; though she was Queen of England, in her heart Aliénor was always Countess of Poitiers and Duchess of Aquitània.

  But wherever she was she brought music with her, or called it to her. Tonight, here in Chinon, one of her favourites would be singing at the meal at the château: Giraut de Besièrs, a favourite of Alis as well. Far from his home near Carcassona he sang in the lenga d’oc, the language of the south, in a dialect close enough to Aliénor’s own Poitevin for her to understand it easily, and be warmed by it.

  He was a favourite of the queen in part because he was so very good at his art and in part because as a boy he had been taught by Aliénor’s own grandfather, Duc Guilhèm IX, whom many called lo paire des trobadors.

  He was a favourite of Alis because later tonight she would slip out of the château and slip into his bed in the little house on the Île du Bois in the middle of the Vienne, below the town and just beyond its walls. Many troubadours were well versed in the Art of Love, and Alis knew many of them, but Giraut was one of the best – lover as well as troubadour. She had known him for years, since they first met in Paris when she was not yet twenty years old.

  Alis realised she had been gazing through the window, down over the town to the river, where the house where Giraut would be staying was hidden among trees just visible above the defensive walls lining this bank of the Vienne. She shook herself and returned to laying out her lady’s clothes for the evening. The blue dress, Aliénor had said. It showed her lovely figure, her full breasts, to perfection. And to set off the curves, Alis thought, the silver chain carrying the cartouche of lapis lazuli. And when she dressed her lady’s hair, she would suggest the simple circlet with the sapphire at its centre.

  Tonight, she was sure, Queen Aliénor would be using her power, working her magic.

  *

  The food, as always where Aliénor went, was excellent. She would stand for nothing less, and Alis blessed the day she had entered her lady’s service for this along with so much else. Aliénor had been just fifteen, suddenly inheriting the duchy of Aquitània, and about to marry Louis, heir to the throne of France. She had chosen those who would be closest to her with care; she knew she would need people she could trust in her own chamber, when she moved from Poitiers to Paris.

  Alis was the second daughter of a minor count who had fought beside Aliénor’s father in Normandy. When she reached the age of twelve her father had asked which she would prefer: a neighbouring count had just lost his second wife in childbirth and was looking for a third; and the new duchess was looking for a maid. Alis knew the count; he was old, over forty, and fat, and farted a lot. She also knew the duchess: tall, slender, graceful, educated, cultured – and lively.

  At twelve, Alis went to work for Aliénor – and within weeks was riding north to Paris. And then there were the fifteen long years of her lady’s unhappiness. Somehow she had managed to get King Louis into her bed enough to have two daughters by him – no one would dare to say they were not – but more than once, more than many times, Alis heard her lady complain that she had married a monk, not a king.

  Indeed, Louis was never meant to be king, but was being groomed for high office in the Church – no doubt a cardinal prince, with power and lands and wealth sufficient for any man, or perhaps even higher – when his elder brother Philip was thrown from his stallion as it shied away from a sow grubbing for food in the squalor of the unpaved, unswept streets of Paris. Paralysed from a broken neck, he died and passed the future throne to his monkish brother.

  Alis wondered sometimes about God’s warped humour, for such a series of unlikely events and early deaths to propel her mistress to the throne could surely not be the work of mere happenstance. Aliénor’s father, Duc Guilhèm X d’Aquitània, had been on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela to atone for the many lives he had taken on campaign in Normandy the year before. A strong and healthy warrior not yet forty, on Good Friday, the most holy and solemn day of the year, he had died from eating tainted meat or drinking bad water.

  Aliénor was now ruler of far more lands than the king. Rather than risk her abduction and forced marriage by any lord ambitious to expand his lands, it made good sense to marry her quickly to the king’s son and heir and so eventually unite Poitou and Aquitània with the Île de France.

  Just a week after their marriage her husband’s father, Louis the Fat, died of dysentery – and at fifteen Aliénor was Queen of the Franks.

  And I was by her side to dress her, and to be as close a friend as our relative positions allowed. (But in truth it was she who comforted me over the years, taking my head and murmuring, ‘My Alis, be brave. I could not manage without you.’)

  *

  For all those years Queen Aliénor tried to bring the culture of the south to what she and her ladies thought of as the barbarous north. Even the entertainers there were less than entertaining; while the troubadours and trobairitz Aliénor brought from the land of her birth and further south, right down to the coasts of Catalonha and Tolosa, sang of love and longing and lust in her own lenga d’oc, the trouvères of the north intoned chansons de geste, interminable narrative poems of heroic deeds in the northern tongue – until Aliénor taught them better. And so, while Louis was on his knees in church or monastery, Aliénor filled his draughty palace with musicians and poets and singers and dancers from wherever she could draw them.

  Their unhappy marriage was so widely known that when they returned from that dreadful crusade to Outremer some twelve years after their wedding, Pope Eugene III literally forced them to share a bed.

  Perhaps this, in part, was why Aliénor loved so much the songs of love. Whether her grandfather Guilhèm IX was the first troubadour, Alis doubted, though he was certainly the first who was high-born: it was said of him that he was ‘one of the most courtly men in the world and liberal in his womanising’. He said he would build a nunnery of beautiful whores, and ended up founding a double monastery at Fontevraud under the rule of an abbess; his long-suffering wife Philippa, who had persuaded him to found it, left him to end her days there rather than share her home with his mistress. But for his mistress Dangerosa he built a tower, La Maubergeonne, in his château at Poitiers – then married her daughter Aenor to his son Guilhèm, so his mistress was Aliénor’s grandmother. His songs vied with those of common jongleurs in celebrating the joys of the flesh. He sang about the difficulty of keeping a wife and a mistress being like keeping two fine horses that cannot be stabled together ‘for they cannot stand each other’. He sang of a knight pretending to be dumb so that two noble ladies would sleep with him thinking he wouldn’t tell. He sang of his own prowess: ‘If she has me for one night, she’ll want me the next.’

  He was a rogue, but a charming one. Though Aliénor did not recall him – he had died when she was very young – she had inherited his undisguised delight in the physicality of love (and Alis had benefited from this in more ways than she would ever openly admit, even – or especially – to her confessor). This made her joyless marriage, her lack of marital union with King Louis, all the more disappointing, frustrating, and worse.

  But Aliénor had learned to channel her love of love in other directions, and not just other lovers than her loveless husband. (Alis was one of the very few who knew the truth of the rumours.)

  She had taken her grandfather’s love of love, and lust, and song (and also, Alis knew, of the God or gods w
ho had given us these desires and joys) and had woven them all together in a union as subtle as a silken scarf so light you barely knew you wore it, yet so close it warmed you in the coldest winds.

  And so, throughout the land the Romans once called Gaul, from the red-roofed towns of the far south through the lands of Aquitània where Aliénor came from, and the Loire, and even as far north as the king’s own small lands, the Île de France, troubadours, trouvères and trobairitz sang their songs, encouraged by Queen Aliénor, and much to the disapproval of her monkish husband King Louis VII.

  A far greater threat was that tedious Cistercian abbot, Bernard de Clairvaux. He wore hair shirts. He slept, as abbot, in a plain, tiny cell below the abbey staircase. And he loathed, detested and reviled women. He would not allow the monks in his abbey to meet their sisters, aunts or even their grandmothers lest it be the cause of temptation. He had no need to meet a woman as powerful as Aliénor to regard her as the work of the Devil. He had no time for such temporal pleasures as the songs of troubadours, even if some of their songs be of God and Mary.

  If he only knew what else Aliénor’s most favoured troubadours sang of, and why, and what they did, he would doubtless have had them burned for the sake of their immortal souls – if he did not die of a righteous fit first: man was ‘begotten in filth, gestated in darkness and born in pain’, he said.

  *

  This night in Chinon the jongleurs had finished their simple songs and tunes, their juggling and tumbling between the tables offering amusement during the meal. Now three musicians played soft and gentle lays while those around the tables cleaned their palates with the soft chèvre, so fresh, Alis told her neighbour at table, that it had still been bleating that morning.

  And with the chèvre came fresh jugs of wine. Alis hated the northern habit of serving red wine almost warm; here, at Aliénor’s table, Chinon rouge was served chilled from the cellars, allowing its full flavour to bless the nose and tongue.

  The musicians had done their job well; the laughing and joking had been replaced by a mellow quietness into which stepped – and Alis gasped, as always, at his beauty – Giraut de Besièrs.

  He bowed to his queen, made a final adjustment to one string of his oud, and turned his tuning (as she knew he would) into the introductory notes of his first song.

  At the beginning of Spring

  Starting with renewed joy

  And worrying jealous husbands

  The Queen would like to show

  That she is full of love

  Eya!

  *

  Aliénor learned of the Art years before from visitors to the palace on the Île de la Cité in Paris – not to Louis’s court, but to her own. Scholars, poets, musicians, who would bring her food for her mind, for her heart and for her spirit. The first hint she heard was from a conversation one evening with the Cathar troubadour Giraut de Besièrs, and a mystical Jew he knew from nearby Narbona, who had studied the Kabbalah just across the border in the city of Girona in Catalonha. There was a mystical Moor as well, from Córdoba in Andalusia, and two Moorish girls who had danced for Aliénor earlier in the evening. With the music and the wine and the conversation the evening had grown late. Louis was away; though he would not have been present anyway for such frivolous entertainment, his disapproval would have filled the palace. But Louis was away, so Aliénor listened, and questioned, and listened, and learned.

  And so did I beside her.

  There would be many more such evenings.

  *

  In the years to come Alis slept many times with Giraut for friendship, for joy, for learning to raise the power of the will; but the night in Chinon, in the little house on the Île du Bois after he had sung at the château, was the one she kept in her heart. That was when Giraut had renewed in her the tenderness of love-making.

  Ah, if that knight I could caress

  All night long, naked in my arms

  He’d be caught by the charm

  Of cushioning his head on my breast

  *

  Those fifteen years married to Louis VII were often a trial for Aliénor and for her ladies, chief of whom was her lovely and much-loved sister Petronilla. We were used to a way of living which was unknown to the king and his court. The battles Aliénor had to fight . . . If she had not been so determined (Louis would say stubborn) we would have been eating our meals, even at the king’s table, off tranches of bread; in the whole of the Île de France they had not heard of plates. Nor, to our shock, had it struck the young king (even at his wedding to my lady I heard the people of Aquitània call him Louis lo Colhon, for he appeared as stupid as a testicle) to put glass in the windows of his château; in winter it was either draughty and freezing cold or stuffy and dark, dimly lit by sputtering oil lamps and candles, with shutters or sacking over the windows. Again, a battle, and again Aliénor won.

  Even the idea of a hearth with a chimney to take the smoke from a fire out of a room, rather than through a hole in the roof, was only just working its way that far north during the time we were there. For Aliénor, for all of us who had left the civilised world of Aquitània behind, it was as if we had gone back centuries in time in moving to Paris. But for Louis and his men it was normal.

  But Paris had one great diversion from which Louis lo Colhon could not keep Aliénor, or any of her ladies she wished to take with her, and that was the teachers on la rîve gauche, what was later to be called l’Université, for everything of worth was taught there.

  And so we attended lectures of the trivium and the quadrivium, and debates which sometimes lasted all day. We got to know many of the students studying there; a year or so after we arrived in the city I had eyes for a tall young lad called Thomas Becket from England, who would later cause my lady’s second husband such grief, but he was a serious boy (though his Latin was no better than mine), and never seemed to notice me, or indeed any other woman. No matter; there were others who did, and my lady was happy to allow our dalliances; here, perhaps, is where it all began, the sacred touching of mind and spirit and body and the mingling of caritas and amor, of agape and eros, of liking and loving and lust, which was to become Aliénor’s song.

  And little wonder, for the best of all the teachers on la rîve gauche was the Breton Pierre Abélard who had lost his balls for his love of Héloyse d’Argenteuil, and who would dispute any belief, however deep-seated, just for the love of the argument. I treasure the day I heard him prove beyond all disputing, though only as a joke, that the great Saint Denis, Bishop of Paris, for whom l’Abbé Suger had the glorious abbey church built just north of Paris, was actually another Denis altogether; the monks did not see the humour, to the extent of forcing Abélard out.

  For his love of disputation Abélard was tricked by the mendacious Bernard de Clairvaux who, having slandered him as a heretic, then challenged him to a debate in the cathedral at Sens in front of hundreds of students – and my queen and her ladies – who became increasingly enraged as it became clear that Bernard had determined the outcome with the bishops sitting in judgement the night before, and used his supposed opening of what was no debate simply to condemn poor Pierre with his own words, precept after precept after precept taken out of all context from his arguments, and giving him no opportunity to respond. And so Pierre Abélard, a brilliant and loving and godly man, was declared excommunicate by the Church.

  Such is the way of the Church when met with one of the finest minds in the world. Pierre, broken in spirit by the same Church that had broken his manhood, died mere months later.

  It was just one more reason for Aliénor – for all of us – to loathe that so-called man of God, who was later to preach the ill-fated crusade which my lady went on with her monkish husband, and which finally destroyed their marriage; they travelled back to France in separate ships.

  *

  Bernard de Clairvaux might fulminate against jewels and makeup – ‘the beauty put on in the morning and taken off at night’ – and yes, I helped Aliénor don this and re
move it each day; but her beauty was in her own features, her deep auburn hair, her striking green eyes, her flawless skin, her lovely smile, her warmth and humour, her sharp intelligence, her often biting wit.

  She was the best of teachers, and I a most willing pupil. She taught me how to draw power from my own pleasure – and how to prolong the pleasure of a man for longer than he would ever imagine, until the moment when the two joined together become one in their release, not just of pleasure but of the height of a crescendo of power – the power of love not curbed, not controlled, but directed by the will.

  If I hold her tight

  She’ll quicken my heart

  And my flesh will grow anew . . .

  *

  Once we had learned the Art of Love, we learned to refine it as a skill, a craft. First we used it in small ways, then we learned how to build a work together. Eventually Aliénor was able to direct us to use the Art to build up power, to gain her annulment from Louis. It involved several of us over some months: the two of us together, me with three troubadours and a count at different times, Aliénor with her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch, when they were on crusade, and with Geoffrey of Anjou after their return – Geoffrey, who was married to the Empress Matilda, rebel queen of England, who had the name Plantagenêt because he wore a sprig of yellow broom, and who was the father of her next husband.

  The joke of Louis and Aliénor’s annulment on the grounds of consanguinity was that just eight weeks later my lady married Henri of Anjou, who was even more closely related to her. In fact a possible marriage between Henri and Aliénor’s first daughter by Louis, Marie, had been declared unacceptable by too close ancestry; but now, through the Art, Aliénor married Henri herself. Then two years later Henri succeeded his mother Matilda’s rival Stephen of Blois as king of England, and my lady became a queen again.