Cathar

by Christopher Bland

  CATHAR

  Christopher Bland

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About Cathar

  In this compelling historical novel, set in the Languedoc at the end of the 13th century, François de Beaufort, a knight and a Cathar, loves three women – Blanche, Sybille and Beatrice. He is Cathar by birth, and ultimately by conviction, despite the unrelenting efforts of the Inquisition to stamp out this heresy through war, torture and the stake.

  After surviving two sieges François is sentenced to a pilgrimage of penance to Compostela, and ends up in the Cathar village of Montaillou. And then the Inquisition strikes again.

  For Archie, Georgia, Jamie, Tara and William

  ‘Tuez les tous… Dieu reconnatra les siens’

  – Arnald-Amaury, Papal Legate, on being asked

  how to distinguish between good Catholics

  and heretic Cathars after the fall of Béziers

  ‘How can people manage to bear the pain when they are burning at the stake?’

  ‘God takes the pain upon himself, of course’

  Cathar conversation from

  The Records of the Inquisition

  ‘Le Catharisme n’est plus aujourd’hui qu’un astre mort, dont nous recevons à nouveau la lumière fascinante et froide, après un demi-millénaire d’occultation’

  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,

  Montaillou

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About Cathar

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Washing Pool

  Chapter 1: Avignonet

  Chapter 2: The Dovecote

  Chapter 3: The Inquisitor

  Chapter 4: The Siege

  Chapter 5: The Inquisitor and Blanche

  Chapter 6: Montségur

  Chapter 7: The Fall

  Chapter 8: The Burning

  Chapter 9: The Price

  Chapter 10: To Carcassonne and Barraigne

  Chapter 11: In Carcassonne

  Chapter 12: Pilgrimage

  Chapter 13: Returned to Mathieu

  Chapter 14: The Last Perfects

  Chapter 15: In Montaillou

  Chapter 16: Summoned to Carcassonne

  Chapter 17: Back to Barraigne

  Chapter 18: In the Village

  Chapter 19: The English Band

  Chapter 20: The Raid

  Chapter 21: After the Clergues

  Chapter 22: Beatrice in Prison

  Chapter 23: The Trial

  Chapter 24: The Calm

  Chapter 25: Arrivals and Departures

  Chapter 26: The Consolation

  Chapter 27: The Reckoning

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Preview

  About Christopher Bland

  Also by Christopher Bland

  From the editor of this book

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  The Washing Pool

  THE REFLECTION IN the water reminds me of the man I am now – there is no one to tell me of the man I was twenty years ago. It is a battered face that stares back at me from the water. Scar tissue from a deep cut that runs along one jaw, a single eye, still blue, the other socket sealed by skin that has grown over the place where my right eye used to be. There is a long scar diagonally across my back from a wound that, years ago, took many months to heal.

  I have lost an eye. I have lost my right arm.

  I see my face once a week in the clear water of the washing pool, and only then when no one else is there to ruffle the surface with their splashing.

  The washing pool lies outside the village. The women grumble about the walk and say that the water from the well could be diverted to create a basin inside the walls. I am the only man who goes there regularly, although I doubt whether the others would bother to wash more frequently even if the pool was closer to home.

  It is quiet there in the early morning, and I have the place to myself for as long as I need to strip and wash thoroughly from head to toe. It is there that I see my face, there that Beatrice saw me naked, made a joke about limbs they had overlooked. When I turned my back on her she gave a little gasp, and I remembered the healed wound under my right shoulder, a wound that nearly finished me, leaving a scar that I have never seen. Beatrice didn’t turn away, watched me dry and dress myself.

  ‘I can see it’s hard to dress with one arm,’ she said, and smiled as she rode away.

  Whoever built the washing pool did a thorough job. The spring is protected by a little stone hut with a timbered roof, and the water flows out along a shallow groove in the natural rock for twenty yards, then drops from a spout into the basin below. The basin is of stone with a rounded lip and a stone floor, a perfect square. The water is four feet deep, and because it is built on a slope there is a steady flow, the water leaving by a second spout on the far side to run off into a series of irrigation channels. There are poplars around three sides of the basin, one long stone bench, and the water is always cool and clear.

  Once I saw a young roebuck drinking from it in the very early morning, his front legs splayed out so he could reach the water. He wasn’t nervous, finished drinking as I stood there, then trotted off towards the woods.

  I feel better after my weekly visit. Some of the men in the village make jokes about my past and the need to wash my sins away. Or suggest I go there because that is where the women go.

  Sitting on the bench to dry myself and my clothes I can see the path that leads across the fields and into the woods, a path I know well, as do the other shepherds. Beyond are the foothills of the Pyrenees and the good summer grazing, and beyond that on a clear day the peak of Puymorens, snow-covered until the end of May.

  The path is my escape route should I need one again. After two long sieges trapped inside castles, I prefer the valley in which I now live. It is a comfort to know I can slip out of Montaillou at night to the safety of Catalonia.

  It is also comforting to know that Montaillou has survived the wars, the skirmishes and the so-called Albigensian Crusade unscathed. Throughout the thirteenth century there has been fighting somewhere in the Languedoc, ranging from pitched battles and lengthy sieges at one extreme, and at the other small raids by marauding bands, intent on survival, and with no other skill but the sword. Religion has always been used as a cloak to justify these conflicts, but the real driving forces have always been the same. Land. Money. Power.

  Montaillou is Cathar, its heresy generally acknowledged at the subtle, subterranean level of Occitan rumour and gossip that vanishes into thin air when challenged. The church is full on Sundays and holy days, tithes are collected and returned to Carcassonne, and our priest uses the heresy of his flock as a means of consolidating his power.

  Is he Cathar? When it suits him, is the answer. The visits of the Cathar Perfects are discreet and infrequent, limited mainly to the consoling of the dying. All in all it is a curious arrangement, in a sense reflecting the dualism that is the centre of our Cathar faith.

  Montaillou is the ideal refuge for me. My missing arm and eye ensure that I am no longer regarded as a threat, and not many in the village are aware of my skill with the crossbow. So here I am, not unnoticed by the Inquisition (they make it their business to notice everything), but categorised by them as no longer dangerous. They sent me to Compostela, and I have the precious certificate to prove that I completed the penitential journey. As I look into the water, the scars on my body bear witness to the existence of evil. I have to look elsewhere for evidence of the existence of goodness, and there have been several moments in my life when the struggle be
tween God and the Devil seemed one-sided. Nevertheless, I am still here. I am Cathar.

  1

  Avignonet

  MY FATHER AND I were both knights; our sworn allegiance was to Bernard de Roqueville, and we lived in a small castle built on a spur in the valley of the River Baise.

  Beaufort (it had a grand name, but was not much more than a fortified farmhouse) was a four-square building with a tower at one corner in which a staircase led to the first floor. We and our close servants lived on that floor in three rooms, eating in the largest where there was a fire which we kept going day and night except during the summer. We spent most of our time in that room, in winter the only warm place in the building.

  Our cattle were brought in at night to the ground floor from the end of September to early April. Their bodies helped to warm the place, which had a not unpleasant smell of milk and cow dung and hay and the steam from their hides. Most of the time my father and I were glorified farmers, making sure that the men looked after the beasts and themselves.

  There were three families working for us, twenty-four souls in all; my father’s right-hand man, Michel, lived with his wife and four children in Beaufort, and the rest in two dwellings built up against the walls. Beaufort was surrounded by a seven-foot wall; the only gate had a dovecote above it with a low-pitched, red-tiled roof, and on top of that flew our flag, day and night.

  I looked after the pigeons, four hundred or more of them, making sure they were fed and watered and setting traps for the rats that were their main predators. The occasional sparrowhawk would appear and try his luck, but I learned to wait until the hawk had made a kill and was gorging on the ground. Then I’d use my crossbow at close range, usually to good effect.

  Once a young sparrowhawk managed to squeeze through the entrance under the eaves. I was in the courtyard when this happened, saw the pigeons exploding out of the dovecote and heard the noise of the wings and the frantic calling of birds trying to escape. I climbed the ladder, opened the trapdoor and there was the sparrowhawk feasting on one of the three pigeons he had killed. He looked at me with fierce, unblinking yellow eyes, then continued with his meal. I watched him for two or three minutes as he gripped the bird with his talons, his curved yellow beak tearing into the soft breast of the bird. I had never been so close to a wild hawk before and felt sorry that I had to destroy such a fearless creature. For several days afterwards the pigeons were unsettled, didn’t lay and twenty or more birds never returned to the dovecote.

  The inside of the dovecote had three hundred small chambers set into its walls, and there the pigeons nested, laid their eggs and reared their young. They were used to me bringing them water and grain, and made little protest when I took away the squabs. The pigeons were an important source of food for us all, the eight-week-old squabs in particular, although we would eat the older birds too when they had come to the end of their useful lives. I collected the droppings once a week and we used them to fertilise the vegetable garden. The constant murmuring of the pigeons was a reassuring sound that you could hear in the courtyard all the day long.

  Roqueville itself stood three miles away from Beaufort at the end of a semicircle of hills open only to the east. It was a fertile valley thanks to the River Baise, producing enough grass for the summer grazing and hay for the winter out of earth that was dark brown, almost black, heavy under the plough. Most of the land was pasture for cattle; we left the rearing of sheep to those who lived closer to the Pyrenees. The valley had been cleared of its woods a hundred years before, but enough oak and ash had been left to provide shade for the cattle, and the wooded hills gave us firewood and charcoal. There were little vineyards on the higher, stonier slopes of the valley, one of which was ours; we produced a hundred barrels of red wine for our own use and sent ten barrels up to Roqueville as part of our dues.

  Our role at Beaufort was to act as sentinels. Our position gave us a good view of anyone approaching along the rough track which ran parallel to the river. We were expected to deal with any small armed bands that might appear; if a serious force arrived we were to withdraw to Roqueville, bringing our cattle with us if we could.

  My father and I both had armour, a helmet, a shield and a horse; we knew how to carry a lance, and regularly practised swordplay on foot and on horseback with each other and with the sergeant-at-arms at Roqueville. As it turned out, all of my later fighting was on foot or behind castle walls, when in the mêlée of scrabbling, cursing, shouting bodies it was hard to distinguish friend from foe, never mind remembering the parry in octave or the disengage in prime. I never used my lance, and soon learned that the most useful weapon, on horse or on foot, was the crossbow, at which I became quick and accurate, as the sparrowhawks learned to their cost.

  We did have a coat of arms, Argent, on a Bend Sable Three Pheons d’Or, three golden arrowheads. My father had them painted on his shield. Our crest, a cockerel with a pheon d’or on its breast, led a precarious existence on the top of his helmet until it was sheared off in the skirmish at Avignonet. The arms and the crest seemed, like the lance, to have been designed for the pitched battles of fifty years earlier, although they came into their own at tournaments, which continued a curious parallel existence to real warfare for many years.

  I was knighted on the eve of the great tournament at Chauvency, organised by Louis, Count of Chimy. Bernard de Roqueville had been invited, and brought with him a forty-strong retinue: knights, esquires, soldiers, his armourer and his herald. Three of us were chosen; we had a ritual bath the night before, kept vigil until dawn in the small church at Chauvency, even though two of us were Cathar, and were formally dubbed knights by Bernard de Roqueville in the morning. I remember his words very clearly:

  ‘You should be hardy, courteous, generous, loyal; ferocious to your enemies, frank and debonair to your friends. He only has a real right to knighthood who has proved himself in battle or in the tournament. You can begin to earn that right today through deeds that deserve to be remembered.’

  Bernard made me the traditional present of a magnificent woollen cloak, dyed purple, with the Beaufort cockerel embroidered at its neck.

  ‘That’s my wife’s needlework. She doesn’t do that for everyone.’ I kept the cloak for several years, wearing it only on the grandest of occasions, until it was destroyed by moths.

  The tournament was held in a large field around which the great men had put up their tents, vying with each other to make the best display with their armorial flags and coloured pennants and the most noise with their musicians and troubadours. I had never before been out of our valley, never before seen such a spectacle – the clash of the jousters, the snorting, whinnying horses, the shouts of the spectators, the trumpeters calling for silence as the heralds announced the names, dignities and armorial bearings of the combatants.

  The jousting was serious and dangerous; after three days there were many wounded and two men dead. I fought only on the first day, reserved for the newly knighted. I was excited and I was frightened, frightened that I might be killed or maimed, even more that I might disgrace myself by swerving away at the last moment.

  I was confident about my horse, less so about my aim with the lance, and uncomfortable in a full suit of armour. My father had helped me choose from the racks of tournament lances – ‘Choose one with the straightest grain, less likely to shatter or splinter’ – and he supervised the Roqueville armourer as he strapped and buckled and bolted me into my armour.

  My first joust was against an equally inexperienced knight from Artois, and after we had each broken three lances, both remaining in the saddle, it was declared an honourable draw.

  The heralds made much of the ten quarterings of my second opponent in the afternoon, dwelling briefly on my coat of arms. My father reassured me as I waited to mount and enter the arena: ‘That only tells you about his ancestors, nothing about him. You’ve a good horse; just keep your eyes on the tip of your lance and line it up with his midriff. Start at a slow canter, and make sure yo
u are at full gallop as you come together. When you are two lengths away crouch down in the saddle and push your lance forward at the last moment. All the lances are the same length, and you want to strike your opponent before he strikes you. Otherwise you will both be unhorsed.’

  I was fortunate; my enemy’s horse was reluctant, barely willing to break out of a trot. I galloped into him, held my lance steady and struck him out of the saddle. He lay stunned on the ground; I dismounted and stood over him, waiting for him until he recovered and formally yielded. I was entitled to his horse, which I certainly did not want, and to his armour, which looked to be German and a good deal finer than mine. But the desperate look in his eyes when the forfeiture was announced by the heralds made me forgo the privilege.

  This earned me great applause from the spectators and kind words from Blanche de Roqueville that evening at the feast, which was held in a great tent close by the jousting field. Three hundred of us sat down to an endless meal, punctuated by troubadours, jugglers, short masques, speeches at random that few could or wished to hear, and later the occasional squabble that relived an incident or insult earlier in the day.

  Blanche de Roqueville was seated many places away from me, but close enough that I could hear the troubadour who sought her out and sang tributes to her beauty:

  ‘Lady Blanche, your virtue and wisdom and beauty,

  Your elegant speech, your sweet laughter

  Draw me to you with a pure and loving heart;

  In you lie all my happiness, all my desire,

  I cannot find another one as fair’

  he sang, and as he sang I fell in love for the first time. Hopeless, appropriately so, for courtly love was meant to be passionate, pure and unrequited. I was happy for the moment just to gaze on her red lips, her black hair, the golden headdress that framed her oval face, and tried to remember exactly what she had said to me on her way to her place at dinner. ‘Good knights make good beginnings’: it was something like that; she rested her hand for a moment on my shoulder, which still burned from her touch at the end of the feast.