Cathar

by Christopher Bland

  We spent some time discussing the water supply.

  ‘Our well has never dried up, even in the drought years,’ said Armand. ‘It’s clean spring water, inside the walls.’

  ‘What feeds it? Where does the water come from?’ asked Etienne.

  ‘There’s an underground spring.’

  ‘Could they cut it off at source?’

  ‘There is no source. It’s all under the earth, hidden in the hills.’

  Gradually Roqueville was turned into a small village; the tilt-yard, archery butts, riding school and pleasure gardens became space for men, animals and arms. Inside the castle we mustered thirty knights, although six of these were too old or infirm to be of much use, about a hundred men and the same number again of women and children. Anyone who wanted to leave was not discouraged from going, but there were few who had anywhere else to go. It was a daunting task to house and feed such numbers within the castle walls.

  ‘We need to hold out for four months,’ said Armand. ‘After that the crusaders will lose heart and their soldiers will start to go home. Winters in our valley can be fierce. They will bring carpenters, blacksmiths, engineers as well as archers and knights and greedy priests. They’ll all need to be fed. We’ve left them nothing to live off; everything will have to come in on their wagons.’

  I asked him about the horses.

  ‘We can keep ten at the most. The rest we will kill for meat.’

  Etienne suggested that we should try to ambush the crusaders at the narrow entrance to the valley below Beaufort.

  ‘That’s only possible if they send an advance guard. We can expect a substantial force, bigger than last time. We have no chance of defeating them in the field,’ said Geoffrey. Armand agreed.

  Etienne and I were given the task of preparing a plan; this we did, but its success depended entirely on surprise, the value of which I had learned at Avignonet. And on reliable intelligence about the arrival of the crusaders, so we posted good men well beyond the valley entrance to warn us of their approach.

  The warning came in September, a month after the corn had been harvested. Our scouts estimated that their total force numbered about three hundred, moving towards Roqueville at the slow pace dictated by their supply wagons.

  ‘Perhaps a hundred knights, or at least mounted men. They have half a dozen priests chanting as they march along. With an advance guard, forty strong, half on horseback, half on foot, a mile in front of their main force.’

  Fifteen of us, all well mounted, trotted down to the wooded area beyond Beaufort where we had buried my father. There I saw for the first time the great circle of scorched earth where they had burned the bodies of my parents. The two empty graves were open to the sky and half full of water.

  Our instructions had been agreed with Armand.

  ‘A quick attack, kill as many as you can, and withdraw before the main force arrives.’

  The advance guard were taken by surprise. We were concealed by the crest of a little hill, charging down it as they passed across fifty yards of open ground. The slope gave us added impetus as we struck into them with our lances; it was the first and last time all that practice in the tilt-yard was of any value. We killed ten or twelve of their mounted men and perhaps six foot soldiers, although the rest of them scattered at our charge and ran back to join their main force. We did not pursue them, withdrawing after twenty minutes of hand-to-hand fighting on horseback. We lost only one man and two horses, such was the value of surprise.

  ‘That will teach them something,’ said Etienne as we cantered back to Roqueville.

  ‘They have enough men and horses to replace the ones we killed,’ I said. ‘But it will show them that we mean business, that we won’t surrender easily.’

  ‘Not like last time when they took Count Bernard to Toulouse.’

  ‘Not like last time.’

  As we arrived back at Roqueville the drawbridge was lowered; Stephanie was in the courtyard, relieved to see that Etienne was safe. Only a small cut on his forehead and a bloody forearm showed he had been in a battle.

  ‘Stephanie is having a baby,’ Etienne had told me on our ride back. I told him he should not have come on our sortie.

  ‘I had to. It was my idea, remember?’

  Blanche was there too; she held my horse’s head as I dismounted, put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I am happy to see you back safe, happy that you won’t need my nursing skills,’ and moved on to speak to the other horsemen. At that moment I wished I had been wounded; my shoulder burned from her touch for the rest of the day.

  Three hours after our return the main body of crusaders arrived at the head of our valley. They kept a respectful distance from our walls. Armand had told everyone, men, women and children, to man the battlements.

  ‘We want them to believe we are three hundred strong,’ he said. ‘They won’t be able to tell women and boys from armed men at that distance. You did well to surprise the advance guard for the loss of only one man.’

  He looked at Etienne and me.

  ‘That’s our first and last sortie; we need to keep our force intact. They will try to starve us out. They won’t succeed.’

  We watched them set up camp in and around our village, using their now empty supply wagons as a wall between the village and the castle. They kept their horses in lines not far from the river. There were many crusaders, over three hundred it seemed, although it was hard to be precise. In the evening we could hear the priests chanting as they celebrated Mass in front of a large wooden cross they had brought with them. They did not use our church, perhaps because they regarded it as tainted with heresy.

  The next morning a small party emerged from the village and came to within a hundred yards of our walls under the protection of a white flag. Their herald blew a fanfare on his trumpet, shouted words we could not hear and then they waited. After an hour Armand and a dozen men-at-arms emerged carrying a white flag and went to meet them. The meeting did not last long.

  ‘It wasn’t a negotiation. Guy de Montfort set out his demands – my mother, my sister and me to the Inquisition. The rest would be offered the chance to repent and return to the True Faith. I told them we were the Good Christians, we didn’t rely on the sword and the flame to show we were right. We knew they were in our valley for money and land. We had paid them once and they would get nothing more.’

  This was our last close contact with the crusaders for many days. They initially concentrated in the village, then spread out in a vast semicircle surrounding the front and sides of Roqueville. And sat there, doing nothing.

  I was surprised at the strain of waiting for something to happen. Etienne, always eager for action, suggested a quick sortie on horseback; we still had eight horses, although all the rest, including Blanche’s beloved grey palfrey, had been killed.

  Armand would have none of it.

  ‘They are ready for us now, and this time we could lose five good men. Remember, they would like us to come out. It is a war of nerves, a war of waiting.’

  Waiting produced disagreement and conflict within our walls, often over trivial matters. Although there was plenty of water from the well, food was strictly rationed and shared out twice a day. One of the men-at-arms was caught stealing from the storerooms and was publicly flogged in the courtyard. Arguments broke out over trivial matters: a piece of bread, a bottle of wine, an encroachment on a bed space. The rota of manning the walls, four hours on, eight hours off, took its toll, especially if you were on guard from midnight to four in the morning. The eyes constantly played tricks and created imaginary bodies of men advancing in the darkness. There were several false alarms.

  I saw Blanche every day; she lived in the keep, while I had moved into the stables, now no longer required for their original purpose once we had killed most of our horses. She and Stephanie would walk round the courtyard every day, and I would cross their paths as often as I dared. Blanche always seemed glad to see me and greeted me warmly. She looked careworn, and thin, a
s we all did on our restricted diet, but she still retained the beauty so many troubadours had praised in song. I felt I had become her protector, not of course on my own; I longed to be more than this and to close the chaste and courtly distance that separated us. There was no such opportunity, and the memory of washing her feet, on which I had drawn many times for solace, had lost its relieving power.

  One morning the crusaders advanced their longbowmen to within eighty yards of the gate and sent an arc of arrows over the walls and into the courtyard. We cleared the courtyard quickly, and the only casualties were a dead bullock and one of our men struck in the shoulder, but it reminded us of the importance of keeping alert.

  They had no siege engines. They had tried to bring a massive trebuchet from Carcassonne, but it was stuck in the boggy entrance to the valley.

  ‘Sooner or later they’ll dismantle it and bring it close enough to batter our walls – and then we’ll have to come out,’ said Armand.

  It was possible, though dangerous, to leave the castle by night through a small postern gate and cross the crusaders’ lines. Even with three hundred men they were not able to surround the castle with an impenetrable ring, and there were big gaps in their lines. We sent out scouts and learned that the crusaders were, as Armand had predicted, bringing the big trebuchet up the valley in pieces.

  ‘They call it The Bad Neighbour. It can throw three hundred pounds of stones over four hundred yards, well out of our range. Our walls wouldn’t last more than a week,’ said Armand. ‘It will take them a month at least to bring it into position. Then we’ll need a response.’

  After ten days of inactivity we could see trees being felled in the woods by the river, and we heard the noise of hammering and sawing by day and by night. They were building a trevise in which to mount a battering ram.

  ‘First they’ll use the trevise as cover to fill in the moat, then haul the ram close enough to start on our main gate.’

  They brought the trevise up at night and began to fill in our dry moat with gorse and brushwood. We were able to burn this, but not the stones and earth which followed. After three days, during which we were able to pick off fifteen of their men for the loss of three of our own, they had a solid platform for the trevise. Inside the structure they had slung a great oak beam with an iron tip and with this they battered our gates. The courtyard was filled with its thudding noise, and the gates creaked and groaned. We threw burning bundles of twigs and brushwood onto the trevise, but the roof had been covered with hides soaked in vinegar and we could do no more than scorch it. Eventually, and inevitably, our gates would yield.

  Etienne came up with a bold solution, which, after some hesitancy, Armand adopted. Our outer gates were strongest, but we had a second gate of half the thickness forty feet beyond the first. This was normally open; closed, it created a square room below the gate tower. After the second day, when our outer gates were still withstanding the regular pounding, we took away the bars and let their ram appear to blast our gates open.

  They rushed through this breach, fifty of them, to find the second gate blocking their way into the courtyard. The bravest of them charged the second gate, while others tried to retreat. We fired at them through slits on either side and poured boiling water on them from two trapdoors in the ceiling. Not one escaped. By the time they had brought up reinforcements we had burned the trevise, rolled the ram down into the moat and closed our outer gates. We allowed them to collect their bodies under a flag of truce.

  This was an important success for us, and we celebrated with a feast in the Great Hall that night reminiscent of Count Bernard’s days. I hoped to sit close to Blanche, but had to gaze at her from the far end of the long table. Etienne, as her new son-in-law, sat next to her, but he had eyes only for his wife. It was a waste of that place.

  A further assault on our gate now seemed unlikely. We had cleared away the stones and earth that bridged the dry moat, and we burned the ram. We kept the iron head as a trophy, placing it on our battlements where the crusaders could see it; their blacksmith had fashioned it into a crude version of a ram’s head, curling horns and all.

  The crusaders were quiet for several days thereafter, although they celebrated Mass with louder than usual chanting. The ceremony gave them an opportunity to bury their dead. They made a few attempts to scale our walls using great ladders under covering fire from their archers; wooden screens protected them from our crossbowmen. We built our own screens on the battlements out of wood salvaged from their trevise. And our own small mangonel was occasionally effective against the archers, despite its unpredictable accuracy. A well-placed volley of a dozen stones could kill or wound four or five archers, or at worst slow down the rate and accuracy of their fire.

  These escalades all failed. I had to admire the courage of the first men up the ladder. We allowed them to get close to the top, then came out from behind our screens and killed them with accurate crossbow fire. It was hard to miss at such close range, and any wounded men were killed when they fell into the moat. Covering fire from their archers came as soon as we emerged from our screens, and we lost three men as a result.

  ‘They may build a wooden tower now their ladders and the ram have failed,’ cautioned Etienne.

  ‘That will take too long. They are more likely to rely on The Good Neighbour to batter down our walls. They have been moving materiel up the valley for three weeks now. It won’t be long before it is ready,’ I said.

  For two more weeks we watched them reconstructing the trebuchet on flat ground near the river, just beyond my now empty dovecote. It was well within range of our walls, completely safe from crossbows and our own mangonel.

  ‘They have almost finished,’ said Armand to me. ‘I would like you to take half a dozen men at night and destroy it.’

  I picked Michel, who knew the fording places on the Baise, two of the younger knights and six men-at-arms. Etienne wanted to come but Armand said, ‘You’ve done enough. You’ve a child on the way and a wife to worry about.’

  We left the postern gate at midnight when there was no moon. Each man carried a flagon of oil, a bundle of dry brushwood, a short sword and a dagger. We crossed the river a mile above their camp; I believed they would not expect an attack in their rear across the river, and we had seen that the far bank was unguarded.

  We recrossed the river just below their site; one of our knights dropped his brushwood, but the rest was kept dry. The frame of the trebuchet was higher than a small house, its throwing bucket twelve feet across, and there is no doubt that The Bad Neighbour would have lived up to its name. We came across a sleeping sentry propped up against a wheel and killed him quietly enough not to disturb the main camp. He was their sole guard.

  Then we piled our brushwood under a cross-beam and soaked the pile with oil. After several agonising failures to produce a flame strong enough to set fire to our kindling, we found their fire store, and carried barrels of tar, sulphur and saltpetre to the great frame. This caught at once, spread rapidly and soon lit up the sky and our retreat across the river. The whole camp was alarmed, and we were pursued by half a dozen men as we retraced our steps back to the postern.

  We were saved by the darkness and Michel’s knowledge of the terrain, although we lost two men as we retreated. A hundred yards from safety Michel took an arrow in his thigh, and I had to half carry him to the little gate. Once we were inside his wound was dressed by Stephanie, and the rest of us watched the blaze from the ramparts, seeing the scurrying crusaders, lit by the flames, form a chain to bring water up from the river. At dawn we could see that we had destroyed half the frame of the trebuchet, the great bucket and everything in the fire store. Several of the heavy counterweight stones had split from the heat of the fire.

  ‘It will take many weeks to replace those beams with seasoned oak. Green wood isn’t strong enough,’ said Armand. ‘We’ve dealt with the ladders, the battering ram and now The Bad Neighbour is in ruins. Some of their knights and soldiers will begin to drift awa
y. They’re well past their forty days of service.’

  All of us in Roqueville had a new confidence; we had supplies for six more weeks and water from the well. The crusaders’ camp showed few signs of activity, and they made no attempt to repair the trebuchet.

  Two days later Blanche sent her page to call me to her room in the keep. I had never been to her room, although I had seen her sitting at its window many times. Stephanie was with her; both women were sewing.

  ‘I wanted to thank you for destroying the trebuchet. It was a brilliant coup. It means the end of the siege.’

  ‘We were lucky to find their fire store. We’d crossed the river twice, and I don’t think our damp kindling would have been enough to set those great beams alight.’

  ‘God was on our side. I know you are a good Cathar, as your father was before you.’

  I did not reply. My longing for Blanche had far outstripped the limits of courtly love and the most liberal interpretation of our faith. It was not the moment for the declaration that I had rehearsed many times in my mind. Our conversation was interrupted by Armand entering the room without ceremony, agitated.

  ‘The well is dry. We are without water. They’ve found the source and cut it off.’

  ‘I thought it was underground,’ said Blanche.

  ‘About four miles upstream there’s a carrier flowing out of the Baise that then goes underground. That’s our source, and I thought no one knew that save me. They’ve found it, blocked or diverted it. And we’ve not been storing water. All we have is a couple of barrels.’

  This was a greater setback for us than the destruction of the trebuchet had been for our enemies. We sent out a scout the following night, who reported that the crusaders had indeed blocked the carrier and were guarding it with a tight ring of seventy men. An attack, even by night, would fail.

  I had always taken water for granted; now we had to exist on half a cup a day apiece. After a week the two barrels, all we had in reserve, were empty. We had to kill our remaining horses, which were going mad with thirst. Our dry faces and blackened tongues and lips were not pretty. We put canvas sheets out to catch the rain, and barrels below the drainpipes, but apart from one brief shower the rain didn’t come. Our women and children were allowed to lick the dew off the canvas in the morning, but that was not enough to save several of the smaller children.