Cathar

by Christopher Bland

  Sybille was shaking when I caught up with her. She’d heard the hoofbeats getting closer and closer, not realising she was being pursued by a dead man. We both dismounted and held each other for a long time, then cantered back to the stables, leading the two stolen horses.

  Raimond Roger was there with half a dozen men, about to begin a search. He was relieved to see us both safe, but questioned me closely about what had happened.

  ‘I’m glad you’re a good shot with the crossbow. But if you’d not been on Octavian it could have ended very badly.’

  I agreed, and then to my dismay fainted. They carried me up to the castle and put me in the sewing room on the second floor of the keep.

  ‘Guillemette and Sybille and I will look after you,’ said Sybille’s mother as I fell into a deep sleep. It was two days before I was back to normal.

  On the third day, late in the evening, Sybille came into the room and into my bed. I had never seen a woman’s naked body before. Indeed in that dim light I saw little of Sybille, as her hair was brushed forward over each shoulder and hung down to her waist, and she was quick to blow out the candle in the little niche above my bed.

  We held each other for a long time. I was very aware of my missing right arm, but Sybille told me it didn’t matter, nothing mattered now, kissing me everywhere, even touching my empty eye socket very gently with the tips of her fingers.

  Then she told me what we had to do next, told me Guillemette had been her instructress, and all went well, even the all-too-brief moment when our bodies were first properly joined. Later she allowed me to relight the candle, and I was able to look at her as she lay back, smiling, on the bed. The images of Blanche, all-powerful in my mind for so long, were banished forever. My feeling of disloyalty lasted only a moment and never returned.

  I was allowed to convalesce for two more days, and then returned to my shared quarters. We made love wherever we could: in the grain store, in Sybille’s chamber, very quietly as her mother slept in the adjacent room, in my room which Etienne left free for us with characteristic generosity, and in the valley when I was her escort. That opportunity came round only every five days, and on the other four I felt a stab of jealousy when she rode out with another knight.

  This couldn’t go on for very long. I consulted Etienne, and his advice mirrored mine to him eighteen months earlier.

  ‘Ask Raimond Roger for her hand in marriage,’ said Etienne. ‘He’ll hardly refuse. If he doesn’t know what is going on he’s the only one in Montségur, he’s as blind as I am. Remember, you’re Francois de Beaufort, you saved her life.’

  I went to see Raimond Roger, who was kind.

  ‘I must consult Sybille and her mother. If they agree she is yours. You can handle Octavian, you’ve proved yourself as a man, and that’s good enough for me.’

  I blushed, then realised he was referring to my skills with the crossbow and on horseback. Or perhaps he knew what Sybille and I had been doing.

  Her mother was more direct.

  ‘Of course you must be married. You are married already in all but name. We’ll organise the wedding the next time Guillaume Authie comes to Montségur.’

  It was a simple ceremony. Raimond Roger entrusted her to my care, Authie blessed us both, Etienne made a brief and flowery speech and Sybille’s mother smiled and cried. Thereafter we were together at night in Sybille’s chamber, and in the daytime I was her only escort when she chose to ride in the valley.

  Which was often. It was a marvellous summer in the Languedoc, sunny days broken only by the occasional brief downpour from black clouds sent from the Pyrenees that stopped the countryside turning brown. The rivers and streams were full from the melted snow.

  After our earlier adventure I was cautious. Whenever we stopped I made sure that we could see around us for half a mile at least, which often annoyed Sybille, who wanted more than our bread and wine when we dismounted. Against my better judgement, and because I too wanted to love her in the open air, we would sometimes stop in one of the little copses that studded the valley, or by the river, and make love on the grass. Or standing up, Sybille leaning back against a tree. Or even once in the river, when it was so hot that Sybille stripped off her clothes and jumped in. I followed her, our wet bodies sliding together in the bracing water of the pool. Afterwards I felt I had not been responsible.

  ‘What if those three marauders had found us like this?’ I said, trying to appear stern as we lay drying on the bank.

  ‘I saw you left your crossbow cocked with five bolts beside it. Even though overcome with passion. And you can reach it now if you roll over.’

  She silenced me with kisses, and I did roll over, but not towards my crossbow. Later we sat drying in the sun, the river gleaming, its surface broken by the occasional trout rising to one of the blue-winged olives drifting down on the current.

  I caught one and showed its gauzy-winged, curved body to Sybille.

  ‘They hatch from those little discarded nymph cases you can see drifting by, then mate in the air and lay their eggs on the water.’

  ‘Like us,’ said Sybille, letting the fly settle on her finger, then blowing it back into the river. ‘And then?’

  ‘And then they die.’

  *

  Sybille

  ‘AND THEN THEY die,’ Francois said. We were lying on the banks of the Adour, a small stream that branches off the big river that keeps our valley green. Narrow for most of its journey, the Adour widens into pools deep enough to swim in, deep enough to hold trout. The river flows over gravel and is very clear, clear enough to see the fish if you look carefully. The water is always cold, even when the sun is shining, as it comes from the mountains, always capped with snow.

  It was very hot; we had taken off our clothes, swum in the river and made love. I teased Francois when, just before he came into me, he made sure that his crossbow was cocked and within reach of his left, his only arm.

  Afterwards we watched the little flies hatching, clouds of them dancing against the blue sky, so many that the trout seemed sated and only occasionally broke the surface of the water to feed.

  Francois caught one and let it settle on my finger, explaining that their birth, mating and death all took place within a day. I found it strangely disturbing that these thousands of tiny creatures had been created for so brief a moment.

  ‘I suppose that as this world is an illusion, created by the Devil, that explains it,’ I said, but Francois had gone to sleep. I fell asleep; when I woke I looked at his beautiful, battered body for a while, tracing very gently the scar that I had nursed. Francois must have felt my caresses and sat up with a start, grabbing his crossbow and scolding me for letting him doze. I kissed him to put him into a better mood, and that succeeded well.

  We rode slowly back to the stables, tired, not talking. My mind was full of the dancing flies, rising, falling, mating, laying their eggs, then dying in the river or in the stomach of a trout.

  The next morning I was sewing with my mother in her chamber.

  ‘How is it that this world is an illusion, the work of the Devil? How can Francois and I be so close, so happy if that is true?’

  She put down her sewing and looked out of the window at the bustle in the courtyard below; the men-at-arms were busily preparing for the siege that Raimond Roger had told us would surely come.

  ‘God allows us, some of us, moments of great happiness in this world. You and Francois are fortunate, for the moment, bringing each other joy. But nothing, not even that joy, lasts forever. If we look around us, we can see evidence of the Devil’s work – the fires of the Inquisition in Toulouse and Carcassonne, the blinded knights, the marauders in the valleys. Look at Francois’s body, as I am sure you do,’ she said, beginning to smile and putting her hand over mine. ‘He is living proof of the cruelty that disfigured him, that disfigures the world.’

  ‘So we’re like those flies?’

  ‘We have a longer life and a greater consciousness. But our life is, in the end,
equally impermanent. We should, I believe, use it to prepare ourselves for the next, the perfect, world. And you can only arrive there if you become more than a believer, become a Perfect.

  ‘I could give up meat, I never swear an oath, I tell the truth. But I could never give up Francois.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that yet,’ said my mother, picking up her sewing and kissing me on the cheek. ‘You have years ahead of you to think about these things, to read the Gospels, to listen to Guillaume Authie. And to discover, as I have, that it is possible to love someone without making love.’

  I thought about my mother’s remarks for many days and began to understand and worry about the impermanence of our lives. Until our discussion I had thought our castle at Montségur, and the valley, and the Pyrenees beyond, as part of a secure and settled existence. I began to realise the threats to our world that even the arrival of the knights had failed to show me. I had been aware only of my love, my passion for Francois.

  I said this one evening to Francois as we were lying in bed. He dismissed it with a joke.

  ‘We have several lives to prepare ourselves for the next world,’ he said. ‘I’d be happy to come back as a dapple-grey palfrey for you to ride.’

  I pushed him away and turned my back on him during the night, but I was unable to resist him when he apologised in the morning. And even that short abstinence seemed a waste.

  *

  Francois

  I BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND Sybille better, to realise she was thoughtful as well as playful, that she worried about much more than her sewing and her horse. She read a great deal, knew Latin and French, and would always attend the services when visiting Perfects arrived at Montségur. She was, I knew, greatly influenced by her mother Claire, a serene woman who had become a Perfect several years before, although she made no attempt to persuade Sybille and me into the rigorous way of life she had adopted.

  I had been marked, in mind as well as body, by war. I had killed men, and men had tried hard to kill me. I had ignored our Cathar belief that human life is sacred, albeit for good reasons. Now a curtain had been drawn between that life and the consuming passion I felt for my wife, making me want to think of nothing but the present, nothing but Sybille.

  I was born Cathar, which I took for granted. Unlike my wife I was not naturally contemplative, took no great pleasure in studying Cathar texts, and I found reading difficult, as my Latin was poor. I was easily out-argued or bored when Authie spoke to us on one of his regular visits to Montségur.

  I told Sybille she made me so happy that I could think of nothing else, and that the idea of abstinence, from meat and eggs and above all from her, filled me with dismay. I told her that, yes, I was born Cathar, hated the Catholic Church, but was happy to trust in the promise of reincarnation to ready myself for heaven. I also said that while I understood our dualist doctrine in theory, in practice I found it impossible to believe that this world in general and our marriage in particular had been created by the Devil.

  I foolishly tried to make a joke of all this, and told Sybille that I would return in my next life as her horse. This made her angry, and she pushed me away, although my apology the next morning put things right between us. She knew better than to argue with me – she knew that I would lose the argument without changing my mind – but she continued to worry about the conflict between the life of a Perfect and our happy, passionate existence. Sybille stopped eating meat and eggs, but happily our lovemaking resumed, although I had to explain to her that a man was, as I had discovered, not as quickly recharged as a crossbow.

  7

  The Fall

  Sybille

  FRANCOIS AND I avoided theological arguments thereafter and became closer than ever. It was a cold winter, and we were fortunate in having our own small chamber with a fireplace; we kept each other warm during the night and often during the day. I no longer needed Guillemette’s advice, and we continued to find new ways of giving each other pleasure. Francois was self-conscious about his missing eye and arm but I was able to convince him that I had helped to heal these wounds on his arrival at Montségur, and that I loved him then and loved him now.

  Spring came early and we began to ride through the valley again, a constant source of pleasure for us both. On a couple of occasions my father and mother, at my suggestion, rode with us.

  ‘Octavian has become your horse,’ my father said to Francois. He had just tried and failed to get Octavian to perform the capriole that had saved us from the brigands a year earlier.

  ‘You were the man who broke him and trained him,’ said Francois. ‘He’d get used to you quickly enough if you rode him regularly.’

  ‘Perhaps. Anyhow, these riding school manoeuvres are not likely to be useful when the crusaders come. Their preparations are well advanced, and we’ll have them here by the end of the month.’

  Soon afterwards their scouts were seen in our valley, and that put an end to our riding. I felt confined as a result; I was deprived of Francois’s company during the day, and spent most of the time with my mother. My father had put Francois in charge of our crossbowmen, and when they weren’t practising in the butts they were making new weapons, repairing old ones and forging an enormous supply of bolts. Francois took his responsibilities very seriously and would not allow me to distract him.

  The valley, I knew, was now barely cultivated, and many persecuted Cathars were inside Montségur or in the ramshackle buildings that clung to the rocks below the walls. We received regular reports of the work of the Inquisition in Toulouse and Carcassonne, and my father had repeatedly warned us all that it was only a matter of time before they came to Montségur.

  Francois was always tired, sometimes too tired to make love, which I found hard to understand at first, until Guillemette told me I had nothing to worry about.

  ‘How often?’ she asked me.

  ‘Until now, every night and most mornings.’

  She laughed. ‘Think yourself lucky. My two husbands managed once a week, then once a month if I insisted. Francois is doing well. As are you.’

  *

  Francois

  RAIMOND ROGER ASKED me about the lessons to be learned from Roqueville.

  ‘Water,’ I told him. ‘Once they had cut off our water supply it was all over, although the end was hastened by treachery.’

  ‘Our cisterns go straight down hundreds of feet into the mountain. We’ve never run out of water even in the driest of summers. And they aren’t supplied by external streams; that was your undoing at Roqueville. They will think they can starve, or dry us out. The Count of Toulouse failed ten years ago and so will they.’

  Montségur’s great strength was that the shape of our mountain made it impossible to cut us off completely from the outside world. The castle was perched on top of a massive limestone pyramid that broadened as it descended into the valley, so that at its base it was fully five miles around. On three sides the approaches were sheer. On the fourth side the approach to the castle was steep – I remembered toiling up the path with my Roqueville knights on that first day – and we had cleared away any small trees and bushes that offered cover.

  Inside the castle we were well prepared. Our crossbowmen, forty in all, were fast and accurate, and we had a good supply of bolts.

  ‘Adequate,’ I told them – Raimond Roger had made me their commander – ‘provided you don’t loose off at long range and don’t miss your targets.’ They accepted me after some initial grumbling; I was as quick and accurate as all but the best of them, a grizzled old warrior who had no wish to command. And they knew I had good reason to want to kill crusaders. We had three good trebuchets and stones for them in abundance; the slope up to the castle was so steep you could roll the stones down on any advancing troops.

  When Hugues d’Arcis arrived from Carcassonne he had a force of, we estimated, around 8,000 men. Our garrison was 450 strong, but only 250 of these were fighting men. The rest were women, children, old men and Perfects, all hungry mouths to feed
and water.

  Hugues d’Arcis did his best to put a cordon round the bottom of our mountain, but even with his numbers the cordon was easily permeable. He left the village alone, and was clever enough to encourage farmers to come to its market and sell him supplies, but that also meant that we were able to divert some of this to Montségur. For three months very little happened; boredom was our greatest enemy, as we needed to keep constantly on the alert for any attack.

  By the end of July the crusaders realised they were not going to be able to starve us out. They attacked at dawn up the southwest slope with perhaps a thousand foot soldiers, behind wooden shields on rollers that they pushed slowly up the hill. Our trebuchets smashed these to pieces and then did tremendous damage to their troops; not many soldiers got close enough to trouble our crossbowmen. We made a brief sortie to collect weapons from the fallen, and then allowed the crusaders to collect their wounded under a flag of truce.

  ‘They wouldn’t have extended that charity to us,’ said Guillemette to me. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t slit the throats of any who weren’t already dead.’

  ‘They will have to feed and nurse the wounded,’ said Etienne, who had been listening to my account of the skirmish. ‘That’s the difference between Cathars and Catholics. We take life only when we have to. They kill for pleasure and the glory of God.’

  There were no more attempts at a frontal assault, and when the rains came and our cisterns filled we thought we were safe. However, they didn’t abandon the siege, and were reinforced by a further 1,500 men, which enabled them to strengthen the blockade. Our search for reinforcements was less successful, although we were joined by twenty or so Cathar soldiers over the summer months. Our supplies continued to trickle in.