I learned my crossbow had to be cocked, that the wolf would disappear at the slightest unfamiliar noise and that I had to be thirty paces away and high in a tree to have any chance. I tried powerful snares, but they were useless for wolves, although I regularly caught mountain hares in them, which enriched our diet.
I think Arnaud expected to part with one or two ewes at the most; after all, he had never seen me use a crossbow. I had lost the iron tube that the blacksmith had forged for me in Montségur, but I was able to replace it in Montaillou. I had kept the padded sleeve Sybille had sewed for me, and the eyepatch, although I never used the latter. Both had survived the long journey to Compostela and then across Spain. After we were married Sybille told me what she had done, at Guillemette’s bidding, to the sleeve. I laughed and said she had indeed bewitched me. It was the only possession I had to remind me of her. The sleeve smelled faintly of lavender, but of nothing else.
In the first month I had one shot, and missed; in the second I killed three wolves; and in the third month eight, including two cubs. Arnaud didn’t know whether to be glad or dismayed.
I was pegging out two wolf skins to dry in the sun; I had made him a present of the first two I cured.
‘Perhaps I made a poor bargain,’ he said.
‘How many sheep did you lose last year?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘This year?’
‘Twelve.’
‘And you’re warm at night into the bargain.’
He laughed and made no attempt to renegotiate.
Although we hardly talked, for he was unused to company, he liked my presence in the little hut and the hares and the occasional roe-deer I brought to our table. I had learned enough from Guillemette about mushrooms to pick and eat them, but Arnaud either disliked the taste or thought he would be poisoned. Otherwise we lived off bread, sheep’s milk, sheep’s cheese and the occasional cup of rough red wine.
One of the Belot boys, Andre, arrived every two weeks with flour, wine and sometimes a few eggs. I once gave him a wolf’s skin in return for the food and his trouble.
‘I’d have given him nothing,’ said Arnaud. ‘Now he’ll be greedy, expect something every time he comes.’
‘You’ve given him nothing, I have. Perhaps he’ll come more often, with more and better provisions.’
Apart from young Belot and the occasional Perfect, whom we welcomed and fed in exchange for a blessing, we had few visitors. I was always glad to see Authie, to whom I could talk about Roqueville and Montségur and Sybille. He came at least twice every season.
The solitary life suited me well; until now my pilgrimage and the need to make a living among strangers as I travelled from Compostela back to my own country had given me little time for reflection.
My sorrow at losing Sybille, my failure either to rescue her or join her, the almost unbearable memories of our happiness together, which at the time I imagined would continue forever, weighed heavily. I had terrible nightmares about what had happened to Sybille, to Claire and the other brave Cathars in the Field of the Burned. I could still hear the screams, smell burning flesh. I thought, too, of Blanche, regretting my feeble defence of her on the way to Compostela.
In the mountains the nightmares came less often, and I tortured myself less frequently with what I might have done. It was partly the serenity of the landscape, partly the preoccupation with sheep and wolves, partly the dig in the ribs from Arnaud if I groaned in one of my dreams, that gave me the beginnings of peace. And I felt I had left my recantation behind, had become Cathar again.
The rhythm of the seasons was comforting. The lambs were born in the spring, and that was a stressful time for Arnaud and me. We got little sleep. He taught me how to deal with a stuck lamb, and after that kind of birth I was covered in more blood than after any of my battles. Inevitably we would lose some ewes, which was always disappointing, although we kept the fleece and the meat. And often enough we would have ewes that produced, quickly and efficiently, twins or even triplets. Pyrenean sheep are tough; they have to be to make the long journey to and from the mountain pastures.
We castrated the male lambs soon afterwards, a business that required a sharp knife and a hard heart. Although it was simple enough to make the cut and extract the two small testicles, I was never able to do the work without feeling a twinge, a retraction in my own groin. Arnaud selected one every three years or so to be spared the cut and replace the oldest and least active ram in his flock.
‘How do you choose?’ I asked.
He looked surprised.
‘I don’t choose. He chooses me.’
And I had thought he just took the one nearest to him at the time.
The lambs were weaned in May, and then the milking began – milk for ourselves, milk for cheese. It took me some time to get used to the taste of sheep’s milk – Arnaud told me he had never tasted milk from a cow – but the hard tangy sheep’s cheese was easy to enjoy.
We had a small brick oven by our cabin where Arnaud taught me how to bake bread. At the bottom of our great meadow there was a stream that held small trout, but these were difficult to catch, as the stream was too big to dam. Arnaud had hooks, but had never used them; I borrowed these to extract one or two fish using a pellet of our bread as bait. My rod was a long willow branch with a line of spun thread which often broke. We smoked any fish I was lucky enough to catch and kept them for a visit by one of the Perfects.
Cheese-making was an art I was slow to master. We had a separate cabin where we made the cheese and kept a stock of two or three rounds from previous years. We sold most of our cheese in the valley at the same time we sold our wool.
When in May I saw four rough-looking men coming towards our cabin my immediate reaction was to reach for my crossbow. Arnaud restrained me.
‘They’re the sheep-shearers. From the Basque country.’
As they came closer I could see they were not from the Languedoc. They were short, wiry men with weather-beaten faces and blue eyes, almost comically identical. It didn’t seem appropriate to enquire whether they had the same mother. Each had a pair of shears and a whetstone dangling from his belt. Their single mule carried half a dozen wineskins.
‘By the time they have finished the shearing they will have drunk all the wine and replaced it with fleeces,’ Arnaud told me. ‘They will have a sober journey back to the Basque country.’
We didn’t have a language in common, but that didn’t matter. We corralled our flock and then let them out two at a time. The shearers, working in pairs, would take off the fleece in less than ten minutes, pausing only to sharpen their shears. They had the knack of holding each sheep on its back, completely immobile after a brief initial struggle, and managed to avoid anything but the occasional small nick in the flesh.
‘How do they do that?’ I asked Arnaud.
‘They’re strong. And they have a word.’
He clearly believed there was witchcraft involved. I looked closely while the shearing was going on, and they seemed to have a grip around each animal’s head or throat that effectively paralysed it. The sheep were unharmed by the process and were happy to be relieved of their heavy burden in the hot weather.
The Basques were with us two days and one night, and it was the only time in the year that we butchered and roasted one of our lambs. The Basques drank their own wine, making it clear that they thought ours inferior stuff. I tried a mouthful and decided it was an acquired taste. They slept in the open, covered in thick brown cloaks that the dew seemed not to penetrate. I remembered Sybille saying Montségur could only be taken by mountain goats, and wondered whether any of these men had been one of the band that had climbed the steep path up to our castle. They looked tough enough for the task; perhaps luckily, I hadn’t the language to ask them.
Arnaud paid them on the second evening with a mixture of coins, cheese and fleeces and then they left, touching our hands first, for the next pasture. Two days later Andre Belot appeared, riding one mule and lead
ing two others.
‘One of them is mine,’ said Arnaud. ‘The other two are borrowed from Clergue. I’ll go with Andre to the market. You’ll manage.’
This was high praise. I watched them leave, the three mules looking like comical, mythological beasts under their woolly burden. My main concern was for Arnaud’s three dogs, but they seemed to know by instinct what to do and rounded up the sheep each evening without paying much attention to my mimicry of Arnaud’s cries and hand signals. I enjoyed being on my own in the mountains, and after a nervous first day realised that the dogs and the sheep between them knew enough to keep us out of trouble. At any event, I didn’t lose any animals, although I noticed Arnaud counted them all into the corral on the first night with particular care.
‘How was the price of wool?
‘Terrible. Worse than last year. I presented a fleece to St Francis and to the Virgin Mary of Montaillou as usual. Never seems to have much effect.’
‘I thought you were Cathar.’
‘So I am. But no harm keeping in with the others.’
That seemed to sum up the Catharism of Montaillou, and certainly that of Clergue. It was a pragmatism that appealed to me. I distrusted the narrow righteousness of Catholic or Cathar zealots, and I had learned that some of the Perfects, like many abbots and bishops, found it easy to fall from grace, especially where women were concerned.
Authie alone seemed to be consistent and undeviating. Belibaste, on the other hand, another Perfect whom we saw occasionally, had broken most of the rules at some time or other. He always travelled with a female companion who was also his mistress. Or so it was rumoured.
In my first year Arnaud and I were celebrating a successful sale of wool with perhaps too much red wine from a fresh wineskin. It loosened his tongue.
‘I became a shepherd when I was twelve,’ he told me that evening.
‘Always here?’
‘No. I was involved in a brawl when I was fifteen and had to leave Montaillou. I worked for five years for Brunissende de Cervello in Puigcerdà.’
‘And then?’
‘Saved some money, bought ten sheep on my return, and here I am, thirty years later. Most shepherds move about, never stay in one place for more than two or three years. Hire themselves out this side of the Pyrenees or in Catalonia, doesn’t seem to matter. Content to live in cabins. Don’t need a house. Neither did I at the beginning.’
This was a long speech for Arnaud. I thought he would ask me about my past, but lack of curiosity or good manners prevented him.
After three years, and many dead wolves, and good fortune with twins during the lambing season, I had built up my own flock of thirty-seven ewes and one ram. I continued to work with Arnaud, both for the company, taciturn though he was, and for his great experience, particularly at cheese-making. Our cheeses always commanded the best price in the market.
It was later that third summer that the accident happened. He’d gone to the far end of the pasture to cut down a tree for next year’s firewood, and when he didn’t return in the early evening I went to look for him.
I found him under the tree that he’d been felling. It had toppled the wrong way and even though he’d managed to avoid the main trunk one of the branches, as thick as my thigh, was crushing his chest. I couldn’t see his face, as it was covered with leafy side shoots; it seemed unlikely he was still alive, but I tried to shift the weight of the tree off him, cursing my lack of a right arm, then hacked away at the branch on either side of his body with the axe he had been using to chop down the tree. This took an hour, an hour during which Arnaud made no sound. When I finally freed his body I could see that he had been killed at once, his chest completely caved in.
I carried him back to our cabin; he weighed no more than a young boy. I laid his body out on his bed, closed his eyes and crossed his hands over what was left of his chest. Then I wept; I had seen many bodies, and many gruesome deaths, but this accident of nature, killing my only friend in Montaillou, seemed a violence as unfair as it was unpredictable. Arnaud had taught and helped me. As I looked at his body I realised that he and I, together with the dogs and the sheep, were all that either of us had as family.
It was two days before Andre Belot arrived with our regular supplies. I explained what had happened, showed him the tree – Montaillou was the kind of village where you needed a witness to a sudden death – and we decided to bury him on the edge of the meadow where he had spent most of his life. We dug a deep grave to keep Arnaud safe from wolves and foxes and said an Our Father together, a prayer used by Catholic and Cathar alike. Andre left to carry the news back to Montaillou, leaving me with Arnaud’s sheep and mine, and his three dogs, until the end of the season.
When I returned to Montaillou I went to Bernard to ask about Arnaud’s house.
‘There’s no one to claim it. Take it. He owes my brother a year’s tithe and me…’ he looked at some documents and then said, ‘… six livres Tournois. Pay us off and you can keep the house.’
‘And the sheep?’
‘They belong to the Church.’
‘Forty of them are mine.’
‘Settle with Pierre. He’ll give you time to pay.’
I was able to agree a price with Pierre, and to pay the brothers off in wool, cheese, sheep and money. I knew where Arnaud kept his coins and had left them in the mountains, buried in a crock under a big stone. The Clergue brothers didn’t need to know about that little fortune.
So I found myself owner of a house in Montaillou, over 200 sheep and grazing rights. I was transformed overnight from a share-cropping shepherd to one of Montaillou’s richer citizens, although I was no rival to the Clergues, the Benets or the Belots.
I mourned for Arnaud. I was saddened by the brutal accident that caused his death, and even more by the fact that there was no one to regret his passing but me. His dogs had transferred their allegiance quickly enough. The next spring I asked Authie to say a prayer over his grave, and that was all that marked his passing.
The Montaillou that gave me shelter and a living was an unusual village as it lacked a lord. It had a small castle occupied by a few dozy old retainers and an ineffectual steward who collected rents when he needed cash. The de Planissoles had married up and out; nobody had seen Beatrice, the heiress and nominal chatelaine of Montaillou’s castle, for several years. This state of affairs had created a power vacuum that was quickly and effectively filled by the two Clergue brothers, Pierre and Bernard. Between the two of them, Pierre as priest, Bernard as magistrate, they controlled every aspect of village life through Confession and the court.
This balance of power changed when, in the year that Arnaud died, Beatrice de Planissoles returned to reclaim her castle. Barely thirty, she had lost her husband, who had been unlucky enough to be killed in a tournament. She was rich, richer than the Clergues, through inheritance and marriage, and had left behind her stepson in her husband’s fiefdom.
Pierre Clergue dealt with any possible challenge quickly and efficiently by taking Beatrice as his mistress. She told me much later that the first time was close to rape, but Pierre was attractive to women and you could sense his power the moment he entered a room. Even in the castle that power accompanied him, and his humble origins (his father had been a herdsman, and Clergue’s manners had been learned in the field and the sheep pen) made him attractive to a noblewoman like Beatrice.
In those early days I saw little of her, although enough to know she was tall, fair-haired and used to being admired and obeyed. I kept my distance. Pierre Clergue was not a man to cross in love, or anything else for that matter. She did once see me bathing at the washing-place in the early morning; I was naked, and she made a coarse remark about my manhood that I found disturbing. And provocative, although I did nothing about it. As it turned out, I didn’t need to.
16
Summoned to Carcassonne
Francois
PIERRE CLERGUE WAS summoned to Carcassonne, ‘on Church business’ he told the few
who dared ask him why; he looked uneasy when he used those words to me. We thought that rumours of Catharism in our village may have reached the level at which they could no longer be ignored. All the great Cathar castles had been taken: Bram, Puylaurens, Roqueville, Montségur; their lords imprisoned or burned, their lands confiscated and given to the Church or one of the crusaders. The Crusade itself was over.
Montaillou survived for two reasons. Its closeness to the mountains made it easy for the few surviving Perfects to come and go discreetly. And Pierre Clergue was skilful in maintaining an outward show of devout Catholicism.
‘Perhaps it’s money, not doctrine,’ I said to Agnes Belot, the mother of Andre, who still supplied me with flour and wine and eggs during the summer months. ‘Perhaps they’ve found out he’s taking more than the priest’s share of the tithes.’
‘Speak quietly,’ she said, looking around her in case we were overheard; the main street was almost deserted, but those habits die hard. ‘I don’t want to suffer Mengarde’s punishment. She can hardly speak, and nothing tastes of anything, poor woman. Although she always did talk too much.’
She looked around again.
‘Pierre may have left. But Bernard’s still here.’
‘Better if it is the money,’ I said. ‘That might clip his wings, and the rest of us won’t be involved.’
Agnes nodded, feeling she had said enough, and walked on to her house. I had only just begun to understand the strange and furtive atmosphere in Montaillou, a combination of fear of the Clergues, the secret Cathar rituals and the sheltering of Perfects, and the complicated family feuds, many of them generations old, that intersected the village. I understood the first two and carefully avoided asking about the feuds. I knew that the Clergues hated the Maurs, and that was knowledge enough.
I was on my way to the castle to pay my feudal dues for my house and for the grazing rights over the upland pasture. The mountain meadows that first Arnaud, and then I, used were the property of the de Planissoles, who in turn paid, not often I suspected, dues to the Comte de Foix. Or perhaps the King of Aragon. The patchwork nature of ownership throughout the foothills of the Pyrenees was never clear, and in the end reduced itself, for a tenant like me, to paying whoever demanded payment and could back up their claim with force.
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