by K. M. Grant
“Take Bors or Galahad.”
“They’re Raimon’s.”
“So what?”
She sniffs.
Aimery exhales a long wintry blast. “What you really mean is that you don’t want just any horse. Bors and Galahad are too old and scarred for a lady”—he makes a derisive gesture—“like you.”
Laila glares at him in the especially vicious way she has when somebody hits on a truth, and the glare has Aimery’s blood flowing hot. This girl! He doesn’t know whether to slap her or kiss her.
The sky chooses this moment to open, and suddenly the snow is not floating but tumbling in huge wet flowers. Men are running for shelter, and Aimery, hitching his jerkin over his head, sees out of the corner of his eye a homing pigeon struggling to reach the loft he has had newly restored. He forgets Laila, just for a second.
“Sir Aimery!”
His squire, Alain, is making his way gingerly, trying not to slip. “We have visitors. Around sixty, I’d say, coming up through the town.”
“Inquisitors?”
“No. They carry no cross before them.”
“Are they armed?” Aimery and Raimon both feel for their swords.
“Yes, but their weapons are all sheathed. As far as I can tell, they’re just seeking shelter. I think this is the start of a blizzard, and it looks to be a big one.”
“Close the gates,” Aimery commands. “We’ve no room for them.”
“The barns are ready,” Raimon contradicts, “the stables too, and the temporary roof on the small hall makes it perfectly usable.”
Aimery taps his sword against his knee. “And what will they eat?”
Raimon stands his ground. “The huntsman’s brought in meat, and although we’re short of grain, we have eggs and cheese. For God’s sake, Aimery.”
Aimery tries to control his temper. He cannot afford to belittle and ignore Raimon, since his bravery during the fire and tireless work on the rebuilding means that those remaining at Castelneuf, from knights to beggars, have developed what, to Aimery, is a misguided sense of respect for him. He considers. Perhaps these people will prove useful, and anyway, turning them away now would not be popular. The French king sets a great deal of store by hospitality. If he were to hear, it would be a black mark. Aimery bats the snow with the flat of his blade. “Oh, let them in, then,” he says, making an effort not to sound grumpy, “and be sure to tell them that even at this time of trial, the Count of Amouroix has not forgotten how to welcome strangers.”
Alain bows and vanishes amid the flurries before he has taken five steps.
Aimery turns his back on Raimon and heads for the loft. At least the birds know who is master. These speedy messengers will, he is sure, be vital for his future for what he sends with them nobody knows except himself. The ladder steps are greasy, and he can feel the wind on the back of his legs. Inside the loft is no warmer. The birds feel the chill too and are plumping up their feathers. Aimery’s appearance has their necks jerking, but few of them express any alarm. They are used to him. He peers around then catches the latest arrival, blowing on his fingers before trying to unbind the little leather capsule in which the message is rolled. He swears as the pigeon flaps and pecks. Finding the binding too tough, eventually he just tugs the capsule off, pulls out a tiny scroll, and reads it. It bears the royal crest. His ill temper subsides at once. Good good. Nothing is over. Indeed, there is still everything to gain. He stuffs the slip of parchment in beside his dagger.
The bird hops away toward a nesting box, her head bobbing back and forth. In his rough hurry, Aimery has injured her leg. He catches her again. “Well, my friend,” he says, holding her up in front of his face, and in her round eye, black as Raimon’s, suddenly sees his reflection distorted into something squashed and bloated. He grunts, and with a vicious twist born of his irritation with Raimon and uncomfortable desire for Laila, wrings the bird’s neck. Her wings spread and beat just once before her head lolls and her eyes cloud. There is no reflection now. Aimery cradles her for a moment, glancing uneasily about. He should not have done that. She was a royal bird, after all. But when the other birds show no interest he relaxes, catches another, and pets it. He reads his parchment again and then, before he descends, quite casually pitches the small corpse into the unforgiving arms of the gathering storm.
2
The Visitors
Some people speak of the dead of winter. I know nothing of that. I know only winter’s sparkle, the crisp lace of frosted fern and the thick curves of drips frozen into polished beaks. In winter I am a fairy-tale country, soft and crackling underfoot, pearly ice adding a brittle, glistering luster to the more workaday silver of my mountains. Today, a weak spring sun spits hazy diamonds and the late-falling snow transforms Castelneuf from a blackened heap into a shimmering stage set.
The visitors, naturally, are blind to the glamour as they struggle through the gate to the courtyard. Winter to the traveler means only hardship and potentially deadly delay. As the snow collects under their horses’ hooves, some of the women are weeping with exhaustion while the men stare balefully at the sky and occasionally raise a fist.
Alain has exaggerated. In all, there are nearer two dozen than sixty visitors. Nevertheless, they come with a good deal of paraphernalia, mostly household rather than war. The majority are men, although there are at least half a dozen wives and daughters, and four of the wives have very small babies tightly bound against the cold. They crowd into the small hall, shaking the snow from cloaks and boots and banging their feet to restore circulation.
One of the women, just a girl really, sits down and gratefully accepts the bowl of soup set on the table before her. As she bows her head to give thanks to God, she makes a neat circular movement with her right hand. At once, her father, a large man whose red nose and melon-skin cheeks hump out of a speckled and bristling beard, stretches across as if to shield her. It is too late. Adela, who has been sitting motionless by the wall farthest from the fire, shovels herself up. “You are of our faith?” she asks, her dulled eyes kindling.
The girl picks up her spoon and her smile splits a face almost unnaturally unlined and untroubled. With her white throat and hair the color of corn, she looks like a doll made out of wool and wax and polished rams horn that Adela once had. Adela doesn’t remember the doll, but I do.
Adela does not wait for an answer. “I, too, am a Cathar,” she says. “My name is Adela Belot and I’ve taken the consolation from the perfectus known as the White Wolf. Many people here did the same. Not that you’d know it.” She casts her eyes contemptuously about the room. “They abandoned our religion when it got too hard.”
The girl swiftly spoons up her soup. “The Cathar religion hard?” she says, and her voice is musical, a sweet voice for a sweet face. “It doesn’t seem so very hard to believe in justice and truth.” She licks her lips with relish. “Perhaps your White Wolf was a little overzealous. Some perfecti are, even though they mean well. Oh! Thank you!” She gratefully accepts more soup. “Our perfectus at home is a nice man, quite gentle. I sometimes think of him as Christ’s brother, although I’d never tell him that because he’d be very embarrassed.” She twinkles and reaches for bread.
Adela is leaning forward. “Did your perfectus also tell you that only true Cathars can be true Occitanians? And did he tell you too that the Cathars now have the Blue Flame?”
The girl scrapes her bowl again, then leans back with a contented sigh. “That’s better. I hadn’t realized quite how hungry I was. It’s hard to think about anything when your stomach’s rumbling.”
Adela is annoyed. How can this girl be interested only in her stomach? “Don’t you care more about the Blue Flame than your stomach?”
“Of course.” The girl wipes her mouth. “We’re on our way to Montségur precisely because that’s where the Flame is. Our perfectus is there already, and all the other Occitanian knights that we know. I haven’t taken the consolation, as you have, but I think I am as dedicated to the
cause.”
“Be quiet, Metta,” her father admonishes and looks around fearfully. The girl taps his chest with affectionate reassurance before she turns back to Adela and notices the untouched food on her plate. “You should eat. Look at you! You’re flat in all the places you should be round!”
Adela blanches. “I’ve told you. I’m one of the consoled so why should I eat? To me, food is just the barrier that prevents us from leaving this life and attaining life everlasting.”
“Is that what your White Wolf says?”
“It is.”
“Our perfectus wouldn’t agree, would he, father?”
“Please be quiet, Metta.”
She is silent, but only for a second or two. Then she takes Adela’s hand. “I don’t want to presume, but I really think your perfectus must be mistaken. Food is not evil if you say the Lord’s Prayer first. Could your perfectus have misunderstood?”
Adela snatches her hand away. “The White Wolf is not mistaken. He knows everything. He’s a great man, perhaps the greatest of all men. He is the Keeper of the Blue Flame.”
The girl’s smile lights up her whole face. “Of course he is! But even the best and greatest men can sometimes be wrong!”
Bile rises in Adela’s throat as she travels in her head to the day when her mother, silent and trusting, starved to death because the White Wolf told her it was the will of God. He must be right, he must. She cannot afford not to think so. She turns on Metta. “Of course good men can be wrong,” she says sharply, “but not the White Wolf.”
“Then,” says Metta with another smile, “he must be right, only he’s certainly a very strict perfectus, the strictest I’ve ever heard of.”
“It’s what the Lord demands,” Adela insists.
“Oh no,” says Metta. Disconcertingly for Adela, her smile is the same whether she agrees or disagrees. “I don’t believe the Lord demands anything except that we love him and allow him to love us.” She licks her spoon again. “That was the nicest soup I’ve ever had. Does your White Wolf—”
“That’s enough, Metta, I mean it,” interrupts her father, adding in a low voice to Adela, “you shouldn’t listen to her prattle. She fell from a mule basket when she was a baby and hasn’t been quite the same since.”
“You mean she talks nonsense?”
The knight hesitates. “I mean she talks a little too freely.” He glances at his daughter with concerned affection.
Aimery and Raimon have come in from helping to cover the tools against the weather and they catch the last of the exchange. Aimery touches Metta’s arm. “So,” he says, and his tone gives nothing away, “you follow the Cathar creed?”
“Metta—,” her father warns yet again.
“Let her answer,” Aimery says, pleasantly enough.
The girl is unafraid. “We did when this lady first asked,” she nods gently at Adela, “and we still do now!”
Aimery ignores the joke. “It’s brave to say so.” He scrutinizes her carefully. “The Counts of Amouroix, and I am the current holder of the title, have always been Catholics.” He glances over at the fat priest supping hugely in the corner. “That’s our priest, Simon Crampcross, and my uncle was an inquisitor.”
The girl’s father gasps, but the girl is quite unmoved. “Indeed,” she says, her eyes twinkling. “We forgive you.”
At this, Raimon laughs out loud, and Metta, noticing him, is startled to find herself blushing.
Aimery bristles and forces her attention back to him. “You think our differences are a joke?” He shouts over to the fat priest. “Simon Crampcross, come here! We’ve heretics in our midst.”
Metta’s father looms large. “I’ve already explained, Sir Aimery,” he says quickly, “that my daughter’s a bit simple. You should take no notice. Now, if you don’t mind, we must see about our things.” He hides Metta as a bear might hide its cub and hurries her away.
“I should stick them all in the cellars,” Aimery says deliberately loudly as Simon Crampcross shuffles over, his long tongue all over his fingers, his shirt spotted with meat pudding.
“It’s not the Cathars who burned down your chateau,” Raimon points out.
“That’s true,” says Aimery. He pokes the priest’s stomach with the hilt of his dagger as he calculates how to turn this situation to his advantage. He stops prodding as something occurs to him. “Go back to your dinner, you fat fool. Fill those bulges and reflect on how you seem to have ended up on the wrong side.” He strokes his beard as Simon Crampcross lumbers off.
Raimon narrows his eyes. The wrong side? What’s this new nonsense of Aimery’s? He wonders if the priest knows something.
He does not. Bemused, for he has served the Catholic counts for nearly a decade, Simon Crampcross’s balding pate shines with the effort of eating and shuffling as he too tries to gauge what is in Aimery’s mind. Is the count about to turn Cathar? Is he just joking? Has he gone mad? Since the fire, after all, Aimery has been as unpredictable and temperamental as a stabled bull. It would be far from unthinkable, so the priest realizes with horror, even with Aimery’s history of taunting the Cathars, that he might suddenly decide to throw over his Catholic faith and join them. It was, after all, the Catholic king who burned his chateau. Only one thing is clear. He, Simon Crampcross, must stay firmly in the chapel until he sees which way Aimery’s wind really does blow. Surely even Aimery would not hurt a man in the house of God, although—and Simon Crampcross almost chokes on the remains of a pickled pig’s trotter—he heard of an archbishop in England who was murdered in his own cathedral. Fear bubbles up through his mountainous layers and he belches uncontrollably.
Raimon’s gorge rises. The smell of Simon Crampcross must make even God sick—not that Raimon cares about God, at least not Aimery’s God, or the White Wolf’s, or the inquisitors’. He had begun to care for Sir Parsifal’s God, but Parsifal is no longer here. He goes back into the snow to breathe cleaner air and finds Cador at his heels.
The boy is munching on an old bit of bread and opens a mouth full of crumbs to catch the snowflakes. “When will we get the Flame back from the White Wolf?” He stamps legs achy with growing pains. He wants action.
Raimon can feel the cold seeping through his boots. “I don’t know. It won’t be easy.”
“All the more reason to get started.” Cador shakes the snowflakes from his ears like a puppy.
“What makes you so sure I can actually do it?”
“Well, we have to, don’t we?” Cador carefully includes himself. “The Flame belongs to the Occitan. You’re the champion of the Occitan and I’m your squire.”
Raimon shivers. He does not feel much like a champion at this moment. “Champions can fail, you know.”
“But you won’t, Sir Raimon.”
“Just Raimon, please.”
It is a well-chosen response, making them both laugh, albeit a little painfully. Parsifal, if you remember, was always disclaiming his knighthood on the grounds that he didn’t deserve it, and Raimon always ignored him. A history of shared expressions is a warm history. Cador chews cheerfully. “You’ll succeed because you’ve got Unbent and me. What else do you need?”
Raimon considers. He does not need to love the Occitan more. That would be impossible. To Raimon, it is the place of which his bones are made, the place from which Yolanda has sprung, the place in which he first saw the Flame, the place in which he wants, eventually, to grow old. If he fails the Flame and the Occitan dies, he will be left in limbo, a man without a country, a lover without a beloved, a boat without an anchor. He cannot explain this to Cador. Instead, he condenses it. “I need to feel like a knight,” he says.
“You’ll feel like a knight when you get the Flame back and Mistress Yolanda comes home and everything is perfect again.”
“You sound like a troubadour.” The words are jesting but Raimon’s tone is curt. “Only they believe in happy endings.” Nevertheless, the little boy’s unflinching optimism is infectious. Raimon curls his finger again
to feel Yolanda’s ring and allows himself to remember the evening she floated like a starfish in the river, her skin glowing like a dusky pearl. Snowflakes fall on his hair and remind his scalp of her fingers kneading away the tangles in his head. For an instant, intruding, he sees Metta’s blushing face. He pushes out his lower lip.
When the wind finally drops off, the snow falls straight down, and soon both Raimon’s and Cador’s arms are ridged white. Cador throws his head back and closes his eyes. On impulse, Raimon bends down, makes a snowball, and pops it into the boy’s mouth. Cador’s eyes fly open as his tongue flies out. Then he bends himself, deftly rolls another ball, skips away, throws it, and hits Raimon smartly above the ear. He gets two back for his pains, one on each cheek. “Now it’s war!” the boy cries joyfully. Raimon hesitates. A knight must watch his dignity and this is hardly a time for larks. But a snowball explodes on his chin and in seconds he and Cador are at it full pelt, two sparkling warriors in a spangled mist.
Their game is stopped when a tightly packed snowball pitched by Cador slams into the chest of somebody who unwisely chooses this moment to emerge into the courtyard. He protests.
“Apologies, Sir Knight,” says Raimon quickly, recognizing Metta’s father.
In his mottled bearskin, Sir Roger de Salas is even larger outside than in and, up close to him, Raimon can see two deep chasms cut into his humped face, chasms that circle his nostrils before disappearing into the mountain of bristle. He spreads huge, knotted hands that Cador reckons, with awe, must take almost a whole sheet of steel to gauntlet, and he moves with an air of concentration, as though always having to remember where every bit of his largeness is. Yet though so disparate in size, Raimon can see a distinct resemblance between Sir Roger and his daughter, for her guileless sincerity is simply a prettier version of Sir Roger’s apologetic courtesy. It is Cador who notices that Sir Roger’s stockings are full of holes, that the leather thongs on his boots have rotted away, and that the hilt of his sword is rusted. “You have a neglectful squire,” he says with the unabashed candor of the young.