Paradise Red

by K. M. Grant

  She moves toward him but is frightened to open herself up again. Doesn’t he understand? Never has she felt so raw and muddled. She loves this man with all her heart. He is her. She is him. Yet though she resents this thing inside her with every fiber of her being, this thing that she cannot see but so nearly killed—there is no denying that it is part of her too. Not part of Hugh. Part of her. She claps her hands to her head. She longs to be at Castelneuf, near the river, in the meadow or up on the roof, somewhere that’s theirs, so that Raimon can feel what she cannot explain. Then she sinks. It is impossible now that Raimon will ever come to Castelneuf again. How can he, knowing what Hugh has done there?

  She feels Raimon’s gaze on her, raking her from top to bottom as though she has some huge blemish running from her head to her toes. Though he may not mean to, he is making her feel dirty when she was just starting to feel clean. In a last effort, she breaks the thong around her neck. “Here. Your ring.”

  He scrapes out some kind of sound. He wants that battered black circle so badly. It seems to him that the best of his life is soldered into it. But even as he extends his hand, Hugh’s child intervenes. “Yolanda was to be yours completely,” the child crows. “Now a bit of her will never be yours, and if you can’t have all of her, do you really want any?”

  He hesitates and then it is too late. Yolanda slowly withdraws the rings, although even now she cannot help making one last, punishing effort. “Raimon, listen! Listen to how lucky we are. We have each other. We have the Flame. We can leave this place to Hugh and the White Wolf and find a new home for ourselves. We can build a new Castelneuf, a new Occitan even. Let’s go back to the Amouroix. It’s where the Flame belongs and where we belong. I’m ready! Aren’t you? We can go together.”

  She has a magnificence about her that is quite new. Yet Laila’s laugh and the child’s imaginary crowing are still a barbed barrier between them.

  “I’m going for Hugh,” he says, choking. “Don’t deny me that, Yolanda.”

  She breaks down suddenly and shockingly. “I deny you nothing,” she cries, flinging out a final appeal she does not want to have to make, “and I’m offering you everything. Can’t you take it?”

  “How can I take something that’s already been taken?” It is half an agonized whisper, half the roar of a wounded bull as Raimon rushes passed her. He vaults onto Bors and, stopping only to sweep up the Flame, thunders out of the valley with Cador on Galahad behind him.

  Sometime later, an errant gust of wind swings the door of the shelter wide open. It swings so hard that its hinges twist, but nobody rushes to secure it, because there is no longer anybody there.

  15

  Silence

  The first Cathar casualty, on the day that, unbeknownst to those either in the fortress or below, Aimery meets his Maker, marks a turning point in the French fortunes at Montségur. The French knights are no longer despondent. The work is hard, but there are fewer complaints. The Cathars are not invulnerable and though it may take some time, they can at least now see a point when this siege will end and they will be able to go home. As Hugh predicted, however, progress is slow. Every inch gained from the pog is backbreaking. With the onset of another winter, progress will be even slower. However, as he reminds the knights and soldiers on a daily basis, now that they are taking decisive action, sometime in the spring the king will get the Flame that the White Wolf still, without any apparent hesitation, holds up in the evening. One great remaining irritation is that the villagers continue to grow fat on the proceeds of the Cathar trade they ply up paths that Hugh will never discover. “How much money do you suppose is salted away up there?” some of the knights ask him, staring up at the fortress hungrily, imagining a fountain of treasure. “The only treasure we are commissioned to secure is the Blue Flame,” Hugh always repeats in his most curt military tones.

  He has aged during this deeply unsatisfactory campaign. He sleeps badly and, though he has charts and maps and plans to keep him more than fully occupied, finds himself permanently counting off the months. Any possible baby must be due in the New Year. The New Year! He will still be here then. Of that he is sure. And afterward? Will he be lauded by the king for a fine achievement or disgraced because it has taken so long? Will he remain the keeper of the oriflamme or find himself the ex-lord of Arcis? Stuck here, he has no idea either about Yolanda’s condition or the French king’s mood and no way of finding out. He finds this burden frustrating. He begins to count the days, cutting notches in his tent pole. “I’m counting for nothing,” he tells himself, but carries on doing it.

  Raimon, too, is frustrated. He does not want to kill Hugh surreptitiously, like a thief in the night. He will settle for nothing less than single combat, sword against sword, knight against knight. He will fight Sir Hugh des Arcis as Sir Raimon de Maurand, as Sir Parsifal would wish, not as weaver Raimon Belot. He cannot do this today or even tomorrow because he will only get one chance, and to maximize that chance, his collarbone and wounds must be properly mended and he must be fit. So he spies, reassures himself that the siege is unlikely to end before the winter has blown itself out, and forces himself to bide his time.

  Parted from Laila and her box of tricks, Cador has to add the role of doctor to that of squire, groom, and forager. He binds Raimon’s shoulder tighter and tighter, as if the bones can be forced to knit together. Hunched around the fire that provides some protection against the now nightly frosts, Raimon turns the lantern this way and that. The Flame is still small and, when its color is not disguised with leaves in a trick Cador learned from Sir Parsifal, its blue still intense and rich. Yet often, hardly realizing what they are doing, both Raimon and Cador use it as a real lantern, even carrying it on the end of a pole in a way they would never have dreamed of doing when it burned in its box. Then it would have felt disrespectful, like using the Bible as a mudscraper. Now it seems natural, as though the Flame has become part of them.

  But as Raimon waits for his body to heal, he cannot accept the kindly comfort it offers. In the Flame’s homely glow he can see nothing but a future that has been snatched from him. It is unfortunate too, though unsurprising, that Cador’s ministrations make Raimon’s wound worse, not better. Had Raimon been in the best of health, things might have been different. But weakened from his lengthy captivity and with bad weather approaching, his condition deteriorates. This adds to the daily bitterness. Yet when, sometime after Christmas, an unhappy and frightened Cador suggests going to find Laila again, or if not her, somebody with some knowledge of medicine, he receives a curt rebuff. The wound will heal. They only have to wait a little longer.

  But in the end it becomes clear even to Raimon that waiting is not enough and when Cador asks directly what he must do with the Flame if Raimon himself dies, something finally breaks. Is he really, through his obstinacy, going to condemn this faithful boy to wander alone with the Flame as Sir Parsifal once did? When Cador goes for food, he sits with the Flame a long time, never looking away as it burns steady as a father’s eye. Three days later, he bids Cador bridle the horses. He knows what he must do.

  They return to the shepherd’s hut in a February snowstorm and when they find it empty, head without further discussion toward Castelneuf, the lantern lighting their way and the horses’ hooves padding noiselessly in the deepening white. Cador gives up ministering to the wound, which, left to breathe, finally begins to settle itself. The days are uneventful, and as the pain begins to ease, Raimon finds himself less tense. Now he tries to face the future as it is. Yolanda will have the child. He must accept that. But once it is born? He stiffens again. It must already be born. Well then, now that it is born, it will be a separate thing from Yolanda, and anything separate can be removed. Did not she herself say that Hugh would claim it? Perhaps it is already on its way to the des Arcis chateau and once there, they need never refer to it again.

  And if she still has it? Even that is not a disaster, for she will know, just as he does, that no des Arcis child can ever live at Cas
telneuf. In his wilder moments, he imagines somehow giving the baby to Metta when the siege is over, for even Hugh will surely not allow the women and children to burn. Yes, he feels as the horses eat up the miles, he was foolish to despair. This thing need not hang over them forever. With the child miles away and Hugh killed in the single combat Raimon will shortly be demanding, that will be the end of it. And if Hugh kills him instead? Raimon does not countenance that thought.

  With his mind eased, the journey as they reach my boundaries becomes for Raimon a journey of memories. Everything seems blue-lit as the Flame guides them over the mountain where Aimery once went to kill a bear and nearly killed Raimon instead and illuminates the familiar outline of the high plateau on which Raimon was himself besieged. Yet how quickly nature reclaims her own! There is no evidence of those hard months now. It is as if they never were. Raimon rides on. Only when the Flame floods the opening of the cave in which Yolanda once, blindly and unforgettably, traced the contours of his face with her fingers in the dark does he stop. The memory of her touch is so strong that he puts up his own fingers as if to catch hers before they slip away.

  They arrive in the Castelneuf valley in a chilly, windless dusk, with the chateau’s lights shining honey-colored through the pearly gloom. As they ride up the road down which Raimon sledded with Metta, both he and Cador are aware that the town lacks all those cheerful, thriving sounds through which it once sang. Raimon touches the lantern. He has the Flame whose advent brought both hope and dereliction. Now it must be the key to restoring life in this place, which had such life before.

  He slips off Bors around the side of the chateau walls, near to where, in his childhood, there had always been a hole. After the old count’s death, Aimery had had it stopped up. Raimon has not forgotten, but hole or no hole, he knows this bit of wall well and wants to enter unnoticed. Bidding Cador to undo the horses’ reins, he measures up. Cador is horrified. “You can’t climb with your arm in that state!”

  “No, but you can. We’ll get you in and there’ll be at least one horse in the stable—that sorrel that Yolanda was riding. She knows you. Bring her out and tie the rope around her neck. She can haul me over. Then you wait with her in the stable.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what has to be done.”

  “I want to come with you. You’re not strong enough to wield Unbent. A squire has his duties.”

  “And one of them is to do as he’s told.”

  Twenty painful minutes later, with the horse returned to the stables, its absence unmissed, and scuffing their footprints as best they can, Raimon is standing at the bottom of the keep steps with the lantern in his hand. The hounds begin to sing, but nobody appears to take much notice. Their song tilts from warning to greeting as they realize that their visitor is no enemy. Raimon loves them for that.

  He secretes the lantern behind his back and climbs swiftly up the steps to the great hall, still half roofless and quite empty. It seems like a long time since it rang with the sounds of hammer and mallet. A different time entirely. He will not think of that time. Instead, he knocks the snow from his boots and silently makes his way through to the small hall. There he stops short. Laila is standing with her back to him, slightly bent over, preoccupied because she is overburdened. She has not heard him, and without thinking, he edges backward into the shadows. He wants nothing to do with Laila. He must see Yolanda alone. The girl puts something down—her box, and opens the door, kicking it closed with her heel.

  At once Raimon pitches forward, sets down the lantern, and fumbles with the box’s catch. He gives a wry smile. The inside is crammed full of tinted bottles and oddly shaped stones, old teeth, thin straggles of hair tied in ribbon, various dented coins, an amputated finger, endless vials of hair dye, and, lined up like autumn leaves, elegant, pointed pouches fashioned from goats’ ears. Holding the Flame closer, he rummages underneath, until, next to a bone jar marked “poison,” he finds the small sheep’s horn filled with wound salve. He takes it. Cador will be pleased. He replaces everything else very carefully. Laila will notice, but he does not care. He closes the box and retreats. They will wait for a day and hope for an opportunity.

  Outside again, he collects Cador and hurries him up the steps into the old pigeon loft. The steps are slimy with disuse, and they find nothing but a blanket of dirty feathers and the dessicated remains of those birds who waited too long for food that never came. Everything of Aimery’s has turned to dust. What sympathy Raimon feels is restricted to the birds.

  The following morning is crisp and cloudless, and the sun is blinding on the snow. Raimon, his shoulder plastered with salve, stretches. Despite everything, he has slept well and this seems a good sign. His shoulder takes longer than usual to resume its normal throbbing. He is not going to die of his wound, at least.

  Both he and Cador are relieved when the hounds are let out, for they will scuff any remaining tracks, although they also worry that they may show some interest in the loft. But the loft is tame when what you long for is a chase with the promise of blood. The older hounds pad directly to the gate and sit, their sterns swaying in expectant hope. The young ones, having larked around for a few minutes, slither after them and sing until the air pulsates.

  Then there is different barking, and down the great hall steps bounds Brees. He glances at the pigeon loft, and his tail momentarily pauses midwag. However, scent is not carrying today, and when the dogboys, also released from the kennels, tumble about, his tail resumes its thumping and with more joyful barks, he tumbles with them. Gui and Guerau are suddenly outside too, shouting for quiet. The reason is soon apparent. Helped by a crimson-curled Laila, Yolanda emerges. She is carrying a bundle.

  Raimon’s every nerve crackles. Every fiber of his being is focused on the bundle, which he has thought about for so long but never, so it seems to him now, really visualized. Here it is, beneath those blankets: Hugh’s child in flesh and blood. Of course it will be a son. Raimon knows that instinctively. What Hugh wanted Hugh has got. Raimon finds he is shaking.

  Yolanda holds her bundle awkwardly. She is very white apart from her eyes. They are huge black holes. Laila hovers over her. There is something so unusual—no, more than unusual, downright odd—about seeing Laila so tender that Raimon’s stomach pitches and rises in his ribs. He leans forward as Yolanda walks toward the mounting block and sits down. She still stares straight ahead, deaf to whatever it is Laila is saying, and Raimon’s stomach rises further, filled with something akin to triumph. Yolanda sits too still for joy, too still for care. The baby is dead. He wants to punch the air. There is a God.

  He begins to move, unable to stop himself, until he hears Cador’s warning exclamation. He looks again, and now there is something—Raimon cannot see what—but some kind of movement from the bundle. His stomach sinks like a stone. The baby is not dead. Indeed, it is very much alive and it is wriggling. Yolanda is suddenly alive too and begins to adjust the blankets. A tiny fist shoots out, and she folds it back in. Raimon watches as a hawk watches a rabbit. But it is not the care she takes that sends all his insides and not just his stomach crashing like a dying horse: it is the way her neck is curved. Such a tiny curve, but so revelatory, for it is not the curve of somebody performing a chore for an unwanted monstrosity. Though she hardly moves, the curve flows down Yolanda’s whole body, forming a perfect arc of love and protection. When she raises her face again, even from this distance he can see, shining through the exhaustion and the memory of pain, an awkward wonder, quite new and clearly not altogether welcome, but so strong that she cannot help but accept and submit to it.

  That night, Raimon enters the keep again. With the Flame held in front of him, he goes up the stairs quietly and this time opens the door to the small hall without pausing even to listen. Yolanda is lying in a bed that has been pulled near to the hearth, with Laila in a smaller cot slightly to the side. Brees shoots up, but Yolanda does not move, and Raimon pacifies the dog until he settles ba
ck, head on paws.

  Then Raimon gazes down. Yolanda is fast asleep, one arm thrown up, one leg half hanging out of the blankets, her hair a bird’s nest, and her mouth slightly open. She is exactly the girl he has always known except that in a wooden crib next to her is a creature whose life, he understands now without a shadow of a doubt, she would choose over his, not because she wants to but because she would not be able to help herself.

  He puts the Flame on the floor, unable to stop himself imagining the night Hugh came here, to this very room, and though he has not really meant to, he picks the child up. He is rough. The baby’s eyes open and they contemplate each other, he and Hugh’s son. How easy, Raimon thinks, to dash the soft skull against the hearthstone. How easy to stamp out this short unwanted life and bury it. How easy and how impossible because unwanted does not mean unloved. Raimon wants both to laugh and to cry, because this tiny, dribbling creature has won a battle it is not even aware of fighting.

  He returns the child to its cradle. He had thought to speak to Yolanda, but what can he say? He tries to construct a few phrases. No words come. But they will, of that he is sure, only not here and not to Yolanda. Everything he has to say will go into his challenge to Hugh. Nothing is over yet. By depriving this baby of its father and Hugh of the chance to see his son, Raimon will have his revenge.

  He holds the Flame above Yolanda, leaving the baby in darkness. With the tip of his index finger, he traces her face, gently tidying her hair. The two leather rings, back on their thong, are nestled in the small indent at the base of her neck. He places the lantern on the table, pressing his thumb against the hot glass as a man presses a branding iron against a cow. He does not wince at the pain. He wants the mark to remain with him. Then he leans over. He wants so badly to wear his ring but cannot bring himself to take it. As long as it remains with her, he can believe that he is with her. “I leave the Flame with you, because it burns for the Occitan, the Amouroix, and for love.” He breathes. She sighs. He holds his breath. She sleeps on. He breathes again. “But love is the most important, and oh, Yolanda,” he touches her lips, “how I’ve loved you.”