by K. M. Grant
The journey out is worse even than the journey in, for though the flames are leaping, the air is now so thick that every step is a step in the dark. They feel the White Wolf behind them as they struggle, all of them doubled over. But he is not trying to escape. He is still trying to pull Metta back. “Metta! Metta! Don’t desert me. We’ll go to heaven together. Together!” His eyes are rolling, his beard just a bristle, and the skin is peeling from the back of his head. “This is what God wants! Our suffering is his greatest delight. Don’t you want to please God, Metta? Don’t you? You disappoint me! You dis-a-ppoint me.” His words lengthen as he begins to disintegrate. He seizes her hood.
She turns. He is a repulsive sight. Now it is she who tries to pull him with her. “Come out. Come out of here, please. Let Raimon save you. I’m begging. How can dying like this possibly be God’s will?”
The White Wolf is almost completely on fire. He bares his teeth and pushes her away. “You question God’s will? You dare to? God knows his own, Metta. God knows his own. Perhaps I was mistaken in you. Perhaps you’re not one of his own after all.”
You think there is a limit to pain? Not for the White Wolf. His greatest torture comes as he draws his last breath, and the pain is not the searing sensation in his chest. It is a far deeper pain than that, for it is only when it is far too late that he sees something more appalling than any sight on earth. As he stretches what remains of his arms toward the starry comforts of heaven and begs God to gather him up, God slowly turns his back. The sight burns hotter than the hottest fire. It burns so hot that it burns away the point of him. His arms drop. “Sweet Jesus,” he whispers, but nobody hears him.
Raimon will not let Metta look or even think as he keeps her sandwiched between himself and Hugh. Kicking in front and behind, they beat their way back to the palisade, most of which is now just a hollow heap, and cry out with relief when they feel the flames behind them. Their relief is momentary. Instead of being met with cooler air, they are confronted with bristling swords.
Though there are not enough of them to form a complete chain, the inquisitors have fanned out like sentries to drive any escapee heretics back into the flames. To reinforce his authority, the chief inquisitor has also seized the oriflamme, which, with the wind now rising, is flourishing its six remaining tails as though they were flames themselves. It takes a moment for them to recognize Hugh as he appears before them, blackened and raw, but as soon as somebody shouts his name, the chief inquisitor cracks the oriflamme like a whip. “You? Sir Hugh des Arcis? You, the keeper of the oriflamme, presume to cheat God of his rightful revenge? You presume to save his enemies? Oh, Sir Hugh, you presume too much—far too much.” The man’s fervor almost lifts him off the ground. “Seize him!” he orders.
“Run, Metta, run!” Who knows who shouts? It might be Hugh, it might be Raimon. All that matters is that she finds herself stumbling obediently away, trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and the hell from which she has been rescued. There is no such relief for Hugh and Raimon, for within seconds the French knight and the Occitan weaver are fighting side by side. Hugh will not be taken without a struggle, and Raimon cannot leave Hugh to struggle alone. “The other is a heretic too,” the chief inquisitor bawls. “Never mind bringing them to me! Push them both back into the fire. I’ll answer to the king!”
Though Raimon thrusts and parries like a cornered jackal and Hugh lunges like a stag at bay, little by little they are forced to retreat. The chief inquisitor edges nearer and tries to hit Raimon with the oriflamme but instead finds himself grappling with Hugh and forced to let it go. The inquisitor pulls out a sword and lunges. Hampered by the banner, Hugh cannot defend himself. Raimon immediately pushes Unbent between them and the inquisitor turns on him too, raising his blade for the killer blow. With two simultaneous giant leaps, Hugh and Raimon catapult themselves back into the furnace where they know neither soldiers nor inquisitors will dare to follow.
The fire has consumed everything in its wake—fagots, hair, bone, flesh, and cloth, and is roaring with less intensity. Now it is the smell that is unendurable. Raimon gags as it invades every vein, every muscle, every pore. It is the smell of pure evil. Underfoot, through an all-pervading viscous slime, unidentifiable splinters push between his blistered toes. This mulch is all that remains of the two hundred human beings who, hours before, had been part of God’s creation. Hugh is not moving well, and at last he falls, the oriflamme slapping down hard beside him. Raimon wrenches him up and feels a sudden gush. For a moment he cannot tell whether the gush is from himself or from Hugh.
Hugh supplies the answer. “Get out of here as best you can.” His breath is uneven. “The inquisitors can’t be everywhere. Find Metta and get her back to her father. That’s what you can do for her. It’s what you must do.”
Raimon gazes around wildly. How can he leave a dying man in this devil’s cauldron?
Hugh’s eyes are wide and the pupils already glazed. “I’m afraid there’ll be no single combat now,” he whispers, “but I still have a challenge for you.”
“Come on, get up!” Raimon pulls at Hugh’s legs. “Get up!”
Hugh groans loudly. Raimon tries to force him, but Hugh is a dead weight. He tries again. Hugh struggles to hold on to Raimon’s arm but finally gives up. “I’m done,” he says. “I’m done.” He is gasping. “But here’s my challenge, Raimon.” He searches for Raimon’s eyes. He wants to say something about Yolanda, Raimon knows it. He does not want to hear it. He will not meet Hugh’s eyes.
Hugh’s gaze begins to dim. He can hardly see Raimon at all. His chest heaves as, instead, he gathers himself to speak slowly and clearly. “Take my sword to my son and look after him for me.”
Raimon claps his hands over his ears. “Don’t ask such a thing! I won’t take it! I don’t want him!”
“You must take it. You must have him. You must.”
“No! Aren’t you listening? Never. Not your son. Why do you ask something so impossible of me?”
Hugh gives a faint, exhausted half smile. “What a silly question,” he murmurs. “Why do you think I ask?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“Oh yes, Raimon, you do.” His cheeks spasm. “I ask you because Yolanda loves you. I ask you because you’re a brave man. But most of all”—the words come urgently now, and not just because his lungs are filling—“I ask you because I’ve nobody else to ask.”
Raimon roars and bends over Hugh, sometimes holding him, sometimes shaking him, until Hugh’s eyes roll and he gives a last faint and wistful sigh as death rattles his throat.
Years later, Raimon is glad about what he does next, though at the time he has no idea why he does it except that it is suddenly unthinkable to leave a man, any man, to the unforgiving mercy of the elements and the inquisitors. Placing Hugh’s sword to one side, he smoothes out the oriflamme and swiftly rolls his enemy’s corpse into it before binding it up as tightly as he can. Then he runs for a flaming plank and sets the banner’s edges on fire. Hugh will have his own pyre. He waits, holding his breath, and only when the fire is white hot does he exhale, and even then he waits a moment longer, trying to find some fitting words of valediction. But what should they be? He has no idea. In the end, he simply seizes Hugh’s sword, plunges it into Unbent’s scabbard, and makes once more for the palisade. Behind him, the oriflamme loosens and the folded tails flutter, before, scorched and torn but freed from all constraint, they stream in one red silken salute straight up to heaven.
19
The Valley
Raimon sits quite dumb on the journey back to Castelneuf. The Blue Flame is saved, but he feels lost. The White Wolf is dead, but the Occitan is lost. Despite all Raimon’s efforts, the south has bowed to the north, and Raimon mourns for the land he loves. And then there is Hugh’s challenge, over which Raimon’s soul is in turmoil. All is over and nothing is over. He wishes he had the Flame with him, that he could hold up the lantern to guide him as it guided him before.
Yet he knows, too, that regarding Hugh’s child he must make his own decision.
Cador looks after Metta. He hung on to Bors and Galahad during the burnings, just as he was bidden, and it was he who, searching for Raimon, found the desolate, desperate girl hopelessly crawling up the pog again, seeking sanctuary in the empty fortress. When Cador shouted Raimon’s name, she flung an arm toward the pyre, and, in return, he flung her the horses’ reins. With the inquisitors driven away from the palisade by the stench and the unbreathable, greasy residue coating every particle of air, the boy held his nose and plunged in. It was he who pulled Raimon out. It was he too who took charge of their escape, calculating the safest route away from a place that at an infamous time was already achieving a special infamy of its own.
It takes three days for Raimon to feel even partially clean, and even when the mountain pavilions among which Montségur is secreted are long out of sight and there is nothing above but larks and spring sunshine, he shudders, for the pyre seems glued to him, ready to engulf him again at any minute. Only Metta riding behind him protects him. She makes no demands and he hopes she knows that he is glad she is there.
On the fourth night, as they rest, Cador asks what will happen now to the Occitan, for though Hugh is dead, others will come.
Raimon shakes his head. “There will be no more fighting,” he says. “The king has broken the Occitan. He hasn’t got the Flame, but he’s won.”
“It’s devilry,” Cador says.
“It’s strategy,” Raimon tells him, because that is what Sir Parsifal would have said. It is the response of a knight.
He does not speak to Cador about the inquisitors, though, for he is quite certain that they will not be suppressed. Indeed, buoyed up by their repulsive triumph at Montségur, they will doubtless redouble their efforts. Yet after this worst of all massacres, they need hardly bother, for the courage of the few perfecti remaining in the Occitan will falter. Raimon does not waste his sympathy. Without the Cathars, the Occitan’s story might have been very different. Yet as he feels Galahad steady beneath him, the angry bitterness that has so often eaten him up eases. So much is lost but not everything. Yolanda has the Flame. At night, at least for part of it, he sleeps.
Only when Cador declares that they will reach Castelneuf the following evening does Metta, who has been almost entirely silent, rouse herself.
“I don’t wish to go to Castelneuf,” she says in her quiet way. “I want to go straight home.”
Raimon plucks at a passing branch and makes himself speak. “Yes. I understand.” He shifts in the saddle. “I’m sorry, Metta. You can’t know how sorry I am. For everything.”
“I do know that.”
“I’m not proud of what I did.”
She presses with uncharacteristic fierceness against him. “Never say that, Raimon. You should be proud of what you did, not to my heart perhaps, but of what you’ve really done. You saved my life, and you saved the Flame.”
“But not the Occitan.”
She is gentle again. “There are more ways of losing the Occitan than at the point of the French king’s lance.”
Raimon feels for her hand around his waist and squeezes it. He has never loved her more genuinely than at this moment. She is the one truly good person he has met. More than either himself or Yolanda, she has something of the Flame’s hopefulness about her. He wants to believe that she is going to be happy. “You’re right,” he says, “right about so many things.”
“Not everything,” she says, and then falls silent again, until, a mile or two farther on, she says, “I should like to meet Yolanda. Perhaps I will one day.”
“I wish you would come with me now.”
She shakes her head. “Will you lend me Cador to see me home?”
Raimon is nervous for her. “Will you still have a home? Your father gave up everything to go to Montségur.” He cannot bear anything else to go wrong for her.
He turns and she surprises him with a smile. “Of course I’ll still have a home,” she says with enough spirit to make it a declaration.
“How can you be sure?”
She lifts her face to the sun. “Because despite everything, I still have faith.” And the look she gives him, in which there is neither self-pity nor recrimination, humbles him.
“I’ll take you.”
“No,” she says firmly. “Send Cador. That’s what I want.”
“Metta—”
“I’ll never forget you, Raimon.”
“Nor I you.”
They part soon after, and their embrace is long and tight. Once she is settled behind Cador on Bors, she looks back only once to raise her arm. Raimon raises his in return and keeps it raised until she is out of sight.
Alone, he rides more quickly, not seeking out remembered places this time, wanting only to arrive. Galahad is driven hard until, just before night falls, they gallop around the corner into the Castelneuf valley, and Raimon looks up. He can see the chateau, its keep and towers bristling starkly in the purple dusk of spring. He also sees that there is no light. Nothing. Not the slightest twinkle of a torch, not the ragged shadow of a hearth fire. Above all, there is no Blue Flame. The place is deserted.
He blinks, searching and searching. No, there is nothing at all, and his heart leaps into his mouth, because better than he has understood himself, Yolanda has understood that there is no future for them in this place of their childhood. In this chateau, once so very dear to them both, they would simply be clinging to the past when all the clinging must be to the future. It is hard to leave the familiar old for the unfamiliar new, but Yolanda has taken the Flame and done it without even him beside her.
He hardly notices that Galahad is wandering apparently aimlessly away from the chateau’s lumpy hillside, over the meadows, through woods and coppices, past shepherds’ huts and up goat tracks he does not recognize. He is conscious only of stopping, hours later, and gazing between the horse’s ears into a valley whose shadowy shape is unknown to him. It, too, has a river, unseen this evening, but which he can clearly hear spilling over stones. There is light here, small dots from fires and smaller dots from lanterns. Slipping from Galahad’s back, he walks downhill with the old horse at his side.
Yolanda is standing in the firelight, holding Hugh’s son aloft, the Flame beside her feet. Her face, always thin, is thinner, but no longer white from exhaustion. The baby begins to struggle, and suddenly, from behind, in a flurry of corkscrew curls, Laila sallies forth, snatches the baby with the deftness of a conjurer, and tosses him into the air. “Oh, be careful, Laila!” calls Yolanda.
Laila laughs and tosses the baby back, making him laugh too. But Yolanda is not laughing, she is waiting. Galahad stands on a twig and Brees cocks an ear before his breathy, jangling welcome breaks forth. Yolanda starts, flushed with hope. Laila tries to take the baby again, but Yolanda shakes her head. She must take the child with her. In slow motion, she picks up the Flame, bids Brees remain where he is, and walks out of the circle of the camp.
They find each other near the water.
“There was no light at Castelneuf,” he says.
“Did you think there might be?” Her eyes are like ripe almonds, the blue of the Flame reflected in the brown. Here he is, living and breathing, when she has so often imagined him—she does not want to recall.
“I was afraid,” he says.
She smiles fleetingly. “You were afraid.”
“Hugh’s dead,” he says, and looks away for fear of her expression.
“Did you kill him?” she asks after a pause.
“No.”
“Do you wish you had?”
He strives for truth. “I wanted to kill him. I went there to kill him. But when he died …” He shakes his head. “I didn’t know anymore.”
She nods. “I wanted to kill him too, yet when the baby was born I didn’t know either.”
“Yes. I saw.”
She brushes his sleeve. “You shouldn’t have gone without waking me.”
The baby gurgles and Raimon stiffens.
Yolanda hands the Flame to Raimon and holds her son defensively. “His name is Arthur Parsifal.” Her breath touches his cheek. “Do you remember how we pretended to be Knights of the Round Table on the old pack pony?”
He nods, his breath mingling with hers. “And we’ve already got Bors and Galahad.” She looks around. “Where’s Cador?”
“He’s taken Metta to her father.”
“Ah, Metta.”
“Yolanda—”
She interrupts. She does not want to talk of Metta. “How will our lives be now, Raimon, with so many people gone and so much over? Aimery, even.” She stops, her lips trembling.
“He was a traitor, Yolanda.”
“You think I don’t know that?” She holds the baby so tightly that he squeals. “It’s stupid, I know, but there’s nobody else who’ll ever call me Yola.” Her voice rises. “I didn’t even like it! But somehow—somehow.” She steadies herself and releases her tight grip on the baby. “I just don’t know what’s left. The huntsman’s here and the dogboys, but I didn’t even know if you were alive.”
“But I am, Yolanda, and I’m never going again. I’ve behaved so stupidly.” He puts the Flame down and breaks away. “Laila!” he calls. “Laila!” The girl appears. Her hair is silver and sparkles against the starry waterfall of stones at her throat, the stones with the dragonfly clasp. “Take the baby.” He cannot yet call it by its name.
“I’m not a nursemaid,” she complains, hands on her hips. She has shaken off the past months as a cat shakes off bathwater, save a small tremor as she looks at Arthur.