Blue Flame

by K. M. Grant

  And anyway, how could Raimon really think that she’d prefer anything to the excitement of clinging together on the back of one of her father’s packhorses, his legs curled around warm flanks, hers curled around his, with the wind whipping their eyes. Under Raimon’s light hands and her lark’s voice, the animal would lose itself in their make-believe and become a destrier, tossing its mane and arching its neck, with Brees providing some heavy infantry in its wake.

  In the summer, they lay together on green stones behind the heavy curtain of a waterfall, gloriously deafened by the thunder until they could stand the noise and slime and chill no longer. And they danced. How they danced! When they danced they never spoke, they didn’t need to. If she liked to wonder about Poitiers, or even Paris, it was only because she was naturally curious about other lives, other halls, other music, whole other worlds completely different from mine.

  She began to run. “Let’s swim,” she yelled. She knew that would wash away the shadows and the smoke.

  “The water’ll still be freezing.” Raimon was grinning again. “Even Brees will yelp.”

  “It’s never stopped us before, and we can’t say it’s really spring till we swim. Come on.” They linked arms and rushed along full pelt, hopping and tripping as they pushed their way through branches sticky with buds until the stream broadened out into a spot perfect for their first dip of the year. Yolanda tossed off her shoes, dipped a toe in, and gave a little scream. “It is freezing.” She hopped about. Two years ago, or perhaps even last year, she’d not have cared about the cold, but this year it pricked her like needles and for the first time in her life, she hesitated.

  “I told you so.” Raimon laughed like a bell at the dismay on her face, the smoke not forgotten but crowded out. There was no hesitation from him. He stripped off his shirt and the belt in which he slotted his knife, and chucked away his boots. The freezing needles from which Yolanda shrank were just what he wanted. She skipped along the bank as he plunged in, exulting in the crash of his heart as the water hit his chest. The stream was a miracle of cleanliness and purity. Then, when he could bear to be still no longer, he doused his whole head before rising up, flailing his arms, and splashing her. Hitching up her skirts, she fled, then returned; and thus they made their way along, Raimon almost blue, shouting with glee. He threatened that, since he wouldn’t get out until she got in, he would shortly freeze to death and it would be all her fault. She, not persuaded, pretended that swimming had been all his idea.

  At last, when it was clear that despite ever more fantastic threats, Yolanda really wasn’t going to swim, Raimon forged his way back to find his shirt. Yolanda raced there before him, whipped the shirt up, and began to run into the trees again.

  “Yolanda! Bring it back at once!” Raimon was half laughing, half annoyed as he grabbed his belt and knife and stumbled off in pursuit, one boot half on. He caught her back in the clearing, where she was standing with the light pouring in behind her. “Why, her hair is shot through with copper,” he thought, and for some reason he could not explain this fascinated him. Yolanda was holding out his shirt and as he took it and their fingers met, his so icy that hers felt like fire, he forgot everything but the fact that her face was tilted toward him and on top of the patchy grime on her cheeks a spray of diamond drops dazzled. He would have done nothing had she not stopped breathing at exactly the same moment as he did, and had those soft eyes not met his with something more than her usual mischief. There was a challenge there, and something more than that. He could not help himself. “Yolanda,” he thought he said, although he actually said nothing at all as he leaned forward and kissed her.

  Her reaction was immediate and not at all what he expected. She jumped, rather as if he had turned green or grown two heads, and he, who believed they had moved together as one, found himself floundering alone. Then she laughed.

  Now it was his turn to jump, tripping over his laces. He did not recognize her laughter for what it was—a mirror image of his own earlier. Nervous, a little brittle, a reaction she could not control because, although she had lived this moment in her dreams a hundred times, had longed for it even, she had never imagined it would come when Raimon was dripping wet with his boots half on and a shirt clutched between them. In her mind, their first kiss would be … well, at a special moment, when everything was perfect.

  Her friend Beatrice, who was to be married in the summer, had told her what such a moment should be. Her bailiff-fiancé had shown her. When he had taken his first kiss, he had held Beatrice’s hand and gazed soulfully at it, recited a few lines of poetry in a theatrical style, then coughed, closed his eyes, and pouted his lips. That was how it was done according to Beatrice, although when Yolanda had pressed her as to what it actually felt like, she was less forthcoming. She did not want to admit to Yolanda that she had had to keep her eyes open to remind herself that she was kissing a man, not a fish. “It is a very important time for a girl,” she had quickly intoned, crossing her plump legs. “You mustn’t let it come just any old way as you do other things, Yolanda.” She was faintly reproving. Yet that’s just what Yolanda had done and she laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.

  Raimon turned his back, hoping she would not see the flush he knew was spreading from his neck. He felt just as he had a year ago, when Aimery had crowed over him, having floored him during a bout of boxing. It was a humiliation.

  “Raimon,” Yolanda said, angry with herself, “I didn’t mean—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She ran in front of him, wanting to brush away the hurt from his lips, but they were set and she was nervous to touch them now. It was hardly like brushing away a crumb. “But it does,” she said. He pulled his shirt over his head. “I don’t know why I laughed. It was just the cold, and your shirt, and I don’t know. I suppose I imagined it would be different.”

  “Different?” He tied up his boots. “Better, you mean?” Though Yolanda’s laughter had quite disappeared, he could still hear it in his head.

  She tried again, rubbing her palms on her dress. “No, not better, just different. Can’t you understand?”

  “No, can’t you understand?”

  He began to walk away, now angry with himself for being angry with her. It was not her fault that it had begun to trouble him, and it troubled him very much, that though they could always flip trout and sit crammed like sardines in the hearth listening to the Castelneuf troubadours, in reality they had little chance of a future together. The granite indifference of my silver mountains might be a constant lesson in humility for everybody from knight to pauper—but he could make no presumption. She was the count’s daughter. That was a fact. And just because Count Berengar’s ways were not grand—his chateau was crumbling and there was little deference or ceremony except when Aimery was home—this did not mean that Raimon could expect Yolanda not to laugh if he kissed her. If she dreamed of Paris, she might also dream of another future, one in which she had more than a weaver’s ring on her finger. And there was something else. Raimon’s relatives were not Catholics as Yolanda’s were, they were Cathars. This had never mattered before. In peaceful lands nobody seemed to care how you worshipped God. But in Raimon’s new, raw state, everything seemed to matter. Just as he was noticing her, he was losing her.

  He began to walk more quickly until he heard Yolanda’s voice, high with anxiety. “Oh no! Brees! He’s in the sheep.” They ran together.

  The dog wandered among the ewes, so much more tempting with lambs at foot. It was strange how like a snake he looked for a heavy, ungraceful creature, his long back a mottled smudge in the chalky white. The mothers were bundling together, their voices raised in a fury of fear.

  “He hasn’t, has he, Raimon?” Yolanda could hardly bear to look. Brees raised his head. He had something floppy in his mouth.

  “He wouldn’t,” Raimon tried to reassure her. “Not with us here.” His words were more certain than his voice. The lesson with the ram was long past. He shouted f
or Brees to come to him, and the dog raised his head. He might have returned without further incident had Peter not chosen that moment to hurl a rock, which hit the dog smartly between the eyes. He yelped, dropped his burden, headed up the ride, cut into the trees, and vanished over the hill.

  Raimon and Yolanda at once changed direction, Raimon easily outstripping Yolanda up the slope. Over the crest, the landscape altered and between thick strips of forest a path of rough scree descended into a small sunless depression pitted with four or five damp caves. The scree had formed natural barriers at the mouths of the caves and though they were always chilly, they were also good for shelter during the frequent storms. Raimon called the dog’s name again and again, climbing into one cave after another. Despite the run, he was shivering again. He could hear Yolanda searching about fifty yards to his right.

  It was thus that Parsifal and Raimon came face-to-face, not in bright sunlight, but in flat, rather sinister gray. They stared at each other; Parsifal’s eyes, though almost invisible under eyebrows thickened with age, were the saddest Raimon had ever seen, and Raimon’s were dark as coal. Parsifal had his hand on Brees’s collar and would have made some kind of exclamation had the noise not got stuck in his throat.

  Raimon immediately reached for his knife. “Let go of the dog.”

  Parsifal’s hand shot up. Raimon was surprised by its pale appearance. It didn’t seem to go at all with the rest of the scarecrow figure. But Brees was free. Raimon began to edge away but found Parsifal moving toward him and when he touched him, Raimon struck out rather harder than he might have done had Yolanda not laughed when he had kissed her. It felt good to hit something. However, the untidy stranger was niftier than Raimon supposed and suddenly Raimon was on the floor himself, face-first in the ashes of an old fire. When he rolled over again, the stranger had vanished.

  He could hear Yolanda admonishing Brees. “You foolish dog, what on earth were you thinking? Peter could have killed you! Look, it was only a rabbit. Thank goodness. Come on, let’s get back into the sun.” It was only then that she saw Raimon had flakes of white in his hair. “What happened to you?”

  “There was a man,” Raimon said. “Didn’t you see him? He must have run almost straight past you.”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “He caught Brees and then he knocked me over. He must have run past.”

  “Are you sure? I saw nothing.”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Well, maybe he’s in one of the other caves.”

  Raimon ran back and searched. All the caves were empty.

  “What did he look like?”

  He answered without thinking. “He looked like Merlin the Magician would look if he’d been buried under a tree for a thousand years. Except for his hands, which were, I don’t know, just not a thousand years old.”

  “I see.” She couldn’t help it if her voice was a little disbelieving. It had been three Christmases since they became obsessed with the story of Arthur, first sung in the winter firelight by Guerau, the younger of the Castelneuf troubadours, a barrel of a man whose tight curls made him seem an eternal youth but whose voice transformed him by turns into Lancelot the Sad, Gawain the Burly, Galahad the Sinless, Bors the Steadfast, and Tristan the Lover. As he acted out their deaths, Guerau could make his voice rise like a soul in final ecstasy or whisper like one of the sorrowful damned. Even Aimery’s cheeks would not be dry by the end. And, being an Occitanian, Guerau had naturally changed the tale to suit his audience. Instead of searching for the Holy Grail, Arthur’s knights were on a quest to find the Blue Flame, which they would deliver to whichever Castelneuf knight had Guerau’s particular favor at that moment, usually the one who had tossed him a jewel or coin. The knight would then be Arthur for the evening. At the end of each ballad, Guerau would act out the moment when King Louis himself would come face-to-face with the Flame. Then the troubadour would scream most horribly and crumple, much to the delight of all, before being carried off by the chateau servants, dressed appropriately for their part as avenging angels.

  “Well, even if he was Merlin, he’s gone now.” Yolanda said. She saw that Raimon was shivering and noticed too, now that she was looking properly, how tightly his skin was drawn over his cheekbones. She remembered that his mother was ill and suddenly wondered if he was getting enough to eat.

  “And I do believe you,” she said gently, although she still wasn’t sure. “Let’s call him the Knight Magician of the Breeze, because he looked like Merlin and it was Brees who found him.”

  Raimon didn’t want to be humored. “I shouldn’t have said Merlin. He looked more like a bear than a knight.”

  Yolanda didn’t want to give in completely. “He could be a brigand knight,” she said, and though she was hardly conscious of it, her voice grew a little dreamy. When she was little, during the dull sermons of Simon Crampcross, a man with jowls like a walrus and a high regard for his position as the town’s Catholic priest, she had often imagined such men. They lived wild lives and though their reputations were brutal and their faces locked under iron helmets, she knew that they were always handsome. Sometimes, even now, she still imagined herself swept up behind one on a white horse with a foaming mouth and emerald trappings. The knight would introduce himself as Sir Brigand of the Four Winds and would declare her more beautiful than Arthur’s queen Guinevere. When they got to his castle, she would tame him, but not too much, and they would sail toward a hazy but glorious future in a spangled barge drawn by swans. She knew she was too old for such things, and galloping with Raimon was far better than any swan-drawn barge. But she remembered.

  Raimon shook his head at her. Bandit knights did not merit dreams or dreamy voices. If such men did sweep girls up behind them, it was not to crown them queen but to tether them with dirty rope until their families ransomed them back. He frowned, remembering the smoke. “I’ll have to see you home,” he said.

  “See me home? But I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “I really think we should go. Come on.” He began to walk briskly and, sighing, she followed. Both put their hands on Brees’s collar but their hands did not touch.

  Right at the back of the largest cave, where a perfect screen was provided by an almost impenetrable fringe of flapping tree roots stretching down in hope of water, Parsifal heard their voices fade. How he envied their companionship. “I just have you,” he croaked at the Flame, which prinked at him, “and you are no conversationalist.” He gathered his things together and went to look outside. Perhaps he should move on.

  He climbed up the scree. Over the horizon the smoke was still rising, but now in small gasps rather than plumes, and the strange smell had vanished. As he watched, however, the wind changed and instead of flighting upward, the smoke bent over the gorge toward Castelneuf. He frowned and rubbed his stubbled chin. Then he went back into the cave. Inside its pouch, the Flame’s wick was darkly solid at the center of the oily pool. “I’m now the Knight Magician of the Breeze,” Parsifal told it. “Should I stay and defend my title?” The question was a wistful joke, but it seemed to him that the Flame did him the honor, almost for the first time, of taking him seriously. Spreading itself over its salver, it hissed, and when Parsifal bent toward it, it hissed again. “Not much of an answer,” he remarked, but after all the years of silence, he was cheered that there had been an answer at all.

  3

  In the Chateau

  Just over an hour later, Raimon and Yolanda crossed the river bridge and began to climb toward the thick, castellated walls of Yolanda’s home. Though its perch looked highly precarious, with the stones of its foundations cut unevenly from the mountainside itself, the chateau offered at least a semblance of protection. Underneath, the paths and houses wound their way toward it in tiers. Raimon could have left Yolanda here quite safely but he did not, and not just because he didn’t really want to leave her at all.

  You see, though the appearance of the Knight Magician and the smoke might be entirely co
incidental, Raimon felt a tinge of true uneasiness. It occurred to him that the Knight Magician might not be a bandit knight at all. He thought once again of that journey with his father from Limoux. What if the man and the smoke were related? What if the man was a perfectus, one of those Cathar high priests his parents held in such high regard that they bowed from the waist when they even thought about them? Raimon had never knowingly seen a perfectus, but he knew they often hid in the hills, waiting to be summoned to perform the last rites for those Cathars who lay dying. Occasionally, his father’s weaving shed would have more men in it than usual. Raimon had never asked who the extra men were, but he had suspected. He felt a cold knot in his stomach because even the rumor of one in the district might be enough to draw in the inquisitors. He had never met an inquisitor either—none had ever thought me worth a visit—but everyone knew what they did. Then again, if the French king really was pushing southward, maybe the man was a scout, although he certainly hadn’t looked as Raimon imagined a scout to look. It was unnerving meeting someone he couldn’t place. He urged Yolanda on.

  She followed him without argument, although they had to slow once they got farther into the town. A mule train had passed along the towpath on the river and people were pouring out, then staggering in, intent on exchanging bolts of cloth and fine leatherwork for carpets and dyes, fancy baskets and spices. Many were gossiping their way home with bulging bundles, their children overburdened like donkeys. Reluctant oxen lowered their heads under the whip and shrugged their bony shoulders. Raimon cursed, but halfheartedly. The busy, familiar scene settled him a little and it was almost comforting when the oxen took no notice of his prods. They were not vexed by anything. They would take the hill in their own time and Raimon would just have to wait.

  As they were forced to halt, Yolanda spied her friend Beatrice and called out her name. Usually the girl would have been as burdened as an ox herself, but today she appeared to be carrying nothing but her purse, a wide beaming smile, and a great deal of dignity. She kept the dignity for a while, then couldn’t resist. Pulling up her satin skirts to display unlovely ankles, she leaped over three new cauldrons and a sack of salt dumped in the road for later collection. “Look what I’ve got!” Glowing and giggling, she opened her purse to reveal a tiny phial. Yolanda stopped. “Perfume! Oh, Bea!” she exclaimed. “Can I smell it?”