I told him I could not sanction his bloody actions. ‘One should suffer for one’s beliefs, Pierre, not kill for them!’ I reminded him.
But he did not listen. He waved a hand at me and said, ‘That is why I am no perfect, pairé, but as imperfect as any man might be, so that I can do the bloody deeds that are necessary! Besides, the young count has promised to come to our aid with the help of Aragon, and soon we will take back our paratge...Think on it, pairé! How free were our people before these troubles!’
Yes, our paratge! Our way of life, our right to worship and live as we pleased! I did not share his hopefulness. I had seen the ire of the Roman Church before, and the pyres that had blackened the skies for near forty years. I also knew the temper of our vacillating Count of Toulouse who, like his father before him, could not decide which side to take. And so that evening, when there was great rejoicing in the fortress, food and wine and merry-making, I was alone with my prayers in the room at the top of the keep.
But the merriment did not last, for soon a shiver ran through the spine of the mountains warning of the gathering up of the French army and not long after that, the army itself arrived: ten thousand men singing Crusading songs were pitching their tents and bivouacs, and assembling their catapults and mangonels on the Col du Tremblement below us.
That, you see, was the beginning of the siege of Montségur, of which you may know something in your time, and the end of our paratge.
The protracted siege continued, through the summer and the dry season, but we southern people have grown used to hardship and so we managed to survive cooped up in our small fortress. Each day when I walked about the inner court it seemed to me that it was more and more crowded with knights and noble ladies and men at arms. Three hundred were now living on this little patch of rock blown by the wind and battered by rain. Many had come by way of the secret eastern path to offer their skills to the garrison or to help defend their friends and if necessary, to die with them. I wondered how long our food would last and more than once mentioned it to Pierre Roger. He took it lightly and said that it would soon be over, for the French were weak and not used to discomfort. They would not countenance one of our winters, frozen to the bone under flea-ridden blankets!
Even so, whenever I went to the ramparts to take a look at the encampment below, it seemed to me grown with more soldiers and tents and siege engines. No, I told myself, the French had not come for a season. They had come for as long as it would take to bring down this fortress, the last bastion of our faith, a faith that the Roman Church had declared heretical.
Autumn had not passed quickly and those messages of support that came now and again from the Count of Toulouse were a welcome diversion. I kept my uncertainty to myself. I feared that these messages falsely raised the hopes of the people of the fortress and waited to see what would happen. The messages came to Raimon de Parella by way of his brother, the Templar Preceptor of Montsaunes, whose preceptory formed part of a network of secret messengers created during the early years of the war. Through these, news came and went by way of troubadours, and ours was a man called Matteu.
I owe much to Matteu, a man I have known for a long time. If I am honest, I must say I have always envied him a little, God forgive me, because for him it was possible to live life to the full while possessing a willingness to die without a fear in the heart. This has lent a certain poignant tenor to his songs; songs of journeys to far off places, and of unimagined adventures, which greatly entertained the old people, brought a blush to the faces of the young girls, and fired up the courage of the lads, who for days afterwards repeated his tales, acting out those parts, which amused them.
Sometimes he sang of something called the Grail – a stone struck from Lucifer’s crown, a stone of the greatest beauty and purity that had the power to bestow eternal life. At other times he sang of the bleeding Spear of Longinus, the spear that had pierced the side of Christ and was said to make any man who held it a king. I considered songs that spoke of eternal life and kingship contrary to our faith, and often told Matteu so.
But what is our faith?
Looking back now I realise that we are no better than our enemies. Like them we have only known one half of the truth, though we have defended it differently: we have been willing to die for ours while they have been willing to kill for theirs.
In truth, in that far off future in which you live, our faith will not be understood, since only the interpretations of our enemies will have survived and so, I beg your indulgence, for I will sing to you a little of the tenets of our beliefs, and how at Pamiers, in civilised debates, we explained our doctrine to the representatives of the Roman Church.
In those days, sitting beside Esclarmonde de Foix (that great lady perfecta) I listened as Guilhabert told the Catholics how Satan had created the world and all its creatures, including man. I smiled to myself to see their faces as he explained, with unequalled equanimity, that a Son of God could not, therefore, have entered such a world to live in the corruptible body of Jesus. I held my head high as he pointed out to them that this meant three things: that Christ, a God, could not have died on the cross; that Jesus’ body of corruption could not have been resurrected; and that his mother, being only a woman, could not be called the Mother of God.
The Romans were aghast and incensed, for these tenets formed the very foundation of their faith!
As far as I could then see, the entire argument revolved around the difference between two words – similar and same. We Cathars believed Jesus was only similar to Christ – while the Romans believed Jesus was the same as Christ.
That is one reason why the Romans feared the Cathar Church and persecuted it, but there is yet another, a ritual called Consolamentum.
The Romans believe this ritual to be evil because alongside the arguments of similar and same, came the arguments of through and from – which began in the 3rd century, and concerned the origins of the Holy Spirit, whom we call the Consoler. I will not dwell on these arguments for they were many and varied, but I will tell only as much as can help you to understand how they have led to our present troubles.
Some time ago the Roman Church decreed that a man could not have a spirit at all – despite the assertion that the man Jesus had become one with the spirit of Christ! Since then, any man who dares speak of a human spirit is threatened with excommunication and is pronounced to be ‘anathema’ which means, cursed by God. Our faith, on the other hand, argued that the spirit can be conferred on any man by way of the laying on of hands – this, despite our assertion that Christ’s spirit could not have entered into a man’s corruptible body!
Do you see how subtly, imperceptibly, each side has fallen into error? Each forming from out of the small and intricate contradictions of the past an erroneous foundation for new and more confusing contradictions in the present, until no man in the future will know if the ground he stands upon will collapse into an abyss!
Oh my! The foolishness of knowledgeable men! And I should know, for the Lord God has given us each a weakness and the foremost of my many weaknesses is that I have always considered myself a man of learning! Yes…I may have sacrificed the love of a woman, marriage and children, meat and eggs and milk, and a wondrous life singing songs like my friend Matteu, but until recently I had not, God forgive me, sacrificed my thirst for knowledge. In truth, night after night I had dreamt of a great library that expanded to infinity and in which there were not a thousand manuscripts but one great book; a book that held the answers to all questions of religion – a book that could prove to the world the veracity of the one true faith: ours of course!
What a pleasant dream! But I was speaking of the debates and how the years passed. Yes, each side could not convince the other and this eternal round of argument continued until one fateful night, near forty years ago, when a papal legate was murdered. That is how ill begets ill, for such a crime gave Pope Innocent, a cannon lawyer before he took up the keys of Peter, the pretext he needed to convince the French Ki
ng of the lawfulness of a Crusade against us.
Fight the heretics and rob them of their lands and their goods! Those who take up arms against these plague-ridden un-believers will be granted heaven by God!
Ah but the men of the south are proud! They would not be cowered and took our part and have defended us ever since; paying for their loyalty with the slaughter of their citizens, the sieges of their castles and the burning of their friends and relatives – God bless them. That is why a small part of me cannot blame the vassals of Pierre Roger for killing those inquisitors at Avignonet, even though it has set me upon this path, which you shall soon know, for you see, now that I have an understanding of everything, I realise that it could have been no different, and to illustrate this, I will sing of the night I met Lea.
It was midnight and all was quiet after a day where nothing was heard save the pounding of shots from below and the shouts of the soldiers from the parapets. Seeking solace, I came again to the meeting room situated at the top of a long set of circular stairs in the keep. It was my custom to come here on sleepless nights so as to read from the contents of our sizeable library. Here, I could read not only the precious writings of the fathers of our church, but also a number of ancient texts brought over from Syria and other far off places. This night, mindful of Guilhabert’s request, I was engaged in copying the Apocalypse (that part which speaks of the woman standing on the moon with the sun in her belly and the stars crowning her head) onto some parchments that I had prepared, when I heard a noise, no more than a whisper of a sound.
There was a small fire in the hearth and only a meagre light from my candle and so when I looked up I saw only a shadow standing outside the threshold of the room. When the shadow stepped into the lighted space I realised that it was a young woman. As far as I could tell she had azure eyes, wide-set and shining beneath fine curving brows in a face that was moulded into a serious expression, as if she were a pure child, bruised by a cruel world. I dismissed this fancy and set down my quill and rubbed my eyes, for surely I had fallen asleep and was dreaming.
‘What is it, my child?’ I asked her.
‘I would speak with you, pairé,’ the dream answered, in a quiet voice, ‘if that is permissible to you.’
I gestured to a place near the fire and her eyes flickered past me to an ample bench. As she walked to it, I had a moment to observe her better.
She was small of frame but the slender neck carried her head well, and this gave her an air of nobility. Her hair was the colour of wheat and tumbled in curls from beneath a clean napkin, framing a face fine boned and fair. To look at her, this apparition seemed neither young nor old, like every woman and yet not a woman at all…Perhaps, I mused, she was a goddess trapped in the body of a woman, or an angel of mercy come to take me to my death! Whoever or whatever she was, she seemed to be touched by a recollection of the divine, by a memory of the soul before it fell to earth and entered into a corruptible body. And so, when her gaze returned to me, my old heart gave a leap.
Quite irrationally, I thought:
Here stands the very limits of blessedness!
Well, that was something new to me. How such an illogical thought had found its way into my dream I did not know, but I tried to dispel it by turning practical. I would treat the dream as if it were real and perhaps this would entice it to disclose its message.
‘Who are you, my child, the daughter of one of our perfects…or a believer?’
The shaking of her head was almost imperceptible but her eyes were steady, each perfectly matched in the spirit of a disconcerting purpose.
‘Who in this world can truly call themselves perfect, pairé? And what good is belief if one does not have eyes to see?’
These words confused me. My back was stiff and I rubbed it, my thin legs had gone all pins and needles, and my head, for its part, felt like a feather blown by the wind. By these incontrovertible signs I discerned that I was not asleep but very much awake and this made me full of vexation. For how could this girl think herself capable of speaking to a venerable bishop as if he were a simple minded man in need of instruction?
I cleared my throat. ‘If you do not trust in perfection,’ I said, sniffily, ‘nor set much store in belief, why have you come to speak with a perfect, a believer?’
‘To show you something…if you wish to see it.’
She waited with an exaggerated patience for me to say something in response, but I did not know what to say so I leant on the staff of procrastination. ‘Can it wait till morning, my dear? My head is light and I shall soon faint from exhaustion.’
‘Secrets are best shown in the night,’ she said, emphatically. ‘Both Orpheus and Virgil knew this.’
Secrets? Orpheus? Virgil?
I cleared my throat. ‘What sort of secrets do you mean my child?’
‘Have you heard, pairé, of such a thing as a Libro Secretum?’
I sighed. Secrets and books were nothing new. There were books locked away in the repositories of many monasteries, hidden from the eyes of the inquisition, such as those kept in our library; books that did not agree with the dogmas of the Catholics and so were deemed heretical. But what could such an elfin girl know about books in any case? Books were precious and not easy to come by, moreover they rarely fell into the hands of women, as few women could read.
‘Is your secret that you know this book exists?’ I said, peering at her.
‘No…there are many who know that it exists, though it remains unseen.’
‘But you said…didn’t you just say that you have seen it yourself?’
‘I see it always, pairé. In truth, anyone may see it.’
My faculties were bewildered. I changed my mind again – this was no woman, this was a dream apparition and a curious one at that!
‘If anyone can see this book, then it cannot be a secret,’ I pointed out quite logically, knowing that this would surely wake me up since logic had no place in dreams.
‘This reasoning is reserved for ordinary secrets,’ she said, with a polite smile, as if she had read my mind and would put it to rights. ‘But this is not an ordinary book which I shall show you. Reason cannot explain it, only philosophy.’
Philosophy! A love of wisdom! I was pricked in my heart! This word recalled to mind my promise and I sat forward with attention. ‘So, when you say it is not an ordinary book…what do you mean?’
‘It is a book…and no book at all. It is invisible…and yet it is visible to any man, for it is everywhere and nowhere at once. It lives in the very skies, in the cloud libraries of God, but it also lives in the memory of the heart. The question is, do you want to see it, pairé?’
What strange riddle was this? A sudden terrifying thought assailed me. Perhaps she was a sphinx? Would she kill me if I gave her the wrong answer? No, soon I would wake up, I told myself, with my mouth dry and my back aching, for I had fallen asleep thinking again of that infinite library and that book which encompassed all the knowledge of the world.
Having read in some place (who knows where?) that one must ask an apparition its name, if one wishes to dissolve it, I did so.
‘Who I am,’ she said, ‘is of as little importance to what I will tell as the wind is to the perfumes that it carries. But you can call me Lea.’
What a singular dream creature was this that sat before me, with her face so poignant and wise, her voice so perfect, her mien so calm, and her answers so infuriating!
Realising that the stubborn spirit would not be put off, I acquiesced. ‘Well then, Lea…why would the wind choose to carry its scent to me this night, in this of all places, with war all about?’
‘You have willed it so…for you have called me here, pairé.’
I was confounded. ‘How on earth, my dear, did I call you?’
‘You are awake while others are sleeping.’
Perhaps I was awake in my dream but surely not in real life! I resolved that there was nothing more I could do except to go along with the dream and see where it wo
uld lead until I finally woke up.
‘What does the book show?’ I asked.
‘Many things, things that are in the past and those that are also in the future...but the part which I will show you, could be called a Gospel…’
A Gospel no less!
‘Why do we need another Gospel, child, when there are so many? Poor Eusebius was driven mad trying to decide which ones to include in the bible!’ I peered at her. ‘Do you know he nearly didn’t add John’s Gospel…the only eyewitness of the sacrifice of our Lord? The truth is, after he had made his choice of gospels he spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile their differences! No, my dear, we don’t need more gospels only more faith!’
‘But what are differences?’ the apparition said, serenely. ‘The back of your head is different from the front, and yet both back and front belong to you and are needed…is this not true?’
I had to agree that she had a point!
Weary and outwitted, I conceded. ‘Well then child, if the Gospels of Luke and Matthew tell us about Jesus, and the Gospels of Mark and John tell us about Christ…what is there left to tell?’
‘Have you forgotten John’s words: that if all that could be said about the Lord were to be written down, even the world itself could not contain all the books that would be written.’
I nodded for this was so, and yet my poor old head was confounded by so many allusions to libraries and books and gospels, that all I could say was, ‘Go on…go on…’ and wave a hand.
‘It begins with two children, not one.’
‘What? What do you mean two children?’
‘The Gospel begins with the kingly child, the other is a priestly one, each is born at a different time but the kingly child is the reason why the centurion is sat upon his horse.’
‘A centurion…a Roman centurion?’ I said.
‘He rides into Bethlehem to kill the child…’
‘Oh, I see! On behalf of Herod.’
‘Yes.’
‘You are speaking of Jesus, then.’
Fifth Gospel: A Novel (Rosicrucian Quartet) Paperback Page 2
