by Richard Reed
“Why did they run away?” queried Philippa.
“They feared the Romans would crucify them, too. Do you remember how when Peter was challenged, he thrice denied that he knew the Lord?”
“So why did Jesus choose Peter to lead the Church?”
“He didn’t, Philippa. At least, not exclusively. I’m afraid many of the gospels have been changed and added to over the years to consolidate the power of the Church. Rome wanted a Bible without room for contradiction, so they simply threw out those texts that differed from their agreed position, and excommunicated anyone who dared continue to use them. Take those verses in the gospel of John – the Catholic gospel, not the Cathar one – in which Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him? They were added later to counteract Peter’s denial of Jesus. And that passage in John where Jesus intervenes to save an adulterous woman from being stoned to death? That was added later, too. And although the woman wasn’t named, they no doubt hoped people would link it in their minds to the Madeleine – which many did.
“Our Lord said he wanted Peter to be a cornerstone of the Church, but a building has four corners. He was never meant to be the exclusive leader after Jesus’s death. Mary, John, Peter and Paul – they were meant to be the four leaders of the new Church. Peter’s role was to preach to his fellow Jews; Jesus knew his limitations. Paul, a more educated man, had the role of converting the Gentiles – principally the Greeks; the philosophers whose ideas have shaped the civilised world. Mary and John were to focus on the spiritual side; to explain Jesus’s higher teachings to those who would listen. But it didn’t happen that way. The power of Rome was too great. Constantine saw the chance to unify the empire under one god, with himself as the Church’s ultimate leader. And now the Bishops of Rome, who claim their role is descended directly from Peter, are trying to impose their version of Christianity on everyone else. In fact, the first Bishop of Rome was not Peter at all – there is not even any evidence he went to Rome – but a Briton called Linus, son of King Caractacus.
“Don’t think we are the first ‘heretics’ to be persecuted; we are not. Many others have been put to death by their fellow Christians in the name of Christ since they first decided what to put in their Bible – and more importantly, what to leave out.” Her throat tightened as she thought of the horrific suffering she had witnessed, multiplied many times over the centuries.
“And so, ma petite, that is why you learn what you learn; that is why we seek refuge among the Cathars, who respect us and care for us. Their truth is not the whole truth, but the parfaits follow the Lord’s teachings more closely than any corrupt Catholic cleric. And as long as we have them to protect us, the ultimate knowledge you and I carry with us will be kept safe for future generations.”
* * * * *
Early that spring, Benoît heard the news he had been dreading. The dreaded inquisition, set up to extract confessions from the Cathar faithful four years earlier, was redoubling its efforts to bring the people of the Languedoc back into the Catholic fold. They had the choice of confessing their heresy willingly, confessing under torture, or dying for their faith. For the simple peasants and even the merchants in the towns, there really was no choice. Despite the Cathar belief that death was a release from an evil world, it was not easy to give up life when faced with the unknown.
“Between them, the Pope and King Louis are determined to exterminate us,” Benoît said wearily one evening, after Philippa had been put to bed.
“The final solution: the Pope gets his flock back and Louis gains control of the Languedoc,” said Corba. “Will we be safe even at Montségur?”
“It is more remote, and better protected. Besides, you will be with your husband, and I will be with my brothers and sisters in faith. Better to die together than alone.”
“Better not to die at all!” reprimanded Corba sharply. “Have you forgotten my bloodline? I fear not for myself, but now that Esclarmonde has chosen to become a parfaite, Philippa must be kept safe, at all cost. The message must be kept alive.”
“Montségur is the safest place to be. If things don’t go well, we can smuggle you over the border to Aragon. King Louis has no power there. The alternative is for you both to flee there now. But I cannot come with you – my place is with my fellow Cathari.”
“And my place is with my family,” said Corba quietly.
They left at the end of the week, with just two men-at-arms. Roger Catala had tried to insist on a larger escort, but Benoît had categorically refused. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,” he said. “Two armed men are sufficient to ward off robbers; any more and we become a target for the king’s men.”
They rode across the flank of the Pic d’Estable, which towered over Puylaurent, and skirted the main highway at Axat to take a tiny track that led up into the mountains. The highway, a quicker route, would have taken them close to the former Cathar stronghold at Puivert, which had fallen to De Montfort’s men at the start of the crusade.
The mountain track – so narrow they had to ride single file – followed a raging stream through a narrow, steeply wooded valley that had gouged its way through the massif west of Axat. They made good progress, however, and spent the night at a small village called Joucou, where they found lodgings at a farmhouse.
In all her wanderings, Corba had never failed to find a warm welcome in the Cathar homesteads. They had now endured two decades of persecution and were a close-knit community, used to the comings and goings of wandering parfaits, bringing their gospel and teaching the true word of the Lord. The faydits, too; the dispossessed nobles who had refused to recant their faith, were made welcome under the roofs of many a simple commoner – though Cathar society was much more equal than under the Catholic nobility.
It was but a few hours’ riding the next morning until the rocky outcrop of Montségur came into view on the horizon, the 400-foot limestone pog pointing dramatically skyward like a finger, a reminder of the heavenly realm so desperately sought by the beleaguered Cathars who fled to its sanctuary.
“Look, Philippa,” said Corba excitedly. “The château of Montségur. We will be there by nightfall.”
“It looks scary,” said Philippa.
“Nonsense! It’s a magnificent place – the views are even better than Puylaurent. And you will get the chance to meet your father, at last.”
“How do I know he’ll like me?” she asked, diffidently.
“Trust me, he adores you.”
“How do you know? He’s never seen me.”
“Yes, he has – he came to see you when you were very little. Don’t you remember? He has asked about you many times in his letters, ma petite. And don’t forget your sister, Esclarmonde, will be there, too.”
Philippa stared at the distant hill, a faraway look in her eyes. “I don’t like it,” she said stubbornly. “Something bad is going to happen, I can tell.”
Chapter 13
Time dragged as they waited for darkness to fall, and the temperature started to drop rapidly. As they sat in silence on the cold stone floor, Rachel couldn’t stop herself from shivering. “Wish I’d brought my iPod,” she said at length.
“Patience isn’t your strong suit, is it?”
She jumped as a strange noise echoed through the church. “What the hell was that?”
“Don’t ask me. You know what it’s like with old buildings – you often get creaks and groans as the timbers expand and contract with the change in temperature.”
“A typical answer from a scientist.”
“It’s what I do.”
She snorted.
Night finally began to fall, and as darkness enveloped the room Rachel began to feel even more jittery. Her imagination was working overtime, but it was more than that. There was a presence here; something malevolent. She could feel it pressing in on her skull; a darkness; an eternal darkness. Someone or something didn’t want her to be here tonight. Her skin began to crawl and her heart raced.
“David!”
“Can we start digging now, please? I don’t think I can take any more of just sitting here doing nothing.”
Without waiting for an answer, Rachel clicked on her torch and a beam of brilliant white light cut through the gloom.
“For God’s sake, Rachel, keep that pointed at the floor – someone might see it through the window!”
Rachel lowered the torch to the debris-strewn floor. “Fine,” she said coldly. “Now let’s clear this crap off the floor and get to work. We’ll take it in shifts. You can start, since you’re holding the shovel.”
“Whatever happened to equality?”
“Can it, David,” she said, struggling to contain her nerves. “We haven’t got long – just get on with it.”
David took the brush and gently swept aside the detritus of years of neglect – dust, leaves, cobwebs and bird droppings – revealing the hard dirt floor underneath, embedded with lumps of stone and old tiles.
“I’m guessing this had a tiled floor at some stage,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind betting it’s not just Cholet who’s been digging this place up. The question is, where do we begin?”
“Cholet reported seeing a relieving arch in the outer wall of the church,” said Rachel. “So I guess that’s the obvious place to start.”
This time it was David’s turn to snort, but he pulled an archaeologist’s trowel from his jacket pocket and started breaking up the surface in the corner of the room, digging out the rubble as he went. Although the surface was hard, the ground a couple of inches down was soft and crumbly, and it wasn’t long before he had loosened an area roughly three-foot square. “That was easier than I thought,” he observed. “Let’s hope the rest is just as straightforward.”
He set to work once more, and soon a mound of earth was piling up in front of them.
“Right, your go,” said David sotto voce, picking up the shovel from the floor and handing it to her.
“You’ve hardly started!” she hissed. “Go on, get digging.”
David put his foot on the top of the shovel blade and tested the soil. The blade bit easily into the ground, and he hoiked out a spadeful of loose sand-earth mix. “This is too good to be true,” he remarked. “Cholet’s mixed sand with this backfill to make re-excavation easier. He must have been intending to come back.”
“He did,” observed Rachel. “But for reasons we will never understand, he didn’t do any digging in here.”
David grunted and continued his excavations. It wasn’t long before a large pile of spoil had formed between them.
“What’s that?” whispered Rachel.
“What?”
“Over there, near the top edge of the hole – it looks like a piece of wood.”
David scraped along the side of the trench with his trowel.
“You’re right. Looks fairly modern – well at least, within the last 150 years… Oak, I would think, or it wouldn’t have lasted in this damp soil.” He pulled a paintbrush out of his top pocket and started dusting along the side of the timber. “Shine the light a bit closer, will you? Ah-ha! The earth reveals its secrets! Look – can you see those rebates, one on each side? They would be for hinges. This must be part of the framework for a trapdoor. I’m surprised Cholet missed that – I was beginning to think he was quite switched on.”
“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he left it out of his report for a reason.”
“Then why mention the relieving arch?”
“A throwaway mention, perhaps. No-one would have believed him if he said he found nothing under the Secret Room. So he just gave enough vague information to satisfy people’s curiosity, without giving too much away. It gave him the excuse to come back later – but someone or something stopped him from digging in here again.”
“I’m beginning to agree with you – there seems to be some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth going on here.” David resumed his digging. “Here we go,” he said at length. “There’s the top of the arch Cholet mentioned.” More and more of the arch slowly came into view, though the stone wall continued underneath it. David stood up to take a rest and looked askance at the stonework. “I’m not sure about this being a relieving arch, you know,” he said slowly. “That’s an arch above an arch, to spread the load; something the architect plans into the building. But the stonework underneath this is just rubble. It looks to me more like infill – someone has blocked up an old doorway. Look, you can see a smooth vertical line of faced stonework going downwards on both sides of the arch, then this jumble of rubbish in between.”
He paused, hand on shovel, scratching his head. “Hang on a minute – I’ve got it! You know a couple of weeks ago we found the edge of what looked like some steps in the main trench? I didn’t want to waste time, since we were getting so close to the wall of the church, but supposing there was originally a staircase outside the church, leading down into the crypt? After all, this was originally a manorial chapel – it’s not unusual to have an external entrance in that situation, so the nobility could come and admire their ancestors’ tombs without having to go through the church.”
“Brilliant, David!” enthused Rachel. “You’re a genius – at least when it comes to archaeology.”
“Thanks – I think.”
“So what does that tell us? Obviously Saunière originally got down into the crypt through the tomb he found in front of the old altar – but when he realised what he had discovered, he had to find an entrance where no-one could see him come and go. This blocked-up doorway must have been obvious from inside the crypt. It gave him the perfect opportunity – he built the Secret Room right over the top of it, then moved the altar inside the church to hide the original entrance from prying eyes.”
“It’s beginning to add up,” agreed David. “Right, back to work.”
“Do you want me to have a go?”
“Be my guest,” said David wearily, handing her the shovel and climbing out of the hole.
Rachel clambered down and starting digging, but the trench was getting so deep she found it hard to lift the spoil over the lip. “We need a bucket,” she observed.
“I’d already figured that one out. But as you’ve probably noticed, there isn’t one to hand.”
“Give me your jacket.”
“What?”
“Just give me your jacket!”
“So you can fill it up with mud?”
“It’s not mud. Anyway, do you want to get in the crypt or not?”
David grudgingly removed his parka, and Rachel zipped it up, folded in the hood, and lay the bottom open in front of her. Soon it was bulging with spoil, which she heaved up to David. They kept up the process until around three feet of stonework was exposed under the arch. “You’re right – it’s just in-fill,” said Rachel, poking the shovel blade into the pointing. “But the mortar’s quite hard, and this shovel is way too unwieldy.”
David pulled a long screwdriver out of his pocket, its tip worn almost to a point. “Try this.”
“What else have you got stuffed in your pockets?” asked Rachel in astonishment.
“I wouldn’t be much of an archaeologist if I didn’t come well prepared. I’ll save the bullwhip for later.”
“You’re not exactly Harrison Ford, you know. So don’t get any ideas.” She took the screwdriver and started to claw out the pointing, but it was slow progress.
“Here, let me.”
Rachel gladly pulled herself out of the pit and let David go to work once more. His powerful arms, acclimatised to long days working in archaeological trenches, soon started to lever out chunks of mortar, which proved quite soft once the hard outer crust had been broken away. “Once we’ve got two or three stones out, the rest will be easy,” he muttered between clenched teeth, as he drove the blade between the stones.
Eventually he had loosened one stone enough to make it wobble. “Assuming we’re right, and there’s a void behind here, this should push right through,” said David. He tried shoving the rock with his
hands, but the six-inch piece of limestone refused to budge.
“OK, time for brute force and ignorance,” he said. He stood back as far as he could within the confines of the small pit, lifted up his foot and pushed hard on the stone with heel. It still wouldn’t budge, so he kicked with his heel time and again until the stone abruptly disappeared from view in a cloud of dust, revealing an inky black darkness beyond.
Encouraged by his success, David set to work again feverishly, gouging out the pointing from the surrounding stones. “Right. Let’s see if we can make this any bigger,” he said, wiping the beads of sweat from his head.
Again, he pushed himself back and gave the stonework a kick. There was a little movement, but nothing else. The rocks appeared to be jammed together by their own weight. Exasperated, he pulled his leg back as far as he could and gave the wall an almighty stomp. The result was more dramatic than either of them could have predicted. With a echoing rumble and a cloud of dust, the top part of the wall underneath the arch tumbled inwards, revealing the straight edges of what had obviously once been a doorway.
For a moment they froze, terrified someone might have heard the noise.
“There’s no way people in the village didn’t hear that,” whispered Rachel.
David put his finger to his lips, and they waited, but there was complete silence, save for the sound of their own breathing.
“We must have got away with it,” he whispered back. “I’ve heard people are always digging around the village looking for gold – apparently, one treasure hunter even used dynamite. I guess they must get used to strange goings-on. Right – hand me the torch. I’m going in.”
David squirmed his way through the opening and shone the torch inside. Through the cloud of slowly settling dust he could see that he was hanging over the top of a stairway descending underneath the church. He pulled out of the opening and handed back the torch to Rachel. “There’s a staircase behind here. I’m going to need to go in feet-first so I can drop down inside. Once I’m in, hand me the torch and then you can follow me down.”
