Siege Perilous

by E. D. Debirmingham

  “You’ll see,” said Artal.

  She wanted to argue with his obstinancy, but reserved her energy for standing upright.

  The sentry went back inside. At Ferrer’s nudging, they walked past the tower westward.

  Ocyrhoe made a dismayed noise before she could stop herself. A long bowshot, perhaps two, away up a final incline, at the very highest point of the mountain, was the building she had seen from below. It was a fortress, with a small barbican jutting out toward them as a separate building. The banner of Toulouse—red with a yellow cross—flew atop the donjon, something she could not see from below. To get to the barbican, they would have to walk about five hundred strides up an ascending mountain crest no wider than a large Roman market green, perhaps treble the breadth her favorite childhood slingshot could have hurled a pebble; beyond the crest on either side, the mountain lumbered downward steeply. She kept her hand clenched to Ferrer’s sleeve as they moved, and her trembling muscles shook her entire small frame.

  “Who is in there?” she demanded.

  “The Good Ones,” Ferrer said, reverentially. He gave her a knowing look, but her brief returning stare was blank.

  When they reached the barbican—an unoccupied building similar to the watchtower—there was a final distance to be crossed to the fortress itself. This final trek was far more harrowing than anything so far: the limestone crest between barbican and fortress thinned here to a very narrow passway. It looked as if giants had clawed away at either side of the mountain ridge, so that for the length of two dozen strides, the ridge itself was perhaps three strides across. The peak broadened out again beyond this limestone bridge, and there loomed the fortress. Everything inside Ocyrhoe trembled, and it was hard to breathe. She grabbed Ferrer’s arm again desperately to keep her balance.

  “One gets used to it,” he said, not unkindly, as an icy breeze nudged them from the east. “Look straight ahead at the walls; looking down will make you dizzy.”

  Ocyrhoe nodded, her breath ragged and shallow. She willed her mind to stop telling her they were about to tumble to their deaths. Without looking down, she could not guess how far she would fall before some projecting jut of limestone snapped her spine or dashed in her skull. She tried not to think about that. Instead she looked at the building looming before her.

  The stone walls, gleaming roughly in the winter sun, were nowhere near as impressive as Rome’s defenses, but their presence up here was almost inconceivable. If one of her street-rascal friends had described this to her, she would have laughed it off as exaggeration.

  The ridge widened out just before the fortress’s iron-covered gate. When they reached this islet of land in a sea of mountain air, she sighed, and her muscles relaxed a little, although she could not convince her hand to let go of Ferrer’s sleeve. To their right, a narrow beaten path sloped down alongside the fortress, to a lower stone wall that continued all the way to the northern extreme of the mountain. Over this lower wall she glimpsed dozens of small stone buildings snuggled on a rocky terrace, a higher wall beyond them. Past that last wall was nothing but air. Those must be storage sheds, she decided. But what a peculiar place to store anything.

  Ferrer pounded on the gate, and a porter within opened it almost immediately on whining hinges. The three of them entered a small, stony courtyard, partly in shadow from the southern battlement. It was broadest in the middle, narrowing to either end. Bulges of limestone blended almost seamlessly into manmade stone walls, as if the fortress were growing organically out of the peak. Sturdy wooden buildings filled the yard in rows along each wall; from the hut to her immediate right came the sound of hens clucking. Across the yard, a little to the right and half hidden by the largest wooden building, was a much bigger gate than the one they’d entered; this was the gate used by the people she’d seen going up and down the western slope. At the extreme right of the courtyard, two stone’s throws at most, the limestone bulged up out of the ground and extended upward, in man-made form, to the stone donjon, a keep at least two floors high.

  Within the yard, several armed soldiers scurried between the wooden buildings in the cold, with quick, suspicious glances at the newcomers. Recognizing her captors, they lost interest and returned their attention to their destination. There were soldiers up along the battlement, watching them incuriously.

  A handful of women in simple black habits emerged from one of the smaller buildings and began crossing toward them, as if to exit. Ocyrhoe’s confusion was tinged with alarm: a religious order, up here? To whom were they allied? Ferrer pushed Ocyrhoe’s grip away, and then, together with Artal, immediately knelt on the rocky courtyard ground and bowed three times in the direction of the approaching robed figures. “Bless me, Lord, pray for me,” the two men said in unison, and in unison, the robed women paused to respond: “Lead us to our rightful end. God bless you and lead you to your rightful end.” They continued on out the gate.

  Ferrer and Artal got to their feet as the robed ones passed, with no further attention paid to them. “This way,” said Ferrer gruffly, and took Ocyrhoe by the arm. He pulled her toward the donjon, past smaller buildings, including—from their scents—a bakery and a drying shed for herbs. In the other direction she noticed a smithy with storage sheds beside it, probably for charcoal and wood. An immense amount of industry was squeezed into this little space.

  Wooden steps up to the donjon had been built over a bulge of natural limestone; they walked up these to a wooden door that led them to the first floor. Artal opened the door and nudged Ocyrhoe sharply.

  As the door opened, she heard conversation and noise aplenty within, but by the time it was fully ajar so that she stood backlit and vulnerable, squinting sunblinded into the room, all talk had stopped.

  Inside was another world: dim, warmer, crowded with human figures, pungent. Ocyrhoe was disoriented, to go from such bright cold spaciousness to this claustrophobic setting.

  Her eyes blinked in the dim candlelight—for this spare room was, impossibly, lit by dozens and dozens of candles, an extravagance she could not fathom even in the richest Roman palace. When she could make out more than mere forms, the motley collection of people gathered around trestle tables confused her. There were hundreds of them, in a hall that could comfortably hold only scores. There were women dressed as the nuns outside, of different ages; and bearded men dressed likewise, also of all ages; there were more soldiers; there were a number of lords; most confusingly there were scores of well-dressed ladies and several children, none of whom she’d expect to find inside a mountaintop fortress.

  What was this?

  “Found a spy, milord,” said Artal importantly. She did not give him the satisfaction of arguing.

  From the score of well-dressed men, two of them—each at the head of one table—stood up. They were both dressed in black wool with bright silken decorations embroidered on their hems and cuffs. They were a generation apart in age. The handsome, stormy-looking younger one, with dramatic dark eyes and a bared head of thick black hair, reached out his hand as if summoning them.

  “Bring him to me.”

  “It’s a girl, milord,” said Ferrer, almost as if he were embarrassed for Ocyrhoe’s sake.

  “Bring her to me and I will take her up for questioning.”

  Ocyrhoe felt her gut clench at that, but she did not show any outward resistance. There was no place to which she could flee, and a show of compliance might relax their guard.

  And so Ocyrhoe was paraded between two trestle tables, hundreds of eyes upon her, her satchel clutched tightly under her arm. She tried not to stare, but she felt her eyes linger now and then on unexpected figures: a sickly young woman in pale silks and furs; solemn-faced toddlers holding hands; several serving women, dressed in black, who ate at the table alongside well-dressed matrons three times their age of obviously higher pedigree. Even in a city like Rome, where patricians and urchins walked the same streets sometimes che
ek by jowl, she could never imagine such a disparate lot breaking bread together.

  When they reached the far end of the table, the dark-haired lord gestured imperiously toward a very old, black-robed man near him, and a black-robed woman with a pensive, weathered face. With a jerk of his head he indicated a set of stairs behind him; these two in robes headed toward the stairs, with candles taken from the table. So did three or four young men whom Ocyrhoe assumed must be the lord’s bodyguard, although why he needed a bodyguard against her was beyond imagining. She weighed about as much as his cloak.

  Upstairs was an open room the same size as the one below, empty but for them, with stacks of sleeping rolls and blankets against the walls. The narrow windows—wider than arrow-slits, but not by much—were covered with parchment against the winter chill. The room was dim beyond the candles they brought with them.

  “Stand there,” the lord ordered, pointing to a spot near the door. Ocyrhoe walked there, the satchel clutched to her side. The lord and his party gathered in a semi-circle, staring at her. Again she wondered if she’d made the right decision by not running from the men.

  “Go,” said the lord gruffly to Ferrer and Artal, with a wave of his hand. “Or eat if you like, and then go.”

  Artal and Ferrer lingered a moment, clearly hoping for a reward without wanting to be so rude as to request one.

  “They’ve already taken my horse,” Ocyrhoe informed the lord. “They require no further compensation for their efforts.”

  “Milord Peire-Roger, hers is the accent of Rome,” warned Ferrer, as he headed down the stairs.

  For a moment, the concert of secular and religious faces stared at her in the candlelight, and she stared back at them, pretending not to feel alarm. She had no idea what religious order this was, but all orders traced their chain of command back to the Vatican. Which meant—since the death of the Pope—to the College of Cardinals. Which meant, in effect, to Cardinal Sinibaldo di Fieschi. Who wanted the cup. And wanted her dead.

  “Well?” demanded Peire-Roger. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  Ocryhoe shrugged. “Those fellows grabbed me. I was minding my own business.”

  “You were minding your own business alone in the foothills of the Pyrenees?”

  “I was seeking lost family members,” she finally said. That was, in a way, not untrue.

  “And what would compel your Roman family members to migrate to these heretical lands?”

  Ocyhroe blinked. “Heretical?” A terrible dread filled her. “Are you implying I am a heretic? Are you Dominicans?” she asked the elderly man in black robes. “Is this the Inquisition?”

  Everyone in the room exchanged glances.

  “Are you mocking us?” asked the lord. “This is Montségur.”

  “That name means nothing to me, I apologize for my ignorance.”

  A shifting of weight and attention among all assembled. More exchanged looks.

  “This is the land of the so-called Cathars,” announced Peire-Roger. Ocyrhoe had heard that word before, but could not remember where, or what it meant. “The Cathars are called heretics,” the lord was saying. “The Catholic Church wants to destroy all Cathars and all their supporters. What do you think of that?” he demanded, studying her.

  “Are…are you, you in robes, sir, lady, are you Cathars, then?” Ocyrhoe said.

  “This is Montségur,” said the bearded, black-habited elder, a hint of impatience in his sharp tenor voice. “Of course we are Cathars. I am Bishop Bertran En Marti.”

  Ocryhoe gasped with the realization: “Then you’re heretics yourselves! So you are not in allegiance with Rome?” A brief laugh escaped her. “That is the best news I have heard in weeks. I thought I was doomed.” Shut up, she told herself, but the relief was too visceral for her to entirely suppress it.

  Now even more bemusement from the assembly. “Why doomed?” Marti demanded.

  “I’m on the run from Church officers,” she risked offering. “That’s why I left Rome.” She held her right hand up and pressed it to her heart. “I give you my oath, by all that’s holy.”

  The old man frowned. “Do you believe in the need to perform an oath?” he interrupted. “Is your word not intrinsically honest?”

  That stumped Ocyrhoe, oath-breaker that she was. “I do not know how to answer that,” she admitted.

  “Gently, Your Eminence,” the robed women advised. She had a calm voice, and her wide-set eyes, peering out of her wimple on her round face, were the kindest in the room. “She need not know our precepts to prove that she is not an enemy.”

  “You are too trusting, Rixenda,” said His Eminence. Then back to Ocyrhoe: “Who are you?”

  She pursed her lips. “My name is Ocyrhoe. I am really nobody. My family were destroyed by Senator Orsini of Rome—”

  “For their beliefs?”

  “For their identity. We are an unusual race. Tribe. I’m the only one left. Orsini and the cardinals want me dead—it’s true I am not a good Catholic—and so I fled as well.” That was true enough; she was simply leaving out the cup, with its attendant farce and tragedy.

  “But why here?” asked Rixenda.

  Ocyrhoe made a helpless gesture. “Random chance. I swear to you.”

  “Again, your oath is meaningless,” insisted the bishop. Having no response to that, Ocryhoe pressed on: “I am from a city, I have no idea how to negotiate the countryside. I just wanted to be safe. I was in Toulouse until a few days ago.”

  The bishop looked thoughtful. “You left Rome for Toulouse? Because you knew an outcast might find safety in the land of heretics?”

  “I had no idea where I was going, and no idea where I’d arrived. But I confess I am very glad to be among you. I have not felt safe for months.”

  “Why did you leave Toulouse?” Marti demanded.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I wanted to find someone,” she said carefully. “I became very lost. As I said, I am inept outside a city.” She thought of the chasm of cold empty space outside the fortress. Four hundred feet down lay the vibrant little village, surrounded by barely inhabited foothills, and below that, sparsely inhabited plains, and beyond those, the city of Toulouse, where she dare not return because of the cup’s unpredictable power. Winter was coming.

  “May I stay?” she said. She was surprised by how pleading her own voice sounded. “Through the winter? I’m not good for much, but I’d make myself useful somehow.”

  Peire-Roger and Bishop Marti exchanged looks. After a moment, the bishop muttered to the lord, “She is hounded by the Catholics much as we are; she is closer to being one of us than one of them.”

  Peire-Roger huffed with annoyance. “Show us your possessions, that we may know you,” he said, and gestured to the satchel.

  At this, her stomach sank. They would see the cup—worse, they would sense the cup’s power, she was certain. She did not quite manage to keep the flicker of worry from her face, and they all noticed it. Peire-Roger took two steps forward crossly, grabbed the bag from her with a warning look, pulled open the drawstrings, and dumped the contents onto the floor before Ocyrhoe.

  The silver cup clanged out on top of the meager other items—some coins, jerky, a few strips of leather, a carrot for the horse, some rags. The cup rolled briefly and was still. Please don’t glow, she begged. On rare occasions it emitted heat and light, usually when she was thinking hard about it. She tried not to think about it now.

  That, of course, made her think about it.

  And it was glowing. She saw the rosy luster in the dish reflect off the wooden floor of the room, and add warmth to the cold, dim-lit space. Alarmed, she looked up at all of them, frantically trying to think of some excuse for possessing such an item.

  It had been merely a chalice from a wealthy table, but events in Rome—events that even now she did not understand�
�had transformed it, as if by alchemy, into an object of occasional but mesmerizing power. Once it had been wrenched from the madman who wielded it, Emperor Frederick had charged Ocyrhoe to keep it safe from mischief, and safe from those who would do mischief with it—especially his nemesis and hers alike, Cardinal Sinibaldo di Fieschi.

  Peire-Roger gestured to one of his guards, who knelt and held his candle closer to the pile. He picked up the cup and handed it to his lord. Peire-Roger considered it a moment, then shrugged and handed it off to Rixenda. “That’s a fine cup for such a scrap of a thing as you are,” said Rixenda, pleasantly.

  “Stolen, no doubt,” muttered Peire-Roger.

  “It was given to me,” Ocyrhoe said nervously. “I was told to keep it for somebody. I must hold on to it.”

  “We are not going to take it from you,” the bishop said condescendingly. “We do not prize such trifles. Material objects are a necessary evil, but we do not covet the possession of any of them.”

  Peire-Roger picked up each other item in turn—there were few things enough—and exchanged a look each time with the bishop. Then he dropped each back to the floor. Everyone nodded their head in passive dismissal: they saw nothing suspicious in her bag.

  She tried to mask her confusion at their indifference to the cup. Did they not see the glow?

  “For whom are you holding the cup?” asked Bishop Marti.

  Oh, damn, thought Ocyrhoe. “For…” She tried to think tactically. Church and Emperor were at loggerheads, and these people were not on the side of the Church. Hopefully that put them in collusion with the Emperor.

  “Out with it, daughter,” Marti demanded. “If we are to house you in our midst there must be absolute candor between us. Hide nothing.”

  That was impossible, she knew. But she did not want to raise their suspicions. “It was given to me by Fredrick Hohenstaufen. The Holy Roman Emperor,” she said, almost apologetically.

  Their sober faces grew more sober. None of them seemed surprised or curious that a girl in rags would possess a gift from the most powerful man in Europe.