Siege Perilous

by E. D. Debirmingham

  “Frederick is as bad as the cardinals,” declared the bishop.

  “That’s all for show,” said Lord Peire-Roger. “He has never sent troops against us.”

  “He told Pope Gregory that we are the greatest danger to Christendom.”

  “That’s only because Pope Gregory first accused Frederick himself of that distinction, and Frederick was trying to deflect it,” the lord explained.

  “That does sound like him,” Ocyrhoe volunteered without thinking. All eyes turned to her. “The little that I know of him,” she added hurriedly. “I was only in his presence for a day or so. When I was fleeing Rome, Frederick was camped outside the walls, and I found myself in his camp. Briefly.”

  “And he gave you the cup.”

  She did not like the direction this was going. She could not possibly explain everything to them.

  “I am stewarding it until I receive further instructions.”

  “From Frederick?” asked the bishop suspiciously.

  “From anyone,” said Ocyrhoe.

  “And how will Frederick—or anyone—find you?”

  Ocyrhoe gave him a helpless expression. “I have no idea. I’m stuck with it for the foreseeable future.”

  “Do you think Frederick is seeking you out?” Peire-Roger demanded.

  “Oh, no,” said Ocyrhoe with a pained laugh. “He doesn’t want it either.” She glanced nervously at the cup in Rixenda’s hands. It was glowing. They either didn’t see it or they didn’t care.

  “It’s just a cup,” said Rixenda. She crossed toward Ocyrhoe, and held it out to her. The inside beamed its faint rosy glow, enough to light Rixenda’s gentle, wrinkled face from below. “You do understand that, don’t you, child? It’s just a cup. It has no intrinsic value or power of any kind.”

  Ocyrhoe looked in amazement from the bowl of the cup to the face that was illuminated by it. “Just a cup,” she said tentatively.

  “Yes,” said Rixenda with emphatic reassurance. “No material object is worthy of reverence. If someone has told you otherwise, it is just another hoax of the Church. Do not be burdened with it. You do not seem pleased to carry it. We have no interest in it, but if you wish to sell it, we can find you a buyer. Money is always useful to fugitives.”

  Ocyrhoe again looked from the cup to the face that it was unaccountably illuminating. “All right,” she said uncertainly. “But I do not wish to let go of it now. I am…fond of it.”

  Now Rixenda’s expression was one of sympathy. “It is certainly a lovely cup, but I hope you do not suffer for having that attachment,” she said. She placed the cup in Ocyrhoe’s hand and looked over her shoulder at the bishop and the lord. “Well?” she said.

  The bishop grimaced thoughtfully. “We call this place a refuge, and a sanctuary.”

  “Yes, we do,” said Rixenda.

  Peire-Roger also grimaced. “Rixenda, if she stays, you will take responsibility for her. Find some way for her to earn her food.”

  Rixenda smiled at her in a way that made Ocyrhoe feel she was about to be wrapped in a warm blanket. “I will,” Rixenda said.

  “If I stay, must I become a believer?” the girl asked. “Is it acceptable simply that I do not cross you? Is there a bed for me? Shall I be a servant?”

  Lord Peire-Roger gestured impatiently about at the room. “If we give you a blanket, you may make shift to find a spot on the floor to sleep at night. My own bed is hardly more than that these days.”

  She felt a wave of alarm. To be this close with so many strangers, who believed uncommon things…what mischief might the cup engender?

  “You are welcome to stay in my hut with me. What are your skills, child?” asked Rixenda gently.

  Ocyhroe felt her face pink. “Precious few for this environment, lady. Mine has been a strange life and my skills are equally peculiar. I am…” she considered it. “I am mostly a messenger. Rome is my element, and I am not good for much outside its walls. But I am willing to learn whatever needs doing to earn the right to shelter through the winter. I will not stay beyond my welcome.”

  1243

  HAVERFEST

  CHAPTER 3:

  THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

  “Well,” said Frederick Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, Wonder of the World. He squinted one final time at the scroll in the ambient sunlight, then crumpled the vellum in his hand and tossed it, with calm annoyance, to the marble floor of the porch. “The College of Cardinals has finally selected its papa. It took them long enough. A new day breaks. Let us pray it doesn’t break civilization along with it.”

  Léna, standing tall and serene to the right of his chair, raised one eyebrow.

  “You already knew,” he said, glaring up at her with grudging affection.

  “My messengers are swifter than yours,” she said, with a reassuring smile. “It’s Sinibaldo di Fieschi.”

  “Of course it is,” he said.

  “Now to be known as Pope Innocent IV.”

  Frederick squinted into the sunlight. “I wonder how quickly he will excommunicate me,” he said philosophically.

  “Are you not already excommunicated?”

  “Oh. Perhaps. I don’t keep track anymore.” He gestured to a servant standing at attention by a column on the near side of the porch. “We are waiting on some viands,” he said. “Wine and cheese at the very least. Go to the kitchens and see what is keeping them.”

  “I hear the vote was unanimous, and that he accepted only grudgingly,” Léna mused.

  “I believe both of those things,” said Frederick. “It’s exasperating, trying to control the world when you are formally in power. I’d be much more efficient if somebody else were on my throne and I could machinate behind curtains.”

  “You tried that with Germany, and as I recall it did not work out well for you,” Léna said demurely.

  Frederick grimaced. “Still I wonder if for all his ambition, was Fieschi unhappy to give up hiding in the shadows.”

  “You can’t control the person on the throne if there is no person on the throne.”

  “Yes,” said Frederick, with a sigh. “I learned that in Germany, too. So now Sinibaldo and I are to deal with each other directly.” He considered this. “That should make for an interesting epoch. I must make sure the chroniclers give me all the best quips.”

  “Send for Raphael of Acre.”

  Frederick squinted up at her in confusion. “Raphael? I would hardly call his scribbles a chronicle.”

  “If Fieschi is the Pope, you should send Raphael to Toulouse.”

  For a moment he stared at her, dumbfounded. “Toulouse? Why Raphael? And why Toulouse? Because of the Cathar heretics? Of course I have to keep an eye on the ground wherever Fieschi—Pope Innocent—has an interest, but I have plenty of spies much closer to Toulouse. I shall send some of them.”

  “Raphael of Acre,” she said with simple conviction.

  A pause.

  “Will you condescend to tell me why?” he asked sardonically.

  “A friend of Raphael—one of those who traveled east with him—is said to be in the region. Raphael would be very grateful, I am sure, to receive news of his friend, and will no doubt speed toward Montségur. Why send your own man when you can use someone else who is already going there?”

  Frederick rubbed his ruddy face, his squinting eyes, his thinning, tousled red hair. Brilliant and capable as he was, he never looked much like an emperor, and at the moment he did not feel like one.

  “There is, of course, some other reason for sending Raphael there, which you are choosing not to tell me.”

  “If you insist, Your Majesty.”

  It was, frankly, a relief to know that somebody in spitting distance knew more than he did, and had a strong opinion about what to do. Were it anyone but Léna, he would not take them seriously. Not even his most
valued advisors had half his brains. But Léna matched him thought for thought, and it was relaxing, sometimes, to be bossed about by her.

  “I’ll send for Raphael,” he said. “To hell with waiting for the wine. Let’s take a nap.”

  CHAPTER 4:

  THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN

  For two years, in the strange little world atop the mountain, Ocyrhoe gazed into the cup with frustrated wistfulness, wanting to understand it. By the time she realized everyone here was indifferent to it, she had become accustomed to its presence when she slept. Through the winter nights it was inexplicably warming, and in the summer heat it remained, also inexplicably, cool.

  It was a cup. A simple, silver table-chalice. She knew that. But the mad priest, Father Rodrigo, had changed it somehow when he pinched it from Frederick’s camp table. Suddenly Rodrigo had half of Frederick’s personal guard ready to march with him against the Mongol invaders. The alarmed Emperor immediately sent the priest out into the hills to hide him from the Roman cardinals, with only young Ferenc—and the cup—for company.

  But almost immediately afterward, he ordered Ocyrhoe after them, with instructions to separate the man from the cup and undo the inexplicable alchemy. Tragedy came of it. Yes, she had gotten the cup, but the price had been Rodrigo’s life. She had no choice but to vanish into the hills because Cardinal Fieschi and Senator Orsini wanted her dead in Rome.

  Hardest of all was her sundering from Ferenc—he taking Roderigo’s body back to Frederick’s camp, she taking the cup into the wilderness per Frederick’s orders.

  The cup should have returned to normal when Rodrigo died. It did not. It frightened and confused her, the shimmer the cup still possessed. She wished she had more complete training as a Binder, for she was certain any real Binder—Léna, for example—would understand what to make of its alarming mystery. Often she reached out to Léna in her mind, craving assistance, begging permission to either return to Rome or head to the Emperor’s court. She felt Léna’s presence, so she knew the older woman was aware of her, but the messages she received were not the maternal reassurance she had hoped for. Always she received the impression that she must move onward, outward, away.

  I am a Binder, Ocryhoe had argued. I am not bound to wander aimless, I am bound to deliver messages. If this accursed cup is a message, to whom should I deliver it?

  Léna never replied.

  And so Ocryhoe had spent her free moments in the fortress of Montségur staring into the bowl of the chalice, trying to understand the message.

  The first year she lived here, she was given menial tasks under Rixenda’s supervision, usually to do with Rixenda’s trade of candle-making. When she was free, she often went down into the village at the foot of the mountain. She liked the energy of traders and craftsmen and merchants. It was a far cry from Rome or even Toulouse; still, the hubbub of town life consoled her. But there was nothing for her to do there. She was an outsider, with no useful skills to contribute. Over time she had retreated to the rugged mountaintop and applied herself to becoming accepted in Peire-Roger’s dominion.

  It was a strange little world. The regular denizens of the fortress itself were its two lords; their families and servants; a garrison of a dozen knights and a hundred men at arms; their families and servants; and a handful of faidit—minor lords who had been stripped of their estates by the ever-encroaching French. And of course, their families and servants too.

  But all of them, rulers and ruled alike, were there to support and protect the elite of the so-called Cathar heresy. These were the men and women dressed in the black robes of friars and nuns, who had renounced their attachment to the world. “Good Ones,” they were referred to by those who cherished them, and Bishop Marti was their leader. The Good Ones contributed to the well-being of the mountain settlement that protected them: many of the men were weavers, and some were smiths; many of the women were candle-makers. Good Ones of both sexes were herbalists and healers; farmers and peasants from all over the countryside would bring their ailing kin to them for help. The southwest slope of Montségur saw regular daily traffic up and down to the village.

  The oddest thing about the Good Ones, to Ocyrhoe, was where and how they lived. While they spent much of their daylight hours in the village or fortress—some of their workshops being among the wooden buildings of the courtyard—they actually resided in the small stone shacks Ocyrhoe had seen when she first arrived, shacks she had assumed were storage sheds. These cramped, unadorned huts were clustered on two walled terraces that faced almost directly into the northern wind. The men were on the lower terrace and the women on the upper, nearly a hundred of each sex. Some shared small huts with other Good Ones; some lived alone. Some lived in cave-like recesses bored by nature into the mountainside. When she first arrived, Ocyrhoe had gratefully accepted Rixenda’s offer to stay with her in her hut, because that meant she had a private place to stow the cup.

  She had allowed herself to become civilized; her hair, once untangled, was plaited behind her, and she was given a more feminine tunic that went below her knees. By the second year, she was fully an apprentice in the candle-making enterprise that filled one corner of the tight courtyard; she’d also grudgingly learned to spin wool, as all the women in the fortress did for hours every day. Her small fingers were already both calloused and nimble, and despite her disinterest in it, she’d quickly earned a reputation as the most efficient spinner on the mountain.

  To avoid such tedious women’s work, she had convinced Peire-Roger to use her as a messenger. She demonstrated to him her remarkable ability to recite long passages verbatim days after she had heard them; she clambered up and down the courtyard walls to prove her agility. Unsure at first, he had made her an assistant to their only female messenger, an older Perfect who was going deaf. They usually traveled with at least two soldiers. Within two months, she had overcome her fear of alpine trekking and was racing up and down the secret paths and limestone tunnels, much faster than her mentor or the soldiers.

  Soon she was spending many hours of a week carrying news from Bishop Marti down the mountain to outlying villages, where she would meet with agents from Toulouse or Usson or the Sabarthes mountains. In this way she learned a little of the reason for the Good Ones to be up here, shielded by their supporters, who called themselves Credents, or Believers. Months passed. And seasons.

  She tried not to think about the world beyond the Pyrenees. There were people and places she missed terribly, but she did not know how to reach them. And she still hoped the cup would make its message plain to her.

  One breezy spring evening after a full winter of Ocyrhoe trying to pretend she was not waiting for anything, Peire-Roger left the fortress with three of his knights. He almost never left. They returned two days later with dried blood on their clothes. For days they remained behind the bolted door of the chapel with Bishop Marti and other lords. A chill dread settled over Montségur. The names Count Raimundo and Guillem Arnaud—and the word, “Inquisition”—were whispered fearfully about the keep.

  A full year passed before she fully understood what had happened. By then, she had become the ablest mountain-climber of Montségur, the most deft at moving undetected through the underbrush, for hiding in plain sight, and Peire-Roger now trusted her entirely. He sent her out, with messages or scouting missions, not only unsupervised but unguarded, so to make best use of her speed and stealth. Those few rare hours that she was not shepherding supplies up and down the mountain, or running messages to other Perfecti or Credents, she maintained her secret meditative vigil over the cup.

  That meditation was interrupted one afternoon by a growing rumble in the courtyard. She left Rixenda’s hut, scrambled up the path and through the gate into the courtyard.

  The entire population of Montségur was clustered here, crowded together along with most of the villagers from below. The villagers’ faces were red from tears or anger. The wall-walks were full of
soldiers staring down toward the village with bows strung and arrows ready; everyone else was looking up expectantly at the men-in-arms, anxious and quiet.

  Peire-Roger hollered down from the northern tower. “The troops are led by that French whoreson Hugue de Arcis who has taken over Carcassonne. Also there are pennants from Gascony and the Aquitaine. And the Archbishop of Narbonne.” He spat.

  “Toulouse?” his wife Philippa called up from the yard. “Is the Count of Toulouse with them?”

  “No, thank God for that at least,” said Peire-Roger. “They’ll expect him, but I hope he can stay away.”

  “Foix?” somebody else asked plaintively. “Sure the Count of Foix is not besieging his own kin?”

  “He has in the past,” said a bitter voice from within the courtyard.

  “I don’t see his pennant,” Peire-Roger announced, “but there are troops still arriving.”

  Ocyrhoe examined the crowd. Children were crying in confusion, clinging to their mothers’ skirts; the mothers were turning to husbands or friends for support; everyone was regarding the overstuffed courtyard with the same unspoken thought: there is not enough room for all of us to stay here for long.

  “Don’t worry,” Rixenda said, seeing Ocyrhoe’s face pucker. “We are unassailable here. Most of the men down there are conscripted from local estates. They owe military service to the King of France, but they have no desire to be here; they do not want to see the Good Ones persecuted nor do they want to see France’s power become more entrenched. When their forty days of duty are up, they will go home, and their leaders will be left alone in their army tents.”

  Forty days came and went; soldiers left, but more soldiers came to take their place. The crusaders, as they called themselves, tried to storm the mountainside; the knights and men-at-arms of Montségur showered arrows and stones and debris down on their heads. There was a constant garrison vigil. But the Good Ones continued to weave and spin and make candles and pray. Ocyrhoe helped spirit the villagers down the mountain to other towns for shelter; she helped spirit food and supplies from sympathizers up the mountainside after dark. She even forced herself to memorize the labyrinthine cave and tunnel system within the mountain, although she dreaded tunnels, and many of these were treacherous, requiring rope ladders to move between levels. To the relief of all, the French never found these passages—indeed, for months, they did not seem to consider the possibility of them, keeping their attention trained only on the slopes.