‘It is you, isn’t it?’
She nodded.
‘You are the reason . . . I came to the Pays d’Oc.’
‘I do not understand you, seigneur.’
‘A wise woman told me you . . . were a great healer. My son was sick. I thought you might save him. But he’s . . . but he’s dead now. It seems you saved me instead.’
‘God saved you. All I did was pray for you.’
‘Then God bewilders . . . me. Why would He save me?’
‘It is not for us to know God’s mind.’ She put a hand to his forehead. ‘You have lost the fever. Your breathing is better.’ She held his head and gave him a sip of water.
‘Where am I?’ he said.
‘This place is called Simoussin.’
‘What is it? Is it a castle?’
‘A cave. A cave – and a cathedral.’
‘How did . . . I get here?’
‘The Viscount’s soldiers found you. They said you attacked the entire Host single-handed.’
‘Is this another dream?’ He looked around. There were hundreds of people in the cavern, seated on the ground, lying down, eating, talking. Yet everything seemed orderly. The shouts and laughter of children echoed around the vaulted roof.
As Fabricia had said, a cavern and a cathedral. ‘I had chosen my day to die. Why am . . . I here?’
‘No one chooses their day to die. It is chosen for them.’
‘Did the knight with the red beard escape also?’
‘You can ask Trencavel’s men yourself when they return. I never ask how you men try to kill each other. It is of no interest to me.’
‘Who are all these people?’
‘Some are from Béziers, some from Saint-Ybars. They have come to try and get away from the soldiers.’
He caught her wrist. ‘Is it true that . . . you can heal? Did . . . you heal me?’
‘I gave you herbs and my prayers. Sometimes people get well, and sometimes they don’t. It is not up to me.’
‘How badly am I wounded?’
‘When you came here we thought you were dying.’
‘But now I . . . am alive.’
‘As God wills it.’ She tried to wrench herself free but he held on. ‘You are very beautiful,’ he said. ‘I expected a . . . hag with chicken bones in her hair, smelling of comfrey and cowslip.’
‘I bathed this morning. I washed out all the chicken bones. They were starting to itch.’
He smiled. ‘I have something important to . . . tell you.’ He let her go, exhausted from this small exertion and his hand dropped back to his side.
‘Tell me then.’
‘I found . . . your mother and father.’
Fabricia caught her breath. ‘Where? They are alive and well?’
‘They are alive. Thanks to the valour of . . . the men I rode with. They were attacked by crusaders but survived. They are on their way to a place . . . they called Montaillet.’
‘You talked to them?’
‘Of course. They told me you were at a monastery called Montmercy. It was where we were . . . headed when we were ambushed.’
‘It’s true. I left the monastery a week ago. I was going to return to the village but then I discovered that the crosatz were there, and I came here. I thought my poor parents were dead.’
‘I can assure you they are very much . . . alive. They wanted me to tell you this.’
‘Thank you for this news. You cannot know what this means to me.’
‘It was my pleasure to bring it . . . to you. By the way, my name is Philip, Baron of Vercy.’
‘I know who you are,’ she said and then moved away to tend to others.
He watched her tend the sick and the injured. There must have been two or three score, lying on the sand near the entrance.
Fabricia Bérenger was long-limbed and green-eyed and flame-haired; she wore a scarf around her hair and a plain brown tunic. There were mittens on her hands, even though it was high summer, and she had a pronounced limp. But this did not detract from her beauty; it made her only more fascinating. There was a serenity about her every small movement he had only ever seen in one other woman, and that was his wife.
‘So look at this! It seems some men are impossible to kill!’
Philip looked up; it was the fresh-faced knight with the one green and the one blue eye.
‘You should be dead, my friend.’ He crouched down and offered his hand. ‘My name is Raimon Perella, I am seneschal to the Viscount Trencavel.’
‘You were the one who . . . brought me here?’ Philip said. ‘I owe you a debt of . . . thanks.’
‘Not me, that healer woman. I thought you were as good as dead. Once a man coughs up that much blood he is stiff and cold within the hour. Lucky for you she was here.’ Raimon pulled up Philip’s tunic. ‘Look at that! If it wasn’t for the hauberk, he would have cut you in half.’
Philip ran a finger gingerly over his ribs. There was a bruise all down his right side, purple and yellow.
‘You are either the bravest man I ever met or the maddest. Did you think you were going to defeat them all? Still, I was grateful for the distraction you provided. I doubt our ambush would have been as successful without you.’
‘What happened to the knight with . . . the red . . . beard?’
‘I saw no such man, at least not among the dead we left there. Was this a personal matter, then?’
Philip nodded. ‘Yes, it was.’
‘You are an òme de paratge then. A man of honour. And a northerner, too! I did not think the two went together. Why are you not with the crosatz?’
‘This crusade is the Pope’s . . . war, not God’s. I came here on my own account. Do you have my . . . horse? Leyla. She’s a big Arab mare.’
‘Of course we have your horse, we are men of honour too, not horse thieves. There is another cave, further down the mountainside, where we keep the animals. She is safe there, fed and watered. When you are well, you can take her and ride back to Burgundy, if that’s what you wish.’
‘And what of the . . . Host?’
‘The crosatz have invested Carcassonne. Those of us left will fight them here in the Montagne Noir. When winter comes, they will have had enough and go home. And then we will go back to Carcassonne and Béziers and kick the rest of the bastards out.’ He clapped Philip on the shoulder, making him wince. ‘Good luck, my friend. Till my dying day, I shall never forget the sight of one man riding against two score. I wish you were fighting for us! Dieu vos benesiga!’ He strode out of the cave.
Philip took stock. His wrist was still stiff and swollen, his ankle too. But he had had enough of lying here like a cripple. He eased himself upright and then slowly climbed to his feet. He looked around. A cave and a cathedral, was that what she had called it? An apt description, for the ceilings were high and arched and every small sound echoed as if he was in a church. But instead of marble or flagstones, the floor of this cathedral was soft white sand. It was bigger than any church he had ever visited. He could not even see the back of the cave, the flickering of torches and cook fires seemed to stretch back hundreds of paces into the dark. The tarred limestone ceilings were supported by heavy timber beams that had been driven deep into the rock walls, in places to the height of half a dozen men or more. This cave must have been here a very long time.
‘You should be resting,’ a voice said.
‘Fabricia,’ he said.
She made him sit down again. She was holding an earthenware bowl. ‘Here, drink this,’ she said. It was a broth of barley and vegetables, the first food he had eaten in days. It took just one sip of it to realize how hungry he was. He brought the bowl up to his lips and thought about nothing else until the last drop of it was gone.
‘Thank you,’ he said when he had done, and handed her back the bowl. He was suddenly embarrassed for her to have seen his raw hunger.
‘How long since you have eaten?’
‘A long time. No, wait. I think I had a grasshopper for breakfast
two mornings ago.’
Two men, dressed in black robes, ducked their heads as they entered. They looked like starved crows: high cheekbones, pale and bony. ‘Who are they?’
‘They are bons òmes.’
‘Heretics?’
‘Yes, heretics. The ones the Pope in Rome lives in such terror of.’
‘They don’t look . . . like much.’
‘Well, they are just men. What did you expect?’
‘And you . . . are you a heretic, Fabricia Bérenger ?’
‘No, I am good Catholic. But I have lived side by side with bons òmes and those who follow them all my life and I will tell you this, they are better men than any priest I ever met, and they will certainly be in heaven a thousand years before any bishop.’
‘I had expected something . . . more formidable.’
They had dark eyes, long black hair, twisted rope belts. He had heard they were all sodomites and Devil-worshippers, and they certainly looked the part.
They knelt to pray over someone on the other side of the cave. He saw that they each had a scroll of parchment attached to their black robes. The Gospel of John, or so he had been told. Possession of the gospel could get a man burned at the stake in Burgundy. He wondered what might be in God’s book that priests did not want him to know.
‘Seigneur, did you really come all this way just to find me?’
‘I did.’
‘And instead you somehow picked a fight with the fifty crosatz.’
‘By that time I had discovered my son was dead.’
Her face changed, as if a candle had been snuffed out in her eyes. ‘I am very sorry. So – does killing assuage your grief?’
‘The man I fought put out my squire’s eyes and as good as killed him. It was a matter of honour.’
‘I have never seen honour in murder, only horror and grief. But you are a knight, seigneur, and I am just the daughter of a church-builder so I am sure you know better.’
He caught hold of the hem of her robe. ‘If I had got here soon enough, could you have saved my son?’
She shook her head. ‘I am just an ordinary woman. I can save no one.’
‘Then why do people think you can?’
‘I don’t know, seigneur. Perhaps because they want to.’ She jumped up.
‘Where are you going? Have I offended you somehow? It was not my intention.’
‘You are a warrior, seigneur, a man of violence. It is not you that offends me, but your calling. Tell me, what will you do now that God has made you well again, when you should be dead of your wounds?’
‘I will find this devil with the red beard and I shall settle my account with him.’
‘And then?’
‘There is no “and then”. He is a knight and he has four score men at his back. Even should I succeed in my vengeance – and I shall – his men will kill me.’
‘And when you are both dead, your friend will have his eyes back and come out of the grave? No? Then what is the point?’
‘It is a knight’s duty to take up arms to protect his family and his property and his king. And most of all – his honour.’
‘And his God?’
‘Sometimes that.’
‘As the crosatz fought for God’s honour at Béziers and at Saint-Ybars? How can there ever be peace while everyone is fighting for God? In my experience, seigneur, men use God as an excuse to do as they wish. Though I am Catholic, I believe as these bons òmes do, that to kill in any circumstance is a sin.’
‘Yet you healed me.’
‘As I have told you, I did not heal you. I only prayed for you. I am glad you are well.’
‘But if you despise me so, why did you pray for me?’
She did a remarkable thing; she crouched down and searched his face with her fingertips, as if she was looking for some small secret that had been written there. Her green eyes locked on his. ‘What do you want, Philip?’
‘What do I want? I want to know what it all means. I am looking for something that will explain to me what has happened to me and to my life. I was ready to die, eager for it even. God took my wife and my son and my best friend. Yet still He has kept me alive and I do not understand His purpose. None of this makes sense to me. Is there a reason to it or just random good fortune? Is there a God in His black heaven laughing at us or is there truly some sense to my life? That is what I want – I want to know the answer to this before I die.’
She took his hand. ‘Come with me,’ she said.
LIX
FABRICIA CUPPED HER hand over the candle to shield it from the draughts. ‘The caves were cut from the mountains back in the time of the Roman emperors,’ she said. ‘They were looking for gold.’
The vast cavern tapered along its length to a single narrow tunnel. It was evidently well used for it was reinforced in several places with stout timbers, and torches burned in iron sconces along the walls.
And then: ‘By God’s holy blood!’
He had experienced something like this, once, when he walked into the new cathedral they were building in Paris. And yet this was a dozen times the size of it. It was as if God Himself had hollowed out the mountain with His fist, like a child scooping the bread out of a loaf and leaving just the crust.
Limestone walls, blackened by centuries of smoke, rose to a ceiling lost to eternal night. Waves of marbled rock were backlit by a thousand candles; rock crystal gleamed like stars. Slick calcite pillars rose from the shadows to form the pews and pillars of a church of living chalk.
A sun and a silver disc of moon had been painted on the marble wall at the far end of the cave. Below it there was a table with a white mantle prepared as an altar. It was silent at first, save for the slow dripping of water, but then he heard the murmur of voices from the tunnel as more people followed them into the cavern; at first a handful, then two score, then a hundred, then a hundred more. None spoke above a whisper but in this perfect cathedral of rock every murmur echoed a dozen times.
Philip paused, clutching his ribs, getting his breath back. ‘Who are . . . these people?’ he said. ‘Are they all . . . heretics?’
‘They would not call themselves that, seigneur. They are crezens – believers.’
‘And what is it they . . . believe?’
‘It is what they do not believe that sets them apart, seigneur. They do not believe God made the world. They believe it was the Devil, whom they call Rex Mundi, the King of the World, and that he is God’s equal and that the world is his creation. Everything we see around us is there to make us forget that we are, in fact, pure spirit and cannot perish. They say there is no hell after we die, that in fact it is this world that is hell. They also believe that everything we touch or see is inherently evil and that the soul’s journey is not one of redemption, but of elevation, and that all souls must stay here, migrating from body to body, until the day they learn to yearn once again for the stars.’
‘They think . . . this world is hell?’
‘They say hell is not a place you go to after you die, it’s the place you go to when you’re born. That is why God cannot help us here, despite all our prayers, as this is the Devil’s realm. All murder is a sin and even eating meat is wrong, because it means the killing of another living thing. But the act of love is the very worst sin of all, for it drags another soul into this world of pain.’
‘So all of these people are . . . chaste? They . . . live like monks?’
She shook her head. ‘No, only the bons òmes live that way. For most people, even the crezens, the discipline is too hard. For the believer, all that is required is to perform the act of homage before any bon òme. They must bow and say: ‘Pray God to make a good Christian of me, and bring me to a good end.’ Other than this, the believer can do as they wish; marry, make money, go to war, even attend mass in a Catholic church. It is only at the end that most people take the vows of chastity and poverty and the rest. But then, when you are about to die, I imagine it is not so hard to refuse meat and sexual pleasure
.’
‘A very practical religion, then.’
‘Is it practical that they don’t threaten to burn anyone who does not believe in them? To me, it is only human. My own mother is a crezen.’
‘And you?’
‘I love the Madonna, but I respect the bons òmes. They are, as their name suggests, good men. And perhaps they are right about the world, I don’t know. Perhaps they have the answers you are seeking. It is not God who has punished you in the world this way because God cannot reach you. It is the Devil that has done this. Is that your answer?’
One of the bons òmes – Fabricia told him his name was Vital – took his place behind the altar and began to preach. Though he barely spoke above a whisper his voice was distinct even to the back of the cavern, where Fabricia and Philip stood. It was the story of paradise; in the beginning, he said, some spirits fell through a hole in heaven down to earth. God put his foot over the hole but it was too late to stop them falling out. So from that moment until the end of time all the good souls had to work their way back to heaven by becoming bons òmes or taking the rites of the consolamentum. When there were finally no just men left on the earth then the end of the world would become possible. The sky would fall down to the earth and the sun and the moon would be consumed by fire and the fire would be consumed by the sea. The earth would become a lake of pitch and sulphur.
When the sermon was over the crezens knelt as one and said together: ‘Pray to God for us sinners so that He will make us good Christians and bring us to a good end.’
And Vital raised his hand in blessing: ‘Dieu vos benesiga. May God bless you, make good Christians of you and bring you to a good end.’
When it was over Fabricia took his hand. ‘Come,’ she said.
*
He followed her by the flickering light of the candle, deeper into the mountain. He wondered where she was leading him. The tunnel walls closed in on them. He banged his head on an overhang and had to crouch over to walk the rest of the way.
He was conscious of the warmth and closeness of her. Perhaps she wants us to be private, he thought. A long time since he had touched a woman; poor Giselle could have assured her of that.
Stigmata Page 21
