He had changed so much since she had last seen him. His skin was loose around his arms where once he had been all muscle; his eyes looked sad and tired; his beard had turned grey and he had grown jowls. He seemed timeworn.
‘Where’s this fine nobleman of yours?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ Fabricia said.
‘I don’t want to be the one to say it, girl, but faidit or not, he’s still noble and he won’t think twice about you now he’s here among his kind again.’
‘He still saved my life, so I won’t think badly of him.’
‘Well, he saved mine as well, me and your mother. Did he tell you that?’
She shook her head.
‘The crosatz would have slaughtered us all if not for him. So we should light a candle for him. But he is what he is, so you should not expect to see too much more of him.’ They stopped inside the nave and he put his hand on her arm. ‘I should never have sent you away to the monastery. It was a cowardly thing to do.’
‘You had no choice.’
‘I am sorry. It was a mistake. You are my daughter and I shall answer for it to God one day.’
They went back inside the church. It was in an uproar. Hundreds of men and women were crammed in, quarrelling over food and places to camp. There was a stench of sweat and sores and rancid incense; the heat was like a wall. She involuntarily took a step back.
Trencavel’s soldiers were at work taking down the cross from the high altar; one even carried away the statue of the Queen of Heaven on his shoulder like the spoils of war. The long-winged angels that had been painted in the high vault watched in shocked confusion.
Elionor sat against the wall with their few belongings, but she was not alone. There was a crowd gathered around her on the flagstones. ‘Who are those people?’ Fabricia said.
‘They have come looking for you,’ Anselm said. ‘Someone here recognized you and they all know who you are now. This one has a sick child; this man, his mother is dying. They say they want you to help them.’
‘What should I do?’ she said.
‘Well, you can’t send them away. If you can end one person’s misery then it’s what you have to do.’
‘I thought you did not believe any of that.’
‘I don’t know what I believe any more.’
Someone shouted out Fabricia’s name and the crowd surged towards her. A murmur went through the church. There she is, the saint of Saint-Ybars. Fabricia wanted to run away. Just leave me alone, please!
But how could she? So she took the baby that was thrust into her arms, knelt down and started to pray. Soon more came.
And when she thought she was finally done, she heard a familiar voice in her ear. ‘When you’re finished here,’ Philip said, ‘will you come with me? There’s a woman over here, her name is Guilhemeta.
She is very sick.’
‘Seigneur, I thought I should not see you again.’
‘Well, you were wrong. Now will you come with me, please?’
Fabricia said yes, she would come. She looked down at her gloved hands. They did not ache so much today, and there was no blood crusted into the wool. She wondered what it meant.
*
The people of Montaillet watched them leave: the priest on his mule, his mistress walking beside him, and a few supporters behind, those Catholics too pious or too terrified to remain. Someone shouted out: ‘This is the first time I’ve seen a jackass riding a donkey!’ and there was jeering and laughter.
A woman, bolder than her neighbours, hawked in her throat, shot her head back and spat right in the priest’s face. Her saliva dribbled down his cowl.
The gates swung open, affording a fine view of the ridge below the town and the bright pennants and pavilions of the crusader encampment. They were already setting up their siege engines.
‘You are all damned!’ the priest shouted as his final blessing.
The gates swung closed behind him.
Anselm shook his head. ‘These priests make me ashamed,’ he said to Fabricia.
They walked back to the church. Elionor was sitting between Father Vital and his socius, speaking in whispers. Anselm did not seem surprised to see them there. ‘What do they want?’ Fabricia asked him.
‘Your mother has asked to take the consolamentum,’ he said. ‘She wishes to be ordained as a bona femna.’
‘But why?’
He shook his head. ‘She has told me she wants to die in the faith she believes in and I have said I will not to stand in her way. How the world has turned for us, my little rabbit!’ She imagined she knew what he was thinking: three years ago he was a member of the guild in Toulouse with a fine house and a marriageable daughter.
Now look.
‘She does not care to wait for the moment of death to be perfected,’ he went on. ‘She says she wishes to purify her soul and live by the Rule. Your mother has been a heretic for many years, Fabricia, you know this. She has always been an honest woman and now she wishes to be more so.’ He looked around the church. He had devoted his life to building houses for God, such as this. Now the saints he had lived by all his life were gone, the cross too, loaded on to the cart that followed the priest out of the gates. Even his wife was preparing herself to become a heretic.
‘I think it is the end of the world,’ he said.
LXXIV
FABRICIA AND ELIONOR sat with their backs to the wall of the nave, staring at the saints painted on the walls of the pillars, the vermilion and gilt peeling away. They were all that was left of the old icons now. On the high altar a small crowd had gathered about Father Vital and were on their knees, praying the Our Father.
‘Papa loves you,’ Fabricia said.
Elionor reached out and took her hand. ‘I do not mean to hurt him with this – or you. I should have taken the consolamentum long ago, but for my family. But I have done my duty to you both, and now I have to follow my conscience.’
‘But why now?’
‘I am tired of the world, Fabricia. Once I thought I should take the consolamentum only as I die. But what if it is sudden, what if there is not the time? I do not wish to come back to this world again, despite all the joy you and your father have given me.’
‘Will you become a priest, like him, then?’
‘Should we somehow survive this – yes, I shall be a priest and preach, as Father Vital does.’
Fabricia hung her head.
‘I do not understand why you and your father persist with the Roman Church, the ridiculous nonsense they believe. Babies born to virgins and the dead coming back to life! Does anyone really believe these old bones will creak back into living once they are buried in the earth?’
‘I don’t know, perhaps you’re right. But leaving Papa on his own after all these years doesn’t seem like such a good and holy thing either, Mama.’
Elionor squeezed her hand. ‘Please, Fabricia. Let me go. My soul yearns for heaven.’
Fabricia winced and withdrew her hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ Elionor said. ‘I forgot myself. How are your wounds?’
‘They are a little better.’ She took off her mittens. She was surprised to find the bandages clean for the first time in months. The blood had stopped seeping.
‘Will you tell me something? The truth?’ Elionor asked her.
Fabricia nodded. She knew what she was going to ask her.
‘These wounds. Did you . . . did you make them . . . did you do it yourself?’
Fabricia stripped the linen bandage off her right hand. She held it to the light so that her mother could see. ‘Look, Mama. The puncture goes straight through. Do you think I could stand the pain of making even one such wound? I have them on both hands and both feet. Why would I do it? How could I?’
‘The crucifixion is a lie,’ Elionor said. ‘Every right-thinking person knows it.’
‘Because you do not understand something does not mean it cannot be. Even in the convent they said I was lying, and to them the cross is every
thing. “Why would Christ’s wounds appear on a woman?” they said. As if I would know the answer!’
Elionor touched her daughter’s cheek with her fingers. ‘I am sorry for everything. I love you.’ And she put her head on Fabricia’s shoulder and wept.
But there was no time for consolation. Fabricia felt a familiar tugging at her sleeve, a woman kneeling there, with her child. ‘Please,’ she said, holding out her infant. ‘Touch her. Make her well again . . .’
LXXV
THEY SENT IN the bandits and hoi polloi first. Philip stood next to Raimon on the barbican and watched them stream up the narrow isthmus towards the bourg. ‘The walls are not strong enough,’ he said. ‘You cannot hold your position there.’
‘I do not intend to. I have told them merely to hold on for as long as they can, let the archers go about their work, and then to withdraw when things get too hot. If we can frustrate them for a few hours they may lose their stomach for it.’
They were singing a Latin hymn in the crusader camp. They must be going at it with gusto to be able to hear them this far off. Down in the bourg Raimon’s plan had gone awry. He could see fighting on the walls already.
‘God’s holy balls,’ Raimon muttered and turned to his trumpeter to give the signal for his men to fall back.
‘You may not need to do that,’ Philip said. ‘It seems they have made up their own minds.’
The inhabitants were already streaming through the streets, a panicked wave of men, women and children, the old and the slow falling under the crush. Raimon’s soldiers were not far behind them.
Raimon went down the ladder to the gatehouse. Philip heard him bawling at the watchmen to open the gates.
He readied himself for a fight. The old seneschal’s armour was a tight fit, but it was well made and would serve well enough; good Toledo steel laced with copper studs, steel gauntlets and thigh pieces, a shield polished smooth as glass. He would not go down easily.
The archers that Raimon had kept in reserve came crowding up the ladders from the court and took their positions along the gatehouse battlements. Philip took his new helm from under his arm and put it on.
As the iron-barred doors creaked open a wave of refugees streamed through, their panicked screams echoing from the walls of the gatehouse. Raimon waited as long as he dared to close them again. This was not the orderly retreat he had planned and not all were on the right side of the gates when the drawbridge was raised.
Those left behind were butchered right there beneath the walls, some killed by their own archers.
Raimon reappeared on the barbican, his helm still under his arm. His face was the colour of chalk. ‘What is wrong with them? My archers are cutting them into windrows and still they keep coming.’
‘They think they have God on their side,’ Philip said.
When those most urgently seeking heaven had died, their comrades finally left off the attack on the south-east wall and retreated, setting fire to the bourg as they went. The town burned slowly at first but by the middle of the afternoon it was well alight. Choking black smoke, driven by the wind, blocked out the sun. Not a good start.
LXXVI
THE CHURCH BELLS were ringing; horns at the south-east gate joined the alarm. Raimon screamed at his archers to follow him and ran along the battlements through the smoke. Philip followed.
They were already fighting hand to hand on the barbican. Men with scarlet crosses emblazoned on their tunics were clambering up ladders they had set against the walls.
A cat – a siege tower – loomed through the smoke, ablaze from the flaming arrows that Raimon’s archers had fired into it. Phillp felt a grudging admiration for whoever commanded the crusader army. He had judged the wind, and deliberately sent the bulk of his force against the bourg so he could burn it and use the smoke as cover for an attack on the other wall.
The Spanish mercenaries were in the thick of it. He saw their captain, Navarese, heft back a ladder single-handed, sending the men on it screaming into the moat, then urge his men against the handful of crusaders who had gained foothold on one of the towers. Raimon ordered more fire arrows into the cat.
Hard to breathe or even see their enemy through the red smoke. How many of them were already inside the citadel? There was no time to help Raimon reorganize the defences now, it was just strike and parry and run, get to the south-east barbican and the looming threat of the cat as soon as he could.
Philip saw a man-at-arms with the three Norman eagles on his shield and went straight for him. The man fell back, trying to parry his blows, but as he reached the wall Philip put all his weight behind his shield and hit him front on. He had advantage of height and bulk and better armour. The man toppled back and fell.
But in his eagerness to claim a Norman he had left his back exposed. As he turned he saw two others come at him, one with an axe, the other with a broadsword. He took the blow from the axe on his shield; the sword gave him a glancing blow to his helm. His opponents were not knights but, though poorly armoured, they were brave enough. He cut one down with his sword but the man with the axe was determined and a second blow this time glanced off his shield and would have taken off his head if it were not for the good Toledo steel of the helmet Raimon had furnished him. Stunned, he went down.
The soldier raised the axe above his head a third time. Philip could not roll to the right, for there was another man fallen beside him. To his left was the wall. Neither could he bring up his shield to deflect the blow in time.
Suddenly the man gasped and dropped the axe. Martín Navarese used the heel of his boot to prise the man free of his sword, and then kicked him over the edge. He gave Philip his hand and pulled him to his feet. ‘You owe me,’ he said.
The barbican had been cleared. The cat was fully alight now; men were jumping from the upper works with clothing alight. Horses, their bellies ripped open, were writhing in the ditch. Ladders tilted back all along the wall, crashing into the chaos of struggling and bleeding bodies below.
Through the smoke Philip saw a knight with a gold helm spur his horse close to the walls to snatch one of his men from under a mass of tangled bodies. His coat of mail bristled with arrows.
As if he wished to remove any doubt of his identity, the knight removed his helm and stood in the stirrups of his destrier, pointing up at the battlements. It was an unspeakably reckless thing to do and for a moment Philip almost admired him for it. ‘Every one of you shall burn. I will have your filthy castle within the week!’
For a moment their eyes met. They were close enough that Philip saw his face clearly and remembered him from that day in the forest when Leyla had broken her foreleg. They had seen each other then, and he knew that the knight had seen him now. There was a moment of surprise, then recognition. Philip turned to the archer beside him and grabbed his bow. This is my chance to square our ledger, he thought. But when he turned back the knight was gone, lost in the drifting pall of smoke.
LXXVII
THE GREAT HALL had been made into a hospital for the injured. The wounded and dying were carried in and dumped on the floors, to lie there groaning and bleeding. A monk who knew something of herbs had been pressed into service, and the bons òmes, who had some reputation for medicine, did what they could. Fabricia and a handful of other women had rolled up their sleeves and joined them, unable to stand the pitiful screams that came from the donjon.
Every time she knelt to help some shockingly injured young man she prayed it would not be Philip.
Smoke from the burning siege towers drifted in all through the afternoon, so that the great arches and high windows of the hall seemed to be shrouded in mist. The heat was oppressive, the air putrid and choked with smoke, and there were flies everywhere. A priest wandered between the rows of injured men, stopping to offer the final unction to any who asked for it. She wondered why he had not left. Perhaps, like her, he was more southerner than Catholic.
Tapers were lit. Father Vital mumbled the consolamentum over some dying routi
er and sent him direct to heaven even after a lifetime of rape and murder.
She bent over a longbow-man; he fought for every breath, the arrow that had pierced his leather jerkin still in him. She took a vial of valerian from her tunic and put a drop on his lips to help with his pain.
She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. She looked up; it was Philip.
‘I thank God you are unharmed,’ she said. She barely recognized him; his face was blackened from smoke, his hair plastered to his skull with sweat. His eyes had a faraway look, as if he were focused on something in the distance. There was blood all over his hands.
‘What is happening out there?’ she said.
‘They burned the bourg and attacked the south-east wall. We have beaten them back, for now.’
‘Now what will happen?’
‘They have lost a lot of men. I doubt they will try another assault very soon. If they cannot scale the walls they will try and bring them down instead.’
Suddenly the ground shook under their feet. It sounded as if the donjon had crashed into the square. She gasped and put out a hand to steady herself against one of the pillars. ‘What was that?’
‘They waste no time. It has started already.’
‘It sounded as if the whole castle just came down.’
‘It is the trebuchet.’
‘What is that?’
‘Remember when we were in the caves, you thought you heard thunder? It is a siege engine, it looks like an immense sling; they hauled it up here with a team of oxen. It is the first time I have seen one, though I had lately heard of them. It seems one of the King’s engineers thought to use counterweights and pivots on his siege machines instead of the old way of twisted ropes. I am told it is so complex, they employ specialist carpenters to work it. It hurls boulders the size of Paris. So for now we are done with honour and courage, our survival is down to men in aprons and pulley systems.’
‘What chance do we have, seigneur?’
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