The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  Roger’s fearsome glare drove her answer. “Guilhelm.”

  “The Templar ... killed my wife?”

  Esclarmonde stole a helpless glance at the Marquessa and Corba, but they were too enmeshed in grief to offer a buffer to his vehemence. “Blame me if you must. I asked him to release her from—”

  Roger ran toward the stables, swearing against God and quavering with such spuming rage that he seemed on the verge of choking. The small garrison and the villagers, drawn by the screams and wails, began congregating in the bailey. Roger pulled a sword from its brackets and climbed the railings of the foaling stall. He hacked away at his favorite steed, the magnificent Arabian that Phillipa had so loved. He seemed possessed of a primeval urge to expiate his wife’s death by sacrificing the one creature that had remained loyal to him in this depraved world ruled by betrayal. The blade sliced into the animal’s neck and splattered blood across the stable. The bawling Arabian knifed to its forelegs.

  Loupe tried to go to her father, but Esclarmonde held tight to her, fearful that Roger would flail away at anything that came within his range.

  After several more blows, Roger fell to his knees, exhausted and slathered with entrails. In a deadened voice, he ordered his men, “Issue the summons.”

  “You can’t mean to go after them!” cried Esclarmonde.

  Roger staggered to his feet and drove her against the wall. “I’ve had enough of your damned religion and its turn of the cheek!”

  “If not for my religion, you’d never have met Phillipa! I beg of you! Leave it in God’s hands.”

  Roger threw her from his path with such force that she fell. “It has been in God’s hands! Now it will be in mine! Take these troublemakers to that den of Hell and stay forever from my sight!”

  Esclarmonde crawled after him. “Banish me if you wish, but leave Loupe in my care. You cannot raise her if you mean to fight.”

  Roger drove a boring finger into Castres’s forehead. “You stole my mother and my wife. If I ever find you in my daughter’s presence, I’ll gut you!”

  “Where are you taking her?” cried Esclarmonde.

  “To learn how murderous monks are dealt with.”

  “She’s only a child!”

  “I grew up before my time,” said Roger. “She’ll do the same.”

  On her knees, Esclarmonde pleaded for her niece to stay. “Loupe, come with me to Montsegur.”

  Loupe burned her with a glare of hatred, then ran off to join her father.

  That winter, a heavy snow buried Montsegur under a pall of despair. Each day brought more refugees from the Northern army’s swath of terror. De Montfort and the Catholic barons ravaged the Aude Valley opposed only by Roger’s small force of Occitan raiders. For the first time since her ordination, Esclarmonde could not find the strength to minister to her people. Beset by a paralyzing melancholy, she sequestered herself in a small hut on the north face of the mount and gave orders that she not be disturbed. With Raymond off soldiering, Corba and Chandelle came to stay with her at the temple. Each day they left food on her sill, but she would not touch it.

  This morning, streams of harsh sunlight invaded the hut. Lying on a straw pallet, Esclarmonde shielded her eyes and found Chandelle standing at the opened door. “Leave me be, child.”

  From the shadows, an elderly man with a wispy gray beard came into the glim holding Chandelle’s hand. Phylacteries hung from his head and his waist was wrapped in a blue sash. His foggy eyes remained fixed with a distant stare.

  “Please talk to this man,” begged Chandelle.

  “I cannot give spiritual sustenance today,” said Esclarmonde.

  The stranger took another unsure step and swiveled his head from side to side. “I have come to give, not to ask.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “You must forgive me,” said Esclarmonde. “I’ve not been well.”

  “You saved my life in Beziers. I am known as Isaac the Blind.”

  The features of the rabbi Esclarmonde had sent to safety with Trencavel slowly came to her memory. “Yes, of course. But why have you come to Montsegur?”

  “This war between you Christians has cast my people upon another diaspora. We were told of a haven in these mountains.”

  Esclarmonde tried to arise, but her vertigo thwarted the effort. “I would do more to ease your plight, but ... we have little to offer.”

  “Aunt Essy, he can help you feel better.” Familiar with the room, Chandelle led the blind rabbi to the pallet. He knelt with difficulty and pressed his palms to Esclarmonde’s forehead as if reading her soul by touch.

  Esclarmonde felt a warmth around her temples. “Are you a healer?”

  The rabbi maintained his silent concentration. After several minutes of this spiritual inspection, he removed his hands from her head and settled into a seated position. He asked Chandelle, “You are certain we are alone?”

  “The others are in the temple,” said Chandelle.

  Reassured, the rabbi edged closer to the pallet. With lowered voice, he said, “That day in Beziers, you spoke of a Light.”

  “Forgive me,” said Esclarmonde. “That is a teaching I can discuss only with the initiates of my faith.”

  The old Jew was undeterred. “Our secret tradition for imparting these mysteries is called Kabbalah.”

  That strange Hebrew word filled Esclarmonde with a rush of energy.

  “It means ‘to receive,’” he explained. “The secret of drawing down the divine Light was delivered to Moses by the Egyptian priests. He taught it to the prophets, who transmitted it by word of mouth to the Essenes. They in turn taught it to your Master Jesus ben Joseph. All who attain the keys to this arcana confront the same persecution that you and I now endure.”

  “You are attacked by those of your own faith?”

  “Charlatans who claim no enlightenment is possible beyond the written Word dismiss me as a demented magician. One who approaches the Throne of the Unspeakable is never accepted by the jackals who scheme to hoard its spiritual power.”

  Esclarmonde had never considered the possibility that the Jews, sons and daughters of the Old Testament, might quest for the same divine radiance. Did searchers for the Light reincarnate into all faiths? If so, it followed that the angels of Darkness would also infiltrate every religion. Something about this rabbi’s quiet confidence led her to believe she could confide in him. Despite her fervent petitions for guidance, her Voice had offered no guidance since the day she had been directed to build Montsegur. Perhaps this mystic Jew could tell her why she had been abandoned. “I’ve lost that which once sustained me.”

  “You are being emptied. Old wine must be discarded to give way to the new.”

  “Darkness drags me further into the abyss with each passing day.”

  “You require the Chariot.”

  “Chariot?”

  “In our tongue, it is called the ‘Mer Ka Bah.’ Ezekiel warned long ago that the higher spheres cannot be reached without it.”

  As a girl, Esclarmonde had been haunted by that prophet’s visions in the Book of Revelation. “Ezekiel was the one who saw the Ark of the Covenant.”

  The rabbi rocked on his haunches in a ritualistic movement that seemed designed to connect him to the higher realms. “The seals are not broken unless one has studied these mysteries in past lives. Is it not written in your gospels that the Rabbi Jesus asked his disciples whom the people thought he was?”

  “It is.”

  “And did His disciples not say that some held Him to be the Baptist, and others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah? Why would they answer this way if they did not believe in the return of the soul?”

  Esclarmonde was amazed. If this rabbi spoke true, then Castres had been correct in his claim that the Church fathers neglected to excise from the gospels certain telling fragments about transmigration. She watched as the rabbi began drawing several shapes in the dirt—triangles, circles, and crosses.


  “The first elders of your faith embraced the truth of reincarnation,” he said. “But when the wife of the pagan emperor Constantine learned that she would suffer rebirth to pay for her promiscuity, she demanded her husband outlaw the doctrine. Your bishops from the West conspired to gain the emperor’s conversion by condemning transmigration as heresy.”

  Chandelle snuggled closer to the Jew, giving the first hint that she had been listening intently. “Did Jesus study your Kabbalah?”

  Isaac placed the stick in Chandelle’s fingers and helped her sketch the sacred images. Together they created a cross with one vertical bar and three horizontal bars—the same symbol that Esclarmonde had seen as a girl in Lombrives. The rabbi embellished his drawing by connecting the lines and adding circles. His finished schematic looked like an intricate tree that bore fruit. Inside the circles he formed Hebraic letters that carried powerful vibrations.

  “Your Rabbi Jesus knew that Ezekiel’s vision was a veiled description of the Chariot,” said Isaac. “The throne of glittering ice was the final approach to the Light’s center. Ezekiel witnessed these during his ascension on the paths.”

  Esclarmonde rubbed her temples in an effort to awaken her dormant mind, dulled by the stupor of her illness.

  Sensing her frustration, the rabbi pointed to his breastbone. “The teaching must be taken here, in the heart. The high priest of the Temple wore the jeweled breastplate to facilitate the heart’s connection to the upper regions.”

  Esclarmonde did not fully understand this mystery of the spiritual Chariot. Yet it seemed to her to be steeped in a profound truth.

  The rabbi persisted despite her frown of confusion. “To gaze upon the Ancient of Ancients with our outer eyes invites disaster.”

  She noticed for the first time that his eyes did not look like those of other blind people, including Chandelle’s, but were glazed white and striated like marbles, as if the pupils had been seared by heat. “Is that what happened to your—”

  “The petty travails of my life are of no importance!” Vexed by her allusion to his own impairment, Isaac fell silent, lost in painful memories.

  Chandelle broke the tension. “I see angels every day.”

  Isaac surrendered his melancholy and blessed the blind child with a toothless grin. “You and I have an advantage, little one.”

  “I feel as if I am the blind one here,” said Esclarmonde in contrition.

  “I have the only antidote for spiritual blindness,” said Isaac. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Some of the angels lusted for the unmediated illumination. They ripped away the veils before they were prepared to received its mediated force. The Light broke the vessels that held it in check. It was like a great river bursting its dams. These ambitious angels were swept away, and when they awoke, they were trapped in the flesh, prisoners of the Demiurge.”

  Esclarmonde realized that the rabbi’s explanation of the world’s calamity was similar to that taught by Castres. Yet one tradition was Christian and the other Jewish. “Are we then condemned to remain lost forever?”

  Isaac directed her attention to his drawing: Nine circles in three rows were connected by lines, resembling an ascending scale. “This is the only escape.”

  “It looks like Jacob’s Ladder,” she said.

  The Jew smiled at her perspicacity. “Jacob climbed the same path ascended by your Master Jesus. These spheres are called Sephiroths. Each represents a spiritual level created by the Ain Soph—the Unspeakable Name—to repair the catastrophe and ration the downward flow of the spilled Light. When you meditate, you must concentrate on riding the Chariot up these planes.”

  “Do these spheres and paths truly exist?” she asked.

  “Can you see the air you breathe?”

  “No, but—”

  “Yet you never doubt the air. Did your Master not promise many mansions in the Kingdom? These paths take you to the gates of true salvation.”

  Esclarmonde traced her finger up the Tree of Life until she came to the highest station. “What will I encounter on this ascent?”

  “The Lords of Light post an archangel at each portal. If you are found worthy, you will be allowed to pass to the next station. What appears depends on the seeker’s needs and merit. There are three primary routes. The left is the Pillar of Severity, chosen by martyrs and ascetics. The right path, the Pillar of Mercy, is traveled by those who ease the suffering of others.”

  “The two outer paths appear symmetrical. Do they depend on each other?”

  He nodded to confirm her astuteness. “Those who suffer are equal in number to those who ease suffering. Likewise, both male and female are present in the Unspeakable. Only when this truth is accepted will the Middle Path open.”

  “But Rome insists that God is male.”

  The rabbi bobbed his head as if attempting to liberate a trapped answer. “The Wife of the Almighty is Sophia, the feminine Wisdom. Together they sit on the dazzling Throne. Fools and usurpers describe divinity by the reflection of their own cross-eyed gaze. Where there is grasping for spiritual power, there will be disharmony. Where there is disharmony, there will be ignorance. And where there is ignorance, there will be injustice.”

  Inspired, Esclarmonde fought the dragging ballast of her lassitude and curled into a seated meditation position. She required all of her wan strength just to remain upright, but she had been given the gift of renewed hope, and for that she was deeply beholden. “Thank you for saving me.”

  “I save no one,” said Isaac. “Your salvation depends solely on your will and courage.” Before departing, he turned back with a warning. “There will come a time on this ascent when you have to make a choice: Leave your body forever, or return to help others find the Light.”

  For five days and nights, Esclarmonde meditated furiously. Yet all she encountered were the tortured thoughts of her own cracking mind. Weak from hunger, she finally collapsed to the floor, convinced that both Isaac and Castres were deluded about the existence of this higher realm. If the God of Light did exist, He had long ago abandoned her. She had lost a niece, a brother, a lover, and a son. All in the bidding of a deity who—

  A violet flash illumined the room. The glowing presence took on the form of a resplendent figure with long dark hair and a countenance of avian intensity. The man—or was it a woman?—wielded a flaming sword and a scale of measures. A serpent curled around the legs of this illuminated figure.

  “Who are you?” she asked with trepidation, backing away.

  “Mikael.”

  “Where am I?”

  “At the crossing to the Splendor, the first gate ... You have a question.”

  She remembered the rabbi’s admonition: Meet all with courage and the truth in one’s heart. “Why does your God allow my people to suffer?”

  “Who made them your people?”

  “They come to me for answers,” she said. “I cannot ask them to die for a faith that I myself do not understand.”

  “There is a war.”

  “I know there is a war!” she shouted. “I have seen it too close!”

  “I speak of a war that has been waged since the beginning. Yours is but a skirmish in the greater struggle.”

  “Why do you not defeat these legions of Evil?”

  “You must first prevail,” said Mikael. “We depend on you.”

  “You ask the impossible! The Northern armies overwhelm us.”

  “You possess a weapon they lack.”

  “Weapon? We abjure all violence!”

  Mikael offered her the shimmering blade, whose tip sparked with a phosphorescent effulgence. “The Sword of Love.”

  The weightless blade resonated from an ineffable force. She tried to return it, but the archangel refused the attempt. Before she could ask him what she was meant to do with the weapon, he receded into the Light.

  Another vortex spawned—Phillipa emerged from its emanating center.

  Overjoyed, Esclarmonde rushed to embrace her departed friend.

  “T
he radiance is too dangerous,” warned Phillipa, backing away. “You must put my death behind you. Do not lose heart.”

  Esclarmonde wept uncontrollably. “Roger is consumed by vengeance.”

  “He must go through his own trials,” said Phillipa.

  “Loupe follows him.”

  Phillipa’s face darkened. “His bitterness must not take root in her heart.”

  Mikael reappeared, signaling to Phillipa that it was time to depart.

  “I have to know what has happened to Guilhelm!” cried Esclarmonde.

  Phillipa disintegrated into the brilliant Light.

  At the portal, Mikael turned back to Esclarmonde and warned, “All now depends on you.”

  The doors of Fanjeaux Abbey slammed open. A startled archdeacon dropped his chalice and backed away from the altar. His fellow monks retreated to the ambits of the nave. Ten Occitan knights marched down the aisle. Loupe walked at her father’s side grasping his hand.

  “Where is the Bishop of Toulouse?” demanded Roger.

  The archdeacon gauged the distance to the sacristy door. “With Simon de Montfort on the road to Carcassonne.”

  The one-eyed Occitan retracted the archdeacon’s cowl. “This one was in Bram when the Norman cut us.”

  Roger clamped the archdeacon’s chin and lifted him off his feet. “And the Castilian Guzman? Where is he skulking??” When the red-faced archdeacon glared his canons to silence, Roger dragged him down the steps of the chancel to confront Loupe. “Your Abbot murdered this child’s mother.”

  “You cannot hold us responsible!” cried the archdeacon.

  “Isn’t that what your God does?” demanded Roger. “Hold each of us responsible for the sins of Adam?”

  “He does, but—”

  “And did your God send His only son to die for the sins of others?”

  The archdeacon whimpered, “He did.”

  “Then, by God’s own law and example, you must be held answerable for the sins of your Abbot, no?”

  The archdeacon cowered on his knees. “Spare me! I beg of you!”

  Roger brought Loupe a step closer. “She will decide.”

  Loupe glared at the frightened monk. “Did you see my mother die?”