The Fire and the Light

by Glen Craney

  “War has its victims, child.”

  “Has she gone to Heaven?”

  The monk withheld an answer until spurred on by Roger’s blade. “Your mother was a heretic. She fell into Satan’s clutches, but you can yet be saved.”

  Loupe escaped crying into her father’s arms, distraught to learn that her mother had been damned to Hell.

  Roger dragged the monk to a Bible. “Find the passage about the eye.”

  The archdeacon trembled as he frantically thumbed through the tome. He stopped at a page and slowly lowered the red ribbon to mark the place.

  “Read it,” ordered Roger.

  The monk’s face drained whiter with each word. “‘If any harm follows, then you shall give ... life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’”

  Roger shoved the archdeacon’s nose into the crease. “Tell this child if your God requires an eye for an eye.” When the monk surrendered a reluctant half nod, Roger asked, “Then I would be a heretic if I did not obey it, no?”

  “The Lord Jesus allows mercy!” sputtered the monk.

  “Be assured that I will be more merciful than you Cistercians.” Roger spread out a parchment and forced a dipped quill into the monk’s hand. “Confess that the Scriptures are in error. Confess that God never required an eye for an eye, and you will live.”

  “I would suffer the fires of Hell!”

  “Your faith seems to have cast you in a dilemma,” said Roger. “The Pope says the God of the Old Testament was righteous. The heretics say that He was a tyrant. I wonder which version you will choose.”

  The monk slung the quill to the floor and made a dash for the sacristy. The Occitans wrestled him down and splayed his limbs. “This is Rome’s justice!” Roger drove his sword into the monk’s right eye. The monk howled and crawled down the nave gushing blood. The Occitans dragged him back to the altar and quartered him. Roger gutted the monk’s remaining eye.

  Loupe stood over the writhing monk and watched him bleed to death.

  The Savior said: “Blessed Thomas, the visible Light shines upon you not to keep you here, but to make you leave.”

  - The Gospel of Thomas

  XXIII

  Carcassonne

  November 1209

  De Montfort slammed the papal communiqué to the table. “I cannot win this war with masses alone!”

  Almaric hacked from the chill that had settled into his lungs as he hovered over the scalloped hearth of his new headquarters in Trencavel’s former palace. “Prayers from His Holiness are worth more than gold.”

  De Montfort glowered at Folques, expecting support in his protest. “Are you going to stand mute while Rome pisses away your bishopric?”

  Folques dared not challenge the Abbot, even though he shared Simon’s frustration with the Holy See’s sporadic financial patronage of the war. When the forty-day pledges expired, the Northern barons had returned home with their spoils. Simon threatened to do the same until Almaric offered Beziers and Carcassonne as inducement for taking command of the army. Simon drove a hard bargain, extracting a commitment from the Cistercians that they would champion his claim for suzerainty over all of Toulousia when the Occitan fiefs were reapportioned by the Vatican.

  Yet the Lion of the Languedoc—the epithet bestowed on de Montfort by his enemies—now found himself embroiled in a grinding war of attrition with no end in sight. The rebels had retreated to their lairs atop the Pyrenees and most of his own troops had been siphoned off to defend the many chateaux in Trencavel’s domain. In a hostile territory scavenged bare of food and fodder, he could count on only a hundred knights to answer a day’s muster. Adding to his woe was news from England that the earldom of Leicester, devolved to him after his mother’s death, had been confiscated by King John for unpaid debts.

  “Ours is not the only army in need of reinforcements,” reminded Almaric. “The Holy Father has called for another mission to the Holy Land.”

  Simon upended a velvet chaise. “Damn that man’s malevolent timing! No knight will join me when he can win Heaven in Jerusalem!”

  “You must hold out for the Lenten season,” said Almaric. “In the spring, I will return to Paris and preach the indulgences.”

  Simon paced in spiraling agitation, rubbed raw by the patronizing military counsel of these clerics. “How am I to defend this shit hole until then? Peter broods beyond the mountains like a dog deprived of his favorite bone.”

  “The King of Aragon is loyal to Rome,” assured the Abbot.

  “And the Wolf? He harasses me without cease.”

  Folques finally found the nerve to speak up. “The Count of Foix’s rectification will come soon enough on the open field.”

  Simon’s rancor came to a sudden boil. He throttled Folques’s neck and drove his nose into the window slit. “You arrant imbecile! That whoreson and his phantoms know better than to attack me on the plains! While I sit here rotting inside this tower, he plans his resistance from those pigeon roosts!” He sent Folques floundering to the floor with a flick of his wrist.

  “The Wolf is a mere irritant,” said Almaric. “Nothing more.”

  “The two of you have made him of consequence with that half-baked scheme to use his wife as arrow matting. Foix has become infested with every miscreant who escapes our fires.”

  “His sister professes to be a pacifist. She will keep him in check.”

  “His sister? From what I hear, he won’t even speak to her! Even though you’ve managed to make her a subject of song in every court from Castile to Rome!” Simon searched the chamber for some accessory that had not suffered his abuse. “I’ll never command the allegiance of these Ocs as long as they hold Trencavel and that Foix bitch in their hearts!”

  “Then you must rid their hearts of such attachments.”

  The intrusion of that new voice at the door was accompanied by a chilling gust of wind. Alice Montmorency de Montfort stood at the threshold, slapping a cropper against her gloved hand.

  All strain sailed from Simon’s face as he rushed to the wife whose companionship he had been denied for nearly a year. If there was anything that stirred his juices more than a well-preached sermon or a battle rife with booty, it was this mole-studded woman whose thin auburn hair was bound as severely as her lips were pursed. “My love! You’ve come at my blackest hour.”

  Alice repulsed Simon’s embrace. She circled the Cistercians with her face so thickly glazed in white powder that she might have passed for an apparition of the biblical Lilith. “So, these are the buglers who send the hounds to the hunt.”

  The Abbot bowed with his hand extended, exuding a cloying charm as was his method upon meeting a new acquaintance who offered the promise of some advantage. “Madam, I’ve not had the pleasure.”

  She fingered the sarcenet silk of his scapular. “By the impressive thread count of your garb, Abbot, I’d venture there is precious little pleasure you’ve not had.” She rifled through the correspondence on his writing desk. “Why have more troops not been provided to my husband?”

  “It is a complicated matter of Vatican policy and—”

  “I’ll not be condescended to by priests relegated to the marches!”

  Rather than taking umbrage, Almaric was fascinated by this Amazon who imitated Eleanor of Aquitane’s example by traveling on campaigns and participating in the war strategies. “The Holy Father cracks the whip, but the sting must come from the pulpits. The bishops in the Languedoc are too craven to confront the nobles and the Northern clergy have little interest in our cause.”

  “Where are the Counts of Champagne and Nevers?”

  “With Beziers and Carcassonne cashiered, the barons saw no reason to continue fighting,” said Folques. “There is also some sentiment, clearly uninformed, that Trencavel was illegally removed from his rulership.”

  Finding Simon slouched in despond, Alice braced his shoulders with her vulturine hands. “I have brought you
four hundred German knights, paid up until Easter.” She shot a sneering glance at the Cistercians. “It seems a woman has more influence than the Pope in raising troops.”

  Simon was alarmed by her blasphemy. He knew that Almaric often weaved such offhanded statements into his correspondence to Rome.

  Unfazed by her husband’s cautioning glance, Alice pressed her interrogation. “Am I to understand that the petty seigneur of this city sits in chains while the Ocs hold out hope that he will return to save them?”

  “We dare not release Trencavel,” said Folques. “He is so beloved, he could raise an army of thousands within a week.”

  “I am not talking about releasing him!” she shouted.

  The guards came running, drawn by her shrillness. The Abbot waved them back to their posts, then poured the lady a libation of sweet Alsatian wine.

  Retreating into an icy tranquility, Alice accepted the Abbot’s offer with a thin smile of intrigue. “Trencavel is a heretic, no?”

  “He refuses to confess,” reminded Folques.

  “Were the heretics at Beziers formally adjudicated?”

  Almaric’s brows pinched. “No, but—”

  “Does God favor some sinners over others?”

  Almaric suddenly deciphered what Alice was suggesting. “Burning a few peasants is one thing. But to execute a viscount ...”

  Alice buttoned the fur-lined cloak around the Abbot’s neck in feminine concern for his health; the gesture also carried a more veiled implication. “You must take better care of yourself. The flux, I am told, is rampant on these frontiers. The disease knows no distinction of station.”

  Simon was becoming disconcerted by the obliqueness of their conversation. The haughtiness of learned monks always made him defensive about his dearth of intellect, particularly when they acted as if he were not in the room.

  “You forget Trencavel’s wife and son,” reminded Folques.

  “Given the alternative of starvation,” assured Alice, “his family will abdicate their rights in exchange for a generous annuity.”

  Only then did Simon grasp the deviousness of his wife’s proposal. “Even if I’m rid of Trencavel, how will I subdue the Languedoc with so few troops?”

  Alice condescendingly pinched her husband’s jowls. “Mon ami, why do you bang your head against these Southern nobles when you can exterminate the instigators who inflame their passions?”

  “If I corner the heretics in one village, they scatter to the mountains like rats and infest some other outpost. The whole pack now hovers in the clouds.”

  “Every rat has a nest, and every nest a queen mother.” In a breathtaking alteration of mood, Alice turned on the monks with eyes slanted in sharp reproof. “Why has the Count of Foix’s sister not been apprehended?”

  “She continues to slip our nets,” said Folques.

  “That broken colt I encountered in L’Isle?”

  “The Ocs are bewitched by her,” said Simon.

  “She has ensorcelled the three of you, it seems! Each time you fail to apprehend her, she only grows in legend!”

  “Foix Castle looms upon a massive rock,” reminded Folques.

  “Then smoke out her brainless brother. He has a temper. Make him lose it.” Alice retreated to the window, impervious to the harsh wind. “A pyre of charred corpses will prove more valuable to us than a battalion.”

  The Abbot raised his goblet to toast her guile. “If only all women were as devoted to seeing Our Lord’s Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven.”

  For three months, Guilhelm and Trencavel had been forced to remain standing on their toes, hung by their arms from pinions in the dungeon below the Comtal palace. Their existence had become the interminable agony of making the choice between allowing the irons to cut their wrists or suffering the cramps caused by stretching to relieve the pressure. Fed just enough slop to stay alive, they had been given no information regarding the progress of the war. Guilhelm suspected that the Occitans were still holding out. If the war was lost, Trencavel would have been traded for ransom.

  Trencavel roused from his misery with inflamed eyes too heavy to keep open. “What day is it?”

  Guilhelm counted the scratches on the web-clotted wall that he had made with his toenail. “The fourth Sunday of November.”

  Trencavel wheezed, “I’ll not see another Christmas.”

  “You must keep your spirits raised.”

  Trencavel retreated into an uncustomary silence. After several difficult exhalations, he asked, “Tell me, Montanhagol ... Why did you join the Temple?”

  “God wanted me to experience Hell before my Judgment Day.”

  “No, in truth. Was it to see the Holy City?”

  Guilhelm hoped Trencavel would take his sarcasm as a hint to desist from wasting strength in speech. He himself had been taught to endure long periods without communication, but Trencavel was an outward-directed soul who craved discourse. Guilhelm grudgingly revealed, “I joined the monks to eat.”

  “Not from faith?”

  “I cared nary a whit about killing Mohammedans. My widowed mother survived by turning whore. When she tired of scrounging scraps, she left me on the preceptory steps. One of the brothers made the mistake of cracking the door. Four years later, I was dodging Saracen missiles below Jerusalem.”

  “Does Our Lord’s tomb still glow from His transfigured Light?”

  “I never saw it.”

  Trencavel straightened with astonishment. “You fought your way across the desert and did not set eyes upon the Holy Sepulcher?”

  “My Master had no interest in tombs. His passion was for other quarry.”

  “Diggings?”

  “I’ve said enough.”

  Denied, Trencavel sank into the chains with despair etched into his face. His breathing was becoming more labored, a transformation that Guilhelm had witnessed in Muslim prisoners hours before they surrendered their spirits. If he did not give the baron a reason to fight on, Guilhelm feared he would soon expire. Besides, what allegiance did he owe the Temple? Trencavel was more a brother to him than any of those monks with whom he had been forced to share meals and cells. He scanned the far reaches of the dungeon to make certain no one was listening. “We stabled our horses under the base of Solomon’s Temple.”

  “You committed sacrilege in the holy sanctuary?”

  “The stabling was only a ruse. At night, we were ordered to burrow into its foundations with picks and axes. We drowned out the clang of the tools with chants. We were assigned shifts every other night so that none of us knew of the prior day’s discoveries.”

  “You were searching for Our Lord’s chalice from the Last Supper.”

  Guilhelm shook his head at the gullibility of fools. “That tale was put out to keep the barons and friars off our tracks.”

  “What did you seek?”

  Guilhelm hesitated, fearful of what Trencavel might reveal if racked. But the longing in his dimming eyes demanded an answer. “The Ark.”

  Trencavel strained against his chains. “The Ark of the Covenant? You found the miraculous tabernacle of the Israelites?”

  “I found nothing. You asked what we sought. What others unearthed I cannot say. All I know is, during the infidel assault, half of my brethren were ordered to continue digging rather than man the walls. When Balian surrendered the city to the Arabs, my Master was so desperate to finish the excavation that he had to be dragged from the tunnels for his own safety.”

  “Then the Ark must still be there.”

  “If it ever existed.” Guilhelm glanced guardedly beyond the grille. “We did find something else. Something none of us could have wished.”

  “The True Cross?”

  “The true story of the Cross ... if racked infidels are to be trusted.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some of the prisoners claimed to have seen scrolls buried in jars by members of a Arab sect that called themselves Nasoreans.”

  “Our Lord was a Nasorean.”r />
  “Not for the reason the Church would have you believe,” said Guilhelm. “He was not from Nazareth.”

  “From whom were these writings being hidden?”

  Guilhelm met that question with a scornful laugh. “The Romans. Followers of St. Paul. Rival Jewish sects. God only knows.”

  Trencavel stretched his manacles to their limit to draw closer. “What did these scrolls reveal?”

  Guilhelm shook his head in admonition for him to lower his voice. “The jars we found under the Temple had been emptied. But the captives swore they had once contained evidence proving that Christ never intended to die on a cross for our sins. He was executed to be silenced.”

  “Silenced of what?”

  Guilhelm shrugged, having asked that question a thousand times.

  Trencavel shook his shackles in protest. “Another infidel blasphemy! You don’t give credit to it?”

  “I too dismissed it as a deceit, until I encountered your Cathars in the mountains. Esclarmonde told me she once saw such a scroll ...” He stopped short of finishing the thought. “I no longer know what to believe. Perhaps it’s best not to believe in anything.”

  “You don’t share your lady’s faith?”

  “Faith is like bottled magic,” said Guilhelm. “Discover the first flask empty, and all desire to open another is lost.”

  “Then you undergo these trials for the viscountess, not God.”

  “Her embrace is the closest I’ve ever come to approaching the Almighty’s grace. Yet she and I are both required to break sacred oaths to attain it.” He saw that Trencavel had become deeply troubled by these revelations. “And you? Why do you defend the cloggers?”

  “I have tried to live as a good Christian. I fail to understand the arguments of theologians. For me, it has always been a feeling of brotherhood. The perfects ask nothing for their ministry. They imitate the Apostles and keep only the possessions they carry on their backs. They have shown great kindness to my family. Did Our Lord not say that we shall know His disciples by their fruits?”

  “So it is written.”

  “Unconditioned love and goodness are shown to all by the bon hommes,” said Trencavel. “Their roots must reach to some deep—”