Paradise Red

by K. M. Grant

  He begins to ask her questions. She answers with open pleasure. The only thing that disconcerts him is that Laila now never leaves him alone, creeping up when he least expects her. She cares nothing about his beliefs. What makes her hiss and spit with increasing venom is his betrayal of Yolanda. And she does not confine herself to whispers. Sometimes, at supper in the hall, with her eyes darting from Metta to himself and back, she demands loudly, “How can you?” He toys with the idea of telling her the truth but discards it. To Laila, information is ammunition, and he could not trust her not to use it for some purpose quite of her own. Nor does he tell Cador, but this is for the boy’s own protection. What he does not know, he can never be made to reveal.

  But what of Metta herself? Ah, what indeed. She hears Yolanda’s name occasionally, but Adela, with whom she spends the time when she is not with Raimon, never speaks of her, and when Laila shoots her barbs, they are deflected by the innocent shine of Metta’s good nature. She will not believe ill of Raimon, not now, although Raimon knows that in the end, when she discovers he has used her, she will hate him. This, curiously, he finds he can bear. Much more unbearable, almost intolerable in fact, is the knowledge that he will have corroded her simple trust as rust corrodes iron. That is what really haunts him.

  Yet the call of the Flame is always stronger than even his worst moments of guilt. He cannot abandon it to the White Wolf. Nor can he stand by as it is captured and carried aloft through the streets of Paris as a final sign of Occitanian subjection. He hardens his heart. Iron can be cured of rust. Perhaps Metta will understand. And it is not, he tells himself, as if his seduction is entirely false. He likes her, likes her very much, and she quite naturally seems to gravitate toward him. Yet he could never love her. That is pure pretense. You see, running or swimming, riding or harvesting, even just lying in a hollow braiding grass, he and Yolanda have always been equals, whereas with Metta he is always the protector. If Yolanda is a wild thing, Metta is a domestic pet, and, apart from Brees, he has never loved one of them.

  The mountain fog thickens, and the atmosphere thickens with it. Though more snow seems impossible, more falls. The visitors settle in and Raimon works hard. When food runs a little short, he makes sure that Metta and her father have more than they need. When Sir Roger complains of stiff limbs, he searches out the apothecary and digs the snow in the garden for a struggling medicinal herb. At Metta’s behest, when starving deer are seen scraping the ground on the opposite hillside, he takes Cador and half a dozen men with pitchforks of precious hay to spread around. Over the last, he teases Metta gently. “I thought you Cathars believed that starving to death is not the worst way to go.”

  Metta will not take this as a joke. “Why do you say that? I told you on the first night we were here that our perfectus teaches that the fast to the death is wicked, and anyway, you have to volunteer for it. The deer certainly haven’t done that.”

  Raimon pats her arm. Metta puts her hand on his. “Christ fed the five thousand in the Gospels,” she says earnestly. “I’m sure some of them must have brought animals. He will have fed them too.”

  “Is that another piece of wisdom from your perfectus?”

  “Actually, I’ve never heard the perfectus speak of it.” Her round eyes twinkle.

  “How do you know it, then?”

  “I’ve read it myself, in the Bible.”

  “You read the Bible yourself?” Raimon is genuinely surprised.

  “Why not? As I keep telling Count Aimery, Christ doesn’t need priests to interpret his good news,” she says. “We can understand it perfectly well ourselves.”

  Raimon takes a deep breath. “You make the Cathar faith sound so different. When you speak, it sounds less like heresy and more like common sense.”

  “It is common sense, Raimon,” she says, quite radiant. “That’s why I believe it.”

  Later, at supper, and bringing Adela into the discussion, Raimon asks Metta more questions, some of them highly skeptical so that Metta has to persuade him of the answer. When he and Adela speak, both are aware that this is their first real conversation since their mother died.

  After supper, Laila disappears, and when she reappears she has painted her face green. “It’s the color of treachery,” she says to Metta, who smiles and turns away. Raimon wonders again if he should take Laila into his confidence and again decides against it.

  The first really clear dawn seems like a miracle and in a splurge of boyish excitement Aimery orders the farrier to bang planks onto runners. “Sleighing!” he cries. “Why ever not!” Everybody rushes out, thrilled to see the sun, and a long sweep is made, the longest Castelneuf has ever attempted. Stretching from the chateau gates down through the town to the river, with enough bends and curves to satisfy the most ardent adrenalin-seeker, eager hands roughly bank up the snow on each side in an attempt to keep the sleighs on course. A carnival atmosphere prevails.

  Only Adela resists, remaining inside the hell she has created for herself, and Metta sits with her, trying again and again, with no success, to get her to see that joy and faith are not incompatible. Adela’s responses are stubborn and surly, but Metta has boundless patience. Sicart hovers until at last he bids Metta go outside. “This is a grand day,” he says. “Don’t miss it.” Metta is torn. “Go on,” Sicart urges. Metta succumbs, pats Adela’s bony shoulder, and then hurries into her boots.

  Ignoring Laila, who, using Ugly as a prop and to the amusement of some, is exaggeratedly shadowing his every move, Raimon tucks Metta into a sleigh, pushes off, and leaps on behind her. “Take care! Oh, do take care!” shouts Sir Roger. “Don’t go too fast!”

  Raimon holds Metta by the waist as they lift their feet and the runners find their path. Leaving Laila behind, they gather speed, and Metta’s hair whips out from under her fur hat, wrapping itself around Raimon’s face. The thick hanks exude a scent of rosemary and mint, a lovely smell, but Raimon can hardly stand it. He doesn’t want fair hair, he wants brown. He doesn’t want rosemary and mint, he wants the musty smell of Brees. Metta holds herself stiffly and jolts against him with every bump. Yolanda would mold herself to him. He and Metta are two. He and Yolanda are one. The joy of the run vanishes. Raimon cannot bear what he is doing.

  Impacted from the many sleighs that have gone before, the snow is unforgiving, and the sun, glancing harshly off the solid mass of crystal, blinds. If Metta feels Raimon’s stiff resistance as they glide and swerve and scrape, she says nothing. When they spin dangerously close to the road’s edge, where the banking has already given way, she cannot help screaming, but there’s no stopping now. As the pace increases, the cold slices through their furs and leathers and skin, stinging like a knife.

  At the horse troughs, they slow. The road is flatter here. Metta shivers. “Shall we go back?” Raimon says at once.

  She turns her head. Droplets have peppered her white skin. Another man might have compared her to a fairy queen. “I’ve never felt so terrified in my whole life,” she says. “If I didn’t have you behind me, I’d have died fifty times. But isn’t it wonderful! Please, let’s go on.” She raises her feet, Raimon pushes off, and the runners are hissing once more. His face aches and his lips are as raw as his heart.

  They slide to an ignominious halt at the bank of the river, and Raimon has to grab Metta to stop her from rolling in. “It wouldn’t matter, it’s quite solid,” she cries.

  “It’s very deceptive, river ice,” Raimon tells her, but she is not listening. She is laughing, high on love and thrills. “I’ve never, ever done anything like that before. Nobody on Earth can have gone so fast.”

  They watch others coursing down and listen to the screams of those who don’t stop in time. Metta claps her hands, blows on them, and stamps her feet. “Shall we walk?” she asks. “It’s too cold to stand.” She motions to the bridge, a new one rebuilt after the fires and complete enough to use. “Can we cross?”

  Raimon watches a streak of vermillion. It is Laila, perched on the front of a sle
igh with Cador and another knight behind. Her hair is braided, with beads woven cleverly into the ends, making them stick straight out behind her like two herons’ beaks. Even as her sleigh bangs and crashes, almost tossing her off, she is throwing out her arms to Aimery, whose sleigh is running beside hers, not plain like the others, but strung with fancy bells and silken ribbons. Indeed, it might have been decorated with Laila in mind. His only companion is Ugly, whose ears have been flipped inside out as she folds her skinny frame to avoid the worst of the pebbled spray. She is terrified. Laila calls her, and in a daring swoop, scoops her away from Aimery. Whooping with delight, Laila ostentatiously covers the quaking animal in kisses.

  They all hit the bottom together, and Cador somersaults smartly off while Laila, abandoning Ugly, whirls like a merry-go-round.

  “I don’t believe Laila’s afraid of anything.” Metta sighs.

  “More fool her,” Raimon says more sharply than he should have, then shouts for Cador. “Will you pull our sleigh back to the chateau? We’re going to walk.”

  Cador leaps up, nods, and shakes himself like a pony. Laila is running to the river, slithering down and jumping about. Raimon opens his mouth to shout a warning. Then he shrugs. Let Laila do as she likes.

  Spears of heat force the blood to flow through Raimon’s ears and lips, making them itch. He takes Metta’s arm to make sure she does not slip and then uses the excuse of a narrow track to let go. As they walk in single file, he strides just a little too fast so that she must scurry to keep up. Her lack of complaint irritates Raimon more. He knows how unfair he is being, but for fully a quarter of an hour he cannot help himself.

  The path soon vanishes in the pristine hush, and Raimon hardly realizes that they have walked straight over the wall and are in the Catholic graveyard. “Take care,” he warns Metta. “Don’t fall over a tombstone.” He takes her arm again, and as suddenly as it arrived, his ill temper vanishes. How dare he snap. None of this is Metta’s fault. He guides her around gently, their footfalls making deep indents, until, though there is nothing to see in the white flatness except some animal tracks, he is sure they must be in the separate place set aside for the Cathar dead. He halts. “My mother’s buried in here,” he says.

  “Oh,” Metta responds, at once full of sympathy. “You must miss her.”

  “Every day,” Raimon replies and draws his dark brows together. Another lie and he surely need not lie all the time. “Actually, Metta, that’s not true. There are days when I don’t think of her at all. It’s only when I hear the snatch of a song or smell bread baking, then I wish I could just—could just—” He cannot go on. What he is saying now is not a lie yet is tainted by its use as another hook to draw Metta to him.

  “I’d like to have met your mother,” she says after a while. “Do you think you’re like her?”

  “No,” says Raimon quickly. “She was not like me.”

  Metta stands, waiting for him to take the lead as is her habit, and Raimon feels again that rush of resentment and now he welcomes it because it helps to harden his heart. “I wanted to be a good son to her,” he says, “but I failed her in the end.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Raimon finds he has to walk on, picking up his feet and placing them carefully so as to make clean imprints. As he walks, he bows his head, swinging his hair over his face. “She wanted me to believe as she did. And I did try, Metta. I even took part in her consolation. It was just that the White Wolf—I told you, remember? He told her she couldn’t eat. It seemed like murder.”

  “It wasn’t murder, but it was wrong,” Metta says, following in his footsteps.

  “Perhaps I was too quick to believe the worst of the Cathar faith, and believe me, when my mother died, I wanted to believe the worst.” He stops when he thinks they are directly beside his mother’s grave and turns. Metta moves until she is standing over his mother, a cozy angel in wool and fur. “But now?” she prompts.

  Raimon takes a deep breath and does not draw back. “I don’t know. These last days, talking to you—” He shrugs. “It’s too late, though, isn’t it.” He finally lifts his face to her.

  Metta smiles her innocent smile. “It’s not too late,” she says. “Many people come to our faith who have spent their lives denying it.”

  “I suppose they do,” he says, and thinks “careful, careful” as he presses on. “Sometimes, when I’m with you, it does seem the only way to make sense of everything.” He feels two bright lying spots under his eyes. Yolanda would have recognized them at once. Metta puts them down to the cold. She clamps her hood tightly under her chin. She is a perfect model for a Madonna, Raimon thinks rather bleakly, because she is a girl without angles, a girl in whom a man might bury himself and find all the comfort in the world. His quicksilver resentment turns again to remorse. She does not deserve this.

  “Come,” she says, conscious of a certain hollowness in his cheeks, “let’s get back into the warmth.”

  As they retrace their steps, snow from the branches above drops onto her head. “I’ve been talking to Cador.” Her voice is light. “He tells me you’re the bravest knight he’s ever served, and from the stories he tells, I think it may be true.”

  “I’m the only knight he’s ever served, and I’m not even a knight.” Raimon moves in front of her so that she cannot see the workings of his face. “Walk in my footprints again. That way your feet won’t get so wet.”

  Metta slots in. “It’s an honor to be walking in the steps of the Knight of the Blue Flame,” she says happily.

  He stops short and spins around. Has she guessed, or is she making fun of him? But she is incapable of either guessing or jesting. She is simply complimenting him in a way she knows will please him. Why this should be the last straw, he does not know, but it is. He cannot deceive her any longer. He will get the Blue Flame another way. “Metta,” he begins, but it is hard. He is only used to revealing things to Yolanda.

  She stands expectantly. “I’m listening,” she says.

  Where to start? “I love this place,” he says.

  “Yes,” she answers, “I know that.”

  “No, you don’t know, not really, not in the way I want you to know. I’d do anything to save it from harm. Anything. Do you understand that? Anything.”

  “Yes,” she says again. “That’s why Cador calls you the Knight of the Blue Flame.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. You see—” But he gets no further for a shriek has Metta clinging to him, and very quickly another shriek follows, high as a banshee so that the hairs on both their necks rise, and they begin to run as fast as the snow will allow, Raimon kicking great clods aside and virtually swinging Metta off her feet. They slither back across the bridge, still clinging together.

  Downriver, a crowd has gathered. Dropping Metta, Raimon pushes through to the front, where he finds Laila, soaking and crying, belaboring Aimery. The pink dye from her hair has run into the chalk with which she has whitened her face, giving her a skinned look. Aimery’s hands and clothes are also pink-blotted as he fends her off. “Jesus Christ, Laila!” he is shouting. “You’re the very devil.”

  Two men are carrying something between them. Dread sucks all Raimon’s breath into an echoing howl. “Cador! Oh my God, Cador!”

  But it is not Cador the men are carrying: it is a skinny, hairless dog. “Ugly!” Raimon exclaims. “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” His relief fires his anger. “That poor brute. What did they do to her?”

  “You knew it wasn’t safe!” Laila is screaming at Aimery, “yet you still threw the bone into the river. Why were you even carrying one?”

  Aimery finally grips her hands behind her back. Her petticoats flap, garish and dripping. “It was the end of my breakfast. I wasn’t thinking about the dog when I threw it.”

  “Why didn’t you jump in to save her?” Laila is writhing, trying to face him, but he holds her too tight.

  “I knew I’d be too heavy. Christ in heaven, you idiot! The ice couldn’t even
hold you.”

  “You could have tried!” She ties herself into terrible, murderous knots.

  “Like you did? What good did that do?” Aimery is puce for he almost cannot hold her, and the puce clashes with the pink as Laila’s screams ricochet around the valley. “Let go of me! Ugly! Ugly!”

  Raimon has reached the dog and is kneeling. Ugly’s eyes and mouth are open, giving her a look of faint surprise. She is already stiffening.

  “If I let go, do you promise not to hit me?” Aimery seems determined to turn this tiny tragedy into something of a joke. He lets go.

  Laila kicks out at him, then rushes to Ugly and takes the dog’s face between her blotched hands. “Wake up!” she orders. “Wake up at once, Ugly. Don’t you dare ignore me. Wake up now this minute.” There is a click as she shakes the dog and the jaw closes. She repeats her order, her voice rising and rising until Raimon puts his own hands over hers. “She can’t obey you, Laila,” he tells her flatly. “She’s dead.”

  For a long moment Laila remains still. Only Raimon can see the struggle going on inside her and the tears she refuses to shed. Aimery will not have that satisfaction. Raimon grips her hands tighter as she shrinks into herself.

  A large shadow is cast over the snow. “Well, I’m really sorry about the dog,” Aimery blusters, “but be honest, Laila, you never liked her much. You were always making fun of her. In fact, you treated her abominably.”

  A tremor shakes Laila from head to toe. Raimon wonders if she is at last going to break down or whether she will conjure a dagger from nowhere and stab Aimery straight through the heart. Instead, however, she turns chilly as the river. Under the chalk, Raimon can almost see her skin stiffening like Ugly’s. She leaves her hands for one more moment beneath his, as if gathering strength, then she whips them out and springs up. Aimery mockingly puts up defensive fists but she simply tosses her head. “Well, there we are,” she says breezily, hands on her hips. “There were already too many ugly creatures in the world.” She seizes a sleigh. “Come on! What are you all waiting for? Let’s go!”