Paradise Red

by K. M. Grant

  After this, the mood on the pog turns very sober—too sober for the White Wolf’s liking. He wants no despondency, for that might lead the knights to thoughts of a truce, and the White Wolf will not countenance that. Martyrdom is what God wants and the martyr’s crown is what they all deserve. When the fortress falls, they must all fall with it, taking the Blue Flame with them.

  He calls them together. “Why the long faces?” he cries. “Our brother monk is in paradise, seized by the arrow of God’s love. Come now. We should be rejoicing that the autumn rains have blessed us and that the oncoming winter will see us warm behind these strong and doughty walls while our oppressors shiver in their drafty tents. De Perella!” Raymond appears. “It’s time we had a celebration. We’ve plenty of food. Let’s feast and afterward open our hearts and sing.”

  He lights a spark and, after a little more persuasion, the cooks make preparations. With the smell of food in the air and the promise of heaped plates, both knights and perfecti begin to relax, and eventually, even among the perfecti, a party atmosphere prevails. Having eaten and drunk more than usual, Aimery sees two of the brothers enter the latrine shack that overhangs the curtain wall at the back of the fortress. “Come on,” he whispers to Laila. “Now’s as good a time as any.” For all his manifold faults, nobody could accuse Aimery of cowardice.

  As the singing begins, they make their way together to the latrines. Aimery has a cursory look around and then they push their way in. When they are first interrupted, and even more when they see Laila, the perfecti are highly affronted. “Get out! Get out!” they bark. But when Aimery draws his sword, their bark turns into a twitter as their hands shoot out protectively and their bowels involuntarily empty. It is not difficult for Aimery to do what Raimon did and divest them of their habits. It is more difficult to know what to do with their victims. “Shove them through the waste hole,” Laila advises. “That’s the easiest.”

  Aimery hesitates. The drop onto the rocks below is immense. One of the perfecti begins to moan and the other, losing his head, yells for help. Aimery cannot afford to hesitate further. With a murderer’s mercy, he cuts their throats before pushing them into the abyss.

  Laila pulls on a habit but makes a face at the sandals. She’ll not wear those if her life depended on it. She drops the hem of the habit over her own shoes, purple today, with heels. Her green eyes glint. “What now?”

  Aimery grins. “I’ve been busy,” he says, and pushes over a pile of stones to reveal one of his stolen ropes. “After we’ve got the Flame, we can tie this to these posts and let ourselves down until we find a ridge. The rope’s long enough, provided it holds.” He covers it up again.

  Both are thrilled by the danger, infected with a madness in which there is no room for caution. They pull up their hoods and slide out of the privy one behind the other, folding their hands inside their sleeves as is the heretic way. With the company still singing and full from the feast, nobody gives them a second glance. The only people sitting glumly are Sir Roger and Metta. “Naughty Raimon,” Aimery murmurs in Laila’s ear. “Who’d have thought a weaver could break a heart?”

  Laila’s eyes harden, but she does not reply.

  The two of them walk freely into the keep behind a cook carrying the last of a large garlic pie. Keeping their heads bowed, Aimery and Laila follow the pie up the stairs. When the cook turns onto the domestic floor, Aimery and Laila continue up. On the next floor, there are three perfecti sitting cross-legged, surreptitiously playing dice. When they see Aimery and Laila’s hooded figures, they leap up like guilty schoolchildren. Aimery nods curtly, and both he and Laila pass through the door and then through again, finally finding themselves outside the room-within-a-room, where two more perfecti are sitting, empty plates beside them, half dozing.

  Aimery and Laila pass around them, turn the corner, and settle themselves outside the glow of any lamps. They wait. The door to the inner room is opened from time to time as perfecti flow in and out. Laila leans very close to Aimery. “Why are we waiting?” she asks.

  “I’m thinking what’s best to do when we get inside.”

  “Oh, I daresay we’ll think of something.” She raises an eyebrow and begins to move.

  “Laila!” But she has gone. To keep up with her, Aimery must move too.

  The first thing they see is the grille around the Flame. The second is a perfectus kneeling in a corner, and the third, on the far side with his hands, as always, bound behind him, is Raimon. Gaunt now, his Cathar habit stiff with sweat and his hair as shaggy as Brees’s, he is as pale as Aimery is flushed.

  Laila quickly joins the black-robed figures processing around the Flame’s table and Aimery has little choice but to do the same. The perfecti are usually silent, but today, in deference to the White Wolf’s injunction to be cheerful, they murmur to one another and occasionally laugh. As he passes within Raimon’s field of vision, Aimery raises his head so that his hood slips back a trifle. When Laila next passes, she does the same.

  Raimon notices nothing at first. The third time she comes around, Laila kicks out. Raimon’s head jerks up and he almost chokes. Two perfecti glance at him but pass on and then, with most of the others, pass back out the door. Aimery and Laila keep walking around for what seems like hours before just themselves and the kneeling perfectus are left. Aimery and Laila grin.

  Having killed two perfecti in cold blood, Aimery finds it easier to contemplate killing a third, but another question bothers him. Should he kill Raimon as well? That would certainly show the king that the Count of Amouroix knows his duty, for Raimon is the most troublesome of the king’s enemies. But he is uncertain how Laila might react, and anyway, first things first. He moves fast, feeling for his dagger, but as he yanks back the head of the kneeling perfectus, Raimon bangs on his restraints and yells “No!” Aimery glances up, then down to see a well of sunken parchment into which a pair of colorless eyes have been carved. He can see no reason to stop. It is only as the hood falls completely away that he realizes the stringy neck he has just slit is a woman’s. It is a second longer before he realizes he has killed Adela.

  He drops her at once and makes for Raimon, unsure what he is going to do. But Laila is there before him, cutting Raimon’s bonds and helping him to rise. Aimery pauses. Perhaps she is right. They should keep Raimon alive until they have gotten the Flame away. He is entirely expendable, and that might be useful.

  Raimon does not want to lean on Laila for he can never forget their fight, but he cannot stand without her. He limps and stumbles toward his dying sister. “My God, Aimery! My God!” He can find no other words. Adela is lying facedown, breathing her last.

  “She hated you,” Aimery said quite dispassionately, “and she wanted martyrdom. This is better than burning.” Nevertheless, he cleans his knife with unusual vigor before sticking it away. “Come, come,” he says, as Raimon sinks down and takes Adela in his arms. “She’d have killed you given half the chance.”

  Laila is pulling at Raimon too. “You can’t help her now,” she says. “Come on. We’ve got to get out.”

  Raimon refuses and turns Adela over. In those seconds when life has gone but death has not yet taken its cold hold surely something about her will soften. Surely something of the sister he knew as a small boy will reappear. It does not. She might have been dead for months instead of seconds. He puts her down very slowly. The White Wolf killed her before Aimery did.

  Laila is now pushing as well as pulling. “The least you can do is hurry,” she says.

  He swats her away. “I’m going nowhere without the Flame.”

  “And you imagine we would?” Aimery is searching the room. “Don’t flatter yourself that we came for you. Now, where’s the key to this damnable grille?”

  Raimon does not move. “The White Wolf has it,” he says. “He never lets it go.”

  Aimery shakes the grille and tries to break the lock with his dagger. He groans with frustration. “What shall we do?”

  Laila has found t
he ends of candles. “We’ll light one of these.”

  Raimon leans against the wall. “Don’t be so stupid. The Flame’s the Flame. It’s not a toy to be shared.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.” Yet he wants to get out, away from Adela, away from the White Wolf, away from here. The feeling is so strong. He goes to the grille. The Flame is still as glass. But he will never abandon it for it has not let him down. All these months, it is the only thing that has sustained him. Behind its grille, with unfailing brilliance, it has shone for him, keeping alive his faith in himself and in the Occitan when his soul and body ached in the gloom. He may die for it, but he would also have died without it. How can he leave it?

  “You know nothing.” Laila throws a candle end at Aimery. “Go on then, Aimery, you do it.”

  But he, too, hesitates. Raimon is right. This is the Blue Flame of the Occitan. It cannot be treated as a plaything. And if he cannot bring the king the real Flame, perhaps he should take nothing at all. He does not want to be hung for a fraud.

  In the end, Laila grabs a candle herself and thrusts it through the grille. “Stop it!” Raimon and Aimery cry together.

  She takes no notice. “I’ll light it if you won’t,” she snorts, “and then you can blow this old Flame out.”

  Raimon rushes at her as she pushes the candle through the bars. It just fits, and she blows so that the Flame, light as a moth’s wing, kinks and bends and touches the wick of the stub. Raimon dare not hit Laila’s arm, although that is what he wants to do, for fear of putting the Flame out altogether. His tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth and his legs shake as if the keep itself is quaking.

  “There,” Laila says with some satisfaction as her candle catches. “The Flame. Now let’s get out of here.”

  Raimon can hardly speak. “What have you done? What have you done?”

  Laila straightens up. “I’ve lit a new Flame,” she says, irritated, “and I’ll tell you something else. If your precious Flame really is everything you Occitanians say it is, it wouldn’t be stuck in an old silver saucer and a decrepit wooden box. It wouldn’t be stuck anywhere. A real Flame would be just as happy on this candle as on any other, and much happier with us than flickering away behind that stupid grille or with the White Wolf waving it about like some smug archbishop.”

  But though something in Raimon stirs, he cannot believe her. After all, what can she know of the Flame, she who is little more than a gypsy trickster? He seizes the bars of the grille again, and again tries to shove his own arm in, stretching every sinew to reach the silver salver that sits just out of reach. “I can’t get it!” he cries. “I can’t get it.” He rattles the bars wildly, straining and straining. There is heavy breathing beside him. “Look!” Aimery says, “just look.”

  The Flame in the salver is subtly changing. Slowly the rich blue that so intoxicated Raimon when it overflowed into the Castelneuf valley seventeen months before fades. The Flame is still lit, indeed it is still blue, but all its charisma is gone. It seems quite hollow, its cone an empty shell. This is a flame, not the Flame, and it could neither intoxicate nor comfort anybody.

  Raimon exhales slowly and tiny fragments of his rejected dream return to him: Yolanda in the valley unbound as a melody and the Flame as the pulse of the land. He gazes and gazes at the silver salver, searching for reassurance. Has Laila done right or is this the end of everything? He receives no answer. The empty flame bends neither to him nor away from him. He longs for Yolanda. She should be here now, not Laila. He closes his eyes.

  They fly open again when Laila kicks him smartly and yanks at a convenient hank of his hair. “Leave the dead with the dead,” she advises. “That’s what I always say.” And suddenly he is hobbling away from Adela’s corpse and the empty flame and running as best he can with legs stiff from lack of use, through the door and toward the stairs.

  “Pull up your hood and walk!” hisses Aimery, overtaking him, and Raimon slows. “Give me the Flame,” Aimery demands of Laila, pulling up his own hood. “I’ve taken a lamp. We can put it in there. We’ll just have to hope nobody stares too closely.”

  Suspicious of his rescuers and uncertain about what he has witnessed, Raimon’s escape from the keep is the uneasiest of journeys. Aimery and Laila are almost running, and Raimon’s joints creak in his effort to keep up. He knows one thing for certain: that given half the chance they will leave him behind, and the Flame will vanish with them.

  They see light when they turn the corner onto the ground floor. The door at the end is open though there is a knot of people bundled around it. The White Wolf is among them. Raimon can hear perfecti running down the stairs behind him. He can hardly breathe. They must have found Adela’s body and perhaps also noticed the changes in the flame. He wants to hurry and has to force himself not to change pace. Ahead, Aimery and Laila are doing the same. He passes under the passage lamp and drops his head right into his chest as he is jostled so close to the White Wolf that he can smell the garlic on his breath. Then, at last, he is out in the teeming courtyard. Nobody catches his collar. Nobody is yelling “murder.” They have a moment’s respite. For a second he loses sight of Aimery and Laila, then spots them and is on their heels at the privy.

  Unnervingly, the shack is occupied, and when the door opens and an unknown man emerges, Raimon sags with relief. Had it been Metta or Sir Roger, could he have ignored them? Sorry—more than sorry—as he is to have hurt them, this is not the time for explanations. He thinks briefly of his father, bearing Adela’s death alone. Laila prods him. He follows her inside.

  Aimery locks the door and they are quickly working together, securing the rope. The fat slit through which the waste falls is stinking and slimy, and if the urgency were not so great, all three would hang back. As it is, the moment the rope is knotted around the bottom of the doorpost, Aimery tumbles out the end into the low-lying cloud. Holding the lantern between his teeth, he lies down, his feet to the slit and his nose wrinkled against the stench. When he has wound his legs around the rope he is ready and begins to slither backward. His legs vanish and suddenly he is at the tipping point. One inch farther and he will be swinging in the abyss. His face is blotched red with effort. He had not realized he was so heavy. His back and stomach scrape through the muck and jam against the stone. He wriggles, he grunts, he gasps, then he is gone. The lantern is the last thing to disappear.

  At once Raimon and Laila are lying down and peering. They cannot see Aimery in the mist clinging to the fortress’s walls but they hear him, his curses distorted by the clenching of his teeth as he crashes against the mountainside, clinging to the rope tighter than he has ever clung to anything in his life. Swing, swing, crash, crash. But always he is descending, the rope-scalds on his hands a welcome price to pay. In two long minutes, he has not nearly reached the bottom of the pog, but he has reached the relative safety of a narrow ledge about sixty feet below. He is only halfway down before Laila is after him. As light as Aimery is heavy, she descends, deft hand over deft hand, more monkey than human. Her grin is enormous.

  Then it is Raimon’s turn. He wonders if his arms will hold him and finds it hard to push off though the smell is choking him. But he can hear a swell outside. The respite is over. Adela’s corpse has been found. He takes a deep, repulsive breath, and suddenly, terrifyingly, he is swinging.

  The mist is moist and sticky, and he is sliding down quickly, too quickly, the rope flaying away the skin on the inside of his legs and arms, his muscles already shrieking. He forces his fingers to tighten as the wind flaps him like a flag, now into the cloud, now clear of it. Down, down, down he goes, all his nerves and ligaments stretched and howling. He cannot hold on longer, yet he does. He reaches the ledge so fast that his bones jar. He drops on all fours, like an animal. His stomach heaves.

  The ledge is solid but only about half as wide as it is long, with crumbling sides stippled with old roots, all that remains of trees that have long since been battered and broken by the weath
er. A sheer drop of more than a hundred feet lies behind him. In front, the ledge stretches like a crooked smile for about ten feet until it gives onto a wider, rounder space, almost a little plateau, on which some grass and thin birches have managed to grow, but which then narrows again to a path that jolts its way unevenly through dense undergrowth to the very bottom of the pog.

  Raimon glances up. The rope, relieved of its burden, is swinging wide in the gusts, slapping against the clouds that begin to dump their burden of rain as though angry at the disturbance the escapees have caused. Raimon does not care. He cannot see the top of the fortress wall, and if he cannot see it, then nobody in the fortress can see him.

  Aimery is standing where the ledge widens, with the lantern in one hand and the other cockily on his hip. Laila is behind him, all alert acquiescence to the man she appears to have adopted as her lord. The rain stops falling vertically and turns into a persistent sideways sheet. Raimon rises and moves with the exaggerated care of a tightrope artist.

  Aimery spreads his legs farther apart, his Cathar disguise beginning to drip. He holds out the lantern, saying nothing. Raimon straightens up, although he barely realized he was hunched. He is almost within touching distance of the new Flame when he sees the knife that Aimery has raised to heart height. “No further for you, I think, Raimon.”

  At first Raimon does not hear clearly, for the wind is an unceasing moan. But the knife is clear enough. He stops. The wind beats the rain against his cheeks as his eyes flick awkwardly between the Flame and the blade. He tries to speak and then realizes he will have to shout. “You’re going to kill me now? Why didn’t you just cut my throat along with the others in the keep?” It is hard to keep his balance.

  Aimery shouts back. “Laila and I thought we might need you. Isn’t that right?” He tosses the last question over his shoulder.