The Treasure of Montsegur Read online

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I say angrily. “I don’t know any children. I have nothing to do with the children. I dislike children.”

  “The other children ran away. They were afraid of you. He says that you picked him up.”

  “Lies, lies! I’m an old woman, that’s all. Now you’ll slander me with lies!”

  “He says you pressed your palm on his forehead and the wound stopped bleeding.” Her voice a whisper now, her words pushed out intently. “He says you took his bleeding hand in yours and stroked it. Like this.” She sets down the bowl and runs the palm of one hand flat across the other.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He says he saw the skin repair itself, and when he climbed down from your lap, there was nothing to show that he’d been hurt.”

  “Never trust children,” I say. “Known liars.”

  “Where are you going?” She grabs my arm.

  I start across the muddy yard, she following.

  “Na Jeanne,” she calls. I stop. She stands, both hands at her sides, looking so forlorn that my heart goes out to her. Perhaps I am mistaken.

  “Yes?”

  “Please,” she whispers. “I want to thank you for what you did for Guiscard. Jeanne, are you a Friend of God?”

  “There are no more heretics. Everyone knows that. Now go away. I have my rounds to make.” I turn to leave again.

  “Will you come to supper tonight?” she asks. “My husband and I would like you to join us tonight.”

  I stop, stunned. Listening. Trying to gauge the direction of the wind. I shut my eyes to hear better, but I cannot catch the drift. When I open them again she’s watching me with her round black eyes. I reach out my spirit, trying to feel her aura.

  “It’s a true invitation.” She senses my hesitation. “Go on your rounds, whatever you do of a day, but this evening, come eat with us. We are good people,” she continues. “We remember the old days.”

  I do not answer. I press on out of the stableyard and into the byway. But she follows me.

  “The stableboy saw you the other day.” Ah, there he comes again, the traitor. He’s the one will turn me in. By now we’re standing on the cobbles of the street. “He says you were sitting still as a tree.”

  “I was probably asleep.” I turn angrily.

  “He says he touched you on the arm. You didn’t move.”

  “Old woman’s sleep.”

  “No, when an old woman sleeps, her mouth falls open and her head rolls to the side. Or perhaps she lies down on the ground. But you were sitting bolt upright. You had left your body,” she says insistently. “And you healed my little boy.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I shout, and I pull from her grip. “Get away from me.” I turn my back, groping for my cane. “I need the latrine. Excuse me, please.”

  She frowns, but she takes the hint and leaves with a quick, irritated toss of the head. She thought I didn’t notice her exasperation, but not much escapes me now; and when she’s picked her careful way back across the stableyard to the house, I return to my lair, glance about to see it’s safe, then quickly lift the board and feel in the straw-packed hole for my treasure. I slip it, still wrapped in its green oilskin, into the inner pocket of my skirts and take up my stick and my little sack with my own wooden bowl and spoon, and I stagger across the yard.

  Halfway across I go back for the bowl that the mistress brought me, and I gulp the few remaining beans hungrily. But I leave that bowl behind. I won’t be accused of stealing. My heart is anxious, not knowing where I am to go but my feet moving along anyway. I know this feeling. It means that something is about to happen, or that soon I shall meet someone. I know where to go too, when this anxiety comes to me, because any step in a false direction feels wrong, and any step in the right direction fills me with a kind of lightness, though I have no idea where I’m heading or what for. I feel led, as if by the metal finger an Arab merchant once showed me, the magic needle always pointing north. Or led by the magi’s star.

  I hurry out of the town, past the smiths and the weavers and the scribes, out the gate and on toward the fields, but a little whimper catches in my throat as I remember the other times, when they were after me, and now the fires are burning in my head again.

  TEN

  I don’t slow down until I’m out in the dirt lane, over the hill, and walking as fast as three frightened legs can go over the stony road between the hedgerows. What did she want from me? Yes, I had been on one of the journeys. Yes, I had healed the little boy. I couldn’t help myself, for I can no more stop the flow of that force through my hands than I can stop the sun from shining. It is only love. No harm in love. The touch of love.

  But that’s no protection now. “Any person is entitled to hunt heretics on another’s land, and he can force the owner’s bailiffs to help in the hunt as well.” I know the decrees by heart.

  “If any heretic is found on your land, your property is forfeit, and the heretic’s house shall be burnt to the ground.”

  The French promulgated the laws after the war ended. When would that have been—about 1229 or 1230? It was just after our beloved Count Raymond VII was scourged before the crowd in Paris. Everything’s a jumble in my memory. William went to Paris with him, and also Roland-Pierre, my two men riding together in his escort. They both told me of the trip. Count Raymond had surrendered, and afterward the French passed laws to encourage us to spy and turn our neighbors in. Mistress Flavia’s servant-boy will hunt me down. And if he catches me, he can probably take over his mistress’s land. If he’s cunning enough, if he knows the laws—though I think he’s just out to make trouble.

  A cramp in my leg. I can walk no farther.

  Yes, it was 1229, after the war ended, and long after the death of Simon de Montfort. Roland-Pierre and William and three hundred knights rode to Paris with Raymond, Count of Toulouse, cavalcading up to the Languedouil, land of the Francs, where they say “oui” for yes, instead of our Languedoc “oc.” He signed the Treaty of Meaux with Louis IX, the boy-king of France, and also with the Pope, and the three signatures stood as equals on the document.

  Yet afterward they whipped him in the new cathedral they’re building in Paris, the one named for Our Lady, Notre Dame. Both William and Roland-Pierre were there.

  The twelfth of April, 1229. Raymond was barefoot and dressed only in breeches and a white shirt. They stripped him naked and put a cord around his neck, as if he were a common slave. (Or was he exalted as Jesus Christ our Lord, who was also whipped for us, a living sacrifice?) Count Raymond knelt at the altar, white buttocks bare before the surging crowd, and Cardinal Romanus of Saint Angelo, the Pope’s own man—the one whose mistress was the queen-regent, Blanche of Castille herself, mother of the young king Louis—Romanus himself lifted his arm at the altar of Christ and brought down the leather whip. Afterward the cardinal and the other papal clerics took the Holy Eucharist.

  Count Raymond left twenty hostages behind in Paris. One of them was his sixteen-year-old daughter, and they say he’s not seen her to this day. That’s what happened when he signed the Treaty of Meaux. The Catholic Church imposed a fine of ten thousand marks—imagine!—just for defending his lands against their invasion. Ten thousand marks! It would take a hundred years to raise such a sum. That was 1229. When he signed the Treaty of Meaux. When he was publicly flogged at the high altar. I heard about it from Roland-Pierre.

  When Count Raymond rode back from Paris in defeat, we gave him a hero’s welcome. He rode into Toulouse, the City of Beauty, where the banners were flying at every window and tower and the trumpets scrawled. The mighty warhorses, draped in tapestry run through with red and gold, paraded heavily through the thrilling crowds; the knights, armored in leather and mail, carried lances decorated with bright red and green and white silk flags. All the windowsills were hung with rugs, and we ladies leaned out to toss roses on the returning count and his cortège. A shining day! And I so
happy that I left my post to run beside the parade, throwing flowers at my splendid men. I could have flown to the stars, swept round the universe with joy!

  Cardinal Romanus accompanied our count. William said his presence wouldn’t matter. We thought we would live in peace now that the treaty had been signed. We would rebuild, we thought, and life would go on as before—though perhaps not on the scale we’d known before. That was too much to ask—to return to that time when the feast of a nobleman might last three weeks and gifts enough to ransom a king be handed out: gifts of horses, armor, lands, and cakes of Oriental spices, wagonloads of salt or bolts of wool or silk. The greater the gifts, the greater the prestige of the one who bestowed them. Never would we see those days again, but we comforted ourselves that the peasants were tilling their fields again, and the first wheat crops would soon fall to the scythes. The perfecti were baptizing credentes again, and the Cathar Church, the Friends of Love, was the stronger for having been driven underground.

  We thought the war was over, when in fact it was only changing form. The day the decrees came out, William took the palace stairway two steps at a time, holding the scroll high overhead as he ran into the great hall.

  “Listen! Listen to what they now demand!” he exclaimed.

  I caught my breath, he was so handsome. His strong square hands, the way held himself, the turn of his fine head, his generous, open smile flashing in his copper beard, the vulnerable curl of his hair at the back of his neck. My patriotic indignation entwined itself with my love for him. Whatever cause William fought was mine as well—we, the freedom-fighters. He handed the scroll to a clerk to read to us aloud.

  “Quiet! Quiet!”

  “Listen!”

  We crowded round to hear how our days would pass from now on.

  “Any heretic who renounces his false faith must wear two crosses sewn on his breast, and the crosses are to be in striking contrast to the color of his clothes. He must change residence. No heretic or reformed heretic may hold public office.” (Well, no one will renounce, that’s all! And laughter follows.)

  “Every boy over fourteen and every girl over twelve shall swear loyalty to the Catholic faith, abjure heresy, and promise to hunt out heretics. This oath shall be renewed every two years.” (The laughter dying on our lips.)

  “All persons, without exception, must attend Mass on Sundays and take Communion thrice a year—at Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost.

  “No one suspected of heresy is to practice as a doctor, and no sick person may have a heretic near him when he dies.” (That’s in case the helper give the consolamentum on the sly.)

  As I recall the reading of the decrees, my present danger hits full force: the danger of healing that little boy, of staying with the dying woman. And I am on my feet again, up from the stone where I’d paused to rest, and moving on, hobbling on my stick. I’m running from the Inquisition that is already on my heels.

  As I run, my mind takes me back to reading the decrees. William stood in the Great Hall, commanding silence with one arm raised, his head bowed, listening to the clerk. I squirmed through the jutting hips and elbows to his side. He reached out and pulled me to him, and I felt a welling up of triumphant joy—in contrast to the horror of the decrees. Around me, the silence deepened as the reality sank in, our dismay at this invitation to denounce our neighbors, betray our closest friends. (“But who would turn his neighbor in?” we asked.)

  There was worse to come. “No one may possess a Bible or translate it from Latin or read it in the vernacular.”

  We looked at one another, stunned. “But who will receive the Word of God?” we asked. If we could possess only a psalter or breviary, and these written in Latin, the scripture would be of no use at all to the ordinary person.

  There were many more decrees.

  “We shall not give in!” William shouted, leaping onto the table. My heart swelled. I promised myself right then that I would fight beside him all my life. I would die for him. And yes!—we would not give up!

  For an hour more we milled around, repeating and discussing the decrees, this tightening of the noose of tyranny. We would refuse—simple as that—to turn our friends in, our cousins, husbands, wives. The hall rocked with our angry disbelief, our voices echoing off the stones of the vast hall.

  “Demons is what those Francs are!”

  “Now anyone can accuse a neighbor of heresy and take his land for free.”

  “But look, there aren’t enough bailiffs and priests in the land to execute these orders!”

  Yet William had his arm around me, hugging me to him, and I could feel my ferocious and exultant excitement: we would fight and love together, he and I.

  Two weeks later, the first arrests took place. They took us by surprise.

  The perfectus Vigoros de Baconia, whose preaching was so passionate that people came from fifty miles around to hear him, was condemned and executed before a lawyer could be called. He was burnt so fast (alive, of course) that we hadn’t time to organize a protest.

  They arrested the two elder sons of our Lady Esclarmonde, and Bernard-Otho was imprisoned for a year before he could buy his freedom; Esclarmonde herself went underground, poor old woman. She was sixty-nine by then. She retired to her country estate with her youngest son and her beloved orphan girls, the ones like me whom she’d adopted and schooled and tended so lovingly. She engaged in no more politics.

  The spying and betrayals spread after those first arrests. And here I am still running, this time from the velvet-liveried stableboy, who’s looking for a lover’s favor, I suppose.

  I stumble on another mile. The sun grows warm at last—amazing in early autumn, when at night I’m goosebumped cold. The last grasshoppers leap out from under my feet, but they are chilly and listless, though you might have thought it summer still with the tall grass and the last dim poppies and wildweed flowers bursting yellow and red at the edges of the road. The land begins to climb, and a river paralleling the road narrows between its banks, running over rocks and tumbling faster in its fearful, white-spumed rush.

  We thought we’d been afraid during the twenty years of war, but in those years we could curl up in each other’s arms for comfort. We knew who the enemy was. Now the Inquisitors ride through the townships with their bodyguards and men-at-arms; they move in herds of twenty, fully armed.

  Advisedly.

  Afraid.

  Advisedly.

  For the Resistance roam the countryside as well. Not long ago, they caught one Dominican Inquisitor and slit his throat and hung him upside down on a tree, his cassock falling over his head to expose his naked brown private parts. “Stupidity!” I whisper now, watching the water spill down its channel, though there was a time I’d thought it fine. “Stupidity.” Such actions only spawn more retribution, more moiling hatred, anger, violence, war.

  Like the vengeance that William and the band of fighters wreaked at Avignonet when they cut the throats of seven Inquisitors. Afterward, they rode all night back to Montségur, softly in the moonlit shadows, their horses hanging their tired heads, and the men tired too by the time they reached home: their laughter dulled; riding in silence toward the end and some a little worried at the repercussions of their actions, but most of them still glorying in the raid. They arrived at dawn to announce their mission, thinking the murders a great blow against the enemy; and the tired men stomping their boots before the fire and tossing down their swords and bucklers with a clatter of relinquished steel and an air of celebration. Pons Diego guzzled beer in great slurps, laughing, the liquid running down his beard, with righteous pride, his cup running over; and William laughing with the others, his head tossed back, his blue eyes flashing. The perfecti were shocked. They shook their heads, fearing that this one foolhardy act would call down on them a siege of Montségur.

  I can’t walk another step. I sit on a stone in the sun, sheltered from the wind, and look out over the rolling hills and green pastures so good for sheep and goats. He maketh me to lie down
in green pastures…. I shall not want.

  Suddenly a great cry rises from my throat, erupting in a wail of anguish and grief. My shoulders shake with the gush of tears. The sunlight is flashing gold and silver off the violent grass, and I am no longer a righteous freedom-fighter but only a fugitive, running for my life.

  ELEVEN

  Well, that was a good cry.

  Buck up, old girl. Things are never so bad as we make them out. I remember Bishop Guilhabert de Castres reproving me at Montségur for worrying. “But it works,” I teased him through my tears. “I’ve worried about a lot of things, and none of them have come to pass.”

  Bishop de Castres, that good, sweet soul, folded my hands between his own gnarled, work-worn, knobby-knuckled hands. “Remember, child,” he said, “all things change. The wheel of good turns round to bad, and bad wheels on to good. But our Lord has made a covenant with us. We may be in pain, but we will never be alone in our suffering. We have a spiritual cavalry at our disposal. Remember, Jeanne, we are always taken care of.”

  I was only fourteen. I didn’t want to say it outright at the time—and certainly not to a bishop—but I wanted nothing to do with any covenant with God, not when our Father would slam His only beloved Son up on a cross and watch Him die, as hard-bitten as Abraham with Isaac. It seemed to me that Christ could have had just as fine a resurrection after a quiet, happy, old-age death in bed (I wanted to say). What was the point of being crucified? Watch out for fathers (I wanted to say). God may have made a pact with humankind, but it didn’t include our knowing the terms, exactly. Better to stay out of His holy sight. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Of course, I said none of this to my beloved, kindhearted bishop; it would only have made him unhappy.