Blue Flame Read online

“We cannot have just any Flame. This Flame was lit specially for us at the moment of Christ’s death, when the veil of the Temple was rent in two. You remember how it came to us?”

  “Through Christ’s mother. She brought it.” He could still hear his mother’s voice telling him the story, though her voice was fainter now. She had been dead for too many years. He looked at the Flame again but it did not seem motherly to him. It seemed to be eyeing him, assessing him, judging him. It was a relief to turn back to his father.

  “Tonight,” Bertrand continued, “Richard’s men will be focused on his wound, so it will be easier to leave. Once we’ve got you out of this keep, you must ride home as fast as you can.”

  “I can’t! I can’t go by myself!” Parsifal wailed.

  Bertrand looked at his son, and his heart was filled with foreboding. He looked at Arnaud, who shrugged. “We have to try,” he said.

  Bertrand stiffened his voice. “You must be brave,” he said. “You must find the right leader to whom to give the Flame, someone who will keep the Occitan free in the paths of righteousness.” He wanted to say more, but his voice choked.

  Parsifal searched his mind for another answer. “Couldn’t we …,” he said.

  Bertrand shook his head. “No more. I will join you if I can, otherwise we will meet again in heaven.”

  Parsifal cried out. “But heaven is so far away!”

  “Yes,” Bertrand said. “But far away from suffering too. I shall be happy there. Come now. That fat pony of yours may be useful yet.”

  The other knights slowly gathered round, dead men walking. “God bless you and God keep the Occitan,” said Arnaud sincerely, and kissed the boy, and the other knights did likewise. Lastly, Parsifal shook hands with the arbalester.

  Then he walked with his father back down the steps, right into the fetid damp of the foundations. Counting steps all the time, for the only light came from the box, Bertrand at last stopped and pushed open a trap door just large enough for a badger or a small boy. He held his son again for a moment, but was almost overcome.

  Parsifal tried to say something, but his father interrupted. He did not want to prolong this parting. “Godspeed,” he said and pushed the box containing the Blue Flame out first and Parsifal after it.

  “Father,” he heard the boy whisper, poised on the edge of darkness.

  He could not remain silent. “Yes?”

  “When we meet again, can I have a proper sword? I should like to name mine Unbent, after yours.”

  “I expect so, if you deserve it.”

  It was the traditional response of a father to a son and it made them both smile fleetingly. There was more scrabbling, then Parsifal’s voice came again, muffled this time.

  “Father?”

  “Yes, my son.”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to hear your voice again.”

  Bertrand was glad Parsifal could not see his tears. “Go now, Parsifal, and may God go with you.”

  He waited, sealing his son in his heart, as Parsifal made his final scramble and emerged in the shadow of a buttress. Bertrand felt his way up the steps to the ground floor. After checking the heavy bars slotted across the main entrance, he began to climb again.

  At the top of the keep, Arnaud was watching as the pony wound its way into the forest. The guards were not interested in such a small boy. If they thought about him at all, they thought he must be a page collecting leaves for a bed.

  Eleven days later, Richard the Lionheart—king of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine—died. He had left quite specific instructions that the man who had loosed the deadly crossbow bolt was not to be harmed. His orders were disobeyed.

  And Parsifal? He began with such good intentions. He made a proper pocket from thin animal skin so the Flame’s blueness could always be disguised from curious eyes and kicked his fat pony toward the south. But he found something he did not expect: the Occitan was already filled with flames, not Blue Flames, or even French flames. These flames were red and carried above them the sign of the cross.

  How had this happened? Distortion. Two ways of worshipping God in the Occitan and neither sect willing to tolerate the other. On one side, the supremely powerful Catholics, and on the other, the Cathars, whom the Catholics designated “heretics,” fewer in number but just as fanatical. Each was convinced that God was on their side and their side only. The Catholics lit the funeral pyres and the Cathar heretics offered themselves as martyrs to the flames, both sides joyfully grasping at these most unholy deaths as a sign of their own righteousness. And the worst of it? Each side claimed the helpless Occitan for themselves.

  What was Parsifal, still so young and with no one to guide him, to do? What would you have done? He did what came naturally. He hid. He dreamed of being heroic. He dreamed of saving the Occitan. But he had no idea how to go about it. To which faction did the Flame belong? He didn’t know and the Flame wasn’t saying.

  At last, almost starving, he was taken in by an exhausted widow, who sold the pony to pay for his keep and put him to work. Parsifal thought his heart would break as his pet was led away. But the Flame, sympathetic for once, dried his tears and kept him alive when he ran off into the freezing mists of the Pyrenees. It was the Flame who led him to the old Muslim shepherd with whom he found solace.

  It was no life for a knight, but then Parsifal, although now of an age for knighthood—with no armor, no squire, and not even a pony—could hardly count himself as special. Curiously though his hands remained unblemished by wind and weather. The old man was kind and Parsifal made himself useful, helping to guide the flocks over the passes into Catalonia for the winter and back into the Occitan for the summer. Soon, just like his shepherd master, he could tell by sniffing from which valley the wind was gathering strength. The shepherd had no cause for complaint and asked few questions. His only interest was his flock. He noted Parsifal’s curious hands, and the box from which strange colors emanated. But the boy’s hands were quick and deft and the shepherd respected secrets. And besides, whatever it was that the box contained kept away the bears and wolves better than any guard dog.

  Forty years passed. The Cathars and the Catholics continued to bicker and fight. The armies of France rolled to and from the Occitan, never defeating it, never leaving it alone; the French kings eyeing it as a man eyes a sliver of sugar for his breakfast table. People spoke of the Blue Flame, wondered about it, but it never appeared.

  When the old Muslim died, Parsifal lost all sense of himself and the boy he had been. He turned vagrant, wandering after flocks of sheep that were not in his charge, stealing food, and, occasionally, when a shepherd was idle or asleep, secretly helping himself to a lamb or a cow. Yet while he was quite aimless, still the Flame burned on.

  Every now and again he fell in with knights turned bandit, or those who had returned from foreign wars and found their castles overrun. He heard them sing the “Song of the Flame” that Occitanians loved to sing. Sometimes he would sing with them. But though these knights pledged allegiance to the Occitan, most wanted the Flame to use as an instrument of revenge against those they felt had wronged them. Parsifal did not linger long with those knights. None of them, it seemed to him, had much interest in the path of righteousness.

  Only once did he show the Blue Flame in public. It was in Foix after he had helped another shepherd drive the flock down to sell. He had seen some knights taking their ease outside a tavern. These knights were not bandits, they were simply old and battle-wearied. One had lost an eye. Another had a wound that would not heal. Yet they were joking gently together, loyal companions in arms who had seen each other at their best and at their worst. Parsifal crept close to them. These men had the kind of companionship for which he himself longed. His throat knotted with shame at his tattered appearance and tattered dreams. He left the knights and ran back into the market place, pulling the Blue Flame right out of its pouch. It seemed annoyed, sinking down until less than a pinprick, but Parsifal shook it until it glittered, even in th
e sunlight, and then held it up over his head. “Who loves the Occitan? Who will lead her in the paths of righteousness?” he called out above the hurly-burly of the market.

  What did he expect? That a selfless hero would rush across the street and claim it?

  Of course people stared at him. The Flame in the possession of a madman with pale hands and a beard as thick as a blackberry bush? It must be a hoax. But not everyone thought so. When Parsifal turned he found himself directly in the path of three inquisitors. These stern-faced, white-robed Dominican friars were the Catholics’ most lethal weapons against the Cathars. It was the Dominicans who claimed to be purifying the Occitan for God by burning at the stake everyone who disagreed with them. From where do such ideas spring? From some thick, black sediment at the bottom of men’s stomachs.

  The leading inquisitor saw the Blue Flame straight away and his eyes almost doubled in size. He gripped his hands together and came to an abrupt halt, his whole attention glued to the tiny slice of color. He shook his head. This could not really be that Flame, not really the Flame of the Occitan. And yet he catapulted forward, his hand thrust out.

  Parsifal was never sure how he escaped. He only knew that he ran faster than he had ever run, and once off the main road, he scrambled and climbed, crept and crawled over hill after rocky hill and through valley after silken valley, until he could no longer feel the inquisitor’s breath on his back. Only then did he sleep, enfolded in a crag that protected him like a shield.

  He remained hidden for weeks, getting up only when forced to by hunger or thirst, while the Flame, more agitated now than it had ever been, both comforted and taunted him, for while it reminded him of his father, it also reminded him of duty unfulfilled.

  It was weeks before he found the strength to emerge, and it was on that day—as the French armies were once again rumbling south, determined to wear the Occitan down in one last, grinding attempt—that a lumpy, shaggy dog appeared, its tail wagging and its mouth full of rabbit. The dog and Parsifal regarded each other, and when the dog dropped the rabbit before him and licked those pale hands, Parsifal chose to take it as a kind of sign. A man will clutch at anything when the map of his life has fragmented. The dog, on the other hand, whose life did not depend on a map, quickly regretted the rabbit and when the pale hands did not give it back, gave Parsifal a very old-fashioned look and yawned.

  2

  Near My Town of Castelneuf, Amouroix, 1242

  Raimon and Yolanda

  In the spring of 1242, Brees—for that was the name of the dog—returned and flopped down in his original position, near Yolanda and Raimon, who were lying on their backs in a patch of scrub amid the trees that rose in an uneven, tufted carpet above a small lake.

  April, when the lake swelled with snowmelt, was the time of year Yolanda loved best. The seasons are a comfort when trouble comes, don’t you think? They remind us that everything passes, not that Yolanda, at this moment, wanted anything to pass. Her birthday party was just over a month away and as she and Raimon lazily spotted the butterflies fluttering above the grass, they were discussing what the entertainments should be. “Jugglers and fire-eaters,” Yolanda was saying, “and perhaps, since I’ll be fourteen, we might have a mock tournament and dancing until after dawn. I’ll get to lead the ‘Song of the Flame’ and then I expect Gui and Guerau will have new romances for us to hear.”

  “All about you, naturally.” Raimon glanced sideways at her, his irises encircled by rims so thickly black that there was only a sliver of deep hazel between them and the pupils in which Yolanda’s reflection shone. He was going to dig her in the ribs, but didn’t. Instead, he raised his arm to pull gently at Brees’s long tan fringe. This dog was not a beauty. An unintended mixture of savage alaunt—a burly, broad-headed greyhound type—and a shorter-legged speckled running hound, he was all untidy limbs and matted fur. When he panted, as he was doing now, his tongue flipped sideways as though he was constantly licking something just out of reach. “We should teach Brees to howl a birthday tune.” Raimon leaped to his feet and threw back his head so his slick of dark hair cascaded down his back. “Yawoool,” he cried, and laughed when Brees threw back his own head and joined in. Raimon’s laughter was not just in response to Brees’s attempt at a duet. He laughed because where once Yolanda’s presence had been as unremarkable to him as trout in the stream or purple orchids in the meadows, now it made him jumpy as a lynx. Brees was a very useful diversion.

  Though they had scarcely spent a day apart since Yolanda had learned to walk, Raimon had, over this last long winter, during which he had celebrated his fifteenth birthday in rather less grand style than was planned for Yolanda’s, become aware of her in quite new ways. He could not pinpoint when this awareness had begun. He only knew that instead of Yolanda just being a friend—his greatest friend, who happened to be a girl—he now noticed the cleft in her chin, the shape of the freckled arc that bridged her nose, the way she scrunched up her legs when she was listening to a sad story, and the sudden creasing of her top lip when her brother Aimery teased her in a way she did not like.

  Raimon had not looked for these things. He had never even described them to himself. It was just that this year, by the time his father had thrown open the doors of the weaving shed to let out the stale winter air, he knew she had become an astonishment to him, and he half longed and half dreaded that she would notice.

  “Don’t,” she was saying now, rolling over and catching at his legs. “You’ll scare the sheep.” She shook herself like a wild pony, her hair a tawny billowing mane, as uncombed as her dress was unwashed.

  “Too late,” said Raimon, although he did stop howling. Brees, finding himself howling solo, soon lost interest and began to sniff for more rabbits. Raimon and Yolanda climbed onto an outcrop of rock and together looked down over the treetops. There, sure enough, were the sheep, running toward the lake in an uneven snowy tide.

  “Peter will be cross with us,” said Yolanda. It was a statement rather than a regret. The shepherd disliked Yolanda’s dog intensely, for Brees was not reliable with the flock. It was not that he ever meant to kill the sheep, it was just that sometimes a red mist would descend and he became hunter and the sheep were his prey and he heard nothing but the roar of the chase in his ears.

  Twice Yolanda had had to beg for his life when Brees appeared, telltale bits of fleece still sticking to his teeth. Twice her father, Count Berengar, lord of all my land, had reprieved him. The third time, when Yolanda knew that there would be no more indulgence, Raimon had hidden the sheep’s body and, shortly after dusk, had taken Brees out and tied him to a ram. All night long the dog had been buffeted and butted, and Raimon sat and watched as the lesson was painfully learned. In the morning, it was a chastened Brees who, after Raimon had tended to his bruises, was returned to his mistress. He had not chased the sheep since, although the instinct still lurked deep within. But Brees seemed to know that in some odd way Raimon had saved his life, and he would often lie at his savior’s feet, staring up at him with ardent eyes. This amused Yolanda very much and she would whisper to Raimon, tickling his ear with her breath, that it was a good thing the dog could not speak, or he would surely give their secret away.

  Today, however, the sheep were running of their own accord, too far away for the dog to give them more than a passing thought. And at this moment there was another smell on the wind that arrested his attention.

  Raimon, alerted by the dog standing, turned to inspect the horizon himself. The weather was clear, so he could see not just the near hills but the far as well. At first he saw nothing unusual, then at the top of one of the gorges where the Amouroix melts into my neighbor’s, a small plume of gray rose before vanishing. He frowned. It was surely nothing, just farmers burning timbers from winter storm damage. The spring saw many such fires. But as he watched plumes continued to rise, and then it was not their increasing number that bothered him so much as the smell—just tiny snatches of it carried over. Brees was bristling. He could s
mell it too. The smell was real and it was foul. Raimon had smelled it before, six years ago, when he and his father had been walking home from his grandmother’s funeral in Limoux. When his father would not tell him what the smell was, Raimon had known that it was not burning wood.

  “Come, Yolanda,” he said, rather more abruptly than he meant to. “It’s time we went back.”

  But Yolanda was also looking to the west. “That’s a lot of smoke.” Clouds of it were forming. She too was sniffing, but without fear. “It’s not in Amouroix, and even if it is, it’s a long way from Castelneuf.”

  “Quite a long way.”

  She nudged him. “Well, whatever it is, it needn’t trouble us, need it?” That was another thing he had begun to notice about her, the way she often deferred to him, as if he knew better than she did. How long had she been doing that? He didn’t know for sure, but he hoped she would never stop. He gave a grunt, which she took for agreement, just as he meant her to. He didn’t want to alarm her. There had been many rebellions against the greedy French king Louis, the ninth of that name, but none had ever touched the Amouroix. What was more, everyone said that Raymond of Toulouse, who had inherited the mantle of leadership for the whole Occitan, could weather the latest storm.

  Yolanda turned her back to the smoke. “I wonder if we could get that famous fortuneteller from Poitiers to come.” She was still mentally organizing her party. A shadow now stippled Raimon’s face that had nothing to do with King Louis. He did not like it when Yolanda mentioned Poitiers. To him, Castelneuf was enough. Why did Yolanda even have to mention other towns, miles away? What could they offer that was not better found here?

  Yolanda watched him. She could follow his thoughts quite easily, even when he didn’t speak. It was always funny to her that he felt he must explain himself. Just lately, she too had felt the new jumpiness between them. She knew it alarmed him, and she hugged this knowledge to herself, for it did not alarm her at all—it just made her blood run quicker, her legs run faster, and the world seem full of new possibilities.