Blue Flame Read online

  Raimon badly wanted to argue, but all he could see was his mother’s hand held by a stranger when it should have been held by him. He went to her. He couldn’t stop himself.

  She whispered to him, harsh whispers, for she had so little strength. “Please, Raimon, I’m so afraid. If you love me … just lay your hands. Please, Raimon, it would comfort … please.” She lay back exhausted.

  Her agony was dreadful to him. In the spasms in her cheeks, he could see the guilt she felt. His unbelief was her fault and God would hold her accountable. She should have tried harder. She was too tired to cry now but she seemed to be dissolving, immersed in grief.

  And suddenly Raimon couldn’t bear it. Why was he making such a fuss? What did it matter what he really believed? The thought that his mother might die with that look in her eyes would torture him always. And for what purpose? The White Wolf was no money-grubbing cleric. If, by putting his hand on her forehead and muttering a few words, Raimon could give comfort to the mother who had so often given comfort to him, should he deny her?

  He watched Adela, tight-lipped, as she washed Felippa’s face and Sicart as he stroked her hair. Only he was barred from this charmed circle. It was intolerable.

  “I’ll do it,” he said before he could have second thoughts. He spoke in such a low voice, he half hoped nobody would hear, but the White Wolf heard.

  “You are a good son,” he said, quick as a flash, and his smile was full of understanding. “You will be rewarded in heaven. It will not harm to do the consolation again.” Without waiting even for a second he placed the Gospel book back onto Felippa’s head, and Raimon’s hand too. When his mother felt it she opened her eyes, and this time, when she saw her son with his arm outstretched over her, murmuring the words of consolation after the perfectus, the grief was washed away and her face was filled with the beauty of joy completed. For that instant, Raimon was certain he had done the right thing. What did it matter now, except that his mother knew he loved her and that she loved him again in return. As the White Wolf moved back so Raimon could take his rightful place, a new kind of peace, strong as wine, descended over the whole household. There was no more talking. They just waited. The end could not be long.

  Two hours passed and Felippa’s breathing, far from growing more labored, became easier. Her skin felt less waxy and the pulse in her neck beat more strongly. She still slept, but no longer the struggling sleep of the dying; and in a gesture so dearly familiar to all her family, she slowly put up her hand to push stray hairs from her face. It was as if she had opened a curtain. Quite suddenly, the ordinary sounds of the day intruded. Sicart, Raimon, and Adela murmured. Only the White Wolf still sat in silence.

  At last Adela got up, rattled the fire, and began to prepare some soup, dropping an egg into it to give her mother strength. At the sight of smoke from the chimney, there was the occasional bang on the door as neighbors called, still exclaiming about the blue dawn but then asking how things were.

  Sicart sent them away. His relief gave way, once again, to tension. “You should go back into the workshop,” he said to the perfectus. “People will talk if we don’t let them in.”

  Unhurried and unperturbed, the White Wolf took out a bit of working cloth. “I am just a visiting weaver,” he said.

  Sicart shook his head. “That won’t be disguise enough now. We’ve Catholic neighbors and, well …” He carefully looked away from Raimon.

  “Yes. I understand.” The White Wolf got up. “What are you doing?” This was addressed to Adela, who had brought the bowl of soup to her mother.

  He smoothly took it away from her and threw it in the fire. Adela gave a small cry as the logs spat.

  “There should be no food after the consolation,” the perfectus said. “That is forbidden.”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Sicart. “Surely my wife can have a little soup? Perhaps no meat, just as you eat no meat. But soup?”

  “There should be nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Sicart struggled to understand.

  “Nothing.”

  “Just for today?”

  “No, nothing ever again.”

  “You mean,” said Raimon slowly, hardly able to believe his ears, “that she should starve?”

  The question hung in the air only for a second before the White Wolf, smiling as always, dealt with it. “No, no, not at all. It’s not starving. It’s like fasting, ready for the eternal feast. Your mother is in a very particular state of grace now. Only her soul is important, not her body.” He was standing over Felippa and she was looking up at him, absolutely trusting. “Yes, the eternal feast,” she whispered.

  “But then she’ll surely die.” Sicart still thought he had misunderstood somehow.

  “We’ll all die one day,” said the White Wolf pleasantly. “And we have become lax. The fast has fallen into disuse. But this is how it should be. Once you have received the consolation of a perfectus such as myself, you divorce yourself from all the devil’s works.”

  “Food doesn’t come from the devil,” Raimon said, breathing quickly. “It comes from the earth.” For once, Adela did not contradict him.

  “And everything on earth comes from the devil,” said the White Wolf, still pleasant. “That’s what we Cathars believe, because it’s the truth.”

  “But you eat.” Raimon no longer cared that his mother winced at the harshness in his voice.

  “So I can carry out my ministry,” the White Wolf replied. “When I become too old to walk, preach, and console, I shall eat nothing more. Then, like your mother, I’ll wait for the eternal feast. I know it’s not easy, this last bit, particularly when so much of life for a Cathar before consolation is quite ordinary. But this is our last preparation. Come, Adela, pray with me now, at the time of your mother’s final struggle.” He smiled still more reassuringly, and his slate gray eyes looked full into hers.

  However, Adela was still too horrified to go to him, and Raimon seized the opportunity. “Don’t pray with him! Please, Adela, don’t. Just think of our mother. If you love her, don’t pray with him.”

  “If you love her, you must pray with me.” The White Wolf never raised his voice “If you don’t, your mother may never see salvation. She will be reborn, perhaps as an animal, and condemned to live out another life of servitude and corruption. Do you wish that?” How was it possible to say such things? Raimon could not imagine. But the White Wolf never let his eyes leave Adela’s until her whole face was trembling and, seemingly against her will, but with awful obedience she began to sink to her knees, the practiced tyranny of the perfectus bearing down on her like an iron cloak.

  At once, the White Wolf knelt beside her, leaving not a parchment’s space between them. If her voice faltered, his did not. Felippa closed her eyes.

  “Get up! Get up at once! Father, make her!” Raimon tried to pull Adela to her feet, but she was a dead weight. He began to shout. Starving people was what despots and torturers did, he yelled. God could not possibly want good people who were dying in good faith to suffer in such a stupid way. He stopped shouting and tried to reason, to inject some sense into this senseless scene. Then he was shouting again and at last, Adela cracked, but only to stop her ears and beg him to be silent. “We must do what the White Wolf says,” she cried. “It can’t be wrong if he says it’s right. And look! Look! Even our mother agrees!” It was true. Felippa was nodding and when she looked at Raimon, her look was once again full of reproach.

  Raimon ran to his father. He was not kneeling, which gave Raimon hope. “You can’t agree, Father. Stop all this. Stop it now.” But the White Wolf began to speak again, utterly persuasive and utterly implacable. Sicart began to sweat. The perfectus was so sure. Who was he to contradict him?

  The White Wolf did not ignore Raimon. That was not his way. “Of course you are upset,” he said, “and how can I blame you? But if you don’t live as you believe God wants you to, what’s the use of living at all?”

  “But how can God want this?” Raimon
cried.

  “God wants what he wants,” said the White Wolf enigmatically, “and only the foolish or the wicked don’t understand that.”

  Raimon made for the door. He wanted to slam it shut as if the slamming itself might crush the White Wolf, but something stopped him. Long afterward, it was of some comfort to him that a slamming door was not the last sound his mother associated with him. Once he had clicked the latch, however, he ground his heels into the dirt as if crushing the perfectus beneath them. He thought he heard Adela’s voice crying after him, but once he started down the road he never looked back. For miles he heard himself murmuring the words of the consolation. They taunted him. He wanted to take them back. But then he saw his mother’s face, and for hours all he could hear, as if it were real and beside him, was the drip, drip, drip of her life needlessly ebbing away.

  6

  Sir Hugh des Arcis

  The following evening, two knights, conscious of the spectacle they made, clattered noisily through the town, eyeing the girls who walked arm in arm in twos and threes. In the pearly light, even the ugly looked beautiful, particularly as many had rolled up their sleeves and loosed their hair as they whispered about the Flame and other, more personal affairs, in the lingering warmth. Thank God for spring, which made it possible to escape from the stifling mugginess of their parents’ hearths where no gossip could ever be private. When they saw the knights, the girls giggled and clung closer together.

  The knight riding on the right forged ahead and despite his hurry, bent down, paying fulsome compliments as he passed. He never liked to miss an opportunity. Then he returned to his companion. Though yesterday’s blue dawn had dominated their conversation since reported by a breathless messenger, Aimery of Amouroix had another concern. Sent to assure Count Raymond of Toulouse, leader of the Occitan rebels, of his father’s support against King Louis, he had also conducted some business of his own and part of this business involved his fellow traveler.

  “I hope the homecoming feast will be to your liking,” he said. “My father is not known for the excellence of his table and I wouldn’t like you to think us inhospitable.” Sir Hugh des Arcis offered no reassurance. He just gave half a smile, which Aimery couldn’t read at all. Aimery jabbed his spurs into his horse’s sides and made it gallop up the final steepness to the chateau gate. “Open up for Aimery of Amouroix,” he shouted rather unnecessarily. The porter, roused from sleep, gave a nervous squeak.

  The first thing Aimery noticed as the gate swung back was that during his absence the chateau had become even more ramshackle. It could, of course, have been that absence sharpened his perceptions, but whatever it was, he now looked with distaste at the mice foraging quite openly amid a sea of speedwell and storksbill and twisted weeds clambering unimpeded up the curtain wall. He kept talking, hoping to divert attention from the door to the armory swinging crazily on one hinge, the pungent trickle around the bottom of the tower, the blackened scar from a kitchen fire, and the small tree that seemed to be growing from the stable roof.

  The count was waiting in the main courtyard, at the bottom of the steps to the great hall, with an urchin from the town hopping from foot to foot beside him. There would be a reward for being the first to tell the count that his son was home and as Aimery dismounted, he watched his father drop a coin into the boy’s open hand, a coin so much more valuable than expected that the urchin, biting it hard to test he was not being duped by base metal, scurried off without even saying thank you lest the count realize his mistake and ask for it back.

  Berengar, however, had eyes only for his son. “Aimery!” he exclaimed, full of welcome, but no sooner had he embraced him than he began to scold. “For goodness’ sake, child. Why aren’t you armed? Have you no sense at all? Two knights like you, riding back from Toulouse at a time like this and neither of you even wearing a hauberk? What were you thinking? Was it for nothing that I told you of the miserable death of King Richard the Lionheart, cut down in his prime through carelessness with his armor? How many times must I remind you? If you had been kidnapped and held to ransom like your uncle Peter—”

  “Yes, yes, it would ruin us, and we have Yola to marry off yet.” Though he flushed slightly, Aimery nevertheless finished his father’s speech for him, as he had done so often in the past. Uncle Peter, now dead, and whom neither Aimery nor Yolanda had ever met, had become a figure of fun to them, so frequently did their father use him as a model either of good behavior or bad, according to the needs of the moment. “But nothing did happen to us, Father. Here we are. May I present Sir Hugh des Arcis. He has been very kind to me.”

  Hugh dismounted and bowed to the count. Before the count had a chance to nod in return, he was giving directions about his warhorse to his squire. Only then did he turn back. At least a decade older than Aimery, his face had that lived-in, battle-worn aura that women tried to copy onto heroic tapestries. His individual features, though not distinguished in themselves, fell together in that fortunate way features sometimes do that implies, without any real reason or evidence, that the man who bears them is a man of great character. “I am at your service, sir,” he said, with another of his half-smiles.

  Berengar, already rendered nervous by Aimery’s slightly dismissive tone, gave the worst possible impression. “Oh no, I’m at your service, as is Castelneuf. Now, I should say what fine horses you have. Yes, fine horses indeed. I hope you and they will be comfortable, although, well,” he waved a vague hand, saw Hugh’s smile again, then took a deep breath. That was enough. He changed the subject. “Now, Aimery, tell me at once. Was Raymond happy with the letter I sent?” Berengar had taken such pains over it, making it supportive but not too supportive in case King Louis should ever read it. Berengar hated trouble and most of his life had been carefully planned to avoid it.

  “Oh, I think so, Father.” Aimery could be vague too, when it suited him.

  “Did you watch him read it?”

  “I was there when he read it.” Aimery’s soft blond beard, newly grown while he had been away, hid a smirk his father would not have liked. “He sent you a message, though. He said it was good to know he had nobles on whom he could rely absolutely.”

  The count’s wrinkles bit a little deeper. The message seemed bland enough, but he knew that tone. Raymond had seen straight through him. “Oh dear,” the count said.

  “Who cares about the letter now,” Aimery said impatiently. “Are people saying that the Flame really has come back?”

  “People seem to want to believe it.”

  “And do you believe it?”

  Berengar sucked in his cheeks. “I’m rather hoping not.”

  Aimery stared at his father, somewhat despairing. “How typical,” he thought. Castelneuf could have been a stronghold and a fortress, sending men out to increase the family fortune. By now, I, the Amouroix, could have been rich and Berengar, not Raymond of Toulouse, the most powerful leader in the Occitan. Instead, Castelneuf was a crumbling apology of a place where men danced instead of fought, and sang of their ambitions instead of marching out to fulfill them, and I was a small country of which few people had ever heard, let alone taken any notice. Except that they would now. Whatever happened to Raymond and the Occitanian rebellion, and whatever happened to his father, Aimery was not going to end up on the losing side. He would make sure of that. He felt a shiver of excitement at the thought of the Flame. What a piece of luck that it had appeared now. He would find it, and he knew just what to do with it. He glanced over at Hugh, noting the solid, expensive Parisian armor even now being unpacked from the baggage wagon and the glint of gold on each finger. What a match. What a joining. Yes, Aimery thought, under his guidance, Castelneuf had a shining future ahead.

  They could hear singing.

  In Occitan there hovers still

  The grace of Arthur’s table round.

  Bright southern knights will yet fulfill

  The quest to which they all are bound.

  A small tornado whipped out of the air
from above. “Aimery! Did you see the Flame?” Yolanda’s pleasure was quite uninhibited. She threw herself off the top step straight into his arms, trusting that he would catch her just as he always had. He did, but his pleasure was rather less than hers. “Yola! Honestly! You’re getting a bit big for this. Where’s your dignity? You could have killed yourself!”

  “But I didn’t,” she responded gaily, and, at the echo of their father’s favorite exclamation and their favorite reply, Aimery gave a genuine laugh. He had not yet completely shaken off his boyhood.

  “Now,” he said, setting her down, “before anything else I want you to meet Sir Hugh des Arcis. We’ve become great friends. He tells stories as well as a troubadour. Gui and Guerau will have competition.”

  Yolanda went directly over to Hugh, who bent his head in a low bow. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and curtsied back. Aimery’s friends usually ignored her. “You’re very welcome, sir.”

  “It is entirely my pleasure to be here.”

  She attempted to smooth her rumpled skirt. “Aimery says you are a fine storyteller. That will be a great pleasure.”

  “It will be in your listening that my pleasure lies.”

  She wondered if he was making a fool of her, with this overelegant formality, but he seemed quite serious.

  He went on without hesitation. “That was a fine song you were singing when we arrived. Would you like to sing a little—”