Almodis (33 page)

In the early autumn of 1069 Ramon and I cross the Pyrenees with more Barcelonese reinforcements for Carcassonne and the landscape is transforming dramatically all around us. The
flaming
colours of trees in the valleys shift to muted fustian browns and dark greens. The trees along the river are nearly all bare so that it becomes possible to see more of the surrounding
landscape
. Many little birds congregate in the branches preparing to fly further south. Instead of the route I took into my
homeland
a few years ago, we follow the coast for some way and then crossing the mountains we head for the tower of Dourne, high above the gorges of the upper Aude. After that we wend our way through Razès along the river, taking oaths from the castellans at Niort, Auriac and Rennes. Heading towards Conffoulens, we ride through the thick trees and the forest floor is littered with mushrooms of all kinds: red and white, brilliant white like angel’s wings, shiny brown caps, and mushrooms decaying so that they look like the faeces of an unknown animal.

In Carcassonne I reunite Adelais and her new son, William-Jourdain, with her mother. She will live with Raingarde, and Ermengard has also promised her a home. Raingarde is well, despite the terrible losses she has sustained over the last few years. She is confident in our new strategem to protect her and her family’s rights.

Ramon and I continue our journey of oath-taking to the castle of Ornaisons near Narbonne. ‘I keep expecting to see your son’s
army camped on the road before us,’ Ramon tells me, meaning Raymond, but there is no sign of him. When we visit Garsenda in Narbonne I am sad to see her alone, now that my dear friend Berenger has died. After Narbonne we strike back towards Toulouse, taking oaths from the castellans at Caberet and Saissac on the southern slopes of the Montagne Noire and at the fortress of Cintegabelle on the road from Foix.

In Toulouse my Barcelonese twins, Ramon Towhead and Beren, are knighted by Guillaume and will travel back to Barcelona with us. Towhead is excited to find that he will be Count of Carcassonne when he comes of age. Guillaume tells me he will not meet Adelais or look at his son. ‘I can’t do that, Mother,’ he says gruffly and my heart aches to think of him as a boy and now this unkind man, dishonouring his cousin.

‘You will regret it,’ I tell him and he is angry with me.

Adalmoda arrives to see me with her husband Pierre and two baby boys named Raymond and Pons. I try not to show her how I dislike the last name. She looks well and happy and is very proud of her sons.

Guillaume gives me news that Agnes of Mâcon became a nun at her Abbey of Notre Dame de Saintes near Poitou and that she has recently died there. Though I had good cause to loathe her all my life, I go to the cathedral and say a pray for her soul for she, like Ermessende, was a very great lady.

On our return to Barcelona the city is in uproar with the news that Seljuk forces have taken control of Jerusalum from the Fatimid caliph of Egypt. The Seljuk will be even more intolerant of Christian pilgrimages. ‘The pope must act,’ are the words in the mouths of many people.

Shortly after our return my daughter Inés was married to Guigues Count of Albon and has left me. ‘She is too young,’ I had protested to Ramon since she is only fifteen.

‘I was that age when I first married,’ he told me. ‘I’ve talked it over with her and she is more than happy about it. You know I would not let her go otherwise.’

I hug fourteen-year-old Sancha to me, my only child left of twelve! ‘Sancha will not wed early,’ I tell him and he bows to us
both. ‘You know that your word is law in this household,’ he says. Pere stands scowling against the wall.

The atmosphere of the court has shifted substantially since our return with Towhead and Beren, and not for the better. Now there are the
conroi
, the followers, of three young princes jostling and vying with each other daily. My Barcelonese twins have returned moulded to the military bearing of my Toulouse sons, who in their turn were moulded by Geoffrey the Hammer. They wear their hauberks and gambesons most days, despite the heat, as part of their toughening regime, and the young men of the court and the city who Pere has not favoured, flock to them instead.

Bernadette tells me she has overheard an argument between Pere and Beren. ‘Pere taunted Beren that his brother is Count of Carcassonne and he will have nothing.’

‘Tsch! He is wicked.’

‘Beren more than stood up to him though,’ she tells me proudly. ‘Clouted him round the head he did, and told him he’d have Barcelona and his mother would see to it.’

‘In the spring,’ I say to Ramon, ‘we will send Pere on a mission to Rome on our behalf. He needs responsibilities and to see the world.’

Ramon and I ride out alone from the city for a rare day off from our own responsibilities. We ride past olive groves where
children
are knocking the ripe olives down with sticks, until we reach a secluded place on the river with willows dipping their leaves in the water. I take off most of my clothes and lie on my back by the riverbank, watching a procession of wispy clouds across the blue sky, while he tethers the horses and unpacks a picnic. My chemise barely comes down far enough to cover my privates. I have a pair of Ramon’s short breeches on to do that and I stretch out my bare legs feeling the sun hot on my skin, although these will be the last days of this summer and the air has a hint of the coming chill.

‘Come on then,’ I say, ‘are you coming in?’

He is divesting himself of his clothes. His legs, and his bare chest when he pulls his shirt up over his head, ripple with muscle.

‘We are in good shape for two middle-aged people,’ I say
smiling
at him. ‘We are a happy middle-aged couple.’

‘Really? Feels to me somedays as if I am in a marriage with a hedgehog.’

He throws himself down beside me laughing, wearing only his breeches, luxuriating with his eyes shut in the sun. He opens one blue eye and squints at me. ‘It’ll be cold.’

‘Nonsense,’ I say, standing up and pulling him up with me and down to the river’s edge. The sun sparkles on the surface. Frogs are mating noisily. Blue dragonflies skid along the water. Fish jump and splash back down. Large black and white butterflies flap along the bank like handkerchiefs. I stand hand in hand with him like the earth’s first man and woman.

‘Here,’ he says, pointing to a place where a flat rock juts out from the bank into the water. ‘It’ll be easiest here.’

I go first, slipping into the water, gasping at the initial full immersion. ‘It’s lovely!’

He looks doubtfully at me, dipping a toe in, but then
somersaults
spectacularly into the water, so that I am drenched. He swims up beside me. ‘Whur-huh-huh! It’s lovely and cold!’

Ducks look at us with amusement, that we have assumed duckness for the day. ‘Or fishness of frogness,’ says Ramon, demonstrating fishy and froggy swimming moves. I laugh and the sounds echo up from the water, bouncing off trees and light.

A plate of pink and green and vermilion marzipans fashioned in the shapes of flowers. The sweetmeat is sweet on my tongue but now I feel a burning sensation in my throat, coughing, choking.

Poison.

I turn my head to where I know Pere stands, holding the plate, but my vision blurs and I cannot see him. I fall and lie on my back, looking at the intense blue of the sky. Shouts and running feet come to me muffled, and then silent, but still vibrating through the ground. Something obscures my vision, gossamer cobwebs I would like to wipe away from my face, but I cannot move my hand. A small oval of blue, contracting.

‘Almodis!’ A quiet shout. I know he is kneeling at my side, but it seems that he is standing on a distant mountain, calling to me. The blue oval of the sky, has become the blue circle of Ramon’s eye, washed and swimming in tears, his tears, my tears.

I try to move my hands to leave some trace of my fingers in the dust.

I think: but I haven’t finished yet.

I, Dia,
trobairitz
of Barcelona, am dying with the old century. It was all so long ago and I forget so much, but I remember
everything
about Almodis. Every word. I remember her, my dear friend. I remember Ramon’s grief, as deep as a gaping well sunk far into the ground, as black as a moonless night.

‘
L’heureuse Almodis, resplendissante sur terre, est passée, par sa mort, a la demeure de la vie,
’ he wrote on her epitaph in Girona Cathedral: Happy Almodis, radiant on earth, is passed by her death, to the residence of the life.

‘Though one may seem to live long in the world,’ wrote her favourite author, Dhuoda, ‘one’s life is short, like that woven cloth that is measured and snipped off in the market place.’

We all knew that Pere had murdered her and Ramon’s grief at that was terrible too: that the warnings had been there, but he hadn’t been able to believe them. Pere was banished and
forbidden
to bear arms for twenty-five years. He lost the kingdom that he had lusted after and hoped to gain by his wickedness. He died young, just thirty-five, and alone, in Muslim Spain. When he was on his death-bed Pope Gregory gave him a pardon for Almodis’ murder. But God will not pardon him. I do not pardon him.

Ramon outlived her only five more years, years of unremitting
grief and loss. The people called him Count Ramon the Old, but he was not old. When she died his hair turned white and the youth dropped from him like a silk shift. I stayed with him for those years and when he too died and went to join her, I travelled with Rostagnus to Parthenay to make our home under the patronage of her daughter, Lady Melisende.

At the moment of Almodis’ death, Raingarde let out a great cry in Carcassonne and never spoke again and died herself a week later.

Some say Almodis was a serpent, a scandal, a whore. They say wrong. She was a sweet lady and worked her whole life for the good of her subjects, her friends and her children. Before she died, I think she learnt to love her husband. She left a great legacy behind her: her sons, daughters and kin are rulers in Occitania, Catalonia and the Holy Lands. She never liked women’s work and was happier with a pen in her hand rather than a needle and thread, but she wove together an empire and a society. Those who come after her now do not have her skill to hold it together.

Bernadette laid out her beautiful lady in her shroud and sat with her in the Cathedral of Barcelona for ten days, rocking
herself
backwards and forwards, and then she blew her nose, took her son, and set up a hostel on the Santiago de Compostela route. Her business flourished and Bernadette’s sayings were famous amongst pilgrims across Christendom. She died peacefully in her sleep a few years back and Charles continues in the hostel still with his large family. He looks very like Piers.

In Catalonia, after Ramon’s death, the twins became joint
rulers
of Barcelona and all its domains and they left Carcassonne to Raingarde’s daughter, Ermengard and the Trencavels. Ramon Towhead married Lady Mahalta of Apulia, the daughter of the Norman, Robert Guiscard, who ruled Sicily. Through these
contacts
Barcelona’s commerce grew more and more and the city’s population with it. Ramon Towhead, Cap d’Estop, was loved for his boldness, kindness, joyfulness and his attractive appearance. He was much like her.

After six years of joint rule, the twins quarrelled and Beren demanded a division that Ramon Towhead would not agree to. After the birth of his son, Towhead was murdered while hunting in the forest on the feast day of Saint Nicholas. Many believed
that his brother Beren was the murderer. Beren ruled as regent for his nephew and never married, but he was not all bad. He formed a tight-knit
drut
, a war-band with his half-brothers, Hugh the Devil of Lusignan, Guillaume and Raymond of Toulouse. They fought together in Spain and Beren was with Guillaume six years ago when he died on pilgrimage. A trial by combat found Beren guilty of his brother’s murder and he died seeking penance in Jerusalem two years ago.

All the children of Almodis and Ramon are gone now: little Inés, she died in childbirth a few years after her marriage to the Count of Albon; Sancha was married off by her brothers to the Count of Cerdanya who had repudiated Raingarde’s daughter Adelais all those years before. Sancha had two sons and one of them is Count of Cerdanya now, but Sancha is gone in
childbed
too. The only survivor of their dynasty is Almodis’ grandson, Ramon Berenger III, a great king, Count of Barcelona and Duke of Provence. Lucia was regent in Pallars Sobirà and ruled well, and the Count of Urgell made her guardian to his children, such was her prestige. Her son, Artaldo, is the count now.

In Toulouse, Guillaume tried to atone for his sins with his cousin Adelais by building a great cathedral but his first wife was barren and his second wife, Emma of Mortain, gave him a daughter, Philippa, and no living sons. So, according to the treaty contracted after the siege of Lusignan in 1060, Philippa has been wed to Agnes’ grandson, Guillaume IX Duke of Aquitaine, who is called the troubadour prince for his poetry.

Guillaume of Toulouse named his brother, Raymond, as his heir some time back and now that Guillaume is gone, Raymond is Count of Toulouse and Saint Gilles and much more besides, and names himself the Duke of Septimania, Provence and Narbonne. Of all her children, Raymond reminds me most of her: a fearless autocrat. When the pope excommunicated him for his
consanguinous
marriage to his cousin Bertranda, Raymond ignored the ruling saying, ‘The church has no right to pontificate on my marriage.’ He has become a great warrior in the mould of Geoffrey the Hammer of Anjou. Raymond lost an eye in one of his battles. He was the very first lord to take up the pope’s call for a holy
crusade
and he left Toulouse four years ago with his third wife, Elvira
and their baby son, leading the forces of all Occitania. He
discovered
the Holy Lance and this summer he was triumphant, taking Jerusalem from the heathens. He turned down the offer of the title King of Jerusalem, saying it made him shudder for that name belonged to Christ. He hasn’t come back from the Holy Land. He is still out there fighting for other kingdoms with a name he’d like. He left his son Bertrand ruling Toulouse, and sure enough Bertrand’s cousin Philippa and her husband, the Duke of Aquitaine are fighting him for it. So Almodis’ children and grandchildren fight on between themselves when she would have woven peace.

Hugh the Bishop, well he is at least an abbot and a most kindly and revered one, and still in Saint Gilles. Adalmoda was Regent of Melgueil for her son Raymond, after her husband died. She had two more daughters after Almodis was gone and named them Ermessende and Adela. Her second son, Pons, entered Cluny and is rising steadily through the ranks, aiming for abbot.

In La Marche, Audebert lived a long life. His son Boson became count but he died in battle a few years later and then Audebert’s daughter, named Almodis, and married to the Welsh Norman lord, Roger of Montgommery, became Countess of La Marche in her own right. My Lady’s youngest sister, Agnes, finally married her heart’s desire, Ramnulfe of Montmorillon, when they were both in their sixties, and her brother and nephew were gone and could not gainsay her.

I live now in Aquitaine with Lady Melisende who is chatelaine of the Castle of Parthenay and has her own lively family. Brother Jourdain comes often to visit us from the Priory of Lusignan. His twin, Lord Hugh the Devil of Lusignan, continues a steady policy of aggression against his neighbours. Jourdain says he is more like his grandfather, than his father. He holds his own against the Duchy of Aquitaine and even annexed a small part of La Marche a few years back.

‘Now he is away with Raymond of Toulouse in the Holy Land, the neighbourhood can relax for a while,’ says Melisende
laughing
at her rumbustious brother.

‘All her children,’ I say. ‘I remember your births and your
childish
pranks. And I remember the men who loved her, the men who she would not love, and the one who she could not have.’