Paradise Red (12 page)

“Tired?” Aimery asks blithely.

Raimon jerks and picks up his reins. Sir Roger has gone and he did not hear Aimery approaching. “No.”

Aimery caresses his arm conspiratorially. “How we've fooled these poor cabbages, you and I,” he chortles. Raimon will not answer. Aimery coughs. “Well, now is the time to make a plan. When we reach Montségur, we should probably—” Sir Roger rides up again to the place he has begun to think of as his own. “Ah, Sir Roger!” Aimery exclaims. “Raimon has been singing Metta's praises and berating me for daring to disagree that it was providence rather than just the weather that steered you to Castelneuf.”

He chatters on and on until Raimon feels his spurs and gallops away. Balls of snow from Galahad's hooves smack Aimery's horse smartly on the nose. “Really!” the count says, turning wide eyes on Sir Roger as Argos throws up his head, “Men in love behave very strangely.” And he goes on to tell Sir Roger, in a loud voice that carries clearly through the crisp air, how Raimon deserves to be a knight, because he prides
himself on never telling an untruth. He paints the saintly picture so thick that he risks Sir Roger rumbling the joke. But Sir Roger is a simpler soul than Aimery. He believes him partly because it seems true, but mainly because, for Metta's sake, he wants to.

By the time Yolanda and Brees reach Castelneuf and run, as best they can, up to the gates of the chateau, they are skin and bone. Few acknowledge them for there is almost nobody left. Aimery may have left men and orders, but the day after he rode away, the chateau began to empty. First to go were the upper servants, the steward, clerks and craftsmen. Next, the two knights he left in charge quarreled quickly, irrevocably, and perhaps purposefully so that they could leave too. And who can blame them, for despite Aimery's assurances that Castelneuf is of no interest, it is rumored that the inquisitors who are on their way south still have Castelneuf on their list of places to visit. No knight intends to burn for Aimery. Better to find another lord to serve.

So by the time Yolanda, speechless and steaming, and Brees stagger in, the only remaining inhabitants are Gui, Guerau, the huntsman, the dogboys, and Laila, of course. It is she who pulls open the postern gate and drags the exhausted travelers inside, hiding her happiness at seeing Yolanda again behind a nurse's scolding. It is she who half carries Yolanda into the small hall and stokes up the fire, sending the troubadours for furs, food,
and more logs. As Brees lies down gingerly, hampered by protruding ribs, it is she who strips Yolanda of everything she is wearing and rolls her up in blankets, and finally it is she who, as soon as a pot boils on the hearth, feeds Yolanda and Brees hot broth, a spoon for one and a bowl for the other. Clucking and fussing, though she would never say so, Laila is so happy that she could sing.

Brees recovers more quickly than Yolanda. Before an hour has passed, he shakes off his covers, wolfs down an entire loaf of bread, and seizes a leg of mutton from the table. Yolanda's lips are too cracked to smile. Besides, the soup that she dreamed about in the blizzard hurts her mouth and very quickly her stomach can take no more. When she turns from the spoon, Laila rummages in her box of tricks and pulls out a salve that she pastes onto Yolanda's whole face before beginning to tease out her hair. Even this is too exhausting. Yolanda's head lolls, so Laila stops and files her own nails instead.

Yolanda dozes, then wakes, and only then notices that there are no footsteps, no voices, and no other people. She tries to free her arms from her woolen cocoon. Laila clicks her tongue. “Stay still, for goodness' sake.”

The paste has eased some elasticity back into Yolanda's skin, and though her lips sting, she forces out two words. “Where's Raimon?”

At once Laila swipes up more salve with her forefinger. “Don't speak,” she orders. Yolanda blinks and turns and is faintly reassured to see Gui and Guerau hovering.

Laila wipes the salve on Yolanda's eyelids and resumes her work on her hair. Her fingers are slow and gentle, then faster and less gentle as her temper gets the better of her. “Oh, why
not tell you straight?” she explodes. “He's fallen for a simpering idiot of a girl named Metta, who set her cap at him after her father and his household sought shelter here from the snow. They've all gone to Montségur and Raimon's gone with them—well, gone with
her
. It's the last stand of the Cathars, don't you know.” Her voice mimics Sir Roger's gruff roll perfectly but with an added twist that loads it with ridicule. “Last stand of the crackbrains, more like.” Her fingers tug, eliciting a yelp.

“Raimon's gone?” That is all Yolanda hears for the moment.

“That's what I said.”

Yolanda has to find some way of not drowning from disappointment. “He's gone for the Blue Flame,” she says mechanically. “That's why he's gone.”

“No, that's not why,” Laila contradicts, and her fingers snap. “Weren't you listening? He's gone with a girl—and Aimery.”

“Aimery?” Yolanda says stupidly.

Laila grabs a comb. “That's why the place is empty. Now listen more carefully to what I'm telling you.” She repeats what she said about Metta, with a few disobliging additions, until she is sure Yolanda understands.

Gui and Guerau join in. “Yes, Aimery's turned Cathar as well. Dismissed Simon Crampcross—everything.”

Laila interrupts. “It's the girl. It all boils down to her. I'm not saying she's a witch, but she certainly cast her spell. You should have seen her, swinging those yellow braids. They weren't even painted.”

Yolanda tries to focus. “I don't believe you. A girl trap Raimon? Never.”

“Oh no? Where is he then?”

Yolanda makes her voice quite firm. “He wouldn't abandon me. He's gone for the Flame.”

Laila stands with her hands on her hips. If Yolanda's heart is not to be broken, she needs to despise Raimon as much as Laila does, so her upset on Yolanda's behalf makes her cruel. “You're quite sure of that are you?”

“Quite sure. He loves me and I've come back. I should never have left him.”

“He's left you.”

“I know him better than you do, Laila. He hasn't.” Yolanda will no longer remain in the cocoon. She emerges and sits with the blankets around her shoulders. The pair to Raimon's ring swings on its leather thong. Laila's eyes narrow. She gives up detangling Yolanda's hair and stands in front of her. Slowly she reaches into her bodice and draws out the ring's pair. “It's true that you did once know him better than I do, but I wonder if you know him at all anymore.” She holds the ring up to the light.

Gui and Guerau retreat. They do not want to see this. They close the door behind them.

Yolanda stares at the ring, but even now she is disbelieving. “How have you got that? Is this one of your tricks, because if so it's a wicked one.” She swallows.

“It's not a trick.”

“Then you must have stolen it. Admit it. You've taken it from him. You must have done. Raimon would never give it up.”

Laila tosses the ring from hand to hand. “I did steal it, in a way,” she says.

“There then.”

“I stole it after he swapped it for a jeweled ring given to him by Metta's father.”

Yolanda clings on with desperate obstinacy. “No. That's not true. You stole it from his finger because you're jealous. You've never liked him.”

“You're right,” says Laila, livid that Yolanda will not believe her, Laila Hajar Mais Bilqis Shehan, who has stood up for Yolanda all these months. “I
have
never liked him. He's not good enough for you. You should marry a prince or a king, and he's just a weaver.”

“How dare you!” Yolanda cannot leap up, but she struggles to her feet. “Get out of here and take all your tricks with you. You can leave Ugly though because she deserves a kinder mistress than you will ever be.” She looks about, suddenly realizing that Ugly is not here either. “Where is she?”

“Ugly's dead,” Laila says quite casually, although her whole face tightens until it is nothing but points and angles. “Aimery threw a bone onto the river ice and she fell through and drowned.”

Yolanda stares. “Drowned? Oh, God! Under the ice? The poor little thing.” She gives a long shiver and draws the blankets close, suddenly freezing again. Her eyes fix on the ring but all she sees is the dog.

Laila sits beside her and strokes her back. She will not speak again of Ugly. “I'm not lying about Raimon,” she says. “It's true that he didn't want to give up the ring, but when Metta's father offered him another, along with his daughter, well …,” she pauses. Yolanda's shoulders are shaking. Some girls would have stopped now, but Laila is determined to drive her point home. “He sleighed with her, Yolanda. He ate food
from her plate.” She pauses again. “He took her to visit his mother's grave.”

An inarticulate sound bubbles up from somewhere.

Laila adopts a more practical tone. “And men accuse women of being fickle!”

The fire crackles. As though some frozen core is melting, hot, slow tears carve neat stripes down Yolanda's dirty face. You might expect sobs, but there are none, for these are not childish tears from some momentary upset or easy tears from a lovers' tiff. They are the kind of tears we rarely shed, because they spring from a well that, once emptied, we feel nothing will ever fill again.

Even Laila's chin trembles as she passes Yolanda a rag for her nose. And suddenly she is crying, and her tears, too, are genuine. “Ugly didn't deserve to die like that.” Then she dashes her weakness away with the back of her hand. “Her death'll be paid for, never fear about that,” she whispers. “I only hope the inquisitors don't get to Aimery first.” She sneezes and her eyes are bright as washed diamonds.

“Oh, the inquisitors too? Haven't we had enough misery here?” Yolanda cries.

“There's never enough misery, apparently,” says Laila, grimly gay. “Only in stories is misery rationed, and sadly we don't live in a story.”

Yolanda wipes her cheeks. In her disarray, she looks much more like Yolanda of Amouroix than Lady des Arcis. When her chest has stilled, she looks about. “If everybody else has gone,” she asks, “why are you still here?”

Laila's face closes. “Because I am,” she says. Then she pokes Yolanda in the ribs. “I was waiting for you, of course.”

“How did you know I'd come?”

“Did you ever think of not coming?”

Yolanda slowly shakes her head.

“Well then,” says Laila, pushing back her curls, and adding with foxy piety, “since there was no appropriate horse on which I might come and seek you, it was my duty to stay and wait where you would first seek me.”

If times had been different, Yolanda would have laughed. The idea of a dutiful Laila is highly comic. Instead, she wants to know something else. “Why did Gui and Guerau and the huntsman stay?”

“So many questions! How should I know? Too comfortable? Nowhere else to go? Lack of imagination? Actually, if you really want to know, the huntsman stayed because some of the bitches are about to pup, and the troubadours stayed because both are secretly in love with me.”

Yolanda still does not laugh, for her eyes are fixed again on the ring. When she puts her hand out, Laila places it in her palm, where it sits, cracked and misshapen, but still the closest to Raimon she can get. She folds it hard into her fist and tries to imagine Raimon with this other girl, talking to her, listening to her, looking at her. Does she smell of the sky, as Raimon once said Yolanda did? Is her skin milky white rather than Yolanda's grubby tan? Does she wear pearls around a perfect neck? She tries to imagine the scene during which, in front of this new girl's adoring eyes, Raimon took off the leather ring that she and he forged together in the white heat of the Flame and replaced it with another.

Her imagining is not a form of self-torture. What she really hopes is that all of these scenes will be quite impossible to
imagine at all. Then she will surely know that Laila has distorted things. But it turns out that Yolanda can imagine the scenes only too well. After all, Raimon was so angry when they parted. No—worse than angry. He would not have discarded her out of anger. He was disappointed and hurt, a far more dangerous combination. How can she blame him, then, if he seeks solace from somebody more sympathetic?

The ring bites into her skin as she glares around the room in an effort not to cry again. She finds little comfort in what she sees. There is almost nothing of her past life left in here. What the fire did not destroy has been pushed around so much that were it not for the hearth and the windows, their shutters untidily half open, Yolanda would hardly know she was in the small hall at Castelneuf at all. The rushes on the floor have been swept out and, with the walls stripped bare, a chamber built for coziness is now just a chamber. What is more, the whole place smells quite different. It has lost, finally, any smell of her mother.

She rocks back and forth. This is the last straw. Raimon has gone, and her home is not even her home anymore. Somehow both have left her behind, caught up in events in which she seems to have lost her part. She never saw the fire here. She never saw Raimon fighting it, or him and Aimery together discussing the rebuilding. She never saw the Cathar visitors. Instead, she is the visitor—worse, she is a visiting stranger.

After the heat of the tears, a dismal bleakness descends. She draws her blanket closer and shuffles back to the hearth, where she sits with Brees on one side and Laila on the other, her mind quite blank.

Laila does not want to stare into the fire, so she gets up,
gathers a heap of expensive-looking rags, and expertly begins to patch a bright green shift. She seems to have been busy. Her special chest is half covered in clothes in various stages of transformation. “In a perfect world, there'd be no men,” she says, watchfully conversational and trying to draw Yolanda in. “I really don't care for them at all.” She finishes a seam, takes the poker, and stirs the fire into an ashy mess.