Paradise Red (20 page)

“You know nothing.” Laila throws a candle end at Aimery. “Go on then, Aimery, you do it.”

But he, too, hesitates. Raimon is right. This is the Blue Flame of the Occitan. It cannot be treated as a plaything. And if he cannot bring the king the real Flame, perhaps he should take nothing at all. He does not want to be hung for a fraud.

In the end, Laila grabs a candle herself and thrusts it through the grille. “Stop it!” Raimon and Aimery cry together.

She takes no notice. “I'll light it if you won't,” she snorts, “and then you can blow this old Flame out.”

Raimon rushes at her as she pushes the candle through the bars. It just fits, and she blows so that the Flame, light as a moth's wing, kinks and bends and touches the wick of the stub. Raimon dare not hit Laila's arm, although that is what he wants to do, for fear of putting the Flame out altogether. His tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth and his legs shake as if the keep itself is quaking.

“There,” Laila says with some satisfaction as her candle catches. “The Flame. Now let's get out of here.”

Raimon can hardly speak. “What have you done? What
have
you done?”

Laila straightens up. “I've lit a new Flame,” she says, irritated, “and I'll tell you something else. If your precious Flame really is everything you Occitanians say it is, it wouldn't be stuck in an old silver saucer and a decrepit wooden box. It wouldn't be stuck anywhere. A real Flame would be just as happy on this candle as on any other, and much happier with us than flickering away behind that stupid grille or with the White Wolf waving it about like some smug archbishop.”

But though something in Raimon stirs, he cannot believe her. After all, what can she know of the Flame, she who is little more than a gypsy trickster? He seizes the bars of the
grille again, and again tries to shove his own arm in, stretching every sinew to reach the silver salver that sits just out of reach. “I can't get it!” he cries. “I can't get it.” He rattles the bars wildly, straining and straining. There is heavy breathing beside him. “Look!” Aimery says, “just look.”

The Flame in the salver is subtly changing. Slowly the rich blue that so intoxicated Raimon when it overflowed into the Castelneuf valley seventeen months before fades. The Flame is still lit, indeed it is still blue, but all its charisma is gone. It seems quite hollow, its cone an empty shell. This is a flame, not the Flame, and it could neither intoxicate nor comfort anybody.

Raimon exhales slowly and tiny fragments of his rejected dream return to him: Yolanda in the valley unbound as a melody and the Flame as the pulse of the land. He gazes and gazes at the silver salver, searching for reassurance. Has Laila done right or is this the end of everything? He receives no answer. The empty flame bends neither to him nor away from him. He longs for Yolanda. She should be here now, not Laila. He closes his eyes.

They fly open again when Laila kicks him smartly and yanks at a convenient hank of his hair. “Leave the dead with the dead,” she advises. “That's what I always say.” And suddenly he is hobbling away from Adela's corpse and the empty flame and running as best he can with legs stiff from lack of use, through the door and toward the stairs.

“Pull up your hood and walk!” hisses Aimery, overtaking him, and Raimon slows. “Give me the Flame,” Aimery demands of Laila, pulling up his own hood. “I've taken a lamp. We can put it in there. We'll just have to hope nobody stares too closely.”

Suspicious of his rescuers and uncertain about what he has witnessed, Raimon's escape from the keep is the uneasiest of journeys. Aimery and Laila are almost running, and Raimon's joints creak in his effort to keep up. He knows one thing for certain: that given half the chance they will leave him behind, and the Flame will vanish with them.

They see light when they turn the corner onto the ground floor. The door at the end is open though there is a knot of people bundled around it. The White Wolf is among them. Raimon can hear perfecti running down the stairs behind him. He can hardly breathe. They must have found Adela's body and perhaps also noticed the changes in the flame. He wants to hurry and has to force himself not to change pace. Ahead, Aimery and Laila are doing the same. He passes under the passage lamp and drops his head right into his chest as he is jostled so close to the White Wolf that he can smell the garlic on his breath. Then, at last, he is out in the teeming courtyard. Nobody catches his collar. Nobody is yelling “murder.” They have a moment's respite. For a second he loses sight of Aimery and Laila, then spots them and is on their heels at the privy.

Unnervingly, the shack is occupied, and when the door opens and an unknown man emerges, Raimon sags with relief. Had it been Metta or Sir Roger, could he have ignored them? Sorry—more than sorry—as he is to have hurt them, this is not the time for explanations. He thinks briefly of his father, bearing Adela's death alone. Laila prods him. He follows her inside.

Aimery locks the door and they are quickly working together, securing the rope. The fat slit through which the waste falls is stinking and slimy, and if the urgency were not so
great, all three would hang back. As it is, the moment the rope is knotted around the bottom of the doorpost, Aimery tumbles out the end into the low-lying cloud. Holding the lantern between his teeth, he lies down, his feet to the slit and his nose wrinkled against the stench. When he has wound his legs around the rope he is ready and begins to slither backward. His legs vanish and suddenly he is at the tipping point. One inch farther and he will be swinging in the abyss. His face is blotched red with effort. He had not realized he was so heavy. His back and stomach scrape through the muck and jam against the stone. He wriggles, he grunts, he gasps, then he is gone. The lantern is the last thing to disappear.

At once Raimon and Laila are lying down and peering. They cannot see Aimery in the mist clinging to the fortress's walls but they hear him, his curses distorted by the clenching of his teeth as he crashes against the mountainside, clinging to the rope tighter than he has ever clung to anything in his life. Swing, swing, crash, crash. But always he is descending, the rope-scalds on his hands a welcome price to pay. In two long minutes, he has not nearly reached the bottom of the pog, but he has reached the relative safety of a narrow ledge about sixty feet below. He is only halfway down before Laila is after him. As light as Aimery is heavy, she descends, deft hand over deft hand, more monkey than human. Her grin is enormous.

Then it is Raimon's turn. He wonders if his arms will hold him and finds it hard to push off though the smell is choking him. But he can hear a swell outside. The respite is over. Adela's corpse has been found. He takes a deep, repulsive breath, and suddenly, terrifyingly, he is swinging.

The mist is moist and sticky, and he is sliding down
quickly, too quickly, the rope flaying away the skin on the inside of his legs and arms, his muscles already shrieking. He forces his fingers to tighten as the wind flaps him like a flag, now into the cloud, now clear of it. Down, down, down he goes, all his nerves and ligaments stretched and howling. He cannot hold on longer, yet he does. He reaches the ledge so fast that his bones jar. He drops on all fours, like an animal. His stomach heaves.

The ledge is solid but only about half as wide as it is long, with crumbling sides stippled with old roots, all that remains of trees that have long since been battered and broken by the weather. A sheer drop of more than a hundred feet lies behind him. In front, the ledge stretches like a crooked smile for about ten feet until it gives onto a wider, rounder space, almost a little plateau, on which some grass and thin birches have managed to grow, but which then narrows again to a path that jolts its way unevenly through dense undergrowth to the very bottom of the pog.

Raimon glances up. The rope, relieved of its burden, is swinging wide in the gusts, slapping against the clouds that begin to dump their burden of rain as though angry at the disturbance the escapees have caused. Raimon does not care. He cannot see the top of the fortress wall, and if he cannot see it, then nobody in the fortress can see him.

Aimery is standing where the ledge widens, with the lantern in one hand and the other cockily on his hip. Laila is behind him, all alert acquiescence to the man she appears to have adopted as her lord. The rain stops falling vertically and turns into a persistent sideways sheet. Raimon rises and moves with the exaggerated care of a tightrope artist.

Aimery spreads his legs farther apart, his Cathar disguise beginning to drip. He holds out the lantern, saying nothing. Raimon straightens up, although he barely realized he was hunched. He is almost within touching distance of the new Flame when he sees the knife that Aimery has raised to heart height. “No further for you, I think, Raimon.”

At first Raimon does not hear clearly, for the wind is an unceasing moan. But the knife is clear enough. He stops. The wind beats the rain against his cheeks as his eyes flick awkwardly between the Flame and the blade. He tries to speak and then realizes he will have to shout. “You're going to kill me now? Why didn't you just cut my throat along with the others in the keep?” It is hard to keep his balance.

Aimery shouts back. “Laila and I thought we might need you. Isn't that right?” He tosses the last question over his shoulder.

Laila nods and gives a small skip. “It is,” she says, or that is what Raimon understands her as saying.

The lantern swings and Aimery shoves it at Laila, motioning her to take it to the plateau, leaving just himself, Raimon, and the knife poised between heaven and hell.

A strange dance is now performed on this narrow sill. Aimery jabs out with the knife, knowing he is too far away to draw blood but hoping to make Raimon jump. Raimon cannot jump, but his feet splay and he hears a few pebbles of displaced rock tumble down, down, and down again, like the distant rattle of timpani. His joints, shocked almost into paralysis by this sudden and protracted activity, hardly obey him. His head swims. Everything seems unreal.

Aimery laughs softly as his face shines out of the gloaming,
his beard glistening in the rain that continues to sweep over them. Raimon shakes his head and is temporarily blinded as his hair whips back and forth. The wind cannot decide in what direction to blow.

Now Aimery is speaking. “There's really nowhere for you to go,” he says, and moves quickly, his fist gripping the knife harder. He is smiling. Raimon raises his arms—and oh, how heavy they feel. His shoulders can barely take the strain. A thought emerges. He must free his limbs, so he crouches and with an effort he can hardly manage, pulls the black habit over his head. This was a movement Aimery had not expected. His knife misses its target.

Without the habit, Raimon feels as though a skin has been removed. Yet it is certainly easier to move, and he does not drop the garment. Rather, burying his fists into the black wool, he holds it out like a toreador facing a bull. Aimery is again disconcerted. He loses his smile and jabs with more ferocity. Raimon raises his black shield and the point of the knife rips it down the middle. The wind bites his ears.

Aimery creeps along the skinny crag, and in an exact mirror image, Raimon creeps back as far as he is able to go. Another thought forces its way into his head. If he tries only to defend himself, he will die. He must attack. If he cannot shove Aimery off the ledge, he must at least push him onto the wider plateau so that they can fight properly instead of teetering like acrobats on the head of a pin. Ignoring his body's protests, he whirls his arms so that the black cloth winds more securely around them and then moves forward, adopting an aggressive stance. Automatically, Aimery sets his feet wider apart, one on each slippery edge, and begins to raise his knife once more.
His mistake this time is to expect Raimon to hesitate, because Raimon does not. Instead, smoothly dropping his shielded fists, he punches up from underneath and causes Aimery almost to lose his balance. When the knife descends, though it cuts into Raimon's shoulder, it misses his neck. Raimon forges on, for to stop is to be lost. While Aimery is righting himself, Raimon drives forward and punches again from below. This time, however, Aimery is forewarned, and his knife bites deep into Raimon's collarbone. Grinning, Aimery twists the blade and as the bone snaps, Raimon staggers. He feels no pain, only a terrible weakness.

Yet the thrust also loses Aimery the advantage, for as Raimon staggers, he hooks his right leg around Aimery's left, bringing them both crashing down. They are barely six inches from the drop. He hears Laila scream as he crunches Aimery's elbow against unforgiving rock and watches his fist fly open. Neither hears the knife clanging its way to the bottom of the ravine.

The rain stops suddenly as both men struggle to get up. Now it is just a bare-knuckle fight, and Raimon drops his cloth shield. This time it is Aimery who is hampered by the habit he has no time to discard, and he begins to pull at it as they swipe at each other like boxers.

Raimon, his strength fading, must find a new trick. He forces himself to believe that he is fit and well and fighting on the widest, flattest surface in the world. Ignoring the blood now flowing down his arm, he squares his shoulders and lunges. Aimery lunges back immediately. They briefly grapple but to no effect. Both men are breathing very fast. The drop is always waiting.

Laila places the Flame on the grass and stands poised, her eyes pinned to Aimery. Every time he threatens to topple, she gives small yelps of anxiety. Both men fall to their knees, and now Aimery has begun to roar. There will be no truce. They both know that. They slug at each other like exhausted boxers, slipping and sliding as the stone begins to dry. Gradually, the cloud clears and they can see rocks miles below. Raimon can no longer pretend. He is losing. “Yolanda!” he cries silently.

Aimery launches a final assault. Raimon sees it coming and suddenly drops. Aimery, pitched over, does a complete somersault. Momentarily confused when he finds Aimery no longer in front of him, Raimon turns in time to hear Aimery scream. He is fumbling and grabbing at one of the twisted tree roots, his legs punching out into nothingness. “Help me!” he cries, although he must be able to see that his opponent can barely help himself.