Paradise Red (25 page)

But as Raimon waits for his body to heal, he cannot accept the kindly comfort it offers. In the Flame's homely glow he can see nothing but a future that has been snatched from him. It is unfortunate too, though unsurprising, that Cador's ministrations make Raimon's wound worse, not better. Had Raimon been in the best of health, things might have been different. But weakened from his lengthy captivity and with bad weather approaching, his condition deteriorates. This adds to the daily bitterness. Yet when, sometime after Christmas, an unhappy and frightened Cador suggests going to find Laila again, or if not her, somebody with some knowledge of medicine, he receives a curt rebuff. The wound
will
heal. They only have to wait a little longer.

But in the end it becomes clear even to Raimon that waiting is not enough and when Cador asks directly what he must do with the Flame if Raimon himself dies, something finally breaks. Is he really, through his obstinacy, going to condemn this faithful boy to wander alone with the Flame as Sir Parsifal once did? When Cador goes for food, he sits with the Flame a long time, never looking away as it burns steady as a father's
eye. Three days later, he bids Cador bridle the horses. He knows what he must do.

They return to the shepherd's hut in a February snowstorm and when they find it empty, head without further discussion toward Castelneuf, the lantern lighting their way and the horses' hooves padding noiselessly in the deepening white. Cador gives up ministering to the wound, which, left to breathe, finally begins to settle itself. The days are uneventful, and as the pain begins to ease, Raimon finds himself less tense. Now he tries to face the future as it is. Yolanda will have the child. He must accept that. But once it is born? He stiffens again. It must already be born. Well then, now that it is born, it will be a separate thing from Yolanda, and anything separate can be removed. Did not she herself say that Hugh would claim it? Perhaps it is already on its way to the des Arcis chateau and once there, they need never refer to it again.

And if she still has it? Even that is not a disaster, for she will know, just as he does, that no des Arcis child can ever live at Castelneuf. In his wilder moments, he imagines somehow giving the baby to Metta when the siege is over, for even Hugh will surely not allow the women and children to burn. Yes, he feels as the horses eat up the miles, he was foolish to despair. This thing need not hang over them forever. With the child miles away and Hugh killed in the single combat Raimon will shortly be demanding, that will be the end of it. And if Hugh kills him instead? Raimon does not countenance that thought.

With his mind eased, the journey as they reach my boundaries becomes for Raimon a journey of memories. Everything seems blue-lit as the Flame guides them over the mountain where Aimery once went to kill a bear and nearly killed Raimon
instead and illuminates the familiar outline of the high plateau on which Raimon was himself besieged. Yet how quickly nature reclaims her own! There is no evidence of those hard months now. It is as if they never were. Raimon rides on. Only when the Flame floods the opening of the cave in which Yolanda once, blindly and unforgettably, traced the contours of his face with her fingers in the dark does he stop. The memory of her touch is so strong that he puts up his own fingers as if to catch hers before they slip away.

They arrive in the Castelneuf valley in a chilly, windless dusk, with the chateau's lights shining honey-colored through the pearly gloom. As they ride up the road down which Raimon sledded with Metta, both he and Cador are aware that the town lacks all those cheerful, thriving sounds through which it once sang. Raimon touches the lantern. He has the Flame whose advent brought both hope and dereliction. Now it must be the key to restoring life in this place, which had such life before.

He slips off Bors around the side of the chateau walls, near to where, in his childhood, there had always been a hole. After the old count's death, Aimery had had it stopped up. Raimon has not forgotten, but hole or no hole, he knows this bit of wall well and wants to enter unnoticed. Bidding Cador to undo the horses' reins, he measures up. Cador is horrified. “You can't climb with your arm in that state!”

“No, but you can. We'll get you in and there'll be at least one horse in the stable—that sorrel that Yolanda was riding. She knows you. Bring her out and tie the rope around her neck. She can haul me over. Then you wait with her in the stable.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to do what has to be done.”

“I want to come with you. You're not strong enough to wield Unbent. A squire has his duties.”

“And one of them is to do as he's told.”

Twenty painful minutes later, with the horse returned to the stables, its absence unmissed, and scuffing their footprints as best they can, Raimon is standing at the bottom of the keep steps with the lantern in his hand. The hounds begin to sing, but nobody appears to take much notice. Their song tilts from warning to greeting as they realize that their visitor is no enemy. Raimon loves them for that.

He secretes the lantern behind his back and climbs swiftly up the steps to the great hall, still half roofless and quite empty. It seems like a long time since it rang with the sounds of hammer and mallet. A different time entirely. He will not think of that time. Instead, he knocks the snow from his boots and silently makes his way through to the small hall. There he stops short. Laila is standing with her back to him, slightly bent over, preoccupied because she is overburdened. She has not heard him, and without thinking, he edges backward into the shadows. He wants nothing to do with Laila. He must see Yolanda alone. The girl puts something down—her box, and opens the door, kicking it closed with her heel.

At once Raimon pitches forward, sets down the lantern, and fumbles with the box's catch. He gives a wry smile. The inside is crammed full of tinted bottles and oddly shaped stones, old teeth, thin straggles of hair tied in ribbon, various dented coins, an amputated finger, endless vials of hair dye, and, lined up like autumn leaves, elegant, pointed pouches
fashioned from goats' ears. Holding the Flame closer, he rummages underneath, until, next to a bone jar marked “poison,” he finds the small sheep's horn filled with wound salve. He takes it. Cador will be pleased. He replaces everything else very carefully. Laila will notice, but he does not care. He closes the box and retreats. They will wait for a day and hope for an opportunity.

Outside again, he collects Cador and hurries him up the steps into the old pigeon loft. The steps are slimy with disuse, and they find nothing but a blanket of dirty feathers and the dessicated remains of those birds who waited too long for food that never came. Everything of Aimery's has turned to dust. What sympathy Raimon feels is restricted to the birds.

The following morning is crisp and cloudless, and the sun is blinding on the snow. Raimon, his shoulder plastered with salve, stretches. Despite everything, he has slept well and this seems a good sign. His shoulder takes longer than usual to resume its normal throbbing. He is not going to die of his wound, at least.

Both he and Cador are relieved when the hounds are let out, for they will scuff any remaining tracks, although they also worry that they may show some interest in the loft. But the loft is tame when what you long for is a chase with the promise of blood. The older hounds pad directly to the gate and sit, their sterns swaying in expectant hope. The young ones, having larked around for a few minutes, slither after them and sing until the air pulsates.

Then there is different barking, and down the great hall steps bounds Brees. He glances at the pigeon loft, and his tail momentarily pauses midwag. However, scent is not carrying
today, and when the dogboys, also released from the kennels, tumble about, his tail resumes its thumping and with more joyful barks, he tumbles with them. Gui and Guerau are suddenly outside too, shouting for quiet. The reason is soon apparent. Helped by a crimson-curled Laila, Yolanda emerges. She is carrying a bundle.

Raimon's every nerve crackles. Every fiber of his being is focused on the bundle, which he has thought about for so long but never, so it seems to him now, really visualized. Here it is, beneath those blankets: Hugh's child in flesh and blood. Of course it will be a son. Raimon knows that instinctively. What Hugh wanted Hugh has got. Raimon finds he is shaking.

Yolanda holds her bundle awkwardly. She is very white apart from her eyes. They are huge black holes. Laila hovers over her. There is something so unusual—no, more than unusual, downright odd—about seeing Laila so tender that Raimon's stomach pitches and rises in his ribs. He leans forward as Yolanda walks toward the mounting block and sits down. She still stares straight ahead, deaf to whatever it is Laila is saying, and Raimon's stomach rises further, filled with something akin to triumph. Yolanda sits too still for joy, too still for care. The baby is dead. He wants to punch the air. There is a God.

He begins to move, unable to stop himself, until he hears Cador's warning exclamation. He looks again, and now there is something—Raimon cannot see what—but some kind of movement from the bundle. His stomach sinks like a stone. The baby is not dead. Indeed, it is very much alive and it is wriggling. Yolanda is suddenly alive too and begins to adjust the blankets. A tiny fist shoots out, and she folds it back in. Raimon watches as a hawk watches a rabbit. But it is not the
care she takes that sends all his insides and not just his stomach crashing like a dying horse: it is the way her neck is curved. Such a tiny curve, but so revelatory, for it is not the curve of somebody performing a chore for an unwanted monstrosity. Though she hardly moves, the curve flows down Yolanda's whole body, forming a perfect arc of love and protection. When she raises her face again, even from this distance he can see, shining through the exhaustion and the memory of pain, an awkward wonder, quite new and clearly not altogether welcome, but so strong that she cannot help but accept and submit to it.

That night, Raimon enters the keep again. With the Flame held in front of him, he goes up the stairs quietly and this time opens the door to the small hall without pausing even to listen. Yolanda is lying in a bed that has been pulled near to the hearth, with Laila in a smaller cot slightly to the side. Brees shoots up, but Yolanda does not move, and Raimon pacifies the dog until he settles back, head on paws.

Then Raimon gazes down. Yolanda is fast asleep, one arm thrown up, one leg half hanging out of the blankets, her hair a bird's nest, and her mouth slightly open. She is exactly the girl he has always known except that in a wooden crib next to her is a creature whose life, he understands now without a shadow of a doubt, she would choose over his, not because she wants to but because she would not be able to help herself.

He puts the Flame on the floor, unable to stop himself imagining the night Hugh came here, to this very room, and though he has not really meant to, he picks the child up. He is rough. The baby's eyes open and they contemplate each other, he and Hugh's son. How easy, Raimon thinks, to dash the soft skull
against the hearthstone. How easy to stamp out this short unwanted life and bury it. How easy and how impossible because unwanted does not mean unloved. Raimon wants both to laugh and to cry, because this tiny, dribbling creature has won a battle it is not even aware of fighting.

He returns the child to its cradle. He had thought to speak to Yolanda, but what can he say? He tries to construct a few phrases. No words come. But they will, of that he is sure, only not here and not to Yolanda. Everything he has to say will go into his challenge to Hugh. Nothing is over yet. By depriving this baby of its father and Hugh of the chance to see his son, Raimon will have his revenge.

He holds the Flame above Yolanda, leaving the baby in darkness. With the tip of his index finger, he traces her face, gently tidying her hair. The two leather rings, back on their thong, are nestled in the small indent at the base of her neck. He places the lantern on the table, pressing his thumb against the hot glass as a man presses a branding iron against a cow. He does not wince at the pain. He wants the mark to remain with him. Then he leans over. He wants so badly to wear his ring but cannot bring himself to take it. As long as it remains with her, he can believe that he is with her. “I leave the Flame with you, because it burns for the Occitan, the Amouroix, and for love.” He breathes. She sighs. He holds his breath. She sleeps on. He breathes again. “But love is the most important, and oh, Yolanda,” he touches her lips, “how I've loved you.”

Only then is he aware of Laila, limbs taut and ready to spring. They observe each other for a whole minute before, with a murmur, Yolanda rolls over and Raimon has, from somewhere, to find the strength to tear himself away.

By the end of February, morale among the French besiegers has sunk again. The winter has stretched out like a long penance with the wet now joining the cold. Progress on the road construction is, some days, impossible. Men are injured by falling stones. They squabble about digging rotations and declare the whole project misconceived. Who can blame them? The skin between their toes cracks in boots that are never dry. Fingers are painfully raw. Armor is rusting, noses run, and though Hugh insists they still respond with a thrust of the oriflamme when the White Wolf holds up a flame he does not, or will not, realize is empty, they do so in dispirited silence—despite the threats of the inquisitors who have now taken it upon themselves to harangue them, in God's name, whenever they threaten to desert.

Only one thing keeps them going, and it is the thought that up in the fortress the Cathars too must be tiring, for Hugh, with a mixture of persistent bribery and the threat of brutality, has had some success in cutting off their supplies. Now the villagers sell to the French. At least that means the food is better and every mouthful a Frenchman eats is a mouthful less for the heretics.