Paradise Red (28 page)

The force of his words has the perfecti easing back into a ragged line, their faces full of shame.

Raimon takes a deep breath. “You no longer have the Blue Flame!” he shouts.

The White Wolf laughs gaily. “In your dreams, Raimon. The Blue Flame is as safely here as the mountain itself. Nobody need take my word for that. They see it every night.”

“What you have is not the Flame.”

“Oh no?” The White Wolf hardly bothers to listen. “Even for a master of lies that's a little far-fetched.”

“You don't understand the Flame. You don't understand anything.” Raimon will not be silenced. “Listen to me!” He appeals directly to the perfecti and out of his mouth tumbles a jumble of Laila's words. “You think the Flame is unchanging, that it must always be the same, and I thought so too. But I was wrong. Don't you see? Things that don't change are nothing but a trap. If nothing changes then we just end up going around in the same circle of fire and war and death.” He takes a deep breath. At least they are listening. He tries to lower his voice but it will not be lowered. “Before I left here I lit a new Flame from the old one, and the one that remains here, the one on which the White Wolf stakes his life and yours too, is just an empty shell. Don't be under any illusions. If you die for that, you'll die for nothing.”

There is an odd, uncomfortable groan.

“And where's this new Flame then,” the White Wolf mocks. “Is it hidden in your sleeve?”

But the perfecti are disturbed. Raimon sounds sincere. And his words provide yet another oh-so-enticing escape route from the pyre.

De Perella steps back onto the box. He has made up his mind once and for all. “Perfecti,” he urges, “look over the walls.” They hesitate. “Go on! Look!” The perfecti look and reel back. The square below is more like a house than ever now, as it has been divided into smaller squares, like rooms, using neat stacks of wood, each square carpeted with straw. Such a pyre has never been seen before. Like the wicked castle in some infernal fairy tale, it will consume them all at once. Two perfecti
faint. “Just look at it!” de Perella urges again. “Do you want to give the inquisitors the satisfaction of setting it alight? Surely it would be much better in God's eyes as well as our own to mutter a few words before disappearing into the countryside where you can continue your preaching and good works for many years to come. You can hardly do that if you're dead.”

“Cowardly talk!” The White Wolf stands in a shaft of sunlight. “The pyre's agony is momentary whereas heaven's joy is forever. Die for God and the Blue Flame.” He is transfigured.

Raimon bangs Unbent against the box. “It's time!” His voice is commanding. “Those perfecti who wish to renounce the White Wolf and continue to serve God and the real Blue Flame, take off your habits. Take them off and live.” He does this entirely for Metta. Once her habit is removed, she will not be able to change her mind.

“No! No!” the White Wolf rejoins. His teeth are now gritted. “Keep on your habits and die. It's what the Blue Flame wants. It's what God wants.”

Everybody freezes, waiting to see what others will do. In the end, six black habits are laid on the rocks and four men and two women, shivering in long cotton shirts, come down from the walkway.

The rest remain still, Metta among them. The White Wolf has more than a partial triumph. Raimon cannot bear it. “Metta! Metta!”

His arm is locked in a huge grip. “Keep away from my daughter.” Sir Roger is shaking him. “Keep away, do you hear?”

“Do you want her to burn? For God's sake, Sir Roger, help me persuade her.”

“You persuade her? How dare you! She only became a
perfectus because of you. If you'd been true, she'd have been your wife and not one of these wretched ghouls.”

“Can you persuade her then? Can you?”

Sir Roger suddenly looks very old. Raimon wrenches himself away and swings again onto the walkway. This time when he seizes Metta he is not gentle. “Take off the habit.” She does not move. He tries to sound less peremptory. “You can remain a perfectus, you know. Just take off the habit for now.”

“And renounce the White Wolf?”

“Yes.”

“I don't want to renounce him.”

“Come on, Metta. When we spoke of him at Castelneuf, you said outright that you didn't find him praiseworthy. How can you follow any man who thinks he knows God better than God knows himself?”

“I see the White Wolf's faults,” she says. “I probably see them better than you. But to renounce him is to cast him off, to say that his whole life has been a sham. That's a cruel thing to do, Raimon.” Her eyes are clear and frank. “I don't like cruelty, so though it's true that I disagree with some of his notions, when I took the consolation from him I accepted them. That was the nature of my promise.”

“Metta, listen. I did a terrible thing to you. How can I blame you for listening to the White Wolf when I proved so faithless? But you know why I did it.”

“Yes, I know,” she says. “And I've often thought that you tried to warn me the day we went sledding. Do you remember that day?”

“Of course I remember it!”

“You told me then that you'd do anything for the Occitan.”
She smiles a little sadly. “I suppose I just didn't think it would be to abandon me.”

“I don't know what to say! I don't know what to say! Only that martyrdom isn't for you. It isn't!”

She looks at him directly. “I gave the White Wolf my word on the Holy Bible. I can't take it back.”

“You wouldn't be breaking your word! You can remain a Cathar! Don't you understand that?”

The terrible, familiar voice interrupts. “She's not stupid, Raimon. She's just loyal, not a virtue by which you set much store.”

Raimon spins around. “You want her to burn?”

“That's not the right question,” the White Wolf observes. He is gaunt with effort. “I want her to remain true, unlike these others whose weakness you have so cleverly exploited even though what you and Sir Hugh des Arcis offer is nothing but dust. Isn't that right, Metta?”

She nods but her eyes never leave Raimon's face.

“Come,” the White Wolf chides her gently. “As I so often say to you, the enemy appears in many guises.”

“Leave her!” Raimon is shouting.

The White Wolf pauses. “What are you going to do? Rip the habit from her body without her permission?”

“If I have to!” He makes a sudden move, but Metta shrinks away from him and now he shrinks back from her. He cannot use violence against her, and the White Wolf knows it. He watches her being ushered into the group of the doomed and sinks down, burying his head in his hands.

The fortress gates do not shut again, though it takes until the next day before all the preparations are made. The knights' wives busy themselves stuffing packs for their journeys home as their husbands decide whether the remaining animals should be either slaughtered or driven out. At last, an hour before noon and leaving a great mess behind them, the heretics begin to file down the mountain, the persistent perfecti moving like a black bruise at their side. Sir Roger rages impotently all the way: at himself, at his daughter, and at Raimon, who has stayed on the pog all night and now walks silently a little ways from Metta, taking Sir Roger's abuse as a man takes a lash he knows he deserves. The White Wolf walks behind them all, and though the way is rough, he holds his flame shoulder high.

The inquisitors are standing in a huddle, condemning Hugh for presenting terms of surrender they consider far too lenient. As the Cathars pass, they make a great show of crossing themselves.

The women and children are sent away at once, but at the bottom of the pog, the knights are forced into pairs and file in
front of Hugh, now seated on a regal chair. Though the oriflamme hanging behind him is mutilated, nobody witnessing this scene can be in any doubt that it is the French king's justice that is being administered, or that Hugh des Arcis intends to keep his word. As each pair of knights kneels, they find that Hugh sticks closely to the letter of the treaty. They must acknowledge the sovereignty of the King of France but they are not required to surrender either their castles or their titles. Sir Roger takes the oath last.

You may feel, as the inquisitors certainly do, that Hugh has been weak, but I can tell you that he has been clever, for Hugh knows, as the king does, that magnanimity is a far more powerful weapon than subjection. Each knight will return home grateful for royal mercy, and his future behavior will be constrained by it.

It is different with the perfecti. Hugh has offered them all he can offer. They must surrender the Blue Flame, and those who will not renounce the White Wolf will die. There are no alternatives. He watches them coming toward him with some surprise. So many? He thought more would take advantage of the proffered escape. He sees Metta, so young and so misguidedly steadfast. Raimon lurks in the background.

The pyre is now virtually a complete though roofless house, with the fagots, some piled up to four feet high, marking out the inside divisions or rooms and a high palisade serving as the outside walls. The youngest and keenest inquisitors do not like this design, for it will block their view of the burning heretics and ruin the spectacle. The older inquisitors are wiser. Mass burnings—though even the most experienced of these men have never seen one involving the nearly two hundred souls
now before them—are not spectacles, they are cataclysms to which nobody can tell quite how they will react. Better to herd the heretics inside and then hide them from view. They appease the younger ones by sending them off through the “door” to ensure that the straw “carpet” is layered thickly enough, and the builders have remembered to leave openings into all the internal “rooms,” whose walls will provide the essential fuel. When the enthusiasts emerge, few are still complaining about the spectacle.

The builders work steadily, and by midafternoon the monstrous palace is ready to receive its guests. There is no point in further delay, so as the last plank in the palisade is secured and with the inquisitors kneeling in public prayer, the victims, young and old, sick and healthy, are pushed unceremoniously inside. Raimon cannot bear it. Abandoning all self-control, he hangs on to Metta until, right at the door, she extricates herself and disappears inside. Sir Roger, roaring, tries to follow his daughter and is taken into custody by two French knights who are ordered to tie him to a horse and accompany him home.

The White Wolf is held back and brought before Hugh, who finds him neither frightened nor regretful, not for himself and not for those who will die with him. Only his oddly childish clutching of the Flame to his chest betrays any human chink in his armor of religious fervor.

“I'll have the Flame,” Hugh says but does not reach out for his prize immediately. “You could save these people, you know. Why not tell them that you'll bear the whole punishment for them. The inquisitors will be angry, but that won't matter to you. Your perfecti will still be under sentence of death, of course, but I could refer the matter of their execution
to the Pope, and that could take years.” The White Wolf just smiles. How little these Frenchmen know him. Hugh presses him again. “Do you want them all to burn? I can hardly believe that.”

“You can believe what you like.” The White Wolf is his usual mild self, his face pure as a child's. “But we know what we believe. We are martyrs whom God will welcome into paradise with loving arms.”

“And what if you're wrong? What if God views you as a murderer?” Hugh will not give up yet.

“Me? A murderer?” The White Wolf seems genuinely amused. “Who is building the house of death, Sir Hugh? Who will give the order to fire the straw? There are certainly murderers here but I am not of their number.”

Hugh tries one last time. “Save these heretics! Or at least save the young ones. They'll listen to you.”

The White Wolf glances toward the palisade, from which the prayers of his followers are rising in direct competition with the prayers of the inquisitors. “We Cathars do not want to be saved,” he says pleasantly. “As I have already said, what's there to cling to on earth when God awaits us in heaven?”

“And I repeat, what if God doesn't want the likes of you?”

“Oh, I'm prepared to take the risk.” Not a flicker of doubt crosses the White Wolf's countenance, not a twitch of apprehension.

Hugh reaches out for the flame. Only now does the White Wolf blanch, finding that at this moment of greatest trial he does not want to lose it. His voice exhibits the tiniest of cracks. “You know that the Flame will be ours whatever you do with it, wherever you take it.” His fingers are tight around
the box. “Long after we are all ashes, people will say ‘that was the Blue Flame of the Cathars.'”

“They will say it was the Blue Flame of the Occitan,” Hugh replies equally forcefully, “if, that is, they speak of it at all. Now give it to me.” The White Wolf takes half a step back, recovers himself, and hands the box over. “We do not need its physical presence,” he says with masterful loftiness, though his eyes linger on the salver. “God lit it for us, and He won't forget that.”

“But did He?” Hugh fingers the box. “Raimon says that there's another Flame, one that supersedes this one.” He speaks with a carelessness he does not feel, for notwithstanding anything the White Wolf might desire, his own future in the king's service depends on this flame being the real Flame.

The White Wolf throws back his head. “What else do you expect a weaver to say?” His tone is now contemptuous.

Hugh wants to be convinced. “How can we tell?”

The White Wolf speaks slowly and very clearly. “I'm telling you, the Flame can't change. It's our anchor. It binds us to the past.”