Paradise Red (3 page)

“Be quiet, Metta,” her father admonishes and looks around fearfully. The girl taps his chest with affectionate reassurance before she turns back to Adela and notices the untouched food on her plate. “You should eat. Look at you! You're flat in all the places you should be round!”

Adela blanches. “I've told you. I'm one of the consoled so why should I eat? To me, food is just the barrier that prevents us from leaving this life and attaining life everlasting.”

“Is that what your White Wolf says?”

“It is.”

“Our perfectus wouldn't agree, would he, father?”

“Please be quiet, Metta.”

She is silent, but only for a second or two. Then she takes Adela's hand. “I don't want to presume, but I really think your perfectus must be mistaken. Food is not evil if you say the Lord's Prayer first. Could your perfectus have misunderstood?”

Adela snatches her hand away. “The White Wolf is not mistaken. He knows everything. He's a great man, perhaps the greatest of all men. He is the Keeper of the Blue Flame.”

The girl's smile lights up her whole face. “Of course he is! But even the best and greatest men can sometimes be wrong!”

Bile rises in Adela's throat as she travels in her head to the day when her mother, silent and trusting, starved to death because the White Wolf told her it was the will of God. He must be right, he must. She cannot afford not to think so. She turns on Metta. “Of course good men can be wrong,” she says sharply, “but not the White Wolf.”

“Then,” says Metta with another smile, “he must be right, only he's certainly a very strict perfectus, the strictest I've ever heard of.”

“It's what the Lord demands,” Adela insists.

“Oh no,” says Metta. Disconcertingly for Adela, her smile is the same whether she agrees or disagrees. “I don't believe the Lord demands anything except that we love him and allow him to love us.” She licks her spoon again. “That was the nicest soup I've ever had. Does your White Wolf—”

“That's enough, Metta, I mean it,” interrupts her father, adding in a low voice to Adela, “you shouldn't listen to her prattle. She fell from a mule basket when she was a baby and hasn't been quite the same since.”

“You mean she talks nonsense?”

The knight hesitates. “I mean she talks a little too freely.” He glances at his daughter with concerned affection.

Aimery and Raimon have come in from helping to cover the tools against the weather and they catch the last of the exchange. Aimery touches Metta's arm. “So,” he says, and his tone gives nothing away, “you follow the Cathar creed?”

“Metta—,” her father warns yet again.

“Let her answer,” Aimery says, pleasantly enough.

The girl is unafraid. “We did when this lady first asked,” she nods gently at Adela, “and we still do now!”

Aimery ignores the joke. “It's brave to say so.” He scrutinizes her carefully. “The Counts of Amouroix, and I am the current holder of the title, have always been Catholics.” He glances over at the fat priest supping hugely in the corner. “That's our priest, Simon Crampcross, and my uncle was an inquisitor.”

The girl's father gasps, but the girl is quite unmoved. “Indeed,” she says, her eyes twinkling. “We forgive you.”

At this, Raimon laughs out loud, and Metta, noticing him, is startled to find herself blushing.

Aimery bristles and forces her attention back to him. “You think our differences are a joke?” He shouts over to the fat priest. “Simon Crampcross, come here! We've heretics in our midst.”

Metta's father looms large. “I've already explained, Sir Aimery,” he says quickly, “that my daughter's a bit simple. You should take no notice. Now, if you don't mind, we must see about our things.” He hides Metta as a bear might hide its cub and hurries her away.

“I should stick them all in the cellars,” Aimery says deliberately loudly as Simon Crampcross shuffles over, his long tongue all over his fingers, his shirt spotted with meat pudding.

“It's not the Cathars who burned down your chateau,” Raimon points out.

“That's true,” says Aimery. He pokes the priest's stomach with the hilt of his dagger as he calculates how to turn this situation to his advantage. He stops prodding as something occurs to him. “Go back to your dinner, you fat fool. Fill those bulges and reflect on how you seem to have ended up on the wrong side.” He strokes his beard as Simon Crampcross lumbers off.

Raimon narrows his eyes. The wrong side? What's this new nonsense of Aimery's? He wonders if the priest knows something.

He does not. Bemused, for he has served the Catholic counts for nearly a decade, Simon Crampcross's balding pate shines with the effort of eating and shuffling as he too tries to gauge what is in Aimery's mind. Is the count about to turn Cathar? Is he just joking? Has he gone mad? Since the fire, after all, Aimery has been as unpredictable and temperamental as a stabled bull. It would be far from unthinkable, so the priest realizes with horror, even with Aimery's history of taunting the Cathars, that he might suddenly decide to throw over his Catholic faith and join them. It was, after all, the Catholic king who burned his chateau. Only one thing is clear. He, Simon Crampcross, must stay firmly in the chapel until he sees which way Aimery's wind really does blow. Surely even Aimery would not hurt a man in the house of God, although—and Simon Crampcross almost chokes on the remains of a pickled pig's trotter—he heard of an archbishop in England who was murdered in his own cathedral. Fear bubbles up through his mountainous layers and he belches uncontrollably.

Raimon's gorge rises. The smell of Simon Crampcross must make even God sick—not that Raimon cares about God, at least not Aimery's God, or the White Wolf's, or the inquisitors'.
He had begun to care for Sir Parsifal's God, but Parsifal is no longer here. He goes back into the snow to breathe cleaner air and finds Cador at his heels.

The boy is munching on an old bit of bread and opens a mouth full of crumbs to catch the snowflakes. “When will we get the Flame back from the White Wolf?” He stamps legs achy with growing pains. He wants action.

Raimon can feel the cold seeping through his boots. “I don't know. It won't be easy.”

“All the more reason to get started.” Cador shakes the snowflakes from his ears like a puppy.

“What makes you so sure I can actually do it?”

“Well, we have to, don't we?” Cador carefully includes himself. “The Flame belongs to the Occitan. You're the champion of the Occitan and I'm your squire.”

Raimon shivers. He does not feel much like a champion at this moment. “Champions can fail, you know.”

“But you won't, Sir Raimon.”

“Just Raimon, please.”

It is a well-chosen response, making them both laugh, albeit a little painfully. Parsifal, if you remember, was always disclaiming his knighthood on the grounds that he didn't deserve it, and Raimon always ignored him. A history of shared expressions is a warm history. Cador chews cheerfully. “You'll succeed because you've got Unbent and me. What else do you need?”

Raimon considers. He does not need to love the Occitan more. That would be impossible. To Raimon, it is the place of which his bones are made, the place from which Yolanda has sprung, the place in which he first saw the Flame, the place in which he wants, eventually, to grow old. If he fails the Flame
and the Occitan dies, he will be left in limbo, a man without a country, a lover without a beloved, a boat without an anchor. He cannot explain this to Cador. Instead, he condenses it. “I need to feel like a knight,” he says.

“You'll feel like a knight when you get the Flame back and Mistress Yolanda comes home and everything is perfect again.”

“You sound like a troubadour.” The words are jesting but Raimon's tone is curt. “Only they believe in happy endings.” Nevertheless, the little boy's unflinching optimism is infectious. Raimon curls his finger again to feel Yolanda's ring and allows himself to remember the evening she floated like a starfish in the river, her skin glowing like a dusky pearl. Snowflakes fall on his hair and remind his scalp of her fingers kneading away the tangles in his head. For an instant, intruding, he sees Metta's blushing face. He pushes out his lower lip.

When the wind finally drops off, the snow falls straight down, and soon both Raimon's and Cador's arms are ridged white. Cador throws his head back and closes his eyes. On impulse, Raimon bends down, makes a snowball, and pops it into the boy's mouth. Cador's eyes fly open as his tongue flies out. Then he bends himself, deftly rolls another ball, skips away, throws it, and hits Raimon smartly above the ear. He gets two back for his pains, one on each cheek. “Now it's war!” the boy cries joyfully. Raimon hesitates. A knight must watch his dignity and this is hardly a time for larks. But a snowball explodes on his chin and in seconds he and Cador are at it full pelt, two sparkling warriors in a spangled mist.

Their game is stopped when a tightly packed snowball pitched by Cador slams into the chest of somebody who
unwisely chooses this moment to emerge into the courtyard. He protests.

“Apologies, Sir Knight,” says Raimon quickly, recognizing Metta's father.

In his mottled bearskin, Sir Roger de Salas is even larger outside than in and, up close to him, Raimon can see two deep chasms cut into his humped face, chasms that circle his nostrils before disappearing into the mountain of bristle. He spreads huge, knotted hands that Cador reckons, with awe, must take almost a whole sheet of steel to gauntlet, and he moves with an air of concentration, as though always having to remember where every bit of his largeness is. Yet though so disparate in size, Raimon can see a distinct resemblance between Sir Roger and his daughter, for her guileless sincerity is simply a prettier version of Sir Roger's apologetic courtesy. It is Cador who notices that Sir Roger's stockings are full of holes, that the leather thongs on his boots have rotted away, and that the hilt of his sword is rusted. “You have a neglectful squire,” he says with the unabashed candor of the young.

“I have no squire at all,” comes the regretful response. “I let him go some months ago. He was a good lad, though.”

“If he was good, why did you let him go?”

The knight's breath turns cloudy. “Oh,” he says vaguely, “my wife thought it best. He wasn't really one of us.” He stops.

“You mean he wasn't a heretic?” Raimon is quick to accuse.

Sir Roger doesn't want to answer but the silence forces him.

“No, he wasn't,” he says. “He was a Catholic, so we didn't think it safe to keep him, either for himself or for us. You know how it is.”

“I do not,” says Raimon haughtily. “I'm neither Catholic nor Cathar. I am an Occitanian.”

The knight regards Raimon with more attention. “I wish more of us had the courage to say that,” he says, somewhat to Raimon's surprise. “Indeed, I wish I'd had the courage to say it to my wife, God rest her soul, and to my son before he left home. My wife was a Catholic, you see, and my son still is. We're a divided family, I'm sorry to say. Perhaps if more of us were like you, King Louis would be thinking twice before sending inquisitors and his army to finish us all off.” There is silence. The knight leans back, his melon skin wrinkling. The bearskin sags.

“So, you're going to Montségur,” Raimon says quickly. A big man deflating is a pitiful sight.

Sir Roger sighs. “Montségur will be our last stand, both as Cathars and Occitanians. This is what it's come to.”

Raimon kicks at the snow. “You'll meet the White Wolf there.”

“So I'm told.” Somewhat absentmindedly, Sir Roger begins to make a snowball of his own, rolling it between soup-plate palms. It is the size of Cador's head.

“I'm surprised Metta had never heard of him. Is he not a Cathar hero?” Raimon watches the knight carefully.

Sir Roger packs his snowball tightly. “A hero to some, perhaps, but I've kept his name from Metta. She believes our faith to be a gentle thing, as do many others. But he's our leader now and since he's called us to fight, what can we do but answer his call? He has the Flame. He calls us in its name.” He pitches his snowball against the remains of a far gatepost.

“Well aimed!” shouts Cador. “Oh, well aimed, sir!”

Sir Roger gives a rueful smile and begins to gather up more snow.

“Why follow where he leads?” Raimon asks, his voice low and urgent.

Sir Roger pitches his new snowball gently and then holds up his hands in mock surrender at the volley of Cador's returns. “Where else is there to go now? Who else is there to follow? We've made too many mistakes to recover. Everybody's going to Montségur.”

Raimon shifts. “Don't you wish to spare your family?”

A spasm crosses Sir Roger's face. “Metta's life is in God's hands.”

The old knight's tone has Raimon exploding like the snowball. “Don't treat me as you treat your daughter! What's the matter with you?” He raises his fists, and Cador raises his also.

The knight's watery eyes peer out beneath his badgery eyebrows. “I love my daughter,” he says simply. “I treat her as she must be treated.”

Raimon drops his fists, conscious that it is the height of boorishness to raise them against a visitor. “I've been rude, Sir Roger,” he says, his contrition cold but genuine.

The knight holds up both palms to indicate acceptance and dismissal. “No need,” he says.

They all gaze at the snow.

“You know,” says Sir Roger, seeking something—perhaps justification for what he has chosen to do, perhaps some reassurance—“it could be worse. At the final reckoning at Montségur, I'm sure the French king will spare our women and
children and those of us who die will die for God under the Occitan Flame.” He stamps a foot. “And you can never rule out a miracle, you know.”