Paradise Red (31 page)

“But I am, Yolanda, and I'm never going again. I've behaved so stupidly.” He puts the Flame down and breaks away. “Laila!” he calls. “Laila!” The girl appears. Her hair is silver and sparkles against the starry waterfall of stones at her throat, the stones with the dragonfly clasp. “Take the baby.” He cannot yet call it by its name.

“I'm not a nursemaid,” she complains, hands on her hips. She has shaken off the past months as a cat shakes off bathwater, save a small tremor as she looks at Arthur.

“Take him anyway.” She flicks her shoulders but obeys.

When they are gone, he and Yolanda stand awkwardly again until, with one mind, leaving the Flame in its own hollow of light they begin to walk along the riverbank. She trips, unable to feel her way, and at once he is there to catch her. In
his arms, she gathers her courage. “Raimon, Arthur and I come together now. I couldn't imagine life with him, and now I can't imagine life without him.” He tries to interrupt, but she won't let him. “And I can't not tell him who his father was. I can't pretend. I know better than anybody that what Hugh did was awful, but he was not a bad man, not really. At least he was better than some and no worse than others and what good will it do to make Arthur ashamed of being half a des Arcis?”

The water is a deep pool below. Raimon brushes her hair with the end of his nose and now he begins to speak. He tells her everything: of his seduction of Metta, of his incarceration by the White Wolf, and of the siege's terrible end. When he speaks of Hugh, he spares neither her nor himself anything, because the details, the intricacies, the memory of how Hugh looked and exactly what he said somehow help to expunge the memory of Hugh as an intruder in the night, of Hugh stealing from Yolanda what she did not freely give, of Hugh as the father of the child that Raimon is challenged to raise as his own.

Yolanda does not interrupt the flow and never takes her gaze from his face, although she feels rather than sees the shifting contours of his every muscle. To stop herself from touching his eyelids and pressing her palms to his cheeks, she fiddles with the leather rings around her neck.

At last, as the moon vanishes into cloud, they sit in complete darkness. Even the Flame and the campfires are hidden. When the moon reappears, however, it illuminates an odd sight. Laila is standing on the riverbank, and suddenly, where the river is strongest, with a flick of her wrist she hurls something in. For a moment, she teeters, as if she has made a mistake, and
then spins and runs back to the baby. They hear her scolding him until he cries and then teasing him until he laughs again.

“What on earth is she doing?” Raimon is half on his feet. He remembers Laila's description of Aimery's last, terrible shriek. He has not told Yolanda of that.

“Who knows,” says Yolanda, silently rejoicing at Raimon's concern. “She does odd things. She's just Laila.”

“And you trust her with the baby?”

“
Only
with the baby,” says Yolanda. “I don't trust her with anything else, but for some reason she loves him, or at least likes to take care of him. One day she'll be off, though. Life here will be too dull for her, so she'll return to Paris and probably end up back in the gutter with nothing but her wits and her box of tricks for company. Then, just when we least expect her, she'll reappear again, still painted, still scolding, still Laila.” She smooths her skirt. “She helped me when I needed her and I'm glad to know her, although I'm glad not to be her.” Her voice peters out.

Raimon hardly hears. The wonder of sitting beside Yolanda is like drinking in the sky, but he still cannot relax because there is something he needs to ask but hardly dares. She feels a tremor shake him, and then, finally, his question bursts out. “Did I fail, Yolanda? Did I fail you and Sir Parsifal and the Occitan and the Amouroix? Did I fail the Blue Flame?”

She takes both his hands in hers, makes him get up, and leads him back to where the Flame is still sitting in its hollow. She bends down and holds it up, and it seems to Raimon that just as it did when he first saw it, before he ever met Sir Parsifal or Hugh or the White Wolf, the small blue curl begins to swell and spill out. This time, however, instead of making him
dance as it did then, he finds himself motionless as the blue streams down the valley into a distance that has no end. “I dreamed of this,” he says, wonderingly, to Yolanda, because he can say anything to her.

“Look,” she says. “It hasn't finished.”

The distance seems empty to start with, but then Raimon realizes it is not empty, not at all. People are making their way toward the blue, only this time not with swords drawn against Catholic or Cathar but armed only with that very particular type of untamed pride for which the Occitan was famous before division and ambition corroded its soul like a fungus.

Yolanda's gaze follows his. “You see, Raimon? You did this. You rescued the Flame from the weary old world and brought it to the new one we're going to make, you and I”—she puts down the Flame and squeezes his hands hard together—“and Arthur.”

Raimon wants to believe her, but not everything fits. “Parsifal gave me Unbent and said I was to be a knight,” he says. “Knights live on the tops of hills, not at the bottom.”

“That's because you think being a knight is all about fighting, which is as silly as the White Wolf and the inquisitors believing God is all about hating. Didn't”—she colors a little— “didn't Metta teach you anything?” He stares at her. How did she become so wise? “What did Sir Parsifal tell you was the most important thing?”

He feels his finger. Without any fuss, without him even noticing, she has replaced the leather ring he never wanted to give up. “Love,” Raimon says. “He said the most important thing was love.”

“And doesn't love flourish in valleys? It's where the crops grow, after all, and the Flame seems to like it.”

He can feel the nervous hope coursing through her as she leans against him just as she used to when, as children, they told each other stories of high romance. “Doesn't it, Raimon?”

“Yes,” he says, “love does flourish in valleys.”

“And for all a knight's prowess,” she continues, “what's the Occitan without love?”

He twists the ring. That is not at all hard to answer. “It's like the world without you,” he says.

She sinks her head deeply into his shoulder, and now he can look without fear over her mess of hair first to the Flame and then to where he knows the campfires burn. He can hear Arthur chortling as he rolls among the dogboys and the huntsman's remonstrances when the play gets too rough. He can hear Laila laughing at some impossible joke of her own.

And he can hear something else. Gui and Guerau are quarreling over a tune. He smiles. He has not heard them quarreling since the old count was alive.

Yolanda raises her head. She, too, is listening. “What are—”

“Ssssh.” Raimon does not want her to move.

When it eventually comes, the troubadours' song is filled with rich regret, as troubadours' songs always are. They have to wait for the chorus to hear what they are seeking, and the troubadours do not disappoint. Instead of ringing with the “Song of the Flame” handed down through past generations, the song both Raimon and Yolanda have sung a thousand times, something different tentatively emerges. Yolanda raises her head again, and this time Raimon does not try to restrain her. There are unfamiliar harmonies here, some of which clash in
unexpected discord. There is another argument, but finally the two voices agree on a new melody that puzzles and disquiets all who hear it, as new melodies often do. Some listeners murmur with approbation, some with disapproval. Unabashed, the troubadours sing on until it is quite clear that they do not intend to stop.

Raimon takes up the lantern. “Come,” he says, and with the Flame in front, Unbent at his back, and Yolanda at his side, he strides forward. Surely, armed with such treasures, there is no challenge he cannot meet.

Galahad is grazing and Raimon does not bother to take his rein. The old horse will find his way. Raimon halts for a moment. When Cador returns, he will get him to polish Hugh's sword until it shines like Unbent. A good father should do no less. He turns to tell Yolanda, but she is running to retrieve her son from the dogboy scrum. He opens his mouth to call, then smiles a smile broader than the valley itself and shakes his head. What is he thinking! There is no need to tell her because she already knows.

And so my tale is ended, although my story is not finished. In a valley deep in my mountains, the Flame still burns. Indeed, it is still tended by Raimon and Yolanda, though not the Raimon and Yolanda you have met in these pages. They are long dead and free to haunt the ruins of Castelneuf when the fancy takes them. The Raimons and Yolandas who tend the Flame today are those with a secret in their eyes, those who will not tell you exactly where their valley lies, those who hold their lanterns carefully. Follow them with caution. Come like the White Wolf, and you will find them difficult company.
Come with a drawn sword, and they will draw theirs in return. But if you come quietly, seeking only to warm your hand on the Flame, while they may at first be suspicious, I do not think they will turn you away.

Author's Note

Sometimes, for writers of historical novels, actually going to the place in which your story is set is as important as doing “drier” research. For the last, climactic book of this trilogy, this was certainly the case, because in
Paradise Red
we arrive at Montségur, a place as full of ghosts as any I've ever experienced in the Languedoc region of southern France. The castle that is currently perched on the “pog” (the name of a particular rock formation in the Ariège district of the Languedoc) is not the original. However, if you visit this bit of southwestern France, you'll still see the same view and be brushed by the same wind as Raimon, Yolanda, Aimery, and Laila. When I visited, I could hear their voices.

The massacre of the Cathars, which took place on March 16, 1244, is well documented, but I got most of my information from Zoé Oldenbourg's
Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade
(London: Phoenix Press, 2000). “Albigensian” is just another name for Cathar. Oldenbourg's horror at the building of a pyre large enough to consume “the bodies of two hundred persons” (Oldenbourg 2000, p. 363) is palpable. She quotes the thirteenth-century chronicler, William of Puylaurens, who
tells us that “they [the French forces of Hugh des Arcis] built a pallisade of stakes and pales,” and heaped up “countless faggots.” It is on this description that I based my account of the notorious burning. I found it troubling to write: my characters may be fictional, but real people were reduced to cinders “close to the foot of the rock.” Yet my discomfort was also a source of satisfaction. There is a prickly edge to a historical novel that no fantasy novel, however brilliant, can ever quite deliver.

I felt no need in
Paradise Red
to explain the history of the religious divide on which this trilogy is based. If required, the details can be found in the author's note to
Blue Flame
, the first in the series. I hope that readers will find enough information in the text to follow the story which, in any case, is about people and how strongly they hold their beliefs, rather than the beliefs themselves. However, as in
Blue Flame
and
White Heat
, I have followed the chronology of events correctly. I like to respect the past as far as is possible in a novel.

Some readers may judge Hugh des Arcis harshly with regard to his behavior toward Yolanda. I beg you to forgive him: he was just a man of his time—and, indeed, he was really the surprise of the story. I honestly thought he was going to be a villain throughout. I was pleased, though, to be proved wrong, not just because I liked him but also because when my characters manage to nudge me aside, it is a joy to give in gracefully.

The end of a trilogy is a time of sadness for an author. It is hard to say good-bye to the fictional Amouroix, to real Carcassonne, and to medieval Paris, about which I learned so much for
White Heat
. It is harder still to say good-bye to the people with whom I have lived for the last three or four years. The
particular challenge of
Paradise Red
was to describe the takeover of the fiercely independent Languedoc by the French without leaving the reader feeling too sad. All I can say is that endings are seldom quite as final as they seem, and when I return to the Ariège district, as I will surely do, I know that I will find the Blue Flame still burning, its new song resounding, and Raimon and Yolanda, arms outstretched, inviting me to join the dance.