Paradise Red (6 page)

“She was just asking about the hounds,” Raimon says with casual innocence, although he knows his face is red.

Sir Roger grunts. Below the hounds sing when the huntsman brings out a horse and swings on. A falconer, already mounted, falls in behind, and two more men armed with nets and bows bring up the rear. They are heavily muffled, and the falconer is swearing as his horse tries to keep its feet.

“Oh dear!” Sir Roger exclaims as the horse slips and bangs its knees. “I suppose they're going out for extra food. We're causing a good deal of trouble.” He gazes anxiously at the sky. “I hope they get back before the weather closes in again.”

Raimon, glad that Sir Roger has ignored his blushes, tries to reassure him. “They've an hour or two yet. I'm afraid you'll not be going anywhere for a while.”

“No,” says Sir Roger, a worry line parting his eyebrows. “I suppose that would be madness.”

“Mad and dangerous,” says Raimon and wonders when Sir Roger will guess that, for Metta, the danger is in remaining here. His conscience twists, but he must get to the Flame, he must.

Typically, it is hawkeyed Laila who first notices how much time Raimon and Metta spend together. “What do you see in that simpleton?” she asks him on the third evening. Snow has been falling since before dusk and now lies in a second or even third lumpy blanket over the ice packed below. Everybody totters gingerly, as if temporarily disabled.

“She's not a simpleton,” Raimon says. “She's good and kind.”

Laila snorts.

For many days following, the sky, low and thick, wraps Castelneuf in a luminous cocoon of half light that gradually blunts the visitors' impatience at the delay to their journey. There is food, there is comfort, there is Laila and her tricks, and, of course, there are always stories. Most beguilingly, in the fog of this half-ruined aerie, they feel beyond the reach of the ordinary world. Only Raimon is still as watchful as ever.

“She's not a simpleton,” Raimon repeats the following week when Laila again badmouths Metta. “She may not toss balls in the air and wear pointed heels, but that doesn't mean she's not just as clever as you.”

Laila humphs. “Yolanda would find her very dull.” Their eyes clash. Laila's lashes are splashed yellow, like a tiger's.

“Yolanda isn't here,” Raimon says curtly.

The girl grimaces. “When she returns she's going to find things a bit different.”

“You mean, she'll find you as Aimery's countess?”

Laila does not even blush. “Why not?”

“You don't even like him.”

“You don't know what I like.”

“You like making trouble.”

“You like making trouble!”
She pouts and imitates his voice. It is all he can do not to shove her out of the way. “And you're so perfect?” She throws back her head and her curls dance. “Why not admit it, Raimon. You're just as bad as the rest of us, calculating your own advantage. I can only think that the ninny-girl's father has offered you money to take her off his hands.”

Raimon lunges but she easily evades him and skips off to find Aimery in the courtyard. Raimon does not follow. Instead he kicks at the snow because, as is her gift, Laila has struck hard where she knows it will hurt most.

Yet he must continue his courtship. The Flame needs him and he cannot think of another way to save it. So he avoids Laila and allows himself some satisfaction as the pieces of his plan fall easily into place. Already, Metta seeks him out. Already she trusts him. Already their names are spoken in the same breath. Yet this, Raimon begins to realize, while it may ensure him entry to the fortress of Montségur, may not get him to the Flame itself. If he is to pass as the White Wolf's friend rather than his enemy he will have to go further. Under Metta's guidance and the canopy of love, Raimon will have to pretend to convert.

The very thought makes his skin crawl and he spends hours wondering whether, after so many public and forceful denigrations of Catharism, any conversion is plausible. And even if it is,
how will he cope with the snide remarks about having eventually “seen the Cathar light” he has spent so much time and energy denouncing? Will he be able to bear the look in Cador's eyes or the gossip and sideways glances? Yet a conversion, which the White Wolf would be obliged to welcome, is a more certain key to the Flame than even Metta.

He persuades himself. Metta's Catharism, after all, is a gentle thing, quite unlike the evangelical implacability of the White Wolf's. She never speaks of starving people to death or of leaping voluntarily onto funeral pyres. Though she might believe the world to have been created through evil, Metta's God is not an arrogant seeker of revenge and punishment. Rather, he is the God of Love. If anybody, therefore, was to lead him to a new understanding of the Cathar faith it would be her.

He begins to ask her questions. She answers with open pleasure. The only thing that disconcerts him is that Laila now never leaves him alone, creeping up when he least expects her. She cares nothing about his beliefs. What makes her hiss and spit with increasing venom is his betrayal of Yolanda. And she does not confine herself to whispers. Sometimes, at supper in the hall, with her eyes darting from Metta to himself and back, she demands loudly, “How can you?” He toys with the idea of telling her the truth but discards it. To Laila, information is ammunition, and he could not trust her not to use it for some purpose quite of her own. Nor does he tell Cador, but this is for the boy's own protection. What he does not know, he can never be made to reveal.

But what of Metta herself? Ah, what indeed. She hears Yolanda's name occasionally, but Adela, with whom she spends the time when she is not with Raimon, never speaks of her,
and when Laila shoots her barbs, they are deflected by the innocent shine of Metta's good nature. She will not believe ill of Raimon, not now, although Raimon knows that in the end, when she discovers he has used her, she will hate him. This, curiously, he finds he can bear. Much more unbearable, almost intolerable in fact, is the knowledge that he will have corroded her simple trust as rust corrodes iron. That is what really haunts him.

Yet the call of the Flame is always stronger than even his worst moments of guilt. He cannot abandon it to the White Wolf. Nor can he stand by as it is captured and carried aloft through the streets of Paris as a final sign of Occitanian subjection. He hardens his heart. Iron can be cured of rust. Perhaps Metta will understand. And it is not, he tells himself, as if his seduction is entirely false. He likes her, likes her very much, and she quite naturally seems to gravitate toward him. Yet he could never love her. That is pure pretense. You see, running or swimming, riding or harvesting, even just lying in a hollow braiding grass, he and Yolanda have always been equals, whereas with Metta he is always the protector. If Yolanda is a wild thing, Metta is a domestic pet, and, apart from Brees, he has never loved one of them.

The mountain fog thickens, and the atmosphere thickens with it. Though more snow seems impossible, more falls. The visitors settle in and Raimon works hard. When food runs a little short, he makes sure that Metta and her father have more than they need. When Sir Roger complains of stiff limbs, he searches out the apothecary and digs the snow in the garden for a struggling medicinal herb. At Metta's behest, when starving deer are seen scraping the ground on the opposite hillside,
he takes Cador and half a dozen men with pitchforks of precious hay to spread around. Over the last, he teases Metta gently. “I thought you Cathars believed that starving to death is not the worst way to go.”

Metta will not take this as a joke. “Why do you say that? I told you on the first night we were here that our perfectus teaches that the fast to the death is wicked, and anyway, you have to volunteer for it. The deer certainly haven't done that.”

Raimon pats her arm. Metta puts her hand on his. “Christ fed the five thousand in the Gospels,” she says earnestly. “I'm sure some of them must have brought animals. He will have fed them too.”

“Is that another piece of wisdom from your perfectus?”

“Actually, I've never heard the perfectus speak of it.” Her round eyes twinkle.

“How do you know it, then?”

“I've read it myself, in the Bible.”

“You read the Bible yourself?” Raimon is genuinely surprised.

“Why not? As I keep telling Count Aimery, Christ doesn't need priests to interpret his good news,” she says. “We can understand it perfectly well ourselves.”

Raimon takes a deep breath. “You make the Cathar faith sound so different. When you speak, it sounds less like heresy and more like common sense.”

“It
is
common sense, Raimon,” she says, quite radiant. “That's why I believe it.”

Later, at supper, and bringing Adela into the discussion, Raimon asks Metta more questions, some of them highly skeptical so that Metta has to persuade him of the answer. When he
and Adela speak, both are aware that this is their first real conversation since their mother died.

After supper, Laila disappears, and when she reappears she has painted her face green. “It's the color of treachery,” she says to Metta, who smiles and turns away. Raimon wonders again if he should take Laila into his confidence and again decides against it.

The first really clear dawn seems like a miracle and in a splurge of boyish excitement Aimery orders the farrier to bang planks onto runners. “Sleighing!” he cries. “Why ever not!” Everybody rushes out, thrilled to see the sun, and a long sweep is made, the longest Castelneuf has ever attempted. Stretching from the chateau gates down through the town to the river, with enough bends and curves to satisfy the most ardent adrenalin-seeker, eager hands roughly bank up the snow on each side in an attempt to keep the sleighs on course. A carnival atmosphere prevails.

Only Adela resists, remaining inside the hell she has created for herself, and Metta sits with her, trying again and again, with no success, to get her to see that joy and faith are not incompatible. Adela's responses are stubborn and surly, but Metta has boundless patience. Sicart hovers until at last he bids Metta go outside. “This is a grand day,” he says. “Don't miss it.” Metta is torn. “Go on,” Sicart urges. Metta succumbs, pats Adela's bony shoulder, and then hurries into her boots.

Ignoring Laila, who, using Ugly as a prop and to the amusement of some, is exaggeratedly shadowing his every move, Raimon tucks Metta into a sleigh, pushes off, and leaps on behind her. “Take care! Oh, do take care!” shouts Sir Roger. “Don't go too fast!”

Raimon holds Metta by the waist as they lift their feet and the runners find their path. Leaving Laila behind, they gather speed, and Metta's hair whips out from under her fur hat, wrapping itself around Raimon's face. The thick hanks exude a scent of rosemary and mint, a lovely smell, but Raimon can hardly stand it. He doesn't want fair hair, he wants brown. He doesn't want rosemary and mint, he wants the musty smell of Brees. Metta holds herself stiffly and jolts against him with every bump. Yolanda would mold herself to him. He and Metta are two. He and Yolanda are one. The joy of the run vanishes. Raimon cannot bear what he is doing.

Impacted from the many sleighs that have gone before, the snow is unforgiving, and the sun, glancing harshly off the solid mass of crystal, blinds. If Metta feels Raimon's stiff resistance as they glide and swerve and scrape, she says nothing. When they spin dangerously close to the road's edge, where the banking has already given way, she cannot help screaming, but there's no stopping now. As the pace increases, the cold slices through their furs and leathers and skin, stinging like a knife.

At the horse troughs, they slow. The road is flatter here. Metta shivers. “Shall we go back?” Raimon says at once.

She turns her head. Droplets have peppered her white skin. Another man might have compared her to a fairy queen. “I've never felt so terrified in my whole life,” she says. “If I didn't have you behind me, I'd have died fifty times. But isn't it wonderful! Please, let's go on.” She raises her feet, Raimon pushes off, and the runners are hissing once more. His face aches and his lips are as raw as his heart.

They slide to an ignominious halt at the bank of the river,
and Raimon has to grab Metta to stop her from rolling in. “It wouldn't matter, it's quite solid,” she cries.

“It's very deceptive, river ice,” Raimon tells her, but she is not listening. She is laughing, high on love and thrills. “I've never, ever done anything like that before. Nobody on Earth can have gone so fast.”

They watch others coursing down and listen to the screams of those who don't stop in time. Metta claps her hands, blows on them, and stamps her feet. “Shall we walk?” she asks. “It's too cold to stand.” She motions to the bridge, a new one rebuilt after the fires and complete enough to use. “Can we cross?”

Raimon watches a streak of vermillion. It is Laila, perched on the front of a sleigh with Cador and another knight behind. Her hair is braided, with beads woven cleverly into the ends, making them stick straight out behind her like two herons' beaks. Even as her sleigh bangs and crashes, almost tossing her off, she is throwing out her arms to Aimery, whose sleigh is running beside hers, not plain like the others, but strung with fancy bells and silken ribbons. Indeed, it might have been decorated with Laila in mind. His only companion is Ugly, whose ears have been flipped inside out as she folds her skinny frame to avoid the worst of the pebbled spray. She is terrified. Laila calls her, and in a daring swoop, scoops her away from Aimery. Whooping with delight, Laila ostentatiously covers the quaking animal in kisses.

They all hit the bottom together, and Cador somersaults smartly off while Laila, abandoning Ugly, whirls like a merry-go-round.

“I don't believe Laila's afraid of anything.” Metta sighs.