Stigmata (19 page)

The woman’s eyes were huge, like a child’s. She nodded. She had no strength to resist Father Ortiz’s charity.

‘Has he had water poured on his head by a priest?’

She shook her head.

‘Then we shall baptize him here and he will have a Christian burial so that his soul might be saved in heaven. Do you go often to church?’

Another barely discernible nod of the head.

Father Ortiz turned to his servants
.
‘We must bury the child,’ he said and ignored their looks of complete astonishment. The ground was baked hard and it seemed to Simon the
poor men were as near fainting as he was. But they did as they had been ordered, scraping a shallow grave from the pale dirt.

Father Ortiz performed a hurried baptism using a little water from the leather bottle at his waist, and then he took the stole from a satchel on his saddle and spoke the words of committal. All
the while the two soldiers of the rearguard, who were now their only protection on the lonely road, grumbled and shook their heads, disgusted that he should have inconvenienced them so for the sake
of a peasant woman.

The infant was placed into the shallow grave and covered over. It will surely be dug up again by foxes or dogs as soon as we are gone, Simon thought.

They remounted their horses.

‘What about the woman?’ Simon asked Father Ortiz.

‘We shall take her with us.’ He led her to his horse and told her to get up into saddle.

‘Father Ortiz?’ Simon asked. ‘Is this wise?’ He supposed what he meant was: is this dignified?

‘I shall walk.’

‘Then you must have my horse.’

‘No, it is my decision. It is what Jesus would have done.’

And that is why Father Ortiz walked the rest of the way to Béziers. For, as he said, that was what Jesus would have done and he could do no less.

Béziers

When they arrived, the crusader Host had already been and departed. Fifteen thousand souls had lived in the town once. They were still there, but they lived no longer. Simon
did not trouble himself to see them, but he could smell them. They were mostly charred, he was told; what was left of them anyway.

The afternoon heat lay ponderous on the burned stones, the citadel exhaling the stink of butchery. Fragments of grey ash still floated in the air. Here and there black smudges drifted upwards. A
wall of the cathedral shimmered and fell as he watched. The air was heavy with the drone of meat flies. Vultures and crows dozed on the walls, replete. Dogs yelped and fought over scraps, though
there was plenty to be had. No human sound.

‘A miracle,’ Father Ortiz said and fell on his knees and gave thanks to God.

Saint-Ybars

T
HE VILLAGE SLUMBERED
under the hot sun. The grey stone houses were different to the north; they all had curved pink tiles
on their roofs and each tile rested on a companion that was exactly the same but inverted. The eaves were weighted with large stones to prevent the mistral lifting the tiles from their position.
The Romans had built their houses this way, they said.

The air was rich and somnolent, spiced with wild thyme. Dragonflies hovered among the cornflowers. The mountains of Castile had disappeared into the haze.

There were ripe figs lying under the trees and Gilles de Soissons got down from his horse and opened one, sucking at the soft grainy fruit inside. They all huddled under a hastily erected silk
canopy, seeking shelter from the enervating heat. Over their heads, a banner with a cross, surmounted by the fleur-de-lis of the King of France, stirred and then was still.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘they refuse to open the gates to us. They are Trencavel’s men inside. They insult us and call us invaders and godless.’

Roger-Raymond Trencavel was the local viscount. He had been warring with Count Raymond of Toulouse for years and was accustomed to being invaded. His soldiers knew a siege like a summer’s
day.

‘We have supplies enough to continue,’ Simon said.

‘I do not care about supplies, I care about their insolence. Do we leave a nest of heretics behind us, unharmed, when I have sworn on the holy cross to come here and eradicate
them?’

The baron’s voice was high-pitched and grated on the nerves. A curious one, Simon thought. He walks like a nobleman; nothing could disguise the gait of a man who had spent most of his life
in the saddle. He just didn’t look like one, in Simon’s opinion. He was from the north, from Normandy, but not dark, as most of them were. His hair was white, even his eyelashes, and he
had no beard. His eyes were pale, almost pink.

His boots were thick with the pale dust of the Midi, he had heavy spurs strapped to them and blood upon the spikes. So he is cruel to his horse, Simon thought. That tells you something.

It had been a surprise to find one of these
castra
, as they called these fortified towns in the Albigeois, still defiant. Every other town they had passed since Béziers had been
deserted. Simon was not sure that massacre should become a Christian principle, but as a tactic of war it had succeeded in spectacular fashion.

‘We should capture the town,’ Gilles said.

‘It is three hundred souls. Why bother? We have no siege engines.’

‘We don’t need siege engines. It is not a proper fortress. The walls are not high; most form part of the houses on the perimeter. They cannot be properly guarded and even if they
could, by my estimate the garrison is not large enough to do it. There are a score of Trencavel’s men in there, two score at most. A handful of my men can scale the walls during the night and
at first light they can rush the gate and throw it open to us.’

‘You do not have enough men for this,’ Simon said.

‘Correct me, Father, but you and Father Ortiz are here to lend spiritual direction to the crusade, not advise professional soldiers on tactics. Am I right?’

Simon turned to Father Ortiz for support, but he looked away.

‘We should join the siege at Carcassonne. They were our instructions.’

‘We do better service ensuring the army’s rear.’

‘If they had wanted this village they would have taken it.’

‘Perhaps they were in a hurry to reach Carcassonne. For them this would be like swatting at a fly. It is better left to smaller armies, such as mine.’

Simon understood the baron’s eagerness to start his war. It required only forty days of active campaigning under the cross to earn the remission of all his sins, so the sooner he began,
the sooner he could mark his place in heaven and go home.

He rubbed at the skin of his back through the woollen cassock, feeling the raised cicatrices of his scars. They itched him when he sweated, hard as bone and inflamed in this heat.
Did I
really do that?
‘If the people won’t come out, then we will go in after them. Their defiance can only mean that they are harbouring heretics in there. If they will not bow down to
Jesus they will bend their knee to the fire. I came here to do God’s work and I am ready to begin.’

‘It is the soldiers who defy you,’ Simon said. ‘Not the townspeople. They have no choice.’

‘Very well, Father Jorda. Tomorrow morning I shall invite any who believe in the Holy Church to leave the village so we shall know there are only the godless left inside.’

‘This is futile! Even if you capture it, you have not the men to garrison it.’

‘There will be nothing left to garrison. I shall do as the Host did at Béziers. We will burn it to the ground and any heretics we find will scorch with it.’

Simon looked at Father Ortiz. ‘Do you agree with his plan?’

‘In Spain we have a proverb. “Where a blessing fails, a good thick stick will suffice.”’

Simon looked up the hill towards the
castrum
. The watch lamps were already shining from the corner of the ramparts. ‘Father, I do not think a big stick is a weapon that Jesus
favoured. I thought we were here to save souls.’

‘We are here to drive the Devil from his lair by any means at our disposal. Those that will be saved, we shall save. But our first duty is to defend Jesus Christ.’

‘Tomorrow I will offer the good Catholics of the town their freedom,’ Gilles said. ‘If they do not choose to accept our mercy, then they shall reap the consequences.’ It
was late in the afternoon and his men had started to build their cook fires. ‘Two nights hence we shall be warming our toes by a larger fire than any of these. The fire will have a name. We
shall call it Saint-Ybars.’

O
NE OF THE
younger soldiers was retching with nerves somewhere in the darkness and his more experienced comrades, ordered
to silence, were kicking him with their boots to shut him up. No moon, only the light at the watchtowers to show them the way.

Diego and Simon stood at the front of the column beside Gilles’s white destrier, a massive beast with red eyes. It jerked on the reins, stamping its hoof, excited by the press of soldiers
around it. Two squires struggled to hold it.

A scream startled him. The fight had started at the
portal
. Half a dozen of Gilles’s men had scaled the walls during the night and were now attacking the soldiers at the gate.

Gilles had told Father Ortiz he must wait for his signal before he gave the men his benediction. Now there was no further need for silence, Gilles twisted around in his saddle and pointed at the
friar. ‘Say what you have to and be quick about it!’

‘Men of Normandy,’ Father Ortiz shouted, ‘God is with you today! Your enemy is Christ’s enemy! Your crusade is greater than even those who fight in the Holy Land, for the
men you go against are not mere heathens, who sin only from ignorance, but men inspired by the Devil himself, Christians once saved by the blood of Christ who in their wretchedness have now turned
against him! They have massacred priests and profaned churches and spat on the cross! They kiss the anus of a black cat and call it Jesus! You can give such people no quarter!’

There were warning shouts and the sound of death from the
portal
. Gilles pulled on the reins of the destrier so that it rose into the air and the great iron hooves crashed down inches
from Simon’s face. The gates of Saint-Ybars swung open. Someone was swinging a torch to give the signal.

Gilles did not wait for Diego to finish his valediction. He spurred his horse forward and shouted the command to attack. His chevaliers – his mounted troops – and foot soldiers
surged behind him.

The Norman army converged on the gate. Simon watched, horrified and afraid.

‘Are you all right?’ Father Ortiz said.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Will you join me in song then?’ He raised the cross above their heads, just as the sun rose over the mountain. It touched the very tip and flashed gold. He started to sing:
‘
Veni Sancte Spiritus
. . .’

There was an explosion of flame at the
portal
, then another. They finished the hymn. Diego shuffled under the weight of the gold-plated cross. ‘They are taking a long time to pass
the gate,’ he said.

Simon heard the panicked shriek of a horse. Soldiers ran from the
portal
, on fire. Something was wrong. They should have been inside by now.

‘Shall we sing the hymn again, Brother Simon?’

They sang the
Veni Sancte Spiritus
twice more. As the sun rose higher in the sky, two thick plumes of black smoke spiralled into the sky.

‘What you said to them,’ Simon murmured. ‘That business about the black cat.’

‘What of it?’

‘I have lived here in the southern lands all my life. I never heard of such a thing.’

‘I have it on good authority.’

‘These
bons òmes
are misguided on many things, it is true. But I do not believe any of them would do such a thing to a cat.’

‘Does this matter so much to you at this moment, Brother Simon?’

‘I believe that God made us guardians of a great truth. We do not need to embellish it with falsehoods.’

One of Gilles’s foot soldiers ran back down the hill, his leather tunic smouldering. He ripped it off, howling in pain. Another followed. Soon there were dozens of them, stumbling,
bleeding, cursing.

Now the chevaliers came, all Gilles’s little army in ragged retreat.

‘What has happened?’ Father Ortiz shouted.

One of the soldiers came over. He had lost his helmet and clutched at his arm, which hung useless at his side. Blood dripped steadily from his fingers. ‘It wasn’t just
Trencavel’s men on the walls! The whole village was waiting for us. Filthy Devil-fuckers!’

The last to return was Gilles himself. He looked like a hedgehog, his coat of mail bristling with arrows. Simon had heard it was hard to kill any knight, even at close quarters, as their armour
was mostly impenetrable. It was only ever the foot soldiers that died, for they only had a piece of leather or a shield to protect them. Now he could see for himself that everything he had been
told was true.

Perhaps that was why men like Gilles loved war so much.

The Norman removed his helmet and flung it into the dirt. His boy’s face was flushed with sweat, his thin white hair plastered to his skull. More arrows quivered in his destrier’s
armour, though one had penetrated, near the shoulder, and dark blood streamed down its foreleg. It jittered and circled in pain and agitation.

‘What happened, my lord?’ Father Ortiz shouted.

‘The townspeople are fighting alongside the soldiers. They had chains ready across the street to bring down our horses and even the burghers were on the roof hurling rocks down at us. Then
they set fire to two hay carts and pushed them down the street. I lost two of my knights and God Himself knows how many men!’

‘I told him we were not prepared for this,’ Simon said to Father Ortiz.

‘You said we were only fighting soldiers!’ Gilles shouted at them. ‘You said the people were good Catholics and it was only Trencavel’s soldiers that would fight us! Show
mercy, you said! Well, now see you where mercy has got us! There’s not one of them in there that is not a Devil-kissing bastard!’