ON THE ROAD TO NARBONNE—DECEMBER 1208
Raoul prepared to leave for Narbonne as the thin streams of apricot light faded from the western sky. He’d spent the day waiting out a sudden storm in a cabanon in a field north of the great salt marshes, just inland from the sea. But he could reach his destination in a few hours’ ride, and if the stars in the eastern sky kept their promise and remained visible, he’d stay dry. Mirò whinnied a question at Raoul as he adjusted her saddle before dipping her graceful head to pull at the meager grass.
He was only a few miles but an impossible distance from his family in Gruissan, where he’d taken Paloma and the children in October, just days after the last grape harvest. Raoul had overseen the pressing before abandoning their home in Lagrasse for the anonymity of Languedoc’s hillsides, coasts, caves, and sheepherders’ paths. But this night would bring him to Narbonne, where many weeks before, he and Manel had arranged, through their small band of allies, to meet.
Raoul departed at dusk, heading west, following a course of his own reckoning, wishing he could see past the darkening horizon and into the future. As the moon rose like a bright silver button in the blue velvet of the sky, it was hard to imagine a more peaceful place. It was almost beyond comprehension that strife and despair flowed all around him. But Raoul felt it in his blood—his dreams were cursed with images of fire and the sounds of suffering.
By autumn, as word of the massacre in Cluet spread through Languedoc, men in plain clothes but riding the powerful destriers of nobles and knights began appearing in twos and threes on the roads from Toulouse and Béziers to Carcassonne and Narbonne and near the great citadels of Peyrepertuse, Quéribus, and Puilaurens. The forests and gorges seemed to swallow them, for no more was seen or heard after they passed through.
The land seemed to ready itself—not just for winter, but for some greater threat—and then it held its breath. Raoul’s lungs pulled tight with Languedoc’s tension, waiting for the sudden change that would force exhalation. And action.
• • •
One head turned as Raoul entered Manel’s room near Narbonne’s port on the Aude. He was a stranger, short of stature but lean and handsome, with dark copper hair and a scruff of beard shadowing his face. He stood beside an empty bed, stripped bare of its covering.
“Raoul d’Aran.” The young man’s voice was soft and full of sorrow; Raoul could see anguish in his eyes. Raoul did not respond, and his hand remained inside his cloak, poised on the grip of his short sword. “My name is Nicolo Carrer,” the man said. “I am your cousin’s steward.” He stammered in langue d’oïl, his accent thickened by his native Italian dialect.
“Yes, he’s spoken of you,” Raoul replied in their common language as his eyes scanned the small room. “Where is Manel?”
Nicolo sank slowly onto the bed and studied his clasped hands. “Monsieur d’Aran. If I’d not known and loved Manel so well and had not already witnessed his fits, I would have sworn a demon had entered him. It was terrible.” He looked up with dark, round eyes overflowing with tears. “But he didn’t die alone. I was with him to the end.”
Raoul sank to his knees, burying his wretched cry in the thick wool of his cloak. He wanted to flail out, destroy this room, destroy the sun as it rose over Narbonne. His beautiful, gentle cousin, brought down by a curse of God. He felt a hand on his back, a hand that gripped his shoulder and drew him up. Nicolo held out a cup of wine. Raoul accepted it and emptied the cup in one swallow.
“Tell me what happened.”
The Italian nodded and cleared his throat. “Manel and I left Paris two weeks ago with merchants and holy men bound for Spain. We were traveling as horse buyers on our way to meet with breeders in Madrid. We arrived in Nîmes, and the group splintered as some headed east to Marseilles or Italy. Manel and I continued here, to Narbonne, where we were to wait for our escort south to Perpignan and across the Pyrénées. It was then Manel revealed to me that we would travel west, deeper into Languedoc.
“We arrived at this hostel two days ago. Manel had arranged to meet an old friend from the seminary in Catalunya. Bonafé, his name was. I went to find a smithy—my mare had a loose shoe. When I returned, the door to our room was open, and Manel was on the floor before the fire. He looked asleep, but he…” Nicolo’s voice broke. “He’d had one of his fits, one of the worst. He’d soiled himself and bitten his tongue, and I couldn’t rouse him. These fits, certainly one as bad as this, rob every measure of strength from his body.”
Nicolo inhaled deeply. “When he woke the next morning, he was confused, babbling about a letter that he insisted was here. I searched our belongings but found nothing. I tried to silence him, to keep him calm, but he raved about you, about your family in Gruissan.”
Raoul ran a hand across his brow, squeezing his temples to check his anxiety. He returned his gaze to the young Italian and nodded for him to continue.
“I know he waited as long as he could. He wanted to see you, to tell you himself. But he must have known his end was coming. He insisted that without that letter, I had to give you his message in person.”
“What message?” Raoul demanded.
“Your cousin told me, ‘Say these words to Raoul d’Aran. Say them, and then forget you ever heard them.’ And his message was, ‘The bear is a traitor. A falcon flies south, and the dove will die.’”
Raoul repeated the words and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. Nicolo’s lips quivered, and Raoul hastened to add, “But no matter. It will make sense when I can think more clearly. Tell me about Manel.”
Nicolo waved his hands helplessly. “He was overcome soon after. Merciful God, it didn’t last long. I felt his life slip away.”
Raoul cursed Manel’s God and then thanked him for relieving the young priest of his suffering. He wished he could believe in Paloma’s superstition of rebirth. Of all the souls who deserved a second life, his tenderhearted cousin certainly did.
Then in a heartbeat, the heat of Raoul’s fury and grief snapped to ice.
Paloma, he screamed silently. My dove. A man one instant from becoming undone, he said in a strangled voice, “My family has been betrayed.”
GRUISSAN—DECEMBER 1208
They stumbled through the streets, pushed on by soldiers. Torches flickered against shut doors and shuttered windows. No one peered out. The village remained closed to them, but Paloma sensed the terror behind the walls. A few streets away, cries echoed, shouts broke like thunderclaps, and then all was quiet. Dread thudded in her belly when she realized how alone they were. Where are you, Raoul? Oh, my husband, you would know what to do.
Saint-Maurice loomed ahead, a terrible hulk of stone turned the color of dried blood by the torchlight. The soldiers shoved her and the children through a door that led into the back of a chapel. The heavy door, bound with iron braces, boomed shut, and Paloma heard the click and rattle of chains. Iron against iron, iron against wood. The doom was thick in her veins, a mordant grip deeper than terror.
The stories whispered at the hearth and in the Lagrasse market of villagers burned alive in churches weren’t gossip or fabrication. They were witnessed horrors of men killing their neighbors, cousins, and brothers. The thought of death by fire nearly sent her mad with panic. “We are lost,” she moaned aloud, and Bertran whimpered under her crushing hold. Aicelina was silent with fear. Paloma prayed for quick deaths, for the smoke to overwhelm them before the flames could sear their skin.
She entered the nave, grasping her children’s tiny fingers in her shaking hands. The dark, cold interior of the church echoed with the cries of babies, the sobs of women, and the pounding fists of men on the wooden doors of the nave and at the shuttered windows. She tried to count the souls trapped with her, but it was difficult to see in the shadows: more than a dozen, perhaps two. They were islands in their fear, no one working together to seek a way out. A woman began to keen, tearing at her hair and clothing, until another woman, perhaps a daughter, pleaded with her to be calm.
The crazed one sagged, and her wails diminished to gasps. The younger woman caressed her back, arranging the torn dress in a touching effort to preserve her modesty. The older woman pushed the other’s hands away, rose, and looked directly at Paloma. Her voice was a mule’s tortured bray, echoing across the dark nave.
“Those children!” Her arm shot up and she extended an accusing finger. “Unnatural creatures. It is a sign,” she bellowed. “You are the devil’s concubine, a witch. You have cursed us all!” The spittle flew from her lips, and her eyes shone with mad triumph.
The pale moons of the villagers’ faces twisted in unison toward Paloma. She held her children tighter. The woman stumbled toward her, her torn shift falling open and her heavy breasts swinging free of the coarse fabric. Time slowed, and details came into sharp relief, even in the half-light: the woman’s pockmarked face ravaged by boils and blemishes, her belly stretched and flaccid from childbearing. Paloma pitied her, pitied them all, trapped and helpless, now turning against each other in their fear. And still her accuser came with hands raised and fingers clawing at the air.
The woman lunged at Paloma, screaming in outrage. Paloma stepped back, but the claw of fingernails ripped the chain bearing a silver cross from her neck. Off balance, the broken woman tripped and fell to her knees and remained there, weeping, while the villagers looked on, paralyzed by shock.
Paloma faced the crowd, standing to protect her children against this final insult. She’d been protected by Raoul’s stature in Lagrasse from strangers’ wild-eyed superstitions that her children, born minutes apart and as alike as rosebuds on a bush, were signs of witchcraft. And she’d been hidden away in Gruissan. Now she met the leering faces alone. Although it no longer mattered what these strangers should think of her; her end would be theirs. But she stood so that her last words would be ones of truth and courage, not mewling pleas for mercy, huddled in a corner.
“My husband is Raoul d’Aran of Lagrasse. He risks his life to save innocents threatened by this war.” Her voice rang across the nave. “I am no one’s whore, I am not a witch, and my children are as innocent as any trapped here. My family and I were brought here to hide in the safety of a friend’s home. We were betrayed, as were all of you. By whom, I do not know, and it can hardly matter now.”
Heavy thudding on the front doors startled the small band. Several of the women shrieked in fright, and the youngest children began to whimper again. There was no break in the ferocious rhythm. It became another element of torture, a senseless gesture to intimidate the already terrified. Some of the women cried, the tears running soundlessly down their pale cheeks. The men’s faces were taut. They all flinched as the pounding continued, slow and steady, with the cadence of a funeral drum.
Paloma’s nostrils flared as the acrid odor of smoke wound invisibly through the nave. She turned to look for its source, but it seeped in stealthily. Then she saw it on the far side: thin shafts of light through the panels of shutters shrunken by heat and rain. Tendrils of smoke caught the light, lazily spiraling up to the ceiling. The pounding stopped as suddenly as it began. The gathered group stifled their sobs and moans as they waited, and the nave grew eerily quiet.
“Fire!” a woman screamed, pointing to a row of narrow windows on the west end still in shadow and covered with boards. Smoke began to pour in, and with it, the first bright lick of flame, tiny but menacing. There was commotion as the villagers moved away from the windows. Paloma looked to the round moons of stained glass high in the north wall, where the dawn light was beginning to glow in the ruby, sapphire, and emerald panels.