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CHAPTER TWENTY
The Lodestone
‘I can’t believe it!’ exclaimed the Lord of Cabaret when the message reached him.
Simon de Montfort, after his victory at Minerve, had left his mighty siege engines outside Carcassonne. They were packed into ox-carts, ready to roll on to his next target. It was too good a chance for the rebels to pass up. The giant catapults stood, with a small detachment of guards, like a child’s abandoned toys, not put away at night by the nursemaid.
In the darkest part of the night, the raiding party from Cabaret fell upon the siege train that was slowly trundling the trebuchets towards Termes. Peire-Roger himself led the attack before the machines were out of sight of the walls of Carcassonne. And the rebels were spotted; soldiers ran out of the garrison and chased them away.
But the Cabaret rebels were like hyenas, which run away when the lion approaches but return to the carcass as soon as the more powerful beast sleeps. At dawn, they attacked the train again and set fire to the machines. And they almost got away with it. But the crusaders came to the defence of the siege train again and soon they had pressed Peire-Roger and his men back to the river.
Casualties were heavy and the water ran red.
‘How did you escape?’ asked Peire-Roger’s men when he made his way back to Cabaret with only a handful of wounded rebels. Their lord was soaking wet and in a very bad mood, stinging from dozens of small wounds, but his face split into a big smile at the question.
‘I rode through the city and out the other side, shouting “Montfort, Montfort!”’ he said. ‘And they thought I was a Frenchman!’
Peire-Roger had not succeeded in capturing de Montfort’s siege engines but he had held them up and when the crusade’s leader arrived with most of his army at his next target, Termes, they were not there. He reached the heavily-fortified city in mid-August.
The massive castle stood on a sheer rock above the village and had a reputation for being impregnable. It was certainly a daunting sight to the Frenchmen.
The Lord of Termes had made good use of the time bought for him by the Cabaret rebels’ raids. The castle was well stocked and had taken in many mercenaries to give extra manpower to the rebels. Now they looked down from the walls at the crusaders, as overwhelmed by the size of the army as the Frenchmen were by their castle.
‘So, it has come at last,’ said the Lord to his band of close advisors. ‘I’m glad you were back in time to join us for it, Gui.’ He clapped the young knight on the shoulder.
‘So am I,’ said le Viguier grimly. He had no intention of being taken prisoner.
Bertran saw him touch for the hundredth time the lady’s handkerchief he wore in his jerkin. The troubadour was sure it was Elinor’s but, although the knight had given them a full account of the long journey to Saint-Jacques and beyond to Monferrato, where he had safely left the boys, of the lady of Sévignan he had said only that he saw her and told her of the fate of her home and family.
Bertran had almost as much of a death wish as the young knight. He was now fully-armed and prepared to defend Termes, the castle that had given him shelter, and its lord, who shared his religion. He had given up the pretence of being Jules; it didn’t matter now who knew him as the troubadour-spy. He hadn’t done anything wrong.
From the very beginning, two and a half years ago, he had tried to put things right, riding hard after Pierre of Castelnau’s assassin, and then warning all the lords of the south about the coming storm. But now, besieged in Lord Raimon of Termes’ castle, he was just another fighting man and not a very experienced one at that.
He hoped to die honourably and closed his mind to the atrocities the French had done to the men of Bram and in many other places. But he had to think what he would do if Termes were forced to surrender and de Montfort offered the same terms to the Perfects and Believers that had been given to them at Minerve. There were only a few Perfects within the keep at Termes and none of the ordinary Believers at Minerve had chosen the bonfires. But Bertran felt that if he were prepared to die on the battlements for the right to practise his own religion, he should logically be ready to perish in the flames rather than give it up in order to gain mercy.
In Chivasso, the Marchese and his army were still away and Elinor found the time lay heavily on her hands. She tried to compose but had no encouragement from Iseut, who also seemed weary of poetry. The weather was oppressively hot and the whole court seemed to be holding its breath, as if waiting for something momentous to happen.
Peire was thriving. The days when his eyes clouded over and he seemed to be remembering his earlier life grew fewer and fewer. He had attached himself to Iseut and for that Elinor was glad. Her friend needed someone to love, she decided – she who had lost husband, child, friends and home – and the boy needed someone to love him.
He was about the age that the baby Iseut had lost would have been if he had survived and he was a comfort to her. She never thought about him as a farmer’s son, a peasant – only as a lost child who needed mothering.
And if Peire was like a son to Iseut, Huguet was a brother to Elinor. Not one like Aimeric, so much older and stronger, but someone who had been a friend and companion and suffered such terrible griefs that the two of them did not need to talk; it was enough to sit quietly together and remember.
Sometimes they played music or Huguet taught her his new planhs and Elinor taught him the one she had written for Iseut’s words. It seemed as if all her thoughts were turned towards sadness and loss now. She felt like an old woman who had been deprived of all her family but she was still only sixteen.
The Marchesa was friendly to her but busy fussing over her newborn daughter, Beatrix, her first after three boys.
‘You will see, Elinor,’ she said comfortably. ‘When you are married. It is good to have boys first – it will make your husband happy. But a girl is a present for the wife, a child you can always treasure.’
But Elinor did not think she would ever have a husband now; she was getting a bit old to marry and she had no dowry. And she did not know if Alessandro of Selva would return from the war or whether, if he did, he would still like her.
Nor did she think her mother had ever regarded her as a treasure! Alys maybe, but not difficult, disobedient, awkward Elinor. She wished now that she had been a better daughter.
Then, one day in high summer, the Marchesa sent to say that the ladies of Saint-Jacques had a visitor. Neither of them could imagine who it could possibly be.
‘Someone with news of my mother, perhaps?’ said Elinor.
But it was a man who waited for them in the Marchesa’s receiving room and a familiar figure. Iseut cried out and moved towards him.
‘Lord Berenger!’ she exclaimed. ‘How wonderful to see you! We thought you had perished at Digne.’
Her eyes sparkled with an energy Elinor hadn’t seen in her for months.
Berenger came forward and kissed both their hands. He looked long and hard at Elinor.
‘I am so glad to find you both safe,’ he said. ‘When I saw what was left of Saint-Jacques, I thought the worst. It has taken me all this time to find you.’
He was touched by the warmth of Iseut’s welcome. His eyes kept shifting between the two women and, suddenly, Elinor saw with great clarity what had happened. A bubble of laughter floated up inside her and spilled out; there was nothing she could do to stop it. She held her hands to her mouth but the laugh and the words came out together.
‘You spoke to Garsenda, didn’t you?’
Berenger looked embarrassed.
‘What is it, Elinor?’ asked the Marchesa, who dearly loved a joke.
‘It is a silly thing,’ said Elinor, striving to straighten her face and anxious to preserve Berenger’s dignity. She too had been impressed by how happy Iseut was to see him. ‘It is just that a meddlesome maid of Lady Iseut’s thought that I . . . that she . . . that I might be a young man in disguise!’
Now the whole court laughed and Elinor realised how very much she had changed since she could pass herself off as a boy.
Berenger was unsure whether to join in. But here was Iseut, whom he had loved for so many years, smiling lovingly back at him and looking even more beautiful than he remembered. And there was her ‘secret lover’, so obviously female.
‘What would Ser Alessandro have to say if you were?’ said the Marchesa, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.
And that made Elinor feel good too, to know that the heir of Selva was acknowledged to be her suitor still.
So it was a merrier party at dinner than had gathered at Monferrato for some time.
Berenger told them his story. It was true that the French had besieged his castle at Digne and had caused some damage. But his garrison had fought back bravely. Although he had been forced to flee, he had gained time enough to gather money and valuables and set off through mountain paths the crusaders could not follow. He had doubled back alone to Saint-Jacques and seen the ruins smoking from a distance.
‘And then I thought that you had fared worse than me, lady,’ he said to Iseut.
‘I did it myself,’ said Iseut quietly. ‘I couldn’t bear to see it in French hands.’
Reinforcements were slow in joining de Montfort’s encampment at Termes. Large though his army was, it wasn’t big enough to surround the walls and some of the soldiers were beginning to drift back to their harvests, their forty days’ service completed.
And when small groups travelled to join the French force they were often set upon by Cabaret raiders and sent on to Termes horribly mutilated and unfit to fight.
Bertran sometimes saw these disfigured Frenchmen from the walls and despaired. It was bad enough to be standing on the edge of the abyss, wondering merely what type of death he and the garrison would shortly meet. But to see that their fellow rebels had been so corrupted by French cruelty that they resorted to the same atrocities made him sadder than anything that had happened in the last two years.
The fate of the men of Bram, which had made him send Huguet and the boy away, had produced a terrible effect on the garrison at Cabaret and in other places; they no longer regarded the French as human like themselves. It could be felt even in the castle at Termes, where the men jeered at the soldiers beneath their walls and launched raiding parties to capture their banners. Bertran was sure that if any Frenchman were to be caught by the garrison, he would be tortured just as badly as the men of Bram.
And Bertran was worried about the Lord of Termes too. He seemed distracted, often forgetting what he was saying in the middle of a sentence. Several times he asked for Peire, forgetting that the boy was no longer at Termes.
The siege stretched out interminably through the summer and, at the very end of August, fresh troops came to join the Frenchmen. At last the trebuchets began to have an effect on the walls of the castle. But the defenders had some siege engines too and they knew what Simon de Montfort looked like.
Twice he was nearly killed: the first time a bolt from a ballista pierced the leader’s tent while Mass was being celebrated. The soldier standing behind de Montfort was killed. Then a boulder from a mangonel on the castle walls crushed one of the sappers as de Montfort was talking to him. He had even had his arm round the poor wretch’s shoulder before he was struck.
‘Third time lucky! Third time lucky!’ chanted the defenders and even the French saw these narrow escapes as a bad omen. De Montfort was so worried that he stopped eating.
But inside the castle at Termes morale was no higher. The water supply was running out. And his mercenaries were pressing the Lord to surrender; they knew they would receive no clemency from the French unless the castle was yielded up.
And in the end, by October, the lack of water was so acute that Raimon did suggest terms on which he would surrender. He would give up the castle for the winter but keep his lands and even take the castle back in the spring.
‘They’ll never agree to that,’ said Gui.
But de Montfort was so desperate that they did and a day was arranged to let the French enter the keep.
The night before, torrential rain began to fall and all the wells and cisterns inside Termes were filled back up to the brim. The defenders ran out in the rain laughing and letting the water trickle into their throats. When the French Marshal arrived, plodging through the mud, Raimon de Termes refused to hand the castle over.
‘Go back!’ de Montfort ordered the unfortunate soaking man. ‘Take any terms you can get, as long as I have this castle for the winter!’
Two of the senior defenders of Termes felt they shouldn’t renege on the terms that had been agreed, just because the rains had come; one of them was Bertran. The others refused and the siege went on.
‘You see?’ said the Lord of Termes. ‘God sent the rain – he is on our side.’
Bertran feared more and more for Raimon’s reason.
Large sections of de Montfort’s army had disappeared back north. But the blessed rain which had filled the castle tanks was to prove the defenders’ downfall. The cooks used it to make dough for bread but the rainwater had mingled with the stagnant mess left in the bottom of the tanks by the dry summer and was full of disease.
Soon dysentery was spreading through the castle and the rebels became desperate to leave. Banking on their superior knowledge of the area, they organised their secret departure from the castle and had nearly all escaped when a French guard raised the alarm.
Bertran was with Lord Raimon, doing his best to see him safe out of the castle and on the way to Cabaret. But Raimon was now delirious and insisted on going back into the castle for something.
‘What, my lord?’ asked Gui le Viguier, who was also part of the bodyguard. ‘We have no time to go back. We must escape.’
‘The boy, the boy,’ said Raimon. ‘I need his little sword.’
He pulled himself out of their grasp and ran back towards the keep. Immediately he was captured by the French.
‘Run!’ said Gui. ‘Save yourselves! There is nothing more we can do for Lord Raimon.’
When the Marchese of Monferrato came back from his wars, Alessandro was not with him. Elinor’s heart sank when she saw no sign of him among the returning knights.
But at supper that evening, the Marchesa reassured her. ‘Sandro is well,’ she said. ‘But his father has died and he had to go back to his castle – he is the Lord of Selva now.’
Guglielmo took a great liking to Lord Berenger and promptly gave him a castle he had taken from the rebels who had been beaten at Cuneo.
As the women settled in for their second winter under the protection of Monferrato, Elinor sensed a change in Iseut. She, Berenger and Peire seemed to have created a new family. Elinor asked her about it one day in November on a rare occasion when she found Iseut on her own.
‘I was homesick, Elinor,’ said Iseut. ‘And I didn’t know it. Berenger reminds me of Saint-Jacques. Even you had only a short history with me there but he knew me before I was married, knew my husband Jaufre, even came to my wedding. Ever since he came here, I feel in touch again with my past.’
‘It seems to me you are thinking of the future,’ said Elinor. She wanted so much to be happy for her friend but all she could feel was a terrible loneliness. Iseut would marry Berenger, she could see that, and would take Peire and go and live with him in his new Piedmontese castle, and Elinor would be alone at Chivasso.
Well, if it was to be, she would still have Huguet and their music.
‘It is true,’ said Iseut. ‘Berenger has asked again to marry me and I have said yes. But I also said I would not leave Monferrato without you and the young joglar.’
Elinor was speechless.
‘Come with us in the spring,’ said Iseut, taking her hands. ‘We can try to make a new home, combining all that we remember best of Saint-Jacques, Sévignan, Digne – yes and Monferrato too. It will be a castle filled with music and poetry and perhaps, one day, more children for Peire to play with.’
It was not long after this conversation that they heard of the fall of Termes and imprisonment of Lord Raimon. But there was still no news of Bertran or Gui le Viguier.
Instead news came that threw the Marchese into confusion.
‘The Pope has excommunicated Otto!’ exclaimed the Marchesa. ‘And now he supports Fredrik as German Emperor. Poor Guglielmo doesn’t know what to do. He is wondering whether to change sides himself.’
And in the midst of this upheaval, Lady Clara and Alys arrived at the court.
Elinor could not believe her eyes; she flung her arms round her sister and then abased herself at her mother’s feet.
‘I’m so sorry, Maire,’ she sobbed. ‘I should never have disobeyed you. And now Paire and Aimeric are both dead and we have all lost our home.’
‘But not because of you or anything you did,’ said Clara, lifting her daughter up and embracing her with more warmth than she ever had in the past. ‘Still, I am glad that you have heard that news already.’
‘And you all have a home with us as long as you need one,’ said the Marchesa warmly. ‘I told you Elinor, didn’t I? A daughter is a treasure to her mother and now yours has two.’
‘Two more for our new castle,’ whispered Iseut, before being introduced to the Lady of Sévignan.
‘The Lady of Sévignan is not me but my daughter,’ said Clara, holding tight to Elinor’s hand. ‘I should like to announce here before the court that my Lord Lanval made her his heir after our son Aimeric. And though her inheritance is now in the hands of the French, the bastide and lands of Sévignan belong by right to Elinor. I hope one day she may retrieve them.’
‘Until then, as my wife says,’ said the Marchese, ‘you are both welcome at my court, wherever I keep it, and in any of my castles.’
He looked round with satisfaction at his dependants. ‘Everyone comes to Monferrato,’ he said.
‘Everyone comes to Monferrato,’ echoed Elinor. ‘It is true. First Iseut and I, then Huguet. Did you know Huguet the joglar was here, Maire? Then Lord Berenger. Even Gui has been here. It was he who told us what had happened at Sévignan. Monferrato is like a lodestone, drawing everyone to it.’
Everyone but Alessandro, she thought. Monferrato has released its hold on him.