THEY SET OUT FOR the castle the next morning. Although Ann had seen the videos she had retained a picture of Carcassonne as a typical medieval town, with winding streets, small one- and two-story houses, churches, and a market square. But at every turn she came upon something new, surprising: a fountain covered in bright geometric tiles; a garden almost hidden from the street; a stall with a roof of striped cloth, selling meat heavy with spices. And the people were varied as well; she saw a man wearing a turban, and then a group of people with dark skin and straight hair who looked as if they might have come from India. Carcassonne itself wasn’t a harbor but there were many towns in Languedoc that were, welcoming ships filled with spices and African ivory, sending out strawberries and pears, Cordovan leather and Toledo blades. And the city was next door to Muslim Spain, with its mathematics and medicine, architecture and poetry, perhaps the most advanced culture in Europe.

She had read historical novels, of course, but little from before the Renaissance, and she had always pictured the Middle Ages and earlier as very boring: a dull procession of peasants and landowners, men and women who worked without ceasing, breaking their routine only to go to church. Instead she had seen Copts and Jews, goddess worshippers and mathematicians—and now she was about to meet heretics.

“Trencavel isn’t a heretic himself, of course,” Charles said, breaking into her thoughts. “But he believes in what you would call freedom of religion, the right of everyone to worship as they like. And it’s almost certain that some members of his family are Cathars.”

Why was he explaining all of this? They had studied it with Professor Strickland, learned it until they could give the lectures themselves. Ann would rather look around her, take in the feel of the tace, the people’s attitudes and expressions, the way she had done in Knossos and Alexandria.

Charles continued to talk, though, and she tuned him out. Probably, she thought, he was one of those people who liked the sound of his own voice.

She soon became aware of one difference between this city and the others she had been to. Garbage flowed down the middle of the streets, channels carrying offal and human waste. It smelled and looked terrible, and the channels overflowed in places; she had to be careful where she put her feet. As she watched a pig waddled to the edge and nuzzled at something, and she had to look away.

It was strange, she thought, that a city that had existed twenty-five hundred years ago had been cleaner than this tace. Progress was not the straight line she had thought it was; all through history things were discovered and then lost again. Someone in Muslim Spain had invented the steam engine, Professor Strickland had said.

The viscount’s castle looked like the outer wall, with the same mismatched stone and squat towers. A stone bridge built over arches led to the castle doors. A guard on the other side of the bridge asked them their business, and when Charles said they were troubadours he nodded and let them in.

“That was easy,” Jerry said, laughing nervously.

“Hush,” Charles said.

They went through a series of cramped dark rooms, cold and uncomfortable-looking, with uneven floors. The castle smelled of burning wood and cooked meat, though none of the rooms they saw had fireplaces. Two dogs ran past, frisked and tangled in a mock battle, and hurried out again.

There were few hallways; instead, one room led into the next, and every so often they found themselves interrupting women at their sewing or men reading aloud. “Do we know where we’re going?” Ann asked. Her voice echoed off the stone walls.

Charles said nothing. They came to a closed door guarded by two men, who ushered them into another room. This one was larger than the others, with candles glittering along the walls, tapestries to keep out the cold, and, Ann was glad to see, a fire burning in a fireplace. There was even a carpet, in knotted squares of red and gold and green.

A large man sat in a carved wooden chair. He wore crimson silks and velvets, and he was clean-shaven, like most of the men of the south. Charles bowed and introduced himself.

“Very good,” Trencavel said. He grinned. “We love music, don’t we?” Several people in the shadows murmured agreement. He hummed for a while and then broke off. “Do you know ‘All the Birds Are Leaving’?” he asked.

“Of course, my lord,” Charles said.

“Wonderful! And your own tunes? Do you have something new for us?”

“We do. Many things.” Charles opened one of the sacks they had brought, but the viscount raised his hand to stop him.

“Not now,” he said. “You’ll play for us at dinner.”

“Yes, my lord,” Charles said. “Thank you.”

“My man here will take you somewhere you can practice,” Trencavel said. “Dinner is in an hour.”

An hour? It wasn’t even noon; dinner must mean something else hern. Even Charles looked a little panicky, though his face slipped back into blandness a moment later.

A man came toward them out of the shadows. “This way,” he said.

When they got to their room Charles took a tablet out of his leather bag, unrolled it, and scrolled through it quickly. “Ah, here it is, by Bernart de Ventadorn,” he said.

He brought out the lute, tuned it, and began to play. “We don’t have a lot of time here,” he said. “You’ll have to learn which instruments to give me, and when.”

“Do you really have your own songs?” Ann asked. “Something new you can play?”

“Not mine, no. But I can play songs that haven’t been composed yet, things I know he hasn’t heard before. ‘I Dare to Claim’—Peire Cardenal will write that a few years from now.”

He started another song, but Ann barely heard it. She felt as if she had just discovered new, unknown rooms within her mind, as if it had stretched outward in order to encompass this new idea. “But—but if this Cardenal comes to hear it, and he starts singing it, and then—well, who really wrote it? No one did, right? Not you, and not him either—it just appeared.”

“We don’t have time for those kinds of questions. Franny, you’ll give me the guitar here. Then when I come to the end of this part I’ll need one of the drums, that one over there.”

Ann could not get the idea out of her head, though, and she thought about it while Charles practiced the next song, missing her cues once or twice. If she used a proverb hern, “A stitch in time saves nine,” maybe, and it survived until the twentieth century and first time she heard it—where did it come from? What if someone introduced Bach’s cello suites, or Einstein’s theory of relativity …

“Ann,” Charles said sharply. “The lute, please.”

All too soon the viscount’s man came to get them, and they followed him through the castle. They came to a hall holding a long table, and the man led them up a staircase into a gallery. A wooden screen stood at the front of the gallery, carved into diamond lattices.

Another group of men was already there, watching them as they took their places. “Who do we have here?” one of them asked.

“We’re troubadours,” Charles said. “We’re—”

“Of course you’re troubadours,” the man said. “So are we—we’re all troubadours. I thought we were the only ones playing today, that’s all.”

“He wants to see who’s better, I suppose,” someone else said.

“Who are you people?” the first man asked.

“My name’s Charles, and these are—”

“Charles? Never heard of you. Well, I don’t see any challenges here.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, sir,” Charles said. “And you never gave us your name.”

“Peire Raimon de Tolosa,” the man said.

The name was familiar from their classes. Charles nodded, and Peire Raimon seemed gratified to be recognized.

People were coming into the banqueting room now, the women in long gowns and fur, the men in jackets and hose. Jewels sparked as they moved, making glittering constellations in the candlelight. They found their places and stood behind their chairs, talking quietly.

Trencavel entered, a woman on his arm. She looked, Ann thought, a little like a fish, with protruding eyes and lips that seemed to lie flat against her face. “That’s his wife, the Viscountess Agnes,” Charles said softly.

The couple sat together at the end of the table, and the others took their places. The talk grew louder, boisterous, and a smell rose into the gallery, of unwashed bodies and heavy perfume. Dogs ran into the room, barking, and dived under the table.

The viscount clapped his hands and the noise faded. “We have two men to sing for our pleasure today,” he said. “Peire Raimon de Tolosa, who I’m sure you’ve heard of, and—” He looked up at the minstrel’s gallery. “I never asked who you were, did I?”

“Charles, my lord.”

The company laughed softly, at the contrast between the melodic sound of the first name and the lone syllable of the second. “Charles. Why don’t you start?”

Charles nodded. He did not look nervous, but his hand trembled as he motioned for his lute. As he played, though, his fingers began to move through the chords with confidence, and his voice sang out strongly into the room below. He was playing “All the Birds Are Leaving,” Ann realized, the song Trencavel had asked for earlier.

The people below applauded when he finished, and then it was Peire Raimon’s turn. He raised his lute, bowed to the assembled company, and set his fingers to the strings.

He sang about his love for a lady, a woman of high birth married to a nobleman. As he came to the second stanza he lifted his head and looked straight through the lattice at Trencavel’s wife Agnes.

They had discussed this in class with Professor Strickland. It was a convention of troubadour poetry to address the lord’s wife, Strickland had said, a way of flattering both the lord and his lady. But Ann had read the poems and seen the naked desire in them, the sexual yearning, and now, watching as the drama played out in front of her, it seemed to her as if Peire Raimon was courting Agnes. No, more than that— as if he was making love to her, before her husband’s eyes.

She glanced at Trencavel but he sat silent, his face impassive. How could he bear to listen to this, to hear his wife’s beauties praised so intimately? Agnes seemed unmoved as well, but as Ann watched she shook her head so that her hair fell to the sides of her face, and she smiled directly at Peire Raimon. No one in the hall would have noticed it, but Ann saw her clearly, her face changing, transformed into something beautiful under his magic.

After Peire Raimon finished Charles started on his “new” song, “I Dare to Claim,” by Cardenal. It had been—would be— composed after the crusade and the conquest by the north, and it sounded different from all the other songs they had practiced—weary, resigned, done with things of this world. He was free of chains now, the troubadour said, speaking of his lover’s hold on him—yet speaking ironically, since he had fallen under the chains of the northerners.

It was a new style, more cynical and less joyful than the songs written before the conquest. Peire Raimon turned to Charles, surprised and impressed, and Ann felt strangely vindicated. One for our team, she thought.

When it was his turn Peire Raimon sang about a man who wished that his lord was far away, so far that he could lie in his lover’s bed and not worry about her husband interrupting them. With each stanza he sent the lord further and further from his castle, until finally he banished him to Jerusalem, where, he said, the lord became religious and entered a monastery.

Everyone laughed and clapped. Trencavel laughed too, and raised his wine cup in a salute, and Peire Raimon bowed to him and Agnes.

Charles began a song she didn’t recognize, one they hadn’t practiced. It was another poem about a man’s love for a high-born lady, the wife of a lord, and as he sang it he seemed to change, to become more alive, intense. He’d gotten caught up in the competition, she saw, determined to meet Peire Raimon’s challenge.

Lady Agnes turned toward him, her eyes shining, her lips parted as if in a kiss. The rest of the company watched the two of them with their mouths open, shocked and gratified at the same time. It was like looking at a car accident, Ann thought, or a sport that could turn violent at any time.

Finally the dinner ended. The viscount and his wife stood and the others followed, their voices louder now.

The troubadours went down into the banqueting hall, mingling with the diners. Her questions were piling up, threatening to spill out into the crowd, but she knew Charles would want her to wait until they were behind closed doors. Someone nearby praised Peire Raimon, and someone else said Peire Raimon had better look out, this new man was the best he’d ever heard.

“Listen, man,” a voice said.

They turned. It was Trencavel, cutting through the crowd to speak to Charles. “God gave you talent, that’s certain enough,” the viscount said. “I’d like to offer you my hospitality, here in the castle. If, that is, you don’t have somewhere else to go.”

“I’d be honored, sir,” Charles said, bowing.

“Wonderful, wonderful. This way, my friend.”

Trencavel led them through more rooms, each opening out of the next like a honeycomb. If Peire Raimon did make love to Viscountess Agnes, Ann thought, where on earth could they go in this castle to be alone?

They reached a hallway, only the second or third Ann had seen in the castle, and the viscount headed down it. “Maybe my cousin’s right,” he said. “Maybe the world is a vile place, already lost to the Evil One. But you can’t think that way, can you? Not when there’s meat and drink, and companionship, and beautiful women … And that music you played— how can that be evil? It gives you joy—it even made me think of God. Not very often, I have to admit.” He grinned, then became serious. “You have to take what happiness you can, especially now. The crusaders are on their way, you know. Who knows where we’ll be, this time next year?”

He wasn’t expecting an answer, of course, but Ann could have given him one. Trencavel would go to the crusaders’ camp, thinking that he could negotiate with them, and he would be held as a prisoner of war until he died there soon after. Or was killed—the history books were divided.

The hallway was cold, but Ann felt a chill that came from somewhere else, the winds sweeping through the years. Seshat, she thought.

A group of men went into one of the rooms, singing loudly: Peire Raimon and his troubadours. Peire Raimon turned to look at them, briefly, then looked again. “Good day, my lord!” he said.

“You’ve met Charles here,” Trencavel said. “He’ll be taking the rooms next to you.”

Peire Raimon scowled at Charles. Well, great, Ann thought. We aren’t even here for a day, and we’ve made an enemy already.

“You can get some dinner in the smaller banqueting hall,” the viscount said to Charles. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned to Peire Raimon and said, “Both of you.”

Ann waited impatiently until Charles had closed the door behind them and then asked, “What on earth was that all about?”

“What?” Charles asked.

“Is Peire Raimon sleeping with Agnes? How could he say those things? And how could Trencavel just sit there and take it—why doesn’t he have him thrown in the dungeon?”

“They don’t have a dungeon.”

“You know what I mean. And you—” She wanted to ask him why he had sung the songs he had, if he was courting the viscountess as well. But she had vowed to be more professional, to finish this assignment without getting into trouble.

“You should have gotten all this from Professor Strickland,” he said. “It’s a convention, nothing more. No, Peire Raimon isn’t sleeping with the lord’s wife. And I won’t be either, if that’s what you were going to ask.”

“It sure seemed like it,” Franny said. Franny the romantic, Ann thought, pleased the other woman was taking her side. “I wasn’t expecting anything nearly that steamy.”

“I bet they are sleeping together,” Ann said. “We don’t have cameras inside the castle, right?”

Charles sighed. “If they were, Trencavel would have thrown him in the dungeon, like you said. Figuratively speaking, of course. He wouldn’t let the man stay here and give him gifts, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know,” Franny said.

“That’s enough of that,” Charles said. “We have to find dinner, and then get our things from the inn—Franny and Jerry, you’ll go and do that. And I have to practice. You’re right about one thing—I wasn’t expecting so many of those songs either. We’re going to have to step up our game.” He took out his tablet and scrolled through it.

The troubadours did not perform at the smaller meal that evening, to Ann’s relief. Charles, she knew, had hoped to be seated near the viscount, but they were placed far from the fire and light, nearly in darkness.

Afterward they went back to their rooms; she anticipated more practice but Charles shook his head.

“They go to bed early here,” he said. “They’re zany careful about wasting candles, and we should be too. And it’s better if we keep to their schedule.”

The viscount had given them two rooms; she and Franny took one, and Charles and Jerry the other. It was far too early to sleep, and she thought that they would stay up and talk about the day’s events, but to her surprise the other woman was soon snoring gently. Maybe she was tired from her walk through the city; they had gotten lost more than once, she’d said.

That was fine, though—she had plenty to think about. “They’re zany careful,” Charles had said, and she had once heard Walker say something similar. Did “zany” mean “very” where they came from, in the future?

But the most important thing, of course, was that strange triangle, Trencavel, Peire Raimon, and Agnes. A rectangle now, with Charles. Maybe she could find out where the viscountess slept and wait outside her room, see where she went. Ann would bet anything she ended up next door, with Peire Raimon. She should have made that bet, with Charles …

She fell asleep, and woke the next morning to see cold golden light coming through the windows.