A halo of buzzing flies crowned Pope Innocent III as he bent to inspect his birthday gift: The corpse of a heretic who had succumbed under the interrogation weights of the Peine Forte et Dure. The victim’s viscera, splayed flat across his skeleton like a flounder, had been packed in ice and transported from the Languedoc by Dominic Guzman and the Cistercians. Undaunted by the sulfuric stench, the pontiff peered with fascination into the skull’s sockets. “Did worms partake of the sinful flesh?”
Folques covered his nose to calm his distempered stomach. “As you predicted, Holiness, we found only the black maggots of Satan.”
“Last month, a Flemish knight released from captivity in the Holy Land was brought before me for judgment,” said the pontiff. “The Saracens had ordered him to devour his children or suffer starvation.”
“What did the man choose?” asked Folques.
Innocent shrugged. “He succumbed to original sin.”
“A difficult case for prescribing penance,” said Dominic.
“Not at all,” said Innocent. “I forbade him from eating meat for the remainder of his life.” Splotched from the fever that now struck him every third day with the regularity of a stigmata, he refused an offer of water in an act of mortification. A distant cackle of foreign voices reminded him of his current cross to bear: Four thousand clerics had descended on Rome to attend the Fourth Lateran Council, a conclave that promised to be the most momentous in Church history. The palace was so congested that three friars and a bishop had been trampled to death in the crush to hear his opening sermon.
Folques was alarmed by the deterioration in Innocent’s health. A premature end to his pontificate would be disastrous; all that now stood in the way of the Languedoc’s subjugation was the promised nuncio divesting the Occitans of their lands. In the two years since the victory at Muret, de Montfort had captured Foix and reinstalled Folques as defender of the faith in Toulouse. But that recalcitrant city remained embroiled in a bloody street battle between the Catholic mercenaries, the White Brotherhood, and the supporters of the Count of Toulouse, the Black Brotherhood. Esclarmonde and her Cathars on Montsegur had eluded capture and would continue to do so until the Southern barons who protected them were eviscerated of their titles.
Folques gently reminded the pontiff of his long-delayed pronouncement. “Holy Father, the heretic nobles will never lay down arms until you recognize de Montfort as their rightful ruler.”
Innocent grimaced pettishly at being required to return to the burdensome affairs of the Council. “I am told the Norman seizes estates without compensating the Church its rightful share.”
Folques’s worst fear had come to pass. Arriving in Rome early, the Counts of Foix and Toulouse had bent the pontiff’s ear with damning reports. Preoccupied with the siege in Toulouse, Simon had sent his dim-witted brother to defend the family’s interests. This private audience was the last opportunity Folques would have to plead the Cistercian case before the plenary session opened. “You must not be deceived by these Occitans, Holiness. They will spout all manner of falsehoods to save their domains.”
Innocent clutched his chest and gasped for air in the Lateran’s stifling heat. “The Holy Sepulcher must be restored to the Church’s protection before I confront my Savior. Philip sits idle in Paris waiting to pounce on Toulousia when de Montfort and the heretics have fought themselves to exhaustion. The French barons will never take up the Cross for Palestine while easier prey lurks on their borders. This war of yours is diverting tithes and recruits.”
This war of yours?
Folques was stunned by Innocent’s retrograding support for the heretic crusade. The pontiff now postured as if he had never preached its righteousness. He might be ill, but he had lost none of his cunning. To check the rapacious designs of the French monarchy, Innocent seemed prepared to relinquish all that his Cistercians had fought so hard to gain in Occitania. Folques glanced expectantly at his superior, but the Abbot, still nursing a grudge against Simon over being denied the countship of Narbonne, refused to raise an objection.
“I intend to place a new canon law before the Council on the morrow,” said Innocent. “It will require every adult to take the Eucharist at Easter and give confession at least once a year.”
Folques met that news with a lock-jawed look of consternation. Such impositions on his dwindling congregations would only stoke their hatred of Rome. “Holiness, my priests barely find the time to make their rounds for the masses, if they manage to enter the churches at all. How can I ask them to—”
“We will recruit more clergy.” Innocent shared a knowing smile with Dominic. “Our brother from Castile has proposed the creation of a new order of preaching monks.”
Only then did Almaric erupt from his pout, his neck spindling with ecclesiastic jewelry. Informed that the ambitious Dominic had been scheming behind their backs, he protested, “Eminence, my monks have made great strides—”
“You have plowed the field,” interrupted Innocent with a peremptory hoist of his horny finger. “But now the tiller must give way to the harvester.”
Dominic kept his head lowered in smug humility. “The mandatory confessions will assist us in ferreting out the heretics. The dualists despise the sacrament. Those who refuse it will be exposed as nonbelievers.”
“There is no scriptural precedent for such a compulsion,” said Folques.
Innocent rebuked Folques with a snap of his cassock sleeve, refusing to be lectured. Folques bowed in a plea for forgiveness, informed that he had overplayed his hand before the full Council had even convened. Innocent eased his petulant stance and accepted Folques’s silent act of contrition. “Am I to understand that this woman in Foix still lives to spread her depravities?”
Dominic answered before Folques could soften the pontiff’s ire. “The Occitans have raised the witch to sainthood. They go to the stake beseeching her spiritual intercession.”
Innocent fixed his calculating gaze on an icon of the Blessed Mother, a gift from the Venetians gained in the plunder of Constantinople. Aureated in tarnished gold leaf, the Virgin’s immense eyes, shell-shaped ears, and long nose had grown with Her holiness, surpassing the normal sense organs of mortals. “Perhaps we should send the most beloved of women to do battle with this Foix temptress. Even in these dens of sin, the people still love the Virgin, no?”
“Such fawning smacks of the pagan disease that gave root to this dualism,” argued Almaric. “The Ocs set their Marian shrines on the same rocks and springs where the abominable whore-goddesses of Canaan once held court.”
For once, Dominic sided with the Cistercians. “Excellency, you know my devotion to the Blessed Virgin. But if she is raised too near the throne of the Trinity, the falsifiers will trumpet their ordination of women.”
Innocent waved off their objections. “I intend to instruct the Council to preach the virtues of the Holy Mother and promote pilgrimages in Her honor. The spiritual corrosion caused by the traveling poets who extol these Occitan courtesans must be suppressed. Deprived of their addictions, the balladmongers will soon take up the Virgin’s cause to maintain their purses and—”
The pontiff’s breath was stolen by a bird-like creature who leapt from the shadows. “I pray you give no credence to the visions of the Ludgard nun!” The intruder, a fur ball with bushy eyebrows and unwashed hair, fell to his knees. “She saw your Holiness condemned to Purgatory until the Last Judgment! But I am certain the Almighty would never allow such an injustice!”
Innocent fought off the interloper’s pawing hands. “Who allowed this swineherd into my chambers?”
“I seek only to live like the Apostles!” cried the begrimed stranger.
Innocent angrily wiped the skirts of his soiled cassock with a kerchief. “The Apostles did not wallow in dung or preach to pigs!”
Dominic pulled the beggarish-looking man to his feet and wrapped an arm around his bony shoulders. “Holiness, this is Francis, from the village of Assisi. He has gained a reputation for great sanctity.”
Innocent cast a narrow eye on the gaunt monk. “Did I not banish you from these confines a month ago?”
Francis kept the moon of his tonsured head aimed at the pontiff’s sandals. “Father, you ordered me to convert the livestock to Christ before returning to your presence. Every night since, I have slept with the lowest of the beasts.”
Innocent slumped in aggravation. “Has the grasp of a simple metaphor become a lost art?”
“I beg forgiveness if I misunderstood your command.”
Dominic brought Francis closer so that the pontiff might discern his holiness. “Last week, I dreamt that another monk would join me in raising the crumbling dome of the Church. Together we held up Christ’s edifice like two human pillars. I believe Francis to be the comrade in my vision.”
Innocent was intrigued. “Speak quickly.”
Francis pressed his fidgety hands together in supplication. “I wish to create an order of friars that will imitate Christ’s poverty.”
Innocent’s chapped lips pursed with abhorrence. “That smacks of the detestable Joachim of Fiora and his barefoot rabble! God has ordained a hierarchy for his clergy.”
“May only learned men spread the gospels?” asked Francis, meekly.
Innocent turned with a huff and marched down the hall. “If I allowed every shepherd to preach the Word, I’d have a thousand more heresies to quash.”
Francis crawled after him. “A blessing! I beg of you, Holiness!”
Innocent turned and vouchsafed a halfhearted sign of the Cross over the foul-smelling monk, then washed his hands in the ablution lave. “I shall take your request under advisement. Until then, take care not to despoil my tapestries on your way out.”
Loupe had never seen anything so opulent. The Lateran’s basilica was embossed in hammered gold and washed in a resplendent blue light that filtered down from the stained glass of its high-arched windows. The ribbed roofing was so elevated and devoid of apparent support that it caused her to feel queasy. She held fast to her father’s hand as he limped down the aisle, still hampered by his wounds suffered at Muret. Face set in truculent determination, Roger fought their way through the assembled ecclesia and its colorful array of cassocks, sashes, skullcaps, and simars. The ranks included the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, seventy-one archbishops, four hundred bishops, eight hundred abbots, and scores of ambassadors and diplomats, all craning their necks over the ropes to gawk at the notorious Languedoc heretics.
Loupe finally spotted a friendly face. She nodded a tense greeting to the elderly Raymond de Toulouse, who sat slump-shouldered in the front row next to his firstborn son, Raymond VII, who had eluded the Cistercian spies by arriving from his hiding in England on a merchant ship. The boy who walked behind his father during the scourging at St. Gilles was now a tall, handsome lad of eighteen with blonde shocks and broad shoulders set back in defiance. His bold demeanor stood in stark contrast to that of his decrepit father whose spirit had been crushed by the Muret debacle.
Since leaving Esclarmonde’s care to go fight with the rebels, Loupe had undergone her own transformation. To her dismay, her athletic body with its slim hips and coltish legs had begun to blossom. She tried to mask her emerging womanhood, preferring loose flaxen tunics and riding breeches to the trappings of a lady’s wardrobe. A tomboy at heart even at age thirteen, she could ride a horse and shoot an arrow as skillfully as any man in her father’s troop. Dark-complected as a Moor, she abhorred rouge and wore her sable hair cut short and blunted. The whites of her carbon eyes were ringed with a pale rinse of red, a residue of torments and rage unnatural for one so young. Her unchecked gaze, fierce and predatory, repulsed the most intrepid of the flirtatious Italian young-bloods. None were left doubting that she was the daughter of the Wolf.
Her coming to Rome was fraught with risk, for if the Vatican’s promise of safe-conduct to her father was abrogated, she would be left stranded in a hostile city. Yet she was determined to confront the men who had murdered her mother and stolen her home. Guilhelm remained in Aragon to avoid arrest, but she had prevailed on her father by arguing that to have her at his side might soften the pontiff’s judgment. She took her seat and leaned forward to discover who the Cistercians had sent to prosecute the indictment against the Languedoc barons. Guy de Montfort met her stare with a yellow-stained sneer of intimidation. She retaliated by silently mouthing an Occitan word suggesting that, in the great spectrum of female chasteness, his mother sat opposite the Blessed Virgin.
An acolyte’s bell silenced the assembly. The Lateran guards led Innocent into the chamber. Weighed down by his miter and embroidered vestments, the pontiff required support at his elbows and could manage only bated steps through the sea of clerics. He reached the ciborium-covered dais as the chants of the Veni Creator Spiritus finished. Loupe had expected a giant full of gas and thunder, but this bag of bones belied his fearsome reputation. How could he have caused so much suffering?
Lowered into his chair, Innocent swept the vast assembly with a leer of suspicion. Only days before, the Council had erupted in a riot during a debate over the German royal succession. This session promised to be no less tumultuous. His hands trembled from the fever’s palsy as he sucked on a cut lemon to lubricate his swollen throat. He contorted his body in a drooping image of humility and spoke to the Occitans in French, “It pains me to learn that there are those in the Languedoc who still turn from our grace and—”
This pretension of meekness stuck in Roger’s craw. He leapt to his feet and sheered off the pontiff’s introit speech. “My land has been singled out unfairly!”
Startled by the interruption, Innocent dropped his lemon.
Folques stood to meet the challenge. “If anyone is to speak for these heretics, it must be the Count of Toulouse! He is overlord to this petty baron!”
Heated with ire, Roger pressed his demand to be heard. “I am no less in stature than are you to that gold-digging Abbot!”
The Council disintegrated into a cacophony of hoots and catcalls. Checked on that point, Folques tried to give way to Almaric, who by seniority should have taken to the floor to force Roger’s hand. But the disgruntled Abbot was bent on letting their cause be lost out of sheer spite against the de Montforts.
Raymond de Toulouse, grossly obese and afflicted with gout, rose with difficulty from his chair. He refused to acknowledge the Cistercians and kept his hooded eyes fixed upon Innocent. When the assembly finally quieted to hear his defense, he said weakly, “We are both old men, Holy Father, worn out by the wrangling of ambitious underlings. I ask that the Count of Foix be permitted to speak on my behalf. He has shared my tribulations.”
Innocent waved Roger up to the dais. Buoyed by the tactical victory, Roger walked the width of the chamber and stopped in front of the Cistercians. He pointed a finger at Folques and shouted with such vehemence that the latticed windows rattled. “This Bishop is responsible for a massacre of Christians the like of which has never been inflicted even by the infidels!”
“Lies of a heretic!” cried Folques.
“What proof is there that I am not a good Catholic?”
Guy de Montfort bolted to his feet and came nose to nose with Roger. “The blood of Muret on my sword is proof enough!”
“That blade is also stained with the entrails of the monarch who turned back the Moors,” reminded Roger.
Aghast at the crass conduct of both parties, Innocent raised his palms to demand order. “You have failed to mention, baron, that the Count of Toulouse remains an excommunicate because of his egregious sins.”
Roger comforted the elder Count Raymond with a hand to his shoulder. “My liege’s complicity in the murder of your legate was never proven.”
“He revealed his colors when he joined the heretics,” said Folques.
“To defend his domain,” reminded Roger.
Folques anxiously assayed the pontiff’s reaction, knowing him to be obsessed with the law and its precedents. To sanction removal of these barons without clear evidence of heresy could foment unrest among the royal houses. “You wish proof? Is this Toulouse baron not your liege?”
“You know it well enough,” said Roger.
“And thus is he responsible for the conduct of your domain?”
“I am answerable to him in vassalage. As I was to the King of Aragon before you gutted him.”
“If I give proof that heretics have been protected within the Count’s borders, will you concede his dereliction of spiritual duty?”
Roger suspected sophistry. “To my knowledge, he harbors no heretics.”
“No?” Folques tarried for effect. “Was your wife not a Cathar?”
Apoplectic, Roger had to be restrained. “Had you not murdered her, she could answer for herself!”
Folques beseeched the Council with arms outstretched in protest. “I have never shed a drop of blood, let Christ be my witness!”
Roger rushed the platform like a snorting bull. “More than a hundred thousand souls, old and young, have been destroyed by this faux Bishop!”
The Council members gasped in disbelief, uninformed by the Cistercians, who had concealed the true number of casualties in the decade-long war.
Folques dissembled the slumped pose of a man assailed by slander. To divert the Council’s attention, he resorted to his old troubadour flair for performance by striding down the length of the chamber, bobbing his head slightly as if entranced in a prayer of forgiveness for his accuser. Suddenly, drawn back from the rapture of unjust persecution, he turned on Roger with becalmed calculation. “Do you deny that your own sister is a heretic sorceress?”
Roger’s indignation lost its edge. “I am not my sister’s keeper.”
“I can produce witnesses who will attest that she took refuge in your chateau at Foix during de Montfort’s siege.”
“When did hospitality to one’s own family become a crime?”
Folques moved a step closer with each interrogatory. “The stronghold of Montsegur is part of your domain?”
“I have never set foot on that rock.”
Folques swiveled sideways to confront Loupe. “And your daughter?”
“Leave her be!” demanded Roger.
Only then did Innocent notice that a young woman was present. His brows knitted into a frown on seeing Loupe’s masculine attire, a trait deemed evidence of heretical perversity in a female. He motioned her forward, so close that she could see the broken capillaries in his flaccid cheeks. Their eyes locked and exchanged messages that words alone could never adequately convey. Her eyes said that if not for the guards stationed at the ends of the rostrum, she would pounce on him like the animal of her name and tear at his throat with her teeth. His eyes were those of Yahweh chastising Job, asking who was she to question him so defiantly, he who wielded God’s power on earth. When she refused to back down, the pontiff broke off their battle of glares and ordered, “If she is of majority age, she shall answer the question.”
Folques hovered over her. “You are the niece of Esclarmonde de Foix?”
“I am.”
“Has that woman ever taken you to the place called Montsegur?”
Loupe glanced at her father, but he was powerless to intervene. “Yes.”
“Is your aunt a priestess in the Cathar sect?”
“She is, but—”
“From the mouths of babes shall come the truth!” roared Folques.
“I have nothing to do with my sister’s sins!” said Roger. “She was bequeathed the fief of Montsegur by my father. By law, I could not divest her of it. I swear by the crucified Christ that no pilgrim was ever mistreated in my county.”
“The souls of those monks gutted at Fanjeaux would swear otherwise!”
“This Bishop is the Antichrist!” cried Roger.
Innocent gripped his armrests, unnerved by the hurling of charges. “Baron, you have set forth your right, but you have sorely diminished ours.”
“He milks vengeance against my family!” said Roger. “When he was a paid singer of lewd songs, his advances were rebuked by the woman he condemns!”
The assembly surged forward shouting objections.
Innocent swooned from the clamor. His attendants rushed to his side with weak tea, but he brushed them away and closed his eyes in meditation. After a delay so lengthy that the deacons feared he had slipped into a coma, the pontiff lifted his lids and pronounced in a less-than-convincing voice, “I find no evidence that these Occitan barons are other than good Catholics.”
Folques stood petrified in disbelief. The conniving Italian was attempting to rewrite the annals of his pontificate to remove all stain of controversy. Armed with this imprimatur, the Occitan barons would wage a clandestine war of attrition while proclaiming a disingenuous obedience to the Church. The de Montforts would be defanged and his Cistercians would be left to cower defenseless in their abbeys. He had to force Innocent to admit his role in front of the Council, or all was lost. Walking across the rows of canons and bishops, he spoke with dripping piety, “Holy Father, none will ever forget your stirring words to those who took the Cross in the Languedoc. ‘Let them march as ones who had seen the Light bearing fire! Let them carry the Cross and the sword!’ If you give back these lands to the heretics, good Christians will have died for naught, deceived in the sanctity of their cause.”
Innocent’s jaw tightened in anger at the public reminder of his complicity. He looked to Almaric for a countering argument, but his old classmate refused to come to his aid. Desperate for a moment’s reprieve, the pontiff fixed upon one of the mosaics on the far wall, a depiction of St. Callistus trampling the schismatics under his foot. After contemplating the scene at length, he roused as if having been visited with a divine epiphany. “You must forgive the lapses of an aged mind. I have not been well, as you know. The Bishop of Toulouse has raised points that I had not fully considered. My ruling was incomplete.”
Roger stood to protest a codicil to the judgment, but he was too late.
“Simon de Montfort shall keep all lands freed from the heretical plague except those inhabited by widows and orphans.” The pontiff glanced at the elder Raymond with a faltering look of deflected culpability. “The Count de Toulouse has allowed this disease of the soul to flourish in his land. In punishment, he shall be disenfranchised and banished from the Languedoc for the remainder of his life.”
A confused silence hovered in the stagnant Roman air. In the span of minutes, Occitania had been saved, only to be condemned. Folques eased into his chair and shot a lipless smile at the elder Count Raymond.
Stunned by the volte-face, Roger tried to salvage compensation for the younger Raymond. “The son has committed no crime! Why is he disinherited?”
Innocent studied the youthful Raymond, who had stood to hear his fate. “Do not despair, my boy. You walk in darkness now, but you must seek the sustenance of our Lord, and He will offer you light.”
Young Raymond held a protective pose over his prostrate father. “So dark is the shadow cast by these Cistercian usurpers that there is no light left in my homeland! They have broken my father! But they have yet to deal with me!”
Incensed by that threat, the assembly’s mood turned turbulent. Before the Pope could issue more punitive rulings, Roger rushed Loupe through the nave amid hissed promises of Hell’s damnation. They fought their way through the doors and down the portico steps past the crush of beggars and pilgrims.
“May you yet find Christ,” said a youthful voice.
Loupe spun toward the direction of those Occitan words, the first she had heard uttered by a stranger in Rome. She broke from her father’s grasp and threaded back into the crowd to find their source.
The presumptuous blessing had been spoken by a Cistercian acolyte who looked about her own age and stared at her with the steely, deep-set eyes of a Caliph’s assassin. He possessed a slightly stunted body and an elfish head, closely shaved except for an archipelago of hemp-colored tufts that ran above his ears. His truculent mouth was liver-lipped and his skin was so bloodless that it appeared to be marbled in variegated shades of gray.
“Traitor!” she said. “Keep your preaching to yourself!”
“You don’t believe in praying for the salvation of others?” he asked.
The acolyte’s self-possessed air of rectitude only inflamed Loupe’s wrath. She shouted at him, “Your priests murdered my mother!”
“You are not the only one who has suffered such a loss.”
“Was your mother taken away?” she demanded.
“Worse. She abandoned me for a pagan god.”
Loupe noticed that the boy had a queer habit of angling his head to one side. Only when he was jostled by a passerby did she see the reason for his effort to maintain a profile to her inspection—his right temple was branched with a repugnant blue vein that throbbed with each beat of his heart. “Who are you?”
The acolyte shunted her behind a portico column. Assured that no one had seen them together, he revealed, “Your cousin.”
“Otto?”
The son that Esclarmonde had lost to the Cistercians placed a finger to his lips for a whisper. “Bishop Folques brought me with him from Grandselve.”
“You must leave that Devil’s handservant and return home,” she pleaded.
“Home to what? To a mother who murdered my father?”
“That is a falsehood fed to you by those monks. My aunt still loves you. The Bishop has kept her away from you all these years for his own evil designs.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Come with me to Foix and I’ll prove it.”
“I will take the novice vows next year,” he said. “Folques is my stepfather. I no longer need a mother.” Seeing Folques emerge on the top step, Otto escaped into the ranks of departing monks to avoid being seen with Loupe.
Loupe tried to go after him, but Roger elbowed his way back through the crowds and captured her arm. “I told you not to leave my side!” He detected her distraction. “What are you looking for?”
In her brief encounter with this cousin, Loupe felt an inexplicable closeness to him, had even understood his anger and feelings of betrayal. Yet she thought it best not to divulge their meeting, fearful that another confrontation could land her father in a Roman prison. She took his hand and ploughed past the leering Italians. As they hurried off, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Otto standing at Folques’s side, still watching her.