The Seal (12 page)

‘It means,’
Etienne answered with impatience, ‘that we are not to announce our arrival . .
.’

‘And Aubert . .
. ?
’ asked Gideon, ‘He is with the horses?’

Delgado shook
his head. ‘No, my Gideon, your country¬man is dead. Some way from the house we
were followed, we had another with us, a man called Amenieu as a guide. He
recognised one of them that followed us – he said the man was a knight in
the service of the visitor.’

‘The visitor?
De Pairaud?’ Etienne
broke in.

‘Yes, two I
killed with my sword. Aubert, he took the friend of this visitor with his knife
but another man came behind and put an axe through Aubert’s head like a melon!
Then this man Amanieu, who was our guide, was all in a rage to kill him but his
sword split on the man’s axe and he was killed. After that I made this other
man wish he were dead for a while.’ Etienne thought he saw a smile spread
across the face. ‘I come alone, with the horses . . . Look Gideon,’ he said, ‘I
buried your friend and took the sacs from the enemies.’ He held up the
shrivelling pairs tied together.

‘Aubert is
dead?’ The Norman had something close to an emotion caught in his throat.

The Catalan
nodded gravely. ‘His head is half and half . . . Still . . .’ his voice
brightened, ‘I have good horses, and I was careful.’

The Norman
nodded and took the bloodied articles from Delgado. He gave them a sniff. ‘They
will cure quickly in this wind.’ He slapped the Catalan on the back. ‘I will
add them to my rope. You have done well, for you are not dead and we have
horses,’ and there followed some friendly banter as they walked on ahead.

When they were
alone Etienne leant in to his Grand Master. ‘These mercenaries,’ he confided,
‘I do not wish to trust them . . . and Iterius . . . I think I trust that
Alexandrian less still.’

‘We must keep
those whom we distrust closer than a wife,’ Jacques said to him. ‘Iterius, well
I don’t know what use he is to us, but he saved my life; besides, he is more
useless under our noses. The other two . . . well . . . time will tell . . .’

Jourdain, on his
other side, whispered, ‘It is as we thought.’

‘Hugues de
Pairaud . . .’ Jacques was watchful. ‘The visitor of the Order in France works
against us, I was afraid of it . . . The galley will be safer at Portugal, and
our small number shall travel unnoticed by those who seek a Grand Master and
his entourage.’

‘They chose you
against him in the election,’ Etienne pointed out, ‘and now he seeks a reversal
of his fortune. He must have spies at Richerenches to know we were coming.’

‘Raimbaud the
Caron, the Preceptor of Cyprus,’ Jacques sighed. ‘He must be in league with
Hugues and since the visitor directs the Temple bank he will be hard trying to
prevent us from going to Poitiers to speak with the Pope lest we change his
mind about a Crusade . . . that is certain. Well, well, we have the Pope
beckoning us, and the bankers wishing to prevent our arrival. It is a pretty
trouble in which we find our¬selves, a pretty trouble. We must have a change of
plans . . .’ He paused a moment. ‘We cannot go by way of Richerenches, but we
can go by way of Languedoc. That is your country, Etienne?’

Etienne gave a
reluctant nod.

‘And you have
countrymen there?’

‘It is a life
behind me,’ he said.

Jacques de Molay
nodded. ‘All the better.’

The Egyptian was
helped from the boat as his injured leg had left him with a limp, and the
party, led by the Catalan, walked through the sand to the line of trees and the
horses. When each man had mounted, the party headed
north-west
,

away
from the mouth of the Rhone in
the direction of the region of the River Aude.

For a week they
rode with the sea at their shoulders and then began the slow climb towards the
mountains. It was cold and the wind brought snow. They paused to rest and eat
by day, travelling by night, sometimes among mists or bent before a wind
blowing leaves into their faces. Their meals were scant; whatever they could
find along their route, otherwise bread and porridge. They met no challenge and
the going was slow.

Etienne grew
silent and reflective the more they moved about that land. To his mind it clung
to life like a dog to the leg of its dead master. His memory of it was of vines
and sun, the Inquisition and blood.

On the
fourteenth day they came off a steep ridge that tumbled down crags and cliffs
onto dead grassland dotted with naked trees. Before them lay a large lake;
above it, upon a high ridge overlooking the ruined remnants of an old vineyard,
sat the tower of the castle keep, pitching and restless.

The men were
paused looking up at it from the track that coursed its way through a meadow.

Iterius said,
‘It is a black place . . . full of memory.’

‘It is Puivert.’
Etienne turned a bland eye upon the Alexandrian. ‘It is the old keep of my
kindred given over to northern knights.’

‘In your wars
with the Pope?’ the Catalan asked him.

Etienne did not
answer.

‘And your
kindred?’ Gideon squinted his eyes to look at it.

‘Gone to God, my
father at the siege of Montsegur. My mother was burnt at the stake not far from
here. I was a child.’ Etienne urged his horse onward and away from the men.

‘There were
Normans in that war against his people,’ Gideon told Jacques de Molay.

The Grand Master
looked back with a fidget of the eye at him, then a sidelong glance at Iterius.
‘Speak no more of it.’

A weak sun hung
loose in the windy sky over the men when they passed a small house of rock and
mortar leaning against the wall of the hill. A cross of carved wood with a
circlet of roses stood at one side of it.

Through the
solution of silence, the ghost of Etienne’s past welcomed him with recognition.
It told him that he was baked into the
soil, that
he
was fallen about in ruin, scattered and over¬run with undergrowth. What was
left of him was like this house, set like mortar between stones.

He shook his
shoulders to dispel the thought. He had not known what would pass over his soul
when he beheld with adult eyes the devastation of his inheritance. Now he found
that where his heart gathered blood to itself there was a fist pounding and a
burning that found the veins in his arm and shot through them like lit arrows.
After a moment the feeling passed and Etienne looked around to the silence that
was apparent and false. He brought himself from out of his thoughts. ‘Someone
is here.’

From inside the
house, as if by command, there came a woman and in a moment she stood
surrounded. Etienne nosed his horse between the bodies of the other horses and
saw that she held a hoe out in front of her like a weapon and had poked a
circle of space around herself. She was small, and old and a peasant, yet for
all of it she stood tall, her head square on broad
shoulders,
the grey and voluminous hair piled high and tucked into a brown bonnet.

‘Who are you?’
Etienne sent his question down at her.

‘Who are you?’
the old woman said in Langued’oc, pitching the instrument at him by way of
punctuation.

Etienne’s horse
took two steps back and Etienne quieted it with a word in the ear. ‘I am the
lord of yonder castle.’

The woman
thought this through. ‘The lord is dead at Montsegur . . . o’er sixty years.’
Then she set the hoe by her side and, leaning forward, shot him a look. ‘What
lives there now comes from the north and lives by the name of Bruyeres!’ She
narrowed her eyes and puckered her mouth. ‘Bernard de Congost had a grandchild
. . . likely dead on Crusade.’

Etienne looked
upward to the sky full of snow-burdened clouds and then down to this apparition
and the scar above the bloodshot eyes. It filled him with a sudden bewilderment
at God, whose whim had kept this woman so long from death. He made a
half-smile. ‘Old woman,’ he said, being all he could say, but his heart was
soft at the sight of her, ‘when did you return?’

‘Return?’ she
scoffed. ‘Forty-two years ago I took you from your mother’s womb and nursed
you. Thirty-five years ago did I take you from another castle to hide you in a
cave from the
Inquisition.
Twenty-eight years afore
now have I waited for your return.’ Once more she leant on the hoe, her chin
jutting out and her eyes like pinpoints of fire. ‘You have come, Etienne de
Congost, and still your grandfather’s house belongs to another man!’

She picked up
her hoe and moved away from the circle of men.

Gideon made a
move to stop her.

‘Leave her!’
Etienne said and watched her go to her little house.

‘Old women have
a taste for rumour, lord.’ Delgado was patting his sides to keep him warm.

She is a cunning
woman to have saved a child from the flames and after that to
have lived
this long waiting. A ‘good woman’ as the pure
ones called them. I recognise her from the scar over her eyes, Etienne told
himself and dismounted, feeling his bones shift all the way to the base of his
skull. ‘She is not one for rumours.’

Jacques de Molay
dismounted and stretched at his back. ‘She wears her head as though it should
bear a crown.’

‘She should like
that,’ Etienne answered him, ‘a crown upon the head of a witch!’ And took
himself to the sparseness of the hut of stone.

The woman was
wrapping a large dry loaf, a block of cheese and a chunk of dried beef in a
cloth. She made a knot at the top with bone-strong hands. ‘You will take this
and yourselves to the old cave. You remember it? Where I took you after your
mother was put to the pyre?’ Then she looked at him through the space that
existed between them and for a moment there seemed to be tenderness in those
black eyes. ‘How you stared at that pyre from the parapets of that castle! I
thought you would cast your body upon the rocks below to follow her to her
death. Then I dragged you through the old passageway kicking and biting . . . I
still bear the scar for it.’

She lifted her
sun-browned hand to show him and nodded to herself and gave him the food. ‘You
are two things, Etienne de Congost, two minds, and two wills, I have always
known it. To these be added a third thing,’ she said and the cold came back
into her stare. ‘When the third comes it shall be the end of something, but it
shall bring an answer to the question you carry in your heart. This day I read
it in your cards . . . I knew you were coming and I knew you would go.’

Etienne stood
with his mouth slightly open. Once again he was a child unable to explain his
thoughts with words.

‘Go now and
forget me.’

‘I shall not,’
he said.

‘Well I shall
forget you, after many years of remembering.’ She turned around to her hearth.

Etienne had a
sense there was no need for further words. In that small time the woman had
come to know the rhythms of his soul and what kind of man he had become and now
she would die, perhaps content to have seen him one last time, perhaps not. For
his part he would go as she said he would . . . but he would not forget the
scar over her eye and the bone-strong hands. He made a vow to himself then that
he would pray each night to St Michael on her behalf.

Outside Jacques
de Molay sat beneath a tree, his countenance pensive and wasted, from the
poison, the journey or his concerns, Etienne did not know which. He observed
this and realised once again that weighty business. The business of making
decisions to secure the welfare of his Grand Master in a land now foreign to
his experience and lurking with enemies.

Jacques de Molay
looked up from his thoughts and, seeing Etienne’s face, nodded, stood and took
himself to his horse. The other men followed and when they had mounted they
waited for Etienne. But Etienne was giving one more look at the stone house,
the
cross entwined
with roses and the road that led
upward to the keep of his forebears.

After that he
mounted his own horse and led the party to the old cave.

The sun had
fallen behind the forest and the evening began to grow cold as they arrived.
The cave was large enough, its entrance occluded by trees. Once he had settled
the Grand Master with Jourdain, Etienne took the others outside. ‘Iterius, go
and gather wood for a fire. Gideon and Delgado, bring the horses to the mouth,
lest they be seen. The Grand Master will rest here until I return.’ He paused,
searching his mind.

Iterius leant
in. ‘The Grand Master takes long to recover . . . not from the poison . . . but
his loss of heart.’

This seemed an
affront to Etienne, and his pensive countenance was made alive with anger. ‘I
do not like you, nor do I trust you, Egyptian! Perhaps you have saved his life
. . . perhaps you have not. On that score I am not yet decided. But that you
add a load to this journey which is ill supported is a sure thing, and I will
not need much reason to lighten it!’

The other man
became the very picture of meekness and a moment later was setting off with a
limp to his task. Etienne watched him until he was out of sight.