The Mistletoe Bride(12)

She paused, breathless, at the foot of the mountain, to gather her strength for the climb. According to her guidebook the summit was nearly four thousand feet above sea level, so she would need to take it steadily and slowly. After all, there was no need to rush. Not now.

Claire slowly approached the Cathar memorial on the Prats dels Cremats, the Field of the Burned, which marked the place where the hundreds of Cathars had walked into the flames. The stone monument, a small stèle, was less imposing than she’d expected. There was nothing defiant about it, rather a humble and modest memorial of haunting beauty. Small tributes had been laid at the foot of the column. Flowers, scraps of poetry, ribbons, personal offerings left by those who had been here before her. A pair of tiny knitted blue boots for a baby.

Claire crouched down and picked them up. Blue for a boy. She wished she had thought to bring something of sentimental value to mark her passing. A photograph, perhaps. Too late now.

Resisting an urge to cross herself – she knew Cathars rejected such gestures – Claire stood up. Here, she felt the presence of the past all around her, benign ghosts who understood her purpose and had come to keep her company on her journey. In her mind’s eye, she could see images of the women who had stood here before her, who had lived and loved and died in the protective embrace of the mountain.

She followed the path over the grass, then into the woods at the bottom of the mountain, climbing up through the box and evergreen, following a narrow track covered in ice and fallen leaves and the last vestiges of winter. Everything was silent, quiet.

Peaceful.

As the path turned a hairpin, Claire suddenly was out in the open, above the tree line. Now, she could see the road far below, snaking through the winter landscape, and ahead, the great white wall of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain.

The higher she climbed, the more history came rushing back and pushed out her own, small memories. Claire imagined how those medieval pilgrims might have felt looking down from the citadel after ten months of siege to see the standards and banners of the Catholic Church and the fleur-de-lis of the French King flying below. In the castle, a hundred defenders. In the valley, between six and ten thousand men. An unequal fight. She thought of the mothers and fathers choosing to die in their faith, surrendering their children to be cared for by others before walking into the flames.

Higher into the clearer air, leaving the world far behind. Now Claire could picture the enemy mercenaries scaling the vertiginous slope on the south-eastern side of the mountain, attempting to take possession of the Roc de la Tour, a spike of stone rising up on the easternmost point of the summit ridge. Catapult and mangonel, an endless bombardment. For those trapped in the citadel, the relentless noise of the missiles must have broken their spirit as surely as they battered the castle walls.

Higher still and higher, up through the clouds.

Claire was only a few dozen yards from the main entrance. Her breath tore in her chest and her red duffel coat felt cumbersome, but she kept going, head down, until finally she reached the Great Gate.

Having planned this journey for so long, now she was finally here, she was suddenly reluctant to break the spell and enter. She needed to savour the moment. She feared the voices would be too strong. Or, perhaps worse, that she would not hear them at all. She took one last look out across the Ariège spread out below her, a patchwork of bare fields and evergreen firs, and then she stepped through the low, wide arch and into the ruins of the castle.

It was all much smaller and more confined than she’d expected, longer and thinner too. There was no beauty here, no mystery, just an empty shell of stone and rock. Claire stood in the uninhabited space. She had hoped to feel an immediate sense of homecoming, proof that she had made the right decision, but she felt nothing. An absence of emotion, neither good nor bad. And though she’d passed no one on the path going up or coming down, she was nonetheless surprised to find herself alone. She had thought the anniversary of the fall of Montségur might have drawn others, pilgrims like her, in search of the spirit of the past.

Claire looked around to get her bearings. Immediately opposite the Great Gate was another smaller arch, more like a door than a gate, which hundreds of years ago she knew had led down to the medieval village. Slowly, she began to walk around, examining the walls as if she could see pictures in the rocks. She went first to the western tip, where the main hall had been, peering, looking for significance, for meaning, in the stone and finding none. She persisted, walking now along the northern wall until she came to a crumbling staircase that had clearly once linked the lower to the upper floors of the keep. When she tilted her head and looked up, she could see the holes in the rock walls where perhaps the joists had rested.