The Seal(26)

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!’