The Sixth Key(31)

At this point the Irish monk entered with a tray on which sat two glasses of mineral water.

‘Do you know,’ the Writer of Letters said, ‘many people fall into the pit of thinking that Parzifal, the Grail knight in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem, was more important than Don Quixote to Rahn. But this is only because they didn’t know him like I do.’

There was no need for a mental calculation. The Writer of Letters didn’t look old enough to have known Rahn. Still, I decided I would play along. ‘Are you saying you knew him?’

His grey eyes widened a little. ‘I know him perhaps better than anyone else.’

‘Do you mean he’s still alive?’

He hesitated for just a moment. ‘That depends on what you mean by “alive”.’

I didn’t know what to say to this oddity.

There was sudden amusement in his voice. ‘You were wondering if I wanted you to ghost write his story, am I right? Don’t be so surprised; it is a logical conclusion but an erroneous one. You see, logic is useless sometimes.’

‘What am I doing here then?’

‘I told you that this is for you to tell me. This is your story – remember? I’m just a character, your mouthpiece. Isn’t that what characters do for their writers, answer their questions? Exorcise their demons? Writing books is better than psychoanalysis, and cheaper too if you ask me. Perhaps that’s why the first natives who saw written words were terrified. They believed that letters were evil spirits dancing on the page and their primitive intuition was quite correct, for at times they are exactly that – the tormented soul content of writers! That is why I call this my garden of good and evil, my cemetery of thoughts, the angels and demons of men’s souls,’ he said, with a wave of the hand.

He was right about one thing: the library did remind me of the cemetery outside. Its atmosphere was weighed down by time and nostalgia. After all, the authors of these books were long dead, their words lying on shelves like the broken fountains and fallen angels of better days.

‘So, what haunts an author like you?’ he asked.

I found myself inarticulate. ‘I don’t know; failure, I suppose. Sometimes I feel life is just an endless attempt to remember something that is doomed to lay forgotten . . . like these books.’

‘Well, the ancients knew how to open and close the door of memory,’ he said, ‘but the best we modern men can do is to try to pick the lock. Speaking of which, shall we?’

I looked at him questioningly.

‘Shall we pick the lock?’ He gestured to the two winged chairs.

Before sitting down he poked thoughtfully at the fire until it blazed. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to diverge for a moment,’ he said.

‘Are you taking me to one of those galleries you spoke of?’

‘Yes, to that dimension where everything that has ever occurred in history, exists in space. You see, in order to understand Rahn’s predicament, his love of the Cathars, his attachment to the south of France, we have to look in the gallery called Matteu,’ he said, and once again, with impeccable diction, he began.





11


Béziers

‘. . . there is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.’

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote


Béziers, 1209

Matteu found himself in the city of Béziers on the eve of the Feast of Mary Magdalene. The boy, only twelve years old, belonged to the company of routiers, the mercenaries who were recruited from every low place for the Crusades against the Cathars of Languedoc. His master was known as the King of the Mercenaries, a Basque for whom all felt a repellent awe. He and his men had already entered the town of Béziers ahead of the armies of the northern knights, and the boy, having fallen behind, looked for him, walking the streets in the wake of his master’s advance to observe, for the first time in his young life, men killing any living thing that crossed their path.

Fearful, he hid behind some wine barrels near the stables and watched the routiers drag the town’s citizens into the streets.

Children were cut from their mother’s arms; a small babe was skewered on the end of a sword and thrown a distance towards the walls to split open like a watermelon; an older one was struck in the back as he ran off; another was taken up to the saddle to have her small neck broken with a twist. Old men were run through or gutted or had their heads lopped off. The women, if they were old or ugly, had their faces beaten in or their throats cut from ear to ear.

The young pretty ones suffered more.

Near where Matteu hid, routiers brought forth two girls and held them down as they kicked and screamed. Matteu looked to see if these Cathars were the Devil’s spawn: half calf and half goat, grotesque creatures, covered in boils, as the priests had said. After all, these were the dreaded heretics who thought the world was created by the Devil and who did not believe in the Holy Cross and the Resurrection. But he saw only plain girls, as plain as could be – girls who were terrified and hunted.