The Sixth Station(98)

“Come on,” he said, and walked a few hundred feet ahead, and I followed him. At this point, I was ready to turn back, but we were too high up for me to attempt a descent alone. He stopped at a large boulder and sat down, patting the side of the rock for me to sit beside him. I sat down, refusing to wince at my bleeding hands and knees.

He knelt in front of me, took his backpack off, and took out a tiny first aid kit. He opened the rips in my jeans and washed my knees off with water, swabbed them with a packet of disinfectant then with an iodine swab, and sealed each with big knee-sized Band-Aids.

“Always be prepared—right?” I said.

He didn’t answer and took my palms in his hands and looked at them. He cleaned them with a new towelette and swabbed them with iodine—and, yes, it hurt like hell.

“What? No more Band-Aids?” I said, refusing to let him see me wince even once.

“They won’t stay on since you’re climbing. But this might help.”

He took both of my hands in his, turned them over palm side up, and looked at them. Then he brought them to his mouth and kissed the left palm and then the right.

I nearly fell off the mountain again. No one had done that to me since my mom used to kiss my scrapes and scratches with her magic kisses.

“Let’s go. Come on. Get up.”

Is this the guy who just made that tender—not to mention sexy—gesture? Manipulative horse’s ass!

I got up and we resumed climbing. After another half hour of straight up, we came to the thinnest part of the trail—just below the remains of the castle walls that I’d seen so clearly in the cell phone’s camera the day before.

When we got to steadier ground, I pulled Sadowski’s phone out of my inner jacket pocket, turned it on, and snapped a picture of the sunlight streaming through the turrets. At the sound of the camera’s click, Pantera turned on his heels in front of me like a madman and grabbed it out of my hands angrily.

He turned it off. “Listen, monsieur, even I know that there’s no signal up here. I tried it from the rooming house.”

“Down there, no. Up here, yes.”

He put the phone in his own backpack, and we proceeded up to the top and over the wall into the courtyard of what was once a great castle.

“This is where the Cathars lived?”

“Well, yes, but not in this castle. The village was destroyed. This was built afterward.14 They lived on the pog here,” he said, pointing out what looked to me like a crazy-steep, uninhabitable mountainside.

“Then why did you bring me up here?”

“To experience the walk our forebears took every day that they lived in peace, and that same path, which they then took down to their deaths in the fire in the valley below.”

“Our forebears? Are we related?” I joked. “Not for nuthin’, but yours might have been French, but mine were Italian.”

“Yes, they were. Well, beginning in May or June of 1244 they sure became Italian, at any rate.”

“You’re saying…” I remembered reading in the book last night about how the smuggled treasure had been allegedly brought to Italy.

Stop with the “alleged.” You sound like a police reporter—even to yourself.

His answer was a crooked grin, and he said, “I want to trigger some memory for you. It’s vital…”

“What the hell are you taking about? I promise you, I’d remember if I’d ever climbed this thing…”

Then I looked down over the ruined castle wall, as he pointed out the gorgeous valley four thousand feet down, already in bloom this early spring day, and at once a crazy sense of déjà vu followed immediately by the stench of burning human flesh hit me again.

“The stench is unbearable,” I choked out, my eyes beginning to burn.

He smiled and simply said, “That, Alazais,” pointing down to the valley, “is called a memory.” He looked down. “That is where they were burned alive.”

“But what is the smell now?”

“Legend has it that a chosen few can smell the fire even to this day. Guess that must mean you.”

“No.”

“Okay, fine. Let me show you something else.…”

“No more slippery slopes. Promise?”

“No,” he said, and immediately walked me around to the most slippery slope of the unforgiving northeastern side of the pog, and I looked down. Straight down. It was indeed impenetrable. “Is this where—”

I heard a crack and at the same instant felt something whiz by my head so close that it literally spun me around. Pantera grabbed me, and we ran back around that steep outer edge and jumped into the courtyard of the castle remains maybe six feet below.