A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

It wasn’t possible for the visitors to join in; the tapping, leaping steps of the dancers-men revolving around the fire, women and children forming little prancing rings of their own on the edges-were too complicated for the uninitiated to join in.

Music was being provided by panpipes, but all of a sudden there was a blast of sound as Prades, the local blacksmith, blew down a pipe he was holding into a fearsome-looking contraption that looked like nothing so much as an enormous pig’s bladder with some of its tubes still attached. The resultant wail was so loud that it could have been heard ten miles away Adelia found herself flinching. They’ll hear. They’ll come. She pulled herself together. This sound belongs to these mountains; why should anyone come?

“Oh, bloody hell,” Ulf said. “It’s the bagpipes.”

Rankin who’d been lolling on the platform, drunkenly nuzzling Thomassia’s cheek, was all at once on his feet. “D’ye ken that? By all that’s holy, it’s the peeps. The peeps. I’ve come home.” He aimed himself toward Prades like a thirsty man toward a fountain, clutching at the man’s arm, begging.

“He’s not, is he?” Ulf moaned. “Yes, he bloody is. He’s going to get himself some peeps. We’re doomed.”

And for the first time in a long time, Adelia laughed.

THE SNOW THAT Adelia dreaded might stop the O‘Donnell coming for them did not arrive, but neither did the O’Donnell. Instead a Cathar perfect arrived to spread his faith in the village.

“Oh, God,” Adelia said, when she heard. “He’ll put you in danger.” The “you” was becoming as important to her as the “us.”

“Will you stop it?” Fabrisse said wearily. “We have posted lookouts for strangers. Brother Pierre is known to us, a good man. He is at Na Roqua’s if you want to go and hear him.”

Adelia consulted the others.

“We should go,” Mansur said. “He may have news of Sister Aelith.” The thought of the hunted, motherless girl disturbed them all.

They didn’t see the perfect, not that day; they were precluded by the number of bodies crammed into Na Roqua’s house, and by those sitting outside it, listening to Brother Pierre’s voice issuing through the windows. He was reading from the Cathar bible in the Catalan patois the villagers could understand, speaking Christ’s words in their own language rather than in the Latin spouted by the priests.

Adelia knew by now that, if Caronne’s villagers were illiterate, they were at least masters of debate, especially on theological matters, and that questions and answers would extend deep into the night.

Leaving the others to listen, she walked back to the castle, followed by Ward, and braved the cold wind for a while on its bridge to look toward the ice-capped peaks of the Pyrenees.

They were a climate gauge; they played Grandmother’s Footsteps; sometimes, as now, their clarity augured a fine day; when they jumped forward, so near that they seemed only a mile or so away, they foretold bad weather. She had come to love them, imagining them as a refuge where misfits like herself could live free on those tree- crammed, bear-haunted, wildlife-infested slopes. I could settle there, she thought. Allie and Gyltha and Mansur and Boggart and Ulf and I, we could be safe. Henry Plantagenet couldn’t find me and send me on any more missions ever again.

A voice in her head asked: And Rowley?

Suddenly she wanted him very, very badly He can come, too.

There was a nudge on her ankles; Ward was getting cold. She patted his head, and they went together into the castle.

“Were you never tempted to become a Cathar?” Adelia asked of Fabrisse, who was putting the Count of Caronne into his cradle.

“No.” Fabrisse bent down to kiss the count’s cheek. “When this one was born, he was ill, so ill. We didn’t think we would save him. That paifait back there, he came to me and said I shouldn’t feed my child, to allow him to suffer the Cathar endura and let him die. He would administer the consolamentum, he said, so as to ensure that little Raymond would be an angel of God in Heaven. But I would not do it. How could I withhold my milk from my own flesh and blood? We fought for him, Thomassia and I, and he lived.”

It was in accord with what Sister Ermengarde had said. Adelia shook her head in amazement at the way every established religion she knew of, even this one, tried to pervert simple, human love out of its natural course.

HALFWAY THROUGH THE next morning, little Berenger Pons, who’d been sitting, shivering, in the church’s high window, watching the track that led eventually to Carcassonne, snatched up the hand-bell that lay beside him and began clanging it even as he scrambled down his ladder. Still ringing, he ran up the village street, shouting at the top of his squeaky voice: “The bayle. The bayle is coming.”

Immediately, women emerged from their houses and hurried to the communal barn that stored the grain sacks. Men dropped what they were doing in the fields and ran to the sheep pens. Na Roqua came out of her doorway, pulling with her the Cathar perfect who’d spent the night in her downstairs room. As if he were a horse, she gave him a slap on his rump to set him galloping toward the castle.

In the castle itself, Fabrisse pushed the priest out of her bed and rushed out to look down on young Berenger as he arrived in the hall still gasping his message. “How long before he gets here?”

“Thirty paternosters, maybe thirty-two.” Having no clocks, Caronne people didn’t reckon time in minutes.

“Good boy. Thomassia.” She rushed to raise the rest of her household. “Quick, quick. The bishop’s tax inspector is coming. Follow Thomassia.”

Scrambling into their clothes as they went, Adelia, Boggart, Mansur, Rankin, and Ulf made their way down to the hall, Fabrisse’s priest with them.

Thomassia was already there, heading out of the entrance, waving her arms to spur the fugitives into a run. There was a momentary constriction at the end of the bridge as they were joined by the Cathar perfect while the Christian priest, still buttoning himself up, pushed past him to gallop down the hill toward his church. Then they were on a path that wound round the back of the castle and headed down toward the forest. On other tracks, they could see shepherds urging their flocks in the same direction, their huge white-coated Pyrenean dogs snapping at the animals’ heels to make them go faster.

Adelia picked Ward up-the shepherd dogs terrified him-and kept running. Ulf, Rankin, and Mansur brought up the rear, helping a lumbering Boggart to keep going.

The forest enfolded them, but Thomassia, holding her chest with the effort, kept on, eventually veering away from the track to wade through dead bracken until she came to a full stop facing an outcrop of rock draped with overhanging ivy. She pulled the thick fronds aside to reveal a cave and ushered them in. “Stay.”

Backing out, she arranged the ivy so that it recovered the entrance.

In the dimness, the deep voice of the Cathar perfect said: “She will return to the castle, brushing out our tracks as she goes. A good woman, Thomassia.”

Of them all, he was the least out of breath; he’d run with an easy lope, thin brown legs showing beneath the robe he’d tucked up into his belt. Stooping to try and get rid of the stitch in her side, Adelia gasped: “I suppose you’re used to this.”

“It has not been unknown.” He sounded amused. He gave a bow.

Adelia introduced herself and the others.

“What’s them people who live in caves. Troglodytes. That’s what we’re becoming,” Ulf grumbled. “Bloody troglodytes. Well, I suppose it gives us a day off work.”

It was a point and, like the peasants they were turning into, he and Rankin, Mansur, and Boggart used the time to doze.

Adelia, the only one with reasonable Catalan at her command, felt that she should be entertaining the perfect with conversation, but kept quiet, hoping the man wouldn’t raise a matter she dreaded.

He did. “You were at Aveyron with Ermengarde when she died,” he said.

“Yes.”

He surprised her. “I saw you. I was there also, a witness, hidden in the crowd. I sent up prayers for her soul, not that she needed them, the good, good woman. And I prayed for you and yours. I rejoice in your escape.”