Three Years Later

Three Years Later

The First Day

Nones

“He’s crazy,“ Geraut said. He was hunched next to Jannequin, both of them wrapped in their cloaks with their hoods pulled down to their noses, backs against the rough front slats of the cart, trying to doze as the old mule plodded along. Eastertide had come late that year, and the country was bursting with birdsong. Jannequin had been listening to it sleepily, wondering, as usual, why birds knew more about music than people did. He had no idea what Geraut was talking about and didn’t much care.
The country was at peace, but the forests of the south were full of outlaws, both Frankish deserters and displaced Occitan men-at-arms. A little earlier in the trip the cart had passed through a long, dark stretch of woods, where the road became a narrow defile between close-crowding trees, a perfect ambush site. The minstrels had no weapons except their eating-knives, and although Jannequin carried a safe-conduct pass with the Senhor’s seal on it, the pass wouldn’t impress bandits who couldn’t read, and everyone knew it. They also knew that they weren’t valuable themselves, but their instruments, the cart and the mule were. And Jannequin regretted having brought the Senhor’s advance payment in his money-belt, but leaving it with Guilhem at the Turk’s Head had been out of the question.
As they moved into the dim tunnel under the shadowing branches they all crossed themselves. Big Heaulmier, who boasted in the taverns that he feared neither God nor the Devil, crossed himself three more times and mumbled a few words of the Paternoster as they passed a tree with the end of a rotted rope dangling from one of its limbs and a scatter of bones beneath it. The skull glared sightlessly up at them, jaws apart as if it was trying to bite those who had left it in such a state. No burial, Catholic or heretic, for the poor soul, whoever he had been, and Jannequin wondered what he had done to be strung up to rot.
But they had come safely out of the wood and were in open country, rolling first through an olive grove and then between the orderly fields and meadows of the Senhor’s demesne. The crop-fields were new-plowed and sown, the pastures were dotted with plump, cloud-fleeced sheep, and equally thriving brindle goats ranged freely. They passed into the manorial village where the bell in the squat wooden tower of the church was tolling Nones. Each wattle and daub cottage was neat, plastered walls newly whitewashed, thatched roofs in good repair. Fat chickens and geese clucked and honked as they scuttled out of the way. It was late afternoon in the planting season for fava beans, vetch and farro, the men still in the fields but the women come back to cook the evening meal. Charcoal smoke weaved from the plastered chimneys, and the aromas threading from the open doors made Jannequin wish he hadn’t shared out all of the sausage and bread already.
Once a woman with two toddlers clutching her skirt emerged from her cottage and stared as the cart creaked past on its dry axles. She and her children looked healthy. The little ones wore clean woolen shirts down to their pudgy knees, and the woman’s kirtle, skirt and coif were unpatched. The Senhor took good care of his people, it seemed, another point in his favor. But there was a cold assessment in the scrutiny of the villein woman. Jannequin offered her a cheerful “God’s Day”, but she stared at him stonily, as if she’d been hoping for a different band of travelers.
Geraut piped up again. “Did you hear what I said?”
“No, and I don’t give a damn.”
“De Lissac. He’s crazy.”
“Oh, Geraut, they’re all crazy,” Jannequin said. Geraut had fitted new sheep-gut strings to his viele, and the plucking and whining as he tuned and retuned was irritating. The other minstrels were asleep, except for Heaulmier, up on the bench driving the cart. .
“Yes, but this one must be possessed by a demon. He starts writing love songs about some other man’s wife, and when she won’t spread for him, he storms her castle and rapes her and she dies later, and now he’s writing songs about how sorry he is.”
“Tavern bullshit. He never stormed her castle – she didn’t have one. He just raped the lady, if it even was rape. She’s still alive, and I guess she must have enjoyed it, because she’s coming to the tournament. Lucky for our man that the lady’s husband got killed and she married an even nobler son of a whore afterwards. Anyway, we won’t know until we get there. Could you please stop torturing the poor baa-lambs? Let them get used to their afterlife for awhile. You’re going to have to retune anyway, when the Senhor teaches us the new songs.”
“Yes, but..”
“Bleeding Jesù, go back to sleep. Maybe the songs will be good.” Geraut was a fool. Jannequin had taken him into the consort to replace the viele player who died at Besièr, because Geraut played well. But he was very young, and he didn’t understand that the music and the money were what mattered, not the strange ways of the noble troubadours who hired minstrels to play it.
The country was still recovering from the first invasion, and it had been a long time since an Occitan nobleman had been able to pay good money to hire musicians for any sort of event. And the Senhor had planned a big one, a week-long tournament with feasting every evening.
“But Lissac…I mean, isn’t all their music about falling in love with some other man’s wife?”
Jannequin laughed. “Of course, but you’re not supposed to fuck her.”
“But they all do!” Geraut said. He sounded personally insulted. “They’re all going to hell!”
“Oh, everybody’s going to hell. Doesn’t make any difference any more whether you’re a Pope-Kisser or a Perfect Fool. We’re all damned, just because we’re still alive. Specially musicians, except for the Archbishop’s buttboy choristers.” The cart jounced hard over a rock in the road and Jannequin regretted giving up what was left of the mule’s hayflake to Gilles. But the piper was old, and so bony he barely had an ass to sit on. Jannequin yawned and tried to find a more comfortable position on the rough planking. “Of course Lissac and us won’t be treated the same down there. The demons will just torture him, but we’ll have to work, same as always. And we’ll get the hot pokers up the ass anyway, when we’re done playing.”
Geraut laughed. “You think we’ll have to back up Lissac’s howling?”
“One way or another. With instruments as out of tune as yours. But at least we’ll be in good company.”
Geraut finally tucked his viele back in its leather bag. “I wonder what kind of instruments they play in hell,” he said.
“Probably something like that,” Jannequin said, jerking his chin at the bundle next to his harp-case.

The boy who had brought the Senhor’s summons on a hard-ridden, lathered courseur to the Turk’s Head, had carried the instrument in a leather sack strapped across his back, because it was too big for a saddlebag. He said the Senhor had gotten it from one of his vassals, an old knight who had fought in Oltremar in the Crusade of the Two Kings. The man had turned Cathar after the carnage he’d seen, done in the name of the Roman Church. His castle had been razed by the Wolf during the first invasion, and he was penniless. The Franks hadn’t even bothered to kill him. They just blinded him, cut off his nose and ears, and put him out on the roads to beg. The Senhor had taken him in, the boy said, because honor demanded it, but the man was beyond help. He died in the Senhor’s castle, and it was said that he received the Consolamentum from a Perfected One before the end. The instrument, with a Saracen sword and shield, were the only things of value he owned, and he’d left them to the Senhor in gratitude, for everyone in his family was dead.
It was about the size of a viele, but with a shorter, wider neck and a belly like half a melon, five strings and no bow. All the messenger had said was that Jannequin should pluck the strings with a goose-quill as one plays the psaltery, or perhaps use his fingers. Jannequin knew how to play the psaltery – it had been his first instrument – although its music was thin compared to his harp’s. The thing had a nice tone, but it sat awkwardly in his lap, and he knew it would be half-drowned by Maroc’s shawm and Heaulmier’s tambours and tuned bells. He might have to restrict Gilles to his set of wooden flutes, since there was no way of muting the old man’s bagpipes.
He worried about Gilles. The piper was famous, at least among musicians, because he had been the first to add a tuneable drone to his bagpipe. In his hands the pipes sounded almost like an organ, and when he was younger he was often hired to play conducti and other sacred music in churches too poor to afford even the portative form of the organ.
But although he didn’t seem to have lost his skill, he was getting strange, forgetful and frail. As a master jongleur, Jannequin had to make it his business to know at least the rudiments of every instrument in a consort of music. And even the single bagpipe played by villeins at village festivals required the lungs of an olifanter and the right arm of a blacksmith, to keep the bag inflated and pumping air to the chanter. Gilles’ double pipes required even more strength, and even though Gilles had invented them, that had been years back, and Jannequin wondered if the man was still up to playing them to their full effect. But he was still revered among men who knew music, and the Senhor had specifically requested him.
Jannequin thought sourly about the new instrument. It was pretty enough, its deeply-rounded back made of alternating strips of pale and dark wood, and its sound-hole covered by an intricately-carved disk. But it was a device of the heathen Turks. And nobody but a double-deeded man like Bernier de Lissac, who had fought for the Cross, but had also, it was said, allowed the Cathar Parfaits free access to his castle, would have dared to introduce such an uncanny instrument into a consort, even though the preachers from both sides of the conflict considered all the music they’d been hired to play sinful, because it celebrated this life, not the next one.
Geraut was still grumbling, so Jannequin raised his hood and leered at him, sticking out his tongue and waggling it like a demon from one of the carved capitals of the old cathedral.
“Yah! We’ve all made a bargain with the Devil. But the Devil’s known for his largesse, and he always pays half in advance.” He touched the slight bulge of the money-belt under his tunic. “And the Devil knows the best tunes, so they say. Geraut, stop grumbling. Remember what Tristan says in the poem – better to wind up in hell with wine and good whores and fine music, than get stuck in heaven where you have nothing to drink but water, and nothing to sing but psalms.”
“They play vieles in Heaven too,” Geraut said. “And harps. And olifants and psalteries. It’s in the Word of God.”
Gilles stirred up out of his doze. “And bagpipes. Oh, yes. There’s a picture in the cathedral, painted right on the wall of the Lady Chapel, under the eastern window. Man in a cap with a cock’s feather, pumping away at his pipes in front of God and the Son and the Holy Virgin and all the angels. And dancing! Got to have the pipes if there’s going to be dancing.”
Geraut said, “There aren’t any pictures in the cathedral. Not even windows. Nothing but arrow-slits. It’s a god damned fortress. What are you talking about?” But Gilles had closed his eyes again, smiling.
“He remembers the old cathedral,” Jannequin said. “Geraut, please, just get some rest while you can. It’s going to be a busy time for us.” He pulled his hood back down over his face.
“Old fool,” Geraut said. “I don’t know why you brought him. The nobles don’t like the pipes any more. Villeins’ music.”
“Like he said, there’s going to be dancing,” Jannequin mumbled through his hood. “And we’re not much better than villeins, unless someone knighted us when I wasn’t looking. So shut up.”

The cart bumped hard again, and Jannequin, jolted from his doze, raised his hood. In the wide meadow below the castle hill he saw a crew of carpenters putting up stands along one side of the expanse, and there were men and women with scythes and sickles trimming the new grass flat in front of them. Evidently the Senhor was planning for jousting as well as the general mêlée, and Jannequin’s opinion of his largesse notched up a little. The new fad of individual combat with blunted lances was more expensive to arrange than just letting the noble maniacs bash away at one another en masse as they did in real battles. He wished the Senhor had told him about the jousting. The knights who participated were all full of themselves, and they required horns to bray out their entrances into the lists. Jannequin knew a good olifanter in Carcassona whom he could have added to the consort for a bit more money. But doubtless the Senhor would fob off the pride of his jousters with the war and hunting horns his men-at-arms blew, even though those instruments were crude and raucous compared to the trumpet, and soldiers certainly weren’t musicians.
Some of the carpenters downed tools and waved at the cart, singing out greetings in the lilting argot of Carcassona. Jannequin thought he recognized a couple of them and waved back. Freemen, temporary hires, like him and his minstrels. The Senhor was sparing no expense. Already the central poles of the large pavilions behind the stands bore the painted banners of the Occitan nobility. And behind the tourney field Jannequin saw ranks of smaller tents going up to house the lesser knights, squires and servants who had come with their lords. Lissac was going all out to impress his guests, and Jannequin wondered if the Young Count himself would be among them. He hadn’t seen the Crotz Occitana of Tolosa among the banners, but of course he and his minstrels had arrived before the noble company was complete, to rehearse the music with the Senhor.
The cart began a steep climb through a little wood to the castle mount. The light bled lingeringly out of the sky and the hammering and shouting from the tournament field hushed as the workers knocked off for the day. The mule stumbled and groaned. Heaulmier swore at it and slapped the reins across its butt. Jannequin reached for the wine-skin, remembered that they had already emptied it, and lay back, thinking about the disappointment on the face of the village woman. He’d already figured out the reason for it, and it didn’t make him happy.