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 urgent 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 tunable 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 fucking 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 horde 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.
 
Vespers

Bernier de Lissac fidgeted through the Vespers Office. His chaplain, sensing the Senhor’s mood, gobbled through the Latin as quickly as he could. In ordinary times Bernier hadn’t bothered to observe the canonical hours in his chapel, but the castle routine had become almost monkish since the war began, and even with the truce, he had to pretend to piety. Having come close to death during the first phase of the war, when at least he’d have died fighting as a belted knight should, Bernier had no wish to be hanged or burned by the Archbishop of Narbona’s menials as a heretic. And if the rumors about a new crusader invasion were true, and the priest blabbed to his overlord about Bernier’s laxness in holy observance, the consequences would be immediate, painful and fatal.
Father Rainard wasn’t much of a priest. Son of a freed villein, he’d been born and raised in Bernier’s manorial village, recruited to the priesthood during the first Frankish occupation, and barely trained. He was still all but illiterate, slovenly in both habit and mind, a drunkard who garbled the Latin of the Mass he’d learned by rote. But he had been useful as the Senhor’s chaplain.
For Bernier, back from campaign after the resistance had begun, paying his usual evening visit to the stables with carrots for his horses, had caught him buggering a young groom in an empty stall. Sodomy was common enough among the priesthood (and the nobility, come to that – people still sang the sirventes about the lover’s quarrel between Richard Coeur-de-Lyon and Philippe-Auguste which had tarnished the Two Kings’ Crusade), but it carried a death penalty if the Senhor chose to call the priest to account in his annual court. And there were few on the demesne who would stand surety for him. Every villein and freeman on his land was a Cathar Credente, or so his wife told him.
That evening Bernier had stood silently watching Rainard grunt his way toward his pleasure, until the priest had spent himself and fallen back on the straw. Rainard had found himself looking up right into the Senhor’s pale eyes. Bernier nodded, and after that there was a tacit bargain with the priest, silence for silence. He hadn’t punished the groom: the boy had been no more than twelve, a skilled rider, good with the horses. He was smart and quick, and with a little polish, in time he might become a reliable page, or even a squire. And Bernier knew Rainard would never touch him again, although some other man might: the boy hadn’t exactly been fighting off the priest.
After the service Bernier saluted the gaunt wooden Corpus on the back wall of the chapel with a perfunctory sketch of the cross, nodded to the priest and stood. He gestured to dismiss the castle staff, but left his wife Isabel still kneeling at the altar, in ostentatious prayer. She was more afraid of the fat little hypocrite than he was, for good reason. Belting his samite robe tighter over his tunic, he left the chapel. Father Rainard watched him go, unsmiling.
The soft Spanish slippers he wore were kinder to his feet than anything the castle’s cobbler could make, but the ankle he’d shattered after one of the diehards defending Besièr had shot his horse out from under him had never knitted properly, and he walked with a limp he could conceal only with effort.

Count Raimon of Tolosa, the sixth of that name and title, had taken the Cross reluctantly, but at first he held his forces aloof from the massacre at Besièr. It began after the Orb River gate of the city was idiotically left open by a group of drunken men-at-arms on the battlements of the city wall who rushed out without orders to attack a band of crusader camp-followers on the bridge over the river who were baring their asses at them and jeering. Simon de Montfort’s forces swarmed in, and from the start everything went bloodily wrong. Arnaut-Amalric, then Abbot of Cîteaux, who had raised the crusader army on orders from Pope Innocent III, had sat on his horse in his cross-emblazoned surcoat and gilded helm, watching from a safe distance. When a frantic captain rode up to him to ask how to tell the Cathars of the city from the Catholics, the Abbot said, “ Kill them all. God will know His own.”
The footsoldiers and Flemish mercenaries began the slaughter, but Wolf Simon’s Frankish and Anglo-Norman knights soon joined it. By nightfall the streets of the city belonged to its dead. It was a hot day, and some northern knights in their heavy mail had fallen themselves from the sheer labor of cutting down defenseless people, dying like heat-struck reapers in an August hayfield working too long under a cruel bailiff. But in Besièr the bailiff was an Abbot whose overlord was supposed to be God’s emissary on earth.
Count Raimon had finally brought his troops into the city in a vain attempt to stop the slaughter, and as Bernier was riding through the central marketplace a surviving defender with a crossbow, shooting from the roof of the granary, had put a quarrel through the eye of his destrier. Ardeur, the finest warhorse he had ever bred and trained, had rolled on his leg as he went down. The chin-strap of his close-helm had broken when he fell, and it rolled off his head. But he could barely keep his face out of the foul stream – spilled wine from the stove-in barrels of the looted taverns mixed with ash, blood, piss and shit – which flowed ankle-deep in the central gutter of the marketplace. By the time his retainers found him and rolled the massive corpse off his leg he’d been howling like a dog.

So Bernier de Lissac had returned from that first campaign of the Pope’s war a damaged man. He hadn’t lost his leg, although he’d almost died from the fever that set in during his days of recuperation. Count Raimon valued him for his loyalty, and had given him a pallet in his own large pavilion outside the city, where his Greek physician had set Bernier’s ankle and administered an extract of poppy to ease his pain and help him sleep. He had recovered to the point that he could still fight and hunt from horseback. But the ankle hadn’t knitted properly, so fighting on foot, climbing a siege ladder in an escalade, even walking over any distance, was still painful. When he returned home he consulted a midwife and healer in his village who used the poppy elixir to ease a woman’s birth-pangs. Yolanda supplied him with it, warning him not to become its slave. But he was angry at his diminishment, and he continued to use it to override the pain so that he could live his life as he’d always done.
One night it sent him a dream about Besièr. He was riding Ardeur again through the burning city, and the windrows of cut-down corpses rose as he passed and fell in behind him like a company of soldiers. Headless, armless, ripped from shoulder to groin with coils of guts tangled around their knees, they staggered after him, joined even by mangled children and tiny babies who crawled along leaving trails of blood on the pavestones as snails leave slime in their paths. He tried to spur Ardeur away from the dreadful company, but the black destrier continued to pace along slowly, leading the procession, and Bernier saw that the crossbow quarrel still stuck out of his eye.
After that night he gave up the poppy juice, but he began drinking more wine to ease the pain in his ankle. He had his armorer make a light metal brace he could strap around his leg under his trews and boots, which helped him walk almost normally when he was holding manorial court or meeting his liege lords in council. But the chafing stiffness of the brace always reminded him of his weakness.
Besièr had stripped him of everything he’d been trained to believe since he’d been a child learning from his father’s serjeant-at-arms the ways of fighting and the rules of paratge – a term meaning more than mere honor – which governed them. And although he’d been glad when Count Raimon defied Pope Innocent’s excommunication and decree of banishment, and had returned to kill the Wolf and throw his Franks out of Occitania, taking back whatever his army could salvage from the ruins the crusaders’ first foray had left; though he’d been happy at the prospect of fighting for land nstead of priestly notions, Bernier knew he’d lost something vital during the last black hours of Besièr. He led his demesne’s compliment of knights and soldiers into battle whenever the Count called upon him. But he fought out of duty and no longer took joy in it.
Although the Count’s campaigns never involved attacking the defenseless, there were moments in the chaos of close fighting when Bernier felt detached altogether from his raging, roaring body, watching himself from a strange red-hazed distance as he crushed the helm and head of a Frank with his mace, as if he were sitting in his hall listening to the exploits of one of Charlemagne’s paladins in a chanson de geste. Often he got so drunk after battles that he couldn’t remember what he’d done during the fighting, and only knew he had survived when he found himself waking with crapula in his tent the next morning, calling for more wine to ease his headache even before he’d gotten up to piss the residue of the previous night’s into the latrines. As he helped his squires clean his hauberk and chausses, his close-helm, shield, sword, lance and mace, sometimes he had to leave the tent, trying not to disgrace himself in front of his men by vomiting because of the terrible human fluids which had congealed on his arms and armor.
And he could tell by the way his squires looked at him that he had become a fearsome, brutal man, no true knight, but a servant of death, as bad as Wolf Simon, Arnaut-Amalric, and the butchers of Besièr. The shame he felt, coupled with the nagging pain in his ankle, drove him to a sort of recklessness which he knew had no part of paratge. And still the Count praised him and heaped costly presents upon him. Bernier knew very well that if the Franks hadn’t finally withdrawn their forces and sued for truce, he would have died, one way or another.
But truce it had been, and a long one. And now it was beginning to fray.

He would water his wine this evening. He’d finished six of his new poems, but the seventh was still plaguing him. The lady Aëlis and her second husband, Bernier’s new liege lord Viscount Jaufré de Roncaisle, would be attending the tournament, although the Viscount was too old to compete in the mêlée, let alone joust. The seventh song was still a little too specific about the physical charms of his new wife. A bit overmuch about her rose-tipped alabaster breasts, and the final couplet about the lover’s wish to die after a single glance at her lovely ankle was too close to the exquisite little death he’d experienced several times between her even lovelier thighs.
He had fallen in love with Aëlis the first time he’d seen her in the ladies’ pavilion at one of the Old Count’s tournaments in Tolosa, before the war began. He’d done well that day, unhorsing two opponents in the mêlée and forcing the one who could still stand up to fight on foot with sword and shield and finally yield to him. He’d made himself a little richer, not only because he’d won his opponents’ horses and arms, but also because he’d cockily bet on himself, laying down hard coin he couldn’t afford to lose with the Jewish odds-makers the Count could still risk tolerating back then. The odds had been against him, for he’d singled out two more experienced knights, and he’d won more than enough to pay his expenses. One of the horses he’d taken, a massive Castilian stallion, had sired Ardeur.
Exhilarated and sweating after his second victory, he’d taken off his helm, thrown back the hood of his mail coif and removed his padded arming-cap to let his head cool. He was walking past the ladies’ stand when a red rose hit him slap in the face. It still had part of its stem, and a thorn raked his cheek. He caught the flower as it fell, and turned to see who had thrown it. She was laughing full out, a slender young woman with immense black eyes and a complexion a little darker than that of the pale beauties troubadours usually celebrated, but with a shining cascade of gilt hair. It was her open laughter which first attracted him – after Isabel had lost their second child she seldom laughed. But then he’d looked at Aëlis fully, and the spirit who is so proud he takes Love for a name had entered him through his eyes, as when an army storms into a city through a breach in its wall, and had invested him entirely, almost stopping his breath for a moment and making his knees tremble.
Bernier put his hand to his cheek and showed the blood to the unknown beauty. “Thank God, no man has made me bleed today. But a lady has. I yield to you!” He took off the neckerchief he wore to ease the chafing of his mail coif and wiped his cheek. He put the sweaty, bloodied scarf on the prick of his sword and raised it to her, saying, “Take this, lady, as a pledge of my submission.” She had, and in time she had rewarded his pledge with her own sweeter submission.
But although in years it had not been long since he and Aëlis had served Love to the fullest measure of devotion, things had changed so much, so quickly, that Bernier remembered his joyous bouts in bed with her as scenes from an age already receding into legend.

The Viscount knew the rules. He was old enough to have attended Countess Marie’s court at Troyes as a troubadour, and earlier, before he had come into his title, he’d been a teen-aged goliard roaming between the great church schools. He’d even written a song in Latin to Eléanor d’Aquitaine herself, a rather desperate outpouring about giving up all the world for one night in the Queen of Angleterra’s arms, even though the Queen had been older than his own mother at the time. The song was still popular, but Queen Eléanor and her daughter Marie were dead, and the young goliard had become the rich, jealous old husband he’d once mocked in his own verses. But Jaufré de Roncaisle was one of the inventors of the courtly game, and he wasn’t yet senile.
Bernier walked out of the chapel into the bailey-court, still bustling with servants preparing for the feast. His butler, a man he’d freed from serfdom when the fellow showed a knack for telling fresh wine from sour simply by rapping a knuckle on one of the casks brought into the buttery, hustled up to him, bobbed a bow, and said, “Well, my lord, this time the bastards in Narbona haven’t cheated us. No vinegar, all good stuff. Value for value received, for a change, although I do think you paid a little high for it. Mind you, it isn’t bad…”
Bernier laughed. “Jesù, Foulke, I can tell by your breath that you’ve already made sure of that.”
“A sip, only, lord, I swear on the blessed memory of my mother.”
“Fine. Keep it to a sip. I’ll need you sober.”
Foulke’s bow was deeper as Bernier walked away, and the Senhor thought, with some regret, that he might have to replace the butler soon. A case of setting the fox to watch the henhouse, after all. He was generally pretty loose with his senior servants, figuring that they knew their business better than he did. But he’d been away from his demesne on campaign too many times and his wife had neglected her duties as chastelaine in his absence, because she’d been busy coddling the Cathars. Perhaps it was time to plant a vineyard on his own lands, so he wouldn’t have to buy wine from others. Grapes and olives seemed to like the same soil, and maybe Foulke knew as much about making wine as he did about drinking it. Put him in charge of the vineyard instead of setting him on the road, give him something complicated to do, and he might sober up, at least until the first vintage was in. There was a fallow field next to the northern olive grove that was too steep for most crops, but it was well drained and should do well for grapevines…
He entered the timbered hall built against the high stone wall of the bailey, and limped up the stairs to his solar at one end of the spacious wooden building’s second story, the only chamber in the castle where he could be by himself. By his order there was a fire already burning in the small hearth built into the broad brick chimney that made up almost the entire western wall of the little room, the conduit which vented smoke from the hall’s enormous fireplace downstairs. He picked a straw out of the earthenware pot to one side of the hearth, lit it at the fire, and used it to ignite the four thick candles on his writing desk. The light in the windowless room touched up the colors of the painting on the opposite wall, a prideful indulgence Bernier had permitted himself after the recapture of Carcassona.
The muralist had painted Joshua and his host swarming over the fallen walls of Jericho, putting the inhabitants to the sword. The man had come high, but he knew something about real fighting, and at the base of the broken wall he’d put in the headless corpse of a defender being stripped of his hauberk by two soldiers. Bernier’s glance lingered on the figure of Joshua, a small golden circlet around his helm, mounted on a white destrier. Not accurate – you send the horses to the rear when the wall is breached, and the first assault is always on foot. But the Biblical captain’s shield was blazoned with the chevron vert and two roundels gules on a field argent of the house of Lissac, and the little fillet of gold around the helm was a flattering touch. Hardly a crown, but a mark of more rank than Bernier had ever enjoyed, or ever would, the way things were going. A pleasant conceit, in any case, and he had paid the painter a little extra for it.
He unstoppered his brass inkpot, dipped his crow-quill into it, and began to write rapidly on the work-sheet of parchment laid before him on the desk, already a palimpsest bearing the ghostly markings of many drafts scraped off, and wearing a little thin. “That I loved you, lovely tyrant, I proved by my steadfast service. That my love brought me pain, even to the little death, only I and God know.”
He charged his quill from the inkpot again, and after a moment, crossed out the punning allusion to the little death. He continued, “You have turned away from me now, for my sin against Love, and I am unmanned.” He stopped and studied the verse as the ink dried. After a minute he took his pumice stone and scraped the whole thing away.
But then he wrote the lines back in. The leader of the consort of minstrels, Jannequin, had once been in service to Bertran de Born himself, the great troubadour who’d died with more deadly sins pulling him down to Hell than Bernier, in all justice, could be charged with. Bernier had never betrayed his oath of fealty to the Old Count Raimon, even in the early days when the Count’s own shameful submission to Pope Innocent had forced him to join the forty-day crusade against his own people that had ended in atrocity at Besièr. And he’d never killed a child, a woman, or an unarmed man.
So perhaps the jongleur could advise him about how to tone down the wording of the last song, without entirely losing its erotic thrust. The man could read and write, and certainly he knew the proper forms. As for the tune, it had come to him all at once while he was coming back from a boar-hunt the year before.

His ankle had been tormenting him, but he couldn’t numb it with wine before a hunt. His wife had called him a fool for riding out. But her preoccupation with the Perfected Ones – Perfect Fools, some people called them – had made her forget the annual payment due to his forester, a freeman hired by Bernier’s father, not Bernier himself. The man had sued for release before the Viscount de Roncaisle, and had been granted discharge, another reason Bernier disliked the old man. Without regular hunts to keep them in check, the wild boars of the wood had proliferated, devouring the deer’s forage and ranging out to root and trample in the cultivated fields. His free rentiers and even his villeins had grown lazy and almost insolent, and he had to show them he was still the Senhor de Lissac.
So he’d formed a small party of men-at-arms who had served with him in battle, and had ridden with them through the manorial village, rousting the freemen and villeins out of their cottages, sometimes roughly, to serve as beaters. It was not a proper hunt, more a cross between a military sortie and the chore of ridding a granary of rats. But boars are bigger than rats. The first killed two of his alaunts before succumbing, and the third one he speared continued its charge until the spearpoint and a foot of the shaft stuck out of its back, and even in its death agony it almost ripped out the belly of his courseur with its tusks before going down.
The scream of the boar as it died had stuck in his head, a terrible ululation of utter rage and defiance, and it had reminded him of the screams he had heard in Besièr, human voices in their last agonies, beyond speech, reduced to the furious dying howls of animals.
It also brought back the last shrieks of a poacher his remaining alaunts had sniffed out by accident on the return from that day’s hunt, for the boars hadn’t been the only dangerous animals that had taken over the neglected forest. The big wolfish hounds had tracked down the wretched man quickly, drawn by the scent of a gutted stag the outlaw had hung from a tree-limb to bleed out. The poacher had loosed what proved to be his last arrow at the hunting party, before trying to run deeper into the wood. But two of Bernier’s mounted men-at-arms had run him down easily. His speech had proven him an Occitan, which offended the Senhor more than if he’d been a Frankish deserter. Bernier had questioned him, but the man had only howled, mixing curses with barely coherent prayers for mercy, offering no excuse which might have preserved his life awhile longer and justified the trouble of taking him under formal arrest and locking him up in the castle’s keep pending a trial in the manorial court.
So the stag was cut down to be skinned and dressed, its meat cut up and parceled out among the villagers. Bernier had directed his men-at-arms to save the rope and drag the gibbering man to the forest track, and they found another tree with a stout branch almost overhanging the path. They hadn’t made the hanging easy for him, for they had drawn him up from the ground slowly, instead of putting him on a horse and whipping it out from under him to break his neck. He danced in the air for a long time, strangling, loosing his bladder and bowels, before he finally hung still. And they had left him to dangle for the ravens, to remind other people like him that the Senhor had returned. After that there was no more poaching on the demesne.
The priest, Rainard, had complained about leaving the poacher’s body unburied. “My lord, it’s a sacrilege!”
“Perhaps, Father Fox. In your next report to the Archbishop, ask him what happened to the dead of Besièr. On second thought, don’t bother – I don’t think he ever entered the city, even after the fighting was over and the dead began to stink.”
He also remembered the Saracen songs he’d learned from the blinded, mutilated veteran of the Two Kings’ Crusade, in the few weeks when the dying old knight had still been strong enough to sing them, as he tried to teach Bernier how to play the oud. The songs of Oltremar broke every rule of orderly Christian music, striking at the heart and loins, with nothing of piety about them. The music Bernier began to compose in his head added to the wild heathen tunes the hoof-beats of his hunting courseur and the quick, tense cries of his men-at-arms as they hastened the death of the boar with their crossbow quarrels. And he remembered Arnaut-Amalric’s order to kill everyone in Besièr, just as he himself had ordered his retainers to kill the rogue swine – and men – in the forest.
So the music in Bernier’s mind had to include a cantus firmus drawn from the Dead Mass, a steady bass line to underlie the savage melismatic ululation and the jittery drumming. It was new music, separate strands of melody melding with one another and letting go again, only to remesh when the burden came round again, like couples in a dance. Perhaps the famous piper Gilles could provide the anchor to the blend.
He hoped the oud he’d sent to Jannequin had arrived in enough time that the jongleur might by now have learned how to play it. Without it, the music wouldn’t sound the same.
The Senhor rubbed his eyes. Push come to shove, he’d play the oud himself. It had never been beneath his pride to play with minstrels, and the new instrument engaged his attention. The man he’d been before the war began – someone he could barely remember – had always played along with his hired musicians, to encourage their invention in backing up his melodies and his clear tenor voice. Occasionally he’d gotten so caught up in the music that he’d almost forgotten his station.
“…So qu’eu plus volh aver/Cor ai que m’en tolha/Ma non ai gespoder/C’ades cuit m’acolha/On plus m’en dezesper…”, the tricky one which begins as a lament but ends as a celebration, tough to bring off unless the musicians played with great delicacy so that the lyrics could be heard.
He loved music and musicians. He loved nothing else, not his wife, not his one-time mistress, not even Jesù Christ, whoever he might have been, whoever he might be.

Isabel, Lady of the Demesne of Lissac, childless after two bloody miscarriages, had little music of her own, and had foresworn her husband’s. She was thirty and knew she already looked old. The daughter of a petty knight rich in land, she’d been shopped, at fifteen, to increase the Senhor’s holdings and further ennoble her father’s line, when Bernier came into his estate after the death of his own father. She knew the marriage had diminished her husband’s standing in the eyes of the Occitan magnates, because he had married beneath his rank. But Bernier didn’t care about rank. He was tender to her, and wept when she first miscarried, almost seeming to mourn more for her agony than for the loss of an heir. But when she miscarried a second time, he had turned cold.
Isabel hadn’t much minded his artful attachment to Aëlis, then the teenaged wife of the Baron de Carvela, Bernier’s immediate overlord. The girl had been sold for the same reason she had been: marriage was business. The affair had been a game, at first, and she loved the songs Bernier wrote about the silly little beauty. They had brought him acclaim among the troubadours of Occitania, Espania and Italia and the trovères of Francia and Angleterra, his fame resounding even among the minnesingers of Germania. But she’d always wished he’d written his lovely songs about her. She’d had no troubadour aching for her, writing her coded poems addressed to a shepherd girl called Isabelot. She’d never been as beautiful as Aëlis, and she knew the botched childbirths had spoiled her figure and hurt her so badly that she endured the act of sex rather than pleasuring in it.
But they were to have one indelible – and final – moment of complicated passion, when Bernier’s infatuation with Aëlis had resulted in scandal.

The emissaries from the Old Count of Tolosa had come to the castle to interrogate her husband. It had been clear to her that if she told the four hard men that her husband had indeed lain with the girl, they would arrest him, not for rape (even the Count’s officers knew the little bitch had only cried rape after she herself had ended the affair), but for betraying his fealty to Baron Carvela. Since she had no place to go if her husband was executed for treason and his lands rendered to Carvela, Isabel had saved Bernier, lying that her husband could not have been with the Baron’s wife on the night in question, because he had been in Carcassona at the time, attending a consultium of nobles called by the Abbot of Cîteaux, concerning the suppression of the Cathars.
The suppression plan was real enough, and Bernier had pledged by proxy to join it because it was deadly not to. Abbot Arnaut-Amalric and Count Simon de Montfort had already begun calling the campaign against the Cathars a Crusade, on the Pope’s authority. But Bernier had never left the castle. Isabel had hidden him, with a goatskin of water and a small breadloaf, in a dank little storage alcove in the keep’s cellarage, a floor below the undercroft. She’d had the castle’s masons brick off the entrance, making it a prison cell, if not a tomb – a detail which hadn’t been lost on Bernier.
The Count’s officers had searched the castle thoroughly for a day and a night, but they’d never found Bernier, shivering, befouled and half-starved, behind the temporary wall.
When Isabel let him out, the Senhor de Lissac had been pathetically grateful to his lawful wife. And Baron Carvela never sought vengeance again. He’d been killed during the recapture of Tolosa, cut down from his ladder by the Frankish defenders during a night escalade on the city walls. When the news of his honorable death became known, there were no further questions about the rape of his wife. Aëlis had remarried quickly, even as Bernier had begun to write his new, remorseful poetry. Another game, certainly, but now Aëlis and her new husband were on their way to the castle.
After her second miscarriage she had stopped sharing a bed with her husband. Another pregnancy, the midwife Yolanda said, would kill her. Bernier had expanded the wooden hall, and on its second story there was room for separate bedchambers. He’d seemed resigned to sleeping alone, and he hadn’t pressed her. But shortly after she had released him from the little cell, Isabel had admitted Bernier into her bed just once, on her terms and at her summons, when she was reasonably certain she wasn’t fertile. And she’d put a pessary into her vagina just to make sure. Erect and poised between her legs, he had the gall to object when she asked him to be a little more delicate about the little slut in his verses.
“You have no right to criticize my poetry, Isabel.”
She laughed and said, “I have your balls in my hand, Bernier.”
Of course they both knew that Bernier had the same power over her, in different form. But he’d been gracious, acknowledging her little victory, and his own humiliation in the dungeon she’d kept him in to save his life. His lovemaking had begun almost tenderly, until she raked his back with her nails and bit him savagely on the shoulder. He’d hissed, his lips drawn back over his teeth, and as he knocked her hands down and slammed into her, she thought she saw the face he wore when he killed people. The glimpse was enough to dismiss the pain from her dry cunt and send her into a harsh ecstasy. Catching her breath afterwards, looking at the blood they’d drawn from each other, she realized he no longer knew the difference between making love and making war. Nor did she.
It had been the last time she had offered him her body. In the morning she woke before he did and dressed in the rough black woolen robe of a Credente nun, a Believer, a follower of the Perfected Ones. She shook him awake, displayed herself in the habit, and told him, “No more games. You know what I am. I know what you are.”

The cart reached the end of the wooded upward track leading to the castle, and came into the wide cleared area surrounding it. Heaulmier reined in the tired mule. The front of the castle’s square curtain wall loomed over them, with two towers at either end, and two more flanking the gatehouse built over its portal. It was hardly a major military emplacement, but considerably more than a fortified manor, and well defended. In addition to the high stone wall and its towers, there was a deep dry-moat, newly dug from the look of it, between them and the portal. The dirt from the moat had been packed on a steep slant along the base of the wall, to prevent siege-towers from getting close enough for an assault over the top of it. And the drawbridge was hauled up.
“How do the gentry get in?” Geraut was still half asleep, yawning vastly, goggling at the drawbridge as if he’d never seen one before.
“Postern gate at the back, probably,” Jannequin said, “But the Senhor seems to have shut his front door.”
Old Gilles coughed up a wad of phlegm and spat over the side of the cart. He crowed in his reedy tenor, “Gentry go in at the portals of Sodom while poor men enter the gates of Venus! It’s the last days! The world turned arsey-versey! Jesù is coming back to pipe the sinners into hell!”
Geraut barked a laugh. “If Jesù plays the bagpipes, we’re damned even if we go to heaven.” Gilles bit his thumb at the young man, and Jannequin told them both to hush.
It was coming on to full dark, and there was no light from the parapet or the towers. Nobody seemed to have noticed their approach. What was wrong with these people? They dig a new moat, haul up the draw-bridge, but they don’t mount a watch?
Sighing, Jannequin stepped down and put the lantern on its hook at the front of the cart, reaching into his belt-wallet for his candle-stub and tinder-box. Perhaps the Senhor had been expecting them to signal their arrival with their own light. He crouched to strike a spark with his flints into the tinder, blew it afire, lit the candle, and fixed it in the lantern, stood up, and waited.
No sign from the wall. It might have been a castle from a romance, sleeping under a spell, awaiting a knight-errant on a magical quest. The last light in the sky silhouetted the swallows finishing their simpler quests and arcing back under the machicolations of the two gate-towers. No sound but the mule shifting wearily in his harness, and a breeze stirring the new leaves of the trees beyond the cleared area.
But then a nightingale, the first Jannequin had heard that year, suddenly poured his liquid song into the hush. The jongleur had pushed his cowl back to his shoulders to light the lantern, and as if summoned by the sweet purling notes of the bird, a breeze lifted his hair gently, like the breath of a lover. He leaned against a front wheel of the cart, flaring his nostrils and breathing in the green, living promise of the zephyr, and a phrase from a goliard song drifted into his mind.
“O, o, o! Totus florio!” He knew what it meant: a glad, triumphant announcement of spring’s awakening, set to music almost martial. Another reason the priests didn’t like musicians who played out of church was that most of them had picked up a good deal of Latin along with other languages, thanks to the goliards, the wonderfully dissolute wandering students who shared their songs and their learning with minstrels in the taverns. A layman who actually understood the secret language of the Mass was almost as dangerous as a Cathar. He sang the opening phrase softly to himself, but the sly zephyr must have wafted his voice to the other musicians.
For the drowsy enchantment of the warm gloaming was suddenly shattered by a shawm played at full volume, blaring the opening phrase and going on to finish the whole melody, spring’s call to arms. The mule startled, jerking the cart, and Jannequin almost fell when the wheel turned under his shoulder. But Heaulmier reined the animal in, laughing. Maroc went on playing full blast. Gilles blew up the bag to his pipes and came in on the chorus of the tune. The drone took the cantus firmus, stolen with gleeful blasphemy by the goliard from the opening notes of the solemn Easter chant “Victima paschali laudes”, the chanter picked up the burden, and Maroc began to improvise a wild melisma with his shawm that wove above and around and in between the pipes. By the time the melody came round again, Heaulmier had wrapped the mule’s reins around the king-post and was in the bed of the wagon rapping his double-ended drumstick on his biggest tambour in a rumbling cross-rhythm which added even more urgency to the music.
Jannequin added his voice to the music, singing the Latin lyrics as loudly as he could in his husky baritone. And Geraut added his viele, sawing away on the new strings which still weren’t perfectly tuned. It was cacophony, but Jannequin lost himself in it. He and the others had been experimenting with the crossing and remeshing of independent lines of music, which was beginning to be called the New Art, beginning with the time they’d played the Cat-and-Trabuquet tenso in the Turk’s Head three years earlier. But this time they were playing it in front of a nobleman’s castle. Like every other deviation from the norm, as the troubles continued in the south and the priests cracked down, new music was dangerous. But caught up in the moment, Jannequin didn’t care.
T he musicians began another chorus of “Totus florio,” knitting the fabric of the polyphony a little tighter, and finally there was a response from the castle. A torch flared from one of the towers and a strong tenor voice soared down to enter the weave, dancing above Jannequin’s baritone. They all did a final chorus and let the music resonate for a long moment, as more flames burst from cressets along the parapet and the drawbridge descended. Jannequin walked forward as Heaulmier led the mule-cart behind him, and he was met by a tall man in a fancy robe who embraced him and kissed him soundly on both cheeks. Servants materialized to take the mule and the cart, and as the other musicians got down from the cart, the man wrapped his arms around each of them and kissed them as well, pounding their backs almost hard enough to hurt.
“We are at your service, Senhor,” Jannequin said. The man turned again to him and gripped him by the shoulders. “Don’t be stupid,” he said, grinning, tears pouring down his cheeks. “I am at yours. Come in, and welcome.”
As the Senhor led them under the raised portcullis, Jannequin said to Maroc, “That worked pretty well. What woke you up?”
“I was hungry. I figured they’d either kill us or feed us.”
“Maybe you should be leading our little band of brothers.” The Senhor strode ahead of them, bellowing commands in a full battlefield voice to his cooks and servants to give the minstrels whatever they needed.
Maroc laughed. “You haven’t done anything wrong so far,” he said.

When Jannequin thought about that night afterwards, he remembered his first feeling that the castle had been under an enchantment. The musicians were taken into a room off the hall where heated water waited for them in a huge wooden tub. Like knights-errant, they were stripped of their clothes by polite manservants and bathed, the servants scrubbing them with brushes foaming with soap that smelled much better than the coarse yellow stuff they were used to. The musicians used more soap and their eating-knives to scrape the stubble from their cheeks, for the younger generation of nobles were clean-shaven, and liked their hirelings to follow the fashion. Their clothes were taken away for washing, and they were given long clean linen shirts to wear for the night. A man conducted them halfway up one of the gatehouse towers, where there was a little room overhanging the moat containing a stool with a hole in it, mounted over a pipe let into the stone floor, with a ewer of water and a pile of soft rushes next to it. The minstrels looked baffled, and the servant laughed and said it was the Senhor’s private shit-hole. “Sit on the stool, do your business down the hole, wipe off with the rushes, and sluice it all down with the water,” he said. Jannequin was amazed: even Bertran de Born had only had open latrines you squatted over. One by one the minstrels eased their bowels. Giles grumbled at first, muttering that it was against nature to shit sitting down instead of squatting. But when he came out he was showing his sparse teeth in a grin. “Well, it’s kinder to my old knees,” he said. “They must shit like this in Heaven.”
The servant led them down and across the bailey court to the hall. At one end of it they found a table set up with a fine dish of pork stewed in a rich, spicy sauce, with boiled field-fare and ample wine, strong and clean, not the thin, sour stuff Guilhem sold. The Senhor himself appeared as they were using their flatbread trenchers to sop up the last of the sauce, and sat down at the table with them. Jannequin rose to kneel but Bernier motioned him to sit again. “Eat, drink, you are my guests. Tomorrow we have a lot of work to do. Did you get the oud?”
“I did, lord. Is that how you say its name? Can’t say I like that. Sounds like you’re choking.”
“Call it anything you like. Can you play it?”
“I’ve found the way of it, I think. But I don’t play it very well yet.” The Senhor leaned closer to him. His pale eyes glinted in the torchlight. “You know where I got it?”
“I… do, lord.” The Senhor caught the hesitation.
“Master Jannequin,” he said, “it’s only a musical instrument. Who cares where it came from, as long as it adds to the music? It has a sweet sound, don’t you think? “
Jannequin shrugged. “Yes, but I’ll have to tone down the other instruments so it can be heard.”
“Of course. We’ll practice together, tomorrow morning. And I will need your advice about my songs.” He stood. “It’s late. Sleep tight.” Jannequin noticed that he favored his left leg as he walked away.
Another servant led them across to the keep, the massive stone tower which loomed up higher than the bailey wall, the castle’s last redoubt if the wall was breached. The heavy iron-braced door on the ground floor was open, and gave onto the barrel-vaulted undercroft. By the servant’s torchlight they passed rows of casks and stacks of boxes and hempen bags holding the castle’s emergency supplies, skirted the low wall of the well dug in one corner of the chamber, and climbed two levels up on broad-runged ladders almost as wide as stairs.
They came into a dormitory laid with orderly ranks of low pallets indeed strung newly tight with twisted leather cords and covered with clean blankets, obviously a barracks for the Senhor’s household men-at-arms in time of siege. The instruments in their cases had been placed carefully in a corner, and Jannequin, easing himself under his blanket, felt again that he had fallen dreamily into some tale of Lancelot or Tristan. The other musicians fell asleep quickly, well-fed, half drunk, cleaner and sweeter-smelling than they’d ever been in their lives. None of them were used to sleeping alone. Even in the palaces and castles of the greatest troubadour nobles, minstrels usually slept on the straw or rushes strewn on the floor of the hall, with the other servants, sprawled around the banked fire in the great hearth. It was smelly and noisy, but neighborly, and Jannequin often learned a lot about his noble patrons from the gossip that circulated freely. Still, he was happy to be clean and lifted above the vermin that always infested the rushes from the moment they were laid down, everything from fleas to hefty mice. He sighed with pleasure and started to drift off. But Gilles was restive on the pallet next to his. “Why do I have to sleep here?” he complained. “Why did they take my clothes away? Are we prisoners?”
“Come on, old friend, you think prisoners get treated this well? Enjoy this while it lasts,” Jannequin said, “The Senhor likes music, and we’re here to play.”
“I want my own clothes back.”
“You’ll get them back in the morning, and they’ll smell a lot better.” He reached across and squeezed the old piper’s hand. “Go to sleep, Gilles. Dream of music.”