Siege Perilous Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 by FOREWORLD LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477817599

  ISBN-10: 147781759X

  Cover design by: Kerrie Robertson

  Illustrated by: Nekro

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013949128

  To the spirits of Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach.

  CONTENTS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  1241 VETURNÆTUR

  CHAPTER 1: CAPTURE

  CHAPTER 2: ARRIVAL

  1243 HAVERFEST

  CHAPTER 3: THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

  CHAPTER 4: THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN

  CHAPTER 5: THE KNIGHT’S ARRIVAL

  CHAPTER 6: ENTER THE OTHER KNIGHT

  CHAPTER 7: A RETURN TO COURT

  CHAPTER 8: PARZIVAL

  CHAPTER 9: THE KNIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN

  CHAPTER 10: A SEEKER REACHES SANCTUARY

  CHAPTER 11: DEPARTURE

  CHAPTER 12: THE ANGEL IN THE WINDOW

  CHAPTER 13: THE BIRTH OF A RUMOR

  CHAPTER 14: MARE NOSTRUM

  CHAPTER 15: THE WEARY SHEPHERD

  CHAPTER 16: REUNION

  CHAPTER 17: THE PERFECT KNIGHT

  CHAPTER 18: FAMILIAR FACES

  CHAPTER 19: HAPPY DAY

  CHAPTER 20: ECCO-LA

  CHAPTER 21: AT THE ROC DE LA TOR

  CHAPTER 22: INFINITA PECUNIA

  CHAPTER 23: TREBUCHET

  CHAPTER 24: OCYHROE DEFLECTS

  CHAPTER 25: FATHER SINIBALDO

  CHAPTER 26: ON ST. AGNES’ DAY

  CHAPTER 27: THE BATTLE FOR THE BARBICAN

  CHAPTER 28: APRÈS-SIEGE

  CHAPTER 29: THE REVELATION OF THE CUP

  CHAPTER 30: AN END

  CHAPTER 31: GRIEF

  CHAPTER 32: A TEMPORARY TRUCE

  CHAPTER 33: INFORMING HUGUE

  CHAPTER 34: BACK TO THE BARBICAN

  CHAPTER 35: SURRENDER

  CHAPTER 36: THE CONSEQUENCES

  CHAPTER 37: A CHALLENGE

  CHAPTER 38: OFFERING TERMS

  CHAPTER 39: THE FOOL’S GUARD

  CHAPTER 40: CROSS PURPOSES

  CHAPTER 41: RECKONINGS

  CHAPTER 42: DEPARTURES

  1244 MAY DAY

  EPILOGUE: THE BINDING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Foreworld Saga

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Ocyrhoe: an orphan of Rome

  Ferenc: a young Magyar hunter

  Percival: a Shield-Brethren knight initiate

  Raphael: a Shield-Brethren knight initiate

  Vera: a Shield-Maiden, once of Kiev

  Frederick II: the Holy Roman Emperor

  Léna: a Binder

  Innocent IV: Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, born Sinibaldo Fieschi

  Romano Bonaventura: a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church

  Dietrich von Grüningen: the Heermeister of the Livonian Order

  Ferrer: a scout of Montségur

  Artal: a scout of Montségur

  Peire-Roger: the ruling lord of Montségur

  Raimon de Perelha: the titular lord of Montségur

  Bishop Bertran en Marti: a Cathar priest

  Rixenda: a candlemaker, elder of Montségur

  Milos: a captain of the night watch

  Otz: a soldier of Montségur

  Savis: a soldier of Montségur

  Hugue de Arcis: the lord of Carcassonne

  Pierre Amelii: the Archbishop of Narbonne

  Vidal: a soldier of Toulouse

  1241

  VETURNæTUR

  CHAPTER 1:

  CAPTURE

  Ocyrhoe was startled awake to the cold morning air by something very sharp poking her face. She sucked her cheeks in and glanced up, scowling.

  “If you move, you die,” said the young man at the other end of the spear. He looked strappy. Probably a well-fed serf by the quality of his boots, which were close to her face. His vaporous breath was backlit by the rising sun. His arms were trembling; either he was unaccountably frightened of her, or his muscles were fatigued from the weight of the weapon.

  “How long have you been standing there?” she asked, without uncurling. “Been passing the time, have you, waiting for me to wake up?”

  “Do you hear her, Ferrer?” he said to an older fellow behind him, similarly dressed. If the fellow had been holding a knife, or threatening with his fist, she’d know how to land him on his arse despite her small size. But she was not used to threats by spear, so she decided to wait the moment out. He clearly had no idea how to use the weapon.

  “Yes, Artal,” said Ferrer as he moved closer, almost absently pushed the spear aside before turning his direction to Ocyrhoe. “You speak in the dialect of Rome. I’ve heard that before.” It was a condemnation.

  “I’m a native of that city,” she answered, still curled around her satchel, glancing up. “I never left its walls until a few months past. Is it a fatal offense in these parts to be from Rome?”

  “You’re a spy,” said Artal. “We’re taking you to Toulouse, where the Count will pay a great sum for your capture.”

  “Sit up,” said Ferrer. He seemed civil. The younger Artal, she thought, was rather beastly. She uncurled carefully and sat up, pulling the wool blanket around her narrow shoulders for warmth. Her tunic and leggings were too thin for this weather; her breath, too, was vaporous. This was the coldest morning she had waked to yet.

  “For whom am I spying?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  “The Pope,” said Artal. Ferrer, to his credit, winced at that.

  Ocyrhoe laughed bitterly. “I am most assuredly not spying for the Pope. The Pope is dead. May I stand?”

  They both took a cautious step back in unison, and Artal rested the makeshift spear over his shoulder. Ocyrhoe was stiff from sleeping on the ground; the cold earth had chilled her from below despite the wool cloak, so she moved slowly, working her fingers and shoulders to warm her joints.

  She glanced around the cypress copse where she had slept, wondering what had given her away. She’d suffocated the ashes from the fire with dirt. She was shielded from the nearest road by trees. The mare, despite the tether, must have grazed out into the broad field. In these huge open tracts of wheat fields, you could see a horse from half a mile away. She should have stuck to the roads that bisected the vineyards.

  “You are spying for the College of Cardinals,” said Ferrer decisively. “There is no sensible reason for a Roman citizen to be in the mountains of Toulouse, alone, this time of year.”

  “That’s true, no sensible reason,” Ocyrhoe said. “But it is not because I am a spy. The Cardinals are a nest of vipers, and the most powerful man among them would like to see me dead.”

  Stop talking, she thought. The abrupt awakening had throw
n her. And she was not used to human company. Best not to speak at all.

  “That is a horse only a well-positioned spy could possibly afford,” Artal pointed out.

  “Is it? If you look at the saddle-blanket,” she said, “you will notice it bears the insignia of His Majesty Frederick Hohenstaufen. Do you think the College of Cardinals outfits its spies with horses from the stables of the Holy Roman Emperor? Although,” she added, mostly to herself, “that would be an excellent cover.”

  Artal handed Ferrer the spear—so clumsily and casually, Ocryhoe could have grabbed it from them if she’d had the confidence to use it. The younger man walked irritably to the log on which Ocyrhoe had set the saddle and blanket the night before. The mare, tethered, raised her head and moved away from him, ears set back and eyes disapproving. Ocyrhoe sent the horse the message to stay calm. It snorted, relaxed, looked away.

  “There is something very strange about all this,” Artal declared.

  You have no idea, thought the girl, but this time kept her tongue in check.

  “We are apprehending you,” Ferrer informed her, in a tone more courteous than Artal’s.

  “Are you?” Ocyrhoe replied, sardonically.

  She considered her situation strategically.

  She had avoided populated areas most of the time, learning slowly and ineptly how to survive outside the walls of Rome. She had spent her first week as a fugitive in a state of panic, even though the imperial grooms had filled her saddlebags with food and water-skins and coins. When the food ran out, she’d invented a routine: she would tether the mare someplace outside a large town—of which there were very few, and certainly no cities—dart into the market with a few coins to buy provisions, and then dart back out again. She could never have explained how a filthy urchin could honestly come by a mount of that magnificence.

  When she’d seen the walls of Toulouse rising up from a distance, she was comforted by the sight: it was enormous, almost as large as Rome. A raggedy youngster leading a fine horse through the streets was less of an oddity within a city than in a mere town; she easily convinced the proprietor of a large stable in Toulouse that she and the horse were the only survivors of an Imperial riding party heading this way; she’d given him most of the rest of her coins as an advance against the reward he was sure to receive once His Imperial Majesty learned how kind he had been to the little imperial page girl.

  That had worked for several weeks, and she had surprised herself with her quick grasp of Occitan. But she had abandoned Toulouse because she found herself increasingly terrified that someone should find out about the cup.

  She’d heard rumors the Emperor was moving his court to a place called Cremona, and she determined to find it, to beg relief from her burden. Growing unaccountably disoriented, she’d left the city walls behind her and headed not back east as she’d intended, but almost due south, into this mountainous terrain. Winter was now upon her, and she knew she could not survive on her own in the wilderness.

  Maybe it was better these clumsy men were taking her captive…at least they would take her somewhere sheltered. She could easily prove she wasn’t a spy once she got there.

  She hoped.

  “All right, then,” said Ocyrhoe. “I’m yours. Where are we going?”

  “The Count’s—” began Artal.

  “The Count has enough to contend with, and he’s too far away,” said Ferrer. “We shall take her directly up to Montségur.”

  “What’s that?” asked Ocyrhoe.

  “The horse can’t make that trek,” Artal protested.

  Ferrer shrugged. “We’ll keep the horse,” he said. “That will be our reward for warning the Good Ones about this Catholic spy.”

  CHAPTER 2:

  ARRIVAL

  They walked for hours without conversation, as the beautiful broad fields began to roll and swell into foothills. There were vineyards, and then fields, and then groves of trees she thought she recognized as olive, and then more fields, some with windmills. Occasionally plumes of smoke nestling together above a rise revealed a village nearby, but they never headed toward one. It was cold, but the sky was an incredible blue and she knew that she eventually would be indoors.

  Ocyrhoe had attempted to be civil at first, partly out of boredom and partly as a tactical maneuver. She wanted her captors to hand her over to their superiors with good report of her. But her first bland attempt—“So where are we going?”—received a stony, silent glare from Artal. Her next foray into interlocution—“Are the two of you kinsmen?”—was simply ignored. She resigned herself to silence and walked.

  They were headed toward a mountain range that had been in sight all the way from Toulouse. By midday, she feared their destination might be on the other side—a concern neither man would quell, for neither would answer any of her questions. But finally there was a smell of woodsmoke, and they turned off the broad, beaten road onto an oxcart-path to a small but bustling village with a windmill. The village, situated at the foot of a steep mountain, had a shallow moat and low earthen berm as additional protection; colorful blankets and banners with images sewn onto them had been flung over the berm to welcome travelers coming from the main road, an invitation to the hamlet’s merchant attractions. She saw banners for a blacksmith, a tailor, a brewer, a baker—the smell of warm bread, late in the day though it was for baking, wafted by—and her stomach growled. The air was loud with tradesmen haggling and children calling to each other playfully. Oh, how badly she wanted to be back in society.

  The peak towering above the village rose steeply out of the cluster of foothills, extravagantly toward Heaven; it did not seem climbable, yet there was a stone building at the top, almost too small to see. Surely they could not be headed up there.

  They stopped outside the village.

  “Is this our destination, then?” she asked. The question evaporated into the dry bright air, unanswered.

  Ferrer led her horse through the gate in the low berm to an outlying stable where he haggled briefly with the stable owner, then left the horse and came out again. Ocyrhoe glared at him.

  “That was my horse,” she said.

  “’Twas Emperor Frederick’s, you said. He’s not likely to come after it. Let’s go.” It was the only thing either of them had said to her for hours.

  They continued on past the village, right toward the gorse-covered slope as if they would encounter a hidden door where soil met limestone. After staring at the mountain a moment, Ocyrhoe realized that there was actually a path steeply zigzagging up it through the brush. Small figures were walking both to and from the speck of a building at the top.

  But she and her captors did not take this path; instead they veered hard to the right, as if they would scale the steeper and undomesticated southern slope. She was alarmed at the prospect. “Are we climbing up there? What’s up there?” She felt mildly ridiculous for continuing to talk, as she had over the past months when trying to make conversation with the horse. No response, except a brief gesture from Ferrer toward their destination.

  As insubstantial as a cobweb, a smaller trail worked its way through bushes and grass and rocks almost invisibly across the mountainside. For some reason they were taking this indirect and steeper route. She guessed her captors wanted her to marvel at how remote and challenging a destination they were headed for. It was probably supposed to fill her with dread. She defied them. “Oh, good, we’ll have the sun on us for the trek,” she said.

  Silence.

  “Are you afraid I’ll bewitch you if we have a conversation?” she asked.

  “We’ve got nothing to say to Roman spies,” Artal huffed. “We’ll not pollute our ears with your lies.”

  “I didn’t realize ‘Where are we going?’ was a lie,” said Ocyrhoe.

  “Shut up and climb,” said Artal.

  With twigs tugging at their woebegone wool wraps—they were al
l three equally ill-kempt—they began a frightful ascent up the narrow footpath. Ocyrhoe kept her eyes on the path, occasionally glancing up at Ferrer’s back. She was aware that to their right, the view must be growing magnificent and broad, but she was too afraid of a misstep to look. Their way was treacherously steep, terrifying in its sheer cliff-drops, the path doubling back on hairpin turns over and again for what seemed like hours. Limestone pebbles, roots, and slick dead leaves colluded against sure footing. As they trudged closer and upward to the eastern extreme, their going grew so steep that they were grasping on to branches and limestone bulges with their hands, tugging themselves up as much as climbing. In a final effort that was almost vertical, they crested the eastern end of the narrow mountaintop, collapsing onto their knees, gulping for breath, skin chilled from the wind yet lungs burning from exertion. Finally Ocyrhoe dared to look around.

  She had to clutch Ferrer’s arm. They were as high up as a pair of griffon vultures on the prowl, and the wind was not only cold but felt thin. It did not nourish her lungs as it should have. The view around them described almost a full circle, all of it breathtaking: farm-filled valleys and wooded mountains, many with higher peaks than this. It felt as if they were in the center of an orb filled with frigid air, its walls suffused with the grey-greens and browns of late autumn. Only to the west was the vista blocked, by the remainder of the mountain rise. Ocryhoe was too dizzy and disoriented to appreciate the view. She was no longer sure this was better than being left to her own in the lowland wilderness for the winter.

  “What are we to do up here?” she asked, her cockiness evaporated.

  “You’ll see in a moment,” said Ferrer.

  A squat, stone watch-tower rose up from a crag here, and Ferrer called out a password to a disinterested sentry within. The sentry—about Artal’s age—stuck his head out the door. He looked at Ocyrhoe, then at the men. “Why’d you come up this way?” he asked. “Much easier to take the path from the village.”

  “We wanted to give this one some time to prepare herself,” said Artal.

  “For what?” asked Ocyrhoe.