Siege Perilous Read online

  That, to Dietrich, Heermeister of the Livonian Order, was sloppy and undisciplined, and brought shame to those who would honorably protect the Holy Church. He could hardly blame the local heathens for their stubborn failure to submit. There was almost something admirable to them.

  Now he approached the largest cottage, where he knew Hugue and the archbishop would be having their weekly discussion. There was never anything new to say. When he’d first arrived, he’d had to argue to be allowed to attend these strategy meetings. Within three weeks he realized they were just an excuse for the two men to get drunk together, as there was absolutely nothing to talk about. Winter was setting in; supplies were running low. These very pressing problems were attended to at other meetings.

  Tonight, however, as he nodded to the guard and crossed the threshold, he heard lively conversation. He hoped there was some news that would break the soporific impasse of the siege. As his eyes adjusted to the smoky light, he saw the archbishop’s tall form pacing in stiff agitation.

  “What do you mean he disappeared?” His Eminence demanded.

  Hugue shrugged his broad, rumpled shoulders. “I was questioning him. He refused to give me a satisfactory answer, but he was quiet and well-mannered. And then he simply walked out of the building.” He spoke in a tone that suggested he was repeating the story for at least the third time.

  “And you sent nobody after him?”

  Hugue took a husky breath. “As I told you, I sent three scouts after him. They couldn’t find him. I do not think he’s a threat. He’s only one man, and we have his horse. He would have to be quite desperate to abandon his horse.”

  “Can I help you?” asked Dietrich, bowing his head to the archbishop and making no sign of respect at all to the Seneschal.

  “There was a spy in the camp, and this fool let him get away,” said the archbishop gruffly.

  “He was not a spy,” the impatient Hugue said as patiently as he could. “Why would a spy deliver himself to the leader of the army? He learned nothing from me or anyone else he spoke to, so if he was a spy, he was a lousy one.” His voice changed pitch; he was running through a list he had already recited. Dietrich wondered how long this meeting had been going on for, and how often they had repeated themselves. “He claimed he was here on orders of the king. He satisfied me that he was not a Cathar, and he was certainly a knight, although I didn’t recognize the insignia. He voluntarily left his horse with our grooms and was gracious to every individual who spoke to him.”

  “Did he identify himself?” asked Dietrich.

  “He called himself Percival,” said the Seneschal. “His order had some long name in Latin referring to the Holy Virgin.”

  Dietrich took a breath and then clenched his mouth shut. In the name of the Father, he thought, they are here, too. What do they want?

  “Was it Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae?” he asked, as calmly as he could manage. “Was there a flower on his surcoat?”

  Hugue blinked. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know him?”

  “I know his brotherhood,” Dietrich said, in a tight voice. God was rewarding him for his loyalty. The Lord has brought us together that I may have my vengeance, he thought hungrily. Whoever this knight was, Dietrich would shame and kill him, just as the knight’s brethren had tried—but failed—to shame and kill Dietrich and his brothers in Hünern. Aloud he said only, “They are not Cathars, but they are most definitely heretics. I assure you, he was not sent by the King of France.”

  “Fool,” growled the archbishop, and reached out in a swiping gesture toward Hugue, who ignored him. “We had one of Satan’s own in our midst and you let him escape!”

  “If I may suggest calm, Your Grace,” said Dietrich, trying to mask a strange, pleasurable thrill. “My men and I are very familiar with his order. If you would give us the run of the camp to find him, I am confident we can extract from him a satisfactory answer regarding his presence here.”

  The two leaders exchanged looks. “It’ll give him something to do,” Hugue said briskly. Dietrich ignored the insult inherent in the comment.

  “You’d better hope he succeeds,” the archbishop retorted.

  Dietrich, at his tent, settled onto his camp-stool and called for a quill and vellum. “Greetings to His Holiness Innocent IV from your humble servant Dietrich of the Livonian Order,” he began. “Your Holiness, I write merely to alert you to an interesting and unexpected development in the army camp below Montségur.”

  It was easy to walk out of a camp at dusk when nobody suspected you, or was truly on guard for mischief, or really even wanted to be there.

  On approaching the general’s cottage earlier, Percival had noted the direction where the forest was the densest. That would be where sympathizers slipped up steep, overgrown paths and somehow made their way up to the little building in the sky.

  And so, after exiting the hut with composure, Percival strode into the darkness as if he knew exactly where he was going. It was the kind of casual confidence that rendered him unremarkable in the chilly, grumpy hum of a camp settling down to sleep. Within twenty paces he was invisible.

  He had left his horse behind. That troubled him, although he was sure the groom would recognize its worth and treat it well. He had pulled the saddlebag off when he’d dismounted and so had some basic supplies with him, although he doubted he would ever see the saddle again. But it did not matter, really. He sensed he was very near to what called him.

  He continued to walk as if he knew exactly where he was going. Every hundred steps or so, a soldier’s voice would call out in French, asking him to identify himself. With an accent that was clearly not local, he would reply that he was here on a special mission. Nobody challenged him. Nobody was interested.

  Raphael, now—Raphael would have made sure to get as much information as possible before casually destroying any future relationship with the leader of the army. The only thing Percival knew for sure was that he did not know very much. Somehow he sensed it did not matter; whatever he needed would present itself to him. Without hesitation he strode on into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 7:

  A RETURN TO COURT

  “How much of this shit must I ingest?” Frederick demanded, his voice echoing in the vastness of the stone hall. Tapestries hung from the walls, and also on large wooden upright frames, to create the illusion of separate chambers within the large expanse. “There is little enough natural sunlight for reading this time of year; must I waste good beeswax candles on such literary flatulence?”

  “You are the leader of the Holy Roman Empire,” said Léna dryly. “You need not do anything at my request. I offer you these as divertissements only.”

  Frederick squinted in annoyance at the scroll he had been reading. “French dog-shit,” he said. He rolled the scroll up tightly and tossed it to the pale-haired youth standing guard at the door. The young man caught it one-handed, unrolled it slightly, and stared at the first few lines. “All yours, my little polyglot,” Frederick said indulgently. “Improve your French.”

  “Yes, the original trouvere was French,” Léna said, immediately offering the emperor a much thicker scroll from off a small table. “This variant is German. If it strains your eyes to read, a minnesinger will perform it for you during supper. He is tuning his instrument across the avenue, even as we speak.”

  Frederick’s brows rose with dismay at the weight of the scroll. He cracked open the seal and unrolled the vellum a palm’s width. “Wolfram von Eschenbach,” he read aloud. “Parzifal.” He blinked. “I knew this fellow!” He sat up a little taller. “This Wolfram fellow. He was a Bavarian—in my court in Germany when I was first crowned. He must be dead by now. He had an appalling obsession with puns. The crudest form of humor.” He frowned, almost resentfully, at the scroll. “This must be ten times as long as the Chretien de Troyes poem.”

  “Not quite,” she said sympathetically
. “And at least this one is complete, which de Troyes’ is not.”

  “I trust you, Léna, and I do like to indulge you when I can, but I do not have the time to read one hundred thousand lines of bad verse—”

  “It’s twenty-four thousand, eight hundred and ten lines,” she corrected placidly.

  He tossed the scroll to the marble floor, where it landed with a dull thud. “I have an empire to keep intact, Mongols to fight off, and a pope to bring to heel. And I want to go hawking with my young friend there. Tell me the point of this exercise. I read the first one. It’s all invented nonsense.”

  “Of course it is,” Léna said. “Deliberately so. A specious distraction. But it’s important that you recognize the invented nonsense, so that you do not mistake it for the real thing, should you encounter the real thing.”

  “Why such fuss about a supposedly ancient, so-called sacred chalice that nobody had even fucking heard of half a century ago?”

  “It was spoken of for centuries before it was written of. You are not so naïve as to think Chretien de Troyes was inventing the Grail. He was merely inventing a story about it. A misleading one, of course, but that’s how these things are done. As you know.”

  “It was a cup from my own table,” Frederick protested. “It was nothing but a gleam in my silversmith’s eyes when De Troyes wrote that dreck.”

  The blonde youth standing watch startled at this, broke from his position and turned to them. “Your Majesty?” he began. “Do you…”

  But Léna gave him a warning head-shake. And a pageboy came running from the broad entrance on the far side of the cavernous room, sailing past all the tapestry-partitions as a cacophony of animal noises, especially the screeching of birds, rose up to the plastered ceiling. The boy, inured to this, kept running until he reached the stately and well-appointed farthest partition. “Raphael of Acre presents him to Your Imperial Majesty,” he said, and bowed.

  The Emperor smiled broadly. “Send him back to us. He may remain armed.”

  The pageboy’s face registered some surprise at this. “He has a woman with him, Your Majesty.”

  Frederick grinned indulgently. “Does he, now? She may remain armed, too, then.”

  The boy bowed and darted back, this time raising a smaller uproar from the menagerie. The young guard at the door pursed his lips together and returned to his position of attention.

  Frederick stood up from his chair, stretched and yawned. “They don’t like to be bothered after their feeding time,” he said of the menagerie, “nor do I, just before my own. But for Raphael”—and here he raised his voice deliberately to be heard over the partitions—“for Raphael, my home is always welcoming.”

  The several footsteps on the marble floor grew slightly swifter. The young guard stood aside; the pageboy and two other figures entered into the space: a dark-haired man with a somberly intelligent, Levantine face, and a broad-shouldered, fair-haired woman who looked as if she could easily beat him in a brawl. The man wore a tunic emblazoned with a rose and was armed with sword, dagger, and knife at his belt. The woman, in a tunic too long for a man but not long enough to be a woman’s gown, had not only sword, dagger, and knife, but also two different kind of bows slung over her shoulder.

  “Good Lord,” said Frederick, upon seeing her.

  “Your Majesty,” said Raphael warmly, and sank immediately onto one knee, reaching toward the royal person to kiss his hand. Frederick almost didn’t offer it, then grinned and reached toward Raphael—but only to smack him gently on the cheek.

  “Get up, my friend,” he said. “Embrace me.”

  Raphael looked up, then stood and clapped his arms around Frederick. Frederick grunted happily. “You are a sight for sore eyes,” he said, almost accusingly. “Next time, show yourself before my eyes are quite this sore.”

  “You do appear to be squinting more than I recall, Your Majesty, but perhaps that is due to the dimness of the room,” said Raphael of Acre with a diplomatic smile.

  “I’m squinting because the glare of all that silver at your temples is blinding me. You did not have that before. Nor did you have such a lovely bodyguard.” He looked at Vera for one heartbeat.

  “This is Vera of Kiev,” said Raphael, gesturing her toward the emperor. “She is of the order of Shield-Maidens, and my comrade in arms.”

  Frederick leered happily. “In arms, eh?”

  “In combat,” Raphael said, abruptly humorless.

  Frederick and Vera sized each other up a moment. He held out his hand, waist-level, ring up, for her to kiss. She studied it a moment. Then without kneeling or bending over, she reached out for it, brusquely pulled it up to her mouth, kissed it, and released it.

  “You have many animals,” she said.

  Frederick decided to like her. “I do,” he said. “This is my traveling menagerie. I keep them with me whenever possible, and since I am settled here in Cremona for a while, and they add a lot of body heat, I have decided they will share this ridiculous so-called palace with me over the winter. That tall one in the middle is called a giraffe. Do you enjoy hawking?”

  The expression on her face suggested she did not.

  “Never mind,” said Frederick. “I’ll take Raphael and Ferenc, and you may stay here with Léna and hopefully find something to gossip about. This is Léna.” He gestured to her with a small smile but no further introduction.

  Léna and Raphael nodded with careful politeness to each other across the lantern-lit space. Vera took several steps closer to Léna, staring at her long, uncovered hair. “You are a Binder,” she announced.

  Léna smiled, unruffled. “That is generally not a comment one makes in public,” she said graciously.

  “We are not in public,” Vera observed. “I recognize the knotted strands in your hair. I have known another Binder, younger and smaller than you.”

  Before the young man at the entrance could react, Léna held out a hand toward him and said quietly, “She doesn’t mean your Binder, Ferenc.”

  “Well,” said Frederick, clapping his hands together. “It’s damn lovely to see you. Shall we go across to supper? There is a smaller hall in the building beside this one. My steward and butler have taken it over so that we don’t have to move the animals every mealtime. I believe Léna has arranged some very boring entertainment for you, a dreadful poem in German. I apologize. I shall have the steward arrange bedding across the way. One bed?”

  “Two,” said Vera.

  “My sympathies,” said Frederick to Raphael.

  Neither of the new arrivals looked at each other. Raphael glanced at the ground.

  “Take them across,” Frederick ordered Léna casually. “I want to check on the gyrfalcon’s wing and then I will join you. If you were serious about the minnesinger, have him start as soon as possible so I miss most of the recitation.”

  Léna acquiesced with her expression only.

  “Normally I wouldn’t ask her to perform a steward’s job,” said Frederick in a conspiring voice. “It’s only because you’re here, Raphael. I’m showing off that I can make beautiful women do my bidding.”

  “I never thought otherwise, Your Majesty,” said Raphael, with an apologetic and amused glance toward Léna. Léna looked bored.

  “Oh for the love of Mary, stop Your-Majestying me. That’s an order. Go on, freshen up and get yourselves some nourishment. I’ll join you soon.”

  The trio headed toward the partition, and again the young guard stood aside. “Raphael,” said Frederick suddenly, in a very different tone. The trio paused before disappearing behind the tapestry. “Have you heard there is a new pope?”

  “Yes. He’s taken the name Innocent,” said Raphael. “News reached us on our way here.”

  “Do you know it’s my old chess-partner Sinibaldo?”

  “Fieschi?” said Raphael, barely hiding alarm.

  Fr
ederick nodded.

  “Good luck to you,” said Raphael.

  “And to you,” said Frederick. “My spies tell me he has a close relationship with the Livonian order. As I recall, your order is not cordial with them. I thought you might want to know.”

  “Is that why you’ve summoned me here?” asked Raphael. “You might have simply sent a message to Petraathen.”

  “No,” said Frederick, “there’s more. We’ll talk about it at dinner. Regardless, I wanted to see your ugly mug again. Thank you for bringing it.”

  Raphael smiled tiredly. “It’s always a pleasure to see Your Majest…ic head of red hair, Frederick.”

  “Before I sign this, let me be sure I understand it correctly,” said His Holiness Innocent IV, reviewing several haphazard piles of vellum stacked before him on the marble table. “The Count of Toulouse was excommunicated for refusing to adequately persecute the Cathars. And now, because he is excommunicate, he cannot join the army that is persecuting the Cathars, because it will not receive into its company an excommunicated leader.”

  Cardinal Bonaventura, standing to the left side of the table, nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  “Which means he can’t persecute the Cathars.”

  “It is ironic, Your Holiness.”

  “It’s worse than ironic, it’s counterproductive,” said His Holiness impatiently. “He’s the overlord there. His family have been Cathar sympathizers for generations. I’m sure he’s supporting them covertly, but none of the faithful can call him to account because none of the faithful can talk to him, because he’s an excommunicate!” Nearly snarling, he muttered, “There’s only one way to hold the little snake accountable.”

  He dipped the quill into a pot of ink, blotted it once on a scrap of vellum by the pot, and signed his name to the one pristine parchment that lay before him. He gestured, and the cardinal heated some sealing wax over the candle. As it melted to a resinous glow, he moved it over the bottom of the parchment and let it drip onto the surface. Innocent immediately pressed his signet ring into the warm wax. “There,” he said, in the resonant tone of an indulgent, loving father. “We have forgiven our son Raimondo of Toulouse, and we bring him back into the fold.” He crossed himself, kissed his fingers, and pressed them briefly onto the seal. Then he pushed the parchment over the pile toward Bonaventura. “See that this is sent to Toulouse as fast as possible so the Count can help to persecute heretics with the rest of those tiresome souls.”