All Things Are Lights

by Robert J. Shea

Note: This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. You are free to distribute and modify this work as long as you do so without commercial gain, share the results under this same license, and attribute the original work to Robert J. Shea.

"How much jousting have you done?"

"A little," replied the young troubadour.

"A little!" the Templar said ironically. "In tournaments all over Europe, Count Amalric has bested hundreds of knights. Many times he has killed men. Of course, it is against the rules. But he is a master at making it look like an accident." He looked at Roland with an almost fatherly kindness. "Indeed, Messire, the best advice I could give you would be not to enter the tournament at all."

Roland laughed. "Such cautious advice from a Templar?"

"We fight for God, Messire. Have you as great a motive?"

"Yes, I do," said Roland, seeing Nicolette's eyes shining in the darkness before him. "I fight for love."

Creative Commons License

This work is released under a Cretive Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You are free to copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works of this work. You must attribute the work to the original author, Robert J. Shea. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder, Michael E. Shea (mike@mikeshea.net).

A full description of this license can be found at the end of this work.

Folio V from Illuminated Manuscript of King Rene's "LeCueur d'A-mour Esptis" with permission from the National Library, Vienna, Austria.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: May 1986

Acknowledgments

Many people helped me with the writing of this book in a great many different ways. I would especially like to express my gratitude to Jeanne Bernkopf, Bernadette Bosky, Frances C. Bremseth, Gerald Bremseth, Ric Erickson, Christine Hayes, Dave Hickey, Dr. Joseph R. Kraft, Mary Kaye Kraft, Neal Rest, Michael Erik Shea, Morrison Swift, Robert Anton Wilson, and Al Zuckerman.

I

ROLAND NARROWED HIS EYES AND STARED UPWARD INTO THE DARKNESS, across the top of Mont Segur toward the Cathar fortress. Standing on a high walkway of planks behind the palisade of the crusaders' small wooden fort, he heard faraway voices and saw torches moving on the Cathar rampart.

The two men on watch with him that night, a sergeant from Champagne and a young man-at-arms from Brittany, were talking in low tones about the women to be had far below, at the foot of the mountain. They seemed not to see the activity about the Cathar stronghold on the upper peak of the mountaintop opposite their own fort. But Roland, knowing Diane was in the besieged fortress, could not take his eyes from it.

He knew he had to act soon. Each day the crusaders grew stronger and the Cathars weaker. Once the Cathar stronghold fell, the crusaders would slaughter all within, including Diane. The sergeant, chuckling, was offering his young companion a wineskin. The Breton never received it.

From behind the Cathar wall came the sound of a huge thump, as if a giant's fist had pounded Mont Segur. Roland recognized the sound, and fought panic as he thrust his arms out, trying to push the other two men toward the ladder. But there was no time for them to climb down to safety. The thump was the counter-weight of a stone-caster, and the whistling noise that followed fast upon it was the rock it had thrown.

A shape as big as a wine barrel blotted out the stars. The stone hit the parapet beside Roland, and the whole palisade shuddered. Roland caught a glimpse of the sergeant's horrified face and heard his scream as the boulder struck him, crushing him to the ground.

Roland and the young man-at-arms clung to the wooden wall, saving themselves from falling twenty feet to the yard below. Right beside them was the gaping hole in the palisade left by the stone.

Roland knew more stones would soon follow, and wanted desperately to jump for the ladder. But he forced himself to stand still long enough to see what was happening at the Cathar fortress. He watched the wide main gateway swing open. A blaze of red torchlight gleamed on helmets and spear-points -- fighting men were pouring out on the run. He waited a moment, counting. A hundred or more.

His breathing quickened and his heart pounded. Here was the diversion he needed.

He shouted down into the darkness, adding his cry to the shouts of men waking up within the crusader fort. "To arms! To arms! The Cathars are attacking!"

Pushing the man-at-arms before him, he hurried down the ladder. The young Breton was blubbering.

"Alain. The damned Bougres got Alain."

"Mourn him later," Roland advised. "Just try to keep yourself alive. "

Roland hesitated at the foot of the steps. The stone had knocked the logs apart, leaving an opening at the base of the wall wide enough for a man to step through.

"I am going out there to get a better look at them," Roland said, sliding the two-handed sword, almost as long as his leg, out of its scabbard. "You report to the commander."

"God go with you, Sire Orlando," the man-at-arms said to him.

Roland hurried out into the darkness, alone with his excitement and fear.

The ground shook as a second Cathar boulder landed somewhere inside the fort. He heard splintering wood and shrieks of pain and terror. Then came another massive thump, this time a counterweight of the crusaders', sending a huge stone screaming overhead to answer the heretic missiles. Behind him rose the clamor of the French knights struggling into hauberks, buckling on swords, shouting names of their patron saints and their crusader war cry, "God wills it!"

A cruel God, if He wills this, Roland thought.

The Cathars had to cross a rock-strewn ridge, barely wide enough for two men abreast, that connected their stronghold on the main peak of Mont Segur to the lower peak, where the crusaders had their hastily built siege fort. If any Cathars had spied Roland coming out, by the time they got to this spot, he would be hidden among the boulders farther down the slope. Having no intention of fighting the Cathars, he sheathed his sword. He took his sword belt off and buckled it across his shoulder and chest, so that sword and dagger hung down his back.

With the tips of his fingers Roland touched the red silk cross on the left breast of his black surcoat, wishing he could tear away the symbol he hated. But only by joining the crusaders had he been able to get here. And this night he would bring Diane out safely, or he would die.

He stood in the darkness breathing deeply, gathering himself for the effort. Despite his chain mail and his helmet, he felt vulnerable, frightened.

Crouching, he slipped away to the left. Beyond the narrow rim of the ridge, the slope fell steeply. A misstep would send him hurtling to the rocks below. He made his way down carefully, painstakingly, over the large boulders for long minutes until he arrived at a narrow ledge about thirty feet below the top of the ridge. He took cover behind a row of charred huts where Cathar hermits had dwelt before the siege began. This whole mountain stank of burnt wood. As he began to work his way around to the other peak, from behind him issued shouts in the dialect of Languedoc: the Cathars, raising their war cries. They must have reached the crusader fort. How wonderful if they managed to drive the crusaders off the mountaintop!

The sharp rocks jabbed and bruised Roland's feet through the thin leather of his boot soles. He wore as little mail as he dared. As it was, the work of clambering around a peak in the Pyrenees weighed down by his fifty-pound shirt of steel mesh was bound to exhaust him soon. His best protection, he hoped, was the black cloak that would hide his movements from the men of either side.

The battle cries of northern crusaders and Languedoc Cathars were now so mingled that Roland could not tell one from the other. Swords boomed on wooden shields and rang on steel helmets. Screams pierced the night, some fading into the darkness below as men plunged off the mountaintop to their deaths.

But the clamor of battle diminished as Roland on his ledge crossed to the north side. The limestone wall of the fortress glowed faintly under the stars, rising above Roland like the hull of a ship. Like the Ark atop Mount Ararat, he thought. Only this ark could not save those who sought refuge in her. Against the pale background of the wall a sloping boulder stuck out, huge and black. Roland's father, who had visited this place years ago, had written him saying, "The top of the great stone is only ten feet below the top of the parapet, and an agile man can make it over the wall there. You should be able to do it, if you have not let the wine and women of France ruin your body ere now."

Roland could make out cracks and crevices in the century-old wall where he might dig in with fingers and toes. Still, it would be a far more fearsome climb than his father had made it sound. Taking a running start, Roland scrambled up the huge rock. Atop the boulder, he threw himself flat against the wall and reached up high, finding a fissure that afforded him a grip. Then he felt about with his right toe until it slipped into a crack between stones. Maybe now he would have the leverage to push himself upward. His limbs ached from clinging to the wall, but he could only inch his way up. He dared not look over his shoulder. Behind and below him, he knew, was black, empty space. Right hand up, right foot, left hand up, left foot, he crawled upward until at last the palm of his hand touched the blessed flatness of the top. He let out the breath he hadn't even been aware he was holding. He raised himself up a little further and slid both arms over the wall and hauled himself to lie flat along the top.

Now at last he could let himself look down into the chasm. Hundreds of fires flickered like stars in the crusaders' main camp at the base of the mountain. The dots of brightness wavered before his eyes. Dizziness swept over him. Fright made his heart thud like a stone-caster, and he gripped the wall under him so hard that his fingernails broke. He had to use all his remaining strength to force himself up to a kneeling position. He made no effort to conceal himself.

He heard at once a shrill cry of alarm from the darkness within the wall. A woman's voice. He could just barely see a wooden platform about four feet below. He dropped to it and raised his empty hands as three dark figures approached.

"I am one man, not the crusader army, Madame," he called. "I come in amity."

He heard a murmur of women's voices and strained to look about him, but the only light came from a vertical slit in a stone building some distance away. A shift in the breeze brought an animal stench that assaulted him. How these people have suffered, Roland thought, overwhelmed with pity even as the smell made him almost ill. Under siege for nearly a year, the Cathars could spare no water for bathing.

"May I come down?" Roland called to the huddled figures he could faintly descry in the darkness below.

"Drop your weapons to us and we will let you live a bit longer, at least," one of the women called.

Roland unbuckled and dangled the heavy weapons over the side of the platform. A slender figure stepped out of the shadows and caught the longsword's scabbard. Roland found a ladder and moved gingerly down it until his feet met flat paving stones. He turned and stood with his back to the wall, facing a row of low wooden buildings a few feet away.

Three gaunt women gathered around him. Two brought the points of their spears within inches of his face. Another aimed a crossbow at him. A twitch of her finger and that bolt would pierce him through as if his hauberk were no more than a cotton shirt. More danger here than clinging by his fingernails on the face of the mountain.

He stood very still, towering over the women, staring down at them. They looked aged, probably far beyond their years. Their eyes glittered with hate.

The crossbow woman spoke. "If you are a friend, why are you not out there fighting beside our men? Why are you wearing the sign of a crusader?" She hissed the last word.

"There is someone here whom I have come to rescue."

"Rescue? Nonsense," another said contemptuously. "We are going to die very soon now. Any among us who hoped for escape gave it up months ago. Death is our escape - from the power of the Evil One."

"Still, I want to try." Inwardly he reproached himself. He'd imagined they would welcome him like a hero. He should have anticipated how they would feel.

"Liar!" the second woman spat. "Spy!" Her spear point was almost at his right eye. He had to call on all his strength of will to keep from flinching back. Were all his pains to reach Diane going to end, absurdly, here?

"How can we know that you are telling the truth?" said the woman with the crossbow.

"Look within yourself," Roland said, keeping his voice calm, though inside he was in turmoil. "All things that are, are lights. The light shines in each man and each woman."

He noticed the spear points wavering a little, and a deep gratitude flowed from him to Diane. She had long ago taught him those sayings.

"Satan himself can quote the inspired word," the first woman said. "What do you know of the true meaning of what you are saying?"

Roland shrugged. "I know it expresses one of the deepest teachings of your faith."

"Is it not also your faith, then?" asked the woman. "Are you not one of us??

"If I were a liar and a spy as you think, I would claim to be one of you. But since I am an honest man and a friend, I tell you I was raised as a Catholic. I am Roland de Vency, born here in Languedoc. You may have heard of my father, Arnaut de Vency."

"De Vency? The Sire Arnaut? I remember him. A Catholic, but as fierce a fighter against the crusaders as any of our own men." The woman lowered her crossbow.

Roland expelled a long, relieved breath. "My father loved Languedoc," he said. "So do I. The crusaders are our enemies, too. And I am here because I love a woman here."

"Let us take him to the perfecti, Corba," said the second woman. "They shall decide. But, Sire de Vency, if you make a single move that puts us in doubt of you, we will run you through."

They walked through an alley between darkened wooden buildings. The suffocating odor and an eerie silence told Roland that behind the shut doorways people were listening, waiting.

He saw no guard at the entrance to the stone keep. Doubtless every able man had joined the attack on the crusaders. Roland's escorts leaned their weapons beside a tall double door and pulled it open. As he stepped within, he blinked. Only a few candles lit the room, but his eyes had gotten used to the night's darkness.

The keep of Mont Segur, he knew, was a most sacred place of the Cathar church. Yet, as Roland looked around the large room, he could see no adornments anywhere, save for white candles in black wrought-iron candelabra. As a place of religion it seemed strangely bare. He was used to churches resplendent with brightly painted statues. Yet the plainness spoke of humility and peace.

The room was crowded with men and women, intermingled, standing with heads bowed. Some prayed aloud, some silently. All were bareheaded and wore black robes. Roland was awestruck. He had seen Cathar perfecti many times before, but never so many in one place. His parents, though they were Catholics, had taught him to admire the holy ones of the other religion as saints, almost angels, because of their heroic virtue and simplicity of life. The spectacle of so many of these good men and women gathered together was overwhelming.

Even though the room was full of people, the smell of unbathed bodies was fainter here. Roland did not doubt that the perfecti shared the hardships of all within this fortress, but their austerity seemed to have purified their flesh.

Roland saw beyond them, at the far end, an ancient, white-haired man who sat in a plain wooden chair on a stone dais. Roland knew he must be their spiritual leader, Bishop Bertran d'en Marti, sometimes called the Pope of the Cathar church.

Diane would not be here, Roland thought. She probably would be out there in the wooden building with the credentes, those men and women who had not taken holy vows and who were seeing to the defense of the stronghold. The perfecti, Roland knew, never bore arms.

A young man came over, his black robe swirling around a body that seemed no thicker than a lance pole. The woman called Corba told him about Roland's climbing over the wall. The perfectus stared at the cross on Roland's chest.

Roland sensed his revulsion. "Forgive me for offending you. I had to wear this to get through to you." He dug his ragged fingernails in under the red silk and tore away the cross. The sound of ripping cloth in the quiet room made heads turn. Roland dropped the strips of silk to the floor.

"Who is that?" said Bertran d'en Marti in a voice that was soft yet carried across the room. "Does he bring news?"

Roland strode across the room before anyone could stop him and knelt at Bishop Bertran's sandaled feet. He reached for the old man's hand. It was as light and small as a bird's wing, and Roland's large fingers held it with care as he pressed his lips to the shiny knuckles. When he was growing up, Roland had often heard stories of Bishop Bertran, especially how, years ago, he had debated and won against the famous Catholic preacher Saint Dominic. The bishop must be over ninety, Roland thought. His face was skeletal and wreathed by wisps of white hair. His dark brown eyes glowed with an inner illumination.

"I wish you had not treated the cross with such scorn, young man," Bishop Bertran said in a voice that was like the rustling of parchment. "Our greatest failing has been disrespect for the religion of our opponents. We cannot build a sound church on hatred. Who are you, my son?"

"Your Holiness, I am Roland de Vency. I am a troubadour and a knight. I have also been a faidit, an exile from this land. My parents, my sister, and I fled with a price on our heads. Now I have come back to Languedoc."

The bishop's penetrating eyes held Roland's "You are dark and have a Roman face, like our southern people. But you are tall and blue-eyed like the men of the north. I sense in you a mixture, a union of north and south, of Frank and Gaul. A tormented union, even as this land is tortured by war between northern and southern Frenchmen. You are a sorrowful man ? you wear somber colors, for a troubadour. You have trouble living with yourself, my son. You do not know who you are."

Roland's chest ached at this reminder of the secret shame of his birth. And he felt fear as well, at the power of this mind that could so easily penetrate his heart.

"Doubtless you are named for the ancient hero Roland, whom The Song of Roland tells us died fighting Saracens in these very mountains," the bishop went on. "And the name, perhaps, has inspired you to perilous deeds. Why have you come to this place, Roland de Vency?"

"Your Holiness, I seek the woman I love, Diane de Combret."

A buzzing murmur came from behind Roland, and the bishop's eyes widened.

"Diane is of your faith, Your Holiness, and I was raised a Catholic, but before I fled into exile we loved each other and were betrothed. The war tore us apart. I took a new name and came back to look for her, but it was as if she had vanished. Then I learned that she is here, and pretended to join the crusaders. I entered the camp of my enemies so that I could rescue her from them." He spread his arms wide. "If I could save all here, I would. But I am only one knight. If all the gallant warriors who defend this place cannot defeat your enemies, can I? But perhaps I can save this one woman's life, which is precious to me above all others."

Bishop Bertran gazed kindly and sadly at him. "Diane. She is here, my son. She has heard all of your brave speech." He gestured with a frail hand.

Roland felt himself starting to tremble. Diane, here in this room? Unsteadily he rose from his knees and turned.

He saw her before him, tall, pale in a long black robe. The candlelight suddenly seemed to grow brighter. The subtle flush in her cheeks, her long shining hair, her huge eyes - Diane had appeared, and color was reborn in the world.

"Roland, Roland," she said. "How did you get here? Roland, I am so happy to see you."

The sound of her voice came to him like the most beautiful of songs played on a well-seasoned vielle. He could not speak. He was stunned, yet more fully conscious than he had ever been.

Diane was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks. She reached out to embrace him.

Then she checked herself. With an obvious effort, she pulled her arms down to her sides and stepped back, her eyes still fixed on his but now full of misery.

He fell to his knees. "Diane, I love you." The crowd of perfecti was watching him, but he didn't care.

"It is no longer possible" - she shook her head - "for you to speak so."

He knelt there, desolate. His mind had finally grasped what had already penetrated his heart.

He knew now what he had suspected from her presence here. She had taken the consolamentum. She was a perfecta. She could no longer know human love.

His heart weighted his chest like a lump of iron. Pain spread from that crushing center to fill his body and limbs with anguish.

He stood up. "Your people's stone-caster just missed me a while ago. I wish it had not."

"Oh, Roland, if only I could share my joy with you," she said softly. "No man could have won me away from you. Every day I heard your voice singing in my heart. But even your songs could not rival the sweetness of God's own music."

Diane wore no ornament, but her long red-gold hair, hanging in ringlets to her shoulders, adorned her more gloriously than any jewelry might have. Her eyes, neither blue nor brown, were a mixture, a catlike green. Her face had always been fine-boned; now months of fasting had put shadows in her cheeks that made her look like an angel on a cathedral pillar.

"I must bow to what you have done, Diane," he said. "But if you will not come with me as my beloved, come as a perfecta. I can smuggle you through the crusader lines. Let me save your life."

Before Diane could answer, the door crashed open. The shrieks and wails of women assailed his ears. From a distance came the shouts of men in combat. The stone floor under Roland's feet vibrated, and he heard the crashing of rock on wood.

A group of women staggered in bearing a wounded man wrapped in a blue cloak. Roland stepped aside as the women laid their burden gently before the bishop. The cloak fell away, and Roland saw that a sword had cleft the man's shoulder. His arm hung by a thread. The women tried to staunch the flow of blood by pressing cloths against the wound.

"Your Holiness," the dying man gasped. "I beg the consolamentum."

"You shall be saved, Arnald my son, and return to the One Light." The bishop got up from his chair with surprising agility, then knelt. He pressed his hand to the dying man's forehead and whispered words over him.

Roland felt himself moved by the simplicity of the ritual. Yet this was the very sacrament, he thought with bitterness, that had taken Diane from him.

"Arnald de Lantar," Diane whispered to Roland. "One of our best."

Roland felt pity for the dying man. That could be me. I could take this man's place. I could join these people in their good fight. I could kill many a crusader, and joyfully.

But more good would I do if I saved this one lady.

When the bishop's soft words ceased, Arnald de Lantar spoke again through his pain. "I am sorry, Your Holiness. We have failed you. Bernart Roainh and Peire Ferrier... killed. Our men... many fell. Fell from the mountain as we retreated. Too many crusaders ... too strong." His eyes closed.

One of the women put her hand on his heart. Then, weeping, the women who had brought him in rose up and carried the body away.

Bishop Bertran turned to Diane with a sigh. "My child, do you wish to go with Sire Roland? I fear these are our final free moments."

"No, Your Holiness," Diane said firmly.

Roland felt himself slump in despair.

"Please, dear Bishop Bertran," she went on. "To leave here, to be safe, while my brethren are dying? It would destroy me. It would hurt me as much as if I were to commit the gravest of sins."

"How can it be a sin to want to live?" Roland pleaded.

"For us death is victory," said Diane, her green eyes shining.

"But if the life of anyone should be saved, there are many of more value than mine. Your talk of spiriting me through the crusader lines is only a frivolous troubadour fancy." She turned away as again the doors to the keep opened.

Roland stood alone, burning with shame and anger. More wounded were carried in and laid in rows on the floor. Calmly, lovingly, the black-robed perfecti, Diane among them, moved along the lines of fallen men. Bishop Bertran walked slowly past them, giving instructions. "Treat this wound at once," he said. "That man will be all right for a time." To those who appeared near death he gave the consolamentum and walked on. Any of the perfecti could have administered the Sacrament, but Roland sensed that it was a special joy for these dying men to receive it from the bishop's hands.

Watching Diane attend the wounded, Roland brooded. He had come all the way from Paris, risking his life over and over again for her, giving up all other women for her - including the beautiful Countess Nicolette. How could she scorn his effort? How could she dismiss his plan because a troubadour thought of it? Yes, he was a troubadour, a maker of songs, and proud of his art. She had loved his songs once.

How old had he been when Peire Cardenal came to Chateau Combret?

It had been August of the year after the eighth King Louis died and the ninth was crowned. That would make it one thousand two hundred twenty-seven. Seventeen years ago, so Roland was ten - two years younger than the new boy-king. Roland's family, in flight from the crusaders who had invaded Languedoc, had been guests of the de Combrets, a prosperous Cathar family, for many months. Their chateau was in Provence, east of Languedoc, where the crusade and the persecutions had not yet penetrated. A score or more people, the de Combrets and the de Vencys and their retainers and gentlefolk from the countryside around, sat at tables in the great hall. Dozens of candles lighted the hall for the occasion.

Diane usually sat beside Roland's sister, Fiorela, but tonight, for some reason, she had placed her chair next to Roland's. He was aware of a tingling excitement in his limbs.

It was partly anticipation of the songs of the great troubadour, Cardenal. But Roland knew these strange feelings had also to do with the slender girl, only nine years old, who sat beside him, her hair so red that it seemed afire.

"Will you sing for Peire Cardenal?" she asked him.

He felt as though a rock from a stone gun had gone right through him.

"Why would the greatest troubadour in the land want to hear me?" Roland shrank his skinny frame down behind the trestle table, as if someone had already called on him to play. "I am lucky just to be hearing him." The Combret jongleur, Guacelm, who had taught him the lute and promised to start him on the vielle had said Roland's was a gift from God. But how much could Guacelm know? He was only a jongleur, not a troubadour.

Roland worked as hard as he could under Guacelm, but he never admitted, even to his teacher, that sometimes, alone in the hills, singing to rocks and trees, he dreamed of being a troubadour. He saw himself commanding words and verses as kings commanded their barons, holding seigneurs and their ladies fascinated by the power of his voice, drawing intricate music from lute and lyre and gittern by the skill in his fingers. Sometimes he forgot he was the son of a hunted outlaw and imagined himself welcomed and honored everywhere.

"I think your music is lovely." Diane's green eyes held his. He loved Diane as much as he loved Fiorela. She was another sister to him, a sister whose fragile beauty inspired protectiveness. But more: when he looked at Diane he understood why men wanted to be knights.

His sister would grow up and marry and part from him. Diane need never part from him.

The servants had cleared away the bread and meats and were bringing around silver basins so that all could wash their hands after dinner.

The Sire Etienne de Combret asked Peire Cardenal, seated at his right at the high table, if he would favor them with a song. Cardenal took his place in the center of the hall. He was a stocky man with iron-gray hair and a battered nose that spread over his seamed face. He beckoned, and Guacelm came out and sat with a vielle between his knees. The hall fell silent, and Cardenal sang a lament for a lady who had died young. The sweet notes of his voice soared above Guacelm's bowed accompaniment, and when the song died away at last, Roland glanced at Diane and saw there were tears in her eyes.

The applause was vigorous, but Cardenal smiled and cleared his throat. "I get merrier as we go along," he said, and everyone laughed.

And he did. He sang songs of heroic deeds in battle, and comic songs. A servant placed a silver goblet set with jewels on the table within his reach and kept it refilled, Cardenal drinking deeply after each song. He began to sing sirventes about happenings of the day, about the rumor that the widowed Queen Mother of the present King of France had taken the Count of Champagne as a lover, about the Pope threatening to excommunicate Frederic, the Holy Roman Emperor, for failing to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. He sang a tenson with Guacelm, a debate on whether a man could truly love two women at once. Cardenal took the affirmative, and the applause of the de Combrets' guests declared him the winner. Much as he admired Cardenal, Roland, who shyly abstained from applauding either side, was sure that a man could love - truly love - only one woman. Roland's own father, he knew, had never loved anyone but his mother.

The wine affected Cardenal's singing not at all. If anything, it sweetened his baritone voice. He sang a duet with Diane's mother, Madame Maretta, who wrote poems of her own and had taught the forms of rhyme and meter to Roland.

Then Cardenal sang of love, songs which, Roland knew, were of his own making. He sang of love that lasted forever, love that defied human laws and even the commands of God, love that consumed men and women like a fire, love that blinded with its light.

Roland found his hand tightly gripping Diane's delicate fingers.

When Cardenal had sung his last song, the applause was muted, but only because all were so moved. Roland felt limp, drained. His hand, still holding Diane's, trembled. Reluctantly he released her, afraid someone might see, and tease him.

After a silence Sire Etienne pushed the jeweled goblet across the table toward Cardenal.

"Drink from this tonight and keep it with you always, Master Peire. A poor thing, compared to your music. But a remembrance of one of the most beautiful evenings of my life."

Cardenal bowed. "A handsome present, monseigneur."

What a power he has, Roland thought. He must have sung for hours, and everybody wishes he would go on for the rest of the night. I could never hold people spellbound like that. It is foolish of me to dabble in music.

The diners stirred. Sire Etienne, Sire Arnaut, and Cardenal stood talking at the table. Guacelm, the jongleur, joined them. And then Roland saw that Guacelm was pointing down the table at him. The terror came back, and he wanted to run out of the room.

Arnaut de Vency, his dark face creased in a smile, beckoned. Roland sat paralyzed.

"Go, Roland," Diane whispered. "You must go."

Dragging his feet, he went to where the men stood. Peire Cardenal fixed him with fierce eyes.

"I am told you are learning to sing and play, my lad. Are you any good at it?"

"Indifferent, Monseigneur," said Roland in a small voice.

"Do not 'Monseigneur' me, boy," Cardenal growled. "I am a baker's son, nothing more. What claim to respect I have is here and here." He touched his hand to his forehead and his throat.

"To me, that means a good deal more than gentle birth," said Arnaut de Vency. Embarrassed, Roland could not look at his father.

"Too many of our good troubadours spend their lives ? and lose their lives - fighting the so-called crusaders who have invaded Languedoc," said Cardenal. "There are but two or three practicing the art now. We need new blood. Let us hear what you can do, boy."

Roland's mother, Dame Adalys, joined the group. "Roland, sing a song of your own - the one about the pines."

Roland thought he would rather face a host of Frankish crusaders with drawn swords.

Sire Etienne called for silence, and everyone sat down to listen. Guacelm thrust the lute and a plectrum into Roland's hands, and his father gave him a gentle tug, starting him toward the center of the floor. He had to walk around the table. He passed Diane.

She squeezed his arm and whispered, "You will be wonderful!"

In a semi-trance he walked out into the center of the room, the lute big and heavy in his hands. With his head lifted as Cardenal had held himself moments ago, he stood briefly silent as he strove to collect his wits. He prayed he would remember all the words to his own song. He had sung it, mostly without audience, many times, but still he felt unsure. He let the melody begin rippling through his mind. Then, holding the plectrum tight between thumb and forefinger, he picked out the introductory notes.

He looked at Diane, her green eyes shining in the candlelight. He took a deep breath and began to sing. His fingers moved on the lute of their own accord. His soprano voice vibrated in his throat. He let his gaze sweep the room, but he sang for Diane alone.

"The trees on the mountains in summer are green But are stripped of their robes in the fall. When the snow shrouds the hills, Then the whole world seems dead, But the pines remain green through it all."

It was a short song, only three verses, and even as he sang them he felt he could hear with Cardenal's ears the echoes of other tunes, the trite lyrics. But when he thought he could not go on, he looked at Diane and felt better about his song.

The applause and cheers were louder and longer than he had expected. They are kind to me because am Arnaut's son, he told himself. He bowed deeply.

He left the lute and plectrum on the table. He was too embarrassed to face even Guacelm. People were starting to talk to one another again. Mercifully, his song was forgotten.

He hurried through a side door and up a spiral stair to a battlemented lookout tower two stories above the main hall. There he went out and breathed deeply of the cool air, scented of the sea whose shore was not far from Chateau de Combret. He leaned against the hard edge of a merlon.

The oak door creaked behind him. A broad figure appeared in the starlight.

"Well, what the devil did you rush off like that for, boy? Think yourself too good for us?"

Roland shrank inside. "I could never be as good as you, Master Peire. "

"To the devil with comparisons. I do not know how good I am, and neither do you. The thing is to know yourself good enough to be a troubadour."

"But how can I know that?"

Cardenal's face came close to Roland's, and Roland smelled the wine on his breath. "You know you are because I tell you, and it takes a troubadour to recognize another troubadour."

The stocky man clapped him on the shoulder. The heavy blow hurt, but it made him think of the moment when, at the touch of his seigneur's sword, a squire becomes a knight.

"I could be a troubadour?" Roland felt light-headed, as if he were floating above the balcony, drifting toward the stars.

Cardenal snorted. "Do not be so quickly overjoyed, boy. It is not an easy life. Singing for your supper, that is what it comes down to."

"Yes," said Roland in a small voice, wanting to disagree but afraid to.

"There is something more important to a troubadour than singing and playing," Cardenal went on.

"What is that?"

"Love. Even before he is a maker of songs, a troubadour is a man in love. You are too young to know love. But you will, and your love will be as vast as the ocean. Sometimes it will hurt worse than the torments of the damned. Love unlocks the deepest places of the heart. You need a lady, a goddess, to inspire you. Without her, you will be nothing."

Roland had heard countless love songs, had sung them himself. He had some sense of what it was that drew men and women to each other. But this talk of Cardenal's confused him. He said nothing.

"In love is the highest happiness known to man," Cardenal said. "And it is given to troubadours, of all men, to see deepest into this mystery whose laws have been in the keeping of women since time out of memory. Remember what I say, but think no more about it for now. Your father will tell you when you are ready."

Moments later, Roland wandered through the darkened great hall on his way to bed, his head a melee of thoughts, frightening and joyful. I must love always, he thought. Yes, I understand that much. A troubadour is a man in love.

He saw in his mind a girl-child with red hair and transparent skin looking at him and saying, "You will be wonderful!"

Yes, he thought. It is Diane. I may be too young, but I love her even now, and when we are older I will tell her. I will be her troubadour, and I will love her for all of my life.

But now Diane had taken herself from him, had chosen to become one with those who lived between this world and heaven. Her choice was the consolamentum, not the song of the troubadour. And as he watched her moving among the last of the wounded, he realized how much finer her goal was. He had no right to feel any claim upon her now.

His attention was draw to the bishop, who had finished his ministrations and returned to his chair. Spreading out his arms, he beckoned the men and women who were the flower of his church.

"My children, this battle we have lost tonight must be our last. The time for fighting has past, if ever there was such a time. Our people should never have taken up arms. It only provoked our enemies to greater violence. Now I intend to order our knights to surrender. "

From everywhere around him Roland heard sighs, groans, quiet weeping. But he heard no protest. They have accepted their fate, he thought. Perhaps they even welcome it.

With a sad smile Bishop Bertran looked about the hall. "Diane. Please come to me, my child."

She approached, lovely and stately, and Roland felt the breath stop in his throat. She bowed her head, her flame-red hair glowing.

"Diane," he said softly, "perhaps God has sent this brave man for a purpose. There are messages we must send to the outside world. We have hidden much of the wealth of our church, and word of the hiding place must be carried to our brethren who will survive us. You must carry it, Diane."

Diane opened her mouth to protest, but Bishop Bertran silenced her with a gentle wave of his hand. "You will also take with you our Holy Vessel and the ancient books that were brought to us from the East. Prepare to leave, my child."

Diane again bent her head. "Your will must prevail over mine, good bishop. But I envy you your martyrdom. And perhaps because I envy you I am not worthy of dying with you."

But Roland's heart gave a mighty leap. Diane would be coming with him.

II

DIANE'S HEART FELT LEADEN AS SHE PREPARED TO LEAVE. EACH FACE she looked at, she knew she was seeing for the last time. As if she were dying and they all were going to live on. Oh, why must I leave? Now, when all of you are about to put on the martyr's crown, how can you cast me out? I want to die with you. I do not want to go on, stumbling through this world alone.

For years these people had been her only family. When she was a child, her faith was preached and practiced openly all over the south of France. The crusade was already twenty years old then, but the perfecti still taught crowds of people in the streets of great cities like Toulouse and Beziers, still won converts away from the Church of Rome. From the lords and ladies in their castles to the peasants on the mountainsides, over half the people were Cathars. Now this year, one thousand two hundred forty-four, might come to be remembered as the year Catharism in France disappeared. From now on there would be nothing but a remnant in hiding, having to sneak about. No, she didn't want to live that way. She longed to throw herself down and beg Bishop Bertran once again to let her stay. But duty pressed down upon her like a mail shirt. It was burdensome, but it protected her from error. She quietly made ready.

Before long, Diane and Roland were standing on the northeast wall amid a group of perfecti. From a family that had taken refuge on Mont Segur had come a red and green costume for Diane, the tunic and hose of a well-to-do boy, an equerry. They had cut her hair short and tucked it under a cap topped with a long partridge feather. They had sewn the red cross back on Roland's black surcoat, and had made one for Diane's tunic from a gentlewoman's crimson scarf. A rope to form a sling was tied around her waist and another around her knees. Roland was similarly tied.

"I am as helpless as a baby," he whispered to her with that one-sided grin she remembered so well.

Tears welled up in her as she looked at the black-robed men and women here to bid her farewell. Dear Bishop Bertran reached up to her. She bent, made awkward by the ropes, and kissed the back of his hand, her tears falling on his white skin.

"I do not want to leave you. I want to die with you."

"Your death will come to you when it is time. May it be a happy one. Go with grace, my child."

Diane felt Roland reach out and squeeze her hand. His firm strength comforted her. But his touching her was against the rule by which she lived. A new anxiety chilled her. She was in Roland's care now. What would happen? What might being close to him do to her? She had loved him greatly. If he had not fled, become a faidit, she might never have taken the consolamentum. She had to be vigilant.

Roland tugged at the separate ropes that held them, making sure they were secure. Then he gave her a gentle push. She felt a choking fear. Whispering the Lord's Prayer to hold her terror at bay, she stepped off into the emptiness beyond the mountaintop. She could see no lights below to show her where the bottom was.

Her life was in the hands of those above holding the rope and slowly paying it out. The rope cut into her waist and thighs. To ease its bite she pulled her body upward with her hands, thankful for the deerskin gloves that would save her hands from being rubbed raw. Her arms ached. She was fortunate, she knew, that she carried very little extra weight. Only a small pack strapped to her back for the plain gold chalice called the Holy Vessel. A most sacred object, it could be borne only by one of the perfecti.

She looked up and, against the torchlight cast from above, saw Roland descending with his weapons and his mail shirt and the large pack holding two big books. He must be in much greater pain than she. And what a dreadful weight, too, for those above to hold, with their starvation-weakened arms. She prayed they would not drop him. She prayed, too, for God to give Roland and her the fortitude to bear whatever might befall them.

As she swung farther down she could barely see Roland. She tried to stay close to him and called softly to him from time to time. She felt better whenever she heard his deep voice answering.

Gradually she could discern, outlined by a diminishing field of stars, the black shapes of other peaks surrounding Mont Segur rising over their heads. She felt as if she were being lowered into the pit of Hell itself.

She pictured herself hanging in midair, hundreds of feet above the forest in the valley, and her stomach clenched. Her body swung slowly from side to side, and she hugged the creaking rope with desperate terror. Stabbing pains in her wrists and arms made her doubt she could cling to it much longer.

From above, she could still faintly hear crashing and clanging, screams and shouts. At any moment the crusaders might break through and find the perfecti holding these ropes, while Roland and she dangled helpless above the rocks.

She pictured her brethren being cut down by those huge longswords, their blood running out over the sacred stones. She sobbed aloud. She heard Roland say something in a low voice, some word of comfort, no doubt, but she could not make out the words.

She lost track of time. It seemed just minutes ago that she had said her goodbyes. And, equally, it seemed an eternity. Would they never reach bottom? The rope around her waist felt as if it might cut her in two.

Suddenly her feet kicked loose rocks and then struck solid ground. Her legs were too weak to hold her up, as if there were no blood in them, and she collapsed. But she didn't mind the bruising fall, so good did it feel to have the earth under her. Roland, who had also fallen to his hands and knees, crawled over and knelt beside her. She wanted him to hold her, but she was terrified of his arms.

Then she looked up and saw that the mountain peak wore a crown of flame. "Oh, dear God, no," she whispered. The fire arrows of the crusaders must have ignited the wooden buildings.

"We called it Mont Segur, the Safe Mountain," she said to Roland, gazing up at the fire. "We thought God would protect us up there. We should have remembered that God - the true God - does not rule this world. His Adversary does."

Unwillingly, she looked up again and saw that the flames had grown paler, and the sky beyond them was not black, but violet. A rose glow, not fire but the rising sun, appeared behind the tops of the pine-covered hills east of Mont Segur. Their long descent from the mountaintop, she realized, had taken from the middle of the night until dawn.

Under her thin silk tunic she trembled, partly from the cold. She rubbed her hands together to warm them, and when she blew on them her breath was a frosty cloud. Spring was still a few weeks away, but the people on the mountaintop would never see it.

With cramped fingers she began to undo the knots around her waist and knees. Roland helped her, and she quivered anew at his touch.

"Come away, Diane. Do not look up there anymore. We need your eyes on the path ahead."

She forced herself to stand. She looked at Roland and could see in the faint dawn light that he, too, looked exhausted. But she knew it would do them no good to stay still in this cold when they were soaked with sweat.

"You know this forest," he said. "The crusaders' camp lies beside the village at the base of the mountain. You must lead the way."

She sighed and gestured to him to follow her.

As they turned their backs on the heights from which they had just descended, the ropes came whistling down, coil upon coil. There was little chance that the crusaders would venture down here and come upon these ropes at the edge of the forest; they would never know anyone had escaped from Mont Segur. Gratitude welled up in her to the faithful ones above who had held those ropes till they were safely down.

She walked beside Roland into the deep pine forest. She glanced over at him. His face was darker than she remembered, and bonier. The nose seemed as sharp and thin as an ax blade. He had pushed his helmet back, and his thick black hair ringed his face. He turned and looked at her, and his vivid blue eyes, so startling in his dark face, sent a thrill through her. My God, she thought despairingly, help me. This is going to be so very hard.

"Why must we go to the crusader camp, Roland?"

"My tent and my jongleur are there. I really had to join their army, you see. It was the only way I could get up there." He gestured toward the mountain.

The thought of being among the crusaders filled her with dread. "Roland, I cannot."

"You will be safe there. No one would expect to find a Cathar in the midst of that army." His tone soured. "Especially not a perfecta. "

He will never understand what my faith means to me, she thought sadly.

They walked along in silence for a time. The air was filled with the fragrance of pines. Her lungs drank it in. She had almost forgotten, after nearly a year trapped in the fortress, the sweet smell of clean air. But that her lost people could not share in even this small pleasure only redoubled her pain.

She moved on, holding branches for Roland so they would not fly back in his face. She stepped nimbly over roots and rocks. Her body moved briskly, but her soul was heavy.

"You walk so surely," Roland said suddenly. "Like a deer. And going down the side of the mountain - few women could endure such an ordeal. When I last saw you, Diane, you were a delicate lady. Now you are a mountaineer."

His words made her feel a glow inside. "Among us there are no ladies. Women work the same as men. The holy work, too. Before the siege I was traveling all over Languedoc. I preached, Roland. I brought the Sacrament to people who needed it."

He stared at her in wonder. "How do your mother and father feel about the work you do now?"

She halted abruptly. Roland, startled, stopped just behind her. She turned to face him.

"I am sure they are very happy about me. They both died, you see, last year. The inquisitors made them wear the yellow cross of heretics and turned them out on the roads to beg. They were too old to survive the winter. But they had a good death. I reached them in time and gave them each the consolamentum."

"Oh, Diane!" He held his arms out to her.

She managed a backward step and a warning gesture, despite her grief.

He turned his back on her, his hands to his face. "Will you not let me comfort you?" he cried.

"It is all right." She felt choked all through. "It is all right. Let us walk on. "

She pushed on before him for at least an hour. Boughs slapped her face, and she slipped sometimes on patches of snow that remained in the cold, low places of the forest. Her leather boots were soaked through, and her toes were numb with cold. Just when she thought she could not take another step, she felt a tap on her shoulder. Roland, tired out, too, gestured toward a fallen tree trunk, and she sat down.

She took off her cap, wiped her forehead, and shook out what was left of her chopped-off hair. Her head felt strange and light. She shrugged out of her pack and set it on the ground with gentle reverence. Roland did the same.

She looked at him and saw a yearning in his eyes that frightened her. It reminded her of days when he and she were much younger. She remembered a mountain meadow and white poppies, the taste of his lips. And a poem he wrote for her:

?That which delights both woman and man Is praise to Him who made them.?

She was swept by a sudden wave of longing, and with it came the unbidden thought: If only I could be that girl of fifteen again.

The strength of her feelings shocked her. She had always been proud of her maturity, felt blessed that she had been able to grasp the deep truths of her faith and to turn her back on this world. In Roland's presence, was she succumbing again to illusion?

Surely I would be better off facing death on the mountain, she thought.

She laid her head on her folded arms and wondered what was happening to all those she loved on Mont Segur. Perhaps even now they were being tied to stakes for burning. She wanted to weep, but she reminded herself that those who died were fortunate. The body was like a clay vessel inside which a ray of pure light was trapped. Death was the breaking of the clay and the liberating of the light.

"Are you crying, dear one?" Roland said gently.

"For those who must die up there on the mountain," she said, with a catch in her voice. "And for myself, because I will not die with them."

She looked up at Roland as she said this and saw the look of exasperation on his face. It is true, he cannot understand, she thought sadly. Never. I must leave him as soon as I can.

"Why do you want so much to sacrifice yourself?"

It was hopeless. He believed God made his body, that it was precious. He was a troubadour - devoted to love expressed through the body. His years as a faidit seemed to have left him unchanged.

"I am not sacrificing myself at all, Roland. Everything I do is for myself. Death is only going back to the Light we came from. When I see the Light, as I do from time to time, I am as happy as anyone can be. Such happiness... you cannot imagine how great it is. "

"Greater than Love?"

She remembered how he had tried to instruct her in l'amour courtois, the religion of Love, before he and his family fled. If he had stayed, she wondered, what would I be now? How fortunate that I was left free to discover the Holy Light.

"Yes, the happiness I have found through my faith is greater than what you call Love. "

"I do not believe that." He shook his head angrily. "By calling yourself a perfecta you pretend you are not human."

"I know how very human I am, and that word is a burden for me - for all of us," she answered gravely. "We do not claim to be perfect, but we try to live as if we were free of all attachment to the material world. And if we fail to live so, there is no forgiveness for us, no second chance."

He closed his eyes in pain, then turned them on her again, burning. "I cannot believe that God wants people to live like statues - or bodiless spirits. This life you have chosen, what is it but fear and hiding, knowing one day those pigs will catch you and burn you alive? Diane, I will take you anywhere you want. You will be safe with me. I will take you away from this war, to Italy. It is beautiful in Italy. There are places there where the Inquisition has no power. You can live as you like. Think of the children we could have."

Despite herself, again she yearned to stretch out her arms to him. More memories came back to her - listening to him sing and play the vielle in her father's great hall, roaming the pine-scented countryside with him, their kisses by a mountain stream. She fought down the sweet wave of tenderness.

"Roland, no. Never. I have taken a vow never to touch a man except, if need be, to save his life, or his soul. "

His blue eyes stared at her, bright as the heart of a flame. If she kept looking into them, she feared, they would melt her. Her own soul was in peril.

"You made that vow not knowing that we would meet again. Be just to yourself."

"Even if I could change my mind, I would not want to." She put into her voice all the finality she could muster.

She saw his lips press together and his eyes grow moist.

She reached out to touch his shoulder, then drew back her hand before it came to rest.

"It is true I never thought I would see you again. Believe me, Roland, when I saw you standing there in the fortress I felt almost as much joy as in moments with the Light. The last I heard, you were in Avignon. Where have you been?"

"In Italy, in Sicily mostly." Roland's voice sounded as if he were dragging himself up out of a deep well of sadness. "The Inquisition was about to catch up with us at Avignon, so my mother and father and sister and I all journeyed on donkey back along the coast into Lombardy. From there we took ship to Palermo, where my father found work with Emperor Frederic."

A fond smile warmed Roland's sharp features. "The Emperor needs men who can read and write well, yet are not members of the clergy, to serve him in his endless quarrel with the Pope. So my father rose quickly in his service. He now holds high rank in the Imperia Chancery. He is very busy, but he finds time to write me many letters."

"I am glad for him," Diane said with feeling, though she thought again of her own father's death in a shepherd's hut. "What of your sister, dear Fiorela?"

"She married well, after I left them, to one of Frederic's noblemen, a Lorenzo Celino, knight of the Holy Roman Empire. My mother writes that he is a thoroughly virtuous man, which is rare for one of the Emperor's courtiers."

She had heard bad and good of Emperor Frederic - that he was dissolute, but that he allowed people to speak their minds.

"And you?" she asked with a smile. "Were you thoroughly virtuous while you were at the Emperor's court?"

He smiled back and shrugged. "I did what I like to do best. I had brought that dear old lute with me, the one I played before Peire Cardenal. I set myself to become a master troubadour. The Emperor has surrounded himself with some of the greatest poets and singers of our time, and I offered myself to them as a humble apprentice. They thought they could teach me something, and soon enough they had me performing my work before Frederic himself. I must have been a success, because after that I dined more often with the Emperor than my father did."

Diane remembered how many times Roland had sung to her alone, how his voice had seemed to draw her soul out of her body. So it was not love alone, she thought. If Emperor Frederic liked him, he really must be very good.

"Was it not hard for you," she said, "keeping up your skill while traveling from place to place?"

He shrugged. "Traveling is what troubadours do most. And wherever we stopped for any length of time, I made it my business to meet any other troubadour who might be in the district and to try to learn from him."

"And so at last the Emperor made you part of his court?"

Roland's face darkened. "He made use of me in other ways as well. Now that he rules southern Italy and Germany, he seeks to control northern Italy as well, and the Pope is determined to prevent him. I fought in the cities of Italy as one of the Emperor's Ghibellines in their battles against the Papal Guelphs. Frederic even knighted me himself. But even when I was in the thick of battle, lines of poetry were always springing into my mind. I would have been happier if I could have just written my music and sung it. The world would not let me do that. Any more than it will let you practice your faith."

"But surely you were better off at the Emperor's court than you are here. Why did you not stay there?"

"I love you," he said glumly.

Her heart wept for his pain.

"I love my country, too," he went on. "I dreamed constantly both of you and of Languedoc. I came back, and the first thing I did was look for you. But all my friends were dead or in exile, and people even told me that you were dead."

"Protecting me," she said. "The Inquisition is everywhere in the south of France. Picking the perfecti off one by one."

He nodded. "It was impossible even to find out whether you were alive, and sooner or later the inquisitors would have found out that Arnaut de Vency's son was back in Languedoc. So I moved up to Paris, where the inquisitors are not plying their trade as yet. And there I am known as Orlando of Perugia, an Italian knight. Trying to make my way as a troubadour. Then a letter came from my father. The Emperor had received an appeal for help from Mont Segur. It gave names of those trapped there. Your name was on the list. My father, who knows this country well, also wrote how I might get into the fortress. I joined the Albigensian Crusade for you. And now I have found you again, and lost you. All I have left are my songs."

He stood up suddenly. "If we meet any crusaders here in the forest they will question us, and it will be hard to think of good answers. We must get to the camp, and that will take us most of the day."

His voice was bleak, Diane thought, that of a man trying to hide his feelings, perhaps even from himself.

Diane, terrified of going into the midst of thousands of enemy soldiers, felt an urge to run from Roland and hide herself in the depths of the forest. But she steeled herself to remember: God is within me, and I need fear nothing.

Many hours later, as they walked onward through the valley in the deep shadow of late afternoon, Diane looked up at the peaks to the west of Mont Segur. They were jagged black silhouettes. Turning her eyes to the besieged mountain itself, she saw its top glowing golden in the light of the setting sun. Now Roland was leading the way, and they followed along the banks of a little mountain creek. The last time she had seen it, it had been clear as spring water. Now she was revolted by its brown color and the stench it gave off, like a town gutter.

She spied figures moving in the woods and froze.

"It is all right," said Roland. "That is just the camp of the rabble: the merchants and whores and thieves. They live on the army as fleas live on a dog."

Only partly reassured, she stooped and picked up some dirt and rubbed it over her face, roughening her skin to make it appear more like a man's. She insisted, too, on taking the heavy pack from Roland. It would seem odd for a knight to be burdened with anything other than his weapons.

Farther on, a lank-haired girl standing ankle-deep in the stream stared at Diane with glazed eyes. She thinks I am a man, Diane realized. The girl couldn't have been more than thirteen, but her belly bulged under her torn skirt. She pulled open her blouse to display pregnancy-swollen breasts in pathetic invitation. Diane turned away, unable to bear the sight. Life had crushed the child's spirit and left her little more than an animal. Could there be a worse crime than to get such a creature with child, forcing her to bring a baby into this suffering world? She heard a jingle and looked back at Roland. He had taken a silver denier from his belt, and tossed it to the girl.

After they had walked on, he said, "My mother might have been such a one as that if Arnaut de Vency had not rescued her. Carrying some crusader's get."

She heard the torment in his voice and pitied him. She knew the source of his pain. In the old days, when he had been courting her, he had confided that his natural father was not Arnaut de Vency but a crusader lord who had raped Adalys, Roland's mother, and left her pregnant. Hating his origin, Roland seemed at times to hate himself.

"Do not speak so of yourself, Roland," she said to him now. "All of us are born of shame, whether our parents are married or not."

Roland eyed her angrily. "And so that is why you perfecti despise human love. Sometimes I do not wonder that the Catholics persecute you."

She felt as if he had struck her.

She walked behind him in silence, apprehensive over the increasing noise in the distance: men's rough voices, the whinnying of horses, the clatter of steel. When, following him, she stepped out from the shelter of the trees, she stopped, her heart pounding with terror.

She was facing the power of the Evil One.

Before her rose a high wall of sharp-pointed logs. A forest of banners of silk and rich samite fluttered above and beyond it. Many of them bore blood-red crosses, some thin and long, some stout and square, some tipped with multiple points. Other banners displayed the arms of the nations and baronies that had joined together at the Pope's call for an Albigensian Crusade, to make war on Diane's religion.

Men in steel helmets wearing long coats of mail strode back and forth before the wooden wall or exercised huge war-horses covered in brightly colored silk coats. The palisade seemed to enclose leagues of rolling hills. On the hills, stretching as far as Diane could see, tents were massed - thousands of them, their pointed roofs clustered together on the hilltops, the biggest tents at the very top of the hills, the smaller ones of the poorer knights lower down.

Thick columns of smoke from cooking fires spiraled up through the clear mountain air, and Diane's stomach turned over as the odor of roasting sheep reached her. Forbidden by her vows to eat meat, she had come to loathe its smell.

The noise was terrifying now, thousands of voices echoing against the walls of the valley in a raucous, deafening clamor. How could she force herself to walk into that camp?

Roland led the way to the main gate, and she made herself follow. A sergeant with a long black mustache came forward to challenge them.

"I am Sire Orlando of Perugia," Roland said.

The sergeant touched his hand to his pointed helmet in deference to Roland's knighthood. "And this young man with you, Messire? He spoke in the Langue d' Oil, the harsh speech of the north.

"My equerry, of course," said Roland airily. "Guibert de Saint-Fleur. "

Diane gave the sergeant a perfunctory bow.

"Why did your seigneur allow you to leave camp?" asked the sentry. "Were you not told that Monseigneur the Count de Gobignon ordered everyone in the camp to stand to arms?" He studied Roland with narrowed eyes.

Diane's heart pounded against the wall of her chest. She prayed that the guard would not look too closely at her. Every-thing she feared about the crusaders was now embodied in this one mustachioed man.

"Why a general alert." Roland asked, his voice incredibly calm.

"Something is happening up on the mountain, Messire." The sergeant gestured to Mont Segur, towering above them. "Nobody knows what. We may be winning, or the Bougres may be counter-attacking."

Diane restrained an urge to wince. They are always making up names for us, she thought. Calling us Bougres - what an ugly sound it has! - because our faith came to us through Bulgaria; or Albigensians, because our first center in Languedoc was the city of Albi. As if to name us gives them power over us. They do not like what we call ourselves - Cathars - the purified ones.

"The Count himself has gone up there, but we have no news," the sentry went on. "It takes half a day to get up."

How well we know! Diane said to herself bitterly, overcome with weariness.

"This is the first I've heard of any of this." Roland smiled. "I was in a place where no heralds could reach me, visiting the daughter of a little local seigneur. She lost all her suitors in the war. Now she is past marrying age and hungers for a man. It was my duty to try to make her happy. Report me if you will. I will take my punishment. Honor forbids me to reveal her name."

How easily Roland lies, Diane thought. Would the sergeant believe him, or would he suddenly arrest them?

But the sergeant only grinned. "Your knightly pursuits are between you and your confessor, Messire. What is your man carrying in those packs?"

"Trinkets the lady pressed upon me." Roland again smiled. "One sometimes finds that unmarried ladies of uncertain age are very grateful."

Dear God, thought Diane, what will I do if he asks me to open the packs?

The sergeant laughed. "Well, it does me good to see our gallant knights prosper. It is no wonder the women hereabouts need real men. All those damned Bougres giving it to each other up the arse."

Diane felt her face flush hot with anger.

The guard stepped back and bowed Roland into the camp.

"Sorry," Roland said when they were beyond the man's hearing. "You are going to hear many a vile remark about your people."

Roland led her along a winding, muddy path through the tall, four-sided tents, each topped with a pointed pennon bearing the badge of the knight who dwelt in it. The tents were arranged helter-skelter, each knight's set up wherever it pleased him.

At the sound of chanting, Roland seized her arm and pulled her off the path.

Soon she saw a dozen priests of the Roman Church in red vestments carrying gilded crosses and silken banners. Young boys in black-and-white robes followed them down the path, ringing bells and swinging smoking, incense-filled thuribles. The robes of the priests looked hideously gaudy to Diane.

She felt overwhelmed with hatred. Priests such as these had instigated forty years of bloodshed in Languedoc. They believed they were serving God, but she was convinced they were doing the work of the Adversary. She listened to what they were singing, Salve Regina. They were praying for victory over her people with a hymn to the Virgin Mary. How could God have a material mother? Blasphemous!

She felt a tugging on her arm and saw that Roland had dropped to his knees in the mud. She resisted. She would never bend her knee to such priests. But if she refused she risked being found out. If only she'd been allowed to go openly to death as a Cathar! She swallowed hard, knelt, and made the sign of the cross.

After the procession passed on, she struggled to her feet, shouldered the two packs, and trudged beside Roland along the twisting path. But she was overcome with fear, convinced that every one of the thousands of men around her could see right through her disguise. Roland pointed out the different companies they passed: Normans, Bretons, knights from the Ile de France, England, Flanders, Germany. But she kept her eyes on the ground, not daring to look up at the cruel faces of the crusaders, and she stumbled along half a step behind Roland, terrified of being separated from him.

"Many of these men are second-generation crusaders," Roland said in a low voice, trying, she sensed, to distract her from her fear. "Their fathers came when the Pope first called for war, and their sons are still at it. Count Amalric de Gobignon is himself one."

"Who?" she managed to ask in a strangled voice.

"You look frightened to death. Try to walk more as if you belonged here. De Gobignon is the commander of this army. But look - here is where the knights from Italy and Aragon have pitched their tents. There are even some few knights of Languedoc camped hereabouts, who have made the crusader cause their own."

The sound of a strong voice singing interrupted Roland. The voice was mellow, and there was laughter in it. Even in her terror, it made Diane feel better.

She followed Roland through a circle of closely spaced tents and then saw an open area, a low hill covered with men seated on the trampled grass. Small fires burned against the February chill. All the men had their swords buckled on, their helmets by their sides.

Only a small part of this army was up on Mount Segur, she suddenly realized. The entire host was huge; this Count de Gobignon had not even begun to throw his men into the fight. It had always been hopeless.

Now she spied the singer, a short, stocky young man with curly blond hair. The golden wood of his lute gleamed in the late afternoon sun. He was standing before a plain black tent. Above its pointed roof a small black pennant flew, bearing a silver griffin pawing the air.

The song he sang was a rollicking one:

"The King of Cats cried, 'Where is that mouse? He has left no virgins in our land.' 'In the palace,' the Pussycat Princess cried, 'Sinning, like Onan, with his hand.' "

The crowd howled with glee, but their shouts renewed Diane's terror, and the heavy smell of wine sickened her.

Roland had stopped and stood at the edge of the crowd, watching the grinning jongleur.

Why are we staying here? she thought. Why don't we go on to some place where it is safe? Someone in the crowd handed the jongleur a wineskin, and he squirted a red stream into his throat. Then Diane saw his eyes flicker in their direction, first at Roland, then at her. The jongleur's face lost its gaiety and became apprehensive.

Diane hurried after Roland as he stepped forward. The men hastily got out of his way. Something about him frightens them, she thought. Perhaps his height, or the long black cape he wears. The men moved away to fires around the side of the hill as he strode through them.

The jongleur bowed to Roland. "I thought it would be a kindness to entertain these fellows, master, while we wait for news." He looked curiously at Diane.

"Did I ask for an explanation?" Roland snapped. "Come inside, quickly."

Diane followed Roland into the black tent. It was as stark within as without. Its main furnishing was a chest of reddish-brown wood studded with brass nails.

No Cathar, but Roland keeps himself as simply as we do, she thought.

Roland silently stretched out his hand, and the jongleur gave him the lute. Roland smiled at it, strumming it lightly with his long fingers and stroking its polished wood, before he wrapped it in its white silk cloth. Diane was unable to take her eyes off his hands. They were still as beautiful as she had remembered them.

The jongleur threw himself on his knees.

"Master! Thank God you made it back safely. I could not sleep for worrying about you. That is why I was out there singing for those louts, to take my mind off my fears." He glanced again at Diane.

Does he know who I am? Diane wondered. Should I fear him, or is he a friend?

Roland seized the young man's arms affectionately, drew him to his feet, and hugged him. "I am glad to see you again, Perrin. But why these fears for my welfare? Have you no faith in me?" Before the youth could answer, Roland turned to Diane.

"This is Perrin. He really is from Saint-Fleur. He sometimes accompanies me when I sing. Also acts as my equerry, and little help he is. Just now, for example, he should realize that we have been climbing down the mountain all night and walking all day, and that he should immediately spread out a blanket for you."

Perrin smiled tentatively at her. "Is this -"

"Yes, Perrin, this is the lady we were expecting, Madame Diane de Combret."

"Excellent disguise, Madame." Perrin smiled, quickly unfolding a blanket and patting it smooth for her. "Pray sit here. Also, please forgive me if my song offended you."

Roland laughed. "It is loyal of you to take the blame. I wrote the song, Diane."

She saw no shame in Roland's eyes. Bawdry amuses him, she thought. He is at home in this world and in his body.

"But how marvelous, master." Perrin was shaking his head. "You actually crossed the battle line, got into the Cathar stronghold, and whisked out your beloved. What a song this deed will make!"

Diane felt her cheeks burn at being called Roland's beloved, and immediately felt further shame in remembering how she had tried to belittle the same deed Perrin praised.

"If need be, you will lay down your life for hers, Perrin," said Roland. He was a head taller than Perrin, Diane noticed, and he stared gravely down into the jongleur's eyes. Roland is taller than everybody else in this world, she thought.

"Madame." Perrin bowed. "Let me tell you in all honesty that I do not hold with heresy. But I would die for this man, and he has risked death to bring you here. I shall not only die, I shall let my immortal soul be damned to help you, if I must."

Now she felt her body grow rigid with anger. Damnation in helping her? How dare he? Heresy, indeed! It is Rome that is rotten with error.

Without answering she took off her cap and laid it beside her on the chest. She combed her fingers through what was left of her hair. They had cut it so it fell just short of her shoulders, like a man's. She heard Perrin sigh and looked up to see him staring. She knew many men found her hair beautiful, but that no longer pleased her.

"I find such wild talk of damning souls troublesome," she said coolly.

Perrin blushed and turned away.

Roland stared at her angrily. "When a man lays his soul at your feet, do not be so quick to spurn it, Diane. He who would save his soul must lose it. That could be true for you, too."

Diane's face grew hot, and tears stung her eyelids. She felt ashamed. How could I speak rudely to these two, who are risking their lives for me? I am guilty of pride. I do not deserve to be called perfecta.

Roland turned away and held out his arms before Perrin, who helped him off with his surcoat and began to unlace the mail hauberk. The equerry hung the heavy coat of mail on a rack beside the chest. Roland gave a deep sigh and flexed his arms appreciatively in his quilted shirt.

She felt sudden panic. Is he going to take his shirt off, too? Then she wondered why that should frighten her. Diane had lived much in close quarters and seen many partly clad men. But she knew the reason for her fear. Somewhere inside her she felt a hunger to see his body. She stood up and turned from Roland in shame.

"I know how filled with sorrow and pain you must be, Diane," Roland said gently. "Yet you have not uttered a word of complaint. There is true steel in you. Forgive me for speaking harshly to you just now."

Diane was on the verge of tears. "There is nothing to forgive. I deserved it."

She started at a sudden commotion outside, men bellowing, cheering. Oh, dear God, it must be the worst.

"Sounds like a crier going through," Roland said. "Perrin?"

After the young jongleur had left, Roland said, "Diane, you can trust that man as you would your brother. Do not get a wrong notion of him because you heard him singing a coarse song. He has a conscience as strong as a war-horse."

"If you say I can trust him, Roland, I will trust him."

"Good. You will have to, because I am sending you with him up to Paris immediately. I have a small house outside the walls of the city, in the faubourgs, where you will be safe. The sooner you leave here, where they thirst for Cathar blood, the better. I must stay or be charged with desertion."

She saw pain in his eyes and knew that he did not want her to go.

Roland turned away from her, undid the laces of his shirt, and stripped it off. She commanded herself to turn away, but she could not. As he walked over to the rack and hung the shirt over his hauberk, her eyes devoured the wiry muscles that moved smoothly under his olive skin.

He turned to face her. A white scar ran like a streak of lightning from his right shoulder across his chest and belly. She gave a little gasp. He smiled at her, raising only the left corner of his mouth. That crooked smile she knew so well.

And loved.

Yes. Her body went cold and her heart fluttered. She tried to make herself picture the blackness of Hell, the abode of the Adversary. If I break my vow I am lost forever.

"Diane," he said softly.

"Please, Roland," she choked, "do not destroy me." She turned her back to him.

There was a long silence. She trembled, dreading his touch and longing for it.

"I have done nothing to you and I will do nothing," he said.

"I am weak," she said. "I did not know how weak I was. I am at your mercy."

She heard him move behind her, and tensed.

"Look at me, Diane."

Slowly she turned. He had thrown his cape over his shoulders. She saw suffering in every line of his face.

"I, too, have my code. As long as I love you, your will must be my will. If you believe that yielding to me would be weakness, that accepting my love would destroy you, I will not touch you. You must come to me with the whole of your will, or not at all."

Relief - and disappointment - swept through her. She sat down again on the chest.

Perrin pushed his way through the tent flap. "The news has just come down from the mountaintop." His eyes, full of pity, met Diane's. "The Cathars sent men out to parley this morning. Terms are agreed. Mont Segur has surrendered."

Diane put her head on her arms and began to whisper the Lord's Prayer. She had known when she left the mountaintop with Roland that this terrible news would come to her.

She felt Roland's comforting hand on her shoulder, and she left it there, for in her grief she desperately needed a human touch.

In her prayer she came to the phrase "Lead us not into temptation," and she whispered it fiercely to herself.

Then she wept, not only for the fall of Mont Segur, but in confusion and despair over her own plight.

III

ROLAND HELD HIS BODY STIFF AS HE FACED THE CATHAR FORTRESS and watched the tall wooden doors swing open. He saw now that the fire of that final night's battle, now fifteen days past, had left no structure standing but the stone keep. Inside the limestone walls stood forlorn, crude shelters made of tent cloths spread over blackened beams.

Cries of farewell and loud wailing came from the battlements above and from the open gateway, as the condemned emerged from the fortress, a long line of men and women in black. Roland's heartbeat broke its rhythm.

During the fifteen days of grace granted under the terms of surrender, he had waited in camp with the other crusaders. Now that Diane and Perrin were safely off on the road to Paris, he felt impelled to be with the Cathars in their final moments, to bear witness. He had volunteered, despite his dread, to help escort the prisoners to their execution. Those Cathars who joined the Catholic religion would now be allowed to leave in peace, though they would be forced to give everything they owned to the Church and wear the yellow crosses for the rest of their lives. But those who clung to their faith would die.

As the Cathars emerged, a man-at-arms directed each to stop at a table beside the doorway, where two Dominican friars sat with parchment scrolls. The friars recorded the name of each person about to die. This meticulous record-keeping, Roland thought, was one source of the Inquisition's power.

At the head of the procession was the Cathar bishop. Bertran d'en Marti's head glowed with the red-gold rays of the low afternoon sun striking his white hair, as if it were already enveloped in flames.

"Form around them," called the leader of Roland's party.

Roland reluctantly stepped forward with the other crusaders. His longsword and dagger swung heavy at his waist. He wore them only because, as a knight, he was expected to. He had left his helmet and mail shirt back in his tent. To escort these perfecti, he knew, he would need no weapons or armor. And they were all perfecti now, the believers who chose to stay and die having received the consolamentum.

Roland and the crusaders fell in beside the doomed people as they began to climb down the western face. At first Roland kept his eyes on the ground. He could not look at the Cathars. Walking with them, hurting for them, he felt ashamed that he was to live while his own countrymen died.

He heard little but the shuffling of hundreds of pairs of feet over rocks and gravel. He listened intently as now and then a voice was raised in prayer or a hymn.

When finally he did raise his eyes to look at the procession, he found himself staring with shock into eyes he recognized. They belonged to the woman called Corba, who had greeted him with a crossbow when he had scaled the wall. She was walking hand in hand with an elderly lady and a severely limping young girl whose long hair veiled her face. Images of Roland's own mother and sister rose before him, and tears burned his eyes.

Is this, he asked silently, the terrible enemy against whom Pope after Pope has called out all the knights of Christendom? Roland looked at the perfecti, fragile, black-robed, many of them women, many old men. Catharism, he thought, is really too gentle for this world.

As Roland watched the prisoners pick their way down the steep, rock-studded path descending from ledge to ledge, he admired the way they helped each other. A strong young man swept the lame girl up in his arms and carried her. That young man and that girl could have long lives ahead of them, Roland thought. Lord, why must they give their young bodies to be burned?

Roland looked downward toward the meadow that would soon hold all the perfecti. In the final days of the grace period, he had watched, sickened, as crusaders built a fence of logs about six feet high around the edge of the meadow. Within it they had heaped bundles of wood cut from the forest. Though the wood was still damp from winter, the bales of straw the soldiers had mixed with it and the pitch they had poured over it would, he thought bitterly, ensure a fine bonfire.

Roland stared down at the fighting men and clergy who had gathered around the fence and who thronged over the mountainside below it. They are happy, he told himself. Here is the fulfillment of their outpouring of toil, treasure, and blood, of nearly a year of siege.

A small group, arrayed in tunics and caps of blue, purple, and red, detached itself from the crowd and began to climb to meet the descending procession. The great seigneurs, thought Roland, the masters of these revels. For what they do this day may they all burn in Hell.

One of those approaching was taller than all who accompanied him. Though powerfully built, almost burly, he moved with ease up the precarious path. As Roland recognized the man, the hairs prickled on the back of his neck. His fingers twitched and his muscles contracted. Amalric, Count de Gobignon, head of this army, destroyer of Languedoc.

The knight in command of Roland's party hurried down the mountainside to meet the Count and bend the knee before him. Amalric stood with his thumbs hooked in his jeweled belt, and they exchanged a few words. The ash-blond hair that fell in waves to Amalric's shoulders was as beautiful as a woman's, but his long, straight nose and square jaw gave him a strong, manly look.

After de Gobignon had spoken, the knight he had addressed scrambled back up the slope. Amalric and his party followed at a leisurely pace.

Upon rejoining Roland's group, the officer raised a hand to halt the Cathar procession and its knightly escort. "Monseigneur the Count requires that the prisoners be roped together and their hands and feet bound."

Roland felt a surge of anger.

"Many of these people," he spoke out, "are old and ill. All are weak from lack of food. This is a steep path. How can they manage it if we bind them?"

He sensed the others of the escort party staring at him.

The officer did not look Roland in the eye. "Monseigneur requires that the prisoners be roped together and dragged the rest of the way."

Roland was stunned. He looked at the long line of Cathars patiently standing on the mountainside. His gaze met Bishop Bertran's. Was there a warning look in the old man's eye? No matter. He could not draw back now.

"What contemptible cruelty.'" he said loudly.

Amalric heard the protest and a hot wave of anger swept through him. How dare a lowly knight question an order of his! But he knew that a good leader does not act on impulse. Begin easily, he told himself. Find out what is happening here before you make a move in front of the whole army.

Continuing his climb up the slope, he inquired almost pleasantly, "Who is it who calls my command contemptible?"

Though he had reined in his anger, he felt the pleasant stirring in the blood he always enjoyed before combat, great or small.

Now he saw a knight step boldly out from among his fellows in the escort. Amalric sized him up. Tall. Might even be as tall as I. But stringy. I've got the weight on him. The face looked swarthy, and so thin that the large, curved beak of a nose seemed huge. Probably Spanish or Italian, perhaps even from around here.

Amalric prided himself on knowing as many of the men under his command as possible. This man, he was sure, he had never seen before. Whoever he was, he was no one of importance. That was obvious from the thinness of his black cape, his torn, dusty black tunic, and his unadorned belt and sword hilt. A thin, dark, purseless fellow, thought Amalric. A shadow of a knight. Amalric studied the knight's bearing. He held his head and shoulders proudly, daring to regard Amalric as if they were equals. And those eyes - they were surprising. Bright blue. As blue as my own, Amalric thought. They do not seem to belong in that brown face. It was as if another man looked out at Amalric through a mask. And the look in those blue eyes was more than defiance. Was there hatred in it?

"Who are you, Messire?" he said, keeping his voice low.

"I am Orlando of Perugia," answered the knight, firmly and calmly. He made no obeisance, addressing Amalric as an equal. Amalric felt his body turn hot. He had heard of the knight-troubadour Orlando. He cursed himself for having neglected to go over the rolls of his army of late. If he had known, he would have dealt with the man before today.

So this is the man who had the audacity to address a song to my wife.

Amalric smarted, recalling the letter he had received months ago in his tent at the base of Mont Segur, from the steward of his town house in Paris. At the beginning of winter, Amalric learned, a man had appeared outside the garden wall just before dawn, singing. When the guards went out to drive him off, he was gone. Later an equerry came to the house bearing a copy of the song for Countess Nicolette. But it fell into the hands of a steward loyal to Amalric, and the man quickly dispatched agents to follow the equerry. They tracked him to Orlando of Perugia, a troubadour newly arrived in Paris. The steward sent the song on to Amalric. It was titled "In Praise of Fair Nicolette," and Amalric had torn it to bits without reading it.

He had resolved to punish the man when the campaign was over. And now here was the same Orlando standing before him, ridiculing his orders.

"I do not give orders lightly, Orlando of Perugia. What is your objection to my command?"

"These people are going to their deaths peaceably. Why add needless suffering to their final moments?"

Amalric glanced at the long line of heretics extending from this spot on the slope almost to the gate of the fortress that had sheltered them. By Saint Dominic, how he loathed those Albigensians! They were like a flock of vultures, with their sharp faces and black robes. He could bear to look at them only because he knew he would shortly destroy them. He wished he could go among them swinging his sword like a harvester in a field of wheat, cutting down each and every man and woman himself. They could never be made to suffer enough to pay for the harm they had done to Christendom.

And to me. For it was creatures like these who killed my father.

"Mercy becomes a chivalrous knight, Sire Orlando. But these heretics deserve not your pity. Most of them are the so-called perfecti, the preachers and leaders who seduced countless others from the true faith. They are worse than murderers. They are killers of souls. To let them keep their dignity in death would give them a last opportunity to mislead their foolish followers. Do we want people from all over Languedoc to hear that these Bougres strolled down the mountain, laid themselves on the pyre, and serenely gave up their lives, just as if they were honest Christian martyrs? No, let it be said that they had to be dragged to their deaths and thrown upon the faggots."

"Men are often cruel in the heat of anger," said Orlando, his voice trembling as if he himself were possessed by fury. "But the foulest cruelty of all is deliberate, calculated cruelty."

"You have had your explanation, Messire Troubadour, which is more than you deserve. Why such tender concern for these imps of Satan?" Amalric grinned contemptuously. "What sort of man is it who prefers simpering with a lute to wielding a sword? I have heard somewhat of your sweet songs, but naught of your brave deeds. Perhaps you feel a kinship with that old Bougre sodomite there?" Amalric pointed to the black-robed ancient at the head of the line of Cathars, their so-called bishop.

As he intended, his words brought guffaws from the listening knights.

"What sort of man is it," Orlando said slowly and clearly, "who takes delight in tormenting helpless, unresisting old men, women, sick people, starving people? Perhaps I will write a song about the brave deed you do this day."

Amalric felt rage rise in him. As his lips drew back from his teeth, he raised his gauntleted fist and lunged at Orlando.

The troubadour seemed to step into the blow, yet it did little more than graze his cheek as he grabbed Amalric's wrist and elbow. A twist of his body, and the troubadour held Amalric's forearm locked tight.

Amalric felt a surge of panic, sensing that the bone was about to give. He was forced to drop to his knees.

Suddenly he felt himself released. The troubadour stepped quickly away from him.

He scrambled to his feet, staring into the astonished faces of a circle of knights. His own face burned with shame.

"Shall we kill him, Monseigneur?" Amalric's aide, Guy d'Etampes, called out.

"Do you need others to settle your quarrels for you?" the troubadour taunted.

"No one has ever spoken so of me," said Amalric. "Let it be trial by combat. I am commander of this army, and by the power vested in me I will mete out swift and final justice." He drew his dagger, a three-edged basilard of Toledo steel, ten inches from its triangular base to its needle point, and began to stalk the troubadour.

Slowly Amalric circled to the troubadour's left, expecting that the dark man would draw his own dagger with his right hand. Amalric moved on the rock-strewn slope so that he was on higher ground than the troubadour. He felt strength and agility flowing through him.

He saw a spot of sunlight, reflected from his basilard, dance on the troubadour's black cape. He shifted the dagger slightly so that the beam of light struck Orlando's eyes. The troubadour winced and sidestepped, but Amalric caught him in the eyes with the light again.

He crouched, shifting the basilard from hand to hand, and gathered himself to rush his enemy.

The troubadour, with the setting sun behind him, was a featureless shadow.

Amalric saw his opponent undo the clasp of his cape and wrap it around his right arm.

"Draw dagger or sword, Messire, I care not which," Amalric said. "I would not strike down an empty-handed man."

"I am as well armed with my hands empty as you are with that skewer," the troubadour mocked.

Amalric felt his face burn with fury.

He sprang at Orlando.

The troubadour raised his cape-wrapped right arm, but Amalric shifted the direction of his thrust and drove the basilard in under the right arm straight toward his enemy's chest.

The troubadour tried to shield himself with his left arm.

Amalric grunted with satisfaction as he felt the steel sink deep into flesh. Snarling, tugging hard, he yanked the dagger out of the troubadour's arm.

The troubadour, his face stiff with pain, stumbled over a rock and fell to one knee. As if searching for a friend, he looked up at the ring of crusaders that had gathered to watch the fight. No one spoke to encourage him; no one moved to help him. His sword and dagger were still sheathed.

"Draw your sword, God damn you."' Amalric roared, making sure all onlookers could hear.

Instead of reaching for a weapon, the troubadour unwrapped the cape from his right arm.

Amalric rushed him.

He saw the troubadour's hand flick and the cape fly out.

He felt something wrap itself around his ankles. Helpless, horrified, he knew that he was falling. He had just time to turn the point of his basilard away from his body before he went down on his face.

By Saint Dominic, the cape was a weapon. It had weights in its corners.

He felt pain stabbing all through him as his enemy landed heavily on his back, the troubadour's knee grinding between his shoulder blades, the sharp rocks on which he lay pressing into his chest.

Amalric raised his arm to strike with the dagger, and felt the troubadour clutch at his wrist, but the man's hand was slippery with blood, and Amalric pulled his arm free.

A burst of pain shot through Amalric's right hand and arm and he bellowed in agony. A big rock, in the troubadour's other hand, had crashed down on his knuckles.

Amalric's hand was empty, and he felt the sharp point of his basilard pressing against his throat.

"I can kill you now," said the voice above him.

"Go ahead."

"I do not wish to," the troubadour said. "Your comrades would surely repay me in kind. But if you move I will cut your throat. I shall release you on one condition, that the Cathars are permitted to go to their deaths on their feet like human beings. Give me your word of honor."

Amalric turned his face to look up at the troubadour. He had no choice unless he wished to die, that steel spike driven into his throat. His hatred burned his enemy's hawklike face into his memory.

"You have my word, but know that what is between us only begins here."

"It began long ago," the troubadour almost whispered.

Amalric felt the man's weight lifted from his back. Slowly Amalric pushed himself to his feet, favoring his right hand, which hurt abominably.

The troubadour had already turned his back on him and was walking away, blood dripping from his left arm.

Without looking at Amalric he let the basilard fall, clattering on the stony ground. D'Etampes hurried to pick it up and brought it to Amalric.

Weighing the dagger in his hand, Amalric thought, I could have him killed now. No, not in front of all these men. It would not seem knightly.

He watched the troubadour go. One day, he thought, I will have that man flayed alive. Slowly he sheathed the basilard.

But a small, cold question, coiling like a worm at the base of his brain, unsettled him. Why has he done so much to make me hate him? Who is this man to me?

Roland walked away slowly. His left arm felt numb. Blood from his fingertips spattered on the rocks. Men moved grudgingly aside, their hands on their sword hilts. At a word from Amalric, they would cut him down. Roland sensed their hatred for the upstart knight who had defeated Count Amalric with outlandish tactics. He had never in his life felt so alone.

He continued to walk amid the heavy silence, tensely waiting for an attack, watching from the corners of his eyes for sudden movement. But none came. Instead, Roland heard Amalric speaking in a low voice and then heard his aides call orders for the procession again to get under way. He heard no further word about binding the prisoners. The Cathars at least were going to be permitted to walk to their deaths under their own power.

The black-robed men and women avoided looking at Roland as they made their painful way past him down the mountainside. They understood that to show him any gratitude would put him in still more danger. He felt a wave of love, as palpable as the crusaders' hatred, from these people who were so soon to be destroyed.

I should go down to the camp now, saddle my horse, and get out of here, Roland thought. I am badly hurt. I need help, and I will get none here. Once Amalric has done these poor people to death, he will turn his full attention to me.

Yet Roland could not bring himself to leave. He had to be able to tell Diane how these people died. But more than that, he felt there ought to be one friend to the victims here in their last moments, even if his love and grief must remain hidden in his heart.

With his own dagger he cut two strips of cloth from his cape and bound one around the wound and one above it to slow the bleeding. His arm was throbbing from wrist to shoulder.

He looked down to the field of martyrdom. The long line of dark figures now extended almost to the stockade. Roland slid down the slope awkwardly, cradling his wounded arm to keep it from striking rocks.

Some of the men in the crowd recognized him and moved away as he came near, but most of them were too interested in what was about to happen to pay him heed. He took a position against the wall of rough-hewn timber, near the gateway.

Not ten feet from where he stood a bonfire of big logs crackled. He could feel its heat. Around it stood a circle of men holding unlit torches.

The Cathar procession stopped as they neared the open gate, and they clustered together in a large group. Roland saw Bishop Bertran, still in the forefront of his people. On a low hill looking down at the Cathars stood a row of men in dazzling vestments, a few with tall, gilded miters on their heads. Those, he knew, were prelates of the Roman Church. The fat one in gorgeously embroidered purple, with two or three jeweled rings on each finger, must be the Bishop of Albi, who had commanded troops in the siege. This must be a special triumph for him, since the heresy was said to be so strong in his city.

In the midst of all the red and purple finery one man caught Roland's eye. His black woolen cloak and white tunic were almost as stark as the robes of the perfecti. Roland recognized the garb of the Dominicans, the leading inquisitors. Pale, shining blond hair wreathed the Dominican's thin face, and the top of his head had been shaved in the priestly tonsure. He approached the Cathars alone, then stood a moment in silent prayer, his eyes gazing heavenward. Roland had seen him before and been told that he was Friar Hugues, the younger brother of Amalric de Gobignon.

As the young Dominican began to speak to the assembled Cathars, Roland watched them intently. Were they grateful for the few additional moments of life this sermon provided, or did this just prolong their suffering?

"Though you have denied God all your lives long, He still loves you, even at this moment," Friar Hugues said pleadingly.

As he went on, he showed himself a mighty preacher, roaring like a lion, whispering like gentle breeze. He was so enthralling, Roland almost forgot the pain in his arm and the suffering in his heart.

Darkness was falling, and the sun had dipped below the western peaks when Friar Hugues, his face lit by the flickering glow of the bonfire, ended.

"It is a painful death you are condemned to. You know, of course, that it is not the Church that punishes you. The Holy Inquisition has merely proven that you are guilty of heresy. It is the secular authorities who will decree that you must be burned to ashes."

Like Pilate washing his hands of the blood of Jesus, Roland thought.

"Yet this death by fire is not imposed out of cruelty," Hugues went on. "We permit the State to burn your bodies as a sign that the Church must be utterly cleansed of false teaching. Think again about your heresy. Search your hearts. Are you so very sure you are doing the right thing in choosing the flames? Is there not one among you who feels some doubt? Do not be afraid. That doubt is the voice of God in your heart. He is trying to save you. Come forward now. Come Forward, come to God. Save yourself, for His greater glory. This is your last chance. I beg you. Jesus Christ begs you. Come forward." Weeping, Friar Hugues dropped to his knees, repeating his pleas.

Among the Cathars no one moved or spoke.

Shivers ran across Roland's back. What a people, who could withstand such a sermon, with the sight of torches before them and the tarry smell of pitch in their nostrils.

Friar Hugues fell on his face on the trampled grass of the meadow, sobbing.

Now another voice rose above the crackling of the bonfire.

"You have said the Church must be cleansed."

Realizing that the voice came from among the Cathars, Roland looked there and saw that it was Bishop Bertran speaking. His voice was not faint, as it had been when Roland last met him, but strong, clear, as it must have been forty years ago, when he debated Saint Dominic.

"The Church shall be cleansed," the Cathar bishop went on. "From the flames you light today will fly sparks that will kindle a great fire of purification. The corruption and tyranny and superstition of the Church of Rome will be burned away."

The Bishop of Albi waved fat fingers glittering with rings. "We have not come here to listen to heretical sermons. You have wasted your last chance to repent. You are hereby delivered to the secular power." He turned to a young friar seated at a table, scribbling industriously on a roll of parchment. "Let it be recorded that the accused died unrepentant."

The Bishop held out a jeweled hand. Roland's eyes followed the gesture, and he saw Amalric, seated on a big chestnut horse, holding a roll of parchment. The Count's silver coronet and his purple and gold mantle proclaimed his power, the power to put two hundred people to death by fire.

Amalric read the sentence of death for all the perfecti, pronounced in the name of Louis, King of the Franks, with a cold serenity that was more chilling than any outburst of passionate hatred could have been.

Men with spears began pushing the condemned through the gateway of the palisade. Roland's heart beat hard with the dread of what he was about to see. Even in peril of his own life, facing an enemy's naked steel, he had never felt such tormenting fear.

He looked up at Mont Segur. The broken Cathar fortress and the crusaders' wooden fort, now abandoned, were still bathed in sunlight, though the shadows of the nearby mountains had crept over the meadow here below. Roland saw small figures standing atop the walls of the fortress. They were those who had chosen to renounce their faith and live, those who would now be left behind. This must be worse for them to witness than it is for me, he thought pityingly.

He turned back to the Cathars in the stockade. As when they were descending the mountain, they helped each other to take their places for death. Within the stockade the bundles of brushwood were piled high, higher than the height of a tall man. Bishop Bertran and the other elderly perfecti were pulled and lifted to the top of the pile by younger perfecti in black robes. Then, crawling over the mass of faggots that shifted and quaked under their weight, they moved to make room for those who came after. Having to burn so many at once, the crusaders had not bothered to erect stakes.

For Roland it was still hard to believe this really was happening. He had heard of people being killed by the thousands, but that was after sieges, when the blood lust of battle was still on men. Here there had been a respite after the siege. The crusaders and inquisitors had had time for calm reflection, and this is what they had chosen to do. It was the deliberateness of all this that made him despair of humankind.

Roland saw the woman called Corba tenderly lift the elderly woman she had been walking with to the top of the pile. Then Corba and the soldierly young man supported the lame girl as she climbed up. There was a family resemblance among the three women. Were they grandmother, mother, and daughter? Roland felt tears burn his eyes and a sob gather in his throat. His helplessness was maddening.

I should have killed Amalric.

That would not have stopped this.

When all the perfecti were inside the palisade, six men-at-arms pushed the gate of half-logs shut and propped more logs against it to keep it closed. Men carrying burning torches of pine soaked with pitch, climbed ladders leaning against the wooden walls. The red flames glowed in the twilight. From within the enclosure rose the sound of over two hundred voices reciting the Lord's Prayer in unison.

Roland looked at de Gobignon. His handsome face composed, Amalric lifted his bare right hand. Even at this distance Roland could see, with a faint satisfaction, that the Count's hand was swollen and purple. Amalric dropped his hand again, decisively. The men on the ladders threw their torches into the stockade.

For a moment the Lord's Prayer could still be heard. Then the flames shot up with a roar. Roland heard screams, for though they were called perfecti, these were human beings, and they would die with cries of pain. The gold banners of fire leaped so high they hid Mont Segur behind them.

As it grew, devouring its victims, the fire was merciful to the executioners and onlookers. Most of the screams were drowned out by the deafening clamor of the ever-fattening flames, like the continuous thunder of a huge waterfall, and the thick black smoke drifted upward into the windless violet sky, so that the dreadful stench of burning flesh was fast carried away.

Roland heard no word from the men around him. As the log wall itself caught fire, the onlookers backed slowly away. The heat was fierce on Roland's face and hands, but he knew it was nothing to the fire claiming the bodies of the Cathars.

Roland looked at Hugues. The friar's face was wet with tears. Is he really grieving for those he thinks of as lost souls?

Bishop Bertran, the lady Corba, all those good people whom Roland had known too briefly, must already be dead.

Overcome, he sank to the ground and, sitting, buried his face in his hands and began to sob. The pain of the wound in his arm, forgotten for a time in the horror of what he was seeing, overwhelmed him, piercing the whole left side of his body, as if a lance had impaled him.

"If you are so damned sorry for them, why not jump into the fire with them?" said a harsh voice above him. Roland stood up wearily. He felt a sudden urge to draw his dagger and strike. The impulse vanished as quickly as it came, drowned by another wave of grief.

Roland reached out with his wounded arm and touched the man's shoulder gently. "You do not know what you have done," he said.

The man shrank from him.

Roland turned his back on the great fire and walked away. He could not bear to watch any longer. How can I ever know a moment's joy in my life again? How can I love another human being, when I know that men can do this?

As he stumbled down the mountainside toward the main camp, the hideous image of three charred skeletons Corba and her mother and daughter - arms entwined, arose in his mind and made him feel faint. He was dizzy, too, from the pain in his arm. He knew he could lose his left arm, or even die, if this wound was not treated. But there was no one in the camp he could trust to help him.

I must get to my horse, try to get help for my arm on the road. Maybe find people who remember my father. Now, before Amalric sends his men after me.

In his despair, though, he walked slowly, because he could not make himself care whether he died of his wound or whether Amalric killed him.

Diane wanted to stay here and die. I did not understand you, Diane. But I do now.

He spoke also to the dead: I vow to your memory that I will do whatever I can to put an end to such evils as this.

A hopeless quest, perhaps. But if I cannot live for Diane, and if life is to continue in me, this is a good purpose for it.

An armed man stepped into his path.

Roland tensed himself defensively.

The man looked like any other crusader, but when he spoke it was in the Langue d'Oc. "Your wound needs attention, Sire Roland. There are those who wish to help you, as you have helped those they loved. Will you come with me?"

"I have many enemies," Roland said, realizing that the man had called him by his true name.

"You have friends as well. All things that are, are lights."

Looking closer, Roland saw that tears were running from the man's eyes. He must be one of the many spiritual children of the perfecti left orphaned by this day's horror.

Despite the darkness of this moment, he felt despair give way a little. Yes, there were armies that could put people to death mercilessly, led by barons like Amalric and priests like Hugues. But there were men like this as well, and people such as the burnt ones had been.

Now, Diane, I, too, have a vow to live by.

Feeling stronger, he said, "Yes. I will go with you."

IV

COUNTESS NICOLETTE DE GOBIGNON PRESSED A WET CLOTH TO THE King's brow. Though he lay there helpless, still she found him an awesome figure, like a fallen cathedral tower.

Only two other men are as tall, she thought. Amalric and Orlando.

She felt a pang of guilt. How could she be thinking about the troubadour here where her royal master lay slowly dying?

She fixed her eyes on Louis, and on the ivory and wood crucifix that rose and fell on his chest with his labored breathing.

Nicolette felt as if she, too, could hardly breathe. Across the crowded room a fire roared in a huge stone-lined fireplace. The air was stifling. She resented all that made it so, down to the woolen draperies and wall hangings and the thick carpets that sealed in the heat. But she knew that this northern chateau, Pontoise-les-Noyons, a day's ride from Paris, had had to be built to withstand cold, its walls thick and its windows tiny ? so totally unlike the bright, airy Languedoc manor she had grown up in.

Sweat trickled down her brow and stung her eyes. Her breath was coming in little gasps. She felt as if she would faint if she couldn't go outside soon.

Dozens of people, the King's family and courtiers, had packed themselves uselessly into the room, making it even more suffocating. Their whispers, like the buzzing of mosquitoes, irritated Nicolette.

Almost all of them, she was sure, worried more about their own welfare than about the King's. And even Louis's wife and mother, though they grieved for him, were too distracted to do much to alleviate his suffering.

She saw the King's lips quiver, and quickly she bent close to him. Any last words could be terribly important.

"Jerusalem," he mumbled. "Towers - golden. Gates of pearl. Crystal waters." Then he panted heavily.

"Hush, sire," she whispered. "Rest easy."

Louis's heavy eyelids lifted slightly, showing only the whites of his eyes, as if he were already dead. He's delirious, she thought.

"The trees bear fruit all year round." He said this distinctly. Then he lapsed into wordless muttering, and then silence.

She took a fresh wet linen cloth from the silver basin beside her, squeezed out the lukewarm water, and laid it on Louis's high forehead.

Why Jerusalem? The Jerusalem he was mumbling about, she knew, existed only in his fevered mind. She had listened to Crusaders who had been there. There were no golden towers or gates of pearl. There were no towers or gates at all now, because the Turks had destroyed them.

She caught her breath. Perhaps it is not an earthly Jerusalem. Could he already be seeing Heaven?

Her body turned cold and her stomach churned as she imagined Louis closing his eyes forever. As a girl, she had seen the village near her father's chateau burned to the ground by marauding knights. Now she saw those flames again; heard the screams of bleeding men, terrified children, women being raped. What had been happening in Languedoc all these years would happen now all over France. War. War had killed her dear father, trapped her in marriage to an enemy. What horrors would she have to endure this time?

There would be factions, and she would have to decide which to join. What side would Amalric take? She had no idea. And where should she go - stay here in Paris, flee north to Chateau Gobignon, or try to get back home to Languedoc?

She felt the urge to weep for Louis as if he were already dead. She liked him so much. When she had first come to court, a stranger and almost a foreigner, he had gone out of his way to be kind to her. And how gentle he was with his Marguerite.

So good not only to those close to him, she thought, but to everyone - merchants, townsfolk, peasants. How they cheered for him as he passed by! What would become of them all if he died?

Amalric should be here at a time like this.

But he considered it more important to visit the properties the Church had awarded him after his victory over the Cathars, take inventory of each one, put down any local disorder, and appoint men to occupy and govern each chateau and town for him. All the spring, summer, and autumn he had been journeying about Languedoc. It might be dangerous for him to be away from Paris and his own holdings if the King died, but he also stood to lose a great deal if he did not fully secure his new lands. He was always at the edge of a precipice, always juggling one danger against another. And how he enjoyed it all!

But not all men were like Amalric.

A wave of grief washed over her, darker than the sorrow she felt for dying King Louis. She had hoped for so much from Orlando. She had loved him so. And now that love was dead.

It hurt to think about him now. But perhaps it was better to feel pain than to feel nothing. The King was quiet as she sat by his bed. He breathed evenly, seemingly sleeping, and as she sat with her eyes fixed on him, her mind wandered. She let herself dream.

* * *

How she had trembled when her eyes first met the troubadour's. His sky-blue eyes, so strange against his dark complexion, compelled her to look at him, as if he were a magician and had her under a spell. It had been early in September, over a year ago, and the King and Queen were holding court in a field outside the chateau at Chinon. Amalric was far away, having begun his siege of Mont Segur.

The troubadour's first words were not to her, but to the King.

"If it please you, sire, I will sing a ballad of Peire Cardenal's."

Even as he spoke, his eyes flickered to her, and he seemed to be asking for her approval as well as the King's. She felt herself nodding and smiling before she knew what she was doing.

He sang, and his voice washed over her, a warm, rich baritone. She felt full of a sweet confusion, certain that it was really to her he was singing. She watched his long, slender fingers on the strings of his lute, and it was as if those fingers were holding her hand and stroking her.

Her gaze lingered on his glossy black hair, memorized his high, narrow forehead, his brilliant blue eyes, his large, slightly hooked nose and sharp chin. No, she thought, not the features of a handsome man, as convention would have it; but having seen him, her idea of handsomeness abruptly changed.

Rapt, she kept her eyes fixed on him all through the song. And her heartbeat quickened with delight each time his gaze strayed to meet hers.

She was filled with a longing that was intensely painful, yet somehow she felt happier than she had been in a long time. She wanted to hug the world to her, as if until this moment she had been sleeping, and now for the first time she was awake and fully alive. And as she listened, she found herself imagining him singing to her alone, songs he would create for her. His lyrics would speak to her of a secret kingdom of love. There she would be the ruler and he the adoring subject. She envisioned herself in some secret silken place lying in his arms.

All too soon for her he finished his song. He bowed deeply - and how gracefully, she thought - to King Louis and Queen Marguerite, and accepted their praise and thanks. Then he walked, with the proud carriage of an Arabian stallion, across the open grass, to stand among the courtiers.

It was only then that she realized she had not heard his name. She whispered to her friend Marguerite, "Who is he?"

Marguerite looked over to where the troubadour stood and back at Nicolette and smiled. "He looks as if he could be a countryman of ours, does he not? A man of Languedoc. Very handsome. If I did not love Louis so much, I could almost be attracted to him myself."

"But who is he?" Nicolette demanded again.

"He is called Orlando of Perugia," said Marguerite with a sigh. "Where is Perugia? Northern Italy, I think. A pity he is not a genuine Languedoc troubadour."

From then on, as the feasting continued at trestle tables set in the meadow, Nicolette's eyes sought him out again and again.

She said "Orlando" silently to herself many times that afternoon, and discovered that in shaping the name slowly, languorously with her lips, they moved as they might if she were kissing him.

But she did not dare try to speak to him. Amalric had his retainers, relations, and favor-seekers scattered all through this festive assemblage, and any interest she showed in another man would surely be reported to him. How fortunate at least that Louis's mother, Queen Blanche, who watched over the younger women of the court as a falcon watches hares, was not with the royal party that day.

Nicolette had been deeply thankful, too, that Amalric was away at war.

At the end of the festive day, when the King and Queen were ready to retire, the troubadour gave her one last burning look before he left the meadow.

She was ecstatic. After eleven lonely years of a marriage she had entered into only to save her mother and sisters, she might have found her true love.

But when would she receive a message from him?

The very next day her personal maid, Agnes, handed her a roll of vellum tied with a black ribbon, and she cried out with delight. He had worn black.

She tore the ribbon loose and devoured his words:

?When I beheld you yesterday You were all that I could see, So bright your beauty shone. It made the castle fade away, And by some wondrous sorcery We two seemed quite alone.?

Five stanzas. In her eagerness she read the lines over and over again. And what delicious pleasure she felt that they were written in her own native language, the southern Langue d'Oc.

* * *

Now, sitting by the dying King's bedside, she remembered the first time Orlando had sung only for her. It had been a year ago, just at the start of winter, after the King and Queen had returned to Paris. She was in bed in the de Gobignon town house on the Right Bank. She had fallen asleep thinking about her troubadour, and she'd been dreaming of him, as she often did.

She must still be dreaming, she thought when she first heard his voice. But suddenly she was wide awake, realizing that he was singing in the garden outside her window.

He sang an aubade, a dawn song of Languedoc, about the agony of lovers parting while a friend on watch warns of approaching morning. She slowly rose from the bed and tiptoed to the window. Though she was barefoot and wore only her shift, she hardly felt the December cold. She struggled with the fastenings of the shutters, yearning to see him.

Then she heard angry voices below, Amalric's men-at-arms up and about, and she froze in terror.

"Oh, no, let him be safe!" she prayed.

She heard running feet and the clatter of steel weapons.

In dread she pressed her hands to her breast. But then there was silence.

She went back to her bed and wept, terrified that something awful had befallen her troubadour.

Later that morning Agnes reported with a twinkling eye that the men-at-arms had chased a prowler, but he had gotten away.

Nicolette all but fainted in her relief.

A week later, Agnes handed her a folded parchment, and again she was aglow with excitement. It was, as she had expected, a plea for a tryst:

?To the lady who is always in my thoughts: We are two rays of light shed by a single sun. The Goddess whom we both serve forbids us to remain apart. I beg you to join your light with mine that both of us may shine the brighter. Entrust your reply to him who brings you this.?

And no signature.

"His man wants to know if there will be an answer, Madame," Agnes said with an amused smile.

Nicolette trusted Agnes, who had been with her since they both were children. The same age as her mistress, Agnes had proved her loyalty by giving up her home and family to accompany Nicolette when she had been compelled to marry Amalric. Both felt out of place in this northern country, and they shared an abiding love for the sweet customs of ladies and troubadours.

"Not now," said Nicolette. "I shall have to think about it."

All that day she tried to decide what to write back. She would take a worn piece of scrap parchment, start a letter, rub it out with pumice, and try again. She must have done it a dozen times.

It is too soon for a meeting, she told herself. If he has been properly instructed in courtly love, he must know that as well as I do. No, first he must woo me at a distance with songs and sweet messages. Then, after a year or so, I shall arrange a very brief secret meeting. That will show whether I can trust him to do only what I allow. Then I may let him kiss me. And then we will proceed ever so gradually, over months and years, from kissing to touching, to lying together clothed, and then with no clothing, and at last, when I have tested him fully and totally, the final sacrament of Love.

But at the thought of that union of their bodies, she could all but feel his arms around her, his hard, lean body pressed against hers. Her hands tensed, as if they clutched his shoulders, drawing him closer still.

Why must I wait? Why must I draw it out as they do in the old romances? In a week or a month he could die, and then I would never know the glory of lying in his arms.

How awful!

She took a fresh piece of parchment and began to write, inviting him to set a time and place for a rendezvous.

It was hard for her, though, to hold the quill firmly, because suddenly she was hearing the voice of her mother, dead these three years, exhorting her.

"You will want to yield to him at once, because to sleep with a man you love is the closest thing to Heaven we can know here on Earth." Her mother had held up a warning finger. "But do not do it. If you give yourself to him right away, the love he feels for you will lose its force sooner than you would think possible. You must use the power of unfulfilled desire - his and yours - to teach him. In the world, man rules woman, but in the kingdom of Love the man must call the lady mi dons, 'my lord,' because he is ruled by her. So my mother told me, and so, in our tradition, mother has taught daughter, in secret, since before the time of Christ. And I know it is true, because I have lived it. Remember, when it happens to you, you are not the first woman to feel this way - although it will seem that way to you. This teaching has stood the test of many generations. You will never know the true magic of Love unless you follow its rules."

Since her marriage at thirteen Nicolette had known what bodily union with a man was like. She even remembered a spring night, two years after her marriage, when, after an evening of merry dancing, she had been able to forget her resentment of Amalric, forget who her husband was, and had enjoyed his body so thoroughly that she had been left trembling from head to foot, exhausted with pleasure.

But she knew deep down that Love could be f