THE SAME 15TH OF AUGUST 1209, OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF CARCASSONNE
A few hours before the hermit’s prophecy to Galatea, the column of sur-vivors leaving the city, their only baggage painful memories and the rags on their backs, stretched down to the river. In the fiery mid-day sun, they shuffled under a rain of insults and spit from the jeering mob out-side the walls. The brief siege of Carcassonne, the mostly heretical city on the banks of the river Aude in Languedoc, had just ended. A short way outside the gate, cross-wearing northerners searched each straggler.
The papal legate’s orders had been clear: “They are to take nothing, not even an earring. Just their sins!”
A yellow turban caught the eye of a young, armed peasant. The big Jew wore a black sarbel despite the heat and nonchalantly carried a bundled two-year-old in the fold of his elbow in what looked like a very comfortable position for the infant. The youth looked at the
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olive-skinned face and the black beard, then shouted, “Hey, you! Hey, Jew!”
Yehezkel had debated himself for an hour, in the “but on the other hand” style of Talmud sages, on what he should do if he heard those words as he left the city. He turned to look at the barbarian. The lanky, freckled teen was armed with a battered shield and spear. The rabbi stepped out of the stream of refugees.
“Show me the child, Jew! You’re crafty enough to have hidden the gold in the wraps!”
Yehezkel snatched the bundle from the outstretched arm. Slowly and wordlessly, his eyes fixed on those of the young goy, he stripped Aillil naked, shaking the sweaty rags in the air before dropping them to the ground. The infant squealed with pleasure. The cross-wearer looked peeved, but unconvinced.
“I know you’re trying to fool me somehow, Jew! That blond babe can’t be your blood, you’re from Outremer. . . .” He looked at the ground, rubbing it with one foot. “I know! You stole an orphan from the heretics to sell it to your Saracen friends, or . . .” the young man’s eyes widened in outrage, “or maybe to raise him as a Jew!”
Visibly impressed by his own acumen, the peasant was already thinking of the prize that awaited him for exposing this perfidious scheme. The kabbalist’s voice caught him totally by surprise. “LAMA RAGSHU GOYIM?”*
Lower than a roll of thunder, the first three words of the second Psalm swept the uncircumsized youth with something like supernatu-ral force. It was as if an earthquake had shaken the ground beneath his feet. Like the voice of a dead man from the depths of hell. No, like the voice of all the Cathars who died in Béziers screaming in unison!
The boy swallowed, then pointed toward the river, unable for all his efforts, to detach his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Yehezkel picked up the wraps and turned away.
*“Why have the gentiles raged?”
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He’d projected his voice with the secret technique Rav Yitzhak the Blind taught him in Posquiére. From the moment the peasant called out to him, he started breathing the “folded breath.” Stripping the child slowly had been an excuse to prolong the preparation, and to hold the goy’s eyes long enough to reverse the flow of fear between them. Then, his chin pressed on his chest, he had lowered his tone beyond, as Rav Yitzhak put it, “the mere physical size of his sounding-chamber,” and howled the three Hebrew words in a vibrato of barely repressed wrath.
Yehezkel smiled imagining the thoughts of the panicked youth.
Most likely he was sure to have just survived an encounter with the devil.
After all, he must be saying to himself, if Satan needed a heretic infant for his plans, who was he to dream of objecting? Yehezkel surveyed the sorry war-time scene to make sure no one had noticed the exchange, then crossed the sun-baked knoll and rejoined the river of exiles.
Carcassonne and Toulouse are the doors to a corridor connecting the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. At the eastern entrance to the valley known as the Lauragais, the Montaigne Noire looms from the north, while sweeping hills overlap southward until they become the Pyrenees.
The bulk of the refugees set off on the road that climbs to the doorway to Spain and takes pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. The Lauragais was like one big forest bewitched with heresy. Lonely watchtowers and menacing fortresses were more frequent on that road than bell towers of churches.
There was no noise of carts—just shuffling feet, moans from the wounded, and the odd woman’s sob—all of it blanketed by the shriek-ing of crickets risshriek-ing from everywhere like derisory, demonic laughter.
Everything spoke of the month-old war: abandoned villages, unkempt vineyards, the desperate bellows of surviving cows—and most of all the whitish, overgrown fields—eerily deserted at the height of harvest time.
As the infant slept on his chest and the air shimmered in the heat, Yehezkel mused. “Here I am, the only Jew stupid enough to be caught in a city of Christian heretics under siege!”
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He smiled, fingers immediately reaching into his beard to scratch the underside of his chin. “True, I could have left with the other Jews, but what would have become of Aillil in all this?” He raised his gaze to the sky and let out a long sigh.
Yehezkel ben Yoseph, a rabbi and a medicus, had arrived in Provence from Egypt five years earlier at the age of twenty-one. He had not just abandoned Fustat and its Nile sunsets but had also given up the shining future that awaited the favorite disciple of Moshe ben Maimon, Salah-ad-Din’s personal physician and the greatest Jewish scholar of his time, known to Latins as Maimonides. And what was more, given it up for the dubious revelations of a bunch of mystics in the French Midi.
The esoteric schools of the so-called kabbalists had fascinated him for some time, but the truth was he’d chosen exile, and knew it, to escape the gloom that enveloped him ever since his Naomi drowned herself in the Nile. Naomi—a sweeter name never existed—hadn’t given him children and her smile faded year after year. Jewish Law ruled that after ten years of sterile marriage, Yehezkel would have the right—nay, the duty—to repudiate his wife. An unshakeable conviction that she somehow deserved that fate caused Naomi’s mind to drift into a no-woman’s land where at times he could reach her, while other times she was alone with pure despair.
Yehezkel tried to reassure her. He told her he would never divorce her. He’d explained about the Matriarchs, all three initially barren—
Sarah to the age of ninety!—but Naomi was inconsolable. Then one night, in the sixth year of their marriage, she left the house and walked into the Nile. The river that gives life to Egypt took the life of his wife.
Custom demanded that he remarry, but Yehezkel escaped to Provence instead, in search of a light in the teachings strong enough to pierce the darkness that had swallowed him.
On his arrival in Posquiére, he’d been accepted on the power of the name of his Egyptian mentor. It would have opened any door in the Jewish world, this time into the school of Rav Yitzhak the Blind, one
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of the first kabbalists to have received new revelations on the mean-ing of Scripture directly from the prophet Elijah. The long nights of study with his new teacher had been full of the ways in which the Sephirot, the ten Divine Emanations, manifest themselves in this world.
Sometimes, waking up suddenly, his nostrils full of the dry fragrance of veal-skin parchment, Yehezkel would wonder for an instant if he’d fallen asleep in his bed with a book on his face, or if he was still sitting at his teacher’s wax-encrusted table, head slowly collapsed onto some holy text.
Yehezkel lived those five years to the hilt, but still they seemed like five months: sea passages, rich cities, markets, sophisticated courts, rab-binical circles. He became the personal medicus of several nobles and learned their langue d’Occitanie, a hard, yet musical tongue. As he did with every new language, he had inadvertently learned its sing-song before its words or grammar, the result being the total absence of a foreign accent that never failed to amaze the locals. Over five years, Yehezkel turned into one of a growing band of itinerant, rebellious, mosly young thinkers of all three faiths: wandering, polyglot mixtures of hope and disenchantment, mysticism and irony, humility and ambi-tion, who prospered in much of the West to the dismay of the church, even seducing many Christian youths.
In his roaming, Yehezkel witnessed the flowering of a new, volup-tuous love for God’s Creation. The courts of heretical nobles hosted rowdy bands of troubadors—melancholy minstrels—usually afflicted with unreciprocated love and invariably intoxicated by the thick wines of the region. In those courts Cathars, Moors, and Jews competed in poetical, musical, and philosophical contests, courting the attentions of witty, beautiful ladies. And all this while in the Holy Roman Empire the worth of a man was still only determined by birth or by arms, and the virtues of women something yet to be discovered.
The column moved on. Dribbles of refugees left on paths familiar to them until, as the sun melted into the hills, some twenty people climbed the last crest, their legs trembling with fatigue as they sighted the fortress
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of Montréal. After a little while, they entered the deserted village, its pink Roman roof tiles set alight by the last shafts of sun shining through the tops of the pines. Many dispersed to their homes. The villagers had fled to the mountains, but as in all wars, a strange mixture of cynical old men, young fanatics, and lonely women hadn’t left. It didn’t take them long to find that these had taken refuge in the kitchen of the Hots, the very family to whom Yehezkel was to entrust the child.
They staggered in one at a time as darkness fell. The big kitchen was divided into three spans by two sturdy pairs of columns joined by arches. At the far end, a huge mantelpiece jutted out over the empty fireplace like a roof, welcoming what was left of the population into its smoky shade. Four men played dice on a low table. A woman sat on a stool suckling an infant. Another followed the game over the head of a man and a third, old and shrivelled, squatted on the floor shelling beans. Five or six more peasants sat on their haunches along the wall.
There was a smell of breaths heavy with wine; and a wick sizzled in the bottom of an oil-lamp, spreading a foul, sticky smoke.
In an instant the apparent calm shattered. The heretics all talked at once, shouting, embracing, weeping. A ruddy woman dished out broad-bean broth for everyone. Yehezkel declined, pulling out some dark bread and a piece of kosher cheese. Aillil was fed and put to sleep on some straw near the far wall. When he’d eaten, the rabbi went out in the yard to say Ma’ariv, the evening prayer. He used the stars to determine the direction of Jerusalem, then saw some chickens milling around and moved a little further from the house. Finally, he closed his eyes and prayed, swinging back and forth in the sultry darkness filled with the smell of rotting hay.
Back in the kitchen, Yehezkel pulled the cook to one side. The woman’s red cheekbones, nose and chin were so swollen and shiny they looked like blisters, yet far from making her look clownish, they gave her face a strangely menacing, thuggish expression.
“What is your name, good woman? Are you part of the Hot house-hold?” he asked her.
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“I am Germaine, and I have been in this kitchen since I have mem-ory of myself,” said the woman.
“The child sleeping over there is Aillil Arifat, the only son of Arnald Arifat. Do you know his father?”
“I held Arnald on my knees. If the infant is with you, am I to understand that his mother . . .”
“Esmeralda didn’t survive the siege, may the Lord have mercy on her soul. She died of the fever three days ago, and with her last words begged me to entrust Aillil to the Hot family in Montréal.”
Germaine looked war-weary, but smiled at Yehezkel with all the assurance she could muster. “I’ll look after Arnald’s son like after my own, Sir. I heard he left for Outremer about a month ago.”
“Yes, God only knows where he is.” Yehezkel fixed his eyes on hers.
“Listen, Germaine. Aillil was born with some deficiencies. Sight, hear-ing, growth. . . . He looks like a babe, but he’s over three years old . . .”
The rabbi paused, his eyes almost weighing the peasant’s heart. “I advise you to find a childless woman to ween him . . . he needs more attention than a normal child, he needs to be . . . stimulated all the time.”
Germaine was nodding slowly, a knowing smile on her lips.
“I’ll come and see him once a year,” said Yehezkel, “and I’ll try to let Arnald know where he is.”
There was a prolonged creak from the door. All heads turned as two perfecti* entered silently, their faces streaked with sweat and dust. They were barefoot and their patched-up habits were black and hoodless. In the leather satchels across their shoulders was the only nourishment they had need for: a Gospel of John.
The white-haired bonhomme was the respected preacher Pierre de Gramazie, but most believers in the room were more devoted to Pons Roger, his young companion with the elephantine ears, whom Yehezkel knew quite well. Despite fasting often, Pons was a handsome youth,
*Cathars were divided in believers and consecrated perfecti, also known as bonhommes.
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whose wide eyes and disarming smile gave him an air of sincerity some-how confirmed by the huge, flapping ears.
The believers stood up and bowed three times to the bonhommes.
Some exchanged the Kiss of Salvation with them, others went down on their knees and asked for the melioramentum, a Cathar blessing.
There were loud requests for the perfecti to give them the Cathar church’s interpretation of the war, but the perfecti knew that the most reliable source of information on events at Carcassone was the Jew, and soon everyone was standing around the table at which the rabbi related the siege to the perfecti. Yehezkel, reluctant to remember the last two weeks, wasn’t very talkative, something unusual for him.
Just five years earlier, a fleet of cross-wearing marauders lead by Enrico Dandolo, the blind Venetian Doge, sacked Constantinople in a frat-ricidal massacre for which its leaders had been excommunicated. And here now was the same pope—as if to prove how far the love of Christ can go—waging war on other Christians himself. And all this while the Holy Sepulchre was in the hands of infidels for over twenty years!
These were indeed dark times.
But the Church had reason to fear these Christians. All through the previous fifty years, something sweet had been fermenting in Christian souls. Love of knowledge, of music, of personal illumination, even love of love. Waves of mystics, new philosophical schools, traveling minstrels, cathedrals that soared as if to touch the Heavens. Rome hadn’t liked one bit of it. An ignorant and corrupt clergy had pushed many Christians to the brink of spiritual rebellion against Mother Church. Of course, for the Church the rebels were all heretics: Cathars, Beguines, Waldenses, Humiliati—in the words of one theologian, “penitents and visionaries to whose mysticism nothing is repugnant.”
But there was no denying the spiritual spasm that seized Christendom in the name of a more apostolic life and of the defini-tive victory of love on earth. The Cathar heresy spread like a plague, from Bulgaria to Northern Italy to Provence. News of sacked abbeys
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and churches reached Rome with alarming frequency. Innocent III—
placed on Saint Peter’s throne at the incredibly precocious age of thirty-seven—seemed not to know what he wanted. One minute the Midi was a wasp’s nest to be uprooted with fire, the next minute they were a way-ward flock of sheep it was his mission to save. Romans joked that their pope was like a blind dog in a meat market.
Then, on a gray January dawn in 1208, hired assassins murdered Pierre de Castelnau, papal legate to Languedoc. The ineptly named Innocent launched a “just war” against the heretics, the cry rising from every pulpit: “Arm yourselves! Go and bring back Christ’s peace in Provence!”
It took him a year to rally Christians to war against heresy. Philip II Capetian, the first monarch ever to call himself King of France, dubbed himself “Augustus” to show his appreciation of the choice made by the Grace of God. Yet he declined to lead the ransack of his neighbors to the south, claiming that the constant scheming of the English against his throne left him no time to chase religious lunatics. But greed, much more than outrage at the heretics, sparked the enthusiasm of French nobility, or at least of the families who hadn’t been quick enough to grab a place in the sun in Greece or Syria.
The army gathered in Lyon on Saint John’s day at the end of June in 1209. Soon the camp was a riotous city of thirty-thousand souls, each one proclaimed a divine executioner by Innocent’s bull. By July the only wolf missing was the leader of the pack, the Duke of Burgundy, who kept them all waiting for two turbulent weeks. There were five thousand knights, and for each knight five ribauds—feverish peasant-zealots, many with their families in tow—who knew that the blood the Cathars would shed for their sins would bring about, as Innocent had said, the mysterious absolution of their own.
The way God chose to deliver Béziers to its executioners was indeed
The way God chose to deliver Béziers to its executioners was indeed