‘I did think she might be right in a way,’ said Elinor. ‘That perhaps I should resume boy’s clothes for our journey, so that it looks as if you have two guards.’
‘It is too late for disguises, Elinor,’ said Iseut, taking both her hands. ‘And indeed I think you would make an unconvincing boy now. I think Garsenda must have very poor vision.’
It was true that over the summer Elinor’s hair had grown to a respectably ladylike length and her figure had filled out. But she would have willingly tried to be Esteve the joglar again if it would have helped in their escape.
The stables were almost empty, Iseut having given horses and harness to all her knights.
‘Take yourselves west to Termes or Cabaret, if you will,’ she had told them. ‘You may find other brave men there to fight alongside. My way lies east, to Italy.’
There were protests at first, because no one wanted to leave their liege lady, who had looked after them so well when their lord had failed to come back from the Holy Land. But there was no time to argue; the Lady was determined.
By nightfall, the castle was silent and bare; all that was left was the wood and kindling for the hearths and kitchen fires. It was time for them to leave.
‘Pile the wood in my hall, Nicolas,’ said Iseut.
The senescal was going to refuse, seeing what she intended. But at a look from the Lady, he did as he was told, carrying logs and kindling as though he were one of the most menial servants in the castle. When it was all heaped up at one end, where the long table used to be when Esteve and the troupe had come to sing at the court of Saint-Jacques, Iseut took a burning torch from the wall and calmly thrust it into the pyre.
The flames soon caught at some tattered tapestries that the pillagers had left, and leapt up to the wooden rafters. Everything was bone dry from the long hot summer and the fire soon took hold.
‘We should leave, my lady,’ said Nicolas urgently.
But Lady Iseut stood and watched her great hall burning as if in a dream. Here she had sat as a girl beside Jaufre at their wedding feast, here heard the music of the troubadours, here danced at many celebrations and later presided sadly while the nobility of the countryside had wooed her without success.
Nicolas looked desperately at Elinor. She went over to Iseut and touched her on the arm.
‘Time to go, lady,’ she said.
Iseut shook herself out of her reverie and wrapped her cloak around her.
‘It will soon be warm enough here,’ she said with a bright, forced smile. ‘But our journey will be a cold one.’
And the Lady of Saint-Jacques walked out of her castle for ever and mounted her horse alongside Elinor on Mackerel. Minou travelled in a basket tied to Iseut’s pommel. The little train wound its way down from the castle and did not look back.
They did not see – as the Frenchmen did, bivouacked only a few miles to the west – the flames and smoke and, at the end, the very stones of the castle glowing blood red against the night sky. The stragglers from the Abbot’s crusaders could only watch and curse. By the time they reached the castle, which they had heard held great riches, there was nothing but a heap of charred stones and ash.
And by then Iseut and Elinor were far away.
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Part Three
Domna
The Albigensian Crusade . . . crushed Occitan cultureand language. Most troubadours fled, especially to Spain and Italy.
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From Music in the Castle by Alberto Gallo (1995)
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Road to Monferrato
Their journey was painfully slow, even on horseback. At first they travelled night and day, hardly resting or eating, anxious to put as much distance between themselves and the French invaders as they could. It took weeks to pick their way through the Alps and it was late September before they reached the plain.
There for the first time Lady Iseut consented to spend the night at an inn. Nicolas carried the saddlebags to the women’s chamber and himself slept on the threshold outside their door. But there was no raid and no thieves. The landlord seemed hurt by the suggestion. There were no French soldiers here in the borderlands.
When Iseut and Elinor had slept for twelve straight hours, they devoured a good breakfast, glad not to have to delve further into their own dwindling supplies.
Although they had both agreed that Elinor had grown beyond a boy’s disguise, Iseut had reluctantly consented to let her young friend play the maid.
‘People will wonder else, my lady,’ Elinor had said. ‘To see a noblewoman travelling without a female attendant. It might cause talk.’
‘It irks me,’ said Iseut. ‘Since you are as high-born as I am.’
‘What does that matter in such times? I don’t mind combing your hair or brushing the mud from your hems.’
‘Then I shall do the same for you in private. After all, I am no longer the Senhor of a great demesne. All I own is in our saddlebags and what is sewn into our dresses. That is all my wealth now.’
‘And all mine too,’ said Elinor. ‘Which is given to me by you. I came to Saint-Jacques without anything but my flute and a head full of songs. That is still all my dowry.’
‘And a fine one it would be for any man, together with your youth and beauty – and courage,’ said Iseut. ‘Who knows what the future will bring you?’
‘Not marriage,’ said Elinor. ‘I can’t imagine a world of courtship and dowries for me ever again. I know it was what I was running away from, but I long to hear news of Sévignan now. If I could be sure the castle was still standing and my family alive, it would be all I could hope for from the future.’
‘Well, while we are journeying to wherever we end up by the winter, you shall be the maid. But never call me Lady again except in public. I am Iseut to you and we are the same – two poor pilgrims on the road, in search of Grace.’
They left the inn and took the way to Cuneo, reaching it before the next dusk.
Cuneo was a new town, built only ten years earlier, at the junction of two rivers. It was wedged in the ‘V’ between them and that was what its name meant: ‘a wedge’. The little party from Saint-Jacques halted wearily outside an inn overlooking the point where the rivers met in the south of the town.
‘We shall stay two nights,’ said Iseut firmly. ‘I want to see what information can be picked up here.’
They supped on peasant fare – rabbit stew with herbs and coarse black bread, followed by small red pears and goat cheese. Nothing either woman had eaten in a castle had ever tasted so fine. The tensions of the last few months were beginning to ebb away and Elinor felt safe for the first time since she had decided to stay in Saint-Jacques in the spring. It seemed so long since she had left the troupe as Esteve and doubled back in her red and yellow dress as Elinor again.
‘I wonder where they all are now,’ she said. ‘Lucatz and the troupe.’
‘Perhaps we will find them now we are in Italy,’ said Iseut. ‘I think we should try to find a court sympathetic to troubadours and trobairitz. Then we might earn our keep as poets.’
It was a novel idea. The trobairitz of the Midi were not like the troubadours; they did not travel from court to court with their latest compositions. But there was no reason why they should not, now that times were different.
Next day they went to the marketplace, which, as with all markets, was a good place for news. They were definitely in Italy now, the voices around them different, but still just understandable by those who spoke the language of Oc. There was even a small group of joglars, who made Elinor’s heart contract, but there was none she recognised among them.
‘What news?’ asked Lady Iseut, after she had bought spiced white bread for them and a drink made of plums from one of the stalls.
‘The cost of flour has gone up something shocking,’ said the baker.
Elinor turned away to hide her smile. Cities might fall and burn, people be slaughtered wholesale, but for a fat country baker with bread to sell, nothing would be as important as the price of flour.
Iseut was sympathetic. ‘That’s bad news for you,’ she said. ‘You have to put your prices up to match and then risk losing custom.’
‘Ah well,’ shrugged the baker, feeling better now someone understood his problems. ‘People will always need bread, no matter how much I have to charge. They won’t find any baker who sells it cheaper.’
‘Has there been a bad harvest in Piedmont then?’ asked Iseut.
‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ said the baker. ‘But I used to buy in some flour from over in the Languedoc and they’ve got it very bad over there – mills broken down and destroyed and so on.’
‘By the northerners?’ asked Iseut.
‘Mainly by the defenders, or so I’ve heard. To stop the Frenchies grinding their wheat for the army’s bread. For all the good it did them.’
‘Yes, news from the west is bad,’ agreed Iseut.
‘And likely to get worse,’ said the baker. ‘They say that Count Raimon’s been excommunicated again, even though he let them whip him at Saint-Gilles.’
Elinor whispered to Iseut.
‘Is there any news of the Viscount Trencavel?’ the Lady asked.
‘No one’s seen him since the French took Carcassonne apparently. But they’ve given his titles to one of them. So I reckon he’s had it.’
Iseut nodded and they finished their bread, letting him serve others. It didn’t do to ask too many questions of the same person. Elinor wandered away, drawn to the joglars even though she didn’t know any of them. She recognised one of their songs and it filled her with a painful pleasure, remembering her time on the road.
When the song was over, she tossed a few small coins into the hat held out.
‘Thank you kindly, my lady,’ said one, a man too old really for the travelling life. He must have been at least fifty and had a face so full of wrinkles it was hard to decipher his features among them.
‘Just Miss,’ said Elinor. ‘My lady is over there.’
‘Ah, do you think she’d like to hear a song or two?’ asked the joglar. For if the maid gave copper, surely the Lady would carry silver?
‘Perhaps,’ said Elinor. ‘She is fond of music. We used to have a troupe at her castle last winter. I don’t suppose you have come across them? Lucatz was the name of the troubadour and he was taking them into Italy in the spring.’
‘Not heard of a Lucatz,’ said the joglar. ‘Me and my boys don’t go far. We don’t need our own troubadour, see? We just learn all the old songs and play around Cuneo.’
‘Do you ever play at court?’ asked Elinor.
‘Not much,’ said the wizened little man. ‘But we used to go as far as Alba. There’s a court there – maybe your troupe has ended up at it?’
At Termes, the defenders spent their time partly mending and maintaining the walls and partly in sending out raiding parties to see if they could capture any Frenchmen or at least steal their weapons and horses. Bertran was often one of the party; the Lord of Termes had marked him out as a leader of men.
More often than French soldiers, they met nobles and knights who had been deprived of their lands. There was a word for them now – the faidits. They had nothing more to lose and readily offered their service to the Lord of Termes.
It was from one of them that Bertran learned the fate of Sévignan. It was Gui le Viguier.
He still had his horse and sword but had lost his shield and helm in the fierce fighting to defend the castle at Sévignan. His sword arm had sustained a bad break and set awkwardly so he couldn’t straighten it. But he could hold his horse’s reins in it and was training himself to fight with his left. He had wounds to his chest too, which needed seeing to. The healer would have a job to fix him up.
‘Lord Lanval stayed to fight, then?’ asked Bertran. ‘He did not leave his gates open like so many lords in the Languedoc?’
Gui snorted but it ended in a cough.
‘No, the Lord of Sévignan didn’t give up without a fight,’ he said. ‘Or his son.’
‘Aimeric was there on the walls with you?’ asked Bertran.
‘You know the family then,’ said Gui, who had not recognised the troubadour under his beard.
Bertran inclined his head.
‘Yes, Aimeric was there. He was my best friend.’ Gui fiercely brushed his good arm across his eyes. ‘The French killed him with a crossbow bolt, right in front of his father, God rot them. Just get me patched up and I’ll avenge him on the next northern bastard I can find.’
Bertran was still for a moment in honour of Aimeric, whom he had cradled as a baby and composed a song for in celebration of his birth.
‘What happened to the rest of the family?’ he asked, bracing himself for the worst.
‘The French broke the walls down with their siege engines,’ said Gui in a flat expressionless voice. ‘But the leader – what do they call him?’
‘The Abbot?’ asked Bertran.
Gui frowned. ‘No, that wasn’t it. Not a churchman. Simon de somewhere. He said, “Give me your heretics and the rest can go.” Lord Lanval didn’t believe him and anyway he wouldn’t give up good people to be burned. He refused.’
Bertran was silent, knowing Lanval’s beliefs.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘They had already built the pyre,’ said Gui. ‘So Lord Lanval said, “I am what you would call a heretic. I will go into the fire myself, if you will free my family and household.” We couldn’t believe it.’
‘He is a brave man,’ said Bertran.
‘Was,’ said Gui.
‘So he did burn?’
‘He walked out of the castle gate and up on to the pyre. It was alight by then.’
‘What of the family? Did the French keep their promise?’
‘Lady Clara and Lanval’s daughter were distraught, hanging on to his sleeves and screaming and begging him not to do it,’ said Gui, who was clearly reliving the moment. ‘But then something extraordinary happened. An old nursemaid hobbled out and tried to climb on the pyre too. “You’ll not die alone, my lord,” she said. And after her at least two dozen, servants, traders, knights. Do you remember Hugo the cook? He was one.’
Bertran felt sick. ‘They all went to their deaths?’
‘Every one. I think even the French were ashamed.’
‘What happened to Lady Clara and her daughter?’
‘We wouldn’t let them watch. We took them from the walls and huddled them in our cloaks so that they wouldn’t hear the screams and smell the burning flesh. And when it was all over, we opened the gates and let the French in. They let us go. They even let us take our horses and weapons. I think they were as stunned as we were.’
He stopped to drink some of the posset the healer had made for him.
‘The senescal took Alys on his own horse and led Lady Clara away. She could hardly hold the reins – she was like a corpse herself.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘To the east. That’s all I know.’
‘Without any guard?’
‘She wouldn’t have one,’ said Gui. ‘Don’t think they were short of offers. But she said, “No, go and fight the French. Kill as many as you can and avenge the Believers of Sévignan.” And she left on the road for Béziers. She said there was nothing left for the army to take from there so her way would be clear.’
‘May God go with them,’ said Bertran.
‘Well, He certainly wasn’t at Sévignan,’ said Gui bitterly.
‘He is the God of spirit, not matter,?
?? said Bertran. ‘It was an evil god who burned your lord and his faithful followers.’
‘So you are one too?’ said Gui. ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I wouldn’t hand you over to the crusaders whatever you believe.’
There was silence between them for a while.
‘Lady Elinor had the right idea,’ said Gui at last, startling Bertran out of his dark thoughts.
‘Lady Elinor?’ he said, as if talking of a distant view of the sea.
‘She left Sévignan rather than marry my father. But she got out last spring before the army was raised. I hope she’s somewhere safe out of this nightmare. She’s the Senhor of Sévignan now, even though the French occupy it and, if I ever saw her again, I’d kneel to her and beg her pardon for ever having teased her.’
Bertran thought back to the time he had rescued Elinor from dancing the saltarello with this same knight. It was a scene from another life, another world.
Riding slowly through Piedmont in October brought balm to Elinor’s and Iseut’s wounded spirits. The country of the plain was wonderfully gentle, with soft rolling hills around and they travelled on to Alba at an undemanding pace. It was true that Iseut had no idea where they would end up but she had always at the back of her mind the words of the pilgrim priest Taddeo, who had mentioned Monferrato as a court where poetry was highly honoured.
If they could get to Chivasso, where the Marchese kept court in his castle, before winter set in, she had a hazy idea of throwing herself on his mercy; surely three weary travellers would not tax his hospitality too much? But at other times she feared that her plan would not work and she had no alternative strategy. She didn’t want to discuss it with Elinor; Iseut just wanted this pleasant journey to last for ever.
Elinor would have understood. She felt the same and had felt it in her previous life as Esteve too. To travel without a definite end in sight had then been the solution to her problems and it was the same now. Then she had been running from an unwanted marriage but, had she really understood it at the time, she would have seen that she was escaping bloodshed and horror as well.