Paradise Red
Authors: K. M. Grant
BOOK THREE
THE PERFECT FIRE TRILOGY
K. M. Grant
For Liffy, with love
A Third Greeting
Did I nod off? If so, I'm sorry. It's just that storytellers occasionally have to pause for breath, and when you are as old as I am, sleep is always lurking in the corner of the eye. I'm awake again now, though, quite awake.
If this is our first meeting, you will not know that I, your narrator, am the Amouroix-in-Occitan. That is, I am a small snatch of land on the northern side of the Pyrenean mountains, one of the counties that make up the broader territory once commonly called Occitania, which you may know as southern France. I don't intrude much into these pages. In fact, I pride myself on intruding so little that when I do, you'll have to pinch yourself to remember who I am. I don't apologize for that. I may be old and called a different name, but I have lost neither my spirit nor my looks. I am worth remembering.
We may, of course, have met before, for what you are reading now continues a story I have been recounting for a little time. If we have not met, however, I need to tell you about Raimon, Yolanda, and the Blue Flame. Nowâa storyteller's conundrum: how to enlighten new friends while not making old friends yawn?
The best way, in my opinion, is just to start, so I shall begin by telling you that I have been woken from sleep by the echo of Raimon's laughter and that this surprises me. After all, Raimon laughing at any time is rare enough, but how can he laugh now? The ring on his fingerâwell, scarcely a ring, really just a strip of leather welded in the heat of the Blue Flame and given to him by Yolanda, the girl he lovesâhas etched both a black imprint on his skin and an aching groove in his heart. He and Yolanda certainly belong together, yet she is married to another, and, worseâthough she wears the pair to his ring in or thong around her neckâhas chosen to stick by that other in his hour of need.
It is not even as if that “other” is a friend. Far from it. Yolanda is married to Sir Hugh des Arcis, the French Seneschal of Carcassonne, the guardian of the French king's standard, a red-tailed banner also known as the oriflamme. It is Sir Hugh who is set to crush the Occitan of which, as I told you, I, the Amouroix, form a part. If I tell you also that Raimon holds the Occitan dearer than his own life, you will understand why, as Sir Hugh's wife, Yolanda seems to have drifted far away in every sense. And Raimon parted from her in anger. It was not well done.
Then his home, together with the whole of my town of Castelneuf, is in ruins despite all the machinations of Raimon's other foe, Yolanda's brother, Count Aimery. The count, while professing to be a true Occitanian, contrived to make his own deal with the French king. The Occitan might be overrun and my lovely lands forced to bow before the oriflamme, but Aimery would be safe. Actually, more than safe, for he planned to trade his Occitanian title for a French title of grander proportions.
However, Aimery miscalculated. Castelneuf, chateau and town, was burned on the French king's orders. Both Raimon and Aimery have been left to sift through it together.
Then there is the loss of the Blue Flame itself. This small living icon, in which the soul of the Occitan is distilled, has both saved Raimon's life and, some might say, ruined it. You see, if Sir Parsifal, the old knight who returned the Blue Flame to the Occitan in its hour of need, had not wandered aimlessly into the Castelneuf valley, Raimon would never have danced to its fiery tune, and had he not danced, there would have been no pyre, and without the pyre, he would not have become the Flame's champion after Sir Parsifal's death. Without the Flame, he might have gotten to Paris in time to save Yolanda from her marriage.
If you are new to my tale, do not be confused. You can catch up with the beginning in your own time. For the present you need only know that the Blue Flame is now in the most dangerous hands of all, those of the White Wolf, a man who professes to be a loyal Occitanian but is, in truth, simply a religious fanatic, being the self-appointed leader of the Cathars, a sect who believe the earth and all its beauties to be the work of the devil. The Catholic French call him and those who follow him “heretics.” Cathar heretics. Raimon just calls them wicked.
So, all in all, you will understand why I say it is a strange time for Raimon to laugh, and I should say at once that his laugh is not the carefree laugh that occasionally rang out before Castelneuf was drawn into this bitter fray. Only a mad person could really laugh like that now. No. Raimon's laugh is squeezed through bad memories and stinging regrets. The life he and
Yolanda might have led will never be because whatever the future holds, the past cannot be expunged. If it were possible to paint Raimon's laugh, it would be edged with black like an old-fashioned mourning card.
Having said all that, however, laughter is laughter, and Raimon is not brooding, at least not at this moment. I can tell this quite easily, since he has one of those cleanly etched, dark-framed faces across which all his moods flit openly, much like the shadows that chase across my jagged expanses. Indeed, not just his face but his whole body is seldom completely still, and even when peace does descend, it is less the stillness of repose and more the stillness of the diver about to leap. I love him for this.
Anyway, what would be the point of brooding? He cannot bring back Sir Parsifal, but although the old knight's absence, together with the loss of Yolanda and the Blue Flame, aches like a throbbing scar, none are entirely gone from him. He still feels Sir Parsifal by his side, usually urging a caution that Raimon is inclined to ignore, and the sky is full of Yolanda since they still share that same sky. As for the Flame, it pulses as a cone of brilliant, prickling blue somewhere deeper than his heart, tugging at him as an impatient child tugs at a father's hand. On waking, he smells its sulfurous smoke. On sleeping, he feels as though the small silver salver in which it flutters has somehow jostled beneath his bedroll. And there is something else, something quite recent. Both waking and sleeping, he feels the Flame is telling him something that remains just beyond his reach.
What is not beyond his reach, though, is the certainty that he will retrieve the Flame from the White Wolf. Like a rod of
steel, this belief stiffens his spine, and if his spine ever softens, all he has to do is touch Unbent, the sword Sir Parsifal bequeathed to him on his deathbed. “Fight for the Flame, for the Amouroix, for the Occitan, and for love,” he hears the dead knight exhort him. And Raimon knows he will fight, fight to his last breath. He looks forward to it.
For the moment, however, Unbent is unsheathed not for battle but for polishing, almost overpolishing, by Cador, Raimon's self-appointed and eager young squire, and Raimon himself is not fighting but building. He is not building alone. He and Count Aimery are building together.
This is quite complicated. Are Raimon and Aimery now friends or enemies? Certainly they were enemies as long as it was Aimery's intention to betray the Occitan. Certainly forgiveness and trust, those two staples of friendship, do not flourish between them. But now that Aimery's intrigues have so hideously unraveled, it is difficult to describe what they are to each other. It is practical expediency, not friendship, that keeps them working together. Both know that a chateau in ruins is easy prey. At any moment, more French soldiers may come to complete the destruction they started, or a troop of random bandit knights could attack and finish the job for them. Also, though they have not yet quite reached my borders, Catholic inquisitors, hungry for souls and brimming with highly imaginative ways of extracting confessions of heresy, are also moving slowly in Castelneuf's direction. French and Occitanian, Catholic and Cathar: the wars between them ebb and flow, with alliances forged in cunning and broken at will. At the time of my tale, not only Raimon but the whole country simmers.
For the moment, however, Raimon and Aimery are straining bare chested, hewing and hammering and heaving, working up a sweat though the air is freezing. And I, who can see everything, can tell you that though King Louis has betrayed Aimery, Aimery's vision of himself as a great man at the French court still tempts him as a plump carcass tempts a wounded jackal. If he, Count Aimery of Amouroix, can only wrest the Blue Flame of the Occitan from the White Wolf and deliver it into the royal hand as he once promised he would, his fortunes may yet be restored.
This is what Aimery is pondering as he pulls his shirt back on, his flesh shining white and a little soft. Despite the activity, he is out of condition. He scratches the blond beard that broadens an already broad face just beginning to coarsen. Raimon's laugher irritates him. “What's so funny?” he asks, his pale eyes darting.
Raimon gestures at a multicolored girl who is slithering toward them carrying a box the size of a cat's coffin under one arm and a skinny creature resembling a misshapen fawnâon closer inspection, a dogâunder the other. “Laila's hissing at the ice as if it's insulted her personally,” he says, and calls out as he picks up his own shirt and slings it over his shoulder. “If you hiss like a snake, Laila, you'll turn into one.” The cold makes his veins tingle as they used to when he and Yolanda took their first bath of the spring. He touches his leather ring, noting that he must oil it or it will crack, then tosses icicled hair out of his eyes.
Laila opens her mouth to offer some sharp retort but slips and crashes onto her stomach. The box, whose contents are a fiercely guarded secret, skitters away in front of her and her
patchwork skirt flaps to reveal numerous jaunty underskirts. The dog, who rejoices in the name of Ugly, lands heavily and spins like a flailing skater. Still, the moment she can scramble to her feet, she whines concern for her beloved mistress, concern that is quite misplaced, for although giddy and panting slightly, Laila has enough breath left to let loose a torrent of curses. Guiltily, Ugly extends a sympathetic and servile paw, a trick that Laila taught her when they met in the Parisian gutter. The girl, still cursing, takes the paw, then topples the dog so that Ugly is upended again. Only now do the curses give way to a percussive chortle.
“A poisonous snake,” Aimery remarks drily to Raimon, although it is his eyes that are snakelike, lingering as Laila rebalances her box on her head, makes a show of smoothing her dress over her hips, and flips a dainty heel to reveal spiked shoes painted pink. A ripple runs through Aimery's grainy cheek.
A man shouts from above. Aimery drags his attention from Laila and tucks his shirt into thick woolen leggings. “Ready?” he asks.
“Ready,” Raimon replies, and drops his shirt onto the ground.
Above them, twenty feet of thick oak, honed and planed into a beam by dozens of woodcutters, has been raised by a specially constructed hoist attached to an enormous wheel turned by half a dozen stalwart oxen. Aimery and Raimon ease their way up the scaffolding poles toward it. This is a crucial moment, as the giant beam is one of six main joists for the great hall's new roof. When the five others are in place, the rest of the keep can grow and Castelneuf will rise again like a man rising from the dead. Raimon's father, Sicart, already perched high on the
opposite wall, braces himself as he takes hold of one side of the sturdy webbed sling in which the beam is cradled. Instructions fly around. “Take care!” “A little to the right!” “Don't let it swing too far over!” Nothing must go wrong.