The Fiery Furnace: Second in the Trilogy, Ordeal by Fire

By F. Scott Kimmich

It is 1234, and heretic Olivier de Mazan possesses a secret that makes him a prime target of the Inquisition’s secular thugs. At the same time, Count Raimond of Toulouse and Queen Blanche of France are using the boudoir to pursue the policies of their respective dynasties.

Olivier’s grandsons – Odon and Rainier – come of age fighting the French usurpers at the side of Robin Hood’s son, a veteran mercenary. Along the way, the lovely performer Huguetta steals Odon’s heart, and Rainier loses his own to Miranda, who embodies Olivier’s secret.

In contrast, Count Raimond risks a rupture with Blanche by attempting to save his dynasty via strategic marriages and consequently delays rescuing his subjects trapped in the mountain fastness of Montségur, “Mount Secure.”

In this continuing saga, a Cathar family embarks on an epic struggle as they discover their true heritage, embrace their faith, and learn what it means to make the ultimate sacrifice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480829381

F. Scott Kimmich

Award-winning Author F. Scott Kimmich’s first novel The Apostles of Satan won the 2016 New Book Awards. His second, The Fiery Furnace, also won the 2016 New Book Awards, as well as the 2015-2016 Reviewers Choice Award for the Northeast Region.

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Copyright © 2016 F. Scott Kimmich.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover Illustration: The siege of Carcassonne, by José Daniel Peña Cabrera

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2936-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2937-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2938-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016905998

Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/25/2018

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Spelling of names and places

Expressions of Distances

Expressions of time

Glossary

Genealogy of Royal Families

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Figures

Figure 1

Figure 4

Figure 5

Acknowledgement

Major Characters

Historical Characters

To Kate

Who, by my troth, modified her life in the 21st century to accommodate a husband living in the XIIIth century.

Introduction

Many readers of The Apostles of Satan, commented that by reading the Historical and Theological Background first, they enhanced their enjoyment of the novel. Few were familiar with 13th century European politics or the Albigensian Crusades. You can read it in The Apostles of Satan or on my website. (http/www.fscottkimmich.com), which also contains photographs of sites where the Crusades took place.

Alternatively, you might consult several sources online. Peter Vronsky’s www.russianbooks.org/Montségur is specific to Montségur, the mountain-top citadel where so much of The Fiery Furnace takes place. www.cathar.info/ and also www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/gbe_cathars.htm are very informative.

If you become hooked on the subject matter, you might want to look into The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, A Sourcebook, edited by a trio of scholars, Catherine Léglu, Rebecca Rist, and Claire Taylor, or any of the histories cited in the Acknowledgement.

For readers of English, here are five accounts that provide copious information, listed in order of least number of pages:

The Catharss by Sean Martin, 2005;192 pp

The Albigensian Crusades by Joseph Strayer,1971, 201 pp

A Most Holy War by Mark Gregopry Pegg, 2008; 252 pp

The Albigensian Crusade by by Jonathan Sumption,1999; 271pp

The Perfect Heresy by, Stephen O’Shea, 2000; 333 pp

The Albigensian Crusades were forerunners of the religious intolerance and deadly violence that we see today in the world around us, including violence between sects of the same religion. State religions have become crucibles of unrest and war. An armed jihad and a crusade are two sides of the same coin.

Occupation following aggression also leads to misery and desperation, especially when occupiers speak a different language from the people they oppress. For seventy years, the United States have failed to enforce the United Nations charter, which forbids land grabs and supports democratic self-determination. Sadly, the occupiers write the history. My books try to portray what happens when religious zeal mixes with politics and greed.

Thanks to the Albigensian Crusades, future French conquests were funded by Church revenues, including repeated invasions of Italy and Sicily over the centuries. At least one of these aggressions against Christian enemies was named an official Crusade by the Holy See.

Pinning the Blame on Plato

A bit before the last millennium, a group of mostly French scholars met to discuss if heresy really did exist back in the 13th century, or if it was, as more and more it seems, dreamed up by the Church itself. They noted that as early as the 9th and 10th century, a way of thinking called Neoplatonism became fashionable in monastaries and the cathedral schools. In the words of historian R.I. Moore, the philosophy emphasized the permanence and purity of idea and spirit as opposed to the transience and corruptibility of material things.

Such ideas contained both great religious potential and inherent dangers. The vision of the soul striving to free itself from the prison of the flesh to reunite with the divine essence from which it had been parted appealed to many who sought the apostolic life, Moore writes. However, by threatening Church dogma, neoplatonism became a fertile source both of heresy and of accusations of heresy. Although most of its adherents actually resolved their conflicts with Christian doctrine, they became highly vulnerable to misunderstanding or misrepresentation.

Because they were mostly nobles, neoplatonists constituted a powerful social elite. By the thirteenth century, when many civic leaders in the Midi — the so-called good men — embraced a neoplatonic ethos and an apostolic way of life, it was no wonder that the Church saw them as heretics.

The Inquisitions

The Apostles of Satan, the first book of the trilogy Ordeal by Fire, didn’t mention inquisitions because they had not been developed beyond sporadic efforts by bishops. However, under Pope Gregory IX, inquisitors had begun work with a vengeance, giving rise to the universal informing and spying that the "Stazis" in the Deutsche Demcratische Republik perfected 700 yearss later and that intelligence agencies in the US have embraced using telecommunications.

The largest and the most completely recorded inquisitions took place over a two-hundred-day period in Toulouse in 1246-47, where almost fifty-five hundred men, women and teenagers were interrogated. Seven hundred fifty had already confessed, and only two hundred and seven (3%) were convicted. Twenty-three (0.5%)were sentenced to lifetime in prison and all the rest had to wear eight-inch by six-inch yellow crosses, front and back — much like the badges that Jews were required to wear.

According to the Toulouse records, inquisitors routinely translated good man or good woman as heretic. Historian Pegg was struck by the type of questions posed. The inquistors did not ask about thoughts or beliefs but, like detectives, asked people what they did, who they did it with, where they went and whom they talked to. By mid-cenntury, it had become dangerous to converse with a good-man preacher because such men were in hiding and thus to meet with one had to be a deliberate, clandestine act.

The confessions were translated on the spot from Occitan into Latin and many of them contained the same stock phrases and abbreviations, but the others described meaningful relationships among people. For the inquisitors, everything was implicated in everthing else.

In the records of the inquisition at Toulous, there is no trace of the dialectic methods attributed to the Scholastics, so that albatross cannot be hung around the neck of the brothers who did the questioning. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, some of the public had begun to believe in dualism because they had been accused of it for almost forty years.

As long as inquisitions had remained in the bishops’ hands, they were largely ineffective, partly because bishops operated under canon law. But once Pope Gregory IX put them under control of the Dominican Order of the Preaching Brotherhood, neither canon law nor civil law was observed, and the long nightmare commenced, especially when the Inquisition became institutionalized in the 15th aned 16th centuries. The inquisitons at Toulouse, did not use torture. It was only after the papal bulls by Innocent IV and Alexander IV in 1252 and 1256, respectively, that inquisitors used torture to enhance interrogation as American intelligence officers describe it today.

In brief, 13th century inquisitions were far more effective and economical than the Crusades in eliminating dissidence in the Midi; they also drastically reduced the number of executions. The Church was no longer promoting total war but settled on mind-control instead. The transition from appalling violence to shameful and degrading snitching was gradual, not abrupt.

Cathar: A Link That Is Missing

Remarkably, none of the inquisitorial records mentioned the word Cathar or Manicheeism or dualism, terms that are ubiquitous in most history texts up to the present. Yet, the term Cathar is missing from virtually all records from the 12th and 13th century! Neverthless, many serious history books retain Cathar in their titles, as you have seen in the examples cited above. The term matters because it implies specific origins and a time frame that don’t hold up to scrutiny and it tends to mislead rather than elucidate the real reasons behind accusations of heresy.

Catharism is such a given in historical discourse, that to encourage tourism and gastronomy in le pays du cathare (proclaimed by road signs as you drive through the region) it became commercially desirable to promote cults about Cathars interacting with the Templars, the Holy Grail, Rosicrucians, and Masons and even acting as the vanguard of Protestantism.

A License For Mass Murder

In, A Most Holy War, Pegg concludes that — as envisaged by Pope Innocent III, the Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to sacrifice on the cross. This ethos of redemptive homicide is what separates the crusade massacres from other great killings before the thirteenth century. By slaughtering a resident of the Midi, whether heretic or orthodox Roman Catholic, a Crusader ensured his place in heaven.

Prologue

Uzès, 1226

Pain! Bone-numbing, stabbing, aching pain! Where was he? What had befallen him? Something was terribly wrong with his face. It hurt worse than anything he had ever known. He moaned out loud. Moving his hand to his nose, he pulled it away as if he had touched a hot coal. It wasn’t his hand that sensed the pain, but his nose or maybe where his nose had been. His hand came away sticky with blood. With his other hand, he gingerly traced a huge gaping wound that ran from his brow down through the wreckage of his nose and his lips to his chin, and there were large bloody gaps where several front teeth on both jaws were missing. The collar of his jerkin was drenched in blood.

Even worse, he couldn’t see! Was he blind? Icy fear gripped him. He squeezed his eyes shut and using his clean hand, ran a finger across the lids of both eyes. His left eye was sore to the touch but the right eye felt sound. Still, how to explain the darkness? Was he dead? Maybe this was what death was like. If it was hell, where were the flames?

"Me voici! C’est moi, Guy de La Beauce, Baron de Rambouillet, Chevalier du Roi," he tried to scream, but his croaking got no further than "Me voici …" before he gave up. Both words were unintelligible and their utterance had knifed hm with agony. Yet, in spite of the pain, at least he had made a noise and heard it!

He tried to sit up; in attempting to brace himself, his hand brushed against something wrapped in cloth. He felt along whatever it was and came to a shoe. Ah, a leg, a man’s leg clad in breeches. Groping back along the leg, his fingers encountered a cold slippery mass that stunk of shit.

Then it all came back in a flash: the porter lying on the ground, blood welling from his tongueless mouth; the dying woman cradled in her daughter’s arms; and his two men-at-arms: Marcel missing a head and Jules, sprawled on the floor disemboweled. The last thing he remembered was using his dagger to deflect the savage strokes of that accursed Albigensian’s big sword.

Apparently, his parry had failed and he had been lying unconscious alongside the body of at least one of his men ever since. How long had it been? Could he be in a tomb? That would explain the darkness.

On his hands and knees, he crawled over Jules’s legs, trying to avoid the loops of bowel, and then he touched the legs of another body. Using his bloody hand, he groped along the abdomen and chest, then his hand reached a blood-soaked collar beyond which was nothing but air. In the name of God, it had to be Marcel! What had become of his head?

Then he realized it didn’t matter. The difference between the quick and the dead became plain. He had to be alive because he could move and feel pain; Jules and Marcel were immobile and stone cold. They were dead.

He kept crawling and his hand hit a wall. Good, now we are getting somewhere, he thought. He slowly stood. His joints were stiff and he felt dizzy and nauseous.

Amazed at his weakness, he used the wall to support himself, staggering along, feeling its smooth stones until he came to a corner. He had to be careful and to try to orient himself, he reasoned. Facing the wall, he had walked to his left, so if he wanted to go back to where he first felt the wall, he would have to face the wall and go to his right.

Continuing to creep to the left, he soon found another corner. Gaining more confidence, he realized that he was in a room, a room with no windows or doors. Maybe a tomb of some kind? He shuddered. Apparently, he and his men had been left for dead. Again, panic swept over him, almost smothering him. Sweating profusely, he sat on the floor and tried to clear his head. If bodies could be brought into a tomb, there had to be a way in, and therefore a way out.

He tried to concentrate on what he knew about the room. He had explored its periphery and it was roughly fourteen paces square. He had found the corpses of his two men. What else might be in the room?

He returned to the first corner he had found and started crawling forward along what he imagined was one of the diagonals of the room. As he guessed he was nearing the center of the room, his head bumped into an upright. Reaching up, he determined that he was feeling the bottom of a table. He stood up and felt its surface

His fingers brushed the cold skin of a hand. He felt along the sleeved arm and realized it probably belonged to the heretic woman he had stabbed to death. He felt her bodice and her cold bosom. Someone had cleaned away the blood from the wounds he had inflicted. Alongside the woman, he found a man’s body. It had to be the porter’s. Whoever had laid them on the table wanted to separate them from their killers.

All present and accounted for, he mumbled, more clearly this time, although speech was still painful. It set him wondering: if he cried out, if he yelled at the top of his lungs, maybe someone would hear him.

Suddenly he realized that he was terribly thirsty, and he tried to put the phrase dying of thirst out of his mind. He had to find a way out! He had no idea just how long it took him, but he methodically retraced his steps, feeling all the stone blocks that he could reach on all four walls. None were loose. Escape seemed hopeless. As his spirits sank, fatigue overcame him, and despite the acute, gnawing pain from his wound, he dozed off.

When he awoke, he was thirstier than ever and his terrible wound was throbbing. He felt his way to the middle of the room and stood up by the table. In the name of God and his Whore Mother, he had to find a way out.

He began to yell as loud as he could, "Help! HELP! HELP! Every word was agonizing, and blood kept oozing into his mouth and down his throat.

‘Twas all the woman’s fault, he raged to himself. If she hadn’t attacked him, he wouldn’t have killed her. The more he thought about it, the more furious he became. With a bellow of despair, he upended the table, spilling the two bodies onto the floor. In the process, his foot hit something on the floor that had been lying under the table. He reached down and discovered it was Marcel’s blood-soaked head. Horror, anger and revulsion flooded his brain, and he kicked the head as hard as he could. It hit the opposite wall with a thud.

As he put his foot back down the floor, he felt the stone slab move. He fell to his knees and pried it out of the floor with his finger tips. Reaching down into the space, he felt a rounded metal surface, almost like the rim of a wheel. In fact, further exploration proved that it was a wheel! The rim was perforated with holes about a thumb square.

The table had six legs, which were spindly, but square. Could they possibly fit those holes? Was this a kind of windlass to operate a hidden door? He groped in the dark for the table legs and found one. He yanked on it, but it didn’t come loose. However, the third leg came off easily. He fumbled around until he succeeded in sticking it into one of the square holes. It fit perfectly! When he pulled the leg toward him, the wheel didn’t move, but when he pushed it in the opposite direction, it moved.

He removed the leg and stuck it into the next hole and pushed. The wheel moved with a grating noise and a faint perpendicular line of light appeared in one of the walls. As he kept switching holes, the wheel turned, the narrow line changed into a wide shaft of light until finally the space was big enough to walk through.

Masteriing the impulse to dash out through the opening, he waited until his eyes accommodated. He was alive! If he survived, he bore a grudge that would not rest until vengeance was his!

Part I

Fanjaus, 1234

In the narrow street, residents stood on their doorsteps gaping at a macabre spectacle. Chanting monks swinging smoking censers were leading a group of sextons and grave-diggers who were using makeshift stretchers to bear shriveled and discolored cadavers clad in moldering rags. Here and there, bony limbs hung over the sides. One or two of the skulls lolled off the stretchers, their jaws with long yellow teeth hanging open, as if laughing at some ghastly joke.

The corpses in the grisly procession had once been villagers who had been posthumously accused of being heretics, and therefore could no longer remain buried in consecrated ground. Having been disinterred, the bodies were on their way to a field outside the walls where firewood had been stacked.

The public display was part of the pope’s determination to cow people into submitting to the inquisition, now led by the Preaching Brotherhood, the order founded by Saint Dominic some twenty years before. The gruesome parade served to warn the populace that heretical ideas were best countered by fire, whether the accused were alive or dead, or whether they were holy men or simply crezens, who believed in the holy men.

Clad in his shoemaker’s apron, Olivier de Mazan emerged from his shop and involuntarily shook his head at the sight, then caught himself and held still. Having been ordained as a holy good man, or what the Romans called a perfect, he was a prime target of the inquisition, and he did not want to risk discovery, no matter how repulsive he found the scene. After all, having become Pope Gregory’s preferred arm in the fight against heresy, the Preaching Friars were well known for turning over so-called Good Men and Women to the secular authorities for immolation.

As the procession passed by, Olivier regarded his neighbors in their doors across the way. Some were stony-faced, others looked fearful, and some scowled in anger. Whether Catholic or true Christians, no one enjoyed watching the remains of towns people one once knew shamed in this way. Their reactions bore out the unpopularity of the Dominicans and their inquisition. Were he a Dominican, Olivier reflected, he wouldn’t want to be alone in the town after dark.

The whole macabre affair reminded him of an incident he had witnessed in Albi. The chief inquisitor, Arnaud Cathala, had ordered a bailiff to exhume a woman a few days after he had solemnly declared her to be a heretic, despite the fact that she had died three years before. The bailiff had refused. Because Cathala was taking part in a synod being held in his diocese, he asked some of the curés at the meeting to help him exhume the heretic. They had just begun digging, when he was called back to the synod.

The clergymen had almost finished the job, when several dozen men appeared and chased them away. Informed of this brash action, Cathala stormed back to the cemetery, and began to upbraid the mob, but he was knocked down and badly beaten. Although some wanted to hang him, they finally decided to drown him in the river. But, as they were dragging him down toward the Tarn, a larger contingent of angry Catholics overcome his captors and set him free.

Surrounded by a dense pack of rescuers, the inquisitor trudged pain-fully back up to the Cathedral, his eyes and lips swollen and bloody, his garments in shreds. Many of the onlookers cried, Kill him, kill him! as he passed by, and here and there, scuffles broke out between the lynch mob and his rescuers. After reaching the priory and recovering his composure, Cathala had excommunicated the entire population.

Lost in memory, Olivier suddenly noticed that one of the monks in the parade had paused and was standing in the middle of the street staring at him. Olivier had spied him before, skulking around in front of his shop. When Olivier returned the stare, the monk turned away and hurried after his brothers around a corner and out of sight.

‘Tis time to move on, Olivier muttered under his breath. Like enough, that monkish wight’s on to me, and ‘twill not be long before he or one of his cronies denounces me. I’ve had good fortune over the last few years, but it may change, now that the Pope has placed the Preaching Friars in charge of the inquisition.

His mind went back to the awful event in Uzès that had set him on his path to become a holy man and to serve the large number of people who called themselves friends of God. His daughter and his son-in-law had been forced to flee to the Diha in the Marquisate of Provença, which, as a fief of the Emperor, was one of the few places where one could be safe from the prying eyes of the inquisition.

He had moved into the Tolosan because of the high concentration of good folk in that region and because of family ties. After two years of learning a trade and aceticism, he had finally been Consoled and gone into pastoral duties in Fanjaus, living and working with his soci in the same house that his mother had once inhabited.

But last year, two unexpected thunderclaps had warned him that this sojourn in Fanjaus might be coming to an end. First, Count Raimond VII of Tolosa had issued an edict warning that he was going to intensify his efforts to drive heresy out of his domains. Everyone had snickered, because the Count had been saying the same thing for years without lifting a finger; but this time they were proven wrong. Bishop Fouga led a cavalcade that bagged nineteen Good Men in one night and had seen to it that all of them were burned at the stake. Had the Count really changed, or was he currying favor with the Holy See? Predicting the Count’s action was no longer to be taken for granted.

The second clap of thunder didn’t seem menacing at first, but it rapidly turned out to be deadly. The Holy See took the inquisition out of the hands of the bishops and put the Dominican Preaching Brotherhood in charge. The monks went to work with a will and within months they had spun their sticky web all across the County of Tolosa. In the town of Moissac alone, two hundred ten heretics were rounded up and burned. That was when Olivier decided to move to Saissac, at the foot of the Black Mountain.

Once the macabre procession passed out of sight, Olivier stepped out onto the street and locking the door behind him, went off to find his soci, who worked as a tailor a few streets away. They had purposely avoided each other, given that the inquisition became suspicious of two men or two women spending time with each other. Such pairings had given away many holy men and women.

Olivier planned to set up a rendezvous that very evening to discuss at length where and when to go. But whatever the decision, Olivier decided it would not deter him from returning to Provença to visit his daughters. They and their children were the home he longed for. Over a year had gone by since he last saw them, and in her most recent letter, Margarida had said that she and her family would be visiting Isabel in Entrechaud. He would be able to see both families together and there would be plenty of time to consult Good Man Marty in Tolosa afterwards.

Viterbo, Tuscany

Sitting at a writing desk, Count Raimond VII of Tolosa stretched his legs and whistled a tune. His new diplomacy offensive was paying off.

Five years before, he had been humiliated and shorn of many of his domains and it had even seemed that his heirs would lose all of the County of Tolosa. The treaty he had signed stipulated that his daughter, Joan, would marry King Louis IX’s brother, thereby making the County part of the realm of France. But recently, in just a few short wonderful weeks, everything had spun around in his favor. Now, once again, he was the Marquis of Provença.

He rose and danced around the room, snapping his fingers to the beat. In his mind, he was back in Lorris, one of Louis IX’s castles in the Loire valley, locked in a fateful discussion with the queen mother, Blanche of Castille. Never had a diplomatic trip been more beguiling.

At forty-six, some ten years older than Raimond, Blanche was still an imposing woman. As they drank wine out of gold-rimmed goblets, she smiled back at him from among the pillows of a divan, one of those pieces of furniture that crusaders had brought back from the Levant.

So, why should we – my son and I – prefer you over Count Raimond Berenger as the Marquis of Provença? If I may speak plainly, what benefit would we derive from such an arrangement? Blanche cocked an eyebrow.

Raimond leaned toward her on his curule and threw up his hands. Your Majesty, the Count of Provença is but an extension of the House of Barcelona and Aragon. Have you his welfare so much at heart that you would expand his power in the region? If he avails, the Catalans will rule all of Provença north and south of the Durança. They will control most of the lower Ròse — excuse me, the Rhône, as you say— and most of its strategic right bank. ‘Tis not so much a loss of tolls and customs, as ‘tis a loss of access and commerce. The Catalans will be able to monopolize trade from Valence to Marselha.

The Queen nodded and peered at him slyly. "How, my dear Count, will it help us to have the Marquisate back in your hands?"

You would hugely benefit from untrammeled commerce on the river. Surely ‘twere wise to have two rival states bidding against each other rather than a single monopoly athwart the lower Rhône.

But isn’t it easier to deal with one power instead of two?

Ease is but the song of a siren. What about gain? By competing for your business, we’d be giving you a chance to gain from a differential in fees.

But in reality, my dear Count, as the Marquis of Provença, you would become the vassal of the Emperor instead of the Holy See. France has oft marched together with the Pontiff and I cannot call to mind when His Holiness has caused any problem. In fact, the Treaty of Paris endows Rome and France with common cause.

Undeniably, he answered, but by allowing the Church to retain the Marquisate, you create a dangerous precedent, where the religious power gains mastery over temporal power. Where does it all end? In any case, I would still be your vassal in my other domains. May I remind you that the House of Tolosa has always stood as a strong counterweight against your rivals, England and Aquitania. Except for that short war ten years ago, we have always been your loyal vassal.

Nevertheless, our two houses were at war. Indeed, good Count, you were insubordinate. You broke your feudal oath, she pouted. Raimond wrung his hands and hung his head. "Yes, your gracious Majesty, I sorely rue having done so, and for taking up arms against my suzerain, and, above all, in losing your personal trust. I’d give anything to have it back. I acted in bad faith, but ‘twas in reaction to the Crusade, which, you must admit, got out of hand. In several of my fiefs, the Church still owes me a good deal of property."

You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, young man, even wiser than your father’s, Blanche said. Ten years ago, I believed that you were sincere in your penitence. My heart was stirred as I watched you standing in your shirttails on the steps of Notre Dame, a handsome young prince whom fate had cheated. I still believe you mean well. Come back tomorrow and tell the king what you told me. In the meantime, I will have a word with him, just to orient him to what we discussed. I’m sure you understand that our conversation is merely a friendly chat, and that my son is the real decision maker, don’t you?

Raimond met her steady gaze and nodded vigorously, even though he knew that she was still very much the real decision maker in France. Of course, and please accept my undying thanks for having hearkened so closely to my words. ‘Tis thrilling just to be in the same room with you, Your Majesty.

By my troth, I’m flattered that you should pay heed to an old woman, Blanche said, beaming up at him and batting her eyelashes.

I always pay heed to beautiful women, Your Majesty, although they are never so clever or so far-sighted as you, Raimond said.

The fervency of this courtly tribute did not go unnoticed, and she smiled and offered her hand to him. He bowed low and kissed it.

Thank you for coming to Lorris, Count Raimond. We will have the pleasure of your company at dinner tonight, I trow?

To be in your presence is overwhelming, but to enjoy your company twice in one day, is a fairy tale. I scarce believe my good fortune. Until this evening, then?

Yes, she said and pursed her lips. Unless….

Unless …?

Unless you’d like to chat and help me pass the afternoon. Here, she said, patting the divan, come over here and sit beside me. As he lowered himself onto the cushion, she leaned into him. Now, isn’t this better?

Forsooth, Your Majesty, he said, ’Tis both an honor and a pleasure to keep you company.

As it should be. After all, we’re kin, or will be, when your daughter marries my youngest son. ‘Tis not far off. So ‘tis fitting that we talk about family matters, bethink you not? Her fingers lightly touched the back of his hand and stayed there.

Twould be a fair way to pass the time, he nodded, tantalized by the gentle caress.

Word has gone that your wife – Sancha is her name, isn’t it? – no longer shares your bed. Is that true?

I’m afraid so, Your Majesty. ‘Tis an unhappy marriage, Raimond shrugged and thrusting his fingers between hers, looked into her eyes.

She returned his ardent gaze. ’Tis such a pity, a big strong man like you, she said breathlessly. Perhaps…

His lips brushed the rest of her words from her own, and as their tongues met, she threw herself into his arms.

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The next day, King Louis granted the Count’s petition and wrote to Pope Gregory, urging him to restore the Marquisate of Provença to its rightful owner, the Count of Tolosa. He also reminded the Pontiff that, according to the Treaty of Paris, the Church was supposed to return certain properties that it had acquired during the Crusades to the Count of Tolosa.

Viterbo

Gazing out over the roofs of Viterbo from a palace window, Raimond ached at the memory of his idyll with the queen mother and became aware of a swelling in his crotch. Aside from one or two courtesans, he had never had a partner with so much fervor and vigor, or whose body was more desirable. A pity that she dwelt so far away!

Tearing his mind away from vivid memories of the nude and eager Blanche, he recalled the concessions he had won from the pope. Fortune had again smiled upon him.

Upon disembarking in Italy, he had learned that the city magnates had driven the Pope from Rome. Making a bee-line to Viterbo, where the pontiff had taken refuge, he commandeered the papal troops and routed Rome’s army with a few deft maneuvers. As a result, a newly empowered Pope was presently negotiating return to Rome on his own terms.

Having taken full advantage of the pope’s gratitude, he was once more the Marquis of Provença. The Church had also made full restitution of the properties they had purloined from him during the Crusade. But the Pope had dug in his heels when Raimond begged him to annul his marriage, insisting that Raimond resume conjugal relations with his wife. His Holiness had also chided him for not carrying out his oath to wipe out heresy in his domains.

Still, all in all, what he had achieved was well worth crowing about, and Raimond decided to look for a woman who could treat his tumescence and hopefully evoke fond memories of the Queen Mother of France.

Narbona

Looking up from his paper work, Bernard Ferrier, Prior of the Convent of Preaching Friars and Chief Inquisitor of Narbona, gasped. The face of the man who stood before him was far more frightful than any of the gargoyles in the stone-work of his abbey. A hideous purple scar ran from one eyebrow diagonally down across the ruin of a nose and through both lips to the opposite side of the chin. Lumpy, uneven scar tissue bulged over indentations in both lips like a freakish double hare lip.

As the man opened his grotesque mouth to speak, Ferrier was appalled to see that three front teeth on both jaws were missing.

Good day, Senhor Prior, the man said, I’m Guy de la Beauce, Baron of Rambouillet and I need your help.

That all depends, my lord, Ferrier answered, tearing his gaze away and praying that he hadn’t offended his visitor by staring. How can I be of service?

I am seeking information about a couple of heretics. One called Gerard Castèlnòudari, whose last known address is Uzès; the other is his father-in-law, who is a perfect named Olivier de Mazan.

"Ah, ‘tis an unusual request. Almost invariably, ‘tis we who collect information about heretics, and not the other way around. Have you come in an official capacity?"

No, Senhor Prior, although I have long served the secular arm in the struggle against heresy. At one time, I served his Grace, the Archbishop of Narbona, as his squire in the first siege of Carcassona and had the privilege of fighting by his side against the Moors.

Ferrier sprang up and shook hands with his grisly visitor.

"Good heavens, Rambouillet! That Baron! Forgive me. It does me great