TARASCON
A silver mist skimmed the tops of the trees on the slopes below the Pic de Vicdessos, as dawn began to give colour back to the world.
Audric Baillard had come alone, leaving the house before first light while Pujol was still sleeping off the effects of the previous evening’s wine. He thought Pujol would have tried to stop him or else insisted on accompanying him. Neither suited Baillard’s purposes. He knew these old Cathar routes like the back of his hand. Despite his weakened state, he was certain he could evade any Nazi patrols operating in the mountains. More, he didn’t want to put his old friend at risk.
He looked down at the milk-white scrap of cloth in his hand, Arinius’ map of where the Codex had been hidden some sixteen hundred years before. Safe, there, for all that time. For a moment, in the shimmering dawn, Baillard suddenly saw his younger self reflected back at him. A boy still, being entrusted with another map by his grandmother, a map leading him and those for whom he was responsible to the village of Los Seres.
‘La Vallée des Trois Loups,’ he said aloud. Eloise and Geneviève had told him the valley had such a name, though it appeared on no map. Even with his extensive knowledge of the myths and legends of the hills, he had never heard it called that.
He closed his eyes. As the timelessness of the ancient forests and mountains seeped into his tired bones, another memory. Himself as a young man – no older than Raoul Pelletier was now, no older than Viscount Trencavel when he gave his life to save the people of Carcassonne – travelling through these lands during another occupation. Remembering how the Inquisitors went from village to village, accusing and denouncing and condemning. Spies everywhere, neighbour denouncing neighbour, until no one knew who to trust. Corpses exhumed to be burned as heretics. The Cathars and freedom fighters of the Midi being pushed back and back into the mountains. The raid in Limoux just days ago, reminding him of another raid in the peaceful mountain town where friends of his had been seized. The inquisitional courts, mirrored now by the trials conducted by the Gestapo. And those few who survived the interrogation to be released, forced to wear a scrap of yellow cloth stitched to their garments.
A cross then, a star now.
Baillard shook his head. The time had come. While he was imprisoned in Rivesaltes, he had not been able to act. The decision had been taken from him. Now he could avoid it no longer. As he looked up at the ridges and crests ahead and compared them to Arinius’ map, he knew he was in the right place. Although the forest had been cut back over the centuries, the essential landscape remained unchanged.
Now, as then.
In his youth, Baillard had taken a vow to bear witness. To speak out so that the truth should not die. He had given his word. He had known great joy in his life, but also great sorrow. His destiny was to watch those he loved live and grow old. In time, to die. Generation unto generation.
He allowed his thoughts to fly north to Chartres. It was a city that had been part of his life for so long, even though he had never been there. Several times he had tried, several times he had failed. He had never seen the labyrinth in the nave of the great Gothic cathedral. He had never met the descendants of those he had fought so long ago and fought against still. But he knew the jackals were coming. Once more, from Chartres to Carcassonne. The names were different – Leo Authié and François Cecil-Baptiste de l’Oradore – but their intentions were the same. Coming, as Baillard’s enemies had done before, in search of the secrets of the Languedoc.
As he stood in solitude, the soft morning air on his face, Baillard knew he was not yet strong enough to begin the climb into the mountains. But he needed to be here, in the peace and silence, to make his decision. To listen to the voices and to hope they would guide him.
‘Per lo Miègjorn,’ he murmured.
In his head, he heard the battle cry. Trencavel’s brave chevaliers attempting to defend the Cité against the northern crusaders. The clash of steel and the sweet, hot smell of blood. In a matter of days, the Jewish quarter had been destroyed, the suburbs of Sant-Vincens and Sant-Miquel put to the flame, the women and men of Carcassonne expelled like refugees from their homes.
Then, as now.
There was no doubt in his mind. He would return, as soon as he had gathered his strength. He would gather to him those who would help him. Sandrine Vidal and Raoul Pelletier, Achille Pujol and Eloise and Guillaume Breillac. With their help, he would retrieve the Codex and bring it down from the mountain.
Most of all, Sandrine Vidal.
He did not know why he was certain that she was so important in this story, only that she was. Two years ago she had told him of the dreams she sometimes had at night. Of the sensation of slipping out of time, falling from one dimension into another through white space. Of the indistinct figures hunting her down – white and red and black and green – their faces hidden beneath hoods and shadow and flame. The glint of metal where should have been skin. Baillard did not know yet what the Codex contained, but he recognised echoes of the Book of Revelation in her nightmares and wondered at it.
Was she linked in some way to the Codex and its history? Was it chance, or was there a design behind the fact that Sandrine had come upon Antoine Déjean at the river that day and heard the words he spoke? Happenstance or destiny?
Baillard sighed. Once more, he was being called upon to drive the invaders from the green lands of the Languedoc. Once more, to fight to liberate the Midi. To protect the ancient secrets buried in the mountains. He turned to the west, where the labyrinth cave lay hidden within the folds of the Sabarthès mountains. Then returned his eyes to the images on the milk-white scrap of cloth.
Baillard feared the power of the Codex. He feared he would not be equal to the task and would fail to control the forces that might be unleashed. But he was resolved to act. He had no other choice, whatever the consequences might be.
‘Come forth the spirits of the air.’ He spoke the words that had lain in the dusty recesses of his mind through his long captivity. ‘Come forth the armies of the air.’
He paused. He listened. And, carried on the air, he heard the land begin to answer.
‘Benlèu,’ he whispered. Soon.
CARCASSONNE
Raoul didn’t want to leave, but Sandrine sent him away as soon as the curfew was lifted. She and Lucie needed to get ready and he shouldn’t be out on the streets for any longer than absolutely necessary.
‘And you can’t stay here,’ she said.
Raoul put his arms around her waist and drew her to him. ‘Be careful, ma belle.’
She smiled. ‘You too.’
‘Chez Cazaintre.’
Sandrine nodded. ‘And don’t be late!’ She leant forward and kissed him.
Raoul left the rue du Palais by the garden gate, into the rue du Strasbourg, down to the riverbank and along. He took an even more circuitous route than usual, to make sure he wasn’t being followed. His eyes darted left and right, watching for patrols or Milice informers. Every journey he was obliged to make during daylight hours was undertaken with a knot in his chest, hands balled into fists, his heart bumping one beat into the next.
No one paid him any attention.
He went out of town towards the Aire de la Pépinière, then doubled back to approach the Quai Riquet from the route de Minervois. There was a blind corner underneath the railway bridge by the station. Coming at it from the eastern side of the Bastide, he could see the whole sweep of the road clearly.
There were no police, no military vehicles, no sounds. Nothing to see but the ripple of the Canal du Midi and no noise but the water lapping against the wooden hulls of the barges moored on the riverbank.
Raoul walked quickly along the narrow pavement in the light of the rising sun and into the building. Careful not to hurry, careful not to idle. The street door to the building where his mother lived stood open, as it always had done. The familiar smell in the hallway, polish and the chill of the floor tiles, caught at his heart. Taking him back to a time when he and Bruno had been rough-and-tumble brothers, eager every morning to be allowed out to play. Watching the barges transporting food and grain along the Canal du Midi, the coopers with barrels of beer and wine from Toulouse, the stevedores with their wide-brimmed hats and faces tanned dark by the sun. Sometimes a sou for holding a horse’s harness while the men went to the down-and-out bar to drink after the sun had gone down.
He took a deep breath, banishing the ghosts of the past, then mounted the stairs two by two to the first floor. It seemed strange to do it, but he didn’t want to scare his mother, so he knocked at the door. Nothing happened. He heard no footsteps, no sound from the wireless or voices talking. He hesitated, then fished the latch key out of his pocket. He put it into the lock and turned.
‘Maman, c’est moi,’ he said, stepping into the apartment.
The silence surged around him like a living thing, curious and intrusive. It seemed cold in the flat, though Raoul couldn’t have said why.
‘Maman?’
A sense of foreboding swept through him.
‘It’s me, Raoul.’
There was a strange noise he couldn’t identify. High-pitched, angry, like a thousand flies trapped in a boy’s jar. The buzzing and humming, and the smell. A putrefying stench that seemed to seep from under the door, sticking to his skin and his hair and his clothes. He looked down and saw that he was standing in water.
‘Maman,’ he said, fear catching in his throat. Or was it grief?
Raoul put out his hand and pushed open the door into the kitchen. Time stopped. He seemed to be looking down on the scene from outside. His hand on the wooden panel of the door – eyes open, heart thudding, the pulse of blood in his head – and seeing, but being unable to take in what he saw. And the sound. The drone of the buzzing and the humming of the black cloud around his mother’s face.
She was sitting in a chair facing the kitchen window. Her body was swollen, purple turning to black, plump in death as she had not been in life. Raoul swallowed hard, snatching his handkerchief from his pocket and clamping it over his nose and mouth. Struggling to keep his emotions in check, he forced himself to think.
Think, not feel.
He had seen men die. Seen their bodies decay when they couldn’t be reached to bring them back to base, in France’s six weeks of fighting in May 1940. So he knew that the death chill that set in immediately was followed, within two to six hours, by rigor mortis. From cold to warm again, it was only days later that the body started to putrefy. Bloating, swelling, turning in upon itself.
The arrangement had been that their neighbour came in every other day. But what if she had forgotten? What if she’d been arrested? What if she stopped bothering, knowing no one else would come?
Was this his fault?
Raoul stood still, his emotions suspended, aware of the lap of water around his shoes, but yet unable to process the information. When had his mother died? Two days ago? Three? Where had he been when she’d taken her last breath? In Limoux, in Carcassonne?
Feeling as if everything was happening to someone else – a man who looked like him, stood like him, grieved like him – Raoul looked around the room. He realised the tap was running into the overflowing sink. He crossed the room in a couple of strides and turned it off, then took the plug out. A gurgle and a gulp and the sink began to drain. He leaned forward and opened the window as high as it would go, then rushed through the flat opening every other window to let the foul smell seep out. He couldn’t bring himself to go closer to the chair where his mother sat.
There were no obvious signs that anyone had been here, but he had to be sure. People didn’t just die. They didn’t just sit in a chair and stop breathing. Did they?
What had happened?
Raoul shook his head, numb with disbelief. He should do something. Call the undertaker, ensure that the dignity that had been taken from her in the hour of her passing was restored to her. Be a good son in this, at least. But he couldn’t, not yet.
He searched the flat. In each room, the same story. His distress grew, his sense of failure at having let her become so ill. Having left her alone. Everywhere were the scribbled notes, the same words written over and over again. On scraps of newspaper, on the cover of a paperback book, on the brown paper packaging of a loaf of bread delivered and not eaten.
‘Les fantômes,’ he muttered. Ghosts.
He screwed up the scrap of newspaper and threw it to the floor. The cheap paper swelled in the centimetre of water, then opened up like a flower.
A shiver went down his spine. He remembered how she stood at the kitchen window, looking out. Waiting for Bruno to come. How much it had frustrated him and upset him and made him angry, because he could do nothing to assuage her grief. All the time talking about how the ghosts would come, that the spirits were waking.
Ghosts?
He had dismissed all of it as delusion. The result of grief and heartbreak too much to bear and the loss of her favourite son. But that was then. Before he met Sandrine, before he sat in Coustaussa and listened to Monsieur Baillard tell stories of the Codex and a ghost army that might save the Midi.
Raoul ran back into his mother’s bedroom, throwing everything to one side, searching for something he’d seen on her nightstand. He took a deep breath and looked down at the desperate message. An empty pill bottle, was that it? But everywhere, words printed in block capitals in pencil on a sheet of cheap blue writing paper: FANTÔMES, ARMÉE, MONTAGNES. Then, on the lines beneath, single words written over and over again like an embroidered pattern: VERRE VERRE VERRE, FEU FEU FEU.
‘Glass and fire,’ he murmured.
He rushed back into the sitting room, thinking he must tell Sandrine. See what she thought. Then he remembered. She and Lucie were on their way to the Cité.
Finally, the horror hit him.
He turned round and saw his mother, for the first time saw her as she was. He doubled over, sorrow and pity ripping his insides open, and emptied his guts. Raoul realised, now, of course. His mother had been dead for two days. The anniversary of Bruno’s birthday. How had she done it? Those pills? Or had her heart simply stopped beating? She had kept going, but where was the sense in it? The loss did not get easier to bear and the war did not end. Bruno was dead and he – the son she did not miss – never came.
Raoul gathered his mother’s last testament – the ghosts that only she had been able to see – and left the apartment where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life. He slipped a note under the door of their neighbour on the ground floor, hoping no harm had come to her, then stepped out into the street.
The peaceful sunlight on the canal mocked the horror of the scene in the room he had left. Raoul hesitated for a moment, then turned and walked to the underground bar. He didn’t know if it would be open or if they would let him in without a password, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
Was it his fault?
The hatch slid back. He sensed a pair of eyes looking at him, then the grating sound of the bolt being shot, and the door opened a fraction.
‘I need a drink.’
A hand pulled him inside. Raoul heard the door shut behind him. He turned to thank the man and found, for some reason, he couldn’t see him properly. He raised his hand to his eyes and realised that his cheeks were wet.
‘Sandrine,’ he whispered, wanting only for her to be with him. For her to be safe.
‘Come on,’ the man said. His voice was gruff, but kind. ‘There’s one or two others in already.’