The sun was sinking down to earth, covering the garrigue in a golden light. Everything was sharp, outlined against the whitening sky.
Audric Baillard stood beside the largest of the capitelles, his hand resting on the stone, still warm from the heat of the day. He looked down the low wall that ran alongside the track back towards Coustaussa. Past the old holm oak, past the white walls of the outbuildings of the Andrieu farm, to the cemetery.
To the west, the ruins of the old château-fort. To the east, Arques and Rennes-les-Bains hidden in the green folds of the woods. Ahead, on the far side of the valley, the village of Rennes-le-Château, a semi-circle of green houses and the flat red turrets and towers of the ancient Château des seigneurs de Hautpoul. The Visigoths had made the hilltop the capital of their spreading empire, building on older remains. The square towers and high arched windows of the more recent castle were reminiscent of the oldest sections of the walls of the medieval Cité of Carcassonne.
Baillard took the fragile scrap of woollen cloth from its linen shroud in his pocket and held it before him, still unable to believe the turn of fate that had brought it into his hands. Crude though the picture undoubtedly was, he was certain the tallest of the peaks shown was the Pic de Vicdessos. He followed the line to the hiding place at its centre with his eye. Hard to tell without an indication of scale, but he estimated it might be some three or four kilometres north of there. Even so, it was a large area, filled with caves and labyrinthine fissures in the rocks. Once, most of the lower slopes would have been forest. Today, open spaces punctuated the woods.
‘A la perfin,’ he murmured. At last.
Baillard took a deep breath, then began to read out loud the few Latin phrases written on the map. Repeating the words once, then again, hoping to hear the voices calling to him from deep within the earth. He closed his eyes.
‘Come forth . . .’
And this time, although the sound was still indistinct and blurred and distorted, Baillard perceived the shift of bones within the land. For an instant, a cooling of the air and the light metamorphosing from pink to silver to white. He caught his breath. The rattle of metal and leather, of swords and marching feet. Banners and battle colours, one row behind another behind another, shimmering like a reflection in a mirror. The heroines of antiquity, Pyrène and Bramimonde, the Queen of Saragossa, Esclarmonde de Servian and Esclarmonde de Lavaur. The song of the dead awakening.
‘. . . the spirits of the air.’
Harif, Guilhem du Mas and Pascal Barthès, all those who dedicated their lives so that others might live. The Franks and the Saracens, the battles of Christianity against another new faith. Stories of treachery and betrayal in the eighth century as in the fourth, Septimania conquered and subjugated and occupied once more. The force of arms and the clash of belief.
‘A sea of glass . . .’
In his mind’s eye, Baillard could see the walls of Carcassonne. Charlemagne’s army camped on the green plain beside the river Atax. Looking out over the plains of Carsac, the widow of King Balaak, the sole survivor in the besieged Cité. Straw soldiers set along the ramparts to protect Carcas, the Saracen queen, from the power of the Holy Roman Emperor. No man left living to send out to parley. Burning what little remained for warmth.
‘A sea of fire.’
Baillard closed his eyes as the legend took shape in his mind. Every schoolchild knew the story. How Dame Carcas fed the very last grains of food in the starving city to a pig, then tossed the animal over the wall. When its sides split open, and undigested food spilled out, the deception was sufficient to persuade Charlemagne that the Cité had food and water enough to withstand. He lifted the siege and struck camp, until the single note of an elephant’s tusk horn called him back and the Tour Pinte bowed down in homage at Dame Carcas’ behest.
Carcas sonne, so went the phrase. Carcas is calling.
A story to explain how Carcassonne got its name. A fairy tale about a brave woman and an army of straw men defeating the might of the army of the Holy Roman Emperor. A myth, no more.
And yet.
Baillard took a deep breath. However impossible the legend of Carcas might be, the Cité itself never did fall to Charlemagne. What had saved Carcassonne? Could it be that, behind this schoolboy legend, lay a deeper and different truth?
‘And come forth the armies of the air.’
Now, in the smallest of spaces between one beat of the heart and the next, Baillard thought he could see the transparent imprint of those he had loved. Foot soldiers in the shimmering ranks of the ghost army as it began to breathe and take form. Viscount Trencavel and the seigneurs of the Midi. From Mirepoix and Fanjeaux, Saissac and Termenès, Albi and Mazamet. And further back in the serried ranks, the cavaliers alongside whom he had once fought.
He caught his breath. Could he see Léonie’s copper hair, like a skein of burnished cloth? The chanson de geste, earlier than the Song of Roland, earlier even than la canso of Guilhèm de Tudèla, a poem that Baillard himself had completed. And her? Might he yet see her? The girl in a red cloak and a green dress, for whom he had waited for eight hundred years.
‘Alaïs,’ he murmured.
Baillard spoke the words once more, but the atmosphere was different. The boundaries of what was and what might be no longer merged one into the other. A diminuendo, the voices fainter now, the outlines faded to grey.
He opened his eyes. He was left with the promise of what might be, nothing more. He understood. The fragments he had spoken were not enough, not sufficient unto the task. He clenched his fist. These times had been foretold by Ezekiel and Enoch. By Revelation. Of the seas turning to blood and the skies black, fish dying on the shore and the trees dead in the soil, mountains torn from earth in protest. In these modern times of the twentieth century, ancient prophecies of thousands of years ago were, finally, coming to pass.
Baillard knew he must find the Codex. Not only because it was the one thing that might serve their cause and change their present. But also because in it lay his only chance of salvation. If he found it and spoke the verses set down, not merely fragments of them, then the army would come. Alaïs might come. Baillard did not think he could carry on living without her.
‘Every death remembered . . .’
The minutes passed. The air became still. The land began to sing its usual song. Cicadas, the wind in the garrigue, the whistling of birds.
Little by little, Baillard returned to the present. No longer the soldier he once had been, but an old man again, standing in the fields beyond the Andrieu farm. The sun was sinking to earth now, setting the shadows chasing one another across the hills on the far side of the valley. He sighed, then turned his attention once more to the map in his hands. He didn’t think Sandrine or Raoul had noticed there was a rudimentary signature on the bottom left-hand corner. Seven letters and an icon, some kind of mark, after the name. He peered closer. It was a cross with four equal arms, a symbol that had more in common with Roman images of the sun and the wheel than the Christian cross.
Proof, surely, that the Codex had been smuggled from the great library of Lugdunum. Someone who was part of the community. He looked at the signature again, holding it carefully to catch the light and managed to read the name written in the corner of the map.
Arinius.