Stigmata (48 page)

He hauled himself up, searched for another foothold, felt something solid beneath his other boot, and steeled himself for a final effort. He reached up with his right hand and groped blindly for
something to hold on to, anything that was not slippery with ice. He even used his chin.

He felt himself slipping back towards the edge.

His shin scraped down the rock, then his fingertips, his fingernails; he clawed at something solid and kicked out again, got one knee over the edge of the cliff and crawled on his belly over the
lip and lay grunting with exhaustion in the snow.

Finally, he opened his eyes and looked at his hands. He had lost almost all the fingernails on his right hand, but he was so cold he could hardly feel anything. He stared at them, fascinated.
How could he do so much damage and be ignorant of it? Slow black blood oozed.

He rolled on to his knees. ‘Fabricia?’

His vision would not clear and what he could see did not make sense. He tried to get to his feet and stumbled. He went down, got up again.

‘Fabricia?’

And then he saw her. He rocked back on his heels and moaned. ‘No,’ he said.

‘N
O!
’ S
IMON SAID
.

Gilles smiled. ‘Do you not think it a perfect retribution?’

Simon reached behind him, and his fingers closed around the heavy copper cross on the altar. He swung it at Gilles’s head.

Such unanticipated violence took them both by surprise. The point of the transept hit him in the temple, and the force drove the tip into his skull.

He went down without making a sound. He lay on his back, blood spurting rhythmically on to the flagstones. Then his legs kicked, and he was still. His eyes were still open.

Simon dropped the cross on to the floor.

He stared at the corpse for a long time. ‘Well then,’ he said aloud, almost to reassure himself. ‘That’s done then.’ His legs felt weak. He sat down hard on the
steps. ‘I’ve killed him.’ The enormity of it was too much to contemplate. He said it aloud again to convince himself: ‘I’ve killed him.’

He stood up and then sat down again. He picked up the crucifix, took his time cleaning it before setting it on the altar, perfectly centred. His knees gave way. He sat back on the floor.

He had to do something, but his mind was blank. There was blood up the wall in a fine spray. There was more blood on his hands.

‘You cannot stay here,’ he told himself and ran up the stairs out of the crypt.

Gilles had crucified her on a pine tree.

They must have brought the crosspiece with them, Philip realized. No random act, then, Gilles must have planned it before he set out. Philip stumbled across the snow and fell on his knees in
front of the cross, staring at the two bright stains of blood in the snow that had dripped from her hands.

She was breathing, but barely. A faint drift of vapour rose from her lips as her chest heaved in her tortured effort to inhale. She was not aware of him, and she did not open her eyes when he
called her name.

‘Don’t die,’ he said.

They had driven nails through her hands and lashed ropes around her wrists and under her arms to hold her to the cross. The Roman way to die took as much as three days, but out here in winter
she would die of cold long before that.

How am I going to get her down? he thought. The crosspiece had been nailed into the trunk of the tree. He stood behind her and slammed the palm of his right hand into it. She groaned as the wood
splintered into her back. Then he stood in front of her, braced his right leg against the tree and pulled as hard as he could. Finally the crosspiece came free and she slumped, whimpering, against
the ropes. He felt her weight sag against him. He eased her down to her knees, then on to her back. She cried out in pain.

He slashed through the ropes that held her to the crosspiece.

Her eyes blinked open. ‘Philip?’

‘Don’t talk. I’ll get you off this thing.’

As he leaned over her the copper and garnet cross she had given him worked free of his undershirt and hung between them, mocking him. He tore it off, ripping the chain and hurling it as far as
he could into the trees. He shouted an oath of murder and vengeance, listened to it echo through the mountains. Then he dropped to his knees beside her again, fighting for control.

There was no easy way. He would never be able to pull out the iron clouts, he could only pull them
through.
But her hands were so frozen he supposed the pain might not be as bad as if she
were warm. He did it quickly, pulling off her right hand, then her left. She cried out each time, leaving more bright blood on the virgin snow.

He scooped her up in his arms. There was a smudge of smoke over the trees. He remembered she had told him they were close to Montmercy. He would have to hurry, before the cold killed them or the
wolves came.

He carried her through the snow, promising her vengeance and life with every step.

Bernadette heard the chapel bell strike for terce. The resinous wood they used on the fire in the chapter house seeped a foul, oily smoke that gave out sparse heat and made her
cough.

Heavy snow this early signalled a long winter, a brutal change after the relentless summer. She fretted for her charges now that she was abbess. The fate of the monastery and its little
community were entirely her responsibility now; the abbess before her had succumbed to her infirmities on the last hot day of the summer.

She stared out of the window over the slate roof of the monastery, watching snow drift from the sky. She worried constantly about bandits. The war had ravaged the countryside, and now there were
refugees and Aragonese outlaws wandering everywhere.

Look there! Something was moving up the valley towards them. She murmured a prayer and watched. It was not a wolf, was too large for that, but too small for a bear or a horse. It must be human
then. But whoever it was they were alone and moving strangely. She ran down the stone stairs to the cloister, calling for the porteress.

She hurried to the gate, pushed the shutter aside and peered out.

‘What is it?’ the porteress said, clutching at the skirt of her habit with her hand as she ran.

‘There’s something out there. Open up!’

The porteress – Sòrre Marie – put her eye to the grate. ‘But we don’t know who or what it is. It could be dangerous.’

‘Open the gate!’ Bernadette repeated.

The snow had piled up in a drift, knee-deep. Bernadette had to clamber over it. She could see now that the stranger was a man and that he was carrying something; and the way he was staggering
with his burden, he was not going to make it as far as the gate.

As a precaution Sòrre Marie went back for her stick. She placed great value on prayer and the rod.

When the man saw Bernadette running towards him, he fell to his knees.

He was carrying someone, she saw, a young woman. There was ice in his beard and neither of them had cloaks; they were dressed only in their tunics. The woman’s hands were bloody and her
face was blue. She was clearly dead.

‘Help her,’ the man said.

The porteress hurried to join her abbess. She was alarmed to see that the man was carrying a sword slung across his back and she took him for a bandit. She hit him on the back of the head with
her stick and he collapsed in the snow.

‘Sòrre Marie, what are you doing?’

The dead woman moved. She opened her eyes, reached out a gory hand and touched the man’s face. ‘Thank you, seigneur,’ she whispered.

‘Get the others!’ Bernadette told the porteress. ‘Quickly! Get hot baths ready and stoke up the fire. And throw that stick away!’ She bent down to cradle the woman in her
arms. She was shocked to realize that she knew her.

‘Fabricia,’ she said.

T
HEY WARMED STONES
by the fire and put them in her bed; and though the nuns themselves slept even through the harshest
winter with just a thin woollen blanket, they piled the one bearskin they possessed on top of her, along with every spare rug they had, to try and warm her. The infirmarian made a poultice for her
hands.

And then they prayed for her.

As for the man: he would only say that his name was Philip and that he believed his own wounds to be of no account. Yet for two days he could not rise from his bed without toppling over. He
retched each time he moved. ‘You have taken a serious blow to your head,’ the infirmarian told him. ‘You have a lump there as large as a chicken’s egg.’ His hands were
badly lacerated, and she carefully removed the torn shards of his fingernails. He tolerated this without complaint.

She also discovered a livid bruise in the centre of his chest. He said he had been hit by an arrow and that his coat of mail, now discarded, had saved his life. When he knew the girl was alive,
and was being cared for, he fell into a deep stupor.

There was a crucifix on the wall of the cell they put him in. The next morning the infirmarian reported that he had torn it down during the night.

When he found his balance again, he made his way to Fabricia’s sickbed. She looked like a corpse, save that she was propped up with pillows. When she saw him she reached out to him with
her torn hand, kissed his forehead and then closed her eyes again.

The abbess kept vigil by the bed with Philip. The logs on the fire were green and the room was so cold it made his teeth ache. The room was lit with tapers. A flurry of snow
whipped against the shutters.

‘Who are you, seigneur?’ Bernadette asked him. ‘You are a knight, this is obvious by your bearing, and your accent is northern. But you are not a
crosat
?’

‘You are right, I have a castle and lands in the north, but they are now under interdict by the Church. So I shall leave as soon as I may. If anyone should find me here, it will cause a
lot of trouble for you.’

‘We have no visitors here in winter so do not disturb yourself on that account. We are forgotten here until spring. But why do you find yourself excommunicate, seigneur?’

‘For doing as you are doing; helping a heretic.’

‘This girl is no heretic.’

‘Her mother took the Cathar rites and her father killed a priest.’

The abbess took a moment to compose herself after hearing this news. She made the sign of the cross.

‘Will she be all right, do you think?’ he asked her.

‘The infirmarian says that the wounds in her hands are infected. It is very strange.’

‘Strange?’

‘When she was with us, she had sores on her hands and feet the whole time, but the wounds never putrefied then. She has also suffered very badly from her exposure to the cold. And she is
skin and bone, poor girl.’

‘But she will live?’

‘If it is God’s will.’

And I know how fickle He can be, Philip thought.

‘What is worse is the violence that has been done to her spirit. I fear that even if her hands heal, there will still be a scar, deep inside. I think she will need time, long after the
wounds have closed over, to recover from the tortures they have submitted her to. She will need kindness and patience and God’s grace. Where will she find such gifts out there in the
world?’

‘I will look after her.’

‘I do not think that would be wise. With respect, seigneur, you are a man of violence. What kind of peace will she ever find with you?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I think she should stay here with us. The world is no place for a gentle spirit like hers. She may find true sanctuary here. Of course, this is only the opinion of a poor nun who has
spent her entire life in the cloister.’

Philip reached out and placed a hand lightly on Fabricia’s forehead, smoothed down a stray lock of her hair. ‘I love this woman.’

‘You need not convince me of that. You have saved her life. But we may display our devotion not only with our possession, but with our sacrifice. After all, you may crush a flower and keep
it between the pages of a book, but then it stops being a flower. And if you are held excommunicate by the Church, where will you go that will be safe for you, let alone Fabricia? Let her go,
seigneur. Yours is not the kind of life that she needs.’

She’s right, Philip thought. The world I live in is no place for her. I came back for her, as I said I would, but to keep her for my own selfish desires would be wrong.

He hung his head. ‘I so wished her to be my wife.’

‘She is the daughter of a stonemason, inclined to mysterious wounds and visions. You are a man of war. How could that ever be?’

Philip nodded. ‘I cannot leave until I know she is well again.’

‘You may stay until the weather breaks. We can give you a donkey and a little food. Where will you go?’

‘I have business I should attend to. As you say, sister, I am a man of violence. I have one more score to settle before I can leave the Albigeois.’

Take a man from his family, Simon thought, and what is left? Take away his mother, his father and his brothers; take away the right to marry and make a family of his own; what
is left?

What is left is the hope of God and of heaven; what is left is the cloister and the prieu-dieu; what is left is knowing the Church is the only place you can ever really belong.

But take away the certainty of faith – what is left then? There has to be certainty. A man has to know; there can be no room for doubt. He cannot dedicate his entire life to a faith that
will not finally earn him redemption.

Because if you take away God – what do you have? Two things only: the sound of your own heartbeat and a nameless, black terror.

The world was smothered in white. It was as if a blanket had been thrown on the earth to silence it.

He made out the black shadow of a cave at the foot of a cliff. There was no sign of habitation but that did not mean they were not there. He could feel their eyes watching him. They would have
seen him coming up the valley long ago.