Paradise Red (24 page)

“But what's the matter with her?” Raimon is terrified.
“What is it?”

“Nothing that need concern you. Now get out of my way. She's not out of danger yet.” Laila berates him all the time that she fetches water and sends Cador for more water still. Now she is rough with Yolanda, pulling her away from Raimon and scrubbing her face and wrists with cold cloths. Cador
holds the Flame for light until eventually Laila dries Yolanda off and goes outside to release an increasingly frantic Brees. The dog rushes in, rears up, and licks and licks at his mistress's face before pulling himself completely onto the bed and settling between her inert body and the wall, his tail beating a persistent tattoo against her legs. Cador places the Flame's lantern beside Raimon and goes outside. Somebody must still stand guard and that somebody must be him.

Laila moves silently, bundling up soiled blankets, and only when she is convinced that Yolanda is sleeping more peacefully does she too venture back into the sun. She takes a dozen deep breaths before beckoning to Cador. “We'll bury these,” she says. He nods, averts his eyes, and does not ask why.

Sometime in the late afternoon, Yolanda speaks. “Did it work?”

Raimon leans over. Her voice! Thank God! How he's needed to hear it! “Did what work?”

Yolanda's eyes fly open and her expression is not what Raimon expects. “Where's Laila?”

“Does it matter?”

Yolanda's lips are flaky and her mouth tastes of ashes. Raimon finds an old flagon of wine. She turns her head away. “I need Laila,” she says.

“Are you in pain?”

She considers. “No.” She does not seem to know whether to be pleased about this or not. “I just want Laila.”

Raimon tries not to let his hurt show. “Why do you need her? I can get you anything you want.” He touches her forehead. “Yolanda, your ring. I didn't—”

“I have both of them,” she murmurs, and now she turns to
him. He strokes her forehead. “The worst of whatever it is is over, I'm sure of it,” he says.

A tear slides horizontally over the bridge of her nose. Raimon wipes it away. “What's the worst?” she whispers. “I don't know anymore.” She drops her chin onto her chest. “I really need Laila. I need to ask her something.”

“Why Laila?” Raimon suddenly cannot bear it any longer. “Why not ask me?”

“I can't, Raimon. Please.”

He gets up. “I'll fetch her.” His voice is dull.

“Raimon?” He is back by her side at once. “You got the Flame?”

“Yes,” he says, “I got the Flame. It's here. But oh, Yolanda, the price was high.”

She moves her fingers against his and closes her eyes.

He goes outside. Laila and Cador are returning, their faces streaked black. “She wants you,” he says to Laila.

“Yes,” she says, giving him a funny look he cannot interpret. “I expect she does.”

He does not follow her but goes to Cador and makes much of him, allowing the little boy to return Unbent to him with formal ceremony. All the time, however, his ears are pinned for sounds from the shelter.

At last Laila comes out, and to his alarm, Yolanda is beside her, walking with difficulty. Laila settles her on a flat stone and comes, whispering, to Raimon. “She wants you now. If you make her cry, I'll punch you.” She skips over to Cador. “Come on. Let's find the horses some new grass. This stuff's got no goodness left in it, and we'll be needing them soon.” They disappear into the trees.

Just the fact of being together in the sun and with Brees beside them is a joy. Raimon and Yolanda lean against each other, just as they used to, except that they are no longer as they used to be, nor will be again. That part of their life is closed. Yet Yolanda can still rest her head on Raimon's shoulder and feel everything he cannot say. She can have these few moments, surely, for once she has told him what she has to tell him, they may be the last. The sun shifts quite some distance before she forces herself to move. She sits independently now, tightens every muscle, and looks at him directly. “I'm having a baby,” she says and does not know any longer if she is horrified or exultant.

Raimon flinches and then slams backward as though somebody has physically hit him. There is a long pause. “Hugh?” It comes out as a retort.

She nods. She knows he is trying not to look down to where the baby still is, despite all her efforts, and though she cannot explain the turmoil she feels, she knows she must try to help him. “Raimon, please just listen without saying anything.”

Her injunction is unnecessary. He is mute.

“Hugh knows I can't love him,” she says, trying to keep everything unrealistically matter-of-fact, “yet he wants a son. He came to Castelneuf.” Her words come more quickly. “I will not, will never, speak of that. But he got his way. He may not have a son, of course, but he has a child. I thought to get rid of it. I asked Laila to help. She didn't want to, but I more or less forced her, and I wanted it to work and then I didn't and I shan't try to be rid of it again. I can't explain why I shan't, except that it has nothing to do with Hugh.” She laces her fingers.

Raimon's voice comes from far away. “When will the baby be born?”

“January.”

“Will you go back to Hugh?”

“No.”

“What about the—the child?”

Now she trembles. “I suppose I shall have to give it up to him. It's a des Arcis.” She wants to make everthing clear, expose it all so that nothing lurks, festering in a corner.

“I had not thought that he would stoop so low.” Raimon's voice is nothing more than a metallic hiss.

“None of us knows how low we can go.” Yolanda puts out a tentative hand. Her crisis has passed as Raimon's is just beginning. He does not take her hand. Instead, he gets up because he cannot stay still. The muscles in his face shift and roll. “Raimon, stay with me.”

He avoids her eyes. “I'm going to murder him.”

She stands as best as she can. “And if I say I don't want you to?”

“I won't believe you.”

“For God's sake, Raimon, I've tried killing. I know it's not an answer.”

“He's a common ra—”

Now she leaps. “Don't say that word! Don't say it! Don't you think I've said it enough times for all of us?” She crunches her arms around herself, protecting herself from everybody and everything. “Now he's just a husband I once had and the father of this baby. Can't you see? I must think of it like that, because it's the only way I can survive without going mad.”

Her face is so open to him, so pleading, so trusting, that
despite himself he begins to melt. Now he can take her hand. More than that, he clutches at her as he might if she were drowning or about to fall off a cliff. He wants to gather her up, to reassure her, to hold her so tightly that their skin is welded together. Then he hears Laila's laughter. She and Cador are returning with the horses. And the laughter, which has nothing to do with him, still seems to mock him, ridiculing all his cradling instincts. Before he can stop himself he draws back and Yolanda is left stranded.

Immediately, Raimon curses himself, but the moment cannot be recaptured. Yolanda's face is closing. Her hand has dropped. She is folding herself away. He backs toward Bors. “Where are you going?” Yolanda's voice is tight.

His response is clipped. “I told you. Hugh doesn't deserve to live.”

“And I'm telling you again. This is my business. Mine.”

His soul feels as though it will burst through his skin. “How can you say that, Yolanda? What happens to you happens to me. Don't you understand that? And this”—he gestures to her stomach—“is just”—he struggles—“not us. It's nothing to us.
It's nothing at all to do with us
.”

She moves toward him but is frightened to open herself up again. Doesn't
he
understand? Never has she felt so raw and muddled. She loves this man with all her heart. He is her. She is him. Yet though she resents this thing inside her with every fiber of her being, this thing that she cannot see but so nearly killed—there is no denying that it is part of her too. Not part of Hugh. Part of
her
. She claps her hands to her head. She longs to be at Castelneuf, near the river, in the meadow or up on the roof, somewhere that's theirs, so that Raimon can feel
what she cannot explain. Then she sinks. It is impossible now that Raimon will ever come to Castelneuf again. How can he, knowing what Hugh has done there?

She feels Raimon's gaze on her, raking her from top to bottom as though she has some huge blemish running from her head to her toes. Though he may not mean to, he is making her feel dirty when she was just starting to feel clean. In a last effort, she breaks the thong around her neck. “Here. Your ring.”

He scrapes out some kind of sound. He wants that battered black circle so badly. It seems to him that the best of his life is soldered into it. But even as he extends his hand, Hugh's child intervenes. “Yolanda was to be yours completely,” the child crows. “Now a bit of her will never be yours, and if you can't have all of her, do you really want any?”

He hesitates and then it is too late. Yolanda slowly withdraws the rings, although even now she cannot help making one last, punishing effort. “Raimon, listen! Listen to how lucky we are. We have each other. We have the Flame. We can leave this place to Hugh and the White Wolf and find a new home for ourselves. We can build a new Castelneuf, a new Occitan even. Let's go back to the Amouroix. It's where the Flame belongs and where we belong. I'm ready! Aren't you? We can go together.”

She has a magnificence about her that is quite new. Yet Laila's laugh and the child's imaginary crowing are still a barbed barrier between them.

“I'm going for Hugh,” he says, choking. “Don't deny me that, Yolanda.”

She breaks down suddenly and shockingly. “I deny you nothing,” she cries, flinging out a final appeal she does not want
to have to make, “and I'm offering you everything. Can't you take it?”

“How can I take something that's already been taken?” It is half an agonized whisper, half the roar of a wounded bull as Raimon rushes passed her. He vaults onto Bors and, stopping only to sweep up the Flame, thunders out of the valley with Cador on Galahad behind him.

Sometime later, an errant gust of wind swings the door of the shelter wide open. It swings so hard that its hinges twist, but nobody rushes to secure it, because there is no longer anybody there.

The first Cathar casualty, on the day that, unbeknownst to those either in the fortress or below, Aimery meets his Maker, marks a turning point in the French fortunes at Montségur. The French knights are no longer despondent. The work is hard, but there are fewer complaints. The Cathars are not invulnerable and though it may take some time, they can at least now see a point when this siege will end and they will be able to go home. As Hugh predicted, however, progress is slow. Every inch gained from the pog is backbreaking. With the onset of another winter, progress will be even slower. However, as he reminds the knights and soldiers on a daily basis, now that they are taking decisive action, sometime in the spring the king will get the Flame that the White Wolf still, without any apparent hesitation, holds up in the evening. One great remaining irritation is that the villagers continue to grow fat on the proceeds of the Cathar trade they ply up paths that Hugh will never discover. “How much money do you suppose is salted away up there?” some of the knights ask him, staring up at the fortress hungrily, imagining a fountain of treasure. “The only treasure we are commissioned to secure is
the Blue Flame,” Hugh always repeats in his most curt military tones.

He has aged during this deeply unsatisfactory campaign. He sleeps badly and, though he has charts and maps and plans to keep him more than fully occupied, finds himself permanently counting off the months. Any possible baby must be due in the New Year. The New Year! He will still be here then. Of that he is sure. And afterward? Will he be lauded by the king for a fine achievement or disgraced because it has taken so long? Will he remain the keeper of the oriflamme or find himself the ex-lord of Arcis? Stuck here, he has no idea either about Yolanda's condition or the French king's mood and no way of finding out. He finds this burden frustrating. He begins to count the days, cutting notches in his tent pole. “I'm counting for nothing,” he tells himself, but carries on doing it.

Raimon, too, is frustrated. He does not want to kill Hugh surreptitiously, like a thief in the night. He will settle for nothing less than single combat, sword against sword, knight against knight. He will fight Sir Hugh des Arcis as Sir Raimon de Maurand, as Sir Parsifal would wish, not as weaver Raimon Belot. He cannot do this today or even tomorrow because he will only get one chance, and to maximize that chance, his collarbone and wounds must be properly mended and he must be fit. So he spies, reassures himself that the siege is unlikely to end before the winter has blown itself out, and forces himself to bide his time.

Parted from Laila and her box of tricks, Cador has to add the role of doctor to that of squire, groom, and forager. He binds Raimon's shoulder tighter and tighter, as if the bones can be forced to knit together. Hunched around the fire that provides
some protection against the now nightly frosts, Raimon turns the lantern this way and that. The Flame is still small and, when its color is not disguised with leaves in a trick Cador learned from Sir Parsifal, its blue still intense and rich. Yet often, hardly realizing what they are doing, both Raimon and Cador use it as a real lantern, even carrying it on the end of a pole in a way they would never have dreamed of doing when it burned in its box. Then it would have felt disrespectful, like using the Bible as a mudscraper. Now it seems natural, as though the Flame has become part of them.