The cars screeched to a stop.
Doors opened.
Men with guns emerged, shouting. In Flemish. The woman whirled around and faced the police, one hand down, behind her back.
More shouts.
The concealed arm appeared from behind her.
A shot rang out.
From the police.
More rounds were fired.
Which seared the woman抯 chest and sent her lean body spinning like a dancer. The sight sickened him. Sure, he抎 seen his share of violence, but was this necessary?
Neither hand held a weapon.
She slid along in a marionette抯 dance, then fell forward unable to protect her face, which smacked hard into the pavement near a stone fountain.
He did not move.
Luckily, he was not near enough to draw attention and the police were focused on the body, advancing ahead with guns pointed. He glanced over the wall. Long fingers of shadow clutched the water in a tight grip. He caught a blur of movement in the darkness and the outline of a boat drifting away from a concrete walk that edged the river.
Nothing would be learned here.
So he hopped over the wall, hung by his fingertips, then dropped to the concrete below.
Chapter 4
Bernat left Carcassonne with Andre, driving nearly an hour east to B閦iers. The town occupied a bluff above the river Orb a mere ten kilometers west from the Mediterranean coast. One of the oldest settlements in France. Neoliths, Celts, Gauls, Romans, and Visigoths all had occupied it at some point or another. Bullfighting was its current claim to fame. A million people came every August to witness the spectacle. But on July 29, 1209, the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene, something happened here that changed the world forever.
The army was camped outside the city, a vast expanse of tents and bivouacs, a solid mass of men, horses, and carts encircling the fortified walls. It had arrived yesterday after a march from Lyon intent on capturing 222 heretics, about 10 percent of B閦iers?population, that the residents were known to be harboring. The warriors had come in response to a call to arms made by Pope Innocent III. The West was accustomed to papal crusades, as it had been waging those since 1095. But all of that venom had been directed at Muslims and the bloodshed occurred far away in the Holy Land. This was to be the first crusade directed against fellow Christians conducted entirely in the heart of Europe. More precisely in a region known as the Languedoc, a proud and independent arc of mountainous terrain stretching from the Pyr閚閑s in the south to Provence in the north. The land of wind, olives, grapes, and sea. Troubadours and traders. Sharing a culture and language with Aragon and Barcelona. A bastion of independent thinkers and capitalistic burghers. Where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived and worked together in harmony.
Here also flourished a new religion. A pacifist brand of Christianity stressing that salvation could be obtained through a detachment from natural goods. One whose origins were wholly unknown, but one that proclaimed itself the true faith, more ancient than Catholicism, tolerance and poverty its keystones.
It had migrated from the East, after gaining footholds in Italy and the Rhineland. Its central doctrine proclaimed that the world was the creation of a dark evil force. Rex Mundi. King of the World. Encompassing all that was corporeal, chaotic, and powerful. Matter was corrupt. Anything that existed in the world was corrupt. Civil authority was a fraud. And if that authority was based somehow on a divine sanction? Like the Holy Roman Church?
That was even worse.
Followers believed the soul was trapped in the body, an imperfect creation within the domain of evil. The object of life was to escape this hell on earth and seek the God of Light who ruled the eternal spiritual domain, unsullied by the taint of matter. Each believer had to choose to renounce the material world. If not, after death, they kept returning, over and over, occupying new bodies, experiencing new lives, until they were finally ready to reject all that was physical. Once done, they were elevated from a mere believer to a Perfectus, capable then, at their next death, of ascending to a blissful, forever state ruled by the God of Light.
The cosmology was one of dual principles.
Evil was seen. Good was not.
An absolute separation of spirit and matter.
They had no need for sacraments, churches, bishops, popes, tithes, or taxes. Those were all part of the physical world that did not matter. Women were equal to men in all respects. No swearing of oaths, no saintly relics, no worship of the cross, which had been nothing more than an instrument of torture. No violence or military service. No eating of food that came from any procreative act. Marriage was meaningless. Having children cruel, as it brought another heavenly soul into evil. Christ had once come, but only as an apparition to spread the dualist truth of Good and Evil and start the chain of believers, which had continued for centuries unbroken. The whole concept was attractive, seductive, and popular. In Italy they called themselves Cazzara, after the Greek katharos. In Germany they were the Ketzer. In France they acquired the label Cathari. Latin for 損ure.?From that evolved the name that stuck.