Citadel (5 page)
The
passeur
cleared his throat. ‘
Sénher, es ora
.’
Shapiro turned round, then back to Baillard. ‘What’s that he’s saying?’
‘That it is time to leave.’ Baillard held out his hand. ‘The
passeurs
know these paths, this mountain. They know where the risk of being spotted by a patrol is at its highest. Do as they tell you.’
‘Here’s hoping,’ said Shapiro, clasping Baillard’s hand and shaking it. ‘And if you’re ever in New York, you look me up. I mean it.’
Baillard smiled at the American’s confidence, hoping it was not misplaced. In the two years he had been helping smuggle people over the Pyrenees – exiles, fugitives, Jews, communists, those without an exit visa – many had ended up imprisoned in gaols in Spain or repatriated to France. Americans in particular did not understand that, in this war, money did not talk.
‘
Pas a pas
,’ he murmured to himself.
He watched the small party set off along the path. Like so many of the wealthy refugees Baillard had guided to the escape routes, they had brought too much with them. The American was not dressed for the mountains, the children would struggle with their cases and the woman looked defeated, someone who had seen too much to think she could ever be safe again.
Baillard sighed, wished them luck, then turned and retraced his steps to the village of Ax-les-Thermes. The air was fresh and clean, but the sun was hot and would get hotter, and he was tired. He had walked many thousands of miles through these mountains, and he accepted that the time was coming when he would no longer have the strength required for such arduous journeys.
He knew many of the secrets hidden in these hills, yet an explanation for the purpose of it all eluded him. He had published books – on folklore, on the bloody history of the region, about the citadel of Montségur and the caves of the Sabarthès and Lombrives and the mountain peaks of the Vicdessos – but still the truth of his continuing mission remained stubbornly beyond his comprehension.
He took one last look. His charges were specks on the horizon, five diminishing figures walking slowly uphill. He said a prayer for them, then turned and slowly began his descent.
It took Baillard nearly an hour to reach the outskirts of the town. There, he changed back into his usual clothes. He noticed a police car idling at the corner of the road and quietly changed direction. The police did not notice him. Or if they did, they had no interest in an elderly man in a white suit taking the morning air. But he took no chances, no unnecessary risks. It was why he had never been caught, not in this conflict nor in any other war in which he had been called upon to play his part.
He circled the town, walking slowly, with apparent lack of purpose, then came back in through the northern streets and went to the Café des Halles by the bridge, where he was to wait. The local doctor was due to visit a pregnant woman, expecting twins any day now, and had agreed to take him back to Rennes-les-Bains, where he hoped the package from Antoine Déjean would be waiting. Baillard allowed himself a moment of anticipation. If all was well, then there was a chance.
‘Come forth the armies of the air,’ he murmured.
Old words, ancient words, from a sacred text Baillard believed destroyed more than fifteen hundred years ago.
But what if the rumours were true? If it had survived?
He glanced at his watch. At least three hours to wait, if the doctor came at all. He ordered something to drink and eat. The café only had thin wine and ersatz coffee. No milk, of course. But Baillard didn’t require much. He ate a dry biscuit, dipping it into the tepid brown liquid, and sipped the rough mountain rosé.
He had seen many summers such as this, the gold of the sunflowers and the pinks, blues and reds of the mountain flowers fading into wine-coloured autumns as the leaves fell. Harsh winters following on behind, the passage of rain and mist to snow and ice. The endless march of the seasons. So many years, wondering whether each might be his last.
The sun rose higher in the sky. Baillard continued to wait and to watch the road, looking for anything, anyone out of place. There were spies everywhere, undercover rather than in plain view as in the occupied zone, but here all the same. Members of the Kundt Commission, the branch of the Gestapo operating in the
zone non-occupée
; SD and SS of course, but also Deuxième Bureau. Willing partners with the invaders whose aim in time, he had no doubt, was to subjugate all of France.
Baillard took another sip of wine. The uniforms were different in each age, the battle colours under which they marched changing as the centuries marched on. Boots and guns had replaced banners and horses, but the story was the same.
Men with black hearts. With black souls.
CARCASSONNE
‘
A
sea of glass . . .’ she murmured, bright in the shimmering.
Sandrine knew it was her own voice she was hearing inside her head, but it seemed to be coming from a long way away. Shapes shifting, fragments of sound. An echo slipping in and out of conscious thought, as if underwater. Or through the clouded gaps between the valleys. She felt the hard metal of the chain in her pocket digging into her hip. She pulled it out, but her fingers didn’t seem to work and the necklace slithered to the ground.
‘Mademoiselle, can you hear me?’
Now she was aware of her hair being stroked gently off her forehead.
‘Mademoiselle?’
A man’s voice, sweet, soft, and a scent of sandalwood. So close, she could feel his breath on her skin.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, you’re safe now.’
‘Sleep,’ she murmured.
‘You shouldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘You must wake up.’
Sandrine felt his hands beneath her shoulders, then the warmth of his skin through his shirt as he held her against him. ‘Open your eyes,’ he was saying. ‘Try to wake up. Open your eyes.’
She felt herself growing heavy in his arms, slipping away again. Then, his lips on hers, the lightest of touches. Breathing life into her. A kiss. Sandrine felt something inside her stir, a shock, a jolt. Then he kissed her again. For a single, unique moment, her eyes fluttered open, but she couldn’t seem to see.
‘I . . .’ she murmured, as her eyes closed once more. ‘I can’t . . .’
Now his hand was cupping the back of her neck, cradling her head in his arms.
‘Wake up. Please, mademoiselle. Sit up.’
Sandrine was aware of the sound of an engine, a different timbre from the motorcycle she’d heard earlier. Louder, a car coming closer. She felt the man’s muscles tense, then she realised she was not in his arms any more. She was being laid back down on the grass, his skin no longer touching hers.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he said.
Sandrine wanted him to stay. Wanted to ask him to stay, but the words wouldn’t come. The car was getting closer, the belch of an exhaust.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice fading. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t be found here . . . I’m sorry.’
Then he was gone. The air was still, empty. She could feel herself drifting away again. The smell of the riverside giving way to other scents, wild lavender and rosemary, the green and purple of the valleys around Coustaussa. Honeysuckle and the sharp tang of wood smoke in winter. Images now, cold reflections. The old wooden sign on the back road marking the way to the
castillous
, the arms crooked like a broken cross. In town, walking alongside her sister and her father beneath a red and yellow CGT trade union poster, a demonstration, before the war. Everyone singing for peace, for liberty, as they walked past the gardens and white balustrades and the marble angel statue in the centre of the lake in Square Gambetta.
‘
Paix
,’ Sandrine murmured.
Carcassonne had marched for peace in 1939, but war had come all the same. In 1940, defeat had come all the same. Their voices had counted for nothing.
‘
Patz
,’ she murmured again. ‘Peace.’
‡
‡
GAUL
CARCASO
JULY AD 342
T
he young monk made his way through the crowds of people filling the narrow streets of the fortified town. Despite the air of trade and commerce, and the brave attempts of everyone to behave as if nothing had changed, Arinius detected a hint of unease, of watchfulness in the air. The same atmosphere that was spreading through all of Gaul since the death of Emperor Constantine. All around him, hands hovering ready to draw a knife from its hilt, eyes darting this way and that.
Arinius knew little of military strategy or the diplomacy of emperors and generals, but from stories overheard in the forum in Lugdunum or told by the merchants he’d met on the Via Domitia, he knew that the history of his country was one of invasion and counter-invasion. From century unto century, the imposition of a new set of values upon the old – defeat, then collaboration, then assimilation. The prehistoric tribes who once lived on the Carsac plains, the Celtic settlers who had come after them, the Volcae Tectosage three centuries before the birth of Christ, the armies of Augustus. Now, it was said, tribes were coming from the East to reclaim what Caesar once had ruled.
Arinius didn’t know how well or how often Carcaso had been called upon to defend her walls, but he could see they had been built to withstand siege and invading armies. The horseshoe-shaped watch towers in the northern sections were faced with courses of dressed ashlar and intersected by red brick. On the first floor of each tower, three semicircular windows were underscored by red-brick arches. The wooden walkway and the battlements, accessed by ladders set against the base of the walls, were guarded by foot soldiers in chain mail and silver helmets, some armed with a
pilum
, a weapon like a javelin, others carrying slings. Some were Roman, but many were clearly from local villages – typical of the
limitanei
, the frontier garrison troops who now protected even these outposts. Arinius wondered for whom these disaffected men on the walls would fight. For the failing Empire? For their neighbours and families? For God? He wondered if even they themselves knew where their loyalties lay.
There were four major streets, forming the shape of a cross within the walls, with other smaller roads connecting different quadrants of the town. Most of the buildings were tiled rather than the bush and thatch still common in the villages of the south. A small central square, a covered forum, was packed with merchants selling spices and herbs, geese and rabbits in wooden cages, wine, woollen tunics and strips of leather to patch broken sandals and belt fastenings. There was hammering from the forge, where a blacksmith worked on a scrawny bay mare.
Arinius saw many different skin colours and different ways of dressing. Some men wore beards, others had bare faces. Higher-born women with braided hair, jewelled and adorned, the daughters and wives of the Roman garrison commanders and men. Others walked freely with their heads uncovered in the older style, pale woollen tunics worn beneath hooded cloaks. It was hard to say who were natives, the original inhabitants of the land, and who the outsiders.
A fit of coughing caught Arinius by surprise. He doubled over, pressing his hand against his chest until the attack had passed, struggling to get his breath. He looked at his palm, saw spots of blood, and a wave of panic washed through him. He had to keep the illness at bay until the Codex was safe. That was all that mattered. Not his life, only that he fulfilled his mission.
He walked slowly on. He needed to rest. Arinius found a tavern opposite the residence of the garrison commander, an imposing two-storey house with red guttered tegulae forming the roof. Outside, the paved street was littered with clay pots, some broken, meat bones, and figs split and oozing rotting purple flesh, but inside the tavern was clean and it offered board and lodging at a reasonable price.
The formalities observed, Arinius drank two cups of wine, ate a handful of almonds and some hard white goat’s cheese with honey. Afterwards he lay down on the hard wooden bed. He unpinned his mother’s brooch, took off his cloak and used it as a blanket. Then, using his leather bag as a pillow, he folded his hands across his chest and, pressing the Codex close against his skin, Arinius slept.
‡
CARCASSONNE
JULY 1942
‘
S
he’s coming round.’
A different voice this time. Another man, formal, educated, northern, not a local accent. Not the boy who had whispered to her, not the boy who had kissed her. The memory faded away. The real world returned, cold and hard and colourless.
‘Mademoiselle,’ the Parisian said. ‘Do you know what happened to you? Can you tell us your name?’
Sandrine was aware of the sharp grass, that she was cold and damp. She tried to sit up, but pain exploded at the base of her skull. She attempted to lift her arm, but she had no strength. The muscles and bones could not be made to work.
Then a woman’s voice, sing-song high. ‘Actually, I think I know who she is.’
Sandrine managed to open her eyes. A pretty girl in her early twenties, with blue eyes, ultra-thin brows and blonde waved hair, the colour of corn, curled off her face. She was wearing an orange and red summer print dress, with big white buttons and trim on the collar and sleeves.
‘Aren’t you Marianne Vidal’s sister?’ the girl said.
She nodded, setting her head spinning again.
‘Sandrine,’ she managed to reply. Her name felt thick in her mouth, like wet cloth.
‘Sandrine, that’s it. On the tip of my tongue. Thought I recognised you. I’m Lucie, Lucie Ménard. We met once, at the Café Continental I think it was, a while back. We were going on somewhere, can’t quite remember where.’
Sandrine recalled the evening well. Marianne had been on the terrace and waved her over to meet her friends. Lucie had stood out. She looked like an American movie star. Mad about anything to do with Hollywood, according to Marianne.
‘You were going to a jazz concert at the Terminus.’
