The First Apostle (23 page)

“I didn’t know any of this,” Bronson said. “It’s just unbelievable. Anyway, back to Montségur. The crusaders were lenient with the soldiers, but I presume not with the Cathars themselves?”

“Wrong again,” Angela said. “The
parfaits
were told that if they renounced their beliefs and confessed their sins to the Inquisition they would be allowed to go free, but they would have to leave all their possessions behind.”

“In other words,” Bronson interjected, “both the Cathars and their soldiers were handed ‘get out of jail free’ cards. But why?”

“You haven’t heard the best bit yet. The first anomaly was the leniency of the surrender terms. The defenders requested a two-week truce to consider the terms—terms that, if they’d been accepted, would have allowed the entire garrison to walk away from Montse’gur unharmed. That’s the second anomaly: you wouldn’t have thought they’d have needed more than two minutes to consider their options, not two weeks. Anyway, surprisingly, the crusaders agreed to this.” She paused.

“And this is where it gets really peculiar. When the truce expired on the fifteenth of March, not only did all the
parfaits
reject the surrender terms unequivocally, but at least twenty of the non-Cathar defenders elected to receive the ultimate Cathar vow—the
consolamentum perfecti
—so condemning themselves to a certain and horrendously painful death.”

“When they could have just walked away, they opted for death?”

“Right. At dawn on the sixteenth of March 1244, more than two hundred
parfaits
were taken out of the fortress and escorted down to the foot of the mountain. There, they were pushed into a hastily built wood-filled stockade and burned alive. None of them recanted their heresy, despite being offered every opportunity to do so.”

For a few moments Bronson was silent. “That really doesn’t make sense. Why would they reject the surrender terms after asking for two weeks to think about it? And, especially, why did the Cathars—and, from what you say, twenty-odd non-Cathars—decide their best option was to scream their way to death in the flames instead of simply walking away?”

“That’s the interesting part. It’s also worth pointing out that even when chained to the stake, the heretics were always given one last chance to recant.”

“And then they could walk away?” Bronson asked.

“No, not at that stage. But as I said before, they would then be garrotted as an act of mercy rather than be burned alive. So what made the Cathars so sure of their faith that they were prepared to die in just about the most painful way imaginable rather than repudiate it?”

Bronson rubbed his chin. “They must have had one hell of a reason.”

“There’s a persistent story—I’ve found references to it both on the Internet and in the books I’ve studied—that suggests there
was
a definite reason for the delay in the Cathars’ decision to accept or reject the surrender terms, and also for their willingness to perish in the flames. They were protecting their treasure.”

Bronson glanced at Angela to see if she was joking, but her expression remained deadly serious.

“Treasure? But how could the deaths of two hundred Cathars by fire possibly help protect it?”

“I think—and this really is conjecture—that the Cathars were prepared to sacrifice themselves as a kind of diversion. They thought that once they’d died in the flames, the crusaders would be less inclined to mount a proper guard on Montse’gur and that would allow a few of their number to escape with their most precious possessions.

“And I don’t believe we’re talking about a typical treasure. No gold or jewels, nothing like that. I think their treasure was some kind of religious relic, an object of undeniable provenance that proved the veracity of the Cathar faith beyond any doubt. That might be enough, not only to persuade the committed members of the order to accept death at the hands of the crusaders, but also to convince the twenty non-Cathars to join them.”

“So the treasure wasn’t really a treasure at all, in the usual sense of the word?” Bronson interjected. “It was probably completely worthless in intrinsic terms—just an old bit of parchment or something—but priceless in what it proved?”

“Exactly.”

“But what could it be?”

“Impossible to say for sure, but we can infer certain things about it from what we do know. If the sources I’ve looked at have got it right, sometime during that last night at Montse’gur, as the flames of the huge pyre at the foot of the mountain died away to a dull red glow, the last four
parfaits
escaped. They’d been hidden in the fortress by the garrison, and chose an extremely hazardous, but almost undetectable, route, using ropes to descend the sheer west face of the mountain.

“They took this risk because they were carrying the treasure of the Cathars. They reached the foot of the mountain and then vanished both into the night and from the pages of history. No one knows what they were carrying, where they went or what happened to them.

“If there’s any truth in that story, then there are at least two points worth making. First, whatever the ‘treasure’ comprised, it had to be fairly small and not too heavy, because otherwise the four men couldn’t have carried it during their perilous descent. Second, it had to be a physical object, not simply knowledge, or the four
parfaits
could have disguised themselves as soldiers or servants and left the fortress with the men-at-arms the following day.

“Now, this is all guesswork, unsupported by a single shred of verifiable evidence, but it does provide a plausible explanation for what happened when the siege of Montse’gur ended. But what happened next on the mountain
is
in the historical record.

“Once the fortress was deserted, the crusaders, acting on the specific instructions of the Pope, tore it apart in a desperate search for some object, some ‘treasure.’ But whatever it was they were looking for, they clearly didn’t find it, because they dismantled the castle, quite literally stone by stone. It’s not generally known, but the citadel that now stands at Montse’gur was actually erected early in the seventeenth century, and no part of the original Cathar castle now remains at the site.

“For the next half-century, Rome ordered all traces of the Cathar heresy to be expunged from the landscape. As well as executing every
parfait
they could lay their hands on, the crusaders also continued their search for whatever had been secreted at Montségur, but without result. Eventually, memory of the ‘treasure of the Cathars’ passed into the mists of legend. And that’s the story of Montse’gur as we know it today: a mix of historical fact, rumor and conjecture.”

“But what the hell has that got to do with a six-hundred-year-old farmhouse on the side of a hill in Italy?” Bronson asked, waving his arm in frustration.

“It’s all in the inscription,” Angela explained. “The first verse of the Occitan poem can be interpreted as a specific reference to the end of the siege.”

She read Goldman’s translation of the verse from her notebook:

“The second line could describe the surrender of the garrison of Montse’gur, and the third and fourth the mass execution when the Cathars were burned alive. But I think the expressions ‘truth did descend’ and ‘truth like stone forever will endure’ refer to the escape of the four remaining
parfaits,
carrying with them some document or relic upon which the core of their faith—their unarguable ‘truth’—relied. Whatever the object, it was so compelling in its implications that Cathars would rather die at the stake than renounce their beliefs.”

“And the second verse?” Bronson asked.

“That’s just as interesting, and again some lines seem to refer to the Cathars.”

Again, she read the verse aloud:

“The expression in the second line was commonly used by the Cathars, and the ‘word’ referred to in the third line could be the ‘truth’ that guided the beliefs of the
parfaits.
The first line’s nothing to do with the Cathars, but I think it’s possible that the reference to the two species of tree indicates a hiding place.”

“And the last couple of lines? About the chalice?”

“I’m guessing—I’ve been guessing all along, but now I’m
really
guessing—that they mean the object was secreted in some kind of a vessel—a chalice—and that it’s dangerous.”

Bronson began to reduce speed. He was approaching Vierzon, where the autoroute divided, and turned southeast for Clermont-Ferrand.

“So what you’re suggesting,” Bronson said, “is that the Cathars had some kind of relic, something that confirmed their beliefs, and that quite probably would have been seen as dangerous by other religions? And the Pope started the crusade to recover or destroy it?”

“Exactly. The Albigensian Crusade was instigated by Pope Innocent III—and rarely was any pope so misnamed—in 1209.”

“Right. So you think the Pope knew about this relic and believed it was secreted somewhere at Montse’gur? And that was why he ordered the different treatment of the Cathars and garrison there, and why, after the massacre, his crusaders demolished the fortress?”

“Yes. And if my reading of these verses is right, I think we may well find that the Cathar treasure was hidden somewhere in Mark’s house in Italy!”

Back at their hotel near Gatwick, Mandino and Rogan had spent hours using their laptops to study the search strings the intercept system had recovered from the Cambridge cybercafe’s.

They seemed to have exhausted all their other options. They’d waited outside Angela Lewis’s building, but her apartment lights had remained switched off, and neither her phone nor her doorbell was answered. Bronson’s house was just as obviously deserted, and Mandino had now realized that both of them had disappeared. The intercept system was all they had left.

The biggest problem they’d faced was the sheer volume of information they had to work with. Carlotti, Mandino’s deputy who’d remained in Italy, had sent them three Excel files. Two contained the searches input at the cybercafe’s he believed Bronson had visited, while the third and much larger file listed the search strings from the other half dozen Internet cafés within the five-mile radius which Mandino had requested.

He and Rogan ran internal searches for words they knew their quarry had been looking for, including “LDA,” “consul,” “senator” and so on. Each time either of them got a hit, they copied the following fifty search strings and saved them in separate files.

Just doing that took a long time, and at the end of it they were really no further forward.

“We’re not getting anywhere with this,” Mandino said in irritation. “We already knew that Bronson had probably worked out what the additional letters meant on the Latin inscription. What I haven’t found yet is anything that looks like it might refer to the second inscription.”

Rogan leaned back from his laptop. “Same here,” he said.

“I think what we need to do is try to second-guess Bronson,” Mandino mused. “I wonder . . .”

He did have one powerful weapon in his armory. The book he held in his safe in Rome contained the first few lines of the Latin text of the lost relic. More important, it had a potentially useful couple of pages that detailed the Vatican’s attempts to trace the document’s location through the ages.

“The house in Italy,” he asked, turning to face Rogan. “Did you find the exact date it was built?”

His companion shook his head. “No. I did a search in the property register in Scandriglia, and turned up several records of sales, but they were all quite recent. The earliest reference I could find was a house shown in that location on a map of the area dated 1396, so we know it’s been standing for at least six hundred years. There was also an earlier map from the first half of the fourteenth century that
doesn’t
show any building on the site. Why,
capo
?”

“Just an idea,” Mandino said. “There’s a section in that book I was given by the Vatican that lists the groups that might have possessed the relic through the ages. The likely candidates include the Bogomils, the Cathars and Mani, who founded Manichaeism.

“Now,” Mandino went on, “I think that Mani and the Bogomils were too early, but the Cathars are a possibility because that house must have been constructed shortly after the end of the Albigensian Crusade in the fourteenth century.

“And there’s something else. That crusade was one of the bloodiest in history—thousands of people were executed in the name of God. The Vatican’s justification for the massacres and wholesale looting was the Pope’s determination to rid the Christian world of the Cathar heresy. But the book suggests that the
real
reason was the growing suspicion by the Pope that the Cathars had somehow managed to obtain the
Exomologesis
.”

“The what?”

“The lost relic. Pope Vitalian called it the
Exomologesis de assectator mendax,
which means ‘The confession of sin by the false disciple,’ but eventually it became known inside the Vatican just as the
Exomologesis
.”

“So why did they think the Cathars had found it?”

“Because the Cathars were so implacably opposed to Rome and the Catholic Church, and the Vatican believed they had to have some unimpeachable document as the basis for their opposition. The
Exomologesis
would have fitted the bill very well. And the Albigensian Crusade was only half successful. The Church managed to eliminate the Cathars as a religious movement, but they never found the relic. From what I’ve read, the crusaders probably came close to recovering it at Montse’gur, but it somehow slipped through their hands.