Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [247]
Despite this she still plods on, still weaves together her informed guesses and plausible assumptions, still ponders over her scraps of fact, her potsherds and broken arrowheads and tarnished necklace beads, arranging them in the patterns she thinks they must once have made. Who cares? Almost nobody. Maybe it’s just a hobby, something to do on a dull day. Or else it’s an act of defiance: these histories may be ragged and threadbare, patched together from worthless leftovers, but to her they are also flags, hoisted with a certain jaunty insolence, waving bravely though inconsequently, glimpsed here and there through the trees, on the mountain roads, among the ruins, on the long march into chaos.
Tony is down in the cellar, in the middle of the night, because she doesn’t feel like sleeping. She’s wearing her dressing gown and her wool work socks and her raccoon slippers, which are finally on their last legs, although they don’t have any legs and the legs they are on are hers. One of them has lost a tail, and they now have only one eye between them. Tony has become used to having eyes on her feet, like the eyes the ancient Egyptians painted on the prows of their boats. They provide extra guidance – extra spirit guidance, you might say – a thing Tony is coming to believe she needs. Maybe when these slippers kick the bucket she will buy some other ones, other ones with eyes. There’s a choice of animal: pigs, bears, rabbits, wolves. She thinks she will get the wolves.
Her sand-table map of Europe has been rearranged. Now it’s the second decade of the thirteenth century, and what will later be France is being torn apart by religious wars. By this time it’s no longer the Christians versus the Muslims: instead it’s the Catholics versus the Cathars. The dualist Cathars held that the world was divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil, the spiritual and the material, God and the Devil; they believed in reincarnation, and had female religious instructors. Whereas the Catholics ruled out rebirth, thought women unclean, and held by force of logic that since God was by definition all-powerful, evil was ultimately an illusion. A difference of opinion that cost many lives, though there was more at stake than theology, such as who was to control the trade routes and the olive crops, and the women, who were getting out of hand.
Carcassonne, stronghold of Languedoc and the Cathars, has just fallen to the bloodthirsty Simon de Montfort and his brutal army of crusading Catholics, after a siege of fifteen days and a failure of the water supply. Full-spectrum killing ensued. Tony’s main focus of interest is not Carcassonne, however, but Lavaur, which was attacked next. It resisted for sixty days under the leadership of the castle’s chatelaine, Dame Giraude. After the town finally succumbed, eighty knights were butchered like pigs and four hundred Cathar defenders were burned alive, and Dame Giraude herself was thrown down a well by de Montfort’s soldiers, with a lot of stones piled on top of her to keep her down. Nobility in war gets a name for itself, thinks Tony, because there is so little of it.
Tony has chosen May 2, 1211, the day before the massacre. The besieging Catholics are represented by kidney beans, the defending Cathars by grains of white rice. Simon de Montfort is a red Monopoly man, Dame Giraude a blue one. Red for the cross, blue for the Cathars: it was their colour. Tony has already eaten several of the kidney beans, which strictly speaking she should not have done until after the battle. But nibbling helps her to concentrate.
What was Dame Giraude thinking as she looked out over the battlements, assessing the enemy? She must have known that this battle was unwinnable, that her town and all the people in it were doomed. Did she despair, was she praying for a miracle, was she proud of herself for having fought for what she