Free The Song of the Nightingale by Alys Clare

had lived with Alazaïs de Saint Gilles, the woman he had been sent to find. Later he moved out – kind though she was, it was clear she preferred to be alone in her tiny house – and now he lived in a household of two young men and their elderly grandfather. The youths were among the group that Ninian was training; a task for which he was far better suited than weaving. Consequently, he was as busy as anyone else in the short hours of daylight, dedicated to his self-appointed task of passing on everything he knew about fighting. Considering that he had spent many years learning the skills you needed to become a knight, he knew quite a lot. His pupils had become his friends, and he had grown close to many of them.
    The men did not want to fight. They believed it was wrong to kill, and their ways were paths of peace. But what were they to do if others attacked?
Simply lie down and die
, the elders said,
for that way we shall be reunited all the sooner with our true spiritual selves, from which we were torn away to this earthly existence.
    Some of the younger men felt the same; quite a lot more had started quietly turning up whenever Ninian began to instruct. For them, earthly life was still too sweet to wish to give it up.
    In those early months of 1211, everyone knew that the vicious, unrelenting crusade against the Cathars would not stop. But nobody fought in the winter; certainly not in the Pyrenees, anyway, for the snow was a more effective ban on hostilities than any truce made by kings or priests. In the village, the ice-bound months passed slowly but peacefully. The villagers tended their sheep, worked at their looms, said their prayers, met in the enfolding darkness after the day’s work to talk animatedly about their faith.
    With nothing else to occupy him in the evenings, Ninian had taken to sitting quietly in the corner of whatever room the elders had gathered in, and listening. He learned a great deal. He learned of the basic conundrum which, it seemed, lay at the heart of the Cathar faith: how can an all-powerful, good and merciful god permit the monstrous evil that undoubtedly existed in the world? The answer was that there had to be two equally powerful gods, one all good and the other all evil.
    Many of the conversations that roamed freely all around him in the course of those long evenings in tiny, smoky rooms, with inadequate heating and one feeble tallow lamp for illumination, were so far above Ninian’s understanding that he did not even try to follow them. Some things, however, stuck in his mind:
Cathars
was what the outside world called his new friends; it was a term coined by their enemies. Their own name for themselves was
good men
or
good women
; or, as they would say,
bonshommes
. Those who loved and supported them, but who were not ready to take the ultimate vow that would admit them into the rarefied circle of the bonshommes, were simply called
credentes
: believers. And the term
perfect
, which appeared to apply to the extremely devout men and women who led the rest – people who lived lives of such austere purity that it was hard to see how they managed to look so happy all the time – was a word used by the enemy not in admiration but with a sarcastic irony. Like Cathar, it also meant
pure one
, but as a constant, sarcastic insult, as if to say
, you lot think you’re so pure, too good to be true!
    The leaders themselves had no special rank or title. They did not need one, for their promise to live a perfect life was between themselves and God. Everyone and everything else was irrelevant.
    They read the bible. This, Ninian perceived, was the worst sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church, for whose priests the idea of letting a layman anywhere near the Word of God was anathema. St John’s Gospel was the important book for the bonshommes. Ninian’s knowledge of the scriptures was sketchy to the point of being virtually non-existent, and to begin with he had