Free Heretic by Bernard Cornwell Page B

gave him the answer. “Do you know how dangerous the roads are?” she asked. “There are coredors.”
    “Coredors?”
    “Bandits,” she explained. “The local people call them coredors. Then there are the routiers who are just as bad.” Routiers were companies of disbanded soldiers who wandered the highways in search of a lord to employ them and when they were hungry, which was most of the time, they took what they wanted by force. Some even captured towns and held them for ransom. But, like the coredors, they would regard a girl traveling alone as a gift sent by the devil for their enjoyment. “How long do you think I would have lasted?” she asked.
    “You could have traveled in company?” Thomas suggested.
    “We always did, my father and I, but he was there to protect me. But on my own?” She shrugged. “So I stayed. I worked in a kitchen.”
    “And cooked up heresy?”
    “You priests do so love heresy,” she said bitterly. “It gives you something to burn.”
    “Before you were condemned,” Thomas said, “what was your name?”
    “Genevieve.”
    “You were named for the saint?”
    “I suppose so,” she said.
    “And whenever Genevieve prayed,” Thomas said, “the devil blew out her candles.”
    “You priests are full of stories,” Genevieve mocked.
    “Do you believe that? You believe the devil came into the church and blew out her candles?”
    “Probably.”
    “Why didn’t he just kill her if he’s the devil? What a pathetic trick, just to blow out candles! He can’t be much of a devil if that’s all he does.”
    Thomas ignored her scorn. “They tell me you are a beghard.”
    “I’ve met beghards,” she said, “and I liked them.”
    “They are the devil’s spawn,” Thomas said.
    “You’ve met one?” she asked. Thomas had not. He had only heard of them and the girl sensed his discomfort. “If to believe that God gave all to everyone and wants everyone to share in everything, then I am as bad as a beghard,” she admitted, “but I never joined them.”
    “You must have done something to deserve the flames.”
    She stared at him. Perhaps it was something in his tone that made her trust him, but the defiance seemed to drain out of her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall and Thomas suspected she wanted to cry. Watching her delicate face, he wondered why he had not seen her beauty instantly as Robbie had done. Then she opened her eyes and gazed at him. “What happened here tonight?” she asked, ignoring his accusation.
    “We captured the castle,” Thomas said.
    “We?”
    “The English.”
    She looked at him, trying to read his face. “So now the English are the civil power?”
    He supposed she had learned the phrase at her trial. The Church did not burn heretics, they merely condemned them, and then the sinners were handed to the civil power for their deaths. That way the Church kept clean hands, God was assured that his Church was undefiled and the devil gained a soul. “We are the civil power now,” Thomas agreed.
    “So the English will burn me instead of the Gascons?”
    “Someone must burn you,” Thomas said, “if you are a heretic.”
    “If?” Genevieve asked, but when Thomas did not answer she closed her eyes and rested her head on the damp stones again. “They said I insulted God.” She spoke tiredly. “That I claimed the priests of God’s Church were corrupt, that I danced naked beneath the lightning, that I used the devil’s power to discover water, that I used magic to cure people’s ills, that I prophesied the future and that I put a curse on Galat Lorret’s wife and on his cattle.”
    Thomas frowned. “They did not convict you of being a beghard?” he asked.
    “That too,” she added drily.
    He was silent for a few heartbeats. Water dripped somewhere in the dark beyond the door and the rushlight flickered, almost died and then recovered. “Whose wife did you curse?” Thomas asked.
    “Galat Lorret’s wife. He’s a