Free Pagan's Daughter by Catherine Jinks Page A

I don’t know what to call this priest. I can’t call him ‘Father’. He’s not my father, and I don’t believe in calling Roman priests ‘Father’, anyway; they don’t deserve that much respect. He says that he’s a Doctor of Canon Law—a teacher from the University of Bologna, north of Rome. So maybe I should call him ‘Doctor’, as his students do.
    ‘Um . . .’ What should I say? I want to ask about my father without seeming to ask about him. What kind of a priest was he? One of those fighting priests? ‘Um . . . when Simon de Montfort killed my mother, many priests helped him.’ (Priests like my father, perhaps?) ‘There are many Roman priests who would rather fight than pray.’
    ‘I fear so,’ says the priest, with a sigh. Mmmm. How odd. I didn’t expect him to agree with me.
    That’s all he’s going to do, though. Agree with me. He isn’t going to comment, not without a prod.
    ‘When Simon de Montfort besieged Lavaur, the Bishop of Paris was with him.’ Hint, hint. ‘And the Archdeacon of Paris, who built Simon’s siege machine.’
    The priest frowns. ‘How do you know this?’ he asks.
    ‘I was there.’
    ‘You were there ?’
    ‘I was only a baby. I don’t remember. But I was told about it. The garrison was murdered, and all the Perfects as well, but they let the rest of us go. Riscende de Castanet brought me back to Toulouse, and passed me on to my Grandmother.’ (Sometimes I wonder why she bothered.) ‘It was a great battle, you know. The siege at Lavaur lasted a month. Once the French pushed an armoured tower up to the castle moat, and tried to fill the moat with wood and branches. But my uncle Aimery dug a tunnel that reached almost to the tower, and one night he came and took all the wood and branches back into the castle.’ You have to laugh, when you think about it. ‘He also threw burning flax and fat and other things at the tower, to make it catch fire. But the French put the fire out. They smoked the tunnel. They won, in the end. They cut a hole in the castle wall.’ God curse them and all their offspring for eternity.
    ‘I am very sorry, Babylonne,’ says the priest.
    Hah! If you were really sorry, you would have stayed and fought. Like the rest of us. ‘We had our revenge, though. Don’t think that they weren’t punished, those French.’ Toulouse would never bow to anyone for long— not even Simon de Montfort. ‘Those murderers came into Toulouse, and they took everything of value, and they tore down the walls and knocked the tops off the towers, and they put many citizens in chains. But when I was six, and again when I was seven, the French were massacred in the streets of the city. I remember it well. All the people came out of their houses with mauls and axes and mattocks and sickles. They built barricades out of coffers and planks and rafters from their roofs. They chopped up the French like cabbage, and skewered them like pigs. They dragged them behind horses to the gallows, and strung them up at every street-corner.’ I remember the blood. So much blood that you were stepping in pools of it. Falling over in it. ‘There was a man—he had his chest cut open. I could see everything in there. He stank. They all stank. Their bowels emptied when they died . . .’
    He’s staring at me. A fixed, frozen stare. He looks like a ghost.
    ‘What is it?’ Stop gawping! ‘What have I done?’
    ‘Nothing, I . . . nothing.’ His gaze drops, and he wipes his hand across his face. ‘Forgive me. Yours has been a hard and bloody life. I am sorry for it, indeed I am.’
    ‘Salve! Pater!’
    Who’s that? Who’s calling? Ah—I see. Over there, on that bank. Sitting under that tree.
    Two monks. Two friars , in fact. Tonsured Dominicans, in grubby white and black, eating bread and cheese and drinking from a wine-skin. One has a band-age around his head, and a bruised cheek.
    Someone must have attacked him. (With any luck.)
    ‘ Salvete ,’ the red-headed priest