Labyrinth

EPILOGUE

Los Seres

SUNDAY 8 JULY 2OO7

It is eight o’clock in the evening. The end of another perfect summer’s day.

Alice walks over to the wide, casement window and opens the shutters to let in the slanting orange light. A slight breeze skims her bare arms.

Her skin is the colour of hazelnuts and her hair is tied in a single plait down her back.

The sun is low now, a perfect red circle in the pink and white sky. It casts huge black shadows across the neighbouring peaks of the Sabarthes Mountains, like swathes of material laid out to dry. From the window she can see the Col des Sept Freres and behind it the Pic de St Bartelemy.

It is two years to the day that Sajhe died.

At first, Alice found it hard to live with the memories. The sound of the gun in the claustrophobic chamber; the trembling of the earth; the white face in the darkness; the look on Will’s face as he burst into the chamber with Inspector Noubel.

Most of all, she was haunted by the memory of the light fading in Audric’s eyes – Sajhe, as she learned to think of him. It was peace she saw in them at the end, not sorrow, but it has not made her pain any the less.

But the more Alice learned, the more the terrors that held her locked in those final moments began to fade. The past lost its power to hurt her.

She knows Marie-Cecile and her son were killed by the falling rock, both lost to the mountain itself in the earthquake. Paul Authie was found where Francois-Baptiste had shot him, the timer detonating the four charges ticking relentlessly down to zero beside his dead body. An Armageddon of his own making.

As that summer turned into autumn, autumn to winter, Alice began to recover, with Will’s help. Time is doing its work. Time and the promise of a new life. Gradually, the painful memories are fading. Like old photographs, half remembered and indistinct, they gather dust in her mind.

Alice sold her flat in England and together with the proceeds from the sale of her aunt’s house in Salleles d’Aude, she and Will came to Los Seres.

The house where Alais once lived with Sajhe, Bertrande and Harif is now their home. They have added to it, made it suitable for modern living, but the spirit of the place is unaltered.

The secret of the Grail is safe, as Alais had intended it should be, hidden here in the timeless mountains. The three papyri, torn from their medieval books, lie buried under the rock and stone.

Alice understands that she was destined to finish what had been left unfinished eight hundred years before. She also understands, as Alais did, that the real Grail lies in the love handed down from generation to generation, the words spoken by father to son, mother to daughter. The truth lies all about us. In the stones, in the rocks, in the changing pattern of the mountain seasons.

Through the shared stories of our past, we do not die.

Alice does not believe she can put it into words. Unlike Sajhe, she is not a spinner of tales, a writer. She wonders if perhaps it is beyond words.

Call it God, call it faith. Perhaps the Grail is too great a truth to be spoken or tied down in time and space and context by so slippery a thing as language.

Alice puts her hands on the ledge and breathes in the subtle smells of evening. Wild thyme, broom, the shimmering memory of heat on the stones, mountain parsley and mint, sage, the scents of her herb garden.

Her reputation is growing. What started as a sequence of private favours, supplying herbs to the restaurants and neighbours in the villages, has become a profitable business. Now, most of the hotels and shops in the area, even as far away as Foix and Mirepoix, carry a range of their products, with the distinctive Epice Pelletier et Fille label. The name of her ancestors, reclaimed now as her own.

The hameau, Los Seres, is not yet on the map. It is too small. But soon it will be. Benleu.

In the study below, the keyboard has fallen silent. Alice can hear Will moving about in the kitchen, getting plates from the dresser and bread from the pantry. Soon, she will go down. He will open a bottle of wine and they will drink while he cooks.

Tomorrow, Jeanne Giraud will come, a dignified, charming woman who has become part of their lives. In the afternoon, they will go to the nearest village and lay flowers at a monument in the square, which commemorates the celebrated Cathar historian and Resistance fighter, Audric S. Baillard. On the plaque, there is an Occitan proverb, chosen by Alice.

“Pas a pas se va luenh.”

Later, Alice will walk alone into the mountains where a different plaque marks the spot where he lies beneath the hills, as he always wanted. The stone simply reads SAJHE.

It is enough that he is remembered.

The Family Tree, Sajhe’s first gift to Alice, hangs on the wall in the study. Alice has made three changes. She has added the date of Alais’ and Sajhe’s deaths, separated by eight hundred years.

She added Will’s name to hers and the date of their marriage.

At the very end, where the story is continuing still, she’s added a line:

SAJHESSE GRACE FARMER PELLETIER, 25 February 2001.

Alice smiles and walks over to the cot where their daughter is stirring.

Her pale, sleepy toes twitch as she starts to wake. Alice catches her breath as her daughter opens her eyes.

She plants a murmuring kiss on the top of her daughter’s head and begins a lullaby in the old language, handed down from generation to generation.

Bona nueit, bona nueit…

Braves amics, pica mieja-nueit

Cal finir velhada

E jos la flassada

One day, Alice thinks, Sajhesse might sing it to a child of her own.

Holding her daughter in her arms, Alice walks back to the window, thinking of all the things she will teach her. The stories she will tell her of the past and of how things came to be.

Alais no longer comes to her in her dreams. But as Alice stands in the lading light looking out over the ancient peaks and crests of the mountains and valleys that stretch further than her eye can see, she feels the presence of the past all around her, embracing her. Spirits, friends, ghosts who hold out their hands and whisper of their lives, share their secrets with her. They connect her to all those who have stood here before – and all those yet to come – dreaming of what life might hold.

In the distance, a white moon is rising in the speckled sky, promising another fine day tomorrow.