Labyrinth

CHAPTER 33

Alice’s hotel was immediately opposite the main gates into the medieval Cite, set in pretty gardens, sunk down out of sight of the road.

She was shown to a comfortable room on the first floor. Alice flung open the windows to let the world in. Smells of meat cooking, garlic and vanilla, cigar smoke floated into the room.

She unpacked quickly and showered, then called Shelagh again, more out of habit than expectation. Still no answer. She shrugged. Nobody could accuse her of not trying.

Armed with the guidebook shed bought in a service station on the journey from Toulouse, Alice left the hotel and crossed the road toward the Cite. Steep concrete steps led up into a small park bordered on two sides by bushes and tall evergreens and plane trees. A brightly lit nineteenth-century carousel dominated the far end of the gardens, its garish fin-de-siecle ornamentation out of place in the shadow of the sandstone medieval fortifications. Covered with a brown and white striped canopy, with a painted frieze of knights and ladies and white horses around the rim, everything was pink and gold-charging horses, spinning teacups, fairy-tale carriages. Even the ticket kiosk looked like a booth at a fairground. A bell rang and children squealed as the carousel began to turn, slowly belching out its antique mechanical song.

Beyond the carousel, Alice could see the gray heads and shoulders of tombs and gravestones behind the walls of the cemetery, a row of cypress and yew protecting the sleepers from casual glances. To the right of the gates, a group of men played petanque.

For a moment, she stood still, facing the entrance to the Cite head on, preparing herself to go in. To her right was a stone pillar from which an ugly stone gargoyle stared out, its flat face uncompromising and blunt. It looked newly restored.

SUM CARCAS. I am Carcas.

Dame Carcas, the Saracen queen and wife of King Balaack, after whom Carcassonne was said to be named after resisting a five-year siege by Charlemagne.

Alice walked over the covered drawbridge, which was squat and confined and fashioned from stone, chain and wood. The boards creaked and clattered beneath her feet. There was no water in the moat beneath her, only grass speckled with wild flowers.

It led into the Lices, a dusty, wide area between the outer and inner ring of fortifications. To left and right, children were climbing on the walls and staging mock battles with plastic swords. Straight ahead was the Porte Narbonnaise. As she passed beneath the high, narrow arch, Alice raised her eyes. A benign stone statue of the Virgin Mary looked down at her.

The moment Alice passed through the gates all sense of space vanished. The rue Cros-Mayrevieille, the cobbled main street, was very narrow and sloped upwards. The buildings were packed so closely together that a person could lean out of the top story of one house and join hands with someone on the opposite side.

The high buildings trapped the noise. Different languages, shouting, laughing, gesturing as a car crawled by with barely a hand’s width to spare on either side. Shops leaped out at her, selling postcards, guidebooks, a mannequin in the stocks advertising a museum of inquisitional instruments of torture, soaps and cushions and tableware, everywhere replica swords and shields. Twisted wrought-iron brackets stuck out from the wall with wooden signs attached to them: I’Eperon Medieval, the Medieval Spur, sold replica swords and porcelain dolls; A Saint Louis sold soap, souvenirs and tableware.

Alice let her feet guide her to the main square, Place Marcou. It was small and filled with restaurants and clipped plane trees. Their spreading branches, wide like entwined and sheltering hands above the tables and chairs, competed with the brightly colored awnings. The names of the individual cafes were printed on the top-Le Marcou, Le Trouvere, Le Menestrel.

Alice strolled over the cobbles and out the other side, finding herself back at the junction of the rue Cros-Mayrevieille and the Place du Chateau, where a triangle of shops, creperies and restaurants surrounded a stone obelisk about two and one-half meters high, topped by a bust of the nineteenth-century historian Jean-Pierre Cros-Mayrevieille. Around the bottom was a bronze frieze of the fortifications.

She walked forward until she was standing in front of a sweeping semicircular wall that protected the Chateau Comtal. Behind the imposing locked gates were the turrets and battlements of the castle. A fortress within a fortress.

Alice stopped, realizing that this had been her destination all along. The Chateau Comtal, home of the Trencavel family.

She peered through the tall wooden gates. There was something familiar about it all, as if she was returning to a place she’d been once, long ago, and forgotten. There were glass ticket booths on either side of the entrance, blinds drawn, with printed signs advertising the opening hours. Beyond that was a gray expanse of gravel and dust, not grass, which led to a flat, narrow bridge, about two meters across.

Alice stepped away from the gates, promising herself she’d come back first thing in the morning. She turned to the right and followed signs for the Porte de Rodez. It was set between two distinctive, horseshoe-shaped towers. She climbed down the wide steps, worn away in the middle by countless feet.

The difference in age between the inner and outer walls was most evident here. The outer fortifications, which she read had been built at the end of the thirteenth century and restored during the nineteenth, were gray and the blocks were relatively equal in size. Detractors would claim it was just another indication of how inappropriately the restoration had been carried out. Alice didn’t care. The spirit of the place was what moved her. The inner wall, including the western wall of the Chateau Comtal itself, was composed of a mixture of red tiles of the Gallo-Roman remains and the crumbling sandstone of the twelfth century.

Alice felt a sense of peace after the noise within the Cite, a feeling of belonging here, among such mountains and skies. With her arms resting on the battlements, she stood looking down to the river, imagining the cold touch of the water between her toes.

Only when the remains of the day gave way to dusk, did Alice turn and head back into the Cite.