Despite everything, Alice found herself smiling.
“Los mots, vivents,‘ he whispered. Living words. ”It was the beginning. I vowed to Alais I would speak the truth, write the truth, so that future generations would know of the horror that once was done in the lands in their name. That they were remembered.“
Alice nodded.
“Harif understood. He had walked the lonely path before me. He had travelled the world and seen how words were twisted and broken and turned into lies. He too lived to bear witness.” Sajhe drew in his breath.
“He lived for only a short time after Alais, although he was more than eight hundred years old when he died. Here, in Los Seres, with Bertrande and me at his side.”
“But where have you lived, all these years? How have you lived?”
“I watched the green of spring give way to the gold of summer, the copper of autumn give way to the white of winter as I have sat and waited for the fading of the light. Over and over again I have asked myself why? If I had known how it would feel to live with such loneliness, to stand, the sole witness to the endless cycle of birth and life and death, what would I have done? I have survived this long life with emptiness in my heart, an emptiness that over the years has spread and spread until it became bigger than my heart itself”.“
“She loved you, Sajhe,” she said, softly. “Not in the way you loved her, but truly and deeply.”
A look of peace had come over his face. “Es vertat. Now I know it.”
“If…”
Another flurry of coughing overtook him. This time, specks of blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. Alice wiped them away with the hem of her robe.
He struggled to sit. “I have written it all down for you, Alice. My last testament. It is waiting for you in Los Seres. In Alais’ house, where we lived, which now I pass to you.”
In the distance, Alice thought she heard the sound of sirens piercing the still night of the mountain.
“They’re nearly here,” she said, keeping her grief in check. “I said they’d come. Stay with me. Please don’t give up.”
Sajhe shook his head. “It is done. My journey is ended. Yours is just beginning.”
Alice smoothed his white hair away from his face.
“I am not her,” she said softly. “I am not Alais.”
He gave a long, soft sigh. “I know. But she lives on in you… and you in her.” He stopped. Alice could see how much it hurt him to talk. “I wish we could have had longer, Alice. But to have met you, to have shared these hours with you. It is more than ever I hoped.”
Sajhe fell silent. The last vestiges of colour drained from his face, from his hands, until there was nothing left.
A prayer, one spoken a long time ago, came to her mind.
“Payre sant, Dieu dreyturier de bons esperits.” The once familiar words fell easily from her lips. “Holy Father, legitimate God of good spirits, grant us to know what Thou knowest, and to love what Thou lovest.”
Biting back her tears, Alice held him in her arms while his breathing became lighter, softer. Finally, it stopped altogether.
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.