Pagan in Exile by Catherine Jinks

you put it on?’ He blinks, and seems to shake off his trance. Looks around at the piles of rubbish.
    ‘I’ll wear the hauberk, but you can pack the rest of the chain mail,’ he says. Right. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Perhaps if I start with the shoulder pieces.
    ‘Pagan.’ His hand on my arm. ‘Listen to me, for a moment.’
    Looking up. What’s wrong? Have I done something?
    ‘Pagan, I don’t want you talking to that woman.’
    ‘You mean Esclaramonde?’
    ‘She’s a heretic. A Cathar. She’s dangerous.’
    ‘But she’s the size of a thimble!’
    ‘Her ideas are dangerous. She could do you a great deal of harm. Please, Pagan.’ He really seems worried. Almost scared. ‘I don’t want to leave you here, but I will if there’s any risk that you’ll talk to this woman.’
    ‘Well then, I won’t talk to her.’ (If it will make you happy.) ‘I still don’t understand, though. What’s a heretic? Some kind of murderer?’
    ‘A heretic . . . a heretic is like a wolf.’
    ‘A wolf?’
    ‘I mean – no – a heretic is outside the church.’
    ‘Like an Infidel?’
    ‘No, not quite.’ Poor Roland. He doesn’t seem to know exactly what a heretic is. ‘Heretics follow the Devil. They say they are Christians, when they’re not. They are outside the church.’
    ‘Like the Byzantines?’
    ‘No, not exactly –’
    ‘Like the Jacobites?’
    ‘No, I – no – at least – ‘ A pause. ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘How do you know she’s a heretic? She didn’t say anything.’
    ‘I – it’s hard to explain.’ (That’s pretty obvious.) ‘There have been heretics in Languedoc for years and years. You see them everywhere – thousands of them. They have set up their own church, with their own bishops and priests, because they say that the true church is the whore of Babylon. Their priests wear black robes. Black robes and sandals. Did you see that woman’s sandals? Imagine a church that allows a woman to be a priest!’ He runs his hand through his hair. ‘I don’t know much about heretics, Pagan. All I know is that they are wicked and wrong. Abbot Cyprien told me so, many times. He was the Abbot of Saint Jerome. He told me that the Cathars’ heresy is a very ancient one, which came from the East, and that it has spread among the lords of this land because they don’t have to pay any money to the Cathar bishops. He’s dead, now.’ Roland shakes his head, slowly ‘I wish he were alive. It would make things much easier. I don’t know what the new Abbot will think, if I arrive on his doorstep with a heretic.’
    Well I can. I can tell you exactly what he’ll think. He’ll think that you’ve converted her back to the true faith. ‘My lord, no one’s ever going to believe you’re a heretic. If that’s what’s worrying you.’
    I mean to say, what a joke. Even someone with half a brain would see at a glance that Roland couldn’t possibly be a heretic.
    Whatever a heretic might actually be. I’m not sure I’m clear on that one, yet.

Chapter 7
    G od, how I hate monasteries.
    It’s the smell that really gets to me. That awful smell of old books and incense. And the silence, like being shut up in a tomb. And the echo of shuffling feet down long, long corridors. I hate the way no one ever runs, in monasteries. I hate the way no one ever shouts. It’s all whisper, whisper, whisper, like a bunch of dead leaves in a cross-draught.
    Speaking of cross-draughts, it’s damned cold in here. That’s another thing I hate about monasteries: they’re always as cold as a crypt. Cold and miserable. I remember what it used to be like at the Nocturnes service, before sunrise, when your knees used to freeze to the floor and your breath came out in great, white clouds when you sang.
    A bell rings nearby. That sounds like the end of Vespers.
    ‘Maybe he’s had an attack of dysentery’
    ‘Pagan –’
    ‘Well why is he taking so long, then?’
    ‘Be quiet, Pagan, please.’ Roland lowers