Chapters 1
Copyright © 2017 by Oscar Luis Rigiroli
All rights reserved. Neither this book nor any part thereof may be reproduced or used in any form without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
It is a work of fiction. The names, characters, companies, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious way. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, or real events is pure coincidence.
Table of Contents
Cast of characters
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
From the Author
Cast of Characters
Alisha Shankar Chand: Young Indian woman of high caste.
Vijai Anand Chand: Father of Alisha, descendant of the Rajas of Bilaspur.
Romain Mercier: Geologist of Canadian origin.
Jack Brody: American millionaire, skipper of the Etoile yacht.
Gaurika: Jack Brody's Indian Bride.
Charuni and Bashira: Sudanese girls aboard Jack Brody's yacht.
Zhang Wei: Pretended Chinese trader in forestry products.
Yashodar Virendra: Friend of Romain Mercier, established as a tailor in Mumbai.
Berthe Gabriac: Mother of Romain Mercier.
Bertran Rostanh: Owner of a tobacconist in Carcassonne.
Adhemar Trencavel: Antiquarian in Carcassonne. Grand Master of the Holy and Venerable Brotherhood of Perfect and Good Cathars Hommes.
Berengar Monferrier: Chancellor of the Brotherhood.
Aulric de Terrailh: Seneschal of the Brotherhood.
Michel Dupont: Captain of the National Police of France.
Roger Maysonet: Captain of the French National Gendarmerie
Olivier Chenier: Commander of the French National Police.
Davide Bressan: Lieutenant of the Arma dei Carabinieri in Venice.
Giuseppe Bertone: Captain of the Carabinieri, chief of Bressan.
Andarbek: Former colonel of the Chechen army.
Introduction
Montsegur, Occitania, France. March 1244
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
(Kill them all, God will separate His people)
The Chevalier Arnaud des Casses entered the vast room where the women were doing their needlework, but the nervousness was evident and predictable completing a two-week period in which the siege was narrowing on the doomed citadel and clouds hovered over the remnants of the ancient Cathar nobility who resisted abjuring their faith and traditions. The smoke from the Inquisition bonfires had already covered the fields of southern France. The crusade against the Cathars that had begun years before under the direction of the brutal Simon de Montfort was already concluding with the fall of the last bastions. The Seneschal of Carcassonne and the Archbishop of Narbonne had besieged the city of Montsegur with an army of ten thousand soldiers and there was no power that could confront them.
The Chevalier des Casses set his voice on the murmurings of the women so that silence seized the hall. Des Casses went straight to the point.
"The Council of Perfects has ordered that all children up to twelve years old be evacuated from the city with immediate effect. The mothers who are breastfeeding should accompany their children and other thirty mothers will be selected to accompany the infants. I know this separation will be terribly painful but we must safeguard our seed and our lineages so that our faith will not be lost in the terrible days that will follow. We also know that those women who are selected will be reluctant to leave their husbands but they must fulfill the task entrusted to them because children need adult guidance.”
De Casses walked to the center of the room and had to overcome his emotions to continue his speech.
"Thirty carts will leave the city tonight, escorted each by a knight and six soldiers. Children and mothers will travel there.”
Tears and sighs had become shrieks as the ladies realized they would have to abandon their children to save them from a horrible fate that the bonfires anticipated.
That night the caravan of wagons departed. The Chevalier Arnaud des Casses supervised the exodus accompanied by the Perfects Raymond Agulher and Guilleme Aicard. Tears bathed the cheeks of the rough men as they watched the children ascend to the sinister wagons to proceed in an unknown direction, lead only by the hand of God.
With his usual sagacity, Aicard asked.
"What do those three carts that are at the end of the caravan contain? I do not see any children or women in them.”
"I have not been informed," Replied Casses. "Nor do I want to ask.”
The shadows of parents greeting their children for the last time moved on the ground projected by a few torches that threw a minimum of light to not warn the besiegers of the maneuver.
And so, quietly and with great grief the carts caravan departed to transport their precious human cargo across Aquitaine and Languedoc, south to Navarre and Catalonia and east towards Piedmont and Lombardy up to Milan.
Unknowingly, those children were carriers not of a theology but of the seeds of religious and political freedom.
Prologue
Seychelles - Indian Ocean
His feet crawled painfully through the wet sand as his legs refused to take the next step, his muscles exhausted by the struggle of staying in the sea water, swimming toward the shore he had barely glimpsed, and finally walk along the endless beach, simply guided by the evanescent sunlight that gradually hid behind the low hills located to the west. His salt-red eyes barely discerned confused shapes in the growing darkness, and his brain scarcely managed to process the information they sent.
He did not see a large sea snail in front of his feet and stumbled with it rolling in the sand. At last his brain disconnected from his senses and fell into a deep mist. Losing the consciousness was an automatic mechanism of self-defense of the organism in that situation of total exhaustion. He had fallen on the edge of the shore bathed by the ocean, but by that time the low tide had begun so that his body was safe from the waters and the sand around him began to dry. The fate that had allowed him to save himself from the wreck and had accompanied him until then was determined not to abandon him completely.
Chapter 1
She walked to the beach where the five meters in length Zodiac raft was already set up, pushed it several steps into the sea until she was sure that there was enough water depth under the semi-rigid hull, climbed aboard and paddled a few meters further into the sea. Alisha started the Yamaha engine with an ease that surprised her every time she did so.
Once the boat had sailed a few hundred meters away from the coast the woman straightened to the north and only once she had set the course did she look back. Then the girl glimpsed the white hull of the luxurious yacht that had landed at Banc de Sable, one of the uninhabited coral atolls that were part of the Admiral Group of the Seychelles Islands, although quite distant from the main island Mahé and the city of Victoria, Capital of the archipelago.
The yacht, called Etoile, belonged to an American millionaire named Jack Brody, a dark-haired character who loved luxury, yachts and sailing as well as beautiful women of exotic and varied ethnic backgrounds. In that particular trip he took with him his Indian girlfriend Gaurika, woman of a singular beauty in spite of its humble origin from an Indian low caste. Jack had also included two young Sudanese girls, with black skin and volcanic temperament, who were nominally members of the Etoile's kitchen staff, although Alisha had her suspicions about their true roles. She had to be thankful that all of the female crew had kept Jack away from her, despite certain suggestive looks he'd directed. This was not surprising to Alisha as she knew she was an exotic beauty. In addition, the presence on board of her father managed to keep the American away from any attempt to approach her.
The young woman smiled as she reflected on all this, and the circumstances that had led her and her father to find themselves on the idyllic, desert beach of the Indian Ocean, away from the places where they were known. Alisha Chand had had in her short live quite a lot of travel and adventure activity. Born in Mumbai twenty-two years before, her parents belonged to the high castes of India. In fact his father Vijai Anand Chand was nominally Raja of Bilaspur, in the Punjab, although that nobiliary title was now only honorific, since the princely power associated with the same had been extinguished in 1948, with the eighteenth Raja, Vijai´s uncle.
Separated from his wife, whose family still held possessions in northern India, Vijai had returned to Bombay with his little daughter years before, carrying his personal wealth. In that city, which in 1955 had been renamed Mumbai, the man had been engaged in financial activities, increasingly lucrative as well as murky, which had forced him three years before to leave the city, the most populated in India and its most important economic center, while Alisha completed her secondary and higher education in Switzerland and then lived briefly in the United States. In this country, the most enjoyable period of her life, she had spent six months with her cousin Lakshmi Dhawan, also born in India but who had been acting for some years as a female FBI agent.
The girl sighed recalling all these alternatives in her young life. Although it had not been free from some trouble, she was allowed to have an infinitely freer and more satisfying youth than the vast majority of young Indian women, even those belonging to the Punjab high caste.
Alisha set the prow to a small white-sand beach that looked promising surrounded by mangrove swamps whose vegetation swung with the gentle waves of the sea. When she reached it the girl turned off the engine and drove gently to the shore, leaving the raft on firm sand. She was busy with the maneuvering and unloading of the diving items she had brought on the raft, but her mind was warning her of something her retina had picked up as the raft approached the beach. When she was satisfied with the nautical activities Alisha headed for the part where she had perceived something that her instinct had marked as strange. She pressed the butt of a knife in her hand, which she carried in her belt, though she did not know well enough what she would need it for on that occasion.
When the woman climbed on one of the dunes that the tides produced and carried from side to side in the sandy beach she saw it. A dark bulk on the white sand, before reaching some coral rocks that emerged from the water and the mangroves that grew behind them. Her stomach squeezed at the sight of what she supposed to be a corpse, no doubt a shipwrecked hurled to the beach by the tides. The girl doubted whether to retrace her steps to avoid the unpleasant spectacle, since the seabirds that hovered in the air had the obvious intention of participating in a carrion festival, but then a pious feeling forced her to go ahead and at least find out whether the body had no life and was beyond any relief she could provide.
Alisha approached the body with great precautions; At first glance there was no movement in it which could resemble breathing or another vital activity. There were no foul smells and no evidence in the body of sea-bird injuries, so Alisha concluded that it had not been there for a long time. The clothes were torn and showed that under the tatters the skin was white. It was a man of considerable stature, lying on the sand on his chest, his arms forming a curious bow. If he had crawled on the wet sand before, the tides had erased all his traces.
No longer hoping to find traces of life in the body Alisha extended her right foot turning the body up, and at that moment she heard a faint moan barely audible over the noise of the waves. With great fear she reached down and brought her face close to the man's face. After a few moments she perceived signs of what could be internal movements. The woman meditated for a few moments, took out the marine watch she used for her underwater activities, dried the glass with the surface of her latex suit and brought it close to the man's mouth. After some tense moments she realized that the glass was undoubtedly fogged by the effects of an almost imperceptible breath.
The man was still alive!
Without hesitation Alisha took off the synthetic material suit that served for her diving activities but made difficult the movements that she needed to do now, being covered only by a tiny bikini.
She knelt near the man's head and started with the forced breathing maneuver many times practiced in training sessions but never seriously implemented. Alisha never knew for how long she was insufflating air in the body lungs but with great satisfaction saw that the presumed castaway began to breathe by his own means, at the beginning in a difficult way. Not knowing very well why she put his head to a side with the results that the man threw up a mousse of brackish water.
The girl remained anxious beside the body for a long time observing how the breathing was normalizing progressively. This result produced her a considerable relief.
Finally the alleged castaway opened his eyes and found his chest caught between two female thighs and a pair of breasts hanging over his face. Alisha heard the man mutter something in a language that seemed French to her but almost inaudible.
"What are you saying?" She asked in the same language, which she had mastered very well from her passage through the Swiss school.
The man cleared his throat and repeated now more clearly.
"Am I in paradise?" His mouth formed a kind of smile.
Alisha became suddenly aware of her almost total nakedness and her position on the man and sprang to her feet as the blush covered her caramel-colored complexion.
The woman was wondering for a while what to do in this totally unexpected situation and for which she had no preconceived solutions. One possibility was to leave the man on the beach and go to the yacht to seek help to carry him to a safe place, but reflected that in the state of unconsciousness the body could be dragged by the tide or attacked by seabirds or animals that might exist inside the thick vegetation of the nearby mangrove. Alisha became aware that she had saved the life of the alleged shipwrecked and felt somehow responsible for his safety until he could defend himself. The girl dragged the semi-rigid raft as close to the position of the body as she could but making sure that she could then make it to the sea again; then she attempted to load the body aboard it. She had to use her strength in order to raise one leg and then the other to the boat and then tried to lift the trunk. After almost half an hour of efforts the woman got her purpose feeling the sweat that slipped through her skin and hearing the muted moans of the man as his body was manipulated in this fashion, at times in a not totally gentle form. Finally Alisha placed the stranger's head on the bottom of the boat and then sat down to wait on the raft. She knew she could not drag the raft into the water so the only solution was to wait for the high water to do the job.
After a couple of hours the rising water set the boat afloat and Alisha waited until it was deep enough and only then started the engine. With the rocking of the waves the body of the stranger rolled to the rigid bottom and the woman only straightened his head and accommodated the limbs. Alisha looked at the man as she ruled the rudder. He was about thirty years old, was certainly an European or Australian, very tall and his hair was reddish, as were the beard of several days and the hair of his body. He was not overly stocky and on the contrary his body was rather thin. In all, a rather attractive complex despite the dirt, the sand that covered it and the stench of the sea that his body and clothes emanated. Then the girl looked at the beach that was moving away and wondered how the man would have arrived there.
At that moment the foreigner, still completely vanished, moved his body and his right hand rested on Alisha's thigh. The young woman's first instinct was to remove it from her body but a soft and pleasant tingling ran down her leg. Alisha realized once again that the man was asleep and decided to keep the situation that only she was witnessing.
After an hour of traveling Alisha could see the bay where she had begun her journey in the morning and the white silhouette of the hull of the Etoile.
From the yacht the crew members had already glimpsed her raft, and another similar boat had detached itself from the ship and was coming at full speed to meet her. It was only then that Alisha looked at her watch and realized that she had left the bay ten hours earlier and concluded that on the yacht everyone, beginning with her father, was surely desperate.