Chapter 2: The Bishops of Cather

Jenny, Joe (her husband) and Sammy were boarding the plane at Dulles for the last leg of their flight to France. Sammy had dressed her. Jenny was in her traditional outfit for public humiliation. This sophisticated, educated middle aged woman was thoroughly uncomfortable with the way she was being presented. Standing, walking through the airport, she was constantly starred at, but did not seem inappropriately dressed. Sure they stared at her because she was beautiful; but did not seem outrageously dressed. When she got on the plane, the stewardess eyed her guardedly, but because of the terrible news toward the airlines, she did not make it an issue. This was a beautiful woman who would give them lots of trouble if they made her change.

Jenny had been ordered to put her hair up; either the long, reddish hair could be set in a fishtail braid or the French braid. The choice was hers. The wire rimmed glasses were typical for her. The long double strand of pearls jiggled and swayed with to telegraph the clip clopping of the dark, suede high-heeled boots that stopped just below her knees. Nobody really knew from watching her walk through the airport that her dark silk stockings were not panty hose. They were separate stockings that stopped just below her crotch and were held up with an intricately patterned band of elastic lace at the top. The item that turned men's heads was the very short form fitting dark silk dress that had a few buttons missing at the top and bottom.

The dress fit like a glove. She had no bra or panties, which were not overtly obvious to the fellow passengers as it was to her. She felt everybody in the airport was starring at her, knowing she was naked behind the dress. On close examination, it was easy to see her long-stemmed pink nipples, outlined and pressing out against the soft, thin fabric. They could be seen bobbing up and down as she walked.

Her tight athletic but did not bounce. The well formed mounds flexed like a quarter-miler walking around the track. The dress barely came down to her wrists. The missing button at the bottom gave a flash of the wonderful things behind, exposing almost all of those wonderfully long, slender, athletic legs that seemed to go to her armpits. She walked with a large Gucci bag over one shoulder which she tried to use for cover. Her fishtail braid had been started above her neck and secured with a rubber band after a few twists. The majority of the remaining curly reddish-brown hair hung loose down the right side of her face and over one breast. It gave her a tremendous feeling of cover. The nipple of her right breast peeked around her right forearm, which was raised to hold her bag where it rested against her shoulder. It bobbed and swayed with each step to point out the center of her medium sized melon shaped breast. It was not big. It was not small. Her breasts were tantalizing mounds that were as big as they could be without any sag.

She had been ordered to hook her arm through Sammy's as though he was her escort rather than her husband. Joe, her husband, was silently stimulated with his wife's embarrassment. This was most of why she was putting up with it. She had promised their marriage counselor to try to be more sensitive to her husband's erotic side to increase his flagging libido.

Jenny had gone along with Joe's outrageous request to wear this outfit in public. She had allowed herself to be picked up by this monster of a stranger and be taken back to his hotel room. She had sucked his dick in front of her husband as a sign of her willingness to capitulate to his wishes. She had reluctantly tried to demonstrate to her husband her love for him in return for an attempt to boost his libido. She had to remind herself periodically why she was enduring this humiliation and embarrassment.

When they got on the plane, Sammy examined their tickets. They stopped in the middle of the first class section. Joe sat on one side of the aisle. Joe put her bags in the upper compartment. Jenny had hoped to sit by the window for some token amount of obscurity. Instead, Sammy went in first, forcing her to sit by the aisle as the other passengers boarded.

Jenny tried to put the long, thin wool cape across her lap. Sammy took it and placed it across his. Jenny turned beet red. It didn't matter if she tried to cross her legs or not. Seated, there was no way to conceal the start of the lace pattern of the top of her dark silk stockings. The startled passengers had no way to stop and stare as they were pushed on by the crowd behind them. But for one brief moment; for one millisecond, most of them thought they had seen the folds of a shaved, bare cleft above the top of the stockings. Was it their dirty little minds playing a trick on them, or did they actually see it?

Jenny was turning red. She struggled to breathe. Sammy clasped her hand like the loving couple they appeared to be. Then to her horror, he began sliding it under her cape into his lap. The other passengers were still boarding. The women were noticeably shocked. Jenny closed her eyes and leaned her head against his shoulder like she was asleep, trying to hide her embarrassment. She tried to keep her left forearm crossed over her crotch as much as possible.

Thankfully, the trip was an overnight flight, and the lights were dark for most of it. Once the lights went down, Joe got up and leaned over to whisper to Sammy. He told Jenny to get up and go to the bathroom and take her cape with her. Puzzled, Jenny got up and went to the compartment at the front. She did need to pee, but was curious about the suggestion coming from the two men.

When Jenny came back, Joe was in her seat. He cupped his hand around his mouth as he whispered instructions into her ear. Jenny blanched in outrage. "I'm just going to have to do it. I promised, and I'm in this too deep to back out now, thousands of miles from home. I can't just get up and leave." She told herself as she reluctantly sat down by the stranger.

The tall, tanned, athletic stranger turned to her in surprise, but registered no outward reaction to the pleasant surprise. "Hi, I'm Jenny. My two friends seem to have some business to discuss." She said. The man said he was returning from business in Washington. He was actually a Lobbyist who had been there to see several senators. They made a little small talk to be sociable. Soon, the man closed his eyes to try to sleep. Jenny let the wool cape fall across her lap. The man got up to use the bathroom himself. While he was gone, Jenny raised the armrest between them and folded it back so they had one long seat. When he came back, he was puzzled, but did not say anything.

After he sat down and buckled himself in, Jenny let her folded wool cape fold open so it covered his lap as well. The man looked over with a puzzled look. Beneath the cape, Jenny forced herself to bring her hand over to clasp his. The man stiffened for a second. Jenny scooted over against him as ordered. She put her head against his shoulder. "Was she asleep and didn't know she wasn't with her husband?" the stranger wondered. "Was she doing it and knew what she was doing?"

Either way, he didn't care. He was willing to pay whatever the consequences to be sitting next to this beautiful woman. Under cover of the cape, she moved her hand to his lap. She felt his body stiffen. She felt the think wake up.

He reached his right hand up around her neck and right shoulder. Reluctantly, he shook her to wake her up. I hate to do this, but I think you dozed off and forgot where you are sitting."

"I didn't doze off. I know where I am. I have been ordered by my husband to do this. He has some deviant, mean spirited ways of expressing his excitement." She said as her eyes seemed to tear up. The stranger looked over to the seats on the other side of the aisle. The two men were trying to look casual and uninterested, but he could see the excitement and faint smiles.

Jenn's ears burned as she tried to bring herself to continue with the orders. The stranger could feel her hands moving. He could feel the zipper being slowly lowered. To Jenny her heart seemed to be thundering. "Couldn't people hear?" she thought as she forced her hand into the opening and groped around to find the opening in his briefs. The stranger moved his hand under the cape as well, and put it over hers in an attempt to help conceal their actions.

Jenny felt his hand on the back of her head, forcing her down. He slipped the cape over her as she reluctantly brought her head down to his lap. She was covered, but her heart was pounding.

Jenny found the end of him and brought it out of his pants. She fought the urge to gag as she opened her lips. She kissed the end softly. She opened her lips enough to get them over the tip. She managed to get her lips over his crown. She nestled her tongue along the bottom of it. They lay there that way the rest of the flight. The stewardess was outraged. She had chased couples out of the bathroom, but she had never seen this in first class. She was not bobbing up and down on him, but she could tell.

The stewardess all came by, not believing the story being passed around. The lights were mercifully lowered around them. Jenny tried to sleep. It was going to be a long flight. Whenever she started to doze off and it slipped out, the stranger would nudge or shake her to wake her up. She would wake up and her mouth would start sucking a few quick motions, like a baby that has had the bottle removed while it is sleeping. Jenny would suckle him for a few moments until she felt it grow.

And so the flight went. The stranger nudging, Jenny suckling until the sun came up. When the light started to fill the compartment, Joe tapped her but. Reluctantly, the stranger nudged her to get her up.

Jenny came up from under her cover, wiped her mouth on it, brought her knees up and wrapped the cape around her in humiliation. The stranger quickly rearranged his clothing to be inconspicuous. He reached back under her wool cape and clasps her hand, silently trying to express his gratitude for the company on the flight.

He slipped a business card into the pocked in her cape. "If you ever need anything at all, please call me. I will never forget you. You have no idea what you have done for me."

Jenny wouldn't look at him. She turned to her husband. She didn't know what to do. "Should she demand to sit with either of the men she came on board with, or was she just safer with the demon she was with?" Jenny wondered.

When the flight stopped, Jenny stood and put on the cape. She felt she had earned it. She felt that she deserved some brief time of concealment. She could not believe she had spent the night with a stranger's cock in her mouth.

Jenny tried to block the last twenty fours out of her mind. She tried to remind herself of why she was there. True, she had been ordered to come, based on the loss of a wager. On the other hand, her interest in Archeology had raised her interest in something Sammy had said. He had some connection with Cathar Castle.

She was curious about the centuries old debate about whether the Cathars had been all executed or whether they were still operating in secret. If they were still in existence, how had their religion evolved over the centuries? Did they know about her Doctoral Thesis that claimed the existence of this obscure religion? Jenny had merely collected other opinions floating on the internet. She was merely bringing up both sides of an argument she had little time to analyze. After a flip of the coin, she summarized that the cult existed and made a compelling argument that they existed near the castle in the south of France and loosely governed by a group of bishops: "The Bishops of Cathar." There was speculation that it was run by the descendants of Samson VII of Toulouse, son of Raymond-Roger Trencavel. Could Sammy be a descendent of Samson VII?

Was Jenny being brought here inadvertently by some sexual deviant? These thoughts clouded her already confused mind. They stopped several times along the four hundred mile trip to sight see. The Pyrenees were magnificent. They stopped several times to tour other castles along the way. They drove high up in the mountains, above the tree line, above the clouds. They stopped to watch the hang gliders floating noiselessly into the canyons below.

Joe took a number of pictures of Jenny and Sammy. He posed them in numerous erotic poses against the backdrop of thousand year old castles and cloud cluttered mountains. Joe had her in front of Sammy. He had unbuttoned her blouse to her waist. He stood behind her with his massive hands cupping her breasts and her long-stemmed pink nipples jutting out over them. Sometimes her hair was swept behind her, exposing both nipples. Sometimes her fishtail braid was in front of her, to one side, leaving a less pornographic and more subtle exhibit of one pink nipple presented as the main focus of the picture. Jenny had tried to force a smile as they had asked of her, but it was a sad listful look that close friends would recognize as troubled.

When the limousine arrived, Jenny recognized it from the pictures. The road ahead of them disappeared as they entered the clouds. It was not visible until they were right on it. The plan looked like two superimposed triangles. The lower set of walls were set so the midpoint of their walls intersected with the much higher walls. The triangular moats within these spaces dropped down a good twenty feet. The castle walls had passageways like the fortress in Quebec, where a small number of men with cross bows or guns could ambush anybody who had successfully scaled the first wall.

The castle no longer had a drawbridge, but had a set if narrow cobblestone steps permit a group of people four wide to go up side by side. They parked at a large plaza in front of the steps and walked through the gate. There were a number of men dressed as servants throughout the compound. Once inside, there was a compound of buildings that stepped back in depth as they went up, with the roof of the last row of rooms being the walkway around the ramparts at the top.

At the lowest level, the main plaza had several rows of amphitheater seating centered on the main axis with the entry. Sammy took them on a tour of the compound.

"From her studies and research Jenny had known that the Cathars were Gnostic Christians. They claimed that their beliefs and practices dated from the earliest Christian times, and predated the innovations of the Catholic Church - a claim that is now recognized by historians as substantially correct. They had survived in Persia and gradually travelled westwards through the Byzantine Empire, the Balkans and Italy to Western Europe.

The Catholic Church regarded Cathars as heretics. It was then a crime to disagree with Catholic theology and a capital crime if the disagreement was repeated.

After several generations of war the local lords were defeated and dispossessed by the (mainly French) Catholic crusaders. The Cathars were exterminated - burned alive by the hundred. The first Papal Inquisition ensured that there would be no re-emergence of the Cathar religion. Their castles fell into the hands of the victors, and the area was annexed to France.

Basic Cathar tenets led to some surprising logical implications. They largely regarded women as sexual servants, and had no doctrinal objection to contraception, euthanasia or suicide. In some respects the Cathar and Catholic Churches were polar opposites. For example the Cathar Church taught that all non-procreative sex was better than any procreative sex. The Catholic Church taught - and still teaches - exactly the opposite. Both positions produced interesting results. Following their tenet, Catholics concluded that masturbation was a far greater sin than rape, as mediaeval penitentials confirm. Following their principles, Cathar could deduce that sexual intercourse between man and wife was more culpable was done as part of the marriage ceremony so the loss of virginity was official.

In open debates with leading Catholic theologians Cathars seem to have come out on top. This was embarrassing for the Roman Church, not least because they had fielded the best professional preachers in Europe against what they saw as a collection of uneducated weavers and other manual workers. Worse still a number of Catholic priests had become Cathar adherents (Catharism was a religion that seems to have appealed especially to the theologically literate. Whole Cathedral chapters are known to have defected, as they did for example at Orleans). Worse, the Catholic Church was held up to public ridicule (some of the richest men in Christendom, bejeweled, dressed in finery, and preaching poverty, provided an irresistible target even to contemporary Catholics in the Languedoc). Worst yet, Cathars refused to pay tithes to the Catholic Church.

From 1208, a war of terror was waged against the indigenous population and their rulers: Raymond VI of Toulouse, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Raymond Roger of Foix in the first generation and Raymond VII of Toulouse, Raymond Trencavel II, and Roger Bernard II of Foix in the second generation. During this period an estimated 500,000 Languedoc men women and children were massacred - Catholics as well as Cathars. The Counts of Toulouse and their allies were dispossessed and humiliated, and their lands annexed to France. Educated and tolerant Languedoc rulers were replaced by relative barbarians; Dominic Guzmán (later Saint Dominic ) founded the Dominican Order and soon afterwards the Inquisition, manned by his Dominicans, was established explicitly to wipe out the last vestiges of resistance. Persecutions of Languedoc Jews and other minorities were initiated; the culture of the troubadours was lost as their cultured patrons were reduced to wandering refugees known as faidits. Their characteristic concept of "paratge ", a whole sophisticated world-view, was almost destroyed, leaving us a pale imitation in our idea of chivalry. Lay learning was discouraged and the reading of the bible became a capital crime. Tithes were enforced. The Languedoc started its long economic decline to become the poorest region in France; and the language of the area, Occitan, began its descent from the foremost literary language in Europe to a regional dialect, disparaged by the French as a patois.

Catharism is often said to have been completely eradicated by the end of the fourteenth century. Yet there are more than a few vestiges even today, apart from the enduring memory of Cathar "martyrdom" and the ruins of the famous "Cathar castles", including the Château of Montségur. There are rumors even today that there are Cathars alive today, or at least people claiming to be modern Cathars. There are rumors off flourishing, if Cathar tourist industry in the Languedoc, and especially in the Aude department. During the eight-hundredth anniversary of important events, more and more memorials are springing up on the sites of massacres. There is also an increasing community of historians and other academics engaged in serious Cathar studies. Interestingly, the deeper scholars have dug, the more they have vindicated Cathar claims to represent a survival