Kitabı oku: «The Crippled Angel»

Prologue Friday 1st March 1381

The chamber was close and warm, its windows closed, its air thick with the scent of herbs.

There was silence, save for the moans of the woman squatting between two midwives before the roaring fire in the hearth.

The woman giving birth was naked; her skin gleamed with sweat, while her unbound hair had soaked into glistening strings clinging to her shoulders and back. The midwives bent over her, holding bunches of soothing herbs close to her nostrils and open mouth, rubbing the small of her back encouragingly.

They did not murmur instructions to her, for Marie was of their own and knew what was happening both to her own body and to the baby it was trying to expel.

Two other women stood half shadowed on each side of the shuttered windows. To one side stood Catherine of France, daughter of the insane Louis and the adventurous Isabeau de Bavière, her attention as much on her silent companion as on the labouring Marie.

Slightly distanced from her stood Joan of Arc, Maid of France, staring intently at the woman struggling to give birth. Her face, if possible, was even more tortured than that of Marie.

She was terrified of what Marie was about to birth.

Joan had spent these past seven months since Charles’ crowning at Rheims cathedral in a fugue of despair. This despair was not caused by Charles’ stubborn refusal to move from Rheims, or to do anything which might be construed even vaguely warlike, but by the swelling of Marie’s body. Indeed, Joan’s despair had increased in direct proportion to the escalating distention of Marie’s belly. Marie might not know how her child had been conceived, or who had put it in her, but Joan had a very good idea, and she knew that if the child confirmed her suspicions then she would have no choice but to abandon her crusade for the Archangel Michael.

How could she serve an angel who so callously used women’s sleeping bodies? Who was so inherently flawed? So inherently sinful? And so arrogant in that sinfulness?

“See?” said Catherine conversationally, very well aware of Joan’s distress. “The baby is about to be born.”

Joan jerked, an almost inaudible moan escaping her mouth. She wished she could tear her eyes from Marie, or run from the room, but she could do neither. She prayed meaninglessly, futilely—for she was not sure to whom she could pray—that somehow the actuality of Marie’s child would prove the archangel’s innocence.

But in Joan’s innermost being she knew that was impossible.

In her innermost being, Joan knew that the archangel had put that child inside Marie.

And in her very few, most painfully honest moments, Joan knew that the archangel had lied and abused and manipulated her even more grossly than he had Marie.

All Marie had to do was endure the agony necessary to birth his child.

All Joan had to do was die. To die for the cause of a sin-crippled angel.

How could that cause be good, and just?

Marie was struggling even more now, moaning as she bore down on the child. One of the midwives moved in preparation to catch the baby as it slithered from Marie’s body; the other rubbed even more vigorously at Marie’s back.

Catherine moved her eyes from Marie, looking at Joan.

There was no venom, nor even triumph, in her gaze. Once she’d hated and loathed Joan, but now she realised that the struggle taking place within Joan was even worse than that which consumed Marie.

Of all people, a child of the angels herself, Catherine was one who empathised with those the angels used and manipulated. She also knew that, riven by her doubts, Joan was no longer such a terrible threat to the cause of Catherine and her fellows.

She wondered again, as she had so many times over the past few months, why the angels believed they could afford to alienate Joan.

Was Thomas Neville now so much their man?

Catherine frowned slightly. The small amount of news she’d managed to glean about Thomas Neville over the past few months indicated anything but that. He’d abandoned his vows, and married Margaret Rivers, half-sister to the Demon-King himself, Hal Bolingbroke. Surely Neville was more in the Bolingbroke camp than in that of the angels?

A particularly intense moan from Marie—more of effort than pain—made Catherine turn back to the woman. The midwife waiting to catch the child had moved forward now, her hands held ready, her eyes intent. Marie threw back her head, bearing down with every ounce of strength that she had.

She gave a sudden wail, almost of surprise, and Catherine saw the baby slither forth.

“’Tis a girl!” cried the midwife, who laid the baby on the waiting linens and was securing the cord as Marie herself sank down to the floor.

Catherine looked back to Joan.

The girl was staring unblinkingly at the scene before her, her eyes round, almost starting from her head. Beads of sweat glistened on her forehead and cheeks, and Catherine thought them less a product of the chamber’s warmth than the intense emotion within Joan herself.

Catherine saw that the cord binding Marie and the baby had now been cut, and the child was wrapped securely in some linens.

She walked over, and took the child from the midwife. “I will bring her back momentarily,” she said at Marie’s murmured protests, then walked slowly back over to Joan.

“See this child?” she said, half holding the baby out to Joan, even though she knew Joan would not take her.

Joan stared down at it, her form trembling slightly.

She was a beautiful child.

Angelic.

And… something else.

“Can you feel what she is?” Catherine said softly, so that neither Marie nor the two midwives could hear.

Joan’s mouth half opened, and her tongue flickered over her lips. Her lips moved, but no sound came forth.

She was still staring at the child.

“Can you feel what she is?” Catherine said, more forcefully, but still low.

She is a demon, Joan. You can sense that, can’t you?

Joan’s face twisted in agony, and she finally managed to tear her eyes from the child to Catherine’s face.

The lack of malice—worse, the understanding—that Joan saw there appeared to distress her even more.

“Can you now see,” Catherine said, “how ‘demons’ come into this world? How is it that we are hated and vile creatures, Joan, when our only sin has been to be abandoned and loathed by our fathers? Who is the more hateful, Joan? The child… or the father?”

“I don’t… I can’t… ” Joan said, then she shuddered so violently that Catherine took some pity on her.

“Go now,” she said. “I will come to you later, and speak with you honestly.”

Joan stared at her, blinked, looked once more at the child, then fled the chamber.

Joan stumbled as if blinded through the passages and hallways of Charles’ palace in Rheims. She managed to gain her small chamber having fallen only twice, and immediately groped her way across the darkened room to a small altar in the corner.

“Saint Michael?” she whispered. “Blessed saint?”

Even now, even though Joan’s mind knew the corruption of the angels, she refused to accept it. She wanted the archangel to appear and reassure her. She needed him to demonstrate to her how she’d been misled, how she’d misunderstood, and how there was a reasoned explanation for all she’d just witnessed.

After all, surely the ways of the angels were strange to the poor minds of mortal men and women?

“Saint Michael? Blessed saint… please… I need to hear your—”

What? My explanation?

Joan’s head jerked up from where it had been bowed over her clasped hands, but there was no physical sign of the archangel. No light, no glowing form, nothing but a heavy coldness that felt as if it had stepped all the way down from heaven.

I owe you nothing, Joan. I care not what you choose to believe. You have proved yourself fragile and useless. I cannot believe that I ever had faith in you.

“Saint Michael, please—”

Please what? Do you expect me to explain myself to you? I have finished with you. Done.

“The child. Tell me about the child!”

The cold intensified, and Joan gasped with pain as it wrapped itself about her.

You have been as nothing. We had thought once to have need of you, but you have proved yourself a passing foolishness on our part. You no longer please us, and we rescind our favour.

The cold, impossibly, grew more intense, and Joan shrieked as iciness enveloped her lower body.

We return you to your normal womanly self, Joan, and leave in place of our favour all the loathing for your kind that we bear. We have no longer any need for you, Joan, and, not needing you, we choose to despise you.

And with that, the icy grip of the archangel gave one final, agonising clench, and then it, as the archangel’s presence, vanished, leaving Joan collapsed and weeping on the floor.

There she lay for long moments, unable to cope with the weight of the archangel’s loathing and betrayal on top of witnessing the birth of Marie’s child.

She suddenly lurched to her feet, her face twisted and wet with tears, and tore from the wall where they hung the sword and banner of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.

She took the banner, and tore it first in two, then each of those two pieces into many more, shrieking and panting in her anger and sense of betrayal.

How could she have been so credulous, so naive, as to let herself be used by such corrupted beings as the angels?

The banner shredded easily, almost as if it too recognised the lies with which it had been constructed, and Joan only paused in her maddened destruction when the banner lay in pieces at her feet.

Then she reached for the sword.

She held it for a moment, staring wild-eyed at it, her sense of betrayal growing even stronger with every second that passed. Then she took it and dashed the blade against the heavy stone sill on the window.

The blade shattered into three jagged sections.

Joan screamed, allowing the useless hilt to fall clattering to the floor.

How could she have made herself the instrument of evil? What if her entire life had been a lie? A cruel hoax, and she the only one not to realise it? Had all of France, all of Christendom, been laughing at her?

She should have stayed home, and tended her father’s sheep. That, at least, would have occasioned no laughter.

Perhaps she should go home… tend her father’s sheep…

But what if her father also now despised her? Laughed at her?

In this past hour, and particularly in these past moments, Joan’s entire faith, her entire reason for being, had been stripped away in so cruel a manner that had her sword still been intact Joan would undoubtedly have fallen upon it.

She started to shake, her tremors becoming so violent that she fell to the cold stone floor. She moaned, and cried out, wishing that death would simply come to take her in this moment of despair.

“Joan,” came a voice so deep and comforting that Joan believed it merely a dream. “Joan, you are so greatly loved that my eyes run with tears for you. Joan, see… see how I weep with love for you.”

Joan blinked, still curled in a tight ball on the floor. Was this a phantasm? Or the archangel come back to torment her?

Another voice spoke, a woman’s this time. “Joan, will you see? Will you raise your eyes and see how much your lord loves you?”

It was the woman’s voice, rather than the man’s, which made Joan raise her face from the stone flagging and stare before her.

She gasped, hardly crediting what her eyes told her.

The chamber had disappeared. Instead Joan lay on the top of a low hill. Before her a woman knelt at the foot of a cross.

Not daring to believe, Joan raised her eyes still further.

An almost naked man gazed down at her from the cross. He had been vilely nailed to the wood through his wrists and ankles, and a crown of thorns hung askew on his bleeding brow. His loincloth was darkly soiled with the blood that had crept down his body.

Yet, even so cruelly pinned, the man smiled down on Joan with such infinite love that her despair vanished as if it had been swept away in a great wind.

“Lord Jesu?” she whispered.

“Joan,” he said, and she could see how much each word cost him. His chest and shoulders were contorted in agony, his every breath an agonised nightmare.

“Joan, will you trust me?”

Joan’s gaze slipped to the woman. She was young and pregnant, and very beautiful, with translucent skin, deep blue eyes and dark hair.

She was also sad, weeping, but somehow serene and strong in that sadness.

“Have you been vilely treated by the angels as well?” Joan asked the woman.

“Aye,” she said, “as has my lord. Joan, we would give you a purpose back into your life, and a gift also.”

“A purpose and a gift?”

“Both with all our love,” the woman said, and Joan realised that she spoke for both herself and Christ, who hung in such agony on his cross that he found speech difficult.

“Your purpose shall be France,” said the woman, and as she spoke she raised her right hand and made with it a sweeping gesture.

A dark vista opened up before Joan’s eyes. It was France, but a France devastated and murdered. Fields lay burning, houses and castles lay toppled, clouds of smoke and ash billowed over the countryside.

Out of this horrid cloud rode a man on a dark horse: a man Joan had never seen before, but one she instinctively knew was the Demon-King. A handsome face under silver-gilt hair, pale grey eyes, a warrior’s body and a warrior’s bearing.

He rode his stallion over the broken bodies of French men and women and children, and they screamed and wailed and bled as he progressed.

Not once did he look down and pity them. Instead, his face was swollen with glory and victory.

His stallion strode forth, and more bones cracked, and more children died.

“I know him,” said Joan.

“Aye,” said the woman. Her hands were now to her face, and she wept as if her heart broke.

Turning her eyes back to the woman, Joan wondered if she wept for France, or for the Demon-King.

“If Charles does not rise against him,” the woman continued, gaining some control over her weeping, “then this is France’s destiny.”

“Charles is a lost cause,” said Joan. “I have given him my all. I have begged and pleaded and threatened. I have spoken prophecies and wrought him miracles, but still he sits here in Rheims and weeps and wrings his hands. France needs a king to lead it, and what it has is a pile of useless excrement. I cannot change him.”

“Yes, you can change him,” said Christ, groaning with the effort of speaking. “See.”

The vista changed so that France became a land of sun-drenched meadows and laughing children. In this new France the Demon-King still stood, but his sword hung useless at his side, his shoulders had slumped, his form was thin and tremulous, and his feet had sunk to their ankles in a pool of bubbling black mud. Dread suffused the Demon-King’s face, and his mouth hung slack with dismay. He stared towards a horizon where appeared a great and mighty king on a snowy war stallion. It was Charles, but a Charles Joan did not think existed.

Behind him rode a shining army—an army of a united and strong France.

The Demon-King whimpered, trembled violently, then sank into the bubbling pool of black mud until he had completely vanished.

“How can this be so?” Joan said.

“All you have to do,” said the woman, now leaning forward and taking one of Joan’s hands in hers, “is to tend your sheep.”

Joan frowned. “I do not understand.”

The woman smiled, and kissed Joan very softly on the mouth. She began to speak, and she spoke without interruption for many minutes.

At first Joan’s face twisted with horror, then it relaxed, and assumed a radiance born both of wonder and of hope.

“I can do this?”

“You are the Saviour of France,” said Christ, and he smiled with such tenderness and love through the haze of his own torment that Joan’s heart overflowed with the strength of her love and joy. “The path ahead of you shall be tiresome and often painful. You will doubt. But I—”

“And I,” put in the woman.

“—will always be there. We will not forget you. When you are at your darkest, then we will be there for you.”

Much later Catherine came to Joan’s chamber, thinking to talk more of Marie’s child, and to use its birth to ensure Joan’s total alienation from the angels.

What she found astounded her.

Joan knelt before her window which she had opened to admit the dawn light. About her lay strewn the fragments of what Catherine recognised as Joan’s sword and angelic banner.

“Joan?” Catherine said. “Are you well?”

Joan lowered her hands which she’d had clasped before her. She rose and turned to face Catherine.

For an instant, Catherine thought that the girl had tripped entirely into the murky waters of insanity, impelled by the truth she’d been forced to witness last night. But then she realised that Joan’s face was infused not with madness, nor even with her previous obsessive devotion, but with a peace so profound that Catherine’s eyes widened in wonder.

“What has happened?” she said.

Joan smiled secretively, although not in a sly manner. “I have found myself,” she said.

Catherine indicated a small stool. “May I sit?”

“Oh, yes. Forgive me. I should have asked you myself.”

Then Joan, who sat on the edge of her narrow bed, tilted her head and regarded Catherine with a modicum of curiosity. “You have not come to gloat, have you?”

Catherine shook her head, wondering what it was that had caused this great change in the girl over only a few short hours. When Joan had run from Marie’s birthing chamber, Catherine thought her close to breaking.

“I had wondered,” Catherine said carefully, “if you might need someone to talk to.”

“That was kind of you,” said Joan, knowing that was not quite the reason Catherine had come to her.

Catherine hesitated, not sure what to say next. This was not the Joan she had expected to find.

Joan spoke again, filling the uncomfortable silence. “How is Marie, and her daughter?”

“They are well,” Catherine said.

“For the moment,” said Joan, “but how will Marie venture forth into the world, an unmarried woman with a bastard child? I worry for her, and feel guilt, knowing how I deserted her when she needed me most.”

“I have arranged for her a place as housekeeper in a small convent in Amiens. The sisters will be pleased to receive her, and both Marie and her daughter will be nurtured.”

Joan’s mouth twitched. “If only they knew what they nurture,” she said, and then the amusement died from her face. “Tell me of the angels, Catherine, and of the misery they have visited on you, and on mankind.”

And so Catherine took a deep breath and, as Hal Bolingbroke and Margaret had once talked to Thomas Neville, told Joan all she knew.

When she had finished Joan looked sorrowful, but still composed. “We have all been grossly misused and abused,” she said.

Catherine nodded, satisfied. “What will you do now?”

Joan smiled, beatifically, as if at an inner vision, and Catherine wondered if she’d slipped back into her previous blind and obsessive piety.

But the expression passed, and Joan spoke calmly and reasonably. “I had thought to return to my parents’ home,” she said. “I thought to devote myself to the tending of my father’s sheep.”

“That’s a wonderful—”

“But I have changed my mind,” Joan said, grinning slightly at the expression on Catherine’s face. “Oh, do not worry, Catherine. I have no doubt that I shall end my days watching over my father’s sheep in some blessed meadow, but there is still one small task left for me to do here first.”

“And that is?”

“To fit Charles for his rightful place, as King of France.”

“You cannot still mean to accomplish that! Charles is a hopeless imbecile who—”

“He will not always be so,” Joan said. “He merely needs an infusion of strength. I am that strength.”

“Then we are still at odds.”

Joan took Catherine’s hand. “Yes. We are. Indeed, our positions have hardly changed. You fight to replace Charles with… well, with whomever. And I fight to give him France. What has changed is that I now understand you, and in understanding you, I have come to a realisation.”

“And that is… ?”

“I think that one day we will be friends. Even, I dare to venture, that we will fight for the same end.”

Catherine opened her mouth to speak, but Joan continued quickly. “Am I not a prophetess? Then hear me out. In the end, I think we will both do what is right for France, and I think that we will both take the path that love demands of us, not those paths that previous blind allegiances have shown us.”

Catherine chewed her lip, then nodded. “Should we still spat in public, Joan? Should I pull your hair every time you pass?”

“Oh, indeed! Otherwise your mother will think the world has come to an end!”

They both laughed, then Catherine rose, aiding Joan to rise at the same time. She kissed Joan’s cheek.

“Be well, Joan.”

“Aye,” Joan said. “I think I will be, now.”