The Maid Page 10

  Abruptly she turned her body so that she lay flat on her back, her face very close to Metz's face. When she spoke, her voice was hard, low, emotionless. "If you go further, it will be the end of everything. Do you hear me?"

  For several moments there was silence. Jehanne felt like weeping. Ignore me, ignore me. I didn't mean it. But at last, Metz too shifted and lay on his back. His voice came through the darkness. "I hear you."

  4

  My angel, the voice said. My brave little angel. No one is as brave as you are. No one is as pure.

  She knelt by the river in a small cove, surrounded by bare brown willows. She could see the abbey up above on the bluff, the black church spire rising up like a knife against the pale gray sky, and she knelt there among the trees and the dark, rushing water and held out her arms to embrace the air, lifted her face to drink the sky.

  Michael was there with her, the golden light rinsing through her, his enormous voice melting her bones. My darling, my brave, perfect little angel.

  It's very hard, she said. So much temptation.

  Yes, but you resisted. You were so strong. He held her closely in his arms and gazed down at her with his stern lion's face, his sad ancient eyes. My love. My strong, brave little love.

  Yes. I am yours. Only yours.

  You must hurry now, little one. There isn't much time. He stroked her cheek tenderly, and then he held her very close and whispered, You'll be dead in two years.

  5

  They rode on toward Chinon that evening in the frigid blue dusk. A silent single file, led by torchlight. Jehanne slumped over her horse, staring listlessly at the ground as they moved over the frozen fields and toward the high black hills, each of the riders silent for different reasons.

  Dead. Dead in two years. At first she had thought she must have misunderstood. What? she had said, terror roaring in her ears. What? And then, Oh no. All the strength had gone out of her. She fell to the ground.

  For a long time she wept. Let the terror wash over her, carry her out to sea. Everything finished. No husband. No children. No home. Ever. She had never wanted these things before, had thought she would never want them, but now she did want them. Desperately. She lay curled on the riverbank, clutching her womb. As if someone had stabbed her there.

  Never allowed to know love, to grow beyond a girl, a child.

  Later came questions. How will I die? Will I be killed in battle? In my bed? Will I suffer greatly? Oh God, please let me not suffer greatly. But he would not say more. He just kept holding her, pouring his sunlight into her, spinning the golden web around her.

  But for the first time, Jehanne did not want the light. Would not allow it to soothe her, make her forget. She wanted only the salt blue water of sorrow, its low, broken voice singing, rocking her as she wept.

  Eventually, when she was worn out from crying, when the sobs had stopped and she lay exhausted and calm on the riverbank, a voice rose up inside of her. Of course, death. Did you think you were going to get out of this alive?

  Oh, but knowing, Jehanne thought. Knowing is different. Knowing changes everything.

  Metz and Bertrand and the others had seen it happen. They saw her kneeling there by the flooded brown river, praying. They had been standing outside the abbey, readying their horses for the journey, when Metz looked idly down toward the water and saw Jehanne there, kneeling on the bank with her arms outstretched, her face shining, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  "What the hell, Metz?" said Bertrand a few minutes later, for Metz had dropped his pack on the ground and let his horse wander off. He was standing at the edge of the bluff, staring down at the girl, and soon Bertrand was beside him. Eventually the other men came too. They watched Jehanne speaking silently to the heavens, the strange radiant tears going down her face, and they watched too when her face crumpled suddenly, as if she'd been hit, and she collapsed to the ground.

  "Should we help her?" Bertrand had whispered, but Metz shook his head. They kept watching, watching her slim back heaving as she sobbed, her hands clawing at the sand, her face turning up to the sky from time to time, raging at the sky until at last the sobs quieted and she grew still. Slowly she wiped her eyes and sat up. She stayed there, holding her knees and watching the river, and when at last she stood and began walking back up the hill, Julian de Honnecourt had cried out, "Oh dear Jesus, forgive me!" and ran stumbling down the road to meet her. He knelt down before her, clutched her hand very tightly and gazed up at her with his strange pale green eyes and sobbed, "Please forgive me for doubting you, holy Virgin. Forgive me, please, I beg you."

  Jehanne wiped her cheek and looked down at him with her swollen eyes. "I forgive you, but you are an idiot," she said.

  The men were different with her after that. The Honnecourts did not mock her anymore. Metz stopped looking at her with lustful eyes. The day by the river frightened him, she saw. Killed his desire. But in its place came awe. Awe and tenderness. When they ran out of food one afternoon, Richard the archer went out into the forest and came back holding up two dead squirrels by the tails. Bertrand roasted them over the fire on a stick and brought them to Jehanne. "What about you?" she said. "We're fine," said Julian, all of them nodding, insisting until at last she ate. Another day, when she went to go to sleep, she found that Colet had rolled up his fine brown woolen tunic and left it beside her cloak to use as a pillow.

  Often, as they rode, the men remembered what they'd seen that day by the river at Saint-Urbain. They thought to themselves, She is sent by God! She is going to save France! And the world seemed to pulse with magic then. Each man felt that he knew his purpose in the world, felt that it was his sacred duty to deliver the Maid safely to the King in Chinon, and they felt honored to have been chosen for such a task.

  For Jehanne, it was love that changed. Love shed its enchantment, its perfume. It stood naked before her now in a bright cold light, showing all of its ugliness, its cruelty. The terrible sacrifice it would require. The blood.

  And because love changed, her world changed too. The world became a stark place, very simple. There was the mission, and there were two years to complete it. That was all. Everything else arranged itself around these two facts. It was still beautiful, the world—in some ways it was more beautiful than before—but death stood behind the blue sky now. Death stood among the flowers. And when the saints sang, a cold snake slithered through her stomach. The hairs on her neck stood up.

  No time.

  6

  I never saw them again, once we reached Chinon. Not really. Not the way I saw them when we were together on our journey, riding through the wilderness, close as brothers. Riding together, eating together, sleeping together, curled up against the freezing wind, hearing one another snore and cough and sigh, shout out in our nightmares. Whisper our prayers. I never knew their breath again, their tenderness, their jokes, their bravery. The wooly sheep smell of Metz's hair when it was wet. The way Bertrand would start blinking very quickly when he got excited in conversation. Occasionally I would see them. I saw Metz on the street once in Tours, saw Bertrand from time to time during the fighting, but it was never the same. We were different people by then. Different people in different worlds, waving at each other from opposite shores.

  I tried to keep them with me in Chinon, tried to bring them with me to the castle. I said they were my men, my protectors, my family. I could not be without them. But the King's messenger would not listen. "Just the Maid," he said. "If you are what you say, you won't need protectors." So I went alone up the hill to see the King. I left my family behind.

  I was always leaving my family behind.

  7

  It was not as they said, her first meeting with the King. She did not miraculously recognize him in the great hall at Chinon. The great Armagnac dukes and courtiers and knights were not there, standing on tiptoe, looking on in their furs and jewels beneath the flickering chandeliers. There was no grand public event. Their first meeting was a secret.

  A few hours a
fter Jehanne and her men had arrived in Chinon, the King's messenger came to the inn near the river where she and the others were finishing supper. Metz and Bertrand speedily dismantling a brown roasted chicken, Jehanne picking at a piece of bread. Better to be hungry. Keep the senses sharp.

  "You are to come with me to the castle at once," the messenger said.

  "What about my men?" she said.

  No. It was impossible. "I cannot stress enough the need for secrecy at this moment."

  Her stomach went cold. She felt as if she'd been slapped. She looked at Metz and Bertrand across the table, their pale, stunned faces. "I'll be back soon," she said at last, forcing herself to smile as she pulled her stiff, mud-caked boots back on. But even as she spoke, a voice in her bones said: You'll never see them again.

  They were too stunned to say much, too stunned to do more than hug her awkwardly, mumble their good-byes. Metz stood watching, holding on to the doorway of the inn so as not to fall to his knees.

  When they were outside, the messenger handed Jehanne a cloak, said she must wear it. "Keep your face down," he said. "Don't let anyone see you." Jehanne had disliked him on sight: a thick, square-headed man with a wide gap between his front teeth and an ugly, wet smile. He made her sit in front of him on the horse and insisted on keeping his big sweating hands on her waist as they rode toward the castle. "I have just ridden eleven days across the countryside, sir," Jehanne said. "I know very well how to sit a horse." But he ignored her. His sweating hands stayed where they were.

  They followed a long, narrow, zigzagging road uphill through the town and the high curling forests above the town toward the pale gold cliffs where Chinon Castle loomed over the valley with its towers and dark slate-roofed turrets, its winding walls sprawling along the clifftops. It was evening now, the hour when the air is violet and everything else stands out in silhouette, black and sharp. A landscape in cameo. Jehanne kept trying to look and see the castle towers up on the cliffs, but every time she tried, the man pulled the hood back down over her face so she could not see anything. "You want trouble?"

  Jehanne said that she did not.

  They did not enter the castle by the main gate. Instead they went through a battered green door in the outer wall, and then up a long drafty flight of stone steps and out into a darkening courtyard. There the castle towers rose darkly overhead as Jehanne and the messenger passed by a stone chapel and a monstrous old oak tree, and at last they entered a tower in the far corner of the courtyard, overlooking the dim blue valley and the town of Chinon, the broad river Loire winding through it, thick with white reefs of ice.

  Inside the tower, five or six people were sitting around an ornately carved oak table. It was a strange room, small and dark, even with the fire going. There were nets of cobwebs in the corners, a close, mossy smell in the air as if it were never used. They all stared at Jehanne as she came through the doorway and pushed back the awful hood at last. "This is her, then?" said a fat woman in a tall red cone hat with its veil folded back like a dinner napkin, her bright dark eyes flashing. On her finger, an emerald the size of a walnut.

  A man in a blue tunic with a faded gold fleur-de-lis embroidered on the chest nodded, stepped forward, and cleared his throat. "Your majesties, may I present Jehanne d'Arc. The Maid of Lorraine."

  He introduced the Dauphin first. Charles VII. The uncrowned king. As soon as I saw him, I knew he'd betray me. She saw it in his face: in the small, shifting eyes; the pale, weak chin; uncertainty wafting off of him like perfume. The words flashed in her mind like lightning: He'll be the death of me. A complete knowledge. Instantaneous. Fear drenching her insides as the judgment was laid out like cards on a table: He's a jellyfish, spineless, no conviction, no will of his own. A broken man.

  Still she knelt down before him, steadied herself. Still the mission must continue. She kissed the hem of the King's houppelande—a tattered yellow silk thing, stinking of mildew—and gazed up at him, "Gentle Dauphin, I bring you good news and hope."

  The King said nothing. Regarded her briefly, then rubbed the side of his long drooping nose and nodded at the courtier to continue with the introductions.

  Next came Yolande. The Queen of Sicily. The Dauphin's mother-in-law. Yolande in the red cone hat and the fat emerald, nodding gravely. Her eyes bright and black as currants. Her hands small and white, tufted with dimples. "If you are in fact the Maid of Lorraine, we will have much use for you," she said.

  Finally, La Trémöille. The King's Chamberlain, Georges de La Trémöille. Jealous, wicked La Trémöille. He was the King's chief counsel. An enormous bald mountain of a man in a black velvet tunic, fatter even than the Queen of Sicily. Thick gold rings on his fingers. A slow, reptilian glitter in his eyes. He did not smile when they were introduced. He simply glanced at Jehanne for a moment from under his sagging eyelids. Then he looked away, nostrils flaring. As if he were offended to be in the same room with her.

  Jehanne hardly noticed. Jehanne could think of nothing but the King. The narrow balding head, the weak, shifting eyes. The sullen, petulant mouth. My betrayer. She felt as if the walls of the room were closing in around her. What did you expect? A tall, strapping thing with blond curls and a gold crown? A hero to help you complete your mission? And she saw then that she had. She had expected something like that. And she saw that she had expected him to love her. To recognize her immediately as God's Messenger, his long-awaited savior, and welcome her with grateful, open arms. She had not expected to see her death.

  The Queen of Sicily came toward Jehanne, her eyes sharp, searching. She took Jehanne's chin in her hand and looked at her, turning her face, first to the left and then to the right. "Does not appear to be mad," she said at last to no one in particular. "But of course appearances can be deceiving."

  She questioned the girl, the same questions everyone asked. Tell me about your voices, your mission, your family, your visions. Are you truly a virgin? How do you know it's God's voice you hear and not the Devil's? How do you know you're not possessed?

  As she answered, Jehanne could feel the Dauphin watching her. From time to time he raised an eyebrow and sighed loudly, as if he were bored. But he did not speak.

  "What sign can you make to prove that you are sent by God?" Yolande asked.

  Jehanne was silent. She wanted to run, to get away from these strange, cold people and never return. Bold! Michael whispered. Answer boldly, love! As he spoke, his fury flooded through her, the fire rising up from her belly to her chest until she felt like biting the air. "Majesty, take me to Orléans and I'll show you the signs you want," she said. Her voice loud, arrogant. "Take me to Orléans and I will show you the greatest victory France has seen in a thousand years."

  La Trémöille's eyes went wide. "The gall," he said.

  "It is not gall. It is God's will."

  Yolande smiled, a long, thin smile, like a dolphin's. "Perhaps it is," she murmured.

  "Well, if it's not, you'll be killed," said La Trémöille mildly, from under lowered lids. "We don't take kindly to pretenders here in Chinon."

  8

  "The room they gave me at the castle was very beautiful," she says to Massieu, her head tilted back against the cell wall, a sad smile on her face. Neither of them has any idea what time it is. The tower is dark as a well. Massieu's candle is still burning, though it's lower now, a yellow pool of wax shines and quivers around its base. "Very beautiful and very cold. A million miles from the rest of the world."

  Her room had sat at the top of another tower, Coudray Keep. It had three diamond-paned windows that looked out over the Loire countryside. Heavy moss green velvet curtains pooled on the floor, a thick satin comforter gleamed on the bed. Even the chamber pot under her bed was painted with delicate green vines and flowers—finer than any dish she'd ever eaten from. That evening, when she was alone in her room, Jehanne picked it up and turned it around in her hands, looking at it in the candlelight. All this is very dangerous.

  She stood up and walked over to the windows
. Looked down through the blue valley at the little rooftops in the town of Chinon, the little silver river flashing in the moonlight, the hills and barns beyond—barns so tiny she could crush them between her fingertips. This is why we don't seem real to them. This is why nothing about us seems real to them.

  They would not allow her to sleep alone there. "Your hosts at Coudray Keep will be Monsieur and Madame du Bellier," the Queen had said. "They'll see to it that you have everything you need."

  And it was Madame du Bellier who had greeted Jehanne after the interrogation and took her to her quarters. Short, quivering Madame du Bellier with a stiff red-gold halo of hair that puffed out from beneath her cone hat and hands that smelled of vinegar. Cheerful and nervous at the same time. As if she were very excited to be near Jehanne, but also afraid she might bite. "I'll be keeping you company at night so you don't get too lonely all by yourself," she said as she led Jehanne through a bare winter garden toward the tower, the square hedges wrapped up in burlap against the frost. Jehanne knew what that meant. Someone watching me at all times, she thought. Someone to tell them everything I do.

  In the middle of the night, the golden light woke her. Margaret was there, rising like a sun from behind the wardrobe, her eyes burning, her pink mouth stern beneath the shadow of her moustache. Be careful! she said. Don't get comfortable here. Don't let it go to your head.

  Oh no, Jehanne said. Never.

  Easy to say now. Wait until it's been a few months. Wait until you're used to sleeping in that soft bed with the feather quilt and the hot bricks down at the bottom, keeping your toes warm. How will you feel about returning to the mud then?