The Maid Read online

  She begged her saints for guidance, but they did not come. Please, she said, kneeling at the chapel in Saint-Denis. I fear that if we do not attack tomorrow, we'll never get another chance. The King changes his mind so often it's a miracle they're here right now ...

  But the voices did not come. The light did not come.

  She wept. Screamed, Where are you?

  Why won't you come?

  20

  They approached the city very early in the morning, through the pig markets that lay outside the city walls, under a light gray drizzle. A maze of wooden pens and troughs and ramshackle barns, the mud-painted animals watching as the soldiers rode through on their horses, the water in the troughs rippling out in circles as the weight of the moving army shook the earth. "Today we take Paris," said Mugot, beaming as he rode alongside Jehanne.

  "Yes," she said, tousling the gold mushroom cap of her page's hair.

  It was promising at first. They were thousands of men on this clear, early fall day, all in good armor, all armed with their wooden shields and culverins, their lances and bows and swords. Their wagons piled high with trembling gray mountains of gunpowder, and as they neared the city walls, there arose for a moment a shimmer of the old glory in the air. A cry went up among the men as they rode. "She will put the King in Paris if it is left to her!"

  Moving in neat, glittering rows, they packed in tightly about the high, gray-stone city walls, atop which its silent defenders stood, lined up like birds on a line to greet them. Dark heads, near black in the distance, with the sun not fully overhead yet, faces unseen, only a long row of heads and shoulders, and the menacing glint of their weapons. Between the French soldiers and the wall lay a broad green moat, its surface velvety with algae. Silently the line of men waited at the top of the wall, watching, their faces dark, closed like stones.

  The moat was very deep; they had to build a bridge to get across it. The men passed wood forward from the back of the army—large bundles of logs and branches weighed down with rocks, whole carts and rock-filled barrels were fed into the moat until a bizarre makeshift bridge began to rise from the water—green and monstrous, like a shipwreck raised from the bottom of the sea. When it was finished, Jehanne ordered the men across with their ladders and cannons and culverins, and then she hopped down off her horse and walked up to stand alongside them at the edge of the moat. She pressed her fingers into a cone around her mouth and shouted up at the Goddons on the wall: "Men of Paris, yield to us quickly, for Jesus' sake. For if you do not yield before night, we will enter by force and you will all be put to death without mercy."

  The sound of laughter floated down slowly from the top of the wall. Behind it a chorus of disembodied voices, echoing in the air.

  "Go back home, you crazy cunt."

  Then a volley of explosions cracked open the air, and a rain of iron cannonballs fell onto the soldiers near the edge of the moat. Alençon's cousin Richard stood beside him one moment, loading his bow, and the next, a cannonball buried itself so deep in his head that only the top of the black ball could be seen, rising up from his skull like a wicked tumor. "Oh," the man said, blinking. Then he fell down. Behind him the red sun sank into the hills, the sky went gray as ash. "Jesus, Richard!" cried Alençon, kneeling beside him, his face freckled with blood. But the man was no longer breathing.

  Beside Jehanne, Poton and Rais rolled a catapult into place. Rais, eyes dangerously alight, set the arm of the catapult, then picked up a pitch-covered rock and placed it into the bowl of the machine. He grabbed his page's torch and touched it to the rock. "Now, burn," said Rais, smiling as the ball burst into a globe of orange fire.

  A moment later the fireball was soaring through the blue sky, and then stopping very abruptly as it entered the ribcage of one of the Burgundian archers on top of the wall. For a moment the man stood motionless on the wall, his chest illuminated as if his heart had caught fire. Then he tipped forward and fell through the air.

  A splash like a wild, white flower rose up out of the green moat. Then the white flower collapsed, sank into rolling waves of foam. And the water was still and green again.

  "Bloody bitch," someone shouted from high on the wall. Jehanne looked up in the direction of the shout, and as she did, she felt a white-hot flash of pain in her leg. She looked down. An iron crossbow bolt was sticking out of her thigh. Her thigh seemed oddly distant from her, as if she had risen above her own body. An ugly thing, the bolt, thick and black and sharp, like the tooth of a monster. Blood was pumping out around it like oil, red and alive. "The Maid!" cried Mugot. "The Maid's hit." He ran toward her, the lovely white silk of her standard waving behind him like a flag above the sea of blood and death, and then his face changed suddenly, as if his skin had been torn downward. Surprise, then shock. His face gone gray. The air around him whizzing terribly.

  A bolt had nailed his foot to the ground. The boy looked down in amazement, then raised the visor of his helmet, and as he did, another bolt sank into the center of his forehead. That bolt, Jehanne would think later, was like a third eye foreseeing a black and terrible future. "Oh no," he said. A long tear of blood ran down his face.

  "Mugot!" Jehanne cried.

  The men around Jehanne stood frozen as the page attempted to move forward. He took a step to the left, and then the bolt pulled him backward, made him wheel his arms like a drunk working to steady himself. "Sorry," he said, as blood poured from his ears. He sat down, the white banner sinking into the mud beside him.

  Overhead the black sky continued spitting down arrows, a waterfall of arrows and cannonballs pouring over the Paris wall and raining death upon the French. The King's army remained at a safe distance. Did not attack. The men up on the ladders had stopped climbing and were looking back toward where Jehanne stood beside the fallen boy and the fallen standard.

  "Don't stop!" she cried. "Keep going! Keep going!"

  Rais stepped in. "Don't be an idiot, Jehanne. You're hurt."

  "Get away from me," she screamed. Her face white, bloodless. "Get away from me."

  He ignored her, picked her up, and cradled her as he would a child as he shoved through the raging sea of men and arrows, making his way toward the earthen ramparts that were the first line of the city's defenses. Jehanne fought him, kicking and sobbing. "Don't touch me. Don't you dare touch me."

  The Baron looked at her. Then he looked at Poton. "Poor thing's lost her mind," he said.

  The soldiers continued their doomed attack on Paris until night fell, but they came no closer to getting over the wall and inside the city. When he saw the pale skull of the moon rise over the hills, Alençon threw his longbow on the ground and ordered their retreat. "Eight hours of fighting and still not one Frenchman over the walls," he said to Poton as they watched the slow parade of weary, mud-caked troops riding back through the earthen works and ditches.

  "Would have helped if the King's bloody men had lent a hand!" spat Poton. He picked up his long ax and threw it into the moat.

  Gilles de Rais was looking at the sky. "And so the spell is broken," he said quietly.

  Alençon's head snapped toward Rais. "Don't say that!" he said. "Don't you dare say that."

  The Baron laughed, gestured toward the royal army as it disappeared in the distance. Then he looked to the Maid, who lay motionless beneath a blanket in a wagon. "Whether I say it or not, it's still true."

  Slowly the rest of the French soldiers retreated through the pig market, their shoulders slumped, the bodies of the wounded soldiers folded over the backs of horses, and the bodies of the dead piled high in the wagons, their stray, bloody hands and steel-tipped boots dangling over the sides, bouncing lightly with the jolts of the wagon, as if they were waving a half-hearted good-bye.

  21

  She woke in the pale first light to an aching leg and no memory of why it ached. It had been too dark to pitch the tents when they made camp, so they'd built a scattering of campfires in a long, flat meadow several miles outside the city and slept around them
, wrapped in the cloaks and blankets they had with them. The temperature had dropped in the night—Jehanne's cheeks and nose were red with cold, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that the field around her was blue and soft with dew, and that her blanket wore a pale skin of dew and that the dew also hung in the trees alongside the meadow, making them seem like a world of ghosts dissolving in the first light.

  She reached down and touched her thigh. Felt that it was wrapped tightly in cloth. When she touched the cloth on the top part of her thigh, she felt a sticky dampness that sent an chill down her spine. Now she remembered. The failure. Her failed promise to enter Paris.

  She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the cloak she'd folded up on the grass and used as a pillow. When she opened her eyes a little while later, she gazed up at the pale blue-white sky and thought how recently such a sky had seemed like the sky of a new and powerful France. Her France. A place of God and faith and victory. No more, she thought. Not anymore ...

  "Maybe I wanted it too badly," she says to Massieu. "Maybe it mattered too much. Maybe God saw that I had become afraid of dying, afraid of losing my power. Maybe the power had corrupted me, made me proud and vain and arrogant, and so He decided to take it away. I don't know. I am only human. But why keep filling me with the urge to fight, filling me full of such wild fighting fire that I could hardly sit still, and then thwart me at every turn until I knew not how to serve Him or whom to trust? Why not let the fire die out, why not let me return to my mother and Domrémy and the sheep?

  "Oh, I cannot tell you the pain of it, what it felt like to have all that warrior fire raging inside, all that hunger to run and ride and fight, my blood singing, Go, go, go, and yet not being able to go. Being cut down, betrayed, humiliated over and over again every day when all I ever wanted was to serve Him, to carry out the mission He'd given me.

  "Maybe I was too hungry. Maybe I was too proud. Oh, but I was only seventeen, Lord. Why would you not forgive me my flaws? Why punish me for the very urges and fires you poured into me?"

  22

  In the morning she shook Alençon's blanketed shoulder until he snorted and sat up suddenly. "What is it?" he said, a wild look in his eyes, as if wolves had been chasing him through his dreams.

  "Let's go. We have to attack again."

  The Duke rubbed his eyes. Looked at her. "We don't have enough men. It's impossible."

  "For God, nothing is impossible," she said.

  He sighed. Looked at her. "What do your voices say?"

  Jehanne did not answer.

  They were quiet for some time.

  "It will be over for me if I fail now," she said at last, looking at him. "Everything will be over if I fail."

  "You don't know that."

  "Yes, I do."

  It was a small company of warriors that rode out of camp that morning. Jehanne and Alençon and perhaps seventy others, looking more like exhausted wanderers than great knights and generals of war. Gilles de Rais was not among them. Gilles de Rais and his men had ridden off that morning without a word.

  They did not approach Paris by the pig market this time. Instead they rode to a place several miles down the river, where Alençon's men had constructed another bridge several days earlier.

  It lay before them, a rough, crooked wood structure that rose over an expanse of glittering green water and landed on a bank of Paris that was barely walled or even fortified, for the deep, broad Seine had seemed a worthy defense by itself. Jehanne let out a whoop of joy when she saw it. "It's wonderful," she said. She looked at Alençon with shining eyes. "Oh, my Duke, you are a worthy man."

  She turned and beamed at the men. "Now we shall have them, men!" she shouted. "Paris will be ours this day!"

  The Duke looked at the ground. As he did, there came the sound of hoofbeats behind them. He and Jehanne turned toward the road, where a man dressed in a blue satin tunic embroidered with a gold fleur-de-lis was riding toward them on a small chestnut pony. "Message from the King," he said, when he and the panting horse stood before them. A small, fox-faced man with large, moist eyes that began to look almost tearful as he took in the bridge and the small troop of warriors. He pulled a scroll from a sack on his saddle, unrolled it with a long W of regret carved in his forehead, and read: "I, King Charles VII of France, command that the Maid and the Duke of Alençon and their men return immediately to Saint-Denis where a matter of great urgency awaits them."

  The girl glanced at Alençon. Then she turned to the messenger. "We're about to mount an attack here. What is this matter of great urgency that requires our immediate return to Saint-Denis?"

  "His Majesty did not say," said the sad-eyed man. "I'm sorry."

  Later that night they learned what had required their immediate return. Jehanne and the Duke and their knights were gathered around the campfire in Saint-Denis, eating in heavy silence when a boy, breathless and red-faced, ran into the flickering circle of firelight and stood panting with his hands on his knees. When he could speak, he said, "They've burned the Duke of Alençon's bridge. The King's men have burned down the Duke's bridge."

  Jehanne looked at him. "You lie."

  "I do not," said the boy. "I stayed behind to see what would happen, as the Duke himself instructed me to, and around sunset I saw them ride in and douse it with oil and light it on fire with their torches." he said. "I swear on my mother's life. The bridge is gone, it's just smoking cinders now. The river has washed most of it away."

  Jehanne looked at Alençon, her heart banging in her chest.

  "He would not do that," Alençon said. "Charles would not do that."

  The messenger put his hands out in front of him, as if to ward off a blow. "I'm just telling what I saw, Your Grace. They say the King's preparing to return to the castle at Loches in the morning," the messenger continued. "I rode past their camp. They're packing everything up."

  Jehanne's nostrils flared wide, like those of a horse. "That bastard," she spat. She threw her stick down in the fire and walked off into the darkness.

  23

  She spent the night alone in the forest. Wandering blindly through the spindled black world of shadows in the high old pines, screaming a deep and terrible animal scream, as if her own infant had been gutted before her eyes. Through the dark corridors of the trees she walked, howling those raw, inhuman sounds, screaming for hours, for years, it seemed, until at last she collapsed at the base of an evergreen and wept, her armored back heaving, her face pressed against the trunk of the old tree as if it might whisper an explanation to her, as if it might lift her into its arms and gentle her against the unfathomable night. "Oh God," she whispered. "What am I to do?"

  24

  In the morning, the rain fell softly through the layered branches of the pines and down onto Jehanne's cheeks and hair. She stood, wiped her face with her hands, and then walked out of the forest. Her eyes were cool, as if she bore no relation to the creature that had grieved so wildly in the night. The camp was still silent when she reached it. The low, dying fires hissing and steaming faintly in the rain, the men lying on their backs with their mouths open, some with empty wine casks in their hands, others with whores, their limbs entangled, oblivious to the rain. Jehanne continued walking. When she reached her own campsite, she packed a sack of clothes, saddled her horse, and rode down the wet red-dirt road into the village of Saint-Denis.

  A silent ride. The world had changed overnight. It felt distant to her now. Foreign. For the first time she saw God nowhere. The fields were just fields, green and damp. The trees, just trees, wood and leaves. The sky gray and flat and having nothing to do with her. None of it having anything to do with her. And there was comfort in this somehow, in the numbness, the cool remove. A strange relief in seeing the world around her as simply a world of things, no Godthings or magical things, no loving things or beautiful things. Simply things. They did not touch her. They were nothing to do with her.

  The rain dripped quietly off the slate roof of the old abbey church
in Saint-Denis and the high, crooked oaks that sheltered it. Jehanne stood in her armor, still as a scarecrow at the altar of the famous church, a small, sturdy figure cast in silver. The church was dim in the rain that day, and she enjoyed the fact that it no longer sang to her. That the stained windows did not throw rainbows on her face and that the flicker of candles no longer filled her with the urge to weep with joy. And she thought that even if it had been a glorious day, a day of sunlight and warm spring breezes flowing through the open windows and green trees rustling outside, she would not have cared. She looked at the many rusted suits of armor that hung on the walls of the church. Hundreds of them, ghostly metal war shells that had been shed and donated by those knights wounded in defense of France, to honor the King and the realm. Warrior selves hung up to rest. Warriors saying this life is finished, I have no more use for this hard metal skin, for this killing suit I donned in the name of God and France. Take it from me.

  Slowly she lifted her silver helmet from her head and laid it on the stone floor before the altar. After that came her breastplate and her greaves, her gauntlets and her besagews and her chain mail, until it all lay on the floor before her in a metal heap, lifeless, surrendered, and Jehanne stood in her brown linen tunic and stockings, small and pale, looking at the armor with cold eyes, as if it belonged to someone else.

  25

  Most of the volunteers had left already, had decided to make their own way back to their homes in time for the harvest. And so it was perhaps just two hundred men who rode sullenly out of Saint-Denis along the southbound road, some cracking jokes about finally getting back to their sweet Loire pussy, about sleeping in a decent bed, about getting a decent breakfast of ham and eggs and fresh hot bread. But most of them were silent, watching the mud puddles in the road before them, their mouths pressed into expressions of bitterness and regret.