When Beneditx had spoken, Severo returned to the main part of the church and knelt in prayer. Rafal followed him. Palinor did not answer, but remained for a long time contemplating the mosaic. It had put a quietness even on him. Then he went out into the actual sunlight, and sat down under a wind-bent pine, looking at the receding panoramas of headland offered by the precipitous shore. Partly obscured by an intervening jut of cliff and woodland he could see a little strand, some way further north; and, diminished by distance, he saw two figures on it – he thought at first a woman and a dog, but when he looked again, two women. They came towards him along the water’s edge, and moved out of sight behind the nearer promontory. There must be something there – some other church, some other settlement, on the extreme margin of the island. Dwelling in remote and beautiful places would make them primitive mystics, he supposed, even without the influence of mosaic.
Emerging from the church, the others joined him.
‘Will you make any answer to Beneditx?’ Severo asked him.
‘He offered a vision, not an argument. He has thoughts of great beauty, and I honour him for them, as I honour the maker of the image of heaven we have just seen.’
‘But . . . ?’
‘No buts. I am coming to love Beneditx. I see how it is that he has reconciled the evil in the world with a faith in a beneficent and all powerful God, as I see what kind of heaven the maker of the picture desires there to be. But to see such a vision and to share it myself are as different as seeing the image of heaven and entering it, sitting on the grass among the blessed. I would like to, but cannot.’
‘Hold hard to that thought that you would like to,’ said Severo, mouting his horse.
‘No glass is dark enough,’ said Palinor, ‘to stand for the suffering of a tortured and dying child.’ He spoke softly. Severo, over the chink of his bridle and the ring of his horse’s hooves, did not hear him. Rafal, holding a horse for him, perhaps did.
21
Strangers were rare at Sant Clara, and unwelcome. Sometimes a holy woman or a poor afflicted peasant wished to pray there. Now and then a cell was found for a visitor in need of a little peace, a little gentleness, or some of Sor Blancha’s concoctions were applied to a sufferer, who was allowed to stay for a while. Sant Clara could comfort, if not heal. But the nuns’ purpose was not to practise charity but to pray for the sufferings of the world. And they were far enough away from the world, on a road that went nowhere else, to be untroubled by visitors. So the appearance of a little group of strangers, gathered at the gate and murmuring, was something new and disturbing.
When they had been standing around for some hours, Sor Agnete, with Sor Eulalie at her side, went out to them and asked what they wanted. They wanted to see the wolf-child. Sor Agnete scolded them volubly for fools and the victims of tricksters. There was no such thing as a wolf-child; and certainly no child at Sant Clara was anything of the sort. Shamefaced, the fellows hung their heads, and shuffled away into the woods, but they were back again the next morning – either those, or others, who could say? Guillem had no doubt kept his word, but someone among his hunters had been less discreet, and the story had got out. Each day the strangers were dismissed by Sor Agnete; each day there were more of them, and they grew bolder. They even hammered on the gates. They prowled around the hermit tower and trespassed on the root-gardens. The two old menservants that the abbess kept for menial tasks about the farm and as night watchmen were bullied and frightened, until the abbess sent them under cover of darkness to ride a pair of donkeys over the mountain and get a message to Severo, asking for help.
Before the help came, the crowd grew bolder and broke in. Their ring-leader was a huge man with coarse features, carrying a heavy staff. He confronted the abbess, coming towards him across the cloister gardens with her sticks, unabashed.
‘You just let us see the wolf-child, and we’ll go,’ he said. ‘But we won’t go without seeing her. And don’t go telling us no stories about how you haven’t got her, because we know that you have, see?’
‘The curse of God is on intruders here,’ said the abbess.
‘Oh dear!’ the lout said. ‘We’ll have to confess what we done before we die, then, won’t we? Now are you going to show us this monster, or are we going to break in everywhere looking for her? How do you want it?’
‘Fetch Amara,’ said the abbess.
There was an expectant hush on the mob. They stood in the garden, waiting. At last two figures appeared, walking under the arches and stepping into the garden, just behind the abbess: a young nun in novice’s habit and a girl in a coarse white shift, dark curls on her uncovered head, sandals on her feet.
‘We are here, Mother,’ said Josefa. Her voice trembled. She faced the hungry staring faces, the sticks and staffs.
‘It’s a trick!’ someone said.
‘I saw a wolf-child once, and it looked more like an animal than a child,’ said someone else. The crowd pressed forward a step or two.
‘Saints in heaven help us,’ said the abbess, ‘What are we going to do?’
Josefa, holding Amara’s hand, felt her tremble. And then Amara howled. She tipped back her head and emitted the blood-curdling animal sound that she used to make on her first few nights at Sant Clara. She dropped on to all fours and howled again.
‘Watch out! She bites!’ called Josefa. The crowd fell back towards the gate.
‘You are in danger of punishment; I have sent for the cardinal’s soldiery,’ said the abbess.
Just at that moment, a distant drum could be heard from the turn of the path, beating a little flourish of the kind that men march to. The intruders bolted, rushing out through the abbey gate and dispersing among the trees in full flight.
Amara got to her feet and laughed. Her barking mirth filled the cloister. ‘Me scare them!’ she said and burst into laughter again. No soldiers appeared, and the drum beat remained unexplained. But the crowd of gapers had disappeared, leaving one solitary outrider – a young man who lingered, standing well back in the shade of the trees by the edge of the ground in front of the gate, and who was still there when night fell.
Severo set a guard on the Sant Clara road, on the far side of the pass, and no more mobs appeared at the abbey gates. Only now and then there was a solitary lurker, a young man who never came near enough to be challenged.
Josefa’s long labours were bearing fruit at last. Amara could dress herself, as long as it was only in the simplest garments; she could buckle her own sandals – made specially for her in the convent workshop, for her toes still turned upwards from long years of running on bent feet. She could sit in a chair; she could sit up at table to eat, and hold a spoon for gruel, though it was grasped in a stiff fist rather than held between fingers, and after one or two mouthfuls she could no longer restrain herself and would lower her face to the dish and bolt the contents.
Most important of all, she was learning to talk rapidly now, her chatter taking on meaning, her words building gradually into fragments of sense. When she was with the sisters, playing in the garden while they spent their hour of recreation walking, or sitting sewing, she charmed them easily, with the innocent selfishness of a child, demanding attention, wheedling for bits of lace or ribbon or coloured threads, running after Sor Lucia or Sor Blancha for a drink of milk or a morsel of honey-plum.
Suddenly, one morning of heavy stillness, threatening heat, Amara said, ‘Mussels. Fetch. Go to the sea?’
Josefa, who was putting on an apron in the kitchen, readying herself to knead dough for bread, stopped, her heart pounding. ‘Oh, did you hear that?’ she asked Sor Blancha.
‘The answer is no, dear. Too much work to do,’ said Sor Blancha.
Josefa seized Sor Blancha’s floury hands. ‘But she has spoken of something she remembers, don’t you see? Something not before her eyes!’ Josefa’s joy was infectious, and the news spread from nun to nun round the cloisters, and reached Mother Humberta before terce.
Sor Agnete was as glad as
anyone – almost as glad as Josefa – at such a step forward for Amara. But as the child slowly achieved a facade of ordinary humanity, her strangeness became more striking than ever, or so it seemed to Sor Agnete. Seeing her doing as a wolf does had been pitiful; seeing a pleasant-looking young woman suddenly bolting her food, shuddering as she swallowed, or hearing a human voice move from sentences, however childish, to that inhuman howling chilled one to the bone. Sometimes her face took on suddenly a wolfish expression – her jaw worked, and her eyes darted around. Strangest of all – it was beginning to strike Sor Agnete – was her appetite for solitude. What child can be left sitting still and in silence for many hours? What child needs neither company nor playthings?
Carefully at first, Sor Agnete began to send Josefa on errands, let her attend office, have the child left more to her own devices. Whenever she was not under pressure to speak, she sat vacantly, feeling it seemed no boredom, but content to be alone, silent and unoccupied, from one meal to the next. Sor Agnete had seen such behaviour once before in her life, as she told the abbess. It had been that of a boy who had survived, alone of his village, a terrible avalanche. Rescuers had drawn him to the surface from under the crushed body of his father. He had been unable to speak for many months.
Asking Josefa produced the simple statement, ‘She is unhappy. She doesn’t like it here,’ which Sor Agnete thought, with a twinge of irritation, she could see for herself.
There are people who have a horror of heights, who are paralysed with fear on looking over a cliff-top, even though they stand secure. It is an oddity of human behaviour that such people are irresistibly drawn towards the brink – can barely help themselves. In just this way the contemplation of the terrible emptiness of Amara’s life, the vast unbroken silence of her soul, the aching void where in her human body human feelings should have been, drew the thoughts of the abbess. Only the knowledge of God was a thing great enough to fill such a chasm; and she had vowed not to convey it.
Josefa was cutting nettles at the top of the root-garden by the edge of the wood. She was using a billhook. Her skirts were looped up, her hands gloved, and her sleeves tied at the wrists to keep her from being stung. Amara followed behind her, picking up the fallen swathes of nettles and loading them into donkey panniers to be taken to the heap. She seemed not to notice the stings on her reddened hands. The donkey stood impassive till she urged him on a few paces. At the far corner of the field, a young man stepped suddenly from under the trees and confronted them.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said. ‘I need only to speak with you.’ He was facing Josefa but looking over her shoulder at Amara. Two scars ran across his face from the corner of his eye to his nose, the lower one crossing his upper lip, the upper one ploughing a furrow that kinked the bridge of his nose. But he did not have the face of a fighter.
‘Go away,’ said Josefa.
‘Please . . . I need . . .’ Following the line of his stare, Josefa saw that Amara was standing very still and staring hard in return. ‘I am thirsty,’ he said. ‘Have you a sip of water?’
Josefa moved back to the donkey and pulled the water-bottle from the saddle-bag behind the pannier. She offered it without comment. When he handed it back, she saw that his arm – his sleeves were rolled up to the elbow – was also marked with lines of white healed scarring.
Amara said, suddenly, in her husky low voice, ‘Hurt. Face hurt. What made hurt?’
‘You did,’ he said.
By the time the riders returned to the Saracen’s House, it was noon, and the heat of the day was oppressive. Palinor swam in his fountain; Severo and Beneditx retired to rest in Beneditx’s room. ‘How long can you stay?’ Beneditx asked.
‘Till the heat abates a little. I must ride back this evening.’
‘I shall miss you,’ said Beneditx. ‘I shall miss your moral support . . .’
Severo regarded his friend gravely. Beneditx’s anxiety was heartfelt, he saw. ‘My skills are not of this kind,’ Beneditx told him. ‘We have always known the truth, Severo, we two, like everyone around us. We have used argument to defend it, to throw up strong walls around our treasure house. That is a fine bulwark against most kinds of attack, but it does not serve against one who does not attack but merely says that all our gold is dust.’
Severo was silent for a while, reflecting. Beneditx’s great reputation for learning and subtlety was for drawing out the meaning of holy truth, refining it into pure gold, gently correcting and uplifting the understanding of those too much inclined to take Holy Writ in crude senses or treat the Church’s teaching as a simple cudgel. Those whom he taught had learned to see depths below depths and heights above heights in God’s word, had learned to use tenderness in disputation, had learned that cleverness imposed a heavy duty of humility. No beatitude said, ‘Blessed are the clever, for they shall correctly understand the truth.’ Beneditx had taught him to think rather, ‘The clever are humble, for they have understood how little they understand.’ It was he, Severo, who had sent Beneditx, armed with thoughts of purest gold, into battle against the tempered steel of the atheist’s alien mind. It was up to him now to offer reinforcements.
‘It is always easier to knock things down than to construct them,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this procedure is wrong. Offering proofs for him to pick holes in, I mean. Perhaps it would be better to invite him to make statements of his own position, and then you can have the opportunity to demolish him.’
‘I have not tried that, admittedly,’ said Beneditx. ‘I was so sure our proofs were good. I do not even know what he would claim to believe.’
‘You must ask him. Surely such an odious and extreme position as his cannot be impregnable.’
‘I will try.’
‘I would be deeply grieved if we should fail,’ said Severo, rising to take his leave.
Although he had seen Beneditx’s troubled eyes and anxious brow, he was not himself concerned. He was no more afraid of the demolition of the proofs of the existence of God than he would have been afraid of the collapse of a proof that the sun would rise the following morning.
22
The clatter of the hooves of the departing horses woke Palinor from the light sleep he had been taking in the afternoon heat. He looked out of his window and saw Severo riding away through the garden approaches. It caused him no concern. Then he looked down and saw Dolca kneeling on a rock, washing some clothes of his in the torrent at the foot of the wall. She leaned forward, immersing the soaking cloth, and straightened, lifting it, working smoothly, her own clothes wet and clinging to her in the mist-like rainfall cast by the fountain over the garden. Palinor watched her for some time, and then retreated to his bed again. He lay thinking of his wife, imagining her walking away from him, as the time went by, and he seemed to have ever less hope of returning to her. She must think him dead. Perhaps by now she had turned to that cousin of his she always liked so much who always made her laugh.
When by and by Dolca came softly into his chamber, on some small errand, he turned back the sheet under which he was lying naked and said to her, ‘Come here.’
She came and stood at the bedside. ‘Off,’ he said, twitching her sleeve. He watched her undress, and stand trembling. With a brief twinge of self-disgust, he said, ‘You can refuse, if you like.’
She said, ‘It’s just that I don’t know what to do.’
‘In that case, cover up again, and bring lamp oil, and honey.’
When she returned, she put the jars down beside the bed and stepped out of her shift. She was slender and dark. Lilac aureoles surrounded her nipples, and a scatter of dark freckles lay around her navel. He pulled her down beside him, scooped oil into his palms, and began to rub her skin. Then he parted her legs, opened the petals of her flesh with the fingers of his left hand, and poured a golden trickle of honey from the jar. She raised her head from the pillow, looking with astonishment, and he smiled at her before lowering his head and licking the honey, following the flow of it as far as his tongue wo
uld go. When he felt her begin to move against his butting head he rose. Kneeling between her legs and oiling his dark member, he thrust hard into her. He felt her flinch, and he knew he would be giving pain, but his own need now was urgent, imperative. Only as he shot and withdrew, did he realize that they were not alone.
Joffre had come into the room. He was standing in front of the door, left ajar, thunderstruck. Palinor rolled off the girl, propped his head on one elbow, and said, ‘Is this really your sister?’
Joffre said, ‘No, master. She is my sweetheart. We lied, to be together.’ His voice was choking.
‘If she is your sweetheart, why are you not further with her? Why is there blood, here?’
The boy blushed crimson and said, ‘I cannot . . . we want to . . . but she seems afraid.’
Palinor said, ‘Close the door, take your clothes off and come here. I will show you something.’
Joffre obeyed. He stood beside the bed with his teeth chattering in his head. Palinor said to Dolca, ‘Sweethearts or not, you can refuse this if you like.’ She shook her head. ‘Lie down with her,’ he said to Joffre. Then, reaching over her, he took Joffre’s wrist between his fingers, dipped the boy’s hand in the oil jar, and laid it in place. As though the boy’s fingers had been the keys of an instrument, he played them with his own. ‘Like your lute,’ he said to the boy, softly. And then, as she began to cry, ‘Now!’
Knowledge of Angels Page 16