Lambs of God

by Marele Day

  Marele Day grew up in Sydney and graduated from Sydney University with BA (Hons). Her work experience ranges from fruit picking to academic teaching and she has travelled extensively, taking up temporary residence in Italy, France and Ireland.

  Coming after her bestselling, award-winning crime novels featuring Claudia Valentine, Lambs of God marks an exciting new direction for this talented writer.

  LAMBS OF GOD

  Marele Day

  ALLEN & UNWIN

  Copyright © Marele Day 1997

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in 1997

  This edition published in 1998 by

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:

  (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:

  info@allenandunwin.com

  Web:

  www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Day, Marele.

  Lambs of god

  IBSN 978 1 86448 696 4

  eISBN 978 1 74269 513 6

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Set in 11/13pt Garamond by DOCUPRO, Sydney

  Table of Content

  Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the Australia Council for financial support while writing this book; Jenny Darling for finding the right publisher; Patrick Gallagher and the team at Allen & Unwin for being that publisher; George Mannix, Julian Miller and Michael Witts for casting careful eyes over the novel in manuscript form; and especially Susie Rourke, who heard every bleat.

  It was soft. Soft and silky as a mouse’s ear. More like a soft little quivering animal than a sprig of sage. Sister Iphigenia rubbed the leaves once more, vigorously this time to release their volatile oils, then dropped them into the teapot. She briefly sniffed her fingers then wiped them down the front of her woollen vest. The nuns had long ago dispensed with formal habits.

  Sister Iphigenia sat in the cloister, in strips of bright light alternating with deep shadow. If she had looked up she would have seen the ribbed vaulting arching over her like the skeleton of an immense dinosaur. But Sister Iphigenia was otherwise occupied. She was watching the fire in the courtyard, watching for the jet of steam from the kettle. Somewhere behind her was the rasping noise of Sister Margarita scrubbing the Eucharist table. Soon, both she and Sister Carla would leave off their tasks and join her in the courtyard. Today was Haircut Day.

  None of this accounted for Iphigenia’s sudden alertness. Beyond the smell of sage, the heavy odour of her own body, the cold ashy smell of stone, the lanolin of sheep everywhere, her nose picked up an unfamiliar scent. Far away and faint, it was barely more than a whisper. A small but regular disturbance. It was there and then it was not, it was there and then it was not. Like the inhalation and exhalation of breath.

  The kettle hissed and spattered water onto the coals. Iphigenia pulled her weight up off the bench. She went into the courtyard, lifted the heavy kettle and poured boiling water over the leaves in the pot. The fresh antiseptic smell of sage was pleasant and it did seem to keep insects and vermin away.

  On Haircut Day they washed each other’s hair and cut it. Then they’d tease out the strands, card and spin it, just as they did with the sheep’s fleece. On Shearing Day the sheep would have their turn. The sisters always did their own fleece first, to set a good example.

  The sheep wandered wherever they liked. In the fields, through the cloisters, in the monastery chapel their bleating would resound, echoing up an ovine hymn to God. As well as the ritual Shearing Day the nuns collected wool throughout the year. Bits of fleece caught in bushes, on the statue of our Blessed Virgin, or in the crevices of the stonework where the sheep brushed past.

  They wandered all over the monastery but did not stray. There was plenty of sweet grass in summer, enough to get them through the winter as well. They didn’t shy away from the sisters. The flock of nuns and the flock of sheep had been together for so long that the sheep, if they had enough brains to consider the matter at all, thought of the nuns as part of the flock rather than shepherds. So that on Shearing Day they would meekly allow themselves to be sheared, one side then the other till big lumps of fleece flopped softly to the ground, the greasy woolly outer layer protecting the fine soft fibres close to the skin.

  Occasionally a ram would break out of the routine and run rampant. Till the nuns found it and slaughtered it for their table. One ram to a flock was quite enough. More than one and trouble started.

  The scrubbing stopped. Iphigenia heard the clank of the bucket and sluicing of water down the drain. Then into the full sunlight came Sister Margarita, her pink hands still wet and dripping, her face flushed with God’s work.

  Iphigenia’s nose was jutting into the air.

  ‘What?’ asked Sister Margarita, drying her hands on her woolly skirt. This had been a great favourite, one of the first pieces in which they had incorporated dyed wool. They had boiled up nettles and steeped the wool to produce a lush green. Then they had knitted a landscape. The nettle-green grass, the white wool of lambs dotted in amongst it. This was before they had started on more complex themes. The grass in the landscape had faded to a dull olive green and Margarita had started wearing it as a skirt. It had grown thin in the front where Margarita knelt on it and a couple of holes had developed which gave a glimpse of her strong sturdy legs.

  ‘Smell with no name. Distant.’

  Sister Margarita sniffed the air, taking it in in tiny bursts then staying very still and letting the grains of odour float into the nasal cavity. She smelled tallow, traces of blood, pollen, the aroma of the sage tea brewing in the courtyard, the pervasive smell of sheep. All these smells had names.

  She shook her head. But because she couldn’t smell it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Her nose was becoming myopic. Unless a breeze carried them directly to her, distant smells had ceased to exist for Sister Margarita.

  ‘Vinegar, pear, leather,’ prompted Iphigenia.

  ‘Sheep knocked over a bottle?’ suggested Margarita.

  Any further discussion of the smell was waylaid by the appearance of Sister Carla. Younger than the others, her wild and woolly hair was still black and lustrous. There were twigs, leaves and other debris in it. She dumped a basket of hair on the table, hair that had been collected from the sisters’ brushes throughout the year. A whole basketful. Nestled in the hair was a pair of scissors, not quite concealing three shining drops of blood.

  Sister Iphigenia looked at her sharply. ‘Accident,’ Sister Carla explained, avoiding Iphigenia’s eyes.

  ‘Never mind,’ consoled Sister Margarita. ‘Turns a lovely russet.’

  The three nuns were gathered in the courtyard. In the courtyard they were closer to the Lord. Four walls with an infinite canopy of sky. Besides, in the chapel they never knew when another fragment of roof might fall on their heads.

  This Haircut Day it was Sister Margarita’s turn to go first. She leant over the wash trough and let the sisters cleanse her hair with the tepid sage liquid, the words they murmured every year on this day trickling into her ears. Then they sat her in a chair, her hands resting in her faded green lap. Sister Iphigenia surrounded her with a sheet to collect the hair while Sister Carla approached with the scissors.

  Sister Margarita listened for the crisp decisive snip. The sound of sharpened scissors
so close to her ears always took her back to the first time she had been shorn. There had been other novices with her that day, silently looking at one another, not speaking, full of expectancy and a need to be brave. Margarita remembered the carpet of hair on the floor when the job was finished. The modest browns, tawny reds plush as foxes’ tails, black hair shiny as raven wings. And her own, as light and golden as a halo.

  Sister Iphigenia watched the clumps of grey fall onto the sheet. It was stronger now, the smell in the distance, and no longer intermittent. Sister Carla was intent on her task, Sister Margarita had her eyes closed. Iphigenia moved her nose around, going through a catalogue of smells trying to identify it. Vinegar, pear, leather. And something else, yeasty but not the yeast of bread or wine. Her nose hovered, brought each element into synthesis. She recognised it now. It was a smell that she knew but had almost forgotten. It was the smell of a man.

  Sister Carla lay hidden in the long grass. She’d been there practically the whole of the drowsy afternoon, skirt up, belly bare to the sun. She’d done this as a child, lain on the ground and looked up at the sky. It may have been only once, it may have been many times and her memory, for the sake of convenience, had gathered all those times in and skeined them into one. What she remembered about it then was the way the leaves cut patterns into the sky, the way a breath of wind would move the leaves and enlarge a space for the sun to fill her eyes with a shimmering that spread and faded out every other detail of the picture. She couldn’t remember how the child was lying, what she was wearing, only the pattern of leaves and the sudden strength of sun. The child would most certainly not have had this round belly with sprigs of hair at the base of it. Carla closed her eyes. When she saw her belly she imagined a sand dune with tufty grass growing round it.

  What was that, the shadow passing so suddenly in front of her? Had she called down Jesus at last? A falling leaf? Her eyes blinked open and looked. A spider. Making a web. She was hanging there, suspended animation. Carla moved her head ever so slightly and saw the sun’s glint on a single thread of silk. The drop thread. Carla looked further up for the bridge line. She found the most likely place, where two branches arched towards each other, but the thread, if it was there, was invisible. The spider was directly above Carla now, pulling silk out of her own fat abdomen. She continued her journey down the drop thread, looking for an anchor.

  Carla hardly felt the spider at all as she anchored in Carla’s sticky tufts of hair. Carla moved her head further to the side and saw that the first three threads made a big capital Y. The spider continued, spinning other threads, returning to the centre, and soon the framework was complete. It shimmered in the tiny breeze, a display of iridescence. Ever so carefully Carla arced her head forward a little and blew her own tiny breeze onto the web. But the spider hardly even noticed. She worked on undisturbed, making a small central spiral to lock the spokes into position, then spun a temporary spiral all the way to the extremities of the web. Back she came to the centre, took up the temporary web and replaced it with the sticky one. The spider disappeared, leaving Carla anchored to her web.

  Odd that the spider should be doing her spinning in the drowsy afternoon, not as they usually do, at night. Carla crept her fingers down the length of her belly and with a sharp chop at the air broke the anchor thread. The web floated free. Weakened, but not destroyed. She pulled her skirt down, shutting her body off from the last of the sun. Time for Vespers. She stood up and made her way back.

  The evening meal had been cleared away, scraps buried. On the table were wool and hair from last year’s harvest, all washed, spun, dyed and skeined. The fresh crop of hair lay in a basket ready to be put through the same process. Sister Margarita sometimes wondered whether it wouldn’t be altogether simpler if they just started knitting the hair directly from the head. They could leave the needles eternally in place and knit another row when the hair was long enough. The pain suffered by sleeping on knitting needles could be offered up for the sins of the world.

  They were about to begin. The knitting pattern was laid out on the table, the pieces that they were working on individually in front of each nun, needles side by side, their points buried in a ball of wool.

  Carla reached out for a skein of red wool, the size of a rat. It wasn’t really red though that’s what they called it. They had boiled it up with beetroot to produce, unexpectedly, a bright shade of orange. Still, it was closer to red than the wool dyed in blood.

  Fully aware that Iphigenia was giving her one of her looks, she picked the skein up, turned it over and examined some invisible detail of it. Taking her time, taking her time. At the very instant that Iphigenia took in a mouthful of breath to chastise her, Carla put the wool down and piously placed her hands together, one over the other, at the edge of the table. Iphigenia released the wasted mouthful of breath. With their eyes closed the sisters began:

  Athena thought: ‘Tis well to praise what others do:

  But let me earn the praise I give, nor see

  Too cheaply scorned my own divinity.’

  And as she pondered thus, her mind was bent

  To plan Arachne’s punishment—

  Her Lydian rival, who was said to claim

  Of all who worked in wool the foremost name.

  On they went, setting forth once again on the story that ended with Arachne being transformed into a spider. They mouthed the words over prayer-poised hands, over the work awaiting them. Arachne and Athena, the litany they used to get the rhythm of the knitting going. The pattern of the story was deeply etched in their minds, any one word from it would evoke the whole. Nevertheless, they liked to say each word and every word, one after the other, a reminder that the whole was composed of thousands and thousands of stitches.

  It wasn’t just the meaning of the words, it was the rhythm and the rhyme. The comfort of knowing when they got to the end of each line there would be the echo of the line before. And the tantalising suggestion of the line yet to come. In less than ten lines the nuns were knitting, their voices trailing off as their hands took up the rhythm.

  In celebration of Haircut Day a fat cake sat waiting to be eaten—gritty millet, cooked soft and slowly till it held together, flavoured with lavender flowers. As they ate the cake they allowed themselves a little conversation.

  ‘Agnes Paul has a big belly,’ announced Margarita.

  ‘Spring’, said Iphigenia.

  ‘Father John,’ smirked Carla.

  Though the Agnes sisters went about their business in their own way and trod their own invisible tracks, they all had names—of former members of the community who had finally joined with Christ. The monastery was so vast that it made the nuns feel more numerous to imagine that the souls of the departed returned to them as sheep. Strangely enough the sheep, as much as sheep had any traces of individuality, took on the characteristics of the sister they were named for.

  Whilst each of the ewes had her own name, the ram was always called Father John. Father John wasn’t a priest who had been part of the community but it was a name that seemed to fit. There had been a succession of priest-confessors, even the Bishop visited the monastery once. A long time ago.

  The sheep were asleep somewhere, lying wherever they happened to be standing when night pressed them down. Occasionally through their talk the women heard a snuffle, like a sequence of wet rubber rings. Sheep-dreams of other lives, of rounding up herds of wildebeests on sun-bright plains, standing on a rocky outcrop like a goat, queen of the realm.

  ‘Father John,’ repeated Margarita. She admired his horns, as beautiful as coiled rope. But sometimes in his docile brown eyes she thought she caught glimpses of a wilder creature prowling around. She was glad that the soft woolly body stopped it from getting out.

  ‘Margarita,’ Iphigenia said softly but firmly.

  Margarita swallowed the last pappy bit of cake in her mouth and stood up, rattling the heavy earthenware cups on the table. Her feet were firmly planted on the ground, her hands resting on the
curve of her belly, one on top of the other. She felt comfortable and composed.

  ‘Beauty and the Beast’, she announced. And on the night of Haircut Day, this is the story that Sister Margarita told:

  ‘Once upon a time there was a merchant. Since the death of his wife from consumption his pretty young daughter had become his only treasure. He had promised her that when his ship came in she could have anything she desired—gold from the Indies, a bolt of silk, rare saffron. But all the girl wanted was a single white rose. He went to the port and waited. But alas there was a terrible storm and the ship foundered.

  ‘On the way home, he got lost. He trudged through the snow and came across the gates to a big house. Before he had time to knock, the gates opened. He took the path to a great door, a path lined with snow-laden bushes. The door opened and some invisible force ushered him in.

  ‘There was a blazing fire to warm him, some slices of meat on a gold plate and red wine in a beautiful crystal decanter. He availed himself of this hospitality and, feeling much better, left the house. As he walked down the path he noticed for the first time that the bushes bore splendid white roses. How strange that they were flowering in the depths of winter. Though he had no bounty to bring home he could still grant Beauty her wish. He picked an armful of the plush white roses and in so doing, pricked his hand on a thorn. Three drops of blood fell onto the virgin snow.

  ‘Suddenly, a hideous beast sprung from nowhere, a beast wearing a crimson smoking jacket. “Ingrate,” bellowed the beast. “Stealing my beloved roses!” He lapped up the blood on the snow.

  ‘The merchant cowered. “I’m sorry, Sir,” he began.

  ‘“I am the Beast and you will address me so.”

  ‘“I’m sorry, Beast, they are for my daughter, my precious Beauty.”

  ‘“Send her here and I will spare your life.”

  ‘And so Beauty came to stay with the Beast. She wore her mother’s wedding ring. “Take this, my dearest, and may God and his angels protect you,” her mother had said on her deathbed the year before. Beauty was frightened at first, even though the Beast kept his distance. He fed her and clothed her but if he went to lay his head in her lap, she held the ring up and he backed away.