Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  “Really, Henri,” she said, “I expected you to show a little more spine than to buckle under to Trochu and his sissies!” Trochu was the military governor of Paris. “Why, just last evening I dined with the Baroness de Chabrillan. She told me that Count Palikao told her that he had it on impeccable authority that the crown prince of Prussia had been brought before the emperor and shot himself.”

  “I heard that as well,” Henri remarked dryly, “just before the announcement that Beaumont had fallen.” At Beaumont the Prussians had surprised the French at lunch and routed them before dinner. Early press reports had gloated over a great French victory.

  “That was a lie, Henri! Must you swallow Prussian propaganda whole?”

  “You’re deluding yourself, Elisabeth. Have you seen the refugees streaming into Paris? Where do you suppose they’re coming from? Have you noticed the defenses they’ve started to mount around the walls of the city? What do you think is going on out there if we are doing so well?”

  Elisabeth struggled to maintain her composure. She hated to argue with Henri. He was so calm, so… so logical. It was infuriating. “You’re just panicking like all the rest. Really, I expected more from you.”

  For weeks she had carried on tirelessly, searching out reports of French victories and repeating them to anyone who would listen: reports that Bismarck himself had nearly been caught by French Zouaves as a whore serviced him in Montigny and that he had been forced to jump out a second-story window; reports that Marshal Bazaine had sent an entire Prussian army corps crashing to a grisly death among the rocks of a quarry at Jaumont in a rout so total that only bloody pieces of the Prussians and their horses remained. Through August she clung to each hopeful story, and embellished it, and above all else wished fervently that it be true. She had one letter from Jules, received soon after he left, in which he told her a little of the gathering army and the upcoming campaign. On the whole he sounded optimistic, if vague. She re-read it a thousand times. She talked to his portrait in her bedroom and clipped articles in the papers that looked promising and ignored the others, and fought the war herself in drawing rooms and at the social gatherings that were still common but that had begun to lose some of their gaiety.

  If a feeling of gloom was descending over certain quarters of Paris, it settled nowhere more heavily than on Paul and Moussa. But for them it wasn’t the war, or the Prussians. It was the end of summer, and the beginning of school. Determined to preserve as normal a life as possible for its children in the face of war, most of the cathedral schools of Paris opened, as did some of the government schools.

  Moussa was desolate. He hated school, and couldn’t believe there was even talk of it. They had missed four days of school the previous winter when a snowstorm had blanketed the city and shut it down. They had missed school when the Seine had run over its banks and flooded the basement of St. Paul’s, the cathedral where their classes were held. They had missed school when Sister Angelique had been killed by a runaway horse.

  So why was it, he wondered, that the Prussian army couldn’t put a stop to it? He worked on Henri incessantly, taking every opportunity to chip away at his father’s determination that he attend as usual.

  “Father, in light of the international situation” – he had heard the words from his aunt Elisabeth, and loved their sound – “I should help you and Gascon with the forest, don’t you think? We’ll need to be ready.”

  “What I think is that you need to go to school,” said the count.

  “But Father…”

  “We’ll stumble along while you’re in class. You’ll do more about the ‘international situation’ if you can read about it.”

  Moussa was indignant. “I can read, Father! You know that!”

  “So I do. You need to read better.”

  It was terrible, made the more so by the fact that they had had such a wonderful summer. He and Paul had done everything. They were old enough to explore Paris, at least during the daytime, and had spent glorious days wandering her streets and learning their way around. They swam in the lakes and spent lazy afternoons fishing from the banks of the Seine, which ran through château property. With the help of Henri and Gascon they made a wooden raft that they put into the water near St.-Cloud and floated all the way to Malmaison. On the way men and women on the shore hailed them and saluted the tricolor atop their mast. Gascon met them with a wagon to transport the raft back home. It was heady stuff for two ten-year-olds.

  The count placed great importance upon the boys’ training with weapons. He and Gascon spent an hour before breakfast every morning teaching them to shoot a Chassepot, the new military rifle with which both Paul and Moussa were excellent marksmen, and to fight with wooden swords, at which both boys were dreadful. Swords clunked harmlessly on arms and heads as the boys clumsily sought to control them. Gascon grimaced as he watched. “It’s a good thing we started with wood, sire,” he remarked to the count, “or we’d be picking up little body parts all morning.” Each boy suffered countless lethal blows from the other before practice improved their agility and they began to show some signs of skill, however slight. With great patience, their tutors taught them to duck, to feint, to anticipate; when to thrust, when to parry, when to advance, how to retreat, the four of them working up a sweat and sometimes ending up in a great heap on the ground, everyone laughing, all tangled and dead. At length the wood was replaced with steel, which Gascon blunted on a grindstone so that mistakes would raise a lump but not cost an arm or a hand. As the boys hefted the heavy blades their muscles grew stronger, their footwork became more deft, and they began to develop a keener awareness of the subtleties and finesse of combat.

  “He’s sharp with a blade, that one,” Gascon noted one late summer morning, as he watched Paul thrust at Moussa. “He’s got an instinct for it.” Paul was the matador, Moussa the bull; Moussa was stronger, confident, more methodical as a fighter, wearing his opponent down through sheer determination, where Paul would taunt and torment his adversary into making a mistake.

  “That he does,” Henri nodded. “They will both make formidable fighters.” He watched with pride, well pleased with their progress with swords and the other weapons. They learned to throw knives and even to shoot rocks from a slingshot, a skill at which Moussa excelled. And in the afternoons, if the weather was right, the count would take them out to hunt with his hawks.

  A glorious time, if only school didn’t have to ruin everything.

  * * *

  “I am Sister Godrick. The Lord God has blessed me with this cathedral and burdened me with this class. If you do precisely as I say, if you work hard, if you mind your manners and keep the devil at bay, He will bless you too. If not” – she pulled a flat oak paddle from the folds of her habit and raised it high, smacking it so hard on the tabletop at the front of the class that even though the boys saw it coming they all flinched in their seats – “if not, this shall be His instrument of correction, administered through my humble hand.”

  All they could see of her was an imperious black shroud wrapped around a thin, sharp face and harsh dark eyes. She was a smallish woman with no figure beneath her habit, just a mystery in black except for that cold face and bony hands that gripped the oak instrument of the boys’ obedience.

  “You shall bow your heads as we pray,” she announced, and immediately the roomful of heads complied, save one. Sister Godrick began to prowl the aisles between the desks of the boys as she prayed in a firm but slightly shrill voice.

  “Merciful Father, through Your perfect grace we have come here to share in the teachings of Your blessed son Christ the Good Shepherd, to learn of the wondrous world You have created in Your image…”

  Whack!

  Without warning the wood crashed down on Moussa’s hand. He gasped in pain and yanked it away. The blow left an angry red welt. He looked up at her in shock. Her eyes were closed as she continued to pray. He had watched her approach, yet her action took him completely by surprise.

  “Ma
y you, almighty God, nourish these small souls with Your grace, and may Christ our divine teacher grant us His light and everlasting love.”

  Whack!

  Again the wood screamed down. Again it caught Moussa on his hand, this time the knuckles of the other one, which he hadn’t drawn away quickly enough. A tear came to his eye and he put his knuckles to his mouth, his eyes full of fear at the specter before him.

  “Amen,” said Sister Godrick.

  “Amen,” repeated the class.

  She towered over Moussa like a mountain of black terror, the lightning in her hand poised to strike again.

  “And now, young man, perhaps you will share with the rest of us the reason why you cannot bow your head in prayer.”

  Moussa didn’t know what to say. He never closed his eyes when others prayed. He didn’t pray himself. He had when he was younger. He had prayed with all his heart for God to make the other children leave him alone. He had prayed for them to stop making fun of him. It had never worked. He had prayed for other things too, for boy things, for toys or for luck or for some trouble to go away. He didn’t mind that it never worked, for he had stopped expecting it to, and he didn’t blame God or anything like that. He had simply concluded in his ten-year-old way that God wasn’t there, or that at least He didn’t listen to children. So prayer was useless. It didn’t produce anything, so it didn’t mean anything. Sometimes, to be polite, he would move his mouth and mumble along when other people prayed, but he’d be mumbling about fishing or something, not God. Sometimes he would actually say the words he’d been taught, to see if they worked any better. But usually he would just observe what was going on around him rather than close his eyes for a prayer that wasn’t there.

  In class he had simply been doing what he always did.

  “I… I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry!”

  “Yes, Sister. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “It is not I you need to concern yourself with, young man, it is the Lord God.”

  Moussa doubted it, for she was the one with the oak paddle. He looked over at Paul, who occupied the seat next to him and was trying his best not to attract Sister Godrick’s attention. He had his head down and was intently studying the wood grain on his desk. Moussa could make out the faintest trace of a smile at the corner of Paul’s mouth. He would get even later.

  “What is your name?”

  “Moussa.”

  “Again?”

  “Moussa.”

  “What is ‘Moussa’?” she asked.

  “It is my name, Sister.”

  “Yes, but what is it?”

  Moussa didn’t know what to say. He shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” Sister Godrick said. She was addressing the rest of the class now. Her voice was mocking. “I’ll tell you. It is a heathen name. It is a godless name. It is the unholy appellation of an infidel!”

  “It is my name, Sister,” he repeated.

  “Moussa, Moussa, Moussa!” Her voice sang it out, scornful and hard. “It is a savage name, and this is a Christian class. Do you have any Christian names, Moussa?”

  Miserably, he shrugged his shoulders.

  “I didn’t hear you, Moussa!”

  “I don’t know,” he said meekly.

  “Don’t know! Don’t know a Christian name, or don’t know if you have one?”

  “I don’t know,” was all he could think of to say. He looked down at his desk. He wished he were dead.

  “Well then, what is your full name? Or do you know it?”

  “Yes, Sister. It is Moussa Michel Kella deVries.”

  “DeVries! So you are the deVries boy!” She said it as though it meant something to her. “Well, deVries, the name ‘Moussa’ shall be stricken from this house of God. We shall call you Michel. Michel, the guardian archangel of the Jews, who are themselves only a half-step up from heathen, but a step up nevertheless. I suppose it’s the best we can do.” It was settled, then, and she turned her attention to the rest of the boys.

  “Now class, you have just met Michel, who shall certainly not forget himseif again. The rest of you – stand and introduce yourselves. One at a time. Let us begin!”

  * * *

  Sister Godrick could remember when she was called Celeste. Nearly all the memories were horrible, and could still wrench her awake at night and constrict her chest with terror and send her to her bare knees on the cold stone floor, where she prayed that God would forgive her, and that she might forget.

  She remembered her mother – a sad, pretty woman who braided her hair in the tiny fifth-floor attic where their only furniture was one wooden chair and a pile of blankets for a bed. There were no windows; the room was always dark. The roof leaked, and it was cold in the winter and broiling in the summer. There was never enough food all the year round. One winter when Celeste was six a fever came. Her mother caught it and coughed up blood and hugged her daughter and died.

  She could not remember her father but she knew who he was. Her aunt Philomena had driven the evil name into her again and again, to make certain she would never forget: Gerard Flaurens, Father Flaurens, the sanctimonious priest lured from the righteous path by lust, and who, having committed the great sin of fathering Celeste, had embraced God anew and abandoned them both – but not before rising to the pulpit to publicly condemn and humiliate the mother, that pretty whoring parishioner, for leading him astray. Celeste had never seen him, nor he her.

  “He’s a righteous one, that,” said Philomena repeatedly. “Forgot God, fucked your mother, found God, and forgot you.”

  Philomena was a woman embittered by life. Her resentment over having to raise a six-year-old with no resources to do it forever poisoned her against the child.

  When Celeste was twelve, her aunt braided her soft golden hair and rubbed rouge on her cheeks and sold her to a cloth merchant for thirty sous. The man kept Celeste locked in his apartment for six days, never letting her outside, tormenting and raping her whenever the mood struck him. Philomena beat her without mercy when she complained. After the cloth merchant there was a blacksmith with huge dirty hands and foul breath, then a drunken lawyer who weighed nearly three hundred pounds, and a series of soldiers from the local garrison, mostly officers who passed her around for days without end. After that there had been three years of it, one gross encounter after another, each, to her, more horrible than the last. Her aunt counted the money and beat her with a cane and searched for the next customer.

  One of the men gave her some rum and she discovered that the act wasn’t so ugly if she drank enough of it. One drink beforehand soon turned to three or four. That was followed by some drinks afterward, and that by drinks at night, and that by drinks in the morning when she awoke, and then it all ran together into blackness. Six months or a year passed that way, the girl forever in a stupor, until finally one winter day she awakened to find herself holding an iron poker matted with blood and hair. Next to her on filthy sheets lay the cold dead form of a man whose skull was bashed in. She supposed she had bludgeoned him to death. She didn’t remember.

  She stumbled out of the room and down some stairs and out into the snow. For days she ran in circles through nameless streets, lost and cold and soaked. She had nowhere to go. At night she slept under piles of trash, or in the sewers where it was warmer but where the rats ran over her legs. She was desperate for a drink and begged for food. Near death from fever and exhaustion, she slipped into unconsciousness in the alcove of a great stone building.

  She awakened in the care of the nuns who found her. There were days of delirium as she battled fever and drifted in and out of nightmares. She would awaken shrieking, fighting furiously against the gentle hands that restrained her. After the fever broke she said nothing, unwilling to talk to anyone. She withdrew into a silent world where she cried herself to sleep every night. One of the nuns had always been there, holding her. They brought soup and fresh clothes and nursed her back to health. They asked her nothing of who she was, or wha
t she had been through, or what she had done, or how she had come to be on their step.

  Murderer? Whore? They seemed not to care.

  For months she lived among them. They let her help in the vegetable garden, where she found she had a talent for making things grow. She helped them put whitewash on the walls of their little cubicles. She worked in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning up after the meals. At first she ate alone in her room, but later she began to share meals with one and then another of them. There were chickens in the yard. She mended the coop wire and changed the straw and gathered the eggs. She washed the floors, and her own bedding and clothes in a stream. She would do anything except run errands that took her outside the four walls of her sanctuary.

  She found she loved living that way, among people who asked for nothing and didn’t care who she was. She loved living simply. Most of all she loved living away from men. She began to speak again.

  After nearly a year Celeste died and Godrick was born. The floodgates of heaven had burst open for her, and she was awash in the perfection of her new life. Like so many converts to a new cause, she became intoxicated by it, and blinded to all else. She immersed herself totally, without moderation, equivocation, or doubt, in her complete devotion to God.

  She became a driven woman, determined to purge herself of her past life and to rid herself of all that was unholy, to strip her heart of material things, to live in detachment and poverty, and to reject her own will, her inclinations, her whims and fancies. When the rules of the convent proved insufficiently strict, she discovered that she could debase herself even more, that she could deny herself even more, that she could rid herself of all worldly pleasure and comfort.