The Bodice Ripper

by Byron Rempel

  The nunnery’s fountain tiles were dry. No rain had fallen for two years. Our nuns’ habits were the colour of dust, and our vile bodies, and probably our insides too. Every morning as I went to the garden of herbs I looked to the heavens and demanded mercy and rain and none came.

  Except this morning. This morning, the Lord answered me. In the form of a falcon, spinning a wheel of fortune over the women. I watched it. Its rhythm made me dizzy. I knelt in the middle of the courtyard.

  That was how the Mother found me. For the Abbess was hurrying to the massive wooden door that shut us all away from the world. Outside, out there, a stranger was beset by demons.

  A little thick-fingered on the dry fountains, but what do you want? This wasn’t a doctoral thesis. Not that at all. She popped two more painkillers.

  They ran in madness about a thing only half alive. The Abbess and I stood frozen at the portico. One of the wolves lunged within the circle and emerged with a bloody snout, and an animal whimper rose in the still air. Another looked up, saw two more victims, and bounded towards us.

  A sabre came whistling past my head, and with perfect aplomb cut the wolf in his neck. Immediately it crumpled to the ground, and the rest of the wolves scattered in the wind.

  In the sand kneeling was a Moor, his robes half ripped from him, his chest not hiding a fresh long scar. His turban had come loose in the fight, and I saw his hair night black, glossy and falling over his thick shoulders. His gaze fell on me without censure, and the Abbess instinctively grabbed me and pulled me into her robes. I wanted to stay there, shivering against the danger I’d only just escaped. But I couldn’t breathe and pushed away the Mother, and from out of the sky like an arrow the falcon descended with a shriek; its talons out like swords and wings spread like an avenging angel. I watched it land on the Moor’s outstretched arm. My insides tightened. My fear mixed with a world of feelings I’d never had before, feelings that began in my heart and ended between my legs. I no longer wanted to be the bride of Christ. I wanted to be the Moor’s falcon.

  She could touch him. There he was. The desert odor of his skin and the scratch of his beard. Anna looked up from her computer, realized she felt the same way the nun did. Pushed her chair from the desk. She could feel him more than she had in years of exegesis on the attire and habits and religion of the Moors. The wolves were to blame. The coyotes, their teeth in the rabbit, the blood on their lips. Anna wiggled her toes. And the dog of course, the one that leaped on her as she crawled from the wilderness. In its excitement to see a visitor it had nipped her lip, and she tasted her own blood. Was it like they said, a beast that has tasted blood…well she had tasted the Moor’s blood, she’d tasted the outer limits of death. And speaking of which, had she taken those painkillers yet? She took two more.

  Anna eased her feet onto her desk. He wanted her. But she didn’t give herself away like that. She was in control. It was time for some context.

  In the new millennium of anno Domini 1000 when the Moors had entered the land as liberators, brought life to the dry peninsula and irrigated it with their knowledge, sprouting jewels of palaces and gardens and verdant growths of maths and sciences, tolerating the religions of the other People of the Book, and bringing to Europe their paper and salt and silk and satin and pepper and clocks and soaps and maps and globes and furs, Rahman III sat in Cordoba amid his library of four hundred thousand books and wept for…

  But who wanted to be in control? The Moor wasn’t seduced by her education.

  The Moor’s heart longed for the hospitallers and libraries of Cordoba; the books that spread out all the information for surgeons; their beliefs in tiny “contagious entities” entering the body during the Plague, while the Europeans still mumbled incantations and foraged among…

  Easy there, girl. Let the story go.

  His robes were ragged; his horse more so. The trek took him across a wild, untamed plain filled with bandits and beasts and barbaric Christians, his robe still wet with rainwater, clinging to his chest and biceps. He shook himself like a wild thing, then let his mount carry him on. That trek of danger meant two days of fatal risk; today it can be crossed in ten minutes by car.

  You couldn’t do that, of course. Although if she did it right, maybe she could innovate. Put in a footnote.

  But what could be done, Anna thought, what should be done, is that she didn’t need the Moor to come rescue everyone. Those that dressed like Moors seemed incompetent in search and rescue, and women were left to rescue themselves, and did fine thank you. Now was the time of the Other Gender.

  When I saw the pack of demons I drew my fingers between my breasts and then from nipple to hard nipple and sang Creator Spirit, Come, with my arms raised up, and Send Forth Thy Spirit and slowly drew off one by one my garments and crosses of my Lord, and I cried “Thou who didst condescend to be born of a Virgin, have mercy on us!” until I was almost naked and open before him. “Oh Lord, open thou my lips,” I pleaded, I rubbed the sign of the cross all over me, consumed by the fire that took all the air from the parched desert.

  Mercy. I could not let the Moor see me further, nor let my heart free. The saints cried, “The heart is a full wild animal!” Cloistered in the abbey I kept my eyes from seeing, my young complexion shut away from the sun and Spanish men. And I didn’t think any more of him, and instead tried to do as the Abbess instructed, to turn my thoughts to the pain that prisoners endured, lying in fetters of iron, of Christians in the dungeons of the heathen. But I was bound like them, and I lay with them, I lay with the Moor amid the chains and dust and despair.

  Anna went to take a shower.

  She sat on a stool and kept her precious toes from the needles of water. The hot water ran through her red hair and over her face and she sat trying not to think or feel. But it took concentration, and her face was scrunched up with effort, and her shoulders tight, and sometimes she forgot her toes and brought them under the shower and screamed at herself. Then she thought about why she tried not to think, and thought maybe because she was doodling around with a stupid fantasy when she should instead finish her papers. The shower began to hurt more than just her toes. Like her whole body had frozen and only now began to wake.

  That nun and Moor stuff was over the top. But she recognized those last paragraphs as the medieval Nun’s Rule, patched together from undergrad days. Was it plagiarism if the text was eight hundred years old? And who would read it anyway? Who would mouth the words, caress the pages, fall under the spell she put on them every night?

  The Abbess pushed three of us toward the Moor, and we grabbed his arms, knotted and warm, and pulled him through the gate leaving a trail, dark and wet. He was covered in blood and sweat, and he struggled to keep his eyes open. His hand searched me out, gripped on my torn robe like a holy relic. When his head fell back his gaze penetrated deep inside me.

  I was brought back by the cries of the Abbess shouting for balms, for lettuces and spices and opium. She commanded me to fetch water—as if it lay all about in abundance. I found enough, a bowl I was careful not to let spill. His robes were pulled to the side, his tunic pulled to the waist. The abbess took the water and poured it over his darkened chest. We gasped and stepped back. A gash from a sword or knife split his flesh.

  This was Julia’s fault: her rhapsody on the wounded alpha male. Made Anna go all romantic poet in the shower, everything wet and slippery and scrubbed. And then right there, with melted toes and careless heart, Anna understood that under the influence of Angeles, the Moor was the first romance poet. Not some inky dreamer. He was the first to bring that veiled fire to the Christians, for them to ignite their troubadours. She hobbled back to her laptop in a towel.

  The Moor came into my life like a hunter in the raw desert. I was drawn to him unlike anything ever before. Maybe it was hypnotism—we didn’t know the secret powers of the dark men from the south. He was wounded, but I was wounded too, not with scars you could s
ee, but he saw, he had more than one scar. We reflected each other. His hunting, his weapons were my balm, even as I prayed they would not kill the both of us. Later I would find his poetry: “The gazelle stumbled in the hunt and showed the side of her heart. She looked into my eyes and became the hunter with me. My arrows stayed in their quiver, for I could not wound her.”

  It was lucky his horse had followed the sheep-drove path to the isolated cloister. Not only because he was a Moor in Christian territory, and might find a hint of mercy here. But that wound would need divine intervention. The alignment of stars. My tears fell on his wounds and seared his heart.

  “He will die,” the Abbess said.

  She looked at me. “It was you who saved him from the wolves. They scattered from your prayers.” The Mother looked at the heavens. The other nuns looked up as well, then to me. Not all the eyes were admiring. “Angeles, you will tend him until then. At the least we can comfort him until he meets his god.” I licked my fingers. They tasted of blood and disaster, desire and pain. His good hand reached up again to me, brushed my breasts, held my arm, pulled me down to him. A breath, a garbled marriage of Arab and Christian tongues came out of his thick lips.

  I understood nothing. I understood everything. I didn’t want any more those passionate prayers to a stone figure. I wanted to kneel before this Moor, this man, and search through his tunic, to find him hard for me, to fall back and sweat and moan and let no gods stop me from being as rough as he, to command and be listened to, even as he held me down, his mouth wet, his dark eyes fierce, his black hair whipping my…

  “Hello?” Anna answered the phone on the first ring.

  “Have you tried cayenne pepper?”

  She was guilty, she was caught, she wanted rescue. All she needed was Christophe’s voice. But she got her mother.

  When she was excited Dotty forgot formalities like Hello. Anna said she couldn’t talk because she was in the middle of her paper for the Journal of Medieval Misbehaviour. Her mother said you didn’t answer the phone if you couldn’t talk.

  “Because they say it can do both in one shot.”

  “Who says what?”

  “Sprinkle it on your toes, that gets the blood circulation alive. They do it in China for frostbite.”

  “Mom, in China they think Canadian seal penises are aphrodisiacs.”

  “And if you put it on the dog bite it helps sweat out the dog saliva.”

  “The penis?”

  “I swear Anna, you only want to say that word.”

  Dotty wondered out loud about a tetanus shot, since it sounded like the beast had been out of control, even though Anna had already informed her it was a poodle, and the wound more an errant scratch, and the hunter’s shack a sort of Bed and Breakfast, with decaf chai. But then her mother didn’t understand much of Anna’s world. That whole episode with the neighbour who had fixed her door, for instance. Encouraged by Dotty. “I feel better Mom, thanks. Like I said, I’m at work on my paper.” Anna sent the Moor to her printer to provide appropriate busy noises.

  “Can you put on your makeup?”

  This was the mother she understood.

  “Trauma, honey. You don’t know how it affects you till it’s

  too late.”

  “Thanks. I’ll put on makeup. If I ever go outside again.”

  “Anyway, when you can, Auntie Pearl wants you to come to her complex and invite her here for Christmas dinner.”

  Anna paused to figure out what her mother meant. “Well right now my toes are ready to fall off.”

  “She’s all alone and she knows too what it’s like to not have a body part. Can you do that for her? You’ve got a few weeks off school? You don’t have any boys come by anymore.”

  They were still boys to Dotty.

  Anna left the Moor alone with his spices. She had been prepared to wash his hair in cinnamon and licorice and cumin, to sprinkle rose petals or lavender in the nun’s bath, to have everyone in the romance in bloom like springtime in goddamn Provence. But her toes were the Black Death.

  There was only one way out, and it was to remember the kiss of peace in the mass. And so I forgot all the world and rose out of my body, and embraced my beloved who went down on me from heaven, into my breast’s bower. I held him fast until he granted whatever I wished, tightly clasping God’s rood, and I fell before the tracks of wolves half afaint, and tried to do as the Abbess instructed, to neither do any thing, nor think, any thing.

  9. Checkmate

  Christophe sashays into the classroom, a sultan in a cold harem. They’re undergrads. They think of themselves, they think of nothing. So simple to be five moves ahead of everyone else. He’s taken Anna’s pawns and he’s not satisfied. He will be more than a visitor, he will be a Chair, he will be a Dean, he will show this outpost what power and knowledge is. The university back in Paris will understand they lost more than a professor when they sent him to Winterville. Without preamble he projects an image of a medieval hand mirror. “The game is everywhere,” Christophe says, stepping down from the lectern. “And not only a man’s game. Impressed on everything a lady might hold in her hand.” He stops at Audrey’s desk, picks up her phone, studies its back as if fixing his hair in the reflection. “Carved in ivory in her hand mirror, on her combs, the same on her casket. And you will love this, you undergraduates, with your thrill of symbol and innuendo. Does our lady study the art of war?”

  The students look up from their phones and laptops and minds. Are they supposed to answer that? Why a chess game? Wasn’t Professor Anna Hill’s class supposed to reflect the role of the spice trade in the flavour of intimate medieval relations?

  Christophe puts his hands on Audrey’s desk front and centre and fixes his eyes on hers. Someday he will be Principal and Chancellor here, and Paris will burn. “Will it be war, milady? Or but a simple passe-temps?”

  “It can’t be war,” Audrey says. “No woman was even considered for battle.”

  Christophe doesn’t take his eyes off her and hears nothing but the reflection of his own voice. The girl’s bones shiver and she grins but doesn’t look away. He tosses the phone back on her desk. A selfie of him appears on the other side now. She moves her hands away. “What is it?” he asks her. The other students can’t look away either. “What do you play at?”

  The girl’s lips flutter. They are thick and painted and she licks one corner.

  “Pardon?”

  “Love,” the girl says. Her head down, her eyes slide up to Christophe’s eyes.

  “Love!” He slams her desk, and the phone slides off into her lap. “Image number three!” His immaculate scarf follows the sweep of his arm, and another image shows a young man and woman playing chess in a tent, nothing untoward about that, carved in ivory and laid in state at the Louvre. But Christophe runs to the screen, puts both hands on the image, first caresses the draperies gouged out of tusk, then turns his back on it to shield it from the students’ eyes. “Sex and violence,” he says, “the Hollywood of the day: conflict and unbearable tension. All these are here, and even the arsenal for the game at hand: all is arranged beforehand, there are moves you must make and others forbidden. Oh, it is chaste, wanton and chaste, they don’t touch or even meet eyes—” Here he glances back at Audrey in the front row, who has not yet looked elsewhere, and he toys with his ring — “but it appears that he has achieved checkmate.” He looks around for something, spots an umbrella of Anna’s in a dusty corner and uses it as his pointer. And without ever a move too brusque, in full command of the students’ attention, the French professor points to where the man grasps the tent pole like his lance, and to the soft lines of the lady, her robes like buttercream in folds of velvet cloth, and to her sex—at his pronunciation of the word some in the class draw in their breath—and everywhere the curtains and the clothes and the tent all combine to announce (he takes a well-timed breath himself here, prepares to
put his heart and umbrella thrust into the six syllables) her pénétrabilité.

  [

  “Well,” says Audrey the next day on the phone, “I mean he did engage the class, you have to give him that.”

  “Buttercream?”

  “It wasn’t in your syllabus.” Anna didn’t respond for a while. “I am sorry I missed it. So he volunteered to step in.”

  “Till you’re on your toes, in his words. I audit the class now. Since my incident with the classroom door.”

  Telephone lines rattled in the wind.

  “Do you need me to come by?” Audrey said. She hoped Anna’s moodiness was a side effect of her medication.

  More silence, then a sigh.

  “Too much history,” Anna said.

  “Anyway, if I come you could help me with the direction of my thesis,” said Audrey, who was not at all concerned with her work, although Anna’s last statement did sound like a good thesis title.

  “Maybe I have too many classes… sometimes I….”

  “I know. Never as straightforward as we’d like,” Audrey interrupted. She had to get over there now, with a bottle of wine, otherwise she’d lose her impressionable advisor. “I’m using that Mimesis quote in the thesis: ‘The historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups.’”