The Maid: A Novel of Joan of Arc

by Kimberly Cutter

  She was not wearing a helmet that day. She had wanted the men to see her eyes, her face, as they fought. And her face was radiant as she urged her men on, up, and over the ramparts, as she cried, "Fight for your families, men! Fight for your freedom!" but the radiance vanished when she saw Bertrand fall. The sight of Bertrand lying on his back, his arms flung out on either side of him, his head a ball of blood, snuffed the light in her eyes. Killed all thought of care or self-defense, and it was then, as she stood on her ladder, looking down at her friend, that an arrow came whistling from below and buried itself in her back.

  23

  When she awoke, she was lying on her side. A wild pain inside her, as if a bolt of lightning was being pulled very slowly through her chest. There was a circle of drawn faces looking down at her, and beyond them, a flash of leaves and blue sky. "Bertrand?" she said.

  Aulon shook his head. "No," he said, wiping her forehead with a damp cloth. "You rest now. You took a bad hit."

  She remembered the arrow. When she looked down, she could just see the tip of the head pushing out of her neck. Blood ran thickly down her breast.

  Rais knelt beside her, a strange glitter in his eyes. "So she is mortal after all," he murmured. "Shall I pull it out for you?"

  "No," she said. "Aulon will do it. But you need to help hold me down."

  "Yes, let me do that," Rais said. He was hovering over her with a green bottle in his hand, looking as if he longed to lean in and drink her blood. "Would you like some hippocras for the pain?"

  "No." She looked at Aulon. Her breath was coming in hard little pants. "Just break off the shaft in back. Go as close to the skin as you can."

  The first time Aulon grabbed the arrow, Jehanne fainted. They poured water over her face to revive her, and when she came to, she reached for the green bottle and drank deeply, the alcohol traveling down her throat like a tangled string of fire. Rais gripped her shoulders more tightly this time. Aulon knelt beside her and took hold of the arrow shaft with both hands—one near the entry wound, the other back near the fletching. Jehanne was clutching Rais's hand so hard it had turned white.

  When Aulon snapped the arrow, Jehanne fainted again. Again they revived her with water. When she came to, she sat up and said, "I'll do the rest." She looked at Aulon. "You and Gilles just hold me steady."

  The men knelt on either side of her. The arrowhead was protruding from her neck, just above the collarbone. But it hadn't completely emerged. Only the tip was visible. The rest lay beneath a jutting tent of flesh. "You'll have to cut the skin so I can get the head out," she said, handing Aulon her knife. "Cut both sides, like a seam."

  Rais picked up one of his leather gloves and handed it to her. "Bite down on this."

  But as Aulon made the cut, Jehanne spat out the glove and screamed like an eagle. A sound so outrageous that both Aulon's and Rais's heads jerked back as if they'd been slapped.

  "Do you want to rest?" Aulon asked when she was quieter.

  "No," she said, the skin around her mouth white. "Just hold me tight. As tight as you can."

  Once more they rearranged themselves. Aulon seated himself with one arm around her waist and his chest pressed against her back. Rais sat on the other side, facing her, his shoulder pressed into her chest. With her thumb and forefinger she dug into the neck hole, grabbed hold of the arrowhead, and pulled it out until it made a deep sucking sound and stuck out several inches from her neck like a bolt.

  Jehanne was screaming so loudly that both men had closed their eyes and were squinting against the sound of it—as if they were walking into a tornado.

  "Let me help you," said Aulon.

  Jehanne shook her head. She wiped her hand on her hose and then, with a firm, hard motion, she gripped the shaft in her right fist and yanked it out of her neck. "Fuck," she said as blood pumped out of her neck. Then she fainted.

  24

  When she awoke, the sky was streaked with the violet blue and hot orange of sunset and the chamomile was glowing in the field around her and a cool breeze had come down from the hills. She was alone beneath a tree, on a hilltop a little ways off from the battlefield. Her horse grazed in the grass nearby. She touched her wound, which the men had dressed with olive oil and cotton. She could smell the fruity scent of the oil and the heavy, pungent scent of blood from the battlefield.

  She got up and walked until she could see the two massive black towers of Les Tourelles and the maze of outer works and ditches and ramparts that surrounded it. The French soldiers still had not gotten inside. She could see them climbing over the high earthen walls like ants. The men still launching themselves up the ladders and fighting along the tops of the walls, the men still falling through the air like birds ...

  Many French soldiers had died trying to get over the wall that day. She saw them as she rode down the hill toward the field where the Bastard stood—hundreds of corpses pulled off the field and lined up to one side. So many feet, Jehanne thought as she rode past, watching the long rows of bodies in their silver suits, the suits glinting in the last rays of sunlight, their long metal shoes pointing upward to the sky.

  The Bastard frowned when he saw her. "What are you doing here? You should be resting."

  Jehanne shrugged. "A scratch," she said, smiling.

  "We should quit for tonight. The men are exhausted. They've been fighting for thirteen hours without a break. None of them has had a thing to eat all day." He gestured out toward the dimming countryside. "It'll be too dark to see soon anyway."

  "I need to speak with my council first," she said. "Call for a break so the men can eat something. I'll be back in an hour."

  She knelt in a vineyard a little ways off from the fighting. Knelt in the crumbled dirt among the rows of dusky blue grape leaves with her eyes closed, listening to the leaves rustling around her, smelling the campfires being lit in the distance and the cool mineral smell of the dirt. She looked at the sky. Show me your will, my Lord. What would you have me do?

  25

  When she returned to the field half an hour later, her eyes were blazing. The Godhead was pounding inside her, hot as a sun. "Now is the time, men," she shouted as she stood before her troops in the flickering torchlight. "My council tells me now is the time for us to take Les Tourelles. The English have their guard down. They think we're finished for the day; they think we're all going to go home and have our dinners; but, by God, we will show them that we have just begun! We must charge like tigers now, men, charge with all the fire and fury in our hearts and with the power of almighty God at our backs, and when we charge, watch me closely, for when my standard touches the rampart, I promise, Les Tourelles will be yours."

  A great roar erupted from the men as they rode through the twilight toward the great fortress, Jehanne running out in front of the troops with her white banner waving, not even feeling her armor as she ran down into a ditch at the base of the rampart, feeling only the chill night air on her face and the wildfire of God blazing inside her, and when at last the tip of her banner touched the rampart of the fort, she turned toward her men and shouted, "Go up now. It's all yours!"

  A speedy assault. The French ran up the ladders and leaped over the walls, catching the English while they were still loading their bows and groping around in the dark for their weapons. Jehanne, halfway up a ladder, kept hearing Rais above, laughing and shouting "Die, pigs! Die!" A bloody fight, but no worse than the ones that had gone before it. No, it was what happened next, on the bridge, that bothered her. The bridge was the thing she could not forget.

  During the night, a group of citizens in Orléans had gathered up a mountain of scrap wood—ladders and boards and old wagon wheels and old doors, any flat piece of wood they could find—and built a high wooden walkway with ropes and pulleys that spanned the gap between the city wall and the destroyed bridge that led directly into the northern side of Les Tourelles. It was a wild-looking thing, stretching crooked and spindly and misshapen over the rushing green river. When La Hire and Alençon and
Rais and their men finally made it over the southern walls of the fort, a group of armed militiamen from Orléans crept out along the bridge in single file, high above the river, toward the unguarded northern wall of the fort, stepping easily and quickly off the mongrel bridge and then charging through the doors and windows of the fort toward the unsuspecting English inside.

  26

  "We cornered them," she says. "Because of the bridge, we were able to corner them inside the fort. By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late." The Goddons had panicked. They'd lowered the drawbridge that led from Les Tourelles to the mainland, and dozens of knights and generals stampeded out onto the bridge with their hands up, shouting, "Surrender, surrender!"—not realizing that the worst still lay ahead. For the Orléans soldiers had loaded up a barge below the drawbridge with pitch and bundles of sticks and straw and oil-soaked rags and had set the drawbridge on fire from below, and almost immediately the entire bridge burst into flame.

  She'd seen it happen. She was standing on the northern bank of the river, and she saw the fire, lapping at the wooden legs of the drawbridge, the long yellow flames rising up and spreading fast along the planks of the bridge itself, devouring it, until there came a deep, ugly crack and a groan, and the drawbridge collapsed, sending the entire crowd of heavily armored men cascading into the river. She saw immediately that they were doomed. Because of their armor they were doomed. And she watched helplessly as they thrashed around in the river in their monstrous metal suits, grabbing at each other and calling "Help, help!" as the weight of their armor dragged them beneath the surface one by one until only two knights were visible.

  One was very fat and had thrown his arms around the neck of a much smaller boy who had managed somehow to get out of his metal suit and was trying to swim to shore. "Get off me!" the boy screamed, thrashing in vain against the big, armored knight who was clutching his neck. "Get off! Get off!" he cried as the big man thrashed and pushed the boy's head under water. As soon as the boy was under the surface, the big armored man began to sink too, flailing his silver arms in the air and then sinking under himself until the surface of the river was completely still.

  A moment later the boy came up gasping, blue-faced. "Swim here!" Jehanne cried, waving her arms. "Swim here!" The boy looked up and began to crawl slowly through the water toward her, but after he had taken a few strokes, he was jerked sharply beneath the surface again. "Jesus!" she cried as his head disappeared into the green water, leaving only one arm waving frantically, and then no arm—just a bouquet of white bubbles—and finally nothing at all.

  La Hire stood beside Jehanne, shaking his head. "Fortune in ransoms lost right there."

  She raised her head, looked at him. "How can you say such a thing?"

  La Hire stared back. Spoke calmly. "Because I don't see the point in crying over a bunch of animals who've spent the last nine months trying to kill me."

  "Just because they're animals doesn't mean we have to be."

  La Hire looked at her for a long time.

  "You think you're not? You think you're any less of an animal because you order others to do the killing for you?"

  "I do as God commands."

  La Hire spat. "Then God's a bloody animal too."

  She did not speak to La Hire for a long time after that. She avoided him. It was easy enough to do. The siege was over. On May eighth, the morning after the French had taken Les Tourelles, the English army rode away. A curious, ferocious retreat. First the Goddons had lined up in the field outside the still-burning skeleton of Les Tourelles in full battle dress, as if prepared to fight. "We will not attack on a Sunday," said the Maid, but she led her army out to face them anyway. One by one they lined up their ponies opposite the English, lances at the ready, a herd of steel-faced monsters. "If they attack, you may fight, but only if they attack," she said. An hour passed, the two weary armies facing each other in a mysterious game of chicken. No one moving.

  Eventually the commander of the English army shouted something and waved his arm backward. Then he turned his horse and rode away from the field toward Meung-sur-Loire, and his army followed him.

  "Look at that," said Poton quietly.

  "My God, you did it," laughed the Bastard, picking Jehanne up and spinning her around in his arms as the great storm of men and horses retreated across the fields and away from Orléans. "You little genius. You did it!"

  27

  When the people of Orléans learned that the siege had been lifted, their joy was so great that life was given over completely to rejoicing for a week. A seemingly endless string of parades and feasts and dancing and tributes with Jehanne as the deity around which everything revolved. The image everyone longed to revere and bow down to. And so she stood, as if at the center of a storm, watching in a kind of trance while thousands of townspeople swirled and roared around her, chanting her name and carrying her in a chair above their heads as they danced and wept and threw roses and made toasts; and the weather was beautiful all that week, sunny and soft and clear, the hills green and lacy, the lilies and bright yellow fields of colza flowers in full bloom, the heady smell of lilacs in the air; and Jehanne seemed part of this great flowering spring, seemed to have created it especially for them. As she sat among them—those thousands and thousands of shining eyes—smiling and waving within that strange communal trance of love, she thought how enormous man's hunger for God was, how desperately we want the thing that we can bow down to and worship, the thing that makes us open our hearts up completely, the thing that unleashes all of our awe and wonder. And it frightened her a little, for she knew very well that she was not God, knew that the people were worshipping nothing but a lamp in which God had chosen to burn for a short time, and she tried to tell them this many times, but they would not listen to her, they did not want to hear. They wanted simply to be near her, to drink in the light that was pouring from her, to sing of her miracles and her triumphs. And it was heady stuff, all this communal worship, and perhaps we should not blame Jehanne too much for forgetting sometimes that she was just the lamp, and for forgetting that one day the holy fire might go away, because who in the throes of love can ever remember the gray, lonesome days, and who among us does not hope with all their hearts that somehow, by some miracle, such love might go on forever?

  28

  The day after their victory, while the people of Orléans were beginning to sing and dance and drink in the streets, Alençon came up to Jehanne, grinning. The sight of his dark, smiling face made her take a step forward. "How are you feeling, my Maid?"

  Jehanne smiled. "Better now."

  "Catch any stray arrows today?"

  "Not yet, you?"

  "Care to take a walk down to the river with me?"

  They walked down to a place where the river was broad and flat and milky green, and they sat on its bank in the grass beside the drowsy willows that hung out over the water, and were silent together, watching the late-day sunlight and the dragonflies skimming and humming above the river. As they sat, Alençon picked up her hand and held it in his own. "It's nice to see you without all that armor on," he said. Then he said her name, tasting the word. Jehanne. He reached up, touched her cheek.

  There came the sound of laughter nearby. Bright, girl's laughter, followed a moment later by the girl herself with honey blond curls, coming down the hill toward the river, great with child. Behind her a tall, thin boy followed, loping, catching her hand and pulling her against him. A passionate embrace, long. His hands in her hair, her body pressed hard against him. The couple unaware of their audience.

  Watching them, Jehanne stiffened, felt a high wall spring up around her. Dead in two years, Michael whispered. Pale as china, she smiled tightly, withdrew her hand from Alençon's. "We should be getting back," she said.

  Alençon gazed up at her, smiling tenderly. "No, we shouldn't."

  "Yes," she said, standing up and brushing the grass from her lap. "We should."

  PART IV

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  "I'm so happy I could kiss you," Charles said when Jehanne brought him the news of their victory at Orléans. "Truly you must be the Daughter of God," he said, squeezing her hands, his small eyes shining, his orange houppelande billowing in the warm May breeze. They were standing in Charles's garden at Loches, and beyond the walls they could hear the voices of hundreds of peasants who'd gathered there, shouting, "Pucelle! Pucelle! Pucelle!"

  Jehanne wanted to take Charles to Reims right away. Crown him fast, Margaret said. He's nothing without that crown. And she knew it had to be done in Reims. Every French king since Clovis had been crowned in Reims. The French people would never accept a king unless he'd been crowned in the cathedral there. But here, Charles's old timidity returned. "It's too dangerous," he said, shaking his head. "There are still too many Goddon strongholds between Chinon and Reims."

  He made Jehanne and her generals wait there in Loches for two weeks just to hear him say that. Said he was meeting with his council the whole time, but there were parties every night. She would hear the laughter, the music coming across the lawn, see Charles staggering around with La Trémöille, both of them drunk, laughing like fools. All the while Margaret chanted in her head: Daughter of God, go go go. I will help you, go!

  Finally she could not wait anymore. Her men were growing restless. They needed to keep their momentum, fight while their blood was hot. She walked in on Charles and his council one morning—just walked in, didn't wait for the page to announce her. She knelt down and threw her arms around his legs. "Oh, do not hold council for so long, my Dauphin!" she said. "But come with me to Reims and accept a worthy crown."