by Lauren Groff
What Asta could do if she were of a warlike mind: machines of awful death, things to flip fire and venom over a distance, crushing machines, machines of ardent substance ready to explode; the strange nun is so excited by ideas she forgets to consider consequence. Astonishing how much road can be carved in a single day out of the ancient forest. The first lobe of the labyrinth is already finished, the second lobe has been begun. And all the women who are out working together feel blessed in golden light, in the haze of the fires, in the fresh air, in their bodies’ joyous sweat and effort. Even the abbess works and Marie’s prodigious strength takes Nest’s breath away; the abbess is not unlike a freemartin, that strange genre of virago ox not one thing or the other but both at the same time. Well: Marie has always been strong. Nest can feel just the power of Marie’s flesh as though it is even now moving under her hand. Odd to imagine that there are some born to fine blood who are stronger in the body than the laborers in the field. This gives Nest pause; does this mean that there are those of commoner blood, then, who should lead? She laughs into her sleeve with the idea. Wevua across the choir blasts her a look of rage.
Versicle. Prayer. Blessing. Nest takes her basket of salve and bandages and nearly runs back to the forest to bind the hands of the afflicted and return them to their work.
Prioress Tilde watches her go, devastated. She says in a lost voice that the infirmatrix could have brought food along with her in the barrow so Tilde herself doesn’t have to take it out to the working women.
And Goda, who is not a soft woman by any means, pats the prioress’s shoulder and tells her to hush, now, to sit for a minute in rest, that Goda herself will take the food out to them. She tells Tilde sternly that she must learn to be more steady, that she must give tasks to others, so she does not die of overwork. Tilde should take her, the subprioress, as example, for Goda could drive the heifers out to the fields every day but her time is better used in seeing to the sickness of the animals, why, just this morning, she put salve on the pig with the extruded anus, and so gave the other sows a little peace from the first’s constant screaming. Yes, Goda says with satisfaction, Tilde must find her own prolapsed pigs and order others to do the heifer driving, this is perhaps what they call a metaphor, but when she turns to smile at the girl, Tilde has already darted off again.
* * *
—
In the forest, Marie, thinking of the queen so newly released from her captivity, how Eleanor might appear after these long decades, for even the queen must age, looks up to see Nest striding over the packed new road, her cheeks flushed with walking, how pretty she is with her smile, the little flaw of the birthmark by her nose making her beauty coalesce.
Marie is hungry these days, hungry for everything, for food, for the work of the body, for this cold good air in her lungs; and this hunger rises up with such force in her at the sight of Nest that Marie has to close her eyes and hold her breath until it passes.
* * *
—
The nuns work until the wind pales with snow and the ground is too hard to dig, and then they enter the long dark hours of winter contemplation, yearning for the trees and open air, their bodies restless with suppressed movement and their dreams in the night full of labyrinths. They have accomplished more than Asta dared to calculate, two whole lobes of forest turned maze, from the town to the northeast to the hills to the northwest from which the wolves slink in the springtime to carry away the lambs. They finish their work in the bakery, brewery, dairy early so they can go to the woodlot to chop and stack wood, how good it feels to sweat again, for their muscles to strain in work. Their sunburns pale in the interior dim. The healthy glow of their cheeks is extinguished. Prioress Tilde watches the servants set the abbey to rights in mere days, all the floors and woodwork scrubbed and shining with polish, all the broken things mended. The manuscripts in the scriptorium that had been set aside in the outdoor work are finished with alacrity, long hours over the breviaries and psalters and missals finished and bound until there are no more commissions left.
Insane Sister Gytha, who is illiterate, because letters dance and shapeshift before her eyes, but who paints the manuscript’s illustrations with wild imagination—perfect devils in blue, martyrs dying in great gouts of blood—has no more manuscripts to illustrate, and to keep her thoughts from flying off like dandelion spores, she begins whispering to all who can hear of orgies in the woods.
Blood pacts, unbaptized babes made into stew, virgins’ blood drunk like wine, she speaks of.
Gytha stops the abbess after Prime one frozen morning and says in her swift breathless whisper that she watched last night as the trees bent and danced to the horns and drums of the witches who had gathered there in the night, full black for it was absent of moonshine, to enact their hideous and twisting rituals of midnight around the fires built not of wood but of the stacked dried flesh of babes. And that Gytha was telling the trees that they in their feigned innocence do not fool her, for she knows full well that trees are the instruments of the devil. She pants. Her teeth are lined in blue from where she sucks on the lapis lazuli brush to make it a finer point.
Marie says carefully that perhaps what Gytha saw the night before had been in fact a snowstorm full of wind and sleet that set the trees rocking, a wind that howled with the many voices of beasts. Marie can see the truth buried beneath in what others call Gytha’s madness.
And that very morning, Marie sets the insane nun to work again painting a great Mary Magdalene with reddish hair loosed around her body upon the chapel walls. Apostola Apostolorum, Marie’s favorite saint; she who, Marie thought, was the truer rock of the church. The saint’s face slowly appears. It is Abbess Marie’s long bony unlovely face in her halo of gilt. Something profoundly equine there. Gytha sings to herself as she works. Marie feels her actual fleshly face burn in dismay; there are no spyglasses here, no tin polished to a shine, and within the greatness of her power she has forgotten even the memory of her own profound lack of beauty until Gytha painted it on plaster.
The others make things. Reams of linens and woolens woven, baskets mended, leather worked. A new kind of gruit ale experimented with in the brewhouse that crouches over the frozen stream.
And out beyond the garden walls, where the nuns of the craft have made their work shelters, Asta, bouncing on her toes in excitement, and the blacksmith and carpenter nuns build machines for better, faster working in the spring. They are assisted by the other nuns of the craft: the cobbler, the glassmaker, the potter. They create a saw, operated by two freemartins or mares walking in a circle, that can take down in minutes a tree the greatness of three nuns linked by the hands. They make a sled that slides trees to the burning piles with only a single yoked beast. They build handcarts with great iron wheels that can move easily over rough ground.
The celebrations of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany like lights shining in the dark.
And the cold darkness ebbs. Before the ground has fully thawed or green showed itself on the land, in the gray before Lent, they return in gladness to the work given them by the Blessed Virgin.
* * *
—
Marie’s hands are bleeding. She has just watched an ash tree sigh in resignation, then give a terrible crack and fall in a slow and graceful crash through the weak March light.
A flood of squirrels flows across the ground, birds spray across the gash in the canopy.
And this is when the second vision of the Virgin descends upon her.
Later, after she turns and flies over the frozen ground and through the fields of winter rye and up at last through the orchard and to the abbey gone so still with the stillness of so few souls in it, and up her stairs to her cold anteroom, standing at the desk, Abbess Marie writes and eventually will copy this in Latin into her private Book of Visions:
The second gift bequeathed to me by the grace of Our Lady, the Star of the Sea, Seat of Wisdom, Mirror of Justice.
I was standing with axe in hand watching a tree fall in the woods when I felt my head heated by a deep throbbing, and then the snake of lightning whipped through my limbs.
A light grew in the forest behind me. It shone upon my daughters and the children seated upon the pulling beasts; and all that had just been in motion were stopped in their work and held there as though by a mysterious hand; and the dirt thrown off the shovel and the sawdust flying were held in its flight. I turned. And then I fell to my knees, for standing in the place where the road was to be made in the forest were two women whose holiness shone so brightly their radiance made me hide my face from them.
The one wore a gown of the green paleness of first spring, when the leaves burst in their richness from the boughs and the flowers first open in bloom and the wind blows sweetly and chill over the land; and jewels of emerald and sapphire and pearl adorned her head and her sleeves, and from her breast there bled a wound large and open and shining in gold, and this was the wound of her maternal sorrow.
For this was the Mother of God, Mary, the Blessed Virgin, who bestowed this vision upon me.
And this was the second time she deigned to reveal her face to me.
Holding her hand was a woman of equal radiance, cloaked in the red of blood, with diamonds and silver upon her neck and wrists, and upon her brow was shining in rubies the wound made by the staff of the angel who had chased her from the first garden; for this was Eve, the first mother of all humankind. And she held in her other hand a rib made of crystal, for she herself had been molded from a rib, and so proved herself a refinement of the first mortal made of mere clay. For is not gold pulled from the rock less perfect than the gold melted from the rock by handiwork and annealed to a shine that echoes that of the sun?
The women gazed upon me in silence and with faces full of love. And when I could at last dare to fix my gaze upon them and did not dare to drag my eyes away, they raised their clasped hands and kissed. Let her kiss her with the kiss of her mouth.
Thus they showed me that the war so often vaunted between them was a falsity created by the serpent to sow division and strife and unhappiness in the world.
For, I saw, it was from Eve’s taste of the forbidden fruit that knowledge came, and with knowledge the ability to understand the perfection of the fruit of Mary’s womb and the gift given to the world.
And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary.
And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life.
Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.
And when I saw this all clear, the two women stood as one and rose up from where they stood in the dead brush of the winter forest and together they rose up in a slow and shining band of light to the heavens.
And all that was left was the thickness of the morning behind them and a smell of myrrh lingering in my nose and the sweetness of first birdsong, for though my daughters had been stilled in their work, the winter birds had seen all, and when the women were gone, they were stirred from their silent wonderment into wild exultation.
And while writing down this second vision, I have come to see the warning in it. I understand that it means the queen is coming here on one of her sudden chevauchées; and that we, my abbey of nuns, must make our united self steadfast in preparation.
* * *
—
Marie calls Sister Ruth to her. Marie’s old friend has not been able to conceal her fears about the labyrinth work, she has sniped at Marie constantly, and to relieve them both, Marie sent her to the town, to become guest magistra and almoness at the abbey’s buildings next to the cathedral, with a small staff of six servants. The buildings had been given to the abbey when Marie had just become prioress, at the time they were merely rat-infested warehouses for grain, a bad dowry a novice brought with her; Marie alone had seen the potential in the buildings and stopped Abbess Emme from having them sold. It took Marie five years to raise the money to finish them, more to build them out, but when the buildings were ready, they kept all visitors and those seeking alms out of the abbey’s lands and enclosure, they no longer needed to take the morning-long walk through the forest and fields to the abbey upon the hill.
No more grasping hands at the wicket. No more trout poached from the pond, or does from the forest. No more threats to the nuns’ enclosure.
Ruth comes in flushed with the cold, plumper than she has been, for she is responsible for giving a good board to the noble and illustrious visitors, the devout on the way to their pilgrimages. She has decided only the finest things are suitable; the abbey’s white bread but the rye not, the abbey’s ale but the wine not. Roasted meats every day. The aged cheese and not the fresh. Marie indulges her; since the famine time when they were young, Ruth has found her greatest pleasure in food.
The queen will be coming, Marie tells Ruth, squeezing her hands. Certainly by Carnelevarium, as Eleanor has always been an elegant gourmande and has never loved a Lent. Thank the Virgin that Easter is not early this year. She’ll have a retinue for Ruth to put up, sizable, too. Dozens. It will be an immense burden on the hostelry, Marie is sorry to say.
Ruth grows pink and sighs and says that she will prepare.
Marie says that the queen will order Ruth to show her the secret way through the labyrinth to the abbey, but she must be firm and smart, and must not do so.
Ruth asks, rather testily, how in the world does a mere mortal tell the queen she cannot do something.
Marie says that one doesn’t. That one washes the queen’s feet very slowly and, after one dries them, one plies her with delicacies and good hot wine, having long before, as soon as one hears news of the heralds entering town, sent off one’s fastest horse to fetch the abbess.
Ruth says after some thought that unfortunately theirs is a royal abbey. Marie, being made abbess, became a baroness to the crown. So why in the world can the queen herself not see the women’s private way in? She is the regent, after all. Marie, though abbess, is but a subject.
The queen of Angleterre, Marie says drily, is a mighty personality, but she never could keep a secret. And even if she could keep a secret she is too fearful of being made captive again, for good reason, that she would never agree to come alone, and one cannot trust in the eyes of the retinue.
Now, though Marie’s body yearns to be out among her nuns, swinging an axe, she spends her days writing her letters, and sending Wulfhild off all over the country with messages.
And when the news comes that the queen has been seen in the countryside nearing the city, that she travels swiftly and without a harbinger, Marie gallops toward the town through the hidden paths and tunnels and is already seated sweating by the fire in the almoness’s reception room when the queen sweeps in, irritated at the interruption of her plans. The abbess holds her face in a mask. She rises to her full height and bulk and grandeur and begins her obsequies slowly, so that Eleanor can stop her and bid her to sit. But the queen does not stop her; Marie feels the other woman’s sharp eyes sweeping over her.
In the dimness of the doorway, Eleanor looked young, but now as she steps near the fire she shows the fine wrinkles under her powder and the hump of her back that has begun to grow. Her perfume so strong it is the avant garde of her attack.
And the world silences in Marie’s ears; all she can hear is her thumping heart. She casts about inside herself, at a loss. If beauty has been stripped from the most beautiful, grace from the most gracious, does that mean god’s favor has been stripped away, as well?
Without preamble Eleanor says, well it has been decades and hasn’t Marie become a great mountain of a woman. She tells her to sit, if sitting doesn’t break her chair, that is. No longer a gallowsbird, is Marie? She, who had once been frightfully bony. My oh my.
Marie smiles.
The queen looks at he
r. She says in a musing voice that no, perhaps these decades Marie has become a sphinx.
Marie says that they do eat well now at the abbey, that this place is not the starving place it had been when she arrived as a girl that Eleanor herself threw away, those weeks when Marie watched little baby oblates go blue and waste away of their hunger. They do eat well and plentifully, though of course none of the nuns are fat. Nearly all of the nuns have tremendous muscles. Perhaps the queen is simply just unused to female strength. Or perhaps it has been so long since Eleanor’s Ladies’ Army that she has forgotten? Perhaps any woman who is not so frail she would shatter with a shout would seem fat, at least to one so refined and courtly as the queen?