Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

  “Try to sleep,” she told the other children when she felt this might be possible. “The worst is over. Tomorrow they’ll be sober. There’ll be no more killing.”

  “What happened Aunt Amalaberg? Basina?”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “Don’t think of it. It’s over now.”

  “Over?”

  “Over.”

  “Nothing’s over!” The words broke out in a dry crackle. Hamalafred was trying not to cry. The sound of a spit followed and the other children could imagine the pale arc between the clap of his lips and the wet smack on the middle of the dark floor. Nothing was over, he repeated. Nothing ever would be, did they hear, did they? Never until the blood-price was paid in full. His wavery boy’s voice fought in his throat with tears, fury and every weakness assailing it. It would be paid, he promised. It would. As soon as he was big enough to exact it. And not in gold either. No wergeld would satisfy him. “Blood,” he whispered, trying to stem the tears he did not want to shed. Blood was what he wanted to shed. Only blood could avenge the lives lost this night. Frankish blood. Brown blood, purple, black. A hunter’s son, he’d seen every kind before now. He had helped disembowel grouse, boar, elk and aurochs. It had all been an apprenticeship. He had tasted blood in blood sausage when the stuff jelled and grew stringy with softly melting strings which you pulled through your teeth. He’d chewed it and was hungry to chew human—Frankish—organs; no composition would do. He’d stick their Frankish gold solidi up their Frankish arses. No matter how long he had to wait, the day would come. He would hang Frankish captives from trees by the sinews of their thighs and catch the drips in a basin. He would roll wooden wains over their massed bodies, would …

  “Hamalafred, shut your mouth! Stop it, Hamalafred.” The girl screamed then checked herself. There was a pause and when she spoke again it was through a throat clenched like a restraining fist. “Can’t you see”, she asked reasonably, “that this is the worst thing of all? That you’re doing the worst thing? Can’t you?”

  He couldn’t.

  “You’re frightening the little ones,” she tried.

  He had an answer to that which he gave more calmly, however, his voice reaching with taut emphasis across the darkness. “They’ve got to see it the way I do,” he said. “We owe revenge to our dead, Radegunda. We owe it to the living. Blood has to be paid for. That’s the law,” he explained patiently and responsibly, being thirteen years old and, for all he knew to the contrary, already the head of his house. “If people weren’t afraid of being made to pay the price”, he told her, “they’d kill each other the way they do crows and rats—the way the Franks kill, who think we’re too weak to make them pay.” At this point Hamalafred’s voice changed. It began to creak and wheeze as though struggling through a closure narrow as the neck of a miser’s pouch. A moment later he was sobbing and Radegunda fancied she could smell his tears. “They’ll find out different,” he wept and sounded suddenly like a small boy again. “I’ll make them … pay … one day …” It was an incantation, vivifying and medicinal: a counter reality more real to him for the moment than the cold room, his weakness and the captivity ahead.

  But Radegunda felt then and later that he had summoned evil forces to pour their poison inside his and her very veins. “Blood-price,” he said, as though that would be the end of it. Radegunda bit her tongue and, tasting it, spat into the darkness. She had her own reasons for placing scant hope in blood feuds.

  When Hamalafred and Radegunda were infants, Thuringia had been ruled jointly by their two fathers who were brothers and lived in peace with each other. Then one day Hamalafred’s mother Amalaberg, who was a woman of ambition, did something which was to affect all their lives. She laid the table for her husband’s dinner in such a way that the cloth only covered one half of it and left the rest bare. “A man”, she told him, “who is content with half a kingdom must be content with half a table.” The meaning was clear and the insult galling. Her husband had had no rest from that day until he had allied himself with the Franks, murdered his brother and seized his lands. Along with the lands he took his brother’s children and brought them up as his own. Radegunda had therefore learned to call him “father” and Amalaberg “mother” before learning from some household slaves the true story of her parentage.

  “That law of yours, Hamalafred,” she broke harshly into his croonings, “isn’t much good to me! If it were such a good law, it would have some guidance for me, wouldn’t it? It would tell me whether I should love your parents as my own or have a blood feud with them. But it doesn’t, does it?”

  Hamalafred had no time for doubts on a night like this. “You’re a female, Radegunda!” He sniffed noisily as though gathering himself together after his weakness. “Anyway, I’m your cousin. You’re my family now. I’ll avenge your parents and my own together. I’ll …” He talked on like this. All night. His voice was charged with the same excitement as his enemies’ outside the room whose hunting-fever was high, whose emanations seeped through the wooden walls to infect the young male with their own zest. “I’ll kill,” he sobbed and swore. “I will!” And from the hall came back the war-songs: “We killed,” the Franks were exulting. “I’ll kill,” groaned Hamalafred antiphonally, “I will, I will, I will …”

  To Radegunda this dialogue sounded like the calls of rabid beasts. She covered her ears but this did not prevent her hearing the little boy on her lap, her four-year-old brother, Chlodecharius, take up the chant: “Kill,” he crowed in his little boy’s voice, “kill, kill, kill.” Radegunda wept.

  [A.D. 568]

  “It was my Gethsemane”, she said of that night years later when she was describing it to Fortunatus, a friend and poet who had offered to write a lament for the destruction of her people, “and my Damascus.”

  Radegunda had by then become a pedant. Pedantry was a rampart against barbarism. She had become a nun. Religion was a rampart against violence. Before reaching the shelter of these ramparts, however, she had had to spend fourteen years as wife to King Clotair.

  “Wasn’t it horrifying for you,” Fortunatus wondered, “to be betrothed to your people’s …” he hesitated over the choice of word, “conqueror?”

  “His Majesty”, remarked the nun with circumspection, “was, as you know, generous with me in the end. This convent,” she spread her hands in a benedictory gesture—the left indicated the convent itself, the right blessed the fields and gardens trembling in the blazing noon of summer in the Loire country—“this was his gift, or rather it was paid for by my morning-gift which he let me keep when I left him for a greater Spouse.”

  Fortunatus bowed his head. “At the beginning, though?” he prompted.

  “The beginning?” The nun reached back. “That night was my beginning. That night I began to long for a reverse-world, a world where things would be the opposite of the way they are. That’s the easiest way to imagine, you know: you just reverse, turn things upside down. There would be no blood-price, no war, maybe even,” an apologetic hand alighted briefly on the poet’s sleeve, “no men. In a way, this”, again she uptilted her hands, managing with a single move to point to the convent and compare it to heaven, “is such a world. Apart from you, Fortunatus, a man so exceptional as to be part angel, we have no men here, no blood-price, no war, no anger even.” She smiled. “We live the way we ourselves want.”

  “I have heard”, the poet teased her, “of monasteries in the East whose monks so distrust the principle of femininity that they refuse to have cows or nanny-goats on their farms—to the detriment of their diet.”

  The nun nodded. “They think the greatest sin is the sin of Eve, but the sin which has always chilled my blood is the sin of Cain. Perhaps all that means is that the sexes are happiest apart.”

  “You were going to tell me about your marriage to King Clotair.”

  “He used to say”—the nun laughed a surprisingly conjugal laugh, the knowing little laugh women keep for talking about husbands—“that
I was more like a nun than a queen. He said it before I ever thought of becoming a nun myself. It would have seemed impossible, you know. At first …”

  “He was an affectionate husband then? Tolerant?”

  “All he demanded was the body. My body can be forced to do anything.”

  “But he did wait to marry you for—was it six years?”

  “Until I was seventeen. Yes. He had me educated: a caprice. Like having a wild horse trained perhaps? One of our silver-coated Thuringian mares. He captured herds of them and—as with me—broke them in. I suppose it amused him to take the princess of a pagan people—it’s true: my people were largely unbaptized and less Romanized than the Franks—to take me and bring me up like the daughter of a senatorial family.”

  She looked at the poet. Unblinking eyes. Very large, transparent, apparently unfocused. They disturbed him. After fishing for a useful image all he had come up with was the fact that they reminded him of a goat’s. Idiotic comparison. A goat’s eyes, for God’s sake—he’d checked—were yellow and not beautiful at all. Whereas Radegunda’s … Still, the comparison had something. It was the transparency perhaps, the diffuseness. Empty of memory. Clotair had left little trace. But then Radegunda was a German and Germans were like that: curiously free of memory’s murk. A German could tell you his grandfather’s name perhaps. Never more. Or didn’t choose to? They had come from Asia not so long ago but could tell nothing of their origins. Nothing of those decades of journeying on wooden waggons across Oriental lands. A peculiar freedom that gave them, he supposed, reflecting that his own racial past tugged at his thoughts like water-weeds at the keel of a boat.

  “Tell me,” he asked, remembering something he had read, “do German women still bring weapons to their husbands as a dowry?”

  “I was brought up”, she reminded him, “a Romanized Frank. I’m grateful to Clotair for that. It was while I was being educated in his villa at Aties on the Somme that I found my reverse-world: Christianity. I had been baptized in Thuringia, of course, but …”

  “He didn’t live at Aties? Clotair?”

  “No. But he was not alone while waiting for me. Clotair in all had seven wives or, to be finical, six and one official concubine. The distinction is subtle. As for unofficial concubines …” The nun threw up her hands, laughing.

  “A man of passion!” The poet stared into the heart of a nasturtium trumpet. “Abundantia gallica … Gaul abounds in life. The Franks do. The royal sons of Clovis perhaps more than the rest and Clotair was the most immoderate of them, wasn’t he? Anyway, he’s dead so safer to talk about!” Fortunatus mimed comic alarm. “You know,” he confided, “he—they all—fascinate me, terrify me too, which is excellent for my verse. When I’m at court I walk a tightrope, my head is dizzy, my senses keen as blades, my mouth dry. I am like a rabbit staring at a hound. I adore that hound: he is the anti-me. I would like to write a panegyric to his immoderacy, to his appetites, guts, kidneys and bowels which are all of so much better quality than my own. To his teeth. Instead, what do I do? I write panegyrics to Clotair’s son and very worthy successor, Chilperic, whom Gregory calls ‘the Nero and Herod of our time’ and praise him for what? For his moderation! Why do I do It? It’s a game, a game whose pleasures I only half understand myself. There’s the obvious one of trying it on, seeing just how much flattery the monster will take. Then there’s my penchant for the horrible which I castigate by denying it—Radegunda, you are annoyed! I’ve said the wrong thing! Forgive me. You know how I let words carry me away. They mean nothing.”

  The nun did not pretend to smile. “Forgive me, Fortunatus, if I say that there is something disgusting about innocence. You are pure and impurity fascinates you! You do not know evil and so you make the word ‘evil’ your toy.”

  “Should I be tried in the furnace of reality?”

  “Maybe you should! No, nobody should. You should believe in reality, though. Believe it’s real. Respect it. It is because things are remote from you, filtered through books and hearsay, that you feel you have to dress them up, make metaphors. You are inquisitive, Fortunatus! You have renounced the flesh, but you do not renounce the thought of the flesh and, since you are a man of words, you enjoy it more avidly at second hand.” She looked him in the eye. “You want me to tell you about my married life with Clotair.”

  “I have offended you. I’m sorry. I thought we were friends. I had come to identify with many of your feelings. It’s not all that hard for me. We had several invasions during my time in northern Italy: the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines. They came as allies but invading allies, you know …” He shrugged. “The Lombards are there now. My family may have been wiped out for all I know—but I shan’t appeal to your sentiment. As for my ‘inquisitiveness’ as you call it—you holy people are harsh—the reason for it is a bit, a significant bit, to the side of where you put it. A poet needs an extra dimension around his poem, one of unspoken knowledge, things I feel and recognize about you but which I will not say …”

  The nun stood up. She was tall, almost a hand’s span taller than the poet. She fell to her knees. “Forgive me,” she said. “I have been lacking in charity.”

  The poet jumped. “Radegunda, please! Oh dear …” He crouched opposite her so that now they looked like lovers taking a vow. “Please get up!”

  “Not until you forgive me. I failed in human understanding. I often fail.”

  “I forgive you. I forgive you. Please get up!”

  She let him help her up.

  “I hate it when you do things like that. Your kneeling to me is so … disproportionate … almost mocking somehow.”

  “I knelt to my offended fellow creature.”

  “Yes.” Fortunatus felt around him on the stone seat for his nasturtium-trumpet. It was torn. He spread it flat and held it to his eye, staring through its flaming membrane at the sun. “It is true,” he admitted, “you have lived closer to action than I. Yet, I like to believe my writing is a form of action too. I explain my position on this in one of my poems. Perhaps you remember? The one praising Launebodus for building a church to St. Saturninus? No? Oh, well, the gist is that to record the acts of the virtuous spurs others on to imitate them. As you know, I am taking notes for the story of your life. This makes my curiosity a little holy, don’t you think?”

  Fortunatus closed his dazzled eyes and put the bruised nasturtium on his tongue, hoping to revive it with his saliva.

  “By the same token,” said Radegunda, “if you wrote down the bloody doings of Queen Fredegunda you might deter your readers from indulging in vice. Have you ever, when at court, asked her to satisfy your holy curiosity?”

  The poet swallowed the flower. He coughed, hawked it up and spat it out: a red glob. “Sorry!” He wiped his mouth. “I write about martyrs. I don’t aspire to join them. Each to his trade. Forgive me, but that sort of talk makes me nervous. Even here you never know who … Besides, there is something distasteful about the queen: fleshy.” The poet made a prim mouth. “I prefer to lie about her, to present her as she ought to be.”

  Radegunda stood up.

  “I was fleshy”, she said, “in my youth. Carnal. But wanton kittens make sober cats. Don’t despair of Fredegunda.” She smiled without embarrassment. “I have to go,” she said.

  He had been bracing himself for a withdrawal but was disappointed.

  “Compline,” she explained with careful courtesy. Convent offices provided endless pretexts for retreat. “God be with you.”

  “And with you,” said Fortunatus. “You will”, he could not resist begging, “tell me later about what went before: your marriage with Clotair, how he came to let you go … and anything else”, he begged, “you’d care to tell me. See what you can remember.”

  Chapter Two

  Radegunda remembers.

  [A.D. 552]

  She remembers lying beside Clotair, her lord. Outside the wooden dwelling which is called a ‘palace’ but is really no more than a hunting-lodge, she hears the wind. It w
hips like black wire. This lodge is one of many, for Clotair loves to hunt. On horseback he is as skilful as a Hun and when walking looks incomplete. His legs arch, straddling an absent mount. When he rides down a boar or stag, Clotair becomes that beast. He feels with it, relishing the clash between its cunning and his own. He knows its tricks, sees the snap of twigs and saplings with the creature’s own surprise, feels a vegetable exhilaration as he hurtles through the bush and, in the loamy giddiness of a green-tunnelled track, would swear the beast shares his eagerness for its death. When he has it cornered, its antlers, if it is a stag, enmeshed perhaps in a branch, it is with a hard, unwavering exuberance that he plunges his weapon in its flesh.

  With the same authority he plunges in and out of Radegunda’s memory. Even here, she cannot control him. The innocence in the midst of his foulness—the scope of his crimes is biblical—makes him hard to reject, impossible to quite condemn. He slithers from definition, radiant in retrospect like some dampish satyr gambolling in the light. She tries to skimp and dim his image, but the merest touch of Clotair is like ginger in a stew. Its pungency swamps the rest.

  Radegunda has galloped after her lord at the hunt and sat with him at table. Now she lies beside him on the feather mattress of their gold-balustered bed. He is kneeling up, his thighs bandy in their triumphant arch, his arms under her belly as he pulls her, backside foremost, towards him so that her buttocks rear into the space between his thighs. She can feel his hairy parts delicately brushing her skin as Clotair plays with her body. He plays gently, frolicsomely, nuzzling and teasing as a soft-mouthed hound will play with a frail young puppy. His touch is light. His fingers ripple along her spine with the movement of lake-waves on a beach. Face in the linen sheet, she imagines her own long white vulnerable back and wonders does it remind him of the back of the deer he killed at the hunt. She clenches her teeth and forbids her flesh to respond to his. She grinds her face into a goose-down pillow, bites her hand until she can taste blood and prays to the Christian God to deliver her from pleasure. Clotair rams his member into the recesses of her body and she screams. “Oh God!” she screams, “No,” she screams, “No, God, No!”