There was a moment’s silence. I could see something odd come into the big man’s face. He said quietly:
“I did not speak, Abbess.”
She turned, surprised. “But you did. I heard you.”
He said strangely, “I did not.”
Children can guess sometimes what is wrong and what to do about it without knowing how; I remember saying, very quickly, “Oh, she does that sometimes. My stepmother says old age has addled her wits,” and then, “Abbess, may I go to my stepmother and my father?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, “run along, Boy News—” and then stopped, looking into the air as if seeing in it something we could not. Then she said very gently, “No, my dear, you had better stay here with me,” and I knew, as surely as if I had seen it with my own eyes, that I was not to go to my stepmother or my father because both were dead.
She did things like that, too, sometimes.
* * * *
For a while it seemed that everyone was dead. I did not feel grieved or frightened in the least, but I think I must have been, for I had only one idea in my head: that if I let the Abbess out of my sight, I would die. So I followed her everywhere. She was let to move about and comfort people, especially the mad Sibihd, who would do nothing but rock and wail, but towards nightfall, when the Abbey had been stripped of its treasures, Thorvald Einarsson put her and me in her study, now bare of its grand furniture, on a straw pallet on the floor, and bolted the door on the outside. She said:
“Boy News, would you like to go to Constantinople, where the Emperor is and the domes of gold and all the splendid pagans? For that is where this man will take me to sell me.”
“Oh yes!” said I, and then, “But will he take me, too?”
“Of course,” said the Abbess, and so it was settled. Then in came Thorvald Einarsson, saying:
“Thorfinn is asking for you.” I found out later that they were waiting for him to die: none other of the Norse had been wounded but a farmer had crushed Thorfinn’s chest with an axe and he was expected to die before morning. The Abbess said:
“Is that a good reason to go?” She added, “I mean that he hates me; will not his anger at my presence make him worse?”
Thorvald said slowly, “The folk here say you can sit by the sick and heal them. Can you do that?”
“To my knowledge, not at all,” said the Abbess Radegunde, “but if they believe so, perhaps that calms them and makes them better. Christians are quite as foolish as other people, you know. I will come if you want,” and though I saw that she was pale with tiredness, she got to her feet. I should say that she was in a plain brown gown taken from one of the peasant women because her own was being washed clean, but to me she had the same majesty as always. And for him too, I think.
Thorvald said, “Will you pray for him or damn him?” She said, “I do not pray, Thorvald, and I never damn anybody; I merely sit.” She added, “Oh let him; he’ll scream your ears off if you don’t,” and this meant me for I was ready to yell for my life if they tried to keep me from her. They had put Thorfinn in the chapel, a little stone room with nothing left in it now but a plain wooden cross, not worth carrying off. He was lying, his eyes closed, on the stone altar with furs under him, and his face was gray. Every time he breathed there was a bubbling sound, a little, thin, reedy sound, and as I crept closer I saw why, for in the young man’s chest was a great red hole with pink things sticking out of it, all crushed, and in the hole one could see something jump and fall, jump and fall, over and over again. It was his heart beating. Blood kept coming from his lips in a froth. I do not know, of course, what either said, for they spoke in the Norse, but I saw what they did and heard much of it talked of between the Abbess and Thorvald Einarsson later, so I will tell it as if I knew.
The first thing the Abbess did was to stop suddenly on the threshold and raise both hands to her mouth as if in horror. Then she cried furiously to the two guards:
“Do you wish to kill your comrade with the cold and damp? Is this how you treat one another? Get fire in here and some woollen cloth to put over him! No, not more skins, you idiots, wool to mold to his body and take up the wet. Run now!”
One said sullenly, “We don’t take orders from you, grandma.”
“Oh no?” said she. “Then I shall strip this wool dress from my old body and put it over that boy and then sit here all night in my flabby naked skin! What will this child’s soul say to God when it departs this flesh? That his friends would not give up a little of their booty so that he might fight for life? Is this your fellowship? Do it, or I will strip myself and shame you both for the rest of your lives!”
“Well, take it from his share,” said the one in a low voice, and the other ran out. Soon there was a fire on the hearth and russet-colored woollen cloth—“From my own share,” said one of them loudly, though it was a color the least costly, not like blue or red—and the Abbess laid it loosely over the boy, carefully putting it close to his sides but not moving him. He did not look to be in any pain, but his color got no better. But then he opened his eyes and said in such a little voice as a ghost might have, a whisper as thin and reedy and bubbling as his breath:
“You…old witch. But I beat you…in the end.”
“Did you, my dear?” said the Abbess. “How?”
“Treasure,” he said, “for my kinfolk. And I lived as a man at last. Fought…and had a woman…the one here with the big breasts, Sibihd…Whether she liked it or not. That was good.”
“Yes, Sibihd,” said the Abbess mildly. “Sibihd has gone mad. She hears no one and speaks to no one. She only sits and rocks and moans and soils herself and will not feed herself, although if one puts food in her mouth with a spoon, she will swallow.”
The boy tried to frown. “Stupid,” he said at last. “Stupid nuns. The beasts do it.”
“Do they?” said the Abbess, as if this were a new idea to her. “Now that is very odd. For never yet heard I of a gander that blacked the goose’s eye or hit her over the head with a stone or stuck a knife in her entrails when he was through. When God puts it into their hearts to desire one another, she squats and he comes running. And a bitch in heat will jump through the window if you lock the door. Poor fools! Why didn’t you camp three hours’ downriver and wait? In a week half the young married women in the village would have been slipping away at night to see what the foreigners were like. Yes, and some unmarried ones, and some of my own girls, too. But you couldn’t wait, could you?”
“No,” said the boy, with the ghost of a brag. “Better…this way.”
“This way,” said she. “Oh yes, my dear, old granny knows about this way! Pleasure for the count of three or four and the rest of it as much joy as rolling a stone uphill.”
He smiled a ghostly smile. “You’re a whore, grandma.”
She began to stroke his forehead. “No, grandbaby,” she said, “but all Latin is not the Church Fathers, you know, great as they are. One can find a great deal in those strange books written by the ones who died centuries before Our Lord was born. Listen,” and she leaned closer to him and said quietly:
“Syrian dancing girl, how subtly you sway
those sensuous limbs,
Half-drunk in the smoky tavern, lascivious
and wanton,
Your long hair bound back in the Greek way,
clashing the castanets in your hands—”
The boy was too weak to do anything but look astonished. Then she said this:
“I love you so that anyone permitted to sit near you and talk to you seems to me like a god; when I am near you my spirit is broken, my heart shakes, my voice dies, and I can’t even speak. Under my skin I flame up all over and I can’t see; there’s thunder in my ears and I break out in a sweat, as if from fever; I turn paler than cut grass and feel that I am utterly changed; I feel that Death has come near me.”
He said, as if frightened, “Nobody feels like that.”
“They do,” she said.
He said,
in feeble alarm, “You’re trying to kill me!”
She said, “No, my dear. I simply don’t want you to die a virgin.”
It was odd, his saying those things and yet holding on to her hand where he had got at it through the woollen cloth; she stroked his head and he whispered, “Save me, old witch.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said. “You shall do your best by not talking and I by not tormenting you any more, and we’ll both try to sleep.”
“Pray,” said the boy.
“Very well,” said she, “but I’ll need a chair,” and the guards—seeing, I suppose, that he was holding her hand—brought in one of the great wooden chairs from the Abbey, which were too plain and heavy to carry off, I think. Then the Abbess Radegunde sat in the chair and closed her eyes. Thorfinn seemed to fall asleep. I crept nearer her on the floor and must have fallen asleep myself almost at once, for the next thing I knew a gray light filled the chapel, the fire had gone out, and someone was shaking Radegunde, who still slept in her chair, her head leaning to one side. It was Thorvald Einarsson and he was shouting with excitement in his strange German, “Woman, how did you do it! How did you do it!”
“Do what?” said the Abbess thickly. “Is he dead?”
“Dead?” exclaimed the Norseman. “He is healed! Healed! The lung is whole and all is closed up about the heart and the shattered pieces of the ribs are grown together! Even the muscles of the chest are beginning to heal!”
“That’s good,” said the Abbess, still half asleep. “Let me be.”
Thorvald shook her again. She said again, “Oh, let me sleep.” This time he hauled her to her feet and she shrieked, “My back, my back! Oh, the saints, my rheumatism!” and at the same time a sick voice from under the woollens—a sick voice but a man’s voice, not a ghost’s—said something in Norse.
“Yes, I hear you,” said the Abbess; “you must become a follower of the White Christ right away, this very minute. But Dominus noster, please do You put it into these brawny heads that I must have a tub of hot water with pennyroyal in it? I am too old to sleep all night in a chair and I am one ache from head to foot.”
Thorfinn got louder.
“Tell him,” said the Abbess Radegunde to Thorvald in German, “that I will not baptize him and I will not shrive him until he is a different man. All that child wants is someone more powerful than your Odin god or your Thor god to pull him out of the next scrape he gets into. Ask him: Will he adopt Sibihd as his sister? Will he clean her when she soils herself and feed her and sit with his arm about her, talking to her gently and lovingly until she is well again? The Christ does not wipe out our sins only to have us commit them all over again and that is what he wants and what you all want, a God that gives and gives and gives, but God does not give; He takes and takes and takes. He takes away everything that is not God until there is nothing left but God, and none of you will understand that! There is no remission of sins; there is only change and Thorfinn must change before God will have him.”
“Abbess, you are eloquent,” said Thorvald, smiling, “but why do you not tell him all this yourself?”
“Because I ache so!” said Radegunde, “Oh, do get me into some hot water!” and Thorvald half led and half supported her as she hobbled out. That morning, after she had had her soak—when I cried, they let me stay just outside the door—she undertook to cure Sibihd, first by rocking her in her arms and talking to her, telling her she was safe now, and promising that the Northmen would go soon, and then when Sihihd became quieter, leading her out into the woods with Thorvald as a bodyguard to see that we did not run away, and little dark Sister Hedwic, who had stayed with Sibihd and cared for her. The Abbess would walk for a while in the mild autumn sunshine and then she would direct Sihihd’s face upwards by touching her gently under the chin and say, “See? There is God’s sky still,” and then, “Look, there are God’s trees; they have not changed,” and telling her that the world was just the same and God still kindly to folk, only a few more souls had joined the Blessed and were happier waiting for us in Heaven than we could ever be, or even imagine being, on the poor earth. Sister Hedwic kept hold of Sibihd’s hand. No one paid more attention to me than if I had been a dog, but every time poor Sister Sibihd saw Thorvald she would shrink away and you could see that Hedwic could not bear to look at him at all; every time he came in her sight she turned her face aside, shut her eyes hard, and bit her lower lip. It was a quiet, almost warm day, as autumn can be sometimes, and the Abbess found a few little blue late flowers growing in a sheltered place against a log and put them into Sibihd’s hand, speaking of how beautifully and cunningly God had made all things. Sister Sibihd had enough wit to hold on to the flowers, but her eyes stared and she would have stumbled and fallen if Hedwic had not led her.
Sister Hedwic said timidly, “Perhaps she suffers because she has been defiled, Abbess,” and then looked ashamed. For a moment the Abbess looked shrewdly at young Sister Hedwic and then at the mad Sibihd. Then she said: “Dear daughter Sibihd and dear daughter Hedwic, I am now going to tell you something about myself that I have never told to a single living soul but my confessor. Do you know that as a young woman I studied at Avignon and from there was sent to Rome, so that I might gather much learning? Well, in Avignon I read mightily our Christian Fathers but also in the pagan poets, for as it has been said by Ermenrich of Ellwangen: ‘As dung spread upon a field enriches it to good harvest, thus one cannot produce divine eloquence without the filthy writings of the pagan poets.’ This is true but perilous; only I thought not so, for I was very proud and fancied that if the pagan poems of love left me unmoved that was because I had the gift of chastity right from God Himself and I scorned sensual pleasures and those tempted by them. I had forgotten, you see, that chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.
“As I have said, the words of the poets did not tempt me, for words are only marks on the page with no life save what we give them. But in Rome there were not only the old books, daughters, but something much worse.
“There were statues. Now you must understand that these are not such as you can imagine from our books, like Saint John or the Virgin; the ancients wrought so cunningly in stone that it is like magic; one stands before the marble holding one’s breath, waiting for it to move and speak. They are not statues at all but beautiful naked men and women. It is a city of sea-gods pouring water, daughter Sibihd and daughter Hedwic, of athletes about to throw the discus, and runners and wrestlers and young emperors, and the favorites of kings, but they do not walk the streets like real men, for they are all of stone.
“There was one Apollo, all naked, which I knew I should not look on but which I always made some excuse to my companions to pass by, and this statue, although three miles distant from my dwelling, drew me as if by magic. Oh, he was fair to look on! Fairer than any youth alive now in Germany, or in the world, I think. And then all the old loves of the pagan poets came back to me: Dido and Aeneas, the taking of Venus and Mars, the love of the moon, Diana, for the shepherd boy—and I thought that if my statue could only come to life, he would utter honeyed love-words from the old poets and would be wise and brave, too, and what woman could resist him?”
Here she stopped and looked at Sister Sibihd but Sibihd only stared on, holding the little blue flowers. It was Sister Hedwic who cried, one hand pressed to her heart:
“Did you pray, Abbess?”
“I did,” said Radegunde solemnly, “and yet my prayers kept becoming something else. I would pray to be delivered from the temptation that was in the statue and then, of course, I would have to think of the statue itself, and then I would tell myself that I must run, like the nymph Daphne, to be armored and sheltered within a laurel tree, but my feet seemed to be already rooted to the ground, and then at the last minute I would flee and be back at my prayers again. But it grew h
arder each time and at last the day came when I did not flee.”
“Abbess, you?” cried Hedwic with a gasp. Thorvald, keeping his watch a little way from us, looked surprised. I was very pleased—I loved to see the Abbess astonish people; it was one of her gifts—and at seven I had no knowledge of lust except that my little thing felt good sometimes when I handled it to make water, and what had that to do with statues coming to life or women turning into laurel trees? I was more interested in mad Sibihd, the way children are; I did not know what she might do, or if I should be afraid of her, or if I should go mad myself, what it would be like. But the Abbess was laughing gently at Hedwic’s amazement.
“Why not me?” said the Abbess. “I was young and healthy and had no special grace from God any more than the hens or the cows do! Indeed I burned so with desire for that handsome young hero—for so I had made him in my mind, as a woman might do with a man she has seen a few times on the street—that thoughts of him tormented me waking and sleeping. It seemed to me that because of my vows I could not give myself to this Apollo of my own free will, so I would dream that he took me against my will, and oh, what an exquisite pleasure that was!”
Here Hedwic’s blood came all to her face and she covered it with her hands. I could see Thorvald grinning, back where he watched us.
“And then,” said the Abbess, as if she had not seen either of them, “a terrible fear came to my heart that God might punish me by sending a ravisher who would use me unlawfully, as I had dreamed my Apollo did, and that I would not even wish to resist him, and would feel the pleasures of a base lust, and would know myself a whore and a false nun forever after. This fear both tormented and drew me. I began to steal looks at young men in the streets, not letting the other Sisters see me do it, thinking: Will it be he? Or he? Or he?
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 360