Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (417 page)

“Then I will go with you,” said Radegunde. “That is very just and my presence will calm the people. To see us together will assure them that no harm is meant. You are a good man, Torvald—forgive me; I call you as your nephew did so often. Come, Boy News, hold on to me.

“Open the gate!” she called then; “All is safe!” and with the five men (one of whom was that young Thorfinn who had hated her so) we waited while the great logs were pulled back. There was little space within, but the people shrank back at the sight of those fierce warriors and opened a place for us.

I looked back and the Norsemen had come in and were standing just inside the walls, on either side the gate, with their swords out and their shields up. The crowd parted for us more slowly as we reached the main tower, with the Abbess repeating constantly, “Be calm, people, be calm. All is well,” and deftly speaking by name to this one or that. It was much harder when the people gasped upon hearing the big logs pushed shut with a noise like thunder, and it was very close on the stairs; I heard her say something like an apology in the queer foreign tongue, something that probably meant, “I’m sorry that we must wait.” It seemed an age until the stairs were even partly clear and I saw what the Abbess had meant by the cumbering of a crowd; a man might swing a weapon in the press of people but not very far and it was more likely he would simply fall over someone and crack his head. We gained the great room with the big crucifix of painted wood and the little one of pearls and gold, and the scarlet hangings worked in gold thread that I had played robbers behind so often before I learned what real robbers were: these tall, frightening men whose eyes glistened with greed at what I had fancied every village had. Most of the Sisters had stayed in the great room, but somehow it was not so crowded, as the folk had huddled back against the walls when the Norsemen came in. The youngest girls were all in a corner, terrified—one could smell it, as one can in people—and when that young Thorfinn went for the little gold-and-pearl cross, Sister Sibihd cried in a high, cracked voice, “It is the body of our Christ!” and leapt up, snatching it from the wall before he could get to it.

“Sibihd!” exclaimed the Abbess, in as sharp a voice as I had ever heard her use; “Put that back or you will feel the weight of my hand, I tell you!”

Now it is odd, is it not, that a young woman desperate enough not to care about death at the hands of a Norse pirate should nonetheless be frightened away at the threat of getting a few slaps from her Abbess? But folk are like that. Sister Sibihd returned the cross to its place (from whence young Thorfinn took it) and fell back among the nuns, sobbing, “He desecrates Our Lord God!”

“Foolish girl!” snapped the Abbess. “God only can consecrate or desecrate; man cannot. That is a piece of metal.”

Thorvald said something sharp to Thorfinn, who slowly put the cross back on its hook with a sulky look which said, plainer than words: Nobody gives me what I want. Nothing else went wrong in the big room or the Abbess’s study or the storerooms, or out in the kitchens. The Norsemen were silent and kept their hands on their swords but the Abbess kept talking in a calm way in both tongues; to our folk she said, “See? It is all right but everyone must keep still. God will protect us.” Her face was steady and clear and I believed her a saint, for she had saved Sister Sibihd and the rest of us.

But this peacefulness did not last, of course. Something had to go wrong in all that press of people; to this day I do not know what. We were in a corner of the long refectory, which is the place where the Sisters or Brothers eat in an Abbey, when something pushed me into the wall and I fell, almost suffocated by the Abbess’s lying on top of me. My head was ringing and on all sides there was a terrible roaring sound with curses and screams, a dreadful tumult as if the walls had come apart and were falling on everyone. I could hear the Abbess whispering something in Latin over and over in my ear. There were dull, ripe sounds, worse than the rest, which I know now to have been the noise steel makes when it is thrust into bodies. This all seemed to go on forever and then it seemed to me that the floor was wet. Then all became quiet, I felt the Abbess Radegunde get off me. She said:

“So this is how you wash your floors up north.” When I lifted my head from the wet rushes and saw what she meant, I was very sick into the corner. Then she picked me up in her arms and held my face against her bosom so that I would not see but it was no use; I had already seen: all the people lying about sprawled on the floor with their bellies coming out, like heaps of dead fish, old Walafrid with an axe-handle standing out of his chest—he was sitting up with his eyes shut in a press of bodies that gave him no room to lie down—and the young beekeeper, Uta, from the village, who had been so merry, lying on her back with her long braids and her gown all dabbled in red dye and a great stain of it on her belly. She was breathing fast and her eyes were wide open. As we passed her, the noise of her breathing ceased.

The Abbess said mildly, “Thy people are thorough housekeepers, Earl Split-gut.”

Thorvald Einarsson roared something at us and the Abbess replied softly, “Forgive me, good friend. You protected me and the boy and I am grateful. But nothing betrays a man’s knowledge of the German like a word that bites, is it not so? And I had to be sure.”

It came to me then that she had called him “Torvald” and reminded him of his sister’s son so that he would feel he must protect us if anything went wrong. But now she would make him angry, I thought, and I shut my eyes tight. Instead he laughed and said in odd, light German, “I did no housekeeping but to stand over you and your pet. Are you not grateful?”

“Oh very, thank you,” said the Abbess with such warmth as she might show to a Sister who had brought her a rose from the garden, or another who copied her work well, or when I told her news, or if Ita the cook made a good soup. But he did not know that the warmth was for everyone and so seemed satisfied. By now we were in the garden and the air was less foul; she put me down, although my limbs were shaking, and I clung to her gown, crumpled, stiff, and blood-reeking though it was. She said, “Oh, my God, what a deal of washing hast Thou given us!” She started to walk towards the gate and Thorvald Einarsson took a step towards her. She said, without turning round: “Do not insist, Thorvald, there is no reason to lock me up. I am forty years old and not likely to be running away into the swamp, what with my rheumatism and the pain in my knees and the folk needing me as they do.”

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.”