The Secret Book of Paradys (20 page)

He said nothing. His companion said, in wonder, “Your living
shade
, Pierre.”

Jehanine said to Pierre, “You must come with me.”

The other student said, “
Oh
no. Come on, Pierre. This is some rogue.”

Jehanine stepped in their path. She shoved the student away from her brother. Being tipsy and fatigued, nor having either the strength of her hard life, he stumbled back and fell into the hearth, banging his head, landing among the bones and ashes. He lay there stunned, and presently threw up there, which caused discontent in several dark quarters of the inn.

While that went on, Jehanine drew her brother after her, staring in his
eyes, beckoning to him but no longer touching. He followed, he did not seem to know why.

As they went out through the door, he said. “Who are you?”

“Your sister,” said Jehanine. But not aloud.

She led him almost listlessly to the alley where the
Imago
thieves waited. She pulled him by a leash of air. Then, in the alley, she took her brother’s hand and drew him forward.

“See,” she said to the thieves. A light flared and went out. Three of them leapt at him and flung a sack over his head, shoulders and arms. Pierre struggled. They beat him and he fell and was scrambled away with. They dived and tore a route into a copse of gutted hovels, where ratlets swarmed from their advance.

She stood by, she watched, lamped in the glow of a far-off lightcast – some brothel’s beacon – as they removed the garments from Pierre’s body, the dyed leather belt and fashionable shoes. At his throat, the topaz glared. They were leaving it till last. Pierre lay moaning, his head still furled in the sack.

“Now what?” said one.

They crowded grinning, and slowly unravelled the cloth from their captive’s face.

“Your kin, decidedly.” They lifted him over on to his belly. “Do you want him?”

“Incest,” said Jehan. Jehan smiled. Then walked off and leaned on a post, not watching finally what was done to Pierre Belnard, turn by turn, by the gang.

But Jehanine heard Pierre scream more than once, a hoarse masculine shriek. She had not cried out at her own rape. Nor had she been so appreciated, for his abusers spoke love-words to her brother.

At length, there was silence, but for the heartbeat of the City, a strange noise Jehanine had begun to hear, compounded of every beating heart that inhabited Paradys. Uncovering her eyes, she noticed that the beacon light had grown in magnitude. Next a cockerel crew deep in the alleyways. Then one by one the bells sounded across the river, closer at hand, the tongue of Prima Hora, dawn.

Jehan’s protector, whose name she had picked out as Conrad, shook her shoulder now. He sweated, and his odour was ripe. She moved away from him. “You’re proved,” he said. “You’re one of us. Sin for damnable sin.” The others mumbled. “Now do it to him, too.”

“No,” said Jehanine.

She walked towards the heap of flesh that was her brother. He lay on his side now, senseless perhaps, breathing through his open mouth. He was naked, covered by blood and filth. She leaned down and drew up his head a
little by the soaked silk of hair. The dawn was spilling on the world. His eyes spasmed open. He looked full at her, knowing her, if not who she was. It was a look so terrible, so agonised and ruined, so utterly devoid of any hope for help or pity, that it reminded her of the face of the crucified Christ, and she shuddered at it.

“It never happened,” she said to Pierre softly. “Such a disgusting thing.” Then she said to the others, “I don’t want him. I’ll have something else.” She ripped the crucifix from his throat, and let his face fall back into the dirt.

The gang of robbers eyed her in the revelation of the light.

One indicated Pierre. “Better kill him. Then scatter.” To Jehanine he added, “You give that here.”

“It’s mine,” said Jehan.

Turning, Jehan bounded out and up from the wreckage. A running male figure, sprinting westward from the sunrise, towards the note of a bell earlier identified as that of the Angel.

Some of them dashed after Jehanine.

It was a dream: she lost them easily.

It was a dream, but in her hand she held the topaz cross.

Well then, waken now. But waking was not to be had.

She saw the nunnery ahead of her, rising from a tide of flotsam streets. The dwellings were of better quality here, and the river, a road of crystal cut by a ship’s mast, was not far away – none of these things had she known before.

She came below the wall where the old bakery was, and saw the tops of the tree she had climbed, two and a half times her height above her. The sacks were gone, but tucked against the stone her clothes lay in a bundle almost as she left them. And down the wall itself, from a bough of the trees, hung a hempen rope. The dwarf had returned again to aid her. For, after all, it was not a dream.

She tied her female clothes to her body, and seizing the rope, climbed up the wall. In the tree, she undid and coiled the rope and took it down with her.

She changed her garments amid the bushes under the tree, in the wetness of the dew, for the nuns would be coming from the church to breakfast, and in the refectory some of the aged lay-sisters would be making the porridge.

As she went however to her cell, accessories bunched in her skirts and excuses ready, Jehanine met no one.

Into the chest she laid all her new possessions. The rope, the male attire, a knife Conrad had awarded her during their trek to the
Cockatrice
. Lastly, she laid the topaz cross upon her pallet. The thong had been broken and lost. She would search out another cord, then she might wear it, under her dress.

Paler than the dawn, the Eastern topaz shone for her. From desert lands
by a sea of salt, under the mountains where God had walked, and from whose stones He had carved his devastating laws, from the tombs of prophets and messiahs, from the dazzling shrines of the Infidel, this jewel had come.

She saw again her brother’s appalling face.

She put the crucifix away into the chest.

Sister Marie-Lis paused in an arch of the south cloister, as Jehanine watched her. Presently, her hands folded in her sleeves, the young nun floated out on to the plot of grass. The dry fountain with the wild-haired stone child holding its bowl had been garlanded again. The child had a kind of crown of thorns of twisted leafless creeper. Sister Marie-Lis seemed not to pay attention to these things. She came to the opposite arm of the cloister, where the northern girl and three of the novices were sweeping.

“Come here, Jhane.”

Jehanine approached. Jehanine’s hair was confined in its scarf from which tendrils escaped like rays of winter sun. Otherwise she was decorous, always excepting her looks.

The young nun eyed her, then called the novices.

“Where is the novice Osanne?”

The girls looked about.

“But she’s here –”

“She came out with us. She had no breakfast. She sets herself penances.”

“The Mother says Osanne is arrogant in her humility –”

“Hush,” said Sister Marie-Lis. “It was the duty of Osanne this morning to attend the infirmary.”

“Well, she’d be pleased to do it.” The infirmary contained sick, senile nuns and vats for boiling soiled linen.

Sister Marie-Lis said, “Our Lord himself had compassion on the sick. On all who call to him.”

Jehanine raised her eyes. She listened, and heard Sister Marie-Lis saying:

“Did he not make the world against the will of his mighty father? Did he not risk all and forfeit all that mankind might live? And as he fell, his torch kindled the moon and stars, and the roots of mountains.”

Then one of the novices exclaimed, “Why, there is Osanne. She’s on the flags on her knees, scrubbing and
suffering
.”

Along the length of the cloister, over the parti-stripes of shadow and sun, the mystic figure of Osanne rocked with its rags like a swaying serpent.

“Osanne,” cried the young nun sternly, “leave that work and go at once to the infirmary.”

Osanne seemed not to hear. Sister Marie-Lis took a step, smooth as if walking on water, towards the kneeling shape. And in that moment Osanne
rose. Without a look or word, she went away, passing through the elbow of the cloister, and out of it into the garden. Her dress flashed very white as she vanished.

“That wasn’t Osanne, sister!” said one of the novices. “And see – the flags aren’t even wet –”

“Hush,” said the young nun once again. She found a hand in her sleeves and touched it to her forehead and breast.

Jehanine felt a desire to follow Osanne as Jehan. Or she might bring in one of the thieves, Conrad possibly, and give Osanne to him as she had given – that other –

A dreadful pain tore through Jehanine, unseaming her. She sank suddenly to the ground and lay still. When the novices squeaked and came running, peering into her face, Jehanine covered her eyes with her hands. The young nun had gone away. Then the bell rang: Tiers. The novices fluttered. They must go to church at Tiers, and what of Jhane?

Jehanine got up slowly. What had happened to her was nothing, she was at her monthly bleeding, it was only that.

As the novices ran away, she realised she would not be able to return among the robbers for a few days, for at these times they might scent her, like a bitch, and so learn her true sex.

As for Pierre, they would have killed him, by what they had done, or afterwards with their knives.

She must think of him as dead, and of herself as his murderer. That was all it amounted to.

Going over to Osanne’s discarded pail and rags, Jehanine detected a curious but delicious fragrance. It fled in a moment. Kneeling down, she began to wash the stones carefully.

In the succeeding days, Osanne was spied at her duties and devotions continuously, but not consistently. It appeared she must be sick, or that the passion of her faith drove her often to lonely prayer – for in the church they saw her most of all. But on their hurrying in she went away, was gone. She spoke to no one. They said the Mother had sent for Osanne, but it seemed Osanne did not attend the Mother.

“See,
look
. There she goes, she,” said one of the novices to Jehanine, as they passed together along the roofed passage between the church’s north wall and the House of the Novitiate. The weather was turning chilly, but they carried between them a cask of candle stubs, due to be melted down for new, and this was heavy, heating work. The figure of Osanne flitting before them gave an excuse to hesitate and lower the cask. “Look how white her skirt is, and her scarf. She must bleach them over and over –” the process of bleaching,
which intimately involved mules’ urine, was disliked; doubtless Osanne would revel in it.

“Osanne!” cried the novice. “Let’s run and catch her.”

They ran, but did not catch. Beyond the passageway, the hostel court was empty, and the churchyard beyond empty also.

They returned for the cask of candles, and the novice started to talk of her marriage to Christ.

Soon after the bell of Matines, Jehanine dreamed the dwarf came into her cell. He carried a stone bowl on his shoulder, the contents of which – fire – he tipped on to the floor.

“Fero, fero,” said he. “Why do you make me wait about under the damned wall?” said he. “Get up and come to the Inn of the Apparition. You know the way. Or you can find it.”

Jehanine opened her eyes and the fire and the dwarf were gone. Her female bleeding had ended, and getting up she opened the chest and looked in at the items there, the male clothes and the rope, and the topaz cross.

Soon a long-haired boy came out of the cell and took his quiet stealth across the courts. The nuns were at their disembodied chanting in the church, but in the garden a nightingale, disturbed, whirred mournfully that the summer had died. Here and there, the garden had begun to smell oddly. The stink of the midden had grown less, but the moulder of fallen leaves, where visiting cats had relieved themselves, seemed sharpened by the cold night. The elder well smelled bad, and might require cleansing. The stealthy boy went on, found his tree, climbed it and roped it, and spent himself into the dark City. The cares of a nunnery were for a while no longer his.

The
Imago
, which owed its Latin name to some obscure story entailing the Roman troops once quartered on this bank of the river (when Paradys was but a hedge of huts the other), had not changed: it roared and thumped, and scaling the stair to the upper room, Jehan had slight need of caution.

She did not knock. She flung the door wide. There they were, staring astonished at her. The dwarf she could not see, but Conrad was the first to his feet cursing her. Others lunged forward, but halted. She they thought a he had come back to them. What plot was in it?

“Thief,” said the fat man.

“Bloody tricky swine,” said the man with the scar down his long nose.

Jehan shrugged elaborately, in the way of young men.

“Did you bring it?” cracked out Conrad.

“What?”

“The jewel –”

“It’s mine. I didn’t come to act a contrition.”

“Get him,” said Scar-Nose. There was a surge again, which now faltered on Jehan’s high, maybe unbroken, voice.

“I’ll find you better.”

They cascaded against her, but the vicious rush had become a pawing query. She kicked and pushed them off.

“Who leads this herd?” she said.

“No man. We’re one. A brotherhood. An equal share, an equal voice for all.”

She supposed then it was actually the dwarf who ruled the gang. She had suspected it. But they were embarrassed to admit the fact, pretended otherwise, and resorted to high-flown phrases of fraternity.

“Tonight
I’ll
lead you,” said Jehan. “Again.”

She was mocked. She took no notice. Where, in her apron and skirts she had no say, now, her breasts bound, and weaponed with cloth in her hose, she had a say, and would say so.

“Be quiet, you pigs. Listen. Didn’t I give you nice sport before?”

“And then cheated us.”

“What’s a paltry bit of coloured glass? It had value for me, not for you.” For a second she was prompted to demand if they had knifed their victim, Pierre, her brother. Something stuck her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and when she could speak again she said, “The upper bank of the City, near that great big church they’re fussing up. I know a woman there. It’s a wealthy house. You’ll see how we’ll find out its secrets.”