The Secret Book of Paradys (29 page)

At first, he was almost unable to take it. But after he had had some, and slept a while, he took more. There was enough of the food for some days.

At the hearth fire, she kept the cauldron heated, and also burned the stained and ruined linen. The wine and apples fortified her now. When she lost consciousness it was never for very long. She had fainted repeatedly in the beginning, kneeling by her cooking.

Some dream told her she had committed a sin, heeding the angel, but she laughed aloud at it. She was full of joy. She would not bother with the rest.

She knew also that miracles attended upon miracles, and that, before Pierre had consumed all the broth, some means of escape would come to them.

One morning, a colossal thunder-clap shook the whole house. It was a group of mailed men banging on the plaster of the lower house with axes and mallets.

Jhane looked down at them dreamily from a window.

“Sister! How are you faring? Are there any more with you? Any still sick with the pest?”

“One man with me. Neither sick now, but starving.”

“You were heard calling, but they said it was a ghost.
I
said, that’s the gentle nun went in there, to help the mason. And God will have spared her.”

He was the soldier who had sneered at her when she had done so. Now his face was bright and young with happiness.

“The plague’s over. It’s gone. Old Death’s taken himself off.”

A chunk of plaster gave way and fell with a crash. The men cheered and hullooed, waving their mallets up at her in salute.

“The young man with me is very feeble,” said Jhane. “Please will some of you come in and carry him down.”

She left the window and went to Pierre to tell him, but he had heard, of course.

He was handsome today, his looks returning like the spring. Under his tunic, hastily pulled on for the outing, the topaz glinted. He did not know her, but he said, “Sister, my own kindred couldn’t have been more tender to me. You saved my life, perhaps my soul. Do you know, I was apprenticed to an artisan. But I heard he died. Well, I’ll find one to take me on. God gave me a talent. I must use it, to God’s glory.”

Then, when a doorway was smashed, and the men came tramping up the stairs, he said, “You have a look of my own sisters, isn’t that strange?”

But his eyes were still dimmed over.

It was two of the soldiers, not Pierre, who noticed her own plight.

“Ssh,” she cautioned, as another of the men bore Pierre away. “Tell him nothing. Don’t mention it when he’s by.”

“But in God’s name, how did this happen?”

Used perhaps to the wounds of war, the two soldiers stayed by her, and renewed the wrappings and bindings. As if seeing the rough staunching by fire, however, for the first, and the protruding sawn bone, so very white, Jhane herself turned ill. When she recovered, she was in the street in the arms of the soldier who had sneered, and now held her like his child. A mild rain kissed her face. “Ssh,” she said again.

“How –” he said. “This sacrifice – did you? How –”

“The Lord guided me and gave me strength.”

Of such matters legends were made.

They took her to another house of nuns, much depleted since the Death, whose inhabitants cared for her in costive silence. The surgeon, a man who had fled the City, returned and did not credit the tale. This woman had been attacked by criminals in the hysteria and panic of the pest. Confronting Jhane with his verdict, he was pleased by her acquiescence. He prophesied that the upper portion of the limb might grow infected, in which case the work would be to do again, the cut higher, and she might die. He did not fear this death, nor warning her lavishly of it, for it was not in itself contagious.

She heard no more of Pierre, who had gone away with his golden head lying on the newest rescuer’s shoulder. She did not give a thought to paintings and carvings which perhaps, by his skill, might come to adorn the churches of Paradys. Or to the love he would effortlessly win, or the jewel Belnard had given him.

Part of her own self had become a part of him, yet even this reverie did not prevail upon her. Recollecting her act, the use of the tools found in the house, the tight-binding and cauterisation, the subsequent preparation of the meat – into which had intruded a ghostly figment of Osanne (whose own disintegrated arm had been raised from the well) – then Jhane herself doubted that she could have performed the deed. She did not at all regret it.

A pain-wrought phantom arm and hand, to the very fingers, remained to her below the elbow. Their presence was so decided that often she would reach out with them, finding with surprise she could not then take hold of things in this way. The phantom was, she knew, the incorporeal arm of her spirit. Unlike flesh, it could not be severed from her.

When she left the nun’s hospital they were greatly relieved, for the proximity of a martyr and saint had oppressed them.

Jhane herself was unencumbered. She was already putting from her mind the image of her brother. She did not feel holy. No more than she hugged to herself the mad terror of her crimes did she clasp the greater terror and madness of her act in the mason’s house. She did not believe she had been valorous, extraordinary, tested, or kind.

The unlocked doors of the nunnery gate had saved them from being forced, for at some time persons had entered. They were gone now, and there had been no desecration, only a certain amount of human dirt left lying. Nor were there any corpses. Jhane set herself, slowly, to clean the yards.

The milk had turned to curds in the refectory-kitchen, and these she ate, along with such fruit and salt fish as the invaders of the nunnery had not devoured. The water in the refectory well was crystalline.

As she ragged and broomed, the flight of a sudden bird among the empty
cloisters, or the flutter of stray sunshine, might cause Jhane to glance about her. But the ghosts did not return.

She would have rung the bell in the tower, but, lacking an arm, it was inconceivable she would be able to do it. She regretted this, the gap where its notes should have sounded oddly disturbed her. She missed also the chanting of the nuns, and sometimes thought she did hear it, but the susurrus was in her own head.

At first she went to the church solely to see what had been done there, and if the great window was broken, but only a little debris had been blown in, and rain, which had formed and dried in pools in the uneven floor. The window was intact. So, on days when the sun shone, and at dawn, Jhane would go to look at the picture, at the Angel Lucefiel, Son of Morning and Bringer of Light, sword drawn and still falling eternally through the sky, the solar halo behind his head, on wings of fire, one foot against a gilded orb. Perhaps it was the daylight which blazed through this image that gave it such reason for her. It was the only artistic form she had ever understood, and the only iconic thing, apart from her doll in childhood, she had ever found plausible.

At night, or when exhausted, Jhane went to her former sleeping place in the cell, in the wooden hostel, and lay down there.

Sometimes she dreamed, on the pallet, that new nuns had filled the stone desert and were at the offices, or hoeing the south garden, while the novices learned from painted books in the House of the Novitiate. It seemed to her this might come to be, and that they would accept her, although she had not been made a Bride, and that it would be very simple to live in this way for a life of years, knowing everything by rote, and beyond the rote, wedded to the certainty of the fact.

Then again, she dreamed that the Nunnery of the Angel had been for centuries a ruin, or that it did not exist, that she had imagined or conjured it. Or that, even though the walls and courts were present, the order had not worshipped Lucefiel, the Christ, but some other.

None of this concerned Jhane. Her dreams were not fears or even questionings. Merely rehearsals of different chance.

She did not attempt – she never had attempted – to count the days. Spring came blustering through the nunnery, and lit the columns and the garden with yellow and white flowers.

As she crossed the south cloister, Jhane saw that the stone child by the fountain had become a dwarf, who got to his feet and bowed and capered, revealing the stone child was there after all, behind him.

“Buy a ribbon,” said the dwarf. “Or have you cut your hair and shaved your quaint skull?”

“I have not,” said Jhane. “But neither do you have your tray of ribbons.”

“True. When you saw me last I was a king. When I saw
you
last, you were a boy. What are you, female or male? Or both – some abomination.”

But Jhane moved on towards the church. The dwarf went with her, and entered as she did through the side door into the nave.

It was almost the hour of Tiers, and the sun filled the Great Light.

They regarded it, the nun and the dwarf.

When Jhane sank to her knees, the dwarf was taller than she. He seemed to be considering this. Then he walked forward, between Jhane and the window. And he began to stand up in his skin.

He became Belnard her step-father, he became the apothecary of her journey, and then he became – spreading and billowing – the fat woman with the keys – and then stretching thin and bearded, he was Master Motius, and, getting fleshy and smooth again, the mason, and losing the flesh, Conrad the thief, and folding inwards and out, in a quick succession, pious Osanne, the Mother, the young nun Marie-Lis. And then, he was Jhane herself.

There she stood, clad as she had been in the bounty of the nunnery, in that plain gown, but her hair was loose and savage about her, her eyes gleaming.

“It’s very clever,” said the real Jhane, still kneeling. “How do you do it?”

“Ah,” said the dwarf-Jhane. “That’s telling, that is.”

And then he rose up and opened into fire and wings and was an angel, all golden, who extended his hand to her, while through the translucence of his garments she saw his heart burning like a wounded golden rose.

Jhane sighed.

“Was it always you?”

“Perhaps,” he said, “or not.” But she barely heard his words through the music of his voice. Leave yourself, said the music. You may come back to her.

And Jhane left herself, kneeling there on the floor of the church. She lifted with the angel into the sky. She was an angel herself. She was not indeed,
herself
. There was no gender, neither female nor male. Jhane was a winged creature of the light. Above her the sun, below, the earth, which was a round orb, shining.

They flew freely, the two angels. They embraced and sang and communed without speech and touched all things and glorified all things, and
were
.

Jhane will die?

Yes, although not yet.

And the world? Will the world end?

One day the world will end.

When will it end? Surely sin will not destroy it?

Sin will not destroy the world. While the world has sin it cannot end. Not until the world is perfect may the world end. The world is for a purpose. But
when the world is perfect and whole, and all things therein, and all mankind, perfect and whole, then the world will be permitted its finish. There will be a great shining, as in the window you see it, the coming of a great light, like fire. And in that time, the world will end, and all life find its liberty.

Life is the dream, said the angel who had been Jhane.

So be it, said the Angel Esrafel. But let it be a sweet dream, at least.

Then Jhane opened her eyes in the church, cramped and chilled, alone, and night was falling in the window.

She could not read or write, and so she could not set down her vision of the apocalypse. It is often the way. This she understood, and that it did not matter in any case.

Rising, she went quietly to the refectory, lit a candle, and ate curds and drank water behind her wooden screen.

“It is Lucifer, Lord Satan, who rules the world,” said the priest. “To survive here, we’re bound to worship him.”

He showed them a drawing on parchment, a rose transfixed by a dagger.

“Remember this sign. We meet here, under the old church. You will be obliged to render passwords. In time, who knows what riches and power we shall accumulate, through the favour of our Master. I myself,” he said, “survived the plague. That was his sign to me. God smote me, but Satan raised me to do
his
work and glorify
him
. You’re an artist of the City. Who spoke to you of this secret society?”

“Several,” said the young man. “But Motius the Artisan was once my tutor.”

“The magician? Yes. His house was burned up and flaming fiends carried him to Hell. You understand, there’s no escape at last. It ends in fire.”

“Hah. Yes.” The young man smiled.

“But meanwhile, a life of wishes fulfilled. His servants he never cheats. All the joys of the flesh, full dominion over others. The end is horror, but you may have three hundred years of pleasures before that payment comes due.”

Through the heavy frozen passageways they went, into a chamber drawn with symbols, floor and walls and ceiling, where the worshippers waited in silence.

“Should I take off this?” asked the beautiful young artist, indicating a crucifix at his throat.

“No. Why would he fear it? He ousted
that
one long ago. It may amuse him. Leave it on.”

The ceremony began. It had elements of a mass, of a communion, and of a christening, for the new initiates were to be sworn and bound, and marked in blood. Three black cocks were sacrificed, and the sooty tapers set alight. Eastern incense smoked from the censers.

Pierre Belnard had once attended such rites in Motius’ studio, but been bored by them. His adventures since had urged him back. There were fever dreams which haunted him still, and memories of the Death, and some story he had heard of a nun who hacked off her hand to feed a starving man walled up in a plague house.

As the rituals went on, however, he grew drowsy.

They had said to him, the other living students with whom he had been reunited, that Prince Lucifer would manifest tonight, to greet his worshippers. Now everyone shouted and howled, and Pierre joined in the tumult, lay on the floor when they did, but felt a sensation of distance, and a wish to go drinking.