Women in the Wall (25 page)

It was when I was fourteen. The territory of the city of Poitiers had been invaded by the Burgundians and also by Chilperic’s men. They had been back and forth several times in the last few years—so often that the horror had become almost normal. We had heard so many stories that none surprised us. Death raged and epidemics reached even into the convent. Outside, people were making bread with pounded fern-roots and grape-seeds. Some, in order to eat, had sold themselves into slavery. Others had eaten green roots, swollen up and died. We distributed food and rationed ourselves so as to help the starving. Some of our nuns had had relatives killed in the civil war, but none of us had seen it close up—and then it burst into our own estates. We saw the flames one night and by next day the invaders had gone. They had been just a handful of men and nobody could tell why they had come. Some said it was a mistake but one fact was sure—our steward brought the news—Merofled and Theudechild—my foster-sisters—had been raped. It was decided that I should load a mule with medicines and provisions and go to them at once. I did. I remember that the effort—I had trouble getting the mule to move—and the rush as well as the shock of the news dazed me and at first I did not feel much. I was in suspense: waiting to feel. I kept poking the mule and shouting at him. Perhaps I was trying to keep the feeling off me? When I reached the vineyard near my foster-family’s farm, I began to smell smoke and cinders: the same woody smell as an autumn bonfire. But it was not a bonfire. The vines were gone—nothing left but a mash of black stumps. The house was gone. It had been made of wood and mud and wattle and must have burned like straw. Now the cinders were being blown away on the wind. In a few months there would be no trace of it at all. Then—no; I can’t—
must
, must go on. I had turned to leave when I saw a figure on hands and knees, scrabbling in the cinders: black-faced, filthy, all mutters and tatters, wheezing, muddy buttocks, a wild goatish eye. It stood on two legs and I recognized Hiltga, my foster-mother. She was holding a clay pot which she had dug out of the ashes. I tried to put my arms around her but it was like putting them around—a tree. She had the same empty look of the refugees who came for sanctuary: sightless, wide, struck blind like the pearly eyes of a dog—but of course she was not blind. I asked her questions and she mumbled, not answering but talking about her clay pot. “Tough enough!” She held it up. “Won’t ever be the same though. That’s all I found. Imagine!” I asked again about her daughters. “I’ve brought some food and stuff”, I said, “from Mother Agnes!”

“Mother Agnes!” She peered at me. She could see after all. “It’s you, is it.” she said.

“Yes, Hiltga. I’ve brought things for Theudechild and Merofled. Won’t you tell me where they are? I have food for them from the convent.”

“The convent!” Her eyes narrowed. There was a spark in the singed middle of them as if someone had blown on a pair of nearly burnt-out coals. “The convent!” she began to lilt, singing at me in her rage of mockery. “The soldiers didn’t go there, did they, oh no, no! That’s holy sanctuary. The crow doesn’t pluck out the crow’s eye but poor folk bear the brunt.
You
were safe while my girls suffered!” She staggered. There was a stream of spittle flowing down her chin. Her eyes were flecked with red. I tried to steady her but she pushed my hand from her. Violently. She was muttering again, but now I could make out the drift: it was the sort of old lament that tenants take up in bad times, a familiar, repetitious, ready-made railing. She was angry because the convent had collected all the crops into the convent barn and the soldiers, finding nothing, had been maddened into raping her daughters. “Gentle folk and convent folk are always safe!” she raged. “
Sanctuary
forsooth!” Then she began to sing an old rhyme which I’d often heard before about a tenant who didn’t pay the eggs he owed and was punished by the lord. “He was caught,” she sang, “he was hung. He was buried in the dung. That’s the place for poor folk, isn’t it?” she shrieked. “The dung! The dung! The dung!”

I thought she was mad. She was. Dangerous too. She kept running cindery hands over her face which was a mess of spittle and black soot.

“I’ll go and look for Merofled and Theudechild!” I told her and managed to pull my mule from a bush of scorched leaves he had been eating. I prodded his rump and dragged him off. A howl came from behind me. “Who hides their dung?” she was shrieking. “Who? Who covers up their dirty doings? We do. I did. But when troubles come the convent whores are safe! Their sins are visited on us!” She rushed at me and shoved her face into mine. Her breath was sour. “They burnt the house,” she screamed, “looking for treasure.
Treasure
! ‘This may be a convent estate’, I told them, ‘but the convent hides no treasure with us!’ All it hides with us is its bastards! I should never have taken you in, you nun’s get!” She was leaning on top of me, pressing me back against the mule. I could feel his stomach pulsing behind me and the fever in her body in front. I was as helpless as corn between two quernstones. Her words fell on me like hail and I didn’t take them in. I was afraid she would hit or strangle me. Suddenly, she stepped backwards, fell silent and, some moments later said in a new voice, an empty, worn whisper of a voice: “I never did tell you, did I?” she asked. “I kept my bargain and little good it did me. Yes, you’re the abbess’s bastard, Mother Agnes’s by-child.” She turned away. Speaking over her shoulder, in the same dull tone, she told me where to find my sisters. I poked the mule forward and went to look for them. What else could I do? I dreaded being alone and dreaded going back to the convent.

That’s it. I’ve remembered it all, or the worst bits anyway. Remember, God, I did it deliberately. I offered it to you. I brought it on myself. I am broken again. The horror comes back. My vision is porous. When I put myself together—as I have done, as I will—carefully, delicately, the way one rivets and sticks a smashed plate, the mended object is always more fragile than before. There are little joins which don’t join, little splinters lost, holes and hollows through which certainties leak. I have never been certain since. My certitude was the convent and the convent hinged on the abbess. Like the axle of a wheel, she was its centre. Behind her was Radegunda who talked to God, but it was the abbess who kept us together. What Hiltga said tore a hole in my world. Oh, I am calmer now, infinitely calmer. I didn’t reason then. I didn’t know what I felt—love for Agnes, pity, horror, fear? It was all mixed up with seeing my poor sisters and the burnt-down house. It was a shock. My spine buckled. My eyes were dazzled as though I had been looking at the sun. When I woke up in the convent sick-cell—they told me later I had collapsed on getting back and they had put me there—when I woke up the abbess was nursing me. She was all charity and gentleness. She was sweet. She was damned. She was my mother and I couldn’t tell her I knew without shaming her. I was glad of the fever which kept me from having to talk to her. When it wore off, she left me alone in the sick-cell and I lay awake, hour after hour, thinking about her and wrestling with the question which I could ask nobody since I couldn’t ask her who was my spiritual superior—
was
she damned? Could she be saved? How? I remembered every sermon I had heard about how a sinner could be reconciled to God. St. Caesar, the composer of our Rule, did not believe a public penance was necessary, but other saints were stricter than he. The abbess—my mother—might count on his words and be deceived. Yet how could she, an abbess, perform a public penance, covering her head with goat hair and sprinkling herself with dirt? There was martyrdom. That brought remission of all sins. But why should the abbess be martyred? There were no martyrs in Gaul now, and I didn’t want her martyred. I had rather be martyred myself. That was how I thought up my bargain: my life for her soul. I could not die but I could give up my life.

[
A.D
. 585]

Fortunatus was dining with Bishop Palladius of Saintes. It was the kind of occasion he enjoyed. The bishop was returning to his diocese after attending the Council of Mâcon and must be apprised of some of the gutsiest gossip in Gaul. The only obstacle to pumping it out of him was that Palladius himself had been a trifle too close to the action. He had compromised himself with the
Pretender
, and it must have been touch and go whether King Guntram would accept his apologies. There must have been humiliating moments. One did not like to probe—or rather, yes, one would have liked very much to probe if only one were not seen to do so. Probably, Fortunatus told himself with some amusement, the bishop’s servants would have been the people to ask about it all. They were probably spilling seamy details in his own kitchen at this moment. Sooner or later, these would reach his own ears. Meanwhile, he kept the bishop’s glass filled and the talk on safe, peripheral aspects of the Council. Bishop Praetextatus of Rouen had apparently read some prayers of his own composing.

“Edifying, I suppose,” said Palladius, “but ghastly Latin. Well, I needn’t tell you. You can imagine.”

Fortunatus could.

“Talking of Latin,” said the bishop, “we had one
hilarious
sample of the darkness which is upon us. Can you believe that a bishop, who must in all charity be nameless, asked were women to be included under the general description ‘man’ in the Bible and, if not, whether they had souls at all? It was discovered, after some probing, that his doubts came from his ignorance of the distinction between ‘homo’ and ‘vir’. The pitfalls of semantics! As one brother-bishop pointed out, the gospel description of Jesus as ‘son of man’ would, if narrowly interpreted, mean ‘son of woman’ since Mary was a virgin and no man involved at all. This should have been enough for our episcopal rustic but perhaps, like most rustics, he was a misogynist and eager to unsoul the sex. Anyway, no more was heard from him.”

“A Frank, I suppose?”

“Oh, a Frank!”

The two smiled.

Fortunatus sighed. “Ah yes! Can I give you some more wine? It’s from Provence. Bishop Theodore”,
experimentally
, he dropped the name of the most compromised of the bishops, “sent me some casks a while back.”

Palladius held out his glass. “He was arrested,” he said. “No respect shown for his cloth. Rathar was sent to Marseilles to arrest him. Foreseeably, Rathar seized the opportunity for a little pillage: Church property.”

“Has Rathar”, Fortunatus risked, “been stricken by some heavensent disease?”

“It’s not funny, Fortunatus! It’s grave.”

“Graveyardly in fact—terrible joke. Forgive it.”

“I suppose you want to know the worst?”

“If you can bear to tell. I hope—well I see, as you’re here, that all went well in the end.”

“The end”, said Palladius, “seemed imminent more than once. All our ends. My colleagues put up a terrible show. Shameful. King Guntram was there in all his royal glory, proud as a dog with two tails and outspoken as a northwester; the bishops behaved like schoolboys quailing from their teacher’s stick. Not one had the nerve to stand up to him for as much as a minute. The stick—men at arms, etc.—was much in evidence and of course some, like poor old Praetextatus, have felt it very literally in the past. You can’t expect nerve in a bishop who knows what it is to be flogged and exiled.” Palladius banged his goblet down furiously. “At one point the rumour was that
two-
thirds
of us would be exiled for having either supported Gundovald or failed to oppose him. That didn’t happen but the abbot of Cahors—a most holy man as you know—
was
excommunicated and the Bishop of Dax, an appointee of Gundovald, demoted. The three bishops who
consecrated
him are to pay him an annual pension out of their own pockets. I”, said Palladius bitterly, “am one of the three. All this was voted by the bishops but the decision was Guntram’s. He’s never been so arrogant: like a cock on his own dunghill. Bishops jumped when he farted. Like trained dogs.
I
had to put up with the grossest insults. Before the Council met at all, he summoned us to Orléans where he abused us at his own table. Bertram of Bordeaux is, as you know, my superior and I thought it my duty to cover for him and take most of the blame for the
Bishop-of
-Dax matter. Small thanks I got from Bertram who turned on me in the most viperish way. The man has no sense of solidarity. In the end Guntram seemed to have calmed down. He allowed us to bless him and we thought everything was forgiven if not forgotten. As a sort of kiss of peace, it was decided that I should say mass the following Sunday. Well I started to and, suddenly, in the middle of mass, the king began to bellow at me—I was, of course, at the altar—interrupting the sacrifice, stamping his feet and behaving like an overgrown infant or a lunatic. I could hardly believe my ears. He was howling the most
embarrassing
abuse. Right in the middle of church. Saying he would not hear the sacred service recited by a perjurer and a liar. No point in repeating his other fulminations. The man is unbalanced. I had to leave the altar while the others calmed him down. Have you ever heard of such a thing? He’s a savage, an animal. All our kings are bestial. I say ‘all’ even though Clotair of Neustria is still an infant. We can be sure he’ll be as bad as the rest. How could he not be with a mother like Fredegunda!”

A vein pulsed furiously in the bishop’s forehead. His lip trembled against the rim of his wine goblet.

Fortunatus shivered. “In a way,” he observed, “you were lucky to be churchmen. If you’d been laymen he would by now have seized your property, cut off whichever part of your anatomy his whim settled on and then finished you off in some imaginative way. The Frankish imagination runs to butchery. Think of what happened to poor
Gundovald
and Mummolus. God rest their souls. Don’t think I’m not sympathetic. I’m sure your motives were excellent but you were involved in a political plot and—well, that game has its stakes and you lost.”

“You clearly are not sympathetic!” said Palladius sharply. “I suppose you feel that as churchmen we had no business engaging in a ‘political plot’ as you call it. Let me ask you something, Fortunatus. What is the function of the Church?”

“Seriously?”

“Very.”

Fortunatus laughed nervously. “What have I got myself into now?” he wondered. “Look, Palladius, I didn’t mean to upset you. I apologize.”

“Apology accepted. Now answer my question.”

Fortunatus turned his hands upwards, fingers spread as though sifting grain. “Palladius, I’m not a theologian. Are you feeling me out for traces of heresy? If you find any, they’ll be rooted in ignorance, not malice. I’m afraid much of my reading has been profane. You’re not”, it occurred to him to wonder, “considering me for a diocese?”

“You may be joking,” the bishop told him. “But that’s not inconceivable. If you serve the Church well.”

Fortunatus shook himself. “You are serious, aren’t you? I get nervous when I’m promised something. There’s always a quid pro quo.”

“Who’s denying it? And the quid would not immediately follow the quo.”

“No, the Church prefers payment in advance. Fair enough. Things temporal should be paid in temporal coin. A diocese these days is very temporal, isn’t it, not to say temporary. Vis Dax.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Fortunatus repeated it: “‘What is the function of the Church?’ I’ll say ‘to save souls’. Uninspired but orthodox.”

“Yes. And what is the commonest obstacle to the saving of souls?”

“Oh, it’s to be an interrogation? Things are serious. You don’t want me to say ‘sin’, I suppose? Or ‘the Evil One’? I thought not. I must be practical. Technical if I can manage it. Let me see: what would I expect you to say? ‘Disorder’? ‘Indiscipline’? Am I getting hot? I know you look longingly back to the days when Church and Empire were merged in the great unity of Romanism: one of your pet phrases, Palladius. I am a parrot. Why not? The wise man parrots a wiser master. ‘Lack of political unity’ then. God knows I agree with you if that’s your answer. How could I dispute it here in Poitiers where the cathedral priests are hard put to remember for which king’s health they’re supposed to be praying and the bishop never knows to which Council of bishops he belongs. He’s been shuttled back and forth every time the town changed hands. Well—one has to find some excuse for Maroveus, apart, that is, from his devotion to the grape. Have some more yourself?”

Palladius ignored the offered wine and didn’t bother to smile. “But”, he said, “you think bishops have no business engaging in politics?”

“Ahh!” Fortunatus exclaimed. “I see a drift. Do I? No, I don’t. That is to say I would if I thought your plot had aimed at bringing back unity, good government, the
pax
romana
and what have you. But your man,
Gundo
vald
, was at best another Frank, another descendant of Clovis—if his claims had anything to them at all—endowed with the same anarchic, licentious, bloody temper as the rest of the royal spawn. One more of
them
on the scene would have meant one more greedy snout snuffling in the wretched pig’s trough which is Gaul today.”

Palladius considered his fingernails. “A weak king,” he said musingly, tilting his hands to the light, “dependent on the Church, ruling a united Gaul, financed, at the beginning anyway, from Byzantium, needing to reconcile the local notables … the formula might just have worked.”

“Was that the aim of the plotters?”

“Of some. A conspiracy is like one of those snow balls children roll downhill. It gathers dirt and whatever lies on its passage. Gaining size it loses purity but, you see, Fortunatus, one learns by past mistakes. If we make a fresh snowball we can direct its path more judiciously.”

Fortunatus stood up restlessly. “Let’s move nearer the fire,” he invited. He picked up a bowl of dried fruit and nuts. “Have a walnut,” he offered. “A fig? They’re good. The nuns from Holy Cross sent them over …” His voice died. The bishop was drilling his stare into him. Coal-black eyes, unwavering mouth. “What
is
it,
Palladius
?”

“How is the prince?”

“Prince?”

“Clovis.”

“Oh!” Fortunatus stuffed a handful of nuts into his mouth, chewed on them quickly, and began to cough. “You mean”, he choked, “Chilperic’s son? The one who killed himself?”

“He didn’t.”

“What?”

“No. Bertram brought him here and left him with you. Alive. I
know
this, Fortunatus. Bertram told me.”

“He died”, Fortunatus looked Palladius straight in the eye, “of his wounds after Bertram left.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The poet shrugged. “Well, if you don’t trust me …”

“You don’t trust me”, said Palladius, “or you wouldn’t lie!”

There was a silence.

“What can I say?” Fortunatus made offers of figs and nuts. “Some Gaza wine then? It’s good. No? No.” He moved to the fire, fiddled with it, sat down finally and faced the bishop.

Palladius had the tone of someone humouring a child.

“
If
Clovis is dead,” he said patiently, “we’ll find another Pretender. Young. Of the royal blood. Whom we can make totally ours—‘we’, you understand, are the Church—and present to the people when the moment comes. This may not be for years. We can wait. We have to do this. It is our duty: a mission laid upon us by history. We want our next king to be a true son of the Church, suckled by it, unweaned from it, his pulse beating with its rhythms. Ours”, said Palladius violently, “is the only institution which can impose order on the country and until it does it can’t have order in itself. Is it possible, Fortunatus, that you don’t see this? Surely you see that as long as a corrupt bishop can bribe a secular ruler to support him, the Church cannot be purged of her unworthy sons? As long as a venomous overlord can demote a bishop, as Guntram just did, and Gaul itself is governed not as a state but as the spoil of royal robbers, peace and justice will be joke words! We”, Palladius made the goblets jump on the table, “intend to make Gaul safe for Christianity!”

Fortunatus seemed mesmerized by the wine in his goblet. He twirled it slowly, watching the firelight play on the transparent liquid.

“Say something,” said Palladius.

“You’ve said everything.”

“There’s a lot to be done. Can we count on your help?”

“I told you …”

“I’m not talking about the prince. I have something in mind for
you.
”

“I’m not a man of action, you know! Are you sure”, Fortunatus asked carefully, “that I’m the man you need?” He buried his nose in his glass.

“Tell me,” asked Palladius, “is there any other man whose welcome is as sure as yours in each of our Gaulish capitals? Any other as well thought of at the court of
each
one
of our mutually suspicious, murderous, terrified
monarchs
? Yours is the only face, Fortunatus, in which neither Childebert nor his mother, Brunhilde, King Guntram nor even the sorceress, Fredegunda, is ever likely to imagine they see the face of their assassin. Not one of them would imagine the poet, Fortunatus, murdering them. Not even for a moment—and, as a moment’s panic is long enough to kill a man, it follows that
you
are the safest man in Gaul.”

“If I listen to you,” Fortunatus told him, “I can see that
that
will soon be in the past tense: ‘Here lies Fortunatus, the safest man in Gaul until he let himself be talked into God knows what bloody scheme by his Grace, Palladius of Saintes. R.I.P.’ You’re not planning for me to assassinate all three I suppose? Or are you? With respect, Palladius, I have the feeling that your experiences in Mâcon have left your blood a touch heated. You should perhaps apply leeches,” said Fortunatus excitedly. “Or is it my wine which has affected you? To return to the murder
hypothesis
: would I be expected to kill them serially or at once? I’m known to be a glutton. I suppose I could procure a poisoned cake and invite them all to partake of it at some ceremony to be devised. You’ll hardly have counted on my using force? I’ve never killed a chicken. My largest kill up to now has been a bluebottle although I usually stick to fleas. As
they
’ve usually had a go at me first, I argue I’m mostly shedding my own blood. As we’re mixing politics and religion, why not go whole hog and let me say mass for the three monarchs? I could poison the blessed bread—or would that upset you?”