Pope Joan (33 page)

Five times the little ceremony was repeated, ending each time with the hurling of the earth. When it came Madalgis’s turn, she tried to run, but the two lay brothers blocked her way. Raban frowned at her.

“Sis mortuus mundo, vivens iter—”

“Stop!” Joan shouted.

Abbot Raban broke off. Everyone turned to locate the source of this unprecedented interruption.

With all eyes upon her, Joan advanced toward Madalgis and
examined her with rapid skill. Then she turned to Abbot Raban. “Father, this woman is no leper.”

“What?” Raban struggled to keep his anger reined, so the bishop would not observe it.

“These lesions are not leprotic. See how her skin colors, fed by the blood beneath? This affliction of the skin is not infectious; it can be cured.”

“If she is not a leper, then what has caused these ulcers?” Raban demanded.

“There could be several causes. It is difficult to say without further examination. But whatever the reason, one thing is certain: it is not leprosy.”

“God has marked this woman with the visible manifestation of sin. We must not defy His will!”

“She is marked, but not by leprosy,” Joan responded sturdily. “God has provided us with the knowledge to discern between those whom He has chosen to bear this burden, and those whom He has not. Will He be pleased if we consign to a living death one whom He Himself has not elected?”

It was a clever argument. With dismay, Raban saw the others were moved by it. “How do we know whether you have correctly interpreted the signs of God’s will?” he countered. “Is your pride so great you would sacrifice your brethren to it—for in order to minister to this woman you must put all in jeopardy.”

This elicited a buzz of concern. Nothing, save the unimaginable torments of Hell, inspired more horror, revulsion, and fear than the disease of leprosy.

With a howl, Madalgis threw herself at Joan’s feet. She had been following the discussion without understanding, for Joan and Raban had been speaking in Latin, but she had managed to discern that Joan had interceded on her behalf, and that the argument was not going well.

Joan patted her shoulder, as much to quiet as to comfort her. “None of the brethren needs be put at risk, saving myself. With your leave, Father, I will go with her to her home, bringing such medications as may be necessary.”

“Alone? With a woman?” Raban’s brows rose in pious horror. “John Anglicus, your purpose is perhaps innocent, but you are as yet a young man, subject to the baser passions of the flesh, from which it is my duty, as your spiritual father, to protect you.”

Joan opened her mouth to respond, then closed it with frustration. No one could be safer from temptation by a woman than she, but there was no way she could explain that to Raban.

Brother Benjamin’s rasping voice sounded behind her. “I will accompany Brother John. I am old, long past the time for such temptation. Father, you may trust in Brother John when he says the woman is no leper, for when he speaks with such certainty, he will not be wrong. His skill in such matters is very great.”

Joan shot him a grateful glance. Madalgis clung to her, her wails tempered into muted whimpering by Joan’s reassuring touch.

Abbot Raban hesitated. What he really wanted was to give John Anglicus a sound caning for his presumptuous disobedience. But Bishop Otgar was watching; Raban could not appear to be unbending or unmerciful. “Very well,” he said grudgingly. “Brother John, after vespers you and Brother Benjamin may go from here with this sinner, and do what may be done in God’s name to cure her of her affliction.”

“Thank you, Father,” Joan said.

Raban made the sign of the cross over them. “May God in His merciful goodness shield you from harm.”

T
HE
mule carrying bags of medical supplies plodded along placidly, indifferent to the westering sun. Madalgis’s cottage lay some five miles on; at this languid pace, they would be hard-pressed to arrive before dark. Joan prodded the mule impatiently. To humor her, the beast took five or six quick steps in succession, then settled back comfortably into its original gait.

As they walked, Madalgis chattered on with the nervous energy that often follows a great fright. Joan and Benjamin learned her whole sad story. Despite her destitute appearance, she was no colona but a free-woman whose husband had held independent title to a manse encompassing some twelve hectares. After his death, she had tried to support her family by working the land herself, but this heroic endeavor was abruptly curtailed by her neighbor, Lord Rathold, who coveted the prosperous manse. Lord Rathold had brought Madalgis’s labors to the attention of Abbot Raban, who forbade her, upon threat of excommunication, ever to take up tiller or hoe again. “It is ungodly for a woman to do the work of men,” he told her.

Faced with starvation, Madalgis had been forced to sell the manse and its house to Lord Rathold for a fraction of its worth, receiving in
return only a few solidi and a tiny hut in a nearby settlement with a small piece of pasturage for her cows.

She had taken up cheese making; in this way she had managed to eke out a minimal subsistence, bartering the fruits of her labor for other food and necessities.

As soon as she caught sight of her home, Madalgis gave a glad cry and ran ahead, quickly disappearing inside. Joan and Brother Benjamin followed a few minutes later and discovered her buried beneath a breathless tumble of children, all laughing, crying, and talking at the same time. Seeing the two monks enter, the children cried out in alarm and surrounded Madalgis protectively, fearing she would be taken from them again. Madalgis spoke to them and their smiles returned, though they studied the two strangers curiously.

A woman came in, holding a babe in each arm. She made a respectful bow to the two monks, then hurried past to hand one of the infants to Madalgis, who seized it joyfully and put it to her breast, where it began to suck hungrily. The other woman seemed a dame of fifty years or more, but then Joan saw that though her face was drawn and lined with care, she was not so old as that—no more perhaps than twenty-nine or thirty.

She has been nursing Madalgis’s babe as well as her own
, Joan realized. With sympathy she noted the woman’s leaking breasts and sagging abdomen and the unhealthy pallor of her skin. Joan had seen the symptoms before: women often bore their first child by the age of thirteen or fourteen and thereafter existed in a state of virtually perpetual pregnancy, bringing forth one babe after another with dreary regularity. It was not uncommon for a woman to have twenty or more pregnancies during her lifetime—though inevitably some of these were cut short by miscarriage. By the time a woman reached her time of change—if indeed she lived that long, for childbirth carried with it a considerable hazard—her body was wasted, her spirit broken by exhaustion. Joan made a mental note to make up a tonic of powdered oak bark and sage to fortify the woman against the coming winter.

Madalgis spoke to her oldest child, a gangly boy of twelve or thirteen. He went out the door and returned a minute later with a loaf of bread and a chunk of blue-veined cheese, which he offered to Joan and Brother Benjamin. Brother Benjamin took the bread but refused the cheese, for it was obviously rotten with mold. Joan also found the
cheese repellent, but to please the boy, she broke off a tiny piece and put it in her mouth. To her surprise, it tasted wonderful—pungent, rich, astonishingly flavorful—far superior to any cheese at Fulda’s tables.

“Why, it’s delicious.”

The boy grinned.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Arn,” he answered shyly.

As she ate, Joan took note of her surroundings. Madalgis’s home was a small, windowless hut rudely constructed of crossed lathes daubed with mud and stuffed with straw and leaves. There were large gaps in the walls, through which the cool night air now swept, stirring the smoke from the hearth fire into a choking cloud. In one corner there was a pen for animals; in another month, Madalgis would bring in her cows for the winter—a common practice among the poor. Doing so not only protected the precious livestock but also brought a much-needed extra source of warmth into their homes. Unfortunately, in addition to their body heat, the animals brought pests: ticks, biting flies, fleas, and a host of other vermin, which burrowed into the floor rushes and the straw sleeping pallets. Most poor folk were covered with painful bites and rashes, a fact documented in the local churches, whose walls featured graphic representations of Job, his body covered with ulcers, scraping at his sores with a knife.

Some people—and Joan suspected Madalgis was one of these— developed unusually strong reactions to the insect bites over time. Their skin swelled into great sores, which, further irritated by clothes of coarse and unclean wool, finally erupted into festering lesions.

The test of Joan’s diagnosis would have to wait, however, as it was now full dark.
Tomorrow
, Joan told herself as she prepared for sleep,
tomorrow we’ll begin.

T
HE
next day they cleaned the little hut from top to bottom. The old rushes covering the ground were tossed out and the earth floor swept perfectly smooth and even. The sleeping pallets were burned, and new ones of fine fresh straw made up. Even the thatch roof, which had begun to sag and rot with age, was replaced.

The difficult part was persuading Madalgis to take a bath. Like everyone else, she washed her face, hands, and feet regularly, but the idea of total immersion was to her strange and even dangerous.

“I’ll catch the flux and die!” she wailed.

“You’ll die if you don’t,” Joan answered firmly. “A leper’s existence is a living death.”

The cool winds of Herbistmanoth had rendered the little creek that ran behind the settlement too cold for bathing. They had to haul the water up and heat it over the hearth fire, then pour it into a laundry tub. While the two monks stood with their backs to her, Madalgis lowered herself into the tub with a great deal of trepidation, then washed her body with soap and water.

After her bath, Madalgis donned a clean new tunic Joan had obtained from Brother Conrad, the cellarer, in anticipation of the need. Made of fine heavy linen, it was warm enough to see Madalgis through the winter yet was far smoother and less irritating than wool.

Bathed and cleaned, her house rid of vermin and gleaming from roof to floor, Madalgis immediately began to improve. Her lesions dried and began to show signs of healing.

Brother Benjamin was ecstatic. “You were right!” he said to Joan. “It isn’t leprosy! We must return and show the others!”

“A few days more,” Joan said cautiously. There must be no doubt whatsoever as to the cure when they returned.

“S
HOW
me another one,” Arn pleaded.

Joan smiled at him. For the past few days she had been teaching the boy Bede’s classical method of digital computation, and he had proved an apt and eager student.

“First you must show me that you remember what you’ve already learned. What do these represent?” She held up the last three fingers of her left hand.

“Units of one,” the boy said unhesitatingly. “And these”—he indicated the left thumb and index finger—“are decimals.”

“Good. And on the right hand?”

“These represent hundreds, and these, thousands.” He lifted the appropriate fingers to illustrate.

“Very well, what numbers do you want to use?”

“Twelve, for that’s my age. And”—he thought for a moment— “three hundred sixty-five, for that’s the number of days in a year!” he said, proud to show off something else he had learned.

“Twelve times three hundred sixty-five. Let’s see …” Joan’s fingers
moved swiftly, computing the total. “That’s four thousand three hundred and eighty.”

Arn clapped his hands with delight.

“You try it,” Joan said, going through it again, more slowly, allowing time for him to mimic each motion. Then she had him do it on his own. “Excellent!” she said after he had executed it.

Arn grinned, delighted by the game and the praise. Then his round little face grew serious. “How high can you go?” he asked. “Can you do it with a hundred and a thousand? With … a thousand and another thousand?”

Joan nodded. “Just touch your chest like this … see? That gives you tens of thousands. And if you touch your thigh, like this, hundreds of thousands. So”—her fingers moved again—“one thousand one hundred times two thousand three hundred is … two million five hundred and thirty thousand!”

Arn’s eyes flew wide with wonderment. The numbers were so enormous he could scarcely conceive them.

“Show me another!” he begged. Joan laughed. She enjoyed teaching the boy, for he drank in knowledge thirstily. He reminded her of herself as a child.
What a shame
, she thought,
that this bright spark of intelligence was destined to be extinguished in the darkness of ignorance.

“If I can arrange it,” she said, “would you like to study at the abbey school? You could go on learning there—not just numbers, but reading and writing as well.”

“Reading and writing?” Arn repeated in wonder. Those extraordinary skills were reserved for priests and very great lords, not for such as he. He asked anxiously, “Would I have to become a monk?”

Joan was amused. Arn was of the age when boys begin to develop a strong interest in the opposite sex; the idea of a life of chastity was understandably abhorrent to him.

“No,” she said. “You would study at the Outer School, the one for lay students. But it would mean leaving home and living at the abbey. And you’d have to study hard, for the teaching master is very strict.”

Arn didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Oh yes! Yes, please!”

“Very well. We’re returning to Fulda tomorrow. I’ll speak to the teaching master then.”