The Maid (15 page)

It was very hard to hear my voices in the castle. Much harder than in the forest, among the oaks and the long pale sunlight. The sunlight of the
bois chenu.
They still came to me, but it took longer and they were much harder to hear. I had to listen very closely. At first I thought it was because the castle walls were so thick—very deep, old, stone walls and so many of them, wall after wall after wall, blocking out the world, the light. But later I knew that it was the air inside the castle too. The air was packed tightly with gossip, thoughts, plans, schemes. Murder. The air in the castle was as loud as a hive.

The day after Alençon arrived at Chinon, he stood with the Dauphin in the
berfois
overlooking the jousting ring, watching Jehanne tilt and ride. It was a cold, bright, clear day. The sky a pale sparkling aqua, a flock of black starlings overhead, diving and swooping through the air. Charles had taken Jehanne to his armory that morning and had her outfitted with a lance and shield and some chain mail. He'd also lent her a dapple-gray horse that put the black rouncy she'd received from the Duke of Lorraine to shame. Now the little Maid flew across the ring like a shot, her chin jutted out, her lance glinting in the sunlight, the red dirt about her horse's hooves jumping into the air. "Holy Mary," the Duke said as Jehanne drove her lance through the heart of the straw man that stood at the end of the ring.

"Isn't she wonderful?" said Charles.

"Oh, all those farm girls can ride," La Trémöille said, rolling his eyes. "For Christ's sake, they bring their damned horses into the house and sleep with them all winter long."

Alençon was not listening. Alençon was watching the girl. "I think I'll join her," he said, handing La Trémöille his cloak and jumping the ring's fence. Half an hour later he entered the ring, outfitted on horseback and carrying a lance. "Shall we have a go?"

Jehanne, slowing her horse, grinned and shouted, "Ah, a worthy opponent at last!"

An hour later she had him off his horse, lying in the middle of the ring, the tip of her lance kissing his throat.

"She's unbelievable," Alençon said that evening, as he and the Dauphin and La Trémöille shared a bottle of wine in the Dauphin's chambers. His eyes were shining. "It's hard to believe she's real."

La Trémöille raised an eyebrow. "Yes," he said. "It certainly is."

They spent the month together. Jehanne and Charles and Alençon. Riding together, practicing jousting and swordplay, studying attack strategies for Orléans. "If you want anyone to listen to you, you have to know these things," Alençon said. Charles refused to participate in the war play. He was a very good horseman, but he wouldn't go near a sword or a lance. He shivered visibly at the sight of Alençon's poleax. "None of that battle stuff for me," he said. But he rode with them down by the river and through the curling, new-green vineyards in the warm spring afternoons, when Alençon sang in his low, clear voice:

O I love to see up on the field,
the knights and horses in their battle array,
And I tell you nothing thrills me, dear,
As when my men shout, "On! We die this day!
"

"What a horrible song!" said Charles, laughing, but as he watched their three long shadows advance together before them on the road, he felt that he was among friends for perhaps the first time.

A sweet, thrilling moment in their lives. A kind of tender, delicately balanced friendship between them: Jehanne and Alençon lavishing their attention on Charles, making sure always to keep him in the center, always included. Charles, shining from all the attention, oblivious. A friendship like a soap bubble. Destined to burst.

One day in Chinon Charles had summoned Jehanne to meet him in the Tour des Chiens. The Dogs' Tower. He stood surrounded by a dozen pointers, stroking their black silken skulls and ears, cooing "Yes, yes, my darlings" as they leaped on him and licked the salt from his thin, violet palms.

"Never seen a whole tower just for dogs before," Jehanne said.

The Dauphin glanced up, grinning. Blushing. "Oh, this is nothing," he said. "My mother kept a whole zoo at the palace in Paris. Full of lions, baboons, crocodiles, snakes." He waved his hand in the air. "Every crazy creature you can imagine. I think she liked them better than people, if you want to know the truth." He smiled, spoke to a dog with pursed lips, scratching behind its ears. "Didn't she, Pansy? Yes, I think she did."

At last he straightened up and turned to Jehanne. "So, I've been thinking, with all this training going on, what do you propose to do in Orléans, exactly?"

Jehanne grinned, cocked her head. "I'll lead them in battle, Dauphin. Fight the English until they are destroyed."

Charles blinked. "But surely you yourself don't mean to be down there on the field with the soldiers in ... in the fighting?"

A big grin then. The dark brows rising, spreading like a crow's wings. "Oh yes, Sire. That's exactly what I mean."

"On horseback?"

"Yes, Dauphin."

Charles was staring now, his heart hammering. "With a sword?"

"Of course."

"You actually plan to fight?"

"I plan to do whatever God tells me to do. I know He will have me out on the battlefield. It seems best if I have a sword."

Silence then. The Dauphin watched her through narrowed eyes. Picturing it. A terrifying, marvelous image: The possessed witch-girl on horseback, leading an army of ten thousand men. An image so potent that a jet of reptilian blood shot through his veins. Reptilian blood singing,
You'll be King. You'll be King. You'll be King!
He smiled. "You'll scare them to death."

"I hope so," she said.

Several days later she stood illuminated by fire in the armorer's dim workshop in Tours. A small black stick figure with her arms held out crosswise, the red forge flames glowing with prophecy behind her. The armorer wrapped a length of measuring ribbon around her arm and scribbled down a figure on a scrap of wood. "She'll for sure be the smallest suit I ever made," he said. Slowly he circled the girl. Lassoing the ribbon around her neck and bust and chest and hips. Hands trembling as he went.

"Make her the finest too," said Alençon. He was seated in a chair in the corner, watching Jehanne with delighted eyes. The air between them charged, electric. Her skin tingling beneath his gaze. "I will," said the man, who had stopped working and was staring at her with enormous wondering eyes.

"I'm not going to fly away," she said, laughing.

"No, mademoiselle. Of course not," he said, though he did not look at all certain.

Later, while she and Alençon were riding back from the armorer's, several people ran by them very quickly. She looked up and saw that a great number of people were running, all in the same direction. All of them with excited, hungry looks on their faces. "An execution," said Alençon.

They followed the running crowds until they came to the town square. It was full of people. People crammed together, talking and watching, fathers with children up on their shoulders, old women in their headscarves, craning their necks, looking toward the center of the square. Some leaned out of windows. Others stood up on rooftops, perched like birds. In the center of the square there was a large platform and on the platform stood a wooden post with a long arm sticking out. A noose hung from the arm. A long, silent O of rope, dangling in the air. A woman nearby was selling hot cakes.

Jehanne watched a wagon move slowly through the crowd. The executioner in a pointed black hood sat up front, holding the reins. His face hidden. In the cart behind him crouched a figure in a ragged gown, clutching something the girl could not see. A woman, old and wrinkled, her head shaved. Her face like a white raisin. The crowd was cheering now. The crowd was wild.

Slowly the man in the black hood led the prisoner up the stairs. Jehanne saw then that she was holding an orange cat very tightly against her. Up on the platform a man read something out loud from a scroll, and the executioner set the noose around the old woman's neck. He took the cat from the old woman, stroked it several times, and then twisted the animal's head around on its neck. A swift, firm gesture. Like wringing out a towel. The animal jerked once, twice, and was still.

The executioner handed the dead animal back to the old woman, who was screaming now. A high, wild scream, like an eagle's. The crowd screamed back, ecstatic.

Alençon looked at Jehanne. Her face was blank. Expressionless.

"They'll do that to me one day," she said.

Alençon blinked. "Don't say that," he said, taking her by the arm. "Come on, let's get out of here."

When Jehanne's armor was completed, Charles went to the armorer's to watch her try it on. "She's for sure the smallest one I ever made," the smith said again as he finished buckling the last greave about her shin. Jehanne stood there in her shining white metal suit. "It's beautiful," she said.

It was lovely, finely made, with jointed plates for the knees and elbows and a short embellished steel skirt, split in the middle so she could ride. The King walked around her, frowning. "Not bad. Of course they do better work in Paris, but I think this will suit our purposes. How does it feel? Can you walk?"

"Oh yes," she said, taking a few stiff steps forward in her long pointed metal shoes.

"Is it very heavy? Are you ready to take it off?"

"Oh no," she said, beaming. "I'm never taking it off."

It was terribly heavy, the armor. Sixty-five pounds, the armorer said. And hot. Like walking around in a coffin. I had to bind my breasts to protect them from the metal. They wrapped twenty feet of linen around me every morning, very tight, fastened with a big steel brooch. But even then there are places you can't protect. Your thighs. Your hips. You've never seen bruises until you've fought in a suit of armor for a few days. Your whole body turns purple and black. After a while, you can't even remember what your skin looked like before.

It does something too, the armor. It's not just that it protects you. It changes you, separates you from the world. From other people. Puts you on a different level. A very simple level. There's only one thing to do in a suit of armor, and that's to fight. So that's what you do. You fight. And sometimes you kill.

Next came the sword. Charles had offered to have the smith in Tours make one for her, but Jehanne refused. "I know what sword I want," she said.

On the way to Chinon they'd stopped at the little town of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois. Jehanne had wanted to pray at the shrine there. To visit with her saint. A strange sort of shrine. Full of old weapons and armor. Long rusted ropes of chain hung from the rafters. Thousand-year-old axes crossed on the walls. "Catherine is the patron saint of grateful knights and escaped prisoners," the priest there had said, pointing out the manacles of the nobleman Cazin du Boys who'd been taken prisoner by the Burgundians, along with the garrison of Beaumont-sur-Oise. "Fellow went to sleep praying to Saint Catherine and woke up the next morning to find his cage door wide open and all the guards asleep," said the red-nosed priest. Jehanne walked among the weapons, touching rust-spotted blades and handles, fascinated. The priest noticed her interest and said, "You know Charles Martel?"

Jehanne did know Charles Martel. Everyone in France knew Charles Martel. The Hammer they called him. He'd driven the Muslims out of France seven hundred years ago. Martel and twenty-five thousand Frenchmen versus eighty thousand blue-turbaned Saracens. A miraculous victory. Invaders with faces dark as hatchets and long black beards had swarmed down over the country like bees, their blood arrogant from twenty years of victories over the Persians, the Romans. Eyes glittering with dreams of conquering all Europe. Martel killed that glitter. Put an end to those dreams. Martel sent them screaming for the trees.

"His sword's buried up behind the altar. So no one steals it."

Jehanne looked at him. "It's really his?"

The man nodded, solemn. "I've seen it with my own eyes. Big gorgeous thing. Five crosses engraved in the handle just like they say in the books."

Yolande loved the idea. "Perfect!" she cried, and sent a messenger to the shrine in Fierbois to fetch the famous sword.

"It should be behind the altar," said Jehanne, "buried a few inches underground."

The messenger looked at her. "How do you know it's there?"

"Her voices told her," said Yolande quickly, before Jehanne could say anything. "They say it is the sword of Charles Martel that will drive the English out of France."

Jehanne looked at Yolande. Was silent.

"Why did you say that?" Jehanne asked after the messenger left. "My voices said nothing about the sword."

Yolande looked at her. "You must trust me, Jehanne. We must use every opportunity we can to convince the people that you are sent by God."

Jehanne looked at her feet. Did not speak.

She let it happen. She did not like it, but she let it happen. Let Yolande spread the tale of the Maid's miraculous sword throughout the kingdom. The famous sword of Charles Martel, revealed to her by her saints in the shrine of Saint Catherine. The sword with which Charles Martel had driven the Saracens out of France seven hundred years earlier. As the Maid would drive the English out of France now. And when the rusted old sword was taken to an ironsmith in Tours for repair and the smith cried out that the rust "just fell away, like magic," leaving the sword a gleaming steel thing, sharp and strong, Yolande crowed, "You see, a miracle! It was meant to be yours, my dear."

"It's no miracle," Jehanne said. But no one around her was listening.

She loved her standard better. Did not feel a flush of shame when she looked at it, felt only the Godhead shining inside her. It took six women three long days and nights to sew her standard. All of them hunched over a round table by the hearth at the head seamstress's house, their hair pulled back into tight braided buns, their long fine needles glinting in the firelight. The standard was made of thick, double-faced white satin and trimmed with golden fringe. Each side was embroidered with the words
JESU MARIA
above an image of Christ seated on the globe and supported by two winged angels. Golden lilies were scattered across the background. The women worked like mules to get it done in time, sewing in a kind of intent, focused ecstasy, their hearts singing
She's come, she's come, she's come!
as their needles dipped in and out of the gleaming material, whip-stitching the lily stems and sewing the angel's eyes up with French knots, their blood jumping with the wildness of it all, the miraculous peasant, the virgin on horseback galloping over the fragrant spring meadows to save France, and the fact that they too got to be a part of it, and so they sewed until their fingers cramped into claws and their lower backs howled in pain, getting up only to splash cold water on their faces or to run quickly outside and around the house in the chill air to keep themselves awake through the night, rubbing their arms and staring up at the moon as they moved through the damp grass, exhausted and exhilarated, happy as dogs.