The Maid (21 page)

In the beginning I was not upset. I was too excited to be upset. You have to understand what it's like, charging all at once like that, throwing yourself into that madness. That sea of fury and death. You know only that you must get through, that if you do not fight your way through the wall of men in front of you, they will devour you. So you fight as you can, as you must, with your sword, your teeth, your hands. You'll do anything to make it through, to make it stop. Anything at all.

It takes you over, war. As soon as you enter the field, you become part of the great Red Machine, a wheel inside the great Red Machine, rolling and rolling forward, fighting your way toward silence. Stillness. There is no thinking, no time for consideration. There is only doing what you must do in the moment, what seems best in the moment. And there's a beauty to it, working like that, letting the ancient instinct take over, the drive that says fight or die. Kill or die.

It happens so fast. At once very fast and very, very slowly. As if your body is moving faster than it's ever moved, and at the same time a hand inside your mind is very slowly, calmly sketching a picture of everything that happens. Recording everything. And only after it's over, only once the great Red Machine has ground to a halt, do you know what you've done. No, even that's not true, because after it's ground to a halt, the fire is still racing through you. Maybe you drop your weapon, maybe you start dancing around, dancing and shouting and laughing and banging up against the other men, screaming because you're alive, more alive than you've ever been. You've killed them, and you're still alive, and it's a long time before that fire burns down and you find yourself sitting in a corner, staring blindly at a tall silver and red pile in front of you, and only when you realize that the pile is a pile of the dead, do you begin to understand what you've done. You don't feel it yet, but the name is there in your head. The name that tells you who you are. The truest self, the one you can never know until you've fought. You see that you are the one who fights. You see that you are the one who kills.

It happened very quickly after that. In a week it was over. They took Les Augustins in one day, Les Tourelles in two. The day after Saint Loup was the Day of Ascension, and Jehanne declared that they would not fight on a holy day. Instead she sent another letter to the English, had her archer shoot it up over the walls into Les Tourelles. The English soldiers just laughed, called her names, threw rotten cabbages at her. Rais was with Jehanne and Aulon that day, seated beside her on his stallion at the edge of the ruined bridge as her archer let the arrow fly. When Aulon repeated the names they called her, Rais turned white as salt. "Who dares say such things to the Maid?" he shouted, the cords in his neck standing out like wires. They laughed at him too, but they shouted their names out anyway. "Thomas Parry and John Cotter," they cried.

Two days later they were found hung from a tall sycamore tree outside the city walls. Each one naked, with his sex stuffed in his mouth, his eyes black, popped out like crab's eyes. She knew Rais did it. Knew, and was horrified, but was also secretly flattered. He claimed he knew nothing—claimed he was up at Dunois's château all night. La Hire backed him up, said they were playing cards together. But she knew. "Why did you do it?" she said. "Why would you do such a thing?"

Rais smiled, his sable collar dark against his pale, mad face. "My dear, I have no idea what you're talking about."

They kept fighting. The war dream went on. A strange time, that time in Orléans. The power was so high in her, she hardly needed to sleep, to eat. Could only think of going forward, of fighting on and on until the red rage left her, until the saints were silent. Until the red rage was spent. And she knew that if she did, nothing would stop them. She knew they would win.

Several times her troops got scared—tried to run. Two days after Saint Loup, as Jehanne and Alençon and La Hire and their men were crossing the river to attack Les Augustins, the bushes along the riverbank began to shake, as if they had come alive. A moment later a whole swarm of Goddons came roaring out, splashing through the clear golden shallows with their swords raised, screaming bloody murder. Jehanne and her troops had not been prepared at all. They were still a mile off from Les Augustins. She could not believe the English had found them.

A wildly hot day. Bizarre for early May. The sun was standing straight overhead, glaring down, so they'd stopped for water. Jehanne and Alençon were standing together in the shade of an oak tree, sharing water from his wineskin. The soldiers were down by the river's edge, filling up their leather caps and helmets with river water and pouring it over their heads and their horses' heads. Jehanne caught sight of Bertrand, with his wild yellow curls, drinking water from a steel boot. He waved and shouted, "Hurrah, Pucelle!" and she was waving back at him when it happened. As soon as the men caught sight of the Goddons coming across the water with their axes out, they ran—started scrambling up the banks and onto their horses and running toward the little makeshift bridge the militia had made of boats and pontoons the night before. A rush of men so powerful that even Bertrand and others who wanted to fight were swept along with it. Men dropping their helmets, stumbling, scrambling up on their horses and running toward the bridge to the mainland, huffing and pushing each other. "Go! Hurry up! Fuck's sake, get out of my way."

Again the fire rose up inside of her. The Godhead shouted through her mouth as she ran down the riverbank after them, the long white banner of God in her hand. "No! Turn and fight, men!" A loud, hard shout. Ferocious. The girl in armor, eyes aflame. "Turn and fight now! Let God's wrath rise up in your breast and let it drive you forward to destroy those bastards who would steal our land and make us their slaves!" And it was as she opened her mouth to shout again that a man ran up behind her, picked her up, and pressed a knife against her throat. "Hello, sweetie," he said, his breath hot in her ear.

La Hire saw it happen. La Hire, who'd been at the mouth of the bridge, trying to block the men from retreating, saw and stood up very quickly in his stirrups. Shouted, "They've got the Maid!"

As one, both the French soldiers on the riverbank and the English soldiers in the shallows turned to see the thick Goddon soldier on the riverbank holding the kicking girl in the air, stroking her cheek with the blade of his knife. A moment trapped in amber. Both armies watching, still as statues. Watching as Jehanne kicked and screamed. Watching as she went abruptly silent and still. Then watching as Alençon broke from behind an oak tree and ran at the Goddon from the side like a bull, knocking him over into the sand and pulling his meaty arm away from Jehanne's neck long enough to push her into a fringe of weeds, then jumping on top of the Goddon and plunging his little hand ax into the man's forehead.

Later Alençon would say that the roar of the French soldiers that sounded then was "like the roar of ten thousand lions." A roar that shook the trees and made the river jump its banks. And the French charge that followed was so ferocious that it resembled a glinting metallic sea, rolling and surging across the island and spilling out into the river toward the advancing Goddons, and even La Hire's heart drew back at the sight of the army's fury, and seeing it, feeling the sudden hot surge in the air, scores of approaching Orléans militiamen and Scots and Spanish mercenaries leaped from the pontoon bridge and ran through the shallow water with their swords raised to join the French charge, howling and screaming with such force that the English simply turned and ran at the sight of them, up the riverbanks and across the fields toward the fort of Les Augustins.

Jehanne lay very still in the grass where Alençon had dragged her, out of the way of the onslaught. Her face was gray. Her lips an alarming lavender. Alençon knelt beside her and held his palm above her mouth. "Oh God," he said. He began to unbuckle her breastplate, his fingers trembling.

Abruptly she coughed and blinked. "Where's my horse?" she said.

Alençon laughed. A laugh and a sob at the same time. "Right here," he said. "Tied up right where you left him."

It was sheer will that did it. Sheer will that drove Jehanne and the French army to charge toward Les Augustins. They knew they were outnumbered by perhaps a thousand men, but they could not be held back now. Their bones were screaming for blood, for vengeance, for seventy years of wrongs to be righted, and it was this long-withheld fury that drove them across the river shallows and up the banks after the English, drove them over the brilliant green May fields toward the palisades that surrounded the old monastery, swinging their axes and flails and morning stars and hammers and kitchen knives, professional soldiers and militiamen, farmers and carpenters alike, riding side by side, swept along by the same mad and holy fire, some falling in the great black rain of arrows that met them as they charged toward the monastery, men screaming and horses screaming and stumbling and falling, but most of them making it, most of them leaping off their horses when they drew closer to the outer works of the fort and hacking into the charge of fresh English knights that ran out of the monastery to greet them. And only when the French had fought their way through those knights, only when they began to call for the battering ram to be brought forward so they could break down the great wooden door that led inside the monastery, did they see the enormous armored giant who stood guarding the entrance like a mountain, ready to destroy any Frenchman who came near.

"Jesus Christ," said the Bastard, stopping dead in his tracks. A man over seven feet tall and thick as an oak tree stood in front of the entrance of Les Augustins with a thick, curling, dark beard and a red shield with a white cross on his chest, a great spiked hammer in his hand. "A monster," Rais said in an admiring voice.

They were crouched in a dim outer ditch before the earthen works of the monastery. It was afternoon. La Hire and his men had joined a remaining corps of militia who were running up to the walls and setting fires at the base of the fort, attempting to send the whole compound up in a blaze.

Jehanne and Rais and Alençon were focused on the giant—on finding a way to get past him. After a time Poton joined them with two Spanish soldiers, Alphonse de Partada and Miguel del Toro, who, upon seeing the monster, simply stopped and stared. "Christ, how are we ever going to get past that?" Poton said. Partada stood smiling. Partada, with two black thumbs hanging from a piece of rawhide around his neck, a wild light in his eyes.

"Any ideas are welcome," the Maid said.

They tried first to shoot the giant with flaming arrows, lining Rais's six best archers up in a ditch in front of the earthen works and signaling them to shoot all at once. But they were too far away. The arrows all buried themselves, smoking, in the ground several yards in front of the giant, causing him to roar with ugly laughter. "We're going to have to use a culverin," Poton said, his feathered yellow hair lifting in the breeze. "And even the gunner's going to have to get closer to get a good shot ... I don't see how we can do that without sending him out in the open."

Jehanne saw. In a flash of vision she saw. "We need to distract them," she said, the Godvoice speaking through her mouth. "A few of us need to run straight toward that beast." The girl's eyes wide from the madness of what she was saying. She looked at the boy who stood beside the culverin. The
couleuvriner.
A slight young man of sixteen with keen dark eyes and enormous hands. He had killed forty-two Goddons in Orléans that winter with his culverin. Was something of a legend among the French and Goddons alike. The Bastard called him the Wrath of God. "You see? You wait 'til all the English are watching us, then get yourself into position while we're still running."

Poton was staring at Jehanne. Staring at her as if he'd never seen her before. "You'll be killed," he said.

She smiled at him. "No. They won't catch me."

Jehanne looked at the Wrath. "As long as you hit him before we get to the door, we should be all right. And while you're at it, try to blast a few holes in the door too, so we can get inside easier."

"I like it," said Partada in bad French.

"It's suicide," said Rais, his eyes glittering.

"You don't have to do this," said Alençon, his face white around the mouth.

"Oh yes, I do," said Jehanne, jumping up and grabbing her standard. "Because this is how we're going to win." She looked at Partada and del Toro. "Are you with me?"

They said that they were.

"Don't miss," Jehanne said to the Wrath, who looked at her as if he were offended by the suggestion that he could.

Side by side the three of them set off running toward the fortress in the late afternoon light. Jehanne in the middle, running without her helmet or her boots, running barefoot and holding her white banner high, the soldiers flanking her on either side, their swords out, prepared to fight. The field was muddy under Jehanne's feet, and her armor weighed half as much as she did, but the holy, violent joy moving through her was so hot and wild that she hardly noticed, running through the mud and corpses and broken arrows like a fox, her two soldiers huffing and grinning beside her as the soldiers on both sides of the battlefield stared with wide eyes. It was so mad, the stunt, so wild and absurd, that it gave the three runners a shimmer of immortality, the air around them pulsing and electric. The French cannons shouted loudly behind them, a ferocious, bone-jangling sound, and immediately she could smell the bitter smoke of gunpowder in the air, could sense the great stone balls hurtling through the blue air above her head, see them crashing into the ground all around her, but it didn't frighten her. Everything seemed slowed down, almost calm, although she was running faster than she had ever run in her life. She smiled, hearing the saints chanting in her ears,
Yesyesyesyesyesyesyes!
and watching as the first cannonball arrived at the fortress, tearing a long hole through the mighty door as if it were made of paper, and then the second cannonball sailed toward the stunned, wide-eyed giant, slamming into his enormous armored chest and blowing him backward amid the splinters of the door. "Jesus!" Partada shouted as the third cannonball crashed into the fortress wall. By the time they reached the great door, only half of it remained, and Partada and del Toro ran easily through. Jehanne stood before it, waving her banner and shouting to the rest of her army, "Charge now, men! Les Augustins is ours!" and watching as La Hire and the great silver mass of his army came charging across the field to slaughter the Englishmen within.