The Maid (22 page)

"Poton loved me after that," she says to Massieu. "He went around telling everyone I was the bravest person on God's green earth, but, in truth, I was not a very good soldier. I did not have the coordination, that panther's grace the best warriors have. La Hire with one hand tied behind his back was more lethal than I ever was with a sword. But I understood about surprise, which most of the others did not. I knew that catching the Goddons off guard, doing what they least expected, was a thousand times better than the best battle plan any general could come up with. With surprise, you can beat any odds."

Alençon had taught her that, back in the winter, when they were riding to Poitiers. Charles and Yolande had gone together in the carriage, but she and Alençon had decided to go on horseback. It was a gray, breezy day, and she was very happy to be away from the castle, riding fast and free over the countryside in the fresh cold air, and as they went, Alençon told her about Charles Martel—how Charles Martel had defeated the Saracen invaders at the Battle of Tours.

"There were eighty thousand of those black bastards," Alençon said. "But the Hammer knew just what to do with them." The Arabs, he said, had outnumbered the French three to one, so Charles had taken his soldiers and packed them in tight, like a glacier, on top of a high, wooded plain outside Tours. This forced the Saracens to charge uphill and through a dense thicket of trees before they could start their attack, exhausting their horses. "The Arabs never knew what hit them," said Alençon. "Here they come, panting and red-faced up the hill, and the French are there waiting for them, cool as bishops with their axes and flails out, ready to tear them up and grind them small."

Jehanne laughed.

"That was the Hammer's brilliance—he knew that surprise is the key to victory. Throw 'em off balance and you're halfway home."

"Is that the trick, then?" Jehanne had said, grinning.

"It's one of them," said Alençon.

So when it came time to attack Les Tourelles, she wanted to attack immediately. That night, as she and her men stood watching Les Augustins burn—a ragged, red cathedral of fire reflected in the dark, rippling river—she said, "We'll attack first thing tomorrow. They won't expect that. They'll expect us to wait for reinforcements. So we'll sneak up, take Les Tourelles at dawn."

But several hours later a messenger appeared at the Bouchers' house, saying the Bastard and his council had decided that once again they must wait for more troops to arrive before they attacked Les Tourelles. "Les Tourelles is impossible," the Bastard wrote. "It will be impossible for us to get inside without more men. We must wait until the reinforcements get here."

The same as always,
she thought.
Wait. Wait. Always wait.
Jehanne, who had been sitting at a table looking over a map of Les Tourelles, shoved the map away from her, got on her horse, and rode up to the Bastard's château. She walked into the dining hall, where the Bastard sat with Gaucourt eating roast beef, their greasy hands shining in the candlelight. "Ah, Jehanne," said the Bastard, smiling. "We were just talking about you."

Jehanne did not smile. "Where is the Baron?" she said.

"God knows," said Gaucourt. "Last I saw, he was down by the river, passing out sweets and hippocras to the choir boys."

"Letting off steam like everyone else," said the Bastard. "What do you want with him?"

"I want him to fight with me tomorrow."

The Bastard frowned. "Did you not receive my letter informing you that the council decided not to fight tomorrow?"

"Bastard, you have been in your council and I in mine," Jehanne said, "and believe me, the council of the Lord will be carried out and will prevail."

"And what exactly does the council of the Lord suggest?"

She looked at him with cold eyes. "We take Les Tourelles at dawn."

"I knew I'd be injured the next day."

"How did you know? Did the saints tell you?"

"No. I dreamed it."

"Tell me," says Massieu. "Tell me how you dreamed it."

It happened the way it always did. She had seen a sudden picture, very clear and specific—an arrow tearing through her breast. And with it came a ferocious pain—pain like she'd never felt before. She woke up panting, her shirt soaked with sweat. "Watch out for me today," she told Pasquerel when she confessed to him that morning. "A Goddon archer will get me today."

Pasquerel blinked. "Not kill you?" he whispered.

"I don't know," she said. "Let's hope not."

"Did you know you were going to win?" Massieu asks.

"Yes. I knew we were going to win. And I knew both sides would suffer terrible losses that day ... but I did not know how terrible." She looks away from him then, her eyes following a white shaft of moonlight slicing across the tunnel of stones. "I did not know that."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't want to talk about the war anymore," she says abruptly in a flat voice. "I'm tired. I need to sleep."

"Of course," says Massieu, getting up and gathering his cloak around him, hiding the disappointment in his eyes.

But in the night the war comes back to her anyway. Comes crashing through the walls of her cell, crouches like a wolf on her chest, panting, poisoning her dreams. It's Bertrand she sees first, Bertrand with his yolk-yellow curls, his crumpled jester's face, walking into her camp with a huge shad in a net—the fish still alive and wet with its sad, jellied eyes, its pearly scales shining in the early light—Bertrand grinning as he lay his prize on the ground at her feet. "Thought you could use a good breakfast," he said. Bertrand fairly hopping with delight at his catch.

But she'd been too nervous to eat. Could not even think of eating. So she winked at him, said, "Let's save it for tonight, eh? I'll bring back a Goddon to serve it up for us."

"Ah, even better!" Bertrand had said. "A victory fish."

And it was the victory fish that Bertrand was thinking of later that morning as he scrambled up a ladder to the top of the high ramparts that surrounded the two enormous black towers of Les Tourelles. The victory fish he was thinking of when he reached the top of the wall and turned around to watch Jehanne, who stood halfway up a nearby ladder, screaming at the men below to hurry up, and so he did not see the spiked iron ball that came arcing neatly through the blue sky and buried itself in his skull. And he did not hear Jehanne screaming as he lost his hold on the ladder and fell silently to the ground. "Oh Bertrand!" she screamed. "Bertrand!"

She was not wearing a helmet that day. She had wanted the men to see her eyes, her face, as they fought. And her face was radiant as she urged her men on, up, and over the ramparts, as she cried, "Fight for your families, men! Fight for your freedom!" but the radiance vanished when she saw Bertrand fall. The sight of Bertrand lying on his back, his arms flung out on either side of him, his head a ball of blood, snuffed the light in her eyes. Killed all thought of care or self-defense, and it was then, as she stood on her ladder, looking down at her friend, that an arrow came whistling from below and buried itself in her back.

When she awoke, she was lying on her side. A wild pain inside her, as if a bolt of lightning was being pulled very slowly through her chest. There was a circle of drawn faces looking down at her, and beyond them, a flash of leaves and blue sky. "Bertrand?" she said.

Aulon shook his head. "No," he said, wiping her forehead with a damp cloth. "You rest now. You took a bad hit."

She remembered the arrow. When she looked down, she could just see the tip of the head pushing out of her neck. Blood ran thickly down her breast.

Rais knelt beside her, a strange glitter in his eyes. "So she is mortal after all," he murmured. "Shall I pull it out for you?"

"No," she said. "Aulon will do it. But you need to help hold me down."

"Yes, let me do that," Rais said. He was hovering over her with a green bottle in his hand, looking as if he longed to lean in and drink her blood. "Would you like some hippocras for the pain?"

"No." She looked at Aulon. Her breath was coming in hard little pants. "Just break off the shaft in back. Go as close to the skin as you can."

The first time Aulon grabbed the arrow, Jehanne fainted. They poured water over her face to revive her, and when she came to, she reached for the green bottle and drank deeply, the alcohol traveling down her throat like a tangled string of fire. Rais gripped her shoulders more tightly this time. Aulon knelt beside her and took hold of the arrow shaft with both hands—one near the entry wound, the other back near the fletching. Jehanne was clutching Rais's hand so hard it had turned white.

When Aulon snapped the arrow, Jehanne fainted again. Again they revived her with water. When she came to, she sat up and said, "I'll do the rest." She looked at Aulon. "You and Gilles just hold me steady."

The men knelt on either side of her. The arrowhead was protruding from her neck, just above the collarbone. But it hadn't com­pletely emerged. Only the tip was visible. The rest lay beneath a jutting tent of flesh. "You'll have to cut the skin so I can get the head out," she said, handing Aulon her knife. "Cut both sides, like a seam."

Rais picked up one of his leather gloves and handed it to her. "Bite down on this."

But as Aulon made the cut, Jehanne spat out the glove and screamed like an eagle. A sound so outrageous that both Aulon's and Rais's heads jerked back as if they'd been slapped.

"Do you want to rest?" Aulon asked when she was quieter.

"No," she said, the skin around her mouth white. "Just hold me tight. As tight as you can."

Once more they rearranged themselves. Aulon seated himself with one arm around her waist and his chest pressed against her back. Rais sat on the other side, facing her, his shoulder pressed into her chest. With her thumb and forefinger she dug into the neck hole, grabbed hold of the arrowhead, and pulled it out until it made a deep sucking sound and stuck out several inches from her neck like a bolt.

Jehanne was screaming so loudly that both men had closed their eyes and were squinting against the sound of it—as if they were walking into a tornado.

"Let me help you," said Aulon.

Jehanne shook her head. She wiped her hand on her hose and then, with a firm, hard motion, she gripped the shaft in her right fist and yanked it out of her neck. "Fuck," she said as blood pumped out of her neck. Then she fainted.

When she awoke, the sky was streaked with the violet blue and hot orange of sunset and the chamomile was glowing in the field around her and a cool breeze had come down from the hills. She was alone beneath a tree, on a hilltop a little ways off from the battlefield. Her horse grazed in the grass nearby. She touched her wound, which the men had dressed with olive oil and cotton. She could smell the fruity scent of the oil and the heavy, pungent scent of blood from the battlefield.

She got up and walked until she could see the two massive black towers of Les Tourelles and the maze of outer works and ditches and ramparts that surrounded it. The French soldiers still had not gotten inside. She could see them climbing over the high earthen walls like ants.
The men still launching themselves up the ladders and fighting along the tops of the walls, the men still falling through the air like birds ...

Many French soldiers had died trying to get over the wall that day. She saw them as she rode down the hill toward the field where the Bastard stood—hundreds of corpses pulled off the field and lined up to one side.
So many feet,
Jehanne thought as she rode past, watching the long rows of bodies in their silver suits, the suits glinting in the last rays of sunlight, their long metal shoes pointing upward to the sky.

The Bastard frowned when he saw her. "What are you doing here? You should be resting."

Jehanne shrugged. "A scratch," she said, smiling.

"We should quit for tonight. The men are exhausted. They've been fighting for thirteen hours without a break. None of them has had a thing to eat all day." He gestured out toward the dimming countryside. "It'll be too dark to see soon anyway."

"I need to speak with my council first," she said. "Call for a break so the men can eat something. I'll be back in an hour."

She knelt in a vineyard a little ways off from the fighting. Knelt in the crumbled dirt among the rows of dusky blue grape leaves with her eyes closed, listening to the leaves rustling around her, smelling the campfires being lit in the distance and the cool mineral smell of the dirt. She looked at the sky.
Show me your will, my Lord. What would you have me do?

When she returned to the field half an hour later, her eyes were blazing. The Godhead was pounding inside her, hot as a sun. "Now is the time, men," she shouted as she stood before her troops in the flickering torchlight. "My council tells me now is the time for us to take Les Tourelles. The English have their guard down. They think we're finished for the day; they think we're all going to go home and have our dinners; but, by God, we will show them that we have just begun! We must charge like tigers now, men, charge with all the fire and fury in our hearts and with the power of almighty God at our backs, and when we charge, watch me closely, for when my standard touches the rampart, I promise, Les Tourelles will be yours."

A great roar erupted from the men as they rode through the twilight toward the great fortress, Jehanne running out in front of the troops with her white banner waving, not even feeling her armor as she ran down into a ditch at the base of the rampart, feeling only the chill night air on her face and the wildfire of God blazing inside her, and when at last the tip of her banner touched the rampart of the fort, she turned toward her men and shouted, "Go up now. It's all yours!"

A speedy assault. The French ran up the ladders and leaped over the walls, catching the English while they were still loading their bows and groping around in the dark for their weapons. Jehanne, halfway up a ladder, kept hearing Rais above, laughing and shouting "Die, pigs! Die!" A bloody fight, but no worse than the ones that had gone before it. No, it was what happened next, on the bridge, that bothered her. The bridge was the thing she could not forget.

During the night, a group of citizens in Orléans had gathered up a mountain of scrap wood—ladders and boards and old wagon wheels and old doors, any flat piece of wood they could find—and built a high wooden walkway with ropes and pulleys that spanned the gap between the city wall and the destroyed bridge that led directly into the northern side of Les Tourelles. It was a wild-looking thing, stretching crooked and spindly and misshapen over the rushing green river. When La Hire and Alençon and Rais and their men finally made it over the southern walls of the fort, a group of armed militiamen from Orléans crept out along the bridge in single file, high above the river, toward the unguarded northern wall of the fort, stepping easily and quickly off the mongrel bridge and then charging through the doors and windows of the fort toward the unsuspecting English inside.