The Maid (25 page)

The fire outside Alençon's tent burned sideways in the wind. A ragged red flag swaying and shifting in the night. Jehanne was sitting on a log, staring into the fire, when Alençon stepped outside and saw her there. He held a dented pewter cup of wine in one hand. "What are you doing, little Maid?" he said.

She looked up at him, flames crackling and dancing behind her head like a halo of fire, her cheeks flushed with heat. "We could just go," she said.

The Duke smiled, sat down on the log beside her, stretched his legs out in front of him toward the heat. "To Paris?"

She nodded. Picked up a stick and poked idly at the coals. "Who knows when the King will stop with this truce nonsense. We're losing men every day. We need to go now."

"You want to go without his permission?"

"What can he do to us? If we lose, he'll scold us. If we win, he'll kiss our feet."

The Duke scratched his chin. Closed his eyes, drinking in the heat of the fire. "He could do more than scold us, you know."

"He won't. He likes you too much and he's too afraid of me." She turned her face toward him. "I can't stand this anymore. Paris is just sitting there, waiting for us to grab it, while the King frets and second-guesses himself. All of my voices tell me now is the time; we must act, Duke. I'll never forgive myself if we don't."

"We can't take the King's army. The Baron de Rais and Poton will come with their men, of course, but that makes us five hundred at best."

"I don't want the Baron," she said.

Alençon smiled. "Without him, we are nothing. Hardly enough to take a bridge, much less a city."

She nodded. Was silent for a time.

"So five hundred, then," she said at last.

"It's not many. I don't know if it's enough."

She touched his cheek. "You forget the angels."

The Duke smiled. "And how many angels are there with us?"

"More than you can count," she said.

They rode out a few days later, just before dawn. Jehanne and Alençon and their corps of warriors. Poton with his troop of ragged mercenaries. Gilles de Rais with his glittering circus. Jehanne could not look at Rais. Could not speak to him. She turned her horse and rode away when she saw him coming toward her. "Hail, Pucelle!" he shouted. Jehanne did not respond.

It was a clear, windy autumn day. The first real chill was in the air, and Jehanne's horse was frisking and straining to run beneath her. She looked over at Alençon, who rode up grinning alongside her and kicked his horse into a canter, so she urged her horse forward as well. Soon she and Alençon were galloping over the sloping yellow fields, racing through the goldenrod toward the rounded hills; and the sky was very blue and the air smelled of wood smoke and the wind was roaring across her face as she rode, roaring cold and fresh through her hair, and it seemed to her that the old magic was upon them then. That they were righteous and blessed, and on their way to carry out God's holy mission.
Surely He'll protect us,
she thought.
Surely this is His wish.

They made camp outside Paris, in the town of Saint-Denis. Jehanne and Alençon and Rais and Poton and their five hundred soldiers. On their first night there, she awoke to the sound of laughter. High, flowering laughter floating out across the night field. Girl's laughter. And something else too. A drum. She sat up and pushed back her blanket. Her eyes wide, her ears snapped open like a cat's. Into the blackness she peered, the high yellow campfires blooming like otherworldly tulips against the deep night sky. Again the laughter. Jehanne's nostrils flared. Quickly she scrambled to her feet, picked up her sword, and followed the sound through the tall grass. Creeping. Silent. Ahead to the left, through a stand of pines, she saw a fire larger than the rest, a raging fire around which a motley crowd of soldiers had assembled, and around which a young brown-skinned woman danced to the drum in a long red skirt, feet bare, dark curling hair long and loose and gilded in the firelight, shoulders and teeth gleaming as she went around the flames, skirts pulled up in her fists, her throat long and smooth, as a small, smiling man patted the drum with the heels of his hands and the soldiers cheered and laughed.

She walked into the circle. Walked up to the dancing girl in the red skirt. "What are you doing here?"

The girl was not impressed. "What does it look like?"

"We're just having a bit of fun, Maid," said one of the soldiers.

"You know whores are forbidden in my camp."

"Why, because the men have to remain pure for battle?" the woman said in a scornful tone.

Jehanne looked at her.

The dancer spat on the ground. "Everyone knows you don't have the guts to attack Paris."

Jehanne smiled, then raised her sword over her head and hit the woman with the flat of it so hard that the sword broke in half. The woman fell to the ground. Everyone around the campfire stood frozen, eyes wide as coins. Jehanne stared back at them. "I said no whores in camp."

Jehanne sighs now, leans her head against the wall of her cell. "I knew it was wrong," she says. "I knew I would pay for it. But the fire in my blood was so strong. All the months of waiting on the King, of watching my beautiful army drift away, of sitting around in those ridiculous castles, waiting. I could not bear it anymore. I knew my power was fading; I could feel the magic draining out of me little by little every day. A terrible feeling. Like watching your own blood pour out of your body. And I did not know why. I prayed more than ever before. I lay on the floor in the churches for hours, begging for guidance, for help, for strength. But something had broken. The winds had changed. And all I knew was that I had to recapture Paris, that the English had to be run out of France, that this was what God had instructed me to do, and that no one seemed willing to listen to me anymore. The King went back to being a coward, the soldiers went back to their whoring and drinking. It was as if they could only bear so much holiness. As if they suddenly had to go back to being animals again, and no matter what I said or how many times I told them God could not help them if they behaved this way, they would not listen. They wanted wine, rest, women, laughter, food. They'd had as much of God as they could bear."

The duke of Alençon was standing in her tent when she awoke. Unshaven, unwashed, a dark look in his eyes. Jehanne sat up, rubbed her eyes, blinked. "Is it true?" he said.

"Is what true?"

"About the whore?"

"What did they say?"

The Duke glanced at the floor. Then back at Jehanne. "That you hit her so hard over the head your sword broke in half. She may not live, Jehanne."

She looked away from him, her ears ringing with blood.

"Did you do it?"

Suddenly her face broke and tears poured down her cheeks. She nodded, pressed her fingers against her eyes.

"What were you thinking?"

"I didn't mean to hit her that hard," she said, sobbing. "They know they aren't allowed to have whores in camp."

The Duke knelt down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder.

She looked up at him with red eyes. Spoke in choked, sodden words. "Nobody listens to me anymore."

She stood in the high pines along the eastern edge of the camp that ran downhill toward the river. She had a place there. A small clearing just above the riverbank where the earth was carpeted in brown pine needles, and the trees were very tall and very old, and there, in that same place, were some young pine saplings with their feathery, light green needles, fernlike in their delicacy, fanning out silently in the still cool air with the old alligator bark of the ancient trees behind them and the long golden river sliding over the rocks beyond. In this place, the black branch of one thick old tree reached out far over the river, and its smallest branches trailed along the surface like fingers, and the light fell and glittered wonderfully on the water, and she could feel her God there, inside of her, could be gentled and calmed by Him as she watched the sun pour down in long shafts and then splinter out across the surface of the water like shards of a shattered mirror. She rested her hand against the rough trunk of the tree and then leaned her whole body against it, soaking in the silence, the curious comfort of leaning up against something so old, listening to the never-ending movement of the water. After a long time, she knelt down and pressed her palms against the earth. She bowed her head.
Forgive me,
she said.
Forgive my wickedness. My temper. My violence. My impatience.
Her shoulders slumped.
Please forgive me.

"It occurs to me, Charles, that we could go ahead and let the Maid attack Paris."

"Is that not what you've been advising me against for the last month, Georges?"

"Indeed it is, but I've realized that there are several things we have not properly considered here."

"And what are those?"

"The first is that the Maid is actually very popular in Paris. Far more popular than you. Possibly more popular than Burgundy too."

"
Mmm.
"

"So it occurred to me that if she does manage to get inside the city, the people might well rally behind her and put her on the throne instead of you. Perhaps that's even what she's hoping for."

"That's insane."

La Trémöille shook his head. "Paris is afraid of you and your family, Charles. They believe your parents destroyed their country. Whereas the Maid, well, the Maid has accomplished a great deal of good for France in a very short period of time."

"What is your point, Georges?"

La Trémöille smiled. Stroked his lips with two fingers. Knew he was conjuring terrible memories from Charles's childhood now. The older brothers poisoned by Burgundy, the whore mother shaming him throughout the city, disinheriting him, calling him a bastard, the poor mad father shrieking in the halls of the Louvre. "Well, it seems to me that it would be best for all concerned if the Maid did not succeed in her attack on Paris."

Charles cocked an eyebrow. "She doesn't have much chance of it without my army behind her."

"Indeed. But if she attacks Paris without your support, that's not going to look very good for you either. People will say,'Why did he not support the Maid? It's his fault that she lost.'"

Charles was silent for a little while. Thinking. "So either way it's terrible. If she gets into Paris, there's a good chance the people will put her on the throne. And if she fails, everyone will blame me ... as always ..." Charles closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips against his eyelids. "Oh Jesus."

"Yes. But this morning I thought,
Well. What if our army goes along with the Maid to Paris, marches right up to the walls with her, but doesn't attack? Is secretly forbidden from attacking?
"

Charles blinked.

"So she attacks with just the five hundred men she's got now?"

"Yes."

"Then she will fail and her reputation will be ruined, but—"

La Trémöille smiled. "None of it will be your fault."

"Somehow Alençon convinced Charles to bring the army to us in Saint-Denis. I don't know how. He rode away from camp one day, and when he returned, his eyes were very bright, and he came running toward my tent. "Guess where I've been."

Jehanne smiles. "He was so kind, Alençon. He tried so hard." She exhales, regards Massieu in the blue predawn light. The old priest nods, looks as if he might weep. "But there was something off about it from the start. The King's army came along with us, but not one of them would look me in the eye. Men who just a few weeks earlier were kneeling at my feet. Calling me the Daughter of God. Calling themselves the Maid's Army. None of them would look me in the eye now. At some point I realized that Charles must have ordered them not to attack. "Humor her. Go with her to Paris. See how things are there. But do not, under any circumstances, attack." I could feel it. They were no longer mine. Not the way they'd been in Orléans. I tried to lead them on anyway, shouted at them to fight for their freedom, begged them to fight for their freedom, but the whole time I knew it was falling apart. I knew my days were numbered."

They attacked Paris on September eighth. The Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin. A holy day. A day, which, in previous times, Jehanne would have declared off-limits for fighting. But such piety did not seem possible to her now. The soldiers were restless. The generals were pushing to attack. "If we don't hurry, we'll lose our chance," said Poton. "This is it." The fire inside her was roaring, desperate, the drum pounding a steady chant:
Attack, attack, attack.

She begged her saints for guidance, but they did not come.
Please,
she said, kneeling at the chapel in Saint-Denis.
I fear that if we do not attack tomorrow, we'll never get another chance. The King changes his mind so often it's a miracle they're here right now ...

But the voices did not come. The light did not come.

She wept. Screamed,
Where are you?

Why won't you come?

They approached the city very early in the morning, through the pig markets that lay outside the city walls, under a light gray drizzle. A maze of wooden pens and troughs and ramshackle barns, the mud-painted animals watching as the soldiers rode through on their horses, the water in the troughs rippling out in circles as the weight of the moving army shook the earth. "Today we take Paris," said Mugot, beaming as he rode alongside Jehanne.

"Yes," she said, tousling the gold mushroom cap of her page's hair.

It was promising at first. They were thousands of men on this clear, early fall day, all in good armor, all armed with their wooden shields and culverins, their lances and bows and swords. Their wagons piled high with trembling gray mountains of gunpowder, and as they neared the city walls, there arose for a moment a shimmer of the old glory in the air. A cry went up among the men as they rode. "She will put the King in Paris if it is left to her!"

Moving in neat, glittering rows, they packed in tightly about the high, gray-stone city walls, atop which its silent defenders stood, lined up like birds on a line to greet them. Dark heads, near black in the distance, with the sun not fully overhead yet, faces unseen, only a long row of heads and shoulders, and the menacing glint of their weapons. Between the French soldiers and the wall lay a broad green moat, its surface velvety with algae. Silently the line of men waited at the top of the wall, watching, their faces dark, closed like stones.

The moat was very deep; they had to build a bridge to get across it. The men passed wood forward from the back of the army—large bundles of logs and branches weighed down with rocks, whole carts and rock-filled barrels were fed into the moat until a bizarre makeshift bridge began to rise from the water—green and monstrous, like a shipwreck raised from the bottom of the sea. When it was finished, Jehanne ordered the men across with their ladders and cannons and culverins, and then she hopped down off her horse and walked up to stand alongside them at the edge of the moat. She pressed her fingers into a cone around her mouth and shouted up at the Goddons on the wall: "Men of Paris, yield to us quickly, for Jesus' sake. For if you do not yield before night, we will enter by force and you will all be put to death without mercy."

The sound of laughter floated down slowly from the top of the wall. Behind it a chorus of disembodied voices, echoing in the air.

"Go back home, you crazy cunt."

Then a volley of explosions cracked open the air, and a rain of iron cannonballs fell onto the soldiers near the edge of the moat. Alençon's cousin Richard stood beside him one moment, loading his bow, and the next, a cannonball buried itself so deep in his head that only the top of the black ball could be seen, rising up from his skull like a wicked tumor. "Oh," the man said, blinking. Then he fell down. Behind him the red sun sank into the hills, the sky went gray as ash. "Jesus, Richard!" cried Alençon, kneeling beside him, his face freckled with blood. But the man was no longer breathing.

Beside Jehanne, Poton and Rais rolled a catapult into place. Rais, eyes dangerously alight, set the arm of the catapult, then picked up a pitch-covered rock and placed it into the bowl of the machine. He grabbed his page's torch and touched it to the rock. "Now, burn," said Rais, smiling as the ball burst into a globe of orange fire.

A moment later the fireball was soaring through the blue sky, and then stopping very abruptly as it entered the ribcage of one of the Burgundian archers on top of the wall. For a moment the man stood motionless on the wall, his chest illuminated as if his heart had caught fire. Then he tipped forward and fell through the air.

A splash like a wild, white flower rose up out of the green moat. Then the white flower collapsed, sank into rolling waves of foam. And the water was still and green again.

"Bloody bitch," someone shouted from high on the wall. Jehanne looked up in the direction of the shout, and as she did, she felt a white-hot flash of pain in her leg. She looked down. An iron crossbow bolt was sticking out of her thigh. Her thigh seemed oddly distant from her, as if she had risen above her own body. An ugly thing, the bolt, thick and black and sharp, like the tooth of a monster. Blood was pumping out around it like oil, red and alive. "The Maid!" cried Mugot. "The Maid's hit." He ran toward her, the lovely white silk of her standard waving behind him like a flag above the sea of blood and death, and then his face changed suddenly, as if his skin had been torn downward. Surprise, then shock. His face gone gray. The air around him whizzing terribly.

A bolt had nailed his foot to the ground. The boy looked down in amazement, then raised the visor of his helmet, and as he did, another bolt sank into the center of his forehead. That bolt, Jehanne would think later, was like a third eye foreseeing a black and terrible future. "Oh no," he said. A long tear of blood ran down his face.

"Mugot!" Jehanne cried.

The men around Jehanne stood frozen as the page attempted to move forward. He took a step to the left, and then the bolt pulled him backward, made him wheel his arms like a drunk working to steady himself. "Sorry," he said, as blood poured from his ears. He sat down, the white banner sinking into the mud beside him.

Overhead the black sky continued spitting down arrows, a waterfall of arrows and cannonballs pouring over the Paris wall and raining death upon the French. The King's army remained at a safe distance. Did not attack. The men up on the ladders had stopped climbing and were looking back toward where Jehanne stood beside the fallen boy and the fallen standard.

"Don't stop!" she cried. "Keep going! Keep going!"

Rais stepped in. "Don't be an idiot, Jehanne. You're hurt."

"Get away from me," she screamed. Her face white, bloodless. "Get away from me."

He ignored her, picked her up, and cradled her as he would a child as he shoved through the raging sea of men and arrows, making his way toward the earthen ramparts that were the first line of the city's defenses. Jehanne fought him, kicking and sobbing. "Don't touch me. Don't you dare touch me."

The Baron looked at her. Then he looked at Poton. "Poor thing's lost her mind," he said.

The soldiers continued their doomed attack on Paris until night fell, but they came no closer to getting over the wall and inside the city. When he saw the pale skull of the moon rise over the hills, Alençon threw his longbow on the ground and ordered their retreat. "Eight hours of fighting and still not one Frenchman over the walls," he said to Poton as they watched the slow parade of weary, mud-caked troops riding back through the earthen works and ditches.

"Would have helped if the King's bloody men had lent a hand!" spat Poton. He picked up his long ax and threw it into the moat.

Gilles de Rais was looking at the sky. "And so the spell is broken," he said quietly.

Alençon's head snapped toward Rais. "Don't say that!" he said. "Don't you dare say that."

The Baron laughed, gestured toward the royal army as it disappeared in the distance. Then he looked to the Maid, who lay motionless beneath a blanket in a wagon. "Whether I say it or not, it's still true."

Slowly the rest of the French soldiers retreated through the pig market, their shoulders slumped, the bodies of the wounded soldiers folded over the backs of horses, and the bodies of the dead piled high in the wagons, their stray, bloody hands and steel-tipped boots dangling over the sides, bouncing lightly with the jolts of the wagon, as if they were waving a half-hearted good-bye.