The Maid (5 page)

It was a few minutes before anyone in the village could understand what she was saying. "Slow down," said her mother, a hand on Jehanne's heaving back. "Take a breath."

Half an hour later they were on the old Roman road, all the residents of Domrémy and their best livestock, setting out in the blue twilight for the fortress town of Neufchâteau. The smell of smoke was heavy in the dusk now, the calves and horses nervous, sensing their masters' fear. Jehanne sat up in the cart beside her mother, who was clutching a speckled laying hen in her lap and wailing loudly. Hauviette and Mengette were in the wagon beside them, weeping too, clutching each other as if they were drowning, their faces crumpled, shining with tears. Jehanne regarded them coldly, thought them foolish. They had to go, that was all. They had to get to Neufchâteau as quickly as possible. Nothing else to think about, no point in crying. Just go. Fast. Now.

Speaking in a low, hard voice, she drove the horses forward into the darkness, and as she drove, she felt calm and clear. A thrilling feeling, as if she were poised on a tight rope above a deep ravine, walking slowly forward. All she had to do was keep paying attention, keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep seeing herself arriving at the other side, her foot touching solid ground. Then she would make it.
I've a gift for this,
she thought.

Her father and brothers were just ahead, herding the cows and sheep, and she could hear the panic in her brothers' voices as they spoke to the animals. Pierrelot's voice high and girlish, "Go, damn it! Move!" Jean thrashing the cows with his stick. They'd bound the hooves of the animals with cloth so their march had an odd muffled sound. There was the usual creak and clatter of the wagons, but below it, a large, awkward dragging, as if a great sea creature were trying to pull itself up onto the beach.

"Go on," said Jehanne's father to a yellow calf that had stopped in the road. An urgent, low force in his voice, his words hitting the air like hammers. "Go on, damn you." But the calf would not move. It dug its heels into the dirt, stiffened its legs and began to bawl. All the villagers around them stared, white as salt.

"Shut it up," said one man. "Shut it up, Goddamn it."

"Shut up," her father hissed at the animal. "Shut up, shut up." But the bawling only grew louder. Soon the animal was howling like a lost child. Her father rummaged furiously in his pocket. Then he grabbed the creature's curling blond head and pulled it back. A blade flashed in the air, and abruptly the bawling stopped. The calf nodded its head and an apron of blood poured from its throat. Jehanne blinked and looked away. After a moment, the animal knelt in the road. Then it lay down. "Let's go," said her father.

She saw the forest rise up before her in a high mass of black trees and vines against the aquamarine sky. A tunnel of dark leaves leading inward, away from the twilight, and the trees looming taller in the gathering dark, their limbs growing monstrous and powerful, asserting dominance over the land. The road itself was very old; it had once lead all the way to Rome, and as they moved through the night forest, Jehanne's mother crossed herself and whispered the Paternoster, and all of the villagers grew quiet, the entire train of them silent but for the shuffling of feet and the snuffing of the animals, and as they rode, Jehanne found herself moving through an ancient dream of rage. Along both sides of the road she saw the souls of her murdered countrymen assembled, thousands upon thousands of them advancing in a slow ghostly parade through the trees. Gray-skinned, sad-eyed farmers and millers, smiths and carpenters, priests and cobblers, wives and whores, mothers, nuns, and hollow-eyed children, Catherine among them, Hemet among them, all of them walking, saying,
Avenge us. Avenge us, girl.

Later came other voices. The chorus of three wild Godvoices in her ears.
Soon, darling, soon,
they sang.
Your season is coming.

Jehanne and her family were among the first of the dusty, exhausted travelers to arrive in Neufchâteau that night, and so they were part of a group led by the innkeeper Madame La Rousse through the dark, manure-stinking streets to her small half-timbered inn where they would stay for several weeks, crowded in with twelve other families from Domrémy, packed tight as rabbits in a warren and waiting for the news that it was safe to return to their village. Jehanne's parents and her brothers bedded down on straw pallets by the hearth. Jehanne lodged in a small cupboard beneath the stairs. Her cloak rolled up for a pillow. A canopy of cobwebs overhead.

She spent little time there. Her mind was too impatient, too feverish for sleep. Each night she lay silent, eyes wide open in the darkness, waiting until the house was quiet, until she could hear her father snoring through the wall, and then she crept out of the inn and into the warm summer night. Up through the maze of dark cobbled streets she went, a small, barefoot figure moving quickly, thick calves, red cheeks, fierce eyes, up and up until she reached the northern wall and ducked into the turret staircase, her hands held out on either side, feeling her way along the cold stone walls until she came out on a parapet overlooking the vast night-blue countryside, the air heavy with the smell of grass and hay, the far-off hills spotlighted by a rind of moon.

Each night she hoped to see just the moon and dark hills before her to the north, just the deep, rolling world of blue, but every night there were fires. New fires. A fire where her home had once lain, her church, her heart. Four blazing orange monsters feasting on the dark shanks of the land.

You will pay,
she thought as she watched it burn.
God will make you pay for this.

"Lord, we pray for the families of Domrémy, whose village has been so cruelly destroyed and who now seek shelter with us here in Neufchâteau." The priest paused, wiped a white ball of spittle from his lips and continued. "We pray that the terrible plague of the English invaders and the traitorous Burgundians be lifted from us and that France be permitted once again to toil and flourish in Your great and holy name."

Jehanne knelt in the hot, overcrowded church among her fellow refugees and churchgoers, her head bowed, hands clasped tightly as she whispered a fervent prayer, oblivious to the stares and raised eyebrows of her fellow Christians. She knelt like that throughout the service, until the bells rang out, and the rest of the churchgoers began their slow march out of the building and through the front doors into the climbing July sunlight of the courtyard, where the wives of Neufchâteau had prepared a communal midday meal. Jehanne was hungry, could smell the hens roasting over the fires outside, but she continued praying. As her father passed by, he stopped, clapped his hand on her shoulder and said through gritted teeth, "That's enough praying now, Jehannette."

She looked up at him. "I'm not finished yet."

Her father's nostrils flared in disgust. "Christ, you're an embarrassment," he muttered under his breath.

"May God forgive you for swearing in His house," she said, her face so righteous that he itched to slap her, and would have done so had they not been in public.

Only when the church was deserted and the front doors closed did she stand. Her legs burning, her knees sore and red. The room was dim and cool now, forestlike, silent. Moving like a sleepwalker, she went to the front of the nave and knelt down before the altar and began to pray once more. Her heart ached now with remorse.
Dear God, forgive me for my rage toward my father and for my rage toward the English, whom I know are Your creatures under Heaven as I am, although it often seems that they are not. Forgive me for my violent thoughts, and for my hunger to see them suffer as we do.

A pause. Watching from the shadow of the vestry door stood the little bald priest in his black robes, transfixed by the strange sight before him. The girl kneeling in a shaft of sunlight, her face and hands raised to the sky, tears rolling down her cheeks.
And forgive me, please, for doubting You, Lord. Forgive me for not accepting without question Your commands, forgive me for being so frightened. I want badly to do as You wish.

Then silence. For a long time, silence.

She lay down on the floor and pressed her cheek against the cold, smooth stone.
Talk to me. Help me find the strength to do as You wish.
More silence. Silence forever, it seemed. The priest staring, frozen, unable to move.

At last came the opening in time. She loosened her grip on her mind, forgot herself, and in her forgetting she opened like a window to the sky. In poured the thrilling light, the joy. A golden burr in her right eye and the spreading warmth in her cheek, along her neck, down her spine. The archangel spoke softly.
Learn to ride, little one. Teach yourself to ride.

It did not rain in Neufchâteau for three weeks. The air grew dry and dusty, the river shrank to a winding trickle in the red earth. Soon a thin red veil of dust covered everything in the town and all the countryside around it. Red dust on the tables and chairs and pots and pans and spoons and knives and windows, so thick on the windows on the front of Madame La Rousse's inn that one still, dull afternoon, Jehanne practiced writing her name with her finger on the glass. It was the only word she knew how to write, taught to her by Père Guillaume in Domrémy several years earlier. J-E-H-A-N-N-E-T-T-E, she wrote. But she did not recognize herself in the word any longer. It seemed to her the name of a stranger.

Dust and more dust, making the horses cough and the farmers out in the fields wipe their eyes again and again with their handkerchiefs. Soon the town's wells were running low and cups of water were being rationed out with care. Out in the fields, women began to clasp hands and kneel down and call to the old pagan gods for rain. "O great Cernunnos," they cried. "We pray in your mighty name."

When at last an armada of low, dark storm clouds appeared in the sky one afternoon, the townspeople were so busy putting buckets and tubs out to collect rainwater and pulling clothes off the drying lines that Jehanne saw an opportunity. Her father was setting up a second trough down by the barn for the animals, and her mother was pounding around upstairs with Madame La Rousse, closing the shutters about the inn, so she slipped unnoticed out the front door and walked nonchalantly away from the house and down the hill, humming quietly to herself, as if she were on her way to church.

Down in the field just outside the western wall of the town, she crouched with her skirt knotted between her legs, watching a horse graze from twenty feet off. A thin, sad-looking creature with a dusty brown coat and hooves the size of church bells. Jehanne could smell the rain coming, the high, mineral scent in the air. The stiff wind moving over the grass. Dark violet clouds scudding across the sky. She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and held her dirty hand out toward the animal, rubbing her fingers together as if she had a treat.

The horse stood with a pale fan of dried grass protruding from its mouth. Rotated its jaw, eyed her skeptically. For every step Jehanne took forward, the animal took one back. "Come on," she said. "Come on, baby." Overhead the wind riffled the trees, and the clouds moved like dark islands over the hills. Crouched motionless in the grass like a wildcat, eyes hooded, she waited until the animal lowered its great head to take another mouthful, and then she sprang forward, hurling herself across the animal's back, clutching at its ragged mane as the startled creature reared up and pawed the air and bucked, shrieking and stomping the earth with its enormous hooves and shaking itself until at last Jehanne flew through the air like a rag doll, and the horse took off running across the field as if the Devil himself were on its heels.

In the morning she looked at her mother across the table and said, "They need help feeding people up at the church. Can I go?"

The rain had stopped. Sunlight was pouring in the windows, and the world outside seemed sparkling and new, as if each of the leaves on the trees had been polished by hand. Jehanne longed to fling herself into it.

"There's a nice idea," said Madame La Rousse, who was rolling dough by the stove, her hair tied up in a black cloth tower on her head.

Jehanne's mother glanced at her husband, who sat at the end of the table, hunched over a bowl of porridge, white twists of steam rising in the air. He did not look up, did not stop eating. He simply grunted and shrugged his shoulders, which Jehanne and her mother took to mean yes.

It was three days before the animal would allow her to mount again. Three days of lying to her mother and then waiting, chasing, ducking the animal's great punching hooves, being thrown into the mud, kicking the grass with impatience. On her way to see the horse the third afternoon, Jehanne cut through the town market. She had a few silver coins her mother had given her for the church collection plate, and as she walked, she jingled them in her pocket. She stopped in front of a cart with piles of rope coiled like snakes on the ground before it. There were thin, fine flaxen coils and heavy tough ones made from hemp, some frayed, some clean and new, shining in the light like a child's braids. Jehanne considered them. She bent down and fingered a sturdy medium-weight length, then stood and lifted the rope with her until it unwound to its full length, which was twice as tall as she was.

"I could think of some things to do with that," said a voice behind her.

Jehanne turned. It was Michel Le Buin.

"Like what?" she said, her eyes cold, her heart itchy with hatred.

The oily-nosed boy pinched out a smile, scratched his neck. "You'll just have to wait and see."

Jehanne turned away and addressed the vendor, who was squatting like a monkey in the purple shade of the cart. "How much for this," she said, hoisting the rope.

"Three deniers."

"How about one?"

"Settle at two."

She looked at him, smiled. "I've only got one and a half."

The man scratched his beard. Considered the rope.

"Fair enough."

"Any chance you could tie it into a set of reins for me while you're at it?"

Jehanne was smiling beautifully now, her eyes shining like river stones.

The man looked away. Then he picked up the rope and began to fold it and knot it for her.

"Jehannette, if you don't marry me, I'm going to take you to court and sue you for breaking an oath."

"I never made any oath."

"Your father did."

"He can say what he likes. Doesn't mean I'm going to do it."

A dazzling high summer afternoon. A light wind rippling across the poppy fields. Cows dozing in the shade of the alders. In the westernmost field of Neufchâteau, far away from the river, Jehanne sat atop a split-rail fence with a bunch of clover hay in one hand and the rope in the other. The horse ignored her, flicked flies with his tail, until she quietly hopped off the fence and crouch-walked toward the animal with the hay held out before her in offering. Its ears twitched, a glossy black eye rolled toward her, but the horse remained still. "Look what I got for you," she said, lifting the hay to the animal's black lips.

A display of long yellow teeth and pink gums then, the horse's jaw rotating as it took the hay in, Jehanne moving slowly, slowly closer to the animal, cooing softly as she went. Slowly, ever so gently, she slipped the homemade reins over the great dusty head and manipulated the rope deep into the animal's mouth along with the hay, setting it in behind the wet molars, and then creeping alongside the horse, taking hold of its mane and leaping smoothly up out of the grass, mounting it once more, this time calmly, and then gripping the sides of the horse so forcefully with her thighs and knees that when the animal bolted forward, she remained in place on its back, leaning over its warm brown neck with her elbows dug in and the rope tight in her hands as the animal took off across the high green field, speaking softly in the animal's ear as it went, and guiding it with her reins until slowly its gait smoothed out to a long and fluid run, and they were moving as one through the grass in the clear summer afternoon with the earth thundering beneath them and the hills a blur of green all around, the enormous blue bowl of the sky overhead and the smell of clover in the air and the sun on their skins and she thought,
I can do this.