Women in the Wall

Almost all the characters in this story lived in Gaul thirteen centuries ago and left behind odd, slivered images of themselves. I have tried to put these together as one might, taking a few surviving sherds, try for the shape of a lost and curious pot. I have bent known facts hardly at all. I did fill in gaps. Two characters are invented—Ingunda and Fridovigia—another, Agnes, is made to remain as abbess for longer than she did and to end more unhappily. The political plot is an invention but its background and
component
elements come from chronicles of the time. I have chosen to suppose that Agnes and Fortunatus had a love affair. It has usually been held that his playful and passionate letters to her expressed a purely chaste feeling. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Recent evidence tends to show that flesh subdued by monastic vows can and does requicken. Celibacy of the clergy, as it is being questioned now, was only partially and reluctantly accepted then. The behaviour of the renegade nuns is far more outrageous in the
chronicles
than in my account. Radegunda’s visions are described by her contemporary biographer, Sister Baudonivia.

My setting is the Wild West of an age often called ‘Dark’. It was a world as fissile and fragmented as our own and its end was often thought to be in sight. Unlike ourselves, thinking people then did not embrace the fragmentary quality of experience but reacted by trying to contain bolting certitudes under grids of inflexible belief. They longed for coherence. In retelling this story, I too have tried for it. But it is, I repeat, a story. For fancy—however empathic—to coincide with one of history’s secrets would be a miracle as odd as any in which the Merovingians believed.

The action of this novel spans the two decades between 568 and 587. There are some flashbacks to earlier events remembered by Radegunda and Agnes. Every change in time is indicated by a date in brackets. The monologue of the anchoress, although presented at various points throughout the novel, takes place entirely in the last two years, 586 and 587.

[
A.D.
586]

The mad cannot sin.

Darkness chews at my brain. Chinks multiply. It seeps in.

Don’t
let
it
!
It is a duty to struggle against the Princes, Powers and Dominations of the World of Darkness and against the evil spirits who inhabit the air.

A losers’ battle?

No.

We are all at war: the Church Militant.

I see—I choose to—the late evening view from the convent garden: field and vineyard strips angled like a backgammon board with shadows, forests, a prickle of light: the river Clain. Our buildings straddle the city walls so that turrets built for defence are now part of our cloister and so, by God’s grace, still used for defence. Our chaplain used to say that. Father Fortunatus. There is only one door. The abbess keeps the key. It is iron and drags at her waist. The knobs in her backbone show through her woollen robe when she bends. It is the only key. All rooms remain unlocked. By Rule. There are many. I can recite their names and uses: a memory test. Refectory, spinning-, weaving-, drying-rooms, book-room and so forth. It is too easy. I listed them yesterday with
everything
they contain: woad, madder, soap, grease, shears, everything. The words flow fluently as water and prove nothing. Memory survives judgment. I must think and talk to myself clearly and sequentially.
Every
day
. It is important that I do, for that is what will help keep me sane.

In reality I have not seen the convent for a long time. I do not know how long. For a while I kept count of the days. I can see cracks of light. I know when it is day and when night. Also, I can hear the bells ring for lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones and for the nocturnal offices. I kept count for seven months and thirteen days. Then I fainted. It was light in the cracks when I lost
consciousness
. It was dark when I came to. Hours later? Days? I could not tell. I could have asked the sister who brings me food. But a recluse does not speak. It was a sign. I understood that. Counting the days was wrong. It showed attachment to the world and I had sworn that I would renounce the world. Therefore I had done wrong to hold on to time. Time is of the world. So: I gave up counting the days. That must have been a long time ago. For a while I thought maybe I should not watch the cracks of light either. I used to close my eyes or turn my back on the cracks. But I understood that that, too, was wrong. I had sworn of my own free will to live as a recluse. So now I must live. Dying would be a sin against the Holy Spirit and against the Will of God. I must not deny the Light. Daylight figures the Light. The world lives in my memory and I do not blot it out for I am not to die but to live meagerly. All my strength must go into staying alive, into staying sane so that whatever I do or suffer remains deliberate. Therefore I allow myself to watch the cracks of light and to notice when they pale and when they turn yellow as they do when the sun is shining on the world outside. I even hold up my hand and drinking-flask to the light and look at them. The flask is of bluish glass full of tiny air bubbles and my hand is pink and lumpy and covered with old scars.

When I was a child, news came to the convent of a boy who had been walled up by his own wish eight years before. He had been twelve years old then and for eight years lived as I do now in a narrow space between two walls, fed, as I am fed, through a crooked slit which let in only cracks of light. For eight years he lived in sanctity. Then demons took hold of him and he began to shout that he was being burned and scorched and that the saints of God were thrusting burning needles through his body. His torment was so great that he succeeded in removing one of the great stones from his prison. Flinging down the wall, he came forth, howling that he was in the grip of atrocious pains and yelling that the saints were the cause of his torment. Raving! He was brought to many shrines but his madness could not be cured. I heard it said then that the demons had gained power over him through his pride. He had aimed too high, starving himself beyond reason, denying himself water and trying perhaps to empty his mind of all but heavenly thoughts. “We are not angels,” our chaplain told us then. “Heaven is not our sphere. If we try to be angelic we will be punished. We will be flung back into our own bestial animality.” Our abbess had the same opinion of violent penances. “Beware,” she used to say, “lest in scouring off the rust, you break the vessel itself.”

*

Radegunda’s most scorching memory was not private.

Half Gaul shared it with her for it was in every harpist’s repertory. It was not only her worst memory, it was also her first for it had burned out everything that had been in her mind before. Some earlier images did survive but could not be deciphered and only glowed with a dark, tantalizing phosphorescence, as old ink-marks might on a fire-blackened page.

The combustive memory was itself suspect. It was too ample, too vivid. Radegunda had been eleven when her family was massacred and had, of course, understood what was happening. The trouble was that she had heard the event described scores of times since, complete with accounts of incidents which she, as a girl, could not possibly have witnessed. These became as real to her as those she had. As time passed, the harpists added more violent detail. The smells of blood and smoke, the burning bones and the wrench of falling rafters were like acid in
Radegunda
’s nose. Once she fainted at a banquet during a particularly graphic retelling of it all.

“Poor lady!”

“Didn’t that fool of a harpist know who she was?”

“How could he? He’s new here.”

“All the same …”

The incident gave the story a new lease of popularity and she had to listen to it even more often. Mournfully, if the passing minstrel knew she was in his audience, with a relish of war-cries and reckless strummings if he did not, her murdered relatives’ names were chanted at banquets and the fall of her house celebrated to honour its conqueror, Clotair, who had taken her captive on the night of the massacre and become her husband in her eighteenth year.

Sitting among Clotair’s drink-sodden warriors at a table littered with knives and remnants of broken meats, she would sometimes occupy her mind with an effort to unravel the bloody tapestry of her history and disentangle what she had seen from what she hadn’t. She did this stoically, for her feelings were few and focused and she had learned to steer them forward rather than back. Still, they had their roots in that night in Thuringia when the Franks had swept in and burnt her uncle’s palace. The shock had curdled her sensibility as rennet curdles milk. She knew that. She thanked God for it. It had been his way of turning her against the world, the flesh and the devil.

Devils were the first element to be discounted in the harpists’ version of Thuringia’s defeat. Monsters, magic, a spontaneous yawning of the unhallowed German fens which had threatened to devour the Christian cavalry—these were clearly a biased story-teller’s rendering of the fact that her uncle had had trenches dug in the hope that the Frankish horses might fall into them. Unhappily for him and her, only a few had. But could she have known even this at the time? Probably her only authentic
memories
would be indoor ones, for the attack had taken place in winter, a season which the hardy Franks found congenial for fighting. So what indoor memories could she recover? She groped, closing her eyes to remember better and smelled the resinous wood of her uncle’s palace walls.

*

[
A.D.
531]

In one room all the women sat around a fire—that was sinister in itself for in normal times slaves and mistresses should have been rushing to get their chores done before the short winter daylight ended. The fire had been neglected. Accumulations of ash sifted up through the logs and choked the flames. Damp filtered the light, swaddling the wooden palace in a mist as clammy and, at times,
translucent
as the nacred track of a snail. Late in the afternoon, a few shafts of brightness percolated through. It was about then, Radegunda was sure, that a burst of shrieks roused the women and drew one of them to the back room where she and her cousins were playing with a stolen scramasax.

“What’s the matter?” the woman scolded. She was one of Radegunda’s younger aunts. “Where did you get that sword?” she shrieked. “Give it here.”

She grabbed it, aimed a blow at several dodging children, missed and did not bother to try again. “What kind of foolery is this? At a time like this?” Her voice jumped. She seemed to be only half thinking of what she was saying. Alert for sounds from outside, she paused. “Listen …” Nothing. Taking a deep breath, she began to shout once more. “I …” But she was like a marauding vixen in a poultry yard: ears half tuned to the fowl, half to the watchdog. Her eyes flicked. Sensing something in the doorway at her back, she turned. The sword was still in her hand.

At this point, Radegunda might recoil, quailing before her own memory. But the images were compelling. This was something she had seen with her own eyes and the action had to be played through.

The armed stranger standing behind the children’s aunt must have been startled by her sudden movement and by the pointing sword. Almost before the children were aware of his presence, he had jerked the weapon from the woman’s hand and rammed his own into her belly. She fell forward: skewered. He shoved her off with his knee, releasing his weapon with the same
movement
. She crumpled as softly as a bale of falling cloth.

The children’s screams stayed jammed in their throats. The man did not move either. He stood, staring at his bloodied sword. Then several other men crowded in behind and past him, grunting and exclaiming in
excitement
. All had drawn weapons. One pushed across the room, making for the large coffer on which Radegunda was sitting. Too stunned to flinch, she waited as he loomed towards her: a great, greasy, intent, uncaring man. He swept her off the coffer with a movement which was neither vindictive nor angry, but indifferent, as though he had been removing an inanimate object, then broke the lock with a light, thrifty blow and raised the lid.

In a moment all the men were bent over the chest. Radegunda, still lying where she had fallen, saw her cousin, Hamalafred, crawl across the floor behind the men’s legs. He was making for the fallen short sword.
Hamalafred
was thirteen years old. Radegunda was sure of this for there had been talk of his joining the Thuringian warriors when they left to fight the Franks and he had been bitterly disappointed when the decision went against him. It was his bad luck to be short for his age although everyone admitted that he was quick tongued and clever as a bag of cats. His fingers were clenching on the
sword-handle
when one of the men turned, saw him and stepped heavily on his wrist. Hamalafred’s face reddened and swelled. Laughing, the man lifted his foot and gently rolled rather than kicked the boy into the corner where Radegunda already lay. With the same lazy movement, the man bent, took her arm and drew her into the light.

“Well!” Gargling small chuckles of amusement around his throat. “What have we here? Young! A bit young maybe, but nice! A nice filly!” He spun her round. “Nice!” he repeated and picked up her skirt. “Pretty little ankle! War’s got its points! Hey!” He called to the men who were still examining the contents of the coffer. “Look at this!” He lifted the skirt a little higher. “Nice knee too! Hey, Count Leudast, what fine do you impose in your court on a free Frank who uncovers a free-born virgin’s knee? In peacetime I mean?”

“Six
solidi
,” shouted one of the men at the coffer without looking up.

“Aha!” said the first soldier with satisfaction. “Six
solidi
for this, eh? And what”—he raised the skirt higher—“for uncovering a thigh? A nice, firm female thigh like this?”

“More than you could afford, you old lecher!”

“And for uncovering the backside? How much? Tell me. I’d like to know!”

Radegunda jerked out of his grasp and dived for the door. Her foot slipped in something and she stumbled but managed not to fall. She rushed out, then spun, clutching the door-jamb. Again she whirled. There were men all over the place. Lighted tapers pierced the twilight; glints flew from cutting edges; shadows multiplied silhouettes. One approached, throwing light on her foot, which was wet where she had stepped in her dead aunt’s blood. Her sandal was coated with it. Her glance ran along the track left by her feet to where the light showed her aunt lying on her back. A stain had spread over the dead woman’s middle. Her eyes were wide but nerveless. Radegunda turned abruptly away.

The man who had lifted her skirt stood beside her.

“Nowhere to run,” he remarked. “May as well stay with me. I’m as good as the next, little pagan!”

“I’m not a pagan,” she shouted in a breathy explosion. “I am Princess Radegunda and a Christian. I want to see your king.”

“Clotair? He’s probably poking your mother this minute.”

“My mother is dead. She was killed the—last time this happened. This has all happened before!” Radegunda’s composure cracked. “And now,” she shrieked, “again, I …” She began to cry but, after a few first uneven wails, got the sound curiously under control so that it must have seemed premature at such a time and more like the cry of a professional mourner than of a child. “All over again,” she wailed, “and again! I don’t want it! No! Not again and always happening and happening. I can’t—where is your king?”

“Stop that! Stop it!” The Frank was annoyed. He pushed her around the dead body and across the room to a bench where several small children were packed together. Radegunda let herself be pressed in between them. Shoulders against the wall behind, as though
gathering
her last dregs of strength, she stared into the eyes of the man who had just removed his hand from her shoulder. Smells of sweat, garlic, urine, rasped metal and—yes—blood and the rancid smell from the butter-dressing in his hair bore down on her. His face came so close to hers that his beard was brushing her skin and the black tunnels of his nostrils blew hot breath on her mouth. She did not scream now. The face hovered. She saw growths of nasal hair puff and ebb like seaweed in a tide. Then the whole thing withdrew.