Women in the Wall (2 page)

“You stay there!” said the Frank. “The kings will be coming in here to check the loot. Thierry and Clotair.” He nodded at the coffers whose contents had by now been piled on the floor. “It has to be brought back to Gaul to be split up fair and square. If you
are
a princess, one of them may want you. Maybe they both will. Maybe they’ll split
you
up, poor little shrew! Split you up the middle with their kingly cocks! You might have been better off with me. Our kings are not what you’d call gentle!” Giving her a kind of soft punch on the shoulder, the Frank left.

The other men followed him shortly after, locking the door behind them on the loot and on the children who were also loot. All night and part of the next day the room stayed locked while the Franks celebrated their victory and slept off their celebration. Shouts, quarrels, even the strains of a harp reached the children who clung together, bunched in the corner furthest from their aunt’s corpse. Radegunda had her small brother, Chlodecharius, on her lap.

“Try to sleep,” she told the other children when she felt this might be possible. “The worst is over. Tomorrow they’ll be sober. There’ll be no more killing.”

“What happened Aunt Amalaberg? Basina?”

“Where’s my mother?”

“Don’t think of it. It’s over now.”

“Over?”

“Over.”

“Nothing’s over!” The words broke out in a dry crackle. Hamalafred was trying not to cry. The sound of a spit followed and the other children could imagine the pale arc between the clap of his lips and the wet smack on the middle of the dark floor. Nothing was over, he repeated. Nothing ever would be, did they hear, did they? Never until the blood-price was paid in full. His wavery boy’s voice fought in his throat with tears, fury and every weakness assailing it. It would be paid, he promised. It would. As soon as he was big enough to exact it. And not in gold either. No wergeld would satisfy him. “Blood,” he whispered, trying to stem the tears he did not want to shed. Blood was what he wanted to shed. Only blood could avenge the lives lost this night. Frankish blood. Brown blood, purple, black. A hunter’s son, he’d seen every kind before now. He had helped
disembowel
grouse, boar, elk and aurochs. It had all been an apprenticeship. He had tasted blood in blood sausage when the stuff jelled and grew stringy with softly melting strings which you pulled through your teeth. He’d chewed it and was hungry to chew human—Frankish—organs; no composition would do. He’d stick their Frankish gold solidi up their Frankish arses. No matter how long he had to wait, the day would come. He would hang Frankish captives from trees by the sinews of their thighs and catch the drips in a basin. He would roll wooden wains over their massed bodies, would …

“Hamalafred, shut your mouth! Stop it, Hamalafred.” The girl screamed then checked herself. There was a pause and when she spoke again it was through a throat clenched like a restraining fist. “Can’t you see”, she asked reasonably, “that this is the worst thing of all? That you’re doing the worst thing? Can’t you?”

He couldn’t.

“You’re frightening the little ones,” she tried.

He had an answer to that which he gave more calmly, however, his voice reaching with taut emphasis across the darkness. “They’ve got to see it the way I do,” he said. “We owe revenge to our dead, Radegunda. We owe it to the living. Blood has to be paid for. That’s the law,” he explained patiently and responsibly, being thirteen years old and, for all he knew to the contrary, already the head of his house. “If people weren’t afraid of being made to pay the price”, he told her, “they’d kill each other the way they do crows and rats—the way the Franks kill, who think we’re too weak to make them pay.” At this point Hamalafred’s voice changed. It began to creak and wheeze as though struggling through a closure narrow as the neck of a miser’s pouch. A moment later he was sobbing and Radegunda fancied she could smell his tears. “They’ll find out different,” he wept and sounded suddenly like a small boy again. “I’ll make them … pay … one day …” It was an incantation, vivifying and medicinal: a counter reality more real to him for the moment than the cold room, his weakness and the captivity ahead.

But Radegunda felt then and later that he had summoned evil forces to pour their poison inside his and her very veins. “Blood-price,” he said, as though that would be the end of it. Radegunda bit her tongue and, tasting it, spat into the darkness. She had her own reasons for placing scant hope in blood feuds.

When Hamalafred and Radegunda were infants, Thuringia had been ruled jointly by their two fathers who were brothers and lived in peace with each other. Then one day Hamalafred’s mother Amalaberg, who was a woman of ambition, did something which was to affect all their lives. She laid the table for her husband’s dinner in such a way that the cloth only covered one half of it and left the rest bare. “A man”, she told him, “who is content with half a kingdom must be content with half a table.” The meaning was clear and the insult galling. Her husband had had no rest from that day until he had allied himself with the Franks, murdered his brother and seized his lands. Along with the lands he took his brother’s children and brought them up as his own. Radegunda had therefore learned to call him “father” and Amalaberg “mother” before learning from some household slaves the true story of her parentage.

“That law of yours, Hamalafred,” she broke harshly into his croonings, “isn’t much good to me! If it were such a good law, it would have some guidance for me, wouldn’t it? It would tell me whether I should love your parents as my own or have a blood feud with them. But it doesn’t, does it?”

Hamalafred had no time for doubts on a night like this. “You’re a female, Radegunda!” He sniffed noisily as though gathering himself together after his weakness. “Anyway, I’m your cousin. You’re my family now. I’ll avenge your parents and my own together. I’ll …” He talked on like this. All night. His voice was charged with the same excitement as his enemies’ outside the room whose hunting-fever was high, whose emanations seeped through the wooden walls to infect the young male with their own zest. “I’ll kill,” he sobbed and swore. “I will!” And from the hall came back the war-songs: “
We
killed,” the Franks were exulting. “
I
’ll kill,” groaned Hamalafred antiphonally, “I will, I will, I will …”

To Radegunda this dialogue sounded like the calls of rabid beasts. She covered her ears but this did not prevent her hearing the little boy on her lap, her four-year-old brother, Chlodecharius, take up the chant: “Kill,” he crowed in his little boy’s voice, “kill, kill, kill.” Radegunda wept.

[
A.D.
568]

“It was my Gethsemane”, she said of that night years later when she was describing it to Fortunatus, a friend and poet who had offered to write a lament for the
destruction
of her people, “and my Damascus.”

Radegunda had by then become a pedant. Pedantry was a rampart against barbarism. She had become a nun. Religion was a rampart against violence. Before reaching the shelter of these ramparts, however, she had had to spend fourteen years as wife to King Clotair.

“Wasn’t it horrifying for you,” Fortunatus wondered, “to be betrothed to your people’s …” he hesitated over the choice of word, “conqueror?”

“His Majesty”, remarked the nun with circumspection, “was, as you know, generous with me in the end. This convent,” she spread her hands in a benedictory gesture—the left indicated the convent itself, the right blessed the fields and gardens trembling in the blazing noon of summer in the Loire country—“this was his gift, or rather it was paid for by my morning-gift which he let me keep when I left him for a greater Spouse.”

Fortunatus bowed his head. “At the beginning, though?” he prompted.

“The beginning?” The nun reached back. “That night was my beginning. That night I began to long for a reverse-world, a world where things would be the opposite of the way they are. That’s the easiest way to imagine, you know: you just reverse, turn things upside down. There would be no blood-price, no war, maybe even,” an apologetic hand alighted briefly on the poet’s sleeve, “no men. In a way, this”, again she uptilted her hands, managing with a single move to point to the convent and compare it to heaven, “is such a world. Apart from you, Fortunatus, a man so exceptional as to be part angel, we have no men here, no blood-price, no war, no anger even.” She smiled. “We live the way we ourselves want.”

“I have heard”, the poet teased her, “of monasteries in the East whose monks so distrust the principle of femininity that they refuse to have cows or nanny-goats on their farms—to the detriment of their diet.”

The nun nodded. “
They
think the greatest sin is the sin of Eve, but the sin which has always chilled my blood is the sin of Cain. Perhaps all that means is that the sexes
are
happiest apart.”

“You were going to tell me about your marriage to King Clotair.”

“He used to say”—the nun laughed a surprisingly conjugal laugh, the knowing little laugh women keep for talking about husbands—“that I was more like a nun than a queen. He said it before I ever thought of becoming a nun myself. It would have seemed impossible, you know. At first …”

“He was an affectionate husband then? Tolerant?”

“All he demanded was the body. My body can be forced to do anything.”

“But he did wait to marry you for—was it six years?”

“Until I was seventeen. Yes. He had me educated: a caprice. Like having a wild horse trained perhaps? One of our silver-coated Thuringian mares. He captured herds of them and—as with me—broke them in. I suppose it amused him to take the princess of a pagan people—it’s true: my people were largely unbaptized and less
Romanized
than the Franks—to take
me
and bring me up like the daughter of a senatorial family.”

She looked at the poet. Unblinking eyes. Very large, transparent, apparently unfocused. They disturbed him. After fishing for a useful image all he had come up with was the fact that they reminded him of a goat’s. Idiotic comparison. A goat’s eyes, for God’s sake—he’d checked—were yellow and not beautiful at all. Whereas Radegunda’s … Still, the comparison had something. It was the transparency perhaps, the diffuseness. Empty of memory. Clotair had left little trace. But then Radegunda was a German and Germans were like that: curiously free of memory’s murk. A German could tell you his grandfather’s name perhaps. Never more. Or didn’t choose to? They had come from Asia not so long ago but could tell nothing of their origins. Nothing of those decades of journeying on wooden waggons across Oriental lands. A peculiar freedom that gave them, he supposed, reflecting that his own racial past tugged at his thoughts like water-weeds at the keel of a boat.

“Tell me,” he asked, remembering something he had read, “do German women still bring weapons to their husbands as a dowry?”

“I was brought up”, she reminded him, “a Romanized Frank. I’m grateful to Clotair for that. It was while I was being educated in his villa at Aties on the Somme that I found my reverse-world: Christianity. I had been baptized in Thuringia, of course, but …”

“He didn’t live at Aties? Clotair?”

“No. But he was not alone while waiting for me. Clotair in all had seven wives or, to be finical, six and one official concubine. The distinction is subtle. As for unofficial concubines …” The nun threw up her hands, laughing.

“A man of passion!” The poet stared into the heart of a nasturtium trumpet. “
Abundantia gallica
… Gaul abounds in life. The Franks do. The royal sons of Clovis perhaps more than the rest and Clotair was the most immoderate of
them
, wasn’t he? Anyway,
he
’s dead so safer to talk about!” Fortunatus mimed comic alarm. “You know,” he confided, “he—they all—fascinate me, terrify me too, which is excellent for my verse. When I’m at court I walk a tightrope, my head is dizzy, my senses keen as blades, my mouth dry. I am like a rabbit staring at a hound. I adore that hound: he is the anti-me. I would like to write a panegyric to his immoderacy, to his appetites, guts, kidneys and bowels which are all of so much better quality than my own. To his teeth. Instead, what
do
I do? I write panegyrics to Clotair’s son and very worthy
successor
, Chilperic, whom Gregory calls ‘the Nero and Herod of our time’ and praise him for what? For his moderation! Why do I do It? It’s a game, a game whose pleasures I only half understand myself. There’s the obvious one of trying it on, seeing just how much flattery the monster will take. Then there’s my penchant for the horrible which I castigate by denying it—Radegunda, you are annoyed! I’ve said the wrong thing! Forgive me. You know how I let words carry me away. They mean nothing.”

The nun did not pretend to smile. “Forgive me,
Fortunatus
, if I say that there is something disgusting about innocence. You are pure and impurity fascinates you! You do not know evil and so you make the word ‘evil’ your toy.”

“Should I be tried in the furnace of reality?”

“Maybe you should! No, nobody should. You should believe in reality, though. Believe it’s real. Respect it. It is because things are remote from you, filtered through books and hearsay, that you feel you have to dress them up, make metaphors. You are inquisitive, Fortunatus! You have renounced the flesh, but you do not renounce the
thought
of the flesh and, since you are a man of words, you enjoy it more avidly at second hand.” She looked him in the eye. “You want me to tell you about my married life with Clotair.”

“I have offended you. I’m sorry. I thought we were friends. I had come to identify with many of your feelings. It’s not all that hard for me. We had several invasions during my time in northern Italy: the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines.
They
came as allies but invading allies, you know …” He shrugged. “The Lombards are there now. My family may have been wiped out for all I know—but I shan’t appeal to your sentiment. As for my ‘
inquisitiveness
’ as you call it—you holy people are harsh—the reason for it is a bit, a significant bit, to the side of where you put it. A poet needs an extra dimension around his poem, one of unspoken knowledge, things I feel and recognize about you but which I will not say …”