Women in the Wall (33 page)

The straw-headed man thrust his scramasax into the slit. There was a cry.

“What’s in there?”

Droctulf and the other two had joined the first man. Jostling they tried to peer into the slit. One ran back to the pitch barrel, took a hold of a burning piece of wood and returned holding it aloft. He tried to cast its light in through the slit.

“No good,” said the pale-haired man. “It’s deep and it’s at an angle. I didn’t hit anything either. The scramasax won’t reach.”

“There might be treasure in there. Those nuns are crafty.”

“We’ll see about that.”

They began to dislodge the stones in the wall, poking at the mortar with the handles of their swords, then levering out the stones with a bar which seemed to have been lying with the rest of the loot. No more sounds came from the hole. Agnes wanted to scream at them to go gently but her mouth seemed to have gone numb. Her mind however was racing like a trapped mouse. Maybe they’re demons, she thought. Maybe they are, I don’t care who they are if only they free her. Free her gently, gently,” her brain screamed at them but her tongue bulged like a piece of dead matter in her mouth and her jaws were locked. “I’ll pray to you,” her brain told the men. “To you.”

When the hole was wide enough, one of the men stepped through it. His companion held up the torch. Agnes had crept heedlessly out of her thicket and was only a few paces behind them but they were all staring at the hole and didn’t see her.

“Well, what’s in there?”

“Shit mostly. It’s a small place. There’s a woman here—or a child. I can’t tell. She’s in a bad way. Here. Catch.”

The man held up an armful of bones and tatters, a limp, live creature whose breath kept coming more and more loudly, wheezing and rasping and thudding through the cloister with such astonishing volume that it seemed to be the breath of the whole building or to be a freak organ, a heart which had grown while the body around it had shrunk into a mere receptacle or casing for this
vigorous
, beating pulse. Agnes glimpsed a pair of dazzled eyes but there was nothing individual about them and she wouldn’t have known them. She herself was standing right behind the men now. She stretched a hand between two of their bodies to touch the area around the two
light-mirroring
orbs. The men were too absorbed to notice. She reached Ingunda’s hair—it was dry and thorning—and one of the men pushed her hand blindly aside without wondering where it came from.

“Are you sure that’s all that’s there?” he asked, taking the wheezing bundle from his companion and leaning so heavily across it that Agnes could hear Ingunda’s breath being crushed. The man craned towards the hole. Agnes put a hand between his heavy body and the frail burden which he was about to flatten. She poked his belly with her elbow and he leaped backwards, dropped Ingunda and, involuntarily, kicked her cranium with his heavy boot.

“The devil,” he cursed in surprise, “I’ve cracked its skull.” He backed away, staring at the fragile creature at his feet. Blood was pouring through the sparse hair. “As well finish it off,” he remarked and bashed it in with a flat blow of his scramasax. There was a sound of bone being crushed. “Queer looking, isn’t it?” he said as he cleaned the short sword on his tunic. “Hadn’t much life in it, I’d …” Then he saw Agnes. “What . .”

Before he could say more, she had snatched the
scramasax
from his limp hand and plunged it at his lower belly. He howled and doubled up. The man beside him swung round, saw her holding the weapon and raised his own.

“Stop him!”

Chrodechilde and Childeric stepped into the light.

“Don’t let them touch her,” shouted Chrodechilde.” Save her. It’s the abbess.”

Childeric was holding the man’s raised arm. “Easy,” he soothed.

“You’re all animals!” Chrodechilde was shaking. “Oh Christ! You’ve killed her. Killed the recluse. Look: Oh Jesus, God!” She shook and swayed in a lament that spilled from her like blood or vomit or some overflowing humour. “Oh Holy God, what have I done? It’s my sin! Mine,” she spurted. Her undershot jaw gnawed the air. Her tongue got in the way and the words fell out like clots of wet, angry matter. “Did you hear, did you? The recluse was her child! Hers. You’ve killed her, you’ll have no luck. We’ll all be damned. Damned! We’ll burn!” She screamed at Childeric. “Your men are devils!” Her mouth wobbled and a spray of white spittle foamed out of it and across the face of the man whose weapon arm was still frozen in mid-air.

The man jerked angrily and Childeric, who was still holding him, pulled him backwards. The man Agnes had wounded was still bent over, holding himself and groaning.

“She’s castrated him!” shouted the fair-haired man. “Let’s kill the bitch. Both of them!” He glared furiously at Chrodechilde. “They’re mad,” he said, “mad, bloody women!”

“Leave them alone!” Childeric turned to Chrodechilde. “I thought you wanted to be abbess yourself?” he said. “Didn’t you? Well, now you’ve got her where you want her. When the bishops hear she had a child …”

“I was wrong!” Chrodechilde flung herself on her knees and began to embrace Agnes’s. “Forgive me,” she
whimpered
. “Punish me. You’re my abbess.”

Agnes stood rigid, dry and dead-eyed. She took no notice of Chrodechilde and did not even look at the
broken-skulled
bundle which had been Ingunda. She waited until Chrodechilde’s outburst had dwindled into a sobbing mumble then said dully. “I am not your abbess. You can take over now. You or … another.” She stepped carefully around the two bodies twisted on the ground and walked towards the hole in the wall. “I shall go in here,” she said. “I shall take her place in the wall.”

*

Fortunatus and the prince rode south. For the first two nights Fortunatus had not slept fearing that the bravoes supplied by Palladius might have orders to kill one or both of them. But they had reached Saintes, Bordeaux, Agen, Toulouse and crossed over into the territory of the Goths without any attempt being made on his or Clovis’s life. The bravoes had become familiar by now. He knew their names, listened to their talk and had grown to trust them. This might be foolish but he could not believe that it was. Reaching the south his spirits rose and when they got to the sea, the southern sea which recalled his youth in Rimini, he had a feeling for a moment that he was young again and emerging from a long passage underground and into the sunlight. He saw it first on a hot morning at the bottom of a sloping field of thyme and lavender, swelling and bellying like a great scaly reptile toasting itself in the sun. A breeze moved the leaves from green to silver. The sea-scales shifted. Crickets made a sound tiny and busy enough to fit the surface quiver of the visible landscape. Fortunatus struck Clovis on the shoulder.

“Look, you Frank!” he shouted. “Here is a country which should sooth even your boiling and spoiling for fights!”

“You wouldn’t want me soothed
now
, would you?” laughed the prince.

The boy thought he was being brought to join an army of supporters who would help him gain the crowns of Gaul. He treated the armed escort as his first henchmen, looked on them with emotion and had confided to
Fortunatus
that he intended to find a good position in his armies for their leader. Poor deluded wretch! Whose fault? Fortunatus sloughed off the discomfort he felt every time the boy talked of his hopes.

“Don’t talk about that!” he said, frowning.

Clovis took on a look of discretion and responsibility. His mouth twitched with joy.

“Oh the devil!” roared Fortunatus and turned his horse down the slope to the sea. He drove it into the waters until they were delicately nibbling at his heel. The boy would have to sail for Byzantium. There was no help for it. He would be told, on boarding the ship, that it was taking him to join the bulk of his army at some likely port, then, once at sea, he would be told the truth. Not by Fortunatus. Fortunatus would be on his way back to Poitiers where he would wait for a bishopric to fall vacant. As they hadn’t killed him, they must reward him. There were only two ways to treat a dangerous man. A man who had been dangerous. A man eager for retreat. Fortunatus bent over his horse’s neck, caught a scoop of sea water and splashed his face with it. Life would be quiet now, he thought as he straightened up. Agnes would be supreme at Holy Cross. She could release Ingunda as she wanted. The matter of the renegade nuns would be easily settled. Bishops Gregory and Palladius would see to that. Radegunda’s white-hot spirit had dissolved and lost itself in the light of the godhead. She was gone, lost like one of those
long-tailed
falling stars which appear from time to time,
inexplicably
burning the air around them, then finally fall and bury themselves leaving a crater where they sink: a space, a hole, a nothingness, thought Fortunatus, looking with a needle-thrust of melancholy at Clovis. At best an afterglow in a few memories.

“Race you up the slope!” he challenged and prodded his horse to a gallop with a quick-tapping heel.

“You cheated!” shouted Clovis, taken by surprise.