The Secret Book of Paradys Page 21

In her mind, Jhane had a knowledge that she must get in again over the wall, the way the boy had done, the young man who had possessed her, he who was the symbol of all the evil of the masculine species. She felt the horror of casting off the cloak (the thief Conrad’s) and being revealed for herself as a male once more.

  On an open area between the houses, some carts were being loaded. This time, there were no mourners. All were dead except for the porters, who went about their task jeering and laughing, and sometimes drinking. Elected to such a duty, they did not reckon they could escape the pestilence. “Drink and be merry!” They shouted to Jhane, then two of them gave chase, reaching after her with hands that had just slung the bodies across each other in the carts. But Jhane evaded the men, and they did not pursue her far.

  The smoke was very thick beyond that spot, and at the end of an avenue of smoke, the gate of the nunnery suddenly appeared in front of her, and above, the ghost of the tower, the bell tongueless in it.

  At that moment, the doors of the gate both began to open. Jhane stood still. The sight of the opening black doors frightened her, making her think of the first night she had come there, and also of the houses in the upper city, the fat woman opening one door, and then the student of Master Motius opening another.

  But no one was to be let in this time. It was a group of nuns who were coming out. How strange they looked, their faces in the icon-like blankness with which they drifted into the church at every office. At their head moved the Mother. Her strong, fleshy countenance had altered, it was now gaunt and very pale, an icon like the rest. She glided out into the street, and the nuns of the Angel glided after her. A vague chanting, the note of bees, floated near but did not seem to emanate from them. They came on. They passed Jhane, not seeing her. And she looked at their Madonna faces in perplexity. When they were gone, had vanished into the vacuum of smoke, she realised she had not noticed among them the face and body of Marie-Lis.

  Jhane approached the gate and went in through one leaf of the unlocked doors.

  The smoke had barely got in here. Jhane could smell incense and herbs and tallow and women – familiar things. She sensed the bell should be ringing for an office – Nonus it would be truly now, perhaps. Her soul had memorised the times. But the tower was mute, and a great quiet lay everywhere – for all at once, all the bells in the City seemed to have stopped ringing.

  She went through the outer court, and under the arch into the churchyard. She half turned towards the hostel then. She could go to her cell and hide herself there. Soon it would grow properly dark. Wrapped in her female clothing and the covers of her pallet, and the night, she might be safe. But no, all these layers would only close her more surely inside her own head, where fear was.

  The nunnery was a desert. They had all gone out of it. Crossing over the south cloister, Jhane remembered sweeping there with the novices, and the phantom of Osanne with her rags and pail. What had it meant, the death of Osanne? Maybe the nuns had understood, for they had gone about disguising the death very swiftly. Jhane, before she knew what she did, sang aloud a snatch of song the novices had taught her: Oh winter is, Oh winter is. “No, no,” said Jhane, and the cloister echoed. At its centre the stone child gripped the bowl of the dry fountain. Jhane hurried on. She entered the garden, and stopped immediately, for there was the young nun gathering up washing that had fallen to the ground.

  Jhane flew forward. She would cast herself at the feet of the young nun. She must say: I have seen. Save me now, tell me what to do. But at the last instant, the nun turned a little, and Jhane saw that it was not Marie-Lis, but one of the senile sisters from the infirmary. Her wizened face was not an icon. It looked on Jhane, and parting the seams of its mouth, plaintively said to her, “They left me here. Useless. Well, here you are then, too. I shan’t die alone.” And the elderly nun sat down on the stone kerb of the poisoned well (in which Osanne had been burned and buried), holding the two or three habits, and the linen things in her lap.

  Jhane went to the old nun cautiously.

  “What is it?” said the nun. “Can you see me? I can see you.”

  “Where have they gone?” said Jhane. “The sisters, the Mother?”

  “There’s a plague,” said the old nun. “Didn’t anybody tell you? Poor girl. They’ve gone to nurse the sick and the dying, it’s a part of the vows. Pay no heed to yourself, the Enemy strikes us down with his arrows by day and by night. But we must love one another. So the Mother prayed and took them all out, and most or all of them will catch the ailment and perish.” The nun was disapproving. “They didn’t think of me. I shall die, but it isn’t plague, it doesn’t matter. Come here, sit beside me. Did you know, this well can’t be used any more? One of the novices drowned herself in it.”

  Jhane went nearer. She said. “Where is Marie-Lis?”

  “Sister Marie? I must think. My old head … Three weeks since the plague came. The night of the Donkey Feast.”

  Jhane crept close. She sat at the old nun’s knee, trembling. Was it so? To sleep three days, or three weeks – she had seen an angel, he had put into her heart the searing light – a slumber of days, weeks, a hundred years, was nothing to that. She meant to say, I was granted a true vison: one of the Lord’s winged knights came to me. But she said only, “She was the youngest of the nuns.”

  The old nun said, “Alas, yes. Now it comes to me. It was like the other, the novice, Osanne. But Sister Marie hanged herself.”

  Jhane now could say nothing.

  “In her cell,” continued the old nun. “Suicide, a mighty sin. But the Lord understands and forgives. It is a sin only against oneself. Now I know you. You were sick with a fever and they tied you down on the bed beside mine. Well it was that night she hanged herself, for I heard the talk that it must be kept from you, she had been kind to you, and you loved her.”

  “Never,” said Jhane. She leaned her forehead on the old nun’s knee and wept silently for some while. The old nun laid her hand gently on Jhane’s hair. When Jhane’s crying ended, the old nun said, “We have a special dispensation, all the City. The priests are dying, or afraid and run off. Any man, or woman, may hear another’s confession. Now you must hear mine.”

  “If you knew what I had done –” cried Jhane. She kneeled up and burst out: “I saw the Angel of the Lord. How can I bear it?”

  But the old nun only said. “Be merciful to me, for I have sinned.” And then she recounted her confession softly, which amounted to some small jealousies and omissions. When she was done, she smiled at Jhane, then closed her eyes and began to sleep.

  She will die in her sleep and leave me alone here, thought Jhane, and had the urge to wake the old nun up. But she looked so peaceful, Jhane did not do it.

  Darkness stole over the garden. The fruit trees and the bare plots dissolved into the night. In a while there came up over the wall a straw-coloured moon.

  Jhane imagined going back to the church and entering it and flinging herself before the altar and the window. Osanne’s ghost might reappear and tell her: “It was your strength that slew me. I got between you and the light. You thrust me aside. It was like the lightning bolt.” Or Marie-Lis might be there and say, “I came between you and the light. I removed myself.” For Marie-Lis too had presented herself as a ghost, and to Conrad besides, for she had been dead by the Day of the Ass. (Or had Marie-Lis been the tempter, the evil one, the shadow mimicking the light – ) But after all, maybe Osanne had only drowned herself in the well and some element in the water had marked her body like burning, and some creature had got down to her and gnawed her belly wide – and possibly Marie-Lis had endured a secret sorrow which she had ended for herself without a notion of Jhane, Jhane’s power, or Jehan’s crimes. And only Jehan’s lust had summoned her back among the plum trees.

  The Angel Lucefiel would not descend from the window to comfort Jhane. The Angel Esrafel would not console her ever again. Yet she had seen him.

  Yes, she had seen a vision, and now her life must change. No, f
or it was changed already, she must only accept the change of it. Nor let your sins weigh you down – your sins are finished, tear up the thought of them by the roots. It seemed the other inner part of her mind had again been formulating plans.

  There in the garden, by the sleeping, dying nun, Jhane pulled off Conrad’s cloak, and all Jehan’s male attire. She unbound her breasts, and did not even notice when the penis of cloth was sloughed into the shadows. Jhane took from the old nun’s lap one of the habits, and articles of linen. Jhane clothed herself. She covered her head and neck with gorget and veil, her body with the robe of the order, when everything was in place on her, she drew up the topaz crucifix and wore it there openly on her breast.

  The old nun still slept.

  Jhane took her hand.

  Light as a husk, the old nun slipped forward and rested on her. Jhane lifted her in her strong arms and bore her back to the bed in the infirmary.

  An hour later, at the office of Hesperus, which was not rung, the old nun died.

  Jhane dug and buried her in a shallow grave, in the traditional area. She did not visit the church, before passing on into the City through the gate.

  They had forbidden the ringing of funeral bells; they had forbidden processions of mourners. Who had done so? None but the unseen Lords of Paradys, her Duke or Prince (and Jhane did not know which), the authorities of the City – most of whom had fled the pest, and sent their orders back with doomed messengers. Almost all the function of the City had stopped, however, and so to cancel funeral rites was nothing. There were scarcely any priests remaining to speak above the bodies. The graveyards were full. Now they dug up any spare land, and piled in the corpses on top of each other, twenty, thirty persons deep. There was no commerce this side of the river. Men lived by what they could get, stealing and hoarding. On the upper bank, some forms were kept, this far, but for how long? The plague seemed fit to withstand them all. The plague was healthy and vital. The Death, they called it now, as if there were no other kind of death in the world, and maybe there was not. Cadavers lay in the thoroughfares, uncollected a great while. They were blotched with black, black boils, and black blood. The dogs, scavenging, refused to eat them. Smoke still rose, the warding fires, and a few vehicles still trundled back and forth. Sometimes there might be a woman at a well, but since the wells were supposedly poisoned, these women were reckoned mad, or already infected – or witches and actually the poisoners, and were liable to be stoned.

  It was difficult to traverse the river. The upper City had set the source of the plague on the other bank, fount of all villainy and misadventure, and sometimes extempore guards patrolled the south and west ends of the bridges. It was also pointless to attempt to escape the City, for the roads beyond the walls, rife with infection, fringed with rotting bodies, were also blocked by wagons and carts of which the drivers had perished, dead horses and sheep, while the fields and woods were said to be choked by wildmen who had lost their minds, and by desperate wolves which had come to a feast that, in the event, repelled them.

  In the new world, Jhane took her way. Dressed as a nun, she was accorded respect. The female orders of the City had proved valiant and thorough, where the priests had frequently made off with their lives. Even the topaz cross on the girl’s breast was not taken from her. What use were riches now? Could you bribe King Death? The plague was everywhere (they said), civilisation was ending. And robbers who thieved food or apparel, let alone gold, they contracted plague from them.

  It was simple and easy to tend the sick, when once all barriers were down in brain and heart. In just such a manner, she had found it simple and easy to do harm, to murder.

  Not so much did Jhane expect death: she expected nothing. She walked among the victims of the pestilence, unafraid, and in itself this gave them a sort of courage. Jhane proposed no remedy for the symptoms of disease. She offered only her cool hands, into which they drove their nails in agony, which they clasped in dying, and only her quiet voice that murmured nothing important to them, and her nun’s robe which symbolised divine respite and forgiveness. She heard ten hundred confessions. When hoarse whispers pleaded for God’s grace, she nodded. Her eyes carried a wonderful conviction. She had done far worse than any of them, or so it seemed to her, and she herself had been consoled by an angel. That they called the world’s Lord by the wrong name, this she overlooked. It was not, this hour of their death, any time to quibble.

  Though sometimes she glimpsed others religious at similar work, she met no nuns of the order she had adopted. She met, however, with many forms of human fear and anger, acted out as if upon a stage. She saw pageants with banners, and orgies, when beer and naked limbs swilled down the street. She saw men who whipped themselves with thongs studded by nails, and women dancing in their skin to the pound of a drum. She saw a death-cowled priest who screamed that the Day of Wrath had come, and a young maiden embracing her lover’s corpse, begging it to kill her with its infection, she would go with him. Jhane paid little heed. It was the new world. But then again, the earth, and all things in it, had never seemed familiar or sane to her.

  The brown days of smoke, the blind nights, went by. Sometimes a biblical, yellow-lit cloud stood over the higher City after sunset.

  She saw and held children as they gave up the ghost, young men, maidens, crones. She learned all the degrees and stages of the illness, and all the guises of it. When they should begin for her, she would acknowledge them. They did not begin for her. Like a weightless feather she floated on the tide of misery.

  “Oh, sister, devout lady, come to the bridge with us. You’ll help us? They can’t turn back you.”

  It was in fact a funeral procession, though not clothed in mourning, which, in any case, most of it would never have afforded. Cartloads of the dead outnumbered the living. Everyone wept, which was now unusual, for apathy and despair, the greatest of the sins, had settled on Paradys.

  A tall old man stood looking down into Jhane’s face.

  “We must get over,” he said. “There are no places left here. Holy ground. They must be got into holy ground. Or when the last trumpet’s blown, they won’t hear it.”

  Jhane did not say to the man, It will not make any odds. There is enough life for all. She did not say, He remembers even the fall of a sparrow. She bowed her veiled head in assent, as she had recently done whenever any request had been made to her that she was capable of granting. She led them towards the South Bridge.

  There was a huge bonfire half-way across, uncared for and almost out. Even so, they must pick through the crackling rims of it, and a black fume rose.

  Over on the other shore, some men in mail coats were standing about. They were soldiers, or a company from some lord’s guard. One stepped forward, on to the bridge, as they came near, and drew his sword.

  “No farther.”

  The carts rumbled to a halt. Women began to cry and wail loudly. Jhane walked on. As she came closer and closer to the soldier or guard, his face engorged – firstly with fear, and then with amazement.

  “You can’t,” he said, when she too halted, a pace or so from him.

  “Yes.”

  “No, sister. Take them back. There’s no grave-ground here. Christ’s nails. They’re burning them, that’s all. Look east, up there. Those aren’t the pest fires. It’s corpse fires now. Too many dead to bury.”

  “Then,” she said, “the fires.”

  “No,” he said again. “We’re keeping the riff-raff away. We’ve checked the sickness this side. It’s less here. But not if they all come over. They stink of death.”

  Jhane stood motionless. She looked into his eyes and said, “When I was hungry, you fed me. When I was thirsty, you gave me drink. I was sick and you tended me, in prison and you visited me. The Lord says, Even as you have done to the least of men, so you have done to me.”

  The mailed man began to cry, just like the people around the carts, but perhaps only the smoke of all the thousand fires of Paradys was in his eyes. He stepped awa
y, lowering his sword. The other men shifted. “Let them by,” he said to these others. “What does it matter.” They moved, and the carts began again to jolt forward. Another man in mail ran at Jhane and pushed the point of his sword against her breast. The first man came and eased the sword aside. As Jhane went on with the carts, she heard him say, “Can’t you see, you fool, she’s the Virgin. It’s a miracle. We’ll be saved!”

  As they proceeded off the bridge, the last cart toiled beside Jhane, and when she looked into it she saw the face of the thief, Conrad, but upside down. He was lying across several other bodies, which they had tried to arrange in a seemly way, although this was not possible. The tall old man trod by the cart. He said, “That was my son. He was a wicked sinner. A cut-throat. He started doing evil as a child. I knew then he was lost. Whatever ground he goes in, or if he’s burnt, it’s the same – he’ll be baking in Hell already.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Jhane. “A woman saw an angel in Conrad’s hut.”

  The old man stared at her, but they were coming level with the outer yard of the church of Our Lady, and a fearful smell was in the air, worse than all the rest. Between the church and the quay boats had earlier been dragged ashore and set alight. This had laid the foundation of a pyre for multitudes, but was now mostly crumbling, a tower of glowing ashes. From thick smog a ragged priest or two was emerging. One ran forward and waved them away. “Not here. No more. Go on to the east wall, the Roman wall. Up there.” Then he drew Jhane aside. Unconcerned with her now, the death procession moved by, and left her behind. “Sister, I can see you’ve had the Death, and survived it.” Jhane said nothing. “It’s plain, you bear all the marks. I too. Look, you see? Like the mark on Cain’s brow. There was one good doctor, he gave me myrrh and saffron, and bled me. On the fifth day the boil burst and I recovered. To show my thanks to God, I serve the City. When this is over, this terrible reckoning, I’ll kill myself.” He paused, waiting to complete his catechism.