The Secret Book of Paradys Page 22

“Why?”

  “Can you ask? There will be so few of us left alive. The whole world will have to begin again. Besides, God’s punishment is so cruel. I’ll thank, but I can’t worship such a God. I defy him.”

  “If someone must be the enemy of mankind,” said Jhane, “and not Satan, then God, perhaps.”

  “Blasphemy,” said the priest. He laughed. “Stay here,” he said. “If you go up there, you may get caught in some building. When the pest comes, the soldiers wall them up alive inside, the sick, the hale, the dead together.”

  Jhane turned from the priest. He said again, “Stay, pale rose. We have wine in the church.” But Jhane slid from him and was gone, climbing up the hills of Paradys, quickly lost to him in smoke.

  Over Satan’s Way, the ribcage of the unfinished Temple-Church had the look of a ruin, something which had been, but now decayed and fell to bits. A large fire had been built in the midst of the sheds, but it was out. No one was by.

  Peculiar noises, often indecipherable, ascended and sank constantly in the City, generally isolated. One such now began in the street that circled beyond the Temple. Jhane came out on the street. It was not as she remembered. The decent houses, the ornate well and trough, the burned house, were in position as before, and yet everything seemed subtly to have misplaced itself. There were no fires here, as if once had been enough, and smoke coloured the air, but only that. Far along the wall of the old garden-park – which had not yet been utilised as a crematorium – mailed riders on thin horses sat under a battered, stained banner. They were directing the actions of some labourers in the process of boarding and plastering over the doors and lower windows of one house.

  “Stay away, sister. It’s here.” The man who rode towards her on the sorry horse did not meet her eyes. “The only method to stop it, lady.”

  Then he drew closer. He leaned towards her. On his face was a terrible invisible unmistakable shadow. He murmured, so the other men should not hear, “I have it. I’m hot and cold, and a pain in my groin. Some live through. I might. I shan’t. When this job’s done, I’ll go up on the waste land, where the fires are. It’s like the Pit up there, the damned all crying in torment, and the flames. Confess me? They say anyone can do it, but a holy nun’s better if I can’t have the priest.”

  “Yes,” said Jhane.

  Leaning from the horse then, as if he discussed ordinary things with her, he gabbled his confession, a sibling to so many others she had heard. And when it was over, he added, “And they’re on my conscience – the mason in the house there. He was at work on the Temple-Church. His wife and servant were taken out, dead, but then the order came, close the house. It’s him and some lunatic son he’s got, dying in there and hearing the plaster shutting round them. Better to go in the open. But I don’t care. Rot the lot of them. Rot ’em.” Suddenly, no longer bothering with life, he rode headlong through the street, going eastward. His men did not pay much attention to him, the labourers none; they were at work on the final window.

  “Let me go in,” said Jhane to the labourers, when she reached them. They looked at her, then at the mounted men under the banner.

  “Trying to earn Heaven, sister?” one of them sneered. “Go on then. It’s up to you. If you can squeeze through the window, skinny nun.”

  But two of the labourers assisted her politely through the narrow aperture, even fisting out some of the fresh plaster. When she was through, they asked her blessing. She rendered it as she had seen the Mother do. Then, she stood in the house and listened to the wood smacked back and the slap of the putty, and watched the light fade.

  The house already reeked of the Death, but the odour was customary to Jhane. She climbed a stair and midway up she was confronted by a man – the dying mason. He raved at her, an intruder in his home. He asked her what she meant by it. But his breathing was hard. He coughed fluid into his sleeve.

  “Forgive me,” said Jhane. “Something made me come in here. I’ll care for you. Recovery may happen.” She saw that this was unlikely. When he staggered, she supported him back to his bed. He had stopped reviling her. He smiled at her in a frightened and placatory manner, like a sick child.

  Presently he said, “Nothing, no chance for me. But the boy –”

  “Your son.”

  “Not my son. I wish I’d had – such a son – still-births were all she could manage, poor bitch. She’s dead, poor bitch.” He coughed and choked and recovered, and said, “Not long. The boy – might live. He’s been sick a while – not this, before. That can – make them stronger to fight – I’ve seen it before. Before. He’s lived through trouble before. Wits – gone – the worst of all – better any crippling – though not the hands –” The mason’s speech wandered with his thoughts. He then said, “Having seen what he was capable of, I asked him if he’d train to work in stone – well – he’d drink and go after – that sweetest part of a woman’s frame – but he was young. Anyway murdered for it, we thought. Then on Fool’s Day, over – the – river – I found him. Some slut had taken him in. Well – he was useless – to her. She told me. She’d come on him – crawling in his blood. Oh the Devil burnt up that house, oh – yes. The Artisan Motius – they said the Devil rode over his roof and hauled him up through a window – all alight. Dead, anyhow. So I took the imbecile in. How could I leave him – in her hovel? Perhaps – did him – a bad turn. This fell on us.” Then he was feverish and screamed that he also was burning, Fire! Fire! And then he choked and drowned and died.

  Jhane went further up the house and came to a small room with a slender bed filling it. On the mattress a young man with wringing-wet yellow hair, writhed and tossed in unemphatic delirium. His skin was blotched by darkness, and beneath one arm nested the black knots of the plague. He was however recognisable. And so Jhane looked into the face of her brother, Pierre.

  Inside the walled-up house, it was very quiet. The earth, which had formerly condensed to a City, had now become the house alone.

  Shortly before midnight, Jhane had managed to drag the heavy corpse of the mason off the bed, and into the chest at the bed’s foot. Plague cadavers putrefied rapidly. The chest, of a proper size and air-tight, must serve as coffin and burial together. Having sealed the chest – its linen would be useful elsewhere – with its own iron clasps, Jhane went about the floors, seeing if anything else was to be had there. All access to a well was gone, but previously in the kitchen, perhaps the bounty of the law, she had found a barrel of water. There were also some casks of ale. Jhane now searched and discovered a store of candles, kindling, garlic and withered apples, and some mouldering bread, but if there had been any other provisions, someone had appropriated them.

  Above, the young man who was her brother strove on between sleep and delirium and death. Jhane had sat by him some hours, telling him at intervals that he would live. It was the only panacea she employed, other than to wash his body with the tepid water, and to moisten his lips. She had rolled him aside also, twice, to ease the soiled clothes from under him, replacing them with fresh. When he cried out or shouted, which happened occasionally, she took him in her arms, responding to all he said, replying, whether he spoke with some semblance of logic or only in nonsense, and whether he might hear her or not. (She had been made aware in the strife of the plague that the sufferers suffered far worse when feeling they were ignored, or that the phantom situations of fever went unstraightened. In certain cases she had also pretended to be wives and mothers, daughters and sons, and the victims – crying for these lost kindred – were deceived and calmed.)

  It had not surprised her to come on Pierre. She had supposed him dead, but the world had changed. It seemed to her, although she did not dwell on it, that the moment the angel touched her, Pierre had been reborn. Thereafter the mason accidentally located and rescued him inevitably. Ever since then, some invisible cord had been slowly pulling her towards this spot. Reborn, Pierre could not die again so swiftly. And to attend and comfort him as he fought for life was not an expiation. He had
been cruel to her, and she had not forgotten it. But what he had done no longer mattered, whereas her own cruel malice had turned her towards kindness and deep pity. Compared to her own wickedness, Pierre’s was of a slight order, and probably he had learnt nothing from it.

  Because he would survive, too, Jhane did not attempt any of those remedies which the doctors had practiced before her in a number of scenes of the pest-stricken City. Though the black boils were hard and leaking, she did not lance or cauterise them; she did not bleed or radically try to cool or inflame the desperate body on the bed.

  For herself, she took no precautions.

  She had always been underfed. She ate the apples, and drank a little ale, and slept in separate minutes, sitting on the floor.

  A morning came, blooming up through the upper windows. A day passed, declining down through them. These windows had been left alone as they were too small to provide egress. But they did provide some air, for the smoke seemed less. That afternoon, Jhane heard a distant bell give tongue in Paradys. She had almost forgotten the sound. In a while she realised it was not a funeral knell, but the Nonus, from some church away towards the river. Beyond the window, in the vanishing light, roofs and towers stood in islands among the smokes.

  When night returned Jhane took off the topaz cross and laid it under the sick man’s pillow. The flash of the jewel as she came from the window had reminded her she wore it. If she had recollected earlier, she would have removed it then and placed it ready for Pierre.

  Near sunrise of the third day, Pierre screamed, and the evil pebbles of the Death burst open, freeing him of poison.

  When she had cleaned him and given him water, he dropped down into an intent oblivion. After the sun had risen, all that day, she sat and watched his skin begin to clear and change colour, the dark patches gradually leaving it. But the ill-treatment, the assault, the rape, the madness – these as much as the pestilence – had aged him and torn his beauty. Through the empty pane of his unconscious face, Jhane could see now a resemblance to his father, Belnard.

  He did not know her. This seemed to her a proof that the insanity the mason had spoken of was leaving Pierre. Sane, he would not accept her presence, he would reject her presence – once precursor of such horrors.

  “You’re good to me,” he murmured, and drifted again to sleep. Later he said, “I’m hungry.” Later again, he said, “Hunger gnaws at me. There’s a snake in my guts. Kind holy lady, please tell them I must have something to eat.”

  “Not yet,” she said. She gave him more water.

  He trusted her, drank, and fainted again into sleep.

  He was very weak and would die without sustenance. What should it be? Milk, with a little bread crumbled in it, a light meaty broth. She mashed apples to a pulp with water heated at the kitchen hearth, and added a sip of the ale. This mush she fed him, but it only made him nauseous, and brought no strength.

  “Who else is here?” he said. “Sister, send some boy to the market. He’s sure to go. Give him –” Here he fumbled for coins, and found nothing. “Well, only tell him Pierre asked it.” He smiled charmingly.

  “Rest,” she said. “I’ll do what I can.” For he had obviously forgotten a great amount, and it was not the time to tell him they were walled up inside a house.

  Almost all the smoke seemed to have cleared from the City, but a heavy rain had begun, and sometimes thunder shook the timbers of the building. The street, peered at through the tiny window-place, looked deserted, though once she saw another cart go past below, lugged by a weary man, mounds in it under a covering, and making east. The mason’s house had no upper east window. She could not see if the pall of the crematory fires still flooded upward there.

  Jhane set about searching the house again. It was true that she discovered items she had not found on her prior foray. In a pocket of the chimney of the great hooded fireplace in the mason’s bedchamber was a cache of coins. In a cupboard she came on the tools of builders, a saw and tongs, pick-axe and hoe. In a box beneath rested the mason’s level, and some wooden shapes whose purpose eluded her. She unearthed some wine also which, as with the cloves of garlic, was a useful disinfectant: the training of the nunnery. She found, too, parchments with architectural drawings, and three books she could not read, ink-horn and quills, a child’s cradle with a cloth doll lying in it, at which she recalled the mason’s words of the still-births, and the bones of a dead rat. None of these was of any help to her.

  Days and nights washed over the house. Each was its own season, a little year.

  Pierre, who had begun to seem stronger, now lapsed. He said, “There’s a hard stone under the pillow.”

  “Not a stone. It’s your own cross.”

  “I haven’t any,” he said.

  “Yes. When you were in the fever, I took it from your neck and placed it there for safe-keeping. Your cross with the topaz.”

  He said, “My father gave it me.” He said, “It came from the Holy Land. Just the jewel, the crucifix was made for it after. My father was on a great crossade. He killed Saracens. They reject the Christ – as you know, sister. They worship a man. And an angel also – Jabrael, God’s Mighty One … Yes, the yellow stone, the topaz, he cut it from some breast-plate of a fallen pagan priest, in a shrine there, or so he said …” He faded and was senseless for a while. Then he woke and said, “But the cross was stolen from me. I remember that. I was beaten, and the cross –” Wild with fear he stared at her, struggling not to remember.

  “A dream of the fever,” she said. “It’s over.”

  Later in the night he said, “I had a sister. She told me lies about our father. How could she do that?”

  He had learnt nothing.

  “Sister …”

  She did, for a moment, start. But all nuns were the sisters of all men.

  “Lie quietly,” she said.

  “Did I – make confession to you?”

  “Never. It was not necessary.”

  “But now.”

  “Nor necessary now.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Live? Yes.”

  “The little cross –”

  “Yes.”

  “If I – don’t live – take it. No, that’s wrong. If I live, take it anyway. For your order, sister.”

  Now she did not start at all.

  “She said, “Some gifts can’t be given. Your father gave it you. It must stay with you.”

  She thought he slept. Then he said, “Will you put the cross round my neck?”

  Jhane did as Pierre asked her. The chain, which had been thieved elsewhere, seemed to puzzle him briefly. Then he lay still, thinking of the feel of the cross, the jewel, on his skin.

  “That girl I told you about – did I? My sister, Jehanine. She was a harlot in the City. She came to me to show me her degradation, then she ran and hid herself. I saw what she’d become, just by looking in her eyes. I wish I hadn’t seen that.”

  Oh, he had learnt nothing. He must live, it was his only hope. Yet he was dying now.

  Jhane walked the house, up and down. She opened again the chests and cupboards, held a candle to the mouse holes, but even the mice were gone. She felt no hunger, she felt only beyond herself, a vast space hollow as a bell, in which she was; breathing, moving, alive, slenderly hard and sure as a needle. But Pierre was like the dust, like melting snow, like water. He must be remade. He must have food.

  In the watery dawn, some men went by. Jhane called down from a window. They took no notice of her. Perhaps her voice failed to reach them, deaf ears or hearts or minds.

  Through the dark, the City bells rang once more every one of the offices. At Laude, Jhane went down through the house, to the kitchen. By the glimmer of the candle, she looked into the empty larder.

  As her hands were searching over the bare surfaces, she thought very clearly and suddenly of the Angel Esrafel, companion-captain of the Prince of Light. Standing quite still, arms on the shelf, her head thrown back, she closed
her eyes, recapturing as it seemed entirely the ecstasy and healing of his embrace.

  Then she opened her eyes and gazing before her, she saw what she had been looking for: food. At the revelation of the sight, she was grasped by utter terror. For an instant she rejected the absolute truth, the miracle, as unthinkable. But in another instant, she felt again the touch of the angel. She accepted that the world was altered. She accepted her own power and strength. Terror left her immediately. There was only the hollow of the night enclosing her hard purity, which could not be shaken.

  Then, practical, she turned to seek out the means of preparation, and – the training of the nunnery – such methods as there were of care.

  “The boy came back from the market,” said Jhane. She set the bowl on the floor. Propping Pierre half asleep on the pillows, she began to spoon the broth into his mouth. She was very weak. It had taken an endless time. It had taken years even to climb the stair, but maybe not so long, for the broth was still hot, fragrant with the grains of garlic, the dash of wine, the ripe clean smell of the fresh meat.

  At first, he was almost unable to take it. But after he had had some, and slept a while, he took more. There was enough of the food for some days.

  At the hearth fire, she kept the cauldron heated, and also burned the stained and ruined linen. The wine and apples fortified her now. When she lost consciousness it was never for very long. She had fainted repeatedly in the beginning, kneeling by her cooking.

  Some dream told her she had committed a sin, heeding the angel, but she laughed aloud at it. She was full of joy. She would not bother with the rest.

  She knew also that miracles attended upon miracles, and that, before Pierre had consumed all the broth, some means of escape would come to them.

  One morning, a colossal thunder-clap shook the whole house. It was a group of mailed men banging on the plaster of the lower house with axes and mallets.

  Jhane looked down at them dreamily from a window.

  “Sister! How are you faring? Are there any more with you? Any still sick with the pest?”