Matrix Page 9

  But the diocesan superiors, seeing the outlay, wore unhappy faces that turned furious with their wine drunk to excess; there were mutterings of combing the abbey for hidden wealth and redistributing it. Her first act as abbess and Marie had erred gravely. She presided over the festivities smiling, but a clammy wind entered her.

  When Ruth, who had been a novice with her, kissed Marie after it was all over and the night had fallen softly on them, she said, Marie, my friend, today you had a radiance to you. A heavenly glow.

  I’m sorry, Ruthie. From now on you must call me Mother, Marie said, and both laughed.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Marie was elected abbess, the heat of the end of her menses had withdrawn from her. Now she is no longer touched by the curse of Eve. When the blood stopped, the knives that had twisted in her since she was fourteen were at last removed from her womb.

  She is given instead a long, cold clarity.

  She can see for a great distance now. She can see for eons.

  She will write of the first great, ground-trembling vision later in a private book, hidden from her nuns. She will describe vividly what happens.

  It is shortly before Vespers. The twilight hangs over the hills, the sun dies in loops of gold and shadow. Behind her the abbey is small and white in the last blaze. The swallows flick in arcs above.

  By the wagons, the villeinesses sing a song of lust so old that the words do not sound to Marie like English; and though they should not listen to such worldly filth, her dozens of strong working nuns listen half smiling with their bodies bent, their black habits falling like shadows in the fields, their scythes hissing the song’s rhythm.

  Marie shivers.

  And in the space of an exhale, all the world goes quiet.

  And then, in all its immensity, it turns the force of its attention upon Marie.

  Lightning sparks at the tips of her fingers. Swifter than breath it moves through her hands, the flesh of her arms, her inner organs, her sex, her skin, and it settles jagged and blazing in her throat. Wondrous colors bloom in the sky above the forests. With a thunder that shakes the ground beneath Marie’s feet, there is a split in the sky that opens. In the split Marie sees a woman made of the greatness of all the cities in the world together, a woman clothed in radiance.

  And upon the woman’s head she wears a crown of stars; and this is how Marie knows her to be the Virgin Mary, whose face is hidden by the blaze of twelve suns.

  The Virgin holds a wine-red rose tight in bud. From her vastness she drops her rose upon the forest at her feet, and the rose blooms out of its bud and just as swiftly it blows. The petals circle in the wind and the soft petals each tear down the great trees of the forest in a pattern. And Marie can feel the pattern in her fingers as though she is tracing it with her hand, and knows it to be a labyrinth; and at the heart of the labyrinth she sees a yellow broom flower holding upon its slender stalk a shining full moon.

  Then with a hand the Virgin clears the veil of brightness from her face and Marie is allowed to look full upon the Blessed Mother; and she wears the face of her own mother, so young, and shining with love. Marie falls to her knees.

  At last the Virgin hoods herself again in radiance and she steps backward through the wound reft in the sky.

  The sky heals into its natural dark blue behind her.

  Radiance bleeds from the day. Marie returns to herself kneeling upon the dirt in a ring of her daughters.

  A voice yells that the abbess is old, she has had a spell; but another says angrily that the abbess is but forty-seven and strong, foolish child, do her eyes not work, can she not see the abbess has had a holy visitation?

  Marie opens her eyes and smiles upon her daughters and they go silent in the force and radiance lent to her by the Virgin. She can feel in her own skin their wonder.

  She says that she is well. She says that oh indeed, she is very very well.

  The bell for Vespers rings across the distance. Marie sends her nuns home, and the villeinesses trundle back with the wagons and the freemartins to the granary, and Marie picks up the skirts of her habit from her legs and runs swift and strong through the fields despite her great size. She goes through the orchards and to the apartments of the abbess and up the stairs and though her own kitchener tries to ask her a question about her evening meal she does not stop. She goes to her study and writes out her vision in full.

  Only when she has re-created in ink upon parchment what she saw does she fully understand it, she writes in her little book.

  Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.

  In the larger world, she sees, the beasts of the apocalypse are roaming, leaving their dark trail smoking and charred on the earth. The fall of Jerusalem, she understands, will make the whole Christian world fall. Christians will be slaughtered and raped and made slaves. Jews throughout the Christian lands will be blamed and caught in their houses and burnt at the stake and murdered without pity; women and children will be buried alive. Famines and conquests and earthquakes and fires and dead bodies littering the plains. A cloud of invisible evil has fallen upon the heads all around, it is darkening the air even where they stand. It is Marie’s duty as Mother to her daughters to banish even the sight of the cloud from this place.

  And in the vision given as a shining gift to her, the Virgin has told Marie how to remove her daughters from worldly influence.

  For Marie herself as abbess is the broom flower growing up through the abbey and it is her strength alone that holds it aloft.

  It is her daughters’ faith that shines brightly as a moon, the light of the darkening sky.

  And with the rose the Virgin made a labyrinth in the forests encircling the abbey, to show Marie that she must do the like.

  She must build a labyrinth.

  The abbey had always been an easy quarter day’s walk from town. But if a labyrinth with a secret passage were built around it, a road that was so complex it would dismay all but the most determined visitors, she could hold her daughters aloof from the corrupting world.

  There would be no authority but Marie’s authority in this place.

  And they could stay on this piece of earth where the place has always stood but her daughters would be removed, enclosed, safe. They would be self-sufficient, entire unto themselves. An island of women.

  2.

  In the night, Marie calls for her four most competent daughters.

  The new prioress Tilde, twitchy and scrupulous, with the sweet, startled face of a dormouse. Oh how the girl loves god, hungers for god, believes in the goodness of all things with a kind of rigorous simplicity. Such knowing simplicity in this complex world takes great intelligence, Marie finds. She envies the girl, admires her.

  And young eager Sister Asta, whose mind is clear and mechanical, seeing deep into the workings of things, who walks at a perilous forward tilt on her toes as if impatient to already be there, whose table manners are so atrocious it is counted a penance to sit opposite her at refectory.

  And Sister Ruth, who had been a novice with Marie and whose judgment is large and fine.

  Finally, Wulfhild, the lady-bailiff of the abbey, summoned out of her sleep from her house in town, where she has four daughters of her own, bright, strong little maidens, and a very fine house.

  It is deep in the night when all are assembled in Marie’s chambers. Marie’s kitchener brings up cheese and bread and pies of fruit and good sweet wine carried over from Burgundy. With the arrival of the food, the women mind less missing their sleep.

  Then Marie stands, huge, by the fire. Ruth thinks with wonder that she glows with a light that is not of fire. She tells them slowly of her vision in the fields that day, and of her plan.

  Prioress Tilde bows her head in awe, there is no resistance; she is frightened of Marie, how s
wiftly her mind leaps and turns, and now she sees the light borrowed from the Virgin as it shines out of her superior.

  In Sister Asta, the challenge of such a huge undertaking is thrilling, a puzzle to be attacked, and her small pointy face grows red with excitement, and she calculates swiftly and says that it can be done in two years, perhaps, if all hands inessential to the abbey’s urgent needs are used and if they buy ten freemartins or draft horses to drag the felled branches to the burning piles.

  In Sister Ruth, a great stillness of doubt takes place. She feels chilled and shivers. But then she thinks in the face of her unease of Marie as she had been a few months after she arrived as a novice: skinny rangy huge thing, silent with her sadness; how in the thirty years since that day of reckoning, the abbey has grown in its prosperity and comfort from twenty starving nuns until now there are nearly a hundred nuns and dozens of servants, and nearly as many villeinesses in their cottages with their children. And all these memories, all the weight of what the nuns owe Marie, her thirty years of control of the abbey and genius in the way she conducted the affairs of the abbey, pour through Sister Ruth. At last she thinks of the practical impossibility of the labyrinth, how nearly stupid it would seem if it were proposed by anyone else but the Virgin Mary through her firm enormous receptacle of Abbess Marie; and she at last arrives at the understanding that Marie’s will is stronger than any practical impossibilities, and it will be done even if Ruth voices her objections.

  She lowers her head and prays and raises it and says yes, though in a voice thick with worry when the vote is called.

  Only Wulfhild resists the abbess. Twelve years now the abbey’s bailiffess, in her strange leather tunic and skirt, shining with the tallow she rubs on to make them impervious to the weather. She is a dark-haired, sunbrowned woman who gives the impression of boiling turmoil held in check by willpower alone, smaller than Marie but like Marie holding a kind of natural authority in her shoulders thrown back. When she frowns, the real beauty of her high cheekbones and long lashes becomes a sudden grimness. It is this Wulfhild, with a strong spine to her, who now stands and tells the abbess no.

  This, she says, is an insane plan. It is destined for failure.

  Marie blinks slowly and the other women in the room hold their breath. The abbess repeats no, without emotion.

  Wulfhild says that they have just recently saved enough for the abbess house, she herself has already had the workers begin the quarrying in the pits where all the abbey stone is cut, it is senseless to stop now. It will take ten more years to save enough all over again.

  Marie asks very quietly if Wulfhild does not love her.

  Wulfhild says she loves her so much that she dares to tell Marie when she is making a mistake and that not all even in this room can boast of such honesty when Marie puts on her murderess face, which she is wearing right now. But the abbess doesn’t scare her, Wulfhild.

  It is clear by the rapid pulse twitching in Wulfhild’s neck that the abbess does in fact scare Wulfhild.

  The silence stretches on and it is horrid.

  In a voice so soft that all the women lean forward to hear, Marie says that when Wulfhild speaks, she speaks in the voice of Marie’s own authority, which she has only lent to the bailiffess. But Marie herself speaks with the authority of the Virgin Mary who has bestowed upon her a great vision that very day.

  Surely, she says, Wulfhild would not dare to contradict the Virgin Mary.

  And so Wulfhild’s resistance is overrun. She sighs. She adjusts. With burning eyes she bends over the table where Asta has already in excitement begun sketching her plans.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the infirmary, the three ancient nuns are set out in the sun. One afflicted, one brainless, one who slides through time.

  Estrid had died in her sleep, and has been replaced with Amphelisa, who stepped over a pair of copulating snakes and was cursed with a stroke in punishment; half of her body is set in stone and she struggles to speak.

  Duvelina, who has the purest blood of any nun, of the greatest family in France, was born with a handful of words in her, a sly smile, a face as though she is squinting into a constant high wind.

  And Wevua, who is becoming even more savage for being unmoored in time.

  Prioress Tilde, run off her feet, has given them peas to shell, for now that the forests are full of the sound of breaking trees, the shouts of nuns, every hand must work, there is no leisure even for the aged and ill.

  Wevua complains that since they started building the labyrinth, the dortoir stinks of sweat. Impossible to breathe enough to sleep. And nothing is clean anymore. The linens are atrocious. The refectory floor full of mud.

  Amphelisa says with her slurry tongue that it is very hard with so few left to work here at the abbey. Poor Tilde.

  They stop shelling for a moment to watch Prioress Tilde’s headcloths flitting in the windows. The prioress was left with only twelve servants and nuns to do the work of the whole abbey, she weeps as she churns butter, she weeps as she runs to pull the bread from the ovens, she has succumbed in despair to letting the weeds take over the garden.

  Duvelina bows her head. Because of her simplicity, she is perhaps the most perfectly faithful nun of all, the one with goodness shot through her, cloudless. She begins to shell peas remarkably fast, her hands blur, she is quite excellent at shelling peas.

  Amphelisa says the word child, meaning how awful that the child oblate died yesterday, standing in the path of a falling oak. Just that morning was the funeral. Amphelisa still can smell the sap of lilies her good hand picked to lay on the body in its shroud.

  Wevua snorts. She tells the others that all child oblates who are sent here die. What can one expect. Starvation everywhere. So much death. And that stupid servant eating a root that looked like a carrot but was not and frothing to death. Wevua’s poor beautiful sisters going blue choking on their lungs, what horror. She herself dug their graves. The cold February rain. Her hands bloody. Wevua opens her hands and looks at her palms. She looks affronted to find her hands suddenly quite old.

  With this gesture, Amphelisa knows Wevua has gone back to the starving time before Marie took the abbey in hand, a few years before she herself came to the abbey a novice of sixteen. She asks Wevua’s opinion of the new prioress Marie, curious to know how Marie had been, so long ago.

  Wevua scoffs and says that the new prioress Marie is a nothing. Weak. Still a child in her massive body. Barely knows even the prayers all Christian children know. It’s shocking. Raised a heathen. True she took the cross as a child crusader but gave up her vows in frailty to come home without ever seeing Jerusalem. Failed crusader; worse even than those who went to Outremer only to enrich themselves. Wevua hears the girl Marie speak aloud in her dreams sometimes. At court she had a great love, it appears. The girl still murmurs for her love. Some nights Wevua wakes to find Marie’s bed empty, who knows where she goes. Wevua predicts she will die soon of a broken heart. Good, she says. To let an unbeliever like her be a prioress of a community of holy virgins is a scandal, a sin.

  Half of Amphelisa’s mouth raises in a smile. Time has proved just how Wevua is wrong.

  Wevua says reluctantly that still, the girl does learn quickly. Sing an antiphon once through and she has it by heart. But Wevua strongly believes Marie should never take the veil for, it is clear, she does not love god.

  And Amphelisa laughs aloud at the thought of the abbess being anything less than radiant with holiness. Then she reminds herself in her head that they are all sinners, and none are perfect, even Mother Marie.

  Prioress Tilde flies down the garden path, panting, crying out from a distance to ask if all the peas have been shelled yet, then nearly screaming when she sees the basket still half full. She pleads for her sisters to work faster and runs away.

  Duvelina’s nose almost touches the peas in her lap, she shells so hard.


  The three nuns are silent while they finish; and they see Tilde darting to the chapel where she herself rings the bells for None. Wevua stands, takes the basket of peas for evening refectory under one arm and Amphelisa on the other, and carries both to the chapel. Her mind is slippery in time but her body is still strong, despite her crushed foot. Duvelina hums shuffling behind. At the door, Wevua leaves Amphelisa but carries the peas inside. Amphelisa waits, leaning on the warm stone. Wevua comes out and puts the basket of peas down on the ground and picks Amphelisa up and carries her in to her bench.

  There are so few nuns left behind to sing None; the rest are in the chapel of the forest, all that sawdust and smoke and birdsong and sweat. There is Prioress Tilde, the three ancient nuns, Goda who is caring for the animals singlehandedly. Infirmatrix Nest returns to fetch some blister salve and bandages to the forest and she sits down impatiently to wait through the divine office. The light falls gently through the windows on the mostly empty wooden benches.

  Prioress Tilde leads the service in the absence of the cantrix.

  Nest sings, but she thinks of the forest. She can hear distant chopping; the crack of falling trees; the others, nuns and servants and villeinesses, have gone back so quickly to their work. She longs to be with them in the sun and wind. A strange magic has befallen their bodies. Every day since the abbess announced the project, the weather has been fine and not too hot, days lengthening so the women’s increasing strength and endurance can be tested with longer hours of work. They return with callused hands, sunburnt cheeks, a swagger of exhaustion and pride in their legs, bodies that are sleeping even as they fall into their beds after Compline. All this time Nest has attended only minor wounds and a single fatality, the little oblate of eight years playing in the brush who didn’t heed the calls to get out of the way of the falling oak. The smaller girls are in charge of the freemartins and draft horses and it is a delight to see how the beasts move to their little voices, to find that most of the girls can work as hard as the nuns of the veil. How swiftly the women have all been working, filled with radiance and conviction. The blinds and hidden paths that hide the shortcut from abbey to town have been made, its final secret tunnel has been dug, only a small stretch from behind the blind up into the barn behind the almonry and hostelry; Nest herself swung the pickax to reveal the exiting light. And through the forest, the streams are buried under roads, the baskets of dirt are carried, the straining creatures are pulling logs and trunks from the earth, the saplings that have been transplanted are somehow doubling their size in a month, the bushes are filling out the empty places as fully as though they had been planted at the formation of the world. And where there are spaces to be filled where bushes won’t suffice, the clever blinds are constructed, completing the illusion of the road running endlessly in isolation, even though it is separated from other roads by a strip of trees and bush. On the surface of the road slowly unfurling itself, a forearm’s fill of pebbles from the quarry underlies an equal thickness of dirt. Then a machine built by Asta and the carpenter and blacksmith nuns comes along, a stunning marvel of a contraption: ten of the strongest workers stand inside a giant wheel and walk together to press the dirt hard and flat.