“Really?” Charles said.
“Truly,” de Chartres said.
Charles looked to Joan, who now walked forward from the wall to stand close to the dais.
She smiled at him encouragingly. “I have no objections to my Lord Archbishop’s questions, sire,” she said. “I am but a poor ignorant peasant girl, and if I speak strange words, then those are only the words of God. If the archbishop thinks to question me,” now she turned and addressed de Chartres directly, “then he will be answered with God’s words, not mine.”
Power whispered through Joan’s voice, and de Chartres paled, and would have spoken himself, save that he was interrupted by Isabeau de Bavière.
“My lords,” Isabeau said, rising from her chair, and walking to stand not an arm’s length from Joan’s shoulder. She would not let this ill-favored semi-woman so dictate matters. “This talk of words is all very well, and I am more than pleased that the archbishop shall have his turn to discover whether or not Joan’s words have been occasioned by God Himself or by the seductive whisperings of devils, but I now speak with the voice of a woman and I hold a woman’s fears about what this girl has claimed.”
As Isabeau spoke, Joan locked eyes with Catherine, then looked to Isabeau. She knew what
Charles’ whore-mother would say next.
“This ignorant peasant girl says,” Isabeau continued, “that she is a virgin, pure and unsullied, and that this enables her to speak with the voice of virtue. But, my lords,” Isabeau spread her hands and shrugged her shoulders slightly, “has she not traveled with men, sleeping by their sides unchaperoned through long nights? Does she not now inhabit a fortress which has strong and lusty men lining its very corridors? She is a young girl, and healthy, and it would have been natural for her to have succumbed to the blandishments of at least one or two of the men within these walls.”
“She is not you, mother!” Charles shouted, jerking to his feet.
Isabeau’s face twisted with disgust. “There are many who say,” she said, “that she favors you with more than words, Charles!”
“Aye!” shouted a voice from further back in the hall. “I have ridden this Joan through more than one night, and I tell you all now, before God, that she had been broken in long before I bedded her!”
Isabeau breathed in relief: the guard had interrupted precisely on cue … her money had been well spent.
“You speak lies,” Joan said in a quiet voice that, nevertheless, carried throughout the hall.
She turned and faced the guard who had stepped forth and shouted. “And for your lies, and your foul, craven heart, God shall call you to judgment before a. further day has passed.”
The guard froze in the act of making an obscene gesture. Then he remembered how much he had been paid, and thought that he feared Isabeau de Bavière more than he feared God’s retribution, and so he completed the gesture with considerably more gusto than he had originally intended.
Joan’s calm regard did not falter, and the guard, unsure once more, stumbled back into the ranks.
Joan turned back to face Charles. “I am a virgin,” she said. “I swear before God that I have lain with no man.”
“I believe you!” Charles said.
“But it is best to be sure” the archbishop said. “Don’t you think?”
He looked to Isabeau. “Madam, as this is a duty not befitting either myself or those of my deputation, perhaps you might…”
“I and my ladies agree to examine the girl,” Isabeau said.
“No!” Charles cried.
“Do not fear for me, your grace,” Joan said, extending a hand to stop Charles. “I have nothing to hide. God and his mighty archangel Saint Michael have been my only companions, my only intimates.”
To one side Catherine smiled ironically. Angelic intimacy can of times be a curse, Joan. Do not think that your devoutness endows you with a knowledge of all the twisted paths evil can travel.
Joan’s eyes flickered Catherine’s way, and she spared a moment to pity the woman whose whoring nature blackened all her thoughts. I will pray for you, Joan thought, but I doubt that even prayer can save a soul cursed from conception.
Catherine’s face tightened, then turned away from Joan. You know nothing of my conception, peasant!
“Tomorrow, perhaps, my lord and lady?” Joan said, now looking at the archbishop and then Isabeau. “I would prefer to spend a night in prayer, asking for God’s strength, before I face this ordeal.”
Both inclined their heads, and Charles slumped back into his chair sulking.
AS SHE did every night, Joan knelt before the small altar in the bare room she had taken in preference to the spacious apartments Charles had offered her. A small wooden statue of the Virgin and Child sat on the altar, flanked by two small, fat candles whose guttering flames were barely sufficient to light the Blessed Virgin’s serene face. Joan’s hands were clasped so tightly before her their knuckles had whitened, and a trickle of blood seeped down her wrists from where her nails dug into the soft flesh of her palms in the ecstasy of her worship.
Joan wore nothing but a simple, sleeveless shift that ended part-way down her calves. Her thick, poorly trimmed and unwashed hair had been pushed haphazardly behind her ears, and there were smudges of dirt on her bare, callused feet.
Goose bumps ridged up and down her limbs, but Joan was so lost in her religious fervor that she did not feel the cold. Her entire body was bowed about her tightly clasped hands.
Everything—her expression, her posture, her trembling muscles, even her lank hair and unwashed flesh—bespoke the obsessiveness of her piety. The Archangel Michael was with her.
St. Michael came to Joan almost every night, and usually the archangel comforted Joan with visions of how her strength and piety would enable the French to overcome both demons and English alike.
But tonight was different. Today evil had spoken publicly against Joan, and so, tonight, the vengeance of the archangel must walk the spaces of la Roche-Guyon.
Joan trembled even as she rejoiced in the presence of the archangel, for she found the taste and tenor of his wrath a truly dreadful thing.
Violent images thundered through her mind: battles where men died screaming their defiance on the point of a sword; fires where women burned screaming with joy; tyrannical kings impaled on their sceptres; and men … men … men taking their hands and making obscene gestures at God’s Chosen. Men, speaking words of filth… men speaking lies … men impaling women on the points of their fleshy spears …
Joan shuddered violently, wondering why the archangel thought to put such horrifying images inside her mind.
Instantly the vision changed. She saw a man . .. the man who had spoken filth in her presence this afternoon.
Anger flooded Joan’s being, revenge consumed her. Righteous anger, vengeful anger … the archangel’s anger. Joan jerked, and hissed. She was lost.
THE GUARD walked the walls of the castle, warm with the drink Isabeau’s money had purchased. And there was money left over … enough for him to purchase some warm flesh to console him once this midnight duty was over.
He smiled, remembering how he’d jested with two of his comrades in the watchtower he had just come from. He had embroidered his tale of the bedding of Joan, telling them how she’d begged him to fuck her, how she’d pleaded, how she’d screamed that God was good for many things, but not for bedsport. His two companions had laughed, and made foul comments, and that had encouraged the guard even more in his tale, and so he had told them that the “virgin” was as practiced a whore as ever he’d had, and he had told them of the tricks she’d performed for him, and the two listeners had gone slack-jawed with lust, and their hands had fallen to their privates to rub and soothe away their envious throbbings.
It had been a good evening.
The guard farted, then belched, then walked a. little further along the wall, dreaming now of which castle whore he’d pay to perform such tricks as he’d imagined Joan to be practiced at.
IN HER tiny chamber, Joan’s body jerked and a tiny moan escaped her lips. This man was truly vile.
THE GUARD was almost to the end of his allotted wall space when the golden hand appeared before him.
He halted, blinking in bemused surprise.
Hovering some two paces before him at chest height, the hand flexed, as if measuring its own strength.
The guard blinked again.
The hand lunged, burying itself in the guard’s belly.
He jerked into rigidity, the agony of the hand’s writhing within his entrails too great for him to scream. His eyes popped, and he drew in a huge, ragged breath.
The hand, so deep within his body, seized a handful of his entrails, and squeezed. They bulged, then popped.