You have been as nothing. We had thought once to have need of you, but you have proved
yourself a passing foolishness on our part. You no longer please us, and we rescind our favour.
The cold, impossibly, grew more intense, and Joan shrieked as iciness enveloped her
lower body.
We return you to your normal womanly self, Joan, and leave in place of our favour all
the loathing for your kind that we bear. We have no longer any need for you, Joan, and, not needing you, we choose to despise you.
And with that, the icy grip of the archangel gave one final, agonising clench, and then it,
as the archangel‘s presence, vanished, leaving Joan collapsed and weeping on the floor.
There she lay for long moments, unable to cope with the weight of the archangel‘s
loathing and betrayal on top of witnessing the birth of Marie‘s child.
She suddenly lurched to her feet, her face twisted and wet with tears, and tore from the
wall where they hung the sword and banner of the Archangels‘ Michael and Gabriel.
She took the banner, and tore it first in two, then each of those two pieces into many
more, shrieking and panting in her anger and sense of betrayal.
How could she have been so credulous, so naive, as to let herself be used by such
corrupted beings as the angels?
The banner shredded easily, almost as if it too recognised the lies with which it had been
constructed, and Joan only paused in her maddened destruction when the banner lay in pieces at
her feet.
Then she reached for the sword.
She held it for a moment, staring wild-eyed at it, her sense of betrayal growing even
stronger with every second that passed. Then she took it and dashed the blade against the heavy
stone sill on the window.
The blade shattered into three jagged sections.
Joan screamed, allowing the useless hilt to fall clattering to the floor.
How could she have made herself the instrument of evil? What if her entire life had been
a lie? A cruel hoax, and she the only one not to realise it? Had all of France, all of Christendom,
been laughing at her?
She should have stayed home, and tended her father‘s sheep. That, at least, would have
occasioned no laughter.
Perhaps she should go home…tend her father‘s sheep…
But what if her father also now despised her? Laughed at her?
In this past hour, and particularly in these past moments, Joan‘s entire faith, her entire
reason for being, had been stripped away in so cruel a manner that had her sword still been intact Joan would undoubtedly have fallen upon it.
She started to shake, her tremors becoming so violent that she fell to the cold stone floor.
She moaned, and cried out, wishing that death would simply come to take her in this moment of
despair.
―Joan,‖ came a voice so deep and comforting that Joan believed it merely a dream. ―Joan,
you are so greatly loved that my eyes run with tears for you. Joan, see…see how I weep with
love for you.‖
Joan blinked, still curled in a tight ball on the floor. Was this a phantasm? Or the
archangel come back to torment her?
Another voice spoke, a woman‘s this time. ―Joan, will you see? Will you raise your eyes
and see how much your lord loves you?‖
It was the woman‘s voice, rather than the man‘s, which made Joan raise her face from the
stone flagging and stare before her.
She gasped, hardly crediting what her eyes told her.
The chamber had disappeared. Instead Joan lay on the top of a low hill. Before her a
woman knelt at the foot of a cross.
Not daring to believe, Joan raised her eyes still further.
An almost naked man gazed down at her from the cross. He had been vilely nailed to the
wood through his wrists and ankles, and a crown of thorns hung askew on his bleeding brow. His
loincloth was darkly soiled with the blood that had crept down his body.
Yet, even so cruelly pinned, the man smiled down on Joan with such infinite love that her
despair vanished as if it had been swept away in a great wind.
―Lord Jesu?‖ she whispered.
―Joan,‖ he said, and she could see how much each word cost him. His chest and
shoulders were contorted in agony, his every breath an agonised nightmare.
―Joan, will you trust me?‖
Joan‘s gaze slipped to the woman. She was young and pregnant, and very beautiful, with
translucent skin, deep blue eyes and dark hair.
She was also sad, weeping, but somehow serene and strong in that sadness.
―Have you been vilely treated by the angels as well?‖ Joan asked the woman.
―Aye,‖ she said, ―as has my lord. Joan, we would give you a purpose back into your life,
and a gift also.‖
―A purpose and a gift?‖
―Both with all our love,‖ the woman said, and Joan realised that she spoke for both
herself and Christ, who hung in such agony on his cross that he found speech difficult.
―Your purpose shall be France,‖ said the woman, and as she spoke she raised her right
hand and made with it a sweeping gesture.
A dark vista opened up before Joan‘s eyes. It was France, but a France devastated and
murdered. Fields lay burning, houses and castles lay toppled, clouds of smoke and ash billowed
over the countryside.
Out of this horrid cloud rode a man on a dark horse: a man Joan had never seen before,
but one she instinctively knew was the Demon-King. A handsome face under silver-gilt hair,
pale grey eyes, a warrior‘s body and a warrior‘s bearing.
He rode his stallion over the broken bodies of French men and women and children, and
they screamed and wailed and bled as he progressed.
Not once did he look down and pity them. Instead, his face was swollen with glory and
victory.
His stallion strode forth, and more bones cracked, and more children died.
―I know him,‖ said Joan.
―Aye,‖ said the woman. Her hands were now to her face, and she wept as if her heart
broke.
Turning her eyes back to the woman, Joan wondered if she wept for France, or for the
Demon-King.
―If Charles does not rise against him,‖ the woman continued, gaining some control over
her weeping, ―then this is France‘s destiny.‖
―Charles is a lost cause,‖ said Joan. ―I have given him my all. I have begged and pleaded
and threatened. I have spoken prophecies and wrought him miracles, but still he sits here in
Rheims and weeps and wrings his hands. France needs a king to lead it, and what it has is a pile
of useless excrement. I cannot change him.‖
―Yes, you can change him,‖ said Christ, groaning with the effort of speaking. ―See.‖
The vista changed so that France became a land of sundrenched meadows and laughing
children. In this new France the Demon-King still stood, but his sword hung useless at his side,
his shoulders had slumped, his form was thin and tremulous, and his feet had sunk to their ankles
in a pool of bubbling black mud. Dread suffused the Demon-King‘s face, and his mouth hung
slack with dismay. He stared towards a horizon where appeared a great and mighty king on a
snowy war stallion. It was Charles, but a Charles Joan did not think existed.
Behind him rode a shining army—an army of a united and strong France.
The Demon-King whimpered, trembled violently, then sank into the bubbling pool of
black mud until he had completely vanished.
―How can this be so?‖ Joan said.
―All you have to do,‖ said the woman, now leaning forward and taking one of Joan‘s
hands in hers, ―is to tend your sheep.‖
Joan frowned. ―I do not understand.‖
The woman smiled, and kissed Joan very softly on the mouth. She began to speak, and
she spoke without interruption for many minutes.
At first Joan‘s face twisted with horror, then it relaxed, and assumed a radiance born both
of wonder and of hope.
― I can do this?‖
―You are the Saviour of France,‖ said Christ, and he smiled with such tenderness and
love through the haze of his own torment that Joan‘s heart overflowed with the strength of her
love and joy. ―The path ahead of you shall be tiresome and often painful. You will doubt. But
I—‖
―And I,‖ put in the woman.
―—will always be there. We will not forget you. When you are at your darkest, then we
will be there for you. ‖
Much later Catherine came to Joan‘s chamber, thinking to talk more of Marie‘s child, and
to use its birth to ensure Joan‘s total alienation from the angels.
What she found astounded her.
Joan knelt before her window which she had opened to admit the dawn light. About her
lay strewn the fragments of what Catherine recognised as Joan‘s sword and angelic banner.