and a bitter penance
–who can forgive me this? –
forgiveness, like love,
is a process of negotiation.
can I be loved?
do I need to love my own skin before another will love it?
do I need to be present before I can start to live?
I am tired of dying
always I am tired of falling away from myself
always I am tired –
sleep brings a little of death’s kindness
–to sleep isn’t safe
when I sleep the wolf will be free –
nothing is safe
– I am never safe –
not here not like this
always I am tired of running
29
You
The winter ends, as winters always do.
Spring brings shorter nights and shorter vigils. You sleep sometimes. On your knees in the chapel. Curled up on the floor in amongst the documents and books, soothed by the familiar smell of vellum and ink, even with the aftertaste of absence. In your bed, in the middle of the afternoon, or in the early hours when the chaplain finds you dozing at your prayers and raises you gently by the elbow to lead you there. Still your eyes are bruised and bloodshot, and your pallor provokes the court to rumour. Your servants try to keep it from you, but you know what they’re saying. That you’re mad. That you lost your mind when Bisclavret disappeared.
You didn’t lose your mind. But sometimes it feels as though he took your heart with him, and left you barely alive, your blood sluggish in your veins and your breath thin in your lungs.
You don’t fail to notice when his wife marries his cousin and heir. It’s natural enough: he has some kinsman’s duty to look after her now that her husband is gone, and she could do worse than to marry him and keep her home. But it takes some effort to push the uncharitable rumours from your mind and wish them both the happiness you’ve lost, and you do not invite his cousin to court to take Bisclavret’s place as a knight.
You withdraw from your councillors and advisors, leave your seneschal to handle the business of ruling, and let mourning dictate the rhythms of your life.
You would spend a year and a day in Masses for his soul, if only it would help.Nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum, gremioque hunc concipe molli. Take him, earth, for cherishing, to thy tender breast receive him.Except that you have no body to bring, not even a ruin; no bones to settle in the soil to be planted with flowers where they sleep. Perhaps if you did, you would not feel quite so much as though you failed him.
Your knights and nobles try to draw you from your penitential self-enclosure. They beg you to spar with them, to hunt with them, to ride out to tournaments with them – but you’ve lost your stomach for the kill, or even the pretence of it. You hunt once, and when you see the deer struggling in a pool of its own blood as the hounds slaver and growl, all you can picture is Bisclavret, pinned to the ground by the wolf. The agony of those final moments. It sickens you; you turn back, and leave the rest to complete the hunt alone.
It will pass. You’ve been told this – that the grief will ease. You aren’t sure how that can be true, when Bisclavret will never stop being gone and the world will never be any less empty of him. But perhaps it comforts others to claim that it will grow easier. Perhaps they find solace in those lies. Sometimes, you’re even capable of pretending that you believe them, mustering a smile and thanking them for their kind words and thoughts.
They cannot bring him back. You want them gone from you until they can.
It doesn’t pass. But you grow numb to it, as the weeks wear on. Your mind hardens against the agony of remembering, as a body does to an old wound.Bisclavret is deadceases to be a fiery lance of pain every time you brush against it by mistake,and becomes a dull ache, a gnawing emptiness. One day it will be nothing but a scar, inured to sensation.
As spring wears on and the weather grows warmer, you go less often to the chapel. You speak prayers for him morning and night, but you trust the chaplain and his clerks to speak the Masses. You commission a fine psalter. You donate gold to a monastery, that they will pray for his soul. You begin once more to take care of your hair and clothes, to look a little more like a king.
