Or maybe she will run with Finn to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense, to the dens of lions and mountains of leopards. Into the Canticle.
Stop. Don’t think about the future.
They enter the building and wait in a hall outside heavy courtroom doors. The guards stand rigid. She remembers Henryk playing soldier, Claus cast as saint. Griete looking over her shoulder. Children merry on the stake, bodies arched toward the sword. Cheerful martyrs.
Don’t think about the past.
Aleys considers the doors, so burnished that the wood grain cascades in dark honey waterfalls. Aleys reaches inside, breathes deep, lets her fingers trace the falling streams. She must be her own alchemy of prayer. She must trust fully. She breathes faith into her lungs, slowly, and feels them fill with a humming, as of golden bees.
She chooses to trust.
From inside, a summons: “Admit the accused.”
The guards open the doors to reveal the room in which she will be judged by men.
At the far end of a long aisle, behind a table, sit three figures in robes of brown and black and scarlet. They are sleek as starlings, sharp-beaked and hungry.
The pope’s legate is at the center, small within the red cloak of authority. He leans toward her, and she feels him strain to detect whether she is come down from heaven or up from hell. He truly wants to know, and in that she feels the kinship of those who must sort the unruly angels, the fallen from the sent. As she approaches, she sees his stray eye. It gives her heart—a man who sees many ways. He regards her with his left eye, then turns his head to regard her with his right, then fixes her for a moment with both, like a three-headed guardian, a puzzled Cerberus with one eye fixed on law, the other on spirit. She can feel the weight of the scarlet duty on his shoulders. He speaks for the pope. She doesn’t envy him the job. Before the day is out, he will have to excommunicate a woman who once worked miracles.
At his right is a Dominican in black, a friar. The man is young, dark eyed and dark haired, too eager, sharp. He wears the pointed shoes of the University of Paris.
To the left of the legate is an old Benedictine monk she recognizes, the abbot of Ter Doest. Aged and soft, his eyes seem clouded with mist.
Before the panel sits a clerk at a desk with a quill, a dun sparrow among glossy birds.
The bishop rises to clear his throat. Jan Smet is wearing the gold cross over a breastbone brittle with cynicism. A man who’s given unto Caesar all that is Caesar’s, but also all that is God’s. He long ago forfeited his own treasure.
Behind him, collapsed on a bench against the wall, is a demon crouched in shadow, a gargoyle in a robe the color of beasts. When it raises its head, its red-rimmed eyes are those of Friar Lukas.
Aleys starts. For a moment, she’s back in her cell, earth grating her back, fingernails scraping dirt. The horror of the open door. No. Stop. She shakes herself. Lukas is merely man, not demon. His power over her is null. She breathes. That was then. This is now.
The bishop signals to the guards to place her in the dock, a wooden platform surrounded by a rail to protect the court from madmen and criminals. She nods and mounts the stand, erect, and sets her hands on the rail.
None of this feels real.
The bishop presses the gold cross to his chest as he bows to the legate. He announces, loudly, as if to a full room, “In this the year of our Lord 1299, we convene in the name of our most holy father and lord by divine providence Pope Boniface VIII. We are gathered in the presence of God and the legatine counsel of the Holy See to try the accused, Aleys of Damme, arrested by the Bishop of Tournai”—he pauses to ensure the clerk records his participation—“for the stain of heretical depravity.”
Heresy? He accuses her of denying God’s truth?
It makes no sense. They’re supposed to try her for breaking her vow of enclosure. Not for heresy. How? Why? The penalty for unrepentant heresy is death.
Aleys feels her composure shatter into bright flinting pieces. There is a retort, as of ice cracking. She falters. Fissures appear in the floor beneath her, chill water seeping through the cracks, wetting her feet. Cold fear mounts her legs and flushes her thighs. She grips the rail like she might drown. The bishop means to kill her. The raw water stings as it rises to her lungs, her breath becomes hoarfrost. Suddenly, the courtroom vanishes and she sees the stake, is tied to the stake, flame licking the hem of her dress. Her feet, her bare feet, shift as they begin to blister. No, she tells herself. This is no vision. She tries to resist the terror, but the burning tide wants to drag her into the open sea.
Remember, she wills. You are not alone. Even here. Even in this. Aleys reaches for the Mother that is Father that is Son that is She.Help.
And they come. From the dark mist, she feels women grasp her wrists, firm and sure. Their palms steady her bones. In their hands is the strength of Mary and Marte, Ida, Sophia. Of Mama. Her own strength flows to meet them. The mist thins. She breathes. She remembers herself and she remembers the God of these women.
I’m no heretic, she thinks. God knows I am no heretic.
But she might be made a martyr.
Aleys turns to face the judge.
61
The Bishop
The bishop registers, with satisfaction, the shock on the girl’s face. He notes again that strange luminescence. The year in a cell has rendered her even more transparent. Aleys straightens and lifts her head. There’s nothing repentant about her. She practically glows with shamelessness. Good. He’ll trap her right in the middle of that self-righteous halo.
