Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  And at the heart of the gathering at the head of the table, the great love of Marie’s life sits shining so bright Marie cannot see the human form in all the brightness, she can only see the radiance.

  The moment fades. And once again she is among the ghosts and shadows, the wind playing at the eaves of the building, and even the ancient walls of this abbey so poor they seem resigned to the sickness and hunger they clasp within them.

  Roused again, the flock goes silently up the night stairs once more, to the beds gone cold. Swan-neck lets Wevua limp before her off to her bed, and holds Marie’s hand to keep her back. She whispers in her ear that she is so glad Marie has come, Emme is useless, Goda only fit for animals, someone has to take charge, thanks be to the Virgin for delivering Marie.

  Sleep again but too soon it is Lauds, half dreaming in the dark and rising song, then ablutions running out to the lavatorium to wash in the cold water drawn by the servants, to the garderobe to piss and shit, back to the chapel for Prime as day begins to slice through the shutters of the windows. In the refectory, they are given work, the weakest given the hardest things, for pain in this place is proof of godliness. Wevua takes the novices to scrub the chapel’s floors with frigid water. Marie has never scrubbed a thing in her life. She wonders, hands aching, how Cecily did not hate her. Then first meal, a bite of black bread and some milk still warm from the cows. Terce; contemplation in the warming-room, the nuns each reading aloud from their books, but Marie is given nothing and she tells poems she’s memorized in her head. Sext. Psalms, always psalms, sparked by the quavery voice of the cantrix.

  Goda shuffles up, sour. Marie is wanted in the abbess’s quarters, although why Goda does not know, she herself is perfectly capable of taking dictation. The subprioress wraths herself outside to collect the eggs.

  The warmth of the abbess’s little white room is such a relief that Marie sits abruptly on a stool. The abbess smiles vaguely and starts speaking, which Marie only belatedly understands is meant to be the dictation of a letter to Eleanor. She scrambles for parchment and a pen, but it doesn’t matter, the abbess’s letter is so strange and disconnected, so full of both obsequy and brimstone, that Marie writes nothing, listening for the gist, and then composes a short, coldly polite letter in Latin requesting the immediate delivery of Marie’s dowry, for the nuns are starving to death. Only into the salutation does she imprint her love. The abbess smiles in satisfaction when Marie reads the letter back, and says with delighted surprise how precise Marie is at dictation, she repeated the abbess’s letter to the very word.

  First writing a letter to Eleanor, then the mess of the account books when Marie gathers enough courage to look into them, all together the work makes Marie nauseated. The families of villeins, the peasants attached to the abbey, have lined up at the eastern door to meet the new prioress. And the long day is not yet halfway done.

  Marie wants to lie on the floor in this white warm room. To leave this prison of flesh in this miserable boggy stinking place, to rejoin her mother in death, to give up the ghost.

  Instead, she works on, and Emme sleeps with a gentle wheeze in her nose and a fly beats its crisp body on the shutters.

  But soon she can hear murmuring, even though speaking is forbidden during work hours, perhaps it is the women who are below in the silk-spinning room, she finds a hole in the floor, perhaps for ventilation, and she comes near, crouching, to listen.

  Someone is saying now, Oh there was a broom flower tucked behind the helmet’s visor and this is how the poor violated maiden’s mother knew who had raped her daughter; and with this, Marie knows with a shock of cold that they are speaking of her own mother; of the circumstances of Marie’s birth. Oh yes, the voice said, warming up, just a maiden of only thirteen, but tall and lovely and out in the fields innocent one warm day, making a poppy wreath and dreaming, when she heard a rattle of metal, and before she could run she was scooped up to the pommel by the hair, for you see the army was camped not far away, and the girl was so tempting just out there in the field all alone. And when the girl staggered back to the château, and told what she remembered, only the broom flower, her mother was so enraged she took the family sword and rode to camp and made a terrible uproar. A broom flower is the Planta Genêt, you see, Plantagenet. Descendants, by the way, of Mélusine, fairy queen who lived among the humans with her children until she was spied upon in the bath where her tail unfurled; then she flew through the window, abandoning humanity forever. And the issue of the Plantagenet violation after nine months was of course our new prioress Marie. Thus, you see, this is how our new prioress finds herself a bastardess half sister to the crown. By the horrid stain of rape. How strange it is to have royal blood, yet mixed with such ignominy!

  Marie feels sick. If she had any self-love left she would flee, but she puts her ear angrily to the hole to hear what else they know of her.

  Someone begins to whisper an Ave Maria.

  Someone else is saying quickly now indeed, that the prioress comes from Le Maine, very near Normandie and Bretagne. A medium-sized estate, not bad, by a Roman road and a river, quite pretty there, the speaker herself is a distant cousin and she knows firsthand that Marie’s is a famous family of viragoes, Marie’s widow grandmother with her seven daughters and along comes Marie, making eight too-ferocious girls. And in fact, when the speaker was a maiden, the girls in her own family used to be told that they’d be strangled if they turned out like their unwomanly cousins, all wild, flying across the countryside scandalously galloping astride, with their swordfighting and daggerwork tutors and their knowledge of eight dialects and even some Arabic and Greek, all those dusty manuscripts, those loud opinionated unnatural women talking over each other, arguing, drawing blood, learning the battleaxe, so strange and so uncouth. But not the speaker. No no, she herself and her sisters, they are quite feminine, the voice says smugly.

  And Marie yearns again for her river in Le Maine, muscular as a vast serpent. The green fields with little gold birds darting through them. The hugeness of her grandmother and aunts as Marie remembers them, when she was so small and the family was intact, all the constant stories and songs, the armarium full of books.

  But someone with a sweet soft voice now cries out, oh she too had heard of this family, they were witches, yes, they turned to wolf-women on a blue moon and stole girl children from the servants and raised them as dog-girls with pointy muzzles and sharp teeth, who ran beside them as they hunted.

  False, the previous voice says, shortly. Lies. In fact, the family was known to be pious. In fact, the four older girls and Marie herself as a very small child went on crusade with the Queen’s Ladies’ Army.

  Our prioress is a crusader? the sweet soft voice says with wonder; and Marie sees again the Ladies’ Army pouring down a hillside in the Byzantine Empire, riding astride unwomanly, shouting, swords drawn, their hair loosed and flying behind them, all in the white and red tunics, ululating, fearsome. And the other nuns murmur, awed, for crusaders wore the holiness of their pilgrimage upon their bodies, upon their skin the sanctity of bloodshed. Marie thought of her aunt Euphémie, able to turn somersaults off the back of a horse, her aunt Honorine, of the twin white peregrines, her aunt Ursule with her golden boots and furious beauty, her strong laughing vibrant mother, all merely girls then, seizing what adventure and godly grace they could take through the crusade.

  Then Marie’s vision cracks open farther and she sees the plains of Thrace, Byzantium glowing on the horizon, the night that she, a tiny girl, rose when the breath of all the sleepers had settled into smoothness, strapped on her dagger that served her hand as a sword, and went shoeless out into the dangerous dark, running with all her speed past the fires, past the hands stretching a moment too late to catch her, coming to the tent with the eagle atop it. For when her mother and aunts had seen it, they had whispered of poisoning wine and slicing throats with daggers and garroting with their bow bands, and Marie had known obs
curely that it had to do with her, for they looked at her while speaking, and that some kind of revenge was hers to take. At the tent she found a peg loose in the earth and prized it up with her dagger hilt then went under the lip of the fabric and in. A single lantern burned. The ground was thick with sleeping bodies and the dogs at the door lifted their heads and sniffed at her but held their barks in their throats. She went toward the bed with her dagger drawn. She saw two lumps there, the farther one emitting thick wet snores, and the closer one that upon long looking resolved into flesh, a breast above the fur coverlet, a long throat, an entanglement of shining hair, an eye rimmed in black and open and looking upon her. A woman. Powerful as a punch to the chest, the wonder Marie felt then, this first love. The woman asked in a whisper if Marie was a demon, then in a moment, seeing the dagger and the little face, she understood and said to herself that, no, it was just a hideous toad of a child. Marie neared. The woman sat up in her nakedness and, looking at Marie’s face, said that ah, this was the famous bastard that she could see the likeness clear though how curious there was not a trace of the famous Plantagenet beauty. But she said, what a strange stalwart creature Marie was, such a pity born a girl. Then the woman put a silken robe upon her body, closing her flesh up, and reached toward Marie and took the dagger from the child’s hand. She said drily she must be gone back to her marital tent anyway, her poor meek ecclesiastical bed. She took Marie’s hand and led her past the sleepers and the guardian dogs who cowered away from the woman; she carried a thickness of power in the air around her body. Far enough out in the night not to be heard by any left awake in the tent the woman asked in a low voice, which of those terrible sisters was Marie’s mother, the beautiful one in golden boots or the one with the birds or the one with the monkey’s face or the one so fat she makes the ground shake when she walks. And Marie said that her mother was not fat but immensely strong, and the woman said that she understood and that the girl’s heart was clearly loyal and brave and that she had come to avenge the wretched sin done to her mother. But such a foolish little mind. For she had come not to the tent of the one Marie sought, for said coward had refused the cross and was staying fat and lazy at home. No, no, this tent belonged to a friend who had argued against Marie’s paltry interests when she was just a seed. A rapeseed, ha.

  And the lady said, besides, didn’t Marie know a real lady does not ever make her hands bloody but rather she gently influences others to do her worst work for her?

  Then the woman cuffed Marie’s head and told her to run along as fast as she could fly, for if the heathens caught her they would sell her and make her scrub floors and feed her the leavings of the dogs. She pushed Marie and the girl took three stumbling steps and when she looked back the woman was vanished into the night. Marie ran to her tent in wonderment and washed her filthy feet in the basin. There was no cloth to dry them. With wet feet she climbed again inside the furs near to the rolling heat of her mother, who felt the ice of the girl and clutched Marie to her in her sleep. Then half waking her mother asked where Marie had been. At last, fully waking, she sniffed and sat up and asked why in the world she smelled like the perfume of the queen.

  And this would be Marie’s first encounter with Eleanor the mighty, regent of France at that time, and later of England, mother of ten, eagle of eagles, power behind the powers. Until her death, Marie would live with this early vision of the queen barbed in her the way an ancient sheatfish carries embedded deep in its flesh the first hook nipped at in its youth.

  It was love she felt in her, a love hard and sharp and fixed.

  But Eleanor has been lost to the distant world of the court; she had sent Marie away forever. Of all the losses, mother, home, court, this is the one that just now proves unbearable. Marie is too sad to listen to any more gossip about herself.

  She stands and goes to the shutters and opens them to the gray, windscoured landscape.

  When she grows too cold, she closes them and turns and now senses that Emme is no longer sleeping. The abbess opens her cloudy eyes and says mildly, Forgive them their loose talk. They mean no harm. Marie says nothing.

  Then the abbess lifts her arm with a great broad smile across her soft face, and brings it down just as the bells shout out, summoning them to divine office, as though she has brought the sound out of the skies with her plump pale hand.

  3.

  Later, Marie will remember those days just after arriving at the abbey as thick and black. When she would peer back into that time, it was like looking from a well-lit room through the window into night; nothing to see but her own face hovering like a moon.

  So hungry, the nuns’ faces are skulls skinned of flesh in the dark dortoir. There are soups in which meat is boiled and removed to save for future soups. Fingernails the cold blue of sky.

  And then one Terce a week after arriving, as she pretends to sing in her dismal darkness, all at once she understands what she must do.

  Eleanor’s best currency is story; love that is given and received through song.

  What has come to Marie is a Breton lai in rhyming lines, sudden and beautiful, in its entirety. Her hands begin to shake in her lap. She will write a collection of lais, translated to the fine musical French of the court. She will send her manuscript as a blazing arrow toward her love, and when it strikes, it will set that cruel heart afire. Eleanor will relent. Marie will be allowed back to the court, to the place where none ever starve, and there is always music and dogs and birds and life, where at dusk the gardens are full of lovers and flowers and intrigue, where Marie can practice her languages and hear in the halls the fiery tails of new ideas shooting through conversations. Not just the tripartite god of parent and child and ghost who is talked about here, not all this endless work and prayer and hunger.

  Marie runs out of the chapel when the service ends and digs into her trunk and takes her money and bribes a servant to go off to town to fetch a bundle of tapers and parchment and ink and tablets of beeswax for the composition. She takes a feather from an outraged goose and whittles a pen. She moves, she breathes, she eats what little the nuns have to eat. In the night she waits for the noises of the dortoir to smooth into sleep, then rises barefoot and creeps to the night stairs and down.

  The world is blue with night. The stars are sharp, accusing. Inside the barn it is warm out of the whipping wind and with the heat cast off by the animals’ bodies, and she presses her face to her horse’s neck until it is no longer numb. The old warhorse turns and snuffles at Marie’s cheek with her damp soft nose. She takes out her things, careful not to awaken the servants sleeping in the loft above, and goes to where the rats click in the deepest dark and sits upon the last few sacks of oats heaped against the stone wall. Then she strikes a spark upon the hay and causes a tiny fire that she uses to light the candle, then steps upon the little fire in the hay until it is out. By this small stub of light with the eyes of rats shining green at her from the deeper dark, she writes.

  As she moves through the days she imagines her lines of the night.

  The life of the abbey is the dream. The set of poems she is writing is the world.

  Into the poems she puts the tent she had known in Outremer, which still haunts her, a great and royal purple thing surmounted with an eagle of pure gold and a woman lying nude on sumptuous furs within. She puts in poor Sister Mamille, who is noseless, for a jealous hound had bitten it off the day she came to her marital house, a new bride; then she was given, still a virgin, to the abbey for the fear that any children of Mamille would be born without a nose. She puts in the words of the poor child oblate Adeliza, hit on the neck by a rotten windfall apple in the orchard thrown by the cruelest novice, Edith, Tels purchace le mal d’altrui dunt tuz li mals revert sur lui! May evil done to others rebound upon the evildoers. Marie modifies an ancient lai so it can be read doubly as itself and as the story of the queen’s grandmother Dangereuse, a famous beauty who did what she pleased, who, though already a mother
and wife, fell in love and ran off in a grand and unapologetic adultery. Marie puts in a remembered weasel running past with a red flower in its mouth when her mother dragged her back from the failed crusade in Outremer—was it a weasel or a vixen?—she chooses weasel. She puts in Mélusine, the fairy, whose strange blood beats in her own veins. She puts in the queen herself, her great beauty and perfect education, her body in which nature has lavished care to mold a perfect harmony, her gracious allure, her beautiful face, brilliant eyes, lush mouth, perfect nose, hair blond and shining, manner courteous, words sweet, a rosy tint to her cheek. No woman her equal in all the world.

  And in the lai she secretly loves the most, she writes the very first vision she ever had. In the weeks before Marie’s mother died and all Marie’s other aunts were either dead or married off, her remaining aunt, Ursule, took to prayer in the little family chapel. At last she came to Marie’s mother, weeping, saying that she would rather die than be married. I would not mind it so much if I could be the hunter, the knife going into the flesh, but I will not be the prey. I will not lie there and let the knife go in and out of me, Ursule said. And Marie’s mother swallowed her smile and said gently not to worry, that she had already arranged the dowry with Fontevraud Abbey, where they would take Ursule as a novice.