Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  It is as though the queen cannot hear her; she says in a musing voice that it’s not as though Marie was ever small, is it, her bones had simply been unfleshed all those years ago. Now she carries her own armor under her habit, yes, she would say Marie has become a great old monocerous. Hide of iron, single vicious horn, or so she hears. Monocerous. Yes, this is exact.

  Marie breathes through her nose, and says that she hopes the queen accepts Marie’s condolences that she has so recently been made a widow. A bloody ulcer, such a painful thing. Marie found it curious that nobody wrote to tell her, that she had to discover the news as though she were not blood kin. Although of course Marie is only a half sibling and a bastard. Surely the queen had been too busy to write Marie, her sister.

  Half sister. And only by marriage, Eleanor says sternly. Yes, in fact, she is always busy. But that it also has felt wrong to accept the condolences when she was not in the least sorry for her loss. There had been real love there, Marie knows this, she saw it herself when she was a girl at court. Great love, even, once. Well, to be frank, the duties of the bedchamber of Angleterre were never the least onerous. And the queen laughs her breathless quick laugh.

  But then Eleanor says that but of course if you put an eagle in a cage for more than a decade, she will try to peck your eyes out when you open the gate.

  Marie says that well, things have worked out and the queen has been released from her long captivity, and now her best eaglet perches on the throne of Angleterre. Those years of prison are redeemed. Though they did say some of the queen’s captors had been quite cruel during her captivity. They took her gyrfalcons from her. They kept her so starved of warmth she had chilblains on her beautiful face. Marie often thought of the queen in her captivity, especially since there were times she was so nearby and the abbey with its comforts could have soothed her torment. In fact, the queen might have been far better here as a nun than as a caged queen.

  Eleanor blinks many times swiftly and Marie laughs inside; swift blinking has always been a window into the woman’s mind. Then the queen says it is odd that Marie had thought of her often, that she must confess she hardly thought of Marie at all. Or if she did it was of a Marie when she knew her, fresh to court and so strange, all elbows and head knocking the doorway and big deep voice trying to engage in disputations, stinking and uncouth and but all the world fleeing before her stomping footsteps. What a poor specimen Marie was then. Before the girl had arrived, the plan had been to marry Marie off, but then in she flapped with her queerness, her panting eagerness. Her unlovely face. And one could not marry off such a creature at all.

  The queen adds that should she retire to an abbey it will be the great Fontevraud, not this paltry muddy place on this hated island.

  The food has come. Marie gestures for the queen to sit. Things have grown too heated, and to cool the atmosphere, Marie says in conciliation that she has had made for Eleanor a copy of her Fables. The abbey’s illustrator is mad and sees devils in the grasses and evil exhaled out of hot onion soup, but her work is very fine indeed. Marie wrote the stories during a blue streak while Abbess Emme was in her decline and she stayed up in the nights in vigil over the old woman as she suffered. She had tried for a new kind of style in the Fables, distant from the style of her lais, she is no longer writing of terrible biting love, after these more than thirty years she feels only love for her sisters in her heart, and her style must change to reflect this truth, of course, as well.

  In any event, she goes on, there’s a story in the book about a crane and a wolf. Does the queen know the story? No? A wolf, chewing a bone, gets it caught in its throat. In pain, the beast calls all the animals of the kingdom together to demand that one pull the bone from its throat. Only the crane has a long enough neck. Of course, the crane is understandably reluctant to put its head between all those sharp teeth. At last, the wolf tells the crane that if it were to reach its head into the wolf’s mouth, it would get a wondrous treasure. So the brave crane reaches in and plucks out the bone. The wolf, released from pain, tells the bird that it now will get its treasure. And that the treasure is its life. The crane must be happy not to be eaten.

  The queen laughs and says, Delightful.

  They eat in silence for some time until the queen, satisfied with her portion of white pheasant meat, sits back, takes up her wine, and begins. She tells Marie that all the world is astonished by the rumors of her labyrinth.

  Marie says happily that it is indeed a feat of engineering. What women can do when given a task! Their abilities seem limitless.

  Ah; but the abbess mistakes the tone of the queen’s words. There are nobles saying that they’d like to bring an army to strip the nuns off this place; to teach them a lesson. There are wild rumors of magic. It is not to Marie’s benefit in this situation that she descends from the fairy Mélusine. Some speak of wealth unimaginable that the nuns are hiding here. The queen has had to soothe the most belligerent. She has found herself having to threaten, to cajole. It is exhausting.

  Marie sets down her wine. She says she knows all this, that she too has her spies and she knows who is saying what. How foolish, all this warlike talk about a community of pious virgins devoted to poverty. Ungodly, to say the least. What the abbey does not spend on living, it gives as alms. They are poor as poor can be.

  But is this true, the queen wonders aloud; she did notice in riding through that the poor of this town are wonderfully dressed. Better than the merchant classes of other places. And that Marie has put glass in the greater windows, neat clear circles embedded in lead, so that the overall impression is that of a sectioned beehive where now the light simply pours in. What awful expense. Perhaps the queen should increase her taxes on the abbey. Perhaps she could squeeze more levies for war mustering from this place.

  Marie says that glass is cheap because one of the sisters is a glassmaker and that the poor here will have to wear the same shoes and tunics for many years to come. Their great project of a labyrinth has impoverished the abbey again. And she picks up the accounting books that she has prepared for this visit, and shows the queen the numbers, which seem very grave indeed.

  Another charge against Marie that the queen has heard, she says, is that the abbess keeps her relics selfishly in the chapel and does not share the miracles they enact upon others who may need them.

  Marie thinks of the assorted teeth and bones of the saints, the fragments of the True Cross. There are so many fragments of the True Cross in Angleterre alone that a whole Golgotha of True Crosses could be constructed on a moor somewhere. It is also true that so few of the abbey’s relics shine with the light of authenticity; so much of the value is in the settings; the ornamented boxes, the phylacteries holding the phalanges and molars. Ah, well; this too will be no great loss. She says thoughtfully that on All Saints’ Day perhaps the sisters of the abbey shall have a procession to translate the relics to the cathedral, as a gift of the abbey’s to the devout of the surrounding lands.

  Eleanor remarks that this is generous, but that All Saints’ Day is a long time from now.

  Marie’s mask slips and she smiles, saying that they will need time to bruit these good plans around, the great beneficence they are bestowing out of generosity and mercy upon the laypeople of the countryside.

  Eleanor sighs. She drinks quietly for a time. She too relaxes and says that she truly wishes that Marie would give up this little folly of hers. This labyrinth is being seen as an act of aggression. Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability. This is what enflames Marie’s enemies.

  Marie says with admiration that that was well put, gracious Regent. But not an order, perhaps.

  Eleanor looks at her; relents, looks away. Perhaps not. Perhaps a warning. But even warned she sees that Marie remains unafraid. That the abbess will continue on.

  Well, yes. As abbess of this royal abbey where the queen chose to plant her so man
y decades ago, Marie says, she discovers herself to be a baroness to the crown with all the rights attendant upon the barony; including the expectation of course to be protected by the powers of the crown. And so far she has been an excellent baroness, prompt about paying the taxes and providing the necessary fees for war when asked. Her loyalty is unquestionable. And, like all landed nobles, she finds that she is allowed the freedom to fortify her land from intruders.

  Eleanor says slowly that all this is true. She puts the talk of the nobles away; it was only an opening sally. Now she bends to her true attack. Her spies also say that all of Rome is speaking of interdiction. They say Marie neglects the hierarchy and considers herself an equal to her diocesan. They say she does not let their messengers come to the lands, but that she meets all dignitaries of the church here in the town. She has enemies even in the church. And as Marie knows, anathema would be devastating for a community of the godly. No Mass, no confession. No singing of the divine office.

  With this, Marie feels a bolt of lightning in her gut because the queen is right, without singing the abbey would be a cold damp impossible place.

  The queen says, And some of Marie’s daughters would die of grief and they would die unshriven.

  Marie says that she too has heard these rumors. That the talk from Rome is more troublesome, that is certain. But she feels quite sure they won’t be sent outside the pale. She has begun fighting Rome’s way.

  Eleanor laughs at this. She asks with what, with prayer? Please. Prayer is lovely. She herself prays every day. But for such a threat, Marie will need more powerful weapons than prayer. Perhaps she doesn’t know this, having been removed from the world these many years, but to engage in war with the world, one needs the world’s weapons.

  There is such a long silence that Eleanor turns her gaze fully at Marie, who is looking calmly back; and the queen says with a thin smile that of course she has already been proven correct to have sent Marie here, she will not apologize for doing what god bade her do.

  Marie lets the silence grow until the queen makes a gesture of impatience, and then the abbess relents and says at last that yes of course they are using prayer, prayer is the finest product of any abbey. They have such a great surplus of it that her nuns are granted generous benefices for their prayers.

  But, Marie says, they are also fighting with gold. Rather a good deal of it, she is sorry to say. She is commissioning songs and stories to be sung in the streets. She is flooding the streets of London and Paris and Rome with songs and rumors of the sisters’ piety and the abbey’s strength and Marie’s own holiness, and their great miracle of the labyrinth. She laughs. Money and stories. Information and sympathy. There can be no real defense against such a war. Eleanor herself was the one who taught Marie this.

  Eleanor holds her cup tightly then finishes her wine, considering. Softly, she says, well now, hasn’t Marie become a clever girl.

  Marie says to herself, very sternly, Down, because she has not been a girl for decades and because her heart has lifted and soared with the praise. For she had once transferred her soul to parchment and the queen had ignored it. She remembers her pain from so long ago now, dwells upon it, so that the old rose of hatred, of love, buds in her and blooms again.

  That night, Marie cannot sleep with the queen so near, just through the wall of the hostelry; she rises for Matins in the cathedral and stays until the hour of Lauds, praying. She loves her nuns’ voices, but the polyphony of this choir of the cathedral chapter fills her with shivers; this kind of music seems to her closer to the songs of angels.

  The queen comes with her handmaidens into the choir for Prime; and in the time she prays and stands, the glass windows fill with light and her retinue has been made ready. Her horse awaits her when she emerges into the pale chill. Townspeople stop, incredulous, to see the great notorious Eleanor. She has been a legend from more than a half century of tales told at the fire in the dark winter and songs circling the country, but now, a miracle, out of abstract story she has been made flesh. She stands on the cathedral step and her breath is white in the cold like the breath of all the living. The queen’s first handmaiden whispers to her and the queen turns to Marie. She smiles.

  She says that she lied when she said that she hadn’t thought of Marie all those years. She has a spy installed in the abbey who gave regular reports. She has been impressed with Marie.

  Marie’s mind slows in surprise, and she spins through all her nuns in her mind, but cannot discover the weakness, or who would have access to messengers. She is unable yet to speak.

  The queen laughs to see Marie stunned. Oh don’t worry, the spy is one of Marie’s stalwarts. The abbess remains mostly beloved by her nuns. Rare among holy women. Such a fractious lot, the weaker sex. All other convents are shrill with strife.

  Marie tucks away the queen’s mostly to turn over later.

  The queen says that Marie will find she has left two gifts. She mounts her horse as easily as a girl. She tells Marie to make use of them both, and a slippery joy threads through Marie; she controls her face and tells the queen thank you, that she would pray the queen travels with god.

  The retinue moves off, the queen impressive in her sable cloak that catches light and sparks with it chestnut and blue and black, the thick gold circlet on her head concentrating all the sun in the street. All is mud and stone and smoke, pigs rooting in the filth; the queen alone is made of higher stuff. Marie’s hands in her sleeves tremble.

  In the hostelry, an air of relief; an emptiness of bodies. There is much to clean. The servant girls in the sun of the window show each other their ankles speckled in red bites; the retinue brought fleas. Ruth comes forward nearly dancing. She pulls Marie by the hand to the presents. One of the gifts left for Marie is an abbatial staff; the note says it was made especially for her when the queen heard of her election; Abbess Emme’s was carved ash wood with filigreed silver and a crook of horn, and it was fine enough, but Marie’s hand needed something weightier. The new staff is solid copper, finely engraved with the entirety of the Garden of Eden in places highlighted in gold filigree, the hook made of the snake with the apple in its mouth, its eyes set with emeralds. Ruth tried, she laughs, but she cannot lift it. It is meant only for the strength of Marie. Marie feels its heft in her hand, up her whole arm, in her gut. It feels like the power she has struggled and scrabbled in the dirt all these years to amass.

  The other gift is small, wrapped in a scrap of blue silk. When Marie opens it, she finds a personal seal matrix of herself, a giant with a head in halo, a book in one hand and a broom flower in the other, nuns gathered around standing the height of her waist.

  Scribe mihi, the queen has embroidered on the silk. An order, not a suggestion. To seal a letter with the abbey’s matrix requires either the prioress or subprioress to read and agree; what the queen is giving Marie with her own personal seal is a delicious and forbidden privacy.

  For an abbey is collective; privacy is against the Rule, aloneness a luxury, time to think with all the necessary work and meditation and prayer too short to ever come to much. Even reading among the nuns is reading aloud; there is no private dialogue to challenge the internal voice and press it forward. Marie does not wonder why so few of her nuns have the capacity to think for themselves; she saw from the first moment she arrived that this was planted deep in the design of the monastic life. As abbess, she sees how dangerous a free-thinking nun could be. If there were another Marie in her flock, it would be a disaster. She feels a sharpness of guilt from time to time; yet she keeps her nuns in their holy darkness with their work and their prayer. She justifies it by telling herself this is how she keeps her daughters in innocence. Hers is a second Eden.

  Marie protects only her own internal landscape; her spirit is the only one allowed to stretch to the farthest horizon, she gives only herself the hawk’s height in the clouds to see the tiny movements below.

  Already Marie is
writing her first letter to the queen in her head. How long will you hide your face from me, she sings in her mind.

  She rides alone to where her nuns are working in the forest. She feels scrubbed raw inside. A long cold anger that she had kept alive in her heart for so many years that she had nearly forgotten it was there has seeped away.

  And into the emptiness where it had been there begin to tumble other, far more mysterious, things.

  * * *

  —

  At night, the heavens spin into their summer constellations.

  The nuns take pauses in the greater work to sow the wheat, to plant the gardens. Rains come in the night and the wet earth bursts to green.

  In the abbey sleepy without its souls, a mother vixen with heavy teats trots out of the cellar dragging a whole dried sturgeon. Prioress Tilde opens the door and steps back for it to go, making a gift of the theft for the beast’s bravery.

  In June, a miracle; Amphelisa, whose half body had frozen after she stepped over copulating snakes, awakens having regained the use of her frozen face and hand, and only limps with a single unwilling leg now. She credits the intercession of Saint Lucy, of whom in desperation she’d molded a wax votive with her good hand and let it melt on a hot stone while praying. Now full of energy, she has taken the garden out of frantic Prioress Tilde’s domain, and the vegetables grow fat; the lovage and fennel and skirret under her care grow madly; the coleworts are the size of three-month babies. Because she sings to them, the bees of the apiary sting her only infrequently when she smokes them to check on their honey. Wevua and Duvelina are her assistants, hauling brush to fire and weaving wattle, because if their bodies are tired enough, their minds, one simple, one sliding, are at peace.