Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  Now the nuns are finishing the final lobe of the labyrinth, near the marshlands to the southeast. Asta had redrawn the final stretch to come straight toward the abbey from the farthest reaches of the forest, so that the weary traveler already come so far would see through the trees the spire of the chapel on its hill for the last slow and seemingly endless climb through forest, and would feel great despair in ever arriving. Her small sharp face beams, she bounces on her toes, jabbing her fingers at the map when she tells Marie of her innovations, false bends, earth-shaping to give the traveler greatest fatigue, so many tricks of mind employed, so much play in this strange formation of the land. Marie kisses Asta on the forehead. Her nuns are marvels.

  Marie has reluctantly returned to her study and devotes herself to the parchments long ignored. Rent in arrears, promised bequests upon a great noblewoman’s death yet undelivered though she has been dead a full year, mold discovered in the malted grain so the sacks of it have to be fed to the pigs, a shame. She keeps the window open to focus her mind upon her tasks. The labyrinth will be finished off by planting blackberries, sloes, plums, brambles, heatherberries, elderberries, raspberries, quickbeamberries, wild currants, and haws all the way around the edges of the fields for added protection in the case of accidental breaching; but also for the sweetness and bounty of the fruit.

  She allows each nun a piece of trout the width of her psalter and a cake of filbert and honey in feasting. And though they eat while listening to the voice of Sister Agnes, whom they call Agnes Dei because she fairly bleats, they are rosy and happy.

  And that evening when there is still light to travel by, the abbess goes off at a fast canter with a torch blazing through the secret passages where her villeinesses will pass to and from with their wagons full of supplies and letters. Those who come to the abbey to say Mass and take confession must be driven blindfolded through this secret passage, now. She had thought there would be a fight when she demanded this concession, but Marie apparently strikes fear in the hearts of those attached to the cathedral. In the morning, Marie will not ride the shortcut but rather the entirety of the labyrinth, the many leagues of it, to see it as though an interloper. She loves this estrangement from her own knowledge, shivers in the thrill of it.

  It is full night when she comes up from the last tunnel into the great barn behind the hostelry. She does not bother the servants for more than a bowl of the pottage served to all the visitors and some cider, and she sleeps in the room where the queen had been. Though it has been months, it seems to Marie that the woman’s strange perfume hangs in the air there still, a hint of her soul left behind.

  She cannot sleep, and is outside in the cold before dawn. She has left a note for Ruth; she would be fasting during this day of prayer to the Virgin. She saddles her horse, a destrier mare found cheap on one of her journeys to the fair in Salisbury, where the beast was being sold for food because her owner had starved her, beaten her, let wounds fester on her haunches and belly, a sorry creature with her windgalls and spavins and staggers, and such a mad desperate sorrow in her eye that she arrested the abbess when she passed. Later they would discover evidence she had been bred many times to bear her great strong foals that would themselves be fed to war. Marie thought the beast might die on the road, but she walked slowly the many lieues and at last was put in Goda’s clucking horrified care. Within a few months, the horse’s skin shone and she was capable of bearing three stout nuns with ease, or a single giant abbess. The mad light in her eye had become a near-human understanding. Having known suffering, redemption, resurrection, the horse, Marie believed, had become a kind of equine saint.

  * * *

  —

  Out in the woods between the cathedral and the almonry, the new public path begins as a feint, they have made it unpromising, muddy and a squeeze, the width of a bridle track. Through it she sets the horse at a fast walk. The hours pass. The sun rises in gold, the day warms. As she rides, she is struck again and again to wonder; how lost a stranger who has not dreamed up the plans herself would become, and how soon the stranger would give up and turn back to the town. The road hardly looks as new as it is; the trees have grown thickly around it. At the first bend, even her own sense of direction begins to snarl. But the day is pleasant enough and she relaxes, she knows she will sleep in her own bed in the abbey tonight. She sees the few bare spots where the forest has been disturbed by the work, but the other roads are well hidden, and when the trees and shrubs are grown at last to full height and thickness, in two or five years, she thinks with satisfaction, the labyrinth will be unbreachable.

  But midmorning comes and she is still in the first lobe and wind blows cold through her scapular and hood. She passes the time by telling herself stories as the horse walks on.

  In time the horse’s rhythm rocks her to sleep; and when she wakes she sees by the slant of sun through the split canopy that it must be at least the time for Terce. She finds she has lost where she is. Her stomach rumbles in hunger. She feels a creeping unease that night will set in soon with its wolves and its dark and its hostile mysteries to find her winding along the endless path still hours from her nuns. She urges the mare to a canter.

  The horse senses Marie’s fear and her ears stiffen and point forward.

  But with the increasing pace, the anxiety in Marie also increases, this is bad, the road is darkening, the sun has snuffed itself behind a cloud, the trees themselves are staring at her with sinister shadows, the branches above are meaty arms paused in downward swing, something is moving in the shrubs like dark and hidden beasts slithering forward swift on their bellies to keep pace with Marie.

  She senses the presence of the devil, the great evil is here, now, with her, she remembers the stories, the pack of glossy black dogs and the enormous spider leaping from the trees to sink a hellish death of venom into the earthly body, the burning eyes, the goat’s horns.

  And she sees for a moment her vast sin, for which she will be punished, because she has pressed it into the labyrinth, this once-pure gift of the Virgin: her hunger for her name to rebound in fame through time.

  The horse hurtles forward over the road and it is as though a door opens inside her, and out of it pours a real prayer, from the deep and quiet parts of her, in her own language, in simplicity.

  Thank you, she prays. Forgive me.

  Then the horse rounds a bend, and with a great welling of relief she discovers the hills purple above the tree line. She knows where she is again. She slows the pace. She laughs at her fear, which is still sending shocks of cold into her hands and feet.

  She believes she has been released from her sins.

  What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, of badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes, the trees felled that held green woodpeckers, the pine martens, the mistle thrushes and the long-tailed tits, the woodcocks and capercaillies chased from their nests, the willow warbler vanished in panic from these lands for the time being; it will take a half century to lure these tiny birds back. She sees only the human stamp upon the place. She considers it good.

  At last, by sunset, she has come into the fields where the abbey’s pale stone shines upon its hill, the moon cupped cold in the blue above.

  Her daughters at this hour will be silent at their evening meal, gesturing for salt, carrots, milk, pottage. She imagines their heads in their dark veils bowed over their food. She imagines the cold sun slanting in through the window and lighting up the faces of a row, pearls on a string.

  She reins in her horse, who dances with impatience to be so close to the stables and grain and water and rest, and bows her head and says a prayer of gratitude to the Virgin.

  This trip, this day, she knows, is the completion of the first great vision given to her; the Amen to the prayer.

  The wind blows and ruffles the dead grasses, throws
the brown hands of oak leaves to the ground to tumble. The fields are cropped close to the soil like a nun’s scalp. There is white in the air, it is too warm for the snow to stick, but the flakes dance and rise with the movement of the wind. It is Marie’s happiness worn by the outward world.

  She has not moved the abbey an inch, yet still she has built a great sea of road between the serpent and her daughters.

  Of her own mind and hands she has shifted the world. She has made something new.

  This feeling is the thrill of creation. It jolts through her, dangerous and alive.

  Marie feels it growing in her. She gorges on it. And despite her vow, her prayer in her fleeing terror from the devil, she understands that she is hungry for more.

  3.

  For decades, Marie had seen revolt simmering behind certain smiles in the town, in the slowness with which certain hands released payment or gifts to the abbey. Now, just as the queen had warned, the resentment is coming to a boil. A shepherdess napping in a bosk overhears a conversation and tells her sister, a servant at the abbey; an unloved stepmother of three fiery youths, who consider her less than furniture, listens to her stepchildren making plans and writes a note to Marie; a maid in a tavern in town is so terrified by the open drunken boasting about the bloody lesson that the nuns will be taught that she takes up her skirts in her hands and runs to Ruth, who sends a messenger that very hour to Marie.

  When Marie traces the plot she sees there are perhaps two dozen conspirators. Well, it’s not so bad, there could be more. To make friends, one must make enemies, but her fearsome reputation still throws shadows in the larger world. She thinks of Eleanor, young, leading armies. She feels her own warrior blood stirring. She calls her council: Asta yelps with excitement, Ruth weeps, Wulfhild is pale and grim and thorough, but the surprise is Tilde, who has the clearest ideas and whose face flushes in readiness. Marie has not yet seen this side of her little dormouse. She is glad for it.

  Ruth protests late in the talks that no, they cannot, all this is a sin. They are nuns. They cannot kill. They should be thinking of turning the other cheek, no?

  Well, Marie says, certainly they must defend themselves. Remember the frailty of the ancient nuns when the Danes’ boats came berserking up the rivers, what happened to the poor pious creatures, the sackings, the breaking of relics, the rapes.

  With this last word, a cold wind enters the room.

  And it is true, Marie continues, perhaps holy women cannot kill, but they can entrap. They can use greed and lust and sloth to drive evil sinners to their own ends.

  And, Marie says, what is paramount is that they cannot let the labyrinth be breached. They cannot allow the story to be told in the larger world that it is even slightly pregnable, or else the whole point of all that work and ingenuity, that great flood of money, loses its—well, Marie says after a pause, it loses its effectiveness.

  Wulfhild laughs and says that their dear abbess almost said magic.

  If one looks hard at even the most powerful magic, one can see nimble human hands, Marie says. Alas, the nuns will not have time to train or to learn how to fight or to use swords. And female bodies are not as strong in muscle; though it must be said there is no greater strength than the power in their wombs to create life. No, no. If they are to keep the abbey safe, they must fight with the least possible fighting.

  The bleary council splits to their separate duties in the morning. The field nuns are pulled off the reaping, the novices are set to work, the villeinesses sing because they do love a brawl. Asta’s team of two dozen dig and build and bend the earth itself at the points they agree are the weakest, where with a few scythes and axes to clear the saplings and brush, almost anyone could push from outer roads to inner ones.

  Marie sets her network in the area to high sensitivity. The schoolgirls she taught, now ladies, read letters not meant for them, for they are loyal to Marie; the renters who have blossomed under her law get their neighbors drunk and pump them; the servants she has placed in good houses listen at doors. Only days later, four separate spies send word that the attackers are massing that night. The villeinesses and servants mill about, excitedly; she is using all of them. There is a wild giddiness in the lavatorium as the forty selected nuns wash and bind their habits up to keep them from tripping. The rest will be left at the abbey to pray and try to sleep.

  How foolish, Marie thinks, cinching the thick leather belt her mother wore to the second crusade. How foolish to choose to attack the abbey on a night with a full moon, windless, full of frogsong; how lazy the rebels have been to have chosen not a more interesting weak point or even two, but instead they found only the one nearest the town. Her women are always underestimated. She straps on her sword, holds her heavy abbess’s staff in her left hand. She rides out.

  On the top of the abbey hill, Marie has set the nuns who can ride astride on the ten horses. Six had been huntresses in their earlier lives and can use the bows and arrows they hold; those who can ride but can’t shoot hold scythes. This would be the last line of defense, should it be needed. Marie looks behind her as she rides into the forest and sees that with the moon shining at their backs, the nuns on horses are huge and black in silhouette and their shadows paint the hill in terrifying shapes.

  Now into the labyrinth, through the cleverly hidden paths on the inner roads to the sixth road out, which will be the point of engagement. Her women are there already, silent, waiting.

  Marie comes to a stop. She prays. There comes into her a certainty that she will die tonight. There is a swift vision of an arrow in her throat, a choking for air, the red flooding her sight. She casts the vision away behind her, into the waiting forest. Her hands shake.

  Beyond, on the external road Marie can hear the voices of the interlopers, possibly drunk, they are chopping, laughing, their horses snort. Her women wait in silence. A swift slender nun runs back to Marie and signs that the group is twenty-one strong, and there are only four horses. Some arrows, some armor, mostly clubs and swords. Then the shadow nun dissolves again back to her watch. Wulfhild frowns at Marie when the one road out has been broached and there are sounds of closing in through the woods.

  Between the roads, Asta and her crew have made a kind of gulley with digging and rockwork, hiding their traces with shrubbery and moss, which to any rational mind would offer an easier way through to the next road than laborious cutting and thrashing. The gulley narrows to single file near the road, and bends sharply so that the bodies that have passed before are hidden.

  Closer. She waits. Closer.

  Marie at last brings down her hand and the villeinesses crouched in wait in the ditch are able to silently swarm, noose, gag, and bind four before a fifth can understand and shout a warning.

  Now seventeen remain, Marie thinks grimly.

  There is a crashing backward, a conferring in voices that are low but still carry through the silence. Marie has an urge to laugh. The shadow nun returns and signs that the horses are coming first this time.

  Marie nods and looks up at the canopy, where she can’t see in the darkness but knows the young nuns are ready with their nets weighted by stones. She raises her fist. The nuns obey and wait, wait, wait, until Marie can see the moonshine in the eyes of the first horse, then she opens her fist and the novices throw their nets, and they fall with a gorgeous slowness downward, and strike true, the stones tangle in two of the horses’ feet and the horses fall and the villeinesses swarm again out of the shadows like the shades of the dead.

  Now out of the trees, a silver rain of stones, the melon sound of stones striking skulls, and bodies tumble and now there is shouting and wild confusion and Marie gives another hand signal and up the road to the north the novices pour into an opening where there are no trees so that the girls shine bluish in the moonlight, their hair loosed and gleaming and all so beautiful, so distant in the bright opening along the dark road.

  While down the
road to the south, lit in equal brightness with torches, stand the stoutest of the field nuns and the servants, grim with their hoes and threshing flails.

  And onto the road pour the remaining interlopers, twelve or so Marie thinks, and in their uproar, half of the group turn toward the novices, and they begin to run, outstripped by the two horses, and the other half turn toward the field nuns, and there is a great whooping of voices as the feet thud upon the road.

  Up and down the road, the novices and field nuns stand firm and ready; oh my beauties, Marie thinks, oh my brave good women.

  Then the catgut strung in the shadows in the novices’ direction catches the riders and one horse screams, a cut spilling blood across its neck, and the horse stands on its hind legs, and falls backward, crushing three runners; and the other horse gallops on, but the next catgut does what it is meant to, and with awful slowness a head lazily bounces off toward the novices, spraying them with blood, and the girls scream and the horse slows and stops when it feels the corpse riding it tilt and slide off.

  Down the road, the field nuns are shouting, roaring, the angry tide of six or seven is coming close, and Marie braces for the clash; but the layer of sticks hidden under a powder of dust at last cracks and gives, and bodies go tumbling down into the deep pit set with spikes and now there is a bloody screaming of the wounded. The villeinesses take down the rest, hollering.

  There is a pause, a moment of peace before the cries of pain rise and fill the air.

  Finished? Marie thinks. Already? The battle itself took not even thirty breaths. Her sword and staff gleam, disappointed. She has not touched or been touched. There has been no arrow to the throat. Her end will be elsewhere, at another time.

  Wulfhild says, oh, well, that went well.

  Rather satisfactory, Marie says drily.

  But a woman is screaming in English, and Marie sends the mare trotting forward, and in the light of a pitch torch she sees one of her villeinesses, the mother of six under the age of ten, writhing in the road, the massy gleam of entrails slipping wet through her fingers and into the dust. Nest swears in Welsh, then puts a leather bit in the villeiness’s mouth and shoves handfuls of guts back inside her until her eyes roll white and her mouth hangs open, the woman either having fainted or being fully dead.