Matrix

by Lauren Groff

  Marie says to take her to the abbess quarters, take her children there also, and Nest sends Marie a look full of anger and betrayal, and turns her back on her old friend.

  The villeinesses put the two dead and nineteen injured interlopers in the road. The horses, which have now become abbey horses, are loaded with three bodies each, and the rest are carried arm and foot back to the inner field, where there are wagons waiting, and hoods of doubled cloth to keep the secret passage back to town a mystery. Nest flits between the bodies, putting on salve and bandages and setting bones. For even though these sinners rose up against a community of holy virgins, in all things, nuns must be merciful.

  Marie has to rescue the severed head from the novices, who are taking turns playing Judith with it.

  The abbess says a prayer over her nuns and servants and villeinesses, her voice loud in the dark field. I am proud of you, my daughters, she says after Amen. Their moonlit faces are happy. Together, laughing and talking, they go up the hill to the hot wine and honeycakes awaiting them.

  Marie on her horse leads the wagons into the sleeping town. In the cathedral she has the stone pulled away from the ossuary, and the injured put in the musty chilly room among the dead. Before she leaves, she pulls off the hoods one by one and stares grimly down; she wants her face to be the thing remembered when they think upon their deathbeds of their most grievous sins. She herself pushes the stone back, and can hear the groaning and the attempts to shout through the gags. They don’t know that someone will come along before morning and they will be freed. She hopes the pain and darkness and fear of being interred alive these hours will be a second lesson.

  And the dead she delivers herself to the estates she knows well, where she has sat with the women drinking ale and eating nut tarts. Now the same women silently reach up for the bodies. They cannot look at Marie. They are not angry. They are sorrowful, guilty. Marie wants to shout at them. But she does not. She rides off.

  She knows before she arrives by the keening coming from the huts near the brambles that the hurt villeiness has died. Perhaps one dead to save many is not a sacrifice too rich. But still this needless death will weigh upon Marie’s soul, she knows herself that there is no solace for a mother taken too young. Well, she will do her best. The older girls will be oblates, the tiny ones taken by the dead woman’s sister. And through the countryside, the women will tell stories, woman to woman, servant to servant and lady to lady, and the stories will spread north and south upon this island, and the stories will alchemize into legends, and the legends will serve as cautionary tales, and her nuns will be made doubly safe through story most powerful.

  4.

  It is after the Octave of Epiphany.

  The world is coated in a fine shining ice a thumb thick. The wind blows in knives of cold.

  Marie is alone in the cloister, walking fast to think. She has trod a black streak into the ice there.

  All her nuns are bent to their tasks. In the infirmary, Nest and the novice she is training in the healing arts, Beatrix, grind herbs with a pestle in the infirmary’s enormous mortar. Since Beatrix has come to the abbey just after All Saints’ Day, something wordless has been unfurling between her and Nest. They think it is invisible to the others, but Marie can trace it with her eye. Marie feels both warmed and suffocated by the understanding that soon, for intimate affection, the infirmatrix will put a stop to the expression of built-up humors in the other nuns, and that Elgiva and Marie and the anonymous others who quietly go to her will return to their bodily suffering for the lack. Marie has already begun to grieve.

  The scriptrix nuns are bent over their manuscripts, the spinster nuns are spinning their yarn, the webster nuns weave the cloth, the baxter nuns are baking the good fine bread of evening meal. And all around there is industry: the kiln has baked bowls and cups all day, broken things are being mended, habits are being sewn, stockings knitted, gossip and stories drawing the nuns closer. Out in the distant wide world the Angevin banner flaps over the dust and heat of the Holy Lands, but Marie can sense that before the year is over, the third crusade will come to an awful, disastrous end.

  Eleanor’s favorite eaglet is now full-fledged, bloody-beaked, savage in talon and temper.

  Stories are told of Eleanor that make Marie burn with rage. They say she is promiscuous, insatiable, she sleeps with whole families from the doddering ancient down to the least servant. There are murmurs that Eleanor can only get her satisfaction from a horse.

  When Marie writes of these things, warningly, Eleanor laughs them off.

  The queen moves so freely out in the world, now, she goes where she wishes with arrogance; she doesn’t understand that she too carries around her own abbey with her, an invisible wall-less abbey of people known to her, very large indeed, but still enclosed by the body and the mind. All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding. At least Marie understands the limits imposed upon her; Eleanor in her great arrogance believes herself to be free.

  Marie looks up and out to find the shearing wind stopped; the trees in their shining shells of ice have all leaned toward her, the dim light of winter is pulsing in the air.

  In her fingers starts the holy fire that whips and sears through her limbs and gathers in her throat and splits her sight.

  And fast descends upon her the third vision that Mary, Blessed Mother, has thought meet to bestow upon her faithful daughter.

  Clear over the stone walls of the potager garden she sees the naked tops of the apples and pears and apricots; and with the vision Marie’s sight rises into the air to the height of the dortoir and she can see the whole of the orchard, the ladder left forgotten leaned against one tree, the piles of pruned branches awaiting the spring bonfire upon the long flat rise beyond it. And in that place the ground begins to thrash and shake and roll as though it is not earth and stone and a thickness of sod but rather the water of the seas, and the tremors reach even Marie’s feet fixed to the stones of the cloister. Now a black hole falls into the ground, of a perfect roundness and incredible depth, and out of the hole a strange and coppercolored sapling grows upward. The tree grows swiftly, it unfurls ever larger until its roots have reached to the boundaries of the edge of the flat land, and the trunk pushes up toward the heavens and from it grow swift fat limbs and boughs of silver and gold and copper and bronze, and the shade of the tree covers the walls of the abbey and stretches down the hill toward the pond, the sheepfold, the pigsty. Out of the final fingerlike branches that are the fatness of Marie’s own arm, there push vast leaves like sails and each leaf has a white cross pressed into its central vein. Now the tree begins to flower, huge white bells greater than the greatness of tall women, and when they open they hold in themselves naked girls held pendant by the ankle with hair flowing down to the ground like stamens. And some of the flowers stay and others blow, the petals rain to the ground, and the girls curl their bodies back up in fruiting, and around them there grow ovules fat and round and the red of carbuncles and the green of emeralds. When they have grown so great they bend the branches and at last break them with a snap, they fall to the ground, where they split upon falling, and reveal faceless women who struggle in the snowy pulp to sit up.

  Then all the frantic growth pauses, the fruit women and the girls in the flowers turn their heads to the east, listening; they leap back into the tree, the tree retracts its boughs and flowers and fruit and leaves, it sinks into the hole it grew out of, and with a low rumble, the hole closes, the world stirs itself again, the wind blows in its chill sharpness, the noise of the movements of nuns inside has returned. Novices are practicing in the choir. And with the voices, the last of the vision has gone.

  Marie runs lightly up to her small, glowing abbess chambers where Prioress Tilde is writing renter letters and Subprioress Goda is making the family trees of the abbey beasts to avoid incestuous breeding. They speak to Marie but their voices are dissolved into the air. She takes up the
book, and even as she is writing she understands.

  The Virgin is directing Marie to begin the construction of the abbess house, though the labyrinth has impoverished them again. Within the vision, she has been shown the way forward. With the greater quarters for the abbess and the larger brighter room for the business of the abbey, there will also be apartments for corrodians, rich ladies come to live their later lives in a more holy way, giving to the abbey a handsome dowry. There will be a large light room for more manuscript copying, for this is the most precious income stream, begun by Marie herself when a young prioress; though in the beginning it was whispered about only among the women of the world, for many consider it unmeet that women be scriptrices, especially of holy works; they doubt their ability to write at all. In the new building there will be a better schoolroom and separate dortoir for the little-girl oblates and it will be large enough to take in the noble girls of the countryside for a goodly sum to teach them to read and to write and to know languages; to seed the countryside with literate girls and women, who through their lives will remain loyal to the abbey. Marie can beg for enough to begin construction and can finish the building on the strength of the silver from the corrodians and schoolgirls alone.

  Perhaps, she dares herself to think, if it is beautiful enough and comfortable enough, it will tempt Eleanor to retire here and not at Fontevraud.

  Then, oh hush, Marie, she tells herself angrily, you would die of such close proximity to that blaze.

  Prioress Tilde is looking at Marie with a face knotted in anxiety. She tells Goda in a low voice that she fears it is another project.

  To this, Goda says oh but she misses the forest work, such as she was allowed to do, for often she was left back with the defective nuns, which she thought was deeply unfair, but of course nobody could take care of the chickens and pigs and goats and kine and geese and so on like Goda, who, everyone says, has a bit of a genius for animals. Such a pity the nuns are now eating the freemartins one by one. Goda herself holds their great heads in her hands and whispers a prayer in their ears when she touches their throats with a knife. She believes it is a solace to them that it is the hand of no less than a subprioress that takes them from the worldly plane. She juts her chin proudly.

  Marie finishes her writing. Words seep back to her mouth. She says, low, to fetch Asta and Wulfhild.

  Goda looks at Marie and her medlarfruit face is changed by what she sees there. She, a great respecter of mystics, leaps up and runs off. Tilde clutches her hands to her chest and says to herself a despairing dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

  * * *

  —

  Later that morning, after the meeting, Marie goes into the warming-room off the kitchens where her nuns are sitting upon their stools with the books they are meditating over in low murmurings. Among the nuns at the abbey only Marie practices silent reading, and every time she does, it makes Goda shiver and protest shrilly at her witchy magic. Yet if there is no inner reading, how can there be any inner life? Marie thinks and imagines the cold blowing desert that must stretch inside her subprioress.

  The obedientiaries sit closest to the fire in order of rank, and the child oblates shiver, farthest from the fire, nearest the cold. Marie closes the door behind her and does not move to take her seat in the place of greatest heat, but feels the chill wood against her back. When she will step forward, the nuns will hear of the new plans, she will share what she has been given; for now she savors the vision inside her. The light through the windows is watery and angled so that it shines through the breath of the nuns as they read aloud, the rising breath silvering, the streams of word made visible, word transformed to ghost as it rises from these mouths. The noise in the room is a low sweet hum without pause, the voices mixing so beautifully that the impression is not a tapestry of individual threads but a solid sheet like pounded gold. With their heads bent over their books like this, their words palely shining, she understands that the abbey is a beehive, all her good bees working together in humility and devotion. This life is beautiful. This life with her nuns is full of grace. Marie sends a prayer to the Virgin in gratitude. And then she steps forward; they are stirred from their reading to look up at her; they see the remaining radiance of this day’s strange woman-tree vision shining out of her; and it casts itself like the light of a fire upon their raised faces. She begins to speak of her newest vision.

  * * *

  —

  Prioress Tilde weeps in her bed in the night, she thinks she will die if she has to do all the work of the abbey again, but she is silent so she does not disturb her sisters.

  Asta dreams of pointed arches, buttresses like the ones she saw going up as a child, the bold and shocking building on the island in Paris with its vast windows, its magnificent height, the facade, they said, that would be thick with statuary in brilliant paint, in her mind she balances and hefts and figures weight against weight and is too thrilled with the planning to sleep for a week. She once ran away from her nurse when she was nine or ten and spent an enormously satisfying afternoon wandering the building site of the cathedral, asking questions of the workers and gaping, and getting herself filthy with stonedust and dirt, until she was caught by the ear and hauled out to the street by her hysterical nurse, who had been pinched and fondled and had fallen down in the rotten pig muck of the street while she looked for her charge.

  Wulfhild stays up most of the night doing abbey accounts. She is exhausted, she rides out six days a week to the abbey’s landholdings and cajoles and thunders all day on Marie’s behalf, she is the abbess’s voice within the town and beyond so that when Marie does at last visit in person, she appears to all eyes as greater than mere woman, she appears as myth; some say saint, some say witch, the rumors mix and muddle; descendant of the fairy Mélusine with the rages and the power to bend nature to her will, kin to royalty, too-huge woman on her warhorse, crusader, abbess of unwomanly face and body and knowledge and force of will.

  Wulfhild swallows her prudence and sighs, because she has no power against the visions of the Virgin. The nuns can do a great deal of the work—scaffolding and small mortaring and thatching and carving and plastering and painting—but there is not one who can teach stonecutting. They are almost self-sufficient, but in this they do not have the skill.

  The next day, she comes up to the abbess chambers. She leans toward the abbess, and they touch foreheads for a moment. Marie kisses Wulfhild affectionately on the bridge of the nose. Then Wulfhild tells Marie her plans, that she will take a team of a dozen of the best worker villeinesses and build a stoneworker encampment over the hill beyond the sheep meadows. There must be no contamination between sexes; she does not want to afford the nuns or servants or villeinesses any sight that might offend their chastity or tempt the weak. She will work out a system of blindfolds to bring the strangers in, give extra pay for swifter better work. She will take it on herself to keep trouble from imposing itself on Marie’s tender nuns.

  Practical Wulfie, Marie says aloud. Inside, she says: heart of my heart.

  Done in a year, perhaps, Asta believes, having her own glorious visions.

  Marie writes and her letters are so clever and charming; to the queen, she sketches the plans, thinking she is seeding the idea to come here in retirement; but in return the queen sends no money, she is hoarding it all behind her own seal at a loyal cathedral, but she does send Marie a warning. When Marie opens the letter, the queen has written only that Marie must be careful, that she risks making her abbey so fine that Eleanor will tax her double next year.

  Marie’s breath catches in her sternum at the thought.

  The field nuns and villeinesses make a better road to the quarry; easy work over the treeless meadows, with the great pressing wheel to use. Stoneworking strangers are brought in blindfolded during the night and installed in comfortable huts.

  The snowdrops press up through the frozen mud.

  The work of the new
abbess house begins.

  * * *

  —

  Early March, after midday meal. Distant noises of stone falling on stone, the groaning of the ropes upon the wooden cranes.

  Full and sluggish with bread and parsnip pottage, Marie is dreaming of lintels. She thinks of lintels carved with wheat and apples; lintels of grapes and sheep; lintels of honeycomb with bees like spangles through them.

  She slides a knife beneath a letter’s seal; she sits forward and reads silently and a smile flicks over her face.

  Goda peers at her. She asks sourly if there is something of interest. Goda smells of placenta and sheep shit; she has been helping three ewes lamb all morning and has forgotten to take off her smock.

  Marie considers telling her to bathe; rejects saying so because Goda would not take it kindly. She says that in three days, they’ll be getting new sister named Avice. Urgent, it seems. Excellent family. A dowry promised so generous she’d be a fool to refuse.

  Goda asks hopefully if the girl has a vocation, or better if she’s a mystic? She is envious of another abbey a day’s ride away that has a famous anchorite to whom pilgrims flock to wring holy advice through the window. It is hard to compete with a holy loner.

  Marie says no, that their newest sister it seems has been too liberal in her affections. Multiple times. Caught in flagrante. Whipped. Remains unrepentant. The abbey it seems is the family’s last hope.

  Tilde snorts, then blushes and pretends to keep working.