by Lauren Groff
It is up to saints and angels to intercede for those humans embroiled in the dirt of the earth beneath, filthy small creatures that must seem to them in their grandeur as little writhing insects crying out in words too muted to hear.
June passes, July. On one of these rides she sees how the brook that feeds the brewery and carries the shit away from under the garderobe has dried up in the heat of August. She rides it thoughtfully upstream to where it disappears into the forest. Even over the dry bed, a great deal of berry brush tangles itself and rakes at the horse’s skin until the poor creature bleeds in tiny ruby beads.
At last, beyond the berry bramble, she finds the close forest, and beyond this she finds the nearest road of the labyrinth.
The stream here is so well hidden in tunnels beneath the road that one would not suspect it runs there. Across the road, she plunges again into the brambles, into the streambed, and pushes through to the other side, and through forest so thick she has to lie flat with her legs behind her and her fat horse has to suck her gut in and twist and groan to squeeze her body through the tight trees. And up again to the road. The horse, who in her life has faced down bloody battles with a valiant heart, balks at the third plunge into thorns, but Marie coaxes her and curses at her until the beast concedes to the abbess’s larger will. Four more strips of thick forest, four more roads, then she is outside the labyrinth.
The trees here are shrunken, the ground sloppy. This must be the crown’s land, she tells herself as her horse’s feet slip in the mud. She ties the horse up, and kicks off her clogs, and keeps walking on though the bog pulls at her bare feet and shins.
At last she comes into an opening so broad and strange she rubs her eyes and looks again. It is marshland with stunted swamp trees like hands scratching at a low sky, and great tufts of green and brown reeds and sickly grasses. Her eye snags at last upon the strange blue bowl of stone that circles all the way around.
She feels the fire in her fingertips; but the fire withdraws itself from its spin through her body, and it is unclear, she will write later, if what she sees is a gift that the Virgin has let fall from her hands or simply a vision her own mind has brought forth.
But what she sees is that this moisture will be stopped up in the place where she is standing. Where the marshland’s wet seeps into mud and finally becomes the stream, there will be wooden locks with iron wheels raising and dropping gates, so that the great bowl of stone will fill with water and become something like a lake. And when it has been pent enough, the stream could then be let to flow no matter the time of year. In the hot months, the sheep would drink fully from the water and no longer find themselves thirsty, they could stand to their knees to cool themselves, the music of the flowing waters would fill the abbey’s summer sounds. The stream would slide calm and constant in its path under the brewhouse so that the abbey could have fresh ale and mead even in the summer, when now they content themselves with old ale and last year’s wine. It would carry away with it the stink of the nuns’ excretions.
And this vision is good, though it may not be holy. It fills her with her hot old ambition.
She will make something useful, a lake, out of something useless, this bog of mud and stink, this swamp. And if it is not her land to drown, there is something angry in her that feels ready to flex her might against the crown that dares to still exist, even though the one who best filled it has been taken to god. She would crush the crown in her hands if she could.
* * *
—
Asta says that indeed, such a project is possible, and she says it with her old quickness, her thin face older only in the fine webs of wrinkles by her eyes. She quivers with excitement. She bounces.
Tilde protests, they cannot, they cannot flood land that is not theirs, it is stealing, but Marie is drawing her plans to demonstrate, and nobody is listening to the prioress.
Wulfhild frowns at the idea of another building project. She says it is a heavy burden. And why do they need to grow ever larger? Why must this abbey eat more land? Marie won’t rest until she controls the whole of this mushy island, she says. She is shouting now. Already, Wulfhild is worked off her feet, already the nuns are so rich their wealth is drawing ire; the alms of clothing this winter were woolens so good that well-off housewives could not afford such stuff, and they complained that the poor should not be given for free what honest folk could not buy.
Time has been unkind to Wulfhild. There have been decades of constant travel on behalf of the abbey, of conflict, of receiving anger and bitterness and abuse, of seeking money, of the sun beating down upon her face; her new grief has aged her even faster. Deep black bags hang under her eyes, and there are strange pouches of flesh by her mouth, under her ears, under her jaw. Since her widowhood, she has brought along her two eldest daughters—Young Wulfhild, and Hawise—because the girls have become their mother’s lieutenants and have taken on the excess work their mother can no longer do. All three smell a bit gamy, the shining leather of their garments impregnated with the odor of their bodies, their horses, the sour weather, the peat and damp of the countryside, the huge dogs they keep to protect them. When Marie looks for more than a glimpse at Wulfhild’s daughters, her breath is knocked from her: they wear their mother’s face from when she was young, those clotted black eyelashes, those rosy cheeks.
Marie says as though it were obvious that they are making the abbey impregnable. If drought comes, if the wells dry up, the abbey will still have water. The nuns can remain inviolate within themselves. She reminds them of the Rule: self-sufficiency.
Asta says not to worry, it’s not a large project, really. A mere fragment of the work of the labyrinth or the abbess house.
Wulfhild leans forward. There is a moment, a sense of building; the will of the bailiffess gathering itself to rise against Marie’s. The other women in the room hold their breath, seeing what they did not imagine, that even redoubtable Marie might be matched by another.
But into the tense room Goda clumps, flexing her hands. She just had to drown three litters of kittens, pity, but serves the cats right for being such lusty little sinners. She chortles. Then she looks around and asks what’s wrong. The sense of power gathering in Wulfhild vanishes.
Wulfhild nods. She says heavily that she will do as Marie wishes.
Tilde says a little more loudly that even stealing from the crown is stealing.
Marie snaps that they are stealing nothing, that the land will remain where it always has, that the nuns are only making it useful. Tilde opens her mouth, shuts it, opens it. Her courage fails. She keeps it shut.
* * *
—
They begin. Blocks are chipped from the quarry walls, carted, trees cleared, stumps removed, a platform built over the marshy ground to enable work. The first blocks laid are swallowed by the mud. The heartiest nuns in their dozens move across the ground like ants, for all is being done in swiftness and silence. It is unlikely that any of the agents of the crown would see what they are doing, for it would entail trespass into the labyrinth, or looking up from one tiny place on a rarely used footpath across the bowl of stone with sharp hawk’s eyes, because a step forward or a step backward and the trees there shield all glimpses of the wall. Yet it is not impossible for someone to glimpse it and tell, Wulfhild told Marie quietly; and though the abbey is more beloved than the crown in all the lands about them, there will always be royalists in this place.
The edges where the dam will grow up each side of the bowl’s opening are built first; and back in the abbey, the blacksmith and carpenter nuns crouch and consider their drawings in the dirt, then the forge rings, the hammers peck all day, the echoes fill the chill air. Snow begins to sift out of the sky, and melts upon the bodies of the working nuns and soaks through their habits. Marie rides out daily to cheer them, to bring them hot food. She prays with them and sometimes stays to bend her body to fitting stone to stone for the external staircase
to access the top of the lock, because even old she is strong and her body longs for this form of hard work of the muscles. And when the nuns gather to work in the morning after Prime, Wulfhild urges them to be ever faster, saying with her pinched face, her hands shoved into the warmth of her tunic, that they must finish before full winter. The water is calf high, now waist high, now it has already climbed against the temporary wall blocking where the gates will stand; so much has already been swallowed under the surface, the grasses, the nests where the rare marsh birds live, the snake dens, the beaver dams. The last living exemplar of strange red salamander found only in this damp place is chased away from its hibernation nest and perishes, its guts pecked open by a bird. The twisted trees, small but ancient, having seen Romans and Danes, watch the waters close up over their topmost branches. There is a shimmer of ice at the edges of the new lake. To carry the lock gates to where they will be installed requires four draft horses straining, shoulder to shoulder, but the nuns have had luck, the ground has frozen and makes the pulling vastly less onerous than it would have been even a month earlier. There is a great snowstorm that halts all progress, the nuns return to the dark, close abbey, and at first it is a relief, it puts them in mind of weary workhorses brought back to the comforts of the stable, but soon comfort becomes a feeling of captivity and they long for air. They watch the icicles grown downward off the roof and think of spring.
At last, with delicious relief, a break in the weather, a shimmering cold day and the snow made such firm ice they can walk upon it. The nuns finish the staircase, working fast to stay warm, the lock gate is sturdily in, the gates themselves rise and fall easily and quietly with Asta’s clever design. Asta has the horses chained to the temporary wall that has held the water back, she shouts for them to pull, and they break the wall, and a great roar of water churns brown out of the lock, until Asta lowers the gate and makes it into a steady flow. Even in the thick of winter, the water rushes merrily down the streambed, as wild as if it were swollen by spring melt and rain, rushing under the roads and into the fields.
Leagues away, in the abbey’s sheepfolds, the shepherdess nuns will hear a thundering and look up to see water in a foamy charge coming over the distance through the dry streambed, and they will think of a herd of riderless horses galloping at full speed, and will shout with joy.
Wulfhild stands beside Marie atop the dam, looking across the great gray matte lake.
Marie considers all around her. She did this. She made this, she blocked the bowl and filled it with water. She feels the radiance in her hands, her feet, in her belly.
She feels royal. She feels papal.
But beside her, Wulfhild wheezes. She has had a cough these months of work and it has deepened, has begun to rattle. Marie looks at her bailiffess, and takes her arm, seeing the paleness beneath the sunbrowning, the thinness in her sturdy body. Marie asks, worried, if Wulfhild is well, but now she feels the heat rolling off her skin.
Wulfhild says that she’s just a little ill and tries to smile. There is something the matter with her lungs.
She has worked so hard, Marie says. She must go home and take a little rest. And she orders someone to fetch Nest, to have the infirmatrix attend to her at her house in town to make sure the bailiffess obeys, because Wulfhild is not happy unless she is riding out on abbey business.
Then the nuns retreat, fixing the cut-through of the roads of the labyrinth as well as they can before they are able to come back to plant saplings and bushes in the spring; they walk home to the abbey alongside the streambed. The younger nuns, thrilled by the wild, churning white water of their efforts, dance and sing, and the older nuns laugh at them and clap their hands for the beat.
Cellatrix Mamille, knowing this day means the end of the work, has plotted with the kitcheners and together they have had a fat pig slaughtered and roasted and there are also buttery leek pies and, most deliciously of all, a soup of milk and fine herbs.
* * *
—
For two days, Nest sends wary messages: Wulfhild is quite ill but the illness is only in her lungs, it is not progressing.
On the third day, when Marie rides out to Wulfhild’s house, Nest runs down to the courtyard, her face looking old in her weariness. Without Beatrix beside her to relax her, her shoulders have returned to their tense place near her jaw. Oh Marie, she says, and tells the abbess she is sorry that she cannot see Wulfhild, that more than anything, Wulfie needs sleep.
The earliest sheep have begun lambing, and Goda and her helpers stay for the night in small clever rolling huts in the sheepfolds. Ah, well, it is not uncomfortable, Goda tells her when Marie comes to visit, and at least it doesn’t smell of feet and flatulence like the dortoir. With a rope, the subprioress ties the still-wet, still-bloodied stripped fleece of a stillborn lamb to an orphaned one, and the trembling baby touches the nose of its new mother, who gives a cry on smelling it that sounds nearly like a woman in pain.
The air is damp with mizzle that increases until it becomes a hard and sleety rain. Marie walks back through the mud, thinking of the lamb in the dead lamb’s skin, thinking what it might mean as an omen.
She dries herself in the lavatorium, then on considering twice, orders a bath for herself, thinking of Wulfhild, how nice it would feel on Wulfhild’s aching body to have a hot bath, knowing she cannot extend this comfort through her own body, but still believing that perhaps her old ancestress Mélusine’s magic extends like this, through the air, for the fairy was one who also loved a bath. Who is to tell what invisible paths such magic takes.
Because of the rain, the night falls too soon and Compline comes on the heels of Vespers. Marie is alone in her bed before she has tired herself out. Something is seeping, a dark mist over the land, something large and dark skulks beyond Marie’s vision. The rain lashes against the windows.
She lies in bed until she hears feet running outside and the bell ringing wildly and she rises knowing that what she dreaded at last has arrived. She puts on her ancient sealskin cloak that she wears on business outside the abbey and runs swiftly out and through the orchard to the yard. There is a commotion in the dark, someone shouts the stream is overflowing, the villeinesses are yelling in their difficult English, one comes close and says to Marie with her face dark in her hood that ach the wantsum lambru die in such wet. Marie thinks of Goda and her nuns sleeping in the fold and it is as though a cold hand has reached into her chest and stills her heart. She sends Asta and three strong villeinesses on horses to the lock, then takes one of the torches being hastily lit and plunges on her fastest legs into the dark sideways rain into the fields toward the sheepfold. She runs and runs and her running seems endless, the ground sucking at her heels.
At last, she sees a clump of darkness on a rise that, when Marie nears, reveals the sheep saved, nuns running into the sodden fields waist deep to save more. Palenesses floating in the dark are drowned sheep. Marie wades out into the icy water to her waist, to her ribs. Cold seizes her and the wet habit grasps at her legs. She finds a ewe standing upon a dead sister, paddling with its front legs in panic, and though the beast is twice the size of an ordinary child and thrashes in her frenzy, Marie picks her up in her arms and carries her to the rise. In the dim all is dark, until a torch burns closer out of the distance and shows the sudden gleam of pale fleece, the sheep pressed together in a cloud at the height of the hill. More torches streaking forward now and she sees that the water has risen too high for most of the nuns to go out safely and they cling to each other weeping in a knot. Marie is not as strong as she once was. Still, she goes back out, chest deep, brings back two ewes under each arm. Again, again, again, again, the water is to her neck, she holds aloft a lamb that is limp though it still breathes.
But now Goda’s face is heaving forward through the dark, her headcloths lost, rain pouring down her cropped skull, eyes narrowed to slits, she is shouting that this is enough, that is enough, they have lost enough, t
hey cannot lose an abbess, also. Enough. Marie hears herself audibly shuddering, a groaning rising up from her gut and through her throat and she can’t stop it, or stop her teeth from chattering. She puts her head on Goda’s shoulder and the subprioress cradles it in her arms. Oh now, she says to her in her native English, calm now, calm your heart, my dearest, my abbess, as though Marie were an unsettled heifer, and the cold rain pours down Marie’s neck.
* * *
—
Morning reveals the size of the devastation: three dozen sheep drowned, and a calf too small to swim to safety, a nun with water in her lungs. The lock has been forcibly broken and it needs, Asta says gravely, three days to repair. The poor sodden sheep are put into the orchard for safety. Dumb creatures with no memory; they are happy nosing among the roots for rotten windfall apples. The lamb dressed doubly in lambskin has been miraculously saved. It gambols as though it has not already tasted loss.
Wulfhild’s three eldest daughters come to the abbey unbidden. Young Wulfhild, Hawise, and Milburga. They stand before Marie, each grave and pale, and she wants to gather them in her arms in her sorrow and guilt. If god had given her grandchildren, it would be these daughters of Wulfhild, whom Marie’s pride is now leaving motherless.
Marie waits for the angry words from them, the recriminations for letting their mother work herself into her sickbed, but the young women press close, kiss her, she does not know why they still love her, she does not deserve their love. It was Marie’s violent grief for her love that sickened Wulfhild; Marie’s vast pride and arrogance.
They say they have examined the broken lock and it was clearly the work of the agents of the crown. And that this fight will continue until it’s far worse, unless they hunt who did it to the ground. They ask that Marie let them do this work. It is unfit for holy women and will give the girls solace because the dam and the lock will be the last of their mother’s efforts. Wulfhild’s labored breath fills the house day and night; she is swollen, wild-eyed. They are glad to escape the house, or they will go mad, they say. They will find the people who broke the lock and ensure that nothing like it will happen again.
