by Tanith Lee
The students were running to their master, who writhed on the floor, stunned and crying and alight. As they came Jehan both avoided and met them, and dipping the last candles, with gentle strokes, torched each of them. They seemed highly inflammable, perhaps some constant contact of their garments with the paints and oils. It was very simply done.
Jehan flung the fire away against a hanging bolt of dry material, which flared at once.
The studio was illumined in saffron, and by hopping, dancing, screaming fire-creatures, that tried in turn to come at her, at each other, and which all the while beat at their own selves, until they went down and boiled along the floor.
Jehan dashed from the room. In the outer chamber he took fruit from the dish and snatched up the gilt jug of wine.
Escape was made by a lower window, into a side-slip between the houses.
In the open yard before the embryo of the Temple-Church, Jehan climbed a workman’s ladder up a pile of stones, and seated there high in the air, watched all the street come alive in terror as fire exploded from the upper storey of Master Motius’ house in one mighty blast. Some combustible in the studio had ignited, it would seem.
In fear for the wooden structures of their homes, men scurried in the street like frightened mice. Jehan, eating plums upon the stone pile, watched. It was like a scene in Hell, until the snow began to fall and, as the cumbersome buckets had not been able to, whisper by whisper, put out the burning house.
He had a fancy for the jug, and kept it by him. Springing down from the nunnery tree with the rope and the vessel in his hands, he found before him a young nun.
“There’s soot in your hair, Jhane,” said Sister Marie-Lis.
“Then I have been in a fire, demoiselle.”
“And this is how you travel the City by night.”
“How else?” replied Jehan.
“But you return.”
“I found a rope hanging down to the street. I climbed it.”
“You are Jhane.”
“Presently,” said Jehan. He moved towards the young nun. He put his face to hers. She did not resist. He put his hand on her breast. She did not resist. “I know a quiet cell, over there,” said Jehan. “We shan’t be disturbed. Or here, on the cold ground in the snow.”
“You are Jhane,” said the young nun again.
Jehan drew back. He lowered his eyes.
“Who will you tell?” said Jhane.
“No one. God sees.”
“You worship Satan,” said Jhane.
The young nun turned from her and moved away over the snow and vanished through an arch of white plum trees. The ground was too hard to have kept her footprints.
Jhane burned on her pallet. Garbed in fire she rose and ran into the south cloister to cool herself in the snow. She wished the fountain would play. It did so. It played fire. Fire like a golden tree splashed up into the black sky. By its light, she saw it was not a stone child who held the bowl, but the dwarf.
“Fero, fero, I am Ferofax,” said the dwarf. “Fire-Bringer. I am a demon. But you’re possessed by devils.”
“Lucifer, King of the World,” said Jhane as she burned.
“His first captains were Azazel and Esrafel,” said the dwarf. “They hastened to him, and consoled him, after the fall.”
“I am burning,” Jhane cried bitterly.
She screamed: “I am burning!” And the nuns tied her to her bed in the infirmary where now she lay in the blazing fever.
“I’m burning! I’m burning! Fire! Fire!”
“Lie still,” they said.
She hated them, but that was not new, to hate. There was a pain in her groin and her bowels. She saw an old man with a beard tied to a stake, and burning too.
“Pierre!” she screamed.
Ferofax sat cross-legged on the foot of her bed, crowned with stone flowers, eating a lump of paint. The world will end in fire.
“It is Yule Natalis,” said the nuns. “It is the birth of the Angel as the Christ.”
Bells rang.
The Temple-Church rose and hung, unfinished in the sky, with great windows like flame for eyes.
When the pain and fever left Jhane, she was very weak for a long while and lay in the infirmary where the old sick nuns came to die.
“The world is a terrible place,” the old nuns said to each other. The City was the world in miniature, filled by lusts and malignities, killings and awful crimes. (Jhane wearily suspected they kept certain secrets and sorry events from her ears, out of regard for her illness.)
There were no novices left. Unfeelingly, they had wedded Christ, as Jhane burned. Christmas was past also. Soon the year would die. New Year would come, and two-faced Janus, an antique Roman deity, would fling open the doors, at the Feast of the Ass.
On the estates of the lord in the north, as everywhere, the Ass Feast had been celebrated with riot. It was the contrary time, the letting of the bung from the cask, when everything must reverse itself, upside down, in order to come right for the remainder of the year. Carts of manure had been trundled through the village, and the unwary pelted. The priest would put on his gown inside out and the bell be rung, for once, but at the wrong hours. Processions roved the fields, beating drums and Eastern tambourines, and a garlanded donkey, though not Belnard’s own, paraded about with an idiot or a young peasant girl made king, and riding on its back. You might do anything on the Day of the Ass: all things at their season. By that token, for the rest of the year you could be virtuous.
It had begun in classical times, the old dying nuns said now, disapproving, admiring. A beautiful god on an ass’s back, drinking, and ritual, and other things.
Jhane, who had had hideous hallucinations and dreams during the fever, did not discuss the festival. The weather had changed. There had been a thaw (Fire! Fire!), and there was an unseasonable warmth, so a few thin buds spurted from the trees and were chided. As soon as Jhane was able, she resumed her duties and chores. But, having spent so long with the senile nuns, she now moved slowly, ached, must lean often on her broom, sometimes fainted as she scrubbed the flagstones, could not remember easily anything.
Jehan woke, got up and dressed himself. Stowed behind the chest he found a wine-jug, gilded, which he had partly forgotten. He took it with him, along with the cross – which he had only once removed, when ill, for fear enemies might steal it as he raved – and his climbing rope.
He left sanctuary behind without a backward look, and made towards the inn, over the slush.
The torches burned as usual on the cobbles before the gate, but in the upper room, only three or four were gathered together.
They jumped up when Jehan entered.
“Where did you go?”
“We thought you were hanged.”
Jehan set down the jug. They gazed at it.
Then Conrad came and grasped Jehan, hugging him close. Jehan eventually pushed him off.
“Tomorrow is the Ass Feast,” said Scar-Nose. “Tomorrow we’ll rob the world and slit its gullet.”
They sat drinking most of the night. Jehan watched them. For the first time, he slept at the inn. When Conrad came slinking to his resting place, Jehan rolled over and laid the knife against Conrad’s windpipe.
“When?” said Conrad.
“After the nun.”
“What nun?”
“The nun I told you of. There’s a dainty nunnery not far off, near the river.”
“Never.”
“Ask the dwarf. He knows.”
“Did you burn the house?” said Conrad.
“A house?”
“In the street where the rich man lived, before we did for him.”
“We’ll burn the Temple-Church next,” said Jehan.
“You’re the Devil,” said Conrad.
“One of his captains,” said Jehan. He laughed softly. “Azazel, Esrafel.”
“You laugh like a girl. Your voice never broke. Is that why you hate the whole earth?”
Jehan reached out
and fondled Conrad. Conrad fell against him. He whined, struggling forward, labouring. Jehan ceased his attentions, spat in Conrad’s face, and went away to another part of the inn to sleep.
At sunrise there was a colossal noise, the clashing of cymbals, pans and pots, the mooing and bray of horns. All the bells jangled. It was Donkey Day, All Fools Feast. The little madness that held off the greater, hopefully, while God, the Harrier and Destroyer, winked.
The gang of thieves came out on the street along with the rest of the City. Festivals were always fortunate. But sometimes, in the day’s tradition, having gained purses and other oddments, a robber might infiltrate a coin into some poor man’s satchel or pocket. A day of reversals.
On the bridges they were fishing with mousetraps, and throwing decaying fish back into the river. Huge chunks of ice still wallowed sluggishly by in the water. But the morning was clammy, and drops sweated on the stones and plaster, the foreheads of men.
Processions were going up and down, men with donkey masks, and donkey phalluses strapped to them, ran about shaking rattles, and fake priests in patchwork gave bawdy blessings, while pretend-doctors, carrying jars of leeches and enormous pincers for the pulling of teeth, lunged to and fro.
At Our Lady, over the river, the whores’ penance would be enacted, and the thieves went, as if idly, across a bridge with Jehan. A country boy, he had never seen such a thing. “Oh, it’s worth your while!”
The City squealed and banged and sang and shouted.
Our Lady was a minor church near the quays, but on the open stretch before, slippery with fish-oil, a mass was being held, with an ass-bishop in a mitre with holes cut for his ears. At each snort and asinine trumpet, the crowd acclaimed the sagacity of the remark.
The whores came from the church presently, in chains, drawing metal balls behind them, but these things were of dented tin and skittered about as the whores screamed with mirth, flinging up their skirts, ribbons in their hair, bare-breasted, some of them.
A cavalcade was coming along the streets, going up towards the market and the Temple-Church.
Jehan pushed towards it, with Conrad and a few others who had not gone after the whores and the tin chains.
Men-devils, next to naked in the muggy day, horned and tailed, and armed with torturer’s forks, pranced about a platform, dragging it uphill. On a gaudily painted throne sat the festival’s king. The crowds bayed and boomed about him, and he nodded at them his head in its diadem of gilded spokes, feathers and bells. His little feet were stuck in pointed shoes, a wooden sword hung at his side painted with the words: Rex Urbi. The wig of flaxen straw framed the handsome, unkind and deformed face of a child. It was Fero, the dwarf.
Jehan laughed with derision.
The dwarf heard him.
“Stop. Your king commands you. I have heard a beautiful sound. It must have been a lark singing.”
The platform waddled, tilted, subsided to a halt.
“Every woman turn to your king your face. I’m about to choose a consort.”
In the uproar, Jehan stood sneering, and the dwarf pointed at him. “There. That one.”
“But, Sire, it’s not a woman.”
“My command is law.”
As he was seized, Jehan did not fight. He hung, contemptuous of them, on the boisterous arms, and was lovingly hoisted aloft. The dwarf caught Jehan and smacked a kiss on to his mouth. “Garments for my queen. You, you. Strip yourselves.”
Shrieking, various girls were made to give up various examples of apparel. They trooped in person on to the platform, twining the handsome youth, adorning him in cast-offs and embraces. When they were shooed away again, there was a sudden relevation. Draped in a mantle, a striped sash, and with a knot of ribbons caught through his yellow hair, Jehan was abruptly a girl.
“Sweetest Jesus,” said Conrad. He seemed stricken, white-faced, his desire bulging before him. But Jehan did not apparently care. He leaned on the dwarf’s shoulder, looking arrogantly about. The glances were unmistakably male, in that young girl’s face.
“Will my queen sit?”
“On your head, pig-dwarf.”
The crowd applauded with zeal.
“On my lap, dear queen.”
“And be got with another babe?” ranted the queen in his high melodious damsel’s voice, playing the part now.
“I’ll give you another!” offered a male in the crowd. Offers fell fast upon the boy-girl queen. She shook her hair, “I came to Paradys to make my fortune. I came to be apprenticed to a trade.”
“Ohh-ho!” volunteered the crowd.
“I meant,” shouted Jehan. “to paint pictures of the saints in the great new church. Not sit in a cart and be dighted by a dwarf.”
The dwarf caught Jehan and pulled him down across his knees. Jehan laughed, this time lightly and boyishly.
“On, slaves, you vermin. To the Temple. My queen shall paint it.”
They careered up the hill, the wineskins jumping through the crowd as if alive. Striving to get one, and to keep up, Conrad lost his brothers. He strove beside the dwarf, took hold of an edge of the platform to help it heave along. He stared at Jehan, who ignored or did not see him, with coals for eyes.
So they poured through the market-place, gathered converts, drove up a hump in the world and into a stone alley, crushed against the walls, the platform tumbling and righting itself in a storm of flesh and confusion.
The outer yards of the Temple-Church, when they got into them, were piled with stones, rubble, bales, ballasts, work-shops, sheds. Architects and menials alike were gone. It was to be their gift to God, the ornament of Paradys, what did it need of protection, the Temple-Church of the Sacrifice of the Redeemer?
Huge and hollow the walls arose: the window-places, finned with iron, gaped. The bones of the scaffolding stood waiting for embodiment, like the Word itself, once. But it had no life, no soul, only its sensed, unborn suspension. The cavalcade swirled about the ankles of future history, and asses defecated there.
“Come now,” said King Fero.
“Not I,” said Queen Jehan.
“It’s a fact,” said the dwarf, “my queen here has borne me thirty babes. We must be wed at last.”
The crowd brought censers filled with old shoes, and lit them, and the reeking smoke lifted to heaven. The donkey in the mitre was led up, and Jehan and the dwarf were married by it, the crowd itself suggesting the proper words.
“And so to bed,” said the dwarf.
“A favour,” said Jehan.
“More delay. What is it?”
“Give me the donkey.”
“I promise I’m better than the donkey.”
“Well, I’ll take him anyway.”
Jehan, garbed in maiden’s robes, intercepted the donkey, tore off its mitre – to yowls of sacrilege – and lifting his skirts, got up on the beast’s back. Mildly clocking heels to its sides, Jehan persuaded the animal to a walk. They rode forward, past the king-dwarf, to where Conrad stood in ecstatic petrification. “Wake up. Get up behind me” said Jehan.
“Rebellion,” crowed Fero. He drank from a wineskin and toppled over sideways from his seat.
Conrad flung himself aboard the donkey. He gripped Jehan by the waist. “The Devil, the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, death, night,” he cursed and moaned, clinging.
They rode off with scant hindrance, the crowd separating to let them by, only cawing commiserations to the dwarf. At its edges, unattended, a pair of drunken men lay on the road.
The donkey trotted now, glad to be out of the press.
They went up a street with an artistic well and a burned house in it.
“Oh Christ, Jehan, Jehan.”
Beyond the walled park, some open land ascended. Presently one could see the wave-head of the City Wall above and to the east.
The donkey cantered. Conrad groaned and fumbled at Jehan, who shifted off the thief’s hands from the area they sought. Conrad mouthed the smooth neck under the ribboned hair. He sobbed, and spasmed
suddenly, giving the ass an unintentional kick that almost unseated both riders.
Having run its length, the donkey pulled up under some trees.
“You’ve had your pleasure,” said Jehan. “Now where are the others?”
“No pleasure. You bastard son of Hell. They were at their own business.”
“Just you then, creep-thief. Spraying your lust on an ass’s back.”
“Shut your damned mouth. I’ll kill you.”
“No you won’t. Now I want that nun.”
“I should slit your throat.”
Jehan swung from the back of the donkey and hesitated, finding himself sore and stiff. Had he never ridden before? The physical sensation seemed familiar, but he associated it with fear, trouble – putting the thought aside, he pulled off himself in a skein the girls’ clothes and the ribbons. Conrad had also left the animal. He sat in the grass under the leafless, untimely-budding trees. He was crying.
“What a fine, brave, bold man,” said Jehan. “The artisan cried. Don’t burn my house! Don’t burn my precious painting!”
Conrad seemed not to listen. “That boy,” he said. “I never should have. That boy, your brother. All my life. Sins, sins. I’ll burn in Hell. The Devil sent you. We’ll be punished, every one. God’s wrath. God help me.”
“Do you have a home?” said Jehan casually, straightening his tunic.
Conrad wept.
Jehan left him there, and the ass feeding on a crocus. But as he went down across the rough land, towards the wall of the garden-park where once some palace had vaunted, Conrad stumbled after.
“A hut’s my home,” he said, “in Smith’s Lane.”
“Good. Then we’ll take her there.”
“Take who?”
“Christ’s Bride. My young nun with the holy face.”
“I won’t. Don’t you fear yourself, Jehan? I won’t do it.”
