Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  Johanna took a long, shaken breath. “Félicien thinks she’s dying, Shasha. Is she?”

  Shasha folded her hands and frowned down at them. “I don’t know.” She raised her eyes. “She isn’t improving, certainly.”

  “What did the old beldame say?”

  Shasha hesitated. “She said,” she said at last, “she said that she had known only a very few women who suffered this badly during pregnancy. And that all of them had died.”

  Johanna swallowed. “She wants me to bring her an instrument, and let her teach me songs.”

  Shasha’s face cleared a little. “Good. If she takes an interest in something other than her condition, perhaps it will help.”

  Johanna was a little shocked. “Shasha! She has been most grievously hurt!”

  “Well, and so have others been hurt, and hurt worse,” Shasha said, a trace of anger in her voice. “And recovered, and gone on to live useful lives. So could she.”

  “Could she?”

  Shasha pressed her lips together. “Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  “Can you not…help her?”

  “If by help you mean help her abort her child, I fear that at this stage anything I did would only make things worse.” She sighed. “I told her so, and she told me she’d rather be dead than carry what she persists in referring to as ‘it’ to term.”

  The next day Johanna went out into the town and found a music shop that sold instruments, and spent far too much on a beautiful lute made of walnut polished to a rich gleam, inlaid with mother of pearl. She bore it back to the inn, and her first lesson commenced that evening. Félicien, propped up by many bolsters and rolled blankets, sat up, her back to the headboard, and cradled the lute in her lap. “Well, now, what first, I wonder. The dawn song, perhaps. It’s always been my favorite. Yes, the dawn song.”

  Every day Johanna attended Félicien in her room and learned all of the songs the goliard had in her repertoire, joined by other members of the company or not. Some songs Johanna had heard many times, like “O Wandering Clerks.” Others were completely new to her, and she could only marvel at Félicien’s capacity to remember each note and every word of what appeared to be every song she’d ever heard, and be capable of retrieving them at will.

  “Where did you learn all these? You couldn’t have learned them all sitting at home in L’Arête no matter how many troubadours your father imported for you.”

  The goliard’s smile was reminiscent. “I picked up some Latin from a defrocked priest I traveled with for a time, and I read everything I could get my hands on.”

  “Such as?”

  Félicien shrugged. “Forgotten scrolls in a letterless lord’s solar.” She strummed a few plaintive notes. “An illuminated manuscript at a monastery where we spent the night.” This time the lute sounded like a monk’s chant. “A good jongleur can memorize three hundred lines of poetry after only three hearings. I don’t know that I ever got that good, but the more I memorized, the more easily rhyme came to me. Almost everything is written in rhyme, you know, religious tracts, scrolls on the cultivation of wheat, a chatty little pamphlet on how to get and keep a husband. All in rhyme. Paper is so scarce.”

  It wasn’t in Cambaluc. Not for the first time, Johanna deeply regretted not learning the art of paper making before they had left. She didn’t trust that her memory would be as good as Félicien’s. “Where else did you find songs?”

  In Montpelier Félicien had met Beatrix, the lady of the local castellan, whose husband went on crusade. “‘If I had gone with him, I would have been only a wife,’ she told me over a fine dinner,” Félicien said. “‘Here,’ she said, ‘I am castellan of my own keep.’”

  “I have heard of this Beatrix,” Alaric said, disapproving. “She disinherited her son in favor of her daughter and granddaughter.”

  “Good for her,” Shasha said, earning an indignant look from the Templar.

  “It was Beatrix who first showed me Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Great Britain. I promptly wrote a song of Igerna’s rape by Uther and she was horrified. She said Igerna was willing, that Geoffrey of Monmouth made that very clear.” Félicien’s lips twisted. “Of course, Geoffrey of Monmouth was a man.”

  No one said anything.

  Félicien took a deep breath and struck a presentation chord. “And then at the puys, the gatherings when all the jongleurs come together, we would all sing our songs and learn each other’s. I’ve borrowed from Polyhister stories of people who sacrificed to Apollo by dancing barefoot over hot coals, of pythons that grew long and fat by feeding from the udders of milk cows, of lynxes who urinated topazes, of the dog-headed Simeans of Ethiopia, ruled by a Dog-King.”

  She laughed, a little guilty, her cheeks flushed with real color for the first time in days. “Once, a local priest denounced me for singing a song of romantic love between a knight and his lady, what he condemned as pagan practices, ‘fit only for the ears of the devil himself.’”

  “What did you do?”

  Félicien’s smile was sly. “I substituted the Virgin Mary’s name for the name of the lady in the song, and all was well.”

  Alaric actually laughed. “You should have been burned at birth, my lady.” Alone among all of them, he refused to revert to calling her Félicien.

  “Then,” Félicien said, “there was a tale of a knight who pretended to be deaf and dumb so his lady would be assured of his discretion and take him into her bed.” This time she laughed with them, and then her face went white and Johanna got the night jar up in position just in time. She washed Félicien’s face with the damp cloth always at the ready. No one said anything. They were all too used to it by now.

  “The songs I liked best were the ones the jongleurs wrote about themselves,” Félicien said, her eyes closed. “Ottar the Black made the mistake of dedicating a poem to the daughter of King Olaf, was condemned to death for his presumption, and gained his reprieve by singing the king’s praises on the way to his execution. ‘A song without music is a mill without water,’ he was quoted as saying, and troubadours from the Danube to the Nile promptly acquired that line for songs of their own. They are great thieves, the jongleurs and the troubadours; they steal lines, verses, entire songs without fear and without shame.”

  Félicien’s eyes opened. “It is a great honor, you know. It means the other singer likes the work.” She smiled. “Besides, you know the story. Why did God make thieves thieves and jongleurs jongleurs?”

  “The thieves had first choice,” Johanna replied by rote, and smiled back at her friend, though her heart was breaking.

  Félicien insisted that Johanna teach her her songs, too. “There isn’t much point,” Johanna said. “When I sing of China, such tales are treated as fine fables, though hardly true.”

  “It’s only because your songs dare to imply that the Chinese culture is far more advanced and superior to the European,” Félicien said, and Johanna laughed.

  More months passed, December, January, February. In the beginning Félicien was well able to reach and strum all the chords, but as winter progressed she was reduced to plucking out individual notes. Her flesh shrank, as her belly grew incongruously in contrast, a hard, firm lump beneath the bedclothes that if nothing else provided a good platform for her instrument. She could no longer rise from her bed unaided, and the company formed the habit of spending their evenings in her room. Alaric and Firas brought tack in to be mended and swords and knives to be sharpened, Shasha mixed dried herbs and put them in packets, Alma painted. Hayat had bought a lap loom and was weaving a scarf of blue silk and green wool, a lovely thing. She had refused to have anything to do with weaving since they had left Talikan, as it was too much a reminder of endless tedium of the harem. It seemed she had decided it was time to take it up again.

  Tiphaine roamed the town for delicacies to tempt Félicien’s appetite, and when Félicien couldn’t eat them ate them herself. Jaufre looked in, but could never bear to stay for long. Félicien’s eyes no longe
r followed him from the room. Mostly she looked out the window.

  One evening when they had left Félicien to try to sleep, Shasha said, “The infant hasn’t moved in days. I think it has starved to death.”

  Johanna thought of the skin and bones that were all that was left of Félicien’s body and wasn’t surprised. “Could that help Félicien? Now that she only has herself to nourish?”

  Shasha leaned against the wall and shook her head. “If it had happened sooner, perhaps.”

  “Shasha? Is she truly going to die?”

  Shasha’s face twisted. “I should have helped her as she wished me to.”

  Johanna put her arms around her foster sister. “And if she had died, you would never have forgiven yourself.” She felt hot tears soak into her tunic. Her turn to comfort now.

  Hari took up permanent residence in Félicien’s room, violating his chughi rules to spend his nights with a woman. They teased him about it, gently, which he took with a smile, and remained where he was. Sometimes he and Félicien spoke through the night. Sometimes they simply shared the silence.

  One day Johanna came to the door of the room. It stood ajar, and she paused when she heard the voices inside. “Peace comes from within, young goliard,” Hari was saying. “Do not seek it from without.”

  “I don’t, truly I don’t, Hari. I found my peace in freedom, and I lost it again because I didn’t want to leave the company of people who had become my friends. Who had become more family to me than my own.”

  “Do you wish, then, that you had not met us on the Road?”

  There was a long pause, but then Félicien said, “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Good. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”

  “Hari?”

  “Yes?”

  “What happens? Afterward?” What might have been a sob. “I have never been what one could call religious, but I am afraid I have sinned greatly, and that I will be punished for it.”

  “Do you wish for a priest, young goliard? There is a parish church here, with a priest I find to be kindly and intelligent. I could—”

  “No, he will only make me confess, and I don’t want to confess to a stranger. And I don’t need to be forgiven by any man.”

  “If it would give you ease—”

  “It wouldn’t.”

  A long silence. “Buddha says that even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.”

  A choked laugh. “There are many who would say I have not lived wisely, not at all.”

  “Yourself included?”

  Another long silence. “No, Hari. No. At the very least, I have lived, and I would not have been able to do so had I remained at home.” Johanna could hear the smile in her voice. “I would not have met you. The man who now shares my nights.”

  In March the days lightened, and lengthened, and came one evening when it was warm enough to leave the window uncovered, when the scent of new grass was in the air, when birds returned from the southern reaches filled the room with song, when Félicien said to Johanna, “Wear your robe tonight.”

  The robe in question had belonged to Johanna’s mother, a robe that she had packed carefully and brought with her all the way from Cambaluc, her most precious possession. It was called the Robe of a Thousand Larks and it was made of heavy gold silk, with wide sleeves and a wide skirt that, after Johanna had unpicked the hem and let it down, just reached to her feet. It was embroidered in silk thread with a thousand larks in all their yellow, orange, red, green and black glory. In between the larks wound brilliant flowers on green vines and black branches.

  It was a glorious example of the spinner and the weaver’s art, and Johanna looked glorious in it. Félicien stared at her from her emaciated face with its sunken eyes and cheeks. Her hair had begun to fall out and Shasha had taken to wrapping her head in one of Alma’s harem scarves, the only color about her now.

  Shasha had summoned them all to attend Félicien that evening and they had all obeyed that summons, Firas, Alma, Hayat, Hari, Alaric, Tiphaine, even Jaufre, who stood in a corner, his arms crossed, his face in shadow.

  “Sing the dawn song,” Félicien whispered.

  Johanna struck a chord, and the sadness of lovers about to be parted was repeated in the features of her face, the gleam of her hair in a last stray beam from the setting sun, and above all in the husky contralto tones of her voice.

  Ah, would to God that never night must end,

  Nor this my lover far from me should wend,

  Nor watcher day nor dawning ever send!

  Ah God, ah God, the dawn! how it comes soon.

  The glittering of the brilliants sewn on the Robe of a Thousand Blossoms captured the little light in the room and threw it back tenfold, so that amethyst lilies and ruby roses seemed to sway in a gentle breeze, and nightingales’ wings flickered in flight.

  Sweet lover come, renew our lovemaking

  Within the garden where the light birds sing,

  Until the watcher sound the severing.

  Ah God, ah God, the dawn! it comes how soon.

  She looked up from the lute to see Félicien’s drowsy smile, saw her eyes close, heard the rattle of breath in her breast. She handed the lute blindly to someone and kneeled to take her hand. Shasha came to kneel at Félicien’s other side, and the rest of them gathered round, as Félicien the goliard, also known as Aceline Eléonor Félicienne de L’Arête, also known as l’Alouette du Sud, slipped from her earthly vessel, and left it, and them, behind.

  14

  Chartres, Spring, 1326

  The day after they buried Félicien, Johanna stood in the yard of the inn and closed her eyes in repugnance against the brightness of the day. The sun felt warm on someone else’s skin, not hers. She felt numb and oh so tired, and beneath it all there was a tiny core of molten anger, anger at Ambroise, at Florian for abetting Ambroise, at Shasha for not being able to cure Félicien, at Félicien for dying. That anger was encased for now in a hard layer of ice but its distant warmth was at present her only comfort. One day soon it would perhaps break free of its icy shroud. One day.

  She heard North Wind give an inquiring whinny. Soon, she would take him out for gallop. Soon. This afternoon, perhaps. Tomorrow. Next week.

  She felt the others assembling around her, and opened her eyes to see that they were all there, gathered around Hari.

  Hari had been an exemplary member of their group since Johanna had rescued him from a potentially fatal beating before the gates of Kashgar, where he had been arrested for preaching without a license. He never again forced his religious beliefs on an unsuspecting populace, or at least not in a manner that rebounded adversely on their company. Upon their arrival in any city, his first action was to seek out the religious community and disappear for days. Imams and priests, rabbis and patriarchs, monks and nuns, scholars and pedagogues, all were of abiding interest to Hari, and evidently none were proof against the chughi’s air of mild inquiry, which was all he ever displayed. When Johanna had asked him what he was doing, he smiled and said, “Listening.” Once when Jaufre asked him where he was going he had replied only, “Forward.”

  He had put off or covered up his yellow robes with clothing more suited to the current climate, but there was no hiding the yellow skin that clung so closely to the high cheekbones, or the tilted eyes, or the shaven head. He would always be other, so long as he stayed in the West, but he seemed unconscious of the second and third looks cast his way, and none of them could deny the air of gentle authority he exercised. People did what he told them to as a matter of course. Not excluding themselves.

  And so here they were this morning, emerging pupa-like from their winter cocoon, burdened with heavy grief at the loss of their comrade, and for the first time in all their time together uncertain of where they were going, or even why.

  “Come with me,” Hari said.

  They followed him, dispirited and unquestioning, through the winding streets of the town and up to the cathedral. It was after morni
ng services but before the line of pilgrims had begun to form see the holy relic, and they passed unhindered and unchallenged between the two towers, under the royal portal and down the center aisle. There were a few people at their prayers and someone cleaning the candleholders on the altar, but for that they were alone. Any scrape of the sole or whisper floated up and was magnified by the impossibly high, vaulted ceilings, carved with fantastical shapes and painted with bright colors.

  “Stand here,” Hari said. They stood, nine abreast where there should have been ten. They had passed rapidly from light into dark and they closed their eyes to let them adjust.

  It was the first time Johanna had been in the cathedral itself, although she had been to its Christmas fair, looking for something, anything to cheer Félicien this past December. What had she bought? A puppet, she remembered, and she and Tiphaine had made it dance on the bedspread, and Félicien had laughed, back when she could muster up enough energy to laugh—

  “Look up,” Hari said. “Look up, now.”

  Obediently they opened their their eyes and looked up, and were assaulted by a blaze of colored light shining through windows that on every side reached for the sky, for the heavens, for the stars themselves. Crowned figures royal and religious, common folk wielding axe and saw and scythe, burghers making and merchants selling, saints ascending unto heaven and angels on outspread wings, mother and babe, mother and man, mother and sacrificial son. Green vines like emeralds and roses like rubies and borders like amber and stars like diamonds twined about the figures, creating a jeweled setting for an already almost blindingly dazzling display.

  Dumbstruck, they drifted in ones and twos from window to window, necks craned, eyes straining. Only Alaric and perhaps Hari understood half of what they were looking at, but somehow they knew that they were reading a book, a book that could tell them the history of the culture of the land in which they now stood. Of course, Johanna thought, of course, in a land where so few people could read, of course the church must have a way to imprint its legends on the lay folk, who after all could not spend all of their time listening to sermons. Here was their story, all their stories, written in light and color, for everyone to see and remember. But it was more than just a book of the church, it was a book of the people as well, kings to commoners. You knew where you were in society, who you were when you came here. Here there was certainty. Here there was clarity. Here there was comfort in the regular order of things.