The Seal

by Adriana Koulias

  Left behind him, war and blood and sparse living were overtaken by the quiet stillness of the white world between the house and the stables, or by the full-worn days of bodily toil, or the warm scented skies, the cold rivers and the rich brown earth that parted before the plough. Peace and mildness had overwhelmed the shadows of his past, of the Holy Land and Christ’s lost kingdom, that had for so long settled over his soul like a cloak. And as his body mended, he began to forget the grand dimensions of his faith and to seek the worship of Christ in the smallest things. His breath was felt in the cooling breeze that moves over the valley floor, His tears in the fine rain that falls on the tired lines of a face after the heat of the day, His word in the wing-song of an eagle and His will in the leap of an elk. He was built into the solid ground and consumed Himself upon the hearth. He was the highest goodness of man and woman each, in the eyes of the spirit and in the heart of the soul; in the blood that pulsates that life which exists between child and mother, between man and woman.

  Such were the feelings that had grown inside him.

  The men, for their part, seemed content. They too had allowed this place to grow in them a disregard for what had come before and what would come after. The Catalan and the Norman saw to the buildings and the fields, he and Jourdain tended the animals. All things between earth and sky were in conformity with the laws of man and nature.

  But the men were mercenaries and Jourdain just a boy; he, on the other hand, was an old man ancient and worn-down. Where had he hid his wisdom? How could he have let the months pass in this state of domestic ecstasy, in this rustic intoxication? He could not answer these questions, only that he had deceived himself and this deception in all its clarity had stood before him bared to his eye one afternoon after a conversation with Jourdain.

  They were paused watering the goats at a nearby creek with the verdant grass beneath them and the canopy of limbs full before a blue sky.

  Jourdain had said to him, ‘Ovid will tell you that to cure the pains of love, no plant avails, Etienne.’

  Etienne with eyes closed, hearing the sound of the breeze in the falling leaves, asked him as he dozed, ‘The pains of love?’

  It caused Jourdain to laugh. ‘The love of nature, Etienne, the goddess which makes for us this day, this grass and sky and creek . . . Ahh . . . truly! This is a love most chaste!’ He leant back against the tree chewing on an apple and smiling and chewing again. ‘For I am not dead, yet do I find myself in Elysium.’

  Etienne smiled to himself. ‘Elysium? What is this Elysium, something made up by your fancy?’

  ‘No! It is the abode of the blessed, Etienne. The paradise of the Greeks that exists at the end of the world where those who are chosen by the gods are sent. There they live without tasting death, to enjoy an immortality of bliss,’ he said. ‘There, Etienne, open your eyes, do you not see her?’

  Etienne half opened his eyes and looked at the day.

  ‘There she walks, Demeter, among those Elysian fields with a basket of grain in her arms.’

  ‘No, Jourdain, I do not see her, this Demeter.’

  Jourdain laughed. ‘Etienne, she is invisible to the eye, you may see her only in spirit, a goddess most loving and nurturing. She brings a good harvest and heals the sick. She is the mother known to have nursed the son of the King of Eleusis back to health by feeding him on the nectar and ambrosia of the gods . . . but she grew very attached to the young boy and decided to take him from his life and make him immortal by placing his feet in fire to burn his mortal nature away.’

  He paused to take a bite of the apple.

  ‘And?’ Etienne asked, sitting up now since something had stirred his soul to attention. ‘And? Did he become immortal?’

  ‘Just as Demeter was holding his feet over the fire, Etienne, the young boy’s mother entered the room and the spell was broken.’

  Etienne looked beyond the creek to the harvested fields and looked for the goddess once again. He did not see her. Instead his eyes fell over the earthly paradise and saw all of its deceptions. At once every faculty of his being told him that this was not his life, but the life of another man stolen. He was not made to be immortal. He had fallen asleep to his duty, which lay elsewhere among hardships and struggles. Not this life, of aimless days! Of rapturous, verdant ecstasies! The entire meaning of this struck him like a slap, and it made a shaking in his lungs and drove a pain through his heart. The ring upon his finger, so quiet and tame these months, called to him now, its voice weak but insistent. This, it said, was the simple thing: the deed accomplished and then to grow one with the ground, thereafter to see not Demeter upon this earth but Sophia in heaven where Michael awaited his arrival.

  The pain in his heart moved its burning towards his hands. He got up. ‘We have been in a dream, Jourdain.’ He gasped for air. ‘We must go.’

  Kneeling now, he acknowledged in the full daylight of his mind that it had been his weakness for the woman Amiel and not his love of pastural delights that had made him linger in this dream. As once he had mistaken her for the Sophia, he had mistaken her also for the goddess of nature, the soul of the world, and had become intoxicated with this love, whose disposition, he realised with shame, was not after all of metaphysical purity, but of physical proportions.

  From the beginning the woman Amiel had come to his little room in the stables to tend to his wounds with capable, gentle hands. Then she noticed his ailment and made him an unction for the pain that leapt from his heart to his hand. As time passed he observed in her a knowledge beyond his own and a talent for listening to words lost in the soul of another – a dialogue that travelled the distance from eye to eye, heart to heart, without words and yet exact in its understanding. Now this communication stood before him like a new thing. Such exchanges, he now realised, left him bare and naked, they tore into him a soft violation more deep and intimate than the sin of the flesh since they went to the soul and the spirit which he had relinquished to Christ and which he placed on an altar during every quiet moment of prayerful contemplation. He was not, after all, a man to be made immortal! She could not burn his mortal nature away!

  After his conversation with Jourdain, Etienne began the business of distancing himself from the woman Amiel and her suckling child that now smiled and laughed and tried to crawl to him as if he were its father. He distanced himself from the house with its warm hearth and the animals and their needs and the tangle of his sentiments whose precise nature he tried with all his will to purge behind an ill temper and a desire for solitude.

  But despite this the communications continued: when she came out of the dwelling to bring scraps to the chickens or when she took herself to wash clothes in the creek. There occurred a pause between them so bottomless and empty that neither could fill it before it was snatched away by Jourdain with his good humour or the Norman with his work upon the anvil, or the Catalan whistling while he worked at weeding the garden bed. Etienne clenched to him his stubborn will and forced deafness to fall upon his spirit ears and still that void stretched forth from her soul to his and made a sound in him as if he were an instrument tuned to her silence.

  He told the men to prepare for their departure, and at the door to the woman’s hut he told Amiel they would soon leave the farm. He told her also that she must not speak to him again because he was not an immortal but a knight of Christ and his will was not his own.

  Now in his confession he put to St Michael this frustration and impotence: A sin of the heart if not the body, dear Lord, and for all of that a greater sin.

  For now there was a burning, an ache more heated and more urgent than that physical ache he had known which, no matter how much he drank the unction the woman had made for him, grew stronger by the day. He knew this must be so, since Ovid had said that such a pain could not be cured with herbs.

  The woman’s father-in-law had sought him out. Some days before he had set himself the task of mending Etienne’s boots and these he had returned to him when Etienne was filling the wa
ter troughs. The old man Iacob had told him, ‘Do not trust a wolf cub, Lord, for it will always become wolf, even if it is suckled among the sons of man,’ and left him to his thoughts.

  Etienne was paused thinking this through, and it brought a sorrow to his heart, to the very core of his being, where his muscles moved against his bones. He tried not to think on it but the more he pondered the more he resolved that the man had entered his soul and had discerned a wolf there, wishing to be a faithful dog.

  Now gazing at all his transgressions he fell to the floor, hands outstretched to form a living cross. In this way he asked St Michael to forgive the woman since she was a Jewess who could have no real knowledge of his life and the rigours of his vows and, in the balance, was not responsible for his weakness and his failure in duty. And secondly, he asked that he might look upon the little family from time to time when Etienne was gone from them and see to their safety. This he gathered under the name of his beloved Lord Jesus Christ and turned his attention to his own sins, the forgiveness of which he found it improper to ask. Instead he made penance by saying thirteen Pater Nosters and seven Hail Marys and waited for a word or a sign that he was heard.

  Whether St Michael heard him he did not know, for at that moment there was a loud, familiar silence that tightened his chest. A scream as quiet as growing plants over the ground, whose message, coming from the direction of the house, was instantly recognised by him.

  It was Amiel, the woman. The sound in his mind made him gasp and the limbs of his body became pinpricked in a provocation to terror.

  It was the voice of the woman’s soul in its dying thoughts, as they were directed towards his soul, and the soul of her child.

  SECOND NIGHT

  THIRD DAY

  REMEMBERING

  Maybe one day it will be cheering to remember

  even these things.

  Virgil, AENEID

  Lockenhaus, July 2006

  The old woman paused. ‘I must go now,’ she said and collected her cards. Without a backward glance she disappeared into the mouth of the little shop, leaving me once again, alone with the portal, the lime trees and the visitors who, having parked their cars, were making their slow way up the avenue dressed in their finest for tonight’s concert.

  I took myself to the hotel room. The ghostly melody of Shostakovich’s fifteenth symphony found me as I dined on cabbage strudel and Burgenland wine. I sat back and listened, letting my tired mind rest a little before tackling the task of reconstructing the story.

  But I was tired and fell asleep.

  I woke the next morning to the bells announcing mass in the village. My limbs were aching and I felt a deep frustration that seemed to have no cause, or at least no cause that I understood.

  I answered my emails, made my phone call to the children, showered and dressed. It was still early when I walked out into the courtyard outside the bistro. The tables stood stripped of their tablecloths and deserted. It looked strangely sad.

  The old woman was tired this day. Her eyes were sunk into shadows and she surprised me by saying she would not open her shop but would sit one last time with me, without disruption.

  It was already hot and bees droned in the flowerbeds and in the long grass. Above our heads hawks made their squeaks and from the shrubs and trees there came the chatter of birds. I observed her as she laid down her cards, always the same way. Today she wore a floral dress but it did not cheer her countenance. She made a shiver as the warm breeze stirred the lime trees and made them move in soft waves. She looked up to them and I saw her face crease in age-worn concern.

  It occurred to me then that I would forever have a longing to return here, to see those lime trees and to hear that voice: a longing full of leftover feelings and unfinished words.

  ‘Shall we start?’ she interrupted my thoughts. She was staring at me with that familiar intense regard.

  I told her I was ready.

  But she did not start. She continued staring. ‘You may turn back now . . . if you do all will be forgotten and you will resume your life as it was. But if you continue, everything will be altered, and you will never put it to rights again . . . it is your choice.’

  It was an inexplicable feeling that came over me at that moment. I was full of dread and fear but also overcome by a desire to fall . . . a vertigo of the soul.

  I nodded for her to continue.

  She gave a deep sigh, looked once more to the lime trees, and continued, ‘Remember . . . the Wolf.’

  THE FIFTH CARD

  WORLD – UNDERSTANDING

  40

  WOLF

  Came from the North the wolf to lure from the wood to the wound

  Prose Edda of Snorre Sturlason: SKÁLDSKAPARMÁL (The Poesy of the Skalds)

  Etienne, with the long sword in his hand, came down the steps swift as a sparrow to where stood Gideon, Delgado and Jourdain. They must also have heard the silent communication and were stood listening into the silence and looking to Etienne who made a signal to quiet and to move towards the door.

  Outside, a wind had picked up and swirled the leaves upon the trees and scratched at the sides of the wooden building. They listened. There was the wretched cry of a child then and Etienne moved to the stable door, but at that moment it opened like a sail with the wind behind it. Revealed in the wake of this gesture was the figure of a man standing in the waxing light. Etienne knew his form, but he could not see his face. A moment later four others came to stand behind him. Etienne could smell blood.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said to the dark face.

  ‘Do you not know me?’ the voice said.

  Etienne stood as though slapped in the face by a strong hand, and struggled to remain upright. When he spoke it was low and guarded. ‘Yes . . . I know you.’

  He did not wish to think of the woman, he would not think of the child and of Iacob the old man. He would leave his mind still and vacant and ready.

  ‘Yes, you know me and I know you, but I am changed, Etienne de Congost. I am without loyalties, like your mercenaries, on hire for good money, and I will kill you, so you are best to give me what I have come to take from you.’

  Etienne looked at that form, now more comprehensible, and he recognised it better than he recognised the eyes which, staring from out of that shock of grey hair, seemed glassy and lifeless beneath a shadowed brow full of longing. The face jumped then, in convulsive twitches, and the mouth moved as if drawn by this contradiction of forces to a grin humourless and stale.

  ‘You look old,’ Etienne said to him.

  There was a wild laugh that made the animals nervous. ‘I am ruined! Yes, ruined! And spoilt! Like old meat left out in the sun! Maktub! ’ he shouted. ‘And yet I may be younger now than you!’ He paused then, relishing his transient humour. ‘In body I am decayed and in soul I am made young, is that not a wondrous thing? My ruination and my youth? It began upon that beach at Famagusta and then at Tomar and finally when I drowned the gold. I warned you, Etienne, that I should lose a wit.’

  Etienne looked askance to the men at his flank. Jourdain, Delgado and Gideon stood in that grey near-dark waiting for a signal from him.

  ‘Who seeks us?’ Etienne said to him.

  ‘There are many hunting you . . . you are wanted for something you have, and I have a task to find it.’

  All was stillness but for the wind outside in the trees.

  Etienne stared hard. ‘How you have come down in the world, Marcus.’

  The man grinned from ear to ear as if this were the most lavish compliment. ‘I am come down to earth, that is certain! But I have not always been so high and mighty, Etienne . . . not like you in your heaven! I came to know how low I had always been upon that beach in Scotland, while I watched the Order fall into the chasm of the sea! I came to know how much of my soul I had put away behind it – or how much it had kept hid. When the Order was gone and, finally, when the gold was lost, there was nothing to prevent me from seeing the vision of my worthless soul! It was
bared to my eye, Etienne, bared! I wished to die then but I was called to a new master . . .’ He looked at Etienne. ‘He has seen my worth and delights in talents not worthy of God.’

  ‘The Devil?’

  The man laughed until his voice was hoarse and he was close to tears. When he stopped his face was a carnival of movement. ‘Let us say that we sit on different benches, you and I. Yes, you on one side with your worthless faith, and I on the other, with my faithless worth! It amuses me this paradox between us!’ He took in a breath and paused, turning practical. ‘But amusement is one thing and business, my friend, another. I have been tracking you a long time . . . and I’m beginning to know what it is they want from you.’