Manna from Heav’n, fish from the sea
Kettles and kettles a’full
The fisherman’s wife, she chops and she slice-s
Three pennies for every fish that she kills.
“Gather close. Oc, do come to me!"
She says as her husband shivers and quivers.
“Be ware what ye ask, what ye deem dear.”
“Be ware ye still want it when it’s here.”
As fingers cramp and her body slumps
She drops deadened blade to the dirt
Grabs a live fish with both of her hands
Hews and chews it thoroughly dead.
Dark blood drips from her teeth and her lips
Frightful sight of fear mixed with need
Not on her face, the ecstatic fisherwoman
But on the faces of her man, now drawn near.
“Be ware ye still want it when it's here”
Jaime’s voice faltered as he read aloud. “Bleak words. Hardly befitting…” He stared at her hard. “Though perhaps not. Something bothers you. What?” His eyes looked troubled.
Auda pushed her wax tablet at him.
Come with me.
Auda’s patched leather boots sank into the cemetery mud. It was a good day for the trip. The clouds formed a diaphanous curtain over the bright summer sun, tempering both heat and light. Pink and white almond blossoms sweetened the air, accented by the buzz of bumblebees and the twitter of robins and chaffinches. Auda let the folds of her wimple hang loose.
At the entrance to St. Paul’s, budding poplars encircled the rusted gates and a choke of weeds concealed the pathway. Normally a place for quiet contemplation, today the grounds seemed burdened, forgotten. Blackbirds preened on a bare tree, the only movement against the sky.
Auda threaded her way through the cemetery to a simple plot, marked with a desiccated vine and a thick wooden cross. Laying down her basket, she sat beside the marker.
“M-Ma,” she said, wincing at the thickness of her voice, and made the sign of the cross. She picked away the dead leaves from the creeper twisted around the grave marker.
Taking her tablet from her basket, she wrote into the wax.
I always wanted to know more about my mother.
Yesterday I learned she died so I could be born.
She didn’t add the question she asked herself—was her mother’s sacrifice worth it? A beautiful life given to a child born wrong. Unless Auda did something with the blood her mother had shed for her.
Jaime knelt beside her and took the tablet. Auda was surprised to see tears form in his eyes as he read.
Caressing the gravestone, he knit his brows. “You asked about my painting,” he said in a soft voice. “I came here from the north. I always wanted to travel away from the town I grew up in.” He handed her the tablet. “It was a small city, not far from Paris, just outside the abbey I ended up in.
Auda gasped. Jaime gave her his crooked smile.
“Surely you guessed I had a Church education. I was to be an illuminator. It’s a rich profession.”
His eyes took on a faraway look. “I was orphaned there. Bandits on the road overtook my parents’ cart. I was young, my brother younger yet.” His voice stayed flat. “They slit my parents’ throats with gentle ease, I’ll give them that. But the silver my parents had was meager, so they tied us, my brother and I, to the back of their horses and dragged us on the road near to a league. Lucky for me, I’d worn a leather jerkin that day. My brother’s clothes were softer, just a thin tunic that shredded against the rocks and dirt like ribbons.”
Auda stared without blinking.
“I think they tied his knots loosely, perhaps out of kindness to a young child, for his rope broke first. It was a fading humor for them anyway, watching us scream. When my rope snapped, a few hills past, they laughed as I ran away. My brother was just pulp and blood when I found him. The skin on his back and legs had rubbed away. He’d died with his eyes screwed shut.”
Auda let out a soft cry, staring at Jaime as though seeing him again for the first time. How did one so young put aside such cruelty and sadness? She knew the answer firsthand—you couldn’t.
“I wrapped him in my jerkin and carried him to the abbey. They took me in but said it was too dangerous to go back for my parents, that the bandits ruled the road. I dreamt that night that the buzzards picked their bones clean.” His lips were pressed flat.
“A caravan of Jews brought their bodies back a few days later, wanting them to have a proper burial.”
Auda breathed out. She laid a hand on his arm, feeling the warmth of his flesh under her cold fingers. He didn’t move, not to flinch, not to face her.
“We live our lives the best we can, the way we can. I believe that’s what God asks of us, whatever His damned Church says.” He closed his eyes and smoothed the lines on his forehead. “I came here searching for peace from my life.” He paused, opening his eyes, and reached for her cheek. “And I think I’ve found it.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Auda sat against the wall in Jaime’s room with a wax tablet balanced on her knees. She pulled at a lock of her hair and nibbled on the end, pondering the different verses she’d copied for the vicomtesse so far. There were many more to go through, and some essays too, written in Latin and French and other languages she didn’t understand. Even written Occitan was difficult for her to follow, took time for her to sound out the words, though she was getting better.
One essay in particular had caught her notice. It was a treatise that talked of how men were to speak to women, and women back to men. Without a doubt the author had been a nobleman. He’d written, “Through time there have been only four grades of love. First is the arousal of hope; then the offering of kisses; next come pleasure in intimate embrace; all leading to abandonment to each other, the body and the soul.”
A perfect philosophy—if only the author hadn’t written that such a love could only exist among the nobility, and even then only for the pleasure of men. “Women are base creatures,” the author continued, “but for noble blood, can be beaten and raped, and sometimes even then.”
She shuddered. There had to be a better way, where men like that had no power. Gripping her stylus, she wrote,
Quiet lass, silent lass
Laughs as dawn rides past.
Reach’s for his rays, bright ‘n’ gay,
No longer alone, the outcast.
Drivel. She knocked her head against the wall and concentrated on an imagination of her mother’s face. The plan to write new verse that sang of the true beauty and challenge of love had come easily enough. So why not the words?
Jaime, sitting at his easel by the window, gave her a kind look. “It’s not always so easy is it, finding the vein of thrill that lives inside you?” He’d been nothing but supportive since she’d told him her plan, agreeing that the vicomtesse might well be intrigued by a new type of song, smart and witty with something daring to say.
If only Auda knew what that was.
She breathed out through her nose, frustrated. That ‘vein of thrill,’ as he called it, was the force that drove him to sketch that first line on a blank canvas, to blend it into a curve and give it shape. Her vein had never been so dry. The words had always come before, insistent with something to say.
Jaime wiped his hands on an old cloth and picked up her tablet. He held it outside the window in the sunlight until the wax became soft. Smoothing the surface out with the edge of his knife, he knelt and handed it back. He placed a kiss on the edge of her temple, his touch light and warm.
Auda breathed in, smelling the familiar odors of charcoal and paint on his skin, the faint fragrance of the outdoors, the vestiges of watered beer on his lips. She turned her face toward him and he kissed her again, this time with more pressure. His hands cupped her face, then slid to her shoulders. She leant into his embrace, urgent. The arousal of hope, kisses and embrace indeed. How could she not want what came next—the abandonment to phy
sical love, though the thought seemed frightening and heady at once. She moved her lips against his, hungry and demanding. He could ask anything he wanted of her in this moment, take anything he dared. She would not refuse.
Then he broke away and leaned back. Eyes closed, he struggled to recover his breath. She gulped—had she done something wrong? But then he opened his eyes and gave her his crooked smile.
“So hard, sometimes, to stop. My apologies.” He bobbed his head even as she shook hers in protest. Then he winked. “To you and not your virtue.”
“Still maybe now you have some motivation.” He dropped a light kiss on her lips.
With a cat’s grace, he leapt back onto his stool and picked up his charcoal stub. Auda watched, amazed yet again at her fortune. Not even a year past, she was hiding in her father’s house, afraid to be seen by anyone who was not family and trading happiness for security in marriage to a stranger whose dreams, if he had them, were foreign to her. She hadn’t even known what true happiness was.
If all wishes were possible, this is what she would have chosen. This life with this man who saw her with more clarity than anyone else in the world, including her father.
And then it came to her. She picked up her stylus and began writing the words.
Auda met with the vicomtesse a few weeks later. Instead of the usual selection of folios and verse, she handed the lady a single sheet of paper. The page bore her father’s watermark, faint under her words. It had taken her a week to perfect the verse. Jaime had taken a week more, to add his own touch.
“We should make it something beautiful,” he’d said. “Something people will want to own.”
The result was a paper tract folded into three panels. The first panel bore the title of her verse, A Girl’s Lament, written in looping brown letters.
The lady gave her a quizzical look and opened the tract to the next panel. A racket of colors greeted her. Jaime had drawn small but precise figures across the panel, miniature animals—cats and chickens, goats and sheep frolicking among the words of her verse. The predators—jackals, lions, and a lone griffin—lurked on the borders, mostly inked in red and yellow, though some bore a hint of green. An intricate design adorned the back, a pattern of interlocking flowers worthy of the carpet pages in a noble’s Bible.
The lady fingered the page.
“What is this?” She scanned the panel. “Where did you find this? These drawings are fresh and on paper. Surely you did not create this?”
Auda steeled her shoulders. Anticipating the lady’s questions, she had written her thoughts on her wax tablet in preparation. For many hours she’d debated how to tell the vicomtesse what she proposed.
She passed the wax tablet to the lady.
The old verses never let women decide,
choose what to want.
They are always victims of man’s choice.
I wrote something different.
Bowing her head, she held her breath and waited for the vicomtesse to speak. Jaime was waiting outside the door—was he, too, anxious to hear the lady’s decision?
“Such a curious thing,” the lady said at last. Was this bemusement in her voice, or approval? “Who penned these drawings for you?”
Auda went to the doorway and rapped against the frame. Jaime walked inside from the corridor, and bowed.
The lady sat in her pillowed chair, drumming her thin fingers against the wooden desk. Her cheeks were pale and tight against the pull of her hair, gathered into a bun. “As usual,” she said to Auda without quieting her restless fingers, “you are full of surprises.” She turned her head a fraction toward the artist. “So then, tell me what you will of yourself.”
Jaime bowed again. “What would you have me say?”
“Have you a story?” she said.
“A story?”
“Yes, is that not what she does?” the vicomtesse said, jerking her head toward Auda. “Are you not the inspiration behind her verse? The hero with a tale? I’d first thought you were one like her, perhaps a deaf minstrel or a blind scribe, some sort of repentant sinner.”
His words were wry. “You credit me with much.”
“Not you,” she said. “Her.” She tapped a long, bejeweled finger against her nose. “Have you read this?” she asked, pushing the soft paper toward him. “Can you read?” She twitched her mouth. “Of course, you must. What do you think of it?”
Jaime rocked on his feet, his gaze flickering from the page to the vicomtesse. “I think…well, I think it’s beautiful.”
The lady flattened her lips and tapped her fingers in a staccato beat against the table.
She gestured at Auda.
“Well, girl. What is this mystery you’ve brought before me?”
Auda met the lady’s gaze. She pulled a sheet of paper and a charcoal stub from her basket and walked toward the pair on shaky legs.
Jaime bowed and took the items from Auda. Turning to the lady, he said, “Domna, if you would propose a scene…”
“What?”
“A person or a place.”
The lady bit her upper lip. Her eyes darted from side to side and her fingers resumed drumming. The skin around her eyes tightened when she spoke.
“A girl,” she said at last. “Young. Scared. Commanded to marry a man much older than she.”
Jaime gripped the charcoal. His fingers moved across the page, swift lines creating a simple scene. When he was done, he put the stub down and turned the drawing around for the vicomtesse.
He had sketched a child clad in a jeweled dress, fragile like a costly figurine. There were smudges on the girl’s face and hands and a skinned knee poked out from the laced hem of her dress. The girl’s eyes were turned down but her lips were firm and thin. Behind her lay a discarded doll; behind it stood a stern lady in a gown that matched the girl’s dirtied dress.
The lady caressed the edge of the paper for a moment.
“Yes,” she said in a trembling voice. She turned to Auda and nodded, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “Yes, I see. You can tell a story worth hearing, I’m sure. Be certain that you do.” She held onto the tract with a firm grip.
Auda bowed as low as she could, so the vicomtesse would not see the tears of joy that pricked in her eyes.
The next day, the vicomtesse bade her to buy more paper from her father and scribe two dozen copies of the verse, simply, without illustration. The following week, the lady summoned Auda back to another Court of Love.
Auda stood again in a corner of the solar, hidden from all but still able to see everyone’s face. Trembling, she wiped her clammy palms against her linen dress and hid them in the pleats of the tan cloth. The ladies ambled in, their voices loud with chatter about family and matters of the fair. As before, they were dressed in silken gowns and bright jewels, though Auda paid scant attention to the details. The room seemed foreign today, the ladies mingled in slow movement, gossiping without purpose. She chafed to move on, anxious and expectant. Finally the vicomtesse convened her court.
“Today, ladies,” she said, “I have a different treasure to share with you, a new type of verse. The less I say about it the better. Let us see what you think.” Opening the plain brown box before her, she unfolded a layer of cloth and drew out the paper tract. She held the front up to the women, who exclaimed their appreciation of the vivid illumination.
“Such colors! What is it?”
Auda blinked to see better. In her dreams she could never have imagined such a thrill, even if the rich ladies clustered together in the solar knew nothing of the story’s author. Was this how learned men felt, releasing their writing into the world? Did they wonder who would read their words, what places their works would reach?
A nervous shiver ran down her spine, her gaze darting between the ladies. The vicomtesse signaled to the minstrel.
Auda felt another thrill of worry. What if the minstrel fouled her words? He seemed so young.
But he nodded with confidence and bowed, and picked up his fiddle.
He started with a simple tune, not one Auda had heard still merry and light. When he sang, his voice bore an edge of mischief.
Here’s the tale of sweet Marg’ry
Who all day works in the fields.
She’s bosoms like pears on a tree,
And a bottom fit to be teased.
A de-vour-esse to be sure
With the sweet tongue of a lamb
The scent of her ’ginity sears,
Calls far ‘n’ wide to come near.
White knight on white horse approaches
“Come lass, the tall grass invites.
A gift for you’s a gift for me,
My girl, lay with me, and see.”
A priest on the road halts their talk,
Says, “Girl, sweet-as-Mary, so pure.”
“List’n to me, we’ll pray together,
Right here, let’s kneel in the heather.”
Just then the Count of the land chances by
His lance firm at the ready.
“She’s my chatt’l, my field to plough
Bear me sons, girl, let us start now.”
“Gallant sirs,” the poor lady says
“Your suits all have much merit.
Yet I am one, you are three,
I can’t split ’mong you all, you see.”
Duel of arms! Pray’r to God! B’gone curse!
They clamor at once. She smiles.
“Nay, wait, it is not meet,” says she
“To fight, pray or rape for me.”
“Let wit be our guide, good sirs,
Tell your tales one after ‘nother
We’ll see who’s fit for the apple
The lion, griffin, or jackal.”
The minstrel ran through the melody once more with quick fingers, then bowed. Auda blinked, her eyes dry. She’d forgotten to look around. Her verse had sounded so real, just like all the others. And yet, what would everyone think? What did the lady think? If the women hated the verse, dismissed it as drivel, would the lady take her fury out on Auda?
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