The Gargoyle

  I’M SURE IT’LL BE FINE.

  “I really am touched by your concern,” she added, “but you needn’t be worried.”

  She headed out into the ocean, calmly. The moon cast a splintered glow over the waves. She did not pause, nor shiver, nor splash, nor scoop up water to smooth over her stomach to acclimate to the cold. No, she just walked out until she was up to her chest and then leaned forward to slide THERE SHE GOES into the water.

  Down the beach, I heard some of the teenagers laughing about the fact that anyone was stupid enough to go swimming at this VERY COLD time of year. I watched the small wake that formed behind her as she headed away from me, but parallel to the shore. At least she was keeping her promise not to head into deeper water. I followed her progress, hobbling along the shore to keep abreast, although I didn’t know what I could do if she encountered trouble in any case. SAY “BYE BYE.” Yell to the teenagers, I supposed; since my accident there was no chance that my body could handle the chill of a winter ocean.

  She cut the surface smoothly; it was apparent that she was good at this and, despite her smoking, her body was strong from the physical labor of carving. Occasionally she would look towards the shore, towards me. I thought I saw her smile, but she was too far out for me to know for sure. I nervously clutched at my angel coin necklace until I saw her turn around and start back to where she had entered the water.

  When she started returning to the shore—to my relief, only a few minutes after leaving it—she exited the water the same way that she went in. She did not rush out, or shake her body to dispel the wet. She just calmly emerged and walked to me, shivering from the night chill, although less than I would have imagined.

  “Do you know what the best part of that swim was?”

  “No.”

  “Knowing that you were on the shore waiting for me.” She used a towel to squeeze the water from her hair—quite a job, I’ll tell you—before she put back on the clothes that I was anxiously thrusting at her, lit a cigarette, and said it was time to tell me more of our story.

  Each time she paused, perhaps to add a bit of drama to the telling, I was worried it signaled the delayed onset of hypothermia.

  XV.

  Now that you had come out of the worst of it, your condition was improving every day. There was still much healing that lay ahead, but I no longer worried about you slipping away each time I left the room.

  In the beginning, you said that you didn’t want to talk about your life. I was unsure if this was because you were ashamed of all your years as a mercenary, or if that final battle was simply too painful to remember. But since your life was not to be discussed, we talked about mine instead. You seemed fascinated by it, by me, which I couldn’t quite fathom. What could possibly be interesting about life in the monastery? But your eyes lit up when I told you about my scriptorium duties, and you excitedly asked for your clothes. I retrieved them from the cupboard where we’d stored them. Even though they were mostly in tatters, the nuns couldn’t bring themselves to throw out something that didn’t belong to them.

  The arrow had cut through the breast of your habergeon and much of the material around it was burnt away, but I could feel something heavy and rectangular in the inside pocket. You pulled out this item, which was wrapped in cloth. The broken shaft was still embedded in its front, with the arrow’s tip just barely emerging from the back. You turned the object over in your hands a few times, amazed that this accidental shield had prevented the arrow from entering more deeply into your chest. After you pulled the arrowhead out, you pressed it into my palm and told me to do with it as I pleased.

  I did not even have to think on the matter; I said instantly that I knew what I would do with it.

  “And what is that?”

  “I will return it to you,” I answered, “after I have asked Father Sunder to bless it. Then your chest can accept it as protection rather than an assault.”

  “I look forward to that day,” you said as you handed over the parcel. “I got this from a dead man.”

  I unwrapped it, revealing a hand-copied book with scorched edges that left charcoal on my fingertips. How, I wondered, could the book have remained undevoured by the flames?

  I held it against your chest, and it lined up perfectly with your burns. The patch of unburnt skin was exactly where the book had been pinned to you by the arrow, and this also explained the small cut in the middle of that unburned rectangle.

  I flipped through the book, noticing that the cut on the pages became smaller the deeper I went, and I asked you about the dead man. You answered, “We had two Italians in our ranks. One was killed in battle, a good man named Niccolò. The book was his.”

  It was not uncommon for the condotta to hire foreigners, provided they had special skills. Your mercenary troop had taken on Italian bowmen and that is, in fact, how the troop began calling itself a condotta in the first place; it was the Italian word for mercenary troop, and the soldiers just liked the way it sounded.

  The Italians were among the best crossbowmen you’d ever seen, and they worked well with you and Brandeis. You couldn’t speak much of their language, but both Benedetto—that was the other Italian—and Niccolò were able to struggle through in German, and during your years together, you came to respect each other as archers and as men. You trusted each other enough even to talk about the fact that you’d all grown weary of battle.

  When Niccolò died, Benedetto decided that he’d had enough. Since he risked death every day on the battlefield, he might just as well risk it in an escape. The fear of being chased down by a team of trackers was finally outweighed by the fear of remaining. Rather than simply disappear without a word, Benedetto offered you and Brandeis the opportunity to join him.

  You considered the idea, but in the end decided against it. Herwald might allow one foreigner to disappear, but if three crossbowmen vanished at the same time, the retribution would be inevitable and gruesome. But, more important, neither you nor Brandeis could make the same claim as Benedetto. The truth was that you were still more afraid of your own troop than of the enemy. Still, you both admired Benedetto and felt compelled to help him, partially out of friendship and partially for the vicarious thrill.

  Benedetto felt it only proper to take whatever he could to Niccolò’s wife and two young boys in Firenze. “The sons should have something that belonged to their father when they grow up.” So, in the dark of night, the three of you laid out the dead man’s effects and went through them. There was a bag of coins, his clothing, his boots, a book, and his crossbow. Benedetto picked the coins, so that he could pass along these items of value to the wife, and the crossbow, which he thought would make a fitting gift for the sons of a warrior.

  Although you really had no need for a book, you pressed some money into Benedetto’s hand to pay for it. “With the father gone, the family will need this more than words.”

  Benedetto agreed, saying that he didn’t know why his friend had a book in the first place. “Apparently, it was written by a great poet of Firenze, but I always kidded Niccolò about it. What do men like us need with poetry?”

  The following morning, you and Brandeis had to pretend that you were as surprised as anyone that Benedetto had fled. Kuonrat the Ambitious was livid and demanded that a large expedition be immediately dispatched to “find and kill the traitor!” Herwald was more reasonable. He decided that only a small tracking crew would be sent after Benedetto, and only for a short time.

  Herwald reasoned, “The Italian will return to his home country. Let him go. He is not German; he is not one of us. But do not think this represents a shift in policy. If a fellow German runs, we will not stop until he is found and killed. Even if it takes years.”

  This speech appeased the troop, most of whom had never liked the foreigners in their midst. For them, it was enough that both Italians were gone, however it had happened. Kuonrat the Ambitious remained angered at Benedetto’s disappearance, but the renewed threat of death to German deserters b
rought a smile to his face. Still, he recognized this was the perfect opportunity to begin a campaign of whispered slander. “The old man Herwald is turning soft.”

  It was at this point that you abruptly stopped telling the story, and looked down at the floor of the Engelthal infirmary so bashfully that I had to ask what was wrong.

  “This book,” you said, “there’s something strange about it. When I first saw it, it seemed to call to me. As if it wanted me to take it.”

  “That’s not so odd. I feel that way about books all the time.”

  “But Sister Marianne,” you confessed, “I cannot read.”

  I don’t know why you would’ve thought that I expected you to be able to. I was well aware that my ability to read was the exception, not the rule. If you hadn’t taken the book, I pointed out, the arrow would have pierced your heart and killed you. “Surely you have found more value in this book,” I said, “than any that I will ever read.”

  You knew, or at least it was your best guess, that the book was in Italian rather than German. I confirmed the fact, but added that I could translate it. You were suitably impressed, because you didn’t know anyone who could read one language, much less two. I promised that I would take a closer look at it, back in my cell, and would let you know what it was about. This pleased you, but you still asked for one more favor.

  “Please pray for the soul of my dead friend Niccolò, and for his wife and children. And for Brandeis. I would do it myself, but my prayers are not worth as much as yours.”

  I assured you that everyone’s prayers were worthy, if spoken with a sincere heart, but that I would certainly do as you’d requested.

  That very evening, I commenced upon a translation. The book had an enormous amount of religious imagery in it, so Paolo’s prayer book was a great help, but it seemed to be written in a rough vernacular, which I found quite challenging. It was apparent from the start that the writing was unlike anything I’d ever read. This was yet another book best kept secreted away from the eyes of the other nuns. Inferno, the cover proclaimed, by Dante Alighieri.

  While it was clear that this Dante was a deeply religious man, it was equally clear that he had little regard for the Church’s daily practices. I gasped when I came to the section of Hell that housed heretical popes. One of the popes was Boniface, who’d served during my lifetime. Gertrud and even Mother Christina had spoken highly of him.

  By night I furiously translated, and by day I tended you. When the nun-nurses stepped out for their prayers, I’d read you what I had finished the night before. It felt as if we were sharing something wicked, but wonderfully wicked. The story took each of us to a different place. The rough language and the harsh imagery brought me towards your world, but the religious ideas brought you towards my life of spirituality. Somehow we met in the middle.

  I’d always been taught that I would find God all around me, in every aspect of creation, but I never really did. I was told that if I was not finding God, I needed to pray for more guidance, or to make myself more pure so that He would give Himself to me. So imagine my surprise when I began to achieve a deeper understanding of the Divine through the voice of Dante and, after a lifetime of immersing myself in the words of Heaven, I finally grasped God only after being given a vision of Hell.

  Our moments alone were never long enough. The other sisters would return and we would have to turn our conversation to things other than the book. Over time you softened your original resolve not to discuss your life in the condotta. I found everything you told me fascinating, including how you became a mercenary in the first place.

  As a child, you had always assumed that you’d follow your father into the masons’ guild. You were training under him and your life seemed set until your early teens, when your father had a fatal seizure while moving stone, and your mother died shortly afterward, of a disease that no one could name, much less treat.

  Just like that, you went from being the son of a good family to being an orphan. The city appropriated your home and, as you had no relatives, you taught yourself to live on the streets. Petty thievery didn’t seem like much of a sin when it was your only option.

  One day you tried to steal some coins from the purse of Herwald, who was in town for supplies. When he caught you, he was more impressed with your nerve than displeased with your offense. He offered you a position in his troop, and you could see no reason not to accept it. It offered excitement and, simply put, you couldn’t imagine anything better coming along.

  The choice to enter the condotta was not a particularly bad one, or so it seemed. The power struggle between the pope and Emperor Louis left princes all over the country in disarray. When the German military forces became exhausted, the nobility started to assemble private armies. The situation was so complicated that they often didn’t know their allies from their enemies and the only thing certain was that there was always work for a mercenary troop. When I asked with whom you sided—Pope John or the Emperor—you answered that as soon as a man has chosen a side in war, he’s already picked the wrong one. “All history is just one man trying to take something away from another man, and usually it doesn’t really belong to either of them.”

  This attitude explained how you managed to go from day to day with a crossbow in your hands. It was simply a matter of practicality. I’d never heard anyone speak as plainly as you did, not even the parchmenter, and I’d certainly never had anyone speak to me the way you did. I hated the fact that it excited me, but it did. It had always comforted me to imagine soldiers as unthinking killers and nothing more, but you disproved that. I was probably a bit of a snob after spending my life in books, but I had to admit there was much you knew that I did not.

  The flesh across your chest was tightening as it healed. You instructed me to cut it open so that it could expand. I didn’t want to, and it was painful for me to see your agony coming from a knife in my hands. It was different from when I had cut away the bad flesh because, in those first days, I had still been able to divorce myself from my emotions.

  But you insisted. You said that you could feel that the treatment was necessary, you could feel it in the way it hurt to lift your arms. So every few days you’d wedge a knot of fabric into your mouth and I’d cut new stripes across your chest to ease the tightening. It was horrible and I had to avert my eyes, but there was still the sound of your muffled screams. You have no idea how much I admired your courage. The treatment seemed to work: eventually, you were able to leave the infirmary bed for short walks, and sometimes our hands accidentally touched.

  The inevitable rumors started to pass through Engelthal. The nurses, upon returning from prayers, had interrupted the story of Inferno enough times to know that we were sharing some kind of secret. And no one could miss that there was something more than the relationship between nurse and patient in the way we looked at each other. The time we spent together could no longer be explained away as simple medical treatment.

  I was certain that Gertrud and Agletrudis were behind the stories. “The mercenary is corrupting our sweet Sister Marianne.” I suppose this was even true, because I was learning it was possible to love more than just God. In fact, I was learning that it was better to love more than just God.

  It had to happen. Mother Christina decided to remove you, but because you had not yet fully healed, she was sending you to stay with Father Sunder and Brother Heinrich. “To ease your transition back into the world,” she said. “The arrangements have already been made.”

  There was nothing for me to say, as I was pledged for all my life to serve my prioress. So you gathered your few items and thanked us all, the other nun-nurses as much as me, for our kind ministrations. Your farewell was so businesslike that it hurt, but I suppose the best warriors know which battles not to fight. Just like that, you were taken out of my life and put into the care of others. I told myself that it was for the best, and I was even determined to make myself believe it.

  It was time to move on. God had not bestowed my l
iterary gifts to enable me to translate blasphemous Italian poets, so I locked Inferno away in my trunk. I told myself that my feelings for you were nothing more than a test, so that I might overcome my earthly longings and thus serve God better. I attended all my prayers and worked late each night at the scriptorium, concentrating on Die Gertrud Bibel. Gertrud had started to design a cover for the book and occasionally wondered aloud whether jewels were too much. I assured her that nothing was too extravagant in honoring the Lord.

  This lasted for a week, and then it struck me. I couldn’t keep Inferno locked away in my trunk, because it was not actually mine. It was only proper that I return it to you. Just as the nuns didn’t have the right to destroy your clothing, neither could I keep your book. This would be a kind of thievery, and I knew that the Lord did not wish that I be a thief.

  I decided to sneak a visit to Father Sunder, and why should I not? I’d been making midnight visits to him all my life, so why should things be any different because you were there? If I avoided my regular habits I’d be allowing your presence to alter my routine—which was exactly what the prioress was trying to prevent. So there it was. The only way to keep you from influencing my life was to sneak a visit to the house where you were staying.

  Father Sunder answered the door and nodded to the corner where you were sitting. “This one,” he said, “has spent the week trying not to mention your name.”

  There was more color in your cheeks than when I’d last seen you, and when you stood I could see that your upper body swung more freely. Soon you’d be well enough to leave, I thought, and in that instant, my heart almost stopped. I turned to Father Sunder and asked in a panic, “What am I going to do?”

  He looked over at Brother Heinrich and something passed between them, a look or a memory, before he turned his attention to me and said with that sweet voice, “Sister Marianne. You’re going to leave Engelthal, of course.”