Marie sees again the Ladies’ Army pouring down a hillside in the Byzantine Empire, riding astride unwomanly, shouting, swords drawn, their hair loosed and flying behind them, all in the white and red tunics, ululating, fearsome.
The queen told Marie to have faith, in time Marie would make a rather good nun. Anyone with eyes could see she had always been meant for holy virginity.
Marie has a swift vision of herself as a tiny figure, climbing the walls; oh someday she will find her way over the queen’s rampart, someday she will be inside, out of the wind. Eleanor will be a model, then, Marie thinks, for her own purpose on the earth, at this abbey she hates so much. She will build around herself walls of wealth and friends and good clear reputation, she will make her frail sisters safe within. Marie will mold herself in the queen’s form, she thinks.
Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs.
All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.
Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not.
And female bodies are not as strong in muscle; though it must be said there is no greater strength than the power in their wombs to create life.
All the people are like grass, the subprioress says suddenly, and their glory is the glory of the field; the grass withers, the flowers fall, but the Word lasts eternal.
And later, as the bells for Matins sounded in the dark and she walked back in the darkness as though blind, she wondered if in fact this has been the closest she had been to God – not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil – but the nothing at the center of the self.
Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals. Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god. News.
She could give up the burn of singular love inside her and turn into a larger love, she could build around the other women an abbet of the spirit to protect them from cold and wet... she would build an invisible abbey made our of her own self.
She gorges on it... she understands that she is hungry for more.
Of her own mind and hands she has shifted the world.
It is also true that she is sleepless because the curse of Eve has been removing itself from her body in flames that cook Marie from the inside out.
As she sometimes does when she rides out to the abbey’s estates, she leans forward against the horn of her pommel, and lets the motion of the horse’s gait build against her until she gasps and something in her breaks.
Collapse is the constant state of humanity, she tells herself; the story of the flood and the great ark that saved the creatures two by two is only the first refrain of a song that is to be sung over and over, the earth’s gradual and repeated diminishment, civilization foundering to dust, until the final death of the children of Eve with the apocalypse, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven bowls.
Time compresses, springs forward.
Its imagination had been limited by the closeness of the walls of the room, the smallest tooth of sky seen through the window, the stifling inside air, the worms fed it one by one out of the hand of the queen.
Please. Prayer is lovely. She herself prays every day. But for such a threat, Marie will need more powerful weapons than prayer. Perhaps she doesn’t know this, having been removed from the world these many years, but to engage in war with the world, one needs the world’s weapons.
She has known prayer in her life, but before tonight it has been prayer like sending a coin with a wish into a body of water, it was hope dispersed vaguely outward. She sent it not toward the stern trinity imposed upon her, but toward the Virgin Mother who wore her own mother’s face. Even in prayer she was rebelling.
There Marie and Ursule sat at the foot of the trees, letting their thoughts dissolve to make themselves more like the roots of the trees they sat upon and erase some of what was human in them.