The Stars and the Cookie Jar

The Heaven Tree

[novella in progress]

   Sanne smiled, small teeth with the light gone through them like quartz. Though she was moon-rounded with the child struggling to leave her, her cheekbones stood sharp as slaughter knives. Her hair was darkened honey-dense with sweat, and one corner of her mouth was red and tattered where she had bitten, but she smiled.
   "Ah, come on, Jehanne, this is how a lady dies!"
   "Not you," she said, or maybe it was "not me." She crossed herself, blood-scent and anguish making her stupid.
   "Two days," said someone near, crowding close enough in the close room to stir Jehanne's wild hair. She had come down from the flock, in her brother's breeches, at a run; and it was like this. She went toward the bed, mud-caulked bare feet shuffling in the rushes, because that was where Sanne was.
   "Girl, you reek of the sheep!" Sanne shook her head, mumming exhaustion, but only once. Her cheek went down then against Jehanne's brown-homespun breast, her eyes closed and the lids showed blue. "Tell me how it is with you."
   Jehanne cleared her throat, burning as if Sanne's screams had swarmed inside it. "It's well with me," she lied. "The sheep. The trees. The grass."
   "Do you still hear...?" Sanne asked.
   Hare under fox's eyes, Jehanne spun her gaze around the room. Susanne's mother's tiring-woman and Jehanne's mother's carding-girl were there, bundling up the bloody linen, but pity or decency made them turn away.
   "Yes. Yes, sometimes. But I never understand."
   "Tell me. Maybe I will." A pain-wrecked voice and half-dead eyes and Sanne might have spoken of this year's apples.
   "A war. a terrible killing. A king who's only a boy." Jehanne's fingers slipped in Sanne's hair. "Things I don't understand."
   Sanne was quiet a long moment, her soundless mouth slack. If the pains had taken her, Jehanne could not tell from seeing; her arm nor hand grasped tighter at Jehanne's back.
   "A fire!" it came suddenly, with the last of her voice, with the last of her. "Ah, my love, a fire! Don't go near!"

   It was raw spring, and rain rattled and sluiced down the steep roof of the Chandeleurs' barn, sneaking through in places to drip into stalls and mangers. In the biggest box in the whole big barn, the one kept for the kind of horse not seen these fifty years, Susanne was hiding from an unshelled peck of lentils, and Jehanne, soaked and lanolin-reeking, nursed a nose that dripped like the eaves.
   "What's the time?"
   "Tierce, I think. I can't hear the bells, for this bloody rain, but it was bright when I came down here."
   "I've wasted the morning," Sanne pronounced, with only half an elbow's effort at getting out of the straw. By her hand was a token piece of linen, lazily broidered, soaking up dirtied drops from the roof. "Waiting for you, as usual. You're slower than your father's sheep."
   "Smarter, anyway. See? I come in from the wet."
   "Virgin's Mercy, smarter than a sheep!" Sanne laughed. With Jehanne's knee and forearm as a ladder she stood up, and shook straw-dust from her skirts. She spoke with some of the laugh still in her voice: "Look at this."
   In the strawstack, when Sanne kicked the loose top layer aside, was a slender bundle of sacking. She stooped to pull the coarse cloth away, smiling coy and cunning as though she revealed a feast to a beggar, the apple to Eve. Jehanne saw something flash, time-dulled but still too bright and fine for this place; uppermost in the nest of straw, the cross of a hilt, silver showing bright and eaten-black.
   "Sanne, where did you get that thing? It's tall as you are!"
   Susanne shook off the last folds of sacking, but could not lift the sword to swing it, even two-handed. It was no arming knife but a real war sword, meant for slashing and striking from horseback. "It was my great-grandfather's. You try, you're stronger than me."
   Jehanne tried her grip, pulled, and brought the blade up to guard, not too badly.
   "Lifting the spring lambs," Sanne observed, gravely. "Every warrior in the king's court does it."
   "There is no king." Jehanne's mouth was dry, from straw-dust, from something. The sword dropped, she felt it, and the hilts crashed onto her bare feet, so that her eyes watered. Sanne jumped out of the way, but what she shouted was lost. Jehanne stumbled, or there was a tilt in the world. She fell half on top of Sanne, gasping, sick.
   "Jehanne!"
   "I hear, I see, I can't --"
   "Jehanne, please. Please. Come back here, to me, please..."
   The rain had gone, and Sanne's wheat-sheaf hair was dull in the dark. Jehanne sat up, from Sanne's shoulder, and blinked and touched her ears. Sanne's blue fulled-wool skirt slid from Jehanne's back.
   "Did you," she started, and did not need to finish it. "I heard," she tried again. "I heard a voice."
   Sanne waited, one hand in Jehanne's hair, the other pressed knuckle to teeth.
   "Not in my head," Jehanne went on, a note of protest rising. "Not saying mad things."
   "Are you all right?"
   "I didn't fall off my horse, Sanne, I heard a voice!"
   "I believe you."
   "You believe I believe me!"
   "No." Sanne frowned. "I saw what happened to you. Do I have to say it twice?"
   Jehanne sobered. "It wasn't a big voice I heard. A girl's, and young. Not like -- the Lord or the Virgin..."
   "I don't think they speak to farm people." 
   "Who, then? She said... about a road in front of me, and the land, blood and the land. Who'd -- talk -- to me?"
   "The gods spoke to us, once."
   "Sanne," Jehanne said doubtfully, "Is this something you got from reading?"
   She shook her head. "Jehanne, your nose is bleeding."
   Jehanne blotted a sleeve across her upper lip, and Susanne pretended to watch the swallows in the roof, until neither could hold longer beneath the other's quiet.
  "It's nothing," said Sanne. "Something my grandmother told me -- or someone -- something I remember. That the gods talked, when the land was ours, when we had kings..."

   The grave was sinking a little now, into the ground of the north rye field. Someone had tied a handful of ribbons in the low branches of the beech that shaded it, but no one stood long there if they could help it; the place was lonely, wolves might roam down from the wood, and Susanne the miller's wife had died before the priest.
   Jehanne's father's dogs kept the flock well enough in the beech grove. She had time, all the time there was between here and sunset, to stand and watch the fading ribbons fly in the fading light.
   "I saw Rosbif and Gambon minding the sheep," came a voice, and Jehanne looked straight up, as if someone might drop from the branches. "I thought you might be here."
   "Durand?" She faced him. "Who's minding the chandlery?"
   "Let the river mind it." Durand was three years older and when he shrugged, he looked like the Fool King from a minstrel's wagon. Very tall, as Sanne had been tall, and very yellow, face and hair; this year's shirt was green, with dark-red points, and did not suit him. "They are dancing tonight at the Lady's Tree. You should come."
   "I've no wish to dance," Jehanne said, and studied her fingernails.
   "You're still wearing that black shirt for my sister." Durand frowned. "If you can wear hose like a boy, and a knife in your belt, you can come and dance at the Tree."
   "The clothes are for climbing, and the knife is for wolves," she replied. "Pere Giraud sees me twice a day, and thrice on Sundays, and he says nothing to me."
   "You wear skirts on Sunday, and if you're out for wolves, what you want is a bow."
   "My father's bow is half of me tall. I suppose you would follow me around and draw it?"
   "I would follow you." And Durand shrugged. "Come to the Tree, Jehanne."
   "Dur--"
   "There are things," he got out, "things to say -- no! It's not like that! It's not for my sake at all." He turned the color of the sinking sun at his back, and drew away from Jehanne and the grave. "Only, I would rather half the village was asleep and the other half dancing drunk, when I say them. That way, they never were said."
   He bowed. He had never done that before. Then he stooped and touched the damp sunken ground, and walked away down the hill.

   He waited at the edge of the beech grove, though the bonfires burned much farther up in the darkness. It was some hours dark, and Jehanne had not come. He thought he would go and drink at the Tree, and jump the fire if wine made him bold; he was still thinking, of whether there would be better wine than ale, when he saw someone running up the hill. A small figure, hobbled somehow but still going a very fine sprint: the tanner’s boy, maybe. Then the night resolved itself around the moving darkness, and Durand knew her.
   "Jehanne!"
   "Help," she got out, and "they’ll kill me!" Her skirts tangled around her knees and she slipped, and she did not put her hands down fast enough for the fall.
   Durand caught her. She looked, even in the wavering light from up the hill, as though they had gotten halfway through killing her as it was. D’Arq the watchman had never been one to beat his daughters, but someone had caught a fist on her lip, and opened a cut that poured blood down her brow. Her dark hair was half in, half falling from a girl’s white cap, and plain skirts were done up to the points of the black shirt cut for a boy; she was crying, but without any sobs, silent and showing her teeth.
   "God’s Blood, Jehanne!"
   "Jean," she said, "and Etien and Father. Something happened at home – I fell down, I –" Jehanne stopped. "I did something to frighten them. I ran but Father sent them – he told them – a witch – said not to come back until they’d drowned me!"
   "Your brothers are the night watch," Durand half laughed. "What could you do to scare them?"
   When Jehanne would not answer, horror smudged out the moment’s humor in him.
   "Where are your brothers?" He asked softly, one hand on his knife.
   Jehanne blinked. "I knocked them down."
   Durand exhaled, thoughts of wardens and cudgels no longer squeezing his breath. He would have laughed again, if her forehead did not bleed like that.
   "I didn’t know what to do," she said, steadier. "I came here."
   "Come to the Tree." Durand helped her to her feet.
   "I am not dancing!"
   "No," he agreed, "but nobody ever tried to kill a girl under the Lady’s Tree."

   Domremy had its own church with a bell, maybe, but anyone with a desire, a pain, a hunger was keeping watch at the fire by the Tree. It was the grandmother of the whole wood, and for three hundred years it had been here; broad and tall before the kings had failed. One more couple walking here was nothing to notice, and whatever they said to one another was lost in the crackle of flames and the skirling of rough pipes. Jehanne had taken off her cap and ruined the linen mopping at her face, and was not too startling now, by firelight. Durand kept a hand on her elbow, and she glared at him, but she was shaking still.
   "Tell what happened," he insisted, not loudly.
   "I do not remember."
   "Your father set two grown men on you." Durand paused, speech and walking. "Did he – did they – find something out about you?"
    Jehanne winced. "What could…?"
   "I am no idiot." Durand half smiled, to take the edge off it. "You were – the sun and the moon to my sister."
   Jehanne looked away, moving so sharply that elf-locks of her hair flew upward.
   "Jehanne?"
   "It was nothing about that." She cleared her throat. "I only remember bringing the pitcher to Father, and falling down. I have heard it happens to people, sometimes…"
   "Sanne told me," Durand said. "About the voice."
   "What?!"
   "It was because of that, I asked you to meet me here."
   "Please. Please, I’m not a witch," Jehanne whispered, pulling her arm from his.
   "If you were, you’d have put a curse on your brothers before they did that." Flatly Durand went on, "she told me last winter, when – when it went ill with her, from the child, and she could do nothing with the daylight but read or spin. She found something, in a book."
He moved his hand in toward his own chest, knocking her sleeve away from her wrist. There was a bruise she had not noticed or thought of yet.
   "Was it because your voice spoke to you, someone did that?"
   Jehanne bit her tongue.
   "What does it say?"
   "She says…" Jehanne faltered. They were far enough from the firelight now that every glint in the darkness seemed the eye of a wolf. "She said, tonight, to go to Chinon, and speak to the King, and with the King’s army drive the English back to the sea." She looked up at him, wincing a little, and fearful. "I don’t even know what the sea looks like, Durand. She called… the King…"
   "He’s called the Dauphin," Durand answered. "You really do hear these things, then?"
   "Yes. Not like dreams. Not in my head. Just talking, like I hear you talking now."
   "And now your father’s heard you talking to it."
   "She."
   Durand shrugged. "No wonder he thinks you’re a witch. Talking away to your familiar."
   Jehanne flinched.
   "Wanted to show you," he said, "what my sister found." From between jerkin and shirt he pulled something hand-small, and brown, and it took Jehanne a moment to recognize that it was bound paper, a book. Durand opened it, to a page where someone had laid a beech leaf, and held it out. "She meant, I know, to show it to you. To help."
   "I can’t read. Father can a little…" Jehanne glanced back through the trees, down the path to the village, and shivered.
   "It says, a girl alone out of Lorraine, with a sword and a banner will save France." Durand closed the book, to have something to look at besides Jehanne’s eyes. "My sister spoke to me as if it was you."
   "What?"
   "Your voice-thing. She believed you."
   Jehanne nodded.
   "She was crazy," Durand said. He watched Jehanne flinch. "But I could always tell when she lied. She wasn’t lying."
   "You’re helping me because of Sanne." She felt as slow in the head as the dancers would in the morning.
   "Maybe. Sort of." He put the book between his wax-spattered leather jerkin and his shirt. "Because you need help."
   "I’m not that girl, I don’t have a banner, I don’t have a sword –"
   "We’ve a sword you can borrow," he said, as if she had come over the way to ask for a bread knife.

   "I said I could ride! Not ride that!" Jehanne stared up at the horse. Its dark eye in the torchlight looked baleful, and it was full an arm’s height above her head. Durand’s gelding – the chandlery’s gelding – stood still and seemed like a mountain, if mountains flicked disdainful tails. Jehanne, muffled in one of Sanne’s cloaks, stepped back far enough to jostle Durand.
   "Go on. Get up," he pushed her, hoisting her by waist and elbow toward the saddle.
   "I’ll be killed!"
   "He won’t hurt you. And he knows the road to Chinon."
   Jehanne wrenched her shoulders, turning to him; her hands were on the pommel and a precarious strand of mane, and her near foot scrabbled for the stirrup. "Chinon!"
   "Where did you think you were going, the Bell and Hare up the way?"
   "To the Dauphin," Jehanne replied, falling back from the horse when her fingers went cold. Durand grimaced and half-hauled her up again.
   "The Dauphin is in Chinon."
   "It’s nine hundred leagues!"
   "Then your brothers won’t find you and drown you."
   "Alone." She would have fled, or fallen. Instead she was up, somehow, her bare feet curling against the horse’s warm sides until she remembered the stirrups. "Durand? I can’t."
   He tossed the reins up to her. "Stay here then. Get married. Get children. Die."
   Jehanne closed her eyes, tightly enough to see lightning. "The voice said, I have to go to the Dauphin. If that’s… so far, then it is."
   "Think of us," Durand said. He slapped the horse’s flank, so that in a moment’s startling speed the world was her hands and the reins and the hard white road. If she had wished to, she could not have looked back.

So, shall I finish that one, then? Not that everyone and their trained monkey doesn't know the Joan of Arc story. But still. Do cast your vote on this particular extended hallucination.