The Gargoyle (54 page)

Marianne Engel was released on Christmas Eve. Honestly, the doctors should have held her longer, but they discharged her in consideration of the date. When we got home, she wanted to eat marzipan and nothing else, but I persuaded her to eat some mandarin oranges as well. I hauled my television and video player from the belfry into her bedroom and we watched
It’s a Wonderful Life,
because that’s what normal people do on Christmas Eve. After it ended, she insisted that I stay in her bed, because she wanted to wake into Christmas Day with me at her side.

I lay in that bed with my thick pressure suit pressed up against her thin nakedness, aware that I should have been enjoying our closeness. But I wasn’t; I was contemplating why her body affected me as powerfully as it did. I had spent much of my adult life in the company of naked women—it had been my job during the day, and my hobby at night—but with Marianne Engel it had always seemed different. It
was
different.

There are many possible explanations for my discomfort. Perhaps her body had a greater effect than that of other women because I actually cared for her. Perhaps it was because for the first time in my life, as a result of my penectomy, I could not dismiss the woman’s body by conquering it. Perhaps my feeling was simply pheromonal. All these theories are plausible, and to some extent perhaps all are valid, but on that Christmas Eve, lying beside her unable to sleep, I worked it through. The principal reason, I believe, that her body so thrilled mine was this: her body affected me as if it were not only human, but also as something that approached memory and ghost.

The first time that I had seen her body, fully, was in the burn ward when she had undressed to show her tattoos. The sight made me aroused and bashful, and when I ran my fingertips over the plumage of her angel wings her body trembled and, in return, trembled my heart. At the time, I did not understand why I felt the way I did, but in the many months that had passed, I had grown into the realization that it was because my fingers felt not as if they were visiting her body for the first time but as if they were returning to a familiar location. I did not understand this until I saw how, when Marianne Engel gave me my first bath in the fortress, she had reached out to touch my body as if it was hers to touch. She moved her arm just as I had reached towards her winged back that first time. It was as if the other’s flesh was already owned, and the reaching hand belonged to a master who had been long absent and was now returned. When I had touched her that first time, it did not feel like the first time I had touched her.

Now, in the bed next to her on this Christmas Eve, her body retained that effect upon me. When I lay beside her, it was as if I were meant to be there, as if my body had rested against hers thousands of times before. So it felt as if I were lying not next to a person, but next to the memory of a person, while at the same time that memory was undergoing a transformation into something even less material. Her body was all too human in its ravagedness, but it also struck me as an entity becoming ghost, as if in her thinness she were slipping into something less than solid. I ran my fingers across her bumpy ribs and traced the gaunt hill of the pelvic bone that overlooked her stomach. Her body, whose flesh and memory had always confused and excited, still felt as if it belonged to me but also as if it were disappearing. It was not only that she was losing substance as she worked, it was as if she were working to lose substance; as if it were not only the gargoyles that were backwards art, but also the artist herself, progressing to a state in which they were both less and more than the material from which they started.

So this is how her body—flesh, memory, and ghost—disarmed me.

I woke, after I finally fell into a short and fitful sleep, before she did. I brought her eggs on a tray, and worked up the courage to give her that year’s gift. Again it was writing, as I apparently had not learned my lesson from the previous year’s poems. I had written from memory the stories she’d told me about her four ghostly friends—“The Good Ironworker,” “The Woman on the Cliff,” “The Glassblower’s Apprentice,” and “Sigurðr’s Gift”—and bound them between covers. On the front was the title
The Lovers’ Tales, as told by Marianne Engel.

“It’s the perfect gift. Not only for me, but also for Sigurðr. For a Viking, the worst Hell is to be forgotten.” She took my hand in hers and apologized. Her intense carving over the previous weeks had taken her over completely and, as a result, she had neglected to get me a proper gift.

“But,” she suggested, “how about I explain what Sister Constantia meant when she said I had desecrated the scriptorium?”

D
awn was breaking when Agletrudis appeared at Engelthal’s gate, wearing a smile so thick with Schadenfreude that it seemed impossible it could fit on a nun’s face. She nodded in your direction, where you were still propped up on the horse with Brandeis’ bloodied body, and said, “I see you’ve brought your lover.”

I couldn’t betray my anger if we were to have any chance of being taken in. I needed to appeal to her better instincts; she was, after all, dedicated to a life in God. “We require sanctuary. Without your help we will die.”

“Ah,” Agletrudis said, nodding and clasping her hands behind her back. “So your adventurous spirit has found what it was looking for. Perhaps even more.” Like Sister Constantia before her, Agletrudis surveyed the bulge of my stomach.

I steadied my voice. “You can imagine that it was not easy for us—for me—to come here.” My hands were also behind my back, but because I didn’t want Agletrudis to see that they were curled into fists. “There’s nowhere else for us to go.”

Agletrudis tried to produce a sympathetic look, but her smile only grew more ugly. “This puts us in a most interesting situation. Our mission is one of mercy, and we are taught to find forgiveness for every sinner. And yet, the difficulty lies in the fact that most of the sisters place you in a category beyond the merely sinful.”

This struck me as a vast overreaction to the fact that I’d left Engelthal. “When I left, it was never my intention to disrespect the monastery or the Lord.”

“Or Mother Christina, I’m certain.” Agletrudis had not lost her ability to strike in the tenderest spot. “Had you simply disappeared, it’s unlikely anyone would object to extending help now. But because of your actions on that night, poor Sister Gertrud died of a broken heart.”

Gertrud would not have cared one bit about my leaving, except for the fact that my absence would have slowed down work on her Bible. “What are you talking about?”

“There is no use denying it, Sis—Oh, excuse me.
Marianne
. Do you not remember that I saw you that night exiting the scriptorium? I remember it, and I also remember how the next morning, poor Sister Gertrud found her work all in ashes. Every chapter, every verse.” Agletrudis paused with a dramatic sigh. “How could you torch her Bible?”

It was the sigh that explained everything.
She
had burned
Die Gertrud Bibel
the night I left, and she had blamed it on me. And so, I’d become known as the sister who destroyed Gertrud’s life’s work, the nun who reduced the Word of God to dust and ran off to live as a killer’s mistress.

Agletrudis’ eyes positively glowed. “Mother Christina has ordered that your name be expunged from all the chronicles, and now that Father Sunder has passed—I trust you know that he, too, has died?—we are removing your name from his writings as well.”

I’d always considered Agletrudis to be little more than a lackey to Gertrud, an inferior in the ways of treachery. How quickly one’s perceptions can turn. It was a revelation to understand, in an instant, the wickedness of which Agletrudis was capable. With my disappearance, she would have reassumed her position as heir to the scriptorium. But this was not enough for her. She had to ruin my name forever, and to achieve this she was willing to sacrifice the life’s dream of her mentor.

I’m not proud that I couldn’t stop my fists. My right hand connected with Agletrudis’ shoulder, the first punch I’d ever thrown. I was aiming for her head but I guess my anger affected my aim. The second and third punches were better, despite my pregnant clumsiness, and landed on her jaw and her chest. She fell backwards, though I’m not sure how much from the force of the blows and how much from surprise. When she got up, she smiled a red mess of teeth ringed with blood.

“I will not lower myself to strike a pregnant whore,” Agletrudis said, “but I’ll be sure to pass your regards to Mother Christina.”

There was no point in staying, as we’d never be allowed in the monastery now, and there was still the matter of the trackers hot on our trail. I forced myself to remount and you let me gallop away some of my rage before asking where we were going. I said I didn’t know. You suggested Father Sunder’s cottage. I said he was dead. You asked whether Brother Heinrich were also dead. I didn’t know. You said that we were out of options, and their house was our new destination.

Brother Heinrich was shocked to find us at his entrance after so many years, but he didn’t even hesitate. He only threw the door open as wide as it would go, and I will always remember him for that. You carried Brandeis directly to the small bed that had been yours during your recovery.

Brother Heinrich looked as though life had sucked most of the wind out of his lungs. He was no longer steady on his feet, and he hobbled around to gather water and fresh bedding. He helped us to treat Brandeis, doing his best to hold him down as you rinsed out the wound. When Brandeis stopped struggling, worn through, it was Brother Heinrich—not you or me—who stroked his hair lovingly, though he had never met Brandeis before. When Brandeis finally slipped into uneasy sleep, Brother Heinrich said he would prepare some food. “I have so few visitors, let me invite you…”

I insisted on helping and it amused Brother Heinrich that I could now cook. When he complimented me on my new skill, I finally found the courage to express my condolences on Father Sunder’s death. Brother Heinrich nodded his head as he chopped the vegetables. “He lived a good life and died in his sleep, so there’s nothing to be sorry about. There was a lovely remembrance and all the nuns said that the Devil rejoiced at his death. Not because the Enemy had won a new soul, but because Friedrich would no longer be able to harm Him with his prayers.”

There was a telling quiver to his voice.
Friedrich
, he had said. Not
Brother Sunder
, as he had always called him in life. In front of me, at least. He tried to smile but could not quite manage it, and I understood why he looked so old. Brother Heinrich was waiting his turn.

“Did you know that Sister Gertrud also died? Her heart just seemed to give up after…” Heinrich’s voice trailed away. He meant, of course, the burning of her Bible. “Marianne, when the burnt remains were found, Sister Gertrud realized that her Bible would never be completed in her lifetime. It was no secret, the bad blood between you two, but you should know that I never believed you burned it. And neither did Friedrich. He died certain of your innocence.”

At that moment a cramp seized my stomach, and my hands instinctively went to the child. I could not look upon Brother Heinrich’s face, wondering whether he would blame my sin of leaving Engelthal for the situation in which I now found myself. But this is what he said: “Friedrich would have been so pleased that you are with child. He always knew that your love was true.”

Right there in the middle of the kitchen, all the previous weeks caught up with me. Losing the life that you and I had built together in Mainz, discovering that I’d been accused of a horrible crime, and learning of Father Sunder’s death. Agletrudis smiling at the gate, as acting prioress. My pregnancy, which I worried about every moment of every day. I had been running on willpower and nervous energy since we had left Nürnberg, but in that instant all my remaining strength drained out. I broke down completely into the tears that I’d not been allowing myself. I collapsed, my body folding into the old man’s arms.

It was so good to be held again, simply held, and spoken to with kindness. You’d been so busy fighting for our lives, driving the horses forward and planning our next move, that you had no time to spend on calming my emotions. I didn’t blame you, but I missed your kinder attentions. Brother Heinrich stroked my hair, just as he’d done with Brandeis, and he put me into his own bed. He covered me with blankets and told me exactly what I needed to hear: that everything was going to be all right.

A few days passed and we had no choice but to stay right where we were. I hoped that we might have somehow thrown the trackers off, but you assured me that we most definitely had not. You said with absolute certainty that, with one of the trackers now dead, the others were regrouping and trying to figure out what resources we had at our disposal.

We had been cleaning Brandeis’ wound diligently and hoping it would heal, but we were hoping for too much. It became infected and he fell into a terrible fever, becoming delirious. You had seen this before, on the battlefield, and you knew what you had to do. Brother Heinrich held Brandeis’ shoulders and I held his legs, while you used a hunting knife to carve away part of your friend’s thigh. When we finished, our clothes were covered in blood and there was a chunk of flesh in a bucket. When I looked at the damage to Brandeis’ thigh, I primarily felt two emotions: shame at my fear that the wound might somehow infect me and harm the baby, and guilt because the injury existed at all. If I had not hesitated at the inn’s window, Brandeis would have been able to escape ahead of the ax.

It was Brother Heinrich who first noticed the two men on horses. They remained a safe distance from the house, past the ridge that I used to play on as a child, but there was no doubt that they were watching us. They were trackers, of course. When I asked why they didn’t come for us, you said, “They know that we have crossbows and that we can use them, so they’ve sent for reinforcements.”