Chapter 57 Aleys
Aleys
Aleys sprints up the aisle, careening like a toddler, reversing her funeral.
She shoves open the cathedral doors and the sky explodes above her.
She stops in awe. The heavens are enormous, astonishing, as if God has lifted the roof off the city.
A sickle moon hangs in the east, and the stars, the stars are white pepper scattered by a careless hand.
So many. So bright. She looks at her feet. The cobblestones gleam like opals.
She must keep moving.
Aleys takes the deserted street beside the church, away from her hold.
At the end, orange light flickers. She hesitates, reminds herself that it’s people, not demons, in the next square, doing what people do on Midsummer Eve.
She pushes on, turns the corner to a bonfire as bright as the sun.
Aleys’s hands fly to cover her face. The insides of her lids glow crimson.
Only slowly can she open her eyes, peering through her fingers, spreading them bit by bit until she holds them to her temple as blinkers.
The air before her seems smeared with paint.
Colors jump from every object, the doors, the flags, the people.
Was the world always thus? She lifts her face to feel the heat.
A man looks over his shoulder, then yanks the arm of his friend. Aleys realizes she’s wearing only a thin shift. Her hair is loose about her shoulders. It’s a feast day, and these men are drunk. She’s not safe here. And, she realizes, the authorities will come after her. She’s a fugitive.
Aleys slips back into the shadows. She hugs her arms over her breasts and walks quickly, keeping to the edges, dodging into alleys, heading for the canal.
She can’t leave the city; the gates are locked.
She can think of only one place to go. She follows the canal until it swells into a pond cinched by a bridge patrolled by swans with inked eyes.
The begijnhof, she knows, is shut for the night.
She remembers a delivery landing on the side canal.
The gate is too high for her to climb into the courtyard, but the dock is hidden from sight.
She gains the small platform. The water is still.
Behind the wall, the begijnhof church rises like a lighthouse, lit and glowing.
Though men may find her tomorrow, she’s safe in this moment.
A breeze stirs, sifting the hairs on her bare arms; she’d forgotten breeze. Her every sense is raw, every fiber tingling like she’s newborn. Aleys stands on her tiptoes and spreads her arms. The night air tastes of juniper.
A beat of drum and tambourine, fresh and sharp, comes over the wall.
Her pulse quickens. Marte will be inside the church with Ida and Katrijn and the young pledges and old Agnes.
Though it’s late, they’re still dancing.
A plaintive flute, full of yearning, fills the night.
Her throat catches. Somehow, the hollow reed knows how it feels to be forced from your home.
Aleys closes her eyes and holds herself still in the flute and the juniper night and feels like she’s hearing music for the first time.
She’s suspended in the sound when the voices ring out: “Sing, O women of Jerusalem!”
Oh, she thinks. Oh. I eavesdrop on angels.
Then she corrects herself. Not angels. This is the song of women.
Aleys presses the heels of her palms to her eyes to quell her tears.
She wants more than anything to be with them.
Not on the outside, looking in. Neither above nor below, but within.
A strand in the weave. She thinks of Marte in the midst of the beguines.
Plain, trustworthy Marte. A woman who will take the gray as her own.
Who’s been at her side every morning, every evening.
Aleys sees it now. She should have told Marte about Lukas.
Marte would have helped her, would have raised an alarm that Aleys’s spiritual advisor had become erratic.
Dangerous. Aleys didn’t ask for her help.
Why? Was it some stubborn pride, some smug sense that God would raise her up through channels dug by men?
That’s crazy. It’s like a sailor trying to discover new lands by canal when the ocean is beyond. Hadn’t she been shown otherwise?
She had missed it. God was there, all along. In the hand of Marte.
As women sing into the darkness, Aleys slides her back down the locked gate and hugs her knees to her chest and grieves.
She weeps for the hold. For Mama’s psalter, left behind.
For Kat. She weeps for the lost, unsung hours.
She weeps that she couldn’t keep her every vow.
That she thought herself invulnerable within stone walls.
Aleys cries until she empties herself and there is nowhere to go but sleep.
Through the night she dreams a dense forest, oak and evergreen, damp with leaf rot.
Owls call through the dusk. She must find the doe.
Aleys squints into the woods, looking for the rust amidst green and brown.
Swans glide among the trees. She walks quickly, alert to the shift in the matrix of leaf and trunk that will reveal the deer.
The forest grows only closer and more impenetrable.
She begins to run through the gathering dark.
She turns a corner to find her way blocked by a fallen tree, a gnarled and twisted trunk across the path, its majestic crown tumbled into the woods.
A voice comes to her. Build me a cathedral of broken limbs.
And so she gathers up the branches and leans them, one by one, against the fallen trunk.
She drags thick boughs across the forest floor and fits slim branches between them.
She weaves the wood together with green saplings.
The beams of our house are cedars, and its rafters are firs.
The sap of wounded limbs coats her palms. Fragments of leaf adorn her fingertips.
And when the limbs are knit tight in shelter against the great trunk, she arches evergreen over the entrance and scatters golden needles to make a floor.
It is a cathedral of balsam. None shall see it but those who seek.
She crawls inside and falls asleep on a bed of thick fragrant needles within the hidden church.
His voice, from the dream within the dream: Thou shalt raise a tent of your failures, so that pilgrims may rest.