Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
GWENNA
“Et voilà,” comes his voice. “La fin de la quête.”
It’s soft, sibilant, mannered, the way he speaks. The liquid edges of French combined with the cool calm of a religious renunciate.
And yet I am terrified.
I am terrified, frightened out of my absolute wits and shaking on this carpet.
Luther’s office is huge, vaulted and wide, and yet it feels cramped with…I can’t even count how many of them there are in here. A wall of white. Impossible to tell one body from the next. All these men staring at me with eyes I can’t see, faces I can’t read, and somehow they’ve been expecting me.
“What do you want?” I say. “What am I supposed to do for you?”
The prior-at-arms, who stands perfectly erect, perfectly straight, lets out a chuckle. A genuine chuckle, lighter-pitched than I would expect, and the eerie contrast between the scene and the sound only makes my heartbeat whirr faster.
“What do we want?” His English is smooth. “Si polie, la petite.”
So polite, the little girl.
“I’m here,” I say, forcing bravery. “I’ll do—I’ll fix whatever it is.” My voice sounds weak, brittle, little-girlish. “I’ve been trying, I really have. We’ve been reading so much, and—”
“Silence,” he says. “Pourquoi parle-t-elle toujours?”
He isn’t talking to me. He’s talking past me. Maybe he doesn’t think I speak French. Maybe he just doesn’t care.
What are you going to do with me? I think.
I close my mouth, a hysterical sound catching in the back of my throat—a wail, a shriek.
I dart more glances around the room. At the windows—tall, heavy, might not even open.
The door—locked, and with a button, I realize, from the desk.
And it doesn’t matter anyway. I couldn’t possibly fight all of them off—I couldn’t fight one of them off.
And I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know what they want. If they’re like the monks at St. Ignaty’s, then…then they’ll kill me. Some ritual, prayers, and then, what? A sword? A noose? Burned at the stake?
I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die. And yet…
Yet I don’t feel that from them. Not exactly.
"Neuf cents ans." The prior turns, addressing the white wall behind me, his voice taking on the cadence of ritual. A sermon.
"Neuf cents ans,” he repeats. Nine hundred years. “Nous sommes des nains juchés sur les épaules de géants. Foulons le chemin de nos frères avant nous.”
My mind snags on the number. Nine hundred years. Twelfth century. Chrétien de Troyes, the Grail romances were first written. Chivalric tradition.
What happened then? I demand. Think, Gwenna. Think.
“Car qu'advint-il alors?” The prior goes on. For what happened then? His speech is formal, stately, yet rapid, and I can barely keep up. “L’homme croyait savoir. Croyait conna?tre Dieu; croyait en savoir plus que Dieu. Croyait n'avoir point besoin de Dieu pour se conna?tre.”
For what happened then? Man thought he knew. Thought he knew God; thought he knew more than God. Thought he did not need God to know himself.
“Ne trouvait nul contentement dans la perfection et le bon ordre des choses, la hiérarchie voulue par Dieu.”
Found no contentment in perfection and the proper order of things, the hierarchy God intends.
“L’homme ne cherchait qu'à changer, à tournoyer, à dire une chose et plus tard en faire une autre. à tromper, tout en nommant cela croissance.”
Only ever sought to change, to cycle, to say one thing and later do another. To deceive, and yet to call it growth.
The prior pauses. “Eh bien, non l’homme. La femme.”
No, not man. Woman.
More murmurs. Shuffling. The prior-at-arms takes a step towards me, and instinctively take a step back—into solid, unyielding white.
I have nowhere to go.
No. Focus. Focus. What are they going to do?
“Qu'advint-il d'abord?” he continues. What happened first? “Nous entend?mes nos petits amis ailés s'alanguir dans leurs ruches.”
I can barely keep up. We heard our little…winged friends? languish in their hives.
The bees. I shudder.
“Nous v?mes Dieu se retirer de sa terre, comme aux jours de Noé et de Lot. Nous s?mes que le fils s'élevait contre le père.”
Witnessed God withdraw from His earth like in the days of Noah and Lot, knew the son rose up against the father…
“Le bon ordre des choses—ruiné. Et tout à cause d’elle.”
The order of things ruined. And all because of her.
Swift, sudden, he turns to me. “Je vous le dis, elle est marquée!”
He draws a long thin blade from nowhere, from what seems like thin air, and flicks it, deft and sharp, at my throat.
But not at my flesh. Not cutting me at all. Only slicing, with fearful precision, the cloth of my sweater, front collar to side seam.
The fabric peels away, a triangle flap, just enough to reveal the skin above my heart, the tip of his sword just millimeters from the raised pearly stripes of tissue.
My scar.
He lowers the blade. The two Brothers on my sides grab me again, squeezing my shoulders to hold me in place. The one on my left presses gloved fingers to my exposed skin. Hard, probing, feeling me in a way that makes my skin crawl.
“Oui!” he declares. “La croix.”
The cross.
“La croix!” cries the prior. “The mockery she makes. To put this on her body.”
Tears are streaming down my cheeks, the sensation startling me—I didn’t even know I was crying. I sniff, pathetic, trying to make no noise, but it’s useless. Those hard fingers on my skin. The glee in their voices when they found what they were looking for. A sob escapes me.
The prior pauses.
“Vous entendez?” he cries. “It is as we knew it would be. She manipulates. With tears. With sighs. She has welcomed them to her body and invited them down the path of destruction. And this—this is why we must do what we do, my brothers. For is it not written in Scripture—”
The room speaks in unison.
“Si ton ?il te scandalise, arrache-le.”
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. I shiver, harder, tears still streaming.
“Et c’est pourquoi, c’est exactement pourquoi, on insiste que les chevaliers affirment le voeu.”
That’s why we make the knights take the vow.
“Parce que nous savons, nous avons toujours su il y a neuf cent ans—”
Because we know, because we have always known, for nine hundred years—
“—que quand ils recontrent le Graal, elle arrivera en forme d’un putain.”
that when they find the Grail, she will come to them in the form of…
His last two words knock me in the stomach.
A whore.
Now he turns, glides in a circle to me once more.
“And so the marked one sates her lust, and the men who were sworn to retrieve the Grail instead die slavering for her bed.”
This time, there are no more murmurs. Just…just hissing, from everywhere, pressing on all sides. I clutch at the sagging piece of sweater, looking everywhere and nowhere at once as the realization hits.
It was never about holy chastity or sacred self-denial. The vow was because they knew. The White Brothers knew they were sending their knights out to find someone, not something, and they knew it would be a woman.
They knew all along.
But I can't stop to process it, because a Brother is approaching me from the side, and he's carrying something yellow. Fabric. He pins it to my sweater—rough, fast, a yellow cross sewn onto cloth.
I know what that is.
The Cathars. The Cathars. Of course. Nine hundred years ago. Languedoc, what’s now Southern France. Heretics. Famously. They believed in…dualism, I think. That the material world was corrupt. Saw no need for priests or churches to find God and live out His will.
And they let women preach.
“Mais tout cela,” the prior says, fighting slightly to be heard above the chorus of hisses, “tout cela peut leur être remis. Tous leurs péchés effacés par le repentir. Car voici qu'elle nous est livrée. Voici qu'elle est—”
My memory reels, flicking through readings I only half-recall in my panic. 1120? 1130? The Albigensian Crusade—not a crusade of Holy Land battles but of villages stormed, peasants interrogated.
Confessions forced.
Torture.
There’s a click behind me as the office door unlocks. I turn, jump, hoping against hope—but I can see nothing, hear nothing, and all that emerges is another white-robed figure, who kneels briefly before the prior.
“Trouvé?”
“Non, pas lui,” replies the messenger. “Mais un autre.”
I strain to eavesdrop. They were looking for someone? Didn’t find him. But found someone else.
“Plusieurs?” The prior’s hand tenses around his weapon. But he nods. “Bien, ca suffirait. On perd du temps.”
That’ll have to do? I’m just wondering—what, what will have to do?
—when swift, hard hands grab me once again, clamped on my shoulders.
A White Brother lunges for my feet, ripping off my boots and socks.
Another rams something onto my head, a tight and prickling circle I can’t see, and yet another thrusts a long, thin candle into my hands.
“What are you doing?” I ask, panic bubbling into my voice. “What is this for?”
But I don’t need to ask. I think I know.
An inquisition.
The prior’s faceless form reveals nothing.
“Marchez,” he orders.
Walk.