To his mind the moon was both Ariadne and Selene, coming to bring him the golden thread and the eternal sleep of Endymion.
‘The secret passage in the well!’ they said to him.
63
VOICES
I know that I hanged on a windy tree nine long nights wounded with a spear . . .
Poetic Edda
The night sky dropped a curtain of rain over Jourdain, and above, a great noise like the roar of a beast but many times multiplied preceded a crack that announced the end of the world. He shivered. His senses took in the wet and the sound of the wind surging upward past him and over the wall that dropped, it seemed to him, violent and steep beneath his feet.
He remembered dreams full of cries and death, and then he was awake to a pain in his leg whose relentless gnawing pierced the dullness of his mind and made him open his eyes.
Now he shivered into his bones and forced himself to look down to where he was lodged, entangled in ropes against the wall of the keep. There he saw the wound that made waste his leg and thus confirmed what, by virtue of his pain, he already knew. For a moment his stomach rolled and he did not know if he was up or down, or this side of life or this side of death.
‘Etienne?’ There was a question that needed an answer!
He put the question to the air, having felt it rising for some moments in his mind. Where is Etienne?
He looked out to the wet world turned blank and inward, hiding its face inside its black cloak. Dawn was near, he could hear it, a stirring of the earth as it rolled over in its sleep. He tried to pray but was full of anger.
‘These are bitter trials, my Lord!’ he shouted at the sky. He could not then fetch his hand to his face to strike it, tangled as it was in the ropes, and so he bit his lip and let the tears flow from his eyes. ‘I will not fall out of faith! My faith will outlast this!’
He was shaking with cold. When had he felt such cold? Cold in the bones and cold in the heart? He burned with thirst. Soon he must die.
Of a sudden the air was calmed and all around him the world waited. He closed his eyes and let his mind emerge from and sink back into the dream. When he opened them again he saw fog and greyness and dawn breaking over the mountains. The memory of his fate surfaced in a surge of pain, as if the flesh were to tear from his bones.
They had come when the men were at prayer in the hall . . . Hungarians or Austrians . . . they had known of the secret panel in the well – the town had betrayed them.
He thought of the slaughter of his brothers in that confused darkness, of Delgado, struck down. He was full of anguish. ‘Where are you, Etienne?’ he shouted loud and heard it bounce from the hills.
No, Etienne was most likely dead, he told himself, and he was doomed to suffer alone like Odin, who hung from a tree that kept up heaven and earth, wounded and hanging on windy gallows for nine long nights.
He heard a sound, a human sound from beyond the fog that was not of his making. Somewhere another man was calling out to him. Perhaps Etienne! But the fog was suspending the truth of things somewhere between him and the voice and he could not see, somewhere between the dream and the ropes on which they endured together.
‘It is I, Jourdain!’ he cried.
There was no answer. Perhaps, he told himself, Etienne was coming in and out of heaven and hell as he was, suffering the same fate. He grasped this thought tenderly, that the space between them was lessened by a concurrence of suffering. Such a fate would seem to him eloquent.
‘Hey!’ he heard then.
‘Ecoutes, Etienne!’ he called out but his lungs were only good for little more than a whisper. ‘Where are you?’
The fog moved off and the dawn light showed him more clearly, the coils of ropes wound around his own body preventing him from falling down the precipice of the castle keep. When he looked to his right and his left he saw what had become of his brothers and he was struck with fear. He strained and contrived his body forward but his leg gave a stab. He waited for the pain to drag him to oblivion but it did not.
Once again the voice, ‘Hey!’ called to him.
But he ignored it since he was looking out from under his brows to something that compelled him: bodies with their heads cut off their stalks, and their arms caught by ropes.
All of the men drowning in the milky air that rose upward, silent and obedient.
Then came the voice again.
‘Hey!’ it called to him and he realised it was not Etienne. He gazed upwards a little to his right where his ropes were attached to a device. He saw an upside-down face and it was shouting down at him full of impatience. ‘Frenchman! I have let you live to see your brothers . . . now hold still!’
Jourdain did not understand his words but in that frowning form doubled over the parapet staring down with the axe in its hand he saw the entire matter of his destiny made clear to him. ‘No!’ he cried then.