The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

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СКАЧАТЬ I ever had faith in you.

      “Saint Michael, please—”

      Please what? Do you expect me to explain myself to you? I have finished with you. Done.

      “The child. Tell me about the child!”

      The cold intensified, and Joan gasped with pain as it wrapped itself about her.

      You have been as nothing. We had thought once to have need of you, but you have proved yourself a passing foolishness on our part. You no longer please us, and we rescind our favour.

      The cold, impossibly, grew more intense, and Joan shrieked as iciness enveloped her lower body.

      We return you to your normal womanly self, Joan, and leave in place of our favour all the loathing for your kind that we bear. We have no longer any need for you, Joan, and, not needing you, we choose to despise you.

      And with that, the icy grip of the archangel gave one final, agonising clench, and then it, as the archangel’s presence, vanished, leaving Joan collapsed and weeping on the floor.

      There she lay for long moments, unable to cope with the weight of the archangel’s loathing and betrayal on top of witnessing the birth of Marie’s child.

      She suddenly lurched to her feet, her face twisted and wet with tears, and tore from the wall where they hung the sword and banner of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel.

      She took the banner, and tore it first in two, then each of those two pieces into many more, shrieking and panting in her anger and sense of betrayal.

      How could she have been so credulous, so naive, as to let herself be used by such corrupted beings as the angels?

      The banner shredded easily, almost as if it too recognised the lies with which it had been constructed, and Joan only paused in her maddened destruction when the banner lay in pieces at her feet.

      Then she reached for the sword.

      She held it for a moment, staring wild-eyed at it, her sense of betrayal growing even stronger with every second that passed. Then she took it and dashed the blade against the heavy stone sill on the window.

      The blade shattered into three jagged sections.

      Joan screamed, allowing the useless hilt to fall clattering to the floor.

      How could she have made herself the instrument of evil? What if her entire life had been a lie? A cruel hoax, and she the only one not to realise it? Had all of France, all of Christendom, been laughing at her?

      She should have stayed home, and tended her father’s sheep. That, at least, would have occasioned no laughter.

      Perhaps she should go home… tend her father’s sheep…

      But what if her father also now despised her? Laughed at her?

      In this past hour, and particularly in these past moments, Joan’s entire faith, her entire reason for being, had been stripped away in so cruel a manner that had her sword still been intact Joan would undoubtedly have fallen upon it.

      She started to shake, her tremors becoming so violent that she fell to the cold stone floor. She moaned, and cried out, wishing that death would simply come to take her in this moment of despair.

      “Joan,” came a voice so deep and comforting that Joan believed it merely a dream. “Joan, you are so greatly loved that my eyes run with tears for you. Joan, see… see how I weep with love for you.”

      Joan blinked, still curled in a tight ball on the floor. Was this a phantasm? Or the archangel come back to torment her?

      Another voice spoke, a woman’s this time. “Joan, will you see? Will you raise your eyes and see how much your lord loves you?”

      It was the woman’s voice, rather than the man’s, which made Joan raise her face from the stone flagging and stare before her.

      She gasped, hardly crediting what her eyes told her.

      The chamber had disappeared. Instead Joan lay on the top of a low hill. Before her a woman knelt at the foot of a cross.

      Not daring to believe, Joan raised her eyes still further.

      An almost naked man gazed down at her from the cross. He had been vilely nailed to the wood through his wrists and ankles, and a crown of thorns hung askew on his bleeding brow. His loincloth was darkly soiled with the blood that had crept down his body.

      Yet, even so cruelly pinned, the man smiled down on Joan with such infinite love that her despair vanished as if it had been swept away in a great wind.

      “Lord Jesu?” she whispered.

      “Joan,” he said, and she could see how much each word cost him. His chest and shoulders were contorted in agony, his every breath an agonised nightmare.

      “Joan, will you trust me?”

      Joan’s gaze slipped to the woman. She was young and pregnant, and very beautiful, with translucent skin, deep blue eyes and dark hair.

      She was also sad, weeping, but somehow serene and strong in that sadness.

      “Have you been vilely treated by the angels as well?” Joan asked the woman.

      “Aye,” she said, “as has my lord. Joan, we would give you a purpose back into your life, and a gift also.”

      “A purpose and a gift?”

      “Both with all our love,” the woman said, and Joan realised that she spoke for both herself and Christ, who hung in such agony on his cross that he found speech difficult.

      “Your purpose shall be France,” said the woman, and as she spoke she raised her right hand and made with it a sweeping gesture.

      A dark vista opened up before Joan’s eyes. It was France, but a France devastated and murdered. Fields lay burning, houses and castles lay toppled, clouds of smoke and ash billowed over the countryside.

      Out of this horrid cloud rode a man on a dark horse: a man Joan had never seen before, but one she instinctively knew was the Demon-King. A handsome face under silver-gilt hair, pale grey eyes, a warrior’s body and a warrior’s bearing.

      He rode his stallion over the broken bodies of French men and women and children, and they screamed and wailed and bled as he progressed.

      Not once did he look down and pity them. Instead, his face was swollen with glory and victory.

      His stallion strode forth, and more bones cracked, and more children died.

      “I know him,” said Joan.

      “Aye,” said the woman. Her hands were now to her face, and she wept as if her heart broke.

      Turning her eyes back to the woman, Joan wondered if she wept for France, or for the Demon-King.

      “If Charles does not rise against him,” the woman continued, gaining some control СКАЧАТЬ