The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

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СКАЧАТЬ spoken prophecies and wrought him miracles, but still he sits here in Rheims and weeps and wrings his hands. France needs a king to lead it, and what it has is a pile of useless excrement. I cannot change him.”

      “Yes, you can change him,” said Christ, groaning with the effort of speaking. “See.”

      The vista changed so that France became a land of sun-drenched meadows and laughing children. In this new France the Demon-King still stood, but his sword hung useless at his side, his shoulders had slumped, his form was thin and tremulous, and his feet had sunk to their ankles in a pool of bubbling black mud. Dread suffused the Demon-King’s face, and his mouth hung slack with dismay. He stared towards a horizon where appeared a great and mighty king on a snowy war stallion. It was Charles, but a Charles Joan did not think existed.

      Behind him rode a shining army—an army of a united and strong France.

      The Demon-King whimpered, trembled violently, then sank into the bubbling pool of black mud until he had completely vanished.

      “How can this be so?” Joan said.

      “All you have to do,” said the woman, now leaning forward and taking one of Joan’s hands in hers, “is to tend your sheep.”

      Joan frowned. “I do not understand.”

      The woman smiled, and kissed Joan very softly on the mouth. She began to speak, and she spoke without interruption for many minutes.

      At first Joan’s face twisted with horror, then it relaxed, and assumed a radiance born both of wonder and of hope.

      “I can do this?”

      “You are the Saviour of France,” said Christ, and he smiled with such tenderness and love through the haze of his own torment that Joan’s heart overflowed with the strength of her love and joy. “The path ahead of you shall be tiresome and often painful. You will doubt. But I—”

      “And I,” put in the woman.

      “—will always be there. We will not forget you. When you are at your darkest, then we will be there for you.”

      Much later Catherine came to Joan’s chamber, thinking to talk more of Marie’s child, and to use its birth to ensure Joan’s total alienation from the angels.

      What she found astounded her.

      Joan knelt before her window which she had opened to admit the dawn light. About her lay strewn the fragments of what Catherine recognised as Joan’s sword and angelic banner.

      “Joan?” Catherine said. “Are you well?”

      Joan lowered her hands which she’d had clasped before her. She rose and turned to face Catherine.

      For an instant, Catherine thought that the girl had tripped entirely into the murky waters of insanity, impelled by the truth she’d been forced to witness last night. But then she realised that Joan’s face was infused not with madness, nor even with her previous obsessive devotion, but with a peace so profound that Catherine’s eyes widened in wonder.

      “What has happened?” she said.

      Joan smiled secretively, although not in a sly manner. “I have found myself,” she said.

      Catherine indicated a small stool. “May I sit?”

      “Oh, yes. Forgive me. I should have asked you myself.”

      Then Joan, who sat on the edge of her narrow bed, tilted her head and regarded Catherine with a modicum of curiosity. “You have not come to gloat, have you?”

      Catherine shook her head, wondering what it was that had caused this great change in the girl over only a few short hours. When Joan had run from Marie’s birthing chamber, Catherine thought her close to breaking.

      “I had wondered,” Catherine said carefully, “if you might need someone to talk to.”

      “That was kind of you,” said Joan, knowing that was not quite the reason Catherine had come to her.

      Catherine hesitated, not sure what to say next. This was not the Joan she had expected to find.

      Joan spoke again, filling the uncomfortable silence. “How is Marie, and her daughter?”

      “They are well,” Catherine said.

      “For the moment,” said Joan, “but how will Marie venture forth into the world, an unmarried woman with a bastard child? I worry for her, and feel guilt, knowing how I deserted her when she needed me most.”

      “I have arranged for her a place as housekeeper in a small convent in Amiens. The sisters will be pleased to receive her, and both Marie and her daughter will be nurtured.”

      Joan’s mouth twitched. “If only they knew what they nurture,” she said, and then the amusement died from her face. “Tell me of the angels, Catherine, and of the misery they have visited on you, and on mankind.”

      And so Catherine took a deep breath and, as Hal Bolingbroke and Margaret had once talked to Thomas Neville, told Joan all she knew.

      When she had finished Joan looked sorrowful, but still composed. “We have all been grossly misused and abused,” she said.

      Catherine nodded, satisfied. “What will you do now?”

      Joan smiled, beatifically, as if at an inner vision, and Catherine wondered if she’d slipped back into her previous blind and obsessive piety.

      But the expression passed, and Joan spoke calmly and reasonably. “I had thought to return to my parents’ home,” she said. “I thought to devote myself to the tending of my father’s sheep.”

      “That’s a wonderful—”

      “But I have changed my mind,” Joan said, grinning slightly at the expression on Catherine’s face. “Oh, do not worry, Catherine. I have no doubt that I shall end my days watching over my father’s sheep in some blessed meadow, but there is still one small task left for me to do here first.”

      “And that is?”

      “To fit Charles for his rightful place, as King of France.”

      “You cannot still mean to accomplish that! Charles is a hopeless imbecile who—”

      “He will not always be so,” Joan said. “He merely needs an infusion of strength. I am that strength.”

      “Then we are still at odds.”

      Joan took Catherine’s hand. “Yes. We are. Indeed, our positions have hardly changed. You fight to replace Charles with… well, with whomever. And I fight to give him France. What has changed is that I now understand you, and in understanding you, I have come to a realisation.”

      “And that is… ?”

      “I think that one day we will be friends. Even, I dare to venture, that we will fight for the same end.”

      Catherine opened her mouth СКАЧАТЬ