Free Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain Page B

praying—and so not alone. I perhaps should pray but am always afraid of boring God. “Arrogance,” says Radegunda. “Humility,” say I but acknowledge that the boundary-line is thin. “Words don’t matter,” she says and I disagree. For me words matter more than anything. I cannot cope with what cannot be put into words. Like her experiences. Her trances which she describes as “beyond words”. But can anything human be “beyond words”? “Yes,” she says and to some extent I believe her. I believe she does come in contact with a life source, the godhead perhaps, anyway a level of reality unreached by the rest of us and which she can’t describe. What I cannot accept is that I ‚ with her help, may not manage eventually to grasp and describe it. I harry her, pressing for precision about these forays, these edgings into the undefinable . I wait. I am like a cartographer questioning some sun-stunned mariner who has been lost off the map, trying to chart the contents of a raving mind, appalled but stimulated by the news that there are wastes about which nothing is known —in cartographer’s terms—and that I may be the one to draw the first map. She needs me to write her life. I shall ensure that when it is finished she will be more revered than any saint who has not had the benefit of my promotion. Careless of the world’s opinion, she won’t appreciate this. Others will: my patrons and perhaps even God.
    I knew within an hour of meeting her that I was meant to stay and be her biographer. That was two years ago. There were practical reasons too but they were merely clues to a destiny I had already somehow divined. I told her and she offered me this house. “Destiny” was the word to sway her. Not my sort of word at all. As though it had been put into my mouth. Everything did seem to happen without my taking much initiative. It wasn’t even my own idea to come here. It was King Chilperic’s, her stepson. Odd go-between!
    He’s a truly nasty piece of goods, a memorable monster: epic, ruthless and, when I first saw him, visibly bloody. His finger-nails were packed with it. A smear was drying on his beard. He’d been hunting and his appearance startled me into a Virgilian quotation about black and flowing gore—not the most tactful greeting to a multiple murderer. As soon as I’d said the words I wished I’d swallowed them. But he was pleased and the quote—a well-worn one from a florilegium of pagan writings for Christian readers—struck the court as betokening astonishing learning on my part.
    “We Franks”, he told me, “are heirs to the whole Gallo-Roman system and that includes poetry. I’m a bit of a poet myself but I don’t delude myself as to my talents. Latin isn’t my first language. Now you are a godsend. Ravenna’s loss will be Soisson’s gain. Write me an ode.”
    He gave me a purse of gold solidi and I wrote an ode in praise of all the qualities it might have been appropriate for him to possess. He was flattered but possibly bored by such a list of—even fictional—virtues.
    “I think you should meet my stepmother,” he told me. “An extraordinary woman. Very holy. You’ll have to go to Poitiers. I’ll give you an escort. Our roads, unfortunately, are unsafe. One can’t see to everything at once. We are plagued by civil wars. My brothers are most rapacious. I sometimes wish my father had strangled them at birth. He killed his nephews so as to prevent civil war in his own time but had no thought for mine. Unforesighted. But, as you know, Rome had a lot of civil war so we needn’t feel ashamed.”
    I accepted the escort. I was coming as far as Tours anyhow where I had vowed to visit St. Martin’s shrine to thank the saint for curing a bad case of ophthalmia which at one point had looked like costing me my eye. Poitiers was close. The escort would be useful. Under the protection of the kingdom’s chief murderer, I would be safe from the knives of lesser ones. I was