Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (419 page)

Thorvald Einarsson said, “Abbess, I am not a bad man.”

“For a good man,” said the Abbess Radegunde, “you keep surprisingly bad company.”

He said angrily, “I did not choose my shipmates. I have had bad luck!”

“Ours has,” said the Abbess, “been worse, I think.”

“Luck is luck,” said Thorvald, clenching his fists. “It comes to some folk and not to others.”

“As you came to us,” said the Abbess mildly. “Yes, yes, I see, Thorvald Einarsson; one may say that luck is Thor’s doing or Odin’s doing, but you must know that our bad luck is your own doing and not some god’s. You are our bad luck, Thorvald Einarsson. It’s true that you’re not as wicked as your friends, for they kill for pleasure and you do it without feeling, as a business, the way one hews down grain. Perhaps you have seen today some of the grain you have cut. If you had a man’s soul, you would not have gone
viking,
luck or no luck, and if your soul were bigger still, you would have tried to stop your shipmates, just as I talk honestly to you now, despite your anger, and just as Christ Himself told the truth and was nailed on the cross. If you were a beast, you could not break God’s law and if you were a man you would not, but you are neither and that makes you a kind of monster that spoils everything it touches and never knows the reason, and that is why I will never forgive you until you become a man, a true man with a true soul. As for your friends—”

Here Thorvald Einarsson struck the Abbess on the face with his open hand and knocked her down. I heard Sister Hedwic gasp in horror, and behind us Sister Sibihd began to moan. But the Abbess only sat there, rubbing her jaw and smiling a little. Then she said:

“Oh, dear, have I been at it again? I am ashamed of myself. You are quite right to be angry, Torvald; no one can stand me when I go on in that way, least of all myself; it is such a bore. Still, I cannot seem to stop it; I am too used to being the Abbess Radegunde, that is clear. I promise never to torment you again, but you, Thorvald, must never strike me again, because you will be very sorry if you do.”

He took a step forward.

“No, no, my dear man,” the Abbess said merrily, “I mean no threat—how could I threaten you?—I mean only that I will never tell you any jokes, my spirits will droop, and I will become as dull as any other woman. Confess it now: I am the most interesting thing that has happened to you in years and I have entertained you better, sharp tongue and all, than all the
skalds
at the Court of Norway. And I know more tales and stories than they do—more than anyone in the whole world—for I make new ones when the old ones wear out.

“Shall I tell you a story now?”

“About your Christ?” said he, the anger still in his face.

“No,” said she, “about living men and women. Tell me, Torvald, what do you men want from us women?”

“To be talked to death,” said he, and I could see there was some anger in him still, but he was turning it to play also.

The Abbess laughed in delight. “Very witty!” she said, springing to her feel and brushing the leaves off her skirt. “You are a very clever man, Torvald. I beg your pardon, Thorvald. I keep forgetting. But as to what men want from women, if you asked the young men, they would only wink and dig one another in the ribs, but that is only how they deceive themselves. That is only body calling to body. They themselves want something quite different and they want it so much that it frightens them. So they pretend it is anything and everything else: pleasure, comfort, a servant in the home. Do you know what it is that they want?”

“What?” said Thorvald.

“The mother,” said Radegunde, “as women do, too; we all want the mother. When I walked before you on the riverbank yesterday, I was playing the mother. Now you did nothing, for you are no young fool, but I knew that sooner or later one of you, so tormented by his longing that he would hate me for it, would reveal himself. And so he did: Thorfinn, with his thoughts all mixed up between witches and grannies and whatnot. I knew I could frighten him, and through him, most of you. That was the beginning of my bargaining. You Norse have too much of the father in your country and not enough mother, with all your honoring of your women; that is why you die so well and kill other folk so well—and live so very, very badly.”

“You are doing it again,” said Thorvald, but I think he wanted to listen all the same.

“Your pardon, friend,” said the Abbess. “You are brave men; I don’t deny it. But I know your
sagas
and they are all about fighting and dying and afterwards not Heavenly happiness but the end of the world: everything, even the gods, eaten by the Fenris-wolf and the Midgard snake! What a pity, to die bravely only because life is not worth living! The Irish knew better. The pagan Irish were heroes, with their Queens leading them to battle as often as not, and Father Cairbre, God rest his soul, was complaining only two days ago that the common Irish folk were blasphemously making a goddess out of God’s mother, for do they build shrines to Christ or Our Lord or pray to them? No! It is Our Lady of the Rocks and Our Lady of the Sea and Our Lady of the Grove and Our Lady of this or that from one end of the land to the other. And even here it is only the Abbey folk who speak of God the Father and of Christ. In the village if one is sick or another in trouble it is: Holy Mother, save me! and:
Mariam Virginem,
intercede for me, and: Blessed Virgin, blind my husband’s eyes! and: Our Lady, preserve my crops, and so on, men and women both. We all need the mother.”

“You, too?”

“More than most,” said the Abbess.

“And I?”

“Oh no,” said the Abbess, stopping suddenly, for we had all been walking slowly back towards the village as she spoke. “No, and that is what drew me to you at once. I saw it in you and knew you were the leader. It is followers who make leaders, you know, and your shipmates have made you leader, whether you know it or not. What you want is—how shall I say it? You are a clever man, Thorvald, perhaps the cleverest man I have ever met, more even than the scholars I knew in my youth. But your cleverness has had no food. It is a cleverness of the world and not of books. You want to travel and know about folk and their customs, and what strange places are like, and what has happened to men and women in the past. If you take me to Constantinople, it will not be to get a price for me but merely to go there; you went seafaring because this longing itched at you until you could bear it not a year more; I know that.”

“Then you are a witch,” said he, and he was not smiling.

“No, I only saw what was in your face when you spoke of that city,” said she. “Also there is gossip that you spent much time in Göteborg as a young man, idling and dreaming and marveling at the ships and markets when you should have been at your farm.”

She said, “Thorvald, I can feed that cleverness. I am the wisest woman in the world. I know everything—everything! I know more than my teachers; I make it up or it comes to me, I don’t know how, but it is real—real!—and I know more than anyone. Take me from here, as your slave if you wish but as your friend also, and let us go to Constantinople and see the domes of gold, and the walls all inlaid with gold, and the people so wealthy you cannot imagine it, and the whole city so gilded it seems to be on fire, and pictures as high as a wall, set right in the wall and all made of jewels so there is nothing else like them, redder than the reddest rose, greener than the grass, and with a blue that makes the sky pale!”

“You are indeed a witch,” said he, “and not the Abbess Radegunde.”

She said slowly, “I think I am forgetting how to be the Abbess Radegunde.”

“Then you will not care about them any more,” said he and pointed to Sister Hedwic, who was still leading the stumbling Sister Sibihd.

The Abbess’s face was still and mild. She said, “I care. Do not strike me, Thorvald, not ever again, and I will be a good friend to you. Try to control the worst of your men and leave as many of my people free as you can—I know them and will tell you which can be taken away with the least hurt to themselves or others—and I will feed that curiosity and cleverness of yours until you will not recognize this old world any more for the sheer wonder and awe of it; I swear this on my life.”

“Done,” said he, adding, “but with my luck, your life is somewhere else, locked in a box on top of a mountain, like the troll’s in the story, or you will die of old age while we are still at sea.”

“Nonsense,” she said, “I am a healthy mortal woman with all my teeth, and I mean to gather many wrinkles yet.”

He put his hand out and she took it; then he said, shaking his head in wonder, “If I sold you in Constantinople, within a year you would become Queen of the place!”

The Abbess laughed merrily and I cried in fear, “Me, too! Take me too!” and she said, “Oh yes, we must not forget little Boy News,” and lifted me into her arms. The frightening tall man, with his face close to mine, said in his strange sing-song German:

“Boy, would you like to see the whales leaping in the open sea and the seals barking on the rocks? And cliffs so high that a giant could stretch his arms up and not reach their tops? And the sun shining at midnight?”

“Yes!” said I.

“But you will be a slave,” he said, “and may be ill-treated and will always have to do as you are bid. Would you like that?”

“No!” I cried lustily, from the safety of the Abbess’s arms; “I’ll fight!” He laughed a mighty, roaring laugh and tousled my head—rather too hard, I thought—and said, “I will not be a bad master, for I am named for Thor Red-beard and he is strong and quick to fight but good-natured, too, and so am I,” and the Abbess put me down and so we walked back to the village, Thorvald and the Abbess Radegunde talking of the glories of this world and Sister Hedwic saying softly, “She is a saint, our Abbess, a saint, to sacrifice herself for the good of the people,” and all the time behind us, like a memory, came the low, witless sobbing of Sister Sibihd, who was in Hell.

* * * *

When we got back we found that Thorfinn was better and the Norsemen were to leave in the morning. Thorvald had a second pallet brought into the Abbess’s study and slept on the floor with us that night. You might think his men would laugh at this, for the Abbess was an old woman, but I think he had been with one of the young ones before he came to us. He had that look about him. There was no bedding for the Abbess but an old brown cloak with holes in it, and she and I were wrapped in it when he came in and threw himself down, whistling, on the other pallet. Then he said:

“Tomorrow, before we sail, you will show me the old Abbess’s treasure.”

“No,” said she. “That agreement was broken.”

He had been playing with his knife and now ran his thumb along the edge of it. “I can make you do it.”

“No,” said she patiently, “and now I am going to sleep.”

“So you make light of death?” he said. “Good! That is what a brave woman should do, as the
skalds
sing, and not move, even when the keen sword cuts off her eyelashes. But what if I put this knife here not to your throat but to your little boy’s? You would tell me then quick enough!”

The Abbess turned away from him, yawning and saying, “No, Thorvald, because you would not. And if you did, I would despise you for a cowardly oathbreaker and not tell you for that reason. Good night.”

He laughed and whistled again for a bit. Then he said:

“Was all that true?”

“All what?” said the Abbess. “Oh, about the statue. Yes, but there was no ravisher. I put him in the tale for poor Sister Hedwic.”

Thorvald snorted, as if in disappointment. “Tale? You tell lies, Abbess!”

The Abbess drew the old brown cloak over her head and closed her eyes. “It helped her.”

Then there was a silence, but the big Norseman did not seem able to lie still. He shifted this way and that, stared at the ceiling, turned over, shifted his body again as if the straw bothered him, and again turned over. He finally burst out, “But what happened!”

She sat up. Then she shut her eyes. She said, “Maybe it does not come into your man’s thoughts that an old woman gets tired and that the work of dealing with folk is hard work, or even that it is work at all. Well!

“Nothing ‘happened,’ Thorvald. Must something happen only if this one fucks that one or one bangs in another’s head? I desired my statue to the point of such foolishness that I determined to find a real, human lover, but when I raised my eyes from my fancies to the real, human men of Rome and unstopped my ears to listen to their talk, I realized that the thing was completely and eternally impossible. Oh, those younger sons with their skulking, jealous hatred of the rich, and the rich ones with their noses in the air because they thought themselves of such great consequence because of their silly money, and the timidity of the priests to their superiors, and their superiors’ pride, and the artisans’ hatred of the peasants, and the peasants being worked like animals from morning until night, and half the men I saw beating their wives and the other half out to cheat some poor girl of her money or her virginity or both—this was enough to put out any fire! And the women doing less harm only because they had less power to do harm, or so it seemed to me then. So I put all away, as one does with any disappointment. Men are not such bad folk when one stops expecting them to be gods, but they are not for me. If that state is chastity, then a weak stomach is temperance, I think. But whatever it is, I have it, and that’s the end of the matter.”