Pope Joan_ A Novel - Donna Woolfolk Cross [110]
Desperately she held on. If he walked through that door, her life was forfeit.
“Brother John?” A voice sounded from the doorway. It was Brother Samuel, his kindly face creased with concern. “Is anything wrong?”
Startled, Joan loosed her grip on her father’s arm. He pulled free and went to Brother Samuel.
“Take me to Abbot Raban. I must … I mush—” He broke off suddenly with a look of puzzled surprise.
He looked strange. His skin had gone an even deeper purple; his face twisted grotesquely, the right eye drooping lower than the left, the mouth crooked peculiarly to one side.
“Father?” She approached hesitantly, holding out her hand.
He lunged for her, his right arm flapping wildly as if no longer under his control.
Terrified, Joan backed away.
He shouted something unrecognizable, then fell forward like a hewn tree.
Brother Samuel called for help. Immediately five brethren materialized in the doorway.
Joan knelt beside her father and supported him in her arms. His head lay heavy and unresisting against her shoulder, his thin gray hair twined between her fingers. Looking into his eyes, Joan was shocked by the malignant hatred she saw there.
His lips worked with a ghastly determination. “M … m … m … !”
“Don’t try to speak,” Joan said. “You are not well.”
He blazed at her with savage fury. With one last, explosive effort, he spat out a single word: “M … m … m … Mulier!”
Woman!
His head turned convulsively to the side and froze there, his eyes set in their baleful glare.
Joan bent over him, seeking any sign of breath from the stretched lips, any pulse from the wasted neck. After a moment, she closed the staring eyes. “He is dead.”
Brother Samuel and the others crossed themselves.
“I thought I heard him speak before he died,” Brother Samuel said. “What did he say?”
“He … he called upon Mary, mother of Christ.”
Brother Samuel nodded sagely. “A holy man.” To the others he said, “Carry him to the church. We will prepare his body with all due ceremony.”
“TERRA es, terram ibis,” Abbot Raban intoned. With the rest of the brethren, Joan stooped to scoop up a handful of earth, then tossed it into the grave, watching the dark, wet lumps smear unevenly across the smooth wood of her father’s coffin.
He had always hated her. Even when she was little, before the lines of battle between them had been drawn, she had never elicited anything more from him than a sour, grudging tolerance. To him, she had always been only a stupid, worthless girl. Still, she was shocked to learn how willingly he would have exposed her, how unhesitatingly he would have consigned her to unspeakable death.
Nevertheless, as the last of the heavy earth was mounded on her father’s grave, Joan felt an odd, unexpected melancholy. She could not remember a time when she had not resented her father, feared him, even hated him. Yet she felt a peculiar sense of loss. Matthew, John, Mama—all were gone. Her father had been her last link with home, with the girl she once had been. There was no Joan of Ingelheim anymore; there was only John Anglicus, priest and monk of the Benedictine house of Fulda.
17
Fontenoy | 841
THE meadow shimmered in the dim, gray light of early dawn, threaded through the middle with the sweetly curving lines of a silver creek. An unlikely scene for a battle, Gerold thought grimly.
Emperor Louis had been dead less than a year, but the smoldering rivalry among his three sons had already flared into full-fledged civil war. The eldest, Lothar, had inherited the title of Emperor, but the lands of the Empire were divided between Lothar and his two younger brothers, Charles and Ludwig—an unwise and dangerous arrangement that left all three sons dissatisfied. Even so, war might have been avoided had Lothar been more skilled in diplomacy. Peremptory and despotic by nature, Lothar treated his younger brothers with an arrogance that goaded them to league