Pope Joan_ A Novel - Donna Woolfolk Cross [6]
“Joan,” she chastised gently, her lips against the child’s soft hair. “Little one, you should be asleep.”
Speaking quickly, her voice high and strained from fear, Joan told her mother about the monster hand.
Gudrun listened, petting and stroking her daughter and murmuring reassurances. Gently she ran her fingers over the child’s face, half-seen in the darkness. She was not pretty, Gudrun reflected ruefully. She looked too much like him, with his thick English neck and wide jaw. Her small body was already stocky and heavy set, not long and graceful like Gudrun’s people’s. But the child’s eyes were good, large and expressive and rich hued, green with dark gray smoke rings at the center. Gudrun lifted a strand of Joan’s baby hair and caressed it, enjoying the way it shone, white-gold, even in the darkness. My hair. Not the coarse black hair of her husband or his cruel, dark people. My child. She wrapped the strand around her forefinger and smiled. This one, at least, is mine.
Soothed by her mother’s attentions, Joan relaxed. In playful imitation, she began to tug at Gudrun’s long braid, loosening it till her hair lay tumbled about her head. Joan marveled at it, spilling over the dark woolen coverlet like rich cream. She had never seen her mother’s hair unbound. At the canon’s insistence, Gudrun wore it always neatly braided, hidden under a rough linen cap. A woman’s hair, her husband said, is the net wherein Satan catches a man’s soul. And Gudrun’s hair was extraordinarily beautiful, long and soft and pure white-gold, without a trace of gray, though she was now an old woman of thirty-seven winters.
“Why did Matthew and John go away?” Joan asked suddenly. Her mother had explained this to her several times, but Joan wanted to hear it again.
“You know why. Your father took them with him on his missionary journey.”
“Why couldn’t I go too?”
Gudrun sighed patiently. The child was always so full of questions. “Matthew and John are boys; one day they will be priests like your father. You are a girl, and therefore such matters do not concern you.” Seeing that Joan was not content with that, she added, “Besides, you are much too young.”
Joan was indignant. “I was four in Wintarmanoth!”
Gudrun’s eyes lit with amusement as she looked at the pudgy baby face. “Ah, yes, I forgot, you are a big girl now, aren’t you? Four years old! That does sound very grown-up.”
Joan lay quietly while her mother stroked her hair. Then she asked, “What are heathens?” Her father and brothers had spoken a good deal about heathens before they left. Joan did not understand what heathens were, exactly, though she gathered it was something very bad.
Gudrun stiffened. The word had conjuring powers. It had been on the lips of the invading soldiers as they pillaged her home and slaughtered her family and friends. The dark, cruel soldiers of the Frankish Emperor Karolus. “Magnus,” people called him now that he was dead. “Karolus Magnus.” Charles the Great. Would they name him so, Gudrun wondered, if they had seen his army tear Saxon babes from their mothers’ arms, swinging them round before they dashed their heads against the reddened stones? Gudrun withdrew her hand from Joan’s hair and rolled onto her back.
“That is a question you must ask your father,” she said.
Joan did not understand what she had done wrong, but she heard the strange hardness in her mother’s voice and knew that she would be sent back to her own bed if she didn’t think of some way to repair the damage. Quickly she said, “Tell me again about the Old Ones.”
“I cannot. Your father disapproves of the telling of such tales.” The words were half statement, half question.
Joan knew what to do. Placing both hands solemnly over her heart, she recited the Oath exactly as her mother had taught it to her, promising eternal secrecy on the sacred name of Thor the Thunderer.
Gudrun laughed and drew Joan close again. “Very well, little quail. I will tell you the story, since you know so well how to ask.”
Her voice