“It wasn’t an apple,” declared Joan. Her voice was as abrupt and blunt as the sound of her name, an Anglicization of the softer Jeanne, and it made Aveline think of how Joan’s outright defiance was the less-refined result of Aveline’s quiet investigations.
“I beg your pardon, child?” demanded Mother Marie-Anne.
Not such a child, thought Aveline. She knew exactly how much Joan’s body had changed over the past couple of years. While they might not have much choice about abjuring the company of men, Aveline and Joan had spent plenty of time learning all the things they didn’t need men to do. Those moments together were no longer filled with innocence and fumbling, but fragrant with sin. Joan wanted to run away before they took their vows; Aveline had promised Joan that, at least, their love would never make them forsworn, since only a man could truly take God’s place in their beds.
“I mean, it have could been,” said Joan. “Genesis doesn’t say it wasn’t. But it doesn’t say ‘apple,’” anywhere in the text.”
Her last sentence was a direct quote from Aveline, who had pointed it out to Joan last night. When there were too many sisters around for bodily pleasures, one had to settle for secrets and whispered knowledge, and Aveline, who spoke Latin as well as she did French, had read every letter of the Bible. The abbess had even called upon her to begin copying it onto precious vellum, so clear was Aveline’s mind and so steady her hands. Of course, Aveline was clever enough to know that, if she wanted to continue her studies, she had best refrain from embarrassing the Mother Superior.
Joan lacked either Aveline’s cleverness or her self-control, perhaps both. Mother Marie-Anne looked flustered. “Well, child,” she said, blushing, “I suppose… that’s true. But it doesn’t really matter what fruit it was, does it? It only matters that it was forbidden.”
Joan was glaring at her, as though all the inadequacies that Aveline was beginning to suspect in “Holy” Writ were really deliberate deceptions on Marie-Anne’s part. “And the snakes, if they have to crawl because they are evil, the what did earthworms do? Earthworms are good.” Marie-Anne wouldn’t be able to debate this point, given that Father Michael had held them up as examples of God’s beneficence in last Sunday’s homily.
“Earthworms don’t suffer for their crawling,” Marie-Anne assured her. “They’re happy in the ground where God put them.”
“Then why does it bother snakes?” Joan demanded. “Look at snakes. They’re fine with crawling. God gave them good enough skin to hold up to the task, and even scales to protect them. They don’t look like they’re suffering.” Again, the logic was Aveline’s, but the intransigence was Joan’s.
“Enough, child!” Marie-Anne snapped. Aveline wondered if the Mother would spank Joan, despite her age. “We have Scripture; we don’t need your troublemaking.”
“But, Mother,” said Aveline, serious and not provocative at all, as though she were a grand theologian, “God loves the snakes, too, doesn’t he? Just as He loves every sparrow in the sky? It makes me sad to think of the snakes being unloved.”
Marie-Anne’s face softened. “I think God can find compassion for anyone and anything, Aveline.”
Aveline didn’t question her reasoning. Instead, she looked to her apron and hands. On her apron was a streak of blood from the fish she had gutted and filleted for dinner, as God had ordained that a human might, and on her right hand were spots of ink from when she had painted God’s word on a lamb’s soft skin. She recalled the stories told her, before she had entered the convent, of her family’s legacy in the conquest of England, and before that in the capture of Normandy. How many people had died for her family’s power and wealth? Death fed everything, everything that mattered; there was no glory without it.
Even now, Marie-Anne seemed to prove the cruelty of God’s order on Earth. She was an old woman, her skin sagging, her knuckles swollen and red, most of her teeth gone, her back bending into an inhuman shape. Was this the most compassion that God could show humanity, after Adam’s fall?
Aveline said none of this to Marie-Anne, but, late at night, as she curled around Joan in a way that looked meant for sisterly warmth, she whispered her pet heresies in her ear. Joan took her hand.
“But would you rather none of us lived in the first place?”
“No,” Aveline said, “I would rather that God were like the ministers say when they’re happy with us, rather than when they think we’ve misbehaved.”
Most of the girls would have said something about mysteries or rewards in Heaven. Joan didn’t. “God could do better, couldn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Then he doesn’t want to.”
Aveline wasn’t sure if that was a question or not, but she answered it anyway. “No, I don’t believe that he does.”
“Then we’re on our own If… if that’s the case, then there’s no judgment, no punishment. Nothing but what we ourselves can manage.” She sounded hopeful of the possibility, although she kept her blasphemies so quiet that Aveline could barely hear them.
Aveline hesitated, something she seldom did. “Unless there’s something else out there.”
Joan tittered with her anxiety. Her eyes were wide, seeking anyone who might be paying them undue attention. “Something else? Like elves and fairies, Sister?”
“Maybe,” Aveline murmured. “Maybe the god we’ve always worshipped doesn’t even exist. Maybe there old gods of Rome were real. Maybe there are elves in the woods and we can sneak out to see them. But we won’t know any of it until we see for ourselves.”
“We could try to find some way to make Father Michael tell us,” suggested Joan.
“And what makes you think he knows? Look at this room. All these girls around us, they’ll live out their lives just as they are. When they’re his age, they’ll have asked no more questions and learned nothing more than they know now.” Aveline kissed Joan’s neck. “But we are different. We will ask, and we will strive, and we will learn, and we will…” she grappled for the right word, “… control.”
“I hope I can sleep tonight,” Joan teased. “It’s hard to wait when we think that we might conquer the world tomorrow.” She breathed out. “And when I think I might dismiss everything we’ve said as a dream when I awaken.”
“I won’t let you forget,” promised Aveline. She gave Joan another kiss. “Sleep well, Sister. We can begin our search for the elves tomorrow.”
They never found the elves, but, over the coming weeks, Aveline began to face something she thought she had always seen: Faint traces of energy, magic, the glow of the gods, whatever one might call it, all through nature, in every rock and tree and blade of grass, in squirrels and fish and the sisters in the convent. It shone no more brightly in Father Michael than in anyone else: The nattering fraud had received no blessings from the bishop’s hands. Aveline herself was another story: She could gather the energy to her, and, though little enough came from any one direction, a thousand fireflies made quite a glow. It was not all she imagined, not all she dreamed, not enough to save her from eventual decrepitude and death, but she was already the most powerful person she had ever met.
Joan progressed more slowly. It was as if, until now, she had been like a puppy, her eyes closed; now Aveline helped her to open them, and Joan, too, began to see the uncanny power that lay within the world. As soon as she could see them, she would try to use them. Half-blind, she might be, but she was also fearless. At times she startled even Aveline with the risks she ran, pulling the power from everything around her so greedily that, within a year, the very stones of the chapel where they practiced began to crumble in their favorite alcove.
Eventually they learned to speak across great distances to the mystical creatures that drifted through the world, relics of a war against Yahweh, and to the even stranger creatures that lay past a gauzy veil in a different realm. Aveline did not consider it Hell, exactly, for though all the creatures she saw were discontented and ambitious as herself, they yet took joy in their power and their dreams of conquest. A great master writhed in that misty vision, a dragon whose hiss, once heard, would always haunt her dreams, and when she called to him by the name of “Lucifer,” she thought his hiss had the cadence of laughter.
Joan refused to make any effort to commune with him. After all, she said, if God had abandoned them, then they were free. Why go looking for a master? She would offer her blood, her taste of humanity, to the hungry earthly spirits, but she would not call on even the greater of those, much less the one not bound by blood and flesh. Aveline parted from her sister’s approach there: She would accept nothing less than the greatest power she could claim, and would never stop seeking the path to that treasure.
Years passed, even decades. The slight powers that Joan invoked slowed her aging more than her peers, although less than the greater ones called upon by Aveline. They lived long in the abbey without ever growing old. Aveline, for half a century the abbess of Little Grove, became a local legend. There were faint whispers of witchcraft among the younger nuns, whom Aveline endeavored to charm, while Joan was likelier to smack them on their heads and warn them against foolhardiness. A few girls showed the intelligence and spirit to be recruited into their group.
Fortune smiled on them in the year 1315, when famine spread across the land. Though hungry, Aveline and Joan had the power to survive, even as their joints sharpened and their cheeks hollowed, and they forced the plants of the convent to grow in spite of the endless rain. The strength to feed the sisters did not come cheaply: Evelyn and Joan had to free enough available power to bargain with the spirits. The blood of unwanted infants, found by roadsides or handed over to the nuns, seeded their gardens, and the sisters harvested its fruits to feed those who might live. The famine continued; they scattered blood across the fields of surrounding villages. At first, the convent’s rate of survival caused jealousy and disquiet, and there was talk of a witch hunt; in the second year, quiet peasants murmured that it was best not to interrupt the shrouded figures that swept through their fields on full moons, nor to ask what kind of blood they left behind in the furrows. By the beginning of 1317, the unwanted included those who could wander the woods by themselves, children old enough to speak and the old who thought it better to starve outside their grandchildren’s sight.
In the midst of this misery, Aveline and Joan thrived. Gaunt and weary, they learned what bargains could be made, and which they were willing to make. Their thin fingers worked magic they had never thought they would dare. Joan killed foundlings for the fields as readily as she would have killed ducks for the table, letting their blood soak the few seed corns so that every precious one might ripen; but she would pledge nothing for the future, not her own soul, nor the land beneath her feet, nor the children she was still, through her power, able to bear. Aveline learned to pledge future slaughter, and sought out and killed them in their homes when they failed to come to her. Both of the witches, for such they now considered themselves, kept moving and speaking when their legs looked like sticks and their lips turned pale, the power that they called on making them strong.
The world believed that God was punishing it, but Aveline and Joan believed otherwise. The pestilence glowed with no more magic than anything else on the Earth. God had forsaken them, not attacked them, and they slowly convinced sister after sister of this. As the old order crumbled around the children, heresy seemed like inspiration, and apostasy like a vision.
The weather returned to something like normal in 1317, although, with so little seed and so few animals remaining, it would take years for the farms to produce the crops to which people were accustomed. The locals had, thanks to the witches’ efforts, suffered less than most parishes, losing mostly those too young and those too old to do much work: They would recover faster than most.
With the people’s desperation receding, by the autumn equinox of 1320, their gratitude had begun to ebb as well. Once again, people whispered of evil and darkness, and thought that they should chase it from their mist. They blamed enchantment for their earlier acceptance of magic, the one charge of which Aveline and Joan both knew themselves to be innocent. Both of them had wanted to see how the people would react on their own.
The members of their coven remained strong. It was time for Aveline and Joan to start anew, this time with the added strength of five chosen accomplices; and what better cover than a pilgrimage to the Vatican, no doubt the world’s greatest repository of forbidden spells?
“I believe it is possible,” Aveline told Joan. “I can awaken Lucifer, the beast, and be transformed.” She handed an old letter to Joan. “Monsignor Guillaume tells me of a certain book, of which there are only two copies, one hidden beneath a sarcophagus in Rome, the other lost somewhere in the Holy Land, which was supposed to attune one to the power of Lucifer forever. To make one his hand, in a way, as much a part of him and as eternal.”
“And does Monsignor Guillaume know only the language of the Welsh peasantry?” asked Joan, trying to hide her horror with amusement.
“Hardly. He speaks everything, including those languages less known in our dear England. Besides, that’s really Greek, phonetically transliterated in the Welsh style. Even the trustiest courier could be robbed, after all, and where would we be without a code?”
“Why do you believe him? He probably just thinks it would be a delightful chase, to see if the nun will yield to his advances.”
Aveline raised an eyebrow. “Are you jealous, sister? You’ve never shown it with any of the others.”
“I’ve never been jealous of anyone who couldn’t take you away from me. I’m not jealous of this strange man. I’m jealous of Lucifer. I’m only skeptical of Guillaume.”
“He’s proven himself before. Little spells, all I imagine his man’s mind can handle. So clumsy, they are, so sure of their own power that they never quite grasp how much more there is to seize in the rest of the world.”
Joan set down the letter with a show of carelessness. “I wouldn’t mind some new views myself. But don’t think I’ll help you with this damnable idea of yours. Guillaume may not take you away, but you seem intent on throwing yourself away. I won’t chant for Lucifer to come and ruin you.”
“Don’t you think the two of us are already past the point where he could ruin us? All the cruelty of this world, we’ve already accepted. We’re running down the same track the god of the Hebrews laid down when he abandoned this sorry world. We run a little faster than most people, but it’s still the same old track, and it would lead us all to the same end.” She sounded so certain that she was exempt. Joan wanted to throw the letter in the fire.
“Better to meet our ends in freedom, then,” Joan answered. “Our master’s gone and left us the run of the place. I won’t wander into someone else’s herd.”
“You think you’re really free? When the world that our Lord set in motion is still grinding us into dust as we speak? Take a deep breath, sister, and taste on your tongue all those who’ve died before us. They’re just like we’ll be, one day, and we’ll be uglier than dirt before we even find that mercy.”
Joan did take a deep breath. She tasted the world, in all its pain and cruelty and vibrancy and freedom. She would never kneel, she would never beg, she would never cry out to a god to make her better. She was what she was, and she would always be only what she could make of herself.
Aveline was brilliant. She knew, in her marrow, that Aveline would succeed, that the books and their power were real; and she could not imagine that Lucifer would reject Aveline, Aveline with her dignified posture and sensual motions, Aveline with her sharp cheekbones and gleaming eyes like full moons.
But, she thought, Aveline knew her as well as she knew Aveline. She must have known that Joan would refuse the offer, would even try to find the second copy of the book to undo the spell. Why had Aveline even mentioned her plan, or the existence of the second copy?
It came to her suddenly. She had overestimated Aveline, not in her skill with magic or her facility for languages or her ability to gauge the popular mood, but in her knowledge of one human heart. Aveline did not know Joan as well as Joan knew Aveline. Aveline thought that, if she could ever spur Joan to obtain the book as well, temptation would overcome her, and the two sisters would be reunited.
It wouldn’t happen. Nothing tempted Joan more than freedom, and she would not sacrifice that even for immortality, nor even for the comfort of Aveline’s arms.
“I won’t help you with the spell,” Joan said. “I can’t. But we’ll travel together as far as we may. I’ve always wanted to see Italy.”
“Of course, Sister,” Aveline said, and kissed her.
They arrived in Rome in January, the region’s most comfortable time of year. Ignoring disdainful looks from male pilgrims, they paid well and found comfortable rooms in the city, and several odd sarcophagi in the tombs. One day, Aveline came back to the rooms with a look of triumph on her face and a book in her hand. Joan steeled herself to keep from closing her eyes or turning away or giving any ground to the pain she felt in her heart. Instead, she looked closely at the book’s cover and hoped that the other copy had the same symbol on its binding.
“Success?” she asked dryly.
“Tomorrow night, I become a new… well, something far better than a woman,” promised Aveline.
“Not this night?” asked Joan. She thought that she should hate the tremor in her voice, but suddenly, she couldn’t care.
“No, I want to study it a bit first.” Aveline took a tiny mirror out of one of her bags and began touching up her subtle makeup. One would have had to look very closely to see that her eyes were not quite as wide or her cheeks quite as bright as they at first appeared.
“I want to do something else first,” Joan said. Its sounded blunt and coarse and selfish, even a little ugly; but then, wasn’t that who she was? She supposed that by now, Aveline was used to it, too.
“A last night?” asked Aveline. Joan thought that Aveline still thought there would be others, that their affair would resume once Joan had seen the promise Lucifer’s spells. But Joan knew that it really was the last night.
It occurred to her that she should make a rush for the book, to light it on fire or at least throw it in the chamber pot. She made up reasons why it wouldn’t work: Aveline was faster than she was, Aveline would manage to recover the book in time, Aveline would still find the second copy. It would be a long time before Joan admitted to herself the real reason: That she wasn’t ready for Aveline to hate her.
They lay down on a narrow bed, so small that when they separated they would have to both sleep on their sides. At least the covers were clean and the bed frame sturdy, which was an improvement over most of the accommodations they had seen on this journey.
Aveline began to murmur sweet nothings to Joan. Joan didn’t care much for nothings, only for Aveline’s rich, deep voice. She wouldn’t remember if Aveline spoke long or briefly, or, probably, more than a tenth of what Aveline said. She would only remember the words that mattered, which Aveline spoke when both women lay panting and sweating, resting on the same pillow.
“It should have been an apple, tart and sweet from first to last,” Aveline told her. “That’s my Eden. That’s what I’ll remember. That’s the only thing of this world that I will ever love.”