Joanna Russ - Souls

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Russ, Joanna - Souls.htm

Souls

by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ has been in the forefront of modern American science

fiction since the late 1960s, when she established a firm following

with the vigorously feminist sword-and-sorcery novel Picnic on

Paradise and the haunting and astonishingly vivid novel of

extrasensory powers And Chaos Died. Her short story, "When It

Changed," was a Nebula winner for 1972.

The brilliant novella reprinted here, which may at first seem to be

historical fiction but which gradually reveals its emphatic science

fiction content, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and

Science Fiction.

Deprived of other Banquet I entertained myself—

—EMILY DICKINSON

This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when

the Norsemen came. I tell it not as it was told to me but as I saw it,

for I was a child then and the Abbess had made a pet and errand boy

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of me, although the stern old Wardress, Cunigunt, who had outlived

the previous Abbess, said I was more in the Abbey than out of it and

a scandal. But the Abbess would only say mildly, "Dear Cunigunt, a

scandal at the age of seven?" which was turning it off with a joke,

for she knew how harsh and disliking my new stepmother was to

me and my father did not care and I with no sisters or brothers. You

must understand that joking and calling people "dear" and "my

dear" was only her manner; she was in every way an unusual

woman. The previous Abbess, Herrade, had found that Radegunde,

who had been given to her to be fostered, had great gifts and so sent

the child south to be taught, and that has never happened here

before. The story has it that the Abbess Herrade found Radegunde

seeming to read the great illuminated book in the Abbess's study;

the child had somehow pulled it off its stand and was sitting on the

floor with the volume in her lap, sucking her thumb, and turning the

pages with her other hand just as if she were reading.

"Little two-years," said the Abbess Herrade, who was a kind

woman, "what are you doing?" She thought it amusing, I suppose,

that Radegunde should pretend to read this great book, the largest

and finest in the Abbey, which had many, many books more than

any other nunnery or monastery I have ever heard of: a full forty

then, as I remember. And then little Radegunde was doing the book

no harm.

"Reading, Mother," said the little girl.

"Oh, reading?" said the Abbess, smiling. "Then tell me what you are

reading," and she pointed to the page.

"This," said Radegunde, "is a great D with flowers and other

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beautiful things about it, which is to show that Dominus, our Lord

God, is the greatest thing and the most beautiful and makes

everything to grow and be beautiful, and then it goes on to say

Domine nobis pacem, which means Give peace to us, O Lord."

Then the Abbess began to be frightened but she said only, "Who

showed you this?" thinking that Radegunde had heard someone read

and tell the words or had been pestering the nuns on the sly.

"No one," said the child. "Shall I go on?" and she read page after

page of the Latin, in each case telling what the words meant.

There is more to the story, but I will say only that after many

prayers the Abbess Herrade sent her foster daughter far southwards,

even to Poitiers, where Saint Radegunde had ruled an Abbey before,

and some say even to Rome, and in these places Radegunde was

taught all learning, for all learning there is in the world remains in

these places. Radegunde came back a grown woman and nursed the

Abbess through her last illness and then became Abbess in her turn.

They say that the great folk of the Church down there in the south

wanted to keep her because she was such a prodigy of female piety

and learning, there where life is safe and comfortable and less rude

than it is here, but she said that the gray skies and flooding winters

of her birthplace called to her very soul. She often told me the story

when I was a child: how headstrong she had been and how defiant,

and how she had sickened so desperately for her native land that

they had sent her back, deciding that a rude life in the mud of a

northern village would be a good cure for such a rebellious soul as

hers.

"And so it was," she would say, patting my cheek or tweaking my

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ear. "See how humble I am now?" for you understand, all this about

her rebellious girlhood, twenty years back, was a kind of joke

between us. "Don't you do it," she would tell me and we would

laugh together, I so heartily at the very idea of my being a pious

monk full of learning that I would hold my sides and be unable to

speak.

She was kind to everyone. She knew all the languages, not only

ours, but the Irish too and the tongues folk speak to the north and

south, and Latin and Greek also, and all the other languages in the

world, both to read and write. She knew how to cure sickness, both

the old women's way with herbs or leeches and out of books also.

And never was there a more pious woman! Some speak ill of her

now she's gone and say she was too merry to be a good Abbess, but

she would say, "Merriment is Gods flowers," and when the winter

wind blew her headdress awry and showed the gray hair—which

happened once; I was there and saw the shocked faces of the Sisters

with her—she merely tapped the band back into place, smiling and

saying, "Impudent wind! Thou showest thou hast power which is

more than our silly human power, for it is from God"—and this

quite satisfied the girls with her.

No one ever saw her angry. She was impatient sometimes, but in a

kindly way, as if her mind were elsewhere. It was in Heaven, I used

to think, for I have seen her pray for hours or sink to her knees—

right in the marsh!—to see the wild duck fly south, her hands

clasped and a kind of wild joy on her face, only to rise a moment

later, looking at the mud on her habit and crying half-ruefully, half

in laughter, "Oh, what will Sister Laundress say to me? I am

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hopeless! Dear child, tell no one; I will say I fell," and then she

would clap her hand to her mouth, turning red and laughing even

harder, saying, "I am hopeless, telling lies!"

The town thought her a saint, of course. We were all happy then, or

so it seems to me now, and all lucky and well, with this happiness

of having her amongst us burning and blooming in our midst like a

great fire around which we could all warm ourselves, even those

who didn't know why life seemed so good. There was less illness;

the food was better; the very weather stayed mild; and people did

not quarrel as they had before her time and do again now. Nor do I

think, considering what happened at the end, that all this was

nothing but the fancy of a boy who's found his mother, for that's

what she was to me; I brought her all the gossip and ran errands

when I could, and she called me Boy News in Latin; I was happier

than I have ever been.

And then one day those terrible, beaked prows appeared in our river.

I was with her when the warning came, in the main room of the

Abbey tower just after the first fire of the year had been lit in the

great hearth; we thought ourselves safe, for they had never been

seen so far south and it was too late in the year for any sensible

shipman to be in our waters. The Abbey was host to three Irish

priests who turned pale when young Sister Sibihd burst in with the

news, crying and wringing her hands; one of the brothers exclaimed

a thing in Latin which means "God protect us!" for they had been

telling us stories of the terrible sack of the monastery of Saint

Columbanus and how everyone had run away with the precious

manuscripts or had hidden in the woods, and that was how Father

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Cairbre and the two others had decided to go "walk the world," for

this (the Abbess had been telling it all to me, for I had no Latin) is

what the Irish say when they leave their native land to travel

elsewhere.

"God protects our souls, not our bodies," said the Abbess

Radegunde briskly. She had been talking with the priests in their

own language or in the Latin, but this she said in ours so even the

women workers from the village would understand. Then she said,

"Father Cairbre, take your friends and the younger Sisters to the

underground passage; Sister Diemud, open the gates to the

villagers; half of them will be trying to get behind the Abbey walls

and the others will be fleeing to the marsh. You, Boy News, down

to the cellars with the girls." But I did not go and she never saw it;

she was up and looking out one of the window slits instantly. So

was I. I had always thought the Norsemen's big ships came right up

on land—on legs, I supposed—and was disappointed to see that

after they came up our river they stayed in the water like other ships

and the men were coming ashore in little boats, which they were

busy pulling up on shore through the sand and mud. Then the

Abbess repeated her order—"Quickly! Quickly!"—and before

anyone knew what had happened, she was gone from the room. I

watched from the tower window; in the turmoil nobody bothered

about me. Below, the Abbey grounds and gardens were packed with

folk, all stepping on the herb plots and the Abbess's paestum roses,

and great logs were being dragged to bar the door set in the stone

walls round the Abbey, not high walls, to tell truth, and Radegunde

was going quickly through the crowd, crying: Do this! Do that!

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Stay, thou! Go, thou! and like things.

Then she reached the door and motioned Sister Oddha, the

doorkeeper, aside—the old Sister actually fell to her knees in

entreaty—and all this, you must understand, was wonderfully

pleasant to me. I had no more idea of danger than a puppy. There

was some tumult by the door—I think the men with the logs were

trying to get in her way—and Abbess Radegunde took out from the

neck of her habit her silver crucifix, brought all the way from

Rome, and shook it impatiently at those who would keep her in. So

of course they let her through at once.

I settled into my corner of the window, waiting for the Abbess's

crucifix to bring down God's lightning on those tall, fair men who

defied Qur Savior and the law and were supposed to wear animal

horns on their heads, though these did not (and I found out later-

that's just a story; that is not what the Norse do). I did hope that the

Abbess, or Our Lord, would wait just a little while before

destroying them, for I wanted to get a good look at them before they

all died, you understand. I was somewhat disappointed as they

seemed to be wearing breeches with leggings under them and tunics

on top, like ordinary folk, and cloaks also, though some did carry

swords and axes and there were round shields piled on the beach at

one place. But the long hair they had was fine, and the bright colors

of their clothes, and the monsters growing out of the heads of the

ships were splendid and very frightening, even though one could see

that they were only painted, like the pictures in the Abbess's books.

I decided that God had provided me with enough edification and

could now strike down the impious strangers.

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But He did not.

Instead the Abbess walked alone towards these fierce men, over the

stony river bank, as calmly as if she were on a picnic with her girls.

She was singing a little song, a pretty tune that I repeated many

years later, and a well-traveled man said it was a Norse cradle-song.

I didn't know that then, but only that the terrible, fair men, who had

looked up in surprise at seeing one lone woman come out of the

Abbey (which was barred behind her; I could see that), now began a

sort of whispering astonishment among themselves. I saw the

Abbess's gaze go quickly from one to the other—we often said that

she could tell what was hidden in the soul from one look at the face

—and then she picked the skirt of her habit up with one hand and

daintily went among the rocks to one of the men, one older than the

others, as it proved later, though I could not see so well at the time—

and said to him, in his own language:

"Welcome, Thorvald Einarsson, and what do you, good farmer, so

far from your own place, with the harvest ripe and the great autumn

storms coming on over the sea?" (You may wonder how I knew

what she said when I had no Norse; the truth is that Father Cairbre,

who had not gone to the cellars after all, was looking out the top of

the window while I was barely able to peep out the bottom, and he

repeated everything that was said for the folk in the room, who all

kept very quiet.)

Now you could see that the pirates were dumfounded to hear her

speak their own language and even more so that she called one by

his name; some stepped backwards and made strange signs in the air

and others unsheathed axes or swords and came running towards the

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Abbess. But this Thorvald Einarsson put up his hand for them to

stop and laughed heartily.

"Think!" he said. "There's no magic here, only cleverness—what

pair of ears could miss my name with the lot of you bawling out

'Thorvald Einarsson, help me with this oar;' 'Thorvald Einarsson,

my leggings are wet to the knees;' 'Thorvald Einarsson, this stream

is as cold as a Fimbulwinter!"

The Abbess Radegunde nodded and smiled. Then she sat down

plump on the river bank. She scratched behind one ear, as I had

often seen her do when she was deep in thought. Then she said (and

I am sure that this talk was carried on in a loud voice so that we in

the Abbey could hear it):

"Good friend Thorvald, you are as clever as the tale I heard of you

from your sisters son, Ranulf, from whom I learnt the Norse when I

was in Rome, and to show you it was he, he always swore by his

gray horse, Lamefoot, and he had a difficulty in his speech; he

could not say the sounds as we do and so spoke of you always as

'Torvald.' Is not that so?"

I did not realize it then, being only a child, but the Abbess was—by

this speech—claiming hospitality from the man and had also picked

by chance or inspiration the cleverest among these thieves, for his

next words were:

"I am not the leader. There are no leaders here."

He was warning her that they were not his men to control, you see.

So she scratched behind her ear again and got up. Then she began to

wander, as if she did not know what to do, from one to the other of

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these uneasy folk—for some backed off and made signs at her still,

and some took out their knives—singing her little tune again and

walking slowly, more bent over and older and infirm-looking than

we had ever seen her, one helpless little woman in black before all

those fierce men. One wild young pirate snatched the headdress

from her as she passed, leaving her short gray hair bare to the wind;

the others laughed and he that had done it cried out:

"Grandmother, are you not ashamed?"

"Why, good friend, of what?" said she mildly.

"Thou art married to thy Christ," he said, holding the head-covering

behind his back, "but this bridgegroom of thine cannot even defend

thee against the shame of having thy head uncovered! Now if thou

wert married to me—"

There was much laughter. The Abbess Radegunde waited until it

was over. Then she scratched her bare head and made as if to turn

away, but suddenly she turned back upon him with the age and

infirmity dropping from her as if they had been a cloak, seeming

taller and very grand, as if lit from within by some great fire. She

looked directly into his face. This thing she did was something we

had all seen, of course, but they had not, nor had they heard that

great, grand voice with which she sometimes read the Scriptures to

us or talked with us of the wrath of God. I think the young man was

frightened, for all his daring. And I know now what I did not then:

that the Norse admire courage above all things and that—to be blunt

— everyone likes a good story, especially if it happens right in front

of your eyes.

"Grandson!"—and her voice tolled like the great bell of God; I think

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