CHAPTER 36
New understanding brought new focus. As Isabella’s Water Style improved, so did her ability to teach her novices and they improved together. Whatever danger the Handmaid faced, the Sisterhood would be ready to help her.
Isabella sat crosslegged on the chapel floor. The stained glass bathed her in warm light, red and yellow interwoven with slivers of blues and purples. In front of her on the small low table sat the glass. Heavy beads trembled on its rim and on the young nun’s forehead. When she inhaled, the surface of the water swelled; when she exhaled, it sagged. Concave … convex … Her hooded eyes watched the centre gain mass, growing round, rising, a drip forming upside down. She huffed like a weight-lifter, her cheeks swollen and red.
‘Madonna!’
Attaining greater height, the swelling became a sphere, and now the glass it floated above began to tremble. There was a high-pitched crack! and a lattice of jagged lines interrupted the surface of the glass. The unseen arrow loosed.
‘Ahhh!’ Isabella covered her face as shards flew around the room. The water spilled onto the floor. She stood and composed herself, looking contritely at the cracked stained glass. From its fractured tapestry, the Madonna looked serenely at the impatiently hovering angel. ‘I’m trying. Give me strength.’
In the sun-kissed enclosed garden, the ranks of the sisterhood practised Water Style. There were more than a dozen of them now. They wore white linen gowns with short, practical sleeves. Some were orphans like Isabella, but most were new mothers whose children had died and who had been turned out by their families for disgracing their towers. It might strike outsiders as odd that the novices were older than their Mother Superior, but not them. They knew what Isabella was capable of.
‘Enough! Let’s see you apply what you’ve learned. Prevent me from entering the baptistery.’
The hitherto synchronised dance became a series of individual sets, faster but still graceful. Isabella was a dark silhouette among the fluttering white; the elaborately long sleeves of her habit stretched after her as her lithe body tumbled in the air, moving across the courtyard like a darting bird, her feet touching earth only momentarily. Graceful as the novices were, they looked clumsy trying to catch her. It wasn’t a question of speed, but of fluidity. Her winding route between the novices was preordained as a river’s course. She had almost reached the end of the courtyard when a hard-eyed figure leapt out from the doorway. Instantly reacting, Isabella kicked the edge of the door to propel herself backwards, twisting so that she landed upright.
The novice fell to the ground with a grunt.
Isabella stood in the doorway and held out a helping hand. ‘Good effort, Carmella.’
The novice stood on her own. ‘Not good enough.’
‘You’ll get there,’ said Isabella, then to the group, ‘just like the rest of you. Back to it. Another hour.’
Isabella turned her back on Carmella and walked into the coolness of the baptistery. The novice stared after her with a mixture of admiration and resentment. Carmella hadn’t lost her family in a burn-out, or been disgraced like the others. She was one of the orphans created in the siege; Rasenna’s hour of glory was her nadir. She was the type of hard-knuckled girl one found in the bandieratori towers: proud, with endless reserves of wrath.
Isabella had to stand on tip-toe to look down into the baptismal font. With a dancer’s grace she leapt and seated herself on the edge of the dark water. There was little light to reflect except certain golden gleamings from the walls, the brightest point the tip of the Herod’s Sword hanging over the font. Isabella involuntarily shivered as she beheld the sacred symbol. Rasenneisi parents held their babes beneath it, that they might became one with He who had died prematurely from an imprudent excess of love.
Isabella looked up. ‘I was just thinking of you.’
‘I haven’t been avoiding you,’ Sofia said lamely. ‘It’s this place. I come here and I think of the Reverend Mother and the Doc. It scares me. Even when the Families were at their worst, we had them to defend it. All we have now is an army.’
‘And you.’
‘I’m not Contessa any more.’
‘You’re much more than that. Memories weren’t keeping you away. You didn’t want me to discover the truth. Sofia, you need to understand there’s no escaping it. Soon everyone will know.’
‘How could I be—?’ Sofia began, then stopped in embarrassment. ‘I’ve never been with a man.’
‘I believe you.’
‘No one else will.’
‘You accepted the responsibility. Now you must live with it.’
‘Why?’ Sofia felt like a child who finds the rules changed. ‘I thought that when I said yes, there would be a change in the world as well as me. If I’m lucky, people will whisper behind my back. More likely they’ll call me whore to my face. My grandfather made the Scaligeri name famous and Doc died defending it. I had to give up my title – I accept that, and I accept that Rasenna has to change – but why must my name be tarnished? Can’t God change the hearts of men? He can open tracks in the desert, move mountains, stop rivers. If this child is His, shouldn’t everyone know it?’
‘No one can know,’ Isabella hissed, ‘and you know why.’ She pointed to the sword above their heads. ‘Nothing’s changed in two thousand years. The same power that destroyed the Madonna’s child will murder yours if It learns of Him.’
‘But why must I sacrifice my name?’
‘It’s that or your child. Would you choose differently?’
When Sofia said nothing, Isabella asked, ‘What did the Apprentice say? The one in red you and Giovanni fought on the bridge.’
‘Before the river took him he said he was going to tell his Master.’
The beads worked in Isabella’s fingers, a habit she had learned from the Reverend Mother. ‘The Madonna was just a woman like you. Herod and Bernoulli were just men, but this child, this child is more.’
‘What if I’m too weak?’
‘Then Man will sleep on, troubled by the same old nightmares. But if you are strong enough – O, what a wakening!’
Sofia’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’ll give up everything – become a nun; people can whisper all they want.’
‘There’s no safety here.’
‘Where could be safer than Rasenna?’
‘There is refuge only at the World’s centre.’
‘Are you pazzo? Jerusalem is half a world away.’
‘You’d sense the water’s flow if you still practised contemplation.’
Sofia could not deny it. She’d sought to avoid water since the buio’s visitation, but nowhere in Rasenna was far from the Irenicon, and every time she crossed Giovanni’s bridge she felt it: a black storm of hunger blowing towards Rasenna, and the river whispering Run! Run while you can!
She had ignored it. She had been Contessa and bride in Rasenna, prisoner in Concord and cook in the Hawk’s Company; if she must be Handmaid now, very well, but for once it would be on her terms. The ceaseless costume changes were like some desperate farce and she was tired of it. Most of all, she was tired of running.
‘Sofia, war is coming. The longer you tarry, the greater the danger to you, and the worse the destruction visited on Rasenna. Wherever you go now, the Darkness follows. Now that It knows you’re in the world, Its agents hunt for you. Stop and It will consume you. There is no safe tower, no friend who cannot be corrupted, no water that will not be polluted.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Isabella cupped her hands in the baptismal font and held up her palms. They were covered in blood.