Read Online The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: M. John Harrison
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foot in sackcloth, and led the plebs pauperum to the Holy City (“What do I care if I die, since I am doing what I want to do?”). “On one hand,” he said, “We have the heresy of the Free Spirit, with its emphasis on the singularity and self-possession of the soul, on the other the beautiful staggered apses en echelon of the Romanesque cathedral. Love and order: the very polarity of these visions demands the Coeur as a higher level of appeal, which will reconcile them by containing them as elements of its own structure, just as the Pleroma reconciles the World and the Coeur.”
But this only made Pam laugh.
“What was it like to live there, Lucas? What did they eat? What sort of pottery did they piss in?”
“We don’t know.”
“No.” She smiled. “We don’t, do we?”
* * *
“For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later ‘Michael of Anjou’), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog.
“At ten in the morning a force of Serbs and Albanians, on ladders of their own dead, breached the inner defenses; by noon they were still only halfway across the citadel, fighting grimly uphill street by street.
“Lascaris was killed there early in the afternoon. Neville, trying wildly to come to his aid with the remains of the small English contingent, seems to have been ambushed and awfully wounded, and it is possible the Empress thought both of them dead. She was last seen on foot at four o’clock, near one of the gates. By then, someone said, she was weeping openly and had picked up a sword. Her armor, though spattered with blood, remained so bright that when the smoke cleared you could not bear to look directly at her. Several people saw her fall. Not content with killing her the Serbs trampled her unrecognizable.
“The invading kings—it seems hardly worth our while at this distance to know who they were—allowed their followers three days in the sacred city before they took possession of it. When at last they rode through the great arch they received into their care a city which seemed to have been in ruins for a thousand years. They wept to see that birds were nesting in the fallen basilicas, weeds growing up between the paving stones.” Lucas told this story a number of times. At this point he would always pause and look at Pam before finishing.
“What had happened? The Coeur would no longer let itself be known, though it did not perhaps breathe its final breath in the world until they identified Gallica by her beautiful armor, and displayed the mutilated head.”
There was a silence.
Into it Pam said. “That’s all very well. We read ‘death’ where we should read ‘transformation’. But when will it allow itself to be known by us?” And she lit one Churchman’s from another, looking steadily at Lucas until he lifted his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of puzzlement as if she had asked the wrong question.
* * *
They were married for a year, then five. During that time Lucas was promoted, but grew no tidier. Pam continued to rise late, take her medication carefully, and stare out of the kitchen window at the trees on the other side of the valley. Lucas replaced his Renault with a more expensive one. The old cat died, and Pam, who had begun to call it “Michael”, buried it quietly in the garden before Lucas came home. Like any childless
But this only made Pam laugh.
“What was it like to live there, Lucas? What did they eat? What sort of pottery did they piss in?”
“We don’t know.”
“No.” She smiled. “We don’t, do we?”
* * *
“For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later ‘Michael of Anjou’), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog.
“At ten in the morning a force of Serbs and Albanians, on ladders of their own dead, breached the inner defenses; by noon they were still only halfway across the citadel, fighting grimly uphill street by street.
“Lascaris was killed there early in the afternoon. Neville, trying wildly to come to his aid with the remains of the small English contingent, seems to have been ambushed and awfully wounded, and it is possible the Empress thought both of them dead. She was last seen on foot at four o’clock, near one of the gates. By then, someone said, she was weeping openly and had picked up a sword. Her armor, though spattered with blood, remained so bright that when the smoke cleared you could not bear to look directly at her. Several people saw her fall. Not content with killing her the Serbs trampled her unrecognizable.
“The invading kings—it seems hardly worth our while at this distance to know who they were—allowed their followers three days in the sacred city before they took possession of it. When at last they rode through the great arch they received into their care a city which seemed to have been in ruins for a thousand years. They wept to see that birds were nesting in the fallen basilicas, weeds growing up between the paving stones.” Lucas told this story a number of times. At this point he would always pause and look at Pam before finishing.
“What had happened? The Coeur would no longer let itself be known, though it did not perhaps breathe its final breath in the world until they identified Gallica by her beautiful armor, and displayed the mutilated head.”
There was a silence.
Into it Pam said. “That’s all very well. We read ‘death’ where we should read ‘transformation’. But when will it allow itself to be known by us?” And she lit one Churchman’s from another, looking steadily at Lucas until he lifted his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of puzzlement as if she had asked the wrong question.
* * *
They were married for a year, then five. During that time Lucas was promoted, but grew no tidier. Pam continued to rise late, take her medication carefully, and stare out of the kitchen window at the trees on the other side of the valley. Lucas replaced his Renault with a more expensive one. The old cat died, and Pam, who had begun to call it “Michael”, buried it quietly in the garden before Lucas came home. Like any childless
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