One Night Before the Pyre

The chain ran from her ankle to an iron loop set into the wall, and because the loop was low, near the floor, Joan could not stand fully upright without the shackle pulling her foot sideways. She had learned to sit with her right leg extended and her left drawn up, her back against the stone, which was damp in a way that never dried. Three months of this posture and her hip had developed a grinding sensation when she shifted. She was nineteen years old and her hip ground like her father's did after a day bent over the plow. The guards changed at compline. She knew the hours not by bells, which she could not hear from this depth of the keep, but by the guards themselves: the Englishman with the pocked jaw came at terce, the one who whistled through his teeth at sext, the quiet one with red hands at none. The compline guard was the worst because he watched her. Not with appetite, not exactly, though the Bishop had refused her request for a female guard and she understood what that refusal made possible. This one watched her the way a boy watches a spider he's trapped under a cup. Curious about when she would stop moving. She did not look at him. She looked at the wall opposite, which was close enough to touch if she stretched her left arm, and she counted the stones. She had counted them many times. Forty-seven whole stones and six partial ones where the wall met the floor and the mason had cut them to fit. She had named several of the stones after people from Domrémy. The wide flat one near the ceiling was her mother. The cracked one at knee height was her brother Pierre. She did not assign her father a stone because her father had said he would rather drown her than see her ride with soldiers, and she had ridden with soldiers, and whether he had meant it or not the sentence stood between them like a gate dropped in a road. Tomorrow they would burn her. She had known this for two days, since the court delivered the sentence and the Bishop told her that her submission of the previous Sunday was void because she had resumed wearing the male clothing. She had resumed wearing it because the guards had taken her dress during the night, leaving only the soldier's tunic and hose, so that her choice was to lie naked under a thin blanket in a cell with men who watched her, or put on the forbidden clothes. She had put on the clothes. The Bishop had called this a relapse. She understood that the Bishop had arranged the theft of the dress, or allowed it, or simply known it would happen and declined to prevent it. The distinction between these did not interest her. The effect was the same. Tomorrow at eight they would bring her out and put her in the cart and drive her to the old market square and chain her to the stake and pile the wood around her feet and light it. She pressed the back of her skull against the wall and closed her eyes. --- The voices had come to her first when she was thirteen, in her father's garden, near the hazel tree by the road. She had been sitting in the grass doing nothing in particular, watching the shadows of the leaves move on the back of her hand, and a brightness had appeared on her right side, always the right side, and with the brightness came a voice that said her name. Not the way a person says a name. She had tried to explain this at the trial. Brother Jean had asked her, "In what manner did the voice address you?" and she had said it was like hearing a word while also seeing it written and also tasting it and also remembering a time when someone else had said it long ago. The word arrived through too many senses at once. It was her name but received in a way that no human throat could produce. She had told the court it was Saint Michael. Then Saint Catherine. Then Saint Margaret. She had given the voices these names because the voices needed names, and those were the saints she knew, and the brightness and the authority and the impossible clarity of the speech seemed to her like what a saint should sound like, if saints were to speak. But in the months since the trial began, the questions had pried loose something she had not wanted pried loose. Brother Jean had asked her, "Do your saints speak in French?" She had said yes because the messages came to her in words she understood, in the language she thought in. But even as she said it she recognized the problem. The saints were not French. Catherine was from Alexandria. Margaret was from Antioch. Michael was an angel and had no country. Yet the voices spoke in the dialect of the Meuse valley, with the particular flatness of vowels she'd grown up hearing in Domrémy, the way her mother spoke, the way the notary spoke, the way the mill operator spoke when he argued about grain weights on market day. It was a small wrongness but once she noticed it she could not stop noticing. Then Brother Jean had asked, "Do your voices speak of things that have already happened, or things that will happen?" She had answered, "Both." "In what proportion?" She had not understood the word "proportion," and he had rephrased: "Do they more often tell you what has been, or what is to come?" She said, "What is to come." "And the things they told you would happen, at Orléans, at Patay, at Reims. Did these things happen as foretold?" "Yes." "In every detail?" She had paused. She had paused long enough that the notary looked up from his writing. "Nearly," she had said. Because the voices had told her she would be wounded at Orléans and she had been wounded, an arrow above the left breast, and they had told her the wound would not kill her and it had not. But they had also told her things about the battle that did not happen until after she told the Dauphin's generals, so that the knowledge itself had changed the events. And once, at Patay, the voice had described the position of the English longbowmen and then corrected itself, as if it had given her outdated information, as if its knowledge of the battle was from a version of events that no longer applied because she was standing in the middle of them with a sword and a standard. She had not explained this to the court. She had barely allowed herself to think it. --- The compline guard shifted on his stool. His name was John Grey and he was from Suffolk and he had a wife there whom he spoke about sometimes when he forgot he was guarding a heretic. His wife was pregnant. He was worried about the baby because their first child had died at three months, a coughing sickness, and he had not been home for the death or the burial. Joan knew these things because John Grey talked to the other guards during shift changes and she listened, and because he sometimes talked to her in English, which she did not speak, as if the foreignness of the language made the conversation less real, less compromising. She had prayed for his wife once. Now she was not sure to whom she had been praying. The cell was cold. May in Rouen should not have been cold but the keep held winter in its walls the way a cellar holds the chill of the earth, and Joan's skin had gone papery from months without sun. She picked at a callus on her palm, a remnant of holding a sword, or holding the standard. She had carried the standard more than the sword. She had told the court she had never killed anyone. This was true, or true enough. She had carried the standard and ridden at the front and been hit by stones and arrows and the flat of a blade once, across the back, and she had shouted until her voice tore and waved the white banner with the image of Christ holding the world, and men had followed her, thousands of men, because the voices told her they would and they did. She was nineteen and tomorrow she would burn and tonight the cell was cold and the guard was watching and the chain on her ankle had rubbed a sore that wept a clear fluid that was not blood and not pus but something between. She closed her eyes and waited. --- The voice came at what she estimated was the second hour after compline. It arrived the way it always arrived: a brightness behind her eyelids, though this meant less in the dark cell than it had in her father's garden, and a sensation of proximity, of someone standing close enough that she should feel their breath but did not. *Jehanne.* Her name, but through too many senses. The taste of it was like cold water from the well at Domrémy, metallic and clean, and the sound of it was like her mother calling from across the garden, and the sight of it was a word she could not read because she had never learned to read, but she saw it anyway, the shape of the letters, which she recognized without understanding how she recognized them. She kept her eyes closed. She had learned early that the voice was clearer with her eyes closed. When she opened them the brightness faded into the ordinary light of the world and the voice grew thin. *We have very little time.* This was different. The voices had never said this before. They had spoken in directives: go to Vaucouleurs, tell the Dauphin, ride to Orléans. They had spoken in reassurances: you will not die of this wound, the city will fall, do not be afraid. They had never acknowledged a limitation. She said, aloud, "I am to die tomorrow." *Yes.* "You told me I would be delivered. You told me there would be a great victory." *We told you what was supposed to happen.* "Supposed." She tasted the word. It was the wrong word for prophecy. Prophecy did not use "supposed." Prophecy said "shall" and "will" and "it is written." Prophecy came from a place where the future was fixed and known and set down in the mind of God. "Supposed" came from a place where the future could go wrong. "Who are you?" she asked. John Grey looked up from his stool. She had spoken in French and he understood nothing, but he heard the address, the conversational tone, and he looked around the cell the way he always did when she spoke to the empty air, checking corners, confirming she was alone. She waited until he settled. "Who are you?" she asked again, quieter. The brightness flickered. *That question is difficult to answer in terms you would understand.* "Try." A pause. The voices had never paused before. They had been instant, complete, each sentence arriving whole. This one gathered itself the way a person gathers breath before saying something they are not sure they should say. *We are people. Not saints. Not angels. People, like you, but born a long time from now.* "How long?" *Centuries.* She opened her eyes. The cell was the same. John Grey was picking at a hangnail. The chain lay across the floor like a dead snake. The stones were the same forty-seven stones. She closed her eyes again. "That is not possible." *You accepted that saints spoke to you from heaven. Heaven is far. The future is also far.* "Heaven is not far. Heaven is here. Heaven is everywhere." *Then the future is also here. Also everywhere. We are reaching you from a great distance, but the distance is in time, not in space. We are in this same country, on this same earth, many years from now, speaking to you through, we do not have a word you would know. Through a method.* "A method." *Yes.* "Sorcery." *No. Knowledge. The way a man learns to build a bridge across a river. We have learned to build a bridge across years. The bridge is not strong. It carries only voices. Sometimes images. We cannot send objects or people. Only information.* Joan pressed her knuckles against her teeth. Her hands were dirty, the nails torn short, and she could taste the iron of the shackle on her skin where she had gripped the chain in the night. "Why me?" *Because you were in the right place. Because you could hear us. Not everyone can. We do not understand why some people receive the signal and others do not. We tried others before you. A monk in Bruges. A girl in Genoa. A shepherd in Castile. None of them could hear clearly. You heard us clearly from the first day, in your father's garden, by the hazel tree.* She had never told anyone about the hazel tree. She had told the court about the garden but not the tree. She had kept the tree for herself, a small piece of the experience that belonged to her and not to the Bishop or the notary or the assessors who watched her speak and wrote down what she said and then rearranged it to mean what they needed it to mean. "You knew about the tree." *We have been watching you for a long time. Not watching exactly. Listening. The bridge goes in both directions.* "You hear me." *We hear you. We heard you when you prayed after the battle at Orléans. We heard you when you sang in the cathedral at Reims. We heard you when you cried in the cell four nights ago and asked God why He had abandoned you.* "And you said nothing." *We were not sure what to say.* --- John Grey stood and stretched. He walked to the heavy door and knocked on it twice and spoke to someone outside in English. Joan heard the word "piss" and the word "back" and then Grey left and the door closed and she was alone for the first time in weeks. The replacement guard would arrive soon. She had a few minutes. "Why did you choose France?" she asked. "Why this war?" *Because this war decides what happens for the next four hundred years. The shape of Europe. Which kingdoms survive. Which languages are spoken. Which ideas take hold and which die. If England holds France, a chain of events follows that leads to a particular future. If France remains French, a different chain follows. We are from one of those futures. We needed the other one.* "Needed." *Our future is not good. We have been trying to change it. The branch point, the place where the path forks, is here. In this war. In you.* "And what happens now? I die tomorrow. Your war is already won. The Dauphin was crowned. The English are losing. You got what you needed." Another pause. Longer. The brightness dimmed and then returned, and when it returned it was unsteady, guttering the way a candle gutters in a draft. *The crowning was necessary. The military victories were necessary. Your death is not.* "But it will happen." *It does not have to.* "The court has sentenced me. The Bishop has my confession and my relapse." *You could recant again. Accept the dress. Accept the court's authority. They would commute the sentence. They have done this for others. You would spend years in prison, perhaps the rest of your life, but you would live.* "I tried submission once. They took my dress." *We know. We were not able to prevent that. Our ability to affect events is limited to what we can tell you. We cannot move objects. We cannot touch your world. We can only speak.* "Then you are useless to me now." The brightness pulsed. Not with anger. She did not read emotion in the voices the way she read emotion in faces, but there was something in the quality of the light, a kind of density, that communicated effort. Whatever this was, this bridge across time, it was hard. It cost something on the other end. *We want you to live.* "Why? You said yourself the war is decided. The branch point has passed. What use am I now?" *You are not a use. You are a person. You are nineteen. You have not seen the ocean. You have not eaten an orange. You have not grown old. These are things that should happen to you.* Joan laughed. The sound surprised her. She had not laughed in months, and the laugh came out cracked and dry, a cough more than a laugh, but it was real. "You sound like my mother." *We are sorry.* "Don't be. I miss her." She pulled the chain through her fingers, link by link, feeling the weight. "If I recant, if I accept the dress and the prison, what happens?" *You disappear from history. The story of Joan of Arc ends with a recantation and a life sentence and a woman who lived out her years in an English prison and died of fever or age or neglect. No one remembers her. The war is won without her martyrdom. The Dauphin consolidates power more slowly, but he consolidates it. France survives.* "And your future?" *Unchanged. The branch point is behind us now. Your death or your life, neither alters the fork anymore. The decision has already been made. We have what we came for.* "Then why are you here?" *Because we put you here. We called you out of your father's garden and told you to ride to war and you rode to war and now you are in chains in a cell in Rouen and you are nineteen years old and we did this to you. We owe you this conversation.* Joan was quiet for a time. She listened to the keep. Water moved somewhere behind the walls, a trickle she had grown so accustomed to that she heard it now only in silence, the way you hear your own pulse when you stop moving. Outside the cell door, footsteps: the new guard arriving, later than usual. "At the trial," she said, "Brother Jean asked me if the voices spoke of things to come. I said yes. He asked if they were always right. I said nearly. He wrote that down. He wrote 'nearly.' I saw the notary's hand stop and then continue. That word bothered them." *It should have. Prophecy is always right or it is not prophecy. We were giving you intelligence, not revelation. Intelligence can be wrong. Conditions change.* "He also asked me what my saints looked like. I told him Saint Catherine wore a crown. He asked what kind of crown. I said I did not know the word for it. He asked if it was gold and I said it looked like gold but was not gold. It was a color I had never seen, brighter than gold, without weight." She paused. "That is not a crown, is it?" *No.* "What was it?" *Part of the equipment we use. The bridge requires, we do not have a word in your language. A frame. Around the head. It looks like metal but it is not metal.* "So when I told them I saw a saint in a golden crown, I was describing a machine." *Yes.* "And I built an entire faith on a machine." *You built a faith on what the machine told you. The information was real. The victories were real. Your courage was real. Only the source was different from what you believed.* "Only the source." She pressed her thumbnail into the mortar between two stones. The mortar was soft from damp and her nail left a crescent mark. "Only everything." --- The new guard settled onto the stool. This one she did not know. He was young, maybe her age, with a thin neck and a wool cap pulled low, and he did not look at her. He looked at his boots. Good. She spoke more quietly now. "Tell me what you know about tomorrow." *You will be taken to the Place du Vieux-Marché at eight in the morning. You will be given a chance to make a final statement. You will be chained to the pillar. The fire will be lit. It will take approximately twenty minutes. We cannot make it shorter. We cannot take the pain. We can only tell you it will end.* "Twenty minutes." *We can stay with you. If you want.* "Through the fire." *Through the fire. We do not know if you will be able to hear us past a certain point. The signal degrades under extreme physical stress. But we will try.* She thought about twenty minutes. She thought about the time it took to walk from her house to the church in Domrémy, which was about twenty minutes. She thought about kneeling at mass, which lasted longer but felt shorter. She thought about the arrow at Orléans, the punch of it above her breast, and how the pain had been sharp and total and then had narrowed to a point and then had become a kind of heat that spread downward, and she had pulled the arrow out herself, or helped pull it, and the blood was red and then brown on her white surcoat and someone had packed the wound with olive oil and lard and she had gone back to the fighting the same day. Twenty minutes was a long time for fire. "If I recant," she said, "you said no one remembers me." *In our records, the historical accounts, Joan of Arc becomes a minor figure. A peasant who claimed divine visions, fought briefly, recanted under pressure, spent decades in captivity. A footnote.* "And if I burn?" *Then you become the story of France. Of faith. Of resistance. Centuries of paintings, songs, books, arguments, interpretations. A saint, eventually. The Church that condemned you will reverse its judgment five hundred years from now and make you a saint.* "A saint." *Yes.* "But I am not a saint. I am a girl who heard a machine." *You are a girl who rode to war at seventeen and turned a siege and crowned a king. The machine told you where to go. It did not make you go. It did not make the men follow. It did not stop the arrow and it did not keep you from screaming when they pulled it out and it did not carry the standard up the scaling ladder at Les Tourelles. You did those things.* "Because I believed God had chosen me." *Yes.* "And God had not." *We do not know if God exists. We are people with a machine. That is all we can tell you about God.* Joan leaned her head back against the wall. The stone was cold. Her skull fit into a slight depression in the mortar that she had worn with months of resting in this exact position. She could feel the shape of her own endurance in the wall. "What is your name?" she asked. A pause. Not a pause of reluctance this time but of surprise, she thought, if the light could communicate surprise. The brightness sharpened the way a lens sharpens when you adjust it, not that she had ever held a lens, but the sensation corresponded to something: a focusing. *My name is Adélaïde.* "That is a French name." *I am French. I told you. We are from this same country, very far in the future, and we are trying to save it. We tried to save it through you.* "Adélaïde." Joan tasted the name. It sat well in her mouth. "Are you alone?" *There are others. I am the one who speaks to you because my voice matches the frequency, there is no word for this, the shape of your hearing. We tried others but you could not hear them as clearly. You hear me.* "I have always heard you." *Yes.* "I thought you were Saint Catherine." *I know.* "You let me think that." *We did. If we had told you the truth you would not have gone to Vaucouleurs. You would not have demanded an audience with the Dauphin. You would not have ridden to Orléans. You would have been a girl in a garden who heard a strange voice and told no one about it because she was afraid of being called mad. We needed you to believe. So we let you believe the wrong thing.* "The wrong thing." *Yes.* Joan pulled her knees to her chest, both of them now, letting the chain go taut and the shackle bite into the sore on her ankle. The pain was specific and good, a real sensation in a conversation that had come unmoored from every certainty she possessed. "I should hate you," she said. *You would be right to.* "But I don't. I don't know what I feel. I feel like I have been standing in a house and someone has told me the house has no floor, and I look down and the floor is gone but I am still standing." She heard how that sounded and did not care. "If I burn tomorrow and become a saint, I will be a saint who was made by a lie." *Yes. But the people who pray to you will not know that. Their prayers will be real. Their faith will be real. The comfort they take from your story will be real. Whether the thing that inspired you was God or a machine or a woman named Adélaïde in a room six hundred years from now, you still rode to Orléans. The gap between what you believed and what was true does not erase what you did because of it.* "That is a convenient argument for the person who told the lie." The brightness dimmed. When it returned it was thinner, a filament instead of a glow. *You are right. I do not have a good answer for that. I can only tell you what your choices are.* "You have already told me. Recant and be forgotten, or burn and be remembered for the wrong reasons." *Those are the choices. I cannot make a third one exist.* --- The young guard was asleep. His chin rested on his chest and his breathing was even and his wool cap had slid forward over his eyebrows. Joan watched him for a while. He was her age. He had probably been conscripted. He was probably cold and underpaid and far from whatever English village had produced him, and if she burned tomorrow he would stand in the crowd or he would not and either way he would go home eventually and marry or not marry and die of plague or war or old age and nobody six hundred years from now would know his name. The anonymity of that seemed, briefly, like a mercy. "Adélaïde." *I am here.* "When I was at Chinon, before the Dauphin received me, I waited in the hall for two days. I slept on the floor near the fire. A servant girl brought me bread and cheese and sat with me while I ate and told me about her son, who had a twisted foot and could not walk well. She asked me to pray for him. I told her I would." *Yes.* "Did I? Do your records say?" *Our records do not track prayers. I do not know.* "I think I did. I think I prayed for him that night. But I am not sure. I cannot remember." She rubbed her ankle above the shackle. "If I burn tomorrow, the fire will eat my body and the wind will carry the ashes over Rouen and into the Seine and out to the sea. I asked Brother Martin about this. He said my soul would go to God." *We cannot confirm that.* "I know. You have a machine, not an answer." She almost smiled. "But here is what I have been thinking. If I recant and live, I will spend the rest of my life in a cell like this one, and every day I will know that the voices were not God. Every day I will know that I rode to war because a woman with a machine decided that France needed saving and I was the instrument. I will sit in this cell and I will know this and the knowing will be the only thing I have. I will die with it." *Yes.* "But if I burn, I will burn believing that what I did was worth the doing. Because it was. Orléans was real. Patay was real. Reims was real. The men who followed me lived or died for a country that you say survives. The country survives." *The country survives.* "Then the lie does not matter. Or it matters, but not more than the rest." She heard how that sounded too, and it sounded like something a person tells herself the night before she dies, which is what it was, and she did not try to make it sound like more than that. *Jehanne.* "Yes." *I will be with you tomorrow. For as long as the signal holds.* "Will it hurt as much as I think it will?" *I will not lie to you again.* "Good." *It will be very bad.* "Twenty minutes." *Yes. But we will be here. Adélaïde will be here.* Joan unfolded her legs and stretched them in front of her. The chain rattled and the young guard stirred but did not wake. She looked at her hands in the weak light from the slit window, which was more an absence of stone than a window, a gap where two blocks did not meet. Her hands were rough. Calluses on the right palm from the standard's pole, a white scar on the left thumb from a knife that had slipped while she was cutting cord at the siege camp. Her fingernails were split from picking at the mortar. These were good hands. They had done real work. She laid them flat on her knees. "In your time," she said, "in the future. Is it better?" The brightness hesitated. *It is different. Some things are better. Some are worse. We have machines you cannot imagine and problems you cannot imagine. People are still cruel and still kind. Children still get sick. Mothers still worry.* "Your mother. Does she worry about you?" *She died three years ago. Our years. She worried about me her entire life.* "Mine too. Tell her, when you see her, when you, no. You said she is dead." *Yes.* "Then never mind." She closed her eyes. The brightness was there, behind her lids, steady now, a warmth that was not physical warmth but occupied the same place in her attention. "Do not leave yet," she said. *I am not leaving.* "Good." She sat with it, with her, with whatever Adélaïde was, a woman or a signal or the final version of a voice she had followed from her father's garden across the Loire and into the rain at Compiègne where they had pulled her from her horse and taken her and sold her to the English for ten thousand livres, and she did not pray because she did not know anymore to whom she would be praying, but she did something that resembled prayer, a stillness, a gathering, a decision to be present in the body she had been given in the cell she had been locked in on the last night she would be alive. Outside the window slit the sky was beginning to lighten. The lightening was gray, not pink, a practical dawn, the kind that arrives without color and simply replaces darkness with visibility, the way a clerk replaces one document with another. She could see her hands now. She turned them over and looked at the palms. Lines crossed them, the long ones and the short ones that the village women said could tell your future. She had never believed in that. The brightness faded with the coming light, the way it always did, the external world crowding out the signal. *Jehanne. It is almost morning.* "I know." *Have you decided?* She had decided hours ago. She had decided, she thought, before the conversation started, possibly before the trial, possibly in the garden at thirteen when she heard a voice say her name through too many senses and stood up and walked toward it. "I will not recant." The brightness held for another moment. She felt it contracting, withdrawing, the bridge between centuries narrowing to a wire. *Then I will see you tomorrow.* "You will see me tomorrow." *Goodbye, Jehanne.* "Goodbye, Adélaïde." The light went out. Joan sat in the cell and listened to the guard breathe and waited for the knock on the door that would begin the last day. Through the window slit the sky was the color of unbleached linen. She could hear, faintly, from somewhere in the city, the sound of a man stacking wood.