Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain Page A

same. I might as well save my breath to cool my porridge. Do you want to join him in the grave?”
    “No.”
    “Well then?”
    They’d be digging it now. Sliding the spade in. Cutting sods. Tug of roots yielding as tiny connecting filaments snapped first serially, then all at once. Smell of pollen and rank greenery when she and Chlodecharius met in hideouts in the woods. The undergrowth was so thick that once Clotair’s hunt had ridden by without seeing them and another time a boar sow with her litter of striped cream-and-brown cubs passed so close that they could have put out a hand and caught one.
    “Why doesn’t she smell us?”
    “We smell of the forest,” he told her. “Earthy.”
    Would his wraith haunt her now, returning in reproach with earthy smells, mouth clenched on the coin which must be placed in it before burial to pay his passage over death’s river? But why her? Was it her fault? She shrugged, intrigued yet impatient at her life’s thread having thickened so interestingly before she was twelve.
    “Listen,” said her nurse.
    Agnes put her fists over her eyeballs and rubbed them in a child’s gesture. “Oh, nurse,” she complained in a high babyish voice, “I’m so tired, you can’t imagine. So ti-ired. I want to sleep.”
    *
    It had been dark by the early afternoon and now, hours later, the terracotta oil lamps disposed around Radegunda’s bedroom had begun to smell and smoke. A servant came in offering to pinch off the burnt ends of the papyrus wicks, but the queen sent him away. Smoke wreaths snaked through the air and the light solidified their outline, hardening them into ropes and chains. The room was choked with coffers, for Radegunda’s possessions had been moved in from the marriage chamber where Clotair now slept alone.
    “Not”, said his queen harshly, “that I expect that to last more than a night or so.”
    Most of the coffers were open and the gleam of gilt embroidery and jewels cut like knife-tips through the smoke. The bed had been piled with tunics, mantles, sleeves, head-veils, silk bonnets and a variety of other garments. Coloured motifs—losanges, crosses—caught the light, floating like bright geometric fish on a dark underlying sea of fabric. Stools and benches bore translucent scent-bottles of glass and alabaster.
    “I shall take everything,” said Radegunda. “Why should I go naked to my new Spouse? It will be my dowry and I shall give it to the Church.”
    She walked briskly about the room, selecting and rejecting garments, talking excitedly. Occasionally, she shook out a long rippling length of silk or linen which hung like a memory in the firelight, then was folded away. A pearl-studded belt was uncoiled then rolled tightly up again with a clap.
    Agnes sat on the small stool used for climbing on to the bed—it was the only one unencumbered—stared at the jewels, blinked in the smoke and listened. The queen had been talking since their return from the funeral. Occasionally she came over to Agnes, bent towards her and stared hard into her eyes. Her own were blue and bright like the paste inlay in her cloisonné jewel-box:
    “I hope”, said she, “you are making a true sacrifice. I would not want you to come with me because you were afraid to stay at court. You must come because you want to make a gift of your life to God.”
    Agnes did not reply.
    “You may feel regrets”, Radegunda told her, “now and later. They do not matter. What concerns me is the purity of your intention.”
    “My nurse, Fridovigia, says …”
    “Take no notice of what she says. She’s a worldly woman.”
    “She will come,” Agnes said, “if I do.”
    “If?”
    Agnes scraped her sandal against the side of her stool. She leaned backwards and felt her shoulders sink into the feather tick behind. She wriggled back into its embrace, feeling it press forward around her like a nest. She would have liked to stay there forever.
    “You are coming?” harried the queen.
    Agnes