Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (25 page)

With a stab, I saw the price my friend paid for our bond, laying herself open to her cousin’s ridicule.

“But, of course, Richardis must go,” Adelheid said, speaking before I could. “She’s the magistra’s scribe and illuminator.”

“Indeed,” I said. “If I am to speak to the archbishop about
Scivias,
it would be most practical to have Sister Richardis on hand, for she has helped me with this work since its inception. In truth, I wish I could take each one of you, but I doubt Cuno would allow that.”

My duty as magistra was to smooth ruffled tempers and keep the peace. I must not appear to put Richardis before the rest, and yet I could hardly disguise my love for her, shining like a lamp within my breast, or my dependence upon her, for she had been as crucial to the writing of
Scivias
as Volmar himself. Without her encouragement, her belief in me, I might not have written a single page.

She was my inspiring angel made flesh, confidante to my soul. While the Rule of Saint Benedict forbade special friendships, the fact remained that our close and cloistered life fostered intimacy of the heart. Guda herself adored the novices for the energy and liveliness they brought to our strictly ordered existence. Hiltrud and Verena were devoted friends. Only Adelheid remained at a distance from us, but only because she loved her solitude and books as passionately as a famished man loves bread.

Two days later, Rorich, Richardis, and I boarded the barge at first light.

Forty-one years I had waited for this passage away from Disibodenberg. Though I was forty-nine years old, I could barely refrain from dancing like a child when the oarsmen pushed away from the landing. I could not quell my ecstasy. The entire abbey had come to see us off. When I first arrived with Jutta as an eight-year-old child, there had been eighty monks, but now I counted fewer than sixty. As the brothers aged and died, their numbers dwindled, and precious few novices came to replenish their ranks. The youngest faces were those of Sibillia and Margarethe, who waved so hard that I thought they would wrench their arms from their sockets. Standing between my sisters and his brothers, Volmar smiled at me with such faith and goodwill. How I wished he could come with us.

“God keep you, Abbess Hildegard!” one of my simple pilgrims cried out, honoring me with a title above my station.

The look Cuno threw me then was enough to burn me to cinders—abbess indeed!—but soon the Nahe’s current swept us away and instead of my abbot’s glowering face, I saw the forest, that great pulsing emerald heart. As Disibodenberg was lost from view, my soul soared free. It was as though I’d dragged a great leaden weight with me for four decades and had suddenly cast it off.

The Nahe unfurled, its silky surface belying the powerful current that pushed us ever onward, farther and farther away from Cuno’s imprisoning walls. Richardis’s face was as rapt as mine must have been as she gazed out at the dense tangle of trees. She pointed to a crane rising from the green to soar on angel-wide wings. My heart quickened, for I had learned the lore of birds and the secret portents they revealed.

“A door long bolted shall now be opened,” I told her.

Something unreadable flitted across my friend’s face.

“I know very well that the door is opening for you,” she murmured, keeping her voice out of my brother’s earshot. “But what of the rest of us? Sometimes I fear you will leave us behind as you march toward your glory.”

Her words struck me like a lance.

“Do you think I’m chasing my own selfish glory?” For a moment I panicked at the thought of losing her love, of being left alone to face whatever the future would bring. “Wherever I go, I want you by my side.”

She blinked, her eyes bright with tears.

“And our other sisters, too, of course,” I added hastily, longing for the dream to be true, that our entire nunnery might sail forth together, free and joyous, never to suffer Cuno’s rule again. “One day, while we are still in this earthly realm, we shall be liberated.”

“How?” she asked, shaking her head as though I mocked her with an impossible dream. “For now we travel forth, but you know as well as I that we must return.”

If my hopes were like the crane rising high in the air, Richardis’s anxieties brought them crashing down to earth. This journey was but a temporary reprieve. Even with the pope’s approval, it could still go wrong for me. Like all mortal men, pontiffs die. The next one might not view me so kindly. Why had God given me these visions if my sisters and I were destined to live out the rest of our days in that cramped nunnery as the underlings of Disibodenberg?

Before my thoughts could become mired in melancholy, Rorich joined us, the beloved companion of my childhood, now a stooped man with thinning gray hair and a timeworn face.

“It may be a shock for you both to enter a city after a life of seclusion,” he told us.

Better a shock than a slow living death,
I thought.

“I remember the city of Bremen from my girlhood,” Richardis said, her sapphire eyes transported to a place that I would never see.

Though she was half my age, she had more experience of the world than I did, for I had never even laid eyes on a large town. Maybe Rorich was right and it would be too much for me. I was like a benighted prisoner, held captive so long in the land of the dead that I might turn to dust if I dared set foot again in the land of the living. Even to hear my brother describe the wonders of Mainz filled me with amazement.

“The city itself is walled, like an abbey, but covers a much larger enclosure with gates that are locked at night. All manner of people, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, live there, and the Romans themselves built their fort in that place, for once it marked the northernmost frontier of the empire. You will see every aspect of secular life on display, from the merchants in their furs to crippled beggars on the cathedral steps. But Heinrich will make you both welcome. This archbishop is the greatest man I’ve ever served.”

My brother’s face softened with what looked like genuine love when he spoke of his master. He sang out his praises for that great man. Of course, I knew already that Mainz, with its cathedral modeled after Saint Peter’s in Rome, had its own Holy See and that the Archbishop of Mainz was the substitute for the pope in the lands north of the Alps. The archbishop was also one of the archchancellors for the Holy Roman Empire and one of the seven prince electors whose task it was to select the emperor.

As Rorich described for us the glories we would soon see, impenetrable forest gave way to fields, farmsteads, and hamlets with churches as tiny as hermit cells. Ragged children scampered to the riverbanks to wave and shout at the sight of me with my magistra’s crook.

“Hildegard of Disibodenberg!” they cried. “The holy sibyl!”

Their mothers lifted infants and cried out my name until I raised my arms in blessing.

“Even these poor souls have heard of you,” Rorich said, unable to hide his amazement.

We floated past teeming villages where girls chased escaping goats and geese, their flashing bare legs reminding me of how Richardis once cavorted in the forest before she made her irrevocable vows.

When the Nahe flowed into the Rhine, that mighty highway, I gripped Richardis’s hand in awe, for I’d never thought to behold such majesty. At the place where the two rivers met, a crag arose, hazy in the evening mist. There loomed a mysterious chapel ringed by a grove of apple trees blossoming in pink and white.

“How beautiful it is,” I said. “Is that a shelter for pilgrims? Will we spend the night there?” I imagined glimpsing the stars through those flowering branches.

My brother laughed. “No, that place is in ruins.” He went on to explain with his easy knowledge of the sights and places that had been forbidden to me. “That’s Rupertsberg. Once it was a hermitage, founded by a pious widow, the holy Bertha, in memory of her son, Rupert, who died very young. He made a pilgrimage to Rome when he was only fifteen.”

“Who owns that land?” I asked, surprised that such a commanding site could be left derelict.

“The archbishop, of course,” my brother said. “He owns most of the lands around here. We will spend the night at one of his estates just a short distance down the Rhine.”

Soon my view of Rupertsberg was swept aside as I gaped at the many ships, boats, and barges jostling for position in the Rhine’s broad sweep. Richardis pointed out the castles, towns, and toll towers that she had seen before, having journeyed up the Rhine with her mother en route to Disibodenberg when she was thirteen.

Suddenly she took my arm, her eyes sweeping over me. “Hildegard, are you ill? You look faint.”

“No.” I beamed. “I’ve just risen from my grave.”

After four decades, I had at last rejoined the great world.

On the third day, when we reached Mainz, a cacophony assailed my senses. The stink of sewage and fish guts arose from the quay, and once inside the city walls, I marveled at the many bodies crowding the streets. The throng’s voices rang out in a babel of German dialects and foreign tongues. From the markets came the smell of roasting meats and the flash of trinkets gleaming in the sun. A waft of attar of roses filled my nose as we passed a perfumer’s shop. Then we turned a corner to be assailed by the smell of swine rooting among refuse-filled ditches. Dirty-faced waifs begged for alms. We walked past the Jewish quarter, where my brother pointed out the synagogue and bathhouse. Farther down the streets, he tried to shield us from the sight of sharp-eyed women whose red hoods marked them as prostitutes.

The city itself was the ring enclosing the jewels—Saint Martin’s Cathedral with its triple spires and the archbishop’s palace.

As my brother guided us through the guarded palace gates, I thought what an honor it was just to set foot in this sanctum. A tightness seized my chest. What if I did or said the wrong thing, offending the archbishop who had been so gracious to invite me here? How easily I could disgrace myself and Rorich, not to mention Richardis and my other sisters.

Before us loomed the Great Hall, built of the same red and yellow sandstone as the cathedral. Its windows of white-green glass glittered in the last light of day. At one end of the Great Hall was a chamber block, three stories high, and behind that I caught sight of the roof of the archbishop’s brand-new chapel, dedicated to Saint Gottfried, and yet another wing containing the archbishop’s private chambers and library. It seemed impossible that Rome or Constantinople contained any structures more exquisite.

“Come along.” Rorich led us to the porch, facing west, and into that Great Hall, more than one hundred and twenty feet long. The tile floor was cushioned in rushes strewn with herbs that released their sweetness with our every footfall. Richardis and I marveled at the six white pillars stretching toward the lofty timber ceiling. The sunset cast its glow through the high windows.

Torches set in the walls illuminated the hall, as did countless candles hanging from chandeliers. Down the center was a long row of trestles and benches. Closest to the warmth of the great blazing hearth was the archbishop’s table, set upon a dais. Above his throne, now empty, hung a silken banner bearing his coat of arms—two silver six-spoked wheels connected by a cross against a crimson background. Servants bustled around, laying out goblets and jugs, knives and spoons and salt cellars, as though preparing a feast fine enough for the pope. To think that my brother had been a part of this household for more than three decades.

“I feel like a beggar.” I wrung my hands, gritty from our journey. “I should join the poor at the almoner’s gate.”

My brother, looking utterly at ease in this palace, smiled. “Here comes a servant to show you and Sister Richardis to your room.”

“Is this heaven?” I asked Richardis as soon as we were alone in our guest chamber high beneath the eaves.

“Not even my mother’s castle was this fine.”

I felt lost, as out of my element as a fish upon dry land. Luckily Richardis, no stranger to courtly life, took charge, opening our traveling trunk to pull out fresh linen shifts and clean habits and wimples. We must appear spotless before the archbishop. But before she could close the shutters to give us the privacy to wash and change, I wandered to the window, which looked out on the archbishop’s private wing. To my delight, I saw a labyrinth below, made of hedges that appeared inky black in the twilight. Though I had read of such things, I had never thought to see one with my own eyes. A pale-clad figure wandered those spiraling paths with an air of deepest contemplation.

“Do you think that’s the archbishop himself?” Richardis asked, joining me at the window. She looked almost impish.

Too nervous to reply, I drenched half the floor as I washed myself. Richardis, already in her clean shift, handed me a towel and stood behind me to work the comb through my hair.

“Don’t act so petrified.” Her breath was warm against my nape. “After all, he’s only a man.” She spoke with such calm authority that she reminded me of her mother.

“Only one of the most powerful men in the Holy Roman Empire,” I said.

When we entered that Great Hall, nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Heinrich, Archbishop of Mainz, rising to welcome us to his table.

Adalbert, his predecessor, had been an older man, wide of girth and heavy of jowls, but Heinrich in his simple linen tunic hardly looked older than Richardis. As beautiful as the Angel Gabriel, his hair was golden and his eyes a warm brown, his smile kindly. His skin seemed to glow from within. This man exuded such saintly purity that I was convinced he was as fair on the inside as he was on the outside. Little wonder Rorich was in awe of him.

My reverence was real as I bowed to kiss his ring. This was the man who had sheltered the Jews of Mainz from the murdering mob, the man who championed my writings, speaking in my defense alongside Bernard of Clairvaux until the pope himself was convinced.

Heinrich honored me by bowing in return. “Hildegard of Disibodenberg, I rejoice to meet you at last.”