Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (7 page)

“Nothing blooms in the middle of winter!”

“Keep it in a warm place. Wait and see.”

“Who are you talking to?” Jutta came in, shivering and rubbing her arms.

“Volmar. He’s gone now.” I listened to his sandals slapping against stone as he hurried off, probably to his sanctuary, the scriptorium, which, trapped in this place, I would never see.

“He gave us a stick?” Jutta picked it up, examining it from all sides.

“It’s for Saint Barbara, the holy virgin martyr!” I cried, afraid that she might snap it in half and burn it in the brazier.

Instead she found a beaker of water. We kept the branch in the warmest and brightest corner of the anchorage.

“Now we must pray to holy Barbara,” my magistra instructed, “on this, her feast day.”

Barbara, the patron saint of prisoners.

In the pool of sunlight pouring through our window of polished horn, Jutta and I curled up side by side. Open in Jutta’s lap lay Volmar’s herbal. Breathless, I leafed through the illuminations he had painted himself.

“Patience,” Jutta said, speaking more like an older sister than my magistra. “Don’t tear through it all at once. Let us read it page by page.”

In her voice, which was as beautiful in speech as it was in song, she read aloud, beginning with the admonition on the very first page, penned in bold black letters.

If anyone steal this book, let him die the death. Let him be
fried in the pan. Let the falling sickness and fever seize him.
Let him be broken on the wheel and hanged. Amen.

We burst into smothered laughter as we imagined gentle Volmar penning such wrath. I pictured him cracking a grin while he wrote it, following some older and less sweet-tempered monk’s dictation.

The herbal was written not in Latin but in German, and it described the worts and weeds that grew in the woodland and meadows around the abbey. Jutta read out Volmar’s words as I followed along, my finger on the page.

Vervain promoted felicity. Marjoram was good for treating bruises. Saint-John’s-wort, which bloomed at Midsummer Day on the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, was ruled by the sun. The monks used it to treat pain and infection. Wormwood cleansed the gut of parasites. Iris root healed dog bites. Blessed thistle, which grew in every monastery garden in the Holy Roman Empire, guarded against plague. Cowbane, though poisonous to cattle, banished lust in men and women.

“Do they grow all these things here?” Closing my eyes, I tried to envision having the freedom to walk through the snowy plots, if only to see the dormant stalks. Beside us in the fragile midwinter light, the Barbara Branch seemed to come alive, touched by an invisible hand, its flat, hard buds swelling.

Although the Twelve Holy Nights of Christmas were still three weeks off, Volmar’s gifts kept appearing in our hatch day after day.

One morning a pair of sandals and a child-size linen shift and woolen habit appeared to replace the sackcloth that turned my skin into a mass of sores. He had only been able to find a boy’s habit, but Jutta helped me alter it into something suitable for a girl. Jutta, however, would not be parted from her own hair-shirt shroud.

The herbal had only been in our anchorage a week when we finished it. Volmar brought another book, even more wondrous—a bestiary with illuminations and descriptions of every known beast, from the common to the exotic and rare.

The manticore, we learned, boasted a man’s face, a lion’s body, and a scorpion’s stinging tale. Swordfish, with their great pointed beaks, could sink ships. Most terrifying of all was the basilisk, whose smell, voice, and glance could slay. Some creatures brought joy. Whenever the halcyon bird laid her eggs, the weather was fine and clear. The swan sang most exquisitely before he died. The lynx’s urine hardened into precious amber. Some animals were tender. The pelican, like Christ, fed her brood from her own flesh. Bear cubs were born unformed, but their mothers devotedly licked them into shape.

Next Volmar lent us a lapidary, which revealed the miraculous properties of gemstones. Once these jewels had adorned Lucifer, in the days when he was the brightest of angels. But when he was cast into hell, the precious and semiprecious stones rained down upon the earth. Since they had their origin in heaven, they could only be used for good, for healing.

“If a diamond is brought into a house,” Jutta read aloud, “then no demon may enter that dwelling.” Her brow furrowed. “A pity my mother never possessed a diamond, although Father gifted her with rubies and jasper.”

“The monks don’t possess one either,” I suggested.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Volmar talked about Tutivillus interfering with the scribes. He makes them spill their ink and copy things wrong!”

“There are scores of demons, Hildegard. Not just Tutivillus.” Jutta juddered, as though a specter had laid its icy hands on her spine. “And they are strongest at this time of year when there’s so little light.”

Volmar’s gifts, as enchanting as they were, only made me long even more for the outside world. After Vespers, I went to see if our Barbara Branch still had enough water. Though the buds had once seemed to swell, the branch now felt like a dead twig I could snap between my fingers. The forest would not stop haunting me. How the wild places called out to me in the face of Jutta’s direst warnings. Again and again she told me that I must dread everything dark and untamed.

Demons ruled the nocturnal hours, she insisted. On stormy nights, outside our anchorage walls, trees writhed, tossing their branches against the moon-drenched sky. As I lay in my narrow bed, my ears rang with the shrieking wind, the cries of owls and wolves in search of prey.

Little did it matter that Christmas was fast approaching. For centuries before the Irish missionaries brought the faith of Christ to this land, before Carolus Magnus toppled the Irminsul, the idolatrous pillar of the heathens, my ancestors had held the Rauhnächte
,
the Twelve Nights of Yuletide, in awe—time out of time when fate hung suspended, when secrets were revealed and fortunes could be reversed. This I knew from Walburga’s tales. The servants and peasant folk back home had muttered stories of the Old Ones roaring across the midwinter skies: the Wild Hunter of a thousand names in pursuit of his White Lady with her streaming hair and starry distaff, the whirlwind before the storm.

Leaving the dreaming Jutta to choke in her sleep and sob her brother’s name, I crept out of bed and stole into the courtyard where I pranced barefoot in the swirling snowflakes like the mummers who came to Bermersheim every Yuletide in their fearsome wooden masks to frighten away harmful spirits.

A gale howled overhead, and the cold stung my soles, sending me spinning as the Wild Hunt of Walburga’s nursery stories raged overhead, that endless stream of unbanished gods and the souls of the unchristened dead. Anyone who dared venture out on a night such as this risked being swept along in that unearthly train.

But did I cross myself and flee inside to safety? No, I raised my face to the clouds racing across the full moon and I begged those invisible riders to take me with them.

Clouds shrouded the moon. Everything went black. I plummeted, down and down, as if there would be no end to my falling.
De profundis clamavi ad te.
Gazing up from the depths, I saw a circle of sky, now emptied of moon and stars. Had I been cast into hell for my sin? From out of that murk came a white cloud bursting with a light that was alive, pulsing and growing until it blazed like a thousand suns.

In that gleaming I saw a maiden shine in such splendor that I could hardly look at her, only catching glances like fragments from a dream. Her mantle, whiter than snow, glittered like a heaven full of stars. In her right hand she cradled the sun and moon. On her breast, covering her heart, was an ivory tablet and upon that tablet I saw a man the color of sapphire. A chorus rose like birdsong on an April dawn—all of creation calling this maiden “Lady.” The maiden’s own voice rose above it, as achingly beautiful as Jutta’s singing.

I bore you from the womb before the morning star.

I didn’t know whether the maiden was speaking to me, lost and wretched, or to the sapphire man in her breast. My vision of the Lady was lost, but her voice lingered.
You are here for a purpose, though you don’t understand it yet.

Barefoot and mother-naked, I found myself within a greening garden so beautiful that it made me cry out. Each blade of grass and newly unfurled spring leaf shimmered in the sun. Every bush and tree was frothy with blossoms and heavy with fruit at the same time. In the midst of that glory, the Tree of Life and its jeweled apples winked at me, and yet I saw no serpent. The Lady’s voice whispered:
See the eternal paradise that has never fallen.

I saw a great wheel with the all-embracing arms of God at its circumference, the Lady at its heart. Everything she touched greened and bloomed.

Pealing bells wrenched me back into this world. The monks were ringing in Christmas morning. I lay on my pallet, the blankets piled over me, my legs swaddled in damp cloth. Above me hovered a maiden with glowing blue eyes. Her veil had slipped and the sun shone through her halo of cropped auburn curls. Whispering my name, she held out a blossoming apple branch, each pink and white flower redolent with the scent of the Eden I had glimpsed.

Jutta kissed my brow.

“At last you’re awake! You lay in a fever for three days and nights. I found you half-frozen in the courtyard. Were you sleepwalking, child? I must bolt that door firmly so it never happens again. What if I’d lost you?”

Sweat trickled down my face. I was too weak to lift my head from the pillow. All seemed unreal: Jutta, dazzling even in her sackcloth, held the Barbara Branch that flowered at Christmas just as Volmar had promised.

Beside my bed was a tureen of soup that had gone cold, but Jutta warmed it over the brazier and then she fed me, spoonful by spoonful.

“The fast is over, child. Tonight, if you’re well enough, there will be a feast delivered to us. Brother Volmar said there will be river carp and quail. And apple cake with nuts and currants.”

“Volmar.” This was the first word to pass through my lips after emerging from that otherworld where I had lain for three days and nights. “You talk to him through the screen?”

“Of course! You were ill. I had to ask him to bring food that would help the sick. Volmar ran to the infirmary and came back with damp cloths for me to wrap around your legs to lower the fever.”

Jutta flushed when she said his name.

So Volmar isn’t just my secret friend.
He whispered through the screen to Jutta. Could he see her beautiful face through the slatted wood, see how her long eyelashes beat like butterfly wings against her creamy skin? What if his kindness to me had only been a ploy to woo her, the holy and aristocratic anchorite? Weren’t they the same age, Volmar and Jutta? Jutta’s nightmares of her brother made her writhe and shudder, yet Volmar was as different from Meginhard von Sponheim as a boy could be. And I, Hildegard, was destined to come in a poor second, to live forever in Jutta’s shadow.

“You were dreaming three days long,” Jutta said. “And such dreams they must have been—you were
raving,
my child.”

She kept calling me that.
Child.
But in those three days and nights, I felt I had grown impossibly old. My childhood had been lost forever, stolen from me the moment they bricked me in here.

Jutta bent close, her face prickling with concern. “If you’re having . . . visitations of any sort, you might be prey to demons, Hildegard. You must confess everything to Prior Cuno and be shriven of your sins.”

Were my visions evil, then? Did Jutta, the girl who starved and beat herself, who thought that demons lurked in every shadow, think that I was the crazy one? My heart raced in terror that she might be right.

“Don’t cry, little sister,” she said, calling me by the special name Volmar had given me. “I have a surprise.”

She bustled to the other side of the chamber and returned with a bundle that looked like an infant tucked in a lambswool blanket.

“This is my gift to you.” Jutta placed it in my arms as carefully as though it were a baby of flesh and blood.

Staring down at the doll’s wooden face, I wished I had the strength to hurl it across the room. Who did Jutta think she was, imprisoning me here, stealing away my only friend, leaving me with nothing but the visions that kept exploding inside my head? The final insult was trying to win my affection with some stupid toy.

“I’m too old for dolls,” I told her, not hiding my contempt.

She flinched as though I had slapped her. “It’s not a plaything, child. It’s meant to represent the baby Jesus. Volmar said it’s customary to give young female oblates dolls for this purpose.”

“I don’t need a
doll.
” Sinking back into my bed, I closed my eyes, allowing the ghost of my vision to envelop me—the maiden holding within her beating heart the sapphire man with his arms outstretched.
I bore you from the womb before the morning star.
Was it truly Mary and Jesus I had seen, or some demonic illusion?

“We must pray to him, our heavenly Bridegroom,” Jutta said. “Let his image fill your heart.”

The sapphire man regarded me with Volmar’s gentle eyes. He held out his ink-stained scribe’s hands.
You are here for a purpose.
If only I knew what that was.

Later that day came Volmar’s gift—an illuminated volume of the lives of the virgin martyrs. Jutta took it from the hatch, her face alight, and, sitting by my bedside, read to me in a voice as smooth as damask. I wanted to hate her, stop my ears, and tell her to go boil herself, but the stories and pictures were so beguiling that they soon caught me in their thrall.

“Let me have the book,” I begged, anxious to pore over every illumination.

When Jutta retired to the outer room to lose herself in contemplation, I threw the blankets off my body, tore the damp rags from my calves, and tottered around on shaky legs. I was bored with being an invalid.