Lilah
Authors: Gemma Liviero
LILAH
by
Gemma Liviero
Copyright © Gemma Liviero 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity in any form or by any means, or
stored by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.
Florence Publishing
Email [email protected]
PO Box 547, Spring
Hill ,
Queensland, 4004
Typeset & Graphic Art:
Talk Turkey Print & Design
The
characters and their activities are fictional.
This
book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance
to
actual persons is unintentional.
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Lilah
My name is Lilah, and barely three months
old, on an icy winter’s morning, I was swaddled in goatskin and left in a
wicker basket on the front steps of the monastery in Güs. By account, my face
was calm and I did not cry out for my mother’s milk, nor did I wear my face in
fear. I seemed to know that I would come to no harm there. But of course there
is no memory of any of this. My earliest memories were of tall gates, soft
voices, warm firm hands holding mine, the smell of lemon trees in summer, and
the burnt smell of lye soap in winter, which wafted down the hallways from the
curing rooms where, I later learned, the sick went to die.
When I was old enough to understand the
complicated world of adulthood, Sister Gertrude would tell me that it was not
my fault that I was abandoned – that times had been hard in 1265, the
year of my birth, with winters so dark there was barely enough light to call a
day. My caul, left also in the basket, was a sign of harsh times ahead when
work and crops were sparse, but Sister Gertrude did not know the truth of it.
It represented something far more ominous.
When I eventually uncovered pieces from my past
I would learn that my parents had fought bitterly about the decision.
That my mother had been against the abandonment and father had to
prise my tiny body from her arms.
Finally, when she had calmed, he had
assured her that it was the only way to save my soul. Though had he known that
his decision would lead me on the darkest of journeys in self discovery, he may
have forestalled the irony, preferring to lock me carefully away under his
pious guidance. Many who have lived long enough to recall these times will say
that nothing stops us from finding our true selves eventually.
In the monastery, I was fortunate to grow up in
a loving world where God was my father, where the Cistercian nuns were my
guardians, and where the poor were my companions. The smiles of those nuns in
their crisp white linen and black aprons gave me joyous pause and I returned
their kindness with loyalty and hard work. It was my earliest desire to be one
of them, to wear their flowing garments that caught the breezes from their busy
chores even when the summer air was still. Those early childhood years were
happy ones. I did not want for food or warmth and it was a mission of the
monastery to share what good fortune we had – meagre as it was –
with many less fortunate.
At eight years, I was allowed to travel with
some of the sisters collecting the infirm from the streets, delivering food
baskets to the poorest of families where the children lived in leaking
makeshift bark shelters; their frail bones covered in threadbare linen and
their faces full of such hopelessness that even our visits were a yard short of
comfort. For although we did what we could to suspend their hunger, there were
too many to feed, and our visits of goodwill were temporary solutions to more
long lasting desperate times. In a week the food we had given would be gone and
they would be left to scrounge and beg once more, to scavenge in the forest, to
dig in the hard, frozen ground with their hands to search for what was left of
the summer roots to boil. And though it would never be openly discussed, we
knew that the scrawny rats that hid in the dampest, darkest corners of the town
were often their only form of sustenance to nourish them through the season.
Each year these winters came around quickly.
The autumn leaves were more magnificent in colour the closer they came to
dying; reds and golds littering the ground prettily to later form a blanket of
slippery mulch buried beneath several feet of snow. The fragrant sunflower
fields, which had been an ally to the homeless on warm nights, became white and
desolate burial grounds for loved ones.
In many ways, I told myself at the time, I was
one of the lucky ones.
Sister Arianne was my closest friend and
confidante. She had joined the monastery by choice at the age of twelve, the
year I turned six, to be groomed for the sisterhood. She taught me much about
life for there was plenty she knew. She told me things she had learned from her
older brothers, from watching her wealthy parents, and from gossiping servants
in her former household. She explained the
sometimes
torturous
world of marriage, where babies came from, and the horrible
things that people did to one another through greed or jealousy or war. And it
was Arianne who told me about the strigoi – stories of gypsy witches
travelling around the country changing into beasts to feed on the innocent. Her
brothers told of these blood-sucking vile anomalies
who
breathed in the souls of children for their youth and immortality. Stories
passed down over centuries from one generation of
story
tellers
to the next. This imagery stayed with me until eventually these
nightmarish fantasies would be overshadowed by reality.
When I came into my womanhood, at the age of
fourteen, life changed. But it wasn’t the physical changes to my body that
altered my view of the world. It was my witchcraft. Life up to that point was
clear and carefree. I was given the holy vows as a novice and my first white
garment. It was something I had dreamt about, but looking back, it was a
childish fantasy to believe that I was meant for the purity of the monastery.
The first time I performed my skill of healing
was at the beginning of autumn after discovering a broken butterfly. One of its
wings was bent back awkwardly and a small piece missing. I had picked it up to
examine the colour of its one beautiful wing with blues and golds when I felt
heat rising within my body. I watched its wing flutter and thicken before me.
At first I thought I had imagined it – that the butterfly had not been
badly injured at all. But then came many more of these incidents as my
obsessive curiosity – perhaps to try and dispel the truth – took
over all other thoughts and I sought every insect or creature that had the hint
of impairment.
To heal sounded simpler than it actually was;
it would take much strength from my own body. Heat would transfer from my hands
and into the broken bodies of insects and birds. I can describe the initial
sensation as drinking heated milk: a warmth in my chest and a feeling of
lightness as the decay within the injury begins to break apart. I am at first
one and the same as the patient.
The after-effects are a different story. It is
as if someone has then poured boiling water down my throat, which slowly seeps
into my lungs. The forces gradually grow in intensity, travelling down my arms
and into my hands, conducting the health of my own body into the broken or sick
one, and transferring the illness back into my own; sometimes leaving my own
body to fight the illness over several days.
These effects did not deter me. I continued my
experiments on fallen lifeless leaves also. They would un-crumble, their dried
and twisted remains uncurling and changing into their former shades of green.
Though it seemed cruel to do such healing, for my experiments would be left to
die again.
I can improve what is there already, but I
cannot replace limbs, nor can I reverse age. And a damaged soul is
irreversible. It would be some time yet for me to recognise those afflicted
with such condition.
I was grateful and prayed often
;
helpful with chores and never complaining about the
hardness of my bed or the cold stone beneath my feet. The same could not be
said for a few of the sisters there who could only equate disease with sin, and
their own discomforts with disdain. One such sister, I will name later.
By the time I had discovered my skill, Arianne,
showing great devotion to the work required, had become a favourite of the
abbess. Arianne had grown attached to me and was inspired by my curiosity.
Sometimes in the dead of night I would appear in her room like a ghost to wake
her with a question. I would give her such a fright. She had her own demons to
deal with of which I would later learn. My questions would be beyond my years,
such as: ‘do the dead crumble away to become part of nature while they await a
new soul?’ or ‘do we live for as long as God thinks we are useful?’ or ‘can one
still be Christian if one does not practise Christianity?’
She said that I thought too deeply about
things yet at the same time showed no fear, especially about my own mortality.
She said my belief was stronger than many in the cloister; accepting the
formalities of living as a prelude to far greater reward.
It wasn’t only Arianne who had noticed there
was something different about me. The abbess, Sister Gertrude, had caught me
once at my secret task. I was fearful at the time that this had killed my
dreams of becoming an angel in white; but I don’t believe she understood what
she was seeing as I bent over the body of a lifeless bird seconds before it
took flight.
Sister Gertrude was very fond of me, and if she
was convinced that I possessed such a craft, and given that
no-one
else saw, I have often wondered whether she would have overlooked these
particular skills. When I turned to face her that day, there was a measure of
concern in the expression of the woman who had made an irreversible vow to
serve God. In any case, I had evoked some suspicion and she viewed me carefully
after that with a gentle frown – a mixture of disappointment, obligation
and love.
Gertrude had
asked Arianne shortly afterwards whether I had developed any strange habits or
perhaps dabbled in magic of the darker kind. The question had confused Arianne
who was yet to learn of my practice. She assured the abbess that I was always
under her watchful guidance and she would make sure I practised the ways of
Christ and not of Satan. But even Arianne could not stop a child from dying. It
was in fact
she
who encouraged the craft, which would ultimately seal my
fate.
And it was after she returned from this
conversation with her superior that I spilled out my soul, telling Arianne
everything and warily showing her my experiments. Not once did she look upon me
with repulsion but I had grown to such a stature in her eyes and she began
following me everywhere. She then asked me to cure the unsightly
bed sores
of the children while they slept and although it
seemed novel and harmless at first, in hindsight, I should probably have
rejected her suggestions from the beginning.
This obsession seemed to transfer to Arianne.
She made it her mission to find conditions for me to cure at night, and
afterwards I would sleep away my voluntary ailments. I was too young to notice
that in her personal quest, I had somehow been forsaken.
Chapter 2
One night, a year after my
self-discovered craft, I was woken in the early hours. Arianne was crying and I
had never seen her so distraught.
‘Claude is dying. He will not see out the
night,’ she whispered. ‘Please help him.’
