Heartland

Felix Anima

O libenter veniam ad vos ut prebeatis michi osculum cordis.

Virtutes

It is our duty to fight alongside you, o daughter of the king.

— Hildegard von Bingen, Ordo Virtutum

XXXI

In each corner of the room, squat stands with a dozen candles each provided illumination. Not enough to reach to the ceiling, not enough to reach to Heaven, but enough to light the lower realm. Opposite me, hidden by muslin screens, was a narrow bed, and shadows danced on the wall behind the bed, phantasmal figures partially visible over the top edge of the screens. Whoever lay in the bed was tied down. I could see enough through the gaps between the screens to discern that the figure wore a plain cotton habit, and judging by the shape of the bare foot I glimpsed, it was a woman.

Kneeling beside the bed-on the side where there were no screens-were three figures. Plain brown robes, belted with long strands of polished beads. Their hoods were up, hiding their faces. The one on the left was holding the long strand of his rosary, his fingers working the beads as he prayed. The one on the right had his hands clasped over his ample stomach, and from the angle of his hood, I wondered if he was praying or sleeping. The one in the middle leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the bed, listening intently to the sounds coming from the woman's mouth.

She was making guttural noises: not quite words, not quite moans of pain; growling as if there was something in her mouth, something obstructing her lips and teeth. Whatever she was saying was important enough that he listened, but not so important that he took the gag out. As if the sound of her voice was more important than the actual words she was trying to say.

What I say and what I mean are never the same.

Something cold touched my side, and startled by the invasiveness of the sensation, by the reminder of my own flesh, I tore my gaze away from the tableau of the madwoman and the priests attending her. There was a hole in my chest, one that wept blood, and for a moment, I couldn't remember how I had received such a wound.

I fell, John.

A fourth priest, kneeling beside the chair in which I was sprawled, was wiping the flow away with a blood- stained cloth. He held the rag over a narrow basin and wrung it out. Blood spattered on the dusty floor, leaving tiny blots of blackness.

My right arm ached; more blood-stained rags were wrapped around the truncated end, and around my forearm, a chain of glass beads-black as night-had been cinched tight. The rosary tourniquet. The silver medallion lay on the underside of my arm, pressed tight against my skin by the loops of the beads. The silver ball on the end of the chain-the sphere that hid the cross-hung from an inch of chain near my elbow. It knocked against the wooden frame of the chair as I shifted my dead weight.

The priest attending me pressed his cloth against my chest wound again and I recognized the blunt shape of his hands. I reached over and tugged back his hood. 'Hello, John,' I said. 'Thank you for trying to save me.'

Detective John Nicols nodded. 'They say you can't feel anything, but I think they're wrong.' As a spirit, he looked much more rested. More at peace with himself.

I looked away, directing my attention to the three wise men. 'They've been pretty right so far.'

'You're letting them be right,' Nicols said. 'You're believing what they tell you.'

'Why shouldn't I?'

'Because they've also said everything they tell you is a lie.'

Nothing is true; everything is possible. When Nicols and I had first met, I had thrown that old phrase at him. Mainly to rile him up, but there was some truth to its seeming contradiction. You could find some freedom in the chaos of that phrase. You could liberate yourself from the tyranny of those old manacles of William Blake's-those mind-forg'd ones-by adopting such an axiom as the foundation of your belief. Nothing is true, and so why believe in anything other than what you wish? Everything is possible, so why not dream of meeting God?

'Why are we here?' I asked.

'Because she Saw us,' Nicols said.

'Who?' I looked at the woman on the bed. 'Hildegard?'

'Yes,' Nicols said. 'She looked into the future and Saw us.'

'You too?' I asked. 'Eight hundred years of Western history preordained by this woman. I don't believe it. John. I can't.'

'You can't dismiss it,' he countered. 'Remember the vision? The figure with all the eyes? The child who ascended into Heaven?'

'I can't trust anything Vivienne told me,' I said bitterly. 'Especially now.'

'But you know, don't you? In your heart, you know she is right. You know who those two figures are.'

'I'm sorry, John. I should have been stronger.'

He pressed the cloth to my chest, and when he took it away again, there was less blood. 'Strong enough,' he said. 'It's all right, Michael. I know it wasn't your fault.'

'I can't subscribe to the belief that this all happened because it was supposed to. It makes it all so meaningless, and so many people died, John. There has to be some meaning to it. There has to be some hope that we could have made a difference.' I closed my eyes as a wave of pain ran through me, a shuddering pulse that rippled from front to back. When it passed out of me, I choked and coughed, and there was blood in my mouth.

Nicols didn't say anything as he leaned forward and wiped my lips clean.

'She only had twenty-six visions,' I continued when the shakes passed. 'She saw key points at best. She couldn't have seen everything. Like Nostradamus. And look at his track record.'

'True, but you're assuming you know everything he wrote. Maybe the material that was clearly the ravings of a madman are the only works that were made public. What of the rest?'

'Well, I guess I wouldn't know, would I?' I nodded at the three wise men clustered around the bed. 'Not having all the answers like them.' Now that I had acknowledged John's aid and that he and I were talking, I was stronger. More anchored in this dream. It was easier to breathe now, easier to speak.

'I'm willing to guess that the old batshit Frenchman didn't squirrel away a bunch of papers where he put things down in a much more lucid way. Even if Nostradamus had secret papers, deciphering them would still be a matter of interpretation, wouldn't it? Like the vision Vivienne showed me. It could mean anything. It doesn't have to be a representation of what happened in Portland.'

Nicols smiled. 'Of course, it doesn't. But that's the case with all of the secrets, isn't it?'

Through the gaps in the screen, I watched Hildegard suffer her ecstatic fervor. Was she Seeing the future? Like Husserl had said: scry reality and fix it in place by Witnessing it. Had her records been better than Nostradamus', or had they been the same sort of vague poetry that we associated with him: open to so many interpretations that it could fit whatever excuse you needed to justify your actions?

But the mission of the Watchers had always been to be True Witnesses, objective observers of history so that there was at least one record that was untainted by special agendas or personal biases. Or was that just the lie all of us eager neophytes wanted to believe?

How different was that from any history we learned?

I got lost in the woods, a scared little boy who was afraid of the dark and the monsters that might lurk within it, and so I invented a way to be strong. I invented a history for myself that would sustain me, that would allow me to understand this strange new world in which I had found myself. And what had that gained me? Wisdom?