The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

now despised her? Laughed at her?

      In this past hour, and particularly in these past moments, Joan’s entire faith, her entire reason for being, had been stripped away in so cruel a manner that had her sword still been intact Joan would undoubtedly have fallen upon it.

      She started to shake, her tremors becoming so violent that she fell to the cold stone floor. She moaned, and cried out, wishing that death would simply come to take her in this moment of despair.

      “Joan,” came a voice so deep and comforting that Joan believed it merely a dream. “Joan, you are so greatly loved that my eyes run with tears for you. Joan, see… see how I weep with love for you.”

      Joan blinked, still curled in a tight ball on the floor. Was this a phantasm? Or the archangel come back to torment her?

      Another voice spoke, a woman’s this time. “Joan, will you see? Will you raise your eyes and see how much your lord loves you?”

      It was the woman’s voice, rather than the man’s, which made Joan raise her face from the stone flagging and stare before her.

      She gasped, hardly crediting what her eyes told her.

      The chamber had disappeared. Instead Joan lay on the top of a low hill. Before her a woman knelt at the foot of a cross.

      Not daring to believe, Joan raised her eyes still further.

      An almost naked man gazed down at her from the cross. He had been vilely nailed to the wood through his wrists and ankles, and a crown of thorns hung askew on his bleeding brow. His loincloth was darkly soiled with the blood that had crept down his body.

      Yet, even so cruelly pinned, the man smiled down on Joan with such infinite love that her despair vanished as if it had been swept away in a great wind.

      “Lord Jesu?” she whispered.

      “Joan,” he said, and she could see how much each word cost him. His chest and shoulders were contorted in agony, his every breath an agonised nightmare.

      “Joan, will you trust me?”

      Joan’s gaze slipped to the woman. She was young and pregnant, and very beautiful, with translucent skin, deep blue eyes and dark hair.

      She was also sad, weeping, but somehow serene and strong in that sadness.

      “Have you been vilely treated by the angels as well?” Joan asked the woman.

      “Aye,” she said, “as has my lord. Joan, we would give you a purpose back into your life, and a gift also.”

      “A purpose and a gift?”

      “Both with all our love,” the woman said, and Joan realised that she spoke for both herself and Christ, who hung in such agony on his cross that he found speech difficult.

      “Your purpose shall be France,” said the woman, and as she spoke she raised her right hand and made with it a sweeping gesture.

      A dark vista opened up before Joan’s eyes. It was France, but a France devastated and murdered. Fields lay burning, houses and castles lay toppled, clouds of smoke and ash billowed over the countryside.

      Out of this horrid cloud rode a man on a dark horse: a man Joan had never seen before, but one she instinctively knew was the Demon-King. A handsome face under silver-gilt hair, pale grey eyes, a warrior’s body and a warrior’s bearing.

      He rode his stallion over the broken bodies of French men and women and children, and they screamed and wailed and bled as he progressed.

      Not once did he look down and pity them. Instead, his face was swollen with glory and victory.

      His stallion strode forth, and more bones cracked, and more children died.

      “I know him,” said Joan.

      “Aye,” said the woman. Her hands were now to her face, and she wept as if her heart broke.

      Turning her eyes back to the woman, Joan wondered if she wept for France, or for the Demon-King.

      “If Charles does not rise against him,” the woman continued, gaining some control over her weeping, “then this is France’s destiny.”

      “Charles is a lost cause,” said Joan. “I have given him my all. I have begged and pleaded and threatened. I have spoken prophecies and wrought him miracles, but still he sits here in Rheims and weeps and wrings his hands. France needs a king to lead it, and what it has is a pile of useless excrement. I cannot change him.”

      “Yes, you can change him,” said Christ, groaning with the effort of speaking. “See.”

      The vista changed so that France became a land of sun-drenched meadows and laughing children. In this new France the Demon-King still stood, but his sword hung useless at his side, his shoulders had slumped, his form was thin and tremulous, and his feet had sunk to their ankles in a pool of bubbling black mud. Dread suffused the Demon-King’s face, and his mouth hung slack with dismay. He stared towards a horizon where appeared a great and mighty king on a snowy war stallion. It was Charles, but a Charles Joan did not think existed.

      Behind him rode a shining army—an army of a united and strong France.

      The Demon-King whimpered, trembled violently, then sank into the bubbling pool of black mud until he had completely vanished.

      “How can this be so?” Joan said.

      “All you have to do,” said the woman, now leaning forward and taking one of Joan’s hands in hers, “is to tend your sheep.”

      Joan frowned. “I do not understand.”

      The woman smiled, and kissed Joan very softly on the mouth. She began to speak, and she spoke without interruption for many minutes.

      At first Joan’s face twisted with horror, then it relaxed, and assumed a radiance born both of wonder and of hope.

      “I can do this?”

      “You are the Saviour of France,” said Christ, and he smiled with such tenderness and love through the haze of his own torment that Joan’s heart overflowed with the strength of her love and joy. “The path ahead of you shall be tiresome and often painful. You will doubt. But I—”

      “And I,” put in the woman.

      “—will always be there. We will not forget you. When you are at your darkest, then we will be there for you.”

      Much later Catherine came to Joan’s chamber, thinking to talk more of Marie’s child, and to use its birth to ensure Joan’s total alienation from the angels.

      What she found astounded her.

      Joan knelt before her window which she had opened to admit the dawn light. About her lay strewn the fragments of what Catherine recognised as Joan’s sword and angelic banner.

      “Joan?” Catherine said. “Are you well?”

      Joan lowered her hands which she’d had clasped before her. She rose and turned to face Catherine.

      For an instant, Catherine thought that the girl had tripped entirely into the murky waters of insanity, impelled by the truth she’d been forced to witness last night. But then she realised that Joan’s face was infused not with madness, nor even with her previous obsessive devotion, but with a peace so profound that Catherine’s eyes widened in wonder.

      “What has happened?” she said.

      Joan smiled secretively, although not in a sly manner. “I have found myself,” she said.

      Catherine indicated a small stool. “May I sit?”

      “Oh, yes. Forgive me. I should have asked you myself.”

      Then Joan, who sat on the edge of her narrow bed, tilted her head and regarded Catherine with a modicum of curiosity. “You have not come to gloat, have you?”

      Catherine