Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain

learning how Gaul is governed. Even disorder has its order—the only one future generations may know. Mine is perhaps uniquely cursed in that it retains a memory of true, institutional order, without any hope of its revival. Like the Garden of Eden, order was and was taken away: a sour and godly trick. All gone now. Illiteracy obliterates memory. The last image of the Roman experience survives in the language—Latin—and even that is crumbling like a weedy aqueduct, gnawed at by epidemics of prepositions which subvert its syntax as termites do timber. I root them out of any text I can, just as I would destroy the termites.
    Another glass of wine. It’s sweet, warm and dulls the devils of the mind. Odd: warmth and sweetness, the most scarce of all sensations in a Gaulish winter are the very ones God chooses for reaching Radegunda. When she has fasted for days she tastes honey on her tongue and when she has been kneeling on cold flags gets a feeling of heat about the heart. Or are these lazy metaphors? I’d like to lick her tongue with mine. Find out what she means by “a taste of honey”. In the gospels God is the Word but comes to her as a sensation. Another sign that language is collapsing. I dedicate my middle age to shoring it up. My letters to our half-literate bishops are lessons. I send them flattery in careful prose, hoping that when they’ve sucked out its sweetness, some sense of its form may stick in their skulls. “Gaul”, I wrote to Bishop Felix of Nantes, “need never envy the Orient the rays of the rising sun since she is illumined by the rays of your glory …” Extravagant? Yes, but his schemes for irrigation and land-reclamation are impressive. “Pray make of my unworthy limbs a footstool”, I begged Bishop Martin with rather less cause, “and lean your weight on my chest.” He sent me some excellent wine and papyrus in exchange. Several patrons are better than one, which is another reason why I didn’t stay with Chilperic but came all the way across Gaul to here, rattling my bones on a wooden waggon. A ghastly journey: I saw ditches rank with filth, carcasses of animals in various stages of decomposition, abandoned infants, beggars dead from exposure, pagan shrines surrounded by every sort of idolatrous rubbish including some stinking horses’ heads set on poles and picked at by daws. Water was suspect, food inedible and I was obliged to wear three different relics to keep off disease. At the inns we heard stories of ritual cannibalism. The economy seemed to have broken down. Murrain was widespread—hence the dead cows—and cured by rubbing oil stolen from church lamps on the cattle’s heads. For poverty there was no cure. Life seemed an increasingly poor gift.
    At one point while clip-clopping down that knobbly spinal column which is the Roman road from Orléans, I began to hallucinate from fatigue and the flow of tree trunks dazzled and confused my eye like the riffled pages of a book. The sun dissolved in a brownish mist pierced by rays which seemed to assemble with the trees in shapes of giant weaponry, flying ships, Babylonian towers innumerable storeys high. I had a sensation of speed, light, a scission of sensibility and—most horrifyingly—of impermanence. It was a vision of hell, I decided, as the shapes changed, reshaped and changed again. Change and impermanence are, after all, the very properties of the devil.
    For the last two days of my journey I was raving with fever. I arrived—I’ve been told since—pale as a parsnip and gaunt as a cormorant at Radegunda’s door. Certainly I was in a receptive state. She fed me and flattered me, telling me how she had always preferred poets to all other guests when she was still King Clotair’s wife.
    “Not that any who came were of your stature!”
    Chilperic’s letter—out of vanity?—had promoted me.
    She confessed she wrote verse herself. A mania, I decided. First Chilperic, now his stepmother. Well, maybe it was their way