I
ORLÉANS, EARLY MAY 1429
This morning is mild, the light gentle. The shutters of Joan’s room are flung open to let in fresh air and a warm wind. It does not feel like a morning when men should die.
Two women are dressing her from foot to head. Around her ankles, they lace greaves, the armor that will protect her shins, and tie together the leather thongs that will secure the plates to her legs.
At her shoulder, she hears a throat clear. One of the women motions her to raise her arms. They must strap on her breastplate. Soon every part of her will be encased in steel.
The other woman holds up a gauntlet, and Joan slides her hand into the glove. She watches her hand of flesh disappear, her palm become stiff leather and metal.
A suit of armor costing one hundred livres tournois has been crafted to her precise dimensions. A banner has been painted, which one among her company will hold. On the banner: A white field gilded with lilies and two angels. An image of the King of Heaven presiding over the world.
Scholars, too, have been hired to locate prophecies in ancient manuscripts. One prophecy is this: that France will be brought low by a whore and saved by a virgin. The whore is thought to be Isabeau, the Dauphin’s mother; the virgin is Joan. They have found something they can use from the wizard Merlin: “a virgin who ascends the backs of archers.” Another, from the Venerable Bede, describes only “a maid carrying banners.” Like most successful prophecies, they are vague. They can be taken to mean both everything and nothing.
Joan’s retinue comprises these members: two pages, both seven years old, named Louis and Raymond; a squire, Jean d’Aulon; a chaplain to hear her confessions; and three servants to wait on her—though, as they soon discover, they are rarely required to do anything, for she is used to looking after herself. So, they idle. They call her the best mistress they ever had.
When Joan arrived in Orléans, she saw Yolande had done her work. The people believed she was a holy woman appointed by God. They thought her presence alone would save them.
She quickly realized: There was no army called Joan’s army to report to her, and she had no title. Her status was as amorphous as Merlin’s prophecy. Her pages, her squire, every person assigned to her—she wonders, Did they draw lots?—shrugged and scratched their heads when she asked them what she should do. She was given a room in the city treasurer’s house, where she would be waited upon by the women. The other captains of France were also staying here, but no one cared what she did with her time. Joan could stay in her room and sleep. If the mood struck her, she could pray. She was commander of nothing, but no one commanded her, either.
The chefs de guerre, the leaders of France’s army, thought she was a bad joke. Jean de Dunois, the illegitimate brother of the Duke of Orléans, refused to look at her. When she came into the room, he faced the other way. La Hire, the famous brigand turned captain, did look at her and a ball of phlegm rose in his throat; his spit landed not far from her feet.
At her door, someone left a pile of unwashed and soiled laundry. Her response: in full view of the men, she kicked the sorry heap down the stairs.
The foot soldiers, too, would be happier if she were replaced by a sighing mule and a cart of supplies. A mule and supplies would be practical, at least. Most couldn’t help staring, though some went further: they shook their heads when she passed them. They thought her presence here was wrong, even insulting. Why was her hair shaved and trimmed in the bowl-shaped cut fashionable among noblemen? Why did she wear a man’s doublet? She could never be a knight, so why should she have a squire and pages and servants?
But they didn’t know her. They didn’t know that the more they stared, the more she would carry herself as if it were she and not Yolande, Queen of Four Kingdoms, who doled out the soldiers’ pay.
She didn’t mind being ignored; she could take the sour looks, the shakes of the head quietly, but La Hire went a step further. Soon after they arrived in Orléans, he sauntered up to her, picking his teeth in a way that reminded her of her father. She wanted to tell him anything that reminded her of Jacques d’Arc made her temper rise.
He looked her up and down. “You have no place here,” he said. “You, a woman? A farm wench, a shepherdess who knows little more than how to squeeze the tits of cows and goats for milk, who crawled out of some hole, some ditch in the kingdom, and now calls herself a virgin warrior? My God, woman, you won’t last five minutes on the field. I don’t care how big you are. Our prince, king, whatever he is, has gone mad like his father, and you think I wouldn’t say this to his face, but I would bark it into his ears if I thought he would listen. I could stand the little boy with bleeding hands and feet, even that lecherous monk. Let them claim to be prophets. Let them sleep until noon and eat meat and pies. What harm could they do? But this?” He beat his chest, wincing at the force of his own fist. “The sight of you offends me as it would any true soldier here. Now grow out your hair and put on a dress!”
He stood a few inches shorter than Joan, so she stared down at him. She took a step closer, covering him with her shadow.
“And I know you, La Hire,” she replied. “Oh yes, I have heard of your reputation. You are a cheat and a liar, a mercenary of the very worst kind. I have heard that years ago, you were the honored guest of a duke, and what did you do when your visit came to an end? You locked your host in his own dungeon and demanded that he pay you ransom for his release. If you weren’t on the side of His Majesty, I would knock your head off your shoulders right now.”
The fact that she talked back seemed to take him by surprise.
“I would like to see you try,” he growled.
“Try?” she repeated. “I wouldn’t have to try.”
They were nearly nose to nose. He scoffed, “Oh, I have heard what you are able to do in training. But the battlefield isn’t a closed pen, sweetheart. It isn’t an empty yard with one straw target for an opponent.”
Dunois stepped between them. “Leave her be,” he said, facing La Hire and ignoring her. “She will soon find out the difference for herself, though she may not live to tell anyone about it, and then the Dauphin will see the error of his judgment.”
“My lord Dunois,” Joan said. It was the first time she had ever addressed him. “How is your wound healing?”
His lip curled at her. “What wound?”
“Your wound from Rouvray, the Battle of the Herrings,” she replied. “The French, as I recall, lost that fight, though they outnumbered the English. And you were forced, I think, to run for your life. So, how is that wound healing, my lord?”
“You unnatural bitch,” La Hire said before Dunois could answer. “I would not lie with you if you were the last whore in the last brothel of the kingdom.”
Joan smiled. She was already rolling up her sleeves. Let me only make an example of this one, and then they will see, she thought. “If you tried to lie with me,” she said cheerfully, “you would be dead before your breeches fell to the floor. This I can promise you.”
Dunois gave his friend a shove and a look, and Joan and La Hire backed away from each other, like two snarling dogs postponing a fight.
The women of the house, the treasurer’s wife and her daughter, had witnessed the scene. From the staircase, they gaped. Joan was only a little regretful. This was probably not how a holy woman, an instrument of God, should behave. But faced with such fools, what choice did she have? She raised her eyes to the ceiling. God give me patience!
A polite cough shakes Joan out of her thoughts. One of the women is offering her something: a helmet. She refuses it. She wants the men—English, French, she doesn’t care which side—to see her face. She wants them to remember it.
“You are trembling, Joan,” the same woman tells her.
She does not speak. She is afraid that if she speaks, her voice will tremble, too.
Even today, a fine morning in May, no one woke her. No one informed her that the captains of France were going to fight at the fortress of Saint Loup, one of the gates of the city, that this was the day of their first battle. But she has swallowed the insult.
The women step back to look at her. Their task finished, they lower their eyes and whisper a prayer before this figure of steel they have prepared for battle. Normally the squire would have dressed her, but the women of the household wanted the honor. It is as if Joan already belongs to them: the mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters of the city who look to her to lift the siege. The men will free the men, but you will free us.
A servant opens the front door, and she walks into sunlight. Her squire is here with her horse. He helps her mount. Her pages run up with her sword.
A week ago, a sword was taken from the cathedral at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, a relic said to have been wielded by the great Prince of the Franks, Charles Martel. But that sword, seven hundred years old, could not be used; the monks discovered the case held only a piece of rusted iron. So a precise copy was made with a decoration of five crosses on the blade. The monks, too, bless them, had thought it would look very pretty, very dashing, for Joan to carry a scabbard made of cloth of gold to battle. Cloth of gold for a scabbard? And what if the sword should cut through the thread? She had nearly laughed. So, a new scabbard was made, in plain but hardy leather.
As she takes the weapon, everyone is quiet. Her squire will ride after her with her banner. Her pages will remain behind. Her hand, which is now the hand of a metal giant, makes the sign of the cross across her steel chest, over her plate-protected heart.
The treasurer’s wife is looking at her as if Joan were her own daughter. Even with this armor, this sword, they don’t think she will return alive. They don’t believe it is enough against men who are also monsters.
One more moment. One last prayer. Joan shuts her eyes, though it isn’t a prayer that comes to her but a memory, like a feather floating from a dove’s wing. It is a scene of peace in the house of white stone, her sister still alive and mending a shirt. Her uncle stood over Catherine, watching her quick hands. He said something that made Catherine laugh. At their feet, Salaud ran in circles. But when Joan entered the room, they looked up. Salaud rolled out his tongue, ears crooked. “I can’t stay,” Joan told them. “I promised to mend the priest’s gate.”
“That man should pay you,” her uncle said. “But I suppose all his debts are paid by God.”
“Our Joan,” Catherine said, as the needle dipped and rose through the cloth of the shirt. “She is always coming and going. She can never keep still. We never know where she is or where she will be, whether she may be found in the woods or in some neighbor’s field. One time, when I called out her name, her voice came from above my head. She was in a tree eating an apple.”
Durand raised his hands in pretend helplessness. “What can we do about it?” he asked.
Catherine looked at her thoughtfully. Turning back to the cloth, she shook her head. She was always the picture of loveliness, her sister. “Nothing. Nothing can be done, and why should she change? She is our Joan.”
When Joan opens her eyes again, she is greeted by the world as it is.
Her heart is the drumbeat that accompanies her to war. Over her shoulders, she hears the flutter of the banner that will signal her arrival in battle. A light wind cools the sweat running down the sides of her face.
As she passes the cathedral of Orléans, she mutters a prayer, a final word to God, but a figure catches her eye. Beside one of the doors, on a pedestal—is it her imagination?—she sees a statue, its hand poised above a wheel. She has seen this face before, first in a book and then in a dream, and its eyes are watching her. Even when she looks over her shoulder, the eyes seem still to be watching.
As she rides closer to the fighting, men are already running from the battle. They hold their wounds, leaving bloody trails as they stagger. Their faces are frozen in pain like masks.
Her last thoughts are these: The people who once stood in that room, in her memory, are all gone. There is nothing left to her but this.
She feels she is moving through time. Overlying this battle: a clearing. Men are replaced with boys. Swords and poleaxes replaced with stones. At the edge of sight and hearing: a boy screams and falls. What is the difference? Grown men make more noise. There is more blood.
Someone is throwing himself against her horse. Thump. Thump. Joan looks down; it is the first time she sees an Englishman up close. Dark eyes meet hers. A face full of hate; a long white scar along the jaw.
Men with scars. Men who are cruel. Men who don’t speak French. Was it you? she wants to ask. Do you remember Catherine’s face?
But her hand moves before her mouth can form the words, and she barely registers the flash of steel. When she lifts her sword, she sees the edge is coated with blood.
She has no time to think about what she has done. There, a few feet away, two men are wrestling as her brother wrestled the redheaded captain from Maxey. But in place of Jacquemin stands the burly La Hire. And Joan isn’t running with a stick anymore, clutched like a club; she is riding toward them with a sword.
A moment. When the Englishman’s head comes off, it flies in a perfect arc through the air. La Hire shakes off the body, now lifeless.
He looks up, recognizes her. He rubs a cut on his chin and narrows his eyes. “I didn’t need your help,” he says, though it seems he is trying not to smile, not to laugh at how events have turned. Then he spins on his feet and punches another soldier in the face.
How long does a battle last? She doesn’t know. In her head, a voice interrogates every man she cuts down: Was it you? When her sword pierces an opening in armor: Was it you? When her blade plunges through gambeson and her ears fill with the sound of tearing flesh: Was it you? The replies she receives: screams, groans, silence. Yet what she wants is a confession, even if there will be no forgiveness.
Here, too, is another scene she knows she has lived before. She is kneeling. Her gauntleted hand touches the side of a man’s bleeding head, his face for a moment masked by another face much younger than his own: that of a boy of seven. Though, she thinks, he is still young, too. Sixteen? Seventeen? Perhaps he is an elder Guillaume. She remembers him: this man she has named Guillaume. When she passed the camps, the groups of soldiers standing to gawk at her, he was among them. She’d given him a hard stare. What are you looking at? And he had cast his eyes down, as if ashamed. The moment felt like a victory, however small. This battle, too, has been a victory. But he has lost both times. She notices: The elder Guillaume hasn’t died with any weapon in his grip, so what had he been fighting with? His fists?
She feels someone touch her armored back. Even through steel, her shoulder flinches. It is La Hire. “The boy is dead,” he says. His voice is even. The sight of death is nothing to him, a seasoned soldier. But even La Hire has called him a boy. He sees how young he was. “Leave him, Joan.”
She does. The dead stay dead.
She is fetching her supper to bring to her room and eat alone when a throat clears from behind.
They are all here. At the head of the table: Jean de Dunois, Bastard of Orléans. To his left, sitting on one side: Gilles de Rais, Jean Poton de Xaintrailles, and Raoul de Gaucourt. On the other: La Hire, Ambroise de Loré, and Jean de la Brosse. The captains of the French army gathered together.
Joan is about to walk past them with her bowl of stew when La Hire coughs in her direction. What? More insults?
At the corner of the table, the jutting end awkward to sit at, someone has set an extra chair.
“Yours,” Dunois says, addressing the word to the ceiling. He gestures at the chair as if swatting away a fly. “Why don’t you take a seat?”
The men are silent, but no one stands in her way or sticks his boot out to trip her. She sits, the table corner poking into her stomach. She breaks off a piece of bread and dips it in a cup of diluted wine, which La Hire has poured for her. When she raises the cup, she checks it first. No beetles. No dead mouse. She drinks.
La Hire, who is watching her, makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “You trust no one,” he says.
“No, not no one,” she replies. “Just not you.” Yet their voices are bantering.
It is quiet but for the sound of eating. Everyone seems suddenly shy, like children left together to exchange names and become friends. Joan keeps her head down. A plate of ham edges closer to her bowl. She chews, pretending not to notice. But the ham keeps moving closer, as if it has grown legs. When she looks up, she sees the hand of Dunois nudging the plate. He is studying her.
“Where did you learn…” he begins. He cannot quite finish the sentence. He takes a breath. “Where did you learn to fight like that?”
She could be coy. She could say, “Like what?” But Joan knows the moment he is thinking of. She had been unhorsed. Panic made her limbs grow stiff, her sweat turn cold. From the ground, she saw an English knight charging down at her on his horse. Over his head, he waved a mace; the weapon’s sharpened point flashed, catching the light. He was only a short distance away, but she stood her ground. He might have thought that she stood stunned, unable to move from fear, though he would have been wrong. As the knight thundered closer, her ears filled with the sound of hooves, their earth-shattering rhythm. All other noises, the shouts and fighting around her, had diminished to a whisper. She readied her blade. A breath. Another breath. When the horse was nearly on top of her, the knight’s mace already swinging toward her head, she moved swiftly, crouching low. Her sword slit the underside of the beast’s belly. She inhaled the steam of the animal, the dust it kicked up, and felt, inches away, the shudder of muscle; it had been that close. She stood, splattered in horse blood, her face wet and warm, the odor of fresh slaughter tickling her nose. She moved to where the knight landed before he had even risen to his knees. Her hand had only to turn and the point of her sword found him. As the dust settled, she looked around. She saw some men had stopped fighting. They had seen what she’d done: horse and man brought down together. And not long afterward, the battle had ended.
“It is a long story” is her reply. Then: “I am sorry I mocked your wound.”
He nods, accepting her apology. He smiles and she smiles, too.
“What will happen to the dead? Will they be given burial?” she asks.
At this, the men raise their heads and peer at her. Only La Hire answers: “There would not be enough gravediggers, my little shepherdess.”
Most of the ham is gone by the time she speaks again. She has another question: “What next?”
Word has arrived by messenger: English reinforcements are on their way to Orléans, led by Sir John Fastolf, the captain who bested the French at the Battle of the Herrings. The rumor: his army is well supplied and several thousand strong.
“We should wait for reinforcements,” Dunois says, “before we fight again.”
“Why?” she asks. She has been at this table no more than a quarter of an hour, and already she is talking as if these men were her brothers. Brothers can be pushed; they can be shouted at. “Why wait? We should go where the English are thickest.”
She moves the plate of ham and the pitcher, setting them side by side. Meat and water are transfigured into crenellated towers: the two main fortresses of the city, Les Augustins and Les Tourelles. “Take these and take back Orléans,” she says.
“I have seen the maps,” Joan adds.
“What? When?” La Hire barks.
“When you left them out for anyone to look at,” she bellows back.
Dunois touches his shoulder, his wound from Rouvray. He looks from the ham to the pitcher to her. Under the table, he taps the foot pierced by an arrow at Verneuil.
“I told you, Dunois,” La Hire says. “Didn’t I say we shouldn’t have set a place for her? In a few days, she will be wanting your seat as well.” But he is no longer spitting at Joan. He is smiling.
A long, long night lies ahead. Her pages, Louis and Raymond, are full of questions, and her squire, Jean, is composing a letter by candlelight, a message to le Maçon, which, since it contains good news, will find its way to Yolande’s perfumed hand. For the first time in what feels like eternity, the result is victoire. Victory. La Hire is sitting before the fire, yawning. He followed Joan to her room after supper, kicking his boots off and making himself at home. How a battle can change a man. It is as if they have always been the best of friends.
She must be honest. War is horrible, she tells her pages, and means it. The noise, for one. The screams of the dying, both man and beast. Broken bones. The sickening thud of bodies colliding, of horse skull against horse skull. Steel against steel. You cannot look down; you don’t even dare. What you see on the ground will turn your stomach inside out, so perhaps better not to eat beforehand. Your nerves will keep you on your feet anyway. La Hire is right about one thing: training is different from battle.
She describes the space: as wide and large as a courtyard, yet the dead are strewn like rushes across the ground. Some look like they’re fast asleep. Others appear frozen, their muscles tense, as if they could still spring to their feet any moment. A few appear shocked. Death took these men by surprise. Most die with their eyes open, though she thought one corpse blinked at her. Sometimes you cannot tell those on your side from the other. They are just men.
Beneath her feet, the ground squelched, but not with rain or mud. When the fighting was over, she stopped and pressed a hand to her metal belly. She vomited straight into a pool of blood.
She tells her young pages, When you complain about your exercises or feel sore from running, just think what it means to fight three hours without rest, without break, the smell of sweat and dust in your mouth. You can’t remember the moment of victory, but you remember all the other moments, little things, like how blood isn’t at all like water or even like wine, but congealed droplets that stick to your armor; you remember the crooked line of teeth that scatter like dried peas over the back of your gauntleted hand when you strike a man across the face; the strange way some men die as if they are trying to heal themselves, to hold together a split-open chest, a cracked skull.
She takes her pages by the hand. She asks them, her expression serious, “Are you sure the two of you wouldn’t like to enter the priesthood instead?” And they look at each other uncertainly. From his desk, her squire hides a smile.
“But?” La Hire shouts from his chair.
“But it is also a feeling like no other,” she says. “You are never more alive than when you are in battle. Once you have felt every vein of your body thrum, like the taut string of a bow, energy brimming to the very tips of your fingers—”
“The need to take a piss forgotten seconds into a charge,” La Hire adds.
“Once you have experienced all of that…” Joan trails off. She smiles. Such a smile would normally be bestowed on a newborn babe or a blooming garden in springtime. She shows them her hands. “My sword was no longer just a sword. I did not sense either the weight or the heft of it, for it was as though I were holding my own soul.”
La Hire leans forward from his chair. “Well, lads?” he asks the pages, who are both grinning. “What do you think of the priesthood now?”
They couldn’t just put Joan in a suit of armor and bring her to Orléans.
After her last meeting with the Dauphin, she was taken to a different city: Poitiers. There, eighteen clerics gathered by the Archbishop of Reims and vetted by Yolande interrogated her. It was not only the Dauphin who had lost his home. These men, too, had been displaced by the war. After Paris was taken, they lost their great university, they lost their sees and their sources of income, their comfortable and lucrative official roles. These servants of God were angry men. With their homes, they had also lost their sense of humor.
In a room too small for so illustrious a gathering, these men faced her, thin-lipped and grim, like rows of gray-faced toads, some skeletal and narrow, in the manner of the ascetics, others overfed, with chins that sagged to the bottom of their necks. One bishop came riding in on a mule; another, his good friend, from a neighboring city, swayed dangerously on a warhorse. Surely, she thought, the warhorse could be put to better use than as a mount for an overweight bishop.
Yet it was also a balding, liver-spotted reunion for them, these celebrated doctors of theology, who spent their days contemplating Thomas Aquinas’s five proofs of God’s existence. And now they had been asked to contemplate her.
Together they put to her questions, sometimes talking over one another, other times tripping over their own long-winded speech, so she could not hear and they had to repeat themselves. How many times a day did she pray? What prayers had she been taught? When was the last time she confessed, took Communion, fasted? Was she a good child? And if she obeyed her father and her mother—they didn’t like that her answer on this point and other points felt ambivalent—why had she left home without anyone to accompany her? Why did she travel alone? And for what reason did she mention her uncle, by all accounts an unscrupulous individual, more than any other member of her family?
She knew their aim: to uncover the stubs of the devil’s horns in her hair; to find the skin of serpent’s scales beneath her tunic and hose, the pointed tail they imagined she kept coiled and hidden between her thighs.
But le Maçon told her not to worry. The conclusion of these proceedings was already decided. She would pass. So, what was the point then? “I thought there was no time to waste,” she said, and le Maçon flushed. The proper order of things still had to be followed, he explained. Near the end of the sessions, she took to scratching shapes and patterns on the desk with her uncle’s knife. A cloud. A triangle. A unicorn’s horn. This made the priests angry, though none of them dared to take the knife away, because they had heard what she could do with a weapon, any weapon. “She is a proud woman, more arrogant than a prince,” a bishop said. She couldn’t remember which bishop; by that point, their faces had all blurred. But she would have told him, if she could, that it wasn’t anything personal. She was just bored. When the interrogations concluded, they drew up a document and circulated it. The determination: She, Joan, is a good girl who knows her prayers. We can find neither sin nor any form of demonic influence in her.
The examination by the women followed soon after. Yolande had appointed these women, and they asked her to lie down on a bed and part her legs. The oldest among them touched her knees and peered between them, squinting, until something she saw there at last seemed to content her. A young woman replaced her, also staring, and then a third, a solemn-faced matron, who audibly sighed with relief between Joan’s legs, which made her squirm. By the time they were finished, she had begun to miss the bishops; she stared at a spot on the ceiling and drummed her flat stomach with her fingers. With a restless nail, she picked at a scab on her left wrist. The faces of the women appeared over her head. They peered down at her and nodded. “You are chaste,” the oldest announced gravely. “A true virgin.”
Really? she almost said. I didn’t know.
After each session in Poitiers, she went straight to the stables and the training yard. The knights kept well away, but the pages, the young boys between seven and twelve years old, couldn’t hide their curiosity as they watched her stuff straw back inside the targets she’d impaled. At first, they pretended not to notice her. They whistled and kicked the hay at their feet while stealing glances in her direction. Then they crept closer, huddling together in a group. They blinked at her, and she looked back at them: the future of the realm, the young sons of the nobility, though they didn’t seem to her all that different from the kitchen boys who had watched her pare vegetables in Neufchâteau. She smiled at them, and they smiled back.
From then on they watched her shoot, faces peering between the gateposts. They watched her mount her horse and ride and took turns touching and lifting her sword. They shaved and trimmed her hair to the bowl-shaped cut and washed it, many small hands on her head, as if to collectively baptize her. In the way of children, they each kept a lock of her hair for good luck and because they believed it would give them strength.
After Poitiers, she traveled to Orléans, stopping at Tours and Blois for supplies. She thought there would be fighting as soon as she reached Orléans, but her squire informed her that while the English numbers were strong, they hadn’t enough men to cover every gate in the city. So, through the Saint-Aignan gate, she arrived with her small household. A train of supplies followed. It was already dark, yet the city, lit with torches, was as bright as morning. Some people held candles, the last stubs from their cupboards, to light her way. Fathers lifted their children, bleary-eyed with sleep, to watch her. She saw a man mouth the word “angel” into his daughter’s ear. She saw they were hungry, that some were ill, and they were tired of living under siege with the English at their backs. They wanted something to believe in and were ready to believe in anything, even ancient prophecies from the wizard Merlin and the Venerable Bede. She saw they were ready to believe in her.