The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

       Prologue Friday 1st March 1381

      The chamber was close and warm, its windows closed, its air thick with the scent of herbs.

      There was silence, save for the moans of the woman squatting between two midwives before the roaring fire in the hearth.

      The woman giving birth was naked; her skin gleamed with sweat, while her unbound hair had soaked into glistening strings clinging to her shoulders and back. The midwives bent over her, holding bunches of soothing herbs close to her nostrils and open mouth, rubbing the small of her back encouragingly.

      They did not murmur instructions to her, for Marie was of their own and knew what was happening both to her own body and to the baby it was trying to expel.

      Two other women stood half shadowed on each side of the shuttered windows. To one side stood Catherine of France, daughter of the insane Louis and the adventurous Isabeau de Bavière, her attention as much on her silent companion as on the labouring Marie.

      Slightly distanced from her stood Joan of Arc, Maid of France, staring intently at the woman struggling to give birth. Her face, if possible, was even more tortured than that of Marie.

      She was terrified of what Marie was about to birth.

      Joan had spent these past seven months since Charles’ crowning at Rheims cathedral in a fugue of despair. This despair was not caused by Charles’ stubborn refusal to move from Rheims, or to do anything which might be construed even vaguely warlike, but by the swelling of Marie’s body. Indeed, Joan’s despair had increased in direct proportion to the escalating distention of Marie’s belly. Marie might not know how her child had been conceived, or who had put it in her, but Joan had a very good idea, and she knew that if the child confirmed her suspicions then she would have no choice but to abandon her crusade for the Archangel Michael.

      How could she serve an angel who so callously used women’s sleeping bodies? Who was so inherently flawed? So inherently sinful? And so arrogant in that sinfulness?

      “See?” said Catherine conversationally, very well aware of Joan’s distress. “The baby is about to be born.”

      Joan jerked, an almost inaudible moan escaping her mouth. She wished she could tear her eyes from Marie, or run from the room, but she could do neither. She prayed meaninglessly, futilely—for she was not sure to whom she could pray—that somehow the actuality of Marie’s child would prove the archangel’s innocence.

      But in Joan’s innermost being she knew that was impossible.

      In her innermost being, Joan knew that the archangel had put that child inside Marie.

      And in her very few, most painfully honest moments, Joan knew that the archangel had lied and abused and manipulated her even more grossly than he had Marie.

      All Marie had to do was endure the agony necessary to birth his child.

      All Joan had to do was die. To die for the cause of a sin-crippled angel.

      How could that cause be good, and just?

      Marie was struggling even more now,