Prologue to THE REBEL NUN by Marj Charlier
anno domini 613, a villa south of Paris
The hour I learned of Hilda’s death, the cool autumn mist had crept into my garden, telling me it was time to call a truce with the weeds and bugs for the night. From stiff knees, the effort of rising forced a low moan from my lungs. I brushed the dirt from my hands and picked up a sack to gather the herbs I had harvested that afternoon.
It was the time of day when, usually, I would look forward to a comforting fire and a quiet evening meal of fresh cheese, bread, and watered wine in the villa’s garden shack that I had made my home. Then I would crawl under an old blanket and bid the world goodbye for the night—or perhaps forever, for all I knew.
But that night, I would not sleep. Under the full moon, my friends and I would celebrate the moon goddess Máni with the pagan rituals we revived when I returned to this village twenty-two years ago and found the women eager to reclaim our ancestral rites. They joined me in the daytime for lessons in the healing power of herbs, wild roots, and allium—secrets I had learned from my mother and grandmother decades ago in this very garden. And twice every cycle of the moon—at its fullest and its darkest—we gathered to remember the goddesses who rule the celestial realm and to affirm our ancient beliefs.
Careful to keep my balance, I bent to collect bundles of borage for stomach ailments, betony to relieve headaches, sage to treat the village children’s persistent colds, and rosemary to ward off nightmares. Hens scuttled out of my way, flapping their wings, irritated at me for interrupting their feast of cabbage worms. At first, their flurry and cackling kept me from noticing the lone rider coming through the chestnut trees between my garden and the main house.
“Sister,” he called out, startling me. I looked up and froze. Only one kind of visitor would address me as a nun: a messenger from the posse loyal to my Aunt Hilda, known as Queen Brunhilde to most of the world. She had been the one to rescue me from the church’s suffocating grasp but had never stopped referring to me as a penitent.
My heart clenched painfully. Only one thing would bring this envoy to my door after so many years. “When?” I asked, tears already swelling under my eyelids.
“A week ago.” The large man slipped off his mount and walked toward me with the horse’s reins in one hand, his fur cap clenched against his chest in the other. “I am sorry for my delay. The queen’s enemies swarm like wasps, even now. I had to avoid the roads, and many times I had to stop and hide for hours.”
I studied him. He looked like so many of Hilda’s men—tall, exceptionally strong, with long blond hair and sky-blue eyes. Not so different from the man who had held my heart for so many years, now traversing the heavens with the Valkyries, as only the worthiest are chosen to do.
“Come inside.” I motioned toward the door of my hut. “You must be weary, and the autumn chill is creeping into my bones. I need to know everything.”
The news was worse than I could have imagined. Nearly eighty years old—the oldest person I had ever known, my aunt, queen to the late King Sigibert—had been dragged by the hair and torn limb from limb by horses, surrounded by a drunken, cheering horde of her political and religious enemies.
Few women in our time have acted so bravely or had so much influence over our kingdom as she did. But, in the end, Hilda had fewer friends than powerful foes. A gang of Catholic bishops and counts allied themselves with Clothar, my evil great-nephew, and ordered Hilda’s execution. Clothar and his bishops now reigned over Austrasia and the territory known as Neustria, which my own father once ruled.
The women who gathered for the full-moon ceremony later that night were as distraught as I was over the news. Through clouds of incense, we chanted praises to the moon goddess until our voices were hoarse from song and smoke. We passed communal goblets of wine and cider and tossed bundles of herbs and fragrant branches into the bonfire.
These were the same rituals as ever, but hanging over us was a raw fear, a new awareness of how vulnerable we were. If Hilda, with all her cunning and wiles, could face such a brutal end, we knew that the king who ordered her execution could, at any time, command men to storm our gatherings, lay axes to our altar and swords to our flesh.
As could any man of the church.
Days later, Hilda’s death haunts me still as I sit with Gregory’s Ten Books of History, rereading his account of our rebellion at the female Monastery of the Holy Cross, which Hilda abetted and from which she rescued me. In his book, Decem Libri Historiarum, Gregory, the late Bishop of Tours, has distorted the truth for his own polemics, painting me as a prideful and brash perpetrator of a reckless rebellion and my sisters as feckless pawns. As one of the few who was there and is still living, I have long been tempted to refute his fabrications with my own story. They have stoked the hatred that precipitated Hilda’s murder. By penning this, I will honor her heroism to preserve, for posterity, the truth, both on her behalf and in the memory of the other brave women who joined our rebellion: Covina, my closest friend and our staunchest rebel; Basina, my sometimes rebellious, sometimes fragile cousin; Bertie, brave despite her tiny stature; and Veranda, whose stoicism in the face of danger and death was far greater than I could ever muster.
As I write this account, I will not attempt to dodge my share of blame for the death of those women whose bodies bled dry onto the cold stone floors of the monastery just outside the city walls of Poitiers. But the story does not begin or end with the bloody clash at the Holy Cross.
It began when Christianity first swept across Gaul, and the church demanded the obliteration of the pagan rituals, shrines, and deities that had guided our tribes for centuries. It continued as the church declared women unclean, threw us out of the clergy, and denied us the right to sleep with the priests to whom some of us were married. Our monastery’s founder, Radegund, who had the powerful status of a queen, was able to retain her status as a deaconess, and bequeath her boldness and independence to Agnes, who became our abbess. But when Agnes died, the church moved quickly and cruelly to assert its control over our monastery.
The story of our struggle will end only when our kingdom is no longer at the mercy of the patriarchy and the church, the matriarchy flourishes anew, and pagan traditions are again celebrated across the land with impunity.
- Reprinted with permission of Blackstone Publishing
