News traveled quickly in the days we were stationed in Rouen, and word of her military successes and her spiritual calling preceded her by many months; it was as if horses ran faster, and people wrote and spoke more clearly then, aided somehow from above. I believed in such heavenly intervention then, and I still do now. It was our biggest difference, Frémin and I, for Frem was the rare soldier who didn’t believe in God; it was clear he too fought for love, for life, for land, but never for the divine.
When prophecy’s subject was handed over, I noticed first her short hair, uneven, as if cut with a blade, her head scraped in places. She looked like one of us. She smelled of burning grass, the surrounding countryside, but something of it seemed in her essence, like she was the reason the earth this summer was going to be hot and dry. Frem came from a hot and dry land—did she remind him of one of his sisters or brothers, his mother? Then I noticed the rings around her wrists from where various manipulations—chains, armor, hands—kept her imprisoned, even as she walked, escorted by us to the cell with the fallen beam where we, instead of the nuns customary for keeping a woman, would watch her for three nights. [ . . . ]
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