Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross Page A

laughed with pleasure. Joan had just finished a row when she looked up and saw John hurrying across the field toward them. She tapped her mother’s arm in warning; Gudrun saw her son, and the Saxon words died on her lips.
    “Quick!” John was breathless from running. “Father wants you at the house now. Hurry!” He pulled Gudrun by the arm.
    “Gently, John,” Gudrun reprimanded. “You’re hurting me. What has happened? Is anything wrong?”
    “I don’t know.” John kept tugging on his mother’s arm. “He said something about a visitor. I don’t know who. But hurry. He said he’d box my ears if I didn’t bring you right away.”
    The canon was waiting for them at the grubenhaus door. “It took you long enough,” he said.
    Gudrun stared at him coolly. A tiny spark of anger ignited in the canon’s eyes; he drew himself up importantly. “An emissary is coming. From the Bishop of Dorstadt.” He paused for effect. “Go and prepare a suitable meal. I will meet him at the cathedral and lead him here.” He dismissed her with a wave of the hand. “Be quick, woman! He will arrive soon.” He left, slamming the door behind him.
    Gudrun’s face was rigidly expressionless. “Start with the pottage,” she said to Joan. “I’ll go collect some eggs.”
    Joan poured water from the oaken bucket into the large iron pot the family used for cooking and set the pot over the hearth fire. From a woolen sack, almost empty now after the long winter, she took handfuls of dried barley and threw them into the pot. She noticed, with surprise, that her hands shook with excitement. It had been so long since she had felt anything.
    But an emissary from Dorstadt! Could it have anything to do with her? After all this time, had Aesculapius finally managed to find a way for her to resume her studies?
    She cut off a slab of salt pork and added it to the pot. No, it was impossible. It was almost a year since Aesculapius had left. If he had been able to arrange anything, she would have heard long ago. It was dangerous to hope. Hope had nearly destroyed her once; she would not be so foolish again.
    Nevertheless, she could not still her excitement when the door opened one hour later. Her father entered, followed by a dark-haired man. He was not at all what she had imagined. He had the blunt, unintelligent features of a
colonus
, and he carried himself more like asoldier than a scholar. His tunic, bearing the insignia of the bishop, was rumpled and dusty from travel.
    “You will do us the honor of supping with us?” Joan’s father indicated the pot boiling on the hearth.
    “Thank you, but I cannot.” He spoke in Theodisk, the common tongue, not Latin, another surprise. “I left the rest of the escort at a
cella
outside Mainz—the forest path is too slow and narrow for ten men and horse—and came ahead alone. I must rejoin them tonight; in the morning we begin the return journey to Dorstadt.” He withdrew a parchment scroll from his scrip and handed it to the canon. “From his Eminence the Lord Bishop of Dorstadt.”
    Carefully the canon broke the seal; the stiff parchment crackled as it was unrolled. Joan watched her father closely as he squinted to make out the writing. He read all the way to the bottom, then began again, as if searching for something he had missed. Finally he looked up, his lips tight with anger.
    “What is the meaning of this? I was told your message had to do with me!”
    “So it does.” The man smiled. “Insofar as you are the child’s father.”
    “The bishop has nothing to say about my work?”
    The man shrugged. “All I know, Father, is that I am to escort the child to the schola in Dorstadt, as the letter says.”
    Joan cried out in a sudden rush of emotion. Gudrun hurried over and placed an arm protectively around her.
    The canon hesitated, eyeing the stranger. Abruptly, he came to a decision. “Very well. It’s true that it is a fine opportunity for the child, though it will be hard enough for