Burnt Offering

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Burnt Offering

The old marketplace, the center of the gathering, could be dated back to the glorious Romans so many years ago. Cauchon squirmed uncomfortably as he stood in his white robes outside of the church in Rouen. Standing there, he thought of how those ancient warriors, that red legion, would honor their pagan, heretic gods with burnt offerings. He wondered doubtfully,
with the silent weight of guilt like a tomb balanced on the tip of his pointed mitre hat, if he was not doing the same.

They brought her out, head shaven and in men’s clothing. This heretic fool. He had tried to save her from this, tried to bring her back from demonic damnation at that trial. But she was
insistent, persistent in delusion. She heard voices, she had said, as though the tongue of Satan flapped from between her lips. She stated it was the saints in her ears; Catherine and Margaret.
She claimed that God almighty, in France’s great time of need, would speak to this peasant farm girl.

What true God spoke to women? None. This was not Genesis nor the book of Luke, where God and his angels would send the golden voices of divinity to speak truths to humankind’s ears. This was France, four hundred years had passed since the First Holy Crusade. If anyone, God spoke to the Pope, but to filthy girls like her? No. It is just not so.

One or two of the armed English soldiers stifled a laugh as the pale young woman squeaked slightly in pain as they shoved her forward into the old market square. Only nineteen they believe, a beautiful girl, even with her hair gone and that gap between her teeth, she had done so much―too much―too quickly. From peasant to leader of all the armies of France, shining in armor underneath bloody banners at Orleans and Patay―Cauchon thought she was a half-witted girl who was lucky in leading some good fighting men forward. No hand of God, no voice of the Almighty blessing her ear. Yet, as she staggered forward bound in the malice of others, Cauchon thought that her bald head and her ragged men’s clothes shimmered with the same metallic glint of steel armor she had worn only a month ago.

Cauchon looked down at his white tunic and patted at the wrinkles on his chest. Yes, yes, his conscience was clear. No woman would hear the voice of God―she had to be lying, she was
a fool, and no God would support the French over the English and Cauchon’s own Burgundians. He had captured, tried this girl, and thus, God had to be on his side. Who was ending their story
bound and put to death? Not him―it was her― if that didn’t prove guilt enough, then what did? He thought of another being he had studied who had been bound before, but shook the example from his memory― he sniffed loudly, this was nothing like that. He looked down and spat. Some of the crowd looked up to him. He thought he could smell the burning scent of Roman offerings―the scent of frying pork skin riffled through his nostrils. He spat again. No. The drunk English men tied her to a tall stone column built long before anyone could remember. The soldiers started singing in English as they gathered wood in front of the murmuring crowd:

“Our King went forth to Normandy With grace and might of chivalry; There God worked marvelously for him, Wherefore England may call and cry out: Thanks be to God!”

The girl’s eyes pierced through the thundering silence which roared even under the drunkard song of the English. A mountainous stoicism bound to the unnerved frame of this pale, bald, gap-toothed girl. Cauchon could see her teeth from his position above the crowd. Was that a smile? Or was she wincing? He saw the whole universe in the gap of her teeth and he looked down again to spit.

He shook his head. A heretic deserves hell. God would say so, God had said so. From Revelations: “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those
who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.” Had this girl not been cowardly and sexually immoral by dressing in men’s
clothing? Had she not been idolatrous, by pretending to hear voices? Of course. This was holy practice, Godly practice. The will of the Lord, the want of the Shepherd. Cauchon knew his responsibility, and he too had a flock to keep, to herd from danger and hell. The girl smelled coarsely of hell of wrongdoing, of vulgarity. He could smell it from all the way over here, her wrinkled face almost like a moon in the water of time. That scent―that burning pork again―again he thought of those red Romans and their burnt offerings.

His white robes ruffled in the light breeze as he heard a pile of wood clunk against the base of the column the girl was tied to. She remained motionless as the pile of wood grew around her feet―she was a fool who deserved this. He looked down to spit again but he saw at the knee of his glowing white gown, a smudge of mud. It must have splashed up from the mud of May in
Rouen’s streets. It was a brown and black pupil that sneered upwards, a smudge of filth. There was that pugilent smell again―and then the thought that came with it: what had she said,
through that gap between her teeth at her trial? What were those words she had said with the spite and skill of clerical expertise?:

His tail had tightened between his legs as she had gone on and on of the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret and the love of God above. The jury of
clergymen had shaken their heads in unison, a forest of disapproving skulls. Cauchon was onto her; he knew in her heart was the heart of the false shepherd, the idol of darkness sewn tightly into the fabric of her soul. His patience had run out and so he had asked her, this peasant girl who knew not her letters nor anything of royal courts nor law, he had asked: “Do you know, in fact, that you
are in God’s grace?”

And the clergy at the trial squirmed in excitement, a law they had learned in their universities, in the instruction of logic on the will of God. Surely the girl who had sworn to have heard the female saints above in her ear knew she was in the grace of God. The question was a tricky one, a trap to show her as the dark idol he had known her to be. If she said yes, he’d call her a heretic―only God Himself can know if one is in God’s grace. If she said no, she’d be admitting that she was a false prophet, a liar mincing the words of saints for witchly powers. But the silence of the room felt hollow, like a rotten trunk in a forest. The many heads in their white gowns of purity pierced the girl in her mannish clothes as she stood pale as snow in the center of the room. Her hands were bound, her eyes trembling, her body as calm and quiet as mountains of southern France. Cauchon, himself, felt the roaring impatience of the ocean breaking upon Normandy’s shore, chewing at timelessness and silence with bereft, incessant motion.

“Answer the question;” he said with shark teeth, “Do you know, in fact, that you are in God’s grace?”

The girl exhaled as though the very tome of patience was being written in the breath winding out over her tongue, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” She said this slowly, her enunciation like the great royalty of old, the clarity of doctrine thundering through her quiet, yet powerful words. The forest of clergy rocked in the wind of her deposition, and Cauchon splashed in the suddenly calm waters of her profundity, his shark teeth dulled in her iron stoicism.

He had had her jailed anyway. Looked the other way as Englishmen had their way with her. Punished her when she had stripped herself from her dress and put men’s clothes back on. She was guilty, in every action, she was a heretic at best, at worse, a witch. The scripture was very clear. Fire. Fire. Fire at the stake. He realized now, the memory flowing through him, that that had been the moment when he first smelled it: the burnt offering smell, that stench of roasting pig fat broiling on a spicket. That flashing visage of red Romans uttering some mantra to a pantheon of dead heathen gods. That was the first time, and he smelled it again now as the torch of the sacrifice―no, breathe,

Cauchon―the torch of the sacrament of God was being lowered down around her feet. He had apparently missed the announcement of her wrongdoings, her public sentencing, and he refocused now as the orange torch spread the flames which began to lick around her ankles. Her mouth finally found its anxiety, its concern, its devine doubt as the kissings of flame found her bare skin and the small hairs populating her legs began to scorch black. Small shrieks were splattered out from that gap between her front teeth, and though Cauchon was certain he saw a flash of summer sunshine emanate from between them, her words became partnered with steaming tears as she squirmed and wriggled against the column holding her firmly to her sacreligious punishment.

She moved like the worm she was as she shouted out the name of the lord, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” as the flames turned her bald white skin pink and as pink began to ebb into black. The smell was putrid, it was overwhelming. Cauchon looked away from the sacrif―sacrament and back into the black iris-stain on his robes. He felt his smile fade, like it was yanked downward and away from him. He closed his eyes but the Romans shouted their mantra at him beneath his eyelids.The thunder of drumming banged along as he heard her high whimpers and the hushed gasps of a hungry crowd.

The fire was short yet cruel and the screechings of the witch passed like the May breeze. The crowd shuddered at the squealing of this girl, once the proud knight of the people, the banner of the crown of France. The vigorous body slumped into crooked black cruelty, a charred remain bent in holy prayer folds, like a large pair of prayerful hands clasped black from the ash of holy incense.

The smoke was worse than the flame. Cauchon thought so as he stared at the smoldering pile spit its black color into the blue void of the sky. He thought he saw faces in the smoke.

Female saints? A gap-toothed woman? Eternity was above, yet also, eternity drooled below in the pits of hell. That black smoke, as he walked over to the pyre through the crowd leaving the site, past the drunken English soldiers, seemed to smolder so quickly into the heavens. He looked at the charred body, the white skull beginning to glimpse through the falling ash of burnt flesh. The Romans in his brain were shouting now, their mantra of polytheism berating like a drum on the inside of his skull. He saw the white set of teeth peer through the ashen black, smoke whispering in whisps from a jaw still unclenched from the world’s cruelty.

He fell, knees first, into the ash. His white robes soaking in the soot. He stared at that small gap between the ruin of her skull. He smelled the burnt flesh of pig skin. He heard the hammering of drums, he felt a strong current anchoring him downward beneath the stonework. His ashen knees began to bleed and blister upon the hot cobblestone.

Two clergymen saw Cauchon’s fall and they ambled over to him. Try as they might, they struggled to lift him from his knelt position, a position almost as in prayer, so close to the still hot ash and coals of the public execution. He started shouting, hardly words at first, and then his words fell to a constant incoherent mumbling as yet more clergymen pulled Cauchon from his troubled kneel. They brought him to the infirmary. His mumbling never ceased.

He was blanketed and someone lit a fire in his hot room to sweat out the demons from his body. It was probable that devils had made him sick in the first place, they suggested, being in such close approximation to the witch’s death.

Cauchon’s eyes stared at the little fire in his little room, his eyes unsleeping, unwavering from the coals replenished and replenished by concerned clergymen of Burgundy. But as they cleaned his sheets and changed him, as they fetched him french water and bled him from disease, they heard him ask a quiet question to himself, over and over as the fire continued to flicker. It was a question none of them answered nor interrupted, nor wrote down. One they ignored, for though they would not say, they felt it too:

“Am I in God’s Grace?”

He would shiver with each inquisition as the words rolled from his tongue. All the while, his eyes watched the fire and his nostrils smelled the burnt flesh of burnt offerings to pagan gods as he laid in his shadowed monk cell sweating through his sheets.

Peter Randazzo has a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies Education from SUNY New Paltz and a Master’s Degree in Curriculum Instruction with a focus in Literacy from SUNY Empire. He teaches history in upstate New York, is a poet with Dead Man’s Press, runs the Clever Name Collective writer’s group in Albany, and runs the No Poet blog on WordPress. He has published in the anthologies of Eber & Wein, Hidden in Childhood, Penumbra, and has self-published "Dandelions & The Right Notes" on Amazon.