***NOTE***
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY ARE MEANT TO BE REPRESENTATIVE OF MEDIEVAL PREJUDICES AND WORLD-VIEWS, SOME OF WHICH WERE VERY COMMON IN THAT TIME PERIOD. THEY DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE AUTHOR'S PERSONAL SENTIMENTS OR BELIEFS.
With that said, please enjoy this strange tale.
The Color of Mantis
C. Casey Gardiner
* * *
The world was hers, the whole blessed world, but she was away from it all. Simultaneously, she was within and without the world.
By the tallowflicker of candlelight, Maria Verdelanda di Conte-Pinento concentrated on the page. Some of St. Benedict's words were difficult for her; she had never seen them before, but by context, by examining the other words and phrases around the word in question, she was able to decipher their basic meaning. A part of her was off wondering about this: If one could examine the influences of a concept, but never the concept itself, couldn't one also come to a relatively accurate conclusion about the unknown? Which is to say, more concretely, if one might be allowed to examine the nature of creation on very large, and very small, and very personal and impersonal levels, then could one not come to also understand the nature of the creator, if indeed one did exist?
Maria furrowed her brow, and the shadows on her face deepened the lines of worry. She realized these were thoughts that bordered upon heresy. In fact, they might have been heresy, but she hadn't studied too many dogmatic texts to know for certain which of her thoughts were criminal or not.
It wasn't entirely by her own choice that she was here, but there was a portion of her that genuinely wanted to learn at the Benedictine convent priory of Conte-Pinento. She recalled her stepfather Francisco's words, when he was watching her pack. It was his decision that had enabled her to be here.
"Better a sister than a witch," Francisco scowled. "Always prattling on about lodestone properties and tinctures what might resurrect the dead... How can the Kingdom of God be held aloft in the sky? Whatever might the mechanism be? Does such a mechanism also hold the sun, and the stars, and the whole damned firmament above the earth? You can trust the order to put those devilish notions out of your head. You've caused your mother too much pain."
"You're not making me go," she reminded him. "I want to go. I want to study, and there's very few places in the world..." she paused, "this world... that would ever allow it."
Her stepfather groaned. "Oh, curse my brother for ever teaching you a single, written word. I daresay that for whatever reason you've managed to hold onto a bit more original sin than any other lady I know. The taste of the fruit's never left your tongue."
She gave him an exasperated look. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"You know very well what it means. You've got a touch of Eve in you. You always have."
She smirked. "Don't you mean Lilith?"
"What was that?"
She looked at his face and saw something fearful beginning to emerge in his expression.
"You've been running around the synagogue again haven't you?" She watched his lips curl back. "Damn you! You were to stay out of the Jew district! Did I not make myself clear? Those pig-sucklers have poisoned your mind, the same as they poisoned the wells with the Black Death and killed their fellow countrymen."
She looked away. "The world is turning, father. We're no longer the savages we once were. Scientific and philosophical advances are being made each day, each one building upon the last. We don't have the luxury of ignorance in these times."
"It's not ignorance, you silly child, it is fact! Father Morenti himself has said many times that the-"
"Oh, Father Morenti, of course!" She broke in with a false smile. "That dutiful and compassionate soul, what a paragon of virtue, he is. And wasn't it he who saw fit to have his own cousin put to the stake?"
Francisco's eyes blazed. "How dare you! That was before your time! You have no right to even speak of it."
Maria set her jaw. "Tell me father," she said slowly, watching his face. "Who holds more authority for you, the Church, or God?"
Sitting in the quiet of her cell, Maria absently rubbed at the side of her face. The bruise had faded one month earlier, but the area was still tender to the touch. When she had been brought to the gate, and her personal jewelry was presented as a tithe, the questioning nun who answered had been given the explanation that, as a girl who was still a little clumsy, she had taken a rather nasty fall in the hay-shed. Under her stepfather's watchful eye, Maria did nothing to correct him.
"It's over," she said to herself. "Let it go. It's all over now." She realized her mind was too distracted to concentrate properly on Benedict's words. She sighed, and quietly closed the Book of Hours. It would be getting late now, and even though her natural tendency was to stay up through the late, late hours, the witching-hours, as her family called them, it would do her no good in the morning. Maria slid the book to one side of the little wooden desk and opened up the thin parchment drawing folio beneath it. Flipping past buildings and people; butterflies, toads and sparrows; woods and hills and plains and desert sands, Maria settled on a blank page. Reaching across the candlelight, she picked up a simple shard of charcoal and began to carve delicate lines into the surface.
As she drew, she watched what she drew, and with a small satisfaction, she saw that it was good. At first a line, and then a thickness. A feeler? Very well, a feeler. She was drawing an insect, then, but what variety? Maria enjoyed her sketching moments, as she sometimes felt as if the universe was drawing whatever she drew for her, and through her, like a channel carrying fresh water from one side of the land to the other. It took very little effort, and almost no thought at all. Maria looked again, and was pleasantly surprised, for looking back up at her through the flat, monochromatic dimensions of the page, through swirls of charcoal dust, there was a keen creature. A praying mantis.
Maria's sudden snort caught in her throat and she coughed. "Appropriate," she muttered. She turned the page around to examine her work. The lines were sure, but now, here, the eyes! What lovely eyes.
"A comely beast in miniature, the Praying Mantis." The voice came from behind her. "Truly, one of God's beloved works."
Maria stiffened, and turned around to see the pillared form of Sister Drudola lifting a lighted candle in the open doorway. How silently the woman walked! From dusk until dawn, it was Drudola who always kept the watchfires of the priory's dorter lit. Maria knew what her presence meant.
"Might I stay up for a little while longer?" She begged, “This drawing's not finished yet."
Drudola sighed. "How would one be finished with it? How could they? The world is a shifting place -- ever-changing, ever-tumbling and grinding, and now left to be guarded by us. No, Maria. We keep a strict schedule for a reason. If you adhere to it long enough, you'll come to understand this reason for yourself."
Maria managed to accompany her nod with a faint smile. It wasn't that she disliked the woman, but there was something vaguely disturbing about her presence. Perhaps if a person walked the lonely walk of the night-watch for long enough, it would inevitably begin to change them into something more night-like. Silently, Maria thought this, but seeing the woman wouldn't be swayed, she closed the book and put things back in their place.
"I bid you good night," Drudola said, and Maria could almost see the cobwebs between her words. Soon, with candles left smoking in the darkness, Maria of Conte-Pinento let stillness overtake her.
Out of that stillness, a great, thunderous voice shook her small frame. "PATIENCE," it growled.
Maria turned to look behind her, and beheld a great and terribly emerald creature. This was an animal of armor and sinew and polished surfaces. It was like no mantis she had ever seen in her life: A veritable god of an insect, if such an insect were to have a god, and that god were not in the painted shape of the deity which mankind was reported to be a reflection of. "What?" She asked, and felt she could barely get the words out.
"PATIENCE," came the command again. It sounded less like words, and more like the scraping of metal against stone.
"I... I don't understand. You wish me to have patience? Patience for what?"
"PATIENCE."
"Patience for patience?" She tried to laugh, and found she could not. "What little sense you make!"
"PATIENCE."
Now she realized the alienness of this being. If this creature were to speak human words, why would they have to have a human meaning? Did the honeybees hum, as it had often been jested, merely because they could not remember the words to a song? Of course not. That was a purely human conceit.
"PATIENCE... PATIENCE... PATIENCE..." The words grew faster, like a heartbeat amplified by the echoes of a cavern, with smaller and smaller intervals, until she was sure she was hearing something entirely different, the sound of a mill-wheel turning.
She now saw the emerald behemoth swing into a slow motion, like some great and terrible machine. She watched it rear back, and then, she saw it change into something incomprehensibly swift.
Now she saw what was happening, and too late, she tried to run, but the monster would not be denied his prey.
Jaws closed in around her, and little Maria gasped.
She was in her room, damp in her bedclothes. Her heart was still pounding. The room was dim, but outside her open window, dawn threatened to spill over the horizon within the hour. Beside the open shutters, upon the stone ledge, a small shape moved.
"...As a thief in the night!" she said with wonder, recalling the verse from Thessalonians. Now she was sure that she was awake, and that she was looking at a mantis standing upon her windowsill, innocently. But how innocent can thieves be? She wondered. And if a god should be a thief, what is it they would steal?
"Where did you come from?" she said, now finding laughter again.
The mantis shifted its weight, and did not answer.
Maria heard the morning call to prayer echo through the halls outside. A steady rap came at her door.
"Rise," said Sister Clarissima, "And serve the Lord." She said it only once, and moved on. Maria knew by now what was and was not expected of her each day. She was expected to rise. This day would be filled with more strenuous labor in the neighboring vineyards. The Doges always made great contributions to the priory, indeed it was their financial contributions which had ensured the buildings themselves to be built, so in exchange, the clergy were obliged to return favors. One of the ways in which this was done was through the tending of the nobles' vineyards. It was tough work, somehow made tougher by the silence the nuns imposed on themselves when they labored out in the field. If you had breath to speak, Sister Altadonna had often said, then you had wasted breath. You were clearly not doing your share of the work. And we all must have our share. it was usually then that she would quote the beloved Benedict: "Orare est laborare, laborare est orare." Maria had come to disagree with Altadonna on many virtues, but this too, she did in silence.
Maria steeled herself for the day, and rose from her straw-filled pallet bed. "You may peruse this cell if you wish," she addressed the creeping mantis, "But, you won't like it. I doubt you'll find very much food here. You'll fare much better outside this drab, dark..." She reached for the insect, but it leapt up and fluttered off into the dark corners of her room. "Merda!" Her small voice swore after it, and then she clapped her hand over her mouth, and felt her ears burning.
Very well. It was a small matter, and one she didn't have time to worry about. She would find the insect sooner or later, dead or alive, though she rather hoped, alive. It would be a shame if this creature starved to death in her chamber.
The heat of the noonday sun was tolerable, and Maria was grateful for the coarse-woven straw hat Altadonna had, begrudgingly, allowed her to wear. Blinking at the array of brilliant green leaves and stems before her as the girl picked waxen grape after grape from the bushes and deposited them in her basket, she allowed her thoughts to drift off, as she had several times already that day, once even during morning prayer, toward the mantis.
In the middle of a droning Pater Noster, she had encountered it again.
"Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie..."
Green. Flashing.
"...et ne nos inducas in tentationem..."
Patience.
"Amen..."
Was it merely coincidence that she had drawn the creature before seeing it? Dreaming about it could be no coincidence at all, for that was how the imagination worked. Troubles during the day always became the evening's nightmarish trials. She didn't have any phobia of mantises, or any other insect she knew of, really. She was unique in that way, among her peers. As a young girl in the fields, while her cousins would run squealing at the sight of a large beetle, she was always there, stick in hand, to prod the poor creature. She had to know how it was, why it was. That was the way to learn. What else was there?
Maria rubbed the dust from her eyes, and straightened her back, for a moment. The leaves were everywhere around her, and behind every one, in her mind's eye, she could almost make out a mantis hiding behind each.
Waiting.
For what?
Now, there was the noonday bell, and Maria watched the others as they each laid down their baskets and filed in toward the priory walls for the midday prayer, what was known as the Sext. As a mere oblate, Maria was not required to observe every single canonical hour of the day, but she was required to attend all of the major ones. She was not trapped. If she had wanted, Maria was sure she could leave this mode of life for good, and seek her own dubious fortune in the world. She was not ready to leave, not yet. Each day had her sitting in the middle of the choice. Would she serve God, or only herself? Was this the only way to do it? Certainly not. There was also the Synagogues, or the strange temples of the Orient. There was even the heathen mystics of faraway lands to the East, mysterious people who claimed to gain insight not from texts but from watching leaves as they fell from trees, or by tracing the aberrant movements of rabbits on the heath. But for now, at least, there was only the convent. Maria trod up the path with the others.
"Do not touch the text!" Sister Florula barked, "Until you are ready. You are not ready!"
"I... I wasn't!" Maria defended herself. "I was merely looking..." Her eyes darted back over the cascading, diamondstroke forms, so typical of Beneventan-style letters.
"You are not fit to look!" The stout woman said, stalking over to snap the gilded book shut before Maria's eyes. "You are not fit to touch! Lovely work you have, Maria, beautiful, beautiful, but it must be perfect! How else are we to reflect the words of God?"
Maria pouted. "But... the only thing as perfect as God, would be God. How can anyone's work ever be that perfect?"
"It can't!" Sister Florula said with satisfaction. "But to realize this fact means we are now fit to approach the work."
Maria perched herself upon the groaning wooden bench with excitement. It had been with great consternation that she had been allowed to attend the woman's presence in the scriptorium, but after reviewing some of the girl's work, Florula had to admit Maria's artistic skill showed promise.
"And now, let's see that folio of yours, eh?"
Maria quickly handed her sketching book to the nun and waited with hands clasped behind her back.
Florula flipped through the pages. "Good. Very good. You're showing progress. Not so heavy on the line now... What's this?" She paused at the last sketch of the mantis. She chuckled. "Oh, Maria. Your rendition is too kind for this species. No mantis is this handsome."
The girl felt a twinge of anger. "Sister Florula, you would think differently if you ever saw a mantis."
"Child, I have seen many a mantis in my days. They were each of them, as revolting as the first. Have you ever been witness to the way they eviscerate their prey? Hmm?" She clucked. "Few sights are as unpleasant in nature as a praying mantis having a jewelled songbird for lunch. You cannot imagine. They... they pluck the feathers..." She shivered. "I cannot feel badly for one who has never witnessed it. Enough of this. Let us resume the lesson in ligatures..."
From hour to hour, the tasks and rituals were the same as they had been, as they would continue to be, for years and years to come, for the others definitely, if not for her, but now Maria's mind was pierced by something new, and it was this something which threatened to overtake her conscious mind each hour, when she could not -- was not allowed to -- occupy it with something else other than a quiet, meditative state.
She began to imagine, absurdly, a priory much like her own, but one staffed by mantises in appropriately tailored habits. As she sang, she watched the creatures, demonic perhaps, hiss and chitter and sway to the hymns. Such creatures, if they were able to conceive of a god, would doubtlessly conceive of something more universal to their own lives of waiting and hunting, gripping and tearing. They might begin to call this deity something equally monstrous, such as the Great Razored Hunter, or The Giver of Flies.
"Stop it," she scolded herself, and Sister Francesca, the pale woman seated next to her, risked a glance to see what was wrong with the new oblate. Maria now realized she had spoken out loud. She retreated to her hymnal, with her face flushed.
Mercifully, the end of the day arrived, and Maria found herself, once again, within the quiet of her own cell, but her mind was far from quiet. No trace of the insect could be found, though it was not for want of trying. Again, unable to concentrate on Benedict's words, she opened the folio to a fresh page, and let her arm move of its own accord. Within several seconds, Maria saw the beginnings of a fantastical-looking creature: A hybrid between a man and a mantis. In his own strange way, she had thought, he did look... handsome...
"This will not do!" she chided, and to rid herself of the demoniac incarnation, the young girl tore the offending sheet from the folio's binding. It was a desperate move, and perhaps ill-proportioned, as parchment was more expensive these days, but she had no other way of erasure, so it was surely necessary. Crumpling the sheet into a ball, she resolved to hold it over her reading candle until it burned away to nothing. Beside her hand, there was a movement.
"You..." Maria regarded the mantis with a steely eye. The firelight took away some of the greenness in its features, but the creature was still quite verdant. "Though you have no reason to know it, you have caused me no end of trouble this day."
The mantis trod quietly closer. It turned its head and met her eyes.
Maria's next words were cut off. What an expressive animal! Few there were in the insect world who made such emotive gestures. Bearing these phenomena in mind, it was not difficult to make the mental jump from observing a simple beast to sharing a space of time and uncertainty with a fellow being, yet another of creation's awe-inducing works.
A comely beast.
"Hold," she spoke to the mantis. "If you would do me the honor of holding that position," She fumbled for parchment and charcoal, "We may yet make amends." Maria scribbled furiously, thicks and thins, lights and darks, steady, steady lines, but mostly shades. The mantis held still.
"There." She said, proudly. "What do you think of that?" She held up the drawing: A three-quarters' view of the specimen, rendered in thick, baroque tones. A portrait.
The mantis crept forward and nodded, perhaps, appreciatively.
Maria blinked. Had she seen what she thought she saw? Ridiculous. She was only projecting her human concept of a conscious being onto an animal's form. This creature could not comprehend abstracts such as perspective and dimensional depth. A mantis knew nothing of art.
Again, the voice behind her. "Well... you have an admirer already, do you now?" Sister Drudola's chuckle rose above the cold stone. "I am not surprised."
Maria turned around, blushing. "Sister, I had the most frightful dream last night." She told her about the terror of being devoured, and the cascading, possibly sinful thoughts she had been host to throughout the day. "And I might blame it all on this little one," she nodded to the mantis perched on her desk. "Please take it away for me, Drudola, won't you? Place it in the garden when you go out tonight."
Drudola pulled a face. "Oh, you've no right to be upset, Maria. Each one of us is an instrument of the Lord, from the very large, to the very small. It seems to me that you might have been chosen."
"Chosen..." Maria frowned. "By God?"
Drudola shook her head. "By Mantis. And by God, yes. Who among us can fathom the infinite mind of creator and created? Who can count the number of his servants? And who, dear Maria, knows the depth and breadth of his court, or the cunning of his messengers?" She reached out to pick up the mantis.
"Be careful," Maria warned. "He's a quick one." She swallowed when she watched the Mantis step calmly onto the woman's hand.
"Is he?" Sister Drudola gently lifted the creature. "Well, I must be terribly quick myself. We're all quick, then. If we wish to be."
Lying awake, or half-awake, Maria recalled Drudola's words. Chosen by Mantis. She had heard her say that. Was that a heretical conceit? Did it matter? Could a god have practical use for lesser god-like, archonic beings? Was she allowed to think such things? She shut her eyes and tried to forget it.
Instead, the girl found herself, in time, or outside of it entirely, it was difficult to say which, as a mote drifting through the cosmos.
Spread out before her, as a great celestial backdrop, were all the rotating crystalline wheels and spheres of the machination of the universe. Great and thunderous balls of liquid fire, dancing comets with foxish tails spread out behind them, and the magnanimous, rolling marbles of heavenly planets all spun and moved along their ancient, unfathomable tracks. And there was Maria, floating, like a feather, among them. Her apparent destination was now within view: An unearthly, circular-domed pavilion with a lit gazing pool in the center, but with no structure beneath it. The vast, polished marble-esque floor and columned arches hung unsupported in the darkness. She landed, touching down gently with one foot, and then the other, and saw that on the other side of the glowing pool, there was a tall, armored figure.
A great distance was still between the two of them, for the stone floor, more like a plaza, was expansive. It was difficult to tell if this was because she and her host were very small, or if the pavilion itself was very large, but mostly, it was difficult to tell who or what her host was.
The figure slowly strode toward her. "Magnificat." His arms, all four of them, were wide open. "Ah, truly the Giver of Flies blesses me."
Maria stared at the arrowed head and met the creature's eyes. "I know you... you're-"
"Yes."
She tilted her head. "Mantis?"
The verdant being took a step to the side and made a low bow. "At your service this evening." She watched with morbid fascination as the antennae atop his head flicked. Maria saw now that what she had at first perceived to be armor instead appeared to be a silken coat that was roughly the same color as the creature who was wearing it. What manner of beast was this?
"This is a dream," she said suddenly.
Mantis looked up again, and smiled. He nodded. "That is true, sweet Maria... but what is life itself, but a dream of the ‘Great Razored Hunter?'"
She flinched. "You mustn't say those names."
"Why not?"
"They're monstrous."
He rubbed his chin with one large, clawed hand. "And, you do not believe your God to be monstrous?"
"Certainly not!"
"Why not? Because he resembles humanity in every aspect, from having five digits upon each limb, to being burdened with the necessity to eat quantities of bread and meat, and relieve himself daily?"
"Of course not," she scoffed. "That's absurd!"
Mantis scratched his chin. "Is it? Where do the similarities end, I wonder?"
She laughed. "This conversation, and the entire situation accompanying it is absurd."
"Oh, so you're not one for conversation, I take it."
She folded her arms. "I did not say that."
"Let us dance." He said, suddenly. "That is, rather... Would you care to dance?"
"What?"
Mantis fumbled with his words. "I apologize if I have offended you in any way, but the truth of the matter is, I have wanted to dance with you, from the very first moment I met you..."
"The first moment you met me?"
"Yes, the very first... I had the insatiable urge to ask you to dance. It sounds absurd, I know. It may be absurd, but the heart itself is absurd, as we all know, that is how the creator saw fit to make it, and that is how I truly feel." He finished, and then made another, hesitant bow.
"Why now?"
"Life, milady, is short."
"Is it?"
"It is."
A strange smile crept into Maria's face, and she shrugged. "Very well."
Mantis leaped to attention. "Really? You mean it?"
"If that is how one's heart feels, then there is little one may do about it, is there?"
"I do like a woman of reason." Mantis took a step forward and gently took hold of Maria's hands in his own monstrous, claw-like hands. She flinched, and then realized with surprise how warm he felt.
"But, there's no music."
Mantis smiled a monstrous smile. "Isn't there?"
All at once, Maria heard it, like a troubadours' ensemble whose music was wafting over the hill from a village far away. The sound was like bells and drums and airy, echoing horns. It sent a shiver up her shoulders. "What is it?" She asked, trembling.
"The music of the spheres."
And they danced. And as they danced, the wheels and spheres and fox-comets danced with them. As they danced, the universe danced. Being within and without time and within and without space and cause and reason, the whole of creation swung back and forth, like a great, ferocious pendulum of light and matter. And then she felt it: the rising of the dawn. Her dawn. Her own and everyone else's.
There was a knock. "Rise, and serve the Lord."
Perhaps she would, but perhaps, she might do it in a different way. One that might have been more meaningful, even with infinite meaning, because she herself would create it. Already the dream was fading, and Maria found she could no longer recall that strange and timeless music anymore. The air was dry, and she let out a cough. Perhaps this was heresy. Perhaps it was the Tempter's work.
She scowled. "The Giver of Lies."
It hardly mattered. The day would be as quiet as all the others, if she could manage to keep her own mind quieted.
* * *
{end of part I}
