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know …” He shrugged. “The Lombards are there now. My family may have been wiped out for all I know—but I shan’t appeal to your sentiment. As for my ‘ inquisitiveness ’ as you call it—you holy people are harsh—the reason for it is a bit, a significant bit, to the side of where you put it. A poet needs an extra dimension around his poem, one of unspoken knowledge, things I feel and recognize about you but which I will not say …”
    The nun stood up. She was tall, almost a hand’s span taller than the poet. She fell to her knees. “Forgive me,” she said. “I have been lacking in charity.”
    The poet jumped. “Radegunda, please ! Oh dear …” He crouched opposite her so that now they looked like lovers taking a vow. “Please get up!”
    “Not until you forgive me. I failed in human understanding . I often fail.”
    “I forgive you. I forgive you. Please get up!”
    She let him help her up.
    “I hate it when you do things like that. Your kneeling to me is so … disproportionate … almost mocking somehow.”
    “I knelt to my offended fellow creature.”
    “Yes.” Fortunatus felt around him on the stone seat for his nasturtium-trumpet. It was torn. He spread it flat and held it to his eye, staring through its flaming membrane at the sun. “It is true,” he admitted, “you have lived closer to action than I. Yet, I like to believe my writing is a form of action too. I explain my position on this in one of my poems. Perhaps you remember? The one praising Launebodus for building a church to St. Saturninus? No? Oh, well, the gist is that to record the acts of the virtuous spurs others on to imitate them. As you know, I am taking notes for the story of your life. This makes my curiosity a little holy, don’t you think?”
    Fortunatus closed his dazzled eyes and put the bruised nasturtium on his tongue, hoping to revive it with his saliva.
    “By the same token,” said Radegunda, “if you wrote down the bloody doings of Queen Fredegunda you might deter your readers from indulging in vice. Have you ever, when at court, asked her to satisfy your holy curiosity?”
    The poet swallowed the flower. He coughed, hawked it up and spat it out: a red glob. “Sorry!” He wiped his mouth. “I write about martyrs. I don’t aspire to join them. Each to his trade. Forgive me, but that sort of talk makes me nervous. Even here you never know who … Besides, there is something distasteful about the queen: fleshy.” The poet made a prim mouth. “I prefer to lie about her, to present her as she ought to be.”
    Radegunda stood up.
    “I was fleshy”, she said, “in my youth. Carnal. But wanton kittens make sober cats. Don’t despair of Fredegunda .” She smiled without embarrassment. “I have to go,” she said.
    He had been bracing himself for a withdrawal but was disappointed.
    “Compline,” she explained with careful courtesy. Convent offices provided endless pretexts for retreat. “God be with you.”
    “And with you,” said Fortunatus. “You will”, he could not resist begging, “tell me later about what went before: your marriage with Clotair, how he came to let you go … and anything else”, he begged, “you’d care to tell me. See what you can remember.”

    Chapter Two
     
     
    Radegunda remembers.
    [ A.D. 552]
    She remembers lying beside Clotair, her lord. Outside the wooden dwelling which is called a ‘palace’ but is really no more than a hunting-lodge, she hears the wind. It whips like black wire. This lodge is one of many, for Clotair loves to hunt. On horseback he is as skilful as a Hun and when walking looks incomplete. His legs arch, straddling an absent mount. When he rides down a boar or stag, Clotair becomes that beast. He feels with it, relishing the clash between its cunning and his own. He knows its tricks, sees the snap of twigs and saplings with the creature’s own surprise, feels a vegetable exhilaration as he hurtles through the bush and, in the loamy giddiness