Elliott David - Voices

Copyright 2019 by David Elliott All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. All trial excerpts from Saint Joan of Arcs Trials, Saint Joan of Arc Center (stjoan-center.com), New Mexico, founded by Virginia Frohlick. hmhbooks.com Cover illustration 2019 by Charlie Bowater Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Elliott, David, 1947 author. | Title: Voices / by David Elliott. | Audience: Ages 14 and up. | Audience: Ages 14 and up.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025855 | ISBN 9781328987594 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Joan, of Arc, Saint, 14121431Juvenile literature. Christian women saintsFranceBiographyJuvenile literature. Christian saintsFranceBiographyJuvenile literature. Women soldiersFranceBiographyJuvenile literature. SoldiersFranceBiographyJuvenile literature. Classification: LCC DC103.5 .E45 2019 DDC 944/.026092 [B]dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025855 eISBN 978-0-358-04915-9
v1.0319 To Kate OSullivan, editor extraordinaire and Kelly Sonnack, agent nonpareilwomen warriors in their own right.

How lucky I am!

Much of what we know about Joan of Arc comes from the transcripts of her two trials. The first, the Trial of Condemnation, convened in 1431, found Joan guilty of relapsed heresy and famously burned her at the stake. The second, the Trial of Nullification, held some twenty-four years after her death, effectively revoked the findings of the first. In both cases, the politics of the Middle Ages guaranteed their outcomes before they started. It is in the Trial of Condemnation that we hear Joan in her own voice answering the many questions her accusers put to her. In the Trial of Nullification, her relatives, childhood friends, and comrades-in-arms bear witness to the girl they knew.

Throughout Voices, you will find direct quotes from these trials. Oh, one more thing: Because the book is written in rhymed and metered verse, its important to get the pronunciation of the French names and places right. Heres a quick pronunciation guide to help you out. DOMRMY: dom-ray-MI (very much like the song) TROYES: twah (rhymes more or less with law) CHINON: she-NOHN VAUCOULEURS: voh-koo-LEUHR ORLANS: OR-lee-OHN (three, not two, syllables) PATAY: puh-TYE REIMS: rahnce (not reems) ROUEN: ROO-uhn (kind of like the English word ruin)

ROM her earliest years till her departure, Jeannette [Joan] the Maid was a good girl, chaste, simple, modest, never blaspheming God nor the Saints, fearing God.... Often she went with her sister and others to the Church and Hermitage of Bermont. Perrin Le Drapier, churchwarden and
bell-ringer of the Parish Church
Trial of Nullification I
recall
it as if it were
yesterday. She was
so lovely and young.

In
her hand I darted and flick
ered away, an ardent lovers ad
venturing tongue. I had never known
such yearning, exciting and risky and
cruel. As we walked to the church, I was
burning; she was my darling, my future,
my fuel. I wanted to set her afire right then.
But she was so pure, so chaste; her innocence
only increased my desire. Still, I know the
dangers of haste. So I watched and I studied
and waited, and I saw that her young blood
ran hot.

She had no idea we were fated. I
could name what she craved; she could
not. Then in her eye, I caught my
reflection. In her eye, I saw my
self shine, and I saw the heat
rise on her virgins com
plexion. Thats when
I knew: She was
mine.

Ive heard it said that when we die the soul discards its useless shell, and our life will flash before our eyes.

Is this a gift from Heaven? Or a jinx from deepest Hell? Only the dying know, but what the dying know the dying do not tell. What more the dying know it seems I am about to learn. For when the sun is at its highest, a lusting torch will touch the pyre. The flames will rise. And I will burn. But I have always been afire.

With youth. With faith. With truth. And with desire. My name is Joan, but I am called the Maid. My hands are bound behind me.

The fire beneath me laid.

I yearn I yearn I yearn my darling I yearn I yearn I yearn Every life is its own story not without a share of glory, and not without a share of grief. I lived like a hero at seventeen. At nineteen, I die like a thief. Ill begin with my family: a father, a mother, uncles and aunts, one sister, two brothers, all born in Lorraine in the Duchy of Bar. Domrmy is our village.

Its north of the Loire, the chevron-shaped river that cuts across France. My parents were peasants, caught up in the dance that all the oppressed must step to and master: work harder, jump higher, bow lower, run faster. The feel of the earth beneath my bare feet, the sun on my face, the smell of the wheat as it breaks through the soil, the curve of the sprout as it bends and uncoils, the song of the beetle, the hum of the bees. I was comforted by these, but they would not have satisfied me, for something other occupied me. To take the path that I have taken, I have abandoned and forsaken everything I once held dear, and that, in part, has brought me here, to die alone bound to this stake. Each decision that we make comes with a hidden price.

Were never told what it is we may be asked to sacrifice.

A shape begins to form itself in the air in front of me. Trunk... and roots... an ancient tree, its limbs so low they touch the earth. I know it now.

Around its girth we village children sang and danced. The tree was thought to be entranced; our elders said beneath its shade a band of brownies lived and played. I wonder if they live there still, or have, like me, they been betrayed? OT far from Domrmy there is a tree that they called The Ladies Treeothers call it The Fairies Tree.... Often I have heard the old folkthey are not of my lineagesay that the fairies haunt this tree.... I have seen the young girls putting garlands on the branches of this tree, and I myself have sometimes put them there with my companions.

Joan Trial of Condemnation I sing the mournful carol of five hundred passing
years.

Nurtured by the howling wind and the
music of the spheres, I have retained the record
of every heart that ever broke, every wound that
ever bled. I remember single drops of rain, every
day of golden light, the sorrow of the cuckoos
crimes, the lightning strikes, the trill of every
lark. And I have stored the memory of these
consecrated things in the scarred and winding
surface of my incandescent bark. Etched there,