Last night, I spoke at the monthly meeting of the North Shore Writers Association, and read a passage from my novel Muse in which a lunar eclipse takes place. Around 1 am, I rose from bed to look out the window. The moon, high in the sky, was dramatically eclipsed. We see the diagrams in the newspapers and know the cause, but in the 14th century, eclipses were terrifying. Here’s the passage, set in Avignon at Mardis Gras in 1343, that I read from Muse:
The palace watch did not challenge me, even though I was without my customary escort. Clement had become a benign tyrant, a grand seigneur who forbade me to go outside the palais on my own, but it was Shrovetide, when anything might happen, and the guards opened the double portcullis for a coin. Although I had no lantern to hold up, the moon was full and I knew the streets and byways better than anyone.
The alleys were seething with dark forms surging towards the twelve gates in the old city wall. I liked slipping my leash and walking amongst the folk once more. I felt the force of the mob as I headed towards the rue du Cheval Blanc, where I had agreed to meet Gherardo. The gates were guarded after curfew, but the guards were common yeomen. Tonight, they were drinking liberally and turned bleary eyes on the slurry of humanity issuing out of the city. Only those foolish enough to carry lanterns, as was the law, were marked down in the record book for the city marshal’s inspection.
The canal was full, the water skimming over the top onto the marshy ground. Here in this sublunary realm, where the Pope could not enforce his curfew, a dark power welled up. There were no men of science, no dissectors of the truth, only peasants illuminated by the fickle moon. The folk were bent on enjoying themselves before being shriven on Ash Wednesday for the forty days of fasting. A vast fire was already burning and the fête du quartier was underway, a black sabbath by the looks of it, for a pig was boiling in its grease and more animals were tethered. There would be a mass-bouffe and a few sacrifices before pointed sticks would fish the boiled pig-meat out of its cauldron.
Drummers and acrobats led the dancers along the rue du Cheval Blanc. Ahead, I saw Gherardo, back in his own clothes with a wineskin fastened to his lips. The harlots had come out of the Cheval Blanc to enjoy the fête. Here, also, were liveried servants, who stood out against the dull backdrop of peasants, churlish apprentices, and dyers who could not afford to wear the purple that stained their own arms. Few of the people had bothered with masks and in the half-shadow, halflight I might be one of them again. I caught up to Gherardo to ask for a turn at the skin. Our talk of Francesco and my lost son had depressed my spirits. Tonight I felt like escaping into the world these people inhabited, but Gherardo refused to give me any drink. Instead, he handed the wineskin to a mountebank as they staggered off together, arms linked, into a passage.
All at once a pall fell over the sky, and I remembered the astrologer’s prediction. The folk pointed in horror as the surface of the moon became mottled, then blood-red. A giant unseen orb traversed the moon until the entire sky swelled with hellish red. An old weaver shrieked in langue d’oc that the devil had drawn his altar cloth across the moon. Reeking with fear, the folk cried out that the moon was dying and the whole world with it. Ignorant of eclipses, they believed they were about to die unshriven and plunge headlong into hell. Mothers wept, causing panic in their children, and ox-like men stood on the lip of the canal, ready to leap in to extinguish the hell-fire. One man held two infants in his arms, prepared to fling them into the water to spare them from the flames, and others were dragging their children to the brink to do the same.
Gooseflesh erupted along my arms and I tried to marshal my thoughts into some order. The sky was now so black it no longer held even a smudge of colour. How long had it taken the moon to darken? I knew from the court astrologer that it would take an equal time to lighten, but the terrified would drown themselves before the moon reappeared, since few of the folk along the canal could swim.
I stood on one of the planks across the canal, lifted my hands to command their attention, and shouted, “None of you will perish if you do as I tell you. Say ten paternosters, one after another, and before you say the tenth, the moon will return.”
I started chanting a paternoster loudly. The woman next to me joined in, and so did the next, and the next, and so did all the men, until all the jumpers were chanting, the children most eagerly of all. Gradually, the sky became a field of chevrons, pulsing red on black, then black on red, like the patterns that sometimes appeared on the inside of my eyelids. On the ninth paternoster, the fat red moon appeared on top of the teeth-like crenels of the city wall.
A man yelled, “The moon is back! The devil swallowed it, then spat it out!”
The jumpers left off chanting to crow at their good fortune and the musicians picked up their instruments to pluck them with gusto. The folk celebrated their escape from hell by throwing more fuel on their fire. A goose was hauled up a greased pole in a basket and the brawniest of the climbers, who finally made it to the top, earned it as a prize. A reveller chased down a striped cat, normally thought to bring good fortune. The youths nailed it to a post and took turns butting it with their heads.
What issued from the pipes, psaltry, and tabors could not be called music. It came like a disease from the gut of the poor, a dark, wounded joy. The thigh-slapping rhythm made my feet twitch with old memory and I danced until every bone felt alive and only thinly clothed in flesh.