The Tenderness of Gargoyles
Fiction - by Deborah Davitt
The rooftop of the cathedral glittered with snow under the full moon, and the grotesques gamboled and capered among the drifts. The sheela-na-gigs emerged from shadowy crevices to grin and grimace, their weathered features stretching, snapping at the two-headed dragons and double-bodied men who laughed and shied away from the sheelas as if afraid. But their cavorting was all in play, for soon the sheelas swarmed in close to embrace their ancient friends.
Each of them had been carved by the ancestors of those who dwelled in the village below. Half to remind parishioners of the sins they should leave outside in the world before entering this holy place, half in apotropaic defiance—to hold those very sins at bay. A last defense against true evil, both from without and from within.
But the villagers scarcely remembered to look up at them these days. And the priests and nuns of the cathedral only remembered them when a new novice glanced up at a ceiling and gaped at a lascivious and terrifying sheela, her hands hooked between her legs to spread her vagina wide, as if to birth out a world—or devour one.
No, only the village children recognized the grotesques for what they were these days: Reminders of terror.
And the surest defense against it.
The gargoyles, unlike the grotesques, however, never played or leaped. They had more serious tasks in hand, their mouths held agape to let snowmelt pour down from the sloping roofs above. And as they worked, the gargoyles sang in voices of water and ice that rang out over the wind. Spring will come, spring will come, no matter how harsh the winter is, yet spring will come, and new life with it, they sang.
But the villagers didn’t hear them during the day. They were busy, laying tracks for a new steam engine that would shortly join them to the greater cities that lay around them. And at night, exhausted by their labors and stupefied by the drink that eased their aching muscles, they lay unhearing. Content in the knowledge that the newspapers brought, which was that the gods were dead. Man had killed them, and there was no more sin. No more reason to fear what came in the night. Why, they should not even fear each other, for what could they do that was wrong, when there was no judgment left? Everything that they did, was for their own good, and that was surely enough.
And the gargoyles and the grotesques keened, as even the priests took up this modern calling, and murmured of psychology and justification. To the gargoyles, the compassion that so many called for on the steps of the cathedral should be given to the victims of crimes, not the perpetrators of outrages.
“But,” they counseled one another, “perhaps it is we who do not understand? Perhaps it is we, who are but remnants of an unwanted, unneeded past?”
“Perhaps it is we who should decay or leave,” they whispered.
“But where would we go? Is it not our task to stay and protect these humans? And is not our duty the whole of our existence?”
But one night, another voice wailed and cried, so loudly that even the gargoyles let their endless song fall silent. The grotesques peered over the edge of the roof in time to see a shadowy figure leaving a basket on the steps of the cathedral. “A foundling,” Hommequicrie said, though his gaping mouth never closed on the words.
“The babe will die on a night as cold as this,” the eldest Sheela noted. Crone-like, her gaze never wavered on the tiny bundle
“It’s a girl,” Pleureur, the weeping wyrm, sang up through the pipes that were her long, sinuous body. Her head, poised just over the cathedral doors, could see everyone who came and went. “The servant who brought her wore fine clothing.”
“A bastard of a noble house,” another replied, her voice a threnody. “While they no longer believe in evil, still they believe in shame.”
“They will make her a nun,” the eldest Sheela said, scowling. She’d been carved by men who remembered their barbaric ancestors, who’d heard tales of valkyries and mother goddesses in the hungry earth. “She’ll live and die in toil, led by the handful of old women in the convent who still believe . . . but surrounded by the young novices, she may never believe, herself. Her life will be empty.”
“But she would be alive,” Hommequicrie pointed out, putting his hand to his ever-screaming face, and leaning his head into it, contemplative.
A pause as the grotesques conferred in glances. “Could we keep her? Raise her here, beneath the stars?”
Pleureur reached out with her mouth, armed with icicle fangs, and got a grip on the basket’s handle. With a tearing sound, she unlatched herself from the stone of the cathedral’s façade, and raised herself up to the roof, depositing the basket in the snow. “She will need food,” the great wyrm said, and lowered herself once more to sing her songs of ice and water and sorrow.
They raised her on the rooftops, feeding her goat milk stolen from the convent’s barn, close by the cathedral. When she was old enough to walk, Hommequicrie took her into the convent garden on moonless nights, and taught her to pick grapes from the vineyard, to uproot carrots from the ground, and eat new peas still in their pods. The eldest Sheela, daring greatly, snuck into the convent’s own kitchen, snitching soft goat cheese and little cakes to keep their darling happy and hale. To that they added crystal water from their own cisterns, and the occasional stray pigeon, roasted over a fire lit by one of the double-headed dragons.
For clothes, they stole again, but from the garments left in the donation box for the poor, so while their child might have worn rags, she was never cold.
And Felicity, as they called her, became their joy. She learned to call all the Sheelas Grandmother, the angels Mother—and all the monsters were Father to her. She hid in their shadows by the day, and gamboled with them at night—though they were careful to keep her from the dangerous edge, fearful of what a plummet could do to her fragile human form.
And Felicity learned the gargoyle’s songs, and could sing them almost as well as they. But when the choir sang in the nave below, the sound of human voices shuddering through her feet, she went silent, eyes wide and frightened. “Who are they, Grandmother?” she whispered to the eldest Sheela, cowering close one night. “If they sing, why do they not come out to do it under the stars?”
The eldest Sheela put her arms around her, and the girl did not shrink back from the cold of her stone embrace. “Their ancestors believed that they were only secure in the love of the gods inside of the gods’ own house.” The Sheela’s voice rasped and grated from her granite throat. “While they yet believed, it was so. Now . . . there is only habit. They have killed their gods, and only we remain.”
And Felicity nodded, not understanding the words, but comprehending the sorrow in this grandmother’s voice.
“You must understand,” Hommequicrie told Felicity on another day, “that we gargoyles and grotesques see everything, hear everything. We hear the confessions of the villagers as they mumble words by rote behind the elaborate screens in the cathedral. We listen as they ask forgiveness for beating their children. For taking a young girl’s innocence against her will. For harrying a beggar away from a café door. We heard the words as we have for centuries, generation after generation of evils, some great, and some small.” He paused, mouth agape, his face contorted into existential fear and dead. “These words, these prayers, were meant for the gods. But now, they rise no further than to us, and they wear at us like water on stone.
While he could not shut his lips completely, Felicity usually understood him quite clearly. This time, she didn’t comprehend half the words . . . but she knew what erode meant. “Humans are killing you?” she asked in her piping voice.
“Some of the smallest of us have worn into nothing, yes.”
“Am I human?” Her voice became even smaller. As if she were ashamed of the mere possibility that this might be true.
He picked her up in his stone arms and lifted her up to the sun. “You wear their flesh. But you have our heart. You are our beloved daughter.”
And yet, when she was seven, workers came to the roof to repair loose tiles, and found her there, asleep. They picked her up, and she jolted awake. Struggled. Screamed. Tried to run away, even if it meant dashing for the edge.
The grotesques could do nothing for their darling girl. They did not dare to move in daylight, where the humans could see and take fright. Then they’d just return with greater numbers, with the hammers and chisels that had created the statues and could also destroy them.
They could only watch in horror as the villagers dragged their daughter away. Listen to the well-meaning voices of the men as they said, “Your mother has to be missing you, lass. We’ll get you back home and safe.”
“This is my home!” Felicity wailed. “Mothers, Fathers, don’t let them take me!” Her hands stretched imploringly towards the roof as the workers dragged her away.
The gargoyles wept, singing low in their pipes, “Peace, daughter. You will not be alone for long.”
“What shall we do?” Hommequicrie demanded that evening, his face frozen in his eternal scream, though rage lit up his basalt eyes. “Sneak in and steal her, as we have stolen their food?”
“The workers will only be back to work on the roof again. We cannot hide her here forever.” The eldest Sheela stared out at the starry eastern sky.
“Do you mean to leave her in their hands?” he demanded, and the dragons and beasts growled.
“It has sometimes been my thought that we may have been selfish, to keep her for ourselves,” she murmured slowly. “That we have kept her from her birthright—from her own humanity.”
“Her birthright?” Pleureur sang, her voice resounding through all her chambered lengths. “And what a birthright it is, to live and die among those who do not know her, do not love her, and will teach her to toil endlessly. Not for herself, but for the enrichment of others.”
“To hollow her heart every day, and silently endure the evils of those around her,” a dragon rumbled.
Eldest Sheela frowned. “There is still good in some human hearts,” she whispered. “But if we are resolved, know this. To keep her, and keep her safely, we cannot remain here.
The grotesques hesitated. “But . . . this is our home,” a satyr protested. “We were carved here to perform a duty. To protect all the humans here from harm.”
“The linchpin, the hinge of their pact with the gods,” the two-headed dragon murmured from both mouths.
“To protect them from the shadows of their own minds. From the evil of their own souls, which they blamed on maleficent spirits,” another satyr chimed in, gesturing down at the prominent erection which some long-dead sculptor had endowed him.
“From their own desires”, eldest Sheela corrected tautly, and they all fell silent, nodding.
They knew it as truth. They’d been carved to deflect evil, to warn people of the darkness within them all.
But the humans below no longer believed that they had evil within them. They had the light of all their good intentions, after all. The crackling light of new electric lamps, the shining steel of their steam trains. They were crafting a new world all around them—one in which there was no sin.
And yet, evil remained. No matter how they displaced the cause of evil, no longer blaming devils and demons, witches and warlocks, evil gods or fallen angels . . . evil still existed.
It just welled up out of humans. Just as good did, but . . . good seemed to dwell less within the hearts of each successive generation.
“Then let us leave them,” Hommequicrie cried recklessly. “They no longer need us. They no longer want us. We will take her back and find somewhere else to dwell with her.”
“If they see us, they will hunt us!” a satyr retorted.
“Even if they see us, they will not believe,” a bull-headed beast, silent till now, countered. “They will not pursue.”
“And if they come to believe?” a younger Sheela demanded. “Will their belief in us engender belief in the gods? Will that not, in turn, awaken the gods from death? And then, will we not be punished for leaving our post?” She gestured at the confines of the roof, almost frantic with sudden distress. “We were created for the protection of humans. We embody their sins, their evils, in our own flesh. What are we but a conduit for vileness—that is, after all, why they made us ugly and malformed.” She lowered her head, a single crystal tear working its way down past the nugget of her nose, over her bulbous cheeks. “We have no other right to exist, but that duty. We will be punished.”
“Our daughter has never found us hideous or evil,” a harpy sang, plangent and true.
Hommequicrie put a finger beside his long, hooked nose. “And if our disobedience somehow brings the gods back to life, would that not be a disobedience worthy of reward?” he asked slyly.
“These questions are meaningless!” Pleureur sang, her breathless voice suddenly filled with anguish as she reared up all her long length from the cathedral door to stare at them all. “The real question is, what if Felicity, our little love, does not want to leave? Perhaps, having met her own kind at last, she will no longer fear them, as we have done. Will she wish to stay with them?”
Silence pulled back from her words like ripples in the air as the grotesques considered her words.
“If she wishes to stay with them,” Hommequicrie finally responded, with difficulty, “then all our disobedience and rebellion ae indeed meaningless.”
He stared at his clawed feet.
Eldest Sheela covered her face with her hands, and then stood up, straight and resolute. “She must make the choice for herself. Their flesh, or our heart.”
A low rumble of consensus shook the roof tiles.
And then they slipped down from the roof, all of them. They left the girders and arches of the interior, tearing themselves free from cloister ceilings and chapel walls. They departed the buttresses and supports of the exterior. Even the gargoyles tore themselves free, ripping themselves from the stone to leave the rainwater draining over the edge of the roof, unshepherded.
And yet, out of centuries of habit, they did not approach the convent doors boldly, like an invading army, like a vanquishing force. They crept, as best they could on stone feet, as if fearing that they might profane, somehow, the sanctity of the cloister.
As if they, in truth, held all the forgotten sins of humanity in their stony flesh.
They clung to the shadows until Eldest Sheela’s granite hand took the knob of the door, and wrenched it free, sending the metal clattering across the courtyard. Then they poured through the door into the kitchen they’d so often scoured for dainties for their daughter.
All the humans that dwelled within lay sleeping, though some bolted awake in their beds, clutching the sheets and trembling at the sound of stone feet clamoring against their floors. Some of the nuns screamed in terror, calling out for the gods to save them, that all the devils of the hells had come to tear them from their flesh. Others pressed themselves against their doors, weeping, in the fear that some band of marauders had come for theft and rapine.
None of them opened their doors, or dared to look. Only one hand cracked a door open—and then Felicity ran down the hall, tears in her eyes, and leaped into Hommequicrie’s arms. “You came for me, you came for me!” she sang, in all the echoed tones she’d learned from Pleureur—the hollow rushing notes that would shimmer in her voice for all the days that she lived. Here, in the forest where they would take refuge, and all places beyond. “Mothers, Fathers, you came for me!”
And her choice made, they bore her from out of the convent, with Felicity riding on Pleureur’s back into the night.