Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  “Something lies to you, but it’s not your heart.”

  “Stop that weird shit. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “We have to go to Avignon. But first we go to Paris. There’s something in Paris we need.”

  “What we need is to stay in the country. Those big cities are tombs, and they’re hungry. Going to them is stupid.”

  “Yet we have to go.”

  “Says who?”

  “Père Raoul.”

  He threw up his hands.

  “What, the dead one?”

  “Yes, he is dead. He died in his little house with his blanket over his head. He came to tell me.”

  “Horseshit.”

  She knitted her brow again.

  “I’m going to sleep a little more,” she said.

  She lay back down on the packed earth as if it were settled.

  “If you see your dead priest again, tell him he can go to Paris and Avignon alone. After he fucks himself.”

  “He won’t be back.”

  “Good.”

  She curled her knees up kittenishly and was almost instantly asleep.

  Thomas waited until he heard her soft snoring and then quietly gathered his things. The girl was a liability; he would have a better chance on his own. He could travel faster, hide more easily; if he needed to do something brutal, he wouldn’t have her knowing, flint-colored eyes on him, making him hesitate and perhaps dying because he had. This world wasn’t made for children, particularly girl children, and most particularly those without fathers. That wasn’t his fault. If God wanted her protected, He could do it Himself. He was about to leave her in the church when he saw something red by his foot. It had not been there before. When he saw what it was, he crossed himself for the first time in months and flung it outside. Then he put his gear down. His heart was pounding in his ears.

  The item that had bothered him so was a crude painted mask with horns on it. The kind a country priest would wear to play the devil in a mystery play.

  FOUR

  Of the Monastery, and of the Best Wine Had in Seven Years

  They marched together for two days, and on the first day they saw no people and ate only green stems, a parsnip she pulled out of the ground (using the end of her dress wrapped around her hand), a grasshopper she managed to catch, and a very little honey. They were making for Paris, though the girl couldn’t say why. Despite the devil’s horns he had seen the night before, he thought about abandoning her no less than a dozen times, and, to that end, he hardly responded to her attempts to speak to him. She had a pretty voice, and decent manners, and he would easily feel affection for her if he let himself, but he determined not to.

  With limited success.

  “Where were you born?” she said as they crested a hill under a pleasantly warm, blue sky.

  “Picardy.”

  “What town?”

  “A town.”

  “A big town?”

  “Just a town.”

  “With what name?”

  “Town.”

  “This town. Is it near a mountain?”

  “No.”

  “A hill, then?”

  “No.”

  “A lake?”

  “No.”

  “Farms?”

  “No.”

  “All towns are near farms.”

  He scowled down at her, but she deflected this with a look of unperturbed precocity. The intelligence in her eyes goaded him, reminding him of someone else.

  Someone who had hurt him.

  “Then, yes,” he said.

  “Near farms.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Trees? Is the town near trees?”

  “I guess.”

  “I want to revisit the question of the hill. Because you didn’t seem sure.”

  “Yes, it was near a hill.”

  “But you seemed sure about the mountain. So no mountain.”

  “No.”

  “And the name?”

  “Town, I said.”

  “No town is named Town.”

  “Mine was. Townville-sur-Cunting-Town. What did your papa do again?”

  “He was a lawyer.”

  “It shows. Now shut up.”

  “You’ll never get a wife being so mean.”

  “I already had one.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I killed her for talking.”

  The girl giggled at that.

  “And is she buried in Townville-sur-Town?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I suppose you killed your children, too.”

  “All of them.”

  “What were their names?”

  “Boy, boy, girl, and shut up.”

  They saw the monastery on the second day, and only because they went into the woods to forage. They got less than a fistful of sour berries between them, but, as they were about to leave, Thomas spotted a hare and chased it down a footpath that led farther into the woods. The hare got away, of course, but the woods broke on a small hill, and from the hill he saw the low stone walls and the thatched roof, and what looked like a garden.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, let our luck be in,” he said, and the two of them went to the gate. It was a simple gate of interwoven sticks, standing open. A wooden sign over the gate read, in burned-in Latin:

  THIS GATE OPENS

  TO ALL WHO ENTER

  IN CHRIST’S PEACE

  He drew his sword and went in.

  She followed behind him, with her hands clasped as if to pray, and then moved past him and headed directly for the little stone church, ignoring his “Ho! Wait!” He let her go, shaking his head at her, and then assessed the grounds.

  It was a small monastery, home to no more than twenty brothers from the look of it. Only the church and the outer walls were stone; the cloisters and dormitory were wattle and daub. Another hare, or the same one, darted from the garden, but Thomas didn’t even try to lunge at it, instead making straight for the earthen cellar where he suspected the buttery would be. It had already been emptied. Considerately, respectfully, and quite thoroughly emptied.

  “No luck at all,” he said, and suppressed the urge to spit.

  The dormitory was empty, except for ten straw beds, several of which bore the stains of plague on them. He backed out quickly.

  He found the girl kneeling outside the church, praying silently into her clasped hands, her cheeks wet.

  “Why didn’t you go in?” he said.

  She just looked at him and wiped her cheeks.

  And then he smelled them.

  He peeked in the door, waving flies away from his face, and saw four puffy corpses lying in the nave, wearing their off-white, undyed woolen habits. Three were lying on their backs, and the last one, an old man, was curled like a baby near them. He had his eating knife in his hand, and his habit was open on one side. The floor was sticky under him. He had died trying to burst one of those awful lumps. Flowers were strewn on the lot of them.

  “Cistercians,” Thomas said.

  Fresh dirt mounds out back covered the first brothers who fell, but only four. If they had been buried one to a grave, and if all the beds had been filled, a few were unaccounted for; probably those who had emptied the buttery. Maybe they thought they would go to another abbey. Thomas didn’t envy them trying to travel unarmed with the last cart of food in the valley.

  When the girl finished her prayers, Thomas said, “No food. They got the stores, and emptied the fishpond and the dovecote. They had an oven, but it’s been cold a long while. The garden where they grew food is all turned up. All they’ve got is damned herbs and flowers.”

  The girl went to the herb garden and motioned for Thomas to follow. She handed him a bucket from the well and walked him through the garden, filling it with flowers and greens she tore expertly with her small, white hands. He started grabbing at everything, but she stopped him before he grabbed one green stem. She shook her head at him urgently.
r />   “What? Why?”

  She used her finger to write monkshood in the dirt.

  He furrowed his brow to read it, sounding out each letter.

  Monkshood.

  Poison.

  “Oh. Thank you. So, what, you’re not talking?”

  Not here.

  He sounded this out, too, pointing at each letter.

  “What, because it’s a monkery?”

  She nodded.

  “You didn’t take a vow.”

  Yes I did, she wrote. By the church. In my heart.

  It was taking him so long to read this that she just pointed at the church and placed her hand over her chest.

  He grunted.

  “Is this vow for the rest of your life?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Just while we’re here?”

  She nodded.

  “In that case, we are definitely spending the night. Maybe a week.”

  She reached into the bucket and threw some damp leaves at his face. One stuck on his forehead and she laughed in spite of herself and her temporary status as maiden Cistercian.

  They ate their bucket of greens and bright flowers. Along with the buttery little crowns of calendula, which he remembered now from his mother’s garden—she used to mix it with chickens’ grain to make their egg yolks darker and, she said, better for the blood—Thomas kept picking out one broadish leaf, nodding his head as he tasted it.

  “What’s this one?”

  Sorrel, she wrote.

  He followed the letters with his finger, pronouncing each syllable as shakily as a foal walks. She nodded when he pieced them together correctly.

  “It’s good. Like a lemon, but good. And this?”

  Lovage

  “This?”

  Comfrey

  “This one I know. Don’t eat it all. And get more of it in the morning, if there is more. It’s good to pack in a wound to stop bleeding.”

  Yarrow

  “How do you know all this?”

  Mother, she wrote, and a smile broke so gently on her face that Thomas bit his tongue viciously to keep from weeping for his own.

  They slept in the open air of the cloisters, near statues of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Genevieve of Paris, and the Archangels Michael and Gabriel. Thomas woke up in the middle of the night and went to look at his comet. It was across Cygnus’s neck now, and seemed to be reddish at the tip, as if there were a tiny vein of blood in it. He rubbed his eyes and looked away, but when he looked back it was still there. He noticed a second comet now, close to it and very faint.

  “Just kill us all,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

  He slept hard after that, and dreamed of monks singing plainchant. He woke in the peach light that came just before sunrise. The air was chilly, and the girl was still sleeping.

  The air smelled of juniper, though he saw no juniper bush.

  It also smelled of wildflowers.

  Both of them had been covered in flowers.

  * * *

  They met travelers the next day: a cloth merchant from Bruges, his family, and two Flemish men-at-arms, with five horses between them. All seemed to be in good health. Thomas would have been glad to meet them two months before, with Godefroy and his band of killers behind him; the horses were young, the cart promised excellent pickings, and Godefroy would not have raped this woman.

  The two parties stayed fifty paces apart and Thomas and the merchant each shouted news about what lay behind him. The news was not good in either direction. Then the man offered to buy food. Thomas said he had none to spare, and would have said the same had the girl’s sack been full of sausages and peas; money wasn’t what it used to be. The merchant looked at the sack. The older of the two Flamands suddenly looked nervous, and Thomas guessed that he was afraid the merchant might order them to search the sack. Neither man wanted to tangle with Thomas. The merchant, who was in fact assessing Thomas, finished this, saluted him, and moved his party on.

  The bridge Thomas wanted to cross was said to be just on the other side of a river town called St. Martin-le-Preux, but as he and the girl approached the town, they came to an overturned and wheel-less handcart, on the bottom of which someone who was not a confident speller had painted, in what looked like blood:

  GO BACK

  As this was the only bridge they knew of, they continued forward, although Thomas traded his straw hat for the helmet and carried the sword naked across his shoulders. The girl took her bird whistle out, poured a little of her water, and began to make birdsong with it.

  “Stop that,” he hissed.

  “I just don’t want to surprise anyone. And I thought this would let them know we’re friendly.”

  “I’m not friendly.”

  “But I’m friendly, and I’m the one with the whistle.”

  He was just about to take it from her when a priest walked out to meet them, easily visible in his white linen alb, holding in his hand a horn lantern. It was still light enough to see, but the priest kept the lantern near his nose and mouth.

  He came from a hidden recess in the woods near which the skulls of animals had been nailed to trees.

  “Stop. Please,” the priest said, holding up one very delicate-looking hand.

  Thomas was glad to keep his distance; he turned his head to left and right to make sure nobody was moving on their flanks. The priest now looked to the right and left as well, wondering if the soldier had confederates skirting up the sides.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” the girl called out to the priest, but Thomas pinched her arm.

  “Speak when I tell you to,” he told her. Then he called to the priest, “We’re not sick.”

  “Do you promise?” he said.

  “On my word,” Thomas said. “Are you alone?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite alone.”

  The priest lowered his lantern.

  “I’m not sick, either.”

  “We saw your sign.”

  “Sign?”

  “Go back.”

  “Ah. That will have been the militia.”

  “Where are they?”

  “As I was their confessor, I fear they probably bypassed purgatory on their way straight to the cauldron.”

  “Dead?”

  “Some time ago.”

  “We just want to cross the bridge.”

  “That’s problematic.”

  “Why? There’s no toll, is there?”

  “There’s no bridge. When was the last time you had wine? And I mean good wine.”

  Thomas smiled broadly, showing teeth in surprisingly good shape for his age. Teeth he would be very glad to stain purple.

  The people in the town near the river had burned the bridge to try to isolate themselves, but the Death was on both sides and found them anyway. A peddler had paid a farmer to sleep in his barn, against the orders of the seigneur, but the next morning the farmer found him there with his face frozen in pain and fear, and muck from the horrid buboes staining the pits of his shirt. The farmer had seven children, who worked and played in the fields with neighbor children and helped out at the widow’s alehouse. Soon half the families on the east side of town were stricken, along with the widow. The die-off started, as it always did, with those who were good enough to minister to the sick and bury the dead, and with those who gathered at the alehouse, including the militia. When the churchyard was full, families dumped the bodies in the river and the eels fed on them.

  Then something else moved in that also liked to eat what the eels grew fat on. Fishermen who speared or cast nets for trout, eels, and pike began to disappear, even when they went in groups of two or three.

  Nobody knew what was happening until a young boy sprinted back to town and said that his father and uncle had been eaten by a “great black fish or snake” with a “flat mouth” that hid in the murky shallows. It had lashed at them with the end of its tail and pulled the men in, then tore them with spines, and then its great, froggy mouth had opened
and clamped down on their heads, swallowing each of them whole in several fast gulps. The boy had stood transfixed until he saw that it was slithering up the bank toward him, and then he had run screaming for the road. The monster would have caught him, but his panicked flight had startled his uncle’s mule, still tied to its cart, causing it to buck and catch the thing’s attention. It wanted the mule more than the boy, so it coiled all around the poor animal and bit its head off, dragging the body, cart and all, back down the bank and into the river.

  “How long was it, boy?” the priest had said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think. You saw it take the mule. So of course it was longer than a mule. As long as three mules perhaps?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “How many, then?”

  The boy held up eight fingers, then corrected it to nine.

  Several of the men in town who were still healthy and still brave enough to leave their houses met up at the alehouse and drank until they had the stomach to go down to the river and look for it. They took their axes and wooden flails, their clubs and scythes, and they swore to Saints Martin and Michael and Denis to cleave the thing in two or die in the attempt. The priest, who drank with them, witnessed these oaths, and agreed to come with them, and to hold over the men his processional crosier with its agonized Christ. All their boozy courage left them when they went to the banks and saw the wreckage of the cart, and the piles of shit the thing had left on the bank, all full of boots and bones and broken tools, and even the shredded cuirass of a man-at-arms. Even with the bridge down, it seemed, some were trying to cross the river. But they were not making it to the far shore.

  “This is beyond our power, brethren,” said the priest. “God forgives us the oaths we make in ignorance. Let us return to town before we make the thing stronger on our fat and our blood.”

  None of them protested.

  “What about the seigneur?” asked Thomas, leaning toward the priest over his modest table. “If he’s well enough to issue orders about letting in strangers, he should have enough spunk to buckle on his armor and put a sword in that thing.”

  The priest smiled his distinctive, sad smile, making the well-used lines around his eyes deepen. He was probably a year or two older than Thomas, but drink and soft living made him look closer to fifty than forty; faded speckles of wine on the chest of his alb, only muted by his attempts to clean them, testified to the death of the town laundress. Despite his woolly eyebrows and masculine chin, there was something womanish, almost wifely, about the cleric’s aspect.