Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  Thomas alternated between stabbing the water with the spear and slapping it with the sword’s flat, until it seemed to him that he was wasting his time.

  “What, you only kill mules and fishermen? You only take the legs off fishwives? Come and get me! Me!” he said, his voice cracking a little. Rain poured into his armor and down his face, making him blink. Relief that the thing didn’t want to fight him blended with shame at that relief, but then relief won out. Perhaps a few more stabs at the base of the pilings and then he could say he’d done his best. He slapped the surface of the river halfheartedly again, then began backing out of the mucky water.

  And tripped.

  He put his booted heel down on a submerged log in the mud behind him; the log slithered out from under his foot at great speed, causing him to fall into the river and hurl the sword behind him. He thrashed in the water and sputtered, getting to one knee with difficulty, cocking his spear arm.

  Part of the thing coiled through the water in front of him.

  He lunged at it with the spear, twisting his body into it with the brutality that hours in the tiltyard had made as natural for him as walking. The spear stuck deep; that lunge would have impaled one man and killed the man behind him, but this was no man. The thing coiled rapidly away from him, wrenching the spear from his grip. He stood up with great effort, the sodden chain mail trying to drag him under, and launched himself toward where the sword had fallen.

  He saw that the girl was looking for it, too, up to her thighs in dirty water, her little limbs white against the river and darker sky. She bent down fully into the water now, her face submerged as though she were hunting turtles. He tried to yell Get back! at her but could only cough, so he reached into the water, grabbed a fistful of her blond hair, and jerked her up and toward the bank. She had the sword by the blade, getting cut again as she fell and dropped it. He saw where it fell, though, and saw her clambering through the mud and up to the bank. The priest was running to fetch her. Thomas grabbed the sword and wheeled around to the river, sensing he had had his back to it for far too long a fall of seconds.

  “Watch! Watch!” the priest was yelling over the rain.

  He turned to see the thing slithering toward him just under the water, its flat, froggy head as big as two tournament shields, its obscene whiskers trailing behind it, the spear making an S pattern in the water where it was still stuck in the thick of it. It was easily twenty paces long, the water rolling over it hypnotic, almost beautiful.

  Its head broke the surface now and its whiskers flicked forward and whipped him. Thomas heard splashing to his right but ignored that, keeping his eye on the monster and bringing his sword up. It opened its mouth wider than it should have been able to, showing its sickly white inside and rows of teeth the length of long fingers. Thick, clear liquid poured from it. It coiled its body up behind its open mouth in preparation for the strike as Thomas readied himself to die plunging his sword down its throat. Something flashed at the edge of Thomas’s vision, and he saw the billhook come down with great force on the side of the thing’s head, opening up a white, blubbery wound and making it hiss. The billhook fell again and again; the farmer was going at it like he was hacking down a tree, his red mouth pursed with the effort. Thomas struck it with his sword now, cleaving a horrible wound into its nose and mouth, from which it recoiled, doubling back on itself under the water with a great splash.

  Once it was out of reach, it broke the surface again, rearing up to show its white belly, on which pairs of backward-facing, curved, black spines the size of paring knives were arrayed like teats. It hissed at them and the spines flexed and oozed black fluid all over its belly. It had oily fins on the sides of its neck ending in more spines. Now its tail rose up out of the water, and the farmer crossed himself and whimpered. The tail had a human hand at the end of it. So white it was nearly translucent, bright against the black sky.

  A fucking hand!

  The tail slithered forward now, and the hand groped the side of the thing until it found the spear stuck in it, which it pulled out. Thunder grumbled behind it.

  The farmer started whimpering an Ave Maria, and it cocked its head, listening, its whiskers whipping excitedly. Thomas banged his fist heavily on the stout man’s shoulder to shut him up, but he only prayed louder. Without warning, a ripple went through the thing and the end of its tail lashed like the end of a whip. The hand released the boar spear and it flew at the farmer as though it had been shot from an arbalest. It would have skewered him right through his praying mouth had not Thomas shoved him. As it was, it laid open his cheek and his temple and he screamed horribly.

  Then the creature did the worst thing Thomas had seen yet; it opened its mouth and exactly imitated the farmer’s scream.

  It moved toward the men again. The farmer just kept screaming, even as it mocked him, holding his hand against his head where the blood ran out thin and fast in the rain.

  Thomas had never been so afraid. I can’t I can’t I can’t, he thought, even as he drove his legs forward through the muck to meet it. Thomas swung hard at its head, but he only hit it a glancing blow as it lunged past him and grabbed the screaming farmer, cutting off his screams as it took the man’s head and shoulders into its mouth with a violent, wet slapping sound. It contracted the muscles in its neck now and lifted the heavy farmer out of the water, pointing his kicking feet at the sky and trying to swallow him in repeated gulps, BAMF, BAMF, BAMF, like a pelican taking a big fish.

  Thomas saw the end of the farmer’s billhook sticking out of the water. He sheathed his sword so not to lose it, then sloshed over to grab the pole arm. The thing was having trouble getting the farmer down. Thomas slashed at it with all his considerable strength, gouging tears in it that would have gutted an ox. One of these, driven high, opened a hole near the lump the thing was trying to swallow, and Thomas was treated to the sight of the farmer’s white face turning as he went farther into its gullet. It could no longer ignore the strong man tearing at it, though, so it turned its blind face toward him, the other man’s feet sticking out of its mouth. It lashed its whiskers at Thomas to find him, then slithered the tail-hand up around his leg. It dropped its head and neck into the water now and slithered more of its coils around the nuisance who had been chopping at it. It foamed the water with its spasms as it continued trying to swallow its meal, but now its back half was free to fight.

  Thomas dug at it underwater with the point of his weapon, gouging it so its oily blood floated up, but then the awful white hand was on his face, grabbing his cheek excruciatingly, digging for his eyes. He wrenched his head back and forth, then drove the weapon into the riverbed so he could find the shaft again. He was not strong enough to pull the hand away from his face, however, and he felt something sharp scrape his cuisse as the thing constricted around his leg.

  “Whoring spines,” he squealed crazily, standing wide and struggling to keep his footing, now jerking the hand’s thumb back as he would to break a man’s grip. With the other hand he found the knife on his belt and began to saw where the hand joined the tail. His knife bit deep, and it withdrew the hand to save it, then jerked, pulling Thomas underwater.

  He felt sure he would die now, but he didn’t give up.

  He wrestled and arched, and managed to get half his sword free, though it was no easy task with the black coils around his legs and those evil spines scraping his chain mail, and he bent into a coil of it and started using his weight behind the half-exposed blade to cut. It thrashed, jerking him around madly on the muddy bottom, though his head broke the water and he managed to get a breath in him. His sword came out of its scabbard and he held on to it for his life. It was then that one of the spines on the bottom of it found purchase and punched through his armor at the groin, where a few snapped links of chain he had meant to have mended allowed a small opening. It was enough. He ground his teeth together against the pain and nearly lost the last of his air, but instead drove his sword into it hard, causing it to release him entirely.
He broke the surface of the water and got heavily to his feet just as the thing’s head came up, its first meal now down nearer the middle of it, but it was Thomas who moved first, lunging at its neck.

  He got there before it could face him and leaned into his sword, driving it through the monster, and driving the monster down until he felt his point bite rock on the other side. He pulled the sword half out and changed the angle, leaning into it again and using the strength of his legs against the river bottom to push like a plowman and slit a huge gash in it, through which black, stinking fluid now poured. It thrashed violently, but Thomas held on even though the world was beginning to get dark. He summoned what felt like the last of his strength and pushed the sword toward where he hoped a heart was.

  It punched through something. The thing shuddered and turned on him now and bit him, taking his head and neck into its mouth as it had done with the peasant, but, though the pressure on his chest was terrible, its strength was ebbing and its teeth did not pierce his chain. Thomas screamed hoarsely in the darkness of its mouth, and then couldn’t scream anymore as it took him underwater. Water and foul issue flooded its mouth and Thomas began to black out. Then it shuddered again and vomited Thomas into the river, along with the dead farmer, someone’s head, the woman’s leg, and any number of eels.

  Thomas fought to keep his head above water, praying the priest would haul him out. But he was alone and dying, with his armor heavy on him in the river. He would have to save himself. He heard it thrashing, and then the thrashing stopped. He thought it was dead but didn’t think he had the strength both to turn and look at it and to keep from falling into the water. He hauled himself to the shallow part and nearly collapsed, but he knew he would still drown if he did. So, with his leg going numb from the thing’s spine in his groin, and the river and black sky seeming to spin around him as if he were a bead in a toy top, he crawled through the mud on his three good limbs until his face was far enough out of the water that he knew he would not breathe any in.

  His legs were still in the water. If it wasn’t dead, it would drag him under. But he didn’t care now.

  Something was banging on his armor and his helmet.

  Hail.

  It was hailing.

  So this is the end of the world, he thought, feeling nauseated, hoping to pass out.

  And he passed out.

  SIX

  Of the Marriage on the Bank and the Visitation in the Stable

  The woman stumbled down the muddy road, trying to remember how to get to the river. She had lived in St. Martin-le-Preux her whole life, but the fever made her forgetful and she kept losing her way. The hail had woken her up from what might have been her last sleep, and when she woke she had such thirst that only the river could slake it. Besides, a devil was in her house. Not the Devil himself, but a small one. A goat kid with a twitching tail that climbed on the bed with her and tried to steal her breath when she got sleepy. It leapt away when she woke, and hid in the shadows, waiting for her to get sleepy again. She would cheat it this time; she knew it wouldn’t follow her to the river. She went out into the hail and took a beating from it, but it stopped soon and turned to cold, stinging rain.

  She got terribly lost even though she knew the river was close, and she slapped her palm on several doors, some of them doors she recognized as belonging to friends, but nobody opened to her. She cried against the wall at one house and a gentle voice from inside, her sister’s voice, said “Go on, now, Mathilde. I still have the two children and you mustn’t give it to them. Go on.” So on she went. Her children had died of it, and her sweet, old husband, and his brother, and she was the last one in the house. She had paid a young boy to care for her when she knew she had it, but he had left after one day. All he did was bring her things she asked for; but he refused to empty her slop jar and still he wanted a week’s farm wages for the first day. She paid him, but he saw where she got the money from and took the coffer in the night, leaving her with nothing. The boy had worked with her husband. Learning to be a cobbler. Now he had his master’s money, but little good it would do him in Hell; he was already sweating with the first fevers. It was after he left that the little goat had come.

  The woman had no wimple on and her pale orange hair hung greasily about her shoulders. Her eyes were red and swollen. Windows closed as she passed them, and it began to make her angry. She wanted to stop and have words with the betrayers who were abandoning her, but her throat hurt like it had pins in it, and if it came to a fray, she didn’t want anyone touching her left armpit, which had grown a painful swelling the size of a crabapple that gurgled at night and seemed to speak to her.

  She had to get to the river.

  At length, she remembered a turn between two houses that she had passed several times, and she stumbled downhill, laughing and crying at the same time at the sight of the water. She didn’t care if the water was clean as long as it was cold. She would wade into it and might even put her head under to stop the heat in it.

  That was when she saw the knight, lying on his stomach with his feet in the river. She knelt next to him and drank, coughing half of it back up; something foul was in it. Foul and oily. But her throat felt better.

  She looked at the knight and saw that he was strong and beautiful, and dead. She cried for how beautiful he was. Even his scars were beautiful and perfect, the pit on his cheek where God had put His finger to mark him as holy. She lay down next to him on her side and took off his helmet. He still wore a chain hood, but she could see his hard, beautiful face better now. Her husband’s wedding ring was on a cord around her neck, and she took this off, and breathed on it, and pushed it onto the knight’s finger, though it wouldn’t pass the second knuckle because his were soldier’s hands.

  “I marry you,” she said. “I marry you now, knight.”

  She cried and kissed his still mouth, tenderly at first, then with her tongue. His mouth was warm. He was breathing. She became confused about whether he was dead. Perhaps not, but, like her, he would be soon. Everyone would be soon. She used her hair to clean his brow, and she stroked his face with her hand.

  “My husband is in Heaven with his first wife, but I will go to Heaven, too, and you will be my husband there. And I will be a good wife. I will show you. I will dress for bed,” she said, and took off her sickness-stained gown and one of her muddy hose. She got tired unrolling the second one and draped herself across the knight’s armored back and died there.

  And that was how the priest found the armored man and the pale, dead woman, nude but for one stocking, her back covered in plague tokens the color of eggplant, as if a little goat had danced upon her and bruised her with its hooves.

  “Where am I?” Thomas shouted from the bed, his eyes wild.

  “You’re in my home,” the priest said, looking down at him. “You’ve been hurt.”

  The priest was holding a lantern near his nose and mouth.

  It was night.

  Thomas began to remember. The creatures in his dream had not been friendly, so he took a moment trying to remember if this priest was. Frogs. Now he remembered. Frogs had come, latching onto him, feeding on him, covering his face and hands. He had been watching from outside himself as spiny little frogs ate him. He shuddered, then kept shuddering. The pains in his head and in the corner of his groin were distinct: one was leaden and dull, like an old rusty lock set at the top of his neck, and embraced his temples; the other was hot like someone had taken a coal from a brazier and tucked it at the top of his pubis. Everything on him felt clammy and sticky. He sneezed.

  He looked up at the priest again and saw the half of his face that was brightly lit by the lantern he held close to it. Three superficial scratches jagged across his cheek.

  “What have you done with her?” Thomas said, and sat up heavily, looking at the priest with dangerous, murky eyes.

  “Nothing, friend. She’s…oh, the scratches. She gave me those when I pulled her away from you. On the shore. Really, I was pulling her away
from the…There was a…a young wife, Mathilde. A good woman. With Christ now, if any of us are. You may be sick.”

  “Where is the girl?”

  “I persuaded her to sleep in the stables tonight, but she will come back when she wakes up. She sat on that little stool near you until an hour ago. She’s quite faithful.”

  Thomas looked under the threadbare sheet that covered him and saw what the thing in the river had done to him; an awful hole a few inches above the base of his verge wept into the hair there. All the skin around it was swollen, and a separate swelling was coming in near it, where the leg met the groin. The whole area was a misery.

  “So I have some uncleanness in me from that thing, as well as plague.”

  “It seems so.”

  “Did you give me last rites?”

  “Three hours ago.”

  “I’ll try not to sin.”

  “You’re in no condition to sin, except perhaps unclean thoughts.”

  “Not having any. Hurts too much down there.”

  “You’re safe from lust, at least. Having any temptations about gluttony?”

  Thomas shook his head.

  “And it’s hardly sloth for a sick man to rest. Don’t worry. I’ll look after your soul. As for the body, that’s in God’s hands.”

  Thomas nodded.

  “You killed it, you know.”

  Thomas made a pleased sound and his lids got heavy.

  “It floated downriver like an old empty sock, leaving its awful guts behind it. It was an awful, murderous thing, and you killed it with your own hand. It was worthy of a saint.”

  Thomas slept.

  He woke up again just before dawn, to the sound of labored breathing. Not his own. Someone was suffering, trying to breathe with pierced lungs. He hadn’t heard that sound since the catastrophe at Crécy, when he lay with a broken leg and an arrow through his face, listening to his seigneur breathe his last breaths, sucking bloody air in around the ashwood arrows that had punched through his chain hauberk in three places. He always loved his lord for not moaning, as other men did. As Thomas did. He knew in his heart that his lord, the Comte de Givras, had died awake, gritting his teeth, using his last strength to keep from making an unchivalrous noise. The comte was not as strong in the arms as Thomas, almost nobody was, but he was tougher. He died a better death than Thomas was about to, fouling his sick-sheets in bed.