Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  “Now would be a good time to tell us what you’re looking for,” Thomas said. The girl nodded. She looked frightened. She didn’t look like she knew anything about why they were here.

  “The first thing is to find lodgings,” the priest said.

  Nobody alive wanted them, and the dead didn’t answer.

  They wound through the narrow, muddy streets, at turns disgusted by the filth beneath their feet and awed by the soaring spires of churches or the houses of the very rich. On some streets the houses and shops were so close they nearly touched heads together over the muddy paths, throwing everything into shadow. Some bodies, at least, were being picked up in tumbrils pushed mostly by desperate-looking fellows who had as much to fear from hunger as from the murderous, stale air around the dead.

  Nobody answered at the inns on the Right Bank, or, when they did, it was just to tell them to go away. Most of the people who had gold had already piled their possessions in whatever they could still find with wheels on it and headed for the countryside. The only medical advice that proved sound against this sickness was “run far and stay long.” Yet even that worked only if you were lucky or well-informed enough to run where it hadn’t struck yet. And if you were not already sick. The only thing that slowed its spread was the speed with which it killed; once it was in you, you had a day or maybe two before you were too sick to travel. Or hours. Thus it spread from town to town at the speed of a leisurely walk, but it missed nothing.

  So they went south on St.-Denis until they got to the bridges that crossed the Seine onto Île de la Cité, the island at the heart of the city. The larger of these bridges, the Pont aux Changeurs, was for wheeled vehicles and beasts and had shops along the sides, none of which were occupied. Likewise, nobody was bothering to collect tolls. Between the shops on their right they could make out the smaller bridge, the Pont aux Meuniers, which was only for pedestrians and had thirteen water mills at its base. Both bridges were wooden. The celebrated stone bridge, the Grand Pont, had collapsed during a winter flood fifty years before. At the time, that had seemed the greatest calamity Paris could suffer. Now the mills at the base of the pedestrian bridge regularly spat out corpses that citizens living close to the river had jettisoned rather than waiting for the cart to come.

  On the island, they rode past the strong, white walls of the royal palace, atop which several archers were laughing, firing their bows at something on rue St. Barthélemy. As they cleared a stack of empty, ruined wine barrels, just near St. Barthélemy church, they saw the target; a very fat dead man with thirty or forty arrows stuck in him, and more stuck in the mud or lying with their points broken off from hitting the stone building behind him.

  They would have to cross the field of fire.

  “Please don’t shoot us, brothers,” the priest called to them.

  “We don’t shoot priests,” said one of them.

  “Well, he doesn’t,” said the other.

  “Hey, Father! Make a circle with your arms! A big circle!”

  The others laughed.

  They were drunk.

  “Yes, and put that bastard driving the cart in the middle of it.”

  “Shut up. He looks like a knight.”

  “Knights ride horses.”

  “A glass of cider says he’s a knight.”

  “All the more reason to fling a shaft at him. Maybe he’s one of the eunuchs that let the English shame us at Crécy.”

  “Don’t let Sir Jean hear you.”

  “Fuck him, he went with the king.”

  “You may pass, but hurry up.”

  “Yes, hurry!”

  Thomas urged the mule forward.

  For a long moment the only sound was the clop of the mule’s hooves on the muddy street.

  “You wouldn’t,” one of the archers said.

  “I dare you,” said another.

  Thomas said “Don’t look at them.”

  An arrow whistled behind their heads and stuck in the dead man’s open mouth.

  “Phillipe! You did it.”

  “I work better with obstacles.”

  Past the palace and St. Barthélemy church, they went right on rue de La Vielle Draperie, and then right on La Juiverie, named for Jews now absent, having been expelled from the city yet again nearly thirty years before. Soon, seeing the twin square towers of Nôtre Dame off to his left, Thomas tilted his head back and spat toward the great cathedral, watching the white spittle arc and separate in the air; he imagined it was a stone tossed by a trebuchet and that it would knock a hole in the gorgeous round window over the doors, but it just fell in the mud.

  They were coming to the southern part of Île de la Cité, where the Hôtel Dieu stood near the Petit Pont that led to the Latin Quarter. The Hôtel-Dieu would have let any poor travelers stay one night, as was its custom, had the great hospital not been overwhelmed with those dying of plague. A staggering heap of bodies lay outside awaiting removal, two of them filles blanches, young nuns in white who had been taking care of the sick. A glimpse through an open door revealed a hell of vomiting, coughing, and sobbing with a very few wretched figures in white trying to ease the torments of far, far too many.

  The girl sobbed and the priest held her. Thomas’s hand jerked with the long-suppressed reflex to cross himself, but he did not do that. He ground his teeth and shook his head.

  As they approached the bridge to the Left Bank, the girl sat up from where the priest had been holding her and looked at the gray waters of the Seine rushing under it. A dead sheep floated by but didn’t keep going on the other side. The priest wondered if it had caught on debris down by the piers, and if that debris included people, and surprised himself by not feeling anything about it. On the other side, at the entrance to the Latin Quarter, they passed a painted wooden statue of Christ up on a pedestal of stone, at the foot of which a feverish woman grinned, sweating, with a dead cat cradled in her arms. Thomas looked up at the long-headed Christ and said, not wholly under his breath, “You’re dead, too, aren’t you? If not, get off that whoring thing and do something. Or at least whoring wink at me. You can do that much, can’t you?”

  It didn’t wink.

  But the woman did.

  They wheeled along in the butchers’ quarter, where the mud stank with the blood and viscera of slaughtered animals, a few of which were still being butchered despite the paralysis that gripped so much of the city. A man grinned a nearly toothless grin at them as he cut the throat of a suckling pig he had just tied up by its feet, its blood jetting on his stiff leather apron and into the pail he had placed beneath it. He called out the price of the pig, but they couldn’t hear it over its squeals. The men of rue de La Bucherie seemed to be doing better than the dyers on Gobelins, just nearby, where nothing was moving at all.

  They got lost again in the labyrinthine streets and began to despair of finding lodgings. The sun was so low that only infrequently did it finger its way between the buildings to throw cool, golden light on the mud. Just such a shaft of light illuminated the foot of a masculine-looking woman. She sat in the doorway to a leaning timber building with flaking paint. A sly-looking young man stood near her, cleaning his nails with a rusty knife.

  “You look lost,” she said to them.

  The priest looked first at her greasy blue stockings, then up at her tangled hair, and finally at her face. She had the look of a wary mastiff. She also had a moustache that might have better suited a thirteen-year-old boy.

  “We are,” he said.

  Thomas noted that she was a big woman with strong hands and shoulders, old enough that the man near her might have been her son, and that she wore a fine hat, a rich man’s floppy felt hat with a gold pin. Doubtless there were more fine hats than living heads to fill them in this city, and after a point it could hardly be considered looting to liberate them.

  The girl noticed her eyes. They seemed kind to her, despite the woman’s rough look. Out of nowhere, she wanted the woman to hold her. It had been so long since she had smell
ed a woman’s skin that even a dirty woman’s embrace would have been welcome. She was still disturbed by the sight of the dead young nuns near the hospital and she wanted a woman to hold her and tell her that the whole world didn’t yet belong to Death, masculine Death with his hourglass and his holes for eyes. Death with his bony arms that only embraced to take you away, like a lamb from market. Like the pig on La Bucherie. How did Heaven come into all of this? Heaven was life, not death. Heaven was a woman holding your head in the crook of her arm and looking down at you. Heaven was a warm hand on your cheek and the smell of soup with garlic on the fire.

  How could people enjoy anything in Heaven with their noses rotted off and their ears full of mud and worms, and no cheeks, and no hands to lay on cheeks?

  She had never felt so alone, or so confused.

  “Maybe I can help. What are you looking for?”

  She thought she smelled garlic coming from the building.

  “A bed,” the priest said. “A stable. Anything.”

  “You’re in luck,” the woman said. “I own a few buildings in this neighborhood; the renters all died in one just down the street, you see it there by the big puddle, with the blue door. But it’s dry and it’s got two decent beds. How much have you got?”

  “How much do you want?” the priest said.

  “Ho-ho!” said the woman. “You’re stumbling around this dead city an hour before dark with your heads up your asses, lucky anyone says a word to you, and you want things done your way. Are you going to tell me how much you’ve got?”

  “Well, no, but I will tell you what we’re willing to spend.”

  “I’m sure it’s not enough. But tell me. I could use a laugh.”

  The last of the sun slipped off her foot and now winked on a silver spoon hanging from her belt.

  “Ten deniers.”

  “Ha! That’s a country priest for you,” she said to the young man, whose nails didn’t really look any cleaner for all his knifing under them. “First time in the big city, eh?”

  “All right, all right. How much?”

  “Three sous.”

  “Is this room perhaps in the royal palace?” Thomas said.

  She narrowed her gaze and jerked a thumb at him, looking still at the priest.

  “I don’t like him.”

  The priest said, “He’s a bit gruff at first, but he has a good heart. How about one sou, five deniers?”

  “I’m not the one who has to bargain. It’s three sous.”

  “How do we even know you own the room?” Thomas said.

  “If he talks again, I’ve got nothing else to say.”

  The priest looked imploringly at Thomas, who shrugged and turned his gaze away.

  “Will you show us the room?” said the priest.

  “I’m not getting up. I don’t step and fetch for you.”

  “What about this young gentleman?” Père Matthieu said, indicating the sly young man.

  “He’s busy.”

  “May we have the key?”

  “When I get the money.”

  “May we at least see the key?”

  “You may see it and have it when I get the money.”

  The priest went to the cart and got the coins, which he reluctantly put in her mannish hand. She made them disappear, then rummaged in a moldy pouch on her belt and produced a small brass key, holding it up before the priest.

  He took it and frowned at it.

  “It looks like a coffer key, not a proper door key.”

  “Oh,” she said, “Am I a liar now as well as your servant? Then give it back to me and go your ways. Go and sleep in shit for all I care.”

  “I’m a priest, you know.”

  “Then pray for a room.”

  “Never mind. We’ll take it. But it had better be what you said.”

  “Fine.”

  The woman now produced a little piece of ginger and began to chew it.

  The girl salivated despite herself and asked, “Do you have any more ginger?”

  The woman shook her head and flicked her hand at them.

  They left.

  Maybe sixty yards away, they stopped the cart near a big depression in the road in which a puddle had formed. The priest approached the blue door the woman had indicated and went to fit the key, which was clearly too small, into the lock, but the door opened anyway.

  The room was mad with flies.

  Three badly decomposed bodies lay in the room, which stank miserably from them, but also from mold (the roof had fallen in), urine, and feces; several piles of turds lay near the open window—clearly people sat over the ledge to shit or pissed freely through the opening. The dirt floor was also littered with animal bones, eggshells, fish scales, and all other manner of refuse. They had been sold the right to sleep in the neighborhood morgue, latrine, and dump. The priest gagged, the girl moaned, and Thomas went to the cart and got his sword, drawing it from its sheath. He ran the sixty yards back to the stoop, but of course the woman and her companion were not there.

  He kicked in the door and went into the building, where a young woman grabbed up a child he had knocked over with the door; the child screamed and held his head. An older woman he didn’t recognize stood frozen near the fire where she had been stirring garlicky pottage, and now a man grabbed up a meat cleaver. He stood in front of the women and the child but was too scared of Thomas to move forward.

  “What do you want! Get out!” he pleaded, gesturing impotently with the cleaver.

  “The…the old woman on the stoop. She cheated me.”

  “What woman!”

  “She sold us a bad key.”

  “What! You hurt my son! I don’t know about a damned key!”

  “You’re hiding her,” Thomas said, but didn’t believe himself. The old trickster had nothing to do with these people. The money was gone.

  A thin-limbed man with a strangely protruding belly came from upstairs with a sword, but he froze, too.

  Rob them! Make them give you what they have!

  Thomas shook that wicked voice out of his head.

  The man from the stairs licked out toward Thomas with his sword, but he was scared and kept himself well out of range to hit or be hit back.

  “Get out!” said the man with the cleaver, his face very pale now. “Get out!” said the mother, still holding the hurt child. The woman at the pot threw a ladleful of hot, oily pottage at him.

  Thomas could see in the young father’s eyes that he was working himself up to take a real swing at him with the cleaver, and there would be blood if that happened. A lot of blood.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, backing out the door.

  An old man looked at him from a window across the narrow street but then moved into the shadows, saying feebly, “Go away. Leave them alone.”

  Confusion, anger, and guilt wrestled in him.

  “Whore!” he screamed. “You rotten old whore!”

  “Shut your hole,” a deep voice said from a high window. “You’re a thief!”

  “You should know about thieves around here!” Thomas rejoined.

  He spat on the ground and stomped back to the cart.

  Nobody followed him.

  Thomas returned to the cart just as the priest was about to throw the useless key into the street, but the girl said, “May I have it?”

  “Whatever for?”

  “It’s pretty.”

  Her simplicity made Père Matthieu embarrassed for his anger at having been cheated. He gave it to her, and she smiled up at him.

  “If it made you smile, it’s not completely worthless,” he said, smiling back at her.

  “I’m glad you two are so goddamned happy,” Thomas said.

  “You have food on you,” said the girl.

  “I’ve worn worse. Now what?”

  “I suppose we sleep in the cart,” said the priest.

  “All right. Let’s pull it away from this shithole of a neighborhood first.”

  A few minutes later, on another s
treet, the girl pulled a green ribbon from her sack and tied the key around her neck, then sat back, looking at the last, orange light of the sun on the rooftops. That was when she saw the angel. It was neither male nor female, but both somehow, and more beautiful than either gender. It asked her to sing a song for it.

  “I don’t know if I feel like singing,” she said.

  It asked her to sing anyway.

  The light was on its beautiful hair and the whole street suddenly smelled like pine trees and juniper.

  She sang.

  Hey little robin, hey-ho

  Do you sing for me, hey-ho?

  In your Easter best

  With your pretty red chest,

  Do you sing for me, hey-ho?

  Hey little robin sing-hey

  Do you fly to your nest, sing-hey?

  To your house of sticks

  And your pretty little chicks,

  Do you fly to your nest, sing-hey?

  “Hey down there!” said a man from a second-floor window. “I know that song. Are you from Normandy?”

  The girl nodded.

  “So am I. My mother sang us that on our way to church. I haven’t heard it in twelve years or more.”

  “My mother sang it to me as well.”

  “Are you healthy?”

  The girl nodded and showed him her neck.

  “All three of you?”

  “On the blood of our savior,” said the priest.

  “You shouldn’t be on the street now. It’s nearly dark.”

  Thomas stopped the cart.

  “Do you know what happens after dark?” the man continued.

  “We have no place to go,” said the girl.

  The man looked back over his shoulder and exchanged a few words with someone. Then he looked at them again.

  “I’ll feed you, the three of you, if you’ll sing it for me again.”

  Jehan de Rouen was a woodcarver. He sold wooden statues of Christ and the saints, but especially Mary, from his first-floor shop, and he and his wife lived above this. His success meant that they did not share their house with another family, as most merchants were obliged to. The workshop was neatly kept except for the odd piles of shavings, and the priest felt bad about bringing the mule inside.