Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  “Oh sweet God,” Annette said, moving toward the door.

  Her husband pushed her back and shook his head, too scared to speak.

  The baby cried again, bawling in terror or pain.

  “We have to!” Annette shouted.

  Now a woman’s voice came to them through the oak door.

  “Please,” it begged.

  Annette struggled with her husband, but he kept her back.

  “Please, help us. In the name of mercy, I beg you,” the woman’s voice implored. “My baby…Help my baby.”

  The child cried again, more pathetically now, ending in an alarming rasp.

  “I don’t think you should open it,” Delphine said quietly, too scared to make herself heard even by the priest. She knew she should speak louder, but she couldn’t.

  Thomas looked over his shoulder at the priest, who crossed himself and nodded.

  “Help my baby…”

  Delphine let go of the priest’s hand and moved to grab Thomas’s arm, but she was too late. She watched helplessly as the door opened.

  A woman. No, a statue of a woman. With a crown. The Virgin.

  Delphine’s heart leapt with gladness that they were saved, and then it sank just as quickly.

  And she did wet herself.

  The door had opened on a six-foot statue of the Holy Virgin with a high crown, holding a scepter in one hand. But where the Holy Infant should have been cradled in the other, her stone hand held the ankle of an infant who dangled upside down with the purplish skin of a plague victim. He had been dead for some time. Flies buzzed around him. His milky eyes saw nothing. And yet he opened his swollen mouth and cried again.

  “Help my baby,” the statue said, its mouth moving jerkily. It ducked its crown and stepped into the room with the sound of a millstone grinding, and everyone recoiled from it. Now it flung the infant at Thomas so hard it knocked him backward. Delphine gaped at it; when it moved, it somehow seemed like a statue seen in glimpses; it moved fast, but choppily. It was impossible.

  The fight was awful. It was hard to see in the near-darkness of the candlelit workshop. Delphine shook her head, trying to wake up from what couldn’t be happening; the unholy Virgin had Annette by the arm. The arm broke. It bit something off her face and spat it at Jehan. It stove her head in with its scepter.

  God, God, why sweet Annette?

  “No!” Delphine tried to scream, but it came out like a kitten’s mew.

  The priest pulled Delphine behind him again, saying a Pater Noster, but she looked around his robes; Thomas had flipped his sword, holding it near the point, bludgeoning the living statue, making sparks and chipping it, but he could not stop it. It wanted the woodcarver now. Jehan’s mallet knocked a point off the crown, but then it lowered its head like a bull and gored him against the wall, again and again, shaking the building with the force of it.

  A trio of wooden Marys seemed to look on helplessly as a stone version of themselves killed their maker.

  Now it was coming for the knight. Thomas, putting his back into a low swing, broke a foot off it, but it dropped to all fours and bit and gored at him, toppling wooden statues, wrecking everything around it. It swept out with the scepter, hitting his leg hard, almost spilling him. He grunted in pain, then lashed down and broke the scepter.

  Get the spear.

  Delphine ran to the table where the flute-shaped case held the spearhead, and she grabbed it just before the panicked mule kicked the table over, almost on top of her. She opened the case. The priest said her name; she handed him the spear and he understood.

  Thomas had broken great pieces off the abomination, but still it kept after him.

  Until it saw what the priest held.

  It flipped over sideways like an acrobat doing an arch and righted its head, making the priest stop. It grinned at him and black ichor came out of its mouth. It grabbed the dead infant and whipped it around, trying to knock the spear out of Père Matthieu’s hand.

  “Touch it!” Delphine yelled now. “It doesn’t want you to touch it!”

  The priest stepped forward again.

  Thomas swung for all he was worth and caught it square in the face with his sword’s heavy hilt and quillons, breaking the nose from it.

  The priest poked at it with the spear, and it scuttled backward out the door.

  “I see you,” it said to Delphine, though its stone eyes did not seem to see anything.

  She shuddered.

  “You didn’t help the baby,” it said, and walked backward into the night.

  They had little time to mourn their hosts. The priest yelled, “Fire!” as he noticed one wall of the house smoking, and licking flames spreading from a pile of wood shavings near Jehan’s work desk. One of the candles had landed there when the mule kicked the table over, catching not only the wall but an apron hanging from the corner of the desk. The priest tried to swat out the apron, then tried to swat it against the walls, but only succeeded in stirring the flames to greater activity. Throwing down the apron, he took the mule by its halter and handed it to Thomas, who, with difficulty, led the terrified animal out into the street. The priest now gathered up both the spearhead and its case from the floor, and then he went to Delphine. He had to unmake her fists from where she held strands of Annette’s hair to cry into, but then she allowed herself to be picked up. He took her through the kitchen and out back, put her into the cart, gave her the reliquary, and then unbolted the door that led from the tiny courtyard garden into the street; Thomas had led the beast around and now the priest hitched it up. Thomas ducked back into the house for the rest of his and the priest’s things, then loped up the stairs for Delphine’s sack as she yelled, “Leave it! Hurry!”

  Choking black smoke sifted up through the planks of the bedroom floor, but he found her sack and limped down the stairs, past the now-smoldering wooden figures, and through the kitchen. Coughing savagely, his eyes tearing and his face besooted, the knight lifted himself and their goods into the cart.

  He patted out with his mailed hand the edge of the priest’s linen robes where they glowed orange and curled, just on the verge of breaking out in flames.

  Barely noticing this, Père Matthieu reined the mule, yelling, “Fire! Wake up!” several times for the benefit of any neighbors who might be left alive. They pulled away from the woodcarver’s doomed house and rode into the last of the night, dazed and stinking of smoke.

  They looked warily about them all the way, lest some fresh horror come at them from the blackness of an alley. Thomas coughed intermittently, the priest awkwardly slapping his back. Delphine held her spear tightly, distracting herself by singing, while crying:

  Hey little Robin, sing hey

  Is it time to fly away

  with your strong, young wings

  as your father sings,

  Is it time to fly away?

  The only person they saw was a woman who dragged an old man out of her house and sat him by the door; she had trouble propping him up, but finally managed. When she saw the cart, she said, “Take him, please! I’ll pay! I have radishes, you can have them! He was good to me and I want him buried. Please!”

  Thomas shook his head at her.

  “At least give him last rites! You’re a priest, aren’t you?”

  Père Matthieu moaned softly in his throat but fixed his eyes forward.

  “Stay in the cart,” Thomas said wearily.

  The priest said, “I’m sorry,” too quietly for the woman to hear, and kept the cart moving, even though she followed for a few steps, imploring. The girl, who might have protested, just sang her song again and closed her eyes.

  On their way out of the quarter, they passed a church whose stone walls were covered with mold and whose stained-glass windows had been broken out. Deep tracks from all directions pocked the ground around the building, which stank so badly of rot and mold that all of them gagged. The life-sized statue of the Virgin stood by the door, with a bloody, broken crown, a missing foot, and no nose.
She held the broken haft of a scepter and cradled the abused form of a child dead of plague.

  The priest stopped the cart.

  They had to go past this church to get to the bridge.

  “It’s nearly dawn,” said the girl. “I don’t think they move in daytime.”

  The priest urged the mule forward, but it took its steps slowly, as though it reserved the right to stop the moment it felt inclined to.

  The church was ghastly; if it had once belonged to Heaven, it did not now, and the air around it swarmed with flies. The mule swished his tail or jerked the skin of his flanks constantly against the many flies that landed on him. Flies crawled maddeningly in the priest’s arm hair or landed near Thomas’s mouth.

  They drew closer, hugging as tightly as they could to the shops on the other side of the narrow street, but still coming uncomfortably close to the spoiled église.

  Besides the gruesome Virgin, other statues of saints, kings, and apostles stood on their pedestals, lighter in color than the greenish-black growth quilting the walls, their limbs and faces also spattered here and there with blood. Although it was hard to see in the gray of first light, the blood looked bright and fresh; they had only just returned from their hunt. Did an angel with a missing wing just shift itself? Did a gargoyle lick its forepaw as a dog might? Several of them held small forms that, as the cart drew closer, the knight, the priest, and the girl were sickened to recognize as dead children. A blood-mouthed St. Paul the apostle held his stone book in one hand and, with the other, dangled a limp boy-child aloft by the head as if the saint were being fellated, the boy’s arms gone entirely, his pale legs swinging gently like a hanged man’s.

  St. Paul turned his stone head and looked squarely at Père Matthieu. The priest felt an icy finger in his heart, and then his head exploded in pain as St. Paul assaulted him with a wordless shout:

  DO YOU LIKE THIS BUGGER PRIEST WE DID THIS FOR YOU YOU FILTHY BUGGER SODOMITE DRUNK WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FOOLING WOULD YOU LIKE TO CLIMB UP HERE WITH ME AND HOIST THOSE ROBES HOC EST ENIM VERGUM MEUM

  The priest let drop the reins and put his hands over his ears, but it didn’t help. At the same time, a statue of St. Martin pointed his sword at Thomas and split his head with:

  COWARD HAVE YOU RAPED THE GIRL YET BECAUSE YOU WILL WE WILL MAKE YOU RAPE HER IN THE ASS BUT NOT THE CUNT BECAUSE SHE WILL BE A VIRGIN WHEN YOU CUT HER THROAT FOR YOUR MASTER AND YOU KNOW WHO THAT IS DON’T YOU

  St. Anne crouched as though she might leap at the girl and thought-screamed into her head:

  EVERYONE YOU LOVE WILL DIE THIS PRIEST AND THIS KNIGHT BOTH OF THEM WILL DIE BECAUSE OF YOU WE WILL KILL THEM WE DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE BUT WE WILL FIND OUT EVEN IF WE HAVE TO CUT YOU OPEN AND THAT TOY WON’T HELP YOU

  The cart wandered unguided as the three of them writhed under the words hurled at them. Then, beyond the buildings to the east and behind the clouds, the sun rose unseen and the voices stopped. The priest collapsed against the good weight of the knight and did something like sleeping.

  Delphine, who had begun to feel nauseated and had a pain in her lower belly, comforted herself by leaning forward to stroke the priest’s hair.

  Thomas took his chain mail gloves off his shaking hands and took up the reins.

  The only sounds as they left the Latin Quarter were the clop of the mule’s hooves and, somewhere, the barking of a dog.

  THIRTEEN

  Of the Rain and the Figure of Death

  The rain started almost as soon as they went out the Port St. Bernard and left Paris behind, the girl thinking of the tale of Lot’s wife, telling herself not to look back at the dying city and then doing it anyway. A column of smoke above Paris bade them farewell, as another column of smoke had once greeted them; this one, however, was in the city, where the fire at the woodcarver’s would burn his whole block, sending the healthy into the streets, consuming the sick and the dead. The drops of cold rain that fell on Delphine’s face were the vanguard of the deluge that would save the Left Bank from burning but flood the marshy land on the Right Bank all the way to the Place de Grèves. Bells tolled in the Latin Quarter; there were enough hands, at least, to pull a rope or two. Delphine tried to picture the people ringing those bells; a lone Dominican monk or a paid ringer for the convent; another priest like Père Matthieu, too scared to minister to his flock but trying to save what was left of his soul by warning them about fire. Or were the dead ringing their own bells? If statues could walk, why not them? She felt more tears coming for Annette, and also for herself; when would she feel a woman’s love again? Had Annette died because Delphine had wanted to stay with her? The words of the wicked statues rang in her head again, and she looked at the men in the front of the cart.

  Please don’t let them die because of me, God.

  And now the rain fell, and fell, and fell.

  On the third day of it, and their second day without food, the priest saw a stone barn and a cottage and hoped they would be deserted. What had things come to when a man of God wished misfortune on a family because he coveted their roof?

  The door to the cottage was open, but they made for the barn, as they would have more room for the mule, and none of them were in the mood to find bodies.

  The barn was not deserted.

  The priest walked in first and found a naked man on all fours, stuffing hay into his mouth. An abundance of hay and grasses were knotted into his white beard and hair. His ribs were showing, and he was grimed over and wet, whether with rain or the sweat of some fever was unclear. His eyes were wild, though. And he was not frail. He picked up a rusty scythe with a broken shaft from a pile of farming tools and started toward the priest.

  Good God, he means to eat me.

  Then Thomas and Delphine walked in, Thomas with his sword unsheathed, and the man bolted out the other door, falling when the edge of the scythe clipped the door frame and slipped from his hand, but scampering to his feet again almost instantly. He ran straight across the puddled field and kept running, his bare feet kicking up water all the way, disappearing not in the direction of the house, but toward the tree line past the field.

  Thomas broke the silence that followed by saying, “So that’s what the reaper looks like without his robes.”

  The priest laughed after a pause, but the girl just blinked rain out of her eyes and looked at them for an explanation.

  “Death, girl. Death,” said the priest.

  Now she laughed, too, and the sound of it was good in the barn.

  * * *

  They built a fire and took off as many of their clothes as decency allowed, hanging these on sticks to dry. When they had, they changed out of their underlinens and then hung them, putting the cozy, dry ones back on, glad for once not to be cold and soaked. The weather had changed, and where the days had been warm and the nights cool, now the days were cool and the nights cold. They agreed to stay in the barn until morning, then scout the fields for fruit or nut trees, or whatever they could find. In the meantime, they set out their cups and bowls, as well as Thomas’s helmet and thigh armor, to catch enough water to keep their bellies full, which somewhat eased the pain of their hunger.

  “I wish we had music,” the priest said, poking at the glowing logs with the broken end of the scythe he was nearly killed with.

  “I don’t. You might be tempted to sing,” Thomas said, inspecting his leg where the thing had hit him with her scepter. He suspected the bone of the shin was chipped; a truly ugly bruise had formed, and the flesh around his ankle was swollen and bruised as well. The damned thing had gotten him right where the horse had broken his leg at Crécy.

  “Perhaps the girl will sing,” the priest said.

  “I don’t feel like it,” she said in a nasal little mew. She was getting sick. She had no fever, but she sniffled and complained of an ache near her hips. She had been in enough cold and wet that neither man suspected her of plague. “But what kind of music would you like to hear if you could choose?” she asked Père Matt
hieu.

  “Oh. A lute. Most certainly a lute. And you, sir knight?”

  “A lute? That’s court music. That’s for troubadours to make wives spread their legs when their husbands are at war.”

  “I find it very pretty. If the player is skillful. It takes more training to master the lute, don’t you agree?”

  “Than what?”

  “A drum, for example. Or a cornemuse.”

  “That’s what I’d like to hear. A drum and a cornemuse.”

  “Soldiers’ music. That’s for making husbands leave their wives behind for troubadours.”

  “Ha!”

  As night came on, they fell to telling stories to pass the time.

  The priest began, telling the story of a knight who was actually a werewolf, but a very considerate one who removed himself into the forest to change his skin. His wife, however, betrayed him by hiding his clothes so he could not change back; in this way, her husband was thought to have disappeared and she was able to marry her lover.

  “Go on,” Thomas said. “Finish it.”

  “It is finished.”

  “The hell it is.”

  “Is it not?”

  “No, it is not. You only told half of it.”

  “It’s all I know.”

  “What the hell kind of story is that? The adulterous wife wins out? The noble werewolf is deceived and banished?”

  “Forgive me if I gave offense. Perhaps you should tell one now to instruct me in how these things are properly done.”

  “Imagine it’s a sermon. A good story has a lesson. What’s the lesson here? Whores triumph?”

  “I don’t know,” the priest said, fidgeting. “Maybe. Something about the deceiving nature of woman.”

  Thomas stared intently at the priest in the firelight, and it was difficult for him to tell whether Thomas was being jocular or actually growing angry.

  “That explains it, then,” he said. “They tell priests stories about how bad women are so they won’t fuck them.”

  “It’s hardly working. I’m the only priest I know without an acknowledged mistress in his village.”