Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  It was near one of these willows that a bright swath of moonlight dragged itself over a set of cast-aside clothes. Père Matthieu could not resist peeking at the river, where he was sure he would spy a bather. He was not disappointed. In fact, there were two of them, and much closer than the clothes.

  Seeing him, a girl inexpertly stifled a squeal, then thrashed out of the water, covering her breasts and running for her homespun dress. She was plump and pale. God help him, it was Mélisande.

  He knew who was in the river.

  The girl picked up her clothes and ran to where the trees got thicker before dressing and loping home. The other made no effort to run; he did not even leave the river; rather, he just crouched to hide all but his head and languidly oared the water around him with his arms.

  He was looking directly at the priest, who stood there for a long moment, torn between turning and walking home and trying to find something to say. Nothing occurred to him. He could not see the freckle in the boy’s eye, but he imagined it. He imagined more than that. Cloud shadows moved across the water, now darkening the lad’s head, now letting the moon paint it silver.

  “Come in,” the boy said, so quietly that Père Matthieu convinced himself he had not heard it. He just opened his mouth and closed it again, like a landed fish trying to breathe.

  “Come in,” the object of his affection said again.

  “I can’t.”

  “Père Matthieu can’t.”

  “No.”

  “So shed him with your clothes, and put him back on when you leave.”

  “No.”

  “That’s the beauty of being nude in a river; you’re nobody. You’re anybody you want to be. It’s just a dream.”

  You used the same words to get the girl in there.

  The priest opened and closed his mouth.

  “Come in,” the boy said again.

  And he did.

  The Great Death got close in June, and the bridge leading to Paris was burned on the seigneur’s command. Little groups of armed farmers hid in the woods and frightened off those coming overland from the other side; they soon found that the days off from farm labor were to their liking. They also found that, with no wives to nag them, they could drink all the beer and cider they cared to. They fashioned masks of river reeds and clay, raven’s feathers, and the teeth of foxes to make themselves terrifying, and also to remind them not to look anyone in the eyes—it was widely believed that the plague leapt from one man to another by means of a deadly beam from the eyes. They called themselves the Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse. They drank themselves into such a state of belligerence that even groups of strangers who agreed to turn around found themselves cudgeled so they would remember not to try again.

  It was not long before they carried their antics back with them into town; Élise Planchette, the widow who ran the alehouse, soon learned to hate the hooting and boasts that announced the brotherhood’s return from patrol. Shutting the door was no good—they would keep at her until she opened it, then expect their drinks for free for their solemn work guarding the town from pestilence. Nearly every day they could be seen at the widow’s tables, dicing and carousing with their masks tipped back; those who watched by day came in the evening. Those who watched in the evening came by day. Their farms suffered as their wives and fathers took up the manuring and the weeding and the harrowing, but the men of the brotherhood had grown so fond of their newfound status as militiamen that there was no reasoning with them. The reeve could not make them work. The priest could not turn them away from their folly. Their number did shrink as some men, like Sanson Bertier, dropped out; but it grew again as bullies saw a way out of work.

  When one of them stole wood from the widow’s house, saying his duties left him no time for chopping, she tried to block his way out but found herself pushed down on her backside. She complained to the herald. This herald promised to take the matter before their lord, but nothing was done. The seigneur, terrified of plague, had suspended court sessions and shut himself away with his retinue. Only the herald was seen, arching his painted eyebrows and reading unenforceable proclamations from the back of his palfrey. Men-at-arms could be seen walking the parapet of the keep, their armor winking in the early summer light; but they never came down anymore. The Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse was all the justice there was in St. Martin-le-Preux.

  One night, when there was enough moon, several of the day watch went drunkenly to the river to gather reeds for new members to make masks with. Steering for a growth of reeds near the charred and collapsed timber of the bridge, one of them noticed a pair of red stockings balled up on the shore. Other clothes were concealed nearby.

  “Look here, boys,” he whispered, “we’ve got some June frolics in the river!”

  “Ho,” one of them cried, slapping the water with his staff. “Come out, little fishes. One of you can show us her gills!”

  They guffawed at that and began whistling, but no head broke the water.

  “Under there,” one said, pointing at where the western ruin of the bridge still stood. They waded in the mud and looked underneath. There, hiding by the pilings, shivered a very pale and naked priest holding the hands of the reeve’s son, who was also in the state of Adam. Both of them were slicked with mud halfway up their shins.

  “I don’t believe my whoring eyes,” one man said.

  Now the boy panicked and sloshed out toward the other side of the bridge, running when he got to the bank. Père Matthieu nearly followed him, but then lost all hope. He turned his back to the men, held his face in his hands and cried.

  He was sure they would kill him.

  None of them moved for a long moment. Then one of them spat on him. Then another. When all of them had done so, they turned, laughing, and walked back up the river and into town to spread the news.

  So it was that when the plague came, only a dozen souls were coming to Mass. Père Matthieu’s assistant and bell ringer, a stocky, busy, black-haired child everyone called Bourdon, performed his duties without his former energy. Hardly any received the priest when he came to anoint their loved ones in death. Only a handful sought confession. Soon the reeve’s son died, and the reeve, and nearly the whole village. Heartbroken yet afraid for his life, the priest stopped going to church at all, shutting himself up in his house with his wine. It was not until the monster moved into the river that the villagers sought their shepherd out and shamed him into helping them. There was no one else they could go to. So he tried. He went house to house seeking men who could use a weapon. When he saw how strong the thing was and knew he did not have enough healthy men to fight it, he took up the place where the brotherhood used to wait, and sat with his lantern, praying for soldiers to come down the road.

  As it turned out, one did.

  As for the Brotherhood of St. Martin’s Arse, they were already gone. They were, in fact, among the first victims. The widow fell ill, having caught it from the farmer’s child who helped her clear up, and the surgeon had refused to see her. Trying to do for herself what she believed he would have done for her, she bled herself into a wooden bowl, though this only made her weaker. The lump in her groin was so painful that it was all she could do to drag herself down the stairs and to the alehouse door when, after one of her bleedings, the brotherhood pounded at it. They wore their masks. They stank of drink and were demanding more.

  She told them to go away because she was tired.

  They insisted.

  She told them to go away, for the love of God.

  They said they had none.

  So she served them.

  If they tasted the blood mixed into their beer, they never said a word about it.

  FIFTEEN

  Of the Visitation in the Barn

  “So I damned half my village. My weakness made them hate me, so they stayed away from Mass. They were cut off from the sacraments.”

  Thomas furrowed his brow at the priest.

  “But it doesn’t make sense. As you
said yourself, most priests have a mistress. Why would they hate you so for dallying with the girl?”

  The priest shook his head and looked at the sky.

  “Why would the boy run off and leave the girl in the river with you? And why would she want a knobby old priest twice her age when she could have a handsome lad who was going to be a lawyer?”

  “The mysteries of the heart are unknowable.”

  “And the way you described his legs. It was the boy who stayed in the river, wasn’t it? Not the girl at all. You kept saying ‘the object of my affection’ because you plumbed the boy.”

  “No,” the priest lied.

  “What good is confession if you lie?”

  “Everyone lies at confession. Around the edges, at least. A man who fornicates with his brother’s wife will say it was a whore. A woman will say she was glad in her heart that her blind and deaf baby died, when what she means is that she drowned it. But I wasn’t lying. Because a man of war like you cannot travel with a known sodomite.”

  “You’re goddamned right,” Thomas said.

  “You need the object of my affection to have been the girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “So it was the girl.”

  “Good. I hope you fucked her right in half.”

  The priest smiled sadly and kept looking at the sky, though the moon was gone again, covered over with clouds. Thomas drank another swig of rainwater and went inside, mildly fuming.

  “I wouldn’t leave you,” a small voice said. The priest looked down and saw that Delphine had come from the barn. “If it was the boy,” she continued. “I wouldn’t leave.”

  He smiled at her and wiped at his eye with the back of his hand.

  Then the rain came again and they all tried to sleep.

  In the loft above the barn, a mouse had just peeled herself away from nursing her litter. She left them in the nest and went through a tunnel in the rotten hay, sensing that the rain had driven hosts of little bugs from the sodden ground and into the structure. It was the perfect time to hunt; ants or grubs would make better milk than grain, and there hadn’t been grain in this barn since before she birthed. As she got to the end of the tunnel, she stopped before she crossed the plain of planks that led to the beam she would skitter down to forage in the barn. She poked her nose into the air and sniffed. This was where an owl could most easily kill her, as one had had taken her mate on the path between the barn and the house. She smelled something, but it was no owl.

  Something landed wetly on the roof; no heavier than a branch full of wet leaves, but that wasn’t what it was.

  She looked up, then froze.

  It came through the straw thatching on the roof, forcing its way between the fibers, at once liquid and not liquid. She had never seen tentacles, but that was what it was: a mass of tentacles that knotted on itself again and again to move. It had no head at all; to her, it looked like a nest of snakes’ tails.

  She was too afraid to move back into the tunnel, even when it dropped onto the planks not two yards from her.

  It writhed nearer, rearing up several of its tail-arms to regard her, but then, thankfully, decided she was not what it was looking for. It collapsed on itself and went liquid again, blacker than blood, so black it was less like a stain and more like the most profound absence of light. It oozed through the spaces between the planks and disappeared.

  She had never given any thought to the people sleeping below her, but she knew this not-owl, this snake-knot was after them.

  She went back into the tunnel and burrowed in with her blind young ones, shivering so hard they moved away from her.

  Thomas dreamed.

  He was walking across a burning landscape of dry grass and nettles, and sand that shifted in the hot wind and stung his eyes. He was wearing armor. The sun seemed to hang closer to the earth than it should have; it seemed to press on his armor as if it had hands, heating the links of his mail unbearably. Smoke began to fill the air; fires at the horizon line twinkled as figures moved near them, fanning the flames.

  He had heard that the infidels under Saladin had burned the grass at the Horns of Hattin to drive the crusaders mad with thirst before he crushed them in battle, driving them out of the Holy Land, and Thomas thought that was where he was. Near Jerusalem, in the Levant. The figures working the fires didn’t look like people, though, not even Moslems.

  “Goddamn it, stop that!” he tried to shout, but the words caught in his throat as if they had hooks. His throat was unbearably dry, and he knew he might die of thirst. It was the figures who were doing this to him; if he could reach them and kill them, it would stop. But they were so very far away, and his sword was so rusted it looked as though it would break if it struck anything hard. He clenched his teeth and moved forward, but then one of his teeth broke; he pulled a mailed glove off and pulled the tooth out. The action of doing this dislodged another one so it wobbled in his gums, then another; soon his whole mouth was full of loose teeth as dry and fragile as kindling. He opened his mouth to try to get some air in it, but then he realized that was a mistake. Almost as soon as the idea came to him that the sun was so hot it might light his teeth on fire, it did exactly that. They smoldered painfully in his gums, even after he shut his mouth, and he looked around for anything at all that might give him relief.

  That was when he saw the thorn bush.

  It was about as high as his ribs, with long, wicked thorns. The whole bush seemed to bend around something at its center: a pear. But not just any pear. This was the fattest, sweetest-looking pear he had ever seen, with a leaf on its stem of impossible greenness. He knew that it was so full of watery nectar that one bite would not just ease his pain, but strengthen his limbs so he could set about the business of killing the shadowy fire makers on the horizon.

  He put his glove back on against the thorns and knelt down before the bush, picking gently at the needled twigs encasing the fruit. How like ribs around a heart they were. He had to be delicate so he didn’t rupture the pear, but this was hard. The thorns were so long and slender they slid deeply into his fingers even through the links of his mail. He had to make the thorn bush want to yield the pear, so he tried to say Please, but all that came through his ruined mouth was a grunt. Smoke came from his nose. The arrowhead was lodged in his tongue again. He couldn’t speak; he would never speak. He would never be understood by anyone or anything again. He jerked more roughly at the branches, but they pulled back.

  Rip it open. Use your strength. Destroy it and eat the pulp. You can’t know how sweet it is!

  Lies.

  He was being lied to.

  He understood at once that this pear was cousin to the fruit that ruined man in the Garden of Eden, and it would ruin him, too. If he ate it, he would march to the horizon, but he would not fight the fire makers. He would become one of them. Forever. He had to pull himself away from it and then move toward the horizon.

  He had to fight them.

  It was a miserable thing to leave that sweetness behind, but he did it.

  He got up on his leaden legs and marched toward the fire.

  He coughed a huge gout of stinging smoke from his mouth and nostrils into his eyes, sending him to his knees.

  That was when he sneezed a horrific sneeze that ejected smoke, snot, and blood all at once. He even thought some of his brain came out of his nose. Something definitely came out of his nose, and maybe his ears as well.

  And then he realized he was kneeling not in a hot and dry grassland, but somewhere cold, dark, and damp.

  The barn.

  With the rain on the roof and thunder growling outside.

  Something ran across his lap, something oily and dark,

  die with her then you limp weak prick

  and it rained itself upward somehow through the planks of the loft above them.

  It had left smears on his white thighs.

  Or was that blood?

  His breeches were down and his verge was half erect.

 
Delphine was in front of him, and he was holding her arms so tightly he must have been close to breaking her delicate bones. He loosened his grip but still held her, trying to understand.

  She was naked.

  “Oh Christ, Christ, no,” he moaned helplessly.

  She shook her head.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “You stopped. It tried to make you, and you could have, but you stopped.”

  He blinked dumbly at her dark outline with the sound of the rain dripping.

  The priest snored.

  She managed to smile through her quiet sobbing.

  He let her arms go and she put her gown back on.

  He pulled his breeches up, still staring at her, peripherally aware that his hands hurt.

  When they were both clothed again, she hugged him and cried warm tears onto his neck. He patted her sides and shoulders awkwardly.

  “You beat it,” she said, her lean body hitching with sobs.

  “You won.”

  He saw that her gown was bloody, but then realized it was his blood. His hands were bleeding freely where they had been stuck with thorns.

  In the morning, Delphine woke again to find that not all the blood on her gown was from Thomas’s hands, which she knew had been injured.

  Thomas was at the other end of the barn, with the mule’s leg between his, scraping mud and rocks from its shoe. How like him, to defy his pain by doing something to make it worse.

  Her belly hurt, and her thighs were slick with blood. At first she feared that she might have been wrong and that he might have violated her in the night, but this was only for an instant.

  The dream had seemed like other true dreams. She had dreamed that Thomas had a black crab in his head that was driving him as a man drives a cart, and this crab wanted him to hurt her. She had awakened in the darkness to find him undressing her, delicately at first, but then roughly, his eyes far away. But as she tried to pull away from him, he sneezed violently and something came out of him. He had pushed it out of him. Besides, the pain was in her belly, not where it would have been had she been taken.