Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  Big-arms and the younger oarsman searched the boat, the latter pitching the man with the hip wound into the shallows to stop his caterwauling; he managed to scramble onto the bank and limp away in great, loping spasms that made the captain laugh girlishly from where he sat his supervisory post cross-legged atop the cabin. He laughed harder yet when the man collapsed in a field of rotten squash.

  The take was unimpressive.

  A few coins, a small drum, some extra clothes, and three finches in wooden cages; the oarsman put his foot exactly next to the foot of the wounded man and then made him remove his leather boots.

  “You idiots fled to save this shit?” he said, trading shoes, handing the hurt man his worn-out slippers.

  The other man, a paunchy youth with soft hands, said, “We did not wish to be harmed for our poverty. We were going to Avignon to seek work at the court of His Holiness—the man you pitched over is a great jester.”

  “Well, he sure runs funny.”

  The oarsman presented the cages to the captain, who had leapt down from the cabin.

  He reached inside a cage, caught the panicked bird with some difficulty and wrung its neck, throwing it at soft-hands. He was reaching for another cage when Delphine ran forward, just escaping the grasp of the priest, who tried to stop her. She wrapped her arms around the cage and sat down, putting her hand over the door. The oarsman tried to yank the cage away, but she held tight, letting him jerk her halfway to her feet. The captain instinctively drew back to strike her, but checked himself, sensing that Thomas had taken a step in his direction, also having noted that big-arms was still on the other boat.

  He changed what would have been a vicious backhand into a tousling of her hair, at which she grimaced, clutching the cage more tightly.

  “Let her have the birds,” the walleyed man said, proud of his spontaneous magnanimity. “Her papa has been useful.”

  “We thank you,” the priest said, as Delphine set the cages down and opened their doors, taking one docile bird and then the other into her hands. She kissed them both, then released them. One flew up into the sky; the other went toward the bank.

  The captain turned his head toward Thomas.

  “Happy?” he said.

  Thomas pulled Delphine behind him.

  “So happy I could shit,” he said, sheathing his sword.

  Big-arms got back on the raft. The uninjured man tended his friend’s scalp.

  Nobody saw the second finch fly into the squash field, where it stayed for a moment before flying up again and into the clouds.

  Neither did they see the jester now get to his feet and run toward a farmhouse in the distance, no longer limping.

  Big-arms, whose Christian name was Guillaume, had argued against it, but now it was happening.

  The captain, seeing that the foolish priest was sleepy, had given him unwatered wine to put him under so he might peek at what their passengers were carrying. Once the priest was asleep, the captain had looked into the knight’s satchel even as the girl slept on it, and the sight of gold had maddened him. He took a chain and a few coins without waking her, but more lurked under her head. He called the others to the rear of the raft and told them the time had come to bid their passengers farewell.

  Guillaume and the older oarsman wanted none of it; the oarsman was fine with piracy but felt that harming paying passengers was a kind of oath-breaking.

  Guillaume, for his part, felt a deeper loyalty to the knight who had also faced the English at Crécy-en-Ponthieu than he now did to this captain, whose arrogance and madness were worsening by the day. He said it went against his conscience to rob their guests, who had been good and useful companions.

  The captain had said, “The guild knows its own, and has no loyalty to any other. It also saw fit to make me captain of this raft, and master of you, even unto your life. We send them from this wicked world, and take upon ourselves the guilt of their wealth. That is my command.”

  Guillaume nodded his assent but asked that the girl should be spared and brought to Avignon, if she would go with them after.

  The captain had agreed, but Guillaume knew he was lying.

  And now it had begun.

  The oarsmen had their daggers out and were creeping toward Thomas as if toward a sleeping bear. The captain, holding a brutal, rusty falchion, was on his way to dispatch the priest where he snored sitting up near his empty wine bowl. The stars were very bright above them and the Rhône was creeping slowly, lulling with its mutter, leaving the raft a steady platform for murder. Guillaume had his crossbow at the ready, and two others at his feet. If the knight stirred, he was to shoot him.

  The oarsman’s knife was almost at the knight’s throat.

  Guillaume only knew he was going to do it a heartbeat before he did; the thought came to him and seemed so clear and correct that his fingers squeezed the lever almost on their own.

  He shot the oarsman.

  The man made a small gagging sound and jerked, reaching for the quarrel in his back.

  He dropped his dagger pommel first, and the sound woke Thomas.

  The younger oarsman looked back at Guillaume with wide, betrayed eyes, and at that moment Guillaume’s sight went black as the captain’s falchion struck him on the crown and he fell.

  Thomas had been dreaming of his wife; she was crying, pounding the heel of her hand against the table and shaking with something between remorse and outrage. It seemed wrong that her small hand had made such a loud noise on the table, a noise like dropped metal, and Thomas opened his eyes to see two men standing over him, one of them twisting, grabbing at his own back, the other turning now to look behind him. Farther down the raft, big-arms went to his knees and the figure that had struck him moved toward Thomas.

  He scooted forward on his butt and kicked the feet out from under the confused oarsman while the wounded one managed to touch the feathered part of the quarrel in him, the pain making him vomit all over himself. He fell suddenly, and then lay still.

  Thomas just had time to get to his feet, taking a slash from the falchion that numbed his mailed forearm and then kicked the captain in the hip to push him back. He used his still-sheathed sword to slap the younger oarsman across the head, knocking him down, and then he drew his weapon.

  The girl was awake now, howling, “Stop! Stop!” at the brawling men, shaking the priest to wake him.

  The captain sprang back, sheathed his falchion, and grabbed up his long spear.

  “Don’t kill him!” the girl yelled.

  “I won’t if he jumps over!” Thomas answered.

  Guillaume fell on his stomach, but then struggled up on all fours, panting like a dog, trying to make sense of the chaos around him, and of the blood pooling under his face.

  The younger oarsman, also stunned, shook his head clear and dashed between Thomas and the captain. He grabbed the girl by her hair now and exposed her throat. The priest tried to grab his arm but was viciously elbowed in the nose and fell backward.

  “Drop the sword or I’ll open her!” the oarsman said.

  “Don’t kill them, please!” the girl yelled, as if she were not the one closest to death. Her hands were on the man’s knife arm, but they were little more use than a cat’s paws would have been.

  Then she shut her eyes because she felt the oarsman’s arms tense and knew he was about to cut her throat.

  Except that he didn’t.

  Big-armed Guillaume, blinking blood out of his eyes, had crawled over and now held the oarsman’s arms from the outside, pulling them apart as slowly and irresistibly as a starfish opening a clam, clutching as hard as he could and hoping his blood-slick hands kept their grip; if he slipped, the other man’s knife would all but cut the girl’s head off.

  “Don’t!” she yelled again, still at Thomas, who was coming at the captain, ducking his spear slashes laterally, but unable to get inside because the other man circled so quickly.

  Guillaume had the oarsman spread-armed now, and the priest hit him in the fa
ce with his wooden bowl so hard he broke it; the oarsman dropped his knife. Guillaume let the man’s arms go, then heaved him over the side, passing out as he did so that one arm trailed in the cold water.

  The girl got to her feet, as did the priest, and she stood behind him, wanting to jump between Thomas and the captain, but knowing the captain would kill her.

  “Drop that whoring thing and jump if you want to live,” Thomas said to the walleyed man.

  “I don’t need to live,” the captain said, “I’ve already seen the sea!” and, keeping his gaze deceptively on Thomas, he lashed out sideways with his spear, just missing the priest, whom he would have impaled.

  The girl cried out in a startled squeak.

  Thomas attacked the spear rather than the man now, driving it down with his sword and stepping through it, breaking off the first third. The captain, not missing a beat, whipped the remaining part of his shaft around and caught Thomas a glancing blow on the shoulder that also struck his head, rattling him even through his chain hood.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Thomas cut the man’s arm off just below the elbow.

  He looked stupidly at it where it lay, and bent to pick it up with the remaining one.

  “Thomas!” the girl yelled at him. “Thomas!”

  She meant to make him spare the beaten man, if his life could still be saved at all, but her words had the opposite effect; the captain’s jab at the priest had clipped her below the mouth; not much, but enough to beard her chin in blood.

  When Thomas saw that the girl was cut, he breathed out like a bull, grabbed the dazed captain’s hair, yanked his head back and cut his throat with the long, notched blade. He took his time about it.

  The girl screamed, “Noooo!” and then she just said, “No,” and she let the priest take her in his arms even though the tears she thought herself about to shed didn’t come.

  The captain fell so his head lolled back and his open throat bled into the river. Thomas watched this for a moment, then wiped his sword.

  “I told you not to,” the girl said, but her face betrayed her relief that the hurtful man was gone.

  “We’re going to pay for that,” she said.

  “I’m ready,” said Thomas.

  “I’m not,” she said, and looked at the water. Thomas rolled the captain’s limp body off the raft, and it sank as if pulled down.

  A fucking hand!

  The raft drifted sideways and into the darkness.

  When the sky got light enough for the work that had to be done, Guillaume bowed his head and let Thomas stitch him. Thomas had sat with Guillaume through the last hours of darkness, holding the captain’s extra shirt to the wound as the big man shivered and swore. The bone needle and twine had also come from the captain’s trunk.

  Guillaume was strong, and he lived.

  For a time.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Of the Island of the Dead

  At first it was not easy for the knight and priest to control the raft, but the soldier told them what to do until he was strong enough to take an oar himself. On the second day after the fight, he and Thomas were bending their bodies into the effort of wagging the oars of the raft behind it, pushing it forward just that little bit faster than the current, telling stories and sharing jokes.

  “What will you do with yourself?” Thomas asked.

  “I’ll keep on for Avignon. I’ll sign on for the new crusade.”

  Thomas’s face soured at the memory of the knight and his retinue that passed them close to Auxerre.

  A devil and a host of the dead

  “Some face you pull. Do you not love the thought of Jerusalem in Christian hands again? It might be just the thing to quench God’s wrath at us.”

  “About that,” Thomas said. “What have we done to make God so mad at us? What have we done that our fathers and their fathers did not do?”

  “They were punished, too. The year I was born, the famine near made my mother’s milk dry.”

  “It can’t have been that bad; look at the size of you.”

  But it was that bad, and Thomas remembered it well; for nearly five years, when he was first a page and then a squire, the crops drowned in the rain and murrains killed the beasts; a hanged man had disappeared from the gibbet, and everyone knew the farmers on the edge of town had eaten him. Only the kindness of Thomas’s seigneur had kept his family from taking such desperate measures.

  Père Matthieu drew closer, waiting for his chance to join the conversation. The girl ate a salted fish and stared at the water.

  “We have famine, too,” Thomas rejoined, “on top of war and pestilence. How are we so wicked as to deserve all of this?”

  “Well, you may not be wicked, but I’m wicked enough for both of us.”

  “If you were wicked, I’d be in that river. All of us would. You’re a good man, Guillaume.”

  “That wasn’t goodness. That was fellowship.”

  “Martial camaraderie,” said the priest.

  “Fellowship will do,” said Guillaume, nodding his head at the priest as if to say, Can you believe him? Then Thomas was struck funny and laughed, looking not at the priest but at Guillaume.

  The priest laughed, too.

  “What?” the big-armed man asked.

  Thomas said, “I should trim that last stitch. When you jerked your head it stuck straight up. You look like a sour apple with a little stem.”

  His face flushed red, though he was smiling.

  “And you look like…”

  “What?” Thomas dared him.

  “The ass of…”

  “The ass of what?”

  The soldier thought for a moment.

  “Something I wouldn’t want to walk behind.”

  Even the girl laughed at that.

  “Even if we are wicked…” Thomas said, but the soldier cut him off.

  “Everyone is wicked.”

  “What about her?” Thomas said, pointing a thumb at Delphine.

  “Well, I don’t know her, do I? She doesn’t look rotten, but she could be. Or maybe she will be later. Everyone sins. Isn’t that right, Father?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Père Matthieu said, with some enthusiasm, glad the men had moved from martial stories about camp and training (though never Crécy) to something he knew how to talk about. “Man is born into sin. All because of Adam.”

  Guillaume said, “Mostly Eve, my priest told us.”

  Delphine looked up from the water now.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “How’s that?” said Guillaume.

  “She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Huh,” the priest said, trying to knock the rust off his rhetoric, but failing to find the proper argument.

  “I told you everyone was wicked,” said the soldier. “Her sin is that she goes against the teachings of the church.”

  The priest said, “May not a man be tempted by a sinful child?”

  “As we are now,” laughed the soldier.

  The girl thought, absently fingering the scab on her chin, and said, “Yes. But what of a child tempted by a sinful man?”

  “As Guillaume was, in the field, by an uncle. Two uncles,” Thomas said.

  “Don’t be crude,” she said. “This is important. Is the child misled by the man more sinful than the man misled by a child?”

  “I should have warned you her father was a lawyer,” said Thomas.

  “Are you not her father?”

  “Christ, no. I’d have shaken that out of her.”

  “It’s never too late,” said Guillaume.

  “Oh, I fear it is.”

  “You haven’t answered the question,” Delphine said.

  “I’m just going to pull my whoring oar,” said the man.

  “Me too,” said the knight.

  “Are men who swear foul oaths during a conversat
ion about God fit to point out sin in someone else?” said the girl. And she ate her fish right down to the tail, looking more than a little proud of herself.

  At the end of the third day after the fight, just at dusk, they came to a dam in the river. At first it seemed to be something men had made with logs, but as they grew closer, it became clear that the obstruction was composed mostly of dead cows, sheep, and the bodies of men and women. Dead fish, heaps of them, also glittered in the last of the sunlight.

  “How the Christ are we to get around that?” Thomas said.

  Guillaume shook his head.

  “Shit, what is it? You know this river.”

  The big-armed man shrugged his shoulders.

  The raft drew closer.

  One of the cows moved now, but not of its own power—something under it had shifted, causing it to lurch in the water and bump against the other flotsam.

  “I think we should pull to the shore,” the soldier said, and the priest said, “Yes. Yes, please.”

  They turned the oars, and the raft turned a little but just kept heading for the island of dead things; they wrenched the oars with all their strength now, leaning back, but still the raft moved downriver, though it faced diagonally.

  Something was pulling it.

  The girl whimpered and took up the flute-shaped box around her neck, opening the tiny hinges. The priest crossed himself and looked over the side; something white bobbed in the water not far below the surface, and it seemed as though something viscous and opaque had formed itself into long ropes. That was what had the raft; that was what reeled it in.