Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  Other white things bobbed as well; one of them now rushed past the vessel, and the priest saw it was a sheep’s head—but the head was encased in a kind of gelatinous creature the size and shape of a large basket; it pulsed itself to move, opening and closing itself like a flower, its rim fringed with reddish purple tendrils that trailed behind it.

  “God preserve us, please, please,” Père Matthieu said. The men at the oars stopped trying to use them to move the boat and came to look at what the priest was gaping at.

  Now several of the jellied things pulsed underwater around the raft, seeming to glow with their own faint light; at the center of each of them was the head of a man, woman, beast, or child.

  The raft lurched against the dam of bodies, none of which had heads attached. Thomas looked at the nearer shore and removed his helm and chain hood. Guillaume, seeing his intention, began to help him off with his surcoat, but it was too late.

  One of the things flopped onto the raft.

  The head in the middle of this one was decomposed, but not so much they could not tell its filmy eyes were set too far apart and looking in different directions. It pulsed and slithered forward, its frill of tentacles waving in the air now. Thomas lashed at it with his sword, but it parted around his blade and did not suffer. The girl tried to touch it with her spear, but it twitched away from her, one of its frills brushing her wrist in riposte.

  It stung her.

  She cried out in pain and nearly dropped the spear; that brief caress had burned like touching a hot coal. The priest pulled her back.

  Now another one, with an old woman’s head at the middle of it, flowed up from the river onto the raft.

  Yellowish tentacles, presumably from a much larger cousin of theirs, began to rise up from below and wrap themselves around the raft, causing a corner of it to dip underwater. Desperate, Thomas writhed out of his surcoat, but the chain hauberk was still on him, threatening to pull him down like so many bricks if he went over.

  He had no time.

  The tendrils yanked harder, pulling the raft at a sharper angle, causing some of their cargo to slide forward. A case of weapons slid into the water; now the wrapped salt cases were moving, too.

  Salt!

  The priest ran for the salt and began working at the twine that kept the oiled cover on it.

  Delphine backed up, lashing at the first horrid thing with her spear, though she missed and was stung every time; her wrist had swollen and she could barely feel her hand.

  Worse than its stings were its words; it spoke to her, and even though the mouth of the captain’s head moved in its viscous host, she wasn’t sure if the voice was only in her thoughts or not:

  I AM CAROLUS THAT WAS A GIFT FROM CAROLUS CAROLUS AND WHAT IS YOUR NAME YOU’LL TELL ME WHEN I TAKE YOUR HEAD UNDER WITH ME TO THE BEAUTIFUL THE LIGHTLESS BOTTOM OF THE SEA WHERE THE DROWNED WILL MARRY US

  Guillaume grabbed an axe and hacked at the jaundiced ropes hauling the raft under, but some of these lashed about and stung him, too. Thomas sidestepped the second of the jellied things, which were not graceful out of water, and saw what the priest was doing. He stepped over and cut the twine. The priest opened a sack and flung it now, hoping he was right about its properties.

  The properties of salt.

  He was.

  The one he salted twitched and recoiled at the first grains of the desiccant, and, when showered with a proper fistful, browned and died, melting from around the stinking head of the woman, which now lay still and dead.

  Thomas sheathed his sword and opened two sacks, grabbing one in each fist; he hurled these at the monster that was hurting Delphine and it, too, hissed and died its second death, leaving the captain’s head openmouthed in a rictus of betrayal and pain.

  The sun was long gone now, and the gloaming was upon them.

  The water shone with phosphorescence; it would have been impossible to count the number of them moving about in the river.

  “Salt!” Thomas yelled to Guillaume. “Salt the bastard that’s sinking us!”

  He turned now and ran for the sacks, as Thomas also went to grab more, but a fresh bloom of tentacles rose from the river and lashed the fore of the raft, pulling it so sharply that the salt, the weapons, the fish, the men, and the girl all went into the cold water.

  They plunged into the river, which was mercifully shallow here, having flattened out to flow around the dam as best it could, perhaps thirty yards from the shore. At once, the priest grabbed for Delphine and made for the bank, half swimming and half stumbling on the bottom.

  At the same time, Guillaume put himself under Thomas and hoisted him to help keep his head above water.

  They got ten yards before the things realized where they were.

  And the stinging began again.

  The large one, visible now that night had come, shone dimly as a sort of luminous, grayish-white sail in the middle of the dead island; it could not move from the deeper middle of the Rhône, but it sent out long strands of its underside, trying to wrap them around the fleeing men and the fleeing child, which it wanted most. Its tendrils smoked and broke when she touched them with her stinger, but the smaller swimmers were stinging them dead.

  Thomas lived because his armor and surcoat protected him from the worst of the stings. Delphine lived because the priest used his body to shield her.

  Guillaume was taken.

  He had been pushing Thomas forward, but the things had stung his submerged groin and legs countless times, and he fell behind, jerking now with every sting.

  Three or four of them crowded around him now and brushed him all over with their frills.

  The poison in him stopped his heart.

  He went still and sank.

  The tentacles from the big one webbed him now; they pulled his head from him and reeled it back into itself, where a new swimmer would be made. Guillaume’s body was pulled into the island.

  Thomas, unaware of Guillaume’s fate and mad to get out of the river, strode through the shallower water now, bulling forward so as not to slip under; he caught up with the envenomed priest, who was barely moving, his remaining force going to his arms, which held the girl up and out of the water.

  She had passed out.

  She was dead weight.

  And yet he held her.

  The knight would never forget the image of the faltering priest holding the girl up; how like the raising of the Eucharist it looked.

  Thomas, kicking one of the swimmers out of the way, grabbed the priest’s belt, hauling him the last yards to the shore. The priest wanted to fall, but Thomas would not let him; not until they reached a small road by the river, crossed that, and made their way to a field gone fallow and wild with lavender bushes past their flowering.

  They were almost in Provence.

  When the men and the girl were clear of the water, the tentacles from the thing in the island whipped around furiously, making a small rain fall around it, and, from below, a ghastly moaning came from the submerged and captive mouths of the dead.

  It was supposed to take the girl.

  It would be punished.

  The island bobbed and shifted and moved south as the abomination in its middle dragged its prizes down the Rhône and to the sea.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Of the Cottage, and of the Song

  Thomas took the girl from Père Matthieu, hoisting her over his shoulder in the same way that Jacquot had so long ago on that rainy afternoon in Normandy. The knight pulled the priest along by the arm for as far as the cleric could walk, which was not far; he was struggling to breathe, and his face had swollen so badly his eyes had shut. He looked dead already. He collapsed in a field not far from a house where the light of a hearth fire danced behind closed shutters.

  Thomas, dripping and cold in his armor, laid the girl down next to the priest. He knew they would both need warmth—he must go to the house, and he must hurry—but the priest sounded as if he were choking even now. Thomas stripped down to his shirt and
breeches and propped Père Matthieu’s head up as best he could with the soaked gambeson he wore beneath his chain mail, and that seemed to help.

  The priest pawed the air blindly with one shaking hand, and Thomas squeezed it.

  “Don’t die, bugger,” he said, now picking up the girl and sloshing through the high grass and wildflowers toward the cottage.

  Dogs barked at him from inside, and he heard a goat bleat as well. A shadow blocked the firelit gaps in the shutters as someone inside peeked at him. He held the girl out as if she were his bond of peace.

  “I am unarmed. I need help.”

  “Are you sick?” an old man said.

  “No.”

  “Well, I am. I buried my last son yesterday and today I can’t stop sneezing. I know what that means.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Our ship sank in the river. My daughter will die without warmth.”

  “She’ll die if she comes in here, like as not. There’s a horse blanket in the stable, if nobody’s taken it.”

  “I want to bring her near the fire. Please.”

  “Your choice,” he said, and drew the bolt, letting the door swing wide.

  The goat ran out but stayed near the house.

  The dogs whimpered and barked uncertainly until their master kicked them, which was what he always did to show them a visitor was safe, so they stopped and settled near the fire, one of them halfheartedly wagging her tail. They were kicked again to clear a spot for the girl, who was waking up now.

  She whimpered.

  “What happened to your faces?” the old man said.

  “River. Something in it stung us.”

  He looked at the old man now, with his fine white hair plastered to his head, and saw the sorrow in his eyes, and the sag of the skin around them. The man looked gray. The man looked sick.

  “Stung you? I’ve fished that river fifty years and nothing ever stung me.”

  “I’ll talk later. Our priest dies tonight, but not in a field.”

  The old man looked Thomas over but then sighed, concluding that he had nothing to lose by trusting him; death at this giant’s hands would be kinder than what would come in a day or two.

  And it would be nice to see a priest.

  “Bring him, then.”

  The old man sneezed three times in a row and crossed himself as Thomas limped off into the darkness beyond the door.

  The female dog licked the priest’s face.

  Thomas went to push it away, but Delphine pointed at the priest’s mouth, which bore a hint of a smile, so Thomas acceded. He wondered how long the man had left—he had thrown up violently and now he couldn’t stop shaking; worse, he fought for every breath.

  But he did not cry out.

  “You might not have been a soldier, bugger, but you’re tough.”

  “Stop calling him that,” said the girl.

  Thomas turned an angry glance at her but softened it immediately.

  “Yes.”

  He put his hand on the priest’s chest.

  The priest fought one of his slitted eyes open and looked at the knight. Then he looked up and past him, pointing at something on the wall.

  A lute hung diagonally, covered in dust, near several upside-down bouquets of dried flowers.

  Thomas turned now to the old man and said, “Do you play?”

  “I did,” he said, holding up two hands with gnarled fingers. “I thought I wanted to be a troubadour, but then I married.”

  “Can you play at all?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  The old man clambered onto a stump and pulled the instrument down from its pegs, blowing a plume of dust off it. He tried to tune it, but couldn’t manage with his wrecked fingers; he plucked a few sour strings and limped through half a Provençal love song, singing in his croaking voice; then he couldn’t stand the sound of himself anymore, and he stopped.

  He sneezed, wincing, putting his finger to his neck and feeling for the first time the exquisitely painful, acorn-sized lump there.

  “And so,” he said, letting the lute dangle from his hand.

  He looked at the man dying by the fire, and at the sadness in the knight’s face, and he thought about the shallow graves near the lavender. All he could do was to chuckle without humor, coughing as he did, shaking his head at the lies he’d believed in his youth about God’s love and mercy.

  At least there might be someone to bury him now, in the lavender, near all that he had loved.

  The girl held out her hand for the lute.

  He narrowed his eyes; she seemed half asleep, and he knew no young girls who played.

  Yet, when he handed it to her, she tuned it expertly.

  “I had no idea,” Thomas said, but she ignored him and he was silent.

  She played.

  She sang.

  It was a song Thomas dimly remembered from his wedding feast, when his wife’s eyes looked so kindly upon him; he had thrown a handful of sweetened nuts into his mouth, and his new, heavy ring had hit his tooth, making him swear, making her laugh. The whole table had laughed.

  From that day forward, three taps of her ring on anything meant, Do you remember our wedding day? and three taps on his part meant, God, yes.

  He recalled it all quite sharply: the smell of bergamot in her hair, the whiteness of her neck, her eyes pear-green, how sweet the marriage bed had been. How, even after years of amorous tusslings with camp women and kitchen girls, he had stood nervously while the old women took the ribbons off his verge, looking at this beauty whose pale, lovely belly was his to put children in and whose mouth was his to kiss for as long as she lived.

  Or, as it turned out, until he left for war.

  The old man knew this song, too; it was the one he had learned in Valence his seventeenth year, in the music teacher’s studio above a candle shop, where those gorgeous sounds had married themselves to the smell of tallow such that even fifty years later he could not smell candles in church without being transported. It was this song, more than any other, that made him want to travel with his lute; it was this one he played to seduce the chestnut-haired girl whose pregnancy anchored him on this little patch of land forever.

  The priest also remembered the song. He had heard it just before he went to take orders, when the bishop’s personal musician came to the lord’s castle and hushed the room with it, making it seem possible to Matthieu that a greater world lay beyond the disappointment of his father and the vanity of his brother; a world where God’s love was unfiltered by priests or texts and could be had freely by looking up at the sky. Or hearing a man sing. It was a promise of joy he would not feel again until the May before the Great Death came, a joy made even brighter by how swiftly it was seized back again, how much it cost him.

  It had never occurred to him that a female voice might animate those fondly remembered lyrics even more sweetly than that long-ago minstrel in the bishop’s train, but now it did.

  The next two days would be hard.

  Thomas would dig Père Matthieu’s grave as their host burned with fever and lost his reason; he would pull Matthieu from under the arms while his feet dragged and the girl cried and he got a last noseful of the priest’s woolly, winey, lonely smell. The following day Thomas would dig another grave and lay the old man in it without ever learning his name, though he knew the name of the wife, because it was to her the old man addressed his last words. On the third day, he and the girl would make for Avignon, pulling the little goat on a rope, trying to call the dogs to follow them; but the male would stay whimpering in his master’s house and the female would lie on his grave, wagging her tail at them until their forward motion eclipsed her behind a stand of goldenrod.

  That would be tomorrow.

  For this moment, all three men remembered the best hours of their lives.

  When the song finished, the priest spoke.

  “The river,” he said, and Thomas thought he meant the Rhône, the one that h
ad killed him.

  “River froze last winter…saw you on skates of horse’s shinbones…and now…so white…your legs…not red at all.”

  Thomas understood now.

  “Moon’s light…on you…”

  He wanted to turn his gaze away at this talk of love between men, but couldn’t; he knew it was the last he would see of this flawed priest who had become so dear to him so quickly. This was harder than the comte’s death. For all his goodness, the comte was not gentle; he was of this world, and of the brutality of the world. This man, Matthieu Hanicotte, seemed to have been misplaced here.

  He hoped there was wine in his Heaven.

  Could a sodomite attain to Heaven? He remembered the priest holding the girl up out of the water as the abominations stung the life from him.

  Hoc est corpus meum.

  If that was not good enough, nothing would be.

  “Robert…” he said now, grabbing Thomas’s hand.

  “Thomas,” the knight said in the husky voice of one fighting with tears, “I am Thomas.”

  “No…find Robert…tell him…”

  “Who’s Robert?”

  “My brother…tell him…”

  “Tell him what?”

  The priest worked one eye open again and looked at Thomas, breathing with great difficulty.

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  The priest smiled.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He breathed three more hard breaths, each one longer in coming, and then he stopped.

  Thomas had seen so many die that his hand moved with the reflex to close the priest’s eyes, but they were already glued shut for good.

  “Play another song, would you?” the old man said.

  Delphine looked up at him, surprised he was looking at her.

  He repeated himself, and she looked down at the instrument in her lap as though it had just appeared there. Her tears fell on its face.

  “Play us something sad and sweet.”

  “Go on,” the knight said. “I don’t think his soul’s so far above us yet.”

  She gave them a look and a sad smile that puzzled the old man, but Thomas had seen enough from her to understand.

  She doesn’t know how.