It followed her outside and to the base of the tree, but it had drawn around itself her blanket, which she had forgotten inside, and she could not see what it was; she thought she saw a blackened face and a wisp of hair.
You stupid Norman cunt you’ll die in your sleep tonight and fall from that tree like rotten fruit
“I will not fall. And you will not be here in the morning. There are wicked things strong enough to harm me, but you are not one of them. You’re a scarecrow. You are made of lies, and you are not made well. I feared you, but now I pity your suffering. Good night.”
The only sound that answered Delphine was the wind in the leaves around her.
By and by she slept.
In the morning, she saw her blanket at the bottom of the tree. A profanity of sorts lay atop it, but a very sad one, made from a broom, three cross-sticks, and the missing arms from the nuns in the garden. A skull crowned with reddish-gray hair sat atop the broom. She dragged the blanket over to the garden, then took the thing apart, using the saw she found in the chapel to cut the twine that bound it together. She put the human remains in the garden and said an Ave Maria over them. She used the broom to sweep the chapel out and then leaned it against the chapel door.
Delphine shook out her blanket and put it around her shoulders, walking down the road that led to Orange and then to the city of the pope.
TWENTY-SIX
Of Thomas, and of an Oath Long Overdue
The girl was gone.
The knight looked around their camp for signs that she had been taken, but found nothing.
He was sure she had left.
She had barely spoken since the priest’s death, and he believed she blamed him for it.
“We’ll pay for that,” she had said when he cut the raftsman’s throat, and he was sure she had decided the priest’s death was ordained from the moment Thomas broke her commandment not to kill.
He wasn’t sure she was wrong.
Yet he could not bring himself to regret finishing that wretched, murderous walleye.
“Goddamn it,” he said, feeling truly lost for the first time since this had all begun. Who was he now, without his pack of brigands, without that girl and her visions, without a coat of arms on his chest or a horse or the first whoring idea what he might do if he never saw her again?
“Goddamn it.”
Thomas called for her a dozen times or more, but then his voice went hoarse fighting the dry wind, and he set off down the road heading south.
If he took big steps, he just might pass her.
When the big, dirty soldier saw anyone at all, he asked, “Have you seen a girl?” The first response he got, other than a shrug, or a quick flight up a hill or into the shadows of a thicket, was from a Provençal with a deeply lined face. The man nodded, slowly got up from the shadow of his house, and went inside, fetching out a homely teenager who pouted her lips at Thomas despite the fact that she was nursing a large infant.
There was no fixing the misunderstanding.
From then on, Thomas said, “I’m looking for my daughter—have you seen a young blond girl?” but those were too many words for the others he caught sight of. They either cupped a hand to an ear and shook their heads, or else they fired their own language back at him, causing him to cup his hand and shake his head.
He passed a large ocher rock covered in scrub, and then a small village. Two bearded men sat on the ground outside a house with missing roof tiles, one of them whittling a stick with a knife, the other sitting far away from him, holding a bloody cloth to his face and glaring at Thomas as he passed. A pig slept in the sun nearby.
He kept walking into the evening, past a convent with a garden full of long-dead nuns and then to a gully, where he lay down and slept until just before sunrise.
The castle on the hill near Mornas flew the cross-key ensign that announced it belonged to the pope. When he tried to approach the walled city, he was shouted away without even the chance to ask about the girl.
“Goddamn it.”
As he turned his back on Mornas, he heard bells ringing in the south.
He found out why within the hour.
His first thought, upon seeing the crowd gathered in the street of the next village he came to, was that the plague must be over here. Although he had seen a great many desiccated cadavers in Provence, he had not seen a fresh body in some time, and these people were standing near one another with no apparent concern for contagion. As he drew closer, he saw that there were, in fact, fresh bodies here: a dozen or so of them laid out in front of the church. These were not plague victims, though. They bled. A priest bent over one on the end, removing an arrow that looked to have stuck the young man’s liver.
A very long arrow.
Several of the mourners saw Thomas now, and began to shout and point.
This was not just a group of villagers.
It was a group of furious villagers.
It was a mob.
“Oh, whore,” he said.
There were too many to fight and he was too encumbered to run.
Mostly women and old men, too.
This would be a hell of a way to die.
He showed them his hands.
An old man grabbed one of these and jerked him toward the bodies. He pulled away, but then several sets of hands grabbed him, and he allowed himself to be pulled and pushed along. A woman whose eyes blazed wide with grief and hate dipped her hand in a young corpse’s wound and rubbed blood on Thomas’s face.
“Wait! I haven’t done anything!” he said, though he wasn’t sure they could hear him through the shouts.
“I did not kill these men!”
He was hit several times, once with the end of a rake, and a remarkably quick little boy took Thomas’s sword from his sheath, running away with it, its edge making sparks on the ground.
Another man now shouted at the crowd and moved his hands in a gesture to suggest calm, although he still held in one hand the arrow he had just pulled from a dead man.
It was their priest.
Despite his predicament, Thomas suddenly missed Père Matthieu so badly he almost sobbed.
The crowd stopped its jeering.
“You are…from France?” the cleric said.
“Yes.”
“Not English?”
“No! Picardy. I’m from Picardy,” he said, careful to enunciate every syllable, pointing back up the road that led north.
“You are come for crusade?”
“I…am looking for my daughter. Have you seen a strange girl? A blond girl?”
The priest’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head, suspicious of distraction.
“You are not with these English routiers?” he said now, showing Thomas the bloody arrow. Priest or not, he looked capable of shoving it into Thomas’s eye.
“No,” Thomas said solemnly. “I swear it.”
An old man, his cheeks soaked with tears, said something to the priest and pointed at the church. The priest nodded.
“You make your oath in church.”
Thomas knelt. The priest stood before him.
“Are you a knight of France?”
“I am.”
“Swear it.”
“Yes. I do so swear.”
“By Saint Michael and Saint Denis?”
“By Saint Michael and Saint Denis, I swear that I am a knight.”
“Are you a knight turned routier? Brigand?”
“No.”
“Swear it.”
“I swear I am no brigand, nor taker of men’s goods, nor of their lives. I swear that I am a loyal knight of France, servant to God and to the king, and a friend to Provence.”
“These men who come…with the long bows. They are routiers. If you see them, and you are able, you give them God’s justice? You will find others and give them justice?”
“Yes. I swear it.”
The priest motioned for Thomas to stand, and he did so.
Now the holy man made an announceme
nt to the crowd.
Many nodded, and some stepped forward to clap the knight’s shoulder.
The boy brought his sword back, his father at his arm, the point well off the ground.
Thomas wiped it with the tail of his gambeson and sheathed it.
Before he left, women sat him down and pulled off his boots. His feet and face were washed for him. He was offered a pot of lukewarm chicken stew, redolent with garlic and leeks, and so thick the wooden spoon stuck straight up out of it.
He ate it all.
He stood tall as he walked toward the town of Orange. Even in his all-but-ruined chain mail, even with his tattered boots and his sweat and rust-stained gambeson, his bearing made him look more like a knight than he had in years.
A hare crossed the road in front of him.
He laughed.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Of the Routiers
The city of Orange sat behind a big Roman arch that seemed to guard the road it straddled, the road leading up to the gates. Shops and houses that had sprung up outside the city walls leaned against those walls, or against one another, but a reverential space had been left around the arch. It was as if the emperor or general who had commanded it to be raised were still held in such awe that his arch was left unmarred, even when men seeking stone for houses poached freely from the amphitheater against the hill.
The bathhouse sat closer to the arch than any other building, and the girls who worked there loved the old monument. They pulled vines from it and pulled up young trees whose roots might one day have harmed its foundations. They came to sit against its cool stone when they had to get out of the steam. Like the arch itself, these girls were known.
Travelers from all over Provence and Langue d’Oc knew about the Stews of the Arch, as the bathhouse was called, and about the women who worked there; not the fairest flowers of Orange, perhaps, for those were sent to Avignon; these were the gently flawed pretty ones that would have gone south but for a mole or the weakness of a chin. Girls who had not married because their fathers put them out to get money, or girls who had married, found it bitter, and came to live in the shadow of the arch. Girls who knew pleasure and taught it.
The sun had just gone down when Thomas approached the hulking Roman arch and the small town outside the town. He had little money, so there was no point in going up to the gates of Orange, which were closed in any case, or to the cluster of inns and wine shops just past the arch, whose lanterns advertised they were open for commerce. He did want a look at the town, though; he had first heard the name of this city in a chanson de geste called “La Prise d’Orange,” in which a splendid Arab queen betrayed her husband and her faith to deliver the city to the Franks.
“You’re all alike, aren’t you?”
He was just about to leave the road and head into the countryside, hoping to find some fallow vineyard in which to sleep, but he saw a lovely young woman dash topless from a large house, laughing; a fair-haired young man, down to his breeches, stumbled out and fished her back in. It would do Thomas’s eyes no harm if they fell upon a pretty whore before he took to his field, so he strayed closer to the Stews of the Arch, smiling a little. Ten years earlier, with a pouch full of deniers, he would have gone into this place, which steamed enticingly in the first cool of the evening, and which rang with laughter.
Now he was content to look.
He saw that one man sat outside the building, drinking from a flagon, swaying on his bench. A guard. He called inside to the others, but not in French, and not in Provençal.
His language was English.
And his weapon was a longbow, strung and propped against his bench, with a fence of three arrows stuck in the ground.
A stack of other bows leaned against the wall near him, along with a heap of quivers and a couple of poleaxes.
Thomas stopped cold.
These were the killers he had sworn to give God’s justice, drunk on wine purchased with the blood of the last village. They would enjoy these women and be on their way in the morning, before news of the massacre reached Orange and the girls of this place stopped laughing with them. From the number of dead in the last town, these archers were likely only one wing of the company—the others would have secured a camp and fanned out to find other entertainments. If this was the only brothel, they would come here in shifts.
Did they even care if news reached Orange while they were still here? It was unlikely the provost of the town or the local seigneur could raise enough men to challenge this band. The plague was on the wane here, but it had done its work. More houses were empty than not, and for every girl laughing in the stews, there were probably two shoveled under in a common hole nearby, or tossed in the river.
Thomas faded between two houses before the drunk sentinel turned his attention back to the road. The knight crouched down in an alley and watched, batting away an orange cat that purred and rubbed itself against him.
It was not long before the watchman went to piss.
The Englishman wove his way into the alley, seemed about to piss against the bordello’s wall, then apparently thought better of raising a stink in the Stews of the Arch and turned to piss against the building across. He barely noticed Thomas, who was alone, walking rather than running, seeming intent on simply passing the man. Rather, he put one hand over the man’s mouth and used the other to ram his head twice against a house beam. The man went limp, still pissing, and Thomas let him fall.
The knight unsheathed his sword and moved across the courtyard, stopping just before the door. “Saint Denis and glory,” he whispered bitterly, and now breathed in and out twice like something between a bellows and a bull.
He stepped through the doorway and into a womb of flickering candles and steam. His knees were bent as he walked in, and his chain hauberk rasped against a beam.
He carried his sword over his shoulder, one hand on the pommel, the other under the quillons; he was ready to kill with it.
Several of the men in the tubs gasped. They all stared at him, none of them daring to speak.
They saw that this man was lethal.
He was huge and armored and they had seen enough fighting to know a killer’s eyes, even through steam and in the flickering light of candles.
In an open field they would have stuck him to his death with arrows, but here they were drunk and naked and at close quarters; just so many heads bobbing in hot water.
A woman, who had been smiling at first, thinking him one of their company, now felt the fear of the archers and said, in French, “Please sir, do not quarrel here.”
Another woman echoed her in Provençal.
He stepped farther in, moving so his back was not to the open door. One Englishman considered the plank spanning his tub, the remains of a game hen and two cups of wine upon it; could he wrench the plank up and wield it as a club and a shield? He would have no leverage in the tub, and he would be decapitated before he could get out of it.
The man in the tub nearest Thomas prepared to splash water in his face, clamber over the girl next to him, and roll over the edge, hoping to find his dagger on his belt among his clothes, drunk and in the half darkness; but the girl, sensing his tension, grabbed his bitte underwater as if to hold him fast by it. Even had she not, the plan seemed so clumsy to him that he couldn’t gather the nerve to move.
Nobody moved.
One ruddy blond man spoke to him in English, telling him to do it if he was going to, but Thomas did not understand.
Or care.
It was then that it happened.
He felt something touch his heart, as though tiny fingers were on it, holding it as gently as one might hold a bird.
Voices came to him, as if from far away.
Don’t kill him.
Don’t kill anyone else again.
Thomas.
Sir Thomas.
We’re going to pay for that.
Find my brother…tell my brother…
Do you swear to give them God’s justice
?
I swear.
He breathed in and cocked his hips, and the nearer men ducked underwater, one of the filles de joie screamed, but he stopped. He had fully intended to start lopping and gouging these helpless men in their four huge vats.
But he just stopped, waiting until the submerged men came up panting.
He looked at each man in turn, and each of them, even the ruddy one, looked away when his turn came.
He sheathed his sword.
“Not tonight,” he said, and backed out of the room.
None of them mistook his actions for cowardice.
He had them.
All of them.
And they knew it.
Thomas slept that night in the belfry of a small, dead church that overlooked the road; he doubted the routiers would follow him, but it was always better to act as though the worst might happen. On his way out of the stews, he had walked by the stables and seen them full; how desperately he longed for the feel of a horse under him, but a little voice in him said no and he knew it was her voice somehow. He left the stable alone and veered off the road and into the fields.
This belfry was a good spot.
More than for the brigands, of course, he was watching for the girl, whom he suspected he had passed up. It had occurred to him that he might have harmed her indirectly by letting those men live—what would they do with her, after all, if they found her? Yet her wishes were unmistakable.
Her command.
Well, who is she to command me?
Who are you to resist her?
He tried to answer that, but only said, “Huh.”
For whose sake did he keep pretending that she was not something like a saint? He had never believed that saints were anything more than figures in stories, no more a part of this world than basilisks or griffins or the other magnificent beasts nobody he knew had ever seen with their eyes.
And yet.
If he told anyone of this girl who spoke languages she did not speak and played instruments she did not play, they would say…
Witch.
That was what they would say.
Between Two Fires (9781101611616) Page 27
