Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  “Christ!” he roared. “Did you see what I just had to do because of one of you blind pricks? And I’ll do the same to any man that looses on a woman or a child again, understand? You look first. This doesn’t fucking go, you hear?” The thirty Englishmen, many of whom had served under him when he was a centenar under King Edward, all said, “Aye, sir.” His Gascon second in command repeated the order in French, and the dozen Gascons nodded, too.

  He walked to the body of a very rich knight, a big, young fellow in exquisite armor that had nonetheless failed to stop the arrow that went through his aventail under the chin. He sorted through the pouch on the fellow’s belt and took the coins out, tossing aside a piece of rolled parchment bound with a cloth-of-gold ribbon.

  “What were you quarreling about, then, eh?” he asked the dead man jovially. His Gascon was just picking up the dead knight’s facedown adversary by the hair, meaning to cut his throat, when Janus glanced over. The big man was still breathing, but not for long. The knife was under the chin, angling for the jugular behind the half-white beard.

  That beard.

  “Attends!” he said.

  The Gascon looked at him, still holding a fistful of greasy longish hair, so comfortable with killing that he might as well have been holding a flower he was about to be asked not to gather.

  “Je regards son visage,” Blount said.

  The Gascon lifted the head higher, the eyes in it rolling white.

  It was the man from the stews.

  The big Frenchman who had walked into the Stews of the Arch like a goddamned bear and caused them all to piss their tubs. He could have killed half of them, maybe the lot, but didn’t.

  Blount had no idea what had stayed the Frenchy’s hand, but quid pro quo was one of the few Latin terms he knew and he was a big believer in it.

  “Not him,” he said. Then, in case somebody else happened over, he shouted it and pointed down at the man.

  Not him.

  Now the routiers killed the rest, took their money and horses, and melted back into the woods.

  The wind had started up.

  Thomas woke with his head in a woman’s lap.

  Not a woman’s.

  A girl’s.

  Her luminous, almost lupine gray eyes looked down into his as she wiped his temples. It was hard to focus—everything looked blurry. Something moved behind her, and he thought he saw wings.

  He had trouble remembering the last time he had seen her, yet it seemed very important that he should.

  “You left wildflowers,” he said.

  “What?” she said, smiling.

  He slept.

  Near dark, he woke again, and smelled food.

  Delphine had made a good, hot fire from blackthorn wood, and over that she boiled thyme, chard, and turnips in a soldier’s wide-brimmed helmet. He heard a sound that at first seemed quite natural, but which he then remembered as wondrous.

  A horse’s whinny.

  Jibreel stood eating grass near the stream, handsome and brown with white forelegs.

  “He wouldn’t go away,” she said.

  “He was mine.”

  She nodded.

  “He remembers you. There’s another horse hanging around, but it’s scared. A little horse.”

  “We’ll catch him,” Thomas said. “Can you ride?”

  “Just a donkey.”

  “That’s something. I’ll teach you.”

  He sat up against his tree, rubbing the back of his head and looking at her. He remembered being thumped now. Why didn’t his head hurt?

  And the girl. Was she just a cat’s whisker taller? Was there the hint of a curve in her hips?

  “You’re different,” he said.

  “So are you.”

  She handed him a few sloe berries to eat.

  He ate their flesh, then spat out the pits, making a face.

  “They’ll be sweeter after a frost,” she said.

  “You know what we’ve come to do now, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Mostly.”

  “I won’t like it, will I?”

  “Why should you? I don’t like it.”

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  “You’re not that different, are you?”

  He shook his head, smiling.

  “But you’re ready,” she said. “We’re both ready.”

  He looked at her for a long while.

  “What?” she said.

  “I know what’s different about you.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got tits.”

  She shook her head slowly at him.

  “It’s true. Just little ones, but they’re there.”

  She threw a sloe berry, which hit him exactly in the middle of the forehead.

  “I think you spout vulgarity all the time because you’re afraid to see the big part of yourself that’s good.”

  “And I think you’re changing the subject. We have to hide those.”

  “I will,” she said.

  She came nearer to him now and showed him a piece of parchment rolled up in a ribbon of cloth-of-gold.

  “What’s that? The deed to a manor?”

  “It’s an invitation.”

  “To what?”

  “To dine with His Holiness at a great feast of warriors.”

  “An invitation for the dead one over there, not for me.”

  “You are the dead one.”

  Thomas blinked at her, not understanding her game.

  She went over to the dead comte and unbuckled his polished helm, pulling it off him. She brought it over to Thomas.

  “How am I supposed to eat if I keep a whoring helmet on all the time? Or speak? Or…”

  She held up the helmet to him.

  The last of the light reflected in its fine steel, the color of smoke and lavender; the helmet also reflected a face back at Thomas.

  But it wasn’t his face.

  She took him down to the stream and asked him to kneel.

  She took water in her hands and asked him if he forgave the dead man whose face he now wore.

  He paused; and then he said yes, and she poured water over his head.

  She asked him if there was anyone else he carried anger for.

  He paused again, and she waited.

  “My wife,” he said.

  “Do you forgive her?”

  “I can’t.”

  She looked at him gravely.

  “You can,” she said. “If you choose to.”

  “No,” he said, his eyes turned to the side.

  “Then go back to Picardy,” she said, and she let the water fall from her hands.

  He looked down at his reflection in the stream; it was too dark for him to see clearly, but he could make out the outline of a bearded man with long hair. He was himself again.

  The miracle was spent.

  Delphine went back to where her makeshift pot of soup smoked and began to eat. She poured some for Thomas, and they ate in silence, although she looked at him the whole time.

  She took his bowl and the helmet and walked to the stream to rinse them.

  “Do you want to try again?” she said.

  “Tell me she’s dead. Tell me the plague took her and she died in a fever saying she was sorry. Maybe then.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. That’s not forgiveness, it’s justice. And wretched justice at that.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “It just does,” she said.

  “Whatever we have to do in that city—and I’m frightened of that city, I’m not ashamed to tell you—it’s going to get us killed, right? Isn’t that enough?”

  She furrowed her brow, thinking.

  “No,” she said, and handed him the clean vessels.

  “What do you want me to do with these?”

  “Put them somewhere, I don’t know. I’m not your wife.”

  He tossed them down.

  She started walking toward the road.

  “Wait,” he said. “Delph
ine.”

  She looked at him with that drowsy look he had come to dread; the look that meant she was about to speak words that weren’t her own.

  “Go back to Picardy and ask the bishop to pardon you, if he’s still alive. He’ll send you on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, or maybe on crusade, if there’s anyone left to make war on in the east; and back you’ll come to the bishop, and you’ll say words you don’t mean and he’ll say words he doesn’t mean, and you’ll get your castle back. If you can find anyone to run it. And be a seigneur, if anyone’s alive to grow the wheat. And you won’t have to forgive anyone or be merciful, or thoughtful or courteous, because devils will rule here. They’ll kill the good ones first, and when all the good men are dead, they’ll come for men like you, who were almost sound, but not quite; the bowls that leaked. And when you’re gone, the worst of men will find themselves in the teeth of their masters, because those that fell have no love for man. And they’ll take good and bad alike to Hell, because there won’t be anyplace but Hell anymore. Not without love. Not without forgiveness.”

  Thomas stood and looked at her, and she at him, and night came on with a strong wind in the trees.

  “We all fall short of perfection. You. Me. Père Matthieu. We all disappoint someone. Can we forgive only those who sinned against others?”

  He closed his eyes and saw the priest’s swollen, stung face, smiling weakly at the thought of his brother.

  If you see Robert, tell him

  Tell him

  I don’t know

  Do you forgive her?

  TWENTY-NINE

  Of Marguerite of Péronne

  Thomas de Givras married Marguerite de Péronne on a sleeting Candlemas Day, 1341. The daughter of a minor seigneur of the lagoons, she still brought a decent dowry: a cedar chest, three mares, two tapestries, ten gold livres, and a much-coveted recipe for pâté of smoked eel. Her true dowry was twofold. First, her connections—her mother’s sister had married into the family of the great Enguerrand de Coucy. Next, and more troublesome, was her beauty. Many lords and not a few merchants had sought her hand, and yet her father had held out, hoping to thicken his descendancy with a drop or two of royal blood. It never came. By the time he lowered his standards, Marguerite was twenty.

  Bad luck spoiled two near-matches. One knight of Abbeville died from a bee sting. The other, the very handsome son of a Ghent textiles merchant, hanged himself following an argument with his true love, a laundress, regarding his impending nuptials to a Frenchwoman he had never met.

  Had he seen his betrothed, he might have only toyed with the rope.

  Beautiful or no, Marguerite was on the waning end of her twenty-third year. Worse, it was widely rumored that she numbered among the nearly two hundred girls in Picardy to have been deflowered by the troubadour Jehan of Poitou, who was keeping count, if not naming names, in his verses. Even if this was true, she was a lucky catch for a foul-mouthed knight of low birth like Thomas de Givras. The father’s agreement had been woven from three cloths: his desperation to see her avoid the nunnery; his love for the Comte de Givras, who had proposed the match; and the girl’s own preference.

  At first she had been wary of the match, disappointed to receive no letter from Thomas, rightly suspecting that his education stopped at the tiltyard.

  It was October when he came to visit.

  As soon as she saw what a costaud Thomas was, thin of waist, thick of chest, with his hair still dark on the fine head he had to lower to enter a room, his face still clear of the arrow-pit she would never see, she was dressed for the oven.

  When she saw the impish humor in his eye, she was cooked. If he had few letters, he was neither stupid nor dull.

  She was well matched for Thomas in this way, too.

  It was common for her to take the Lord’s name in vain twenty times between confessions.

  She did it the moment she laid eyes on her future husband.

  “My God,” she said, too low for anyone to hear.

  And then she said it again.

  On the cool October day of their meeting, Thomas had gone with a riding party that included the Seigneur de Péronne, the Comte de Givras, and Marguerite. From the moment she spoke, he was intimidated by her learning—this was no kitchen woman, as his mother had been; this Marguerite de Péronne not only knew Latin, she told jokes in it; following a hawk’s near-refusal to come down from its tree, she said something to her paunchy, well-dressed abbot of an uncle that nearly made him tumble sideways from his palfrey. She sang, too, and not out of duty. Her voice was unfiltered joy. On the ride back, at any time the men ran out of words to say about the king or the war or the quality of the horses, she lit up her father’s birch woods with snatches of carols, and sometimes looked at her suitor to see if he was moved.

  He was, and that was good.

  For at that young age, she still told herself she would never lie beneath a man who did not love a song.

  On the day after their wedding, Thomas took his new bride to the top of the old Norman tower he had just received from the Comte de Givras. The February sky, gray, though no longer spitting ice, stretched above them, and the brown fields and few houses of Arpentel stretched below. His wife was smarter than he would ever be and prettier than he thought wives were made, and yet she was happy with him. Her pleasure in the marriage bed had seemed to touch even her soul, and her verdant eyes had rarely left his; three taps of her ring would always remind him of the three times he took her. “Once like a bull, once like a fox, once softly as a lamb,” she said. He would be faithful to her. They would have many sons. He had risen. By God and by the grace of his beloved seigneur, he had risen.

  His mother, a widow and a sort of handsome, dark-haired giantess, had worked in the comte’s kitchens. She had told Thomas his father was a German knight on pilgrimage to Spain, ironic since she herself was the bastard of a Spanish knight, Tomás de Oviedo, whom she remembered in her nightly prayers though he was ignorant of her existence. She wedded young to a joiner’s son who was already hurting from the kidneys that would fail before her daughter was three. She never married again. She came home smelling of grease and flour, bearing bones, cheese rinds, second cuts of meat, and stale bread from the comte’s table, keeping Thomas and his older half-sister fed when others went hungry. Thomas had been such a large and physically gifted boy that the comte had taken him on as a page, and soon squire. He took to sword, lance, and horse so naturally that it was clear he had chivalry in his blood if not in his pedigree. After his accidental knighting at Cambrai, Thomas had distinguished himself at tourneys and in the comte’s personal affrays; he had proven invaluable at training younger men and had endeared himself to the comte, despite the latter’s godliness and his own coarse humor.

  By the time his mother died, Thomas’s sister was married and he was a necessary part of the comte’s retinue. The gift of Arpentel and its crumbling, square tower to Thomas had enraged one better-born knight who, at a Michaelmas feast following Thomas’s departure, got so far into his cups that he told the comte he felt himself more deserving of land than that “fatherless Knight of the Hare.” The comte had kept his temper. The Comte de Givras never raised his voice. He coolly told the other man, toying with the mustachios that were his only concession to vanity, “If you covet Sir Thomas’s land, fight him for it. To the death. I shall grant you the title if you win.”

  The man had found reasons that this would not do.

  “Then hold your tongue. Wine makes men fools, and I myself have said foolish things in my cups. But if you wish to be welcome at my table, and in my house, you will never again let me hear you slander a fellow knight in his absence. Try me on this and you will think men lucky who sleep under roofs, let alone in towers. Am I understood?”

  He was.

  “It seems painfully obvious to me,” Marguerite of Péronne, Lady of Arpentel, had said to her new husband on that morning, “that the Comte de Givras is your father.”

  She stood there,
stunning in her fox-fur mantle, her greenish eyes alight with mirth, and he was no more sure whether she was jesting than if she had said it in Latin.

  He had laughed at her, and she had never said it again.

  And he had never thought about it again until Crécy, when he watched the great man die a man’s death.

  Wouldn’t he have told him then?

  No.

  Not a man who would not cry out.

  Was it a promise to his mother? To God?

  He would never know.

  But now he thought she was right.

  Marguerite, who saw through everything.

  Marguerite, who knew how to cut her losses.

  She had chosen the son over the father.

  Over him.

  Over honor.

  And she was right.

  When Delphine saw the knight’s eyes soften, she reached her small hand out, and he took it in his large one. And she led him down to the stream, and, with its cool water, washed his head and his feet, and helped him wash the anger from his heart.

  His own face slipped from him once again, and fell in the water; and again he assumed the aspect of his dead rival.

  PART IV

  The walls of God’s kingdom held. And though the devils despaired of breaking the walls and burning the deep architecture of Heaven, yet were the angels stoppered in and could not come safely out; and so, unchallenged in the middle lands, the wicked ones delighted in what they wrought there. So they resolved among them to hold the plains and the mountains in their fist, and not to suffer the cities of men to live; but rather to reign there, on the thrones of their second Hell, with the first as their footstool and the angels of God trapped above.

  They would weave sackcloth to mask the sun.

  They would confound the father to kill his son, and then would they kill the father.

  They would replace the beasts with clockwork things and the birds with dead hands that flew.

  It had already begun.

  And the angels of God stood at the walls of Heaven and sorrowed at the misery below, and fell out amongst themselves, some saying it was better to perish at once, in hot struggle for man’s sake, lest the Lord return to find the earth empty of men; others cried that if they left their walls, He would return to find Heaven bereft of angels and smoldering, and Lucifer instead on His throne.