Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  THIRTY-ONE

  Of the Feast, and of the Hunt of Stags

  The page of the Comte d’Évreux had turned so pale that the Valois Duc sitting to their right asked if the young man was well.

  “Yes, my lord,” the page said. “I have…I have not slept as well as I should have, for excitement at the chance to see the Holy Father.”

  “Eat a good piece of beef, boy; it will feed the blood. And throw a bit of wine on top of it, but not too much,” the great man said.

  “We are undeserving of such kindness, my lord,” said the Comte d’Évreux, getting a hardy slap on his shoulder from the older lord just before they both looked up to see the feast that was coming from the dressing area.

  It seemed that every creature that flew, swam, or walked had found its way to the trestle tables in the Grand Tinel. Swans with their necks twisted together as if in love floated amid armadas of game hens and quail, sails of swan, dove and peacock feathers jutting above them; these fleets cut through blue-plated “waters” of crabs and prawns and every imaginable fish, repeated every two yards so that each diner might reach his preferred dish. Before the diners ate, however, the steward walked both lengths of trestles, inclining over each plate a strange little coral tree hung with shark’s teeth and the horns of narwhal; the pendants were said to shiver in the presence of poison. They did not shiver. The pope rang a small bell calling for the meal to start, and conversation died in the room as the sounds of eating rose up.

  For Thomas, this had more than a whiff of the feast in the devilish Norman castle about it. He ate, though, and ate well. A serving boy filled his wine goblet, and he felt Delphine’s hand on his wrist. He looked at her, with her shorn hair, wearing the livery of the dead Navarrese page, her nascent breasts bound tight beneath it. Her gray eyes speared him. She shook her head.

  “What? Why?” he said.

  She leaned close and whispered, “Just don’t.”

  He whispered, too.

  “Poison?”

  “No.”

  “Will it damn my soul?”

  “I…I don’t think so.”

  “What, then?”

  Exasperated, she said, “Just drink it, then.”

  He didn’t for a long while.

  Then he forgot and drank.

  It was good.

  He heeled a drop from his lip just in time to see a viol player, who was introduced as the best in Aragon, stride into the middle of the hall, just at the end of tuning. He began, filling the room with his sad, exotic rhythms and complicated changes. Thomas knew the music, as well as the man. It was the very same one from the castle of the night tourney. As he had at that feast, the man went from guest to guest, and Thomas felt his insides go cold at the prospect of being recognized.

  The musician did look Thomas directly in the face, but no longer than he had at the Valois Duc; he must have seen only the smug, youthful face of the Comte d’Évreux. When the man passed, his hips rolling with the music he bowed out of the viol, Thomas breathed out in relief and drained his goblet.

  Delphine stepped on his foot and he glared at her.

  She glared back.

  Other musicians followed as the diners wrecked first this armada, then cross-shaped heaps of the finest pastries, nougats, and marchpanes Thomas or Delphine had ever seen. The tables were at last cleared of all but wine, and other entertainments commenced. A dancing bear capered to drum and fife; acrobats piled up on one another and tumbled. The steward apologized for the absence of a jester; a truly magnificent one had been expected from Dijon, but must have been delayed.

  “I hope this will not dim your ardor, however, for, as baser men have said without error, a man may amuse himself without smiling…”

  At this, the servers extinguished half of the torches lighting the hall.

  “We should go,” Delphine said, though she knew there would be no way to leave early without drawing unwanted attention. She was fighting a full bladder; she had not wanted to go through the kitchen and into the latrine tower, as other guests had, for fear of exposing her sex.

  “We can’t yet,” Thomas said, and she nodded, casting her eyes down.

  The steward spoke again.

  “Now let the forests of Provence grow beneath the stars, and let God’s friends have a foretaste of the delights that await them in the kingdom they have worked so hard to serve.”

  Servants wheeled out a number of trees whose leaves had been replaced with very thin, masterfully worked leaves of gold; golden and silver fruits and other precious objects winked in their midst. Now tapestried couches were rolled out and placed in nooks of the golden forest such that they were partly or fully hidden.

  “Let those among you with cooler blood seek gifts from the branches; let those with hotter humors enjoy the hunt…”

  At that, the viol player returned and played a march that summoned forth a line of twenty women, all of them nude save for magnificent stag masks with golden antlers. Their bodies were perfect; lithe and firm, no one of them seemed younger than seventeen or older than twenty-five. They all struck poses beneath and among the trees, some leaning, some on all fours, one hanging upside down from a branch.

  Thomas stared at this spectacle, a slow smile creeping onto his face.

  Delphine shuddered.

  Now the knights and cardinals began to file around the table.

  Servants scooted back their benches.

  “Come on, man!” the Valois Duc said, as drunk as any man still walking, “unless you mean to spend the whole night at whispers with your page.”

  Thomas followed him before Delphine could speak again.

  He walked out into the dim hall, afraid and excited.

  He entered the grove, melting in with the red-robed cardinals and resplendent seigneurs; a white-gloved hand plucked a pear of emerald-studded gold from a tree. A younger knight rubbed the backside of a “stag” who wiggled, and then led him off to the near-privacy of a couch. One girl’s nude bottom now rubbed against Thomas’s hip, and she turned her stag mask to him; the hall was so dim he could see nothing but blackness in the holes cut for her eyes.

  A wall of strong perfume hit his nose, eastern scents he could not name as cardamom and sandalwood and patchouli, but which pleased and thrilled him.

  He began to stiffen against his silk and woolen tights, pushing at the bottom of his red cotehardie. The stag noticed and lined herself up to grind the center of her on that. She was very good at it. Had he been nude, he would have entered her; the tip of his verge had nearly entered her even through the cloth.

  It felt so good, and it had been so long since he had enjoyed that sort of pleasure, that full release was imminent. With some effort, he pulled back from her, another knight laughing at him and clapping at his now-obvious excitement.

  “With your permission, my good comte, I shall take your place,” he said. “I had an eye on that one the moment I saw her long legs.” So saying, he fumbled up his outers and down his inners and slid into the girl with a frisson, not even bothering to four-leg her to a couch, but taking her against a tree, the golden leaves of which were soon rattling against one another.

  Thomas saw that some had taken gifts and returned to their tables, so he reached up for a whitish something-or-other that turned out to be a finely etched ivory comb trimmed with golden angels. He took it and hurried back to his spot, just as he saw Pope Clement, magnificent in his red and cloth-of-gold robes and triple crown, enter the grove. With each step, a golden cross flashed on the toe of one of his slippers. He smiled at Thomas, and Thomas smiled back.

  The knight bowed and said, “Thank you, Your Holiness.”

  “It is only a trifle, my son,” the pontiff said, his words like warm honey. “Greater wonders await us all.” And then he took a stag by the ear and led her in.

  Thomas was half sure the pope had watched him leave, but he did not turn back to look.

  Delphine knew she would never make it to the sumptuous apartment near St. Peter�
��s where they were lodged, so she ran to a dark alley and squatted, pissing for what seemed like half a day.

  Thomas turned his back and shielded her from view with his body.

  “You didn’t touch any of those deer, did you?” she said.

  “No. Wanted to.”

  “Uck,” she said.

  “Uck, yourself. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know more than you.”

  “Like what?”

  She stood up and wiped her hands now, trying to walk like a boy.

  “Let’s just say ‘more than you.’ Anyway, I suspect more than I know.”

  So saying, she looked down, pulling Thomas’s gaze down to his thigh, where something moved.

  It was a maggot.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Of the Night Vintners

  “What are you doing here?” Robert Hanicotte said.

  He had come for his nocturnal visit with Guêpe and had nearly leapt out of his skin to see the small girl in her dirty gown hugging her knees in the back corner of the Arab’s stall.

  “You’re going to get stepped on,” he said. “Besides the beating you’ll get if the stablehands find you.”

  “Why don’t you beat me?” she said. “You found me.”

  “I just might,” he said, but not even the horse was convinced.

  She was an odd-looking little bird: long-legged with outsized feet and short hair. A peasant girl, but not from here. She spoke to him in his own Norman French.

  And the horse liked her. Goddamn if he didn’t seem to like her.

  Her words were lucid, but her heavy-lidded eyes looked half asleep.

  “Robert Hanicotte,” she said, causing him to start at the sound of his last name, which nobody had bothered to say for some time, “your brother died bringing me here.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, Robert-of-the-bushes.”

  Matthieu’s name for him when he hid from his chores in the bushes behind their house. Matthieu, eight years older, who had done what he could to deflect their martial father’s scorn from the younger and even more feminine brother.

  She had used his childhood nickname.

  He shook this off. Nothing he wanted to hear would come from this girl’s mouth. He just wanted to be left alone.

  “How dare you come to me and tell me my brother is dead? What can you know about it, you dirty little thing?”

  He turned his head to shout down the stables for the napping boy who was supposed to be watching the horses.

  Only when he turned his head, she was standing where he looked.

  “Saddle that horse,” she said.

  He opened his mouth but said nothing.

  “Père Matthieu opened his mouth like that when he wanted to speak but had no words. Now saddle your wasp. I have something to show you.”

  “I…the cardinal won’t like it.”

  “The cardinal serves a devil.”

  “How do I know you’re not the devil?”

  “If you were not deaf to your own heart you would know.”

  He opened his mouth again.

  “Robert, you’re in danger.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t know anymore. But I know my words are true.”

  “Where…where are we going?”

  “To the pope’s land.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Delphine sat before the handsome, perfumed man as he cantered the horse through the steep streets of Villeneuve, just across the river from Avignon. It was in this city, away from the press of workers’ houses, Jewish ghettos, market stalls, and ordure, that Cardinal Cyriac kept his great stone house with its tiles and garden and fountain. Most of the cardinals lived here. This was a city of ivy and warm stone and plane trees. Delphine closed her eyes so the beauty of Villeneuve would not distract her—it was going to be so hard to turn this man, she would need to be a clear vessel for…

  For what?

  For God

  God is gone

  For His angels then

  But Robert had agreed to come with her, and she had not thought he would. He might yet do what she wanted of him.

  What they want of him

  I’m scared of them, too, almost as much as I am of their dark brothers; they’re so bent against each other how can man matter to them?

  I’m going to die soon

  Delphine shook her head against her doubt.

  There are far, far worse things than dying

  And I’m about to see them

  The horse stumbled on loose stones and jarred her eyes open just beneath the massive tower Phillip the Fair had built to menace the city of the popes some forty years before; Villeneuve was in France, not Provence, while Avignon had just been bought outright by the pope himself, making an earthly sovereign of him. The tower had been built by a bullying king to bully a weak pope; now both were dead and France and Avignon were in bed together, for good it seemed. The tower’s murder-slits were dark, unlike many windows behind her; sleep was not coming easily to the city of cardinals, where important men could afford candles to burn against their nightmares. The people of Villeneuve did not know how close those nightmares were to birthing themselves in the world.

  They rode across the torchlit bridge into Avignon, then took the northern gate toward Sorgues, and toward Châteauneuf.

  * * *

  Delphine had walked this way with Thomas after his transformation; she had seen the handsome ramparts and great square towers of Châteauneuf by day. She had seen the vineyards that provided the last wine in Provence lying still and had not thought to return by night. Unlike Sorgues, which lay dead and open, no part of it still working save the papal mint, Châteauneuf was alive—alive enough to shut the Porte d’Avignon at night as it had even before the plague struck. Delphine’s business was not in the city, however.

  It was in the vineyards that aproned it.

  They steered Guêpe off the Grand Chemin de Sorgues and onto the small paths between the lieux-dits, bearing names like Bois Renard, Beau Renard, and Mont Redon; these were among the most beautiful vineyards in the world.

  But something was very wrong here.

  Robert started to speak, but she pinched him to keep him silent, pointing at the rows of vines lying under the nearly full moon.

  “What?” he said.

  She got off the Arab and led him to a fence.

  Robert dismounted, too.

  “Tie him,” she whispered, and Robert did.

  She pointed again.

  “I still don’t…” he started to whisper, and then he did see. The harvest was on. These vines were Grenache, an October grape, sweet, the latest to go in the basket. Now the backs and heads of men and women bobbed like so many black shadows in the moonlit vines. They hunched to gather, then shuffled to the next plant, shearing clusters of grapes off with the curved iron knives of their trade.

  “So what?” he said. “There’s moon enough to see. Perhaps they fear a frost and work night and day to save the crop.”

  She led them closer, creeping quietly down the row.

  To Robert’s surprise, however, she led them past the gatherers altogether, following three women with huge baskets of grapes on their backs. The women made for a stone farmhouse, just outside which a dozen workers tromped in a wine press.

  The women dumped their grapes in as men in knee-length sackcloth switched out empty juice bowls for full ones, handing these off to men on ladders who funneled them into a giant tun.

  The men seemed to be smiling, or making some other face that showed their teeth.

  Robert did not care for this at all and did not want to know more.

  “Let’s get back before we’re caught,” he said.

  “Do you see?” she whispered.

  “I just want to go back.”

  “They’re not singing,” she said. “And they’re not humming and they’re not talking. Have you ever seen wine treaders tread in
silence?”

  He was fuming now.

  This child who did not speak as a child was bewitching him.

  He turned to leave and ran directly into a man bearing grapes on his back. Robert began to excuse himself, and then the smell hit him. He had walked directly into a dead man, whose lower jaw was missing and whose eyes had collapsed in on themselves. The dead man pushed by Robert, and then, as if it had struck him that something wrong had just happened, he turned. His black stub of a tongue worked and he pointed at them.

  Neither Delphine nor Robert had to tell the other to run.

  The dead man now drew air into his unsound lungs as best he could and made a dry, horrid sound like something between a busted cornemuse and a dying calf.

  The treaders stopped treading and the gatherers stopped gathering.

  All of them turned now to look at the fleeing man and girl who had intruded upon the vineyard. Whether by instinct or at some command, the treaders climbed out of their vat and the gatherers dropped their baskets. But not their knives. Now they ran, too, some of them falling as they blundered into vines.

  They were gaining.

  Guêpe bucked and reared at the smell of them, or perhaps at the sound of them rushing through the leaves and butting against one another, and his rope threatened to come loose—if he ran off without them, Robert and Delphine would be

  hung like pigs with cut throats to bleed out into the vats

  caught.

  It was the girl who grabbed his reins, calming him while Robert fumbled with the knot.

  “Hurry!” she said.

  The rope came loose.

  Robert mounted and nearly bolted without her, but he wheeled and scooped her up just as the dead swarmed over the fence. She would never forget their faces—even as their bodies rushed to do violence, what remained of their faces betrayed sadness, even apology for the murder they were being compelled to commit.

  Their knives were out, and the first ones grabbed for the reins. Guêpe jumped one way and then another avoiding the flashing knives; he back-kicked one man whose head fell mostly off, causing him to flail his arms wildly, and then the horse found his footing and bolted down the Grand Chemin de Sorgues.