Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  Behind them, the sound of threescore corpses shouting through blasted lungs and throats rose up, and, above them, the moon flirted with slow, ragged clouds as though everything below her had not spun wild.

  The bridge was nearly deserted as Robert and the girl cantered across. She did not have long left to convince him.

  “If you insist on blinding yourself to what you have seen, you’ll have peace for a time. But they will come for you; and then you, too, will stomp in the wine press. Or you will go to Marseilles and sew sails with those who do not flinch when the needle pricks them. Or they’ll strip your flesh from your bones for sport; you have no idea how much they hate you, though they smile.”

  “What do you want from me?” Robert said.

  “The…Holy Father trusts you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Arrange an audience with him for my lord the Comte d’Évreux. A private one.”

  “Why does he not send the request himself?”

  “Because the meeting must happen, and it must happen in the next days. There is no time to filter the request through secretaries.”

  Robert sighed heavily, pushing the air out, still shaken by the night vintners. He shook his head, though she could not see him behind her.

  “Something about this smells.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It does. And the stink is coming from the palace.”

  While Robert Hanicotte eased back in next to the belly-sleeping cardinal, Thomas sat on the edge of the linen-covered bed in his lodgings. He had not slept, worrying about the girl. He had stirred happily at the sound of footsteps once before, but those had belonged to a chamber boy bringing up a brazier of hot coals.

  At last he heard her small, bare feet on the steps, and the door creaked open.

  They looked at one another. His hands were folded like the hands of a father waiting to scold, but it was not his place to scold her, whatever she was. She was much more powerful, now, than she had been in that long-ago barn.

  “You don’t like me to be away,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  She smiled.

  She smelled like night air.

  “It’s good and warm in here,” she said, putting off the harder thing.

  He nodded.

  “It’s going to be tomorrow,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “What we came for.”

  “And what is that?”

  “We’ll save the pope.”

  Thomas laughed a little at that.

  “It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that. An orphan from Normandy and a thief from Picardy saving the pope. The whoring pope.”

  “You know when you swear that I’ll say ‘don’t swear,’ and then you won’t for a while. Why not just not swear in the first place? But I suppose that’s asking a horse not to whinny. Anyway, you’re not a thief. And as long as you’re with me, I’m not an orphan.”

  Thomas grunted.

  “He doesn’t look like he wants saving. The Holy Father, I mean,” Thomas said.

  “The man we saw wasn’t him.”

  Thomas stood up and went to the window, looking up where a faint, reddish stain seemed to corrupt the moon. Subtle, but there.

  “Who was he, then?”

  “You know.”

  “The Devil?” Thomas said, with neither sarcasm nor disbelief.

  “No. But one of his marshals.”

  She drew in a breath to say the next thing.

  “And he’s raising the dead. Lots of them.”

  Thomas’s hand twitched, but he still could not cross himself.

  “How do you know this? Dreams?”

  “Yes. And I saw the unclean risen tonight, harvesting in his vineyards. And those girls…”

  “Girls?”

  “The stags in the Grand Tinel. They were readied before the great hearth in the dressoir, out of sight. They were perfumed and then filled with warm olive oil and honey, and then they were all backed up against the fire to heat their loins. Hot brass was put in their mouths and hands to warm those. So nobody would notice. That they were dead. The knights and cardinals had intercourse with the dead.”

  Thomas turned around now, his massive silhouette blocking the moonlight, but not the cool breeze that blew in the window.

  “The devil in the pope’s robes…does he have a name?”

  The girl said something so faintly he could not hear.

  He asked her to repeat it, so she wiggled her finger to make him bend down.

  She said it in his ear, whispering as if the wall itself might hear her.

  The wind blew the dead leaf of a plane tree into the window.

  Thomas closed the shutter and lowered the bar.

  “And what are we going to do with this…Baal’Zebud?”

  “Zebuth.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “You know that, too,” she said.

  And his hand was already holding the pitted spear from Jerusalem.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Of the Pope’s Garden

  Robert Hanicotte held the bright little flower in his hand, noting its fragility; he had seen this variety before, of course, jabs of them clustered in vivid yellow in this garden or that, but he had never had a mind for herbs and flowers. He struggled to remember its name.

  “Tansy,” the pope said. “Crush it, Robert.”

  He did as he was told, then put his nose to the palm of his hand.

  Pope Clement smiled at the face he made, which betrayed a reaction somewhere between revelation and distaste.

  “That’s it exactly. Its fragrance rushes at us, strikes us, and leaves us uncertain how to feel about it. So much power in something so tiny. Orange blossoms are similarly potent; I had the pleasure of smelling some brought from Naples when Queen Joanna was here; but they simply please where tansy bewilders. You seem bewildered, young Robert. What is it that you wanted to see me about?”

  The air was cool in the garden, whose high walls thankfully sheltered it from the wind whipping through the alleys of Avignon and blinding its citizens with grit.

  In the distance, in the duller section of the papal gardens where food was grown, women gathered onions and turnips bound for the pignotte, where the pope showed his magnanimity by feeding Avignon’s poor. An easier task now that the plague had thinned them so; it had raged mercilessly in the poorer quarters, leaving some streets entirely empty of the living.

  A lion roared.

  A second lion, in a cage neighboring the first one, paced discontentedly and then curled up at the rear of his enclosure. The cardinal had been meaning to ask where the new one came from; it was larger than Misericord, the good-natured male the pope had received from the king of Bohemia before his death at Crécy, and Misericord did not like his neighbor. The new lion had too much black in its mane and its eyes were set too wide—something one might not notice without a well-made lion next to it, although Misericord was never precisely next to the new one; he tended now to sulk in the farthest corner of his cage.

  Robert glanced over at Cardinal Cyriac, who was waiting politely out of earshot, watching a snow-white peacock trundle its carriage of feathers almost over his slippered foot. The cardinal did not like the intimacy between the great man and the man who once saw to his candles, not least because he feared that the boy (hardly a boy, but boyish in body and energies) would ask to be removed from his household. He knew he had been less than generous toward his concubine of late, but seemed unable to stop himself; intellectually, the boy had something about him of the dog who feared so much to be kicked that kicking it seemed obligatory.

  “Your Holiness, I had a dream that troubled me. I should perhaps not let such matters disturb my peace.”

  The pope floated his hand before Robert’s gaze, which was focused somewhere left of the Holy Father’s foot, and lifted that hand gracefully, taking the younger man’s attention with it until he found himself looking into the pope’s ocean-blue eyes. It was a gesture he
knew from his days as cubicular; this pope did not insist on the same sort of deference other powerful men did.

  He wanted men to look into his eyes, which were powerful instruments of persuasion, benevolence, or, more rarely, blame.

  “Dreams are sometimes folly and sometimes fact. If we could choose between the two, we would not need our Josephs and Daniels, would we?”

  Robert shook his head.

  A manicured bush full of some exquisite blue-and-white flower moved in the cold breeze behind Clement’s head. He was waiting to be told about the dream.

  So Robert told him.

  He omitted the fact that he had awakened in his clothes with his stockings wet from dew. The dew of the vineyards.

  The pope tilted his head just a little, a paternal smile coming to his lips and his eyes.

  “Are you sure this was a dream, Robert?”

  “What else could it have been, Papa?”

  Something tickled his hand, and he lifted it to see a fly with a body of brilliant gold rubbing its forelegs. It flew off again as if it had never been there. The smell of tansy welled up again in his nose.

  “I hate to pronounce the word,” the Holy Father said, “but I think you can guess it.”

  Witchcraft.

  The word leapt into being and disappeared again as swiftly as the fly had.

  The pope’s eyes gleamed just a little as if in confirmation.

  “It is no secret that we move in strength against the Arrogant One’s hold on this world. Is it so unlikely that He would seek to stop our enterprise? And is it unlikely that He would seek to blacken our good name with His sorceries? The girl in your dream will have shown you her own villainies to confound you.”

  “Do you think they mean you some harm, Papa?”

  “It would serve the Cruel One’s purpose; I am turning mighty wheels against Him. Surely He trembles at the thought that we might seize from Him the city of Christ and David. Surely He dreads the check He will suffer when we remove from us His agents, the Jews.”

  “I believe,” Robert said, nodding, “I believe the little girl in the dream is pretending to be the page to Chrétien de Navarre, the Comte d’Évreux.”

  The pope’s eyes registered something.

  The older man stepped closer.

  Robert watched the white silk glove rise again, the weak sun flashing in the sapphires of the pope’s rings as he laid his hand upon his former cubicular’s shoulder. He was struck again by the majesty of this man, with his robes the color of aubergine, the pure white zucchetto on his head; he felt the warmth of the man even through the silk glove, even through his own vestments. His father had seemed mighty to him, but he only laid hands on Matthieu and Robert to strike them or yank them out of his way.

  He wanted to cry at how deeply accepted he felt.

  “You are perceptive and brave. And you are loyal, Robert. You have our gratitude,” the pope said, the smile lines around his eyes deepening. “And you will have much more than that.”

  Robert’s breath caught in his throat with excitement and gladness.

  “Cardinal Cyriac,” the pope said, calling the red-robed figure to him. “It is our pleasure to elevate this faithful servant, though to what position we have not yet determined; be as a father to him, and know that we shall return your every kindness to him tenfold.”

  Dismissed, the cardinal and the young man walked out of the garden, passing by the cages of the pope’s zoo.

  We shall return your every kindness to him tenfold

  The cardinal moved his lips as he silently repeated the pope’s words, trying to plumb them for their true meaning. He glanced past his self-satisfied lover, whose expression was not so bold it could be called a smile, and at the enclosures of the Holy Father’s bestiary. Something was wrong with the lions. It took him a moment to register what it was.

  They were both in the same cage now.

  The new, black-maned one sat kingly on its haunches while Misericord hunched miserably in his corner with something like fear in his demeanor.

  A chill passed down the cardinal’s left side.

  Those cages don’t communicate.

  He blinked his eyes, sure they must have deceived him earlier.

  He looked back at the black-maned lion, which yawned, curling its tongue lazily. When it noticed him looking at it, it did a very curious thing.

  It stared directly at him, its mouth standing open, and moved its tongue over its teeth as if counting them.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Of the Arrest

  The lodgings at which the pope had placed the Comte d’Évreux and his page sat practically in the shadow of the hulking palace, quite near St. Peter’s church. The series of slanting and hunch-shouldered workers’ houses that had occupied the place before had been pulled down four years earlier, the lumber carted to the palace and cheerfully burned in its kitchens and beneath its baths—it was as though the palace had eaten them. Pope Clement had continued his predecessor’s policy of building up a stone Avignon to replace the wooden one, and the Elysium House was a fine example of the new extravagance.

  Thomas and Delphine had sequestered themselves in their room, having excused themselves from the midday feast that an English duke was putting on in the courtyard. The sounds of revelry had been floating up to them for nearly an hour, and, as the revelers emptied pitcher after pitcher of the pope’s wine down their gullets, more and more often the Valois and English lords who had once faced each other across battlefields now united in good-natured mockery directed at the window of the man they took for the Comte d’Évreux and his Navarrese page. This was precisely what Thomas had feared—though he bore the face and body of the dead man, he did not share his memories, and the world of high-placed men, though embracing all of Europe, was as small and incestuous as a village.

  He was dangerously near betraying himself as an impostor.

  “Is my lord of Navarre taken ill?” shouted the young William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, in the boxy, snub-nosed French of English nobility. “For I should have liked to have a wrestle with him.”

  Delphine used the tip of her comb to trace the hem of a woman’s dress on the wall hanging near the window. It was the simple comb of her mother’s, brought from Normandy—she had flung the ivory comb from the stag orchard into the muddy street the instant Thomas had given it to her.

  “No, my lord Salisbury, he will not wrestle you. He was only wont to wrestle his little brother until Charles grew a moustache. Now he wrestles other men’s wives.”

  “That is too much, my lord,” laughed another Frenchman, though it was hard to hear him over the horsy guffaws of Sir William, who displayed a foreigner’s overappreciation of French wordplay, as well as an Englishman’s amusement at French adultery.

  “I but jest. If our good Chrétien would poke his head out his window, he would see that I am all smiles.”

  Thomas felt vertiginously insulted and also pleased that the Comte d’Évreux was being insulted.

  “Leave him be; he is ill from the other night’s excess.”

  “Then how does he propose to face tomorrow’s excess?”

  A messenger had come the day before, crying the news below every window: Since the plague had killed so many cardinals, a new one was to be created tomorrow night; the celebration would be held outside, in the open courtyard of the palace, and open to all.

  Now Delphine traced the legs of a knight, skipped chastely past his middle, and rejoined the outline at his belly. Past the tapestry knight, a young girl and her father bent in the field, their faces turned away, gathering sheaves. She traced them, too. It soothed her to keep her hands busy while she waited for a helpful thought to come. For once, Thomas would have been grateful to see the heavy-lidded gaze that meant she was about to use words that were somehow not hers. Neither of them knew quite what to do while waiting for an invitation to see the pope, an invitation that might not come at all.

  He shuddered at the thought of trying to stab the f
alse pope in camera, let alone in front of a table full of knights and a company of guards.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I’ve come here to die.

  “Give us at least your head, my lord of Navarre, so we may know you are not dead!” shouted up the English duke.

  “You’d better,” said Delphine, now tracing a little dog.

  Thomas smoothed his unfamiliar, closely shorn hair and wiped at his beardless chin before thrusting his head out the window to general applause. He waved a hand at the celebrants.

  “Come down,” one said.

  “No,” Thomas said. “Our friend is quite correct; I ate more than a young man should at the warrior’s feast, and have paid an old man’s price for it.”

  The table below erupted with laughter.

  “Where’s Don Eduardo de Burgos?” another shouted. “He’ll purge it out of you with jerez!”

  Thomas swallowed hard at this.

  “But,” he continued, waving the last comment away, “with temperance and prayer, I should be whole by this evening. If my lord the earl does not throw me to the ground too roughly.”

  They laughed again.

  “Well, get back to your sickbed,” said the Valois, “and no more excuses tonight. Though you should send your page down for a bowl of this stew. It’ll make a man of him. Oysters, ginger, and pepper.”

  Thomas made as though to vomit, provoking a cheerful “Hoooo” from the table, then withdrew his head and closed the shutter. It was struck by what sounded like a plum.

  Delphine raised an eyebrow, impressed.

  “Now go get us a bowl of that stew,” he said.

  The soldiers came an hour later.

  Delphine had eased out of the bindings that flattened her modest unboyishness and sat upon her pallet near the window. The spear was around her neck. Thomas was scraping at the bottom of his bowl with a crust of hard bread, eager to get every drop of the spicy stew.

  The sound of boots on the stairs froze them both.

  They looked at one another.

  These were not the light footsteps of the chamber boys, one of whom, Isnard, had made fast friends with Delphine in her role as page, nor was this a solitary messenger.