Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (2 page)

The soldiers found the donkey on Friday. It was lame and its ribs were easy to count; it was too weak to run from them or even to bray at them, but it didn’t seem to have the disease. It was just old.

It looked at them hopefully from beneath a willow tree, swishing its tail against the flies. The fat one, and nobody knew how he stayed fat, took his war hammer up, meaning to brain it, but Thomas stopped him. He pointed at the barn. It would be smarter to walk it to the barn first, where they could shelter against the coming rain. Godefroy nodded his agreement.

The four men had been on the road in their rags and rusty armor without a good meal for many weeks, living on spoiled food from houses, watercress and cattail tops from ditches, worms, bugs, acorns, and even a rotten cat. They had all eaten so much grass that they had green piss. The disease was ruthless here; it had killed so many farmers that there was no bread even in this fertile valley. There were not enough hands to swing scythes, nor enough women willing to gather for the threshing, nor any miller to grind, nor bakers to stoke the
ovens. The sickness, which they called the Great Death, passed mysteriously but surely from one to the other as easily as men might clasp hands, or a child might call a friend’s name, or two women might share a glance. Now none looked at their neighbors, nor spoke to them. It had fallen so heavily upon this part of Normandy that the dead could not be buried; they were piled outside in their dirty long shirts and they stank in the August sun and the flies swarmed around them. They lay in weed-choked fields of rye and oats where they had fled in delirium. They lay pitifully in the shadow of the town church where they had crawled hoping that last gesture would lessen their time in purgatory, stuck like glued birds to the limestone where they had tried to cool their fevered heads. Some fouled in houses because they were the last and there was no one to put them out. Those with means had fled, but many times it dogged them even into the hills and swamps and manors and killed them there.

The soldiers made a fire in the barn just near a small creek and a still house. The wood was damp and smoked unpleasantly, besooting the unchimneyed barn, but soon they were carving meat from the donkey’s haunches, running sticks through it, eating it almost raw because they couldn’t wait for the fire to do its work, licking their bloody fingers, nodding at each other because their mouths were too full for them to say how good it was.

The sun was setting orange beneath a break in pewter clouds that had just begun to spit rain when the girl poked her head in the barn door.

“Hello,” she said.

All of the men stopped chewing except Thomas.

She was a bad age to meet these men; just too old to be safe and just too young to know why. Her flaxen hair, which might have been pretty if it were not greasy and wet, hung damply on her neck, and her feet were growing before the rest of her, looking too big for her sticklike legs.

“Hello,” she said again.

“Hello, yourself,” Godefroy said, leaning his lanky body toward her like a cat sighting on a bird.

“You’re eating Parsnip,” she said matter-of-factly.

“It’s donkey. Would you like some?”

This last would have sounded friendly except that Godefroy patted the rotten beam he was sitting on. She should sit near him if she wanted food.

“No. She was tied up in the woods to hide her, but she must have gotten loose. Her name is Parsnip,” she said.

“Well,” Thomas said, “that’s lucky for us. We’re not supposed to eat meat on Friday, but parsnip is perfectly permissible.”

The others laughed.

“The mouth on you, Thomas,” Godefroy said, lingering on the final
s
, which Thomas’s half-Spanish mother had insisted on pronouncing. “To the whoring manor born.”

“Is it Friday?” the fat one said. Both Thomas and Jacquot, the one with the drooping eye, nodded.

Only Thomas kept eating. The rest watched the girl. The girl stood there.

“Come sit near me,” Godefroy said, patting the beam again. With his other hand he brushed back a wick of his stringy, black hair. He wore jewelry that didn’t seem to belong on such a dirty man. Her eyes fixed on a cross of jasper on a gold necklace; something the seigneur’s wife might wear.

“I need help,” she said.

“Come sit here and tell me about it.”

Nobody wanted strangers close these days; she began to realize there was something dark in this man’s mind.

the word is rape he’ll rape me

She thought about turning and running to her tree, but an angel had shown her these men, and pointed to the barn. She knew it was an angel because his (her?) pretty auburn hair didn’t seem to get wet in the rain, and because he (she?) looked like something between a
man and a woman, but more beautiful than either; it just pointed and said,
Go and see
. When angels spoke to her, and she had seen perhaps three, they spoke the same Norman French she spoke, and she found that odd. Shouldn’t they sound like foreigners?

She put her faith in the angel even though it was gone now. It was that angel whom she saw most often, and she liked to think it was hers.

She didn’t run.

“I need help putting Papa in a grave.”

“Silly bitch, there aren’t any graves anymore. We’re in a grave already, all of us. Just stack his bones outside. Someone will get him.”

“Who?”

“How the devil should I know? This is your sad little village. Maybe some nuns or monks or something. Anyway, everyone else is just putting them outside.”

“I can’t lift him.”

“Well, I won’t lift him. I didn’t live this long to catch it by hauling around dead serfs.”

“He’s not a serf.”

“I really don’t give a shit.”

“Please.”

“Forget it, girl,” Thomas said. “Go back in the house now.”

This man was different; he didn’t frighten her, even though he was the biggest of them. He was handsome with his longish dark hair; handsome despite a nose that had been broken more than once and a round, pitted scar on his cheek. He wore more armor than the others, some on his legs and shoulders, as well as a longer coat of mail. But over his chain mail hood he wore a peasant’s big straw hat with a horn spoon through a hole in it; he was clearly dangerous, but also just a little ridiculous. He had spoken gruffly, but in the way that a man barks at a child to make the child act swiftly when there’s trouble.

She liked him.

“Wait a minute,” Godefroy said, dismissing Thomas, and now addressing the girl. “How much is it worth to you?”

Brigands. That was the word for what these men were; men who were soldiers before the war with the English, but who now traveled the roads, or hid in the woods and robbed people. Even before the plague had come, her papa had spoken with their neighbors about what to do if brigands came.

Now they were here and no one could help her.

Why had the angel left? Why had he pushed her toward these thieves?

“We only have a little silver,” she said, “and some books.”

“I don’t want silver.”

“The books are very good, most of them are new ones from the university in Paris.”

“Books are for wiping my ass with. I want gold.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Of course you do.”

Godefroy got up now, and Thomas stopped eating. Godefroy went over to her and pointed two fingers at where her pubis would be beneath her dirty gown.

“Right there,” he said. “Haven’t you? Haven’t you got just a little gold there already?”

The fat one was the only one who laughed, but it was hollow. None of them liked this about their leader, his taste for the very green fruit. She had the fine bones and small build of a child, but her gaze was more than a girl’s; she was probably just on the eve of her first bleeding. If she lived, she would be tall next summer.

“Christ crucified, Godefroy, let her alone,” Thomas said.

“That’s only for my husband.”

“Ha!” Godefroy barked, pleased at this touch of worldliness. “And where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He shouldn’t leave you alone.”

“I mean I don’t know who he is. I am not yet promised.”

“Then I’ll be your husband.”

“I should go now.”

“We’ll all be your husbands. We’re good husbands.”

“She could have it,” the fat one warned, eating again now.

“I’d rather get it from her than her papa.”

“Leave her alone,” Thomas said, and this time it wasn’t a request. He put his straw hat beside him. He tried to do it casually, but the fat one saw it and, also trying to be circumspect, spat out the overlarge piece of donkey he had just taken and set the rest on his leather bag.

Godefroy turned to face Thomas.

The girl slipped out the door.

“What if I don’t want to leave her alone?” Godefroy said.

“She’s just a scared little girl in a dead-house. Either she’s full of it and you’ll breathe it in from her, or she’s shielded by God’s hand. Which would be even worse for us. Save your ‘husbanding’ for whores.”

“The whores are all dead,” said Jacquot.

“Surely not all of them,” said Thomas, trying one last time. “And if one whore in France still has a warm
chatte
, Godefroy will smell it out.”

“You make me laugh, Thomas,” Godefroy said, not laughing. “But I need to fuck something. Go get that girl.”

“No.”

Thomas stood up. Godefroy backed up a little in spite of his nominal leadership; Thomas had white coming into his beard and lines on his face; he was the oldest of the four, but the muscles in his arms and on either side of his neck made him look like a bullock. His thighs were hard as roof beams and he had a ready bend in his knees. They had all fought in the war against the English, but he alone among them had been trained as a knight.

Godefroy noted where his sword was, and Thomas noted that.

Thomas breathed in like a bellows, and blew out through clenched teeth. He did this twice. They had all seen him do this before, but never while facing them.

A drop of sweat rolled down Godefroy’s nose.

“I’ll get her,” Jacquot said, proud of himself for thinking of a compromise.
He went out of the barn into the rain, pulling his coarse red hood up. He held the hood’s long tail over his nose and mouth against the smell pouring out of the house as he pushed the door open with his foot. The sun was almost down now, but the house was still full of trapped heat. The smell was blinding. Wan light coming from the polished horn slats in the windows shone on the rictus of a very bloated dead man who had stained his sheets atop a mess of straw that could no longer be called a bed; he had kicked hard at the end of it. His face was black. His shirt rippled; maggots crawled exuberantly on him, as well as on two goats and a pig that had wandered into the single-room dwelling to die.

The girl wasn’t here, and even if she had been, Jacquot didn’t want to find her badly enough to stay in that hot, godless room.

He would have preferred to go back to the barn then, but his failure would only put Godefroy in a worse humor. So he went around the back of the house, thankful for the cooler air, and whistled for her. He stood very still and looked around carefully. His patience was soon rewarded; he noticed her white leg up in a tree. Ten minutes later and it would have been dark enough to hide her.

She was up in her tree, whispering for the angel and asking it to come back; but then she wasn’t sure anyone else could see them, or that they could do anything or lift anything. Or even that they were real. She had only started seeing them since the Great Death came on.

She thought that the ones she was seeing were lesser ones; that the famous ones like Gabriel were preparing for Judgment Day, which must be soon. Gabriel would blow his horn and all the Dead in Christ would get out of their graves; she knew this was supposed to be a good thing, but the idea of dead bodies moving again was the worst thing she could imagine; it frightened her so much she couldn’t sleep sometimes.

If the angels were real, why had she been abandoned now?

And why weren’t they helping anybody when they got sick?

Why had they let her father die so horribly?

And now the man with the drooping eye had seen her.

Why did her angel not strike this man blind, as they had done to the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah?

“Come down, little bird,” Jacquot said. “We won’t hurt you.”

“Yes you will,” she said, gathering her leg up under her gown as well as she could.

“All right, we will. But not much and not for long. Maybe just a night and a morning. Then we’ll be on our way. Or, better yet! We might take you with us. Would you like that? Four strong husbands and passage out of town?”

“No, thank you.”

He leapt up onto a strong, low branch, almost high enough now to reach her foot, but she climbed higher. She was much lighter than he. He would lose this game.

“Don’t be trouble,” he said.

“Don’t rape me,” she said.

“It won’t be rape if you agree.”

“Yes it will. Because I’ll only agree to avoid being hurt.”

“So there we have it. You’ll agree to avoid being hurt. Very well. Come down or I’ll hurt you.”

He dropped back down to the ground now.

“You don’t mean it,” she said.

“I do.”

“You’re not a bad man. I don’t believe you are.”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“But you don’t have to be!”

“Sorry. Already am. Now I see a bunch of lovely stones by the stream. What say I go get them and throw them at you until you come down?”

The foliage wouldn’t allow for much stone-throwing, and he wasn’t sure he could make himself throw a stone at her in any case, but he said it as if he meant it. He sensed he had to get her to the barn quickly.

“Please don’t.”

“Then come down.”

“It’s the other one. He’s the bad one. Tell him you couldn’t find me.”

“He has a temper.”

“So does my father.”

“He’s dead.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Enough games. Come down or I knock you down with stones.”

She was crying now. He thought she would call his bluff, but soon she probed for a lower branch with her long, ungainly foot. He helped her down and felt her trembling. He felt sick about what he was doing, but hardened his heart. He decided to talk to her about it while he hoisted her up on his shoulder and walked back toward the barn.