Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (27 page)

But now the boy had come, and he was different.

He was quite credible as the herald to a prophet, with his eyes of northern ocean blue and his dimpled smile. Even his German accent, normally a hindrance in these xenophobic times, lent him an air of
exoticism; after all, if some holy cure were to come to Auxerre, it would not come from Burgundy. Why not the piney forests of the north?

But this boy sold no cures.

He never mentioned money at all.

“Wait!” he said, capturing his audience with an up-pointed finger and a theatrical tilt to his head. “I believes I hear them. But perhaps you will hear them, too, if you make
der
Alleluia.”

Nobody spoke.

“Children of Gott, make
der
ALLELUIA!”

“ALLELUIA!” they cried, and a drum began to beat a simple march.

The sound came up through the narrow streets that led down and to the river and echoed on the shuttered shop fronts and timbered houses that bordered the square. A line of ecstatic men and women entered the Place St. Etienne, shuffling slowly in something like a drugged march, striking themselves in time to the drumbeats with leather thongs fitted with iron hooks or spikes. They were naked from the waist up, like the boy, all wearing simple skirts that had once been white but had been marched in and bled on until they were the color of earth and as stiff as leather. The crowd gasped at the sight of them; the women’s bare breasts, the old blood drying, the new blood trickling, the white caps they wore with red crosses on the front and back. Some of the Auxerrois even fell to their knees wailing, thinking Judgment Day had come, here, now, and soon Christ himself would split the sky and part the damned from the saved.

Now four women called out and four men answered:

And then the men called and the women answered:

Then, all together:

Behind these eight and the drummer trained a score or so who had clearly been recruited from other towns, all stripped to the waist, though less uniform in appearance. Some of them whipped themselves with tree branches; a girl walked behind bearing a bundle of sticks on her back to replace those that split.

Now the drummer beat three beats and they all stopped. They shouted
“Iesu!”
and flung themselves facedown into the street, arms out, cruciform, eliciting a gasp from the crowd. The ones at the rear then stood and came forward, giving a stroke of the whip or the branch to each prone figure they passed, until they reached the front and flung themselves down again. In this way, like some horrible caterpillar, the entire line worked its way toward the square in front of St. Etienne and the astonished crowd of onlookers, then collapsed all at once.

All but the man beating the drum.

He set this aside now and looked at the crowd.

“I am Rutger the Fair,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height.
Fair
might have been a name from his youth; it seemed a better word to hang on an urbane womanizer than on this handsome but shocking man of thirty or so, graced with the broad, muscular chest of a woodcutter or a swordsman, brutally scarred from months of flagellation. His carelessly shaven (or intentionally cut) scalp would have sat well on a madman, but his deep-set eyes shone with intelligence,
even wisdom. A goatish beard of blond and gray erupted from his chin. He seemed less a cleric than the antidote to clericism. If Christ had been German as well as a carpenter, and if He had survived His scourging, and if He had shorn His head with a broken bottle, He might well have looked like this man.

“I come to you, Auxerre, from the land of Saxony, where the plague is not yet come, and shall never come; I stand before you to offer you either the cup or the sword. The cup is that of forgiveness, and the sword is that of wrath.”

Now the boy came up from behind the crowd, bearing a pewter goblet and a small sword. He stood by the man, stomping his feet twice.

“God demands a tithe. If one in ten of you turn from your lives of false comfort and walk with us for thirty days, your town will be spared. Or if three of you will sit the cross for three days, your town will also be spared. But if you stay here and do not show the Lord your love, you will all die the death of the stone under the arm, or the stone in the crotch, or the death of the spitting of the blood. I see by your faces you know these deaths,
ja
? Well, you have now the chance to turn the face of death away from you. Shall I speak further on God’s offer, or will you harden your hearts and go to your houses to die in sin?”

“Speak on!” someone yelled.

Another repeated it.

“Hup!”
Rutger said, and the cruciform Penitents behind him stood, arms out, faces lifted to the sky.

Some of them were sobbing.

He spoke.

Emma watched, amazed, as the butcher and a vintner named Jules, who had once courted her sister, came bearing a two-wheeled cart. They put her poor, stiff husband in it, revolted by his decomposition but seemingly unafraid of his disease. Why were they not calling out
to her? Because she sat in shadow and they thought she was dead, too, like almost everyone on this side of the Yonne. Or they thought that she had run away.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked, letting a little sunlight fall on her face so they could see her. She winced as much from the sunlight as from her fear of their reaction to her color, but she did not startle them. If they thought she was yellow, they were very polite about it.

“The cathedral,” Jules said. “You’ll want to see this, Emma.”

“Are you burying him?”

“No, Emma. Come to Saint Etienne.”

So saying, they carted her Richard away, his knees still locked against his chest, the little blond boy now visible, skipping before them through the thistles and singing a song in German.

The sun was lowering when the three dead Auxerrois were brought before the cathedral of St. Etienne. Richard was the worst of them, having been dead a week, but two others had been chosen. A beautiful young maid who had broken hearts in the wine shop by the front gate was only one day gone, though her beauty had already been cast down; she had been healthy at daybreak, but by Nones, the plague had turned her the color of an eggplant and killed her outright.

The third was Yvette Michonneau, the bishop’s acknowledged mistress, who died after fighting grimly through an unheard-of ten days of lancings and bleedings, leaving behind three of the bishop of Auxerre’s chubby, dark-eyed bastards. She had been wrapped in a shroud and buried, but the German boy commanded her to be retrieved. Yvette’s mother, also a fighter, had brawled in the churchyard to keep her daughter’s hard-won Christian burial from being upset, grabbing away the sexton’s shovel and breaking one Penitent’s nose with it before being wrestled down and hustled off by her neighbors.

Auxerre had tried to please God with Christian burials, but clearly something more was required.

*  *  *

The cart was drawing near Auxerre; the square tower of the cathedral beckoned them as they topped a hill near Perigny, but, with only an hour of sun left, they decided to make camp near the wall of an old convent, long abandoned and swarmed with ivy now blushing mostly red. All the ivy in the abandoned village of Perigny crawled toward Auxerre, as if reaching for it with delicate fingers.

The girl slept hard and neither man wanted to rouse her from her sleep. Thomas covered her with their horse blanket, and then he and the priest left her and went into the damp woods bordering the field looking for sticks dry enough to burn.

Delphine woke alone in the cart, her heart racing from a dream that a devil was in Auxerre turning people into poppets. In the dream, she was able to stop it, but the devil, who had too many eyes, was very angry, and it chased her. That was when she awoke. She knew the dream was true, and this frightened her so much that she pulled the blanket over her head; then she thought of her father and mother, and of how she would have felt to see either of them turned into a devil’s plaything. She gathered her blanket around her, meaning to set off down the road, knowing she didn’t have much daylight in which to walk the last few miles.

An angel was sitting on the back of the mule, facing her and wringing its hands. It was the same one she had seen in Paris and back home in Normandy; it was the saddest she had ever seen an angel look. It told her to stay in the cart, speaking as if every word hurt it.

“Why?” she said.

She would only make things worse, it said, however noble her desire was. Getting to Avignon was all that mattered.

“Is a devil going to Auxerre?”

Yes. A very strong one is already there. And another is coming.

“Who will help the people in the town? Will you?”

It hung its head. It was a minor angel, made better at messages than war. The strong ones were fighting in Heaven.

Delphine thought, from the way the angel spoke, that this fight must not be going well.

She wanted to cry.

What would happen to the souls in Heaven if the angels lost? Would they have to go back to their bodies? Now she imagined her mother and father at the end of a stick, jerking beneath a devil’s hand in a parody of a dance.

Stay in the cart.

She could not bear to say no to the angel, so she shook her head, though so gently a person might not have noticed.

She looked around to make sure the priest and the knight didn’t see her, because they would stop her, or follow her and put themselves in danger. She bent to muddy her finger and wrote on the side of the cart. Then she patted the mule’s side, as much to comfort herself as him, and started off down the road barefoot.

Please,
the angel said behind her, and she stopped for a heartbeat and then kept going. She was afraid she might lose heart, so she made herself count ten steps before she looked behind her.

The angel was gone.

Thomas found the cart empty, with writing on its side. He put his meager bundle of sticks and chestnuts on the ground and called the priest over.

The priest read it aloud.

Fully one hundred people had gathered to see the Penitents perform their miracle in the square before Auxerre’s cathedral. A light breeze blew, but it was not so cold since the rains stopped. Rutger’s followers held candles, the last candles the remaining Benedictine monks at the abbey of St. Germain had. They wanted no part of the Penitents’ display, but the Auxerrois had told them plainly that they
would have no more food brought to them unless they gave over their tapers; the brothers had already killed their last hog and chickens, and their measly garden could not get them though the winter. They had reminded the crowd that starving out monks was not high on the list of deeds that would get one into Heaven; further, the abbey was dedicated to St. Germanus, who had taught St. Patrick and argued against the Pelagian heresy, and these brothers were the keepers of his holy bones.

When Giles the armorer suggested that these bones might be put into broth, the monks knew they would get nowhere appealing to the better natures of the Auxerrois, and the candles were surrendered.

Rutger beat his drum, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

The Penitents, having handed their candles off to the people, bloodied themselves with their whips and branches in time to the rhythm, ending in an orgiastic frenzy that actually sprayed droplets into the crowd. The madness spread from the flagellants to the townsfolk; many cried out or swayed, and some were moved to begin striking themselves or one another.

“More!” shouted Rutger, and the blond boy echoed him, crying,
“More!”
His openmouthed grin might have been the same if he were sledding down a steep hill.

Some in the crowd punched each other.

Then the biting began, and the scratching.

One who held a candle held it to his face, lighting his beard, then slapping it out with a hoarse scream.

At the crescendo, Jules cut his little finger off with his own knife, shocking Emma, who stood near him openmouthed.

Rutger saw this and smiled for the first time, showing his crooked teeth.

“Yes!” Rutger said. “
Und zo!
It is enough!”

He beat the drum one time hard.

The crowd’s violence ebbed, and they edged closer.

Now he pointed at his acolytes, the four men and women who had given the call and response.

They took their evil, hooked whips and stood near the dead.

Rutger banged the drum.

“Death, where is your power?”
he asked.

“Gone!”
responded the eight, whipping the dead ones.

With each question, he banged the drum.

With each response, the dead were scourged.

With this last stroke, the body of Yvette Michonneau jerked.

The crowd gasped.

Now all of the dead spasmed when struck. Some at the edges of the crowd ran away, but others leaned in, eyes wide. The last slice of sun dipped below the horizon, leaving the sky lavender and pink.