Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (40 page)

Something was wrong, though.

He tried to speak, but couldn’t, and Thomas saw why.

An arrow had sprouted from the front of his head, all the way down to the fletching.

One eye filled with blood and he fell.

Thomas fell, too, his dizziness taking him as the clearing erupted with the whistle and crack of arrows striking home, and with the cries of those they struck.

The last sounds he heard were the brutish grunts and drawls of English as the
routiers
came out of the trees to finish their work.

Janus Blount, the leader of the English and Gascon brigands, led his men down through the stand of trees that sloped to the clearing. He had counted twenty horses before it started, and fifteen still stood near the stream, waiting to be led or mounted by men now dead.

“Shite,” he called, “Who shot the page?”

Nobody answered. The boy lay curled around his chest wound, still alive but dying. Janus looked down at the tearful, shuddering boy and saw that his wound was hopeless. He knew of a monastery with a handful of monks still alive in it, but this little bird was stuck too deep to make the journey. He would die in minutes, and long minutes they would be. The brigand put his callused palm against the page’s soft cheek and said, “Sorry, lad.” He punched his rondel dagger up under the boy’s sternum and, when he finally lay still, thumbed his eyes closed.

“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. “Delphine.”

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

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.