Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (41 page)

It was October when he came to visit.

As soon as she saw what a
costaud
Thomas was, thin of waist, thick of chest, with his hair still dark on the fine head he had to lower to enter a room, his face still clear of the arrow-pit she would never see, she was dressed for the oven.

When she saw the impish humor in his eye, she was cooked. If he had few letters, he was neither stupid nor dull.

She was well matched for Thomas in this way, too.

It was common for her to take the Lord’s name in vain twenty times between confessions.

She did it the moment she laid eyes on her future husband.

“My God,” she said, too low for anyone to hear.

And then she said it again.

On the cool October day of their meeting, Thomas had gone with a riding party that included the Seigneur de Péronne, the Comte de Givras, and Marguerite. From the moment she spoke, he was intimidated by her learning—this was no kitchen woman, as his mother had been; this Marguerite de Péronne not only knew Latin, she told
jokes in it; following a hawk’s near-refusal to come down from its tree, she said something to her paunchy, well-dressed abbot of an uncle that nearly made him tumble sideways from his palfrey. She sang, too, and not out of duty. Her voice was unfiltered joy. On the ride back, at any time the men ran out of words to say about the king or the war or the quality of the horses, she lit up her father’s birch woods with snatches of carols, and sometimes looked at her suitor to see if he was moved.

He was, and that was good.

For at that young age, she still told herself she would never lie beneath a man who did not love a song.

On the day after their wedding, Thomas took his new bride to the top of the old Norman tower he had just received from the Comte de Givras. The February sky, gray, though no longer spitting ice, stretched above them, and the brown fields and few houses of Arpentel stretched below. His wife was smarter than he would ever be and prettier than he thought wives were made, and yet she was happy with him. Her pleasure in the marriage bed had seemed to touch even her soul, and her verdant eyes had rarely left his; three taps of her ring would always remind him of the three times he took her. “Once like a bull, once like a fox, once softly as a lamb,” she said. He would be faithful to her. They would have many sons. He had risen. By God and by the grace of his beloved seigneur, he had risen.

His mother, a widow and a sort of handsome, dark-haired giantess, had worked in the comte’s kitchens. She had told Thomas his father was a German knight on pilgrimage to Spain, ironic since she herself was the bastard of a Spanish knight, Tomás de Oviedo, whom she remembered in her nightly prayers though he was ignorant of her existence. She wedded young to a joiner’s son who was already hurting from the kidneys that would fail before her daughter was three.
She never married again. She came home smelling of grease and flour, bearing bones, cheese rinds, second cuts of meat, and stale bread from the comte’s table, keeping Thomas and his older half-sister fed when others went hungry. Thomas had been such a large and physically gifted boy that the comte had taken him on as a page, and soon squire. He took to sword, lance, and horse so naturally that it was clear he had chivalry in his blood if not in his pedigree. After his accidental knighting at Cambrai, Thomas had distinguished himself at tourneys and in the comte’s personal affrays; he had proven invaluable at training younger men and had endeared himself to the comte, despite the latter’s godliness and his own coarse humor.

By the time his mother died, Thomas’s sister was married and he was a necessary part of the comte’s retinue. The gift of Arpentel and its crumbling, square tower to Thomas had enraged one better-born knight who, at a Michaelmas feast following Thomas’s departure, got so far into his cups that he told the comte he felt himself more deserving of land than that “fatherless Knight of the Hare.” The comte had kept his temper. The Comte de Givras never raised his voice. He coolly told the other man, toying with the mustachios that were his only concession to vanity, “If you covet Sir Thomas’s land, fight him for it. To the death. I shall grant you the title if you win.”

The man had found reasons that this would not do.

“Then hold your tongue. Wine makes men fools, and I myself have said foolish things in my cups. But if you wish to be welcome at my table, and in my house, you will never again let me hear you slander a fellow knight in his absence. Try me on this and you will think men lucky who sleep under roofs, let alone in towers. Am I understood?”

He was.

“It seems painfully obvious to me,” Marguerite of Péronne, Lady of Arpentel, had said to her new husband on that morning, “that the Comte de Givras is your father.”

She stood there, stunning in her fox-fur mantle, her greenish eyes
alight with mirth, and he was no more sure whether she was jesting than if she had said it in Latin.

He had laughed at her, and she had never said it again.

And he had never thought about it again until Crécy, when he watched the great man die a man’s death.

Wouldn’t he have told him then?

No.

Not a man who would not cry out.

Was it a promise to his mother? To God?

He would never know.

But now he thought she was right.

Marguerite, who saw through everything.

Marguerite, who knew how to cut her losses.

She had chosen the son over the father.

Over him.

Over honor.

And she was right.

When Delphine saw the knight’s eyes soften, she reached her small hand out, and he took it in his large one. And she led him down to the stream, and, with its cool water, washed his head and his feet, and helped him wash the anger from his heart.

His own face slipped from him once again, and fell in the water; and again he assumed the aspect of his dead rival.

T
he walls of God’s kingdom held. And though the devils despaired of breaking the walls and burning the deep architecture of Heaven, yet were the angels stoppered in and could not come safely out; and so, unchallenged in the middle lands, the wicked ones delighted in what they wrought there. So they resolved among them to hold the plains and the mountains in their fist, and not to suffer the cities of men to live; but rather to reign there, on the thrones of their second Hell, with the first as their footstool and the angels of God trapped above.

They would weave sackcloth to mask the sun.

They would confound the father to kill his son, and then would they kill the father.

They would replace the beasts with clockwork things and the birds with dead hands that flew.

It had already begun.

And the angels of God stood at the walls of Heaven and sorrowed at the misery below, and fell out amongst themselves, some saying it was better to perish at once, in hot struggle for man’s sake, lest the Lord return to find
the earth empty of men; others cried that if they left their walls, He would return to find Heaven bereft of angels and smoldering, and Lucifer instead on His throne.

And the world was imperiled unto its death.

For now a call had risen up from he who held Peter’s Chair in the west.

And a call had risen up from he who wore the sultan’s crown in the east.

And men of great valor gathered in the city by the river and swore to take Jerusalem, and if they could not hold it, to put it to fire and sword.

And the valorous men of the deserts gathered in their tents and swore to hold Jerusalem, else to put it to fire and the sword.

And so were readied the armies of Armageddon, yet not at the hour long foretold.

And the dead stood with the living, and the living knew it not.

And the Lord made no answer.

THIRTY

Robert Hanicotte stood in the stables, breaking up a leaf of hay for one of the cardinal’s six black Arabian stallions. This one bore the name Guêpe because he was small and wasp-waisted, mean like a wasp; not as fast as the others at a straight run, but capable of breathtaking turns and giddy leaps. He was not the cardinal’s favorite, but Robert loved him more than perhaps anything in this city. He would never let the old man know, though, or permission to ride him would be used as leverage.

He put his head against the horse’s shoulder and took in his nutty, masculine smell, his own dark hair blending perfectly with the animal’s coat. Guêpe wanted to move away from him, but not enough to stop eating.

“You’re like me,” he said, “small and beautiful and captive. We can neither one of us leave this place.”

A nightmare had chased Robert from his master’s bed; his older brother, Matthieu, the priest, had been laughing in a river with a soldier. Little black devils stood on the banks hurling rocks and spears
at them, but they laughed on and on, Matthieu saying, “These are just our bodies! You can only reach our bodies!” At last Robert was pulled into this dream when his brother spied him in the bushes. He was suddenly ashamed because he realized he should have been helping but had chosen instead to hide. Matthieu stopped laughing now, and, looking remarkably like St. Sebastian, what with all the horrid little barbs stuck in him, pointed toward Robert and said, “But you’re theirs, aren’t you? All of you, inside and out.”

“No!” Robert yelled, but now his brother and the soldier left, walking out of the river and ashore, leaving him alone with all the black devils. They looked at him, now, and the dream went dark until he could see only their yellow eyes burning like a hedge of malign stars. He understood that they would come now and take him to Hell.

He had woken up sweating, frightened at first, and then angry and not terribly surprised that Matthieu had found something else to make him feel guilty about.

“Boring old man,” he said under his breath, meaning both his brother and this flaccid cardinal who could sleep only on his stomach, his ridiculous white ass pointed up to the top of the canopied bed. Robert was nearly thirty-five now, but taut and lean, not yet showing his age; Cardinal Pierre Cyriac was an out-of-shape sixty, and Robert intended to throw himself from a tower before he let his body look like that.

He heard a sound in the streets below, outside the high walls of the house, beyond the little grove of Spanish clementines the cardinal had planted every May only to have the mistral kill them each December.

A woman crying, now shouting, “No! No!
No
,” banging a fist on wood to punctuate each word, and another woman, crying more quietly, trying to hush her.

Another plague death, as like as not, all the more stinging because the disease was actually loosening its grip on the city, only killing scores a week instead of hundreds. Robert hated this time, less because he feared death than because the cardinal did; and because the cardinal did, he had forbidden his concubine to go out into the streets without him. He wanted to watch every move the younger man made, to assure
himself that he kept a safe distance from strangers, that he did not go to the baths, that he did not linger too long in the market and risk bringing
it
home. He had sneezed once a few days before, and the old man had looked so coldly at him that he thought he might have him thrown from the house if he sneezed a second time.

He did not.

The Arabian had finished his hay now and would not suffer himself to be caressed further tonight. He didn’t mind the saddle, but he seemed to hold men’s hands in contempt. Robert slapped him briskly on the shoulder, earning himself a displeased whinny, and walked back toward the house, Guêpe nosing the door of the stall for a second leaf, which did not come.

Robert thought he might reread his boring old brother’s last letter, in which he fell all over himself in thanks for the wine he had been sent. It was sweet, really, how easy it was to please Matthieu. And, however dull his company, he had been a comfort during the time of their youth in their monstrous father’s monstrous house.

He would ask the cardinal for another small barrel, from the pope’s personal vineyard this time, to be sent north when next His Holiness sent an envoy to Rouen. Lots of envoys were going north these days, asking for money and tradesmen and men-at-arms for the crusade.