Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (44 page)

And I’m about to see them

The horse stumbled on loose stones and jarred her eyes open just beneath the massive tower Phillip the Fair had built to menace the city of the popes some forty years before; Villeneuve was in France, not Provence, while Avignon had just been bought outright by the pope himself, making an earthly sovereign of him. The tower had been built by a bullying king to bully a weak pope; now both were dead and France and Avignon were in bed together, for good it seemed. The tower’s murder-slits were dark, unlike many windows behind her; sleep was not coming easily to the city of cardinals, where important men could afford candles to burn against their nightmares. The people of Villeneuve did not know how close those nightmares were to birthing themselves in the world.

They rode across the torchlit bridge into Avignon, then took the northern gate toward Sorgues, and toward Châteauneuf.

*  *  *

Delphine had walked this way with Thomas after his transformation; she had seen the handsome ramparts and great square towers of Châteauneuf by day. She had seen the vineyards that provided the last wine in Provence lying still and had not thought to return by night. Unlike Sorgues, which lay dead and open, no part of it still working save the papal mint, Châteauneuf was alive—alive enough to shut the Porte d’Avignon at night as it had even before the plague struck. Delphine’s business was not in the city, however.

It was in the vineyards that aproned it.

They steered Guêpe off the Grand Chemin de Sorgues and onto the small paths between the
lieux-dits
, bearing names like Bois Renard, Beau Renard, and Mont Redon; these were among the most beautiful vineyards in the world.

But something was very wrong here.

Robert started to speak, but she pinched him to keep him silent, pointing at the rows of vines lying under the nearly full moon.

“What?” he said.

She got off the Arab and led him to a fence.

Robert dismounted, too.

“Tie him,” she whispered, and Robert did.

She pointed again.

“I still don’t…” he started to whisper, and then he did see. The harvest was on. These vines were Grenache, an October grape, sweet, the latest to go in the basket. Now the backs and heads of men and women bobbed like so many black shadows in the moonlit vines. They hunched to gather, then shuffled to the next plant, shearing clusters of grapes off with the curved iron knives of their trade.

“So what?” he said. “There’s moon enough to see. Perhaps they fear a frost and work night and day to save the crop.”

She led them closer, creeping quietly down the row.

To Robert’s surprise, however, she led them past the gatherers altogether, following three women with huge baskets of grapes on
their backs. The women made for a stone farmhouse, just outside which a dozen workers tromped in a wine press.

The women dumped their grapes in as men in knee-length sackcloth switched out empty juice bowls for full ones, handing these off to men on ladders who funneled them into a giant tun.

The men seemed to be smiling, or making some other face that showed their teeth.

Robert did not care for this at all and did not want to know more.

“Let’s get back before we’re caught,” he said.

“Do you see?” she whispered.

“I just want to go back.”

“They’re not singing,” she said. “And they’re not humming and they’re not talking. Have you ever seen wine treaders tread in silence?”

He was fuming now.

This child who did not speak as a child was bewitching him.

He turned to leave and ran directly into a man bearing grapes on his back. Robert began to excuse himself, and then the smell hit him. He had walked directly into a dead man, whose lower jaw was missing and whose eyes had collapsed in on themselves. The dead man pushed by Robert, and then, as if it had struck him that something wrong had just happened, he turned. His black stub of a tongue worked and he pointed at them.

Neither Delphine nor Robert had to tell the other to run.

The dead man now drew air into his unsound lungs as best he could and made a dry, horrid sound like something between a busted cornemuse and a dying calf.

The treaders stopped treading and the gatherers stopped gathering.

All of them turned now to look at the fleeing man and girl who had intruded upon the vineyard. Whether by instinct or at some command, the treaders climbed out of their vat and the gatherers dropped their baskets. But not their knives. Now they ran, too, some of them falling as they blundered into vines.

They were gaining.

Guêpe bucked and reared at the smell of them, or perhaps at the
sound of them rushing through the leaves and butting against one another, and his rope threatened to come loose—if he ran off without them, Robert and Delphine would be

hung like pigs with cut throats to bleed out into the vats

caught.

It was the girl who grabbed his reins, calming him while Robert fumbled with the knot.

“Hurry!” she said.

The rope came loose.

Robert mounted and nearly bolted without her, but he wheeled and scooped her up just as the dead swarmed over the fence. She would never forget their faces—even as their bodies rushed to do violence, what remained of their faces betrayed sadness, even apology for the murder they were being compelled to commit.

Their knives were out, and the first ones grabbed for the reins. Guêpe jumped one way and then another avoiding the flashing knives; he back-kicked one man whose head fell mostly off, causing him to flail his arms wildly, and then the horse found his footing and bolted down the Grand Chemin de Sorgues.

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

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.