Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (5 page)

“Do you know where his house is?”

“No.”

“If we find him, I’m leaving you with him.”

Fresh graves pocked the churchyard, and just past that a big pit yawned with a heap of dirt near it. He knew what was in the pit. Every town had something similar. The first dead had been given Christian burials, and then the ones who had buried them needed
burying, and then there were so many a pit was dug, and then there was nobody willing even to take them to the pit.

“Everyone’s dead here,” she said.

“Maybe. More likely that they’re hiding. I would hide from strangers, wouldn’t you?”

She shook her head no.

“No, I guess we know you don’t do that.”

Thomas pulled his scarf up over his nose and mouth as they passed the pit and went to look in the church. It was a simple church with a dirt floor. The cross and everything else of value had been taken from the altar.

“I think your priest is dead,” Thomas said, looking back at her.

The girl knitted her brow.

“He was so good. Why would God kill good priests?”

“The plague kills everything. Only the priests who won’t visit the sick have a chance of living.”

“Then he’s dead,” she said.

“Looks like I’m stuck with you for a while longer. We’ll sleep in the church. Maybe nobody died in here.”

During the night he heard the girl speaking, but not in French. Latin. He thought he heard her say “Avignon.” He thought about shaking her, but instead got up and went outside to walk in the cool air and look at the stars. A comet had appeared last week, near Cygnus, and he looked to see where it was moving. It would not be long before it cut the neck of the pretty swan in the east. He knew it was wicked, a plague token in a sick sky, but it was so beautiful he couldn’t stop looking at it. There had been others before it. Three at once had shared April’s sky, one so bright it washed out the stars near it; this was before the plague had come to Normandy, but it had already started spreading elsewhere, and everyone was talking about Judgment Day. He remembered the tales of the travelers they met, and often robbed; an earthquake in Italy, dwarfed by the earthquakes and
freak storms that punished India; how the earth had cracked in the land of the Mongols, all the way down to Hell, and it was Hell that burped up this pestilence.

The comets had been just another indication that something in Heaven’s mechanism was sprung. Several of the other brigands under Godefroy had melted away before the sickness pared them down from twenty to the four they had been when they found the girl’s donkey. Those who left had thought to save their souls by quitting the pack of thieves but had probably saved their lives. The company had gotten sick after robbing merchants with a wagonload of furs; no sooner had they abandoned one sick one to his death than another started whimpering in his sleep from a swelling in his armpit or groin.

Twelve died in two weeks.

He thought further back, to the days after his injury and betrayal, when he first came to Normandy, meaning to damn himself and grow rich. A whore had warned him not to take the road from Normanville to Évreux that particular spring night because she knew men who lay in ambush there. Thomas paid her to take him on that road, which smelled of all spring’s gaudy notes, but honeysuckle most of all, and to introduce him to those men.

To Godefroy.

The most feared brigand in Normandy, for a year or two.

The man he had just killed.

When he went back in the church, the girl was sitting up.

“We are going to Paris. And then to Avignon,” she said.

“The hell we are.”

“I have to go to Avignon. I’m not sure why. I have something I have to do. And you have to make sure I get there safely.”

“I don’t like your dreams. Someone’s going to call you a witch and turn you over to the church.”

“Do you think I’m a witch?”

“They’ll put the tongs to you. Would you like that?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t know if you’re a witch.”

“What does your heart tell you?”

Thomas put his hands on his hips and walked in a slow circle, his head down.

“My heart lies,” he said.

“Something lies to you, but it’s not your heart.”

“Stop that weird shit. I don’t want to hear it.”

“We have to go to Avignon. But first we go to Paris. There’s something in Paris we need.”

“What we need is to stay in the country. Those big cities are tombs, and they’re hungry. Going to them is stupid.”

“Yet we have to go.”

“Says who?”

“Père Raoul.”

He threw up his hands.

“What, the dead one?”

“Yes, he is dead. He died in his little house with his blanket over his head. He came to tell me.”

“Horseshit.”

She knitted her brow again.

“I’m going to sleep a little more,” she said.

She lay back down on the packed earth as if it were settled.

“If you see your dead priest again, tell him he can go to Paris and Avignon alone. After he fucks himself.”

“He won’t be back.”

“Good.”

She curled her knees up kittenishly and was almost instantly asleep.

Thomas waited until he heard her soft snoring and then quietly gathered his things. The girl was a liability; he would have a better chance on his own. He could travel faster, hide more easily; if he needed to do something brutal, he wouldn’t have her knowing, flint-colored eyes on him, making him hesitate and perhaps dying because
he had. This world wasn’t made for children, particularly girl children, and most particularly those without fathers. That wasn’t his fault. If God wanted her protected, He could do it Himself. He was about to leave her in the church when he saw something red by his foot. It had not been there before. When he saw what it was, he crossed himself for the first time in months and flung it outside. Then he put his gear down. His heart was pounding in his ears.

The item that had bothered him so was a crude painted mask with horns on it. The kind a country priest would wear to play the devil in a mystery play.

FOUR

They marched together for two days, and on the first day they saw no people and ate only green stems, a parsnip she pulled out of the ground (using the end of her dress wrapped around her hand), a grasshopper she managed to catch, and a very little honey. They were making for Paris, though the girl couldn’t say why. Despite the devil’s horns he had seen the night before, he thought about abandoning her no less than a dozen times, and, to that end, he hardly responded to her attempts to speak to him. She had a pretty voice, and decent manners, and he would easily feel affection for her if he let himself, but he determined not to.

With limited success.

“Where were you born?” she said as they crested a hill under a pleasantly warm, blue sky.

“Picardy.”

“What town?”

“A town.”

“A big town?”

“Just a town.”

“With what name?”

“Town.”

“This town. Is it near a mountain?”

“No.”

“A hill, then?”

“No.”

“A lake?”

“No.”

“Farms?”

“No.”

“All towns are near farms.”

He scowled down at her, but she deflected this with a look of unperturbed precocity. The intelligence in her eyes goaded him, reminding him of someone else.

Someone who had hurt him.

“Then, yes,” he said.

“Near farms.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Trees? Is the town near trees?”

“I guess.”

“I want to revisit the question of the hill. Because you didn’t seem sure.”

“Yes, it was near a hill.”

“But you seemed sure about the mountain. So no mountain.”

“No.”

“And the name?”

“Town, I said.”

“No town is named Town.”

“Mine was. Townville-sur-Cunting-Town. What did your papa do again?”

“He was a lawyer.”

“It shows. Now shut up.”

“You’ll never get a wife being so mean.”

“I already had one.”

“What happened to her?”

“I killed her for talking.”

The girl giggled at that.

“And is she buried in Townville-sur-Town?”

“Shut up.”

“I suppose you killed your children, too.”

“All of them.”

“What were their names?”

“Boy, boy, girl, and shut up.”

They saw the monastery on the second day, and only because they went into the woods to forage. They got less than a fistful of sour berries between them, but, as they were about to leave, Thomas spotted a hare and chased it down a footpath that led farther into the woods. The hare got away, of course, but the woods broke on a small hill, and from the hill he saw the low stone walls and the thatched roof, and what looked like a garden.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, let our luck be in,” he said, and the two of them went to the gate. It was a simple gate of interwoven sticks, standing open. A wooden sign over the gate read, in burned-in Latin:

He drew his sword and went in.

She followed behind him, with her hands clasped as if to pray, and then moved past him and headed directly for the little stone church, ignoring his “Ho! Wait!” He let her go, shaking his head at her, and then assessed the grounds.

It was a small monastery, home to no more than twenty brothers
from the look of it. Only the church and the outer walls were stone; the cloisters and dormitory were wattle and daub. Another hare, or the same one, darted from the garden, but Thomas didn’t even try to lunge at it, instead making straight for the earthen cellar where he suspected the buttery would be. It had already been emptied. Considerately, respectfully, and quite thoroughly emptied.

“No luck at all,” he said, and suppressed the urge to spit.

The dormitory was empty, except for ten straw beds, several of which bore the stains of plague on them. He backed out quickly.

He found the girl kneeling outside the church, praying silently into her clasped hands, her cheeks wet.

“Why didn’t you go in?” he said.

She just looked at him and wiped her cheeks.

And then he smelled them.

He peeked in the door, waving flies away from his face, and saw four puffy corpses lying in the nave, wearing their off-white, undyed woolen habits. Three were lying on their backs, and the last one, an old man, was curled like a baby near them. He had his eating knife in his hand, and his habit was open on one side. The floor was sticky under him. He had died trying to burst one of those awful lumps. Flowers were strewn on the lot of them.

“Cistercians,” Thomas said.

Fresh dirt mounds out back covered the first brothers who fell, but only four. If they had been buried one to a grave, and if all the beds had been filled, a few were unaccounted for; probably those who had emptied the buttery. Maybe they thought they would go to another abbey. Thomas didn’t envy them trying to travel unarmed with the last cart of food in the valley.

When the girl finished her prayers, Thomas said, “No food. They got the stores, and emptied the fishpond and the dovecote. They had an oven, but it’s been cold a long while. The garden where they grew food is all turned up. All they’ve got is damned herbs and flowers.”

The girl went to the herb garden and motioned for Thomas to follow. She handed him a bucket from the well and walked him through the garden, filling it with flowers and greens she tore expertly with her small, white hands. He started grabbing at everything, but she stopped him before he grabbed one green stem. She shook her head at him urgently.

“What? Why?”

She used her finger to write
monkshood
in the dirt.

He furrowed his brow to read it, sounding out each letter.

Monkshood
.

Poison.

“Oh. Thank you. So, what, you’re not talking?”

Not here.

He sounded this out, too, pointing at each letter.

“What, because it’s a monkery?”

She nodded.

“You didn’t take a vow.”