Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (6 page)

Yes I did
, she wrote.
By the church. In my heart.

It was taking him so long to read this that she just pointed at the church and placed her hand over her chest.

He grunted.

“Is this vow for the rest of your life?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Just while we’re here?”

She nodded.

“In that case, we are definitely spending the night. Maybe a week.”

She reached into the bucket and threw some damp leaves at his face. One stuck on his forehead and she laughed in spite of herself and her temporary status as maiden Cistercian.

They ate their bucket of greens and bright flowers. Along with the buttery little crowns of calendula, which he remembered now from his mother’s garden—she used to mix it with chickens’ grain to make
their egg yolks darker and, she said, better for the blood—Thomas kept picking out one broadish leaf, nodding his head as he tasted it.

“What’s this one?”

Sorrel
, she wrote.

He followed the letters with his finger, pronouncing each syllable as shakily as a foal walks. She nodded when he pieced them together correctly.

“It’s good. Like a lemon, but good. And this?”

Lovage

“This?”

Comfrey

“This one I know. Don’t eat it all. And get more of it in the morning, if there is more. It’s good to pack in a wound to stop bleeding.”

Yarrow

“How do you know all this?”

Mother
, she wrote, and a smile broke so gently on her face that Thomas bit his tongue viciously to keep from weeping for his own.

They slept in the open air of the cloisters, near statues of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Genevieve of Paris, and the Archangels Michael and Gabriel. Thomas woke up in the middle of the night and went to look at his comet. It was across Cygnus’s neck now, and seemed to be reddish at the tip, as if there were a tiny vein of blood in it. He rubbed his eyes and looked away, but when he looked back it was still there. He noticed a second comet now, close to it and very faint.

“Just kill us all,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

He slept hard after that, and dreamed of monks singing plainchant. He woke in the peach light that came just before sunrise. The air was chilly, and the girl was still sleeping.

The air smelled of juniper, though he saw no juniper bush.

It also smelled of wildflowers.

Both of them had been covered in flowers.

*  *  *

They met travelers the next day: a cloth merchant from Bruges, his family, and two Flemish men-at-arms, with five horses between them. All seemed to be in good health. Thomas would have been glad to meet them two months before, with Godefroy and his band of killers behind him; the horses were young, the cart promised excellent pickings, and Godefroy would not have raped this woman.

The two parties stayed fifty paces apart and Thomas and the merchant each shouted news about what lay behind him. The news was not good in either direction. Then the man offered to buy food. Thomas said he had none to spare, and would have said the same had the girl’s sack been full of sausages and peas; money wasn’t what it used to be. The merchant looked at the sack. The older of the two Flamands suddenly looked nervous, and Thomas guessed that he was afraid the merchant might order them to search the sack. Neither man wanted to tangle with Thomas. The merchant, who was in fact assessing Thomas, finished this, saluted him, and moved his party on.

The bridge Thomas wanted to cross was said to be just on the other side of a river town called St. Martin-le-Preux, but as he and the girl approached the town, they came to an overturned and wheel-less handcart, on the bottom of which someone who was not a confident speller had painted, in what looked like blood:

As this was the only bridge they knew of, they continued forward, although Thomas traded his straw hat for the helmet and carried the sword naked across his shoulders. The girl took her bird whistle out, poured a little of her water, and began to make birdsong with it.

“Stop that,” he hissed.

“I just don’t want to surprise anyone. And I thought this would let them know we’re friendly.”

“I’m not friendly.”

“But I’m friendly, and I’m the one with the whistle.”

He was just about to take it from her when a priest walked out to meet them, easily visible in his white linen alb, holding in his hand a horn lantern. It was still light enough to see, but the priest kept the lantern near his nose and mouth.

He came from a hidden recess in the woods near which the skulls of animals had been nailed to trees.

“Stop. Please,” the priest said, holding up one very delicate-looking hand.

Thomas was glad to keep his distance; he turned his head to left and right to make sure nobody was moving on their flanks. The priest now looked to the right and left as well, wondering if the soldier had confederates skirting up the sides.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” the girl called out to the priest, but Thomas pinched her arm.

“Speak when I tell you to,” he told her. Then he called to the priest, “We’re not sick.”

“Do you promise?” he said.

“On my word,” Thomas said. “Are you alone?”

“Oh, yes. Quite alone.”

The priest lowered his lantern.

“I’m not sick, either.”

“We saw your sign.”

“Sign?”

“Go back.”

“Ah. That will have been the militia.”

“Where are they?”

“As I was their confessor, I fear they probably bypassed purgatory on their way straight to the cauldron.”

“Dead?”

“Some time ago.”

“We just want to cross the bridge.”

“That’s problematic.”

“Why? There’s no toll, is there?”

“There’s no bridge. When was the last time you had wine? And I mean good wine.”

Thomas smiled broadly, showing teeth in surprisingly good shape for his age. Teeth he would be very glad to stain purple.

The people in the town near the river had burned the bridge to try to isolate themselves, but the Death was on both sides and found them anyway. A peddler had paid a farmer to sleep in his barn, against the orders of the seigneur, but the next morning the farmer found him there with his face frozen in pain and fear, and muck from the horrid buboes staining the pits of his shirt. The farmer had seven children, who worked and played in the fields with neighbor children and helped out at the widow’s alehouse. Soon half the families on the east side of town were stricken, along with the widow. The die-off started, as it always did, with those who were good enough to minister to the sick and bury the dead, and with those who gathered at the alehouse, including the militia. When the churchyard was full, families dumped the bodies in the river and the eels fed on them.

Then something else moved in that also liked to eat what the eels grew fat on. Fishermen who speared or cast nets for trout, eels, and pike began to disappear, even when they went in groups of two or three.

Nobody knew what was happening until a young boy sprinted back to town and said that his father and uncle had been eaten by a “great black fish or snake” with a “flat mouth” that hid in the murky shallows. It had lashed at them with the end of its tail and pulled the men in, then tore them with spines, and then its great, froggy mouth had opened and clamped down on their heads, swallowing each of them whole in several fast gulps. The boy had stood transfixed until he saw that it was slithering up the bank toward him, and then he had run screaming for the road. The monster would have caught him, but his
panicked flight had startled his uncle’s mule, still tied to its cart, causing it to buck and catch the thing’s attention. It wanted the mule more than the boy, so it coiled all around the poor animal and bit its head off, dragging the body, cart and all, back down the bank and into the river.

“How long was it, boy?” the priest had said.

“I don’t know.”

“Think. You saw it take the mule. So of course it was longer than a mule. As long as three mules perhaps?”

The boy shook his head.

“How many, then?”

The boy held up eight fingers, then corrected it to nine.

Several of the men in town who were still healthy and still brave enough to leave their houses met up at the alehouse and drank until they had the stomach to go down to the river and look for it. They took their axes and wooden flails, their clubs and scythes, and they swore to Saints Martin and Michael and Denis to cleave the thing in two or die in the attempt. The priest, who drank with them, witnessed these oaths, and agreed to come with them, and to hold over the men his processional crosier with its agonized Christ. All their boozy courage left them when they went to the banks and saw the wreckage of the cart, and the piles of shit the thing had left on the bank, all full of boots and bones and broken tools, and even the shredded cuirass of a man-at-arms. Even with the bridge down, it seemed, some were trying to cross the river. But they were not making it to the far shore.

“This is beyond our power, brethren,” said the priest. “God forgives us the oaths we make in ignorance. Let us return to town before we make the thing stronger on our fat and our blood.”

None of them protested.

“What about the seigneur?” asked Thomas, leaning toward the priest over his modest table. “If he’s well enough to issue orders about
letting in strangers, he should have enough spunk to buckle on his armor and put a sword in that thing.”

The priest smiled his distinctive, sad smile, making the well-used lines around his eyes deepen. He was probably a year or two older than Thomas, but drink and soft living made him look closer to fifty than forty; faded speckles of wine on the chest of his alb, only muted by his attempts to clean them, testified to the death of the town laundress. Despite his woolly eyebrows and masculine chin, there was something womanish, almost wifely, about the cleric’s aspect.

“Our lord is what you might call…”

“A frightened cunt?”

“If no more generous term occurred to you. He has shut himself and his retinue in the tower. His herald comes down on Fridays and reads his proclamations, which are ignored. He never gets off his horse. A man confessed to me that he intends to throw a slop pot at the herald the next time he comes, and asked me to pardon him in advance. I told him that gesture would put him one slop pot closer to Heaven. Better the herald should get a faceful of shit tomorrow than an axe handle across the nose next week. That’s where things are heading. We starve down here, unable even to pull fish from the river now, while our master has the water mill and ovens and has hoarded back enough grain to keep himself fed until doomsday.”

“So, a week’s worth, then?”

The priest laughed and went to pat Thomas’s arm in fellowship, but Thomas pulled his mailed arm back with the sound of money being withdrawn from a card game. He waved a cautionary finger but was still laughing. As was the priest.

The priest noticed the salt stains on the knight’s dark garments and the rust stains on his light ones. Had he had a page and squire? A wife? Or had he been this dirty before the Death came?

“Who is the girl to you?” asked the priest, gesturing where the girl lay sleeping on a straw pallet. “And don’t say your daughter.”

“I don’t know who she is. But she sleeps a lot.”

“Maybe she’s hoping to wake up from this bad dream.”

“If so, she’s smarter than both of us.”

“I don’t know what smart is anymore. More wine?”

“With pleasure.”

“Good, isn’t it?”

“The best. Black as a woman’s heart and sweet as her…”

“Yes?” the priest said, amused.

“Other heart.”

The priest tipped the small cask of wine so the last of the pretty, red liquid spattered out of it and into the serving jug.

“The wine is from Beaune, but it comes via Avignon, from the private stock of His Holiness.”

“But how…?”

“Where my younger brother is a steward of sorts; one of those who dresses His Holiness, or was. His office now is less…formal.”

“But, still…”

“My very handsome younger brother. Eight years my junior, but seems younger still. A certain cardinal is…fond of masculine beauty. And this pope is known for his generosity. Even when it comes to vices he does not share.”

“Ah.”

“Indeed.”

Thomas laughed.

“So you drink the fruit of your brother’s damnation?”

“Just the one barrel. I believe God has it within His heart to overlook my overlooking.”

“You had only one barrel of this? Why drain it tonight?”

“Why not? The desire came on me suddenly. It’s the last wine in town. I should have used it up at Mass, but there is neither wafer nor bread to go with it. I think the monks who made my wafer are all dead.”

“Cistercians? Half a day from here?”

“Yes,” the priest said hopefully.

“They’re dead. A few may have fled.”

“Ah,” the priest said. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed
hard twice, and his eyes moistened. He nodded. He looked as if he wanted to reach out for Thomas’s hand, but he didn’t.

“Anyway, nobody comes now. I haven’t even been in the church in two weeks. I’m as scared to go there as they are.”

“If you don’t go to church, how do you know they don’t go looking for you?”

The priest looked down at his hands, where the fingers were grabbing each other.

“They know where I live. Some still come for confession; they shout their sins from the path and I shout back their penance from my window. Though even that’s been nearly a week. No more Mass, in any event. And the wine may serve a holier purpose in your belly.”

“Oh?”

“I was hoping a cup or two might extract some knightly oath from you. You are a knight? Or were?”

“I was. I still am, I suppose. But it feels more like I was. It feels like a long time ago.”

“You could be one again.”

“I doubt it. I have done things.”

“Things?”

“I was cheated of my holdings.”

“The English?”

Thomas shook his head.