Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (7 page)

“Worse. A Norman. Le Comte d’Évreux, who treated with the English after our loss at Crécy. My keep was near Givras. I…despaired of justice. I took to the road and lived by the strength of my arm. I sought out even worse men than myself. I wanted revenge on him. I still do.”

Thomas fell silent.

“Do you want to make confession?”

“No.”

“Not to me, eh?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if it was me.”

“No, it’s…No. There’s no point.”

“Kill the abomination in the river and God will make you a knight again.”

“I’d rather He got me another goblet of this.”

“No,” the priest said. “You wouldn’t rather a goblet of wine than your honor back. Your joking is pleasant, but it doesn’t hide the hole in you.”

Thomas turned his eyes away from the priest’s warm gaze.

He only just managed not to cry. He did this by angering himself at God for making him suffer and pay for sins he had been backed into. God ringed you round with hounds and cornered you, then speared you with your back against a tree. When Thomas spoke, he turned down the corners of his mouth, and his words came out as a quiet growl.

“I’ll kill the whoring thing.”

FIVE

Thomas slept poorly; the wine had given him a burning stomach, and when he slept he dreamed of wading in mucky water, looking for things he had dropped. He gave up at first light, still belching sour wine, and began to put his armor on.

“Christ, it tasted good going in.”

He had slept in his filthy padded leather gambeson, as he had for months now, so he started right in putting on his armor, starting with his
cuisses
. He had finished buckling his second thigh piece when he stopped. The priest was sleeping heavily on his short bed with his knees drawn up and his ankles crossed. Thomas shook him awake. The smaller man looked frightened at first to see the large, strong shadow over him, but then he remembered he had a guest.

“Good morning,” the priest said.

“How deep is the river?”

“The river?”

“Where your monster is. How deep? Thighs? Tits? Chin?”

“Well…chin. On me. At the deepest. Perhaps to your shoulders.”

“Shit,” Thomas said.

“You’re really going to the river, then?”

“I said I would.”

“What we say and what we do are…”

“Well, I do what I say. Which is why I don’t say much.”

Thomas stood for a moment, considering the heavy, rusty mail coat in his hands.

“You’re wondering about your armor.”

“Yes.”

“You only half believe there’s a monster in the river. And you don’t want to drown looking for it.”

“I know of men who have been pulled under by their armor. That’s real. The thing you described? I don’t know. It seemed possible last night that a monster might be eating men in your river, though I’ve never in my life seen a monster. So this morning…Can such a thing exist in sunlight? And yet it seems these are the end days, and I think Hell has opened its doors.”

“I think that, too.”

“Spines, the boy said?”

“Spines.”

Thomas considered the priest’s soft hands and kind, almost comical face, what with his wild gray eyebrows and long head. He didn’t seem sick, though he was likely a bugger; not that Thomas had known many of the latter.

“Help me with the rest of this.”

The priest stood and helped Thomas wriggle into his mail shirt and buckle on his shoulder pieces.

“You should scour all that,” the priest said, smiling and showing Thomas his orange hands.

“Later. If your big eel eats me and shits me by the river, it should have rust for its spice.”

“What, saffron? It’s nearly that color.”

“Who can afford saffron? Mix it with blood and we’ll have paprika.”

The priest laughed.

Thomas put his surcoat on over everything; it was filthy and blue and had no coat of arms on it.

“Now get me your sword; you’ll want me to bless that.”

“Where is my sword?”

He had propped it against the wall, but now it was gone. As was the girl. Thomas banged the door open and went outside, where the sun was now rising, peering tentatively under a scud of clouds that would soon swallow it. He saw the girl sitting by a tree with his sword unsheathed next to her. She had blood on her gown. He stomped over to her, took the sword up with one hand, and yanked her up by the arm with the other.

“Jesus whoring Christ,” he said, looking at the cut on the meat of her hand. It was half the length of her smallest finger and not very deep, but it was still bleeding. “Do I have to watch you every second? Can’t I just sleep without you doing something stupid?”

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly.

“What was your idea, touching my sword? Nobody touches my sword but me.”

“I…I wanted to clean it for you.”

“Well, don’t! This is what you get.”

He bent her arm around hurtfully to show her dripping hand to her.

“I want to help.”

“You bleeding all over my things doesn’t help me, you, or anybody. Understand?”

She nodded, trying not to cry, and he noticed he was still holding her wrist, which suddenly looked very small and fragile in his big hand. He let it go. She wanted to rub it, but she was embarrassed and hid it behind her instead, looking up at him. He was about to bark,
What do you want now?
at her, but he thought about it and saw that she was hoping to get some kind word from him. He fished around in his head for one.

“Go…go see the priest,” he said, as gently as he could. “He may
have a cloth to bind that little cut. And put some yarrow in it, since you know what that is.”

She obeyed him.

He picked up his sword and saw that her blood was smeared on its point and the well-notched edge that had bitten her.

“Clumsy little witch,” he said.

It got darker.

A drop of rain fell in Thomas’s eye.

The priest went with Thomas, wearing his chasuble and a threadbare golden stole, holding the crosier over his head while the girl walked beside them swinging a censer with frankincense and rosemary in it. At the priest’s suggestion, Thomas held his sword by the blade, inverted so the quillons made a cross of it. The rain was light now, little more than a mist, but the road was muddy enough to coat the soldier’s boots and the priest’s simple shoes. The girl had left her shoes behind because she felt God liked bare feet better than shoes for holy work.

Two men from town came with them; one a heavily bearded young man with an ancient boar spear, the other a fat, blond farmer with blond porcine bristles on his jowls, armed with a billhook for hedges. Both wore straw hats. The smaller one looked scared, as did the priest. They had both been to the river to see the thing’s signs. But not the farmer. The farmer was piss drunk. Thomas reminded himself to stay well away from him if a fight started, because he was stout and thick-armed and likely to gut friend and foe alike. Among the bitterer lessons of brigandage Thomas had learned was that farmers were strong, often stronger than the horsemen who despised them, and that they lived so close to starvation that they would fight like bears to hold on to what crumbs and bits of wood or leather they owned.

If the priest hoped their procession would draw fresh recruits from the houses they passed, he was disappointed. A few women peered at them
from windows, all crossing themselves, and, on the outskirts of town, one bare-ribbed dog looked up at them briefly before going back to breakfast on the foot of a corpse leaned up against a sheep wall. The body had a flour sack over its head at least, but it had stained the sack and it stank even in the cool rain. Sheep’s bones littered the field past the wall—sheep had fared as poorly as men in this scourge—and the seigneur’s keep came into view around a stand of alder trees.

The pilgrims marched up to the gate, where Thomas pulled a leather cord that rang a bell up on the battlements. He waited the time it took the swaying, fat farmer to piss against the wall—the priest admonished him with his name, Sanson, but was waved away with the man’s free hand—and then Thomas rang the bell again. After a third tug on the cord, a very pale young man with plucked and redrawn eyebrows looked down at them from the wall. He held a crimson woolen cloak squared over his head, presumably to protect fine clothes they couldn’t see from their angle.

“If you’re not here to buy grain, then go your ways,” he said.

“Good herald,” the priest said, “please let us speak to Guillaume.”

“Guillaume has fallen. I am seneschal now. You may speak to me.”

“Then I will say a Mass for Guillaume, and rejoice in your good fortune. We have not come here to buy grain, which you know we cannot afford, or to rent your mill, for we have nothing to grind, or your oven, for we have nothing to bake. Rather, we offer your master the chance to win God’s love in battle.”

“Go away,” he said simply, and disappeared.

Thomas felt his anger rise.

“Herald!” he shouted, making the skinny man flinch.

No answer came from above.

“Whoreson ass-sniffing herald!”

The herald reappeared.

“Who has the insolence to speak that way to me? When you speak to me, you speak directly to my lord!”

“Then tell your lord to get his little prick out of his wife and help us kill the thing in the river.”

“You common bastard!” the herald yelled. “I’ll have you know we still have men-at-arms in here.”

“Then tell them to stop husbanding their hands and come down to the river. Something is killing your people.”

“It’s called the plague, you idiot,” the herald said, more quietly, and disappeared again. Thomas’s worst insults didn’t bring him back this time. So he grabbed the cord and yanked with all his might, grinning at the sound of the bell coming loose and clanging down stone steps somewhere above them.

The five of them gasped at what they saw. Tracks in the muddy bank, like a snake would make, but much larger, had beaten under all the grass close to the river, and crisscrossed and looped between here and the town. It was visiting the town now. The piles of foul shit the priest had described were still there, full of bones and clothes. A woman’s severed leg lay white but mud-spattered just by the bank. This was nothing less than a visitation from Hell. The priest, quite pale now, began to pray psalms in Latin, and he urged the girl to swing the censer, which she did. The man with the big beard started shaking. Thomas said, quietly, “Priest. If it goes badly for us, run like a young man, and take the girl. She’ll try to stay, but don’t let her.” The priest never stopped praying, but nodded, which Thomas didn’t see because he kept his eyes fixed on the milky gray waters of the river.

He went forward at a crouch, with his sword at the ready. The stout, drunk one with the billhook came next, and the beardy one barely walked forward at all, staying close to the priest and the girl. Thomas was as taut as wire.

Step.

Step.

Step.

He froze when something moved in the water near the pilings of the collapsed bridge, something like an oily black arm, but the width of a draft horse’s chest. He wasn’t entirely sure he had seen it.

Then all of them said some variant of “My God” when its head broke the water’s surface.

White-eyed and flat-headed, like some giant cross between eel, newt, and frog, it laid its head on the bank and felt the ground with long whiskers around its mouth and eyes until it found the woman’s leg. Its tongue darted out and latched onto the leg with a thatch of evil little hooks at its tip, pulling it under the water with it, bending a growth of sweetflag rushes. They sprang back up. The water foamed and then flowed gently again, as if none of it had happened.

Those white eyes, a grandfather’s blind eyes.

The small, beardy man dropped his boar spear and ran so fast his hat blew off him.

The stout one stood openmouthed, then vomited. But he didn’t run. Rather, he followed Thomas right up to the edge of the water, which flowed gently now and showed no sign of the thing.

“Please, sir knight. Please protect me in this fray.”

“Wipe your chin,” Thomas said.