Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (9 page)

She got terribly lost even though she knew the river was close, and she slapped her palm on several doors, some of them doors she recognized as belonging to friends, but nobody opened to her. She cried against the wall at one house and a gentle voice from inside, her sister’s voice, said “Go on, now, Mathilde. I still have the two children
and you mustn’t give it to them. Go on.” So on she went. Her children had died of it, and her sweet, old husband, and his brother, and she was the last one in the house. She had paid a young boy to care for her when she knew she had it, but he had left after one day. All he did was bring her things she asked for; but he refused to empty her slop jar and still he wanted a week’s farm wages for the first day. She paid him, but he saw where she got the money from and took the coffer in the night, leaving her with nothing. The boy had worked with her husband. Learning to be a cobbler. Now he had his master’s money, but little good it would do him in Hell; he was already sweating with the first fevers. It was after he left that the little goat had come.

The woman had no wimple on and her pale orange hair hung greasily about her shoulders. Her eyes were red and swollen. Windows closed as she passed them, and it began to make her angry. She wanted to stop and have words with the betrayers who were abandoning her, but her throat hurt like it had pins in it, and if it came to a fray, she didn’t want anyone touching her left armpit, which had grown a painful swelling the size of a crabapple that gurgled at night and seemed to speak to her.

She had to get to the river.

At length, she remembered a turn between two houses that she had passed several times, and she stumbled downhill, laughing and crying at the same time at the sight of the water. She didn’t care if the water was clean as long as it was cold. She would wade into it and might even put her head under to stop the heat in it.

That was when she saw the knight, lying on his stomach with his feet in the river. She knelt next to him and drank, coughing half of it back up; something foul was in it. Foul and oily. But her throat felt better.

She looked at the knight and saw that he was strong and beautiful, and dead. She cried for how beautiful he was. Even his scars were beautiful and perfect, the pit on his cheek where God had put His finger to mark him as holy. She lay down next to him on her side and took off his helmet. He still wore a chain hood, but she could see his
hard, beautiful face better now. Her husband’s wedding ring was on a cord around her neck, and she took this off, and breathed on it, and pushed it onto the knight’s finger, though it wouldn’t pass the second knuckle because his were soldier’s hands.

“I marry you,” she said. “I marry you now, knight.”

She cried and kissed his still mouth, tenderly at first, then with her tongue. His mouth was warm. He was breathing. She became confused about whether he was dead. Perhaps not, but, like her, he would be soon. Everyone would be soon. She used her hair to clean his brow, and she stroked his face with her hand.

“My husband is in Heaven with his first wife, but I will go to Heaven, too, and you will be my husband there. And I will be a good wife. I will show you. I will dress for bed,” she said, and took off her sickness-stained gown and one of her muddy hose. She got tired unrolling the second one and draped herself across the knight’s armored back and died there.

And that was how the priest found the armored man and the pale, dead woman, nude but for one stocking, her back covered in plague tokens the color of eggplant, as if a little goat had danced upon her and bruised her with its hooves.

“Where am I?” Thomas shouted from the bed, his eyes wild.

“You’re in my home,” the priest said, looking down at him. “You’ve been hurt.”

The priest was holding a lantern near his nose and mouth.

It was night.

Thomas began to remember. The creatures in his dream had not been friendly, so he took a moment trying to remember if this priest was. Frogs. Now he remembered. Frogs had come, latching onto him, feeding on him, covering his face and hands. He had been watching from outside himself as spiny little frogs ate him. He shuddered, then kept shuddering. The pains in his head and in the corner of his groin were distinct: one was leaden and dull, like an old rusty lock set at the
top of his neck, and embraced his temples; the other was hot like someone had taken a coal from a brazier and tucked it at the top of his pubis. Everything on him felt clammy and sticky. He sneezed.

He looked up at the priest again and saw the half of his face that was brightly lit by the lantern he held close to it. Three superficial scratches jagged across his cheek.

“What have you done with her?” Thomas said, and sat up heavily, looking at the priest with dangerous, murky eyes.

“Nothing, friend. She’s…oh, the scratches. She gave me those when I pulled her away from you. On the shore. Really, I was pulling her away from the…There was a…a young wife, Mathilde. A good woman. With Christ now, if any of us are. You may be sick.”

“Where is the girl?”

“I persuaded her to sleep in the stables tonight, but she will come back when she wakes up. She sat on that little stool near you until an hour ago. She’s quite faithful.”

Thomas looked under the threadbare sheet that covered him and saw what the thing in the river had done to him; an awful hole a few inches above the base of his
verge
wept into the hair there. All the skin around it was swollen, and a separate swelling was coming in near it, where the leg met the groin. The whole area was a misery.

“So I have some uncleanness in me from that thing, as well as plague.”

“It seems so.”

“Did you give me last rites?”

“Three hours ago.”

“I’ll try not to sin.”

“You’re in no condition to sin, except perhaps unclean thoughts.”

“Not having any. Hurts too much down there.”

“You’re safe from lust, at least. Having any temptations about gluttony?”

Thomas shook his head.

“And it’s hardly sloth for a sick man to rest. Don’t worry. I’ll look after your soul. As for the body, that’s in God’s hands.”

Thomas nodded.

“You killed it, you know.”

Thomas made a pleased sound and his lids got heavy.

“It floated downriver like an old empty sock, leaving its awful guts behind it. It was an awful, murderous thing, and you killed it with your own hand. It was worthy of a saint.”

Thomas slept.

He woke up again just before dawn, to the sound of labored breathing. Not his own. Someone was suffering, trying to breathe with pierced lungs. He hadn’t heard that sound since the catastrophe at Crécy, when he lay with a broken leg and an arrow through his face, listening to his seigneur breathe his last breaths, sucking bloody air in around the ashwood arrows that had punched through his chain hauberk in three places. He always loved his lord for not moaning, as other men did. As Thomas did. He knew in his heart that his lord, the Comte de Givras, had died awake, gritting his teeth, using his last strength to keep from making an unchivalrous noise. The comte was not as strong in the arms as Thomas, almost nobody was, but he was tougher. He died a better death than Thomas was about to, fouling his sick-sheets in bed.

But now that horrible breathing.

Outside his window.

A shadow passed.

He got to his feet and found that the right leg was completely numb, as if it had fallen asleep, and it was all he could do not to crash to the floor. He was sick and dizzy and his nose was running into his beard, but he got his sword and moved past the sleeping priest. He opened the door in time to see the form of a man limping toward the stables.

Where the girl was.

“You!” he said, but coughed at the end of it.

The figure didn’t turn.

Thomas tried to run at it, but now his woodish leg betrayed him and tumbled him onto the ground, where he blacked out. He came to not very long after, and went farther toward the stables, where he saw the girl and the figure talking over a lantern. His eyes were tearing, and he couldn’t see well, but it looked like a man. A shirtless man with long spines. Thomas lurched toward the couple, but the world spun again and he went out.

He woke again moments later, or thought he did, to find the spined man helping him into bed. Except the man was bleeding all over the bed and laboring to breathe, because he was full of arrows, not spines.

“Seigneur!” Thomas tried to say, but it wasn’t his lord.

He didn’t recognize the man, a short dark-haired youth with protuberant, drilling eyes that looked almost luminous.

The man exhaled a shuddering breath, spraying a small amount of froth from his chest wounds, then pressed hard with his thumb on Thomas’s forehead, forcing him to fully recline. It hurt. The man wheezed and coughed horribly and limped out of the room.

Thomas still felt the imprint of that hard thumb.

He slept.

But not before he muttered,
“Sebastian. Saint Sebastian, help me.”

SEVEN

In the morning, the girl told the priest that the three of them were going to the shrine of the Virgin of the White Rock, ten miles north. She was granting miracles to some, and she would rid Thomas of the plague.

“But, child,” the priest said, “this man cannot travel. And the bishop heard rumors of this shrine many years ago, and visited it and declared that, while it was a holy place and Christians should pray there, they should expect no miracles.”

A saint had told her. She bit her lip, wondering if she should let them know one spoke to her. It seemed better to keep that secret.

“A higher power than the bishop says the shrine is healing people. And we can take the knight upon a cart.”

“If I had a cart.”

“Go to the almond orchard and pray. God will show you a way.”

“No,” the priest said forcefully. “We must stay here. If God wants our friend to live, He will bestow that grace upon him wherever he is.”

Her insides fluttered as though a small bird were near her heart. Words came to her. She closed her eyes and said them.

“Matthieu Hanicotte,” she said, calling the priest by his true name, which he had never told her, “you say these words because you fear to leave your little home. But I turn your words upon you; if Death means to take you, he may do it here as easily as on the road. He is already in this house.”

A chill passed through the priest, and he said meekly, “Watch over our friend. I am going to the orchard.”

The dead man’s cart was in good repair, and the three of them were soon upon the road to Rochelle-la-Blanche, a hill village where granite was quarried. The priest drove the fine cart, while Thomas lay feverish in the back of it. The girl held a cross over him with one hand and lay her other hand upon his burning chest. The priest was certain she was a saint. He had no other way to explain his discovery in the orchard.

The cart’s owner had broken his neck trying to stand on the wheel of the cart and beat the last almonds from a high branch. The body was still warm when the priest found him. A chill had gone through Matthieu Hanicotte, and for a moment he had wondered if the girl was diabolic in nature. He thought not. Then he had a moment to wonder whether God had slain this man to provide them a cart, or if He had merely directed Matthieu to the scene of this sad event, already foreordained. What was the difference? Everything served God’s will, and here, at last, after months of senseless deaths and unending tears, was a tragedy that bore some fruit. The priest had blessed the man, then cried and thanked God for at last revealing His face to him. For all those thanks, however, the mule was stubborn, and it had taken the priest nearly half an hour to get it moving.

But now the mule was happy to pull.

As they got closer, they passed others bearing the sick and dying to Rochelle-la-Blanche.

It was midday when they saw the town.

And the mob that was heading there.

Nearly thirty peasants, mostly men, were marching on the town, several of them pulling a small, empty cart by hand. They were all armed. When they noticed the priest’s cart coming up behind them, they turned.