Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

The sickness, which they called the Great Death, passed mysteriously but surely from one to the other as easily as men might clasp hands, or a child might call a friend’s name, or two women might share a glance.

“Hello,” she said. All of the men stopped chewing except Thomas. She was a bad age to meet these men; just too old to be safe and just too young to know why.

Nobody wanted strangers close these days; she began to realize there was something dark in this man’s mind. the word is rape he’ll rape me

Godefroy noted where his sword was, and Thomas noted that. Thomas breathed in like a bellows, and blew out through clenched teeth. He did this twice. They had all seen him do this before, but never while facing them. A drop of sweat rolled down Godefroy’s nose.

He stood very still and looked around carefully. His patience was soon rewarded; he noticed her white leg up in a tree. Ten minutes later and it would have been dark enough to hide her.

“Don’t be trouble,” he said. “Don’t rape me,” she said.

His killer had put the sword exactly where he wanted it, and with great strength.

“Don’t kill him,” she said. She looked up at Thomas, and he noticed how very light and gray her eyes were. Like the flint in the walls of the barn, but luminous. Like an overcast sky on the verge of turning blue. Thomas lowered his sword. The rain stopped. “Don’t kill anybody else again.”

Will you leave me my sword and crossbow?” “I don’t know.” “Because if you don’t, it’s just like killing me.” “No, Jacquot, it’s not. Killing you would be just like killing you, and I’m still tempted.”

“I’ll catch it!” “I didn’t. You won’t.” “I will.” She looked at him now. “Then maybe you’ll go to Heaven if you catch it doing something good.” Thomas went to speak but didn’t. He hung his head and nodded.

“And I’ll swear as I please. By the Virgin, by her sour milk, by the hair of dead pigs, whatever the devil puts in my mouth. And the more you complain about it, the worse I’ll get.”

“Making you happy is not my job.” “I know. That’s why I want the whistle.” He grunted and gave it back to her. “Don’t you do anything but grunt?” He grunted again.

“Would you like to know my name as well?” “No.” “Is it because you don’t want to feel affection for me?” “I don’t.” “But you might if you knew my name and other things about me so I wasn’t just ‘girl.’ Is that why?” “Shut up.”

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

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.

The intelligence in her eyes goaded him, reminding him of someone else. Someone who had hurt him.

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Thomas had never been so afraid. I can’t I can’t I can’t, he thought, even as he drove his legs forward through the muck to meet it.

She looked at the knight and saw that he was strong and beautiful, and dead. She cried for how beautiful he was.

Thomas lay very still, breathing his last. He had the impression that something with a cold, fishy mouth was tugging at him. His bladder loosed and he breathed out, his chest rattling. He did not inhale. The girl took the Virgin’s hand and forearm up and pressed the two stone fingers, held out in benediction, against the knight’s forehead, just where he had felt St. Sebastian’s thumb the night before. She pressed hard. The thing with the fishy mouth left. Thomas gasped and opened his eyes. And then he slept.

He believes the sickness, like a dog, bites those who fear it.” “The dog I saw bites everyone and can’t hear music.”

“I thought tournaments were forbidden by the king.” “The king’s arm has grown short.”

“He needs you,” she said, and disappeared farther up into the tree.

The priest crawled into bed beside Thomas an hour later.

Lgbtq??

Everyone laughed, except Thomas and the priest.

Yes, this was Hell. And if all that was left for him to do was fight, he would fight to frighten Lucifer.

He saw Matthieu now, lolling against a rail, his head tipped back. The viol player from before was pouring wine down his throat, his free hand rubbing the older man’s crotch.

Death’s hand sat upon the brow of the king and also the farmer; Death took the beggar and the cardinal, the money changer and the milkmaid.

Some righteous men and women yet held faith, but they were scattered so far that none could see the other’s light, and it seemed the darkness had no end.

“I don’t care,” Thomas said, at the end of this chain of thoughts, and neither of his cartmates pressed him for what he meant. There was a great deal in this world not to care about.

Nobody alive wanted them, and the dead didn’t answer.

Thomas looked up at the long-headed Christ and said, not wholly under his breath, “You’re dead, too, aren’t you? If not, get off that whoring thing and do something. Or at least whoring wink at me. You can do that much, can’t you?”

Doubtless there were more fine hats than living heads to fill them in this city, and after a point it could hardly be considered looting to liberate them.

Out of nowhere, she wanted the woman to hold her. It had been so long since she had smelled a woman’s skin that even a dirty woman’s embrace would have been welcome. She was still disturbed by the sight of the dead young nuns near the hospital and she wanted a woman to hold her and tell her that the whole world didn’t yet belong to Death, masculine Death with his hourglass and his holes for eyes. Death with his bony arms that only embraced to take you away, like a lamb from market. Like the pig on La Bucherie. How did Heaven come into all of this? Heaven was life, not death. Heaven was a woman holding your head in the crook of her arm and looking down at you. Heaven was a warm hand on your cheek and the smell of soup with garlic on the fire.

Go and sleep in shit for all I care.” “I’m a priest, you know.” “Then pray for a room.”

“May I have it?” “Whatever for?” “It’s pretty.” Her simplicity made Père Matthieu embarrassed for his anger at having been cheated. He gave it to her, and she smiled up at him. “If it made you smile, it’s not completely worthless,” he said, smiling back at her.

Overcome with emotion at her kindness and her plain, handsome face, the girl kissed her hand. The wife stroked her hair. The girl suddenly felt the hurt in the woman, how it mirrored her own hurt. One had lost a daughter, the other a mother. Each saw a flicker of the dead one. It was bitter but very sweet and good.

I just … don’t want anybody’s eyes on me. If I have to do things to survive.” “I see.”

“Heresy, sodomy, blasphemy. The usual things to turn a petty lord’s village against him.” “You don’t strike me as a sodomite.” “Oh, but heresy and blasphemy sit well, do they?” “Perhaps blasphemy. You do have a colorful way of expressing displeasure.

It had rained. Just a quick August shower and then it was gone and everything smelled like late summer with just that hint of damp and rot.

Suddenly he was leaning back, almost out of the saddle, looking up at the clouds. But his eyes weren’t focused right because there was something white in the sky. Fletching. He had an arrow in the face.

The page held the seigneur’s hand as Thomas heard his awful breathing; he was drowning. He died clenching his teeth and shivering. He was awake until the very end and knew what was happening to him, but he did not cry out. Thomas did, as much to see that the great man was dead as for his own pain.

The night was very dark. The nameless horse sometimes pitched to avoid the body of one who had tried to flee but succumbed to his wounds; so many had died that Thomas could not comprehend it. The plain below the English position would be known as the valley of clerks, for it would take an army of men with pens and field desks to record the names and titles of the French dead.

Thomas breathed in, as if to exhale some oath, but he had mellowed with the telling of his tale. He suffered the priest to put his hand on his shoulder, then hung his head.

The group continued on, the ailing monkey locking eyes with the priest and staring at him with disturbing intelligence.