Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

“I should damned well turn around and let you go.” “Maybe you should.” He didn’t.

Delphine heard Thomas breathing in and out like a bellows, preparing to fight; she knew that for all his faults, he would die before he let harm come to her. She felt safer.

“Where do they find these wise counselors in stories?” Thomas said, “for I’ve never met a king who let one speak.”

“Is it cold in this castle?” “Of course,” she said, very seriously. “All castles are cold.” “Exactly how many castles have you been in?” “I haven’t been in boats, but I know they have sails.”

“The knight is not important now.” “So the unimportant knight.” Delphine got up and walked away, folding her arms. Both men, giggling like boys at her irritation, now implored her to come back. “Sweet Delphine, tell us the story!” “Don’t take on so! The story, the story!”

At length she took her place again but pointed her small finger at Thomas. He put his hand over his mouth. “So the king laid out the clothes for the beast, but it just sniffed them and sat down.” Thomas removed his hand and said, “Did it … ?” but she cut him off with a “Ssst!” and pointed her finger again. He replaced his hand.

“Couldn’t sleep?” the priest asked. Thomas didn’t answer. “I know. Stupid question. Hardly worthy of William of Ockham. I should have asked if you had bad dreams. I did. Would you like to know what about?” Thomas didn’t speak. “I was being led around the countryside by a little girl. There were horrid things in rivers and statues crawled off churches, and a great sickness had killed most everybody. I was starving, to boot.” Silence. “My only other companion was a moody, excommunicate knight who rarely spoke and didn’t have the slightest interest in hearing about my nightmares. And, of course, a mule.”

It seemed curious to him that only the left armpit was affected; perhaps, he thought, because the heart was supposed to sit just a little to the left. And his sin, as of this morning, was still only in his heart.

This new love-sweat hit high in the nose with a sharp note like cheese, or salt, or metal, or the miscarriage of all three. His inner cassock was so ripe with infatuation that he sweated again when he brought it to the laundresses and blushed when he gathered it back.

Nonetheless, it was Samuel Hébert who took from them, and these proud Norman farmers better perceived slights than kindnesses. And, by peasant standards, he was rich.

What troubled him most was his feeling that God could see into his heart and knew that his love was twisted. God would weigh his most secret thoughts and, finding them repulsive, would take an even heavier toll on the villeins of his flock. He would have thrown himself into the river, but a suicide priest might be worse in God’s eyes than a would-be sodomite. He had never felt so ignorant, useless, or doubtful in his life.

For every time he sneaked a glance at Michel Hébert, he made himself look ten more parishioners in the face.

He was in danger of losing his belief, if not his soul. Were there souls at all? Was there really a naked, invisible little version of himself hiding under his skin, so valuable to Heaven and Hell that each would send emissaries down to fight for it?

“Come in,” the boy said, so quietly that Père Matthieu convinced himself he had not heard it. He just opened his mouth and closed it again, like a landed fish trying to breathe. “Come in,” the object of his affection said again. “I can’t.” “Père Matthieu can’t.” “No.” “So shed him with your clothes, and put him back on when you leave.” “No.” “That’s the beauty of being nude in a river; you’re nobody. You’re anybody you want to be. It’s just a dream.” You used the same words to get the girl in there. The priest opened and closed his mouth. “Come in,” the boy said again. And he did.

They wore their masks. They stank of drink and were demanding more. She told them to go away because she was tired. They insisted. She told them to go away, for the love of God. They said they had none. So she served them. If they tasted the blood mixed into their beer, they never said a word about it.

“I wouldn’t leave you,” a small voice said. The priest looked down and saw that Delphine had come from the barn. “If it was the boy,” she continued. “I wouldn’t leave.”

He had to make the thorn bush want to yield the pear, so he tried to say Please, but all that came through his ruined mouth was a grunt.

His breeches were down and his verge was half erect. Delphine was in front of him, and he was holding her arms so tightly he must have been close to breaking her delicate bones. He loosened his grip but still held her, trying to understand. She was naked. “Oh Christ, Christ, no,” he moaned helplessly.

Thomas was at the other end of the barn, with the mule’s leg between his, scraping mud and rocks from its shoe. How like him, to defy his pain by doing something to make it worse.

“What are you thinking about over there?” Thomas said. Ever since the incident in the barn, he had been kinder to her. She wondered how long it would last. “Death,” she said.

But who was he to judge anyone, or propose any remedy for sin? He was such a profound sinner that he had considered leaving off his robes and stopping the pretense. He was just an old bugger who would sell his last possession for a barrel of good wine. Or any wine. And he was lonely. The most puzzling thing for him was his own reaction to the newfound, though seemingly platonic intimacy between his companions; Père Matthieu was jealous.

“Goddamn it,” Thomas said, gazing at her small cache. “Maybe God would be more generous if you swore less.” “God starves babies sometimes, and they don’t swear at all.”

They climbed wearily into the cart and left. None of them noticed that the maple stump against which Delphine had slept had grown into a tree.

Delphine’s hand gripped Thomas’s harder, but he pulled away from her.

“He kills people. I read Latin. The little girl asks questions. And also reads Latin.” “All right. The big one helps build the fence. You, too. And the girl mends nets. You give us a half day of work and we’ll feed you tonight. But then you’re on your way tomorrow. We don’t want to start liking you and have you up and die on us.” “You’ve got a deal. Would you like me to say a Mass for you in the morning?” “What, God-in-Heaven? The only thing I say to God is my daughters’ names. And it’s not a prayer. It’s a rebuke. We’ll thank you not to say any blessings at dinner.”

As they got closer, they saw that it was a cotehardie, saffron yellow, adorning the week-old, grinning corpse of a hanged squire; they all knew that cotehardie, and knew that its owner had once had pimples. There was a sign around his neck. The priest shivered and crossed himself. “What’s it say?” Thomas asked. The girl told him. rapist

“Do you really want to go back up there?” Thomas asked. The man sat down in the grass and looked bewildered. “I don’t know,” he said. “But don’t you see? This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can’t plow. I can’t build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now.” The priest opened his mouth to contradict the man, but nothing came out. “Shit,” Thomas said. And then he hauled the dwarf back up the cross and tied him fast.

How was she to believe man was anything special when he looked so much like any other animal in death? He was just a rained-on, ruined carcass, as if he had never kissed her, as if he had never danced.

Delphine thought, from the way the angel spoke, that this fight must not be going well. She wanted to cry.

Please, the angel said behind her, and she stopped for a heartbeat and then kept going. She was afraid she might lose heart, so she made herself count ten steps before she looked behind her.

The boy spun the girl around. “WAS TUST DU, HEXE!?” “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at him, even through him, with her sad, luminous gray eyes, “It’s not your fault. But you’re dead, too.”

The crowd grabbed her roughly, tearing her blanket from her and using it to bind her arms to her sides. She knew she was too weak to fight them; she wished Thomas were here, then blinked that wish away, knowing he would die for her and still the mob would have her.

She let her body go limp, trying to see it from outside herself. If she must die, she would neither cry nor cry out—it was all she could do, so she focused on that. She would die bravely.

Now Delphine saw the angel; it stood in an alley, unseen by the devils in the square, more purely itself than it had been upon the mule. Its beauty crushed something inside Delphine and made nectar of it.

One of the clouds grew two great black wings, and the other grew six that seemed to fold in on one another Seraph good sweet Lord a fallen seraph and, just like that, both of them bled themselves up into the larger cloud that now covered most of the sky.

The exhausted priest stopped running and fell to his knees. God God God “Where are you?” the priest yelled.

It roared, and its roar was familiar, that lion’s roar in grotesque. An angel of wrath

“Where are you, where are you,” he said at intervals, but it was not until the wind calmed down that he heard a voice above. “Here,” it said. It was small and scared. Delphine. She was up a tree. Of course. She had run to the same strong old oak tree that had attracted him.

NO! he tried to scream, but his flat lungs allowed only a croak. The thing above him held the tree like a toy. It was an abomination. Six wings. Six arms. Pulling the tree apart now. Why must you hurt her she’s so small

In the barley field, great beings, beings the size of windmills, thrashed and rolled and gouged the earth. Two of them were as black as though holes had been cut in the fabric of the world; one shone like the full moon, just that heartbreaking in its beauty, casting mad shadows through the grain and the trees and along the hills as it moved.

And great was the noise of flies around him as he walked the earth.

And the Lord made no answer.

“Oh. Yes. They ship it on the river. It would take too long on a cart. Rivers are fast.” “Some rivers are fast.” “They’re all faster than a mule because they don’t rest.” The priest nodded, impressed.

“God forgive me my excess,” he whispered, “and I will try never to drink so very much again.” “Try is the word that trips you, brother.”

Everywhere else was dark, save above them, where the stars blazed with a sad, desperate light that seemed to Matthieu Hanicotte like the gaze of a mother watching her child wrestle with a killing fever.

“How can you ask me to kill a girl?” “Killing in God’s name is a holy thing.”

There was something weak in this man, Thomas thought. Something that needed to be told he was in charge, where stronger men just knew it.

When Thomas saw that the girl was cut, he breathed out like a bull, grabbed the dazed captain’s hair, yanked his head back and cut his throat with the long, notched blade. He took his time about it.

Thomas said, “I should trim that last stitch. When you jerked your head it stuck straight up. You look like a sour apple with a little stem.” His face flushed red, though he was smiling. “And you look like …” “What?” Thomas dared him. “The ass of …” “The ass of what?” The soldier thought for a moment. “Something I wouldn’t want to walk behind.”

“Man is born into sin. All because of Adam.” Guillaume said, “Mostly Eve, my priest told us.” Delphine looked up from the water now. “That’s not fair.” “How’s that?” said Guillaume. “She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”