Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

The sun was long gone now, and the gloaming was upon them.

The knight would never forget the image of the faltering priest holding the girl up; how like the raising of the Eucharist it looked.

“I’ll talk later. Our priest dies tonight, but not in a field.”

Thomas would dig Père Matthieu’s grave as their host burned with fever and lost his reason; he would pull Matthieu from under the arms while his feet dragged and the girl cried and he got a last noseful of the priest’s woolly, winey, lonely smell.

Hoc est corpus meum.

“Go on,” the knight said. “I don’t think his soul’s so far above us yet.” She gave them a look and a sad smile that puzzled the old man, but Thomas had seen enough from her to understand. She doesn’t know how. It wasn’t her that played.

She blew into the dead man’s mouth a dozen more times, but his fingers never moved again, and, when she began to have the feeling she was troubling him, she went to a corner and sobbed until she washed the whites out of her eyes.

Delphine traced her fingers on the sleeping knight’s face. ThomasThomasThomasThomas. She touched him lightly enough that she knew he would not stir; he slept like a soldier, always set to spring awake at a strange sound, but he seemed to know it was her hand upon his face, and that she was no threat to him. But I am.

She would go on alone. Her fingers lingered just below his nostrils, and the feel of his living breath pleased and thrilled her. If God wanted her in Avignon, He would have to get her there safely without using Thomas and then casting him away when he was no longer needed.

May God forgive him, since he couldn’t forgive God. Can I?

The cold, dry hand took the coin back, and a sound like very dry hissing or rattling came from the other in the room.

The thing in the room dropped the pretense of human voice. Give me that fucking case. “I refuse.” Something bit in front of her face, the smell of mold and dust and stale death washing over her.

“Goddamn it,” he said, feeling truly lost for the first time since this had all begun. Who was he now, without his pack of brigands, without that girl and her visions, without a coat of arms on his chest or a horse or the first whoring idea what he might do if he never saw her again? “Goddamn it.”

Rather, he put one hand over the man’s mouth and used the other to ram his head twice against a house beam. The man went limp, still pissing, and Thomas let him fall.

He carried his sword over his shoulder, one hand on the pommel, the other under the quillons; he was ready to kill with it. Several of the men in the tubs gasped. They all stared at him, none of them daring to speak. They saw that this man was lethal.

It was then that it happened. He felt something touch his heart, as though tiny fingers were on it, holding it as gently as one might hold a bird.

A piece of the moon hung in the sky like a polished bone. He would be able to see her if she came. He fell asleep watching for her, then eased seamlessly into a dream about her walking down this very road; she had a basket of wildflowers, and she scattered them as she went. He felt as proud as a father when he saw what she was doing. It was brilliant of her to think of strewing wildflowers behind her; he smiled in his sleep. He would be able to find her now.

This group of men and horses changed everything for him. It drowned his foal-legged love of mankind and his suckling desire to let even the wicked live in peace. It took him back to the days after the tragedy at Crécy-en-Ponthieu, when hate had draped the furniture of his soul and left him willing to damn himself for revenge. One of the four knights was Chrétien d’Évreux, heir to the throne of Navarre, and the man who had stolen his land, his wife, his knighthood, and his soul.

My goddamned horse. And my squire. André. I hope your dubbing was the best day of your life. How could you serve this bastard now? The squire did not lower his eyes, but those eyes moistened with shame.

They weren’t going to let him dismiss this man now that they knew who he was. If Chrétien opened the gates of Jerusalem with one hand and burned down Acre with the other, these men would remember his cowardice here, by this stream, and they would speak of it.

Thomas woke with his head in a woman’s lap. Not a woman’s. A girl’s. Her luminous, almost lupine gray eyes looked down into his as she wiped his temples. It was hard to focus—everything looked blurry. Something moved behind her, and he thought he saw wings. He had trouble remembering the last time he had seen her, yet it seemed very important that he should. “You left wildflowers,” he said. “What?” she said, smiling. He slept.

And they’ll take good and bad alike to Hell, because there won’t be anyplace but Hell anymore. Not without love. Not without forgiveness.”

As soon as she saw what a costaud Thomas was, thin of waist, thick of chest, with his hair still dark on the fine head he had to lower to enter a room, his face still clear of the arrow-pit she would never see, she was dressed for the oven. When she saw the impish humor in his eye, she was cooked.

She was well matched for Thomas in this way, too. It was common for her to take the Lord’s name in vain twenty times between confessions. She did it the moment she laid eyes on her future husband. “My God,” she said, too low for anyone to hear. And then she said it again.

His wife was smarter than he would ever be and prettier than he thought wives were made, and yet she was happy with him. Her pleasure in the marriage bed had seemed to touch even her soul, and her verdant eyes had rarely left his; three taps of her ring would always remind him of the three times he took her. “Once like a bull, once like a fox, once softly as a lamb,” she said.

He put his head against the horse’s shoulder and took in his nutty, masculine smell, his own dark hair blending perfectly with the animal’s coat.

“You’re like me,” he said, “small and beautiful and captive. We can neither one of us leave this place.”

He could see Matthieu’s hands turning the tap, Matthieu’s eyes lighting up when he saw the color of the vintage coming out of the spout, Matthieu’s sad, grateful smile exaggerating the lines around those eyes. It made him feel warm enough to face going upstairs. One more goblet of something strong and he would crawl in beside the belly-sleeper, moving as lightly as a mosquito on the skin in hopes he would not wake him and be handled.

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The dead man pushed by Robert, and then, as if it had struck him that something wrong had just happened, he turned. His black stub of a tongue worked and he pointed at them. Neither Delphine nor Robert had to tell the other to run. The dead man now drew air into his unsound lungs as best he could and made a dry, horrid sound like something between a busted cornemuse and a dying calf.

he ran off without them, Robert and Delphine would be hung like pigs with cut throats to bleed out into the vats caught.

She would never forget their faces—even as their bodies rushed to do violence, what remained of their faces betrayed sadness, even apology for the murder they were being compelled to commit.

His hands were folded like the hands of a father waiting to scold, but it was not his place to scold her, whatever she was. She was much more powerful, now, than she had been in that long-ago barn. “You don’t like me to be away,” she said. He shook his head. She smiled. She smelled like night air.

“It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that. An orphan from Normandy and a thief from Picardy saving the pope. The whoring pope.” “You know when you swear that I’ll say ‘don’t swear,’ and then you won’t for a while. Why not just not swear in the first place? But I suppose that’s asking a horse not to whinny. Anyway, you’re not a thief. And as long as you’re with me, I’m not an orphan.” Thomas grunted.

He knew he had been less than generous toward his concubine of late, but seemed unable to stop himself; intellectually, the boy had something about him of the dog who feared so much to be kicked that kicking it seemed obligatory.

His father had seemed mighty to him, but he only laid hands on Matthieu and Robert to strike them or yank them out of his way. He wanted to cry at how deeply accepted he felt.

This was precisely what Thomas had feared—though he bore the face and body of the dead man, he did not share his memories, and the world of high-placed men, though embracing all of Europe, was as small and incestuous as a village.

He shuddered at the thought of trying to stab the false pope in camera, let alone in front of a table full of knights and a company of guards. It doesn’t matter. I’ve come here to die.

Thomas made as though to vomit, provoking a cheerful “Hoooo” from the table, then withdrew his head and closed the shutter. It was struck by what sounded like a plum. Delphine raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Now go get us a bowl of that stew,” he said.

He was not dragged to the papal palace by his testicles. He was taken in a cart. After they broke his legs.

Thomas was cold. He hurt so badly in so many places that a strange sort of numbness had settled into him. His chief complaint was the cold, which felt as though it would never be out of him.

He looked up at the man wheeling him, and the man looked down at him with kind eyes. He wanted to ask him who he was, but he didn’t have the strength.

He placed this around Thomas, and Thomas smiled. A doctor, then. He might yet get home to Arpentel and see his wife.

“I’m going to die,” he managed. “You already did die, remember? You’re the dead one.” He felt his spirit coming loose, like a ship from its moorings, but she lifted his head and pointed. “Hold on,” the girl said, “just for a moment.”

He was being kissed now by his own mouth, not as lovers kiss, with tongues, but as true lovers kiss, sharing breath. He breathed out of the comte’s lungs and into his own. The ship of his soul lurched away from his false body.

He thought this might be the last time he ever rode a horse, but he didn’t mind. He had died this morning, and he knew what it was now. Tonight would bring more death, probably his. He was ready. This would be worse than Crécy, but sweet where that was bitter.

Brother Albrecht felt the man’s chest and cheeks (was he preparing himself for the day he would need his hands to read faces as well as hearts?) and found no harm in him, but rather a long-buried goodness.

God knew they had more habits now than living men to fill them.

She bent him down and kissed his cheeks. Daughter witch page saint prophet angel what are you what are you You Delphine “What are you?” he said. “Two things, I think. But soon I’ll be just one.” He shook his head to keep from crying. He could not, he would not watch her be hurt. Not if it meant his soul.

He ate the game fowl and sausages and even drank the wine, sweet from its late harvest, and with just a hint of something dead feet corpses’feet else. The something else was easily forgotten, though it tended to bob back up again, requiring further attention at inattention. So much of life demanded a kind of truce with perceived facts—one could not allow the suffering of the kitchen women, for example, to spoil the taste of capon.