Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

“I was hoping a cup or two might extract some knightly oath from you. You are a knight? Or were?” “I was. I still am, I suppose. But it feels more like I was. It feels like a long time ago.” “You could be one again.” “I doubt it. I have done things.”

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

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.

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?

“But I won’t tell anyone if you won’t. ‘What’s to eat?’ he says. Nothing but the worst soup in Christendom; grasses, flowers, twigs, some fungus from the sides of trees, a blighted radish, and, the best of all, four baby birds I broke free from their eggs. I was hoping just to get the yolks and whites, but the chicks were nearly ready to enter this sad world. Now they’re in soup. You’ll have to eat one, bones and all.” “I’ve had worse.” “Well, I haven’t. I’m just a soft priest in a cozy village. Or was. At least there’s a little salt.

This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

“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.”

“Babies go straight to Heaven,” she said now. Thomas didn’t look up from his work setting river stones to make a fire. “Bad ones don’t,” he said. “There are no bad babies,” she said. “They don’t know any better.” “Sounds like you’ve never met a baby.

“We’re starving. Can you help us?” The woman scratched her chin, looking them over. “Will you work for it?” “God, yes.” “What can you do?” “He kills people. I read Latin. The little girl asks questions. And also reads Latin.”

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.”

“It is only for Christ to raise the dead. And I do not think you are Him.”

God should be your comfort, but you have made comfort your god.

“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.”

May God forgive him, since he couldn’t forgive God.