Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  “My husband?”

  “Yes, you know. The very tall, handsome one who gave you several stillbirths, then went off to die in Picardy.”

  “Ah. Him. His name was…”

  “Horace?” barked her father.

  “No.”

  “It was Pierrot?” suggested the viol player with a decidedly Aragonés inflection, never missing a stroke on his instrument or a turn of his waspish hips.

  “No, you silly hedge-cock, I would never spread my legs for anyone named Pierrot. No, it was…”

  She opened her mouth now and issued a deep, manly belch. One heartbeat after it was finished, the whole room erupted in exuberant laughter.

  Thomas was sloshily offended.

  He banged his fist on the table. Nobody noticed, so he banged his wooden goblet on the table, splashing wine all over himself and the priest. The laughter died off to a trickle.

  “You go too far!” he shouted at his fellow celebrants. “You injure the memory of a worthy man.” He was swaying.

  “Oh?” said the seigneur, amused and intrigued. “How so?”

  The wine-sotted soldier could not answer, and almost cried, remembering his lord’s hard death.

  The man next to Thomas said, “Please forgive him, sire. He was also at the cursed defeat of Crécy, and I think his heart was broken there. Perhaps he knew the man in question. Sir knight,” he said, turning to face Thomas, “while you were serving under our noble king, did you have the honor of knowing a tall, handsome chevalier named…”

  At this he belched even more forcefully than Euphémie had.

  Everyone laughed.

  Thomas went to backhand the man, but fell, causing the room to laugh harder. He got to his feet, feeling nauseated.

  “I will not dine with you troop of pigs,” he said, and looked around for the priest, who was passed out now with his head on his arm and a puddle of drool under his face. He jerked at the priest’s robe, but the priest did not awaken. Thomas left him where he was and lurched in the general direction of the door, followed by the viol player, who used his music to dramatize Thomas’s struggle to make an indignant exit. The room was hysterical. A woman gasped for breath near him: “Oh God, oh God, I think I pissed myself!”

  He kicked backward at the viol player, catching him in the knee and making his face contort in pain, changing the music from a racy celebration of the drunk’s progress to a lament for all unjustly injured musicians.

  Thomas got to the doorway and went out into the darker hall, still hearing laughter and music behind him. He felt his way along the wall for support, realizing now he had no hope of finding his chamber without the boy who had brought him here.

  “I’ll sleep in the whoring stable, then,” he said, and kept moving.

  He felt his way along the straight wall for what felt like an hour, passing many exquisite tapestries with bizarre motifs. One stopped him and made him stand swaying before it, trying to comprehend; it seemed to show a noblewoman from the previous century bathing an infant; but she was holding it by its legs head-down into the tub. Bored angels in clouds above received the infant’s drowsy, winged soul, while at the bottom of the tapestry, black devils with tusks coming from the bottoms of their mouths, and even stranger devils in a great variety, received the ecstatically grinning soul of the mother. A lionish thing with human hands felt the woman’s breast. Next to it, the largest of the devils had twelve eyes and a round, fiery mouth. It seemed to stand on owl’s legs. Its black hand was between the legs of the woman’s soul, two fingers in her up to the knuckle.

  “Filth,” Thomas slurred.

  Just then the candle to the left of the tapestry flickered and a spill of wax overflowed its sconce, spilling suggestively on the floor.

  “More filth.”

  He remembered that he had to find the stable and go to sleep there, so he continued on. Soon he came to an open, well-lit archway he hoped might lead outside. Instead, he entered the Great Hall once again by the same door he had pitched out of. Everyone was looking at him, deeply amused but silent, as if they had been waiting to surprise him. He felt his way to his seat, pulled it forward, and sat down again next to the unconscious priest. He put his arm on his head and slept.

  * * *

  An instant later, someone was shaking him.

  It was the man next to him, the man he had tried to strike.

  “Sir knight, sir knight,” the man was saying in a hushed voice.

  “What?” Thomas slurred.

  The man’s mouth was so close to his face he could see the texture of his green little tongue and a dark shred of meat between two of his asymmetrical teeth.

  “You passed out. You mustn’t sleep at table.”

  Thomas shook his head and sat up, profoundly confused.

  He was about to point out to his neighbor that the priest was sleeping and nobody had bothered him, but when he looked he saw that the priest was awake and having his goblet filled again.

  “Everyone is toasting the heroic deeds of the war with England. You don’t want to miss it, do you?”

  “No,” he said thickly.

  The serving woman now filled his goblet. He saw that her nipple was out over the top of her garment and had the nearly irresistible urge to lean forward and lick it.

  Across the hall, Théobald de Barentin had taken to his feet and was looking at Thomas with his protuberant eyes.

  “And let us not forget our friend, Sir Thomas…of Picardy?” he said. “Although I cannot remember what town in Picardy. But I believe I met you near Cambrai, ten years ago.”

  Thomas felt his face flush, and he resisted the urge to look down.

  “Yes, it was you!” the other man continued. “Your seigneur, the Comte de Givras, a worthy man with ridiculously large mustachios, was camped near the Count of Hainault as the English drew their battle lines across from us.”

  “You are correct, sir knight. I was there. Let us speak of something happier.”

  “Forgive me, I must continue, it’s just too good! This Thomas was not yet a knight, though he had thirty years behind him. Still, his manners were so coarse and his birth so low, his seigneur, again, a wise and worthy man, had not yet bestowed upon him his belt and spurs. Now, imagine! This great battle was about to start, and, suddenly, a noise went up from all the men on both sides. The Count of Hainault hastily knighted some dozen of his young squires and men-at-arms so that they might fight and perhaps die in the holy state of Christian knighthood. This man’s lord, looking at his brawling, overmuscled squire with white hairs coming into his beard, took pity upon him and knighted him as well. Only the battle hadn’t started yet. A hare had leapt between the legs of the French army, and they had been cheering at that. A hare! The battle never started. Our king decided to remove himself, and everyone went away. Only here were all these sad bastards knighted because of a hare. The Knights of the Order of the Hare! And one of their illustrious number is with us tonight!”

  “I have fought many actions since then!” Thomas roared.

  “All in our king’s service, no doubt.”

  “Get yourself fucked, and your shit-nosed girl of a squire. I don’t have to answer to you. Where have you fought? In a whorehouse brawl? For the right to plow your whore mother without paying?”

  “Ah, there’s that rare strain of nobility that made your lord so proud to knight you. And you know perfectly well where I fought. You’re just too drunk to remember.”

  “My nobility will show itself on the field,” Thomas said, waving off the girl who tried to fill his cup again. “And not in perfumed words to impress teenaged serving girls.”

  Théobald bowed.

  “Ho-ho!” the seigneur said. “Now I would not miss the night tourney for anything. Not cunting anything.”

  He smiled with his mouthful of black teeth.

  Night.

  The blackest hour of it.

  Thomas found himself in bed, but he was not sure how he got there. His head hurt miserably. A s
mall wax candle guttered in a nook, making the shadows on the stone walls hop nauseatingly. He would have done anything for a cupful, or even a palmful of water. The figure next to him shifted.

  “Père Matthieu,” he whispered.

  The figure shifted again, pulling the blanket half off itself, revealing the very pale, moley back of the lord’s daughter. Something growled from the lower half of the bed. He looked up to see a tiny dog curled between his mistress’s feet, growling a warning at him. He growled back at it, then reclined. The room smelled like hot cunt and red wine vomit. He checked over his side of the bed and confirmed his suspicion that he had been the source of the latter.

  Fragments of the night’s events came to him in watery flashes:

  Her open mouth coming to kiss his, her teeth graying toward the black of her father’s teeth, her pear-green eyes half-lidded as her tongue flicked forward, her breath with its notes of garlic, fecundity, and rot; his two fingers sunk in her up to the knuckle; her wheezing beneath him and digging into his shoulders with her fat little fingers, her legs curled up so she made a football of herself. She had bitten one of his nipples so badly he wondered if he might lose it.

  “So this is Hell,” he muttered.

  He glanced at his borrowed robe, which was hanging from a nail near his head. He noticed the cloth-of-gold stars on the sage-green fabric and saw that they looked very much like the stars in the actual night sky. He found the constellation of the swan. Then he found his comet, with its little bloody vein. And the smaller one near it.

  He was afraid now.

  He did not want to touch the robe, so he put on his soiled long shirt and inner leggings. When he sat gingerly upon the bed to put his boots on, the little dog uncurled itself and stood yapping and growling at him as if it were in pain. Soon it was, because it made the mistake of biting Thomas’s arm, for which he grabbed it, absorbing two more little bites, and flung it against the wall. It made a great noise. He didn’t look to see if it had roused the woman on the bed, because he didn’t want to see one of her large green eyes fixed on him; he was grateful to hear her chortle softly and then snore.

  He took his sword and left.

  Soon he was lost again in the labyrinth of stone halls, dripping candles and sputtering torches. At last he felt cool air and went outside into the night; other people, still dressed in finery from the feast, were moving in the dark courtyard as well, and some now came through the same door he had just used. The woman from his bed was one of these, her headpiece perched on her high forehead again, the wicked little dog in her arms, her green dress shining.

  How did she get dressed so quickly?

  She ignored him as she moved past, then turned her head and said, “You’d better find your armor. And I hope you ride better than you fuck. Théobald outclasses you miserably there.” Everyone around them heard and laughed.

  He stood there, headachy and confused, while the crowd flowed past him. He looked where they were going and saw pennants flapping in the cool night breeze over a grounded constellation of lit lamps and torches.

  The tournament field.

  He felt a tug at his elbow and saw the boy, Simon, standing there.

  “The armorer wants you.”

  Run! Get out of this place!

  Armorer.

  How long had it been since he’d had an armorer?

  In his confusion, he followed the boy to a lit tent. The two men who had taken his armor before were within, ready to suit him in his mail and plate; it had all been scoured and shone marvelously. A tournament helm sat on the arming table.

  Thomas’s mouth stood open.

  “Don’t just gawk at us. And don’t get too attached to it. Sir Théobald will smash it all into junk, like as not, and you with it. He fights with a mace, and he’s quick as a fish from a dead man’s skull.”

  Thomas nodded at them and let them begin.

  He noticed his surcoat, cleaned now, and emblazoned with a heraldic image that had not been there before. Two fleurs-de-lys and a hare.

  He chuckled.

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

  “Fuck it,” he said. “Just fuck it.”

  “That’s what we say, Sir Thomas,” the older armorer said. “And if it won’t let you fuck it, cut its throat. Hey, Jacmel, pass us down his sword. He’ll want that cleaned, too.”

  The other man handed him the sword, and the armorer only half unsheathed it before he sheathed it again and put it down on his arming table.

  “Christ! What the hell is on this thing?”

  “I killed something foul in a river.”

  “Well, I’m not touching it. Hey, Jacmel, you want any of this?” he asked the other one. The other one shook his head. The first one tossed the sword at Thomas’s feet, and they finished buckling him in. A horse whinnied outside the tent.

  “That’ll be your horse, Grisâtre.”

  “I thought he was riding Belâtre.”

  “Oh, right. The seigneur is riding Grisâtre.”

  At that, trumpets sounded and the herald spoke, though Thomas could not hear what he was saying. Then the crowd roared. The tourney had begun.

  He went out of the tent and saw the mottled charger he was meant to ride. A gray-haired, long-headed squire in an ill-fitting jerkin and loose hose held the reins, and the man was so drunk he could barely stand. A second look at the ridiculous squire showed him to be Matthieu Hanicotte, the priest.

  The sound of something punching through armor came from the tournament field, and the crowd loosed an impressed HOOOOOOAAAAA!

  Thomas’s borrowed horse turned to look at him, and Matthieu motioned toward the saddle. Thomas mounted.

  “Are you yourself, or a devil?” Thomas asked, putting on his tournament helmet.

  “I don’t know,” he slurred, “but I’m fairly sure there’s a devil out there.”

  A horrible shriek came from the field then. The crowd went, “HO-ooooooooo,” the way a crowd will when something awful has happened to a man. The squire-priest grabbed a lance from where it leaned against a rail and handed it to Thomas, taking up two spares as well. Thomas looked down the shaft at the point; it was a war point, sharp and deadly, not the blunted quartet of knobs one used in tourneys.

  “So be it,” he said. “Let’s go die, priest.”

  “I wish that were all we risked here,” Matthieu said.

  He turned the horse and brought it onto the trampled sod of the list.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said under his breath.

  Two horsemen were on the field, and a third waited on the far side.

  What must have been a hundred torches burned, and burned the image into his mind; the German-looking Frenchman from the feast was sitting dead in the saddle, a lance through his side. His helmet was off. The seigneur, also sans helmet, circled his horse around him, then spurred it close, using a one-handed war axe to split the man’s head laterally, from nose to the back of his skull, the contents of which flew all over the sand.

  The crowd screamed its approval.

  Then a monkey came from beneath the stands, a monkey of the same sort as the three that had been roasted for supper, and began to pick from the sand and eat what had flown from the man’s head. When he had gotten all there was to be found on the sand, he scampered up the horse and up the armored body of the half-headed German Frenchman, and began to eat directly from the bowl of his remaining head.

  “Hoooooooooo!” went the crowd.

  Now the monkey kicked his heels against the armor of the dead knight he straddled, and the knight’s body jerked and spurred the horse, who trotted off the field to eat grass. The knight’s body slid heavily out of the saddle, and the monkey scampered beneath the stands again.

  The crowd went silent, then began to chant, “Next! Next! NEXT! NEXT!”

  The lord, still circling on Grisâtre, pointed his gory axe at Thomas.

  Thomas suppressed a shudd
er.

  I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, he thought, then spurred his horse forward to take his position at his end of the list.

  “Lance, or sword?” Thomas shouted at the seigneur.

  “LANCE!” he bellowed, “But not me. Him!”

  Théobald de Barentin was in position now, placing his tournament helm and taking his lance. He sat a whitish horse that couldn’t wait to run. His dandy squire handed him his first lance.

  “READY?” screamed the lord, raising his axe.

  Théobald raised his lance.

  Thomas raised his.

  The axe fell.

  The chargers started off, Thomas’s more heavily, and the two made for each other. At French tournaments, a barrier normally separated the jousting knights to prevent collision, but this was open like a German field. Thomas reined his horse to keep it on the right side, his lance pointed crosswise, but the horse stubbornly made right for its oncoming counterpart. At the last minute, the other horse corrected and the men shocked their lances into one another. Thomas felt his glance solidly but harmlessly off Théobald’s chestpiece, rocking him back with the impact. Théobald’s point, however, gouged into Thomas just below the left hip, dislodging several links of chain and digging a hotly painful furrow into him. He gritted his teeth and tried unsuccessfully not to grunt, reeling but staying upright in the saddle.

  Both men had kept their lances, so they wheeled their horses around and repositioned themselves for another charge. Neither waited for a signal from the seigneur this time; they both made for each other.

  This time, however, Thomas felt his horse slowing beneath him. He swore at it and spurred it, but Belâtre kept losing speed, even as the other knight loomed larger and more dangerous through the slit in Thomas’s helm. The horse stopped altogether.

  “You whore!” Thomas said to his mount even as Théobald’s point dropped and slammed into Belâtre’s chest. The horse screamed, reared, and threw Thomas off. He landed heavily on his back, sending a wave of pain down his legs all the way to his heels. He sat up to see the dying horse topple on its side, kicking its legs in the air. No sooner had it landed than at least a score of dark shapes rushed from beneath the stands and swarmed over it. The monkeys. Only this time Thomas wasn’t sure they were monkeys. Whatever they were, they dragged the horse away, already disemboweling it.