Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  Jehan insisted.

  While his guests sat down to table between the kitchen and the workshop, Jehan fetched a bottle of pale spirits, setting out a bowl and pouring some in. He gave it first to the girl.

  “Do you recognize that?”

  She made a face but nodded.

  “Papa likes that.”

  “Everybody’s papa likes that in Normandy. It’s made from the best apples in France.”

  He shared the bowl around. It made a pleasant little fire in their bellies.

  The priest set in praising the artisan’s figures. Thomas, who recognized their long-headed style, said “Did you make the Christ on this side of the bridge?”

  The woodcarver flushed with pride, hoisting up his very heavy brown eyebrows, which hardly thinned over his nose.

  “I did.”

  “A marvelous figure,” said the priest. “A welcome reminder of Christ’s love after the misery at the Hôtel Dieu.”

  “Actually, the abbey commissioned it, hoping it would keep the plague out. But we’ve had plague. And worse.”

  “Worse?” the priest asked, not incredulously, but hoping for specifics.

  “You’ll sleep in my workshop. Keep the windows closed and barred. If you use the slop jar, don’t open the windows to throw it out until morning. They don’t come every night, but it’s been nearly a week. They’re due.”

  “What are due?”

  “If you hear something heavy treading in the street, pray hard but quietly, and stay away from the windows. And if anything knocks, don’t open.”

  “What knocks?”

  Jehan darted his eyes at the girl, then shook his head and took a deep breath.

  “What comes?”

  “We don’t know. Nobody who sees them lives.”

  Jehan’s wife, Annette, brought out stale bread trenchers with the last of their thin soup. “Don’t be shy about finishing it; we’ve had ours,” she said. 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. Annette took her head into her bosom, tentatively at first, but then with great emotion, and cried down into her hair.

  “What are you called, little bird?”

  “Delphine.”

  They cried together and held each other as the priest looked at Thomas and Thomas looked down, deeply ashamed.

  In their weeks together, neither man had ever asked her name.

  The liquor was soon gone, and the embers of the fire were cooling. After a hushed consultation with his wife, the woodcarver took his hat in his hands and asked Thomas and the priest if the girl might be allowed to sleep in the bed with Annette; Jehan would make his bed on the woodshop floor with the other men. They nodded.

  “Thank you,” Delphine said, and went upstairs.

  The priest and Thomas looked at each other, each thinking the same thing.

  She’s home. This is her home now.

  When the men were all settled on the tightly packed dirt floor, Jehan spoke to them in a whisper.

  “It’s not that nobody has seen those that knock; it’s that what they’ve seen is so awful.”

  “Go on,” Thomas said.

  “Maude, a widowed hatmaker on the next street, heard the knock and didn’t open. But she heard her neighbor, Humbert, open for them and then yell. Her house is old and she could see out through a space between the beam and plaster. She said a stone man had Humbert by the hair and bit his nose off. Then it went in, and a stone woman after it. The whole family was killed: bludgeoned and bitten. The work of the Devil.”

  “It was dark, yes?” the priest said.

  “Course it was; they only come at night.”

  “How could she be sure it was stone? Maybe these were just thieves.”

  “There was stone dust and bits of stone in the house from where Humbert’s son tried to fight them. And I reckon you could tell a stone man from a man of flesh even in the dark. And what thieves bite people to death?”

  “Hungry ones?” Thomas said, but neither of the other men found that funny.

  His sorry joke hung in the thick darkness of the workshop for a long moment, until the mule took a relaxed and abundant shit on the woodcarver’s floor. Thomas started chuckling, and soon the priest and Jehan were chuckling as well, and then the three of them were trying unsuccessfully to bite back laughter like naughty boys in church.

  “What’s so funny down there?” Annette called.

  “Oh, nothing,” Jehan said. “One of our guests said he enjoyed his supper.”

  They laughed themselves to sleep.

  Nothing knocked for them that night.

  Morning came. The sky was a bright gray that neither threatened rain nor allowed for the possibility of sunshine, but it was welcome after the night the men had spent huddled on the workshop floor listening for the knocking of God knew what. Thomas was up first, and he opened the window enough so that he could try to scrub the worst of the rust off his armor. The sound woke the priest, but the woodcarver snored on, the scent of his Norman apple brandy still spicing his exhalations.

  The priest sat close to Thomas and spoke quietly into his ear.

  “What are you going to do if the girl stays?”

  “She’ll stay, all right. She’s already spreading rushes with the woman and helping her kill fleas on the coverlet.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “Same as before. Push on.”

  “Where?”

  “Hadn’t thought about it yet.”

  “I have. I think I still want to get to Avignon.”

  “Your catamite brother?”

  The priest winced at that, but nodded. There was something flinty about Thomas this morning.

  “You might come with me.”

  “In your cart?”

  “How else?”

  “I might take the cart and leave you here.”

  “I couldn’t stop you, of course.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t talk like that. What’s gotten into you?”

  “I’ll talk as it pleases me to talk. And don’t look so wounded about the cart. Just because you went out to the orchard and found it doesn’t make it yours.”

  “I’m not contesting that. I just thought…”

  “Well, don’t think. I do better alone, that’s all. I don’t know how I found myself tagging behind that little witch in the first place. Or with you. I’m damned already, as are you, though you don’t realize it because you’ve got your robe and your cross and your Latin. I just…don’t want anybody’s eyes on me. If I have to do things to survive.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t see. What you don’t see is that you’re a common bugger priest. And she’s just a skinny little girl who wants her mother. And I’m an outlaw knight who’s been formally cut off from the sacraments of the church. Death means Hell, so I’m going to keep death off me as long as I can. And I’ll do that better in the country than I will in Paris or Avignon.”

  The woodcarver stirred, but then went back to snoring.

  “You’re…you’re excommunicate?”

  Thomas nodded, then stood up from the floor without the use of his hands, as a fit young squire might have; as if his anger made him youthful. With his brow creased and his eyes set belligerently he looked thirty, not forty. He looked like figures of Mars. Or Lucifer. He got his sword and sharpening stone and squatted nimbly back on his heels.

  “When?” the priest said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’m just curious. It’s…It’s so final.”

  “I thought I’d let you know before you cried too hard about parting company with me.”

  “Why did they do that to you?”

  “What do you want, the given reasons? Or the real one?”

  “Given, fir
st.”

  “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. But why did they really excommunicate you?”

  “To get my land. Why else?”

  “Blasphemy is serious.”

  “This from the man who took communion from a monkey’s head.”

  “That really happened?”

  “If we both remember it, I’d say yes.”

  The priest’s face reddened with shame, and then he looked forlorn.

  “Don’t take on so,” said Thomas. “Nothing cunting matters.”

  “That’s the way a man talks before he damns himself.”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve said it.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Is our host sleeping soundly?”

  As if to answer the question himself, Jehan the woodcarver exhaled horsily with his lips, making a sound like “Plah.”

  The priest looked back at Thomas.

  “Tell me.”

  TEN

  Of the Battle of Crécy

  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. The farms in Picardy were stubbled where the wheat and barley had already been mowed. The ground was moist and Thomas could smell the good, black soil of his home province, even over the equally pleasant nose of horses and oiled steel.

  His lord, the Comte de Givras, had sued for the pleasure of being in the first line of knights to charge the English where they set themselves on the field at Crécy, which meant he sued for Thomas’s right to be there, too. They drew up in the first line of attack along with Alençon, the king’s brother, and came up to the edge of the field, looking at their adversaries.

  The invaders under King Edward of England had backed themselves up a terraced slope between two copses of trees with a flat field before them. At least, it looked flat on the approach. A bank with a drop the height of a man revealed itself as the French host drew up; to attack the English lines, the knights of France would have to ride around to where it flattened out, which was only about eighty yards from another run of trees, and then mount the hill.

  It was a funnel.

  It was a trap.

  The crossbowmen, mostly little Genoese mercenaries whom the French called “Salamis,” went out first at the king’s command. They were bitching because the big shields they hid behind while reloading hadn’t come forward yet, and their hempen strings were wet from the rain; besides, it was late in the day and they would have to shoot uphill and into the sun. They wanted to wait for their pavisses. They wanted to wait until morning, when the sun would confound English arrows. King Phillip told them they would have worse than arrows to deal with if they didn’t do their work tonight. But, as the French were all about to find out, the king didn’t have anything worse than arrows.

  The Salamis came running back after about ten minutes, more than a few of them bloodied and stuck with feathers; Thomas would always remember how one had an arrow stuck straight through his hand and was waving it about as if it were on fire and he might put it out. A French knight yelled, “They’ve switched sides!” and another yelled, “Cowards!” and soon the impatient knights were riding over the Genoese through that narrow pass to get at the English. Some even struck down at the fleeing men, but Thomas’s lord did not, so neither did Thomas.

  They rode hard at the line of English knights, who were standing at the top of their tawny slope like bait. They were standing with their poleaxes and swords, confident the French would not reach them in any shape to hurt them. They were flying the banner of the dragon, as the French were flying the sacred red oriflamme, which the Valois king had fetched with great ceremony from St. Denis; both banners meant the same thing—no quarter. Thomas’s seigneur wanted at the English king, whose camp sat by a large windmill, or at his son, the Prince of Wales. He wanted to punish them for the insult of their small numbers; the French had them three to one, as men-at-arms went. Most knights, lords of manors and castles large and small from the breadth of France, had only contempt for the rows of farmer-soldiers arranged in wedge formations between the English knights, but Thomas’s blood wasn’t so far above theirs. And he had a bad feeling. The archers were standing like dogs at the crouch with their longbows strung and little fences of arrows stuck into the ground at their feet. They were waiting. Thomas guessed that they had picked a landmark to range their first flight, and that they would loose when the French vanguard passed it. Now the hill got steep and took the speed out of their charge, the horses sweating and blowing hard from their nostrils. Thomas looked at a knobby shrub jutting out, and thought, That’s it, even as Alençon’s horse drew beside it.

  The English archers, rough plowmen from Lancashire to Kent with overmuscled right shoulders and no feeling in the first three fingers, sank into their hips and pulled their heavy bowstrings back to their ears. As did the pale, dark-haired Welsh bowmen in their parti-colored green and white. Some five thousand archers in all.

  They loosed.

  Thomas couldn’t hear the slap of all those bows through his padded aventail and helm, but he saw the arrows rise like a swarm of flies and then come down. He had no visor. Many of those who had them didn’t push them down in time. The arrows fell hard with a noise like hail on tiles, but also sick and wet where one slammed through chain mail or into horseflesh. Men gasped and swore and screamed, but the horses’ screams were worse. They bucked and reared and bit at the arrows sticking in them. Some turned their haunches and ran, while others lay down and refused to move again. Many fell and pitched their riders. The French line was dissolving, and they weren’t halfway to their enemy. Thomas saw that his lord was riding crooked in his saddle, and then he saw two shafts sticking out of the older man, both in the chest; the older man would have fallen but for the deep saddle and high pommel made expressly to keep knights cinched in place. Thomas raised his lance and couched the butt in its fewter, reaching out to grab the reins of the comte’s horse; and then an arrow went whung on his lord’s conical helm, and he felt a hard slap on his face, like from his mother’s spoon in the kitchen. 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.

  He sat up and the pain hit him so hard he dropped his lance and almost passed out, but he didn’t. The horses had both stopped. His seigneur was slumped to one side, in danger of falling. Thomas tried to speak, but only blood came out of his mouth—the point was in his tongue. What was left of the French line, maybe four dozen knights and the Comte d’Alençon, was bulling toward the English, their backs receding as they rode to die.

  As the remnants of the French vanguard closed, the English began to touch off crude cannons, sending brass and stone balls whizzing into men, sending limbs and scraps of armor and fabric in all directions, sending gouts of smoke skyward. The banging cracks, like near thunder, further terrified the injured horses. One knight to Thomas’s left, whose surcoat blazed with three crescent moons argent, tried to regain control of his mount, which was kicking madly with a half dozen shafts in him. The horse kicked Thomas’s leg and broke it even through the greave, then, his eyes as wide as goose eggs, threw his rider off and stamped the man’s helmeted head into the mud again and again with his front hooves, destroying it utterly. Then he lay down and died on what remained of his master. He was not alone; one Englishman would later say the dead horses were lined up like piglets to suckle.

  Thomas grabbed again for his lord’s reins, using the rowels on his spurs to guide his own horse, and turned them both away. The Comte de Givras groaned, as if in disappointment, and a
nother shaft caught him in the back. Thomas spurred them both for the French lines, but the next wave of knights was charging at them, shouting “Saint-Denis!” and “Glory!” They were beautiful in their surcoats of many colors, a flock of exotic birds heading for birdlime. Some of them were dying already, as the arrows were falling their way now.

  Only the fact that the archers preferred charging knights to retreating ones saved Thomas and his Lord from being riddled; the volleys had also opened up big enough holes in the ranks for the two men to pass through, although one knight in robin’s-egg blue glanced against Thomas so hard he knocked him into his seigneur, who nearly fell again. He was shaking his head, ashamed not to be dying on the field. But he was certainly dying.

  His little page, Renoud, and Thomas’s squire, André, ran up with a barber-surgeon, who helped the injured men off their mounts. Thomas was nauseated from pain and all the blood he had swallowed, and the eye above the arrow wouldn’t stop tearing.

  The surgeon used a pair of shears to cut the arrow on the comte’s back so he could lie down to die; the Comte de Givras was a more important man than Thomas, but the surgeon attended Thomas because he saw that he might live. He pulled the big man down and wedged a stone between his back teeth to keep his mouth open, then cut the corner of his mouth forcing the shears in to snip the shaft. He got the point out of the tongue—nothing had ever hurt Thomas so badly—then pulled the shaft up out of the cheek. His hands were slimy with blood, and his grip kept slipping. He would have stitched Thomas, but someone had him by the sleeve now, shouting, “The king’s musician is hurt, the king commands you!” and he was gone.

  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.