Between Two Fires (9781101611616)

by Buehlman, Christopher

  It was the worst day he had ever known.

  With the squire’s help, Thomas sat up and watched the second wave fail, too, though some had gotten close enough to exchange blows near the banner of the Prince of Wales. Soon they were finished, and a lull followed. Now bare-legged Welshmen ran from the English lines and stuck knives into the eyes and visors of the stunned knights on the ground, killing them as easily as boys hunting crabs.

  Thomas’s eye was hemming itself shut as the injured side of his face swelled. Men who passed them did not recognize him. Now a man wearing the king’s livery came and took both Thomas’s warhorse, who was lathered in sweat and stooping his head, and his mild-mannered palfrey, who always did a side-to-side dance when he smelled lettuce. He never saw either horse again.

  The sun went down and still the beaten French rallied again and again to ride into the gloaming. Thomas had a moment’s hope when he saw the windmill near the English king on fire, its great spars turning ablaze like a slow wheel in Hell; but the English had burned the windmill themselves to give their archers light to murder by.

  It had been dark for an hour when the call went up to flee. There would be no more French charges; the English were coming down from their terraced hill, and there was nothing to stop them. Thomas was suddenly aware of being alone—he did not know where his squire was and could not remember the last time he had seen him. The cries of wounded men being killed on the ground grew closer, as did the rude, choppy language of their killers, confident now, calling out to one another. Thomas sat up as best he could with his sword pointed behind him, ready to take the leg off a Welshman before he died. He heard hooves and wondered if an English knight was about to spit him. He turned his head. Here was his squire with a horse, a tired old nag from the baggage trains. Thomas tried to speak but wept when his swollen tongue touched his palate. André made a shushing gesture and, with some effort, got Thomas up, and then on the nag’s broad back. He leapt in front of his master and took Thomas’s great weight on his back as he took the reins and they cantered away from Crécy-en-Ponthieu. The night was very dark. The nameless horse sometimes pitched to avoid the body of one who had tried to flee but succumbed to his wounds; so many had died that Thomas could not comprehend it. The plain below the English position would be known as the valley of clerks, for it would take an army of men with pens and field desks to record the names and titles of the French dead.

  It was at the town of Amiens where Thomas convalesced, his squire having paid a surgeon to see to him.

  “A good thing it was a bodkin point on that shaft,” the surgeon had said as he put first wine and then egg white in the punctured cheek. “A broadhead would have never come out. As it is, I’m scared that tongue will sour and kill you, so I’m tempted to have it off. But then what would you pray with?”

  Before he pulled the tooth whose roots were knocked loose by the arrow, then stitched the tongue and face, the surgeon told the squire to hold Thomas’s head still. Thomas grunted something.

  “That’s what they all say,” he said, “but he’ll hold you just the same. And if your lordship bites me, I’ll yank a good tooth as well.”

  It had taken less than an hour, but it was the longest hour Thomas could recall.

  The ten minutes he took to set the leg seemed merely purgatorial after the hell of little pliers fishing in his cheek for loose bone, and the dip and bite of the curved needle in his tongue.

  “You’ll not be so pretty now, but you may live to thank the Virgin, if she saves you. The pain’s a good sign. I’ll come around again tomorrow night. Splash some more wine on that around suppertime, but no supper for you till Tuesday, and then only broth and raw eggs. God felt so bad about throwing man out of the garden, he gave us the chicken, which gave us the egg. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out angels’ blood was egg whites. God rest you, sir knight.”

  The squire stayed with Thomas for two weeks while the arrow wound toyed with his life, first reddening around the margins, then running clear, then slowly, very slowly, beginning to heal. When he was out of danger, though still not well enough to travel, he sent his squire home to tell the lady of the manor he was alive. The seneschal, who had been watching for Sir Thomas, stopped André at the gate and told him what had happened.

  The squire turned around quickly and rode hard for Amiens.

  André stood in the little room with his hat in his hands and his hood thrown back. He measured his words and spoke them slowly, pausing before the worst ones.

  “Sire…Your keep and the lands of Arpentel are…forfeit to the Comte d’Évreux, of Navarre and Normandy. Your seneschal made to stand against him and prepared for siege; but your wife, fearing the comte’s cruelty should he breach the walls, treated with d’Évreux and let him into your keep. And, it seems, after very little struggle…her bed. Your son, however, has been declared by the comte the lord of the manor and stands to inherit when he comes to majority. D’Évreux, in the interval, is regent and protector, and your rents will go to him, save enough for your lady to keep a modest household.”

  Thomas shook his bandaged head and said words that sounded like “the king.”

  “The king is weak now. The lords of Normandy scheme against him, and treat with England. King Phillip gave our fallen lord’s lands of Givras to the Norman to keep him from rising in plain revolt. And now he has seized yours, which border Givras. Because he can. Because you were faithful to your seigneur, and he was faithful to the defeated king, you have been…moved aside.”

  Thomas shook his agonized head, his eyes tearing.

  “Further,” the squire said, “you are declared excommunicate. The bishop of Laon himself has ordered it, against the protests of your priest. They will strip you of your spurs in absentia, empty the chalice, and lay down the cross; if ever you return and try to claim your land back, the priest must deny the people the sacraments as well.”

  Thomas made a sound that might have been, “When?”

  “The ceremony is tomorrow.”

  And so Thomas had healed. When his money ran out, he went west to Normandy and sold his soul to Godefroy, watching always for the heraldic crest of the man who had ruined him, Chrétien, Comte d’Évreux: the gold-on-red wheel of Spain quartered with a barred field of fleur-de-lys. Thomas agreed to stay with the brigands so long as they stayed in High Normandy; Godefroy agreed that they would often visit the comte’s domain. Thomas swore that this grasping lord with lands in Spain, Normandy, and Picardy, who had his piggish eyes even on the crown of France, would die in the mud at a brigand’s hands.

  He swore it, spat on a cross, and flung it down.

  Since God had permitted his excommunication, he would earn it.

  Thomas never thought himself the kind of man to take part in theft and killings, and to permit rape, but, in the name of revenge, he became exactly that kind of man.

  For a time.

  ELEVEN

  Of the Market on Rue Mont-Fetard

  “What became of your squire?” said the priest.

  “I’ve no whoring idea. I sent him off rather than take him to Hell with me, but he’s like to have found another hell. Probably married an English girl and hung a mess of brats off her dugs.”

  The woodcarver’s eyes were open now. Thomas turned his gaze upon him.

  “How much did you hear?”

  “More than I shall soon forget.”

  Thomas breathed in, as if to exhale some oath, but he had mellowed with the telling of his tale. He suffered the priest to put his hand on his shoulder, then hung his head. Now the woodcarver sat up and put his hand on Thomas as well.

  Jehan the woodcarver was nearly out of food, so he had to go to market. Normally he would have done this on his own, wearing a yoke with two baskets and wearing a cloth about his face, taking care to stay as far away from others as he could; but today Delphine insisted on coming along. Which meant Thomas would go as well. The priest was half dying for want of wine, and things had gotten so bad in the qua
rter that Annette didn’t want to be left alone. Neither did the mule, but it wasn’t asked.

  Annette went up to a trunk at the foot of her bed and took out a pair of pretty yellow woolen hose that had belonged to her daughter, as well as a pair of wooden pattens for tying to the bottoms of one’s shoes to protect them from the mud and worse of the Parisian streets. She made a gift of these to Delphine and combed her hair out, humming the same Norman tune the girl had sung beneath their window the night before. She was smiling more than Jehan had seen her smile in months.

  It was midday when they left.

  The five of them kept tight to each other and walked a twisting mile through the streets, with the shop fronts shuttered, the few open windows on higher stories staring at them like dead sockets. Other groups huddled to themselves, and nobody spoke. A cart passed them, forcing them to hug up against the buildings, the driver saying, “Watch out,” as mechanically as if he were talking to himself. Rats ran in the gutters and sometimes on the roofs, but otherwise things were so still that a dog barking in the distance sounded like music.

  It got noisy as they drew near, however.

  The market on the rue Mont-Fetard was one of the few places where people would still congregate, and, as such, was one of the most dangerous places one could go. Many of the spaces where stalls once stood were empty now, and those that remained had distanced themselves well away from their neighbors, like teeth in old gums.

  Still, the market presented a rich spectacle, even in fraction.

  Yellow finches fluttered and chirped in cages; an acrobat walked backward on her hands with eyes painted on her bottom and outsized gloves on her feet; a Spaniard berated two little dogs who had grown tired of spinning in circles on their hind legs while he played a horn.

  People yelled and bargained as they had before the sickness; they just did it farther away from each other. Hawkers called to the group in singsong chants:

  Salt from Brittany, and the Franche-Comté,

  who’ll save your flesh if you walk away?

  Indigo, indigo, precious and blue

  as the peacock’s chest and his proud tail, too.

  Who’ll buy my musk? Who wants to make love?

  The rabbit, the fox and, in his turn, the dove.

  The girl, who had walked very near the group while they made their way through the dead streets, now let herself be pulled this way and that, now trailing the group, now trotting awkwardly ahead, unaccustomed as she was to wearing pattens on her shoes. She had the feeling that whatever she sought in Paris would be here, in this market, but she loved the market’s éclat with the love of a child who has been quiet too long. She loved the colors and the motion of commerce, but especially the noise. The sound of foreign languages pleased her particularly, reminding her that a whole world lay beyond the horizons of Normandy and Paris: a world of varied provinces and innumerable towns and hamlets that might not all be dying.

  Foreigners were in no short supply at the Mont-Fetard market; Germans hunched over stacks of iron, spraying beer through their whiskers as they called out. Spaniards sang “Cuero, cuero, cuero de Córdoba” over shoe leather so fine one could almost see light through it. Bohemians tapped bars of lead in rhythm and sang inscrutable songs, more to amuse themselves than to draw custom.

  Delphine loved it all.

  The Florentines had the biggest and most beautiful stall; they had lived in the city and had grown rich selling the bright red wool of Florence in bolts that drew the eye from thirty paces. Now they wore plague masks that made them look like awful birds. A table sat before them with a bowl of water in which one was to place money, as it was believed this would cleanse it of bad air. These merchants had grown adept at showing their cloth by means of two sticks, and they rolled and fluttered it before Annette as she came near, though she could only come so near; little stacks of bricks marked the boundary past which customers’ feet were not to step.

  But where was the food?

  When the priest, whose stomach was rumbling noisily, asked Jehan where the food sellers were, the woodcarver pointed up ahead, past a group of bickering men. As they approached, they saw a sergent with his baton of office yelling through a handkerchief at a shrugging merchant who sold tortoises and tiny owls and other exotic animals. The officer gestured at a miserable-looking monkey in a cage.

  “That beast has it. You have to pitch its cage in the river, or burn it, but either way, get it out of here.”

  “Monkeys don’t get plague. He’s just tired. Who wouldn’t be tired with you yelling at him?”

  “Monkeys are just little men, aren’t they? Foul little men who bite and throw filth. I’m telling you, he’s got it.”

  The sergent was obliged to use reason because he had only one man with him, and the merchant, who had a Gascon accent, had several dark-skinned fellows who looked like brothers sitting within easy reach of staves and knives.

  The group continued on, the ailing monkey locking eyes with the priest and staring at him with disturbing intelligence.

  Now the chants of food sellers came to them; hazelnuts, apples, pork pies in crusts. One stall was wild with hanging game, some of it none too fresh; the hunter, sweating in a hat made from no less than three foxes, was using a leafy branch to swat flies away from a deflated-looking rabbit.

  “Wolf pelts!” he barked at them, now gesturing at an impressive stack of hides. “Winter isn’t so far away, you know. You’ll want good furs for the little girl.” The priest politely waved away the man’s solicitation, provoking something very like a silent snarl from him.

  Next were the fishmongers, their carp and sturgeons and black bass laid out on wet straw, the sellers stinking of the river, wearing aprons brown with blood and glittering with scales. Thomas went to a large carp, but Jehan pulled him away.

  “Not this stall,” he whispered. “They have a stall on the Right Bank as well, and whatever doesn’t sell there comes here. They redden them with pig’s blood.”

  “Let the man look!” the fishmonger hissed.

  Jehan made the sound of a pig snuffling.

  “That’s a lie!” the man said.

  “Since when is an oink a lie?”

  “Leave it,” Annette said, as the fishmonger wiped a rusty filleting knife with his apron. A look from Thomas made him put it down.

  The other fish stall was ropy with eels, and neither Thomas, the priest, nor the girl wanted any part of it. The butchers were next, and there were a good many cuts of meat to be had, though the prices were ruinously high. Annette debated with Jehan about a shoulder of pork, which he haggled for and got. Soon she found a bag of onions, leeks, and garlic. Then two fistfuls of hazelnuts; Annette was happier than she had been in many weeks, and she was going to cook a proper meal for their guests.

  Thomas cheerfully munched a black pudding he found for a denier, sharing pieces of it with the priest, until his attention was called by the sound of a barrel rolling. He walked over to a table full of bright, new chain mail, though this was not for sale.

  “Clean your armor, my lord?” sang out a man too old for the scalloped fripperies he wore as he turned a handle that turned a barrel full of sand and vinegar. “Ten minutes in here and your hauberk will shine like God’s teeth.” He had the air of a squire, perhaps one whose seigneur had died. When he saw that Thomas was hooked, he said, “Two deniers to make it like new, sire. You won’t find better or cheaper.”

  Thomas had just begun stripping off his belt and surcoat when the girl yelled, “Père Matthieu! Please come!” with such urgency that he ran with one hand holding the belt closed and the other on the hilt of his sword.

  The priest and Thomas arrived at the same time to find Delphine standing near a cart belonging to a seller of religious articles, a hunched, pale little man with very black hair who seemed to smile at everything, even the sight of Thomas stomping toward him.

  “What in Christ’s name is it?” Thomas said.

  “The oil!”

  �
�What?”

  “This is the oil that the Magdalene used to wash Jesus’ feet!” the girl said excitedly, bouncing a little on the balls of her own feet. She was pointing at a little clay vial stoppered with cork.

  “Sure it is. And I’ll bet that’s the hammer that pounded in the nails,” he said, gesturing at a plain wooden mallet.

  “No, actually,” the seller said, “it’s the hammer that fixed the axle of this cart. But…” he continued, producing a carpenter’s plane, “this is the plane used by the carpenter Joseph, father of Our Lord; the very one sweet Jesu learned to use as a boy. It is said that any beam planed with this is proof against fire, and no two such beams might ever be separated. Imagine! A house that would never burn and never fall!”

  “Do I look as though I build houses?”

  “No, my lord, you look as though you knock them down and none can stop you. But surely you will want a fine house built one day, and you may lend the carpenter this holy thing.”

  “I had one house. I will not have another.”

  “A traveler! Then look upon this…” he said, fishing something out of a leather sack. “A lock of Saint Christopher’s hair in a reliquary of horse bone. The horse was Caesar Constantine’s horse, a stallion of white so fair he made snow look like coal ash.”

  “You met this horse?”

  “He was described to me, as I have described him to you, as it was described to him that sold it to me, and on backward to antiquity. Ride with this in your saddlebag, sir knight, and your horse will never stumble in a river, nor throw a shoe save within thirty yards of a farrier. Also, you will never lose your way again, for Saint Christopher himself will lead your horse by the nose, even to the tavern door.”

  Delphine had stood rapt throughout this pitch, but now the priest spoke up.

  “Your stories are very pretty, but surely you see that only the child believes them. Good day to you.”